Which of her predecessors did she call to mind? Elizabeth Taylor, another raven-haired beauty with extraordinary eyes? Ava Gardner? That was perhaps more like it. The ruthless duality which had made Ava a star had begun to assert itself in Alison’s being. The eyes were too vivid. The soul was too big. She was both body and self. As he reached for the condoms in his bedside table, Lars let the thought skitter across his brain: Men would want that. It was marketable.
Lars had been intuitively aware of this possibility from the first moment he saw Alison Moore on a television trailer which had been forwarded to his email account from his otherwise generally useless agent. He was constantly being told to “take a look” at these girls and in fact it was a part of the detritus of his job that he enjoyed. Girls were always being offered up to him; he was expected to taste and determine which ones might develop into more than a taste. His agent had told him that Alison was “something special,” but they said that about all of them, and most of them were anything but. Even in their early twenties, they had been sculpted and painted into an abstraction of beauty that was cheap and pornographic: the silicone breasts, the tiny nose, the strangely voluptuous lips, enormous eyes, tight, perfect skin. These were the girls who came to Los Angeles with a fierce and unexamined ambition to be a star, and each and every one of them proved willing to subsume any shred of individuality in the quest for that prize. Lars had railed about the contradictions mercilessly during drunken arguments with producers: None of these girls were anyone! Why do you need to turn them all into Kewpie dolls? Where is the next Monroe supposed to come from? You would have dismissed her for being fat. Streep? Funny chin. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, God forgive us, those two horsefaces wouldn’t have made it out of the starting gate. They all laughed at him, and had another martini. The next day he would get another ten emails, with footage on ten more identical starlets. When Alison’s demo showed up in his inbox he didn’t dismiss her immediately simply because she was a brunette. Perhaps if he had been less bored by all the Botoxed blondes, he wouldn’t have given it any attention at all. But he was bored, and Alison was having sex with some good-looking hunk. The chemistry with her costar was impressive, and so were the green eyes. Having now tasted the wares, he could congratulate himself on the unerring accuracy of his instincts.
Alison stretched. As she drifted back into consciousness of what she had been up to the night before, she had to admit that making Lars wait had not been such a bad idea after all. Having finally landed herself in a movie director’s bed, she also had to admit it was not a bad place to be. Lars was handsome, rich, and emotionally unavailable. After their second round in the sack they took a shower together, lounged around the apartment until noon, and then had sex again on the blond wood floor of his pristine dining room. The next day a pair of stunning silver earrings arrived at her apartment two hours before he did, carrying two bottles of Veuve Clicquot and one of the very finest olive oil. The olive oil was not for cooking.
“Well, you must have had quite a weekend.” Ryan was positively cooing over the phone lines. It was only Monday afternoon.
“What are you talking about?” Alison felt a quick panic. She already knew that Lars had an absurd, even paranoid obsession with privacy. If he thought that she was out there bragging about their sexual escapades, the whole thing would immediately fall apart. “Tell me what you heard and who you heard it from.” It crossed her mind that Lars might have had security cameras taping their activities in his apartment. She prayed there were no crazy photographs or sex tapes on the internet.
“I didn’t hear anything! But you have been getting some very interesting attention from some very interesting people.”
“Stop being coy or you’re fired,” she announced.
“That’s my little spitfire! Louise Nagler just called. Lars has talked to the studio. They’re moving ahead with an offer for you on Last Stop.”
Her heart stopped. Would he do that? Would he cast her because she had fucked him? The idea seemed too ludicrous to even entertain. “Oh, for crying out loud, Ryan,” she said. “That’s—impossible.”
“Oh, no it’s not, my dear.” His tone was brisk, excited, confident. “You don’t need to think about this side of it. Let me do my job. You just keep doing yours.”
The words went through her like a knife. “I didn’t sleep with him to get a job offer,” she protested.
“No no no, of course you didn’t. That is not what I meant. I meant acting. You are a brilliant actress. Stay focused on that. That is why they want you.”
It hit her sideways. Kyle’s accusation, that she was “brilliant.” This was all moving too fast.
“Ryan, it’s not Sophie’s Choice. It’s an action flick in the middle of the jungle.”
“Okay, fine,” he replied. “You don’t have to do it, if you don’t want.”
“Of course I want to do it, I just—you know, I’m surprised. I didn’t see this coming, I really didn’t.”