I know the book’s general spin on Vaught and Kisses, more or less. Mel Vaught, brilliant addict/erratic cutup/blabbity bloo, gone from this world, leaving her quirky, lesser partner to while away as a shut-in, getting tubby and running out into traffic without her pants. Beyond that, I don’t care to know the details.
Later that night, when we’re cleaning up after dinner, Danny asks me, “Do you miss her?”
I nod. Hope what I’m not saying will be enough to create that space of wordlessness people are supposed to recognize as the forbidden zone, that deep well of hurt human decency demands you not touch when speaking about the dead.
But Danny presses. “You don’t talk much about her.”
“Yeah. Well.” I shrug. Turn my back. Pretend to scrub the counter.
Danny sits at the kitchen table and looks at me, hands on his knees. All big, sincere eyes. Waiting. He knows I’m shortchanging him.
“What. What do you want me to tell you,” I say. “What would you like to know that’s not in that book?”
“Wasn’t going to mention the book. Wasn’t even going to bring it up.”
“Come on. I saw you reading it.” It’s louder than I mean for it to be. “You might as well. How many hillbilly cough-syrup jokes did they let slide through editing? Or is that too gauche to include in a book of that caliber?”
He rubs his face and sighs. “Jesus, Sharon.”
It’s a fight. We don’t have many, and we don’t have them that well, going back and forth on an uneasy sort of equilibrium. Sometimes our happiness does not lessen the feeling of sand running out from underneath my shoes, me constantly changing positions in order to stay on land. We’re not even comfortable enough with each other to argue. When we’re upset, we hit a wall. No one makes a move. Just thick, world-ending silence.
“I wish you’d let me in a little more,” he says. “My girlfriend’s a superstar and I have close to no idea about that part of her life. I don’t feel like I know Sharon the cartoonist.”
“Dude. Do you really want to?”
He clears his throat. “I don’t want to feel like an intruder when I’m asking you questions about yourself. It feels like you had this entire life before I met you that I’ll never have access to. I mean, your best friend died and you almost never talk about it.”
I turn away from him. Go to work vigorously rinsing forks, water full blast. “That’s not my life now.”
“That’s not the point. It feels like you’re trying to keep something from me. It’s always kind of felt like that. What don’t you want me to know?”
“Could we not keep going in circles about this? There’s nothing I don’t want you to know.”
He comes behind me and shuts the faucet off. “Okay. Let’s talk about the damn book. It says things about you that are really disquieting, Sharon. And considering the fact that we are sharing our lives with each other, it worries me some.”
“I don’t plan to read it,” I say.
“Maybe you should take a look.”
He holds it out to me. I heave a sigh. Take it from him with two fingers.
Sharon Kisses laughs like a goat. And when she’s on a panel, she always wears a push-up bra. It’s like two terrified honeydews peeking out of a wrinkled Costco bag.
“Why are you shocked? You see that every night.”
He rolls his eyes. Turns the page.
Page 343:
You think she’s the stable one? Sharon’s totally bizarre. There’s a reason their cartoons are so, you know. Visceral. Maybe she was stable in comparison to Vaught, but that’s not really saying much. She’s super-impulsive, too. She used to. Well. How do I put this. Couple in random places? The worst I heard about was her having stand-up sex with a guy in a carousel in this, like, abandoned amusement park in New Jersey. Just picture that for a second. Like, sex during which you can hear the retching of a crackhead from the old Tilt-A-Whirl. It’s not hard to see connections, is it? Like, you have to be really unhinged to make the sorts of things they made.
I grunt, throw the sponge I’ve been using in the sink. “That’s Fenton,” I tell Danny, “and he’s a grade-A dick. Just an incredibly nasty guy Mel managed to piss off, one way or another, so now he’s out for blood. He used to work for Glynnis. Now he’s a cultural critic for some blog. He should also get a fucking medal for most ticlike usage of the word like. That’s millennial journalistic integrity at its best.” I turn to the fridge and haul a bottle of Ketel One out of the freezer. “Besides, this is New York. I’ve heard of sex in worse places.”
I’m dumping the vodka into a tumbler of orange juice when Danny reaches out, gently takes hold of my wrist. “That doesn’t bother me,” he says. “If watching Irrefutable Love didn’t make me jealous, you think that would?” He flips the page, points. “Right there.”