“You must come!” she said, smiling winsomely, completely pretending that he hadn’t insulted her life choices six times in two minutes. “It’s actually such a crazy interesting and dynamic place. It truly is a melting pot, it’s so amazing to live with so many people from so many different cultures. I love it.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Martin informed her.
“How long have you been there now?” Kyle asked.
“Wow, I guess it’s been—four years? Five years?” She wasn’t feigning; at some point time did blur and that point had been passed long ago. Which was why, presumably, she could stand in the kitchen of Kyle’s glorious home and chat with total strangers about nothing. In the distance a doorbell rang. Kyle’s pretty wife floated by, greeting people, making sure their coats were put in the proper bedroom. A gorgeous little girl ran after her, golden curls flying. Kyle was apparently living a Victorian fantasy now.
“How do you and Kyle know each other?” Martin asked.
“We dated in high school,” Kyle said.
“Oh.” Martin made a face, putatively impressed. “Kyle! You have an eye for the ladies.”
“Well.” Kyle smiled and offered up a self-conscious little shrug, what can I say? There were more people now, drifting into the kitchen, cooing hellos. He turned to greet them and to collect drink orders.
“You and Kyle dated?” This Martin person apparently had concluded that Kyle’s offhand mention of it made their personal history fair game.
“We did, yes.”
“So how’d you let him go?”
“Excuse me?”
“Good-looking doctor, isn’t that what you girls all want?” Leering? Was he actually leering? “You’re an actress, you’re going to need someone to take care of you. Unless you were looking to trade up.”
“Oh, look who’s here!” What a fucking creep. “Excuse me, I really do need to say hello.”
Tragically there was really no one she knew there, but she headed across the room with a purposeful determination. The guests who were slowly filling the house were a different sort from what she was used to. The women were dressed up; Ann Taylor or something like, tasteful fitted dresses off the rack, a lot of beige brushed wool, a flash of houndstooth, low heels. Their husbands in dress slacks and sports coats, ties, Alison honestly didn’t know any people like this anymore, and there were so many of them here, standing around holding wineglasses and chatting. They were all clearly educated and well-off, young adults who seemed like old adults. She felt like a slightly dysfunctional teenager next to them; her black jeans and loose violet-striped top seemed boho and unsophisticated and rebellious, when in fact she had hoped that something so simple and chic might help her fit in. You look hotter than anyone else in the room, her brain reminded her. Stop worrying.
This particular bit of internal advice bucked her up, made her feel strong, independent, more like a television star and less like a loser actress. She gave herself permission to temporarily ignore the little pods of people who were ignoring her, and drifted over to the wall of bookshelves to read the spines of the books and find out what Kyle and Van were reading or pretending to read. She and Kyle had both been book junkies back in high school but she always went for a good novel while Kyle was constantly struggling with the serious thinkers who were utterly over her head. He had been so sure she could join him in his fascination for theological and philosophical ephemera, but while she had loved listening to him read to her, she actually never understood a word. Although she did develop a true fondness for Teilhard de Chardin, that old brainiac priest who had fallen in love with a woman he couldn’t have sex with.
And there he was, the intellectually impenetrable and physically chaste Jesuit, represented by at least six or seven volumes, next to Henri Nouwen, another high school favorite, and there at the end of the shelf four volumes of Thomas Merton. Another one of those priests who couldn’t consummate their lust for the women they loved, because of the church. They were their own Boy Scout troop, those guys. The Merton books were newer, while the other books sported the battered covers of those read years ago. Probably the same ones he’d read to her in high school before she would finally get sick of it and climb all over him. She thought about reaching up and taking a peek, hoping to find one of the passages he had read to her back then, but decided against it. No more of that, she reminded herself, as she let her attention drift to the other shelves—volume after volume of medical textbooks and then shelf after shelf filled with books about childbearing and child-rearing—What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Years, Bearing His Fruit: Stories About Godliness for Children. Were Kyle and Van some sort of Jesus freaks now? Some of these books looked more like mindless Christian middle-stream tripe.
“You checking up on my reading?” Kyle asked, stepping up beside her.
“Absolutely,” she admitted, and she gave herself permission to grin at him. “You still reading this stuff?”
“Mostly Merton now. I went down to his monastery in Kentucky, it was really beautiful.”
“You went to a monastery? What, do they give tours?”
“Not a tour,” Kyle explained, smiling a little at her cheeky ignorance. “More like a retreat. Their doctor needed some time off, so I went down for a week and took care of them, and prayed with them.” He bumped a little on the word “pray.” Kyle knew her attitude toward that sort of thing, or at least he knew that her attitude toward that sort of thing had probably not changed over the past years. She had never been openly disrespectful about the seriousness with which he regarded his Catholicism, but it was impossible not to notice that her views were a shred hostile. One time she had actually posited that she might not believe in God; that was another big hurdle.
“So you’re a bigger Catholic than ever, I guess,” she observed.
“I guess I don’t have to ask where you stand,” Kyle replied.
“That whole horrible religion sucks,” she informed him. “Although I do still have a soft spot for Caravaggio.”
“The murderer.”
“He was a genius who broke some rules. Like your favorite Jesuit.”
“Chardin didn’t break rules, that’s the point.”
“He so did too, Kyle, that much I remember. The church told him to shut up, which he didn’t—”
“He did.”
“No, he didn’t, he kept writing.”
“But he didn’t publish until after he died.”
“They were creeps, they should have let him do what he was doing, discovering Piltdown Man.”
“Peking Man.”
“Whatever. They sent him to China, right—”
“Yes, that’s—”
“As a way to shut him up and stop him writing about evolution, even though he knew that God wanted him to be doing that.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“You told me the story enough times, and then when they banished him to China, what do you know, the biggest find of the century, Peking Man, is right there. So that’s either irony or God. You can take your pick.”
A charming laugh flashed out of nowhere and skittered between them like a butterfly. “What are you two arguing about?” And there was Van, smiling, rosy, the blonde child propped on her waist. “Reminiscing about your great romance?”
The shock of Van’s direct allusion to their “great romance” clipped Alison right across the back of her neck. She turned, polite, racking her brain for a sufficiently lighthearted comeback, but Kyle was ahead of her. “Hardly,” he said. His indifference to the accusation put him effortlessly on firm ground. “We were arguing theology.”
“Hardly that either,” Alison echoed. “I never understood a word of it.”
“Not so. You’re very good,” he informed her. “More wine?”
He turned and reached over to a side table, where several opened bottles waited for a host’s attention. Van’s smile floated over them, and back to her guests with
an adorable, bemused exasperation.
“She was the love of his life, you can’t blame a wife for suspecting the worst,” she announced cheerfully.
Alison remembered how at Dennis’s Christmas party Van had proved herself so adept at the art of inflicting wounds in public.
“Well, I want to hear about the theology,” Martin announced. “An actress, arguing theology! You don’t see that every day.”
“She’s quite intelligent,” Kyle stated. He wasn’t looking at her.
“I’m sure.” A cute chuckle from that fucker Martin, what an asshole.
“The best actors are brilliant, they have to be, to understand Chekhov, Shakespeare, Molière,” Kyle informed him. “You can’t approach the world classics without some spark of genius.” That was her argument, made years ago how many times in the face of his insistence that she’d be throwing her life away. “What would the world be without our great artists? Or our great actors?”
“You’re on television, aren’t you?” This from the cheerful woman in the houndstooth, Alison hadn’t even met her yet.
“I don’t know if I’d call that brilliant,” said Martin.
“I wouldn’t either,” Alison agreed. “It’s a good job, though. I get health insurance.” This was meant to be a joke, but Kyle did not look up from the glass of wine he was refilling with such concentration and diligence. His face was set, severe. Was he angry?
“You’re being much too modest,” Van insisted, kissing that blonde child on the head.
“I’m an actor, we’re not a particularly modest tribe.”
“Do you see that as being your goal, then?” Kyle finally lifted those pure gray eyes of his. She’d seen that look before. He was angry, but not at the creeps who kept pawing at them. He’s mad at me, she realized.
“I—it’s more of a job, I don’t know about goals,” she stuttered.
“Meaning?”
“Well, television shows don’t last forever.”
“But you’ll stay in television.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Somebody lobbed that one in from the back of the crowd. “They pay like, crazy money, don’t they?”
“Who are you people?” Alison laughed lightly, to let them know she was kidding, or maybe the laugh was just to take the sting out of the fact that she wasn’t kidding. “Do you really hang out in Ohio and speculate on what television actresses make?”
“What do you make?” This from one of the men. They had all gathered around her, like she was a science exhibit.
“What do you make?” she tossed back.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
“What are those things you aren’t supposed to talk about, at dinner?” Van asked.
“Politics and religion,” Martin answered.
“And money,” Van finished. Underneath that angel in the house, there was something implacable and she was not happy. Having started it all, this whole scene wasn’t going the way she wanted.
“They already broke the rule about religion!” Martin protested. “All bets are off.” The assorted party guests chuckled at this shrewd point.
“We weren’t talking about religion at all,” Kyle said. “We were talking about art.”
“I don’t know if I’d call what I do art,” Alison countered.
“You used to.”
“You gotta eat.” Now that idiot Martin was stepping into this on her side? How could this keep getting worse? All the other guests were nodding; this was a version of the world they understood. Being an actor was a ludicrous idea unless you were on television making a lot of dough.
“I still want to do Chekhov, is that what you’re asking?”
“You still want to do Chekhov?” Kyle was implacable, and unamused.
“Doing television is hardly selling out. If I get big enough, they’ll pretty much let me do—all the things—I want to do.” This was such crap she couldn’t believe she had actually said it. But it was what they all said; every actress she knew who was stuck on a shitty television show at one point or another ended up explaining to anyone who would listen that she had bigger dreams than sitting in a trailer all day for the chance to wear pretty dresses and spout bad dialogue. Besides, putting her in a position where she had to defend her choices to a bunch of strangers was really the limit. They didn’t even know each other anymore! “And television isn’t exactly a wasteland,” she added. “The best storytelling in America is happening on television.”
“I just thought you had bigger dreams,” Kyle said. The thread of bitterness lying under all of it revealed itself, pricked her.
“I thought you did too,” Alison countered. “I thought you were going to South America to set up health clinics.” Kyle’s jaw stiffened, another one of his tells. But who was he, after all, to judge her?
“Oh, sure,” said Martin, that charmer. “South America!” He laughed, as if he even knew what any of this meant.
“It’s true, it’s the whole reason he wanted to be a doctor, it was all tied up in this idea of service to the poor,” she announced. “God’s calling. He wanted to take care of the masses.”
“Well, there are certainly masses of people down at Pediatrics West,” Houndstooth Woman observed. “Everybody’s still out there having babies.”
“That they are,” Kyle interjected, with a finality meant to settle this line of argument. Alison was moving ahead, though, pushing straight toward the coming train wreck. It was her worst failing, and her greatest virtue, this recklessness. Kyle had loved and hated her for it, back in the day.
“It’s just not what you said you wanted to do.”
“What did he say he wanted to do?” Van was looking at her now like she was insane.
“He wanted to go to Ecuador to set up health clinics. Didn’t have to be Ecuador.” She waved her wineglass in the general direction of somewhere else, both insisting on her point and dismissing Kyle’s past with an insouciant social flare. “Could have been anywhere that they needed him. He was studying Navajo at one point so he could go work at the Navajo Nation.”
“Navajo?” Van was beyond astonished at that one.
“You know how they say ‘I love you’ in Navajo?” Alison asked. “They don’t have a word for it, really. Because they don’t believe in possession. You can’t possess another person. You can’t possess anything. So they say ‘I’m glad about you.’ That’s how you say ‘I love you.’ I’m glad about you.” She looked over at Kyle, who was seriously about to kill her. She didn’t care. “Look, he still has the book,” she noted. And there it was, on the shelf, Navajo Made Easier, in with all the other books they had wrangled over. Learning Navajo, another complete delusion, long since tossed aside.
“How charming.”
“It’s not anything, Van.”
“The dream of your youth? That’s not anything?”
“It wasn’t a dream. It was nothing.” Did he actually say that? The hours Alison had spent listening to him describe the need for doctors in developing countries, the call to social justice, the hope to work for WHO. The whole problem between them, his missionary’s heart and her selfish vision of being an actress. They had never even talked about getting married and it wasn’t the Catholic church that was the problem. What was a Doctor Without Borders going to do with an actress wife?
But what was he doing with this one? What was he doing with a nice house in the suburbs and a pretty wife and a charming toddler and a baby upstairs? What was the name of the place he worked? Pediatrics West? That’s what he gave it all up for? This wife and this house and Pediatrics West?
He knew what she was thinking; of course he did. At least that was clear, they still tracked each other’s inner lives with alarming specificity. It wasn’t Alison’s careless reference to their long-buried romance. He was embarrassed before her, the accusation that she had abandoned her dreams had doubled back on him with devastating accuracy.
Why had they given up everything for so little? And if they were going to
give up their dreams anyway, why not give them up for each other?
Questions that didn’t have to be answered. Blessedly the door opened behind them; another guest arrived, and another. The blanket of civility descended. It was a dinner party! No one had to account for their souls.
sixteen
“I’M HAVING DINNER with Dennis tonight,” Kyle informed Van with casual indifference. He was still at the office, in front of his computer, his eyes bleary from the hours of emailing his practice now required. It was so much cheaper to consult with patients online, there was no way the insurance company would allow him to require office visits when a few keystrokes would do. It didn’t mean less work of course—it meant more patients, given less care. His rage at the failures of the medical system got filed into another corner of his brain while he waited for Van to respond to his announcement.
“You’re having dinner with Dennis? When did this happen?”
“He called this afternoon.”
“And you didn’t think to ask me?”
“I’m asking you now.”
“You’re not asking me, you’re telling me.”
“I’m asking you, that’s why I called, because I’m asking you.” A peeved silence bloomed on the other end of the line. This had been the norm for weeks now, ever since he had, according to Van, “humiliated her” at the dinner party he had insisted on throwing for “his old girlfriend.” The endlessly circular arguments went nowhere, no matter how many times he reminded her that the idea of the dinner party had been hers, she was the one who thought it would be fun, she wanted her friends to meet the baby and she was bored, that was really how the whole thing had come to pass—no part or whole of any discussion or argument mattered.
And he could not, finally, dismiss the spirit if not the letter of her indictment. It wasn’t the fact that he had gotten into an argument with his old girlfriend. It was what they had argued about. The swift if fleet eruption of accusation between himself and Alison had carried too much information, finally. Van could forgive the social faux pas—they had in fact gotten so heated that they were all but yelling at each other—but what Van couldn’t forgive was the fact that Kyle had never told her, even once, of the missionary dreams of his youth. That he had once wanted to go to Ecuador, or Nicaragua, the mountains of Peru, to work in a health clinic. That Alison knew an essential truth about Kyle’s soul that he had never even mentioned to Van. That she had blurted it in front of their peers. These facts informed every corner of their lives now.
I'm Glad About You Page 20