This is what I am compelled to draw. The things that come to me out of the dimness, what I see on the inside of my eyelids after pressing them with my hands, my automatic writing. The List is the thing I make for no one, in a place no one can see; a dark, constant discovery. Even on days when I can barely stand to look at it, it is one of the few things in my life that enthrall me.
Teddy Caudill makes appearances throughout—as gatekeeper, or bystander, or both. I have trouble recalling his face after so many years, but I sketch him with tenderness—his blond head tilting, arms outstretched, as he sails heavenward from a trampoline; he leaps over a flock of geese. He looks on, a tiny head in a locket, at numbers 14, 27, 81. His hands peel an orange in one panel, his sneakers, grass-streaked and worn, crumple in another. The lost ideal: Teddy, my whisper of peace.
It’s all pencil, my first, best method. The pages have achieved a satin quality, thick and polished. I’ve encased some of the brittle early sketches in plastic, sewn loose pages together with thread. There are multiples of some, revisions I could not help but execute, all done with the utmost care. No eraser tracks, no stray pencils markings. No hackery. Pristine.
I can feel myself circling some untouchable, hidden part of myself in this; the danger is part of the allure. God knows what’s hidden in there, what I might find if I dig hard enough.
For a while, I told myself that the List was a maybe-sort-of project instead of a compulsion. Something Mel and I might turn into a cartoon, if I ever got the guts to show it to her. But I knew what the List was; or, at least, how it felt. In a word: predatory. Upending these men, placing them into a story that was not theirs but mine, and a murky, troubling story at that. It has never been seen by anyone else; it is not meant to be seen.
In her weird, exhibitionist’s way, Mel likes the intimacy of what we do, of placing herself at the center of what we make. I love the work for the opposite reason: for the ability it gives me to abandon myself, to escape the husk of my body and fly off into the ether. I know a day of work has been really good when I have to look up from the board and recall who I am and what I’m doing.
That very few of these guys actually made it into my life beyond the pages of this book constitutes a failure, something I wasn’t able to do like normal people. If hope is desire with expectation, then the List is a hopeless thing. I desire blindly, with wild, flinging abandon, but no aims, no goals.
It has—at least—a form.
I sketch Beardsley quick, as I saw him tonight in the streetlights. I have plans for him. Rising up from the center of a lake, in robes, humped fish surrounding him like coyotes. There, I think. Now you really are mine, Beardsley. You stupid shit.
There’s a thin, clear light coming through the room’s dirty window. It’s dawn. I’m still looking at the sketch when my phone rings. I pick it up without looking. “Yeah.”
“Is this Sharon?”
“Yes.”
“We were given this number by Dana at Independent Artists Agency? We’re looking for Melody Vaught.”
My watch reads seven-thirty A.M. I look up. Mel’s iPhone lies cracked side up on the table. “Her phone’s busted.”
The voice hesitates. “We haven’t been able to get ahold of her, and we really need to.” I hear the twang now. Shit. A collections agency. “I’m calling from the Central Florida Women’s Correctional Facility clinic regarding Kelly Kay Vaught?”
I stare at the wall, totally useless, until it hits me: Mel’s mom.
“Ma’am? Are you still there?”
“I’m sorry. Yes, I’m still here. What about Kelly Kay?”
“Ms. Vaught passed away yesterday evening. Melody is listed as her next of kin.”
The woman gives me a phone number, an address, stresses Mel’s need to be there to identify the body. I feel like my ears are stuffed with cotton. We hang up before I realize I did not ask how she died.
I wonder if Kelly Kay had seen Nashville Combat. I wonder if she died knowing that her daughter made a movie about her. I wonder if she died while her daughter was on a stage, accepting an award, blinking blindly into the bright lights.
FLORIDA
I tell Mel in the darkness of a car service sedan that her mother is dead. I can’t see her face, only the pinched white shape of it in the passing streetlights. The inability to see her, more than anything, makes me afraid.
“What?” she says.
I scrabble. “I’m so sorry.”
I see her mouth open, her chest rise and fall a few times, hands opened long and pale on her lap. She lets out a sharp sound, something close to a laugh, but she’s not smiling. “You’re kidding,” she says. “Right?”
“No.”
Chest goes up, down, up. “You’re sure.”
“Someone at the agency gave them my number. I think they tried you. Your phone.”
She runs a hand through her hair and exhales hard. I smell a combination of rum and Robitussin. “Shit. I forgot about my fucking phone.”
“Yeah.”
She blinks, facing the road. “What happened?”
“You know, I feel really stupid. I didn’t ask. They said something about complications before surgery?”
“She was going to have surgery?”