Free I'm Glad About You by Theresa Rebeck Page A

told the camera bitterly. “It was always, ‘he’s my buddy.’ You mess with that at your own peril.”
    “This is it, this is the big scene,” the real Alison informed the room.
    “Did you feel threatened by that?” asked the ADA.
    “I felt disgusted by it,” Alison told him. “He was always telling me, ‘I love this guy.’ He said it so many times I thought, why don’t you just sleep with him then.” Everyone in the room said “Oooooo,” like she had really stepped over the line with that one even though no one could give a shit about implications of homosexuality in New York City. On the television set the scene was erupting. The lousy, threatening boyfriend leaped across the room and started strangling Alison. People cheered. And then when he hurled her across the table—someone somewhere apparently did not think that was too much, after all, and they used the more exciting shot—everyone cheered again. All in all, the drunken celebration surrounding her television debut was enormously satisfying to Alison’s ego, and she didn’t pick up her cell when her mother called because she was having too good a time and she wasn’t going to let her mom wreck it with some ill-placed remark.
    The party lingered on lazily after the episode’s conclusion at 11 p.m.; the young would-be actors and intellectuals gathered in Lisa’s apartment insisted they wanted to catch up on the news but once the sound was muted during the commercial break no one really turned their eyes to the screen again. For a short while they drank and chattered cheerfully about Alison’s debut and how much fun guest leads could be and what upcoming auditions were hanging out there for her now, and then two by two they drifted away to look for cabs. Not quite ready for her moment in the sun to end, Alison hung around, collecting glasses and empty bottles and organizing the detritus of the evening into a slightly more coherent version of itself.
    “Leave it!” Lisa commanded. “Benita comes tomorrow, she’s got to have something to do.”
    Alison raised her hands, leaving the glasses in place. “I always forget you have a cleaning lady,” she admitted.
    “ Cleaning lady ? Oh God, you are so Midwestern,” Lisa tossed back at her, pouring the ends of a bottle of red into a water glass. She staggered a bit as she turned toward the kitchen, where Seth was hanging in the doorway, holding a beer and watching the girls with an amused glint in his eye. The whole scene was a little too Tennessee Williams, Alison thought, but she plowed ahead bravely.
    “This was so nice of you, letting us come over and watch the episode together. I hate to leave you with such a mess.”
    “I said leave it,” Lisa told her, picking up several bottles herself as if Alison were bound to do it wrong anyway. While she was fairly sure that Lisa’s snarl had a little more behind it than too much alcohol, Alison was in too good a mood to be wounded.
    “Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow then,” Alison shrugged, picking up her jacket—a denim relic from high school, so unchic it actually counted as cool—from the chair by the door, where she had dropped it with her purse three hours ago.
    “You’re uptown, right?” Seth said. “We should split a cab.” He downed the end of his beer, leaned back into the kitchen, left it on the counter, and sauntered toward the doorway. He had framed the announcement with the kind of impartiality that made it impossible to tell if there was any hidden meaning in it, but in the lexicon of young New Yorkers, “We should split a cab” could mean “I find you kind of hot and I’m interested in going home with you if it turns out that something develops in the back of that cab.” Or it could mean “We should split a cab.” Alison had no interest in splitting a cab with Seth for any reason whatsoever, but there was no way Lisa could read Seth’s careless announcement that he was leaving with Alison as anything other