The Animators(87)

I put my head down. It’s like a needle going through my neck. Like reading that article the Salon guy wrote about Nashville Combat all over again, but with a greater echo. As it turns out, indictments are even more unpleasant when they’re coming from the people you love.

“Hey,” Teddy says, rising, voice filled with remorse. “Wait.” He puts his arms around me. “I think what you guys do is great. I mean, you ever watch Ryan and Tatum with Mel? We’re all fans. Okay? Me too. Especially me. I just want you to be careful, Sharon. If you feel like you’re doing something adverse to yourself in making this, then stop. You’re still recovering. Give yourself a break. Okay?”

“I’m not going to hurt myself.” I say this into his chest, hot and muffled.

“I don’t think you ever would intentionally,” he says. “But you’ve got your blinders on when you work.”

“I’m okay. I really am.”

He pulls me in tighter, cupping my head in his hands. “I worry about you all the time. You know that?” he says. “All the time.”

He lifts me up and puts me on the bed, rolls me on top of him. I feel his beard against my neck. It makes me forget how much my hands throb. He turns to take one of my fingers in his mouth, then spits it out. “Jesus,” he says. “I just got a mouthful of ink.”

I hold my hand up. He’s right. They’re splattered. “Sorry.”

He tugs my underpants down with his thumbs. “I’m glad I met you at thirty-two,” he whispers. “Not twenty-two. I was rotten at this at twenty-two.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Yes.” They’re down completely and he lifts up my hips and there is the heat and slight sting of entry. We stop talking.

We live to reach the middle of each other, even after an argument. The best is when I straddle his lap, wrapping my arms around his head, his mouth to my ear. It feels impossible to be closer to anyone than I am to him when we do this, when I can clasp him inside me, pulling gently. And it is during lovemaking, sometimes rowdy enough to be called fucking and sometimes gentle enough to be called prayer, that we loosen our holds on ourselves enough to confess that this has never happened before, to either one of us, maybe not to anyone else ever, and we hope against hope, with gritted teeth, that there will be no end.

—

After New Year’s, we finally decide to let the boys see what we’ve made—the first fifteen minutes of whatever this project will be. We’ll buy wine and Chinese food and invite them over to the carriage house for a screening.

We’re anxious—or I’m anxious, anyway. I spend the bigger part of the morning in Mel’s bathroom with the trots. What if Teddy doesn’t like it? What if it upsets him? What if it’s not good enough to convince him that I am above wrongdoing?

When I emerge, Mel is buttoning up a fresh flannel shirt. She offers me a very large joint. Says, “Dude. Relax. He’ll love it.” She wrinkles her nose, looks over my shoulder. “Guh. Gonna need an exorcist in there.”

She sweeps the carriage house floor and sets her pocket projector against a clean white sheet hung on the wall. She leans into the bathroom, watches me apply eyeliner. “Don’t be nervous,” she says. “It’s our first audience, and it’s a good one. A smart one. They’ll have good things to say.”

They arrive, a burst of noise and cold from the outside—the boys, stamping snow from their boots, Teddy’s icy face pressed into mine. We eat, we drink. Finally, Mel ushers us over to the sitting area. Her laptop is ready to go.

Teddy’s arm is slung around my shoulder. I feel good, loose. Excited. It’s been a long time since Mel and I have had something new. I want Teddy to see it—to see how good Mel and I can be. I’m in my customary place, nestled into the angle under his arm, leg bent atop his. I can hear his breathing, feel the rise and fall, the echo in his chest when he speaks or laughs. He rubs my shoulder. “I’m excited about this,” he says. “Really curious to see what you all have been holed up working on.”

“I’m excited for you to see it, too,” I say. “I know I haven’t filled you in on much of it.”

“You’re a tough one to figure out, Kisses.”

“Okay,” Mel says. “We’re ready. Go easy on us.” She hits the lights. The projector glows. In the neon letters we favor: The List.

“Working title,” Mel says.

The scene starts in my parents’ living room. There is a storm rumbling outside, the faint sound of sirens tipping off. Me in front of the television, the glow illuminating my body against the dark. No internal monologue. These are the Faulkner scenes, childhood-mined. The colors are soft and whitewashed; it is dreamlike, lingering on single images, echoing sound. A this-is-the-space-your-brain-cannot-decode sort of work.

When the ottoman shatters the glass, the screen purples. Everything speeds up, becomes dark and fleet. The sound, fighting tracks we saved from the Kotex commercial, babbles.

There are laughs where we want laughs. There is silence when we want silence. Mel and I trade looks: That was the way to go. Let’s cut that. Let’s adjust the color at the end. We can’t part with it now. We are completely in its service.

The next scene: the shift to summer. Teddy and I bounce on a trampoline, mouths open, eyes wide. A motor churns in the distance. Then a lingering shot we worked particularly hard to set: a decrepit silver van creeping up a mountainside, the sky shot with pink and brown veins.