I'm Glad About You (8 page)

“Apparently it is a pretty big part, that’s what I’m told,” Susan responded, the breath of annoyance entering from her side now. Van’s bright femininity most definitely had an edge, which someone like Susan was never going to particularly forgive. A nurse, she dealt daily with people who were in a lot of pain, and she didn’t like a lot of foolish small talk. Not that Van was a fool. But she was, to Susan, an exquisite annoyance. Susan had a long plain face and a sturdy build, and she worried about being left alone in the world. It galled her that her handsome brother, who could have had his pick of any girl out there, went for this, whatever she was. It also galled her that this Van had clearly gotten Kyle to have sex with her and that his idiotic dedication to their parents’ mid-fifties version of Catholicism had doomed him. Susan felt her life moving through her like a curse.

Kyle knew he had to step in and smooth the waters before they got any more roiled in these mysterious female ways. “I talked to Dennis, he talked to Alison last week, and he said that apparently you never really know what’s going to happen until it airs.” The room fell silent at this, as if he were imparting news of great import. Dennis Fitzpatrick had been one of Kyle’s best friends for sixteen years, and he was a great favorite with all the Wallaces. Dennis also had known Alison since the first day Kyle laid eyes on her, and it was to be expected that Dennis would still have some loyalty to her. There was nothing incriminating about Kyle getting information through Dennis. The most natural thing in the world.

“Oh,
Dennis
talked to her?” Kyle’s father noted. “And she told him about it?”

“He talks to her all the time.” Kyle nodded, trying to match his father’s politely disinterested tone. Once again he was embroiled in the last thing he ever wanted to do again, as long as he lived, which was talk about Alison. But this whole sorry conversation was seemingly unstoppable.

“What I don’t understand is why all those shows have to be so violent,” his mother sighed, shaking her head with a quiet but decisive disapproval which Kyle had learned to dread in his childhood. “Everyone acts like there’s nothing you can do about it but I say turn it off! They’ll just keep putting that garbage on television unless we stop watching it. There didn’t used to be shows like this on all the channels. Now it seems like no matter when I turn it on, it’s all killing and shooting and sex. I’m sorry that Alison thought it was a good idea to get involved in something like that. I thought she had more sense than that, I really did.” Kyle’s mother had never forgiven Alison for breaking her son’s heart not once but four or five or six or seven times—who could keep count how long those two made each other miserable? She was a smart girl and pretty and she had had every chance in the world. But there was clearly something wrong with her character.

“Well, we don’t actually know if she’s shooting people or not, do we, Kyle?” his dad asked with a good-natured contrariness. “Maybe she’s getting shot.”

“She’s not shooting anybody or being shot either, as a matter of fact,” Kyle informed them, grinning at his father’s subversive levity. “She’s a
witness
.”

Before Van could react to the fact that Kyle did, actually, know rather a lot about the show, his father stepped in. “So that’s not so terrible,” he observed, decisive. “A witness is an honorable role to play. We are all witnesses to our Lord and his creation. And now Alison is getting paid for it, which is always a good thing for our young people. Let’s say grace.” He bowed his head, folded his hands, and eased elegantly into the prayer over the meal. “We thank you, Lord, for this beautiful food, prepared with loving hands by Susan and Margaret for our nourishment. Look kindly on us as we gather in your name, and keep an eye on your daughter Alison, who has run off to the big city to follow her dreams. Some of us think that may have been a mistake and that she will need your guidance there, as we need it here. Amen.”

There really was not much you could say to that. Dad started cutting his chicken with gusto and told Susan that it all looked terrific. Susan thanked him and said that she had gotten the recipe out of that church cookbook Mom had gotten from St. Bernard’s almost ten years ago now. Mom said something about how many good recipes she had found in that old thing, it was maybe the best cookbook in her kitchen. Van took a bite and told Susan it was so good, she’d heard about pecan-crusted chicken but she’d never had it before, she always thought of it as a Southern dish. Bill started to explain how in many ways Cincinnati really was a Southern city, sitting right there across the river from Kentucky, and how it was one of the first stops on the Underground Railroad. They had a lovely dinner, everyone went home early, and nobody watched Alison make her television debut.

five

“I
’M SORRY,
what was the question?” Alison asked, confused.

“DID SIMON DILLINGHAM INSTRUCT YOU TO LIE TO THE POLICE OFFICERS ABOUT WHAT YOU SAW OUTSIDE THE BODEGA THAT MORNING?” The ADA was really leaning on her. He was incensed.

“No, he didn’t,” Alison said, defiant. Tears were streaming down her face. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Permission to treat Miss Garrity as a hostile witness, Your Honor,” the ADA snapped suddenly.

“
I’m
hostile,” Alison snapped back. “You should look in the mirror.”

This brought cheers to the small gang of near strangers who were crowded on and around the bed in the corner of Lisa’s so-called loft, watching it all on the flat-screen TV screwed into the wall there. “I can’t believe you
improvised
that,” Lisa announced, with a tone that was not particularly admiring, in spite of the general approbation of the bed full of people.

“It just came out,” Alison admitted.

“You could have gotten fired.”

“No one was going to fire her over an improvised line,” one of the other actresses, Marnie, observed with a careless tone of dismissal. Some people thought Lisa was too bossy. Now that Alison had actually booked a television job and landed herself an agent, Alison was beginning to find Lisa a bit bossy too.

“They stopped the cameras!” Lisa announced, comically outraged.

“Were you there?” Marnie asked.

“I wasn’t there, I’m just telling you what she told me. It was not a good thing.”

“People laughed,” Alison said, trying to defend herself from, what she wasn’t entirely sure.

“The
crew
laughed,” Lisa reminded her. It
was
sounding as if Lisa had been there, when in fact she had just hung on the phone, disbelieving, while Alison gave her a blow-by-blow of the day, which had gone well—just as the other three days of shooting had gone well.

“I like crews, they’re the nicest people on those sets,” Marnie observed.

“They’re not the ones who are going to be deciding if they should hire you back,” Lisa argued.

“Nobody does that anyway; once you’ve done a guest spot they don’t bring you back ever, or if they do it’s not for four or five years.” Marnie was like a wayward pit bull in this debate. Alison wished they would both shut up, as the scene was rolling by, unwatched now, on the television set. The rest of the gang was getting impatient with the debate as well. Several people started to shush the speakers and then someone called out, “Back it up, I want to see her tell the DA he’s hostile again. It’s the best moment in the whole show.” Alison glanced behind her to find out who it was requesting an encore of her moment of rebellion and saw that it was Seth, the smug writer who had been snotty about her grammar and her undergraduate education in this very loft, not three months ago. He was squeezed into a corner with his back against the headboard and his long legs dangling off the edge, propping himself up at an awkward angle as he slugged back a bottle of beer. He seemed sincerely amused by all of it. “Back it up, back it
up
,” he insisted. “Who has the clicker?”

While several people went diving into the pillows and blankets, Seth caught Alison’s glance and raised his beer and an eyebrow at her, not smiling, but impressed. Alison turned to get back to the television set and simultaneously grab whatever refill was being offered, which seemed to be a cheapish sort of half-decent pink wine from Argentina. Lisa had informed her not a week ago that she was happy things had never heated up between Alison and Seth because it seemed that this young paragon was now interested in Lisa herself. Lisa and Seth had gone out for drinks after bumping into each other at a screening; one thing led to another, bodily fluids had been exchanged, and Lisa decided that Seth and all his East Coast promise were not meant for Alison after all.

Under which circumstances Alison was not particularly interested in renewing an edgy flirtation with the guy. It was clear that he was now somewhat more impressed with her dubious credentials as an actress and he was still, as she recalled from her first meeting, pretty cute. But the fact that he seemed to have changed his opinion of her because she was on television just annoyed the shit out of Alison. She was beneath his notice three months ago when she was a would-be actress who had gone to Notre Dame, but now he was interested because she had a guest lead on a mediocre cop show? And this was what passed for intelligence and sophistication in the Big Apple?

As soon as the thought flew by—
mediocre cop show
—Alison felt some part of her surge up with pride and defiance. It
wasn’t
mediocre, she told herself; it was crime drama, a time-honored form, and all these people who she barely knew had gathered at Lisa’s invitation to watch it. Two years ago, in Seattle, she and her little band of passionate theater friends spent a lot of time making fun of mediocre cop shows, but for an actress in New York, someone who was actually taking a shot at it, someone who was going to try to make it happen, these shows were bread and butter, and besides, some of the best actors in the country were doing them. The actor playing the surly DA was a huge film and theater star, who happened to work regularly in television as well. There was no selling out involved in this experience. This was a major step up the ladder.

And the part, which had been only two lines when she went in to read for it, turned out to be quite a juicy little nugget of a role. The thing just kept growing. Within a day, there were two extra scenes sent to her Gmail, and by the end of the week there were three more. Each came with a brief notification attached, that all scenes were subject to change, and her new agent, Ryan Jones, warned her numerous times that it was great that the part was growing, but it could shrink just as easily. But it didn’t shrink. The witness was given her own name—Elizabeth Garrity—and a backstory: She was dating one of the friends of the killer, who had some sort of “he’s my buddy” pact with the guy that was more important to him than anything in the world. There was even a great scene added in which she accused her nasty boyfriend, in front of witnesses, of being in love with the killer. Then he tried to slug her and strangle her, and the cops in the room had to jump him and drag him off. That bit necessitated a fight choreographer who for a couple of shots had the other actor throw her across the desk, but the director thought it was too much and declared firmly that he wasn’t going to use any of it.

The whole experience was a complete blast, on top of which they actually
paid
her. She had done a couple of scenes in an independent movie while living in Seattle, so she was already a member of SAG, which meant they had to pay her SAG minimums, eight hundred dollars for every day she was required to be on set. Because the new scenes got added so late, they got shoved into the schedule wherever they fit, which meant that Alison was required to be on the set on four separate days. Which broke down to four times seven hundred, twenty-eight hundred dollars for the whole gig, a figure she never would have gotten if they could have scheduled her scenes more tightly. Ryan wanted them to pay her even more—he tried briefly for the top-of-show rate, which was what anyone with a major guest part should have gotten. But everyone knew this was a huge break for Alison already and they weren’t going to go the extra mile for an actress who was such a total nobody. Ryan settled for the $2,800.

Besides which, there definitely was some confusion around the way that audition had been booked. As it turned out, Ryan
hadn’t
submitted Alison for the two-liner. His
assistant
, somebody named Darren, was the one who put the call in without running it by his boss, which was why the suspicious casting agent had never heard about Alison from Ryan—because Ryan had never heard of Alison either. Alison didn’t even know about this angle of the shenanigans until Ryan called her the next day to congratulate her on booking the gig and to ask her who the hell she was. She told him what she knew, as she had been told by Lisa, about the whole hip-pocketing plan, and Ryan informed her that this was all news to him but that he’d love to meet the girl who had managed to convince a writer to build a whole subplot around her in one audition. Once in his reasonably swank offices, Alison had apologized, but she also was shrewd enough to continue to stick to the point, which was that she had actually booked a pretty big job with very little assistance on anyone else’s part. The agent, who
was
in truth impressed, was the one who actually explained to her the whole story—how she had wowed the writer so much that he went ahead and reconceived the entire episode, which never happened, and would not have happened if the script hadn’t in fact come in eight pages short to begin with. But that specific detail was neither here nor there. Alison had done what everyone told these young actresses they had to do: Grab an opportunity and make it your own. Ryan Jones signed her on the spot.