I'm Glad About You(92)

“I don’t have my cell phone, I left it in my trailer.”

“You can use mine.” He reached into his pocket.

“Do I have to do it right now?”

“Yes, you have to do it right now.”

“Once I do it, this will all be over,” she warned him. “Like, we escaped, we really did, for six hours. And once I call in, we won’t have escaped anymore.”

You really need to kiss her right now, his brain informed him. But the cell phone was already in his hand, an anchor holding him in place. Its cold weight tugged him back into the reptilian subcortex which innately understood the narrower rules by which the demimonde operated. Something she had said earlier had been lurking there.

“Gordon is personally approving your costumes?”

“Yes, it’s a complete pain in the ass. They have to send him swatches.”

“What do you mean, swatches?”

“For all the dresses. They have to make them, because he was like, he didn’t like anything that they shopped, so they’re building all these dresses for me and he’s more or less hyperobsessed and you know. He wants to see fabric swatches.”

“The head of the studio. Is looking at fabric swatches. For your costumes.”

“Stupid, right? Plus he can’t make up his mind, so they have to build like two or three versions of every dress. It costs a lot of money, everybody’s all worried about the budget but he keeps going, ‘That dress sucks,’ and he keeps reshooting things.”

“He’s ordering a lot of reshoots? For what?”

“No one knows. Or at least they’re not telling me. No, wait, the one we were supposed to do today? They reshot it three times, and now it turns out he wants me to be putting lipstick on. While I’m talking on the phone. Which you know is harder to do than you’d think, and besides which, nobody does it. If you’re going to put lipstick on, you set your stupid cell phone down. Which is, that’s all I was saying and then everybody stormed off the set.”

He had heard a lot of crazy things as an entertainment reporter, but this creeped him out. And it was bad, that she had dropped the wig. You just innately knew that people were not going to have a sense of humor about that. “You have to call in, Alison,” he said. He held out the cell phone. “You have to do it right now.”

She grimaced and for a moment it seemed like she was simply going to refuse. A fierce argument hovered, just behind her lips. It reminded him of the moment they had met, when she was so quickly irked by his pretentious babble. He wished that he had just taken her home that night, and fallen in love, and married her. Maybe you should just do it now. But she had taken the phone, and she was dialing dutifully. She smiled at him with a rueful obedience.

“Ryan, hey, it’s me, Alison,” she announced. “No no, I’m fine, I’m fine. There was just a kind of misunderstanding at the set and I didn’t know what was going on, it sounded like we were finished for the day, so I took off and— Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ohhhh. Wow. No no, I am so sorry.” She actually was a good little actress. At least the phone call was a masterpiece. “Oh, God, no! I was ready to do the shot, and I was asking a few questions and then everything seemed to erupt, so—of course I’ll call Lars. I lost my cell phone, I didn’t—oh, it’s in my trailer! Of course it is. Well, I’ll call him right now. You call him too. It’s a total misunderstanding. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks.”

She clicked the phone off. “This whole movie business is retarded,” she announced. “It’s a f*cking police state. No kidding, they went into my trailer and found my cell phone. I have to call Lars immediately and apologize. When he was the one being mean to me.” She sighed and started to dial again. “I warned you, once I made a phone call, all the fun would be over.”

Yes, she had warned him, and she had been right.





twenty-three





MARRIAGE COUNSELING was hideous. Van was eight months pregnant, and uncomfortable. And she didn’t want to be there. She had to be told point-blank that if she didn’t go to counseling with Kyle, he would refuse to even consider an annulment. The whole argument was circular and coercive: Unless you try to talk things through and save our marriage, I won’t admit that the marriage never in truth existed.

Poor Van. She had more or less entered this miserable marriage because Kyle felt duty bound, as a Catholic, to wed the woman he had deflowered. Not, actually, that he had deflowered her. But he had deflowered himself. Which at the time had somehow seemed to be the same thing. And now she wanted to escape. But apparently she had fallen in love with a man who was every bit as Catholic as Kyle. He wanted that annulment, and he was not going to marry her without it. She was stuck.

Kyle didn’t want to be there either. But the kindness of the monks to whom he’d fled for wisdom could not absolve him of the worldly responsibilities he had taken on with this marriage. No one ever said as much; in fact, those quiet, decent men said pretty much nothing at all. They accepted his sudden arrival as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They took him in; they gave him a bed; they let him sleep. For two days, no one asked him anything at all. They were simply content that they had something to offer him. They accepted that he understood the value of peace, and time, and prayer.

And pray is what he did. He got up at four in the morning and sat in the plain wood loft, listening to the brothers chant below him. He went back to his room and slept, then got up at seven and went back to the chapel for more of the same. Then he wandered the grounds until he could go back to the chapel and listen to them chant some more.