“I don’t want any food, I’m serious!” she told him again.
“It’s for me, I’m hungry,” he informed her. She was on the move again, ignoring him. He rooted through her mostly empty kitchen drawers until he located a lone fork, and then followed her into the tiniest of living rooms. She really didn’t have any money. All the dresses and shoes would have been provided, the jewelry too, those girls looked like a million bucks but how much were they really worth? Agents, publicists, stylists, business managers, everyone got a piece, and what were her credits after all? Two seasons on a trashy TV show, and one movie that bombed. Because she was a neophyte film actress they would have paid her pennies. That’s why they hired those girls: because they were all interchangeable anyway, and the new ones were so fucking cheap. They didn’t hire her because she was a star; they didn’t see women as stars. They saw them as fodder, and then they used them up. What had this one done to piss them off so badly that they would send attack dogs after her?
“Who do I talk to?” she asked. “You’re a reporter.”
“Alison, you don’t want to draw any more attention to this. Seriously. It’s just junk on the airwaves.”
“If they’re allowed to put junk on the airwaves why can’t I put junk on the airwaves?”
“You can, but it will make it worse. You have to let other people take care of this, Alison. I mean it.”
“I’m not even allowed to say this is bullshit?”
“That makes you sound defensive.”
“Defending myself makes me sound defensive? That’s terrific, Seth, I never thought of it that way! Let’s NOT defend ourselves then. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking that DEFENDING YOURSELF WHEN YOU’RE ATTACKED IS A GOOD IDEA.” He had never seen her like this. The size of her anger was impressive as hell: She was a titan. The idea of wrapping all that up and putting a little bow on it suddenly struck him as the height of absurdity. They don’t know what she is, he realized. They never did.
“You have to let someone else do it,” he started.
“I ASKED you to do it, and you said no,” she retorted. “I think that was like a minute ago, I ASKED you to do it—”
“I can’t do it, because I almost got fired for sexually harassing you, remember?”
“That’s why you should do it!”
“Schaeffer will do it. You don’t even have to ask him. He’s probably already done it.” She was about to spit something back at him, but her complete faith in Schaeffer silenced her. It was weird, and touching. The mere mention of Schaeffer seemed to spark a fragile hope somewhere in her that everything would be all right. Schaeffer to the rescue, he thought. And why not? “He was the one who planted all those pieces that saved my job,” Seth reminded her. “After you almost got me fired for sexually harassing you, which need I remind you I didn’t do.”
“I never said you did!”
“You got me in big trouble.”
“You got yourself in big trouble.”
She was coming back, inch by inch. “Well, Schaeffer is the guy who knows this so-called universe. He was the one who told me about it even being out there, otherwise I probably wouldn’t know anything about it because nobody reads that shit.”
“Everybody reads that shit.”
“They read it, and they know it’s junk,” he said. “No one cares, Alison.”
“If no one cared, they wouldn’t have done it,” she told him. “And I worked so hard for them. I showed up on time. I was nice to the crew. I was polite. I never made a fuss when I got the shittiest trailer, or when they kept fucking with my costumes, or when they were mean to me, I was never rude back—no matter how much shit they threw at me, I was good. I was grateful. I always knew my lines. I flirted with everyone, yes, because you’re supposed to, if I didn’t flirt with everybody, you know what they would say about me? She’s cold. She’s stuck up. And I don’t care—I don’t—but what are they so mad at me for? I was good. Like a good person, good.” The breath of something deeper, a profound disappointment, had entered the room. “And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve done bad things. I have, I’m not . . .” She shook her head, trying to get out from something from the past. He wondered what it was she was trying to forget. “But that wasn’t true here. It wasn’t. And even if people don’t believe what they said, in that stupid article? They’ll believe I did something bad, something that made them hate me. But what was it?”
She had a point. Sadly, not much of one. “Alison, people just do this shit,” he told her. “They don’t care if it’s true or not. They just do it and it makes them feel good and then they go and do other shitty things and that’s the world,” he said.
“That’s not the world,” she said. “You think that? You think that’s the world?” Behind her, the phone rang.
“Yeah, I do,” he admitted. “You can’t answer the phone—Alison—”
“It’s my sister Megan.”