The Bones (10 page)

"You want something to drink?"

"You have any beer?"

"I made margaritas."

"Very spring break in Baja."

"Never been to Baja but we used to go down to San Padre Island and get hammered for a week straight"—trying to convey she's
a big girl, all grown-up as she walks into the kitchen, leaving Frank wondering,
What's with the loose sweatshirt?
"You're from Texas, too, aren't you?" she innocently inquires.

"Don't remind me. I moved to New York as soon as I had the money for a bus ticket." Frank not one of those cowboy-boot Texans
who revels in his geographic origins, more
landsman
than cattleman, a Texas Jew who never bought into the whole long-necked-beer-drinking, rhinestone-wearing, football-loving,
cheerleader-worshiping culture whose apotheosis is a large, air-conditioned home in a boiling suburb hewn from the harsh mesquite
plains equipped with a big-screen television, three kids, and a God-fearing spouse who believes in active church membership
and a generous defense budget. That was never his personal vision and he left the state before Austin emerged as a plausible
alternative.

Candi's gone to the refrigerator and removed a pitcher of margaritas. She takes two empty Flintstone jarh jars out of the
cupboard and pours the drinks, Frank looking her over in the daylight for the first time, wondering if she's old enough to
drink alcohol legally in the state of California. Not that it would make any difference in his plans.

Handing one of the makeshift glasses to him, Candi raises the other in a nervous toast: "Mud in your eye." She wishes she
could have come up with something more original, but there it is.

"I like my drinks fruity during the day in case I forget to eat," Frank tells her, sipping the pale green liquid, thinking
she must have poured half a bottle of tequila in there.

"Thanks for coming."

"You already thanked me."

"I know, I know. I'm a little nervous is all."

"I didn't have anything going on today." A short silence ensues during which Frank briefly flashes on Honey lying unconscious
at Cedars-Sinai less than ten miles away while Candi hopes he will say something amusing. "You went to the University of Texas?"
Not bothering.

"Graduated in June," she says, inadvertently answering Frank's unasked question regarding the legality of her beverage choice.
"Packed my stuff in the Datsun and drove to L.A."

"And now you're working at the Comedy Shop fending off the unwanted advances of your new show business friends."

"Everybody's been real nice so far."

"Just wait. They're a backstabbing bunch of amoral jackals. And those are just the waitresses."

Laughing, Candi gestures they should sit on the couch, where the cats have taken up residence. She shoos them off and sits
at one end, knees together and ankles crossed. Frank sits across from her in a yellow wing chair she'd found on the sidewalk
in front of the building the day she moved in. It has a large stain on one of the arms.

"You like cats?" she asks.

"Love 'em," he lies, allergic.

"That's Andrew and the other one's Brian," she says by way of introduction.

"Human names. Love that." Frank is not a pet person and can't bear the anthropomorphic thought process implied in giving something
as disgusting as a cat a person's name. Yet he realizes expressing this opinion today will not be helpful.

"Thanks for corning over. It's my first audition and I'm really nervous. I know, I already said I was nervous, but this is,
like, a big deal for me."

"Charisma makes me feel fresh all day," Candi's saying for perhaps the hundredth time as she sits on the worn sofa in her
cramped living room beneath the unframed poster of
Sleepless in Seattle
she had picked up for ten dollars at the Rose Bowl flea market the previous Sunday. Frank has now moved from the wing chair
to the couch, ostensibly to correct her posture by placing a hand in the small of her back as she delivers the line. One of
the cats has disappeared but the other sits on the arm of the couch next to Candi and stares malevolently at Frank, who feels
his sinuses closing as a result of the feline presence. Frank's looking at his watch. Honey has probably gone from a B cup
to a D cup by now, and eventually his absence is going to be noticed.

"You've got it down," he says. "If I'm a chick, I am definitely going to be douching with Charisma after I see your commercial.
I'm digging it so much I'm using it on days I don't need it. Guys are going to be buying it for their girlfriends because
it'll bring them closer to you." Frank laying it on fairly creatively.

"You think so?"

"I'm ready to order a case and I don't even have a girlfriend." Honey, being wheeled into post-op as he's saying this, her
new breasts bursting skyward beneath their bandages, awaiting his loving touch. "I wish I was a chick so I could use it."

She laughs, tossing her head back, and looks at Frank as the laugh trails off in an appreciative giggle.

"You're just like you are on TV."

Frank gazes into her eyes, knowing the meter's running. He kisses her gently on the lips.

"And you're beautiful."

"What a line."

"We can keep talking about Charisma if you want."

"No."

He kisses her again, and in a moment her tongue is probing the nether regions of his throat. They tear at each other's clothes
and Candi, standing in front of a naked and tumescent Frank in matching teal bra and panties, which combining forces wouldn't
cover a challah, quickly tosses cushions helter-skelter onto the hooked rug and unfurls the foldout bed. They fall upon it
like a couple of drunks at Mardi Gras, and after a hurried course of cunnilingus with a side of fellatio, Frank is inside
her, weighing whether the nearly ninety minutes spent giving Candi performance pointers was worth the effort. But her pneumatic
enthusiasm, combined with sets of well-developed abs and glutes rendered even more efficient by daily hikes in the nearby
hills, soon makes Frank banish conscious thought altogether and allows him to make sweet love to this avatar of youth and
innocence with a fervor that causes him to forget he will one day die. That is, until he ejaculates, at which point conscious
thought returns at Mach 5. Christ! Honey's probably out of surgery by now.

Candi is nestled into Frank's shoulder dreamily wondering which of the friends with whom she shared that long-ago high school
cafeteria conversation she is going to call first.
Tonya, it's Candi. Guess whose face I just sat on? And I was fresh as a daisy down there because I used Charisma, a company
I'm going to be working for thanks to my famous new boyfriend.

She isn't really naive enough to think that just because she'd had sex with Frank he'd be her boyfriend. But she ardently
hopes that now that she had, she will at least occupy a more prominent place on his radar. And then there was the career-enhancement
aspect of the whole endeavor. Candi Wyatt is feeling good. She's only been in Los Angeles a few months and already managed
to have sex with someone who's been on TV.

Frank, the effect of the margaritas sweated out of his system by the recent exertions, is feeling parched and tense, the got-to-goes
having arrived. Still lost in her youthful reverie, Candi goes to kiss his neck just as he sits up, causing inadvertent contact
between male shoulder and female nose.

"Oooww!"

"Oh, no. I'm sorry."

Frank sees plasma seeping from a nostril. Shit, he thinks, this is going to slow my exit. Candi, who put her hand to her face
immediately upon contact, removes her fingers from her leaky proboscis and sees blood.

"I haven't bled after sex since I was a virgin." Smiling. "I'm young again." Making Frank laugh. He almost regrets he's about
to shoot out of there.

"I gotta go, so let's get you fixed up." No explanation necessary. "Let me get you some tissue for that." Ever the gentleman.

Frank moves toward the bathroom, where, out of habit, he takes a quick peek in the medicine chest—birth control pills, Mylanta,
nothing worth borrowing—before grabbing a handful of toilet paper and giving it to the naked girl, who is sitting on the foldout.
She presses it to her face. The two of them pull their clothes on in silence. Frank, who is now wearing pants and shoes but
hasn't put his shirt back on, wants to make a gesture that will reflect well upon him and augur encore performances. Unable
to think of anything else to do, he folds up the folding bed. As soon as this is accomplished, they hear an agitated mewling
emanating from an unseen place. Candi looks around the apartment, does a quick calculation, and realizes she is one cat short.

"Where's Brian?" Frank doesn't want to deal with this, thinking,
I just folded up the bed without being asked and now I have to help find the fuckin' cat?
But Candi is worried, and Frank wants a return engagement, a need that forces him to feign concern.

"Where could he be? Here, Brian . . . " Frank feels himself cringing as he says the embarrassing words, the master performer
finding it hard to deliver those lines with anything approximating actual concern.

Candi's eyes dart around the room as the mewling becomes louder and more frantic. Then, realizing what's happened, she says,
"Frank, he's in the bed. You folded him into the bed!"

The two of them simultaneously reach for the metal bar to pull open the unit. With a focused intensity that belies what was
occurring on the same piece of furniture mere moments earlier, they yank the bar toward them, unwittingly causing the cat
to shoot out of the unfolding mattress in a frenetic parabola of anxiety, propelling him directly onto Frank's shoulder, where
his sharp claws make themselves at home in the soft skin.

"Fuck!"

Frank pries the hysterical beast off his back, resisting the urge to throw it out the window.

Laughing, her own burst nasal blood vessel now forgotten, Candi looks at Frank's torn flesh. It appears as if a spastic child
has dragged the tines of a fork over his shoulder and down his flip side.

"Do you have any Bactine or something?"

In his horror and discomfort he had already forgotten he'd performed a Dun & Bradstreet on her medicine chest and no traditional
tinctures would be forthcoming.

Thirty seconds later Candi is pouring tequila into a wad of toilet paper and pressing it against Frank's wounds. He winces
in pain as her Cuervo says hello to his ripped hide.

"Is it still bleeding?"

"Just a little."

"Do you have an old towel I could borrow?"

"Frank, I'm really sorry."

"Just get me a towel." Done playing.

Frank spends the drive back to the hospital with a Wal-Mart towel pressed against his throbbing back thinking about how he's
going to explain his wounds to Honey and wondering whether he can conceivably avoid appearing shirtless in front of her for
the time it's going to take them to heal. He worries he's going to have a hard time elucidating how he'd been attacked by
a wild animal while in the waiting area of the Seymour and Rivka Tublitz Pavilion at Cedars-Sinai, heretofore known primarily
as a habitat of nervous family members, not feral beasts, for this was where he'd assured her he'd be during her procedure.

Such are the hazards of the wayward life. It won't be the first time he'll have made up a story.

Chapter 6

A toxic piecrust of pollution hovers above the San Fernando Valley as Lloyd drives over the crest of Coldwater Canyon toward
his new office at the Lynx studios the next morning. The Saab is filled with the soothing tones of an N PR report about unspeakable
violence in an unpronounceable place, but it seems far, far away to him as he crosses Mulholland Drive and begins his descent
from the apex of the gilded hills toward the hurly-burly of Ventura Boulevard and his new life as the target of every comedy
writer in town.

Comedy writers are a notoriously vitriolic bunch of dyspeptic malcontents who often build lucrative careers channeling noxious
emotions into the socially acceptable outlet of sitcoms. The goofy-seeming fellow in the causal clothes who writes all those
funny things the cute black kid says in the hit show is more often than not consumed with a rage that, in another context,
would lead to flying fists, broken glass, and the burning of Atlanta. But in the fluorescent rooms where sitcoms are brought
to life by these socially maladroit young men and women, the boundless irritation felt by the shtickticians will undergo an
alchemic process resulting in entertainment palatable to the viewing public. This is the magic of television comedy writing.
The latent anger exuded by these practitioners of the laugh-inducing arts, all of whom, like the U.S. senators who think they
should be president, believe they deserve their own shows, is tamped down by the egregious amounts of money they're paid;
but it will still occasionally flare, when properly provoked, and manifest as derision and disdain.

Such were the emotions engendered by the contract bestowed on Lloyd Melnick by Lynx among those who labored in the comedy
vineyards cultivating the japes of wrath. All of them may have been overpaid, but Lloyd was now being overpaid to the tune
of eight figures over three years, which was absurd even by the ridiculous standards of this business. It's one thing to rain
crazy money on Phil Sheldon, went the aggrieved reasoning. He is the creator of
The Fleishman Show,
success extraordinaire, liner of wallets and builder of mansions, not to mention second homes on beachfront property, all
praise be upon him. Phil Sheldon had made an extraordinary amount of spinach for many people involved in his show and clearly
deserved to feast at the table of massive ancillary sales and the ensuing Niagara Falls of residuals. But Lloyd Melnick, the
vox populi held, had done nothing, repeat nothing, repeat once again to make sure you really get the point,
nothing
to deserve the riches that had been conferred on him. Making it worse still in the eyes of those who judged him and found
him so annoyingly wanting, not only had Lloyd done nothing to merit his new wealth, he had given interviews to newspaper and
radio outlets where he failed to sufficiently distance himself from the creative accomplishments of
The Fleishman Show
cash cow, which, so clearly to everyone, belonged entirely to Phil Sheldon and Charlie Fleishman. That was the tipping point
for the Melnick-watchers, the nocturnal breed of gainfully employed hacks often seen scurrying rodentlike to their imported
cars at three or four A.M. after gangbanging a rewrite on a hapless script for a show beyond repair even before it was sold,
the point conversations about Lloyd downshifted from "Can you believe how lucky Melnick is?" to "What an asshole."

To be fair, Lloyd was not deserving of this disparagement. His media foozle had been entirely unintentional. No publicist
had been retained to launch his name into the ether, nor did he care terribly much about being known to the general public.
It was simply that Phil Sheldon and Charlie Fleishman didn't want to give interviews after the show had become a cultural
touchstone and journalists were left to seek the secondhand insights of those whose presence had been announced in a more
obscure part of the credits. Lloyd, by virtue of his ability to unconsciously ape Phil Sheldon's attitudes, political opinions,
philosophy, and, finally, his ramrod-straight physical posture, had endeared himself to his boss to a degree no other staff
member could understand or approach. This talent, this ability to project an essential Sheldon-ness to Phil Sheldon led to
a term of longer duration than that of any other writer on the series, most of whom were sent packing after one unhappy season
of trying to discern their enigmatic boss's obscure needs.

So Lloyd became the default sound bite of choice for anyone chronicling the
Fleishman
phenomenon because who was he, the son of Estelle and Bernie, middle-class parents in the Bronx, people who vacationed at
a bungalow colony on Lake Kiamesha and hoped their son would become a CPA, to say "No, thanks" when the
Los Angeles Times
asked if he would sit for an interview and a photograph?

Today is his first day at work and his place in the comedy universe does not concern him as he drives onto the Studio City
lot of Lynx TV. What Lloyd is thinking about is how is he going to possibly justify what Lynx is paying him because, along
with everyone else in his incapacious little world, he, too, knows he doesn't deserve it. Turning down the radio, where a
debate about the abrogation of the Bill of Rights is taking place, Lloyd gives his name to the uniformed guard at the gate,
a pale Caucasian man with a comb-over, and is handed a pass to place behind his windshield. Moments later he glides into a
parking space at the head of which sits a piece of concrete five inches tall and two feet long emblazoned with the stenciled
letters LLOYD MELNICK.

Lloyd gets out of the car, hitches up frayed khakis, and walks into Bungalow 42, his ostensible home for the next three years.
The ground floor of the two-story building contains the offices of
Men Are Tools,
a struggling sitcom about a high-powered single lawyer who returns to his hometown to run his father's hardware store and
the high jinks that ensue. It is exactly the kind of tired nonsense the writers of
The Fleishman Show
looked down on from their cushy perch in the cottony white clouds of critical and ratings approbation.

Lloyd takes a brief gander around the sad-looking hallway in which he can see the doors leading to the offices of the people
working on
Men Are Tools,
people who are striving to entertain America with their low-rated little show, a show they are desperately hoping won't be
canceled and replaced with something from the network news or reality departments. This should be a moment of triumph for
him, Queen Elizabeth at her jubilee, Sally Field at the Oscars, a moment where he could thrust his fists into the air and
declare, "I am Melnick, hear me roar!" But, oddly, he finds he can't move. Literally. Lloyd looks toward the stairwell, which
leads to his second-floor aerie, inside whose four walls he is expected to perform great, or at least profitable, things,
and he feels as if his feet were magnetized to the floor by an unseen force. He'd like to turn around but is even unable to
execute that simple maneuver. Were a pirouette within his current repertoire, he would get back in his Saab, drive home, call
his manager, Marty Lavin of Invisible Entertainment, and order him to give the money back to Lynx, informing them it's all
been a big misunderstanding and he's sorry for the whole thing.

Lloyd hears life proceeding around him, the quiet hum of voices, the soft tapping of fingers on a keyboard, the deferential
laugh of a writer's assistant, and is overwhelmed by the simple desire to stay where he is, to not move, to root in the ground
and remain there, inanimate, inviolable, forgotten and left alone. Behind him is Stacy, wielding fabrics, furniture catalogs,
and squares of Tuscan marble samples for the Brentwood pleasure dome. In front of him are the expectations of a major American
corporation, which have taken human form in the fast-talking men and women clad in expensive suits beckoning Lloyd to their
pernicious paradise. A light-theadedness comes over him. Darkness encroaches in his peripheral vision. Lloyd, conscious of
the tension across his upper back and neck, tries to relax his shoulders, but they are frozen. Then he remembers his lungs,
which have not taken in oxygen for the last forty-five seconds. He tries to breathe deeply but is only able to manage a short
intake of air.

***

Five minutes later he is still in the same position.

"Lloyd?"

Lloyd does not have to move any part of his body to see this person who has parked herself in front of him. It's Tai Chi Chang,
his assistant, a petite Asian hipster in a black miniskirt, white tee, red canvas Converse high-tops, and a thin silver ring
in her nose.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm terrific," he manages to croak, the presence of a familiar face serving to relax him, albeit not entirely. He had met
Tai Chi a week earlier and retained her on the spot, not wanting to go through a lengthy search for someone whose primary
function would consist of picking up the phone when it rang and saying, "Lloyd Melnick's office." She was twenty-five; she
was cute; she was hired.

"Should I make coffee?"

"Sure."

Lloyd has already had his dose, but declining might lead to a discussion of his coffee-intake patterns, and anything that
detailed and personal is unwelcome at this point given the difficulty he is experiencing simply forming words. Tai Chi turns
and heads up the stairs, followed by Lloyd, who would ordinarily have admired the contours of her posterior and wondered if
she'd ever slept with a Jewish guy, but not today. Sex is not on the Melnick agenda right now, focused as he is on getting
himself up the stairs and into his office without announcing his presence to the staff of
Men Are Tools
by howling like a banshee.

Ten minutes later Lloyd sits in his empty office behind a large, boxy desk that seems to be swallowing him. Against one wall
is a standard-issue office couch, in front of which Hes an oblong coffee table. A nondescript chair is parked opposite his
desk. Lloyd is as expressionless as the furniture. Tai Chi walks in holding a cup of coffee.

"I hope you like milk. I put it in. Should have asked."

"Milk's good."

She places the coffee on the desk, then hesitates. Lloyd wonders why she doesn't turn around and walk out; and can she actually
see the jagged crack he feels developing in the center of his forehead?

"Need anything else?"

"I'm fine."

"Okay. I'm right out there." She points to the door. Lloyd nods. "I know."

"Okay. Cool."

Finally, she goes. Lloyd touches his forehead and is relieved to feel it is intact.

It is not the first time Lloyd's consciousness has played host to an anxiety attack. Once, while seated in an American Airlines
jet next to Stacy getting ready to fly to Cancún, Lloyd had nearly been overcome by an urge to run up the aisle and leap from
the door of the plane onto the tarmac. He attributed this sensation to adult-onset claustrophobia, and the Valium Stacy provided
took care of it that day, allowing him to withstand the flight without incident and more or less enjoy a week of sunbathing
and piña coladas. But it was not claustrophobia. Stacy was three months pregnant and Lloyd had the incipient sensation he
was not married to the right woman. They'd bought the house in Mar Vista and a child was on the way, but Lloyd was beginning
to question the pillars on which he was constructing a life. Outwardly, all was well. He'd been working on
The Fleishman Show
for several years, he was married to an attractive, intelligent woman (Stacy no walk in the park, to be sure, but it was generally
acknowledged Lloyd had acquitted himself satisfactorily in the wife derby), and they were starting a family. Then why did
he feel that day, sitting in seat 24C, his face pressed against the cool plastic of the window in a primitive attempt to calm
his rampaging nervous system, the plane getting longer and narrower as if undergoing some kind of Lewis Carroilization? Claustrophobia
was the easiest explanation, the one least inclined to crack his porcelain life. When they returned from the holiday in Mexico,
he was referred by one of the Jews Without Jobs, the conclave of writer confrères with whom he breakfasted each Tuesday (Tuesday
is Jewsday, they'd say), to Dr. Len Tepper, a fiftyish psychiatrist well versed in the garden-variety neuroses of the local
citizenry. He prescribed Paxil, the Reese's Pieces of the urban bourgeoisie, and in the ensuing years, while not entirely
symptom-free (there was the time he'd been squeezing plums in the produce section of Ralph's Supermarket on Olympic Boulevard
and was suddenly overcome with an ineffable sadness that nearly caused him to weep), Lloyd was able to keep these feelings
under control.

Until today.

"Dr. Tepper, it's Lloyd Melnick. If you could call me back when you get a chance, I'd appreciate it. My cell phone number
is 310-613-2461." Lloyd hangs up. Tepper was in session and would probably not call him back before the end of the day. How
had he sounded? Did he sound too normal, too under control? Might Tepper not return his call until tomorrow, at which point
he could be in a straitjacket? Should he call Tepper back?
Jesus,
he thinks,
get a grip.
Lloyd takes a breath and finds he is able to fill his lungs with air this time. Just calling the psychiatrist has clearly
helped.

Now what to do? He looks at his watch: 11:07. He would have to stay at least until three his first day to put Tai Chi on notice
that he intended to work something approaching real hours. Her respect could not be earned by leaving for the day before noon,
and he needed her respect if having sex with her was going to be an ongoing fantasy of his because Tai Chi would never sleep
with him in his fantasy if she didn't respect him. Lloyd realizes he's having a sexual thought about Tai Chi, which comes
as a great relief since it indicates his brain function is returning to normal.

Lunch could be justified at twelve-thirty. That leaves an hour and twenty-three minutes to fill. But fill with what? He had
read the paper over breakfast three hours earlier. There is no TV in his office yet. No Internet hookup. Lloyd glances around
the room. He feels as if he were sitting in the furniture section of a Staples store.