I'm Glad About You

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Of course I know who you are!” Van smiled. “I’ve heard all about you!”

  “Nothing too bad, I hope!”

  “Not at all. Everyone was so excited when you were on that television show. That must have been so exciting for you.”

  “It was nerve-wracking, but fun.”

  “Well, everyone in Cincinnati was talking about it, it seemed like. We were so sorry to miss it. We were having dinner with Kyle’s parents and his mom was worried it might be too violent. And who can blame her! It’s awful, some of the things they put on television, just ridiculous anymore.”

  Alison blinked. This last zinger was clearly an uncalled-for dig, although who was kidding who? They both were expected to hate each other on sight, and they most certainly did. She was just stunned that a total stranger would feel free to haul out big moralistic guns about what Alison was doing for a living within the first thirty seconds of conversation. Dennis, watching the whole thing, was practically licking his chops.

  “Where is Kyle?” he asked. “I thought he was here a second ago.”

  “Oh, he went to get me a club soda,” Van explained.

  “A club soda? You’re not drinking?” Dennis raised that eyebrow again. It was starting to look like he practiced it, in the mirror.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “It’s a Christmas party, you don’t want even a glass of wine?”

  “No thanks.” Her tone was deliberately blank, as if she were landing the words without intent.

  “Why, Van, you sly puss.” Dennis focused his attention on her with a sudden glee.

  “What is that supposed to mean, Dennis?” she countered. “You are always acting like you know some big secret.”

  “Do you have a big secret?”

  “If I did, I certainly would not tell you.”

  “I’ll just get it out of Kyle.”

  “You will not, because maybe Kyle doesn’t know.”

  “Then there is a big secret.”

  “There’s always a big secret.”

  “Not this big.”

  “Stop it, Dennis. You’re terrible. Where is Kyle?” Van arched her neck toward the light, as she looked around with eager delight, trying to spot Kyle in the crowd. Alison knew the whole performance was for her benefit, and in a swift moment of clarity she found it terrifically unfair, that they both thought it so clever to torture her this way. She had never done anything to Dennis worse than refuse to hook up with him while she was in love with the boy he proclaimed was his best friend. And this Van, Kyle’s new wife? Alison had never done anything to her at all. Yet here they were, performing an excruciating opera—which centered on the pain they must be causing her—solely for their own amusement.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly and completely at the end of her emotional rope. “I’m going to go get myself a drink.”

  “Oh, let me!” Dennis said, smiling his devil’s grin.

  “I’m not a fucking child, Dennis; I can get my own fucking drink,” she told him, pulling out her potent ability with the word “fuck” in an unflinching warning.

  “Well, I guess you need one,” he informed her, as bitchy as an old theater queen.

  “That’s right, I do,” she shot back, as she turned away from them both. She knew that this would instantly become a part of the lore surrounding her unpromising meeting with Kyle’s idiotic blonde wife. Good, she thought.

  Across the room and behind a pillar Kyle watched Alison turn, her pride and her anger flashing like a sword in battle. Then, there it was: The color rose to her cheeks and he recognized the quick shame which overcame her every time she let her temper get the better of her. The sight of her—vulnerable, stylish, alone—unmoored his heart beyond reason. She looked taller, somehow, and more slender than he remembered. Her hair was longer, and cut into subtle layers which revealed the occasional auburn highlights buried in the dark, textured browns. He had told himself, in the past, that those hidden streaks of auburn were his alone; as he came to know every inch of her they had revealed themselves readily to his seeking hands while remaining elusive to the unknowing eyes of others. Now that some clever New York hairstylist had uncovered them with a swipe of the scissors, he felt lost and adrift. Those hidden glints of red were no longer his, and neither was she.

  But that was on her; it was all on her. She was always the one to end things, usually with no warning; they would be completely drunk on each other in every way possible, and then it was like she would simply turn the spigot off and disappear inside herself. Then the other Alison showed up, the one who was cold and clinical and determined that it was long past time to end this. That Alison wouldn’t even discuss things. It was like dealing with someone who had multiple personality disorder, frankly. He remembered all the times he would show up at her house, or her dorm at college, or that exhausted apartment she shared with those hippies in Seattle. Every time she would open the door, his nerves would stand completely on edge, waiting to find out which one of her was in charge. If she smiled and threw her arms around him, they were going to have an amazing night. If she couldn’t meet his eyes, not so much.

  But the first Alison—the one he was in love with—always returned to him. That was the reason he held on with such determination, even during the months of separation and break-offs. Those times always seemed to be merely necessary, part of the cost of adulthood, and education. They had fallen in love in high school, for crying out loud, and even though they started applying to colleges at the same time, there was no discussion, ever, that they might apply to the same school. It wasn’t done. They were too young. Too young and too sensible. His parents had sat him down at the well-worn Formica table in the kitchen and told him soberly that they thought it would be a bad idea; they loved Alison and they knew he did too, but college was a time to broaden your world as well as your mind, and going to school with your high school sweetheart would cut you off from all that. He nodded and accepted everything they said, swallowing the panic that threatened to rise up like gorge from his stomach; he was an essentially obedient young man, and the idea of defying his parents on a point so patently established in the local cultural lore was not in his skill set. When he presented this reality to Alison, she thought about it only briefly, then shrugged. Her parents had not given her the same speech—there was too much chaos over at the Moores’ for things like parental guidance, honestly—but she had assumed that this would be the lay of the land.

  “Well, if they’re going to split us up for four years,” she said thoughtfully, “we need to get busy.” And with that she climbed onto his lap, straddling him with those long legs, reaching under his shirt, and kissing him with a passion that never ceased to thrill him. They were sitting on a floor in the corner of the Moore family room behind the piano; it was one of the few relatively private spaces in that small house full of people but it wasn’t like they couldn’t be seen, if someone went looking. Alison didn’t care; she never did, even after her mother had found them one night so close to having sex they might actually have fallen off that cliff if Rose’s spot-on timing—and enraged disgust—hadn’t intervened. Kyle remembered every one of those make-out sessions with a vividness which still frightened him; at night, when he would return to these memories obsessively, living in the heat of the past, he wondered if they would ever wear thin. As of this instant, they had not.

  It was a spectacularly delusional dance. He truly hated her, and had already laid full responsibility for the creeping mediocrity of his marriage at Alison’s feet. But even as he privately nursed this whisper of blame—for a disaster which hadn’t even occurred yet—he simultaneously drowned, every chance he got, in the memories of their time together. Outwardly, no one would ever know. He barely knew himself, the cost of holding those two opposing psychological rivers right up next to each other, day in and day out. But he had a powerful mind, and an even more powerful will, put in place by years of Catholic indoctrination. No one would ever have to know.

  Th
e question now, of course, was how to get out of there without having to speak to her. He was furious with Dennis, who had told him in no uncertain terms that Alison had not been invited, and that there was no chance whatsoever that she would show up. He was furious with Van, who had insisted on coming even though he tried to beg off a half dozen times, on the off chance that in spite of his protestations Dennis actually might try to pull something like this. And he was furious with Alison, who he knew in his heart had come to check out and judge the woman he had married instead of her. Instead of her. He hated thinking of the two of them in the same sentence; his past and his future were completely different lives and there was no point in comparing the two women, and even if he did—even if he did—Van clearly was the superior choice. She was more beautiful, and there was a supple grace to her blonde loveliness which was, frankly, relaxing. “Relaxing” was the last word you would use in regard to any aspect of Alison. Van was every bit as intelligent as Alison, if not more so; Alison’s erratic emotionalism always crippled her in an argument. And Van was loyal. He knew that she would never turn on him, or abandon him, under any circumstance. The same could not be said of Alison.

  Who, at that very moment, was pushing through the crowd in the foyer with an unflinching determination, headed right for him. As soon as the thought flickered through his head he had to deny it: She wasn’t technically heading for him; she was heading for the bar, and the phony Grecian pillar behind which he had hidden himself was positioned just to its left. Two teenage girls in sexy black barkeep garb poured drinks with a slashing efficiency which was called for under the circumstances; Dennis’s new friends from Cincinnati’s corporate set were predictably alcoholic and swarming, and Alison was temporarily trapped in their midst. She glanced skyward with annoyance and then, as her eyes raked back down in an attempt to gauge her distance from the bartop, her gaze suddenly and unexpectedly landed on him. Their eyes met.

  He plastered a smile on as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. She saw, who knows what she saw, but it was seen before he could hide it. Even now! They were stuck in the middle of a crowd of strangers, they had not spoken or laid eyes on each other for almost a year and a half, and yet he could not escape the terrifying probability that she had once again managed to intuit some unknowable aspect of his interior life. This had proven true so many times that she used to tell him he had a glass head. He felt like he had a glass head now.

  “Hello!” he said. It sounded like an idiot was speaking.

  “Hello, Kyle,” said Alison. She had inched incrementally forward in line and he could see that her cheeks were flushed. That could have been the heat. Or the alcohol. Only she had not managed to get herself a drink yet. It was probably the heat.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Can you what? Sorry. Oh. Sorry, no, I can get myself a drink, thanks.” She squeezed past another stranger. “Besides, you look like you have your hands full.” Her eyes flickered down to the drinks in his hand. A wilting cup of club soda and a possibly drinkable scotch, served over ice in a plastic tumbler.

  “Right! I need to get this back to, my wife.” He stumbled over the words at the last minute. Of course he did. He meant to just say her name, Van, just toss it out there casually, the name of the woman he was with now, but then it seemed cold, he needed to do better by her, out of loyalty, and also let Alison know that he regretted nothing, he had moved on, he had a wife now, that was his reality, a reality that Alison knew nothing of. Sadly there were too many tumbling worries and the words escaped with that slight stutter step which, he knew, made him sound again like an idiot. He felt Alison’s eyes looking straight into his glass head. I didn’t ask for this. Fuck Dennis, and fuck her, he thought.

  “Yeah, your wife, I met your wife, we just met,” Alison acknowledged. She had finally maneuvered her way through the throng and secured a spot at the front of the line. “White, anything white,” she told the sexy young bartender. “Wait. Anything white that’s not a Riesling.”

  “Chardonnay?”

  “That would be fantastic.” She smiled politely, but the girl was uninterested in the social niceties; she uncorked the necessary bottle and poured. Alison turned back to Kyle with an air of what she hoped would sound like a sardonic hopelessness. “I love Chardonnay. A nice California Chardonnay, I don’t know why people make fun of them, I love them.”

  “Do people make fun of them?”

  “In New York everyone’s above them. You’re embarrassed to order them. Pinot grigio would be acceptable, if it didn’t give you a headache. Sadly it does.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” God, he sounded like a complete ass. And even worse, he felt the same way he had the first time he laid eyes on her. He had to get away from her. He couldn’t move. Alison accepted her tumbler of white wine from the humorless barkeeper girl and then, scooting to get away from the crushing hordes of desperate alcoholics behind her, she slid to her right, holding the drink up high so that it didn’t get bumped. She looked backward as she did—either to keep a lookout for who was pushing her, or so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes again—but the maneuver sent her unguarded chest within inches of his. He could smell her.

  “Sorry,” she said with a tight, polite little smile, as she landed herself on the opposite side of him, where the crowd was less crushing. “I can’t believe how many people are here. It looks like Dennis invited half of Cincinnati. And I of course know no one!”

  “Yeah, I’m surprised to see you here,” Kyle said. She looked at him sharply, like that was the wrong thing to say. Was it? His brain was in hyperdrive but it felt like all the gears had locked up and so the whole operation was just spinning uselessly. Every word he uttered sounded thin, small and phony, while as usual Alison just seemed larger than life. Even though she was tossing off social nothings with no content whatsoever, they sounded like so much more. Her glances all looked like so much more. They looked like the glances of someone with a soul. He told himself once again that it wasn’t that she was a deeper person; it was just that she was an actress. A notoriously shallow and unstable breed. Famous throughout the centuries for bringing men to wreck and ruin. That was all she was, and all she had ever been. An actress with green eyes. She was just an actress with sensational green eyes.

  “You look tired,” she informed him.

  Those long years of passion and disaster moved through him as if they were happening now. How could he be expected to even say hello to her if just seeing her in the middle of a crowd did this to him?

  “The holidays are always a little stressful.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How’s your family?”

  “Everyone’s great. The house is packed. Megan’s about to pop, it looks like.”

  “Yes, I heard she was pregnant. When’s she due?”

  “Of course you would ask that. And of course I have no idea.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. You and she were so close, I just thought . . .”

  “No, you’re right, you’re totally right. I have been shockingly narcissistic with regard to these babies. Maybe I’m jealous of them. Wow, maybe I am.” An edge of painful admission had crept into her tone.

  “Of them, not her?”

  “No, of them. They have her now.”

  “This is her first pregnancy?”

  “Yeah. It’s two, even. Twins!” It was a little loud by the bar, and Alison was now studying her plastic cup full of white wine with distracted determination. He wished she would look up at him and tell him that he looked tired again, and ask him why, and let the slightest air of her tenderness breathe on him, even though there was no place for it. “She’s one of them now, I guess,” Alison said, glancing away, suddenly opting for a lighter tone.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Megan. She’s one of the people who have children and, you know. Turn into zombies.”

  “I hardly think children turn adults into zombies.” He meant to adopt a careless tone, like hers, but it
came out sounding superior. He sounded like a superior prig.

  “No, no, that’s not— Well, it is what I said. I didn’t mean— I just meant, at least over at our house, it’s all kids all the time, and it kind of distorts. You say, I need a car tonight, and it turns into an endless circular discussion about whether or not some child might need ferrying somewhere in the most abstract and bizarre system of logic imaginable, you know, everything is just kind of . . . You would know better. You’re a pediatrician, you would know, I wouldn’t know,” Alison said, breezing right by the edge of his tone with an easy forgiveness. A forgiveness of what? Of everything? If she forgave him everything, he would go home and hang himself. “Wow. It’s great to see you, Kyle,” she finished, unexpectedly. “I’m going to see if I can find the bathroom.” She swiveled and paused, facing the daunting necessity of somehow plunging herself into that teeming hive of alcoholics, and turned sideways. He could see again, now, how thin she was. She downed the rest of her wine, dropped the cup on the bar, and worked her way into the crowd with a determination which did not look back.

  She had made her escape just in time. As he watched her go, someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Is that for me?” Van asked, flirtatiously imperious. She poked her head around and reached for the now-exhausted cup of club soda which he held clenched in his fist. “I didn’t know where you went!”

  “Sorry, it’s so crowded,” he started. And then, “I bumped into Alison.”

  “So I saw.”

  “Yeah, she said that you guys met.”

  “Dennis introduced us since you wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t even know she was here,” Kyle noted. “Dennis told me she wasn’t coming.”

  “And you believed him? I didn’t.”

  “I guess you’re smarter than me, then.” He finally took a much-needed sip of his now-watery scotch. It tasted dreadful.

  “You didn’t tell me how tall she was. She’s just huge,” Van observed, searching the crowd for another glimpse of her.