I'm Glad About You (9 page)

As Alison found out later, the reason her episode came in eight pages too short to begin with was that in the middle of November the show was hitting a wall; all the scripts were coming in late, and the executive producer, who was an egomaniac and a prick, had spent too much time rethinking every choice anyone made in any of the episodes that had already been shot and so they were days behind schedule and inches away from shutting down production for a week, which would have cost a complete fucking fortune that the network was not willing to spend for a show that was on the bubble. So while the egomaniacal prick of an executive producer was off putting out fires with the network, the episode’s writer was left to solve his own problems. When this young actress showed up and actually gave an emotionally charged reading of two fairly mediocre lines of his dialogue, he felt artistically vindicated and knew that this was his chance to spread his wings.

“Everything was for Billy,” Alison told the camera bitterly. “It was always, ‘he’s my buddy.’ You mess with that at your own peril.”

“This is it, this is the big scene,” the real Alison informed the room.

“Did you feel threatened by that?” asked the ADA.

“I felt disgusted by it,” Alison told him. “He was always telling me, ‘I love this guy.’ He said it so many times I thought, why don’t you just sleep with him then.” Everyone in the room said “Oooooo,” like she had really stepped over the line with that one even though no one could give a shit about implications of homosexuality in New York City. On the television set the scene was erupting. The lousy, threatening boyfriend leaped across the room and started strangling Alison. People cheered. And then when he hurled her across the table—someone somewhere apparently did
not
think that was too much, after all, and they used the more exciting shot—everyone cheered again. All in all, the drunken celebration surrounding her television debut was enormously satisfying to Alison’s ego, and she didn’t pick up her cell when her mother called because she was having too good a time and she wasn’t going to let her mom wreck it with some ill-placed remark.

The party lingered on lazily after the episode’s conclusion at 11 p.m.; the young would-be actors and intellectuals gathered in Lisa’s apartment insisted they wanted to catch up on the news but once the sound was muted during the commercial break no one really turned their eyes to the screen again. For a short while they drank and chattered cheerfully about Alison’s debut and how much fun guest leads could be and what upcoming auditions were hanging out there for her now, and then two by two they drifted away to look for cabs. Not quite ready for her moment in the sun to end, Alison hung around, collecting glasses and empty bottles and organizing the detritus of the evening into a slightly more coherent version of itself.

“Leave it!” Lisa commanded. “Benita comes tomorrow, she’s got to have something to do.”

Alison raised her hands, leaving the glasses in place. “I always forget you have a cleaning lady,” she admitted.

“
Cleaning lady
? Oh God, you are so Midwestern,” Lisa tossed back at her, pouring the ends of a bottle of red into a water glass. She staggered a bit as she turned toward the kitchen, where Seth was hanging in the doorway, holding a beer and watching the girls with an amused glint in his eye. The whole scene was a little too Tennessee Williams, Alison thought, but she plowed ahead bravely.

“This was so nice of you, letting us come over and watch the episode together. I hate to leave you with such a mess.”

“I said leave it,” Lisa told her, picking up several bottles herself as if Alison were bound to do it wrong anyway. While she was fairly sure that Lisa’s snarl had a little more behind it than too much alcohol, Alison was in too good a mood to be wounded.

“Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow then,” Alison shrugged, picking up her jacket—a denim relic from high school, so unchic it actually counted as cool—from the chair by the door, where she had dropped it with her purse three hours ago.

“You’re uptown, right?” Seth said. “We should split a cab.” He downed the end of his beer, leaned back into the kitchen, left it on the counter, and sauntered toward the doorway. He had framed the announcement with the kind of impartiality that made it impossible to tell if there was any hidden meaning in it, but in the lexicon of young New Yorkers, “We should split a cab” could mean “I find you kind of hot and I’m interested in going home with you if it turns out that something develops in the back of that cab.” Or it could mean “We should split a cab.” Alison had no interest in splitting a cab with Seth for any reason whatsoever, but there was no way Lisa could read Seth’s careless announcement that he was leaving with Alison as anything other than a rejection. At the very least, “We should split a cab” meant “I’m not sticking around to have sex with Lisa, in whom I am less interested than she seems to think.”

“Oh!” Alison laughed, trying to sound as uninterested in the subtext of all this as she possibly could. “I was going to stop and pick some things up on the way.” This didn’t come off as smoothly as she wished; it sounded more like she was making a fake excuse to cover the fact that she was walking off with Lisa’s boyfriend. Seth raised that eyebrow again and said, “Well, but you’ll still need a cab, I’m guessing.” With that he opened the door and with a wave of his hand indicated to her
after you
, as if this dual exit were the most natural thing in the world.

Alison hesitated, then smiled back at Lisa and said, “See you! Thanks again!” which also sounded phony. But there was nothing else for it. She preceded Seth out the door and pushed the button to call the elevator. They both waited in silence while the wall hummed and clicked with the sound of the lift approaching. The elevator door slid open, and Alison silently stepped inside the tiny cubicle, which was lined with faux-wood Formica paneling. She concentrated on the line of buttons in front of her, and pushed “Lobby.” There was another tense pause until the door finally slid shut. Seth glanced down at her, grabbed her by the waist of her jacket, and pulled her to him.

“Hey,” said Alison. “Hey.”

The fleeting worry that this would really piss Lisa off was obliterated by the thrill of having a man’s torso up against her own and his tongue halfway down her throat. Alison’s brain vaguely noted how quickly Seth’s right leg shoved itself between hers as he actually lifted her up against the wall, how his hand slid up the back of her shirt, but after that, her brain went on hold, and there it stayed. Her lonely spirit and young body were severely in need by that point, and the brain’s concerns seemed less and less relevant with every passing second in that elevator. Seth was momentarily surprised at the visceral power of that first kiss, and so was she, and the heated cab ride home did nothing to diminish their sudden and demanding physical hunger. So when they finally made it into an actual bed the sex was long, complicated, and satisfying.

After they had finished, Seth stretched his arms toward the wall, yawned, and glanced at the cheap LCD alarm clock plugged into the wall at the side of the low futon. “What time is it, three?” he noted. “Shit, I have to go.” He stood, naked, and drifted into the bathroom, peeling off the condom he kept so handily in his wallet. He returned moments later and idly picked up a corner of the strewn sheets and blankets, carelessly searching for clothes which had been torn off in an unself-conscious frenzy hours ago. Reason reasserted itself and as he located his boxers and stepped into them, Seth’s maneuvering mind moved back into place.

“That was great,” he told Alison, as if to reassure her that in fact he hadn’t already forgotten how great it was.

“Thanks,” she replied.

“I’ll give you a call, okay?”

“You have my number?”

“Oh. No, I guess I don’t. Hang on. Let me get my pants on . . .” He slipped into his jeans, and found his socks, barely paying attention to her. “You have a pen?” he asked. “Something to write on? You don’t have a card, do you?”

“What? We just had sex so you want my
card
?”

Seth sighed; he remembered this about her now—she was difficult. This really was the problem with so many of these women: They wanted a career and a life in the fast lane and love and commitment and a man who would almost fuck you in the backseat of a cab and then pretend that it was love. He had appreciated the fact that Alison was so receptive to his come-on, and that once things were moving in the right direction she didn’t seem all that interested in talk. He regretted the fact that she seemed to want to talk now.

“Look, I said it was great, and it
was
great,” he reminded her, successfully keeping the impatience out of his tone. “I want your
number
, I think is what I said.”

“Well, I’m kind of lying here naked, so I don’t actually have a pen, or a card, on me.” She didn’t mean to sound like she thought he was an idiot, but there was something about this all that bugged her, even in the languid throes of satiation. She wasn’t mad at this guy, she really wasn’t; she wanted to tell him how much she enjoyed the meaningless sex, the way he was telling her the same thing. There was something vaguely bemusing about this onset of manners.

“I don’t need you to say you’re going to call me,” she said.

“It’s not whether you
need
it,” Seth told her, zipping up his fly. “I
want
to. I think you’re great. Didn’t you think that was great?”
Some writer
, she thought,
the only word he can come up with is “great.”

“It was fucking awesome. I have not had sex that amazing in my entire life,” she told him. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, the truth. She had had several on-and-off boyfriends in her years in Seattle, in between the torturous months when she was once again trying to work things out with the insistently celibate Kyle. But none of those guys—and there weren’t, honestly, all that many of them—were any great shakes in bed. This so-called writer, on the other hand, clearly enjoyed sex, and he was good at it. Sex with tall, arrogant, self-involved Seth
was
fucking awesome. Unfortunately, Alison’s cool tone belied her hyperbole, and Seth heard sarcasm instead of truth in her statement.

“Well—you weren’t exactly pushing me off.”

“No, I was not pushing you off.”

“Oh, brother,” he muttered. This chick got under his skin in all the wrong ways. And it was too bad, because she really was great looking—those green eyes were killer—and she was a total animal in the sack. But even after sex that good, she was too much work. “What do you want? You want me to say I’m in love with you?”

“No, I’m not interested in ‘love.’ I think that’s pretty obvious.”

“Well, then is there a problem here? I really was going to call you. Unless you don’t want me to.”

“You know, I don’t think I do want you to,” Alison admitted. Mere moments before Seth’s brain had been busily trying to get his body out the door without committing himself to any future contact with this great-looking actress. But now that she told him she didn’t want any contact either, he felt wronged.

“Thanks a lot,” he said.

“Don’t be mad,” Alison sighed.
Boys are morons
, she thought.
They act more like girls than girls do.

“I’m just confused,” Seth continued, trying now to sound more like he gave a shit. “Is this about Lisa?”

“Lisa?” Alison asked. Lisa, she knew, would never forgive her this, but Lisa had already not forgiven Alison for actually landing a part from an audition that she helped her get. Lisa hadn’t forgiven Alison her uncool mother, whom she had met and deemed “cute.” There were a million things Lisa was already finding unforgivable about Alison, and she didn’t even know that Alison had utterly betrayed her by falling into bed with the guy she wanted.

“Look, there’s nothing going on with me and Lisa,” Seth explained, still miles behind Alison in his conception of this situation. “She wanted you and me to get together, she told me to come to that party, whenever that was back in September, just to meet you.”

“The demimonde,” Alison murmured, watching him wearily through half-closed eyes. She really wanted this conversation to be over. The guy was racing to get out of there minutes ago; why didn’t he just leave?

“Yeah, right?” Seth agreed. For a moment he grinned and she felt the stirrings of interest; his amusement at the memory of that moronic argument was the most personality she had ever seen him express, the few times their paths had crossed. The moment was fleeting, though. He went back to his default position of privileged white male egocentrism with alarming speed. “That’s my point. Us getting together was Lisa’s idea in the first place. She was disappointed when things didn’t click the first time.”

“She’s not going to be disappointed now,” Alison informed him with a sardonic edge.

“She doesn’t have any claim on me,” Seth said, bristling, as if this were really the problem. “Seriously, I’ve known her a long time and I like her. We went to high school together! And then one night a couple weeks ago things went a little further than usual, that may be what she told you about. But if she told you it’s more than that, she’s misguided.”

“She does think it’s more than that,” Alison sighed. “So you maybe will want to clear that up with her.”

“I will, I totally will,” Seth said, not even bothering to pretend that wasn’t a lie. He picked up his shirt and studied the front of it, which seemed to irritate him for a moment. “Shit,” he observed. “We actually tore a button off.” He glanced around the room idly, as if that might yield the missing button, before turning his ADD attention span back to the girl who was lying naked in the bed. “So I can call you?”

Alison felt the sudden urge to start yelling at this guy; his logic was so utterly fucking self-involved. But she was just too tired. “No, you can’t call me,” she said. “I did think the sex was great. I wasn’t kidding when I said that was the best sex of my life. But even though I like having sex with you, I think you’re kind of a huge asshole, and I don’t want to have to talk to you again. And even though that probably would work for you? That we never speak but we still get together and just fuck every now and then? I’m from the Midwest and we don’t do things like that there. So I don’t think you should call me.”
That should do it
, she thought.