“There’s nothing to do in New York City over the holidays? I find that hard to believe.”
“No, there’s things to do, of course, I just wanted to come home. Let my mom feed me for a little while. Free food.” She said it lightly, like a joke, which in fact it was because there was free food everywhere here in Cincinnati but she wasn’t allowed to eat it. Nevertheless, there was no reason to hang out in New York, which was truly a cold and dreary place if you had no money and no friends and nothing to do. Plus she had to ask her parents for money. That might actually take the whole two weeks to figure out.
“Well, it’s good news for me because I’m seriously bored as shit. I’m quitting my job, I don’t give a fuck how good the health insurance is, I am not working for Procter and Gamble for the rest of my life, or even till I’m thirty. Fuck this fucking bullshit. My dad went to Paris with Felicia and I’m house-sitting, so I’m having a party tonight,” he informed her, switching subjects on a dime. “I want to see you, you have to come.”
“Oh, a party!”
“Yes, everyone you know will be there.”
“I don’t actually know anybody in Cincinnati anymore, except for my family. That’s what it feels like.”
“Well, that’s fine because I’m not talking about anybody, I’m talking about Kyle.” Dennis tossed this off with the devilish bonhomie which was, in truth, his specialty.
“Kyle and I are done done done, as you well know.”
“You and Kyle have been done done done so many times, Alison, I’ve lost track.”
“You don’t need to keep track. This time he went and got married.”
“So you’ll come and say hello and get it over with. Seriously, Alison, both of you are being totally fucking ridiculous,” Dennis told her, finally plunging into the heart of the matter. “When was the last time you talked to him?”
“Who cares?”
“It was a year ago August. You haven’t spoken to him in eighteen months! He’s married, you’ve moved on, you’re a big fucking TV star, so fuck him.”
“I was on one television show.”
“You were and you looked fantastic and I loved it when the guy threw you across the desk, it was fucking awe-inspiring.”
“Is she going to be there?”
“Yes, she is, and she is not going to like you one bit and you are going to hate her. You still have to come and just get it over with.”
“You said she was nice. When I asked you last year, you said she was really nice.”
“What was I going to say? She’s a cunt?”
“Is she?”
“Is she a cunt? Absolutely.”
In high school everybody’s parents loved Dennis because he always knew how to charm them, but, honestly, behind their backs he had the filthiest mouth. He also drank way too much every chance he got; plus he was a total hound. But the charm was quite real and not specifically reserved for parents. Calling Kyle’s new wife a “cunt” had a very friendly ring to it.
“Come on, you’ve got nothing else to do, I can hear it in your voice,” he informed her. “You’re going to be stuck at home with all those millions of brothers and sisters you never liked and what, seven hundred nieces and nephews?”
“I like my brothers and sisters.”
“Well, as my memory serves, they only tolerate you. I want to see you! And everyone will make a huge deal about that television show, I swear all of Cincinnati is abuzz. It’s the talk of the town. Wear something hot, you’ll totally scare the bejesus out of Van, I can’t wait to see it.”
“Why would I want to scare her, I don’t even know her,” Alison told him, trying to maintain a shred of maturity in the face of this.
“Trust me, you’re going to hate her. I think he just married her to get back at you, I really do.”
“I could give a shit what Kyle does,” she lied.
“Then why am I begging you. Just come. I told Kyle you’d be there, and he’s fine with it. You just have to get through ‘hi,’ which is in fact in your skill set. Besides, you love my dad’s house.”
“All right, all right, all right,” Alison caved. “Fine, I’ll show.”
She returned the old-fashioned phone receiver to its cradle in the kitchen and reported back to the audience that had appeared in the kitchen.
“Dennis is having a party tonight.” There were as usual a mob in there—Andrew, Stella, Megan sitting down, Lianne pouring juice for three toddlers, Mom at the stove. Most of them didn’t even hear her. It was the way, finally, you dealt with so many people: You just tuned everything out. Except for Rose, who glanced up from the stove, where every burner was covered with some sort of pot.
“Oh, Dennis!” she said, with a fond interest. She was one of his many fans in high school; whenever he came over to hang out, he flirted with her shamefully. “Where is he living now?”
“You know, I’m not sure. He had a place somewhere over in Clifton for a while, I guess he’s still there.”
“Maybe you should find out where his apartment is before you go to a party there,” Lianne advised. Pure Lianne, Alison thought. Can’t say anything nice, and in such a stupid way.
“He’s house-sitting for his dad right now,” she announced, as if the room in general had inquired as to Dennis’s whereabouts. “In that huge place on Grandin Road.”
“Well, the kids wanted to go to a movie tonight, so I don’t know what the car situation is,” Lianne observed, looking at her mother with a worried parental superiority. Alison wanted to smack her but the truth was that every one of her siblings had assumed that tone one by one, as they started having kids. The unspoken addendum to any sentence being But the kids might need that! Alison and Jeff and Megan, the last unmarried Moores, had frequently rolled their eyeballs at each other whenever someone started indulging in the whole you wouldn’t understand because you don’t have kids line of logic. But Megan was married and pregnant now and Jeff was off in Germany. Alison just had to weather this one alone.
“Well, we have Andrew’s car and Paul’s car and your father’s car,” Rose informed Lianne. “And your car, right?”
“Do we know if Andrew and Paul are doing anything later on? Weren’t some people going to Skyline?”
“Oh, they were going to do that around five, I don’t think that will interfere with movie plans.”
“Well, that’s when we would be going, right around five. They’re little kids, we need to get them home early, Mom. They need to be in the bathtub by seven thirty.”
“How many people were thinking of going?”
“To what, Skyline or the movie?”
“Either one.”
“Well, that’s my point, it sounds to me like everyone is going to one or the other.”
“I don’t think your father is going to want to go to Skyline, or a kids’ movie.”
“Okay, then everyone except Daddy. That’s still everyone.”
“Except for me,” Alison inserted.
“But that’s the point, it’s just you, taking a whole car, which would leave us sort of stranded.”
“Would it?”
“Our car sits eight,” Andrew noted.
“Yes, but you’re going to Skyline. Which will leave us with just one of the vans, and Dad’s car, and Mom’s.”
“And Paul’s car, right?”
“We don’t know what Paul’s doing.”
“If you’re going to the movies at five, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Alison said, trying not to look like her head was about to explode. “I’m sure Dennis is not expecting anyone till at least eight or nine.”
“Well, but we might want to go get a bite after the movie.”
“I thought the whole point was to get the kids home early.” In spite of her best intentions, Alison’s tone shifted into something a shred too aggressive and Lianne bristled. She turned back to the sink, started shoving dishes around loudly, and then she sighed, clearly communicating how selfish she thought Alison was being. Everyone
in the room exchanged glances with everyone else while simultaneously avoiding eye contact with Alison, who felt herself immediately in the doghouse for having crossed a line with Lianne even though Lianne was acting like a colossal idiot.
“I think it will be all right,” Megan said. “Who knows how long the movie will take, but Skyline is so fast! Those guys will be in and out in no time. If Alison doesn’t need the car before six thirty, there should be no problem.”
“I don’t think I’m going to need it until eight,” Alison said, trying to sound innocent and reasonable.
“I just think it helps to plan these things out,” Lianne commented. “You didn’t tell us anything about a party until just this second, it would have helped to have some warning.”
“I didn’t know about it until this second.”
“That’s not my fault.”
This could have gone on forever, but the transportation problem was in fact sorted out—everyone made it home from both Skyline and the movie by seven—so there were cars aplenty. Alison took her mother’s, a sky-blue Oldsmobile a shred less massive than all the other vehicles crowding the driveway, and headed across town to the problematic party—problematic in more ways than one—on Grandin Road.
seven
IT WAS HARD to go inside. She stood for a moment, shivering in the December night and wondering what on earth she was going to say to Kyle when she saw him in the middle of a sloppy crowd of drunks, with a total stranger standing next to him as his wife. The last time they had seen each other—almost a year and a half ago now, in Seattle—she had said unforgivable things to him, and then they had made out on her bed with a loveless fury before he abruptly stood and left the room, her apartment, and her life. The morning after this final encounter, as Alison stepped into the shower, she had stopped, in shock, at the sight of her naked body in the bathroom mirror. Her breasts were covered with bruises. He was willing to maul her, but not make love to her, no matter how desperately they both wanted it.
Why did it finally pervert itself into that disaster? So many other times their connection to each other seemed to make one living thing, something with roots and branches. Everything about their relationship had some sexual element to it—arguing about Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin could still turn her on, because she had spent so many hours listening to Kyle trying to explain why their arcane and mystical brilliance might one day transform the earth into something holy. Then he would run his hands up her torso under her sweater while moving her whole body beneath his own, finally getting her just where he wanted her, before leaning in for his first kiss of the night. It would literally make her see stars. He was a truly gifted lover, if you ignored the fact that there was no genital interaction whatsoever other than the most extended and painful dry humping the universe has ever seen. But they were happy—they were—when it all wasn’t too dangerous to be tolerated. For the whole time they were together, the agonizing simplicity of their physical connection annihilated what otherwise were real obstacles. He was so fucking uptight about the church. She despised lying institutional hierarchies. He wanted to be a Doctor Without Borders. She wanted to be an actress. Why would anyone think this was ever going to work out? The puzzlement was that it just did.
But now, standing out there on the frozen lawn, Alison remembered the night of their final breakup and the morning after as one long moment of heartlessly cold dismissal. It was the poison that she was left with now. “This is stupid,” she muttered to herself, gathering her courage as she stalked toward the medieval manor and the warm chaos of the party within. “Fuck Kyle and his fucking Catholicism. It doesn’t matter who he married. What’s done is done. I can do this.” She was grateful the lawn was so expansive. It gave her time to convince herself that this was true.
Whereas parties at the Moores’ were known for the mountains of deliciously trashy appetizers, Dennis’s were known for their bacchanalian excess. For Dennis, a party was all about the booze, and he always bought way too much of it: case upon case of European and Mexican beers, enormous bottles of bourbon and vodka and gin and scotch with plenty of vermouth and soda and juices and maraschino cherries and olives and anything else anyone might imagine would be a good thing to toss into a cocktail. No soft drinks, and no wine—if you wanted that, you had to bring it yourself. At some point, inevitably, someone got hungry and sent out for pizza, which everyone chipped in for with a good-natured and very drunk esprit de corps. There would also be some drug action—the occasional joint, one or two people doing lines in the bathroom, maybe a few people dropping Ecstasy—but mostly when you went to one of Dennis’s parties, you knew ahead of time that people were going to be getting really drunk. That was the given, even in high school, when some kind of parental supervision might have been expected.
Things hadn’t changed. Alison cautiously opened the front door—it had been standing half ajar, so there was no reason really to ring—and for a moment watched a bunch of total strangers laugh and shout at one another. She was glad that she had bothered to put on several choice pieces of her new wardrobe; Dennis was hanging out with people who dressed considerably better than she or any of their friends had in high school. These people had jobs and money and they seemed to think that a Christmas party was the perfect opportunity to show all that off. The house was just as she remembered it—exquisite—although the beautiful lines of the mansion’s soaring front foyer were obscured by the numbers of partygoers who truly seemed crushed into every odd corner they could find. Even though this was a fancier crowd, the rules of too much alcohol still, apparently, applied. Everyone was smiling and laughing and flirting cheerfully; they had all already had maybe two or three. It was numbers four, five, and six when things got a little wilder.
But as well as she knew this party, she didn’t know any of the players, and for a moment she panicked. It was a learned fear, something that she had just picked up in the past few months. In New York, when you walked into a party alone, you really were alone, and unless your host had invited you in order to palm you off on someone who was looking to be fixed up, no one was going to even bother saying hello. Up to this moment, she would have said that Cincinnati truly was different when it came to the party scene; when you arrived by yourself, people would welcome you politely, usher you in, and introduce you to their friends, who would ask engaging questions and try to make you feel at home. But now she wasn’t sure where she was. This party looked impenetrable and, given her already heightened nerves, downright terrifying. She almost turned and ran.
“Not so fast,” laughed a voice at her shoulder. A hand actually reached out and held her in place.
“Dennis! Merry Christmas!” She smiled professionally. Dennis looked exactly the same, his open and sunny Midwestern grin undercut by skittering eyes which were slightly too obvious in their hunger for things which would be bad for him. His dark hair was still thick, thinning only at the temples, which made him look even more sardonic than he was. He gave her the once-over with that hedonist’s appreciation she had seen before, but it wasn’t a source of real worry; in the past few years, Dennis was consistently too drunk to really try anything more than an inconvenient grope. In high school, he always seemed radical in his decadence, but it was easy to see now what a coward he was. Flushed with drink, hiding in Cincinnati, working at P&G—and she really had no idea what he did there, since he never shared the specifics—hovering constantly around the wealth and privilege accorded to a father he despised, Dennis was now in the full flower of his weakness. If he’d left Ohio he would have turned into nothing, but it would have made a man of him, she thought. He’ll turn into nothing here and it will just make him even more bitter than he is already.
“You look fantastic,” she said.
“Well, you look like a scared rabbit,” he told her, with a superior glint in his eye. He kissed her on the cheek, lingering just a second too long.
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“What do I mean by ‘s
cared rabbit’? I mean ‘delicious,’ Alison; you look good enough to eat. The boots are a terrific touch and they make you nice and tall. Well done. Now, let’s get this over with.” He put his arm around her shoulder and steered her straight into the heart of the crowd.
“Do you think I could take my coat off and get a drink, Dennis?” Alison laughed. Her heart was literally pounding; she could hear the blood in her ears.
“Absolutely, give me that, and what would you like?” He peeled her coat deftly off her shoulders and draped it over his arm. “Van, you have to meet Alison! Alison Moore, this is Van. Evangeline Wallace, she’s Kyle’s wife, and she took Kyle’s name, isn’t that right, Van? Sorry, Evangeline.” Alison stared. She had had no idea, honestly, that the interloper wife was standing there, right in front of her.
“You can call me Van,” Van laughed. She had a perfect laugh, silvery, delightful.
“Yes, but why would you, if the real thing is Evangeline! Isn’t it fantastic, Al, someone in Illinois actually named their kid Evangeline.”
“Well, I wasn’t born in Illinois! We’re really transplanted Southerners,” Evangeline declared cheerfully. “My mother is from Louisiana.” She reached out and shook Alison’s hand. Alison shook it back, nodded politely, and hoped that her smile was coming off better than it felt like. She couldn’t believe it. Evangeline, or Van, or whatever her name was, was no taller than five foot one, and she had a perfect little peach of a figure. Her skin was a creamy kind of pink, and she had startling blue eyes, a blue so dark it looked like a lake in the mountains in the winter. Her mouth was wide and delicate with a crazy fullness in the middle where the upper lip parted from the lower with an unconsciously lovely lift. This chick was a total blonde cupcake. Alison knew that’s what men wanted, how could you not know, just growing up in America, that every boy out there innately just wanted some sweet little blonde thing to smile up at him, but Kyle? That’s what Kyle wanted, too?
“I’ve really been looking forward to meeting you,” Alison told her, with what she hoped sounded like sincerity. “I’m an old friend of Kyle’s.”
I'm Glad About You Page 8
