five
“I’M SORRY, what was the question?” Alison asked, confused.
“DID SIMON DILLINGHAM INSTRUCT YOU TO LIE TO THE POLICE OFFICERS ABOUT WHAT YOU SAW OUTSIDE THE BODEGA THAT MORNING?” The ADA was really leaning on her. He was incensed.
“No, he didn’t,” Alison said, defiant. Tears were streaming down her face. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Permission to treat Miss Garrity as a hostile witness, Your Honor,” the ADA snapped suddenly.
“I’m hostile,” Alison snapped back. “You should look in the mirror.”
This brought cheers to the small gang of near strangers who were crowded on and around the bed in the corner of Lisa’s so-called loft, watching it all on the flat-screen TV screwed into the wall there. “I can’t believe you improvised that,” Lisa announced, with a tone that was not particularly admiring, in spite of the general approbation of the bed full of people.
“It just came out,” Alison admitted.
“You could have gotten fired.”
“No one was going to fire her over an improvised line,” one of the other actresses, Marnie, observed with a careless tone of dismissal. Some people thought Lisa was too bossy. Now that Alison had actually booked a television job and landed herself an agent, Alison was beginning to find Lisa a bit bossy too.
“They stopped the cameras!” Lisa announced, comically outraged.
“Were you there?” Marnie asked.
“I wasn’t there, I’m just telling you what she told me. It was not a good thing.”
“People laughed,” Alison said, trying to defend herself from, what she wasn’t entirely sure.
“The crew laughed,” Lisa reminded her. It was sounding as if Lisa had been there, when in fact she had just hung on the phone, disbelieving, while Alison gave her a blow-by-blow of the day, which had gone well—just as the other three days of shooting had gone well.
“I like crews, they’re the nicest people on those sets,” Marnie observed.
“They’re not the ones who are going to be deciding if they should hire you back,” Lisa argued.
“Nobody does that anyway; once you’ve done a guest spot they don’t bring you back ever, or if they do it’s not for four or five years.” Marnie was like a wayward pit bull in this debate. Alison wished they would both shut up, as the scene was rolling by, unwatched now, on the television set. The rest of the gang was getting impatient with the debate as well. Several people started to shush the speakers and then someone called out, “Back it up, I want to see her tell the DA he’s hostile again. It’s the best moment in the whole show.” Alison glanced behind her to find out who it was requesting an encore of her moment of rebellion and saw that it was Seth, the smug writer who had been snotty about her grammar and her undergraduate education in this very loft, not three months ago. He was squeezed into a corner with his back against the headboard and his long legs dangling off the edge, propping himself up at an awkward angle as he slugged back a bottle of beer. He seemed sincerely amused by all of it. “Back it up, back it up,” he insisted. “Who has the clicker?”
While several people went diving into the pillows and blankets, Seth caught Alison’s glance and raised his beer and an eyebrow at her, not smiling, but impressed. Alison turned to get back to the television set and simultaneously grab whatever refill was being offered, which seemed to be a cheapish sort of half-decent pink wine from Argentina. Lisa had informed her not a week ago that she was happy things had never heated up between Alison and Seth because it seemed that this young paragon was now interested in Lisa herself. Lisa and Seth had gone out for drinks after bumping into each other at a screening; one thing led to another, bodily fluids had been exchanged, and Lisa decided that Seth and all his East Coast promise were not meant for Alison after all.
Under which circumstances Alison was not particularly interested in renewing an edgy flirtation with the guy. It was clear that he was now somewhat more impressed with her dubious credentials as an actress and he was still, as she recalled from her first meeting, pretty cute. But the fact that he seemed to have changed his opinion of her because she was on television just annoyed the shit out of Alison. She was beneath his notice three months ago when she was a would-be actress who had gone to Notre Dame, but now he was interested because she had a guest lead on a mediocre cop show? And this was what passed for intelligence and sophistication in the Big Apple?
As soon as the thought flew by—mediocre cop show—Alison felt some part of her surge up with pride and defiance. It wasn’t mediocre, she told herself; it was crime drama, a time-honored form, and all these people who she barely knew had gathered at Lisa’s invitation to watch it. Two years ago, in Seattle, she and her little band of passionate theater friends spent a lot of time making fun of mediocre cop shows, but for an actress in New York, someone who was actually taking a shot at it, someone who was going to try to make it happen, these shows were bread and butter, and besides, some of the best actors in the country were doing them. The actor playing the surly DA was a huge film and theater star, who happened to work regularly in television as well. There was no selling out involved in this experience. This was a major step up the ladder.
And the part, which had been only two lines when she went in to read for it, turned out to be quite a juicy little nugget of a role. The thing just kept growing. Within a day, there were two extra scenes sent to her Gmail, and by the end of the week there were three more. Each came with a brief notification attached, that all scenes were subject to change, and her new agent, Ryan Jones, warned her numerous times that it was great that the part was growing, but it could shrink just as easily. But it didn’t shrink. The witness was given her own name—Elizabeth Garrity—and a backstory: She was dating one of the friends of the killer, who had some sort of “he’s my buddy” pact with the guy that was more important to him than anything in the world. There was even a great scene added in which she accused her nasty boyfriend, in front of witnesses, of being in love with the killer. Then he tried to slug her and strangle her, and the cops in the room had to jump him and drag him off. That bit necessitated a fight choreographer who for a couple of shots had the other actor throw her across the desk, but the director thought it was too much and declared firmly that he wasn’t going to use any of it.
The whole experience was a complete blast, on top of which they actually paid her. She had done a couple of scenes in an independent movie while living in Seattle, so she was already a member of SAG, which meant they had to pay her SAG minimums, eight hundred dollars for every day she was required to be on set. Because the new scenes got added so late, they got shoved into the schedule wherever they fit, which meant that Alison was required to be on the set on four separate days. Which broke down to four times seven hundred, twenty-eight hundred dollars for the whole gig, a figure she never would have gotten if they could have scheduled her scenes more tightly. Ryan wanted them to pay her even more—he tried briefly for the top-of-show rate, which was what anyone with a major guest part should have gotten. But everyone knew this was a huge break for Alison already and they weren’t going to go the extra mile for an actress who was such a total nobody. Ryan settled for the $2,800.
Besides which, there definitely was some confusion around the way that audition had been booked. As it turned out, Ryan hadn’t submitted Alison for the two-liner. His assistant, somebody named Darren, was the one who put the call in without running it by his boss, which was why the suspicious casting agent had never heard about Alison from Ryan—because Ryan had never heard of Alison either. Alison didn’t even know about this angle of the shenanigans until Ryan called her the next day to congratulate her on booking the gig and to ask her who the hell she was. She told him what she knew, as she had been told by Lisa, about the whole hip-pocketing plan, and Ryan informed her that this was all news to him but that he’d love to meet the girl who had managed to convince a writer to build a whole subplot around her in one audition. Once in his reasonably sw
ank offices, Alison had apologized, but she also was shrewd enough to continue to stick to the point, which was that she had actually booked a pretty big job with very little assistance on anyone else’s part. The agent, who was in truth impressed, was the one who actually explained to her the whole story—how she had wowed the writer so much that he went ahead and reconceived the entire episode, which never happened, and would not have happened if the script hadn’t in fact come in eight pages short to begin with. But that specific detail was neither here nor there. Alison had done what everyone told these young actresses they had to do: Grab an opportunity and make it your own. Ryan Jones signed her on the spot.
As Alison found out later, the reason her episode came in eight pages too short to begin with was that in the middle of November the show was hitting a wall; all the scripts were coming in late, and the executive producer, who was an egomaniac and a prick, had spent too much time rethinking every choice anyone made in any of the episodes that had already been shot and so they were days behind schedule and inches away from shutting down production for a week, which would have cost a complete fucking fortune that the network was not willing to spend for a show that was on the bubble. So while the egomaniacal prick of an executive producer was off putting out fires with the network, the episode’s writer was left to solve his own problems. When this young actress showed up and actually gave an emotionally charged reading of two fairly mediocre lines of his dialogue, he felt artistically vindicated and knew that this was his chance to spread his wings.
“Everything was for Billy,” Alison told the camera bitterly. “It was always, ‘he’s my buddy.’ You mess with that at your own peril.”
“This is it, this is the big scene,” the real Alison informed the room.
“Did you feel threatened by that?” asked the ADA.
“I felt disgusted by it,” Alison told him. “He was always telling me, ‘I love this guy.’ He said it so many times I thought, why don’t you just sleep with him then.” Everyone in the room said “Oooooo,” like she had really stepped over the line with that one even though no one could give a shit about implications of homosexuality in New York City. On the television set the scene was erupting. The lousy, threatening boyfriend leaped across the room and started strangling Alison. People cheered. And then when he hurled her across the table—someone somewhere apparently did not think that was too much, after all, and they used the more exciting shot—everyone cheered again. All in all, the drunken celebration surrounding her television debut was enormously satisfying to Alison’s ego, and she didn’t pick up her cell when her mother called because she was having too good a time and she wasn’t going to let her mom wreck it with some ill-placed remark.
The party lingered on lazily after the episode’s conclusion at 11 p.m.; the young would-be actors and intellectuals gathered in Lisa’s apartment insisted they wanted to catch up on the news but once the sound was muted during the commercial break no one really turned their eyes to the screen again. For a short while they drank and chattered cheerfully about Alison’s debut and how much fun guest leads could be and what upcoming auditions were hanging out there for her now, and then two by two they drifted away to look for cabs. Not quite ready for her moment in the sun to end, Alison hung around, collecting glasses and empty bottles and organizing the detritus of the evening into a slightly more coherent version of itself.
“Leave it!” Lisa commanded. “Benita comes tomorrow, she’s got to have something to do.”
Alison raised her hands, leaving the glasses in place. “I always forget you have a cleaning lady,” she admitted.
“Cleaning lady? Oh God, you are so Midwestern,” Lisa tossed back at her, pouring the ends of a bottle of red into a water glass. She staggered a bit as she turned toward the kitchen, where Seth was hanging in the doorway, holding a beer and watching the girls with an amused glint in his eye. The whole scene was a little too Tennessee Williams, Alison thought, but she plowed ahead bravely.
“This was so nice of you, letting us come over and watch the episode together. I hate to leave you with such a mess.”
“I said leave it,” Lisa told her, picking up several bottles herself as if Alison were bound to do it wrong anyway. While she was fairly sure that Lisa’s snarl had a little more behind it than too much alcohol, Alison was in too good a mood to be wounded.
“Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow then,” Alison shrugged, picking up her jacket—a denim relic from high school, so unchic it actually counted as cool—from the chair by the door, where she had dropped it with her purse three hours ago.
“You’re uptown, right?” Seth said. “We should split a cab.” He downed the end of his beer, leaned back into the kitchen, left it on the counter, and sauntered toward the doorway. He had framed the announcement with the kind of impartiality that made it impossible to tell if there was any hidden meaning in it, but in the lexicon of young New Yorkers, “We should split a cab” could mean “I find you kind of hot and I’m interested in going home with you if it turns out that something develops in the back of that cab.” Or it could mean “We should split a cab.” Alison had no interest in splitting a cab with Seth for any reason whatsoever, but there was no way Lisa could read Seth’s careless announcement that he was leaving with Alison as anything other than a rejection. At the very least, “We should split a cab” meant “I’m not sticking around to have sex with Lisa, in whom I am less interested than she seems to think.”
“Oh!” Alison laughed, trying to sound as uninterested in the subtext of all this as she possibly could. “I was going to stop and pick some things up on the way.” This didn’t come off as smoothly as she wished; it sounded more like she was making a fake excuse to cover the fact that she was walking off with Lisa’s boyfriend. Seth raised that eyebrow again and said, “Well, but you’ll still need a cab, I’m guessing.” With that he opened the door and with a wave of his hand indicated to her after you, as if this dual exit were the most natural thing in the world.
Alison hesitated, then smiled back at Lisa and said, “See you! Thanks again!” which also sounded phony. But there was nothing else for it. She preceded Seth out the door and pushed the button to call the elevator. They both waited in silence while the wall hummed and clicked with the sound of the lift approaching. The elevator door slid open, and Alison silently stepped inside the tiny cubicle, which was lined with faux-wood Formica paneling. She concentrated on the line of buttons in front of her, and pushed “Lobby.” There was another tense pause until the door finally slid shut. Seth glanced down at her, grabbed her by the waist of her jacket, and pulled her to him.
“Hey,” said Alison. “Hey.”
The fleeting worry that this would really piss Lisa off was obliterated by the thrill of having a man’s torso up against her own and his tongue halfway down her throat. Alison’s brain vaguely noted how quickly Seth’s right leg shoved itself between hers as he actually lifted her up against the wall, how his hand slid up the back of her shirt, but after that, her brain went on hold, and there it stayed. Her lonely spirit and young body were severely in need by that point, and the brain’s concerns seemed less and less relevant with every passing second in that elevator. Seth was momentarily surprised at the visceral power of that first kiss, and so was she, and the heated cab ride home did nothing to diminish their sudden and demanding physical hunger. So when they finally made it into an actual bed the sex was long, complicated, and satisfying.
After they had finished, Seth stretched his arms toward the wall, yawned, and glanced at the cheap LCD alarm clock plugged into the wall at the side of the low futon. “What time is it, three?” he noted. “Shit, I have to go.” He stood, naked, and drifted into the bathroom, peeling off the condom he kept so handily in his wallet. He returned moments later and idly picked up a corner of the strewn sheets and blankets, carelessly searching for clothes which had been torn off in an unself-conscious frenzy hours ago. Reason reasserted itself and as he located his boxers and stepped in
to them, Seth’s maneuvering mind moved back into place.
“That was great,” he told Alison, as if to reassure her that in fact he hadn’t already forgotten how great it was.
“Thanks,” she replied.
“I’ll give you a call, okay?”
“You have my number?”
“Oh. No, I guess I don’t. Hang on. Let me get my pants on . . .” He slipped into his jeans, and found his socks, barely paying attention to her. “You have a pen?” he asked. “Something to write on? You don’t have a card, do you?”
“What? We just had sex so you want my card?”
Seth sighed; he remembered this about her now—she was difficult. This really was the problem with so many of these women: They wanted a career and a life in the fast lane and love and commitment and a man who would almost fuck you in the backseat of a cab and then pretend that it was love. He had appreciated the fact that Alison was so receptive to his come-on, and that once things were moving in the right direction she didn’t seem all that interested in talk. He regretted the fact that she seemed to want to talk now.
“Look, I said it was great, and it was great,” he reminded her, successfully keeping the impatience out of his tone. “I want your number, I think is what I said.”
“Well, I’m kind of lying here naked, so I don’t actually have a pen, or a card, on me.” She didn’t mean to sound like she thought he was an idiot, but there was something about this all that bugged her, even in the languid throes of satiation. She wasn’t mad at this guy, she really wasn’t; she wanted to tell him how much she enjoyed the meaningless sex, the way he was telling her the same thing. There was something vaguely bemusing about this onset of manners.
I'm Glad About You Page 6
