“I thought the whole point was to get the kids home early.” In spite of her best intentions, Alison’s tone shifted into something a shred too aggressive and Lianne bristled. She turned back to the sink, started shoving dishes around loudly, and then she sighed, clearly communicating how selfish she thought Alison was being. Everyone in the room exchanged glances with everyone else while simultaneously avoiding eye contact with Alison, who felt herself immediately in the doghouse for having crossed a line with Lianne even though Lianne was acting like a colossal idiot.
“I think it will be all right,” Megan said. “Who knows how long the movie will take, but Skyline is so fast! Those guys will be in and out in no time. If Alison doesn’t need the car before six thirty, there should be no problem.”
“I don’t think I’m going to need it until eight,” Alison said, trying to sound innocent and reasonable.
“I just think it helps to plan these things out,” Lianne commented. “You didn’t tell us anything about a party until just this second, it would have helped to have some warning.”
“I didn’t know about it until this second.”
“That’s not my fault.”
This could have gone on forever, but the transportation problem was in fact sorted out—everyone made it home from both Skyline and the movie by seven—so there were cars aplenty. Alison took her mother’s, a sky-blue Oldsmobile a shred less massive than all the other vehicles crowding the driveway, and headed across town to the problematic party—problematic in more ways than one—on Grandin Road.
seven
IT WAS HARD to go inside. She stood for a moment, shivering in the December night and wondering what on earth she was going to say to Kyle when she saw him in the middle of a sloppy crowd of drunks, with a total stranger standing next to him as his wife. The last time they had seen each other—almost a year and a half ago now, in Seattle—she had said unforgivable things to him, and then they had made out on her bed with a loveless fury before he abruptly stood and left the room, her apartment, and her life. The morning after this final encounter, as Alison stepped into the shower, she had stopped, in shock, at the sight of her naked body in the bathroom mirror. Her breasts were covered with bruises. He was willing to maul her, but not make love to her, no matter how desperately they both wanted it.
Why did it finally pervert itself into that disaster? So many other times their connection to each other seemed to make one living thing, something with roots and branches. Everything about their relationship had some sexual element to it—arguing about Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin could still turn her on, because she had spent so many hours listening to Kyle trying to explain why their arcane and mystical brilliance might one day transform the earth into something holy. Then he would run his hands up her torso under her sweater while moving her whole body beneath his own, finally getting her just where he wanted her, before leaning in for his first kiss of the night. It would literally make her see stars. He was a truly gifted lover, if you ignored the fact that there was no genital interaction whatsoever other than the most extended and painful dry humping the universe has ever seen. But they were happy—they were—when it all wasn’t too dangerous to be tolerated. For the whole time they were together, the agonizing simplicity of their physical connection annihilated what otherwise were real obstacles. He was so fucking uptight about the church. She despised lying institutional hierarchies. He wanted to be a Doctor Without Borders. She wanted to be an actress. Why would anyone think this was ever going to work out? The puzzlement was that it just did.
But now, standing out there on the frozen lawn, Alison remembered the night of their final breakup and the morning after as one long moment of heartlessly cold dismissal. It was the poison that she was left with now. “This is stupid,” she muttered to herself, gathering her courage as she stalked toward the medieval manor and the warm chaos of the party within. “Fuck Kyle and his fucking Catholicism. It doesn’t matter who he married. What’s done is done. I can do this.” She was grateful the lawn was so expansive. It gave her time to convince herself that this was true.