I'm Glad About You (10 page)

Seth nodded and then gave a little shrug, while he buttoned up his shirt. He even grinned a little, to himself. This chick was a mess. And the sex was great. The combination had its appeal. He dropped onto the bed, coming down to her level. “You’re from the Midwest, but you’re learning fast,” he informed her.

Which, to his delight, made her smile. The smile was crooked, ironic, intelligent. The green eyes, amazing. “True enough,” she admitted.

He kissed her. He was fully dressed now but she was naked beneath him, and the one fast kiss was just hot enough to give him the beginnings of yet another boner. He was starting to like this girl enough to pay attention to the signals, though, and decided not to push it.

“I got to get out of here before this goes any further,” he informed her.

“Yeah, you do,” she agreed.

He stood, and picked up his shoes. “I can’t believe you called me an asshole,” he told her.

“You
are
an asshole,” she said, but with enough good nature, it sounded almost affectionate.

six

A
S USUAL,
Christmas was shaping up to be an excessive, loud, crowded food orgy at the Moores’ house. Years ago, Andrew, the third of the middle brothers, had taken to declaring, “More is Moore, less is Not Moore!” and while it wasn’t the wittiest thing anyone had ever heard, the truth of it was undeniable. Growing up, there were eight Moore siblings, plus Mom and Dad, which made the family ten. But as of this particular Christmas, there were now twenty-three—six spouses, seven small offspring—with Megan pregnant with twins and ready to pop any minute and bring on numbers twenty-four
and
twenty-five. She had taken her husband’s name, so there would not
literally
be two more Moores, but there definitely would be two more small people, who had been named “Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five” by the exuberant multitudes which regularly gathered at Rose’s house. Megan informed them all that she did not want her unborn children to be treated like a football score, but led by the sardonic Andrew, everyone ignored her wishes and chanted “Twenty-four, twenty-five” every time her swelling belly entered the kitchen or the dining room or the family room or any room where two or more of them had gathered.

Alison frankly found all this joviality tedious. Her brothers and sisters were nice enough individually but there was a pack mentality to these gatherings which left her annoyed and alienated. One person wanted ice cream, so eight people would drive to Graeter’s. Some niece or nephew needed new shoes, so half a dozen would end up at T.J.Maxx. Every meal was an endless affair which necessitated at least five people running around Rose’s kitchen, cooking the multiple gigantic casseroles necessary to feed the hordes. And the lying around in front of the television set! It seemed at times that all twenty-three of those Moores and subsets of Moores took the holidays to mean, somehow, that the television set should stay on
all the time
. People would drift in and out of the family room watching a nonstop stream of football games, cartoons, and Fox News shows until, after days of this, Alison finally asked, “Can we just turn that thing off for a while?” The six or seven television watchers who were in there all the time were so engrossed in what was on—some cartoon about Christmas—they didn’t even answer her. She went back into the kitchen and thought about complaining to Rose and Megan and Andrew and his wife, Stella, but they were engrossed in a conversation about the possibility of going to Skyline for chili later that afternoon, so Alison held her tongue. She knew that complaining about that stupid TV would just make her seem a crank and an ungrateful crank at that, because they all had made much of the fact that she had recently
appeared
on television. If she announced that she just wished they would turn the damn thing
off
, she would open herself to days of good-natured derision about being an intellectual snob who couldn’t support herself unless she was on television, which she thought she was too good to watch.

Alison’s private speculations about the ribbing she would take under the circumstances were not far off. In truth, the general consensus among the Moores was that Alison was bright but misguided, something of a problem child. She was the only one out of the whole brood who had ever expressed any interest in the arts, and it had marked her as odd and pretentious; she wanted to talk about Shakespeare and analyze movies all the time while they just wanted to relax and watch football and have a couple of beers. She had a famously fractious relationship with her father, who was no walk in the park for any of them, but why antagonize him like that? Plus she and Lianne, the oldest of the younger sisters, couldn’t stand each other, which constantly created problems at family gatherings. Alison was the source of so much contention that she had no traction in her family. The only siblings who connected with her were Jeff, her smarty-pants brother, but he wasn’t home this year—he was off doing research on APO-E and DNA repair at some Alzheimer’s lab in Heidelberg—and Megan, who was deep in the land that pregnant women went to when they were about to give birth. Alison felt more isolated and blue than ever.

In addition, just before coming to Cincinnati for the holidays she had received an email from Ginger which informed her that their third invisible roommate had decided to leave his tour as of the New Year and needed his room back. Ginger herself was doing some out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, so Alison could sleep in the other bedroom for a couple of weeks, but essentially Alison was going to have to go apartment hunting as of January 1. And she was broke again. Ryan needed her to do new fancy head shots, and he had insisted that she get her hair and makeup done for them. He also pushed her to expand her wardrobe into a more sophisticated and upscale style; there was plenty of work for pretty girls out there but you had to look like money. Looking like money, Alison discovered, cost money, and she had been forced to break her own rule about depleting the bank account and running up those credit cards. It was the worst time possible to be told to move out of that lousy sublet; while she might have the wherewithal to come up with a first month’s rent on a new place, she didn’t have a penny to put down as a security deposit. She was going to have to ask her parents for a loan.

It was a hideous prospect. The night her episode aired, while Alison was off having a one-night stand with a guy she didn’t really like all that much, Rose had called and left a tearful message on her cell about how much her father had liked the show and how he “didn’t really understand” what Alison was doing but he was “relieved” to see that she really might be able to make a go of this acting thing. Alison knew that her mother had meant it as some kind of apology but in it she heard all the negative assumptions her parents had been trading between themselves for her entire life. Her father had never been terribly subtle about the fact that he didn’t think much of her career choice and that he believed she would never be able to support herself; he also had articulated—publicly—more than once that he doubted she would
ever
find someone who would actually want to marry her. She had to put up with this crap on a regular basis, and then everybody got mad at her when she talked back to him! Whatever. After she and Kyle had finally broken up for good, the sniping had just gotten worse. And now this apologetic message, through Mom, that he was “relieved.” He might as well just come out and say that he sure didn’t want to be on the financial hook for the rest of his life for his least favorite kid with the lousy rotten attitude who nobody would marry, so it was a good thing somebody finally put her on television. And now she had to ask him for money.

On top of all that she was
starving.
This on the unflinching orders of Ryan: She had to lose fifteen pounds, and keep it off. He was very clear when he signed her about the demands of the marketplace. She was by no means fat, he was not saying that
at all
, but it was his job to be straight with her about what people were looking for, and the fact was that the curvaceous nature of her physical package would not be well received. He didn’t want her to get all feminist on him and think that because she looked great that would be enough. He wanted her to be a realist: Theater audiences maybe wouldn’t care so much if she looked like an actual woman, but all you had to do was watch one night of television to see what the score was there. Inwardly, Alison flinched when she heard the words “actual woman.” It was hard not to read that as a euphemism; he may just as well have called her “chunky.” An “actual woman”? The directness of his approach did the job. In November and December she had managed to take off nine pounds with relatively little trouble by reducing her lunch and dinner to virtually nothing while adding three extra four-mile runs to her weekly workout schedule. But she was starting to feel hungry all the time now, and the last six pounds seemed to be just stubborn as hell. And now here she was at Christmas in Cincinnati, where every table was loaded down with homemade cookies and chocolates and pies and cakes, and every meal included bread and mashed potatoes and gravy, and anything healthy—like the occasional vegetable—was drowned in cheese sauce and cream of mushroom soup. She was starving amid a sea of fattening plenty, and it was making her cranky.

But even though she was positively light-headed with hunger all the time now, she had to admit it—when you got extra skinny, you did look great. Her cheeks were defined and chiseled, which accentuated her eyes, and it was kind of fun to feel how loose her jeans had become. Her breasts were no longer as luscious as they had been, which gave her a pang of regret, but this was more than offset by the thrill of actually seeing her ribs when she lifted her arms and looked at her slender new self naked in the mirror. The new clothes and the rail-thin new figure which wore them got her a kind of attention she had never had before. When Andrew picked her up at the airport just two days ago, he had noted, “Well, looks like somebody’s been living in the big city,” but his tone was not as effortlessly dismissive as she had known it to be growing up. There was no mistaking it: He was impressed. Rose was impressed as well. As Alison shrugged off her winter jacket, her mother actually exclaimed, “Alison! You’re beautiful!” Which frankly didn’t suck to hear.

“Alison! Hey, Alison, the phone’s for you,” Andrew called to her. He held out the beige receiver, which was still attached by a curlicue cord to the functionally ugly phone screwed into the wall at the other end of the kitchen. It took Alison a moment to realize that he was speaking to her; the kitchen was hot, everyone was talking at once, as usual, and recently she had noticed that she was so hungry all the time it made her a little slow on the uptake, like her blood sugar levels were really just too low.

“For me?” That seemed unlikely. “Who is it?”

“I think it’s Dennis? Dennis, is that you?” He asked the receiver. A moment later he held it out to her. “It’s Dennis.”

“Dennis?” she asked.

“Ho ho ho,” the voice on the phone informed her with a dry, sarcastic edge. “Merry Christmas, Miss Television Star.”

“Hey!” she said. “Dennis, hi, Merry Christmas!” No one in New York ever allowed themselves this degree of unabashed enthusiasm and she sounded idiotic to herself, but it had been a long time since she’d heard from any of her old friends, who, since high school, had drifted irrevocably apart. Parents she couldn’t talk to, siblings who thought she was weird, old friends who didn’t stay in touch, new friends who came and went too quickly: The past few months she had gone on some major crying jags. But here was Dennis, calling her on the phone. It was fantastic. “I heard you were in town, my brother bumped into your sister at the mall this morning,” he informed her. “Gotta love Cincinnati. Two million people, but everybody still bumps into each other at the mall.”

“Which sister?” she asked.

“Who can remember; don’t you have like thirty?”

“Four girls, four boys, it’s very symmetrical.”

“Whatever, there are too many of you. I had it all written down on a cheat sheet in high school but I don’t know where it is anymore. How long are you here for?”

“You know, a while,” she admitted. “Like almost two weeks.”

“Jesus, why?”

“Show business,” she sighed. She ducked out into the hallway, pulling the phone cord as far as it would go, which was just inside the doorway of the tiny bedroom around the corner from the kitchen. It was exactly the same routine she had perfected in high school, plopping on the floor and trying to get the door to close even though it never would, because of that stupid cord. Why Mom and Dad didn’t break down and buy a portable phone was beyond her. “Everything shuts for two whole weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. All the people with money and power go to Aspen or Hawaii, so nobody else has anything to do.”