The Animators(77)

—

We dress and emerge to find a Murphy bed opened, Ryan, Tatum, and Mel scattered across it in their socks and T-shirts. Mel’s arms are splayed across the boys, glasses pushed up to her forehead. She snores, mouth parted. Ryan is in a fetal position, fingers curled underneath his chin. Tatum’s hands hang long and white, trailing nearly to the floor.

We stare at them for a moment. “Breakfast,” Teddy whispers.

He leads me through the living room to the kitchen and closes the door, a frail oak scratched all to hell. The fridge is a listing Frigidaire icebox, at least fifty years old. A recliner sits inexplicably in the corner. I curl up on it and stare into the stove seam where two pilot lights glow. “The kitchen and the bathroom were part of the servants’ quarters,” Teddy says. His shirt is open. Two folds of softness eclipse his belly button when he bends to retrieve eggs. “This is one of the oldest mansions in the city. It was built by a banker whose granddaughter was killed by the Mafia and left in a ditch on Dixie Highway. He let the place go to hell after that. It was a crack house in the eighties. How do you like your eggs?”

“Sunny-side up.”

“I had a feeling.” He produces a spatula, a grinder of sea salt. He cracks the eggs. I wonder if I could cajole him into fucking me on the tabletop.

He tosses the shells in the trash, then comes for me, takes my face, kisses me. Presses his forehead to mine. There’s the gassy flare of stovetop, a sizzle of melting butter. We smile at each other like goons. I never want to leave. We could stay here and live together in this creaky old apartment. Go to the farmers’ market every Saturday. Have weird babies with psoriasis and stutters.

And then I remember the project. Shit. What did I tell Teddy about our project last night? What were the chances I fed him a few half-truths trying to get him into bed? I drum my fingers against the armrest. “Um,” I start, “did we talk much about what Mel and I are working on last night? I can’t totally recall.”

“There are parts of last night that are spotty and there are parts that are still in very clear relief.” His shoulder and elbow make circles above the bowl. The fork clicks. “We talked about it a little. It’ll be about you? The stroke?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“It will be amazing, I’m sure,” he says. “Go over big in New York with that string of boyfriends you have up there. All those hipster types with their slouchy ways. I’m sure you work your voodoo on them.” He swishes his fork in the air. Yolk flies onto the countertop.

“Not quite.”

“Modest Mabel over here. I’ve got homemade sausage in the fridge. Are you a meat eater?”

I wrap my legs around him and we commence to making out while the eggs scorch. There’s a good, minuteless block of time, his hands well up my shirt, in which he whispers in my ear how happy it would make him if I stuck around for a few days. And just like that, I lose my courage.

—

It turns out the kids subletting our studio want to extend through the holidays. I propose staying in Louisville for a few weeks. “For research,” I say.

Mel rolls her eyes. “Researching Ted’s peen,” she says.

But she’s not the hard sell I think she’ll be. She crashes with Ryan and Tatum, and after two weeks of general carousing with the boys, she is a convert. “This place is fucking fascinating,” she tells me. Ryan and Tatum fill her in on the city’s more destructive history and she follows up like a model student, spending hours at the university poring over photos of the 1977 tornado, rooting through the downtown cemeteries. At night, she and Ryan and Tatum drive around looking for abandoned buildings to explore, crossing the river into Indiana. She locates a regular weed dealer in Waterfront Park after three days and goes on long runs through downtown, platinum head bobbing and weaving through traffic. The city is a borderline zone—neither Union nor Confederacy, neither big nor small. Mel seems to master it quickly. She gets it, she tells me. She gets what it is.

“Let’s try this,” Mel says. She’s sketching in the back room of Weirdo Video, waiting for the store to close so she can go out with Ryan and Tatum. She’s sunk into what we’re making already. Knowing it would make her more agreeable to staying—the baby with her bottle—I’ve encouraged it. “Be part of the great flight from New York. All those people flinging off their Brooklyn bullshit and migrating out to Detroit and Asheville and Austin? Well, for a quarter of the rent, why not Louisville.”

When the first installment of the grant comes through, we have the check sent to Weirdo Video, cash it, and rent out a furnished carriage house at the rear of an enormous Victorian owned by a U of L professor. We convert the back into sleeping quarters for Mel and rig up the front as a workstation. Mel improvises, building a drawing board out of spare lumber and an old Formica tabletop, banding a handful of flashlights above the board for perspective.

After we finish setting up, Mel looks around appraisingly, hands on hips. “Okay,” she says. “We can work with this.”

—

Meanwhile, I’ve unofficially moved in with Teddy. We’re in the kitchen cutting vegetables for soup and I’m taking down a carrot, slowly, deliberately, when my cell rings.

I see the 606 area code for Faulkner.

I angle the knife fast and wrong, slicing my thumb open. “Crap,” Teddy says. “Hold on.”