I'm Glad About You(28)

Who, at that very moment, was pushing through the crowd in the foyer with an unflinching determination, headed right for him. As soon as the thought flickered through his head he had to deny it: She wasn’t technically heading for him; she was heading for the bar, and the phony Grecian pillar behind which he had hidden himself was positioned just to its left. Two teenage girls in sexy black barkeep garb poured drinks with a slashing efficiency which was called for under the circumstances; Dennis’s new friends from Cincinnati’s corporate set were predictably alcoholic and swarming, and Alison was temporarily trapped in their midst. She glanced skyward with annoyance and then, as her eyes raked back down in an attempt to gauge her distance from the bartop, her gaze suddenly and unexpectedly landed on him. Their eyes met.

He plastered a smile on as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. She saw, who knows what she saw, but it was seen before he could hide it. Even now! They were stuck in the middle of a crowd of strangers, they had not spoken or laid eyes on each other for almost a year and a half, and yet he could not escape the terrifying probability that she had once again managed to intuit some unknowable aspect of his interior life. This had proven true so many times that she used to tell him he had a glass head. He felt like he had a glass head now.

“Hello!” he said. It sounded like an idiot was speaking.

“Hello, Kyle,” said Alison. She had inched incrementally forward in line and he could see that her cheeks were flushed. That could have been the heat. Or the alcohol. Only she had not managed to get herself a drink yet. It was probably the heat.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Can you what? Sorry. Oh. Sorry, no, I can get myself a drink, thanks.” She squeezed past another stranger. “Besides, you look like you have your hands full.” Her eyes flickered down to the drinks in his hand. A wilting cup of club soda and a possibly drinkable scotch, served over ice in a plastic tumbler.

“Right! I need to get this back to, my wife.” He stumbled over the words at the last minute. Of course he did. He meant to just say her name, Van, just toss it out there casually, the name of the woman he was with now, but then it seemed cold, he needed to do better by her, out of loyalty, and also let Alison know that he regretted nothing, he had moved on, he had a wife now, that was his reality, a reality that Alison knew nothing of. Sadly there were too many tumbling worries and the words escaped with that slight stutter step which, he knew, made him sound again like an idiot. He felt Alison’s eyes looking straight into his glass head. I didn’t ask for this. Fuck Dennis, and f*ck her, he thought.

“Yeah, your wife, I met your wife, we just met,” Alison acknowledged. She had finally maneuvered her way through the throng and secured a spot at the front of the line. “White, anything white,” she told the sexy young bartender. “Wait. Anything white that’s not a Riesling.”

“Chardonnay?”

“That would be fantastic.” She smiled politely, but the girl was uninterested in the social niceties; she uncorked the necessary bottle and poured. Alison turned back to Kyle with an air of what she hoped would sound like a sardonic hopelessness. “I love Chardonnay. A nice California Chardonnay, I don’t know why people make fun of them, I love them.”

“Do people make fun of them?”

“In New York everyone’s above them. You’re embarrassed to order them. Pinot grigio would be acceptable, if it didn’t give you a headache. Sadly it does.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” God, he sounded like a complete ass. And even worse, he felt the same way he had the first time he laid eyes on her. He had to get away from her. He couldn’t move. Alison accepted her tumbler of white wine from the humorless barkeeper girl and then, scooting to get away from the crushing hordes of desperate alcoholics behind her, she slid to her right, holding the drink up high so that it didn’t get bumped. She looked backward as she did—either to keep a lookout for who was pushing her, or so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes again—but the maneuver sent her unguarded chest within inches of his. He could smell her.

“Sorry,” she said with a tight, polite little smile, as she landed herself on the opposite side of him, where the crowd was less crushing. “I can’t believe how many people are here. It looks like Dennis invited half of Cincinnati. And I of course know no one!”

“Yeah, I’m surprised to see you here,” Kyle said. She looked at him sharply, like that was the wrong thing to say. Was it? His brain was in hyperdrive but it felt like all the gears had locked up and so the whole operation was just spinning uselessly. Every word he uttered sounded thin, small and phony, while as usual Alison just seemed larger than life. Even though she was tossing off social nothings with no content whatsoever, they sounded like so much more. Her glances all looked like so much more. They looked like the glances of someone with a soul. He told himself once again that it wasn’t that she was a deeper person; it was just that she was an actress. A notoriously shallow and unstable breed. Famous throughout the centuries for bringing men to wreck and ruin. That was all she was, and all she had ever been. An actress with green eyes. She was just an actress with sensational green eyes.

“You look tired,” she informed him.

Those long years of passion and disaster moved through him as if they were happening now. How could he be expected to even say hello to her if just seeing her in the middle of a crowd did this to him?