“It was pretty claustrophobic downstairs and I didn’t know anybody. I was just getting some air, and then, you know, people kept coming.”
“I thought you might have left. Not just me,” he added immediately. “Van, actually, and Dennis, were wondering. They hadn’t seen you. So they thought you left.” It came out sounding like the opposite of what he meant to imply, which was that it wasn’t a big deal whether she left or not. Obviously it was a big deal or he wouldn’t be making such a big deal of it. Glass head.
“I didn’t leave, no,” she admitted, before glancing up at him under those long bangs. “I thought about it. You know, Kyle, honestly, I am sorry about— Dennis told me that you knew I was coming and that you agreed it was time to just say hello and get it over with. And then when I showed up, it was so clear you didn’t know I would be here. But that wasn’t, I didn’t, I wouldn’t have come—”
“It’s fine.”
“Obviously it’s not fine. Honestly I would like to kill Dennis. He’s such a liar and a pig. I’m amazed you’d leave him downstairs alone with your wife. She’s so pretty he’s surely started putting the moves on her by now. It’s not safe, you know it’s not.”
“He was on the brink of passing out. I’m sure he has by now.”
“Well, that’s good news. Honestly he’s such an alcoholic,” she said, standing in front of her ex-boyfriend surrounded by dozens of empty wine bottles. She laughed at her own joke, and made a little wave of her hand over the bottles before her, as if she were blessing them.
“I was going to mention it but I thought it would be rude.” This sounded more real, to his relief, friendly even. She started to pick up the bottles, with the apparent conviction that straightening the room would keep things light.
“Anyway, I am glad we have a minute. I mean, I know it’s just a minute.”
“Yes.”
“I wish it was more than that. Because because because what happened, in Seattle—”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do, Kyle. I’m so ashamed of myself, the things I said to you.”
“It was a long time ago.” At some point he had stopped counting the days; it was when Van had appeared in his life and provided such a blessed distraction. Then later, when the memory of Alison began creeping back into the corners of his brain, he would rouse the specter of time as a weapon—can’t even remember how long it’s been, more than a year, almost thirteen months since you’ve even seen her, she’s been out there throwing her life away for fifteen months already. But that line of logic finally turned on him: It’s been eighteen months since you’ve seen her, and the rest of your life is going to feel like this.
“Anyway, it’s great to see you,” he announced. “Really great. Do you like living in New York?” The only way to keep this going, he knew, was to be as much like a normal person as possible. She smiled at the question—thank God—and set the bottles down on the bookshelf behind her.
“It’s okay. It’s kind of lonely. You know they say that about big cities, they’re the loneliest places? That turns out to be true.”
“I couldn’t live there.”
“No, I know that,” she said. “I’m not likely to forget it.” There had been a few dreadful conversations about his moving to New York, which went nowhere. It would have been impossible for him to live in a city as large and dirty and impersonal as New York, it was too far from his parents, and it just wasn’t an environment that interested him in the least. “You thought my fascination with it was, what did you call it? Delusional?”
“Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know, Kyle, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s where you have to be if you want to be an actor. That or Los Angeles. Which didn’t interest you either.” Her ironic tone was starting to drift into bitterness, which she pulled back on immediately. “But there’s no point, honestly, is there? We don’t have to go back to that stuff anymore. The answer just turned out to be so obvious! Stop torturing each other and you can both live where you want. Ta-da! Not so hard after all.”
“No.” The cold admission of this startled him back into the present—the real present, the one in which she didn’t in fact exist. This was not reality. In reality, she was about to evaporate.
“You look thin,” he said.
“Anorexia one oh one, the required class for all would-be actresses,” Alison nodded, recovering with what sounded like a practiced, tossed-off laugh. “And I’m supposed to lose another six pounds! I don’t know how, or where it’s supposed to come from.”
“Someone’s telling you to lose weight?”
“My agent,” she said, shrugging as if agents were something everybody had, although it was an entirely new entity in her life, as far as he knew. “It’s not his fault, honestly. He’s just telling me what people are looking for. Casting people want actresses to be thin, so, if you want to work, you have to starve yourself. It’s business.”
“Not art?”
“I don’t know about art right now. I’m just trying to survive.”
“You always made fun of that.”