“She’s not huge,” Kyle replied. “If anything, she’s thin.” That ought to shut her up, he thought. Although Alison certainly was taller than he remembered. During their brief conversation he had been so disconcerted by so many things, he had not considered that she was now looking him in the eye, which might have been part of the disorienting effect.
“I didn’t mean huge, I meant tall. Which feels huge to me! She’s like a tree, she’s so tall. And you’re right, she is skinny! Well, I guess if you’re an actress you have to worry about all that.”
Kyle didn’t even know how to respond to that one. He took another hit off his scotch and wondered how much time he had to give to this. He knew that they should leave, that even hanging around this dreadful party would be a bad idea, but he also knew that to suggest such a thing within instants of talking to Alison would be incriminating beyond belief. Then there was also the fact that he couldn’t bear to leave. The thought that he might actually bump into her again was humming in every cell of his body. And why shouldn’t he talk to her? He was married now. All that nonsense with Alison was finally, blessedly over. He could talk to her. He could see her, and talk to her.
“So did she have anything to say?” Van asked. He glanced down at her. Her eyes were glittering with an air of exasperation, as if there were simply no reasonable answer to this, but somehow it was his fault that she had been forced to ask.
“She didn’t, really.”
“What about you, you apparently had a lot to say.”
“‘Hello’ was actually pretty much the extent of it.”
“Well, you talked for quite a while, for two people who have nothing to say to each other.”
“Were you watching?”
“I was waiting for my club soda, which took you so long to deliver it’s flat. So yes, I was watching, and you did more than say ‘hello’ to each other.”
Kyle let that one land for a moment before he deigned to respond to it. This harping about Alison was a repeat offense with Van, and sometimes the best way to deal with it was to let her go too far. The silence bloomed, and he took another sip of his watery scotch. He knew how to outwait her. It usually didn’t take very long.
“Well, that’s great,” she said, glancing away with unmasked contempt. “That’s just perfect.” He considered letting that hang out there as well, but they were in public, and there was an unexpected ferocity behind Van’s agitation.
“I don’t know what you’re mad at me for,” he told her. “I didn’t even want to come to this party. That was your idea. As I told you, Dennis said she wasn’t coming, I didn’t fully believe him, just for the record, I’m not an idiot, so I said I thought we should stay home. I said it more than once. You were the one who insisted we come.”
“You knew she would be here.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. That’s— I just told you a moment ago that in fact, I didn’t—”
“You just said—”
“I said I knew there was a chance I was being lied to. But generally I try to assume that I’m not.”
“Whatever—”
“Not whatever. No. I was told she wasn’t going to be here. That is what we both were told.”
“I don’t—”
“In spite of which, you, apparently, at least so you say, knew she would be here, and you wanted to come! Insisted on it, in fact. Which, if logic serves, would indicate that you were the one who wanted to see her, not me.”
“Maybe logic isn’t everything.”
“Clearly it’s failed us tonight. If you don’t want to be here now, we can go home.”
“Why, because you can’t stand to be in the same room with her?”
“Fine, then let’s stay, since we’re both having so much fun.”
“I have no friends here,” Van hissed, furious now. “Everyone is your friend, and they haven’t been exactly welcoming, so if I get invited to one Christmas party maybe I might want to go. Even if your ex-girlfriend is going to be there.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Everybody loves you. My parents adore you. And Dennis thinks you’re great.” This wasn’t strictly accurate. Whenever they met for dinner, or drinks, or a casual movie, the conversation was cool and impersonal unless Dennis decided that Van needed to be flirted up, in which case all burners went on high. In other social situations Van was effortlessly positive and poised, presenting herself confidently as the working wife of a young doctor in Cincinnati. But that’s pretty much where things had leveled off. Kyle told himself it was just a matter of time till everyone got to know each other but even his parents seemed to have settled into a kind of withholding formality. Susan was still trying too hard publicly and not giving anything privately. For all her charms, Van had not been let in, and he did not know why. The sudden recognition of the pain and loneliness that this exclusion must be causing her softened the irrationality of his mood.
“Look. We should go,” he said. “Really. It’s not the only Christmas party. And if it isn’t going to be fun, I don’t see any point in staying.” He meant it as a kindness, but Van’s eyes flickered at this, settling themselves into some sort of sullen, disappointed rage. Why? He was saying, I can see that this is no fun for you, let’s get out of here. Why would that piss her off?
Whether he knew why or not, it most certainly had. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” she replied. “Besides, if we walk out within instants of your little tête-à-tête with your old girlfriend, people will be gossiping for weeks.”
“I can’t imagine that people find us that fascinating, Van.”
“You can count on it, Kyle,” she informed him. And with that she plastered on a lovely, bright smile, and waved her hideous glass of dead club soda at Dennis, who was in fact watching them with a shred too much interest from across the room. “Help! Help!” she called with her bubbling laugh. “He’s failed me utterly!”
She was so pretty and impermeable. She said things which were clearly meant to express something about her interior life but he simply couldn’t understand what she meant, or even what the words meant. It was like talking to a puppet. It was less coherent than talking to a puppet. With a puppet, you could take things at face value, and interpret backward, to what the hidden meaning might be when you worked what you knew about the identity of the puppet master into the equation. But there was no puppet, no puppet master, only words that indicated emotions in a way which revealed nothing, words which simply mystified the workings of the heart even further. If his head was made of glass, then hers was iron, or stone.
“His interview with the great actress was more impressive than mine,” Van informed Dennis, who had joined them behind the pillar. “At least it went on long enough for my club soda to lose all its fizz.”
“Well, that’s a metaphor if I’ve ever heard one,” Dennis noted.
“You told me she wasn’t coming, Dennis,” Kyle reminded him.
Dennis smirked. “You needed to get that over with,” he informed his friend. He took the weakened scotch out of Kyle’s hand and leaned through the people cluttering the end of the bartop to return the empty plastic tumblers to the bartender. “Two Macallans, and we would appreciate a heavy pour.”
“I’m driving.”
“Van’s only drinking club soda, she can drive. Besides, you’ve earned it. That was hard, seeing Alison, and you both got through it. Well done, Kyle. Well done, Van.” Van lifted her chin with the slightest edge of appreciation at this and Kyle recognized that once again Dennis had managed to soothe her agitation with a minimum of effort. How did he do it? What did it matter. He took another hit and let his glance float over the crowd. Alison was nowhere to be seen.
eight
ALISON WAS NOWHERE to be seen because she was literally hiding from him. Her immediate impulse—to find a bathroom and hole up in it—had been thwarted by the crowd of well-dressed Cincinnatians who clustered around the doorways to the two half-baths on the ground floor with drunken determination. So
she snuck up to the second floor and down the three successive hallways to the enormous marble bath off the master bedroom in the back.
The way was familiar enough; Dennis had given her a tour of the house years ago, when he was babysitting the place the first time his father went wandering the globe with Felicia. What a ridiculous episode that was, she remembered. Dennis had eased himself onto the edge of his father’s bed and turned on her, with his practiced and wicked glee. “Come on, Alison,” he purred. “Let’s have sex on Felicia’s duvet.” A moment before she had been admiring it—it was made of some sort of shimmering material, pewter gray, edged with muted gold braiding and tassels—but immediately it looked tawdry and like the kind of duvet you’d find in a whorehouse. The room was dark and she became aware, in the stillness which followed his proposition, that she was in fact alone in the house with him. She took a moment to consider a saucy retort, something dismissive enough to buck up her nerves and also shut this whole line of logic down forever, but he instantly misconstrued her silence to express some degree of interest on her part. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he said, moving quickly down the path of his own desires. He grabbed the tail ends of her shirt in his hand, pulling her toward him with a shred too much force. “You have such beautiful breasts.”
“Dennis, for crying out loud, Kyle’s your best friend.” She shoved him away and took a step backward, out of his range.
“He knows I’m not to be trusted. And if he doesn’t know that about you yet, he should.”
“Who wouldn’t leap at that charming offer?”
A swift anger blew through Dennis’s expression. “You, I should think. Aren’t you getting tired of waiting for it?”
There was a meanness to this that hit her like a physical blow. Had Kyle talked about their sex life with this most disreputable of all his friends? Why did these two even like each other? Alison knew she’d better get out of there, but she couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Wow, what romance. ‘Come fuck me in my father’s bed.’ Maybe a therapist could help you out with this, Dennis,” she told him. “Your issues are out of my league.” Then she had turned and walked out, and he didn’t follow her. And nobody ever spoke about that again.
Was the surreptitious disaster of this horrible Christmas party just another one of Dennis’s fucked-up games? Kyle, she knew, had been blindsided by her appearance; she could see it in his eyes the instant she caught him watching her from behind that ridiculous pillar—Dennis had once again lied to him thoroughly. Alison couldn’t help wondering how that worked, how all those Catholic boys made sense of the many ways they betrayed themselves and their girlfriends and each other every minute of every day. Maybe it had something to do with the way all those self-congratulatory priests lied to them about what it meant to be a “man for God” and then turned out themselves to be thieves, drunks, child abusers, and power mongerers. If the priests are all massive liars about everything, why wouldn’t their students turn out to be the same? Kyle would never have tolerated that discussion; there was something relentlessly rigid about his innocence. Dennis on the other hand would have found it an interesting notion, and then used it to try to coerce her into the sack again. It wasn’t worth thinking about. She collapsed on the bed, which luckily had a new bedspread.
“Excuse me.”
Alison cracked her eyes open. The girl in the doorway was young, maybe still in high school, even. Her clothes looked expensive but without style; the cream sweater top actually had gold sparkles in it and the wool skirt, cut in straight, unflattering lines, was red. Alison wondered if she had ever dressed like that herself, and concluded that even at the height of her Midwestern ignorance she most definitely had not. She most certainly had never worn her hair in such a deliberately asexual do, tight to the head, with plastered bangs cut way too short for a face that round. Everything about this girl told you she was innately too boring to even look at.
“I’m just looking for the bathroom,” the fashionless girl explained. “Is there a bathroom back here?” Her voice was cautious and simple, respectful to a fault. Alison felt a pang of yearning to just be back in New York, where people didn’t abase themselves like this just because they were looking for the bathroom.
“It’s over there.” Alison lifted her arm and pointed to the far wall, but she did not bother getting up. Her eyes, which had only barely opened in the first place, slipped shut again. This girl, who was doubtless a really, really nice person, would come and go more quickly if she wasn’t encouraged by a lot of well-mannered drivel about absolutely nothing.
“You’re Alison Moore, aren’t you? I saw you on television. You were amazing! But I don’t want to bother you.”
And yet, you kept talking, Alison thought. “No no,” she said. “No bother at all.” In complete contradiction to her sardonic inner monologue, the words came out of her mouth with an effortless grace. You can take the girl out of the Midwest but you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl. She didn’t want to talk to this person but there was no way to get out of it without being rude, and she just didn’t have the energy for that. It was, finally, easier to be super polite.
She should have left. Why run upstairs and hide? Why not just leave? Well, where would she go? She couldn’t go home and face her interminable family, who would all ask her what she was doing home so early, revisit the mind-numbing wrangling about the car, and then drift into a bunch of boring quips about Dennis and how rich and unethical his father turned out to be. Plus, she wanted to see Kyle again. She didn’t want to talk to him; she just wanted to look at him. Her thoughts were ping-ponging now. His wife is horrible. She’s fucking gorgeous. I can’t believe he married that person. I can’t believe he didn’t marry me. I wasn’t going to marry him anyway he’s too Catholic I hate the Catholic church how could he marry someone else why am I even thinking this shit I should never have come.
“Can I ask you a question?” Alison found herself hating this girl almost as much as she hated herself right then.
“I guess that depends on what the question is,” she said. Considering the fact that she was still lying there with her eyes closed, she sounded ridiculously sunny.
“Well, I just, I love acting. I just love it. Like, I totally think it’s what I want to do with my life? And I’m still in high school, so I’ve only really done a few plays, but I had pretty good parts in both of them, like we did Charley’s Aunt and I played this character who is really Charley’s aunt. Like, not the guy in the dress, but the real Charley’s aunt? And in the other one I played just, like, a servant, who had, like, five or six lines, only, but I had to do an Irish accent, which was really, people said it was really good! And I just wondered if you could give me some advice? About how to pursue it, as a career?”
This was unspeakably dreary.
“People probably ask you that all the time. Because you’re so phenomenally successful.”
“Oh, boy,” Alison sighed. “Successful? I don’t—no. I wouldn’t say that.” She let her eyes drift over the ceiling, the drapes, the black trees and the winter night hovering just outside the window. On the wall across from the bed there was a collection of small but surprisingly well-chosen artworks—one of them, a framed red-and-black cartoon, was an actual Matisse. Felicia’s enormous jewelry box sat like a majestic throne just under it, on top of Felicia’s enormous dresser. She had a pearl necklace in there, an emerald tennis bracelet, and two pairs of diamond earrings; on that memorable night many moons before, Dennis had told her the prices of everything, mocking his father’s lavish spending on his stepmother before inviting Alison to have sex on her duvet. But it was hard to take the trappings of wealth seriously, when you had so little of it yourself. Why would you spend thousands on a tennis bracelet when you didn’t have eight hundred dollars to spend on a month’s rent?
“But you have an agent.”
This kid was incredible. “Yes, I do; I do have an agent.”
“Is it hard to get an agent? Like, if I came to New York
, and wanted to try to be an actress, would that be something I would have to do? Because I heard that there are lots of auditions you can get, where you don’t even really need agents.”
Alison decided the kid was just weird enough to tolerate. She liked the way the inane questions kept her from obsessing about Kyle and his gorgeous blonde wife. “Look,” she said. “I can tell you all about this? But I need a drink.”
“Do you want me to get you one?”
Two hours and four drinks later, the party in the bedroom was in full swing. The kid—her name was Donna—eventually got dragged off by her sister, who needed to meet some people in Mount Adams, but by then Alison had lots of new friends. Every twentysomething who went looking for the upstairs bathroom eventually found a way to the back bedroom. One wily youth snuck down the back stairs into the kitchen, where he snagged a couple of six-packs, several bottles of really good wine—Christmas presents, clearly—and a gourmet gift basket full of cheese, summer sausage, and fancy crackers. Alison observed that this was better fare than Dennis usually served, and everyone agreed so readily that it was established that all present had been guests at his bacchanals more than once.
Cincinnati parties were much better than New York parties, Alison decided. Even the slightly too uptight retro-Catholics in the bunch were major drinkers, and as the evening wore on they grew progressively more jocular. People she had known only vaguely in high school were so impressed by her small shred of New York success that they congratulated her enthusiastically. They asked curious and respectful questions about how television was made, which largely focused on the technical aspects of the process. A few brazenly asked how much money something like that would pay, and she answered with direct specificity, explaining terms like “top of show” and “day player” and how much these definitions might earn you as a neophyte on a SAG contract. Everybody thought that being paid almost three thousand dollars for one week of work—and pretty glamorous work, at that—was impressive. She tried to make the point that she had had to audition for weeks and months on end before she landed that singular job, and all her earnings went into head shots and new clothes for more auditions, but no one found that to be a serious detriment to the whole idea of being an actress. She had done it; she had gotten herself on television; she had arrived. When she tried to make the point that she’d like to continue to do theater as well, no one understood why. None of them had been to a play in years. One girl talked about how she used to go to student matinees in grade school, and how she remembered liking it a lot, but now theater was so expensive and if she had a hundred dollars extra to spend she’d rather go to dinner at a really good restaurant, because that was fun too and the last time she went to see a play it was boring and she felt ripped off. Alison thought about how everyone she knew in New York would make fun of this position, and perhaps even say something unkind about how this girl—who was slightly chubby, truth be told—maybe should take art more seriously than food once in a while. But Alison also thought that the slightly chubby girl was right.
I'm Glad About You Page 10
