The Animators(80)

She doesn’t like it when I leave for the day. “This feels slow,” she says. “Does it feel slow to you? We can be patient with it, but that doesn’t mean don’t push a little.”

For the first time ever, leaving work is the best part of my day. I live for the long, slow walk back to Teddy’s, dawdling by the park he took me to our first night here, opening his apartment door using the key he made especially for me. Dropping the keys and massaging my hands, a pervasive ache from my palm to my thumb.

I run a bath and sink into the deep porcelain tub, letting my fingers prune up. I stare at them. There used to be something inside me that made drawing feel like a natural passage. I never knew this until I tried to draw without it.

Teddy walks through the door and makes me forget. Being happy makes work’s shitfest a lot easier to handle. Who cares if I never draw again? We occupy our own universe. He likes to bring me antique sodas he keeps in the fridge—Moxie, Cheerwine, Nehi—and apply himself to my neck while I let the cold run down my throat. He recounts his day and I trace my fingers up the planes of his face, the chin, the cleft above his lips, the strange, soft little whorl where his neck ends and his earlobe, wild and unattached, begins.

He stops talking and he says, “How goes the project?”

“Rough.”

“Oh, babe. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. Mel’s all gung ho. I can barely keep up.”

“She’s a little hard on you, don’t you think?”

“I can handle it,” I say. I move my hands and find the bulge I know will be there, to cup it and hear the sound that comes from the back of his throat.

We fuck so long and so often that we make each other sore. We are getting to know each other’s weaknesses, the triggers that make the world stop: tonguing a particular place on the collarbone, grinding against him while he washes dishes, palming him while he’s on the phone to feel him come alive in my hand. We can smell each other on our skin when we’re apart. “I’m not getting anything done,” he teases me. “I’m having a contest with myself to see how often I can make you come. Doesn’t leave time for much else.” At night, we sleep deep, limbs thrown all over the other.

I have never had a life like this, where I felt so good so often, so perpetually safe inside my own head. I wake up with no headaches and no dream recall.

It becomes winter.

—

I’m not sure how I keep justifying postponing telling Teddy about the project, but I do. There’s always something else to talk about. There are stories about ex-girlfriends, and there’s the graphic novel he’s tried to start five times. There is the first apartment I lived in in New York and the time two middle schoolers tried to mug me on the L train platform. There was his first kiss in the eighth grade from a girl named Becky Walters, who tongued his face so hard she gave him a rash. How I met Mel. The cabin he dreamed of building in Henry County. Story on top of story; we lose whole nights of sleep talking to each other. We’ve missed twenty years of life with each other. We feel the need to catch up.

Most days, it feels wasteful to address anything that could spoil this. When it eventually comes up, he will understand, I tell myself. You two will be so far into whatever this is that he will understand what you’re doing. He’ll understand why you’re committed. It will be fine.

One night, searching through the bathroom cabinet for Q-tips, I find a girl’s scrunchie, a big, ruffled gold job of the American Apparel variety.

Before this, I haven’t experienced what a sweet sea of land mines living with a lover can be. Are you moving into their territory, or are they moving into yours? Are there areas that are off-limits to you (his workspace, for example, stacked with store ledgers and videotapes and plans for the next film festival)? Are there people who are off-limits to you? What are the necessary, unspoken truths of the house, and how unpleasant will it be when you discover that they are to remain unspoken? Mel and I had known each other so well for so long; even our surprises had the feel of the well-worn. There are times when I have to remind myself that Teddy is not Mel, that I cannot live with him in quite the way I lived with her.

I pick up the scrunchie and bring it out, waving it in the air, nose wrinkled. Expecting to get a laugh.

Teddy looks irritated instead. “Okay,” he sighs, plucking it out of my hands. “Where’d you find it?”

“Under the sink. That thing’s the size of my head. Who’d it belong to, Pebbles?”

He grimaces and turns away from me. I see crimson rising up from his shirt collar. “Victoria. An ex. She works at the bookstore.”

The girl on our walk to the bar, our first night in Louisville. That was bookstore girl. Victoria. I feel a twinge. Mystery woman’s not so funny anymore with a face and a name.

Teddy softens. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” he says. “But I did have a life before this, you know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s just that you ask for a lot of information when you’re not always forthcoming, you know? It feels a little imbalanced sometimes. Look. Watch this.” He leans over, throws it in the trash, ties off the bag, and lifts it out of the bin. “Out of sight, out of mind. Okay?”

“I wasn’t trying to pry,” I say, but he’s out the door and on the balcony, back turned, lighting a Benson & Hedges. Effectively ending the conversation.