I'm Glad About You (26 page)

“No one inquires about avails to be polite.”

“How do you know?”

“I think I know a little bit more about show business than you do. They’re concerned about your series, whether or not your dates would conflict.”

“They are not.”

“How do you know, Miss Thing? Who’s the agent, me or you?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Who’s the agent?”

“Ryan—it’s ridiculous to even talk about something that far-fetched anyway. Besides, I have a seven-year contract on a terrible television series and they aren’t going to let me out.”

“Let’s just take it one step at a time, doll,” he replied. “When are you seeing Lars next?”

“I’m in Cincinnati, Ryan,” she started.

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll check with my mom,” she said. “I think she wanted me to be here for some brunch thing she’s doing this weekend.”

“It would be great if he could see you before then,” Ryan informed her. “I’ll let you work it out.” The fact that there was no wheedling in his tone made it eminently clear how serious this might be.

But how serious could it be? Show business was all talk and money and kind of nothing else. She could fly herself out to Los Angeles and sit in any number of indistinguishable offices and talk to faceless men in suits for months on end, and it would amount to nothing. Or it would amount to something, for reasons which no one could begin to comprehend. Alison knew that she was going to end up sitting in those tragic offices eventually, was there really any reason to rush into it?

It was all so hard to explain. Megan stopped by with the twins to pick up a peach pie Rose had made for her and Phil, and Rose immediately launched into her version of events, reinterpreting the thumbnail sketch Alison had just finished narrating.

“Alison’s agent called, she’s being offered a big part in a big movie,” Rose began excitedly. She was in pre-dinner mode, which entailed a lot of straightening of the kitchen, so that when Dad arrived back from his day of adventures as a retired businessman the house was tidy. Her actions were both conscious and unconscious, the patterns of a lifetime. Megan barely noticed the fact that her mother barely noticed her as she steered those twins out of the kitchen and into the family room, which was still, after thirty years of offspring, littered with toys. Alison did her best to keep up with the swooping women, as well as the fierce and unremitting confidence of their dialogue.

“Oh my God! That’s amazing!” Megan started.

“I haven’t actually been offered it,” Alison cautioned.

“But they want her for it.”

“They didn’t actually—”

“He called here, to tell you that you had to go to Los Angeles—”

“They just want to talk to me.”

“Well, they want her,” Rose repeated. She was so determined that this was true, and so honestly excited that Alison didn’t have the heart to contradict her again. “The director asked for her himself, which has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Who is he, is he a big deal?” Megan’s question was cheerful, innocent, full of her own delight at all this. She had subscriptions to
People
magazine as well as
Entertainment Weekly.
Showbiz gossip was like a bag of M&M’s to her.

“He’s not a big deal. He’s kind of a big deal,” Alison admitted. Only a total art snob would pretend that Lars Guttfriend was not a big deal. “He directs action movies. You know.” Her head drew an utter blank trying to remember the action movies Lars had directed. They all sort of blurred together after a while, you had to admit that, even if you weren’t an art snob. “I don’t know him that well. We went out a couple times.”

“You’re
dating
a movie director? Oh my God, I have to tell Suzanne, she will just flip
out.
” She pulled out her cell and started to text feverishly. Suzanne was Megan’s best friend, they seemed to be joined at the hip by their iPhones.

“We’re not dating. It was just a couple of dinners!” The absurdity of all this was starting to amuse Alison, as well as panic her. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone in her family had thought anything she did was cool.

“Do you tweet about it?”

“No, oh God, no—I haven’t figured tweeting out yet.”

“You’re dating a movie director, and he wants you in his movie, you need to tweet about it.” Megan was hardly paying attention, the toddlers had stumbled back into the kitchen and they were everywhere now. She kept scooping them up and feeding them Cheetos out of a small Tupperware container. They gobbled the Cheetos with such single-minded pleasure that Alison could not stop herself from reaching over and helping herself although she knew that if she was flying to the West Coast on Friday she had better start the starvation diet again, pronto.

“How come you know so much about tweeting?” Alison asked. “You’re a young mother with twin toddlers, everybody expects you to be brain-dead for another six years at least.”

“The only thing I have time to read is tweets, they’re nice and short, and they’re funny.”

“I don’t even know what a tweets is,” Rose announced.

“It’s stupid, Mom,” Alison reassured her. “It’s a lot of people with nothing better to do throwing their brains away.”

“Oh my God, you are such a snob!” Megan protested. “Mom, you know about tweeting, I showed it to you. People talk to each other on the internet. A lot of people all over the world are tweeting now and it’s a big tool for social justice.” Rose had, in recent years, become interested in the plight of the poor. She was apparently hanging out with a bunch of nuns who got together and prayed for the suffering of people all over the planet. It seemed harmless enough but it did call to mind stories her mother had told them, in childhood, about how she used to collect money for pagan babies. Another activity instigated by a bunch of nuns, just one that wafted even further into the past, ever further into her mother’s unwavering innocent heart.

“It’s not for helping the poor, Mom,” Alison contradicted. “Tweeting is just a lot of people saying absolutely inane things because they want to be famous.”

“That’s why you have to do it! You’re famous now,” Megan insisted.

“I’m a television actress, that doesn’t make you famous.”

Megan was having none of it. “Everyone in Cincinnati tweets about your TV episodes as soon as they come on,” she informed her. “My friend Suzanne tweets about you constantly. When she hears you are going to be in this movie, honestly she is going to flip
.”

“Why does your friend Suzanne care about what I do?”

“It’s just fun, it’s a fun thing,” Megan said. “It’s something cool that we can talk about.” One of the twins was getting to the tail end of her Cheetos, and her orange face was starting to register exhausted bewilderment. Alison didn’t know much about kids in general, but she knew enough to recognize Megan’s precious seconds of adult conversation were coming to an end.

“Well, I haven’t been offered any movie, and you cannot tell your friend that I’m dating this movie director because it’s just not true,” she warned her sister. “I mean it, don’t go telling people that. I could get into a lot of trouble if something like that showed up on some dingdong’s Twitter feed.” Because she was afraid, this pronouncement came out more forcefully than she had intended. Megan picked up her orange-faced baby and tried not to look hurt, and Alison wilted inwardly.
That’s not what I meant
, she wanted to blurt, but too many years of being the black sheep kept her mouth shut and Megan turned away from her, fussing with the children, closing herself off from what had mere moments before seemed like pleasant, nonsensical banter.

Honestly, everyone in her world treated her like a complete idiot. Her agent, her publicist, every director she ever met, bloggers—with the exception of Schaeffer, that nutty guy who seemed to think she hung the moon. Now here she was in Cincinnati, and they all thought she was an idiot too. Only in a more Midwestern,
you’re so ungrateful
kind of way. And it wasn’t what she meant! She loved that Megan was tweeting with her friends about Alison and her slightly silly television show. She liked her fans, they were pretty nice people, when she bumped up against them. They were all so happy to have their pictures taken with her, and gossip about what was happening on the show.

“Here, come help Grandma with the soup.” Rose lifted one of the twins into the air and handed the kid a piece of chopped carrot. “You just put it in there. Perfect!” For indeed, the tiny fist had immediately hurled the bit of vegetable into the giant pot of water on the stovetop. With an unconscious ease, Rose handed the second twin her own bit of carrot, so that both children would have a turn. The simplicity of the moment was weird and graceful, plugged innately into a kind of knowledge Alison couldn’t penetrate. How did these women know so instinctively what those kids wanted? Even chopping vegetables was a mysterious enterprise these days. It was a given that you would just buy them already chopped, at Dean & Deluca.

The phone rang. Everyone’s focus had so completely moved on to the task at hand—dropping vegetable bits into that giant pot of water—Alison was the only one available to pick the thing up. “Hello,” she announced.

“Alison, hi.” Time flipped. The past and the present kept smashing into each other in completely untenable ways. How did people do this? Why was she so bad at it?

She called upon the actress. Chipper, bold, secure. “Hey, Kyle, hi!” Megan glanced up, but somehow managed not to raise an eyebrow. They were all moving on.

fifteen

K
YLE’S WIFE SEEMED
to float. She was gliding around the glorious open kitchen, a kid on one hip, pushing a perfect wisp of a blonde curl off her forehead, turning with a faint look of confusion and then smiling, welcoming, couldn’t be happier to see Kyle’s ex in her fantastic home.
Wow
, Alison thought.
She’s like a painting.

She
was
like a painting, a painting of a wife inside a painting of a house. As she hurried across the room to greet Alison, the illusion of perfection gave way to a kind of harried happiness, which seemed even more perfect. She was so pretty it was like a state of being; she clearly had carried it with her from childhood. Alison knew these girls. There was something about being told you were pretty from the second you were born; it did something to your brain.

“Alison! I am so glad you could come.”

“Thanks! Thank you, Van.” Alison was abashed in the face of the other women’s lovely enthusiasm. Van seemed like such a
nice person
; of course Kyle would marry a nice person. “Here, I brought you this.” The standard offering, a generic Malbec, the guy in the store had promised it was good. Van laughed at it, finally a slight note of brittleness.

“Oh, I wish I could! I’m breastfeeding, I can’t have a drop of anything. And my milk is so erratic. I know you saw Kyle buying formula, which I
so
didn’t want to do, but my placenta tore, there was blood everywhere and I was a
ne
mic for three days, the milk just didn’t come and didn’t come and you’d think being married to a pediatrician they’d warn you what that might mean—”

“I did warn you,” Kyle noted, reentering the room with another guest. Thank God, this was an actual party, there were going to be strangers to meet who would keep the whole thing complicated and social. “Alison, this is Martin Emory. Martin is a friend of ours from St. Luke’s. Martin, this is Alison Moore, she’s visiting from New York.”

“Of course I know who you are,” Martin assured her. He was plainspoken, with an open face, good looking perhaps if he would compose his features into some kind of expression, but that hadn’t occurred to him, or maybe he didn’t actually know how to do it. His absolutely ordinary face seemed to simply want to be pleasant. These people really didn’t exist in New York; they just didn’t.

“Nice to meet you, Martin,” Alison responded.

“When Kyle said you were in town, I thought, terrific! I really want to meet her,” Martin explained.

“Oh, thank you,” said Alison. This was different from her fans, who gushed a little more effusively and always took a selfie. Martin was considering her now with a quiet and expectant enthusiasm. He seemed to want her to say something more, but what? Or maybe this fuzzy silence was enough for him. He smiled and nodded, and for a moment Alison thought that he might start bleating, like a sheep.

“So you’re from Cincinnati!”

“I, yes,” Alison agreed.

“But you live in New York now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought all you actresses lived in Los Angeles.”

“Oh—well, a lot do,” Alison acknowledged. What was with this guy? He didn’t come at her with the alpha male energy of a New Yorker, but there was an undertone that implied that he knew absolutely everything, even though he was from Ohio. On her way over Alison had told herself that a party at an old boyfriend’s house in Cincinnati would be a cakewalk compared to the shark-infested dinners and screenings and openings and club nights that were her usual fare. But she was already feeling the troubling misconnects of people who lived and believed different things. What had Kyle just said, he knew this guy from
church
? In New York no one admitted that they
went
to church, unless they went to temple.