The Animators(84)

It usually doesn’t become fractious until the second bottle of wine peels the manners away. It starts with stupid stuff—which is the best Martin Hannett–produced album, Joy Division or Psychedelic Furs. The best David Lynch movie. The funniest Dostoevsky. The efficacy of the European Union. Tax penalties for the uninsured. But it devolves from there. It is during one of these exchanges that I learn Teddy is a registered Independent. Mel tries not to laugh. She fails. Another loud, sharp back-and-forth ensues over the many empty bottles on Teddy’s kitchen table, each adopting their customary stance—Teddy pushing his glasses up his nose and flagging his hands in a trying-to-reason gesture of Look, while Mel folds arms across her chest, incredulous, smirking—all while Ryan and Tatum and I grimace at each other. Outbursts are always followed by weird little islands of silence, poisonous glances while shifting sitting positions or turning to fetch another beer. Friday dinners begin to end with something latent and unpleasant stretched over the top. Nobody likes Teddy or Mel very much after these squabbles.

—

There is drinking. It’s hard to ignore. Teddy drinks. He drinks when he comes home from the video store, and he drinks when we make brunch on the weekends, and he keeps a beer at hand when he’s working at his laptop. When I’m sick, he makes tea with a shot and a half of Old Grand-Dad dumped in. He buys crystal tumblers and silver service trays for his bar, spends hundreds of dollars on Pappy Van Winkle bourbon and cordials that come in perfume decanters, and he takes evident pleasure in preparing outdated cocktails from the forties, humming under his breath, eyes warming as he mixes. He calls it his hobby, his weird little pet interest—niche drinking. He drinks and he drinks and he very rarely appears drunk, but I smell him in the night and it is alcohol sweating through his skin. Alcohol on his breath. Alcohol, seemingly, in his hair.

One night his mom calls him. His mom, he tells me, has problems with painkillers. She claims it started with a back injury, but he remembers orange and tan prescription bottles littering the bathroom vanity, her makeup table, the kitchen counter, long before. He recalls an intervention organized by one of her sisters on Christmas morning that ended with her locking herself in a bathroom. When his phone sounds off, his shoulders sag and I see a wary, glazed look in his eye, what I imagine I look like when my mother calls me. “I better get this,” he mutters.

I pretend to answer emails while he takes his cell into the next room. I peek in once to see him hunched over, grinding one palm against his head. It gives me a queasy, culpable feeling to see Teddy in distress. I go sit in his bedroom, where I fall asleep reading.

I’m awakened by the sound of retching. Teddy is on the outside balcony in his boxers, shaking. The queasy feeling swells. I tuck myself into the wall in the dark, listening to the sound outside, cringing. It’s that weird, transferable sort of shame when you feel the weight of embarrassment for someone else.

When I take him by the shoulders to lead him inside, his voice comes out trembling with cold. “I’m a failure,” he says.

I wet a washcloth and begin to mop him down, looking away from his face. This is the trade-off, I tell myself, for a man so genuine, a man who feels so deeply. This is what you wanted, I remind myself as I sponge the vomit from his torso.

It occurs to me before I can stop it: We’re head people, Teddy and me. We spend a substantial amount of our lives scratching around up there, realizing joyful, private milestones we’ll never admit to on the ground. But there are the corresponding dark territories we’ll never leave, tangled forests no one else can ever enter, where we will spend most of our lives alone. We may be lured out, once in a while, but we won’t remain outside for very long.

Did I really expect him to step outside for me?

And then I think of Mel last summer, in exactly this position, sputum dribbling down her front. I think of her as I take Teddy’s shoulders and gently tug, pulling him onto his side for sleep.

When I wake the next morning, he is already gone.

—

The project is cruising uphill, all pressed gas and increasing volume. But for the first time, Mel and I are not living in the same place while we’re building a project. She alone falls into our standard work mode pattern—sleeping in fits and starts, smoking like a demon, funneling coffee at all hours—while I punch in at nine, do the day, and go home at six. “Where are you going?” she always yells.

“Bye.”

“Don’t bye me, turdlet. Get your ass back here.”

“Bye. Bye. Bye.” I shut the door.

Tatum, that ingenious kid, has purchased himself a lightboard and has volunteered it for our use. It is moved into the studio and we get going, inbetweening on what we have posted to the storyboard.

To my horror, I find that I can’t do it anymore—the rapid-fire production of images on onionskin, each shifted a fraction of a hair’s difference from its predecessor, hundreds of pages granting an object its movement. It’s close, fast work, the bare-bones first step of animation, period. Screw it up by a tenth of a centimeter and the whole illusion of movement is busted to pieces. When I try to get a rhythm going, my hands shoot with tremors, cramps. The pencil’s a bucking bronco. All my subtlety is lost.

I let Mel take over the inbetweening, feeling a little guilty. But she doesn’t mind—Mel was always our woman for this driving, hunched-over work. To watch Mel inbetween is to watch a sort of ghost birth in which a figure is born, light and quick and precise, in seconds, and then born again, the miracle finally evident only at fifty or a hundred pages, when it scratches its nose, or rolls its eyes, or blinks. What is tedious and overinvolved for me is just another day at badass school for Mel; her wrist arched and still like a pianist’s, her hand twitching over the sheet, then turning for a fresh page: flip, scratch, done. Flip, scratch, done.