I'm Glad About You(77)

She didn’t answer.

“And the cops never thought of talking to you, you were long gone, everybody thought it was somebody on the catering staff. Or me! That was what my father thought. Felicia certainly thought so. But no. It was my dear friend Alison Moore. Stole jewelry worth, do you know what that stuff was worth?”

She still couldn’t speak, or look at him. Her brain was frozen with the truth of all of it.

“When Kyle told me you were up there, not having sex yet again, I thought, oh what the f*ck, you know what I thought. And did you ever stop to think what happened, what happened to me? My father was furious. Whatever happened, there was no question it was my fault.” The fullness of his betrayal came back again. “I lost everything. So under the circumstances, a little friendliness on your part might not have been amiss.”

His anger frightened her into the barest attempt at an argument. “Dennis. You need to stop drinking and and and—”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do,” he warned her. The alcohol had leant a righteousness to his disgust. Laying his hands on her seemed like nothing compared to what she’d perpetrated. “I’ll tell you what you need to do, is you need to write me a check. Five thousand—who am I kidding—ten, ten thousand dollars. You have it, you can’t tell me you don’t have it.” She didn’t answer. “I’m f*cking broke. But we’ll just, ten thousand and we’ll call it even.”

When he turned his gaze back to Alison, she seemed like a strange, poisonous flower. Her back against the wall, wearing that ridiculous pink gown. She was scared as shit. That wasn’t nothing.

“You don’t have a checkbook?”

“It’s in the desk.” She tipped her head. He glanced around the apartment, which was spare to the point of absurdity, truth be told. But yes, there in the corner, a tiny Ikea desk, something you might find in a dorm room.

“Go get it,” he told her.

“You step aside,” she answered.

“Oh, relax. I’m not going to rape you, Alison, although some people surely would think you deserve it.” He downed the last of the vodka, barely tasting it now. The drive toward oblivion was familiar, his old friend. But he did as he was told, and took a step back toward the couch. After a moment she eased herself out of the corner and walked across the room with as much dignity as she could muster in that pink dress.

“You make yourself look like that, and then you’re surprised that men want to f*ck you?” he asked.

That one she had no answer for.





part three





twenty





THEY ENDED UP going darker with the hair and everyone had to admit that Lars’s preoccupation with the exact color was pure genius, because Alison looked devastating. Face framed by feathers of raven curls, her complexion drifted into a pure, vulnerable alabaster. Those green eyes were even more startling in their intelligence and cunning, but now there was the whisper of hurt there too, a panic which occasionally flickered to the surface before it was willed away. It wasn’t precisely Ava, or Liz either; for both of them, the black hair had a Samson-like power: Those girls knew how to snarl. Alison had something more wounded-bird going on, and the whole effect was startling. It was, in fact, that rarest of commodities, for Hollywood: It was not merely familiar; it was also new.

Unfortunately, getting the hair to that exact color wasn’t easy. Alison’s natural brunette was so dark the stylist, a fierce and competent young woman who was covered in slightly scary tattoos, explained that they would actually need to strip Alison’s natural brunette and lay in the raven, which had less red and more black in it, on top of the stripped hair. So then they needed a high-volume peroxide in order to activate the bleach and remove the color, and then they had to shampoo, remove the bleach, and do the whole thing again. The bleach had a high lift, which removed the color well enough, but a pale orange cast in the stripped hair was tenacious. After two days of this, the intimidating hairstylist—her name was Rocky, of course it was—pointed out that all this manipulation could permanently damage Alison’s follicles as well as the hair itself. In other words, if they kept this shit up, it could ruin Alison’s hair for life. Determined that when he got her to Los Angeles to meet the studio royalty she would be as close to perfection as he could make her, Lars fired Rocky and hired a second, and then a third stylist, flying them both in from London. They made all sorts of wild promises and in fact delivered one hell of a cut and color, but just when Lars finally approved a stunningly accurate deep brown-black, Alison’s own roots, with those hints of auburn, were starting to show. The second as well as the third stylist confirmed what Rocky had been fired for saying: Much more of this, and her hair would be wrecked for good. Ryan got involved, and in the end they compromised: You can touch up the roots for the screen test. After that, you’re going to have to wig her.

In the moment, the compromise was acceptable. Alison’s meeting with Gordon and Norbert and Barry and David and Ron and half a dozen other white men was set, and it proved to be a superb exercise in feminine charm. She wore a skintight pearl-colored georgette slip dress that left little of her figure to the imagination. The dress was so low-cut she was convinced that her nipples might slip out at any moment and ruin everything, but Lars had insisted it would keep the room on edge (it did), and more important, it was the kind of thing that a screen goddess would do. She’d sit there in a dress like that, acting like a perfect lady, and letting them all fantasize about f*cking her on the floor.