I'm Glad About You (36 page)

“An
annulment
?”

“It’s the
truth
, it’s the truth of our marriage. You never loved me, you always loved that other
person
and it was never a true marriage.”

The pins were starting to drop. He never actually knew what that old phrase meant before this moment,
what the fuck are dropping pins
, but he saw them now, in his head, metal rods in a clock-like contraption, pieces fitting together so that the mechanism is complete.

“He’s Catholic,” Kyle told her. “You met him at church.” He took a couple of steps closer to her, so that he could see her better in the gloom. He felt like Sherlock Holmes. But how had he missed it? Holmes would never have missed the clues of what was happening right under his nose. “Who is it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“You don’t know him, Kyle, so it does not matter.”

“Is he married?”

“I’m not talking about him. He is none of your business.”

“It’s none of my business. You’re cheating on me, you’re pregnant, you’re talking about destroying our marriage—”

“It was never—”

“I’ve heard, Van; I know the arguments, okay? I know the whole stupid annulment argument, I know the whole crazy Catholic set of rules,
I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC
, and I understand the logic of the technicality, if some consortium of elders in the Catholic church proclaims that the marriage never existed, then you’re free to marry again within the church. Which means that somehow you have managed not once but twice to fall in love with a practicing Catholic. Which is impressive; honestly there aren’t that many of us out there anymore.” His anger was spent. Somehow explaining Catholic dogma to this devious, pretty lunatic had brought him back to himself.

Van watched him, uncertain. “So are we finished, then? Because I really am very tired.”

“I—guess—we are finished.”

She reached for a pillow. “I’ll go sleep in the baby’s room. It’s a miracle you didn’t wake her, but she’ll be up soon enough.”

“It’s okay, Van. I’ll go somewhere else.”

“I don’t want Maggie to find you sleeping on the couch. Until we get this settled about how we’re going to proceed, I don’t want her to have to worry about, you know. Why is Daddy not sleeping with Mommy? She needs to be protected.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before.”

“I did
nothing
but think of that before,” Van flared. “Do you think this has been easy? It has been hideous. Every thought I had was for those girls. You feel nothing for them, that is so clear to everyone. So don’t, just don’t you
dare
throw that at me. I am a fantastic mother. You don’t have any right to accuse me, on that level.”

Would this never end?
“I will not sleep on the couch.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“I will sleep somewhere else.”

“Please don’t go to your parents’. We really do have to talk to lawyers first.”

“I will not go to my parents’.”

“Where will you go?”

“I . . . will go to Dennis’s.”

“Of course.” She smiled at this, triumphant, her point made.

Really, would this never end?

Dennis, drunk and sympathetic, was also completely unrepentant about whatever part he had played in this increasingly sordid drama. Kyle threw back a huge glass of Dennis’s best scotch—
how can he afford this stuff he never has a job
—while Dennis explained how Van had played him like a violin, had poured her heart out about her insecurities, had demanded the truth about Kyle and Alison, had been assuming something so much worse.

“Seriously, Kyle, she was way out on a limb. She had a whole thing going on, you were flying to New York behind her back and having sex with Alison, it was crazy, she had dates and times all worked out. It was completely insane. And that’s what I told her.”

“And then you told her—”

“I told her that the only thing I knew was that one night, at the Christmas party.”

“You mean the night I
didn’t
have sex with Alison? You mean that night?”

Dennis shrugged. “You were up in that bedroom alone and it didn’t sound entirely innocent, my friend. I put the best spin on it but what can I say, it wasn’t exactly innocent.” Dennis’s tone moved off of reassurance and on to something darker but it bounced quickly. “What she did with it, I have no idea. She’s an interesting woman, your Van. How you two ever got together is a mystery to me. She’s a killer.”

“She wants an
annulment.
” Blearily, he reached for the scotch bottle. “This is going to kill my parents.”

“Come on, parents are generally sturdier than we think.”

“Mine aren’t
.
” He was drinking much too fast, he knew it, but if ever a person had earned the right to pour booze down his throat, it was him, and the moment was now. “They’re like children, both of them. My mother,
Jesus
, this afternoon she was
congratulating
me on my happiness with Van, how we both finally seemed so
happy
and seeing me so
happy
made her happy and it was the best day of her whole
life
. This was, oh, four hours ago.”

Dennis simply shrugged at this news. “If you don’t tell them anything about what’s actually going on, how are they supposed to know any better?” He swung himself out of his one good chair and headed back to the kitchen. It wasn’t actually a kitchen; it was a kind of old-fashioned kitchenette space that boasted a tiny refrigerator and the smallest four-burner stove imaginable. Dennis’s little apartment was both sparse and suffocating. Next to the charms of the sprawling Victorian mansion Kyle shared with Van and the girls, it looked pathetic.

But Dennis considered his singular ice cube tray with the focused confidence of an aristocrat. “Well, I’m sorry if my little foray into the truth got you in the shithouse with Van. But for fuck’s sake, Kyle, the woman is a nightmare. I would say if she wants a divorce you should be
celebrating.
Do not pass go, just get out of jail free.”

“It’s hardly that simple.”

“Stop being such a pussy. You’ve been miserable for years. You never had the balls to just take what you want. Catholicism is
stupid.
Everybody else knows this; why don’t you? You’re supposed to be so smart, the
doctor
, start acting like it!” This last bit was delivered with a flash of mean pleasure. It moved quickly, but it was startling in its sneering superiority. Something in Dennis had begun to edge into bitterness; he was turning into the definition of a nasty drunk. The clinician in Kyle recognized the signs and behaviors of the toxicity, how thoroughly the alcohol was taking hold of the organism. Dennis needed months in rehab. He needed his family to step in, not that they would. His father had washed his hands of him years ago.
Can you do that? Can you wash away your children?
The sacrament of baptism, the washing away of sins.
Can you wash away your life?

I need to get out of here.
Kyle stood, swayed briefly as the oxygen hit his brain. He needed to find an all-night diner, and get four or five cups of bad coffee into him.

“Where are you going?” Dennis asked. “Kyle! Where are you going?”
What’s he so pissed about?
Kyle’s bad brain seemed to finally have gone to sleep. Why, he couldn’t say. Maybe it was the sight of Dennis, drunk, proud, withered, old. “Are you going to New York, to finally
do it
with your long-lost love? Let me tell you. You haven’t missed that much. Seriously! She’s still not giving out. Not to the likes of us, anyway.”

What was he saying?
Kyle knew he was trying to get a rise out of him. He knew, also, that Dennis was a liar, that he
had
told Van whatever he could, that he had thrown bombs into his marriage, that Dennis was every bit the man he claimed to be—charming, dangerous, completely and utterly destructive in every way. He reached for the doorknob behind him.

“Yeah, you heard me!” Dennis jeered. He sounded like a kid in a schoolyard, daring Kyle to punch him. “I went to New York, I saw her!” Kyle turned back and looked at him. “She’s totally sold out. She’s fucking some director, she’s fucking anyone. Anyone except you and me! She is what she always was, Kyle. She’s nothing but a
whore.
”

“Stop.” Kyle was exhausted by the breakage. The breakage of everything. Dennis wove in and out of focus. He was wearing a dirty plaid robe—
what an affectation
—over a T-shirt and sweats. His face was full-on purple, the color of someone about to have a heart attack. How had this happened?

“Did you even hear what I said?”

“You should go back to AA, Dennis,” Kyle told him. “You’re not well.”

“That’s hilarious, coming from you.”

Kyle turned the doorknob, swung the door open.

Can you wash away your life?

twenty-two

M
OVIES WERE FUN.
The makeup trailer was boring, and it was a drag to have to get out of bed at four in morning all the time, and everybody obsessing about your hair was boring, and having your picture taken and talking to reporters all the time was also dead boring. But the rest was a blast.

A movie set is a like an aircraft carrier
. One of the grips had told her this. A big guy with a plain blue tattoo on the back of his left hand, Stu had been in the navy for sixteen years before they sent him to the Gulf, where he saw some honest-to-God action. According to Stu, who was also a huge flirt, everything in the navy was built toward that aircraft carrier. It was the
tip of the spear.
The fighter pilots were the tip of the tip. They were the movie stars. He would grin at her, point. She was the tip of the tip here.

Not that Alison
was
a movie star. Not yet. But the dailies were phenomenal. She had been warned not to watch them, and in fact she wasn’t
allowed
to watch them, but the buzz on the set was “phenomenal.” It was a peculiar word, when you heard people say it over and over; it sounded insecure and phony, so she didn’t believe it when it first started floating around the bubble of their own little biosphere. Of course people in show business were always pumping themselves up and no one ever wanted to be caught up saying anything negative, that was the sort of shit that could get you fired. But at some point a different sound entered all the narcissistic chatter. There was, apparently,
buzz.
The suits started to show up on the set. Everyone started to take credit.

Everyone especially started taking credit for
her
. “I was thrilled when Lars brought up her name, the first time,” Norbert told
Us Weekly.
“Gordon said from the start, we need to make a star with this one and I took one look at Alison and said, she’s the one.”

“She’s been on everybody’s radar for a while,” Colin told
People.
“It was just a matter of time until she made the leap into features. I had seen tape on her a couple years ago, people were talking about her then. I said to Gordon, you have to see this girl. And Gordon totally agreed.”

This account was politely contradicted by Gordon. “She was my idea, from the word go,” he told
Entertainment Tonight.
“I told all of them, you guys need to look at this tape on this girl before you do anything else. It was Lars who needed a little convincing.”

“So what’s the story?
Gordon
fixed me up on a
date
with
Lars
?” Alison was endlessly on the phone with Ryan now; it was like he didn’t have a single other client. Day or night, she had the hot line.

“You are not to worry about the
story
,” he informed her.

“People ask, Ryan! People read that stuff and they believe it and then they ask me, did Gordon really fix you up with Lars? What am I supposed to say? You and I both know he fought tooth and nail to keep me out of this.”

“Darling, if Gordon didn’t want you in this movie, you would not
be
in this movie,” Ryan reminded her.

“That’s not true, Ryan! You told me yourself—”

“I
told
you there were reservations at the studio level—”

“Oh, bullshit, you told me that Gordon wanted a big star—”

“Alison. Alison. Alison.” She hated it when he did this, it sounded like he thought she was eight years old. She was already struggling with the fact that everyone treated her like a complete child. Whenever she was in hair and makeup, they actually sent a production assistant over to walk her to the set. Usually a total nitwit, someone fresh out of college who had a dad who pulled connections and got little Heather or Connor or Jamie a job on a movie set, where their responsibilities included fetching cappuccinos from the coffee truck and making sure the star didn’t get lost. Not that she was a star. Yet. There was always that caution. She wasn’t a star
yet.
She had a long way to go, and to get there, she would have to play nice.