I'm Glad About You(91)

“I have a feeling it was a little more complicated than that.”

“Not all that much.”

She took another hit off the vodka bottle with just enough exhaustion to lead him to suspect she was lying. “The wig isn’t what’s made you a movie star.”

“I’m not so sure it isn’t the wig,” she said. “Or the wig and the dresses. Honestly, the acting isn’t anywhere near as difficult. You spend hours in hair and makeup, and wardrobe, you spend years in wardrobe, and then like sixty people change their mind about your costume and your hair, even the head of the f*cking studio is obsessing on what I wear, it just takes forever. And then I get to the set, and the scenes are really not all that—you know, half the time, I’m just running from one set of rocks to another, yelling, ‘Come on!’ Occasionally I get to throw a grenade. I was doing more acting on that terrible television show.”

“You have good scenes in this.” She looked at him, surprised. “I have a friend in the Xerox department. She slipped me the script.”

“A friend in the Xerox department. That’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.”

“It’s not a euphemism; they have Xerox departments, and I have friends there. And none of them are in the demimonde, let me reassure you. There are no Xerox departments in the demimonde.”

“There are no actresses there either, let me assure you.”

“No, the actresses are all in the theater, starving.” He knew plenty of them, and they were no fun. OCD losers who lived in a constant state of rage because they couldn’t get cast in anything, and when they did get cast the plays were so bad no one came to see them. Plus they got paid next to nothing. Then they proceeded to lord their Commitment to Art over any actor out there who did manage to land a money gig. Like Alison. He was sure they all hated her. Certainly her old friend Lisa had nothing good to say about her.

“You ever hear from Lisa?” Alison asked, as if she were reading his mind.

“Now and then.”

“She won’t talk to me. She’s convinced I stole you from her.”

“That’s not what she thinks.”

“Oh ho.” Alison glanced over at him. “What does she think?”

“She thinks that the demimonde would be a fun place to live, and she’s jealous that you get to live there, and she doesn’t.”

“So how’d you end up here?” she asked. He’d asked himself that question, on plenty of drunken nights. How was it that no amount of money, looks, talent, pedigree, education could extricate him from this petty, demeaning, and meaningless livelihood; why couldn’t he shake himself out of it, write that novel, run off to Africa to report about child soldiers, research a book on China’s stunning takeover of global capitalism? Why couldn’t he do that? He himself had taken every step down the path to the nihilistic cultural abyss which was entertainment reporting—there was no choice that he hadn’t made with full knowledge of where it was leading. But there had been some whispered promise along the way, this is how you get to where you’re going, this isn’t the destination, this is power, you need to build up your power, make a name for yourself, get to know people, this is how writers rise.

“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you,” he reminded her.

“Is this an interview?”

“You’re lucky it’s not. You could get in big trouble for saying shit like this to a reporter. You know not to do that, right?”

“Lancelot, where have you been all my life?”

“Hey, listen, I’m serious.” She arched her eyebrow in surprise. For all her flirty irony, she really was, somehow, a total innocent. “You need to call somebody, tell them where you are.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a commodity, you’re like a valuable thing to them. You can’t just run off, it freaks them out.”

“They should be freaked out. They treat me pretty shitty, if you want to know the truth.”

“They treat everybody shitty. You have to take it until you have enough power to treat them shitty.”

“Why can’t they just treat me well, and then when I have power, I won’t want to treat them shitty?”

“Because that’s not the way it works. And besides which, they don’t think they’re treating you shitty. They put you in a movie and they’re making you a big star, they think that’s pretty nice of them.”

“But they don’t talk to me like I’m a human being!”

“You’re not a human being.”

“I am too.”

“Well, you have to try and forget that for now.”

“That’s right, you had to apologize to me because you were so mean to me on the red carpet.”

“I was not mean to you. But I did have to apologize and get it out into the Twittersphere that I wasn’t sexually harassing you. Because if I didn’t it would have wrecked my career.”

“Such as it is.”

“Well, precisely. I know what I’m talking about. You need to call somebody right now and tell them where you are and that you weren’t feeling well and you’re so sorry you had to go home and get some rest. Have your agent do it.”