The Bones (11 page)

Tai Chi enters holding a pile of legal pads.

"I thought you might want these."

Lloyd wrote on a computer until he was hired on
The Fleishman Show,
where he observed Phil Sheldon's collection of legal pads. Sheldon was a technophobe and only wrote longhand. Lloyd soon converted.

Tai Chi places the pads on his desk.

"Thanks."

"You want more coffee?"

"No thanks."

Say something clever, he's thinking. You're the high-priced Lloyd Melnick for godsakes. Look at her; she's waiting.

Nothing.

"Okay," Tai Chi says, not exactly sparkling in the conversation department herself.

As Tai Chi leaves, marveling at Lloyd's apparent absence of social skills, he reflexively picks up a legal pad. Pulling from
his pocket the gravity pen he was given as a gift at the end of the fifth
Fleishman Show
season, a pen that would allow him to write lying on his back should the need arise, he moves the point slowly across the
yellow tablet as if the simple act of putting ink to paper will eventually result in something useful.

An hour later he has filled the page with doodles of a doghouse, an airplane, constellations, horned beasts, and several musical
instruments. Tai Chi has not reappeared, preferring instead to sit at her desk outside Lloyd's office and work on the novel
for young readers she is writing.

Then, voices.

"I did the DeLorenzos' house and Abby DeLorenzo swore to me her eczema cleared up a week later," a woman says.

"I think Lloyd's gonna love it," says Stacy Melnick, who at that moment appears at the door of Lloyd's office accompanied
by a stick-thin woman in her late thirties wearing black leggings and a satin smock that goes down to her knees, giving her
the look of a collapsed café umbrella.

"Hi, honey. This is Cam Rousseau."

"I loved
The Fleishman Show,"
Cam exclaims.

"Thanks." Then, to his wife: "I didn't know you were coming."

"I called Tai Chi and told her not to tell you."
I've known Tai Chi three hours and already she's betrayed me,
Lloyd thinks. "I hired Cam to feng shui your office."

Lloyd notices Stacy is holding several picture frames in her hands and she begins arranging them on Lloyd's desk, saying,
"I thought you needed some personal touches." He looks at the pictures and sees they're of Stacy and Dustin in different combinations
with Lloyd. There they are at SeaWorld, visiting Stacy's parents in New Jersey, and at Dustin's last birthday party, which
the boy demanded be held at Chuck E. Cheese's, causing Lloyd and Stacy to spend an endless afternoon somewhere deep in the
San Fernando Valley in an animatronic rodent-infested Day-Glo nightmare. "In case you forget why you're doing this."

"I'm not going to forget." She either doesn't hear or chooses to ignore the slight edge with which those words are uttered.

"Did you write the episode where Charlie and the kids get stuck in the elevator? I loved that one." This from Cam.

"It's a good one. Phil wrote it."

Cam is now looking around, a painter of medieval frescoes regarding a naked church wall, trying to determine where the energy
planes reside. Stacy looks at her husband and mouths, "She's good."

"Everything in the office is in the wrong place," Cam pronounces. Including me, Lloyd wants to say. "Your desk needs to be
over there." She points to the opposite end of the room with the confidence of General Patton arranging a battalion placement.'
'The coffee table is facing the wrong way. The sofa wants to be against
that
wall." The next hour is passed moving the pieces of temporary furniture around the room in various configurations until Cam
is satisfied their energy potential is being maximized.

Ordinarily, Lloyd would have wanted to pour hot lead down the throat of someone like Cam Rousseau, but today her presence
is a welcome diversion that almost makes him forget Tai Chi's treachery.

Content that her labors appear to have ended, Stacy tells Lloyd she wants to give him time to get some work done on his first
day. "I got a babysitter. Let's go out tonight to celebrate."

"What are we celebrating?"

"Hello! Lloyd! Your deal!" She kisses him on the mouth to assert possession, as Cam, recently divorced from an unemployed
actor, watches jealously.

Lloyd spends the rest of the day with his feet on the desk, the legal pad on his knees and the pen in his hand, trying dutifully
to bring forth a concept for a frothy network half hour. But what, exactly? A family show about a husband and wife and their
adorable kids? Did it have to have kids? Lloyd doesn't want to do television kids, all of whom sound to him like middle-aged
Jewish comedy writers stuffed like giblets into the bodies of gentile cherubs. Dustin Melnick, his own four-year-old, rarely
said anything an adult would find amusing; or another four-year-old, for that matter.

As Lloyd sits in his Spartan office, ruminating on children, he continues to ponder his own son and reflects on just how unamusing
the kid is. When Lloyd and Stacy learned their child was going to be a boy, Lloyd would entertain himself by fantasizing about
all the dad-type things he would do with his son. They'd play catch and take walks, climb rocks and learn to swim. They'd
ride roller coasters and bodysurf, go to ball games; maybe even go camping. To Lloyd's chagrin, not much of this was coming
to pass. Dustin was a delicate, unathletic child who was scared of water, upset by direct sunlight, and would only eat chicken
nuggets and cake. He was demanding, petulant, and given to tantrums. That Stacy viewed Dustin as her personal project, her
hobby, her raison d'être, was of no small relief to Lloyd given what a handful the boy had turned out to be. They'd heard
from mothers whose sons he had had play dates with that Dustin seemed to take unabashed joy in pulverizing elaborately built
LEGO structures, destruction that would usually leave the host child lying on the floor gasping for breath in a paroxysm of
grief and wounded feelings. The truth was Lloyd didn't really like Dustin right now. He felt guilty about it; he knew it was
wrong but he couldn't help himself. His son was obnoxious and Lloyd could only hope Dustin would grow out of it and not become
someone who tortured little animals.

So, no, he would not be doing kids on his show, which meant a family comedy was not in the offing. A workplace comedy, perhaps?
But to set it where? A television station, a magazine, a store, a doctor's office, a radio station, a record company, congressman's
office, a hair salon; it all felt so familiar and cloying.
The Fleishman Show
had been about a suburban family who ran around their suburb doing suburban things.

That worked pretty darn well for Phil,
Lloyd thinks.
Why don't I take the same idea and set it in a different suburb? I'll take characters that have new and endearing quirks and
I'll . . . Oh, who am I kidding? It's so utterly transparent and lame.

Hours later, Lloyd still has nothing. But the Tag Heuer wristwatch Stacy purchased for him upon the signing of his deal told
him he had done a day's work, so Lloyd puts his pen down: 3:47. If he leaves now, he'll beat the afternoon rush hour.

"Going home?" Tai Chi asks as Lloyd walks past.

"Yeah. Don't want to shoot my wad on the first day," he says, immediately regretting his choice of words.
She'll probably file a sexual harassment suit tomorrow,
he thinks. Then, noticing a page of prose on her computer screen, he tries to move the conversation along. "What are you writing?"

"A novel for teenagers."

"A novel? Really?"

Really, indeed. Tai Chi is writing a novel? Not a spec screenplay or a sample television script like every other sentient
person in the greater Los Angeles area but ah actual book? Something that would appear between hardcovers to be read by more
than ten development executives? This number ten, incidentally, is a fairly accurate representation of the number of individuals
who will generally peruse a bought-and-paid-for script since the ratio of what is written to what is made is virtually a hundred
to one, and these development executives are the collective readership of most professional writers in Hollywood.

"How's it going?" Casual, trying not to show surprise.

"I'm about halfway through. I'd love for you to read it when I'm done." She's already forgiven the unfortunate wad-shooting
image, he realizes with great relief.

"I'd be happy to. Oh, Tai Chi, by the way, if my wife ever tells you to not tell me something, tell me immediately." He smiles
at her, wanting to diffuse any possible tension, but letting her know not to conspire with Stacy again.

Lloyd spends the drive home to Mar Vista regretting not having taken himself more seriously as an artist back in New York
before he had assumed the obligations with which he is now burdened. Had he followed his better instincts, the ones that had
led him to earn a B.A. in English from SUNY at Albany where he'd pursued a sincere interest in nineteenth-century American
literature, particularly the Transcendentalists
(Oh, for a beach chair on Walden Pond!
Lloyd often thought), something worthwhile might have been produced. Instead, he had become another man's water carrier. Well
compensated, to be sure, but still drenched from the splashing of the pails.
Yes,
he whines internally,
I may be doing better in the crass terms that enslave everyone around me here in Los Angeles, but it is Tai Chi, my lowly
assistant, who is going to be the author of a novel.

This is the disturbing thought he focuses on as he makes love to Stacy that night after their celebratory dinner.

Lloyd is thinking about Tai Chi.
Her breasts. Her novel. Her breasts. Her novel. Her breasts. Her novel.

Stacy is thinking about upholstery.

She comes first.

Chapter 7

The day previous to Lloyd's anxiety attack, over the hill from the San Fernando Valley office, a man visited Rosa's Florist
on La Brea, produced two crisp hundreds, and left with a three-foot-high horseshoe of white carnations that appeared to have
been diverted from their intended appearance at a Mafia funeral. They were not just flowers, these carnations; they were a
statement, a message, an avowal of eternal devotion writ in flora.

The man with the hundreds was Frank, who had stopped on the way back from his North Hollywood acting class/tryst/animal attack
to arm himself for his return to Honeyworld, and the statement he wanted to make was The Bones Digs You, Babe.

Frank pulled the Caddy back into the Cedars-Sinai parking lot. Turning off the engine, he removed the towel from under his
shirt and looked at it; the blood appeared to have dried. Frank folded the evidence, hoisted the carnation horseshoe, and
walked quickly back into the hospital, his back still sore from the recent feline assault.

Frank was a guilt-free cheater, a man whose personal moral code was not constrained by anything approaching the traditional
view, at least when it came to his own behavior, and felt himself entitled to spread his very special Bones Love hither and
yon. He wakes up and goes to sleep with Honey, he reasons, and what greater proof of true fidelity was there than that? What
he does in between those two events, those twin signposts of the quotidian day, he is quite certain is no one's business but
his own, least of all Honey's. In their time together, she had had suspicions, most notably during his tenure on
Hollywood Squares
when a young makeup artist took what Honey perceived to be an unusual interest in the condition of Frank's pores, but Frank
was a smooth and careful liar and she had never been able to uncover any tangible evidence that would suggest he had slept
with enough women during the time they had been together to field a baseball team.

With a designated hitter.

And four subs on the bench.

Which, when you thought about it, was only about two and a half extracurricular sexual partners per year, a number that allowed
Frank to bask in the glow of what he considered to be his commendable self-restraint.

Entering the lobby, he deposited the bloody towel in a wastebasket and walked to the elevators.

Frank arrived at Honey's private room and gently pushed open the door. Sticking his head in, Frank saw her lying in bed looking
like Billie Holiday after an opium bender, her consciousness the beam of a flickering flashlight as the batteries run down.
She looked over at him. Frank clicked into Dutiful Mode.

"How're you feeling, babe?" Respectful. Quiet. Caring.

Then she focused and the ethereal swamp in which Honey appeared to be wading drained and left her wriggling her painted toenails
in a moist silt of displeasure. She hadn't said a word but Frank thought,
Does she know what Daddy's been up to?

"Babe, how're you feeling?"

Honey came at him full tilt. "How come you weren't here when they brought me up?" Was that an accusation?

"I was out getting you these." Frank presented the three-foot-high carnation horseshoe with a flourish befitting the Hope
Diamond as he walked over to the bed and kissed Honey on her uncharacteristically pale lips. "If some guy named Chickie No-Neck
shows up looking for 'em, don't mention my name," he said, shifting easily into performance gear. She tried to laugh. Frank
noticed with no little relief the flowers had done their time-tested trick, that of mitigating female annoyance on some impossible-to-understand
biological level. The effort at laughter caused her to grimace in pain.

"How are you feeling?" One more time.

"Like my tits were hit by a train."

"Ouch!"

"Hand me my purse. I need to put some makeup on."

Holding a pocket mirror in front of her face, Honey restored herself to her former glory with a few simple strokes of blush
and powder and was once again ready to perform unnatural acts with the ninja king in front of a movie camera. At least from
the neck up.

"Did you get the scrip for the Vicodin?"

"It's in my purse."

Frank stuck his hand in the purse and rummaged around, a truffle pig on the trail. In a moment, he had the prescription in
hand. Looked at it, frowned.

"Only a one-week supply?"

"I'm in the hospital getting a boob job and all you can think about is Vicodin?"

"I was thinking about you."

"Sure."

"It's just I can't usually get it legally."

"Yeah, whatever."

"I spent the whole time I wasn't getting you flowers sitting in that waiting room surrounded by other people's anxious relatives
hoping you'd come out of the anesthesia alive."

"So you could cop my Vicodin."

"No. Not because of the Vicodin."

"You're such a liar."

Frank saw she was teasing him now, her personality starting to return.

A nurse came in, checked her vitals, and an hour later Honey's new breasts were pronounced ready to go home. She was sitting
in the passenger seat of the Caddy appearing to listen to the Metallica CD Frank was playing when she looked over at him.

"Do you think this is going to help?"

"What?"

Honey glances down at her bandaged chest, then over at Frank, as if he were slow. "The boob job?"

"Hell, yes. Movie people love the big boobs."

"I'm not thinking about movies."

"No?"

"I'm thinking about TV."

"Oh?"

"I want to play Borak."

Borak, temptress of the tundra, was the titular Kirkuk's girlfriend.

They weren't even home from the hospital and she was starting up again. Frank tried to remain impassive.

"I told you, the Eskimo show is not happening."

"You should do it."

"Why?"

"Because I'll look totally hot in an animal skin."

"I'll buy you an animal skin."

"Don't patronize me, babe."

This from Honey? Did she just say "Don't patronize me, babe"? For a moment, Frank was too astonished to respond. Had the doctor
who had enlarged her chest adjusted other aspects of Honey Call as well? Had an assertiveness chip been implanted while she
was in surgery? Did the newly minted D cups portend further changes in the heretofore sweet Honey persona? Frank had never
even considered this.

She had gone into the operating room with the simple goal of becoming more drool-inducing in a hormone-dominated industry,
a thought bovine both in its simplicity and its result (at least in Honey's case, since she had taken it to the logical conclusion
of silicone implants), but now she had emerged from the procedure physically rounder yet paradoxically more sharp. How could
that be? Frank had assumed they'd go home, drink a bottle of merlot, and order some Chinese takeout; then, after some post-lo-mein
cunnilingus (intercourse being out of the question given Honey's delicate state), he'd go to the Comedy Shop and let Honey
spend the evening watching TV and fantasizing about her future prospects as a newly busty thespian. But she wanted to talk
business. Now. On the way home from the hospital, for godsakes.

Well, if Honey could thrust, Frank could parry, because what was a tetchy girlfriend to a comic except a heckler on the local
level?

"How about a Stuart Little toy? If you want to wear an animal hide, I'll get you a Stuart Little and you can skin him and
make a thong," Frank suggested as E. B. White spun like a rotisserie chicken in his austere New England grave.

"You're not doing the Eskimo show because you don't want me to have a part."

Honey appeared headed into previously uncharted waters of psychological exegesis. What
had
happened during that surgery?

"That isn't true at all. If I do a show, I'll get you a part," Frank said, regretting it instantly. "It's just not going to
be the Eskimo show."

"Promise?"

"Yes."

So, there it was. Frank on record as saying he would make Honey a part of whatever television context he was thrust into.

"We're coming around the bend when someone shifts their weight and the whole raft tips over. One second I'm sitting back with
a Corona in my hand, floating down the river soaking up the sun, and the next second I'm in the rapids trying not to smash
into a rock. So I get my bearings and swim to the shore, and the beauty part is I don't spill a drop." This is Robert Hyler
talking about his recent trip down the Snake Fiver in a raft of industry players whose collective heft could have launched
a small country. Frank and he are seated in the sterile Studio City office of Pam Penner, head of comedy at the Lynx Network.
It's hard to visualize Robert in a drizzle much less a river as he sits on the sofa, tasseled loafer crossed over worsted-wool
knee, a picture of pampered prosperity, regaling Pam with tales of wilderness derring-do. Frank is seated near him trying
not to stare out the window. He's already heard his manager perform the river story, and whatever amusing quality it once
held has vanished.

They are in a pitch meeting, a gathering whose mysterious rituals are as proscribed as a Kabuki performance (only with less
room for improvisation), and currently the schmooze phase is taking place, where the pitchers entertain the pitchees with
something having as little as possible to do with what they are there to discuss or, rather, sell. Common subjects are home
renovations, children (but only if more than one person in the room has them, otherwise their very existence suggests a superannuating
that augurs the grinding end of a promising career), restaurants, and, of course, vacations. Hence Robert's seemingly relaxed
recounting of the rafting anecdote. After ten minutes or so of light banter, this overture to the sales buck and wing, often
with no segue more deft than a sudden "So!" from the chief pitchee, the pitchers get the signal that they have finished performing
the introductory part of the show and are now expected to dim the houselights and bring on the headliner.

Pam Penner, a cherubic dumpling of a lesbian in her forties, Jurassic (though childless!) by the standards of the network
television business, exudes the eager charm of a well-adjusted teenager. Her loose clothes can barely contain the vibrating
energy emanating from her as she leans forward in her chair, listening to Robert, nodding, laughing, the blond tips of her
dark hair jiggling attentively. Pam was a lesbian before it was a career move and spent many years hiding in the darkest reaches
of the closet, up on the shelves behind the shoe boxes, certain imminent discovery of her sapphic proclivities would put an
end to the dreams of industry glory she had nurtured from an early age and consign her to life with a Nissan Sentra and no
expense account. But without much time to spare, given her relatively advanced age, the cultural climate in Hollywood had
shifted, and just prior to AARP having found her, portly Pam Penner came rocketing out of the closet with the force of an
F-16.

"How's Maria?" This from Robert, the final stroke of the fur, the acknowledgment, the I-know-you're-gay-and-I'm-down-with-it
question, Maria being Pam Penner's much younger, raven-haired girlfriend, whose framed picture sat on Pam's desk near a bowl
of guppies.

"She's good. We have to go out with you and Daryl."

Given the nature of the conversation that is taking place, you would be forgiven for thinking Pam was unaccompanied in her
office. You would be mistaken. Network executives, like urban pigeons, never travel alone.

Pam has two young minions in the room with her, one of whom, having proven his mettle as a taker of notes, has graduated from
that humble function and is now allowed to be padless, the better to participate in the conversation. The other, untried and
recently out of college, is expected to take the minutes. The non-note-taker is Jason Fendi, a stripling of indeterminate
sexuality whose lanky, Prada-knock-off- clad frame folded forward as he tried to look interested in Robert's river story while
thinking about the restaurant he is going to dine in tonight. The note-taker is the inappropriately named Jessica Puck (her
persona more Hamlet-ish than Puck-like), and she is as humorless as only someone in the network end of the comedy business
can be, which is to say her demeanor is that of a North Korean bureaucrat in the Ministry of Collective Farming listening
to a request for a new thresher. Yet, ironically (for where else should irony abide if not in the comedy business?), Jessica
Puck's function is to record the concepts, jokes, the wit—every bon mot spritzed by the visiting shtickmeisters as it comes
sailing through the ether—and then later remind Pam, whose job in this situation is to be delightful and encouraging, what
she had heard and whether she had liked it.

Each hapless purveyor of light entertainment entering the Penner lair to beat the sales drum dreaded the notion of Jessica
Puck being the underling designated 1:0 encapsulate what had been said, given the apparatchik-like gravity of her bearing.
So they desperately hoped Pam Penner would immediately buy whatever wares they were hawking, rendering Jessica's assuredly
desiccated summaries moot.

"So." This from Pam, Segues "R" Us, right on schedule. "Frank, you've got an idea for a show?"

Robert glances over at Frank, who has been wondering when enough time will have elapsed for him to call Candi Wyatt without
her thinking he's interested in a more than carnal way. "You're on."

"Thank you, Bobby." Frank leans forward in his seat and makes eye contact with Pam Penner. Jason Fendi and Jessica Puck may
as well have vaporized. "This is a show about"—here he pauses and observes the looks of benign anticipation they're affecting—"me."

Tentative laughter because of the attitude with which he delivers the line, a casual arrogance that presumes complicity on
the part of the listener, one that says, "What else would the show be about?" Not that he's said anything actually funny yet.
But the idea of Frank, his essential Bones-ness, has prepared them to be amused. They lean forward expectantly. He hesitates
for a moment.