I'm Glad About You (39 page)

“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.”

“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 fucking 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

M
ARRIAGE 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.

He phoned the office—
emergency family leave—
and then he texted Van to tell her where he was. Not that she cared, but he wasn’t going to give her any excuse to sue him for abandonment or in any way damn him further. The spectacular permutations of her logic in laying the blame for this at his feet overwhelmed him daily; a terrible rage would unleash itself like some sort of mindless undersea creature determined to strangle the life out of him. Her declaration that
he
was to blame for her infidelity, that he was
responsible
for her utter betrayal, after everything he had suffered, lost, mourned, on her behalf. His dreams of accomplishment and joy, gone. His children, taught to see him as an enemy. His parents, yearning for grandchildren she willfully held away from them. The woman was a fucking holy terror.

He did not know how long this bitterness might consume him, nor did he know how long the good brothers would allow him to live among them without finally asking a question or two about his plans. By the end of his second week in retirement from the world, the steady hum of prayer and spiritual good will actually began to do its work, and he could go for longer stretches between seizures. He texted Susan, asked her to let his parents know he was on retreat at Gethsemani. He knew that simple detail would ease their anxiety, and in this moment of bewildered compassion—
they must be worried sick—
he began to find his way back.

Brother Peter joined him in the cafeteria for a 5:30 breakfast one morning, and after they had prayed over their eggs and toast, he asked a gentle question.

“Have you found comfort, in your time here with us?”

“I have, yes,” Kyle responded, a little too quickly. It made him sound glib, which was the last thing he wanted. The few words you might use in a place like this should all matter.

“How long are you able to be here with us?”

“I would like to stay forever,” Kyle confessed.

The brother nodded. So much silence. It was different from his own silence, which too often placed a wall between himself and Van, or the girls, or the nurses. He remembered that Alison once accused him of using silence as a weapon.

“My wife,” Kyle began. He faltered. What was there to say about Van? Was she really his wife? She said she wasn’t, but if not, then what was it that they were to each other? “She wants to end our marriage.”

“That must be painful.”

Was it painful? Certainly the rages which overwhelmed him when he considered her vast betrayals were painful. Less so the distance, the time, the fact that he didn’t have to face her determined disappointment every single day. “The situation is painful, but I find my time here to be wonderful,” he said. “I don’t want to go back.”

Peter nodded at this and even smiled, rueful. “Everybody’s trying to escape,” he admitted. “Most days, I’d give anything to escape from here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t find it a little prison-like? Those tiny rooms? The marching to chapel every three hours to pray for half an hour? The work details? The monotony?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Try it for ten years.” It sounded like blasphemy but Peter was completely content to admit it, and seemed to have no fear of being overheard. “But life isn’t something we’re meant to escape. Or rather, we are meant to escape it, profoundly, in death. While we are here, we are meant to live it.”

“Then you don’t see the monastery as an escape.”

“For me it was a choice. Were I to abandon it, I would be abandoning myself. Which would be the same as abandoning God. So I wish to escape, but I choose to live through that wish, to discover what wisdom God might choose to bestow.”

“Might?”

“Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? He might just decide to bore me to death. But I suspect he has better plans, for both of us.”

This ruthlessness of choice was completely belied, of course, by the life of their saint Mr. Merton. Kyle was finally permitted to accompany one of the older monks to the site of Merton’s hermitage, down a simple path through a few charming thickets to a clearing where a humble cinder-block structure stood. He had long known the story of the famous writer, who actually couldn’t decide between a life of prayerful seclusion or a life in the world. But those fates were afforded to great men. The longer Kyle stayed and pondered God’s will, the more he felt the constrictions of his psychological trap. These good monks would not send him back to his life, but neither would they make him one of their number. Unlike Merton, who found a way to straddle two identities, Kyle would be left floating between them. And so he got in his car and drove back to Cincinnati.