“Let’s try this on the couch,” Lars told them.
It wasn’t a difficult scene. In fact, there was nothing to it. Laila was sitting on the edge of her bed, and the guy came in, kissed her, and then they had sex.
“You want us to do this scene?”
“Is that a problem?” Lars didn’t even look up from his script.
“There’s not much to it.”
“Let’s just take a shot at it.”
“You want me to sit here and make out with Carl.”
“I want you to act the scene.”
She actually started to do it. She sat on the couch, brooding—that was the direction in the text, Laila, brooding, sits on the edge of the bed. Her shirt, loosely unbuttoned, has slipped off her shoulder, revealing the nipple of her perfectly formed right breast. Carl sat down on the couch. He shifted, took a moment to settle, then leaned gently toward her.
And then it didn’t feel like so much fun anymore. “Hang on, cowboy,” she said. She turned to Lars, who was considering her with a slightly too-deliberate curiosity. “You want me to open my shirt and reveal the nipple of my perfectly formed right breast?” she asked.
“That would be fine,” Lars informed her. She didn’t know if he was kidding. It seriously wasn’t clear.
“You want me to make out with him? Right now? Like, right here on the couch?”
“We’re doing a scene, Alison,” Lars reminded her, with a condescending Icelandic superiority.
“Sure we are, Lars.”
She sat in silence for a moment. Carl looked back and forth between them, then stretched his hand down his back, like he was warming up for a wrestling match. “So do you want me to . . .”
“I need you to take off, Carl,” she said. “All of you, take off.”
“Oh,” said Carl, surprised, and clearly disappointed.
“There are still several scenes I’d like to look at,” Lars told her.
“Well, I don’t feel great, I really don’t feel up to this right now and I’d love it if everyone left.”
The two actors turned and looked at Lars for direction. It was enough to make your head explode. “Hey, numbnuts,” Alison snapped. “This is my apartment. I get to say who stays and who goes, not him. This is my home. I want you out of it.”
“Oh, sure, I just wasn’t sure what—” the poor dope started.
“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT HE WANTS TO DO. I’M CALLING THE POLICE IF YOU GUYS DON’T GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.”
That did the trick. The two guys picked up their backpacks, their eyes averted, mumbled their apologies and good-byes to Lars, and then shuffled to the door and split.
It was so sheepish and guilty, Alison knew immediately that they were all in on it. “You told them they were coming over here to fuck me,” she said. “You told them that I would do it. In my apartment. You told—two total strangers—”
“They’re not strangers, I’ve worked with them on several projects.”
“Did you honestly think I’d do it? You fucking ASSHOLE.” She did like Lars, and she was afraid of him too, but it felt good calling him an asshole.
“I just wanted to see when those Midwestern values would finally assert themselves,” he said, observing her coolly. The whole situation was appalling. How had she gotten here? One step at a time.
“You need to get out of here now.”
“Do you really think I’d want to stand here and watch someone else make love to you? That would be torture!”
“Then why did you do it?” Alison could not stop her eyes from filling with tears. Her voice was cracking.
Lars looked at her intently, those blue eyes alight with cool imperial wisdom. “I wanted to see the saint in you again,” he said. “I know the whore now. I wanted to see Joan of Arc.”
“Lars, please. You have to go. I mean it. Don’t make me yell anymore.”
“I like it when you yell.”
“Well, I’m tired, I’m really just so so so—tired.” There was a moment of silence as they considered each other. God, Alison thought, suddenly praying, please make him understand that I’m not kidding. Please, God.
Lars went to pick up his glorious shoulder bag, where he had dropped it near the door. Thank you, God, Alison thought. Then Lars moved back into the room, reaching for her. Fuck you, God, Alison thought, what new hell is this?
Then he kissed her on the forehead and finally, blessedly, left.
So when Alison insisted to Ryan that things between her and Lars were “fine,” she was not strictly telling the truth. This whole fiasco had just been three days ago, and she hadn’t seen Lars since. He had sent flowers twice, and this morning another dress had come, a vibrant, frankly disturbing pink. I’ve seen the saint, now I want to see the whore again, was her guess what he would say.
But when she finally tried to tell her stupid agent about all this, he would have none of it. “Lars is notorious for knowing what he wants,” Ryan told her. “That’s what makes him a great director. And the fact that he is so committed to casting you is a total game changer.”
“In spite of the fact that there’s no offer.”
“You cannot get hung up on that! People know you’re being considered and that’s enough!” On some sick level Ryan was telling the truth. Ever since the word went out that Lars Guttfriend was going to cast Alison Moore as the female lead in Last Stop, the scripts had been rolling in. Managers were calling for interviews. Publicists were begging to take her on. This was her moment. Careful what you wish for. This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? Who would decide to be an actress, then try to back out of the whole thing when someone said, Okay and now we’re going to make you a star? None of her friends, what passed for them in the acting community, had any sympathy—they were all too jealous. She had gone out for drinks with Lisa and her trust-fund pals and they all got so brittle when she mentioned it, she had to make it seem it was a near impossibility she would actually even get the part, and quickly changed the subject. Her friends from the show, no better. She hadn’t even tried to tell her mother what all this involved because she had been so thrilled when that first call came in. How could she explain these hypersexual machinations to her mother? Her father would see dollar signs. Her brothers and sisters would think she was making it all up.
The door buzzed. Lying prone on her unmade bed, where she had spent much of the past three days, Alison had a hard time deciding whether or not she should answer it. She had no doubt that Lars was finally making his appearance, to find out if he was forgiven, to see her in the pink dress. The buzzer sounded a second time and she sat up.
Mom is right about this, she thought. Even the Catholic church is right—this loveless sexual power game is a sin. In some stupid primal universe this is the shit that gets you sent to hell. She had to cut Lars off. It’s not like she didn’t know how to do it; she had broken up with Kyle something like thirty times, and she loved him. Lars, she didn’t know what that was, but it was nothing remotely resembling love. They weren’t ever going to offer it to me anyway, she knew. This is all nothing, it’s nothing at all. She opened the door.
nineteen
THE HAIR WAS pulled back in a ratty knot at the back of her neck, and she wore a pair of naughty-librarian eyeglasses. In the past three years, Alison had somehow become the kind of beauty who could look stunning in sweatpants and a T-shirt, which was what she was wearing.
“Dennis,” she said. “Dennis! I—have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.” She threw her arms around him and dragged him through the door.
It wasn’t what he had expected, but it would certainly do.
“Alison, you look sensational.”
“Don’t tell me I look pretty, I’m sick of it. What are you doing here?” The buzz of familiarity, the relief of it, had been replaced by a terrifying jolt of guilt. What was he doing here? “Do you want a—seltzer, or a juice with some soda or something?” She strode briskly back to her kitchen, gathering her wits. And acting. Jus
t keep acting.
“Actually, my flight was ridiculous, you don’t have any vodka, do you?”
Alison turned and looked at him with stern, good-natured disapproval. Dennis grinned. “Don’t you laugh at me, I’m serious, Dennis, I heard you stopped.”
“Oh, yeah, who’d you hear that from?” he asked. He smiled at her, knowing.
Something in her chest tightened. “All of Cincinnati was talking about it,” she informed him. “Don’t change the subject. Did you fall off the wagon?”
“Darling, I fell so very far off the wagon so very long ago you can’t even see the wagon from the pit of iniquity into which I have so recklessly tossed myself.”
“Oh, Dennis.”
“Oh, Alison—really it’s not as bad as all that. I’m not the desperate character I used to be. I have learned how to drink responsibly.”
“Sure you have.”
“No, I have, I really have.” His insistence was so underwhelming that he actually rolled his eyes at himself. It was fine; it made her laugh. Really she was always such a forgiving girl. “You never knew me, in my sober days, anyway,” he reminded her, leaning against the clean blond woodwork of her very chic little kitchen. “You haven’t been back to good old Cin City for so long, you completely missed my resurrection and subsequent decline. It was quite the nonevent. Where is my vodka?”
Alison handed him a glass with ice over a bare inch. “I don’t care if you’re drinking again, but if you say you’re in control of it, I want to see it,” she warned him.
“Puritan.”
“Oh, God, have you been watching my television show? I’m hardly a Puritan. They’ve got me fucking anything that moves.” Dennis laughed with delight. She looked so pretty in her sweats, and if anything she was saltier than ever. There was some disturbance running through her that added a warmth to her cynicism. No, that wasn’t new; that had always been there. All that intelligence and heart. A disappointed innocence. And morality. That was why she and Kyle had been so right for each other. They both believed that the universe had rules. They just never agreed on what the rules were.
“How’s Kyle?” she asked.
As tactics went it wasn’t a bad one. At least it got them onto familiar turf.
“I did not travel a thousand miles to merely talk about Kyle, forget it,” he warned her. “I will tell you this, his marriage is a disaster and he deeply regrets that you two never consummated your lust. But other than that I’m telling you nothing.”
“That is so not fair.”
“Not fair is you taking off and completely cutting yourself off from me for three years. I’m really angry with you. And you were in town and you went to a dinner party at Kyle’s—”
“Don’t remind me, it was horrible—”
“I don’t care, I’m really hurt no one invited me,” he said. “There is no food in this refrigerator.”
“There’s food,” she started, but he held open the refrigerator door and waved at it, a careless magician. The thing was an empty cave.
“Celery, nobody eats that. Yogurt, the Greek kind with no sweetener. A bag of carrots. A teeny tiny container of hummus that looks like maybe a rabbit has been nibbling at the edges of. Six cans of diet root beer. Is that your secret vice? You don’t even have a frozen pizza around here?”
“I’m an actress, they don’t let us eat.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that.” He swung the door shut and turned to her. “Okay, so what are we going to do for food? Where are the takeout menus? I want Indian.”
“Okay, but no bread.”
“I traveled a thousand miles just to see you, of course I’m allowed to have bread.”
“I’m not kidding, you can’t do it to me. If I eat one piece of bread I’ll blow up as big as a house. And I can’t have it here or I’ll eat it. Order lentils, or rice.” Why was he here? All of this too-friendly banter was starting to wear on her nerves. The cheerful indifference to facts. A plummeting guilt racked her for a moment but she ignored it. What’s done was done and for three years it had never come up. But then why was he here?
“I want bread,” he announced.
“Dennis, what did you come here for, to make me fat?” She made it sound light. This bit you had to keep light.
What did he come here for? Dennis had spent very little time considering that. But he was moving forward now, it was a good mode for him, people generally did whatever he wanted them to when he just pushed a little. His whole life, it had been that way. A little flattery, a little fun, a little alcohol. Voilà.
“Yes, hi, I want to place an order for delivery,” he informed the Indian voice on the telephone. “We’re going to want lots of bread, what’s that kind of bread that you deep-fry, it poofs up?”
“If you order bread, I’m telling you, I’m going to make you go out into the hall to eat it.”
So she wasn’t going to eat any bread. But otherwise you’d have to say things were going well enough. She had lost interest in the question of how much he was drinking virtually as soon as she raised it. That was the lovely thing about alcohol; everyone really did want to drink it. The man takes the drink, the drink takes the drink, then the drink takes the man. That was the mantra of some old lush he’d met at a meeting and he knew every syllable was true, and not just for raging alcoholics. Even so-called social drinkers got taken in the end. The whole human race was nothing but a bunch of drunks. And the ones who didn’t drink were nothing but dry drunks.
“Nice place,” he informed her.
“Oh, it’s awful. It’s not awful. It’s just a bit plain. I haven’t even painted. And there’s not enough stuff on the walls. It’s just, I never have people over and honestly I’m never here. I can’t believe you just showed up like this. The odds of me being home on any given night are not good, in general.” She swept through the small living room, clearing magazines off the coffee table.
“What are you reading?” She was so clearly embarrassed by the fact that there were so many celebrity rags lying around that he simply couldn’t let her off the hook without catching her on it, just a little.
“It’s just stuff my publicist sends over. You have to look at it and make sure they’re at least pretending to be accurate, otherwise the whole thing gets too weird too fast. You end up with three-headed babies, shit like that.”
“You’re in these? You have to let me see.”
“No. No—Dennis, come on! You’ll just make fun of me, stop!”
“I won’t make fun, it’s so impressive, you’re in trashy magazines, Alison, well done, you’ve made the big time.” And of course she had let him wrest at least a few off the top of the pile. He plopped onto the Naugahyde couch and started leafing through page after page of gorgeous girls in couture gowns, standing on a faux red carpet and smiling inanely at some photographer. “Oh, yes, very nice. Ooo, look at her.”
“I told you it was stupid, you’re the one who insisted on looking at it.”
“I’m looking for you!”
“So, seriously, Dennis. What are you here for?” Dennis glanced up at the sudden shift, but her smile was simple. Which was interesting, considering what a simple girl she wasn’t.
“Kyle asked me to come find you and bring you back to him.”
“Ho ho ho,” she said. “I saw him, and I met his family. He seemed really happy.”
“There you are! That’s a pretty dress.” He waved an open magazine at her; he had in fact found a photo of her on some receiving line. She was wearing a daring black gown with a plunging neckline and a gold cinched waist. “I can’t believe they let you out in public in this thing. You could start a riot.”
“That is generally the idea,” Alison admitted. She took the magazine out of his hands, grabbed the rest of the pile, and carried them all into the teeny bedroom just behind him.
“Aw, come on. I want to see the pictures. I think you look pretty!” Alison reentered and dropped into her chair. He grinned at her. “You know, Alison, I have
to say, you really have turned into a looker.”
“Oh yippee.”
“I also have to say, you know very well that Kyle is not happy.”
“He has a gorgeous wife and a gorgeous house and two gorgeous kids and he’s a rich doctor, and my impression, from that dinner party, is that he is happy.” This was a colossal lie but so what, human beings lied all the time. “And I have a very hot movie director boyfriend, and I’m happy too,” she lied.
“Tell me about your big-shot boyfriend.”
“Well, he’s really talented. And handsome.”
“Do you love him?”
Alison momentarily regretted having dumped the subject of Kyle, thus opening the door to this line of inquiry. “Okay, you don’t love him,” Dennis said. “Moving on. What do you like about him?”
Alison paused, trying to make it look like she was being careful about choosing her words, instead of just making shit up. “He’s interesting. He’s smart. He knows so much about how this world works, and it’s reassuring, in a way, to have someone like that in your corner.” Dennis wondered for a moment why Alison was such a good actress and such a bad liar. There was probably a reason those two things went together, but he wasn’t curious enough about the intricacies of psychology to run down that train of thought. He just made his face as sympathetic as possible, and let her hang herself. “He’s crazy attractive, he’s like—trust me.” She blushed; that meant the guy was good in the sack. “He’s got a lot going on, so I don’t see him for a while, then it’s like twenty-four seven. And he knows, just everybody. It’s a bit more glamorous than I’m used to. I’ve been to these amazing dinner parties in the Hamptons, they fly you out in helicopters. I know that sounds a little—excessive.”
“Alison, remember who you’re talking to. I did not inherit any Midwestern snobbery about wealth. Far from it.”
“No, I know. It’s just weird for me a little bit.” The blush was back again. He let the silence hang. “Anyway. He’s also famous, you know, he directed these big movies. “
“You mentioned.”
I'm Glad About You Page 23
