I'm Glad About You (33 page)

“What is this material?” he asked, closing his hands around her back. “It’s so nothing, it’s nothing is here.” His hands were slipping down, now, pulling the skirt up.

“Dennis, stop it,” she said. No more back patting. “I mean it, let go.”

“You’re so soft,” he told her.

“Stop it.” Even drunk, he was so fucking strong. She heard and felt the fabric shred as he pulled the skirt up, sudden. “Dennis, stop,
STOP IT!
”

For a moment he didn’t, and then he did. It was like a breath of reason, moving through a tomb. He just let her go. She pushed him away and he let her. And then he sauntered back to the coffee table, picked up his glass, and poured more vodka into it. As if nothing had happened. No one said anything for a moment, which made him feel great. She was scared; he had succeeded in that at least. It wasn’t nothing.

“I know what you did,” he finally said. “Kyle told me. That you guys were up there, in my dad’s bedroom.” Alison was as still as she could be. “And then he left. He left you up there. And then things went missing. Didn’t they. Alison.”

She didn’t answer.

“And the cops never thought of talking to you, you were long gone, everybody thought it was somebody on the catering staff. Or me! That was what my father thought. Felicia certainly thought so. But no. It was my dear friend Alison Moore.
Stole
jewelry worth, do you know what that stuff was worth?”

She still couldn’t speak, or look at him. Her brain was frozen with the truth of all of it.

“When Kyle told me you were up there, not having sex yet again, I thought, oh what the fuck,
you
know what I thought. And did you ever stop to think what happened, what happened
to
me
? My father was furious. Whatever happened, there was no question it was
my
fault
.
” The fullness of his betrayal came back again. “I lost
everything
. So under the circumstances, a little friendliness on your part might not have been amiss.”

His anger frightened her into the barest attempt at an argument. “Dennis. You need to stop drinking and and and—”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do,” he warned her. The alcohol had leant a righteousness to his disgust. Laying his hands on her seemed like nothing compared to what she’d perpetrated. “I’ll tell you what you need to do, is you need to write me a check. Five thousand—who am I kidding—ten, ten thousand dollars. You have it, you can’t tell me you don’t have it.” She didn’t answer. “I’m fucking broke. But we’ll just, ten thousand and we’ll call it even.”

When he turned his gaze back to Alison, she seemed like a strange, poisonous flower. Her back against the wall, wearing that ridiculous pink gown. She was scared as shit. That wasn’t nothing.

“You don’t have a checkbook?”

“It’s in the desk.” She tipped her head. He glanced around the apartment, which was spare to the point of absurdity, truth be told. But yes, there in the corner, a tiny Ikea desk, something you might find in a dorm room.

“Go get it,” he told her.

“You step aside,” she answered.

“Oh, relax. I’m not going to
rape
you, Alison, although some people surely would think you deserve it.” He downed the last of the vodka, barely tasting it now. The drive toward oblivion was familiar, his old friend. But he did as he was told, and took a step back toward the couch. After a moment she eased herself out of the corner and walked across the room with as much dignity as she could muster in that pink dress.

“You make yourself look like that, and then you’re surprised that men want to fuck you?” he asked.

That one she had no answer for.

part three

twenty

T
HEY ENDED UP
going darker with the hair and everyone had to admit that Lars’s preoccupation with the exact color was pure genius, because Alison looked devastating. Face framed by feathers of raven curls, her complexion drifted into a pure, vulnerable alabaster. Those green eyes were even more startling in their intelligence and cunning, but now there was the whisper of hurt there too, a panic which occasionally flickered to the surface before it was willed away. It wasn’t precisely Ava, or Liz either; for both of them, the black hair had a Samson-like power: Those girls knew how to snarl. Alison had something more wounded-bird going on, and the whole effect was startling. It was, in fact, that rarest of commodities, for Hollywood: It was not merely familiar; it was also new.

Unfortunately, getting the hair to that exact color wasn’t easy. Alison’s natural brunette was so dark the stylist, a fierce and competent young woman who was covered in slightly scary tattoos, explained that they would actually need to strip Alison’s natural brunette and lay in the raven, which had less red and more black in it, on top of the stripped hair. So then they needed a high-volume peroxide in order to activate the bleach and remove the color, and then they had to shampoo, remove the bleach, and do the whole thing again. The bleach had a high lift, which removed the color well enough, but a pale orange cast in the stripped hair was tenacious. After two days of this, the intimidating hairstylist—her name was Rocky, of course it was—pointed out that all this manipulation could permanently damage Alison’s follicles as well as the hair itself. In other words, if they kept this shit up, it could ruin Alison’s hair
for life.
Determined that when he got her to Los Angeles to meet the studio royalty she would be as close to perfection as he could make her, Lars fired Rocky and hired a second, and then a third stylist, flying them both in from London. They made all sorts of wild promises and in fact delivered one hell of a cut and color, but just when Lars finally approved a stunningly accurate deep brown-black, Alison’s own roots, with those hints of auburn, were starting to show. The second as well as the third stylist confirmed what Rocky had been fired for saying: Much more of this, and her hair would be wrecked for good. Ryan got involved, and in the end they compromised: You can touch up the roots for the screen test. After that, you’re going to have to wig her.

In the moment, the compromise was acceptable. Alison’s meeting with Gordon and Norbert and Barry and David and Ron and half a dozen other white men was set, and it proved to be a superb exercise in feminine charm. She wore a skintight pearl-colored georgette slip dress that left little of her figure to the imagination. The dress was so low-cut she was convinced that her nipples might slip out at any moment and ruin everything, but Lars had insisted it would keep the room on edge (it did), and more important, it was the kind of thing that a screen goddess would do. She’d sit there in a dress like that, acting like a perfect lady, and letting them all fantasize about fucking her on the floor.

“Yeah, but most of them are gay,” Alison pointed out to him, afterward. “They don’t want to fuck me at all. They want to fuck you.”

“They want to
be
you,” Lars informed her. “That’s better.”

“I don’t know, Lars,” she sighed. It seemed weird, frankly, the way these guys obsessed on her every detail, like she was their own favorite Barbie doll. Lars seemed to care more about the shade of her lipstick than what kind of car he drove. And the hair thing was totally bizarre. He wanted her to look exotic, confident, Audrey Hepburn–like in the knowledge that no matter how boyish the cut, she still knew she was a ravishing beauty. The flip side danger of a cut that short was that she would look like a lesbian. He went back and forth relentlessly about it, as apparently there was nothing in the universe less sexy to all men, gay or straight, than lesbians. But she had made it through that essential meeting with flying colors, and finally he could relax, and express approval. “You look amazing,” he told her, studying her from behind. His hands were creeping around her waist, slowly pulling up the georgette. She wondered how much of this crap Ava or Liz had to put up with and immediately regretted even asking herself the question. Her brain whispered back to her,
A lot
.
They had to put up with this a lot.

There were plenty of stories out there about how continuously Ava was preyed upon. Maybe not Liz, who looked like she could defend herself, but Natalie Wood, yes, Marilyn Monroe, certainly. There were a billion stories about old Marilyn getting raped at parties by the biggest guys in Hollywood. It wasn’t a surprise, if you thought about it.
Dennis was right
. Turning yourself into a person who men wanted to fuck all the time, what else was going to happen? The memory of what had almost happened shot a bolt of panic through her. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t learned to handle, but she wasn’t going to let Lars just have his way with her either, especially from behind. She let him paw her breasts for a moment, press that perpetual erection up against her, and then she shrugged, deliberate, a gesture that was unmistakable:
Not now.

Lars was never one to misunderstand body language. His power, her power, her lack of power, her appreciation for his power—it was an ongoing board game of unspoken one-upmanship. He wanted to have sex, she didn’t; he wouldn’t push now, because that would be begging, which he didn’t do, he was indifferent to sex, except that he thought about it all the time, and he was furious now that by shrugging her shoulders she had acted on her own power which was a threat to his power which meant he was going to have to make her pay for it later without making it look like that’s what he was doing. Alison was well aware of the nuances of this dance, and she rarely bothered to push her luck. Lars was no better than any of these guys, but he was in her corner. If letting him dress her up like Ava Gardner and have sex with her constantly was the price, so be it. But once in a blue moon a shred of defiance was not only inevitable, it was necessary.

The memory of the way she used to yearn for sex rose from the back of her mind. The way she and Kyle used to torture each other with their hunger? Those were the days, when you were just a kid whose mom was always yelling at you for making out with your boyfriend on the family room floor. The distance from there to here seemed impossible; everyone agreed on that much. But everyone else seemed to think that the impossibility of that journey was something astonishing, brilliant, celebratory.
Careful what you wish for.
But had she even wished for this? She didn’t actually think she had. And now here she was, trapped not by her own dreams, but by the dreams of something else, something weird and inhuman but generally accepted as truth.

She would never have been able to explain this to anyone, but there was no question that she understood it. She understood power and she understood that she didn’t have any. Sitting around and letting men fantasize about fucking you, seriously? That was not all it was cracked up to be.
That is the thing everyone figures out too late
, she thought, as she swung open the minibar and grabbed a couple of airplane-size vodka bottles.

“We’re having dinner with Norbert and Gordon,” Lars reminded her. “It’s only the most important dinner of your life, so I’d suggest you show up sober.”

“It’s for you,” she explained, with a well-performed air of apologetic surprise. “I thought you’d want to celebrate! It went well, you know it did.” She cracked open the absurdly small bottle and dumped the contents into the rocks glass which had been so usefully situated for them right there on a scalloped paper doily. She floated by him, and delivered her little offering to the gods with a cocky smile. Checking his emails on his cell, he barely glanced up. Sex or the cell phone, either would do for Lars.