ALISON WAS NOWHERE to be seen because she was literally hiding from him. Her immediate impulse—to find a bathroom and hole up in it—had been thwarted by the crowd of well-dressed Cincinnatians who clustered around the doorways to the two half-baths on the ground floor with drunken determination. So she snuck up to the second floor and down the three successive hallways to the enormous marble bath off the master bedroom in the back.
The way was familiar enough; Dennis had given her a tour of the house years ago, when he was babysitting the place the first time his father went wandering the globe with Felicia. What a ridiculous episode that was, she remembered. Dennis had eased himself onto the edge of his father’s bed and turned on her, with his practiced and wicked glee. “Come on, Alison,” he purred. “Let’s have sex on Felicia’s duvet.” A moment before she had been admiring it—it was made of some sort of shimmering material, pewter gray, edged with muted gold braiding and tassels—but immediately it looked tawdry and like the kind of duvet you’d find in a whorehouse. The room was dark and she became aware, in the stillness which followed his proposition, that she was in fact alone in the house with him. She took a moment to consider a saucy retort, something dismissive enough to buck up her nerves and also shut this whole line of logic down forever, but he instantly misconstrued her silence to express some degree of interest on her part. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he said, moving quickly down the path of his own desires. He grabbed the tail ends of her shirt in his hand, pulling her toward him with a shred too much force. “You have such beautiful breasts.”
“Dennis, for crying out loud, Kyle’s your best friend.” She shoved him away and took a step backward, out of his range.
“He knows I’m not to be trusted. And if he doesn’t know that about you yet, he should.”
“Who wouldn’t leap at that charming offer?”
A swift anger blew through Dennis’s expression. “You, I should think. Aren’t you getting tired of waiting for it?”
There was a meanness to this that hit her like a physical blow. Had Kyle talked about their sex life with this most disreputable of all his friends? Why did these two even like each other? Alison knew she’d better get out of there, but she couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Wow, what romance. ‘Come fuck me in my father’s bed.’ Maybe a therapist could help you out with this, Dennis,” she told him. “Your issues are out of my league.” Then she had turned and walked out, and he didn’t follow her. And nobody ever spoke about that again.
Was the surreptitious disaster of this horrible Christmas party just another one of Dennis’s fucked-up games? Kyle, she knew, had been blindsided by her appearance; she could see it in his eyes the instant she caught him watching her from behind that ridiculous pillar—Dennis had once again lied to him thoroughly. Alison couldn’t help wondering how that worked, how all those Catholic boys made sense of the many ways they betrayed themselves and their girlfriends and each other every minute of every day. Maybe it had something to do with the way all those self-congratulatory priests lied to them about what it meant to be a “man for God” and then turned out themselves to be thieves, drunks, child abusers, and power mongerers. If the priests are all massive liars about everything, why wouldn’t their students turn out to be the same? Kyle would never have tolerated that discussion; there was something relentlessly rigid about his innocence. Dennis on the other hand would have found it an interesting notion, and then used it to try to coerce her into the sack again. It wasn’t worth thinking about. She collapsed on the bed, which luckily had a new bedspread.
“Excuse me.”
Alison cracked her eyes open. The girl in the doorway was young, maybe still in high school, even. Her clothes looked expensive but without style; the cream sweater top actually had gold sparkles in it and the wool skirt, cut in straight, unflattering lines, was red. Alison wondered if she had ever dressed like that herself, and concluded that even at the height of her Midwestern ignorance she most definitely had not. She most certainly had never worn her hair in such a deliberately asexual do, tight to the head, with plastered bangs cut way too short for a face that round. Everything about this girl told you she was innately too boring to even look at.
“I’m just looking for the bathroom,” the fashionless girl explained. “Is there a bathroom back here?” Her voice was cautious and simple, respectful to a fault. Alison felt a pang of yearning to just be back in New York, where people didn’t abase themselves like this just because they were looking for the bathroom.
“It’s over there.” Alison lifted her arm and pointed to the far wall, but she did not bother getting up. Her eyes, which had only barely opened in the first place, slipped shut again. This girl, who was doubtless a really, really nice person, would come and go more quickly if she wasn’t encouraged by a lot of well-mannered drivel about absolutely nothing.