I'm Glad About You (17 page)

She looked around, trying to spot Bradley, but he wasn’t on set yet. It was one of his behavioral trademarks, to make the set wait; he was the show’s acknowledged antihero and he had absorbed his character’s easy contempt for reality and rules. There were better-looking actors on the show, but Bradley’s bad boy with a heart of gold owned the internet. The websites oozed with estrogen gone haywire; the guy was a certifiable rock star, as far as the lonely ladies of America were concerned. He continued to drift down to the set on his own schedule, no matter how much the crew griped about it. But there was no question that today he deliberately was working her nerves. He had been abrupt in the makeup room, commenting on the way she was “letting them” ruin her hair, and announcing to Donny the hair guy that he didn’t want to have to deal with some insane twist on the back of her neck while also figuring out how to actually have sex on a pool table. When Donny earnestly tried to explain that the director had already approved the look, Bradley snapped.

“I have not had sex with her for a
year
,” he told Donny. “I’m not taking the time to do anything but grab her, get her on the pool table, and fuck her.” Before anyone could think of anything to say to
that
, he turned on her. “It’s your hair. Can you take care of this, please?”

She wanted to snap back at him, but she knew to save it up. “Sure,” she said.

“Thank you,” he replied, with an impatient edge that was much more pointed than the words. As she watched him go, she could see Irene from makeup make a small face while concentrating on the difficulties of cleaning a clotted eyebrow wand. Donny tried to recover some of his pride. “Queen Bradley is on the loose,” he observed. “It’s going to be a long day.”

“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 pro
du
cers 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 fucking
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 fuck 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 asshole 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.

That was a year ago. This was today. Alison felt a tingling along her jawline; she was nervous. Because of the bitter estrangement that had been tricked up between Tara and Rob, the writers had condemned them to long months of soul-searching looks, near kisses, and contemptuous verbal take-downs. But now Tara was going to tear down the barriers between them, force Rob to admit that he had never stopped loving her, and fuck him on that pool table in the back room. The crew, to give them credit, behaved beautifully on days like this. Whenever someone said, “This scene is sensitive” to a bunch of union guys, they understood that meant more than
no drooling
. The less-classy writers would gather at the monitors and watch every take like spectators at a porno film, but the muscular, tattooed guys who were out there on the set with the actors, pushing the cameras in and out while they faux fornicated, behaved like utter gentlemen.

The lighting was complicated. The cameras had to do a bit of fancy footwork, which amounted to not much more than scooting forward and back and then zooming in, but it took time to sync it up with the lights. Alison was seated at the corner of the bar for all of this, and finally, Bradley was there too, ignoring her with a maddening deliberation. Some actors, she had heard, were tender and careful with their scene partners when a big sex scene was on deck. Bradley took the opposite approach. He floated from table to table, refusing to acknowledge her presence even as he got closer and closer to where she was, as if being pulled to her by the inevitable tidal forces of his desire. That’s what the stupid director had explained at the read-through—“He’s pulled to you by the tidal forces of his desire.”
Honestly
, Alison thought, while listening politely.
These jobs pay so much money, why do mostly stupid people get them?

This guy was an A-one example of the breed. Before he had even finished blocking the whole scene he had decided he was worried because Tara was sitting there by herself for so long and she was such a
presence
in the scene, and such an important
character
to the show, that she wasn’t active enough. So, what she would be doing, he felt, was
flirting
with the bartender.

“You want me to flirt with the bartender?” Alison tried to ask the question respectfully. “Oh. I’m—but—is that in the script?”

“Not like,
heavy
flirting,” the director said, also respectfully. “Just smile, check him out. He’s cute. Like that.”

“But I’m, aren’t I sort of obsessed with Rob right now? By the end of the scene I’m going to, you know, do him on the pool table.”

“You’re not thinking about that right now. Of course that’s not what’s on your mind.”

“Actually it hasn’t been much
off
my mind for the last three months, I’m constantly whining about how much I miss him to anybody who will listen.” “Whine” wasn’t a good word. She was already miked, so if any of the writers had their ears on, they would hear it and get mad. “Not whining, I don’t mean whining, but seriously, I’ve been talking about it a lot,” she amended.

“Right, but he doesn’t need to know that. You don’t want him to know that. You want him to be jealous.”

“But he’s not paying attention to me.”

“He’s drifting toward you relentlessly.”

“No, I know, I just meant that he’s at least
pretending
to not pay attention. He’s seriously talking to everyone else in the room, and he’s not looking at me, so . . .”

“That’s why you have to grab his attention.”

“By flirting with a bartender?”

“Right.”

“Okay. I get it. I’m just a little, because the bartender doesn’t have any lines, does he? And I’m pretty sure my only line to him is ‘I’ll have another,’ which, I’m not, it’s kind of hard to flirt on that. Unless you really want me to lean into it, like, ‘I’ll have a
no
ther,’ which it’s hard to do without looking really slutty. But if that’s what you want . . .”

She hated talking like this. But it was somehow the rule of television, you had to discuss even the most inane questions as if they were utterly serious.

“I’m not asking for much. Just a little flirt.” An edge of real annoyance had entered the director’s tone. Another fight not worth having; she would need to have this guy on her side when they got around to rewriting dialogue and having sex on the pool table. Time to cede ground.

“Okay. Sure. I see.” She smiled at him with what she hoped looked like a sweet impulse to cooperate. “I think I know exactly what you mean, Jace.”

“Really?”

“I . . . will have another,” she informed him, with a saucy tip of the head. She let her fingers drift up his arm playfully, and grinned at him, flirting. He blinked with surprise at the sudden shift. “Let me play with it.” She turned to head back to the bar, a good little girl ready to flirt with whoever she was told to.

“Didn’t we decide to put your hair up, in some kind of knot?”

Alison froze. The director was staring at her hair with a rapt certitude which made her want to hit him.

At which point an arm crept around her waist, and someone buried his head in her neck. “God you smell good,” Bradley whispered. She felt her knees buckle, but his grip was firm. “Her hair looks amazing,” he informed the director. “I’d do her right now, in front of everybody, if I wouldn’t get arrested for it.”

“Save it up, Bradley,” she said, pretending to take a professional tone. “It’s going to be a long day.”