I'm Glad About You (16 page)

“You’re still going to Ecuador, though? Or Honduras? I can’t remember. Someplace where you could get away with pidgin Spanish. That’s what you said, after you had to give up on the Navajo Nation because the language was so hard. Remember? All we could ever figure out how to say was ‘I love you.’” She had meant that one to come out lightly. When it didn’t, she flailed. “Anyway . . .”

A bolt of rage sliced through him. Whatever he was doing, or not doing, with his life was none of her business anymore; she was in no position to question his choices, or speak to him about his dreams. She rejected those dreams long ago by insisting that her own dreams would be paramount for her. Acting! The most self-indulgent, narcissistic choice imaginable for someone with her strength of mind and will. She was built for a life of service. But she wanted to be an
actor
, as if that would be God’s choice for anyone.
Acting.
On
television.

“Kyle? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You just kind of went away there.”

“No. I’m here.” And now he was ashamed of himself, still judging her choices like this. He had no right. But it was impossible to apologize for something he hadn’t even said. Their lives were so divided, there wasn’t even air between them. She was watching him, her eyes alert, curious. She nodded with that new sadness.

“Well. I hope you do go to South America. Or the Navajo Nation. Wherever. I thought that was a great idea.”

Alison pushed the empty wine bottles onto the top of a bookshelf under the back window. It was only five or six feet away, but it struck him like a blow. This short interview was ending.

“Alison.”

She was crying, and trying not to; she had turned away from him specifically so that he couldn’t see it. But she caught herself with a stern little shake and cut him off. “Anyway, I’m glad that I got to see you, because I do want to say that I’m really happy for you,” she announced. “That it’s all working out for you.” She stopped talking and didn’t try again. The silence which rose between them and filled this foreign bedroom could not have been more complete.

Kyle glanced over at the open doorway. With one fluid gesture he pivoted on his right foot, reached for the door, closed it, and locked it.

Alison lifted her head, startled by the swish of the closing door, or perhaps the tiny ping of the lock falling into place. Kyle looked at her. Her mouth parted open, then closed. She looked down, and ran her right hand along the edge of the bookshelf, a delicate move, no move at all really, except in its direction, which was toward him. He waited. He knew her, still; he knew that she was not going to be able to stand this as long as he could. It had been their pattern for six years.

She took a step, following her hand. “Oh, fuck it,” she said.

It was impossible for Kyle or Alison, in that moment, to understand how kissing each other in this locked bedroom, unseen and unknown to everyone in their world, might be considered a betrayal. The obstacles to their feelings for each other had been so numerous and complex over time that they had come to identify themselves as the victims of a vast conspiracy which involved America, God, culture, gender, capitalism, Catholicism, parental obligation, personal responsibility, youth, age, reality, dreams, and sex. Sex being the worst betrayal of all, because they were, frankly, the two of them, so good at it. When Alison came to him, it was not with a clumsy rush of despair, but rather with deliberate certainty. Her life wasn’t making a ton of sense. Engaging in physical contact with Kyle, the most irrationally destructive thing she could possibly do, made more.

After yearning after him for nearly two years, having Kyle’s tongue down her throat sent Alison’s consciousness reeling. His hand went immediately up her back, under her sweater, where it had always belonged. Her hands peeled at his shirt with desperation; she could not tolerate any inch of him remaining untouched. He pushed her backward onto the bed and she fell willingly, letting him burrow into her neck while his hands dug underneath her bra, insisting on finding her breasts with an unflinching determination. She knew they would be bruised again, and was glad of it. His erection, pressed up against her, was welcome and familiar. She was only wearing a pair of sheer leggings, which meant that once again he was all but inside her. She gripped his back and gasped, silent, for the shred of a moment left to her before he lifted his head and found her mouth again.

And why not? They both had been so unhappy for so long; they both had fought through months of regret that things had ended so poorly between them, regretting even more the choices they had each made which sent their lives spinning farther and farther away from each other. There was no question in either of their minds that it had never been their destiny to go through life without each other; in spite of the repeated finality of their many betrayals, it was not their intent that things should have ended between them ever. This secret tête-à-tête, hidden from everyone who knew them and had ever known them, felt not like a misstep or a temporary slip into madness. For Kyle, it felt as if he had reentered the world. But that was not what was happening.

Kyle’s fierce determination to finally claim Alison irrefutably led him to do what he had stopped himself from doing far too many times. Holding her entire body under his, he reached down with his right hand, grabbed at his belt buckle, and started to unfasten it. His new willingness to just
do it
, finally, was met with no resistance from Alison, whose hands reached up and onto his hips, desperate to just get him out of those pants, and into her. But even as he yanked his belt open and leaned back, momentarily, to tear his trousers off, she pulled away.
She
pulled away. It was so unexpected, to both of them, that it could not be mistaken for an insignificant pause, but Kyle was frankly in no condition to be sensitive to whatever qualms of conscience might be rising out of her primordial cortex. He kissed her again with such total determination she almost succumbed.
Why not why not why not
, she allowed herself to think for one last moment, although too much of her already had remembered what it was she knew.

“We have to stop. Kyle, Kyle, stop. You have to stop,” she gasped, pushing his chest away from her own. “You have to stop.”

“No.” It was all he could say. He did not have any other words left in him.

“Seriously, Kyle, stop.”

He paused.

“We can’t do this.”

Kyle could not comprehend what was happening. Alison had never had any respect at all for the rules which required them to stop at this moment; she had relentlessly begged him to continue in the face of commandments from too many sources that insisted, irrefutably, that they stop. In his determined innocence, all those years, he had protected them both. Now that he knew—as she had told him so many times—that the laws of God were a lie, the idea of
stopping
, now, at this
moment
, seemed so perverse that he had the urge to strike her.

Instead, he stopped. He looked away. Then he looked down at his belt, and once again did as he was told.

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I shouldn’t have done that. This. I shouldn’t have done this.”
As if it were your idea
, he thought,
I came looking for you, and for this, it wasn’t you who did it. You were too much of a coward to do it.
You ran away, and you hid. I was the one who came looking. I was the one who was willing to sacrifice everything for you. You who sacrificed nothing for me.

“You need to talk to your wife,” Alison said. “She has something she has to tell you.”

You know nothing about anything
, he thought. But he would not speak even to curse her. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it decisively behind him, without looking back.

Alison lay back on the bed, her heart pounding. How could she be the one to tell him? He clearly did not know. He was willing to throw everything away, but to throw away this would have been beyond thinking. It would have poisoned everything even more than it already was.

You could have done it just once
, her animal brain informed her, pissed.
Nobody even knows you’re here. You could have done it and walked away and at least you would have done it.
The part of her which understood Kyle better than he understood himself dismissed this.
He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself
, it said.
Wanna bet?
said the animal. Alison barely tracked the back-and-forth, as she listened for the sound of a car door, in the distance, slamming shut, the turn of the motor, the gentle crunch of the gravel under the wheels as it moved off.
That wife better be driving
, she thought.
Kyle is drunk. But she’s not. She’s not drinking, because she has a secret to tell him.
She listened to the end of the night for what seemed a lifetime. Finally, the sounds came: The car door slammed. The gravel crunched. The car drove off.

Alison remained on the bed, staring at the ceiling, the walls, the Matisse, the jewelry box, the wine bottles, the dark air beyond the windows. She heard the rest of the party drain off. Dennis was doubtless passed out on some couch in some room somewhere.

Alison’s reptilian brain, thwarted in its main purpose for coming—a purpose so nearly achieved—was clever and determined, and no longer willing to take no for an answer. There was no reason to stay in Cincinnati; the entire city and her history there was a trap and a disease and a punishment. She had to get out, and get out for good.

She waited another ten minutes. Then she got off the bed, went to the dresser, and opened the jewelry box, emptying its contents first onto Felicia’s duvet, and then into one of the many handbags Felicia had so helpfully left on a shelf of her walk-in closet. Alison then crept down the back stairs and peered into the kitchen, which was deserted. The house was empty. Alison made her way back to the main hallway, where her coat waited for her in a tidy little heap right by the front stairs. She picked it up, put it on, and left, and the following day she informed her parents that she needed to return to New York immediately. Over their heedless protests, Megan drove her to the airport, where she took the first standby seat available.

By the time Dennis’s father and his wife returned to Cincinnati three weeks later, the trail was cold. No one could say when or how, even, the robbery took place. Two months later, Alison put down a security deposit on a tidy little studio apartment just six blocks from the Atlantic/Pacific Street subway station in Brooklyn. Three months later, she booked a pilot.

part two

nine

T
HE SCENE WAS A MESS.
A good mess, but wow was it taking forfucking
ever
to figure out how to get the thing to click. It wasn’t like there were a ton of extras to wrangle, and God knows there wasn’t any fancy camera work going on, but there were about eight entrances and exits and meaningful shreds of conversation that were interrupted by plot elements from six other story lines and then yet more buildup to the climactic fight between Tara and Rob that was supposed to get to some place of white-hot rage in a back room of this location, and then end with them having sex on a pool table.

So there were plenty of unhelpful twists and turns but there was fantastic stuff too. Alison flipped through the pages quickly, reviewing, then let the script drop onto the polished plywood bartop and stood, rolling onto the tips of her feet, stretching out the backs of her calves. Her arms floated up over her head and her fingers met, unbidden, in a reflexive yoga stretch which calmed her nerves and made the black cashmere sweater she was wearing creep up to her midriff, making her look for a moment like a world-class belly dancer. The costume designer, Alec, really knew his shit. That sweater fit like a glove but it would come off as soon as Bradley touched it.