Authors: Seth Greenland
The Bones (7 page)
Best wishes, Robert Hyler
Lloyd is eating a chocolate macadamia-nut cookie and rereading the note when Stacy walks in and says, "Robert Hyler is one
classy guy."
"Who doesn't like a gift basket?" Lloyd neutrally replies.
"Lloyd, I think you should do the show."
"I don't think so," he says, finishing the cookie. "And I don't want to talk about it again."
Stacy restrains herself from responding, Lloyd's massive increase in earning power having brought him significant respite
on the grief-from the- wife front. "How was your meeting?" she inquires casually, busying herself around the kitchen.
"Joel thinks I should start a production company." Joel Gruber is Lloyd's lawyer and automatically takes five percent of his
income. For this substantial piece of change, he reviews Lloyd's contracts and provides him with access to anyone in the entertainment
business.
Were he to want it.
Which he doesn't.
"You're going to be a mogul, Lloyd! Your own production company?"
"So don't worry about me, okay? I know what I'm doing."
Lloyd issues this proclamation with such self-confidence, Stacy has no doubt she has hitched her wagon to the correct star.
Not that she ever did. She loves Lloyd, admires him, and sincerely believes this embryonic comedy god will zoom her directly
toward the light.
Honey Call is standing at the microwave wearing nothing but a silk camisole that stops several inches above her navel, the
twin half-moons of her gravity-defying bottom bobbing lightly as she impatiently shifts her weight from side to side. A spaghetti
strap bisects a tattoo of a dragon curled along her right shoulder.
Moving with a leonine grace developed during a brief early foray into the world of exotic dancing, Honey reaches into a pressed-wood
cabinet to remove two plates. She pulls two servings of macaroni and cheese out of the microwave, places them on the dishware,
and turns to face Frank, the paleness of his smack-daddy physique adorned with the briefest of blue bikini underwear, sitting
on a kitchen chair reading the
Los Angeles Times.
"Breakfast, baby."
Frank looks up from an article on the situation in the Middle East and sees Honey walking toward him bearing carbohydrates.
Notices her pussy, shaved in the shape of a heart, Honey a great romantic.
"Is the coffee ready?"
"It's coming," she says, placing the yellow food in front of him and turning to the coffeemaker. A moment later, Frank is
ingesting the necessary caffeine.
"Can we pray first, please?" Looking at him sweetly, she puts out her hands. Frank, smiling indulgently,
my little religious nut,
lightly takes her delicate fingers and looks at Honey's bowed head, the barely visible roots of her expensive dye job infinitesimally
extruding. "Dear God, thank you for this food we are about to eat and all the blessings you have bestowed upon us, especially
Frank's show. Amen." Smiling at Frank. "Now you can eat."
They'd had a particularly gymnastic fuck that morning, Honey reanimated by the prospect of Frank's show jump-starting her
career and wanting to demonstrate her profound appreciation as acrobatically as possible.
The two of them eat in silence as Frank continues to read the newspaper. Honey runs through the coming day in her mind: morning
yoga class followed by a manicure, then lunch with her friend Amber (a starlet currently appearing at the checkout counter
of Tower Records), maybe an afternoon movie, and finally her once-a-week acting class where she is currently working on a
scene from
Five Easy Pieces
with a twenty-four-year-old rental-car agent from Culver City who is trying to seduce her by promising unlimited access to
a Ford Eclipse.
Honey fervently hopes, in the new life as a television star that surely awaits her, she is going to be hit on by a far higher
class of sleazebag. It isn't that she has any intention of relinquishing her place at Frank's side, she just wants someone
to laugh at her jokes, to pay her a better quality of attention, to support her hopes and dreams. For she thinks in phrases
like that:
hopes and dreams.
The utter banality of what Frank perceives to be her interior life is one of the reasons he avoids talking to Honey about
anything other than himself. He would have preferred having dinner with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross or Margaret Mead and engaging
in esoteric conversations about the five stages of a Samoan's coming of age, but ultimately his libido dictates his social
arrangements, so his consort is chosen accordingly. And he treats Honey well. Frank gives her spangles and bangles and escorts
her to expensive watering holes, where she happily nibbles steak tartare and sips fine wine, but to her increasing chagrin,
all their conversational roads invariably lead to Frank and all their behavioral roads to the bedroom. Her talents there are
protean, to be sure, but she is beginning to feel like the actuary who has been crunching numbers for endless days and now
finds herself increasingly impatient for the gold watch and new meadows in which to gambol.
After five years of cohabitation in the rented West Hollywood bungalow with its small backyard pool, Honey is starting to
show incipient signs of dissatisfaction. Recently, they'd had an argument about his habit of consistently returning home at
four in the morning. He would explain it was part of his work, that the clubs stayed open late and he needed to hang out and
be seen, but Honey made it clear she was tired of going to bed night after night bathed in the dim cathode rays of a talk-show
host. Frank pretended to listen, but Honey, despite her limited intelligence, could sense he was humoring her.
Honey wants to develop her self, to evolve, to become, if not scintillating, then at least someone who is able to have a conversation
about something other than Frank's position vis-a-vis the rest of the entertainment business. To that end, she is taking a
course on twentieth-century painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and, having overheard two women there discussing
something they'd read in the
New York Review of Books,
decided she should join their ranks and so subscribed herself. But all of her self-improvement was having no effect on Frank,
who, when it came to Honey, remained far more interested in getting high and having sex than in discussing abstract expressionism
or the poetry of Philip Larkin.
Still, in her mind, being humored by Frank Bones was a far, far better thing than having, say, one of the wealthy Persian
brothers who owned the rug emporium on La Brea pay her rapt attention. And why? Because Frank was famous. He may have been
B-list but, dammit, he'd appeared on
Hollywood Squares.
And, no, he hadn't been the center square (that honor having been reserved for the sparkling Whoopi Goldberg), but he was
on the top left and an awful lot of people had seen him.
Being Frank Bones's girlfriend elevated Honey Call to a level that eluded most of the hopefuls who annually washed into Los
Angeles on a warm wave of misplaced optimism. It was a leg up, a shortcut to the bright lights she had yearned for while growing
up on a sod farm in Washington State, Honey having spent her childhood literally watching grass grow. Circumstances may have
rendered her obscure prior to her association with Frank, but their romantic association served to illuminate the shifting
shadows in which people like her usually dwell until the end of their days. She is an appendage on the arm of someone who
has had an HBO special and the huge billboard on Sunset Boulevard that goes with it; no small accomplishment in a town where
being an ex-wife of Rod Stewart's carries significant social weight. Perhaps it hasn't gone so well for Frank lately, maybe
he'd been spending too much time working dives in towns like Lincoln, Nebraska, and Portland, Oregon; maybe he hasn't had
the breakthrough role that will catapult him to the forefront of national consciousness. But now the elusive bauble of a network
show twinkles on the horizon like an early-evening star, and Honey feels as if she can nearly reach out and pluck it from
the sky.
She draws an almost palpable strength from the prospect, believing that her prayers have been answered. The Lynx offer to
Frank is surely a testament to God's power.
Even if they want him to play an Eskimo.
"I read the script," she says, having noticed him turning the pages of the newspaper, indicating the search for a new article
to read is on and a conversational opening exists.
"What script?" Not looking up, his eyes having already lit on something in the Metro section about a gang shooting in Pico
Rivera.
"Kirkuk."
This is the Eskimo project to which Lynx is attempting to get Frank to plight his troth.
"What'd you think?" Still not looking up.
"I want to play Borak."
Frank has known this moment has been coming from the instant he read the script and has been dreading it. The situation needs
to be handled with great delicacy lest he find himself sharing the same fate that befell the Athenian men in
Lysistrata:
that is to say, a suspension of coitus until the political situation transmogrifies into something more convivial to the distaff
side.
"Borak is the female lead," he reminds her in a tone intended to convey the inappropriateness of her ambition.
"I know."
"Then let me tell you, before this goes any further, I'm not doing
Kirkuk,"
Frank voileys, hoping to yank this weed before it takes over his garden.
"You're not? I thought you were kidding when you said you weren't doing it. You
have
to do it." The fear in her voice is noticeable. To be this close to having a boyfriend who, with a little luck, could ride
his show to the promised land of the A-list, which, needless to say, would accomplish untold things for both of them, and
then have her dreams dashed by Frank's petulance is unbearable.
"I met with my friend Lloyd," Frank says, his definition of
friend
expanding in direct proportion to his self-interest, "and we're talking about doing a pilot together. So pack up the mukluks,
babe. No one's playing an Eskimo." And with that, Frank turns his attention to the homicide rate in South Los Angeles.
Honey's thinking,
This is different. Things may not be as dark as I anticipated.
"What's the pilot about?"
"The Bones."
"So there's a part for me, right? I mean, if it's about you, then I have to be in it since I'm your girlfriend."
"Yeah, sure, babe. There'll be something for you to do."
The dismissive tone.
Like what? Answering your fan mail?
"Frank . . . " Plaintive.
"There will be something for you to do," he assures her, looking up from a headline reading HONOR STUDENT GUNNED DOWN and
into her limpid pools of nascent vexation. "You feel like knockin' boots?" The sight of Honey's slightly erect nipples pushing
against the sheer silk of her camisole is causing a patriotic stirring as Frank's red blood cells begin to salute the flag.
"I'm going to yoga." She gets up, places her coffee cup and empty bowl in the sink. "Oh, by the way, I scheduled the surgery
for next Wednesday. So don't make any plans for that day." Frank nods barely discernibly as Honey exits.
"Babe"—calling after her—"I want to go out with Lloyd Melnick and his wife in the next few days so let me know what night
works for you."
Honey sticks her head back in the door. "Who?"
"Lloyd Melnick. The friend I just met with."
"Who is he?"
"A writer who's hotter than Satan's balls right now."
"Why do you want to go out to dinner with a writer?" As she says
writer
her voice curdles. Apparently, her subscription to the
New York Review of Books
is doing nothing to lessen the disdain the word
writer
engenders in certain precincts of Los Angeles.
"Melnick is someone everyone wants to be in business with, and I want to get into bed with him in a figurative way because
a guy of his abilities working with a guy of my abilities could put me in the position to buy you a very big house."
Honey likes the sound of that. Suddenly she is slightly less dismissive of this Melnick person, whoever he is. And she can
work on him to write a part for her.
"I'll buy something new to wear," she says, disappearing with an impish grin.
Frank selected Portmanteau, an elegant French restaurant on Melrose, because the owner owed him a favor and Frank knew he'd
let him skate on the bill. He and Honey, who is wearing a clinging angora sweater (purchased for the purpose of making Lloyd
want to have sex with her, a desire she is fervently praying will be channeled into his writing her a particularly juicy part),
are waiting at a corner table when the Melnicks arrive, Frank on time for once in his life. When Lloyd shakes Honey's hand,
he works hard to not visualize her in the latex bondage outfit she wore so well in
Hot Ninja Bounty Hunters
and falls utterly. Frank greets Stacy, whom he has never met, as if she were about to give him a suitcase filled with cash,
and the women exchange uncomfortable smiles.
Lloyd and Stacy settle into the table, steeling themselves for the evening. The dinner had been a bone of contention, Stacy
not wanting to go. Now, Lloyd is concerned that she enjoy herself.
Frank orders a bottle of Chateau Lafitte from the waiter, an actual French person, a young man with Gypsy features Lloyd notices
Stacy looking at a little too intently. When the waiter departs, Frank says, "So . . .," as if inviting someone, anyone, to
step into the conversational breach.
"They still chasing after you for the Eskimo thing?" Lloyd says, knowing any question about Frank's career will lead to an
answer guaranteed to fill up at least the next twenty minutes of the conversation.
Three bottles of Lafitte into the evening Honey is saying, "I was thinking about doing porn for about five minutes after I
did the ninja thing because I got tons of calls, people loved that movie. It sold, like, millions of DVDs. I mean, I have
fans up the yin-yang. It's so funny, you pretend-fuck some guy in a movie and everyone thinks you're, like, porn girl. And
we're talking simulated, you know? It's not like I was really fucking him!"
Honey's voice has risen with her level of blood alcohol, and Stacy looks nervously around to see who might be listening. A
couple two tables away, the man in a conservative suit, the woman in an elegant silk dress, have stopped in midconversation.
As Honey continues, Stacy shrinks into her seat. Lloyd, meanwhile, is fighting an erection. "I wouldn't do anal or two-girl
or gang-bang or even two-guy, and the producer said if I was going to limit myself with what I'd do, then I wasn't going to
go that far in the business." She looks over at Frank and smiles, placing her hand on the back of his neck, massaging it with
the tips of her fingers.
Lloyd is now looking over at Stacy, whose jaw has literally dropped open.
Honey, oblivious to the effect she is having, continues, "I got offers for foot fetish because I have really beautiful feet,
but I thought that was kind of creepy, don't-go-there, right? But the girls who do it? They market their shoes on the Internet,
okay? Guys pay an incredible amount of money for girls' shoes if they're into the girl."
"You could've had a hell of a mall order business, babe," Frank says, swirling his wine around in the glass, not looking at
Honey, having heard this monologue before.