“He’s completely attentive. I get flowers and gifts all the time. Jewelry and dresses.”
“Dresses! You let a powerful man—a movie director—buy you clothing? And then does he dress you up?”
Alison bristled, and Dennis felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, just a little.
“Don’t get mad,” he cautioned.
“I’m not mad.”
“You are definitely mad, and I didn’t mean—”
“You did too, Dennis, of course you did.”
“Okay. You’re ‘dating’ a powerful guy—”
“Don’t put it in quotes.”
“Okay. You’re fucking a powerful guy—”
“That’s not what it is.”
“You’re not fucking him?”
She took the hit. Let it land. The girl had such integrity, in her own fucked-up way. “Yes. I am fucking him,” she said.
“And he sends you things. So that’s cool! He’s rich, he should send you things.”
“I don’t want to talk about Lars,” she said.
“Oh no. Don’t run away from this. Alison—”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m just visiting! I had a weekend off of work and I thought I’d come to New York.”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“I took a few days off.” He reached for the vodka bottle. His hand was still steady. “Come on. You were so glad to see me just fifteen minutes ago. I think it’s great this guy is buying you dresses. He should be buying you dresses and having great sex with you. This is the way things are meant to be, Alison. The way they were with you and Kyle—that did not work out for a reason. And the reason is, Kyle is no fun.”
“He’s fine.”
“I love him. But he’s a mess. I want to see you in one of these dresses.”
“Oh no no.”
“Oh yes! Come on. Please? Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a pretty woman in a really pretty dress?”
“I don’t know who you’re dating, these days.”
“I’m dating nice Cincinnati chicks who think ‘couture’ is spelled with three O’s.”
“I’m a nice Cincinnati chick.”
“Alison, you never were before and you most certainly are not now.”
“Whether or not I am, there are plenty of beautiful young women in Cincinnati who know how to wear a pretty dress.”
“There are, but my dad cut me off and I’m living in a shitty little apartment in Clifton, where everyone dresses like starving hippies.”
The tossed-off admission—my dad cut me off—did its work. Her heart constricted. Dennis kept smiling at her. “Come on. This director sends you dresses. I want to see one. Come on.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she sighed. “There’s a new pink one.”
“Well, put it on!” He smiled.
She hadn’t even tried it on yet, but there was no worry that it would fit; Lars knew her body better than she knew it herself by this point. The slightly crazy fuchsia was truly electric, and the fit made it more so. She had to hold in her breath and try the zipper four times before she managed to get it up. In her childhood, that would have meant that the dress was just too small. In show business, it was never possible that the dress was too small. The neckline was gorgeous, a subtle heart-shaped curve, and the skirt was slit with the same subtle touch—three inches, no more. As she looked at herself in the mirror, she knew that Lars was making a point. Not a saint, not a whore, but definitely a bit of both, she thought. If this was what she owed to Dennis Fitzpatrick for sins of the past, so be it.
When she swung the bedroom door open, stepping out into the living room, Dennis did not immediately respond. The look in his eye was unnerving.
“Well?”
“Sorry. Oh, sorry. That looks—amazing,” he told her, with a deliberate coolness.
“It’s a bit tight,” she said, making a face and pulling at the side like a ten-year-old. It was a self-conscious attempt to lighten the mood, which had shifted into something decidedly more treacherous. She should have paid more attention before, when they stopped bantering. Humoring him about that dress was maybe not the best idea she had ever had. She didn’t want to think about why, but she knew she had better get out of it.
“Ugh, I’m taking this off,” she told him.
“Oh, come on, you just put it on!” Dennis protested. “You have to at least let me see it with shoes.”
“Dennis—”
“It doesn’t look right! It needs high strappy heels, like they wear on television.”
“I’m not putting on heels for you.”
“Why not?” There was no question anymore. There was a meanness, a demand in his tone. She swallowed.
“I’m just not,” she said.
“Come on, Alison. You just told me, not ten minutes ago, you’ll do pretty much anything you have to.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’ve been saying it nonstop since I got here. You hate being in trashy magazines but you have to do it because that’s what they expect you to do. You don’t really like this Lars character but it’s nice to have a big director in your corner, so you fuck him and take clothes from him.”
“I like Lars a lot.”
“Just put some shoes on! What is the big deal?” He was sitting on the couch, his arms and his legs spread wide, like a drunken despot. Alison let her gaze drop momentarily to his glass, and the vodka bottle. She hadn’t paid enough attention.
“Okay. Okay!” She smiled, her most dazzling smile. “As you may well suspect, I do have a pair of strappy sandals, very high heels, which will look sensational with this dress. I will go get them.”
He stood. Even though he was clearly drunk now, he was steady enough. Which made it worse somehow. The apartment was so small, it only took him two steps to position himself between her and the door to the bedroom. His left hand lifted, letting a pair of black slingbacks dangle from them with an elegant confidence. “How about these?” he asked. “I found them under the coffee table.”
“Oh, God, I’m such a slob,” Alison laughed. She hated this feeling, the knowing that things were getting bad and the only way through it was to keep it light. “Let me put them away and find those sandals.”
He handed her the shoes, that part was easy enough, but then there was no way past him. He considered that pink dress with something resembling hunger, or hostility. This was bad.
“Come on, Dennis,” she said, quiet, placating. “Let me go get the right shoes.”
“You’re just going to go in there and take it off, because you don’t like the way I’m looking at you,” he said. He reached out and touched the fitted waist. She wanted to back up, but she didn’t want to raise the stakes any further, or any faster. Instead, she placed a hand on his chest and feigned the affection she had felt for him years ago.
“Dennis, knock it off,” she said. “You’re drunk.”
“I am drunk,” he admitted. “And you’re beautiful.”
“And we’re going to have Indian food, remember? That’ll sober you up. I should never have let you drink that much on an empty stomach.”
“How much I drink is not up to you, or to anyone, Alison,” he informed her, and there was enough disappointment in his tone to suggest momentarily that perhaps she had mistaken his intent.
“Come on, you got to sit down. Seriously, you need to sit down and tell me what is going on with you. Why you’re here.” His other hand had crept onto her waist as well now, but he was falling into some sort of morose stupor. He actually laid his head on her shoulder.
“You’re a goddess and I’m a mess,” he muttered. And for that moment, it was true, and it was all that it was.
“You’re all right. You’re all right,” Alison promised him. She patted his back, reassuring, and gently began to unwind their tattered embrace. “Sit down, I’ll get you a glass of water.” He didn’t move other than to sway, momentarily unsteady on his feet. S
he waited and instead of pushing harder, patted him again on the back. “Dennis?”
“What is this material?” he asked, closing his hands around her back. “It’s so nothing, it’s nothing is here.” His hands were slipping down, now, pulling the skirt up.
“Dennis, stop it,” she said. No more back patting. “I mean it, let go.”
“You’re so soft,” he told her.
“Stop it.” Even drunk, he was so fucking strong. She heard and felt the fabric shred as he pulled the skirt up, sudden. “Dennis, stop, STOP IT!”
For a moment he didn’t, and then he did. It was like a breath of reason, moving through a tomb. He just let her go. She pushed him away and he let her. And then he sauntered back to the coffee table, picked up his glass, and poured more vodka into it. As if nothing had happened. No one said anything for a moment, which made him feel great. She was scared; he had succeeded in that at least. It wasn’t nothing.
“I know what you did,” he finally said. “Kyle told me. That you guys were up there, in my dad’s bedroom.” Alison was as still as she could be. “And then he left. He left you up there. And then things went missing. Didn’t they. Alison.”
She didn’t answer.
“And the cops never thought of talking to you, you were long gone, everybody thought it was somebody on the catering staff. Or me! That was what my father thought. Felicia certainly thought so. But no. It was my dear friend Alison Moore. Stole jewelry worth, do you know what that stuff was worth?”
She still couldn’t speak, or look at him. Her brain was frozen with the truth of all of it.
“When Kyle told me you were up there, not having sex yet again, I thought, oh what the fuck, you know what I thought. And did you ever stop to think what happened, what happened to me? My father was furious. Whatever happened, there was no question it was my fault.” The fullness of his betrayal came back again. “I lost everything. So under the circumstances, a little friendliness on your part might not have been amiss.”
His anger frightened her into the barest attempt at an argument. “Dennis. You need to stop drinking and and and—”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do,” he warned her. The alcohol had leant a righteousness to his disgust. Laying his hands on her seemed like nothing compared to what she’d perpetrated. “I’ll tell you what you need to do, is you need to write me a check. Five thousand—who am I kidding—ten, ten thousand dollars. You have it, you can’t tell me you don’t have it.” She didn’t answer. “I’m fucking broke. But we’ll just, ten thousand and we’ll call it even.”
When he turned his gaze back to Alison, she seemed like a strange, poisonous flower. Her back against the wall, wearing that ridiculous pink gown. She was scared as shit. That wasn’t nothing.
“You don’t have a checkbook?”
“It’s in the desk.” She tipped her head. He glanced around the apartment, which was spare to the point of absurdity, truth be told. But yes, there in the corner, a tiny Ikea desk, something you might find in a dorm room.
“Go get it,” he told her.
“You step aside,” she answered.
“Oh, relax. I’m not going to rape you, Alison, although some people surely would think you deserve it.” He downed the last of the vodka, barely tasting it now. The drive toward oblivion was familiar, his old friend. But he did as he was told, and took a step back toward the couch. After a moment she eased herself out of the corner and walked across the room with as much dignity as she could muster in that pink dress.
“You make yourself look like that, and then you’re surprised that men want to fuck you?” he asked.
That one she had no answer for.
part three
twenty
THEY ENDED UP going darker with the hair and everyone had to admit that Lars’s preoccupation with the exact color was pure genius, because Alison looked devastating. Face framed by feathers of raven curls, her complexion drifted into a pure, vulnerable alabaster. Those green eyes were even more startling in their intelligence and cunning, but now there was the whisper of hurt there too, a panic which occasionally flickered to the surface before it was willed away. It wasn’t precisely Ava, or Liz either; for both of them, the black hair had a Samson-like power: Those girls knew how to snarl. Alison had something more wounded-bird going on, and the whole effect was startling. It was, in fact, that rarest of commodities, for Hollywood: It was not merely familiar; it was also new.
Unfortunately, getting the hair to that exact color wasn’t easy. Alison’s natural brunette was so dark the stylist, a fierce and competent young woman who was covered in slightly scary tattoos, explained that they would actually need to strip Alison’s natural brunette and lay in the raven, which had less red and more black in it, on top of the stripped hair. So then they needed a high-volume peroxide in order to activate the bleach and remove the color, and then they had to shampoo, remove the bleach, and do the whole thing again. The bleach had a high lift, which removed the color well enough, but a pale orange cast in the stripped hair was tenacious. After two days of this, the intimidating hairstylist—her name was Rocky, of course it was—pointed out that all this manipulation could permanently damage Alison’s follicles as well as the hair itself. In other words, if they kept this shit up, it could ruin Alison’s hair for life. Determined that when he got her to Los Angeles to meet the studio royalty she would be as close to perfection as he could make her, Lars fired Rocky and hired a second, and then a third stylist, flying them both in from London. They made all sorts of wild promises and in fact delivered one hell of a cut and color, but just when Lars finally approved a stunningly accurate deep brown-black, Alison’s own roots, with those hints of auburn, were starting to show. The second as well as the third stylist confirmed what Rocky had been fired for saying: Much more of this, and her hair would be wrecked for good. Ryan got involved, and in the end they compromised: You can touch up the roots for the screen test. After that, you’re going to have to wig her.
In the moment, the compromise was acceptable. Alison’s meeting with Gordon and Norbert and Barry and David and Ron and half a dozen other white men was set, and it proved to be a superb exercise in feminine charm. She wore a skintight pearl-colored georgette slip dress that left little of her figure to the imagination. The dress was so low-cut she was convinced that her nipples might slip out at any moment and ruin everything, but Lars had insisted it would keep the room on edge (it did), and more important, it was the kind of thing that a screen goddess would do. She’d sit there in a dress like that, acting like a perfect lady, and letting them all fantasize about fucking her on the floor.
“Yeah, but most of them are gay,” Alison pointed out to him, afterward. “They don’t want to fuck me at all. They want to fuck you.”
“They want to be you,” Lars informed her. “That’s better.”
“I don’t know, Lars,” she sighed. It seemed weird, frankly, the way these guys obsessed on her every detail, like she was their own favorite Barbie doll. Lars seemed to care more about the shade of her lipstick than what kind of car he drove. And the hair thing was totally bizarre. He wanted her to look exotic, confident, Audrey Hepburn–like in the knowledge that no matter how boyish the cut, she still knew she was a ravishing beauty. The flip side danger of a cut that short was that she would look like a lesbian. He went back and forth relentlessly about it, as apparently there was nothing in the universe less sexy to all men, gay or straight, than lesbians. But she had made it through that essential meeting with flying colors, and finally he could relax, and express approval. “You look amazing,” he told her, studying her from behind. His hands were creeping around her waist, slowly pulling up the georgette. She wondered how much of this crap Ava or Liz had to put up with and immediately regretted even asking herself the question. Her brain whispered back to her, A lot. They had to put up with this a lot.
There were plenty of stories out there about how continuously Ava was preyed upon. Maybe not Liz, who looked like she could
defend herself, but Natalie Wood, yes, Marilyn Monroe, certainly. There were a billion stories about old Marilyn getting raped at parties by the biggest guys in Hollywood. It wasn’t a surprise, if you thought about it. Dennis was right. Turning yourself into a person who men wanted to fuck all the time, what else was going to happen? The memory of what had almost happened shot a bolt of panic through her. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t learned to handle, but she wasn’t going to let Lars just have his way with her either, especially from behind. She let him paw her breasts for a moment, press that perpetual erection up against her, and then she shrugged, deliberate, a gesture that was unmistakable: Not now.
Lars was never one to misunderstand body language. His power, her power, her lack of power, her appreciation for his power—it was an ongoing board game of unspoken one-upmanship. He wanted to have sex, she didn’t; he wouldn’t push now, because that would be begging, which he didn’t do, he was indifferent to sex, except that he thought about it all the time, and he was furious now that by shrugging her shoulders she had acted on her own power which was a threat to his power which meant he was going to have to make her pay for it later without making it look like that’s what he was doing. Alison was well aware of the nuances of this dance, and she rarely bothered to push her luck. Lars was no better than any of these guys, but he was in her corner. If letting him dress her up like Ava Gardner and have sex with her constantly was the price, so be it. But once in a blue moon a shred of defiance was not only inevitable, it was necessary.
The memory of the way she used to yearn for sex rose from the back of her mind. The way she and Kyle used to torture each other with their hunger? Those were the days, when you were just a kid whose mom was always yelling at you for making out with your boyfriend on the family room floor. The distance from there to here seemed impossible; everyone agreed on that much. But everyone else seemed to think that the impossibility of that journey was something astonishing, brilliant, celebratory. Careful what you wish for. But had she even wished for this? She didn’t actually think she had. And now here she was, trapped not by her own dreams, but by the dreams of something else, something weird and inhuman but generally accepted as truth.
I'm Glad About You Page 24
