I'm Glad About You (13 page)

Who, at that very moment, was pushing through the crowd in the foyer with an unflinching determination, headed right for him. As soon as the thought flickered through his head he had to deny it: She wasn’t technically heading for
him
; she was heading for the bar, and the phony Grecian pillar behind which he had hidden himself was positioned just to its left. Two teenage girls in sexy black barkeep garb poured drinks with a slashing efficiency which was called for under the circumstances; Dennis’s new friends from Cincinnati’s corporate set were predictably alcoholic and swarming, and Alison was temporarily trapped in their midst. She glanced skyward with annoyance and then, as her eyes raked back down in an attempt to gauge her distance from the bartop, her gaze suddenly and unexpectedly landed on him. Their eyes met.

He plastered a smile on as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. She saw, who knows what she saw, but it was seen before he could hide it. Even now! They were stuck in the middle of a crowd of strangers, they had not spoken or laid eyes on each other for almost a year and a half, and yet he could not escape the terrifying probability that she had once again managed to intuit some unknowable aspect of his interior life. This had proven true so many times that she used to tell him he had a glass head. He felt like he had a glass head now.

“Hello!” he said. It sounded like an idiot was speaking.

“Hello, Kyle,” said Alison. She had inched incrementally forward in line and he could see that her cheeks were flushed. That could have been the heat. Or the alcohol. Only she had not managed to get herself a drink yet. It was probably the heat.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Can you what? Sorry. Oh. Sorry, no, I can get myself a drink, thanks.” She squeezed past another stranger. “Besides, you look like you have your hands full.” Her eyes flickered down to the drinks in his hand. A wilting cup of club soda and a possibly drinkable scotch, served over ice in a plastic tumbler.

“Right! I need to get this back to, my wife.” He stumbled over the words at the last minute. Of course he did. He meant to just say her name,
Van
, just toss it out there casually, the name of the woman he was with now, but then it seemed cold, he needed to do better by her, out of loyalty, and also let Alison know that he regretted nothing, he had moved on, he had a
wife
now, that was his reality, a reality that Alison knew nothing of. Sadly there were too many tumbling worries and the words escaped with that slight stutter step which, he knew, made him sound again like an idiot. He felt Alison’s eyes looking straight into his glass head.
I didn’t ask for this. Fuck Dennis, and fuck her
, he thought.

“Yeah, your wife, I met your wife, we just met,” Alison acknowledged. She had finally maneuvered her way through the throng and secured a spot at the front of the line. “White, anything white,” she told the sexy young bartender. “Wait. Anything white that’s not a Riesling.”

“Chardonnay?”

“That would be fantastic.” She smiled politely, but the girl was uninterested in the social niceties; she uncorked the necessary bottle and poured. Alison turned back to Kyle with an air of what she hoped would sound like a sardonic hopelessness. “I love Chardonnay. A nice California Chardonnay, I don’t know why people make fun of them, I love them.”

“Do people make fun of them?”

“In New York everyone’s above them. You’re embarrassed to order them. Pinot grigio would be acceptable, if it didn’t give you a headache. Sadly it does.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” God, he sounded like a complete ass. And even worse, he felt the same way he had the first time he laid eyes on her. He had to get away from her. He couldn’t move. Alison accepted her tumbler of white wine from the humorless barkeeper girl and then, scooting to get away from the crushing hordes of desperate alcoholics behind her, she slid to her right, holding the drink up high so that it didn’t get bumped. She looked backward as she did—either to keep a lookout for who was pushing her, or so that she didn’t have to meet his eyes again—but the maneuver sent her unguarded chest within inches of his. He could smell her.

“Sorry,” she said with a tight, polite little smile, as she landed herself on the opposite side of him, where the crowd was less crushing. “I can’t believe how many people are here. It looks like Dennis invited half of Cincinnati. And I of course know no one!”

“Yeah, I’m surprised to see you here,” Kyle said. She looked at him sharply, like that was the wrong thing to say. Was it? His brain was in hyperdrive but it felt like all the gears had locked up and so the whole operation was just spinning uselessly. Every word he uttered sounded thin, small and phony, while as usual Alison just seemed larger than life. Even though she was tossing off social nothings with no content whatsoever, they sounded like so much more. Her glances all
looked
like so much more. They looked like the glances of someone with a soul. He told himself once again that it wasn’t that she was a deeper person; it was just that she was an
actress.
A notoriously shallow and unstable breed. Famous throughout the centuries for bringing men to wreck and ruin. That was all she was, and all she had ever been. An actress with green eyes.
She was just an actress with sensational green eyes.

“You look tired,” she informed him.

Those long years of passion and disaster moved through him as if they were happening now. How could he be expected to even say hello to her if just seeing her in the middle of a crowd did this to him?

“The holidays are always a little stressful.”

“Oh yes.”

“How’s your family?”

“Everyone’s great. The house is packed. Megan’s about to pop, it looks like.”

“Yes, I heard she was pregnant. When’s she due?”

“Of course you would ask that. And of course I have no idea.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. You and she were so close, I just thought . . .”

“No, you’re right, you’re totally right. I have been shockingly narcissistic with regard to these babies. Maybe I’m jealous of them. Wow, maybe I am.” An edge of painful admission had crept into her tone.

“Of
them
, not her?”

“No, of them. They have her now.”

“This is her first pregnancy?”

“Yeah. It’s two, even. Twins!” It was a little loud by the bar, and Alison was now studying her plastic cup full of white wine with distracted determination. He wished she would look up at him and tell him that he looked tired again, and ask him why, and let the slightest air of her tenderness breathe on him, even though there was no place for it. “She’s one of them now, I guess,” Alison said, glancing away, suddenly opting for a lighter tone.

“Excuse me?”

“Megan. She’s one of the people who have children and, you know. Turn into zombies.”

“I hardly think children turn adults into zombies.” He meant to adopt a careless tone, like hers, but it came out sounding superior. He sounded like a superior prig.

“No, no, that’s not— Well, it is what I said. I didn’t mean— I just meant, at least over at our house, it’s all kids all the time, and it kind of distorts. You say, I need a car tonight, and it turns into an endless circular discussion about whether or not some child might need ferrying somewhere in the most abstract and bizarre system of logic imaginable, you know, everything is just kind of . . . You would know better. You’re a pediatrician, you would know, I wouldn’t know,” Alison said, breezing right by the edge of his tone with an easy forgiveness. A forgiveness of what? Of everything? If she forgave him everything, he would go home and hang himself. “Wow. It’s great to see you, Kyle,” she finished, unexpectedly. “I’m going to see if I can find the bathroom.” She swiveled and paused, facing the daunting necessity of somehow plunging herself into that teeming hive of alcoholics, and turned sideways. He could see again, now, how thin she was. She downed the rest of her wine, dropped the cup on the bar, and worked her way into the crowd with a determination which did not look back.

She had made her escape just in time. As he watched her go, someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Is that for me?” Van asked, flirtatiously imperious. She poked her head around and reached for the now-exhausted cup of club soda which he held clenched in his fist. “I didn’t know where you went!”

“Sorry, it’s so crowded,” he started. And then, “I bumped into Alison.”

“So I saw.”

“Yeah, she said that you guys met.”

“Dennis introduced us since you wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t even know she was here,” Kyle noted. “Dennis told me she wasn’t coming.”

“And you believed him? I didn’t.”

“I guess you’re smarter than me, then.” He finally took a much-needed sip of his now-watery scotch. It tasted dreadful.

“You didn’t tell me how tall she was. She’s just
huge
,” Van observed, searching the crowd for another glimpse of her.

“She’s not
huge
,” Kyle replied. “If anything, she’s thin.”
That ought to shut her up
, he thought. Although Alison certainly was taller than he remembered. During their brief conversation he had been so disconcerted by so many things, he had not considered that she was now looking him in the eye, which might have been part of the disorienting effect.

“I didn’t mean huge, I meant tall. Which feels huge to me! She’s like a tree, she’s so tall. And you’re right, she is skinny! Well, I guess if you’re an actress you have to worry about all that.”

Kyle didn’t even know how to respond to that one. He took another hit off his scotch and wondered how much time he had to give to this. He knew that they should leave, that even hanging around this dreadful party would be a bad idea, but he also knew that to suggest such a thing within instants of talking to Alison would be incriminating beyond belief. Then there was also the fact that he couldn’t bear to leave. The thought that he might actually bump into her again was humming in every cell of his body. And why shouldn’t he talk to her? He was married now. All that nonsense with Alison was finally, blessedly over. He could talk to her. He could see her, and talk to her.

“So did she have anything to
say
?” Van asked. He glanced down at her. Her eyes were glittering with an air of exasperation, as if there were simply no reasonable answer to this, but somehow it was his fault that she had been forced to ask.

“She didn’t, really.”

“What about you, you apparently had a lot to say.”

“‘Hello’ was actually pretty much the extent of it.”

“Well, you talked for quite a while, for two people who have nothing to say to each other.”

“Were you watching?”

“I was waiting for my club soda, which took you so long to deliver it’s
flat.
So yes, I was watching, and you did more than say ‘hello’ to each other.”

Kyle let that one land for a moment before he deigned to respond to it. This harping about Alison was a repeat offense with Van, and sometimes the best way to deal with it was to let her go too far. The silence bloomed, and he took another sip of his watery scotch. He knew how to outwait her. It usually didn’t take very long.

“Well, that’s great,” she said, glancing away with unmasked contempt. “That’s just perfect.” He considered letting that hang out there as well, but they were in public, and there was an unexpected ferocity behind Van’s agitation.

“I don’t know what you’re mad at me for,” he told her. “I didn’t even want to come to this party. That was your idea. As I told you, Dennis said she wasn’t coming, I didn’t fully believe him, just for the record, I’m not an
idiot
, so I said I thought we should stay home. I said it more than once. You were the one who insisted we come.”

“You knew she would be here.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. That’s— I just told you a moment ago that in fact, I
didn’t
—”

“You just said—”

“I
said
I knew there was a chance I was being lied to. But generally I try to assume that I’m not.”

“Whatever—”

“Not whatever. No. I was told she wasn’t going to be here. That is what we both were told.”

“I don’t—”

“In spite of which, you, apparently, at least so you say, knew she would be here, and you wanted to come! Insisted on it, in fact. Which, if logic serves, would indicate that you were the one who wanted to see her, not me.”

“Maybe logic isn’t everything.”

“Clearly it’s failed us tonight. If you don’t want to be here now, we can go home.”

“Why, because you can’t stand to be in the same room with her?”

“Fine, then let’s stay, since we’re both having so much fun.”

“I have no friends here,” Van hissed, furious now. “Everyone is your friend, and they haven’t been exactly
welcoming
, so if I get invited to
one
Christmas party maybe I might want to go. Even if your ex-girlfriend is going to be there.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Everybody loves you. My parents adore you. And Dennis thinks you’re great.” This wasn’t strictly accurate. Whenever they met for dinner, or drinks, or a casual movie, the conversation was cool and impersonal unless Dennis decided that Van needed to be flirted up, in which case all burners went on high. In other social situations Van was effortlessly positive and poised, presenting herself confidently as the working wife of a young doctor in Cincinnati. But that’s pretty much where things had leveled off. Kyle told himself it was just a matter of time till everyone got to know each other but even his parents seemed to have settled into a kind of withholding formality. Susan was still trying too hard publicly and not giving anything privately. For all her charms, Van had not been let
in
, and he did not know why. The sudden recognition of the pain and loneliness that this exclusion must be causing her softened the irrationality of his mood.

“Look. We should go,” he said. “Really. It’s not the
only
Christmas party. And if it isn’t going to be fun, I don’t see any point in staying.” He meant it as a kindness, but Van’s eyes flickered at this, settling themselves into some sort of sullen, disappointed rage. Why? He was saying,
I can see that this is no fun for you, let’s get out of here.
Why would that piss her off?