The Animators(49)

She wants to make a movie about my strangest, most vicious, most masturbatory headspace, reveal it to an entire population, throw in some fart jokes, and call it good.

I rise. Say, “I think it’s time for my enema.” I leave the room.

—

Later that night, I find myself back in the living room, looking at Mel’s mural. At first I just want to relive my anger: I can’t fucking believe she did that, the balls on that woman.

But once I start looking it over, I can’t stop. I keep going back to the upper-left-hand corner—the single-digits, back in the day. There’s a man I don’t know up there, squinting out. He is wearing suspenders. I look closer. Mel has taken special care around the eyes, the delicate lines around the mouth. A cat perches on his shoulder; there is a wallpaper of popsicles behind him. I look closer, my breath catching. Teddy Caudill.

Mel creeps in around midnight, holding a root beer. A tattered copy of Dolores Claiborne is tucked into her armpit. “Hey,” she says.

I lift my hand.

She sits next to me, opens the pop. “Who you looking at?”

I point.

She bobs her head, takes a swig, expression pinched. “Our man. He wasn’t hard to track, you know. I found stuff about the trial online.” She pauses. Looks at me looking at her sketch. “What do you think? Is it accurate?”

“I dunno. Haven’t seen him in twenty years.”

We stare in silence, the poster board in front of us.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You know me. I see something exciting, I get all over it. I didn’t think about how seeing something like this could be a mindfuck for you.”

I trace my finger over Teddy’s face. The line of the jaw. The temple. The hairline. “Forget it,” I say. “It’s fine.”

—

She said it made her lose sleep.

—

She won’t let it go. The one thing I have kept from her, over the course of our ten years–plus as a team, has captivated her. “I know you always say structure first,” she says, “but I think we have to go with whatever we have right now. Try for scenes. Something to flesh out.”

“It’s funny. How you’re talking about this like we’re going to do it.”

She’s standing by her mural, biting her lip. I come up behind her.

“Why are you so interested in this?” I ask her.

She shrugs, tilts her head. “Because it’s interesting,” she says.

“That’s the best nonanswer I’ve ever heard,” I say. “Really. Why are you so hell-bent on turning this into a project?”

“I’m trying to figure out where you were, all this time,” she says. “Where were you? What were you doing?”

It hangs over the room like an accusation, gray and gassy.

“I was here,” I say. “I was with you.”

She puts her hands on her hips. Leans in to peer closer at a panel. “Were you, now.”

—

It begins with me telling myself: I’m humoring her. But the fluttering in my insides, the heat in my face, says otherwise.

A project always begins like a pimple on the back of the neck. You can’t see it, but you can feel it, rising just under the surface. And it drives you crazy. It swells, gains definition, becomes visible. The bigger it gets, the more it presses into the back of your spine. The more it presses, the less you can focus on anything else. Working on it every day is just a way of scratching the itch until you’ve finished its business and it slowly starts to shrink back down.

I keep my sketchbook by me all the time. I remind myself to be patient. Work in whatever way I can, whenever I can. I let myself draw all the dark, snaky things that occur to me until my wrist gives out: a large Magnavox. Shag carpeting. A driveway with dandelions growing through the cracks.

Teddy. It’s the set of his chin that’s driving me crazy. I can’t get it right. Not yet, anyway.

—

She wants me to unzip myself and spill my guts. She wants new lists—the men I’ve been with, the ones I’ve wanted but couldn’t have, how often I think about them. The stories I imagined coming from them, and the ones that actually did. Traits, physical characteristics. Who are they, when boiled down to ten seconds of screen time? Where was I? What was I doing? Brooklyn? Ballister? Which apartment, studio, project?

“Ever thought about how the List and the stroke might link together?” she asks me.

“Still trying to get the hang of holding a fork again.”

She shrugs. Pops the top off one of my Ensures. “Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay. So I take it you have this idea where you link them together.”

“Maybe.” She takes a sip. “Damn. These sumbitches are tasty.”

I spend my mornings drawing, or trying to draw. It’s slow, frustrating work that feels keenly and, in a way it never has before, like work. The skills are coming back but sluggishly, like they’re resisting. I can anticipate now, but the anticipation doesn’t always mean my hand follows through. There’s no line integrity. My fingers tremble. Two or three hours before lunch is the best I can do. Any more wrings all the energy out of me. I produce sketches that look like they were done by a homicidal pigeon.

“Well, you gotta work through the dead ends,” Mel says. “Just sketch. Draw whatever comes to you. Get in there. Don’t pussyfoot around.”