I'm Glad About You(18)
Besides which, there definitely was some confusion around the way that audition had been booked. As it turned out, Ryan hadn’t submitted Alison for the two-liner. His assistant, somebody named Darren, was the one who put the call in without running it by his boss, which was why the suspicious casting agent had never heard about Alison from Ryan—because Ryan had never heard of Alison either. Alison didn’t even know about this angle of the shenanigans until Ryan called her the next day to congratulate her on booking the gig and to ask her who the hell she was. She told him what she knew, as she had been told by Lisa, about the whole hip-pocketing plan, and Ryan informed her that this was all news to him but that he’d love to meet the girl who had managed to convince a writer to build a whole subplot around her in one audition. Once in his reasonably swank offices, Alison had apologized, but she also was shrewd enough to continue to stick to the point, which was that she had actually booked a pretty big job with very little assistance on anyone else’s part. The agent, who was in truth impressed, was the one who actually explained to her the whole story—how she had wowed the writer so much that he went ahead and reconceived the entire episode, which never happened, and would not have happened if the script hadn’t in fact come in eight pages short to begin with. But that specific detail was neither here nor there. Alison had done what everyone told these young actresses they had to do: Grab an opportunity and make it your own. Ryan Jones signed her on the spot.
As Alison found out later, the reason her episode came in eight pages too short to begin with was that in the middle of November the show was hitting a wall; all the scripts were coming in late, and the executive producer, who was an egomaniac and a prick, had spent too much time rethinking every choice anyone made in any of the episodes that had already been shot and so they were days behind schedule and inches away from shutting down production for a week, which would have cost a complete f*cking fortune that the network was not willing to spend for a show that was on the bubble. So while the egomaniacal prick of an executive producer was off putting out fires with the network, the episode’s writer was left to solve his own problems. When this young actress showed up and actually gave an emotionally charged reading of two fairly mediocre lines of his dialogue, he felt artistically vindicated and knew that this was his chance to spread his wings.
“Everything was for Billy,” Alison told the camera bitterly. “It was always, ‘he’s my buddy.’ You mess with that at your own peril.”
“This is it, this is the big scene,” the real Alison informed the room.
“Did you feel threatened by that?” asked the ADA.
“I felt disgusted by it,” Alison told him. “He was always telling me, ‘I love this guy.’ He said it so many times I thought, why don’t you just sleep with him then.” Everyone in the room said “Oooooo,” like she had really stepped over the line with that one even though no one could give a shit about implications of homosexuality in New York City. On the television set the scene was erupting. The lousy, threatening boyfriend leaped across the room and started strangling Alison. People cheered. And then when he hurled her across the table—someone somewhere apparently did not think that was too much, after all, and they used the more exciting shot—everyone cheered again. All in all, the drunken celebration surrounding her television debut was enormously satisfying to Alison’s ego, and she didn’t pick up her cell when her mother called because she was having too good a time and she wasn’t going to let her mom wreck it with some ill-placed remark.
The party lingered on lazily after the episode’s conclusion at 11 p.m.; the young would-be actors and intellectuals gathered in Lisa’s apartment insisted they wanted to catch up on the news but once the sound was muted during the commercial break no one really turned their eyes to the screen again. For a short while they drank and chattered cheerfully about Alison’s debut and how much fun guest leads could be and what upcoming auditions were hanging out there for her now, and then two by two they drifted away to look for cabs. Not quite ready for her moment in the sun to end, Alison hung around, collecting glasses and empty bottles and organizing the detritus of the evening into a slightly more coherent version of itself.
“Leave it!” Lisa commanded. “Benita comes tomorrow, she’s got to have something to do.”
Alison raised her hands, leaving the glasses in place. “I always forget you have a cleaning lady,” she admitted.
“Cleaning lady? Oh God, you are so Midwestern,” Lisa tossed back at her, pouring the ends of a bottle of red into a water glass. She staggered a bit as she turned toward the kitchen, where Seth was hanging in the doorway, holding a beer and watching the girls with an amused glint in his eye. The whole scene was a little too Tennessee Williams, Alison thought, but she plowed ahead bravely.
“This was so nice of you, letting us come over and watch the episode together. I hate to leave you with such a mess.”
“I said leave it,” Lisa told her, picking up several bottles herself as if Alison were bound to do it wrong anyway. While she was fairly sure that Lisa’s snarl had a little more behind it than too much alcohol, Alison was in too good a mood to be wounded.
“Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow then,” Alison shrugged, picking up her jacket—a denim relic from high school, so unchic it actually counted as cool—from the chair by the door, where she had dropped it with her purse three hours ago.