The Bones (16 page)

That evening, after reading
Goodnight Moon
to Dustin five times before the kid would even agree to lie down, Lloyd forced himself to kiss his son good-night and went
downstairs to brew some chamomile tea, thinking it might calm his nerves, which had been jangling like wind chimes in a monsoon
since Bart Pimento was decreed an integral part of his life. Stacy was in the kitchen poring over a recipe book.

"You're cooking?"

"I'm designing the menu for that benefit dinner for Save Our Aching Planet," she replied, burrowing back into the book. Then,
after a few more seconds of intense concentration: "Hon, for the appetizer course, lemon kelp or sesame seaweed salad?"

Lloyd, who was standing at the sink filling the teakettle, wondered whether she'd ever called him
hon
before. It's usually
Lloyd
or, if she's feeling particularly affectionate,
sweetie. Hon
is a new thing. Where did she get it?

"Is this a theme night?"

"Save the Sea."

"Did I tell you who they're making me have lunch with?" he said, not really interested in edible sea vegetation.

"Who?" Stacy asked, chewing on a pencil, trying to arrive at an informed decision.

"Bart Pimento."

"You're kidding." That got her attention. "He's, like, the sexiest man alive."

"You never want to see his movies."

"I don't like all that thriller/action junk but, hon, don't take this the wrong way, I'd leave you for him." She smiled as
Lloyd looked at her quizzically. "I'm kidding."

Lloyd was now able to add this to the list of his wife's unforgivable sins. Not that she'd joke about leaving him, but that
she'd joke about leaving him for Bart Pimento.

"You really like him?"

"He's totally hot."

A few days earlier, Stacy had reminded Lloyd that if he intended to pack his own books, something he'd told her he wanted
to do, not trusting the movers with a personal library that featured at least a hundred mint-condition pulp-fiction paperback
originals from the 1940s and '50s obtained over the years in various local flea markets, he needed to do it soon since the
move to Brentwood was imminent. Feeling pushed from her orbit by the pulsing force field of her attraction to Bart Pimento,
Lloyd decided now would be a good time to start packing up his library and excused himself.

Lloyd wandered into the family room and began pulling books out of shelves and placing them in corrugated boxes he'd found
in the garage. The Melnick collection was a good one since both Lloyd and Stacy read avidly, and a wide variety of areas were
represented. There was modern fiction, mostly in hardback, and at least fifty paperback Penguin Classics from college days,
their familiar orange spines frayed from use. There was history, sports, film, women's fiction—whose exemplars Stacy regarded
with great seriousness and could never get Lloyd to read—and there was Lloyd's crime fiction and its subgenre, detective fiction,
a genus for which he held a particular affection.

This style of writing in the hands of its more deft practitioners had long provided Lloyd with shocking tours of worlds he
would occasionally think about visiting in real life, if only he had the courage; places populated by grifters and prostitutes,
crooked cops and sadistic criminals, people for whom the world was a steel-cage death match, trust a chimera, and life itself
nasty, brutish, and short. Lloyd knew no one like this in Mar Vista. He'd known no one like this growing up in the Riverdale
section of the Bronx or while he was in college or in his years in a bubble-like Manhattan its residents often mistook for
the larger New York City, which was another concept altogether.

Lloyd would read these books and lower himself into their murky depths, Orpheus vicariously descending, to peer around, titillated
at the crazy quilt of pathology swirling about him. The very darkness of these worlds was a tantalizing opiate, beckoning
him to leave behind the cozy confines of his dull suburban existence and venture forth to lose himself in their stygian mysteries.
Then, finishing a chapter, he would close the book, turn off the light, and nestle into his comfortable bed.

After lovingly packing his vintage paperbacks, Lloyd turned his attention to the film section. There were books on Billy Wilder
and Italian neorealist cinema, books that purport to teach someone how to write a screenplay, and one small red paperback
by Rudolf Arnheim called
Film as Art
(a touchingly quaint title), which had been given to him by a college girlfriend twenty years earlier after he had taken her
to see a Jean-Pierre Melville double feature at the Bleecker Street Cinema (which had since become a shop selling tchotchkes
to tourists, he recalled with no little distress). He almost laughed at the naive aspirations he had held so long ago as he
stood alone in the family room in his Mar Vista house listening to Stacy puttering in the kitchen. Lloyd pulled the Arnheim
book off the shelf and opened it. On the title page was written simply:

Dear Lloyd,

May you get all you deserve.

Love, Kim

What was Kim doing now? She was a clever girl from Connecticut who wore Laura Ashley dresses and talked about becoming an
architect and moving to Italy, a country she'd fallen in love with during a junior year abroad. Lloyd had heard some years
ago Kim was working for a hospital in Maryland.
Probably married a doctor and lives in Bethesda, couple of kids, car pools, IRAs, the golden cage.

Lloyd felt a brief tightening in his throat. He swallowed and breathed deeply, looking at the book, which, he realized, he'd
never actually read.

"Lloyd?" He glanced up and saw Stacy standing in the door. Guiltily, he let the book drop to his side as if it were incriminating
evidence. "I found renters. Older couple, no kids."

"Great." Lloyd and Stacy had decided to hold on to the Mar Vista house as an investment property, and there was some concern
that it would be hard to find people who wouldn't trash the place.

She walked toward him, smiling. "I am so excited. Are you excited?"

"I'm excited, too," he said.

"What are you reading?"

"Nothing." And he stuffed the book into a box.

Three hours later, somewhere between midnight and one o'clock, Lloyd was flopping around the mattress like a hooked trout
desperately wishing some fisherman would materialize out of the darkness to whack him on the head and put him out of his misery.
He had taken two shots of NyQuil, but that had done no good, and his febrile mind, which was leaping from subject to subject
like a monkey in a tree, had landed on the problem of devising a way to frame the Pimento situation to the Jews Without Jobs.
Bart Pimento was the kind of celebrity he and his cronies would regularly eviscerate: dim, humorless, and impossibly good-looking.

But Bart was a name of sizable dimensions, even if his image had taken a beating lately, so that would be good for something.
And his presence in the project, barring a disaster of truly Chernobyl-sized proportions, guaranteed the show would get on
the air. That, too, certainly counted for something, as the various Jews would be clamoring for jobs and those jobs would
be Lloyd's to bestow. But something chipped away at Lloyd, cutting inward toward his core until it broke through to the hidden
chamber where his self-image was kept inside a fortress of willful delusion, protected and safe. And there it was, superhuman,
awesome, like a face in the sky: Phil Sheldon. Phil Sheldon's white-hot righteous glare burned through the protective layer
and left Lloyd defenseless, vulnerable, and ready to fire his manager for getting him into this situation.

Phil Sheldon would not let the network push him around on a casting decision. Phil Sheldon would not be having lunch with
Bart Pimento tomorrow.

Phil Sheldon would . . .

He'd . . .

Okay, so what exactly would Phil Sheldon do? For starters, he would have come up with his own idea already so he wouldn't
be in the position of having to write something like
Happy Endings.

The NyQuil had dehydrated Lloyd, and as he lay there, he could almost see the tiny green NyQuil men chasing down the ornery
sleep-inhibitors in his brain like characters in a Tex Avery cartoon. The NyQuil forces were firing their six-shooters, but
those wily sleep-inhibiting varmints kept dodging the bullets in a Technicolor extravaganza of slapstick violence and near
death. Lloyd had a whole Saturday-morning animation festival going on in his head.

After another half hour of this shoot-out at the Cerebral Cortex Corral, he got out of bed without disturbing Stacy and downed
two more shots of the sticky, viscous liquid. He went downstairs, removed the copy of
Film as Art
from the box, sat on the sofa, and began to read. After a few pages, the NyQuil deputies, now reinforced to posse size, were
able to obliterate their crafty adversaries and Lloyd fell into an uneasy slumber.

He dreamed he was driving a Mini Cooper east on the 101 toward Burbank. Although the tires of the tiny car hugged the freeway,
its body was suspended one hundred feet in the air on a loosely mounted hydraulic pole, so as the Mini careened down the asphalt,
Lloyd swung wildly north, south, east, and west, dangling over roads, houses, and antlike pedestrians, futilely attempting
to restrain the out-of-control machine, constantly on the verge of crashing to the pavement, where his smashed body seemed
destined to lie, a limp sack of blood, organs, bones, and excrement.

And so Lloyd is seated across from Bart eating Euro-Laotian cuisine as the koi swim beneath their feet.

"I really relate to the concept, Lloyd. But I have some ideas . . . " And Bart goes on to give Lloyd the benefit of the deep
thinking he has done regarding his character, a wacky Las Vegas pimp who runs the massage parlor. That his character is not
a character in the traditional sense but rather a vaporous construct Pam Penner had pitched over the phone to his agent does
not register with Bart, who approaches the nonexistent material as if it were
Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lloyd listens dutifully as he picks at his sea bass on a bed of Asian radishes, wondering (a) how is he going to maneuver
Bart away from his show since he knows the actor's participation will spell doom for the project, and (b) what exactly
is
his show? Because if Lloyd doesn't come up with his own notion of a hit network comedy pretty quickly, he is going to plight
his creative troth to both Bart Pimento and
Happy Endings,
which explains the speed with which the bile in his stomach is churning.

"You know what's funny, Lloyd? Comedy-wise, I mean?" Bart asks, breaking into Lloyd's reverie. Lloyd looks at Bart wondering
if he's expecting an answer. Then Bart provides it. "Jell-O. Jell-O is funny. Fill a hot tub with Jell-O, put me in it, and
people will laugh their assess off. Am I right?"

As Lloyd ponders this follow-up question, another thought announces itself: whether or not
Happy Endings
ever gets on the air, Lloyd's weekly checks will continue to arrive with the predictability of swallows to Capistrano. His
ego would be vested in its success to some degree, but as we have seen from his recent literary exertions, he wants to turn
his creative attention in a more emotionally satisfying direction, one where the inner Melnick will be allowed to flower.
It isn't as if he is going to replicate the success of
The Fleishman Show
whatever he does, he reasons, so perhaps it is best to remove the ego and find another field on which to play. These disjointed
thoughts combine to create a moment of stunning clarity for Lloyd, one that allows him to vent the long-submerged subversive
streak that usually, and blandly, only manifests in his wardrobe—

It does not matter if my show fails.
Then, further:
Maybe it will be good if it fails.

Maybe it will be good? If the show falls?

Lloyd Melnick, overpaid envy of every comedy writer in town, is pondering falling on purpose. Not by subverting his project
himself, for that would be too obvious, but by engaging in the far more subtle sabotage of not standing up to protest a powerful
executive's idiotic idea. This is radical behavior for a television writer, a breed known for, perhaps more than anything
else, the intensity with which they will rail, always in private, against the perceived nincompoopery of the decision-makers
with whom they work. And then do absolutely nothing about it. Yet, in the mind of the television writer, no obscenity is too
strong, no feeling too deep, when it comes to describing these whoring, arrogant malefactors with their expense accounts and
their charts and their focus groups whose uninformed regurgitations they regard as holy writ to wave in the faces of the poor
schnooks who have given their life's blood to get their work produced only to be told, "It didn't test well."

DIDN'T TEST WELL??!!

Because eleven fat-assed submorons who had been found perambulating on the Universal City Walk were wired up to some gizmo
created to record their effusions as they watched a new show and suddenly considered themselves cultural critics with whom
to be reckoned? When half an hour earlier their bulbous noses had been buried in chili dogs as they were deciding whether
to see the third sequel of a banal action movie or a ninety-minute comedy whose gags, if spliced together, would provide thirty
seconds of feeble laughs? "Well, fuck that" went the general reasoning.

Lloyd knows he has to escape the creative strictures of Television World while still maintaining his cash flow and realizes
this is perhaps his ticket.

Yes, sign off on Bart and
Happy Endings.
The guy's a movie star. He's promotable. Harvey Gornish loves him. What could be bad? The show will be an abortion and Lynx
won't expect anything from me until the next development period, which is a year away. It's the perfect crime. Not only will
there be no suspects, no one will realize what I've done. It's revolutionary. I'm revolutionary. I'm Che Guevara, only without
the beard, the beret, and the followers. No, wait! I'm not just Che Guevara. I'm Max Bialystock! I'm Che Guevara
and
Max Bialystock. This is brilliant . . . brilliant! Hold it. Didn't Che get killed and Bialystock go to jail? Yes, but they
weren't Hollywood comedy writers. We just get old and bitter. At forty. But now . . .