After yearning after him for nearly two years, having Kyle’s tongue down her throat sent Alison’s consciousness reeling. His hand went immediately up her back, under her sweater, where it had always belonged. Her hands peeled at his shirt with desperation; she could not tolerate any inch of him remaining untouched. He pushed her backward onto the bed and she fell willingly, letting him burrow into her neck while his hands dug underneath her bra, insisting on finding her breasts with an unflinching determination. She knew they would be bruised again, and was glad of it. His erection, pressed up against her, was welcome and familiar. She was only wearing a pair of sheer leggings, which meant that once again he was all but inside her. She gripped his back and gasped, silent, for the shred of a moment left to her before he lifted his head and found her mouth again.
And why not? They both had been so unhappy for so long; they both had fought through months of regret that things had ended so poorly between them, regretting even more the choices they had each made which sent their lives spinning farther and farther away from each other. There was no question in either of their minds that it had never been their destiny to go through life without each other; in spite of the repeated finality of their many betrayals, it was not their intent that things should have ended between them ever. This secret tête-à-tête, hidden from everyone who knew them and had ever known them, felt not like a misstep or a temporary slip into madness. For Kyle, it felt as if he had reentered the world. But that was not what was happening.
Kyle’s fierce determination to finally claim Alison irrefutably led him to do what he had stopped himself from doing far too many times. Holding her entire body under his, he reached down with his right hand, grabbed at his belt buckle, and started to unfasten it. His new willingness to just do it, finally, was met with no resistance from Alison, whose hands reached up and onto his hips, desperate to just get him out of those pants, and into her. But even as he yanked his belt open and leaned back, momentarily, to tear his trousers off, she pulled away. She pulled away. It was so unexpected, to both of them, that it could not be mistaken for an insignificant pause, but Kyle was frankly in no condition to be sensitive to whatever qualms of conscience might be rising out of her primordial cortex. He kissed her again with such total determination she almost succumbed. Why not why not why not, she allowed herself to think for one last moment, although too much of her already had remembered what it was she knew.
“We have to stop. Kyle, Kyle, stop. You have to stop,” she gasped, pushing his chest away from her own. “You have to stop.”
“No.” It was all he could say. He did not have any other words left in him.
“Seriously, Kyle, stop.”
He paused.
“We can’t do this.”
Kyle could not comprehend what was happening. Alison had never had any respect at all for the rules which required them to stop at this moment; she had relentlessly begged him to continue in the face of commandments from too many sources that insisted, irrefutably, that they stop. In his determined innocence, all those years, he had protected them both. Now that he knew—as she had told him so many times—that the laws of God were a lie, the idea of stopping, now, at this moment, seemed so perverse that he had the urge to strike her.
Instead, he stopped. He looked away. Then he looked down at his belt, and once again did as he was told.
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I shouldn’t have done that. This. I shouldn’t have done this.” As if it were your idea, he thought, I came looking for you, and for this, it wasn’t you who did it. You were too much of a coward to do it. You ran away, and you hid. I was the one who came looking. I was the one who was willing to sacrifice everything for you. You who sacrificed nothing for me.
“You need to talk to your wife,” Alison said. “She has something she has to tell you.”
You know nothing about anything, he thought. But he would not speak even to curse her. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it decisively behind him, without looking back.
Alison lay back on the bed, her heart pounding. How could she be the one to tell him? He clearly did not know. He was willing to throw everything away, but to throw away this would have been beyond thinking. It would have poisoned everything even more than it already was.
You could have done it just once, her animal brain informed her, pissed. Nobody even knows you’re here. You could have done it and walked away and at least you would have done it. The part of her which understood Kyle better than he understood himself dismissed this. He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself, it said. Wanna bet? said the animal. Alison barely tracked the back-and-forth, as she listened for the sound of a car door, in the distance, slamming shut, the turn of the motor, the gentle crunch of the gravel under the wheels as it moved off. That wife better be driving, she thought. Kyle is drunk. But she’s not. She’s not drinking, because she has a secret to tell him. She listened to the end of the night for what seemed a lifetime. Finally, the sounds came: The car door slammed. The gravel crunched. The car drove off.
Alison remained on the bed, staring at the ceiling, the walls, the Matisse, the jewelry box, the wine bottles, the dark air beyond the windows. She heard the rest of the party drain off. Dennis was doubtless passed out on some couch in some room somewhere.
Alison’s reptilian brain, thwarted in its main purpose for coming—a purpose so nearly achieved—was clever and determined, and no longer willing to take no for an answer. There was no reason to stay in Cincinnati; the entire city and her history there was a trap and a disease and a punishment. She had to get out, and get out for good.
She waited another ten minutes. Then she got off the bed, went to the dresser, and opened the jewelry box, emptying its contents first onto Felicia’s duvet, and then into one of the many handbags Felicia had so helpfully left on a shelf of her walk-in closet. Alison then crept down the back stairs and peered into the kitchen, which was deserted. The house was empty. Alison made her way back to the main hallway, where her coat waited for her in a tidy little heap right by the front stairs. She picked it up, put it on, and left, and the following day she informed her parents that she needed to return to New York immediately. Over their heedless protests, Megan drove her to the airport, where she took the first standby seat available.
By the time Dennis’s father and his wife returned to Cincinnati three weeks later, the trail was cold. No one could say when or how, even, the robbery took place. Two months later, Alison put down a security deposit on a tidy little studio apartment just six blocks from the Atlantic/Pacific Street subway station in Brooklyn. Three months later, she booked a pilot.
part two
nine
THE SCENE WAS A MESS. A good mess, but wow was it taking forfuckingever to figure out how to get the thing to click. It wasn’t like there were a ton of extras to wrangle, and God knows there wasn’t any fancy camera work going on, but there were about eight entrances and exits and meaningful shreds of conversation that were interrupted by plot elements from six other story lines and then yet more buildup to the climactic fight between Tara and Rob that was supposed to get to some place of white-hot rage in a back room of this location, and then end with them having sex on a pool table.
So there were plenty of unhelpful twists and turns but there was fantastic stuff too. Alison flipped through the pages quickly, reviewing, then let the script drop onto the polished plywood bartop and stood, rolling onto the tips of her feet, stretching out the backs of her calves. Her arms floated up over her head and her fingers met, unbidden, in a reflexive yoga stretch which calmed her nerves and made the black cashmere sweater she was wearing creep up to her midriff, making her look for a moment like a world-class belly dancer. The costume designer, Alec, really knew his shit. That sweater fit like a glove but it would come off as soon as Bradley touched it.
She looked around, trying to spot Bradley, but he wasn’t on set yet. It was one of his behavioral trademarks, to make the set wait; he was the show’s ackno
wledged antihero and he had absorbed his character’s easy contempt for reality and rules. There were better-looking actors on the show, but Bradley’s bad boy with a heart of gold owned the internet. The websites oozed with estrogen gone haywire; the guy was a certifiable rock star, as far as the lonely ladies of America were concerned. He continued to drift down to the set on his own schedule, no matter how much the crew griped about it. But there was no question that today he deliberately was working her nerves. He had been abrupt in the makeup room, commenting on the way she was “letting them” ruin her hair, and announcing to Donny the hair guy that he didn’t want to have to deal with some insane twist on the back of her neck while also figuring out how to actually have sex on a pool table. When Donny earnestly tried to explain that the director had already approved the look, Bradley snapped.
“I have not had sex with her for a year,” he told Donny. “I’m not taking the time to do anything but grab her, get her on the pool table, and fuck her.” Before anyone could think of anything to say to that, he turned on her. “It’s your hair. Can you take care of this, please?”
She wanted to snap back at him, but she knew to save it up. “Sure,” she said.
“Thank you,” he replied, with an impatient edge that was much more pointed than the words. As she watched him go, she could see Irene from makeup make a small face while concentrating on the difficulties of cleaning a clotted eyebrow wand. Donny tried to recover some of his pride. “Queen Bradley is on the loose,” he observed. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“Yeah,” Alison sighed, trying to sound like she was dreading all this. “Let’s just take the pins out.”
“I love your hair up like this. You can see your face!”
“He’s right, it’s not very sexy, Donny.”
“You don’t get to the sex until the end of the scene, you’re sitting at the bar for three whole pages. And it will be so pretty, when your hair comes down, it’s classic, all he has to do is take a few pins out. Neil already approved the look.”
“Don’t throw Neil at me,” she sighed. Neil was one of the too-many executive producers who did nothing but swan around and collect a paycheck for having mediocre opinions about television shows. Honestly he was nice enough but he was sixty-seven years old and gay gay gay; what he knew about hetero sex was absolutely nothing. She was not surprised to hear that this dumb idea about taking pins out of her hair had come from him.
“I don’t want to be the one who tells one of the executive producers that the actors don’t like his taste in hair and makeup,” Donny announced. He was gay gay gay as well. It was ridiculous how they all stuck together. Alison wanted to scream but she knew that if she did they’d all be ready to take her head off as soon as she exited the trailer, and that it would get back to somebody somewhere that she was getting difficult.
“Donny, this one’s not worth fighting,” she informed him. He turned away and unplugged his heating iron with a swing of the shoulders which informed her that in spite of the fact that she was really being pretty nice, he was going to report that she was difficult anyway. Behind him, Irene caught her eye. She was in for it too; when Donny got mad at someone, it was everyone who paid. “I’ll take them out myself,” Alison sighed, and to make her point she did it right there, pulling the pins out and tossing her hair about with as much sexual verve as she could cook up at a makeup station. “Okay, that was fun but we can do better than a couple of fucking hairpins.” As long as she was pissing him off anyway, give him something to report.
But of course everyone wanted a piece of the show today; Tara and Rob getting back together counted as a Big Event. Marketing was putting together a whole promo campaign that had already started even though the episode wouldn’t air for six weeks. They had pulled a lot of shots from last season, singles of her and Bradley turning toward the camera with smoldering determination. She felt like Scarlett O’Hara, about to be ravished by Rhett Butler; their reunion had legendary status, and they hadn’t even shot it yet.
Everybody knew it was going to be a blistering scene. During their initial stint as network television’s hottest couple, she had loved having fake sex with Bradley, who was great looking and funny and unabashedly turned on by her. The first time they made out for the camera—almost two years ago now—he whispered jokes in her ear and made her laugh, then stuck his hand up her shirt and his tongue down her throat. It was a definite shock, but good Catholic girl that she was, she just went along with it, until take three, when she decided to enjoy it. On take four she even reached for Bradley’s belt buckle, which all the cameramen loved. When she went back to her trailer to change into her street clothes, the PA who served as her bodyguard made a quick dry comment about Alison’s “chemistry.” Alison didn’t see the footage until it was all cut together on the air six weeks later, and she was shocked at how raw the sexuality seemed. They were only kissing, for crying out loud! But the high-def camera caught an astonishing level of detail, physical and otherwise. Even though the kiss was shot in close-up, the moment she reached for Bradley’s belt was caught in the specific shift of her shoulder, which left no room for doubt about what else was going on here. Bradley’s answering shift—it was more like a grind—left even less doubt about what he was doing and where that would go, if he had any say about it. On top of which, by cutting the first and last takes together, the editors created a mysterious moment in which the defiant intelligence of Alison’s gaze seemed to simply evaporate as she fell into the kiss. After the show aired Rose called immediately, asking point-blank if Alison was going to be involved in “all that sex” they put on “shows like that.”
Alison felt like hanging up on her. But she didn’t. Don’t be ugly, she thought, it was becoming increasingly clear that her mother had always been right about that one. Be nice. Be pretty.
“There is going to be some sex involved, yes, Mom,” she said.
“I just don’t know why you have to do all that.” Rose was, apparently, just revving herself up. This could go on quite a while.
“Hey, there’s someone on the other line,” Alison replied, trying to be nice and pretty. “I’m so sorry, Mom. If you don’t want to see me doing that stuff, then just shut your eyes at those parts. Because I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be doing all that stuff.”
She was right. The fans loved all that stuff, and Rob and Tara’s explosive first kiss made Alison a bona fide television star. The blogs which obsessively shredded every moment of nighttime television were entranced and turned on. “Tara and Rob tsunami report,” one anonymous blogger announced. From then on, every scene they had together came out under the hashtag #TsunamiReport. “I wanted to fuck them both,” one viewer noted in some comment stream. That got retweeted, too.
Which is why, of course, the writers had to break them up. After almost a year of scorching up the airwaves, Rob discovered that Tara had had a one-night stand with Marcos, and that was the end of everything. It seemed, to say the least, a tad forced—Rob had betrayed Tara about sixteen times, by the time she slipped up—but when she had tried to point all this out to Neil and Craig and Vernon and one or two of the other endless executive producers, she was met with a hostile civility which chilled her to the bone. Bradley actually backed her; he liked playing Rob’s asshole side, but when it got too irrational it became truly hard for him to make the scenes work. Screaming at her incessantly about what a lying, deceiving traitor she was for doing this one teeny thing while he had done so many that were patently worse was honestly too crazy for him to act. He also thought, quite rightly, that it made his character unsympathetic. So both of them stood their ground, together: They understood the need to break up Tara and Rob so that you could spend some time getting them back together, but you didn’t have to make them morons to do it. All the interchangeable executive producers got more and more heated because there was no way they were going to admit that they were wrong and they certainly weren’t going to go back to the even more useless idiots at the net
work and tell them that Alison didn’t want to play what was written. People got on the phone to her agent and she was told to do what she was told, and if she didn’t like the writing they could arrange for her to be released from her contract.
That was a year ago. This was today. Alison felt a tingling along her jawline; she was nervous. Because of the bitter estrangement that had been tricked up between Tara and Rob, the writers had condemned them to long months of soul-searching looks, near kisses, and contemptuous verbal take-downs. But now Tara was going to tear down the barriers between them, force Rob to admit that he had never stopped loving her, and fuck him on that pool table in the back room. The crew, to give them credit, behaved beautifully on days like this. Whenever someone said, “This scene is sensitive” to a bunch of union guys, they understood that meant more than no drooling. The less-classy writers would gather at the monitors and watch every take like spectators at a porno film, but the muscular, tattooed guys who were out there on the set with the actors, pushing the cameras in and out while they faux fornicated, behaved like utter gentlemen.
The lighting was complicated. The cameras had to do a bit of fancy footwork, which amounted to not much more than scooting forward and back and then zooming in, but it took time to sync it up with the lights. Alison was seated at the corner of the bar for all of this, and finally, Bradley was there too, ignoring her with a maddening deliberation. Some actors, she had heard, were tender and careful with their scene partners when a big sex scene was on deck. Bradley took the opposite approach. He floated from table to table, refusing to acknowledge her presence even as he got closer and closer to where she was, as if being pulled to her by the inevitable tidal forces of his desire. That’s what the stupid director had explained at the read-through—“He’s pulled to you by the tidal forces of his desire.” Honestly, Alison thought, while listening politely. These jobs pay so much money, why do mostly stupid people get them?
I'm Glad About You Page 12
