The Man Who Cancelled Himself (23 page)

“Gee, thanks, kid.” Lyle brightened considerably as he took the mug from Naomi, who today wore gym shorts and a short-sleeved jersey cropped an inch above her navel. “Hey, what’s that perfume you got on?”

“I’m not wearing any, Lyle,” she replied coyly.

“All little ol’ you, huh?”

She giggled. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, don’t change a thing,” he said, winking at her.

Katrina missed none of this. Coldly, she watched Naomi head off, tail swishing. Then she turned to Lyle, bewildered and hurt.

“You thought maybe we could do what, Trina?” Lyle asked, sipping his tea.

“Lunch for everybody,” she replied, in her cotton candy voice. “We could get Big Mama Thornton’s to bring over chili and stuff, and we can all eat together in the rehearsal room. It’ll promote a spirit of togetherness, and maybe boost morale.”

Lyle made those popping noises with his lips. “Whattaya you think?” he asked me.

“Can’t hurt.”

“Can’t hurt is right,” he agreed, warming to the idea. “Go for it, baby. Have Leo take care of it.”

“Leo!?” Katrina called.

She was over by the bleachers talking to Phil, the stage manager. She heard Katrina—she flinched. But she ignored her. Katrina’s nostrils flared, and she began to chew on the inside of her mouth.

“Yo, Leo!?” bellowed Lyle.

“Yes, Lyle?” Leo came right over, an unlit Sherman behind her right ear.

Lulu coughed and anxiously nudged my ankle with her head. She gets a little overeager on occasions. No sense of timing. I suggested she cool it.

“I’d like to do lunch for the whole gang today, Leo,” Katrina informed Leo stiffly. “From Big Mama Thornton’s.”

Leo’s eyes were on Lyle. Katrina she refused to look at.

“Chili and corn bread,” Katrina went on. “Some cole slaw, sodas, and a little beer, but not too much. Please have everything ready in the rehearsal room at twelve-thirty. We’ll need paper plates, plastic forks, spoons—”

“What, no tablecloths?” Leo cracked.

“Tablecloths would be nice, too,” she shot back.

Leo stood there fuming.

“Okay, Leo?” Lyle asked her.

“Whatever you say, Lyle,” she replied gruffly. “What do we tell the news media about the bombing?”

“Why, are they outside?” he asked, his voice filling with dread.

“In full force,” she replied.

“Tell ’em nothing,” he ordered. “We got no idea why it happened, no idea who did it. Make sure no one else talks to them, either. I want a tight lid on this. And I don’t want them in here with their cameras, understand?”

“What do I tell Marjorie?” Leo asked. “She’s called twice already.”

“Tell her I’m busy,” Lyle snapped.

“But she wants to know how we’re going to deal with it,” Leo pressed.

“We’ll deal with it,” Lyle said, with mounting impatience.
“Us,
not her.” And with that he went barreling off.

Leo started away as well.

Katrina stopped her. “Leo, I want Naomi Leight fired from the show.”

Leo whirled and looked down her nose at her. “No chance,” she said witheringly. “She’s my best girl.”

“I want her dropped,” Katrina ordered. “Today.”

“You don’t have the power to make personnel decisions, Katrina,” Leo huffed, sneering at her. “Only Lyle does. Take it up with him, why don’t you?”

Katrina’s cheeks turned blotchy. “Don’t challenge me, Leo. You can’t win.”

“You’ve got that wrong, Katrina,” Leo snarled. “I can’t lose.” Then she marched off.

Katrina stood there chewing on the inside of her mouth some more. “I’m going to ask you something, Hoagy,” she said, heaving her chest at me. A sure way to get a man’s attention. “And you’d better not lie to me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Katrina.”

“Did Lyle eat with you last night?”

“Eat with me?”

“He positively reeked of garlic when he got home. The smell of it was oozing from his pores when he came to bed.”

“Sounds romantic.”

She stood there glaring at me, the tigress trying to guard her prize cub. And failing miserably. She was angry and she was scared. Toxic combination. “And where did you take him afterward? He didn’t get home to the Essex House until three. And he was
so
exhausted he fell right to sleep. Didn’t even … well, you know …” She ran her pink tongue over her lips.

“We talked, Katrina. All we did was talk.” Until eleven. I didn’t know where he went after that, although I had a pretty fair idea.

So did she. “Lyle isn’t very strong,” she informed me, a strain in her itty-bitty voice. “Not like you and me. He’s someone who needs constant watching. I thought you understood that. I thought I could count on you.”

“I’m his collaborator,” I said. “Not his keeper.”

“If you’re going to be a bad influence on him you’re not going to be anything—except gone.”

“Suits me. Do you want to tell him or shall I?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you trying to insult me?”

I shook my head. “When I insult you there won’t be any doubt about it.”

She hissed and called me a bad, bad name. Bounced right off of me. When it comes to insults I’m coated in kryptonite. Then she ootsie-fooed off on her high heels.

I joined the writers in the front row of the bleachers. Lyle was pacing before them like a high school basketball coach, running his hands through his curly red hair while he collected his thoughts. Tommy looked positively decrepit after his night of drinking—at least a full year older. Marty looked rested and fit and at least a full year younger. Bobby was still among the missing.

“Who was that major babe you were talking to?” Annabelle wanted to know. “I’m like, ow-mommy mommy, have him bathed, oiled, and brought to my tent.”

“He’s Very.”

“He’s
edge.”

“No, that’s his name. Romaine Very. He’s a cop.”

“I’d like to undress him with my teeth.”

“Jesus Christ, Annabelle,” muttered Lyle. “Get your fucking hormones outta the gutter, will ya?”

“Sorry, daddy-waddy.” She rolled her black button eyes mockingly.

“As if that greaseball Lorenzo isn’t bad enough. What is it with you and low-class gorillas anyway? Hairy knuckles make your pants itch?!”

“It was just an observation,” she objected heatedly. She was genuinely pissed. “And I’m, like, Lorenzo’s
not
a—”

“Can we talk about my show now?!” Lyle broke in. “Do you mind?!”

She said nothing more, smoldering.

Lyle resumed pacing, all energy. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We go back to the pool hall. But we play down the gambling angle. Deirdre doesn’t hustle the milkman. Just shoots pool with Rob. Give the two of ’em their scene together, the same way we were gonna do it in the Japanese restaurant. Only do it in the pool hall, okay?” He clapped his hands together. “Better get on it.” He started off for the living room set. The fire department was leaving, the crew drifting back to work.

“Wait, what about the network?” Marty called after him.

“What about ’em?” Lyle demanded.

“Shouldn’t we clear it with them first?”

“What the hell for? It was the gambling they had the problem with, not the pool hall.”

“She mentioned the pool hall, Lyle,” Tommy pointed out dryly.

“No, she didn’t,” Lyle insisted. “She was cool with it. Am I right, Hoagy? Tell ’em I’m right.”

“She mentioned it, Lyle.”

He gave me The Scowl. “So what if she did? You guys gotta learn how to handle a network. You clear it with ’em
after,
not before. Otherwise, they’ll interfere in every single thing ya do. She’ll find out tonight at the run-through. She’ll have to swallow it because it’ll work fine and because it’ll be too late to change it. Leo!?” he bellowed. “Get the pool hall back from the warehouse!!”

“Right, Lyle!” she called out.

“Let’s rehearse! Time’s a wasting!” He looked around the sound stage. “Where’s the Chadster?!”

“Here, Lyle,” Chad piped up, from the living room sofa, where he sat reading over the script.

Lyle marched over to him, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, pal. Today,
you
drive this car,” he declared loudly. “Let’s you and me get to work—just us two.”

“Great!” exclaimed Chad, grateful for his master’s attention.

I stayed there with the writers. “Bobby still in Boston?”

Annabelle nodded. “He flew up there late last night. He’ll get in before lunch.”

“Were you three together when it happened?”

“Yup,” said Marty.

“I don’t suppose one of you stepped out for coffee just before it happened.”

“Nope,” said Tommy.

The three of them seemed quite unfazed by the bombing and the devastation. I guess they were so used to Lyle’s eruptions that nothing could shake them.

“Any idea who did it?” I asked.

Marty: “Don’t look at me. Loud noises scare the shit out of me.”

Tommy: “Me, either. I haven’t tossed a live grenade since I was six.”

Annabelle said, “Maybe Lyle’s not wacko after all.”

“Great punchline,” cracked Tommy. “But what’s the setup?”

“Seriously,” she said. “What if someone really is out to destroy him?”

“Then I wish that individual would come forward,” Tommy intoned solemnly. “Because I’d like to buy him or her a brand-new luxury automobile.”

“Where were you when it went boom?”

“Right here,” Fiona Shrike replied, gurgling.

Right here was her dressing room, where Lyle’s ex-wife sat perched, cross-legged, on her love seat with her shoes off. She wore linen pants of a shade the catalogues would probably call asparagus, and a loud, baggy Hawaiian shirt that made her seem even more fragile than she was.

“Doing what I’m doing right now,” she added, clawing at the cuticles of her left hand with the nails of her right. She was already in need of two new Band-Aids. Busy morning.

“Which is what?” I asked, averting my eyes. I don’t like to see people draw blood, especially their own.

“Trying to learn this awful script.” It lay open on the love seat next to her.

“You were alone when it happened?”

“I concentrate better when I’m alone.” She patted the sofa. “Have a seat if you’d like.”

I sat. The glass coffee table set before the love seat was heaped with fashion magazines and mail and different drafts of the script. A stick of fruity head shop incense burned in a ceramic holder. Lulu stayed outside in the hall. Incense clogs her sinuses. The door to Fiona’s much-coveted private bathroom was discreetly shut.

“Don’t like this week’s show?” I asked.

Fiona tilted her head forward so her hair shielded her fine-boned face. “What’s to like? It’s not funny. It’s not intelligent. It’s not … anything.”

“According to Lyle, it’s the most original, most brilliant half-hour in the history of series television.”

She let out a girlish snicker, covering her mouth with her hand. “The truly amazing thing about Lyle is he believes it, too. The man has an endless capacity for self-delusion.”

“Bobby thinks it’s just a device Lyle employs to psych everyone up, himself included. He thinks Lyle knows, deep down inside, that
Uncle Chubby
isn’t that good.”

Fiona shook her head vehemently. “Bobby doesn’t know Lyle. Trust me, Lyle
believes
it. Once, when we were leaving the theater after a Woody Allen movie—I forget which one—Lyle turned to me and said, ‘Woody’s not as good as I am.’ And he meant it. He was completely serious. See, Lyle has no perspective. In order to have perspective, you have to be tethered to reality.”

“And Lyle isn’t?”

“Lyle isn’t tethered to anything,” she replied. “He’s a man who has no core. At least, that’s what Noble thinks.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think he’s a born liar,” she said with quiet bitterness. “And that he believes his own lies.”

“Can we talk about your early college days? When the two of you first met at N.Y.U.?”

“Sure, only they’re
my
college days, not Lyle’s. He was never enrolled there. Or anywhere. I grew up in Scarsdale. My father was an insurance executive. I had an extremely boring, antiseptic upbringing. My house was clean, quiet, and safe,
I
was clean, quiet, and safe. And I didn’t want to be. I got interested in the theater when I was in high school, and I talked my parents into letting me go to N.Y.U. drama school. Mostly, I wanted to escape to Greenwich Village and be
artistic.
Write sensitive poetry, drink espresso at Café Figaro. And I did, too. I found a cute little apartment on West Twelfth Street. I wore peasant blouses and jeans and no bra, not that I’ve ever needed to wear one. I listened to Joni Mitchell. I marched in antiwar marches. I worked part-time in a record store on Bleeker and had sex with a lot of guys who I was friends with, which was no big deal then. If you liked someone,” she recalled a bit wistfully, “you slept with him. Only it never seemed particularly special or meaningful. Not sex, not school, not my life.” Fiona shuddered, so convulsively she shook the love seat. “I wasn’t sure why.”

“And then you met Lyle?” I suggested, to nudge her along.

She nodded, hugging a throw pillow tightly to her chest. “In line at the Bleecker Street Cinema. I was by myself, waiting to see
La Dolce Vita,
and Lyle was working the line. He was a street performer in those days—Fucko the Clown, he called himself. He wore a big red wig, red nose, and white-face, and he carried a drum. He’d bang on it and crack terrible jokes and badger people until they’d give him a quarter so he’d go away. He was gigantic and brash and loud. He was eighteen years old.”

“Did you think he was funny?”

“I thought he was horrible. You know what Lyle Hudnut’s first words to me were? ‘I’d like to stick my tongue up your ass.’ That’s what he said to me. And then he honked his nose. I ignored him completely. I mean, I was absolutely appalled. Then a few days later I was in acting class and this big, redheaded guy who was sitting in that day kept, well, grinning at me. Like he knew me. I didn’t recognize him, naturally, since he wasn’t wearing his Fucko the Clown makeup. After class he came up to me and said, ‘I’d still like to.’ I said, ‘You’d still like to what?’ And he said, ‘Stick my tongue up your ass.’ Well, I really let him have it. I told him you do
not
talk to a girl that way—it’s sexist and demeaning and crude. To which his response was: ‘I’m just being honest. Maybe you’d like me better if I lied.’ I said, ‘It certainly couldn’t hurt, because right now I don’t like you at all.’ And do you know what? He got so hurt he started to cry. Genuine tears rolled down his cheeks. We ended up having coffee together, and from that moment on Lyle Hudnut was a major part of my life.” Fiona paused, gulping for air. “Lyle was …” She shuddered again, this time practically lifting the entire love seat up off of the floor—I’m talking Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
here. “He was a wild man. A total free spirit—impulsive, reckless, spontaneous, and wonderfully liberated. He threw himself full-tilt into everything he did, as if he were alive for that moment and that moment alone. He had no past and no future. Only
now.
And because of that, he made
now
so much more vivid and exciting than anyone I’d ever known. He was utterly mad, of course, but for this repressed little twenty-year-old girl from Scarsdale, aching to bust out, he was a dream come true. He had this huge motorcycle, a Triumph, on which he zoomed around the city with total disregard for anyone’s safety, particularly his own. No helmet. I’ll never forget the first time he took me for a ride. I’d never felt so terrified in my entire life. Or so alive.”