I'm Glad About You(32)

“It’s over there.” Alison lifted her arm and pointed to the far wall, but she did not bother getting up. Her eyes, which had only barely opened in the first place, slipped shut again. This girl, who was doubtless a really, really nice person, would come and go more quickly if she wasn’t encouraged by a lot of well-mannered drivel about absolutely nothing.

“You’re Alison Moore, aren’t you? I saw you on television. You were amazing! But I don’t want to bother you.”

And yet, you kept talking, Alison thought. “No no,” she said. “No bother at all.” In complete contradiction to her sardonic inner monologue, the words came out of her mouth with an effortless grace. You can take the girl out of the Midwest but you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl. She didn’t want to talk to this person but there was no way to get out of it without being rude, and she just didn’t have the energy for that. It was, finally, easier to be super polite.

She should have left. Why run upstairs and hide? Why not just leave? Well, where would she go? She couldn’t go home and face her interminable family, who would all ask her what she was doing home so early, revisit the mind-numbing wrangling about the car, and then drift into a bunch of boring quips about Dennis and how rich and unethical his father turned out to be. Plus, she wanted to see Kyle again. She didn’t want to talk to him; she just wanted to look at him. Her thoughts were ping-ponging now. His wife is horrible. She’s f*cking gorgeous. I can’t believe he married that person. I can’t believe he didn’t marry me. I wasn’t going to marry him anyway he’s too Catholic I hate the Catholic church how could he marry someone else why am I even thinking this shit I should never have come.

“Can I ask you a question?” Alison found herself hating this girl almost as much as she hated herself right then.

“I guess that depends on what the question is,” she said. Considering the fact that she was still lying there with her eyes closed, she sounded ridiculously sunny.

“Well, I just, I love acting. I just love it. Like, I totally think it’s what I want to do with my life? And I’m still in high school, so I’ve only really done a few plays, but I had pretty good parts in both of them, like we did Charley’s Aunt and I played this character who is really Charley’s aunt. Like, not the guy in the dress, but the real Charley’s aunt? And in the other one I played just, like, a servant, who had, like, five or six lines, only, but I had to do an Irish accent, which was really, people said it was really good! And I just wondered if you could give me some advice? About how to pursue it, as a career?”

This was unspeakably dreary.

“People probably ask you that all the time. Because you’re so phenomenally successful.”

“Oh, boy,” Alison sighed. “Successful? I don’t—no. I wouldn’t say that.” She let her eyes drift over the ceiling, the drapes, the black trees and the winter night hovering just outside the window. On the wall across from the bed there was a collection of small but surprisingly well-chosen artworks—one of them, a framed red-and-black cartoon, was an actual Matisse. Felicia’s enormous jewelry box sat like a majestic throne just under it, on top of Felicia’s enormous dresser. She had a pearl necklace in there, an emerald tennis bracelet, and two pairs of diamond earrings; on that memorable night many moons before, Dennis had told her the prices of everything, mocking his father’s lavish spending on his stepmother before inviting Alison to have sex on her duvet. But it was hard to take the trappings of wealth seriously, when you had so little of it yourself. Why would you spend thousands on a tennis bracelet when you didn’t have eight hundred dollars to spend on a month’s rent?

“But you have an agent.”

This kid was incredible. “Yes, I do; I do have an agent.”

“Is it hard to get an agent? Like, if I came to New York, and wanted to try to be an actress, would that be something I would have to do? Because I heard that there are lots of auditions you can get, where you don’t even really need agents.”

Alison decided the kid was just weird enough to tolerate. She liked the way the inane questions kept her from obsessing about Kyle and his gorgeous blonde wife. “Look,” she said. “I can tell you all about this? But I need a drink.”

“Do you want me to get you one?”

Two hours and four drinks later, the party in the bedroom was in full swing. The kid—her name was Donna—eventually got dragged off by her sister, who needed to meet some people in Mount Adams, but by then Alison had lots of new friends. Every twentysomething who went looking for the upstairs bathroom eventually found a way to the back bedroom. One wily youth snuck down the back stairs into the kitchen, where he snagged a couple of six-packs, several bottles of really good wine—Christmas presents, clearly—and a gourmet gift basket full of cheese, summer sausage, and fancy crackers. Alison observed that this was better fare than Dennis usually served, and everyone agreed so readily that it was established that all present had been guests at his bacchanals more than once.

Cincinnati parties were much better than New York parties, Alison decided. Even the slightly too uptight retro-Catholics in the bunch were major drinkers, and as the evening wore on they grew progressively more jocular. People she had known only vaguely in high school were so impressed by her small shred of New York success that they congratulated her enthusiastically. They asked curious and respectful questions about how television was made, which largely focused on the technical aspects of the process. A few brazenly asked how much money something like that would pay, and she answered with direct specificity, explaining terms like “top of show” and “day player” and how much these definitions might earn you as a neophyte on a SAG contract. Everybody thought that being paid almost three thousand dollars for one week of work—and pretty glamorous work, at that—was impressive. She tried to make the point that she had had to audition for weeks and months on end before she landed that singular job, and all her earnings went into head shots and new clothes for more auditions, but no one found that to be a serious detriment to the whole idea of being an actress. She had done it; she had gotten herself on television; she had arrived. When she tried to make the point that she’d like to continue to do theater as well, no one understood why. None of them had been to a play in years. One girl talked about how she used to go to student matinees in grade school, and how she remembered liking it a lot, but now theater was so expensive and if she had a hundred dollars extra to spend she’d rather go to dinner at a really good restaurant, because that was fun too and the last time she went to see a play it was boring and she felt ripped off. Alison thought about how everyone she knew in New York would make fun of this position, and perhaps even say something unkind about how this girl—who was slightly chubby, truth be told—maybe should take art more seriously than food once in a while. But Alison also thought that the slightly chubby girl was right.