“I felt disgusted by it,” Alison told him. “He was always telling me, ‘I love this guy.’ He said it so many times I thought, why don’t you just sleep with him then.” Everyone in the room said “Oooooo,” like she had really stepped over the line with that one even though no one could give a shit about implications of homosexuality in New York City. On the television set the scene was erupting. The lousy, threatening boyfriend leaped across the room and started strangling Alison. People cheered. And then when he hurled her across the table—someone somewhere apparently did not think that was too much, after all, and they used the more exciting shot—everyone cheered again. All in all, the drunken celebration surrounding her television debut was enormously satisfying to Alison’s ego, and she didn’t pick up her cell when her mother called because she was having too good a time and she wasn’t going to let her mom wreck it with some ill-placed remark.
The party lingered on lazily after the episode’s conclusion at 11 p.m.; the young would-be actors and intellectuals gathered in Lisa’s apartment insisted they wanted to catch up on the news but once the sound was muted during the commercial break no one really turned their eyes to the screen again. For a short while they drank and chattered cheerfully about Alison’s debut and how much fun guest leads could be and what upcoming auditions were hanging out there for her now, and then two by two they drifted away to look for cabs. Not quite ready for her moment in the sun to end, Alison hung around, collecting glasses and empty bottles and organizing the detritus of the evening into a slightly more coherent version of itself.
“Leave it!” Lisa commanded. “Benita comes tomorrow, she’s got to have something to do.”
Alison raised her hands, leaving the glasses in place. “I always forget you have a cleaning lady,” she admitted.
“Cleaning lady? Oh God, you are so Midwestern,” Lisa tossed back at her, pouring the ends of a bottle of red into a water glass. She staggered a bit as she turned toward the kitchen, where Seth was hanging in the doorway, holding a beer and watching the girls with an amused glint in his eye. The whole scene was a little too Tennessee Williams, Alison thought, but she plowed ahead bravely.
“This was so nice of you, letting us come over and watch the episode together. I hate to leave you with such a mess.”
“I said leave it,” Lisa told her, picking up several bottles herself as if Alison were bound to do it wrong anyway. While she was fairly sure that Lisa’s snarl had a little more behind it than too much alcohol, Alison was in too good a mood to be wounded.
“Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow then,” Alison shrugged, picking up her jacket—a denim relic from high school, so unchic it actually counted as cool—from the chair by the door, where she had dropped it with her purse three hours ago.
“You’re uptown, right?” Seth said. “We should split a cab.” He downed the end of his beer, leaned back into the kitchen, left it on the counter, and sauntered toward the doorway. He had framed the announcement with the kind of impartiality that made it impossible to tell if there was any hidden meaning in it, but in the lexicon of young New Yorkers, “We should split a cab” could mean “I find you kind of hot and I’m interested in going home with you if it turns out that something develops in the back of that cab.” Or it could mean “We should split a cab.” Alison had no interest in splitting a cab with Seth for any reason whatsoever, but there was no way Lisa could read Seth’s careless announcement that he was leaving with Alison as anything other than a rejection. At the very least, “We should split a cab” meant “I’m not sticking around to have sex with Lisa, in whom I am less interested than she seems to think.”
“Oh!” Alison laughed, trying to sound as uninterested in the subtext of all this as she possibly could. “I was going to stop and pick some things up on the way.” This didn’t come off as smoothly as she wished; it sounded more like she was making a fake excuse to cover the fact that she was walking off with Lisa’s boyfriend. Seth raised that eyebrow again and said, “Well, but you’ll still need a cab, I’m guessing.” With that he opened the door and with a wave of his hand indicated to her after you, as if this dual exit were the most natural thing in the world.
Alison hesitated, then smiled back at Lisa and said, “See you! Thanks again!” which also sounded phony. But there was nothing else for it. She preceded Seth out the door and pushed the button to call the elevator. They both waited in silence while the wall hummed and clicked with the sound of the lift approaching. The elevator door slid open, and Alison silently stepped inside the tiny cubicle, which was lined with faux-wood Formica paneling. She concentrated on the line of buttons in front of her, and pushed “Lobby.” There was another tense pause until the door finally slid shut. Seth glanced down at her, grabbed her by the waist of her jacket, and pulled her to him.
“Hey,” said Alison. “Hey.”