I'm Glad About You(38)

“Yeah,” Alison sighed, trying to sound like she was dreading all this. “Let’s just take the pins out.”

“I love your hair up like this. You can see your face!”

“He’s right, it’s not very sexy, Donny.”

“You don’t get to the sex until the end of the scene, you’re sitting at the bar for three whole pages. And it will be so pretty, when your hair comes down, it’s classic, all he has to do is take a few pins out. Neil already approved the look.”

“Don’t throw Neil at me,” she sighed. Neil was one of the too-many executive producers who did nothing but swan around and collect a paycheck for having mediocre opinions about television shows. Honestly he was nice enough but he was sixty-seven years old and gay gay gay; what he knew about hetero sex was absolutely nothing. She was not surprised to hear that this dumb idea about taking pins out of her hair had come from him.

“I don’t want to be the one who tells one of the executive producers that the actors don’t like his taste in hair and makeup,” Donny announced. He was gay gay gay as well. It was ridiculous how they all stuck together. Alison wanted to scream but she knew that if she did they’d all be ready to take her head off as soon as she exited the trailer, and that it would get back to somebody somewhere that she was getting difficult.

“Donny, this one’s not worth fighting,” she informed him. He turned away and unplugged his heating iron with a swing of the shoulders which informed her that in spite of the fact that she was really being pretty nice, he was going to report that she was difficult anyway. Behind him, Irene caught her eye. She was in for it too; when Donny got mad at someone, it was everyone who paid. “I’ll take them out myself,” Alison sighed, and to make her point she did it right there, pulling the pins out and tossing her hair about with as much sexual verve as she could cook up at a makeup station. “Okay, that was fun but we can do better than a couple of f*cking hairpins.” As long as she was pissing him off anyway, give him something to report.

But of course everyone wanted a piece of the show today; Tara and Rob getting back together counted as a Big Event. Marketing was putting together a whole promo campaign that had already started even though the episode wouldn’t air for six weeks. They had pulled a lot of shots from last season, singles of her and Bradley turning toward the camera with smoldering determination. She felt like Scarlett O’Hara, about to be ravished by Rhett Butler; their reunion had legendary status, and they hadn’t even shot it yet.

Everybody knew it was going to be a blistering scene. During their initial stint as network television’s hottest couple, she had loved having fake sex with Bradley, who was great looking and funny and unabashedly turned on by her. The first time they made out for the camera—almost two years ago now—he whispered jokes in her ear and made her laugh, then stuck his hand up her shirt and his tongue down her throat. It was a definite shock, but good Catholic girl that she was, she just went along with it, until take three, when she decided to enjoy it. On take four she even reached for Bradley’s belt buckle, which all the cameramen loved. When she went back to her trailer to change into her street clothes, the PA who served as her bodyguard made a quick dry comment about Alison’s “chemistry.” Alison didn’t see the footage until it was all cut together on the air six weeks later, and she was shocked at how raw the sexuality seemed. They were only kissing, for crying out loud! But the high-def camera caught an astonishing level of detail, physical and otherwise. Even though the kiss was shot in close-up, the moment she reached for Bradley’s belt was caught in the specific shift of her shoulder, which left no room for doubt about what else was going on here. Bradley’s answering shift—it was more like a grind—left even less doubt about what he was doing and where that would go, if he had any say about it. On top of which, by cutting the first and last takes together, the editors created a mysterious moment in which the defiant intelligence of Alison’s gaze seemed to simply evaporate as she fell into the kiss. After the show aired Rose called immediately, asking point-blank if Alison was going to be involved in “all that sex” they put on “shows like that.”

Alison felt like hanging up on her. But she didn’t. Don’t be ugly, she thought, it was becoming increasingly clear that her mother had always been right about that one. Be nice. Be pretty.

“There is going to be some sex involved, yes, Mom,” she said.

“I just don’t know why you have to do all that.” Rose was, apparently, just revving herself up. This could go on quite a while.

“Hey, there’s someone on the other line,” Alison replied, trying to be nice and pretty. “I’m so sorry, Mom. If you don’t want to see me doing that stuff, then just shut your eyes at those parts. Because I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be doing all that stuff.”

She was right. The fans loved all that stuff, and Rob and Tara’s explosive first kiss made Alison a bona fide television star. The blogs which obsessively shredded every moment of nighttime television were entranced and turned on. “Tara and Rob tsunami report,” one anonymous blogger announced. From then on, every scene they had together came out under the hashtag #TsunamiReport. “I wanted to f*ck them both,” one viewer noted in some comment stream. That got retweeted, too.

Which is why, of course, the writers had to break them up. After almost a year of scorching up the airwaves, Rob discovered that Tara had had a one-night stand with Marcos, and that was the end of everything. It seemed, to say the least, a tad forced—Rob had betrayed Tara about sixteen times, by the time she slipped up—but when she had tried to point all this out to Neil and Craig and Vernon and one or two of the other endless executive producers, she was met with a hostile civility which chilled her to the bone. Bradley actually backed her; he liked playing Rob’s * side, but when it got too irrational it became truly hard for him to make the scenes work. Screaming at her incessantly about what a lying, deceiving traitor she was for doing this one teeny thing while he had done so many that were patently worse was honestly too crazy for him to act. He also thought, quite rightly, that it made his character unsympathetic. So both of them stood their ground, together: They understood the need to break up Tara and Rob so that you could spend some time getting them back together, but you didn’t have to make them morons to do it. All the interchangeable executive producers got more and more heated because there was no way they were going to admit that they were wrong and they certainly weren’t going to go back to the even more useless idiots at the network and tell them that Alison didn’t want to play what was written. People got on the phone to her agent and she was told to do what she was told, and if she didn’t like the writing they could arrange for her to be released from her contract.