I'm Glad About You(72)

“You want me to sit here and make out with Carl.”

“I want you to act the scene.”

She actually started to do it. She sat on the couch, brooding—that was the direction in the text, Laila, brooding, sits on the edge of the bed. Her shirt, loosely unbuttoned, has slipped off her shoulder, revealing the nipple of her perfectly formed right breast. Carl sat down on the couch. He shifted, took a moment to settle, then leaned gently toward her.

And then it didn’t feel like so much fun anymore. “Hang on, cowboy,” she said. She turned to Lars, who was considering her with a slightly too-deliberate curiosity. “You want me to open my shirt and reveal the nipple of my perfectly formed right breast?” she asked.

“That would be fine,” Lars informed her. She didn’t know if he was kidding. It seriously wasn’t clear.

“You want me to make out with him? Right now? Like, right here on the couch?”

“We’re doing a scene, Alison,” Lars reminded her, with a condescending Icelandic superiority.

“Sure we are, Lars.”

She sat in silence for a moment. Carl looked back and forth between them, then stretched his hand down his back, like he was warming up for a wrestling match. “So do you want me to . . .”

“I need you to take off, Carl,” she said. “All of you, take off.”

“Oh,” said Carl, surprised, and clearly disappointed.

“There are still several scenes I’d like to look at,” Lars told her.

“Well, I don’t feel great, I really don’t feel up to this right now and I’d love it if everyone left.”

The two actors turned and looked at Lars for direction. It was enough to make your head explode. “Hey, numbnuts,” Alison snapped. “This is my apartment. I get to say who stays and who goes, not him. This is my home. I want you out of it.”

“Oh, sure, I just wasn’t sure what—” the poor dope started.

“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT HE WANTS TO DO. I’M CALLING THE POLICE IF YOU GUYS DON’T GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.”

That did the trick. The two guys picked up their backpacks, their eyes averted, mumbled their apologies and good-byes to Lars, and then shuffled to the door and split.

It was so sheepish and guilty, Alison knew immediately that they were all in on it. “You told them they were coming over here to f*ck me,” she said. “You told them that I would do it. In my apartment. You told—two total strangers—”

“They’re not strangers, I’ve worked with them on several projects.”

“Did you honestly think I’d do it? You f*cking ASSHOLE.” She did like Lars, and she was afraid of him too, but it felt good calling him an *.

“I just wanted to see when those Midwestern values would finally assert themselves,” he said, observing her coolly. The whole situation was appalling. How had she gotten here? One step at a time.

“You need to get out of here now.”

“Do you really think I’d want to stand here and watch someone else make love to you? That would be torture!”

“Then why did you do it?” Alison could not stop her eyes from filling with tears. Her voice was cracking.

Lars looked at her intently, those blue eyes alight with cool imperial wisdom. “I wanted to see the saint in you again,” he said. “I know the whore now. I wanted to see Joan of Arc.”

“Lars, please. You have to go. I mean it. Don’t make me yell anymore.”

“I like it when you yell.”

“Well, I’m tired, I’m really just so so so—tired.” There was a moment of silence as they considered each other. God, Alison thought, suddenly praying, please make him understand that I’m not kidding. Please, God.

Lars went to pick up his glorious shoulder bag, where he had dropped it near the door. Thank you, God, Alison thought. Then Lars moved back into the room, reaching for her. Fuck you, God, Alison thought, what new hell is this?

Then he kissed her on the forehead and finally, blessedly, left.

So when Alison insisted to Ryan that things between her and Lars were “fine,” she was not strictly telling the truth. This whole fiasco had just been three days ago, and she hadn’t seen Lars since. He had sent flowers twice, and this morning another dress had come, a vibrant, frankly disturbing pink. I’ve seen the saint, now I want to see the whore again, was her guess what he would say.

But when she finally tried to tell her stupid agent about all this, he would have none of it. “Lars is notorious for knowing what he wants,” Ryan told her. “That’s what makes him a great director. And the fact that he is so committed to casting you is a total game changer.”

“In spite of the fact that there’s no offer.”

“You cannot get hung up on that! People know you’re being considered and that’s enough!” On some sick level Ryan was telling the truth. Ever since the word went out that Lars Guttfriend was going to cast Alison Moore as the female lead in Last Stop, the scripts had been rolling in. Managers were calling for interviews. Publicists were begging to take her on. This was her moment. Careful what you wish for. This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? Who would decide to be an actress, then try to back out of the whole thing when someone said, Okay and now we’re going to make you a star? None of her friends, what passed for them in the acting community, had any sympathy—they were all too jealous. She had gone out for drinks with Lisa and her trust-fund pals and they all got so brittle when she mentioned it, she had to make it seem it was a near impossibility she would actually even get the part, and quickly changed the subject. Her friends from the show, no better. She hadn’t even tried to tell her mother what all this involved because she had been so thrilled when that first call came in. How could she explain these hypersexual machinations to her mother? Her father would see dollar signs. Her brothers and sisters would think she was making it all up.