The door buzzed. Lying prone on her unmade bed, where she had spent much of the past three days, Alison had a hard time deciding whether or not she should answer it. She had no doubt that Lars was finally making his appearance, to find out if he was forgiven, to see her in the pink dress. The buzzer sounded a second time and she sat up.
Mom is right about this, she thought. Even the Catholic church is right—this loveless sexual power game is a sin. In some stupid primal universe this is the shit that gets you sent to hell. She had to cut Lars off. It’s not like she didn’t know how to do it; she had broken up with Kyle something like thirty times, and she loved him. Lars, she didn’t know what that was, but it was nothing remotely resembling love. They weren’t ever going to offer it to me anyway, she knew. This is all nothing, it’s nothing at all. She opened the door.
nineteen
THE HAIR WAS pulled back in a ratty knot at the back of her neck, and she wore a pair of naughty-librarian eyeglasses. In the past three years, Alison had somehow become the kind of beauty who could look stunning in sweatpants and a T-shirt, which was what she was wearing.
“Dennis,” she said. “Dennis! I—have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.” She threw her arms around him and dragged him through the door.
It wasn’t what he had expected, but it would certainly do.
“Alison, you look sensational.”
“Don’t tell me I look pretty, I’m sick of it. What are you doing here?” The buzz of familiarity, the relief of it, had been replaced by a terrifying jolt of guilt. What was he doing here? “Do you want a—seltzer, or a juice with some soda or something?” She strode briskly back to her kitchen, gathering her wits. And acting. Just keep acting.
“Actually, my flight was ridiculous, you don’t have any vodka, do you?”
Alison turned and looked at him with stern, good-natured disapproval. Dennis grinned. “Don’t you laugh at me, I’m serious, Dennis, I heard you stopped.”
“Oh, yeah, who’d you hear that from?” he asked. He smiled at her, knowing.
Something in her chest tightened. “All of Cincinnati was talking about it,” she informed him. “Don’t change the subject. Did you fall off the wagon?”
“Darling, I fell so very far off the wagon so very long ago you can’t even see the wagon from the pit of iniquity into which I have so recklessly tossed myself.”
“Oh, Dennis.”
“Oh, Alison—really it’s not as bad as all that. I’m not the desperate character I used to be. I have learned how to drink responsibly.”
“Sure you have.”
“No, I have, I really have.” His insistence was so underwhelming that he actually rolled his eyes at himself. It was fine; it made her laugh. Really she was always such a forgiving girl. “You never knew me, in my sober days, anyway,” he reminded her, leaning against the clean blond woodwork of her very chic little kitchen. “You haven’t been back to good old Cin City for so long, you completely missed my resurrection and subsequent decline. It was quite the nonevent. Where is my vodka?”
Alison handed him a glass with ice over a bare inch. “I don’t care if you’re drinking again, but if you say you’re in control of it, I want to see it,” she warned him.
“Puritan.”
“Oh, God, have you been watching my television show? I’m hardly a Puritan. They’ve got me fucking anything that moves.” Dennis laughed with delight. She looked so pretty in her sweats, and if anything she was saltier than ever. There was some disturbance running through her that added a warmth to her cynicism. No, that wasn’t new; that had always been there. All that intelligence and heart. A disappointed innocence. And morality. That was why she and Kyle had been so right for each other. They both believed that the universe had rules. They just never agreed on what the rules were.
“How’s Kyle?” she asked.
As tactics went it wasn’t a bad one. At least it got them onto familiar turf.
“I did not travel a thousand miles to merely talk about Kyle, forget it,” he warned her. “I will tell you this, his marriage is a disaster and he deeply regrets that you two never consummated your lust. But other than that I’m telling you nothing.”
“That is so not fair.”
“Not fair is you taking off and completely cutting yourself off from me for three years. I’m really angry with you. And you were in town and you went to a dinner party at Kyle’s—”
“Don’t remind me, it was horrible—”
“I don’t care, I’m really hurt no one invited me,” he said. “There is no food in this refrigerator.”
“There’s food,” she started, but he held open the refrigerator door and waved at it, a careless magician. The thing was an empty cave.
“Celery, nobody eats that. Yogurt, the Greek kind with no sweetener. A bag of carrots. A teeny tiny container of hummus that looks like maybe a rabbit has been nibbling at the edges of. Six cans of diet root beer. Is that your secret vice? You don’t even have a frozen pizza around here?”
“I’m an actress, they don’t let us eat.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that.” He swung the door shut and turned to her. “Okay, so what are we going to do for food? Where are the takeout menus? I want Indian.”
“Okay, but no bread.”