The Animators(85)

“It’s blood-and-guts work,” she said once. “Makes me feel like an animal. Like in a really good way. I get to turn my brain off.”

She starts in earnest, sometimes breaking from an hour of cramped, close sketching to run high knees by the lightboard, sprinting in place, breaking out the squat-thrusts to keep from going batshit. Her color’s high, her posture strong. She has Ryan and Tatum over for mini-lessons; they cluster near while she draws, points, exclaims. “It’s called the principles of squash and stretch,” she tells them. “It’s sort of like reverb. Like bouncing a rubber ball—when it hits the ground, it flattens for a millisecond, right? Like goes oblong? And then it self-corrects.” She demonstrates, then clears for the boys to take over, letting them stack onionskin to track their progress through the pages. She watches them scoot their arms to the left, tilt their heads, get kissing-close to the surface.

“You know,” she says one day after they leave, “I don’t think I’d mind teaching someday. Maybe I’d like it.” She squints an eye at me. “Think I’m nuts?”

I am struck. “No,” I say. “I think you’d be a great teacher.”

She ducks her head and grins. I’ve hit her bashful bone. “Well,” she says, turning toward the storyboard, pretending to rearrange something. “I’d be better than that fuckpants McIntosh, anyway.”

In my absence, Mel has taken to texting ideas and findings, a steady stream of beeps for every time she used to lean over our desks and say, “Hey, check this out.” A lot are links to videos. An early 1960s stop-motion cartoon ad for a regional ham product featuring pigs in a marching band. A series of Soviet cartoons from the seventies in an unsettlingly florid, psychedelic style. Some old NEA-funded Vincent Collins shorts, the trippy Bicentennial cartoon she’s always adored. We want a feel like THIS for the stroke scenes, she texts. Like spottier and more disconnected than Nash. Combat. Creepier. More confounding.

Cool. Let’s try a draft, I text back.

Teddy has taken me to see Paris, Texas in an old theater downtown. Neither of us has spoken about the other night; in silent apology, he brings me a large, soft cookie from the concession stand. He glances at the phone, then at me.

I put the phone back in my pocket. “Sorry,” I say. “Just Mel texting about work stuff.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

Thirty seconds later, my phone dings. A cartoon short from a website entirely in Swedish. I hesitate, finger over the play button.

Teddy sighs and rubs his face. “Jesus Christ, honey, will you turn your phone off?”

“Okay, okay. Relax. I’m turning it off.”

“I don’t mean to get upset, but my God, it’s like every two minutes with her. Don’t you want to take a break from work when you get home?”

“I am taking a break.” I put my hand on his knee, trying to tamp the fight down before it starts. “I don’t draw at home. I want to be with you.”

“You’re not really taking a break if Mel is pestering you with work stuff at all hours,” he says. “Your phone is never quiet. It goes off when we’re trying to sleep.”

It also went off once in the middle of sex. I started to move for it, him on top of me, then made the save and wrapped my arms around his waist. But he saw that I had to stop myself. And he saw that I saw.

He takes a deep breath, removes his glasses, polishes them with his shirttail. Turns to me. “I love that you guys are so invested,” he says, “but there’s a line you have to maintain between work and life. Just to keep yourself from going crazy. And I think that’s something you need to work on.”

This makes me grit my teeth. “I appreciate you thinking of me,” I tell him, measured, “but there’s no need for worry. I find our balance pretty healthy, honestly. First stages, we go a little overboard, because we’re just getting into it. Later on the pace will become more even. This is pretty standard.”

He shakes his head, unconvinced. Still polishing his glasses. I want to rip them out of his hands. They’re clean, goddammit, rub any more and the lenses will disintegrate. “When Mel’s like this,” he says, “you know what she reminds me of? Did you ever read the Captain Beefheart biography?”

I sink down in my seat. “Nope.”

“He used to lock his band up in this attic in his house for days on end. He was angry and irrational and he had insane mood swings, but he was brilliant. And he was their boss. So they put up with it. One of the band members told this story where he was really pissed off about a take they’d done that he wasn’t happy with, and he just went on a rampage, breaking shit and yelling. And finally, he turned a water faucet on full blast and pointed at it screaming, “Play like that! Play like that!”

“Mel’s not Captain Beefheart,” I say.

“No. She’s not.” Teddy puts his glasses back on.

I open my mouth just as the lights begin to dim. It saves us from whatever I was going to say to Teddy next. I silence my phone instead. Tell him, “When you turn the work on, you can’t turn it off, okay? Mel’s just doing her job.”

“She’s not your boss, Sharon,” he whispers. “She’s your partner. You can stand up to her, you know.”

I roll my eyes and cram the cookie into my mouth.