The Animators(71)

“I have to ask. Did you just see Weirdo Video driving around and decide to stop in?”

I shrug, feeling pretty loose. “No,” I admit. “We came specifically for Weirdo Video. We wanted to look you up. Or I did.”

He raises an eyebrow, puts a hand to his chest. “That’s nice. I’m flattered.”

This makes me dip my head. Nice? The fuck we are. There was a point in my life when I would have lied about that to myself in the hopes of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teddy probably is a genuinely nice person. He has overcome adversity and has lived out his life doing something he loves in a place he has never very much wanted to leave. And here I come, this long-lost vestige of a childhood he has every right to recall as a perfect hell. But he welcomes me. Without reservation. He’s kind and convivial and charming, when he doesn’t have to be. Would I have as much grace, were the roles reversed? Probably not. And what did we come for?

We came to mine him for information. And when we get what we want, we’ll go back to Faulkner. And when we get what we want from there, we’ll leave Faulkner, too.

“We came to Kentucky to work on a new project,” I say.

“Right on,” he says. “I loved Nashville Combat. Obviously.” He nods to Mel and his voice lowers. “It’s about Mel, right? That movie is basically her.”

“Basically.”

He releases his breath in a long, slow whistle. “That’s one way to grow up. And pretty fast, I would imagine.”

I look over at Mel, sketching something else, Tatum and Ryan hovering over her shoulders. “You know, in this weird, backward way, she’s maybe the most adult person I know.”

He gives me that partial smile. “So what’s the new project?’

I stop and look down at my hands. I can feel the support beams in my head start to shiver under the question’s weight. I haven’t been asked to verbalize a pitch yet; we don’t really have a pitch to speak of. I try to imagine the synapses in my brain building a road, point A to point B. Question: answer. “Well, we’re thinking it’ll mostly be about my stroke. You know, my life before, my life after. How it’s changed.”

Is it a lie? Sort of. I try to negotiate with the writhing in my middle while Teddy tilts his head, continues to look at me, fingers peeling the label from his pilsner. That’s a stare. That’s a warm, interested stare. Shit. I only have so many chances to present myself honestly. So I take a deep breath and I start. Because talking to Teddy, in some way I can’t articulate, is different than talking to anyone else.

“I was in a coma for about a week,” I begin.

He folds his arms on the table and turns to me. “Wow. Okay.”

“Yeah. They weren’t sure I wasn’t going to be a vegetable when I woke up. It happened really suddenly, this blood vessel breaking in my brain, and they’re still not sure why.” I trail off, shake my head. “I was really lucky. Anyway, when I was out, Mel found this sort of log I’d been keeping in my journal of every man I had ever been infatuated with.”

“Industrious of you to write it all down.”

I nod, pinch my lips. Try to look wry, or self-effacing. Something other than what I feel, which is embarrassed, with a hearty edge of shame.

“My life before the stroke was—complicated. I had a really hard time with guys. I had intimacy problems, I guess you’d call them. Spent more time imagining the relationships than actually being in them.” I say this with difficulty. “I sort of made up stories and lived in those. Make sense?”

He nods. “I hear you.”

“But because I’m a total obsessive, I kept this log. It’s sort of embarrassing, really. But Mel found it when I was sick, and she thought it was really weird and interesting. She thinks it means something about me, the way I’m wired.” And here’s the giant white space in the middle of the story. The one that features your creepy dad. “So it’s kind of a story about me making this list, or the story will be told through this list. That’s how we might frame it. Still working it out.”

“How many guys are on this?”

“Over a hundred.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Really? Wait. Okay.” He holds his hands out in front of him. “You’ve been in a hundred relationships?”

“No. Like a tenth of those were relationships. Most of them, it’s just, like—”

“Pining from afar?”

I shrug uncomfortably. I know too well what the next natural conclusion will be: That’s a fuckload of pining. What’s wrong with you?

But he grins, big and toothy. Says, “I’m the king of pining from afar.”

I exhale, relieved. “Well, I may be competition for you, friend,” I say. “Because I spent years making this list of my little failures.”

He nods. I try to say something else, but it all falls apart. My mind blanks, my tongue seizes. I’ve got my hands in front of me, trying to sketch in the air what I mean. I let them fall, hit the table. “Talking is hard. Goddammit. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Don’t apologize.”

“I had lots of speech therapy. But there are still. Holes? Am I freaking you out? I’m freaking myself out.”

“You’re not freaking me out in the least.”