There were plenty of stories out there about how continuously Ava was preyed upon. Maybe not Liz, who looked like she could defend herself, but Natalie Wood, yes, Marilyn Monroe, certainly. There were a billion stories about old Marilyn getting raped at parties by the biggest guys in Hollywood. It wasn’t a surprise, if you thought about it. Dennis was right. Turning yourself into a person who men wanted to fuck all the time, what else was going to happen? The memory of what had almost happened shot a bolt of panic through her. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t learned to handle, but she wasn’t going to let Lars just have his way with her either, especially from behind. She let him paw her breasts for a moment, press that perpetual erection up against her, and then she shrugged, deliberate, a gesture that was unmistakable: Not now.
Lars was never one to misunderstand body language. His power, her power, her lack of power, her appreciation for his power—it was an ongoing board game of unspoken one-upmanship. He wanted to have sex, she didn’t; he wouldn’t push now, because that would be begging, which he didn’t do, he was indifferent to sex, except that he thought about it all the time, and he was furious now that by shrugging her shoulders she had acted on her own power which was a threat to his power which meant he was going to have to make her pay for it later without making it look like that’s what he was doing. Alison was well aware of the nuances of this dance, and she rarely bothered to push her luck. Lars was no better than any of these guys, but he was in her corner. If letting him dress her up like Ava Gardner and have sex with her constantly was the price, so be it. But once in a blue moon a shred of defiance was not only inevitable, it was necessary.
The memory of the way she used to yearn for sex rose from the back of her mind. The way she and Kyle used to torture each other with their hunger? Those were the days, when you were just a kid whose mom was always yelling at you for making out with your boyfriend on the family room floor. The distance from there to here seemed impossible; everyone agreed on that much. But everyone else seemed to think that the impossibility of that journey was something astonishing, brilliant, celebratory. Careful what you wish for. But had she even wished for this? She didn’t actually think she had. And now here she was, trapped not by her own dreams, but by the dreams of something else, something weird and inhuman but generally accepted as truth.
She would never have been able to explain this to anyone, but there was no question that she understood it. She understood power and she understood that she didn’t have any. Sitting around and letting men fantasize about fucking you, seriously? That was not all it was cracked up to be. That is the thing everyone figures out too late, she thought, as she swung open the minibar and grabbed a couple of airplane-size vodka bottles.
“We’re having dinner with Norbert and Gordon,” Lars reminded her. “It’s only the most important dinner of your life, so I’d suggest you show up sober.”
“It’s for you,” she explained, with a well-performed air of apologetic surprise. “I thought you’d want to celebrate! It went well, you know it did.” She cracked open the absurdly small bottle and dumped the contents into the rocks glass which had been so usefully situated for them right there on a scalloped paper doily. She floated by him, and delivered her little offering to the gods with a cocky smile. Checking his emails on his cell, he barely glanced up. Sex or the cell phone, either would do for Lars.
“What are you going to wear?” he said. Sex or the cell or her clothing, that was actually door number three.
“I don’t know, what do you think?” At this point, it would be madness to answer any other way. The idea that she might know anything at all about what looked good on her had been dismissed months before, along with the insane idea that something loose and comfortable might occasionally be fun.
“Something with color. I would say pink if that weren’t too much to ask.”
It was a reckless, careless dig. Pink was off limits, and he knew it. But he wouldn’t fucking let it go.
She had never told him what happened to the pink dress. How could she? Would he have wrapped her in his arms and comforted her? Would he have hunted Dennis down and beaten him to a pulp? Would he have done anything that any number of characters in one of his stupid movies would do? Not likely. She had taken the torn dress and thrown it in the garbage.
And then she refused to talk about it. There was nothing to say, any lie that she might have told—I spilled coffee on it, I returned it, I didn’t look good in it, I loaned it to a friend and she ripped it—would have been shredded. So she said nothing.
Which, perversely, worked. The day after it arrived, Lars called and left a message on her machine. “I hope you like the dress,” he said. “I can’t wait to see you in it. Give me a call.” She didn’t. The next day she got another call, this time from his assistant, the interminable Josh. “Lars asked me to call and make sure that you got the package he sent on Tuesday,” Josh told her machine. “Could you touch base with the office and let us know that you got it?” She didn’t call him back either. So then Ryan called. “Alison, it’s me. Give me a call.” She didn’t. He emailed her. And then he called again. “Alison, where did you go? Did you run away to Cincinnati again? I’m going to be really mad if you did. Call me back. It’s serious.” Fuck you, she thought. But after three days of locking herself in her own apartment and taking long showers, she got ahold of herself and called Josh back.