We’ve already done the New York stuff, interviews for magazines and podcasts. We sell more DVDs of Nashville Combat. We’re making a little money. A new wardrobe and some dental work for me. A decisive switch from GPCs to Parliaments for Mel. We stay in hotels and rack up frequent-flier miles. I read a lot. Go to hotel gyms. Check my blood pressure. Make a teary visit to a Munich doctor after a bout of violent queasiness turns out to be nerves. Live in a certain amount of fear.
“Dude, relax,” Mel says. “You’re all, like, bundled up. Squeezing together so nothing can escape.”
“I wish we could talk about something without the inclusion of poop metaphors.”
“You,” she says, “are a chronic worrier.” She thumbs through something on her phone, glasses at the end of her nose, chin tilted up. She’s getting ready to go out somewhere with some women from a Swiss art journal she met the day before. “Sure you don’t wanna go out? Be good for you. Find some nebbishy dude from a former socialist zone to straddle.”
“The Mel Vaught itinerary doesn’t much appeal to me.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I’m just glad I don’t have to share a hotel room with you on this trip.”
I eat and drink a lot. I’m happy to let Mel be the life of the party, go out and make friends, pose for overexposed photos yelling into people’s ears or humping statues or being embraced by slender, brightly dressed women, while I go back to the hotel to eat Kinder bars and watch Cheers with German subtitles.
There are moments when I have flashes of the old longing: in a plane taking off from a green countryside, smelling the moist underground of a foreign city’s metro, seeing a man in a Paris subway flick his girlfriend’s ear with his tongue. And there is the loneliness, a damp omission at my center. The movie takes off and I trudge along behind it, and Mel.
It’s odd to live so sleepily, considering we spend our days being asked about Movie Sharon, heroine of Irrefutable Love—wildly, almost violently emotional. The stupid sexual decision-making, the frantic hunt for something to grasp. When people connect with that Sharon, it shocks the shit out of me. That’s me too! I’m told more than once, and I answer with Hey that’s great before realizing what I’m confirming—about them, but also about me.
“Are you okay?” Mel asks me. “Feeling all right? Tired?” She insists on using the blood pressure monitor on me every night before she goes out. When my leg acts up: “Four hands’re better than two,” she says, rolling up her sleeves, muttering around her cigarette, and we labor over my calf with Bengay until the spasms subside. Once, a production assistant from a talk show on Channel 4 comes in to find us like that, my foot planted in Mel’s lap, her brow creased over in concentration. “Uh, you’re on in fifteen,” he says.
Mel looks up. “All right.” He shuts the door. She resumes.
I watch her for a minute. “People are going to think we’re a couple,” I say.
“I got news for you. They’ve thought that for years.”
“Really? What do you tell them when they ask?”
She ashes her cigarette. “I tell them you wouldn’t put up with my bullshit for five minutes.”
But I have. And on this trip, as her nights grow later and her hangovers more painful, I do it again. Something has happened to Mel since the night of the Four Roses bottle last year; she has become thinner, sharper somehow, as if a part of her once soft has gone rawboned from exposure. I watch her get patted down in Paris, praying she threw away her one-hitter. I listen to her throw up in Amsterdam. I try to will myself numb, covered in petroleum jelly, all concern slicking off. Ignoring how my entire body still knots when she makes certain noises or when she has that webby drunk cast to her eyes. It riles her to bring it up: Someone in a bar in London looked at her drink and said something good and snarky about how Nashville Combat obviously still applies, and Mel shoved the drink at him, saying, “This is ginger ale. So why don’t you take that goddamn quizzical expression and shove it up your pooper, limey.”
After Europe, we end up in San Francisco, a city neither of us has ever visited. Irrefutable Love opens to a bigger response than we could have imagined. The theater is packed. Students, cartoonists, some weirdo Hollywood types. A few of the older guys—those whose movies Mel and I were weaned on, guys whose names popped up in my college thesis—approach us, grasp our hands, tell us well done. We are rendered speechless that night. It is the apex of our hard work and sacrifice. We know it doesn’t happen to everyone. But it’s happening to us, and we are fortunate. We keep glancing at each other in amazement, Mel suppressing a grin, eyes huge, me giggling and adjusting the pants around my belly.