“No.”
She holds up her hands. “Wait a sec, just hear me out. What if we don’t do, you know, the List as is? How about we play around with the idea of all these dudes and do, like, a compendium piece, a sort of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Or a story where this List, I don’t know, sort of forms an alternate universe where like an ur-version of all these guys have to live in a house together and form their own weird Jonestown cult. The Cult of Sharon! Or, wait, no. They have to marry each other. A hundred-dude marriage. And they form a secret society that lasts for centuries. Kind of like the Masons, but. You know. Kinkier.”
Dead silence.
“Or something else. Something that makes it yours. You know? Mess with it. Turn it around. Get weird with it.” She sighs, runs her hands through her hair. “Make it so it doesn’t sting as much. It could be great, Sharon. It could be really good.”
I feel the anger bloom, red and pleasurable. It takes something like this to remind me: Mel is an exhibitionist at heart, a pusher of tensions in unnatural, explosive directions. She has ambushed me, when my defenses are at their lowest. I can practically feel the synapses in my head firing and missing.
She wants to make a movie about my strangest, most vicious, most masturbatory headspace, reveal it to an entire population, throw in some fart jokes, and call it good.
I rise. Say, “I think it’s time for my enema.” I leave the room.
—
Later that night, I find myself back in the living room, looking at Mel’s mural. At first I just want to relive my anger: I can’t fucking believe she did that, the balls on that woman.
But once I start looking it over, I can’t stop. I keep going back to the upper-left-hand corner—the single-digits, back in the day. There’s a man I don’t know up there, squinting out. He is wearing suspenders. I look closer. Mel has taken special care around the eyes, the delicate lines around the mouth. A cat perches on his shoulder; there is a wallpaper of popsicles behind him. I look closer, my breath catching. Teddy Caudill.
Mel creeps in around midnight, holding a root beer. A tattered copy of Dolores Claiborne is tucked into her armpit. “Hey,” she says.
I lift my hand.
She sits next to me, opens the pop. “Who you looking at?”
I point.
She bobs her head, takes a swig, expression pinched. “Our man. He wasn’t hard to track, you know. I found stuff about the trial online.” She pauses. Looks at me looking at her sketch. “What do you think? Is it accurate?”
“I dunno. Haven’t seen him in twenty years.”
We stare in silence, the poster board in front of us.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You know me. I see something exciting, I get all over it. I didn’t think about how seeing something like this could be a mindfuck for you.”
I trace my finger over Teddy’s face. The line of the jaw. The temple. The hairline. “Forget it,” I say. “It’s fine.”
—
She said it made her lose sleep.
—
She won’t let it go. The one thing I have kept from her, over the course of our ten years–plus as a team, has captivated her. “I know you always say structure first,” she says, “but I think we have to go with whatever we have right now. Try for scenes. Something to flesh out.”
“It’s funny. How you’re talking about this like we’re going to do it.”
She’s standing by her mural, biting her lip. I come up behind her.
“Why are you so interested in this?” I ask her.
She shrugs, tilts her head. “Because it’s interesting,” she says.
“That’s the best nonanswer I’ve ever heard,” I say. “Really. Why are you so hell-bent on turning this into a project?”
“I’m trying to figure out where you were, all this time,” she says. “Where were you? What were you doing?”
It hangs over the room like an accusation, gray and gassy.
“I was here,” I say. “I was with you.”
She puts her hands on her hips. Leans in to peer closer at a panel. “Were you, now.”
—
It begins with me telling myself: I’m humoring her. But the fluttering in my insides, the heat in my face, says otherwise.
A project always begins like a pimple on the back of the neck. You can’t see it, but you can feel it, rising just under the surface. And it drives you crazy. It swells, gains definition, becomes visible. The bigger it gets, the more it presses into the back of your spine. The more it presses, the less you can focus on anything else. Working on it every day is just a way of scratching the itch until you’ve finished its business and it slowly starts to shrink back down.
I keep my sketchbook by me all the time. I remind myself to be patient. Work in whatever way I can, whenever I can. I let myself draw all the dark, snaky things that occur to me until my wrist gives out: a large Magnavox. Shag carpeting. A driveway with dandelions growing through the cracks.
Teddy. It’s the set of his chin that’s driving me crazy. I can’t get it right. Not yet, anyway.