I'm Glad About You (18 page)

“This is a nice sweater,” he responded. “I can’t wait to ruin it.” He actually wagged his tongue at her in the sudden brutal gesture of a truck driver in heat.

“Oh, gross, get away from me,” she said, shoving him.

The director got down to business. “So Tara’s already here, at the bar, when you enter,” he explained, flicking his hand toward the proposed action as if it had already played itself out. “And you spot her, across the room, flirting with the bartender.”

“Well, that’ll piss me off.”

“That’s the idea,” the director agreed, pleased that Bradley intuited the brilliance of this. Bradley followed him across the floor, gliding like a cat, nodding intently, and just as intently now ignoring her. Annoying the shit out of her, flirting with her, having hot sex, then ignoring her again—it was just like being in a relationship, only you didn’t have to wake up with the guy or share a bathroom with him. You did everything
but
go all the way, because they were paying you to do it, on film. And then you broke up. And then you got back together and did it all again.

The similarities to her on-again, off-again relationship with Kyle were not lost on Alison. She had boldly made the associations herself, publicly, laughing at her entire past as if it were a joke, many times. The first time they had fake sex on camera—some eighteen months ago, just six episodes into season one—Bradley had brought a bottle of champagne to her dressing room, and they drank it and gossiped with Alec from wardrobe and a couple of day players. After one glass she was giddy and she spilled the whole story to half a dozen people she barely knew.

“That was my relationship with my boyfriend for six years,” she laughed. “I went out with him for
six years
in high school and college and we would do absolutely everything ex
cept
. Aside from the fact that there were no cameras? It was exactly the same.”

“You would do everything except
what
?” Bradley asked, with a gleeful leer. “You’re so Midwest. Except what, except anal sex?”

“God, no! We couldn’t even say the words ‘anal sex,’ we’re too Catholic.”

“Trust me, your priests know about anal sex,” Alec observed with a wry grimace.

“Well, obviously, but they’re still teaching the rest of us that it’s a mortal sin.”

“Anal sex is a mortal sin, they teach that?”

“All sex is a mortal sin. Anal sex might be okay. I think the position is, all sex with
women
is a mortal sin. I think actually that’s true; I think that’s how all those priests justified it.”

“I don’t want to talk about the priests, I want to talk about Alison and the boyfriend she wouldn’t fuck for six years,” Bradley interrupted. He was drinking out of the bottle now.

“No no no. I did, I wanted to fuck him,” Alison clarified. “He wouldn’t fuck me.”

“That’s amazing,” Bradley informed her, serious. “Because honestly—seriously, Alison, you’re pretty hot.”

“Thank you, Bradley.”

“Very hot,” agreed one of the day players.

Bradley smacked the kid on the shoulder. “Down, boy, you’re just a day player,” he warned him.

“So?”

But Bradley was intent on keeping the story on track. “So you didn’t have sex with this guy—excuse me, he didn’t have sex with
you
—because it was a mortal sin?”

“You could have sex, but it was like television sex,” she explained, draining her cup of champagne. “You could strip down and make out for hours, fingers, everything—”

“Blow jobs?”

“Yes, blow jobs.”

“You can’t do that on television.”

“We didn’t do it either, I just knew that theoretically, it was possible. We were more into the whole torture each other for hours—”

“Torture? Like whips and chains?”

“No, more like I love you but I won’t fuck you.”

“How literary,” Bradley observed. He smiled at her with an intimacy that surprised her, while pouring more champagne into her plastic cup.

“It was extremely literary and extremely hot,” Alison admitted. “If it hadn’t made us both completely insane I probably would have married him.”

“You were going to marry this guy who wouldn’t have sex with you? That
is
insane.”

“Right?” The champagne was going to her head, she couldn’t stop laughing now. The whole thing seemed absurd, childish, stupid. She knew telling the story this way was a complete betrayal, but it was what she wanted. She wanted the betrayal, even though no one but herself would ever know it had happened. She wanted revenge on Kyle and her family and her own soul; she wanted her past to be something you could grind into nothing and dismiss. “I finally got sick of it and told him off,” she giggled. “I mean, we were breaking up and getting back together like
forever—
”

“And you never cheated on him? You were—be still my heart—you were still a virgin?” Bradley asked. He was enjoying this as much as she was.

“Don’t get a hard-on,” she warned him.

“Too late for that, I’ve had a hard-on all day!”

“Okay, I did cheat on him.”

“Thank goodness.”

“Well, yeah, I was like twenty-three years old and my boyfriend wouldn’t have sex with me. What was I supposed to do? Besides, he was in med school in Ohio and I was in Se
at
tle, so I just, I just—had an affair with this musician.”

“Oh, ‘musician.’ You mean ‘loser’?”

“I needed to have sex; I didn’t care who I was having it with by that point!”

“You were twenty-
three
?” asked one of the day players, a pretty blonde who looked like she weighed about eight pounds.

“Don’t distract her; I sense that we’re getting to the good part,” Bradley advised. “So you slept with this loser—”

“I slept with this incredible mu
si
cian who was also Irish”—this brought cheers—“who had a fantastic cute accent and he was great in bed. And he was also sleeping with about eight other people, which was a bit of a shock—”

“You were using protection, right?” asked the teeny blonde.

“Yes, of course, he was a mu
si
cian, so I knew he wasn’t some great innocent—”

“Like your boyfriend.”

“Yes, exactly, but nevertheless I did think in the moment he was not sleeping around—”

“Did he tell you he loved you?”

“Yes, he did—”

“In an Irish accent?”

“Oh yes.”

“What was his name?”

“Brendan.”

“Oh, God,
Brendan.
”

“Yes, Brendan the cheater. So he was out there cheating away—”

“While you were cheating on your boyfriend—”

“Because he wouldn’t sleep with me, yes, and I found out about the cheating, of Brendan the cheater, in a kind of horrible way, a mutual friend, someone I barely knew came over the house and said you know I have to tell you this thing I bumped into Brendan at a bar last night and he was with this other girl, and they were making out and then he went home with her.”

“Who is this person, the one who was ratting out Brendan?” Bradley asked.

“His name was George.”

“Did he want to sleep with you?”

“As it turns out, yes, he did.”

“Of course he did.”

“But I didn’t find out that until later. Because when I went to talk to Brendan about this story he went on and on about how much he cared for me.”

“In an Irish accent.”

“Yes. So we ended up back in bed, and I decided he had just slipped up, until a couple weeks later when I was over at his apartment, and I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and one of his roommates called me Kathleen. So then Brendan and I got into a screaming fight and I went home and Kyle was there.”

“Who’s Kyle?”

“Oh, sorry, he’s my boyfriend, the one who wouldn’t sleep with me.”

“He was at your apartment? While you were out cheating on him? I thought he was in med school.”

“He came to surprise me, it was a surprise visit.”

“He came and surprised you while you were out cheating on him.”

Alison was starting to feel tainted by it all. She hadn’t meant for it to go this far, certainly, when she started to tell the story. She just wanted to be cool and hip and
urban
, a New Yorker, a New York actress, someone who ran through lovers willy-nilly and didn’t think twice about it. But these people were strangers, and they were laughing.

“How could she be cheating on him if he wasn’t sleeping with her?” This from that skinny blonde, a girl whose name she didn’t even know.

“Oh, come on, there was no question she was cheating.” That from another one of those day players, a boy with black hair and black eyes, a dead ringer for Brendan himself, truth be told. Someone else she had never really known, not really.

“I was cheating; I was,” she admitted.

“You’re too hard on yourself.” This from Bradley, in the corner, who was watching her so diligently she knew he was still thinking about having sex with her.

“But I was! I was cheating, and Kyle—Kyle caught me! And then I was so angry, that Brendan had been cheating on me—”

“Even though you were doing the same thing to Kyle—”

“
Yes
, even though
I
was doing the
same thing
I was angry at Brendan and Kyle too because honestly I thought I’m sick of dealing with this whole no sex thing, that was just
crazy
, and so I told him I had been having sex with a lot of people.”

“
What
?” Bradley sat up, alert and gleeful even, at this turn of events.

“Yes, I told him I was doing all sorts of— Well, I told him I was—” She stopped, suddenly and completely ashamed of herself, for having cheated, for having lied to Kyle, and now, more than anything, for telling the story to a bunch of nobodies. These people were nobody to her. Nobody.

“You can’t stop now!” Bradley shouted, happy.

“I don’t think I’m drunk enough for this part.”

“Someone give her more champagne!”

“There isn’t any more,” said Alec, pensively turning the bottle over and looking for stray droplets.

“Does anyone have any, in their trailer or anything?” asked the skinny blonde, drunk herself but ever hopeful.

“No no no, she has to tell the rest right now, right now. Get it off your chest,” Bradley insisted.

“I have to save up some secrets,” Alison informed him.

“Not from me,” Bradley grinned. There was no question why he was a TV star. He had thick dirty blonde hair and crazy brown eyes, actual gold flecks in them, a crooked smile. The smallest of scars ran along the right side of his jaw, the souvenir of a bike accident when he was seven. “I’m your destiny, baby,” he said. Rob had already dropped that destiny line on Tara about twenty times. Alison thought it sounded idiotic but the writers seemed to love it. Destiny. Tara and Rob were each other’s destiny.

Whatever that meant, Bradley did stick around after everyone split that night, and he and Alison of course ended up having sex in her trailer. They were quiet, more or less, but it was a tiny three-banger which rocked mightily, so there was no question that the security guards and the teamsters and the craft service people all knew what was going on in there. Certainly the next day there were enough crew members who were being overtly discreet, in the way that people who know secrets are. And then somebody phoned in a tip to Page Six about the two of them, which ran next to a picture of them innocently talking on a street corner. Alison felt completely shamed, just as she had when she came home from her ill-fated tryst with that feckless Irish shithead only to find Kyle waiting for her on her doorstep.

Well, that was then. Her showmance with Bradley fizzled as soon as it started—it was actually more of a one-night stand than a showmance, the rumor mill notwithstanding. And without any further ado Alison fell into the spectacular life that luck had handed her. Being a pretty girl on network television was more work than she had imagined, but it was more fun too. She was invited to gallery openings and screenings and parties at private clubs, where her picture was snapped relentlessly. She was interviewed by morning talk hosts and late-night comedians. She was given free clothes and jewelry from designers who wanted their wares seen draping her body. She was pursued by total strangers, both men and women.

The anonymity of it all was startling. She was constantly surrounded by people, but none of them seemed to want to talk about anything other than parties and dresses and sex. For a while she wondered if these people had forgotten that there was a real life, aside from what was printed in the cheap glossy magazines which more or less passed as female pornography these days. Certainly when Alison tried to make fun of those things, no one reacted very well, and when she heard one of the writers murmuring behind a door that Alison was “really smart,” she understood that brains were not necessarily a good thing around here. Not that you weren’t allowed to be smart—there were plenty of people, especially the crew guys, who were shrewd enough, God knows. But more and more she realized that people judged her as they saw her—a pretty girl, who looked good in clothes, who photographed well, and who knew how to lift her leg for men and sparkle with a saucy wit for the women who wanted those men put in their place. What was that word?
Manqué.
She was a phony person, a
manqué.
Lying on her bed, alone in her apartment, the word popped into her head and made her laugh, and she thought briefly about that idiot reporter who thought she didn’t understand the word “demimonde.”

The lights shifted; the scene was about to start. Alison took a breath. Bradley was suddenly at her side, leaning over her, intent.

“Are you following me, Tara?”

“I was here first, Rob, which kind of suggests that
you’re
following
me
.”

“This was supposed to be a private party. It’s Sheila’s birthday. And you weren’t invited.”

“I didn’t have to be invited because this is a public place, you moron.” A flash of humor passed through Bradley’s eyes. That “moron” was not in the script.