“You’re Alison Moore, aren’t you? I saw you on television. You were amazing! But I don’t want to bother you.”
And yet, you kept talking, Alison thought. “No no,” she said. “No bother at all.” In complete contradiction to her sardonic inner monologue, the words came out of her mouth with an effortless grace. You can take the girl out of the Midwest but you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl. She didn’t want to talk to this person but there was no way to get out of it without being rude, and she just didn’t have the energy for that. It was, finally, easier to be super polite.
She should have left. Why run upstairs and hide? Why not just leave? Well, where would she go? She couldn’t go home and face her interminable family, who would all ask her what she was doing home so early, revisit the mind-numbing wrangling about the car, and then drift into a bunch of boring quips about Dennis and how rich and unethical his father turned out to be. Plus, she wanted to see Kyle again. She didn’t want to talk to him; she just wanted to look at him. Her thoughts were ping-ponging now. His wife is horrible. She’s fucking gorgeous. I can’t believe he married that person. I can’t believe he didn’t marry me. I wasn’t going to marry him anyway he’s too Catholic I hate the Catholic church how could he marry someone else why am I even thinking this shit I should never have come.
“Can I ask you a question?” Alison found herself hating this girl almost as much as she hated herself right then.
“I guess that depends on what the question is,” she said. Considering the fact that she was still lying there with her eyes closed, she sounded ridiculously sunny.
“Well, I just, I love acting. I just love it. Like, I totally think it’s what I want to do with my life? And I’m still in high school, so I’ve only really done a few plays, but I had pretty good parts in both of them, like we did Charley’s Aunt and I played this character who is really Charley’s aunt. Like, not the guy in the dress, but the real Charley’s aunt? And in the other one I played just, like, a servant, who had, like, five or six lines, only, but I had to do an Irish accent, which was really, people said it was really good! And I just wondered if you could give me some advice? About how to pursue it, as a career?”
This was unspeakably dreary.
“People probably ask you that all the time. Because you’re so phenomenally successful.”
“Oh, boy,” Alison sighed. “Successful? I don’t—no. I wouldn’t say that.” She let her eyes drift over the ceiling, the drapes, the black trees and the winter night hovering just outside the window. On the wall across from the bed there was a collection of small but surprisingly well-chosen artworks—one of them, a framed red-and-black cartoon, was an actual Matisse. Felicia’s enormous jewelry box sat like a majestic throne just under it, on top of Felicia’s enormous dresser. She had a pearl necklace in there, an emerald tennis bracelet, and two pairs of diamond earrings; on that memorable night many moons before, Dennis had told her the prices of everything, mocking his father’s lavish spending on his stepmother before inviting Alison to have sex on her duvet. But it was hard to take the trappings of wealth seriously, when you had so little of it yourself. Why would you spend thousands on a tennis bracelet when you didn’t have eight hundred dollars to spend on a month’s rent?
“But you have an agent.”
This kid was incredible. “Yes, I do; I do have an agent.”
“Is it hard to get an agent? Like, if I came to New York, and wanted to try to be an actress, would that be something I would have to do? Because I heard that there are lots of auditions you can get, where you don’t even really need agents.”
Alison decided the kid was just weird enough to tolerate. She liked the way the inane questions kept her from obsessing about Kyle and his gorgeous blonde wife. “Look,” she said. “I can tell you all about this? But I need a drink.”
“Do you want me to get you one?”