Cincinnati people are nice, Alison thought, and for the first time in a long time, the word “nice” carried no negative connotations. “Nice” didn’t mean “stupid.” It meant friendly, and easygoing, and easily moved to happiness. It meant relaxing. It meant sane.
But the nice hidden party in the bedroom upstairs couldn’t be expected to go on forever. The kindly drunken Cincinnati strangers started drifting away, and Alison was searching through the empty bottles for one which might have a few last inches of wine left in the bottom, by the time Kyle came looking for her.
He had in fact been looking for a while, as carelessly as he possibly could. As the evening wore on and he traded light chat with the few people he knew there, he would occasionally let his eyes sweep the crowd swiftly, hoping to search her out without giving any indication to Van that Alison’s presence was of the least concern to him. He had followed Alison’s coat as well. Dennis had taken it off her, just as she said hello to Van, and then carried it on his arm for several minutes before draping it over the banister of the stairway near the door. At one point it slipped off, or someone knocked it off, and from then on it lay in a heap in a corner by the door, where people kept kicking it aside until someone finally picked it up and folded it nicely before setting it on the steps. It was just a black wool coat, relatively indistinguishable from any number of other coats, but he had been tracking it since the moment he saw it on Dennis’s arm, so he knew that it was hers. All night the coat was there but Alison wasn’t—this contradiction went on for so long, at one point he wondered if she had left without it.
“It looks like your friend didn’t stay very long. I haven’t seen her since we got here,” Van finally observed.
“No.” Van of course would not have been tracking the coat. She would just be aware of Alison’s presence, or absence.
“That’s too bad. I really wanted to get to know her! We hardly had a chance to say hello.” Van issued this announcement with a sweet, good-natured sincerity that was so believable it frightened him. Did she mean this? Just hours ago she was spitting venom because he had spoken to Alison briefly about nothing. Now she wanted to get to know her? Her earnest hope to make friends with Alison struck him as the most dangerous and chilling possibility yet presented.
“I guess she did leave,” Kyle said.
“Well, that’s a shame. Dennis! We haven’t seen Alison for hours! Did she leave?”
Standing as they were near the front doorway, Van could easily intercept him on his endless ramble back to the bar. “Alison?” he asked. “No, haven’t seen her since she got here.” Dennis was steady on his feet, but Kyle had known him long enough to recognize the profound alcoholic glitter in his too-steady gaze. His words were hyperarticulated with a heaviness that indicated the coming blackout was maybe fifteen minutes away. “Fled, apparently. You scared her off, Van.”
“I didn’t!”
“You’re formidable. And gorgeous. Kyle always gets the best girls.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I could be much worse, Van; keep an open mind.”
“That’s enough of that.” Kyle draped his arm around Van’s shoulder and pulled her back to him. “She’s mine.” This made Dennis raise his eyebrows and Van blush with pleasure. She loved flirting with Dennis and seemed to have no idea that he was not fully kidding. Or did she? Maybe she was hoping to stir some sort of mysterious plot between the two of them. He didn’t know and less did he care, for he knew from years of experience that as soon as Dennis passed out, the party would dissipate quickly. If he was going to get a chance to speak to Alison alone for even one minute, he had to go looking for her now. “I’m starving,” Kyle suddenly announced. “Is there anything to eat around here? Ever?”
“Food is overrated,” Dennis informed him with a laconic grace.
“Funny, they didn’t teach us much about that in med school. I wonder why. I’m going to go find some crackers. Behave yourself,” he warned Van. She laughed and glowed at him with the charming radiance of a high school girl whose crush had just smiled at her on the way to class. Is that really all it took? Did she want so little, was that the secret? Most of the time it felt like she wanted far, far too much.
He knew the layout of the house well, as he had been there often. Down a short hallway, past a leathery den in which several people were playing a computer game on an enormous flat-screen television. Just past the den the hallway turned into the kitchen, a butcher block, stainless steel cavern which always looked like it should be crawling with minions and never was. One of those chilly bartender girls was at the sink, rinsing glassware; it was later in the evening than he thought. Up the back stairs, into a deserted passage which led to the bedrooms before curving around toward another, much larger space which Felicia had dubbed the “screening room.” If Alison was hiding out on the second floor, that was doubtless where he would find her. The floor was coated with a plush white wall-to-wall substance which he knew must be wool, but always seemed like snow to him. It silenced all footsteps.
Which was how, after thinking about her all night, he almost missed her. His approach was silent, and she was not where he expected. In fact he had passed the door to the master bedroom without even glancing in. It wasn’t till he was three steps farther on that he heard the clink of a glass and the whisper of clothing, someone moving on the bed in the room behind him. He turned simply out of instinct.
They stared at each other through the open doorway. Alison was on her stomach, on the bed, her head lifted in surprise, a half-empty bottle of wine in her hand. She had clearly just retrieved it from the floor, where a half dozen other bottles lay scattered on the snowy carpet; there, a long dark line of red wine drops wound away from her like an accusation. “Oh, God,” she said, looking up at him helplessly. “I didn’t do it! It was some guy who snuck down into the kitchen and brought the red up. Which I told him not to; he clearly just went into the secret stash of Christmas presents, this stuff was probably worth a fortune.”
He took two steps toward the door, toward her. Suddenly appalled at herself, she couldn’t bear to look at him.
“Shit, look at this, it’s a disaster,” she said, biting her lip. This was a disaster, indeed. She looked adorable.
“I’m sure they can have it cleaned.”
“Right, I know, that’s right. Red wine on white wool, I’m sure that will be the easiest thing to just, make go away.”
“It looks like you had quite a party in here.” He hated the sound of his own voice around her; it sounded unfeeling and distant, and angry. She caught it too, with a quick glance that let him know she heard the wounded possessiveness behind the words. Well, what was she doing up here, hiding in the master bedroom with a bunch of guys? Is that in fact what she had been doing?
“It was pretty claustrophobic downstairs and I didn’t know anybody. I was just getting some air, and then, you know, people kept coming.”
“I thought you might have left. Not just me,” he added immediately. “Van, actually, and Dennis, were wondering. They hadn’t seen you. So they thought you left.” It came out sounding like the opposite of what he meant to imply, which was that it wasn’t a big deal whether she left or not. Obviously it was a big deal or he wouldn’t be making such a big deal of it. Glass head.
“I didn’t leave, no,” she admitted, before glancing up at him under those long bangs. “I thought about it. You know, Kyle, honestly, I am sorry about— Dennis told me that you knew I was coming and that you agreed it was time to just say hello and get it over with. And then when I showed up, it was so clear you didn’t know I would be here. But that wasn’t, I didn’t, I wouldn’t have come—”
“It’s fine.”
“Obviously it’s not fine. Honestly I would like to kill Dennis. He’s such a liar and a pig. I’m amazed you’d leave him downstairs alone with your wife. She’s so pretty he’s surely started putting the moves on her by now. It’s not safe, you know it’s not.”
“He
was on the brink of passing out. I’m sure he has by now.”
“Well, that’s good news. Honestly he’s such an alcoholic,” she said, standing in front of her ex-boyfriend surrounded by dozens of empty wine bottles. She laughed at her own joke, and made a little wave of her hand over the bottles before her, as if she were blessing them.
“I was going to mention it but I thought it would be rude.” This sounded more real, to his relief, friendly even. She started to pick up the bottles, with the apparent conviction that straightening the room would keep things light.
“Anyway, I am glad we have a minute. I mean, I know it’s just a minute.”
“Yes.”
“I wish it was more than that. Because because because what happened, in Seattle—”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do, Kyle. I’m so ashamed of myself, the things I said to you.”
“It was a long time ago.” At some point he had stopped counting the days; it was when Van had appeared in his life and provided such a blessed distraction. Then later, when the memory of Alison began creeping back into the corners of his brain, he would rouse the specter of time as a weapon—can’t even remember how long it’s been, more than a year, almost thirteen months since you’ve even seen her, she’s been out there throwing her life away for fifteen months already. But that line of logic finally turned on him: It’s been eighteen months since you’ve seen her, and the rest of your life is going to feel like this.
“Anyway, it’s great to see you,” he announced. “Really great. Do you like living in New York?” The only way to keep this going, he knew, was to be as much like a normal person as possible. She smiled at the question—thank God—and set the bottles down on the bookshelf behind her.
“It’s okay. It’s kind of lonely. You know they say that about big cities, they’re the loneliest places? That turns out to be true.”
“I couldn’t live there.”
“No, I know that,” she said. “I’m not likely to forget it.” There had been a few dreadful conversations about his moving to New York, which went nowhere. It would have been impossible for him to live in a city as large and dirty and impersonal as New York, it was too far from his parents, and it just wasn’t an environment that interested him in the least. “You thought my fascination with it was, what did you call it? Delusional?”
“Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know, Kyle, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s where you have to be if you want to be an actor. That or Los Angeles. Which didn’t interest you either.” Her ironic tone was starting to drift into bitterness, which she pulled back on immediately. “But there’s no point, honestly, is there? We don’t have to go back to that stuff anymore. The answer just turned out to be so obvious! Stop torturing each other and you can both live where you want. Ta-da! Not so hard after all.”
“No.” The cold admission of this startled him back into the present—the real present, the one in which she didn’t in fact exist. This was not reality. In reality, she was about to evaporate.
“You look thin,” he said.
“Anorexia one oh one, the required class for all would-be actresses,” Alison nodded, recovering with what sounded like a practiced, tossed-off laugh. “And I’m supposed to lose another six pounds! I don’t know how, or where it’s supposed to come from.”
“Someone’s telling you to lose weight?”
“My agent,” she said, shrugging as if agents were something everybody had, although it was an entirely new entity in her life, as far as he knew. “It’s not his fault, honestly. He’s just telling me what people are looking for. Casting people want actresses to be thin, so, if you want to work, you have to starve yourself. It’s business.”
“Not art?”
“I don’t know about art right now. I’m just trying to survive.”
“You always made fun of that.”
“Did I?”
“Didn’t you? Everyone who straight out of college took a money job, you were mad at all of them.”
“God, I was insufferable about it.”
“It just wasn’t what you wanted.”
“No, I had big unrealistic and delusional dreams. Shakespeare and Chekhov.”
“I should never have said that.”
“I said worse things, Kyle. About you and God, your boyfriend God. How are things with God?”
“He’s fine.”
“Tell him I need a job. Or if he could just send cash, that would do.” This admission seemed to cost her. She dipped her head, continuing her search for stray bottles behind the bed.
“I’ll do that.”
“Your wife seems nice,” she said, abrupt.
He felt an interior panic rise up and threaten to annihilate him. She was right to mention Van. But it left him adrift, two selves. He turned and looked at the door, knowing he should go now, before he broke down in front of her, or before he evaporated entirely. Those were the choices, as far as he understood them. He needed to leave.
For once Alison misunderstood; she seemed to feel that she had crossed a line and needed to make amends. She put her hand up, palm forward, which she meant as an apology, or a request, but which momentarily seemed to imbue her with a mythic grace.
“No, come on, Kyle, don’t go away,” she said. “I just meant . . . well, you love her, right?”
“Of course I love her.”
“That’s great, then.”
“Yes, it is.”
She cringed. That judgmental harshness had reappeared in his tone. But there was no way to apologize for it without taking back the certainty of his declaration of love for Van. “She’s great. She’s incredible. She has a terrific job at a firm downtown. What she really wants to do is public advocacy, but she needs litigation experience first.”
“So she’s a lawyer?”
“A litigator. That is, yes, she’s a junior associate.” God, had he just repeated himself? This whole situation was intolerable. Why had he come up here?
“You’re still going to Ecuador, though? Or Honduras? I can’t remember. Someplace where you could get away with pidgin Spanish. That’s what you said, after you had to give up on the Navajo Nation because the language was so hard. Remember? All we could ever figure out how to say was ‘I love you.’” She had meant that one to come out lightly. When it didn’t, she flailed. “Anyway . . .”
A bolt of rage sliced through him. Whatever he was doing, or not doing, with his life was none of her business anymore; she was in no position to question his choices, or speak to him about his dreams. She rejected those dreams long ago by insisting that her own dreams would be paramount for her. Acting! The most self-indulgent, narcissistic choice imaginable for someone with her strength of mind and will. She was built for a life of service. But she wanted to be an actor, as if that would be God’s choice for anyone. Acting. On television.
“Kyle? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You just kind of went away there.”
“No. I’m here.” And now he was ashamed of himself, still judging her choices like this. He had no right. But it was impossible to apologize for something he hadn’t even said. Their lives were so divided, there wasn’t even air between them. She was watching him, her eyes alert, curious. She nodded with that new sadness.
“Well. I hope you do go to South America. Or the Navajo Nation. Wherever. I thought that was a great idea.”
Alison pushed the empty wine bottles onto the top of a bookshelf under the back window. It was only five or six feet away, but it struck him like a blow. This short interview was ending.
“Alison.”
She was crying, and trying not to; she had turned away from him specifically so that he couldn’t see it. But she caught herself with a stern little shake and cut him off. “Anyway, I’m glad that I got to see you, because I do want to say that I’m really happy for you,” she announced. “That it’s all working out for you.” She stopped talking and didn’t try again
. The silence which rose between them and filled this foreign bedroom could not have been more complete.
Kyle glanced over at the open doorway. With one fluid gesture he pivoted on his right foot, reached for the door, closed it, and locked it.
Alison lifted her head, startled by the swish of the closing door, or perhaps the tiny ping of the lock falling into place. Kyle looked at her. Her mouth parted open, then closed. She looked down, and ran her right hand along the edge of the bookshelf, a delicate move, no move at all really, except in its direction, which was toward him. He waited. He knew her, still; he knew that she was not going to be able to stand this as long as he could. It had been their pattern for six years.
She took a step, following her hand. “Oh, fuck it,” she said.
It was impossible for Kyle or Alison, in that moment, to understand how kissing each other in this locked bedroom, unseen and unknown to everyone in their world, might be considered a betrayal. The obstacles to their feelings for each other had been so numerous and complex over time that they had come to identify themselves as the victims of a vast conspiracy which involved America, God, culture, gender, capitalism, Catholicism, parental obligation, personal responsibility, youth, age, reality, dreams, and sex. Sex being the worst betrayal of all, because they were, frankly, the two of them, so good at it. When Alison came to him, it was not with a clumsy rush of despair, but rather with deliberate certainty. Her life wasn’t making a ton of sense. Engaging in physical contact with Kyle, the most irrationally destructive thing she could possibly do, made more.
I'm Glad About You Page 11
