—
She wants me to unzip myself and spill my guts. She wants new lists—the men I’ve been with, the ones I’ve wanted but couldn’t have, how often I think about them. The stories I imagined coming from them, and the ones that actually did. Traits, physical characteristics. Who are they, when boiled down to ten seconds of screen time? Where was I? What was I doing? Brooklyn? Ballister? Which apartment, studio, project?
“Ever thought about how the List and the stroke might link together?” she asks me.
“Still trying to get the hang of holding a fork again.”
She shrugs. Pops the top off one of my Ensures. “Sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay. So I take it you have this idea where you link them together.”
“Maybe.” She takes a sip. “Damn. These sumbitches are tasty.”
I spend my mornings drawing, or trying to draw. It’s slow, frustrating work that feels keenly and, in a way it never has before, like work. The skills are coming back but sluggishly, like they’re resisting. I can anticipate now, but the anticipation doesn’t always mean my hand follows through. There’s no line integrity. My fingers tremble. Two or three hours before lunch is the best I can do. Any more wrings all the energy out of me. I produce sketches that look like they were done by a homicidal pigeon.
“Well, you gotta work through the dead ends,” Mel says. “Just sketch. Draw whatever comes to you. Get in there. Don’t pussyfoot around.”
—
“We should actually go there, you know,” Mel says.
“Go where.”
“Kentucky. If we go there, we might get a better idea of what this thing is actually supposed to be. That’s the story’s cradle, man. It’s crucial.”
“Not a good idea,” I say. We’re in the living room, Mel hunched over the drafting board, me massaging my weak leg. “For several reasons.”
She turns to me. “What color were the shutters on the outside of your house?”
I stall, digging into the big muscle of my calf. I get a glimpse of what she’s been working on. A pack of enormous deer, staring out, malevolent. A List-like quality to it. It’s contagious. “I dunno. Black, I think?”
“You have to know, man. It can’t be fuzzy.”
If I weren’t still recovering—if it didn’t still take me a solid ten minutes to get dressed in the morning, if I weren’t still limping so heavily I needed a hospital cane just moving around the house—I’d fight harder. But I don’t have all my ammo back. I’m still at a loss—slower in arguments, pokier making connections between things.
I remind myself: Mel has shown genuine patience. That’s against her true nature. She’s willfully changing herself merely by sitting there and shutting the hell up.
“Making a trip just for that is not necessary,” I tell her. “We can figure this out on our own. Let’s not get the family involved. You know? Making this—thing you want to make will be hard enough without piping my mother into it.”
She pokes me in the side. “Nuh uh. I want me some Missus Kisses.” Yells, “You think you’re better’n me?”
I roll my eyes. Peel the top off a dish of rice pudding.
“We have to,” she presses. “You know why? If you didn’t have that afternoon, with Teddy, in his dad’s bedroom, we wouldn’t have this.” She reaches out and taps the Moleskine, the now ever-present Moleskine, Goody hair band in place. She refuses to be separated from it. I once saw her carry it with her into the bathroom. “The List is the fallout, man. How did this make you what you are?” She flicks her lighter, wags her thumb through the flame. Shakes her hand to cool it. “It’s about solipsism. It’s about wanting. Hunger. It’s about how we get what we need, how we make what we need, and why we need it.”
“Safe to say you’ve moved on from your slapstick Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould idea.”
“Did you ever notice your crush numbers went down when you were working on a project?”
I shrink back, surprised. “No.”
“I did a count by year. When you weren’t busy, you had to find a way to make yourself busy.” She wags her finger faster through the flame. “It’s about holding stories. It’s a control thing. A self-protection thing. I—I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out.” She gets up, starts to pace. Doing that thing where she cups her hands and pops them on top of each other, snapping her fingers. “The story’s not about guys on the List. It’s the List itself, the stuff underneath. And that starts in Kentucky. You, your parents. That fucked-up little house. Those pictures. That shit was so damaging, your brain had to hide it from you. You can’t tell me that’s not a part of the story. That’s the story. And Teddy. Oh my God.” She rakes a hand through her hair. “He’s in this thing so deep, man.”
I stew for a minute before I say, “I’m glad you’ve had such an awesome time figuring this problem out for yourself, but this is not a story. This is something that happened to me. This is something that is still happening to me.”
“That’s why we have to go.”