Jaine Austen 2 - Last Writes (5 page)

Everybody cheered as he handed out the beers.

“How about you, Jaine?” Quinn asked. “You want one?”

Absolutely not. No way. If I wanted to wind up looking like Ally McBeal, the last thing I needed was a fattening beer.

“Sure. I’d love one,” were the words that actually came out of my mouth.

“So how’s your wife doing?” Kandi asked Marco.

“She’s in much better shape than I am. I’m a nervous wreck.”

I remembered what Kandi had told me, that Marco’s wife was about to give birth any day now.

“Let’s hear it for the papa-to-be,” Quinn said, holding his beer can aloft in a toast.

“To the papa-to-be!” everyone said.

The beers were definitely the highlight of the meal. Before long, we were all sitting around companionably, chewing the fat like long-lost friends.

Quinn looked around the nearly empty commissary. “This place reminds me of a dive I used to work at when I was trying to break into the business. It was one of those steak-and-salad-bar steak houses. The chef was a crazy drunk. He used to squeeze the steaks under his armpit before he tossed them on the grill.”

“Euuuu!” we all shrieked.

“That’s nothing,” said Marco. “I once worked on a show where the leading lady was such a bitch, she demanded a kosher pickle at every lunch. But it had to be a special pickle, from a deli all the way out in Tarzana. The propmaster hated her so much that every day before handing her the pickle, he used to piss on it.”

Before long everyone was swapping Breaking Into Showbiz stories.

“When I worked as a waiter,” Dale said, “we used to put phony names down on the reservations list. Names like ‘Seymour Butt’ and ‘Tayka Leak.’ The poor hostess would run around calling out, ‘Tayka Leak! Is anyone here from the Tayka Leak party?’”

Quinn told about how, when he used to work as a valet parker in a swanky Malibu restaurant, he’d leave crazy things in the customers’ glove compartments. One time he put a pair of black lace panties in a married couple’s car. Another time, a snake. And another time, a week-old chili dog. Kandi told about her adventures writing one-liners for a sleazy comedian who tried to pay her off in postage stamps. And Wells told about the time he accidentally gave Lady Macbeth a wedgie.

The stories were great, and the laughter was contagious. No wonder people were always trying to claw their way into show business. It was so much damn fun.

Yet underneath all the hilarity, there was an unspoken competition to be the funniest. It was a contest, all right—subtle but undeniable.

And the winner was Quinn Kirkland. Just as at yesterday’s read-through, Quinn was getting the biggest laughs. The interesting thing was that his stories weren’t any funnier than anybody else’s. But he had a way of telling them that made them seem hilarious. I don’t know what it was—his timing, his expressiveness, or maybe just his amazing teeth. But whatever it was, it worked.

I looked around the room as everyone whooped with laughter at one of his adventures.

Everyone except Dale, who sat smiling stiffly, his jaws clenched like a vise.

“Yikes,” Kandi said, looking at her watch. “It’s after two.”

We’d totally lost track of the time. Which is what happens, I guess, when you have beer for dessert.

The guys hurried off to the stage, and Kandi and I made our way back to the Writers’ Building. I have to confess, I was feeling
tres
virtuous. I’d barely touched my rubber sandwich, which meant all I’d had for lunch was a 150-calorie beer. If you don’t count the teeny-tiny bag of potato chips that I snagged on my way out of the commissary.

Yes, I was feeling pounds lighter already, only faintly aware of my thighs flapping together as we hurried across the lot.

We grabbed our copies of “Muffy’s Revenge” and dashed into Stan and Audrey’s office, only to find the two of them in deep discussion with what looked like a college kid in a three-piece suit.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Stan was saying, as we burst in the room.

“I’m sure,” the kid said.

Audrey looked up at us, irritated. We’d obviously shown up at a crucial moment in the conversation.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Kandi said.

“We’ll call you when we’re ready for you,” Audrey snapped.

We backed out the door, like geishas in a tearoom.

“Who was the kid in the suit?” I asked when we were back in our office.

“Jim Samuels. Programming exec at the network.”

“That kid is a network executive?” I asked, gazing out the window at the transvestites on Santa Monica Boulevard. “He looks like he still needs somebody to cut his meat for him.”

“In television, the kids are in control,” Kandi said. “The logic is that only kids understand what other kids want to watch. And since the target age for most network shows is eighteen to thirty-four-year-olds, there are an awful lot of kids running the show. Everyone in TV is under thirty-five, and if they’re not they lie about their age. Luckily for us,
Muffy
is considered so un-hip that the age thing isn’t a huge issue.”

Good Lord. At thirty-six years old, I was already prehistoric.

“Something’s about to hit the fan,” Kandi said, reaching into her drawer and taking out her stethoscope. “The network guys never show up unless there’s trouble.”

She put on the stethoscope and pressed the earpiece to the wall.

Across the street a black transvestite with a blond afro hopped into a Volvo station wagon with a guy who looked like a charter member of the Young Republicans.

Kandi started giving news bulletins from the wall.

“Jim’s saying he’s testing poorly with the target demographics.”

“Who’s testing poorly?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shushing me.

“Now Stan’s saying,
How are we going to get rid of him?

“And Audrey’s saying,
As soon as his contract comes up for renewal, we can kill him off in a tragic automobile accident
.

“The network guy’s saying,
Yes, and we can turn it into a lesson about the dangers of drunk driving.

“And Audrey’s saying,
And then Uncle Biff can adopt Muffy
.

“And now Jim’s saying,
Let’s do lunch sometime
.”

Kandi turned to me, the stethoscope dangling from her neck.

“They’re talking about Dale. They obviously want to kill him off. And have Quinn take his place as Muffy’s dad.”

Just then I heard something rattling in the bushes outside Stan and Audrey’s office.

“I wonder what Dale’s going to do when he finds out,” Kandi said.

“Come see for yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

I motioned her to my side and pointed to a figure crouched in the bushes, listening intently to every word of Stan and Audrey’s conversation.

It was the future accident victim himself, Dale Burton.

As it turns out, what Dale did was dust himself off and slink out of sight.

“What a desperado,” Kandi said. “I can’t believe the man would hide in the bushes to eavesdrop.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said, pointing to the stethoscope still dangling from her neck.

She had the grace to look marginally ashamed.

At which point, the phone rang. It was Audrey, summoning us back to rewrite duty. The Millers said nothing to us about Dale’s imminent demise. Instead, we went back to work on next week’s script as if no funeral bells were about to toll in Muffyland.

By four o’clock, Stan was well into his third Evian bottle of the day. So I was shocked when, in spite of enough gin in his veins to keep a bunch of fraternity boys drunk for a week, he actually managed to come up with an idea.

If you remember (and there are demerits for those of you who don’t), the script we were working on was the stirring saga of what happens when Muffy turns her biology teacher into a frog. In the script, Muffy keeps the frog in her kitchen sink. Stan suggested that when Muffy’s spell finally wore off, the audience would see the teacher, soaking wet, sitting crammed into Muffy’s kitchen sink. Okay, so it wasn’t Neil Simon, but it was an idea, one of Stan’s very few.

“Not bad, Stan,” Audrey said.

Stan beamed like a kid getting a gold star from his kindergarten teacher. It was pathetic how much he seemed to need Audrey’s approval.

“Let’s go down to the set,” Audrey said, “and see if it’s possible for someone to actually fit in the sink.”

And so the four of us went trooping over to the stage, where Audrey was annoyed to see that the actors had already left for the day.

“It’s like The Actors Country Club around here,” she muttered. “I suppose we ought to be grateful that they put in an appearance each day.”

Somewhere off in the distance, we heard a radio tuned to a Latin salsa station.

“Must be one of the crew,” Stan said.

“At least somebody’s working,” Audrey sniffed, as she led us over to the kitchen set.

“Okay, Stan,” she said, pointing to the sink. “Hop in.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because we need a man-sized butt. And when last I looked you were the only man in the room.”

She shot him a look of steel. But surprisingly enough, Stan stood his ground.

“I’m not getting in there. You know I’ve got a bad back. Why can’t one of the girls do it?”

Audrey turned and looked at us appraisingly. Kandi, with her size 6 tush, was quickly eliminated. Audrey gave my derriere the once-over. Apparently, it met her standards for a man-sized butt.

“Jaine,” she smiled icily, “would you mind?”

“Of course I’d mind. That sink doesn’t look big enough to hold a crockpot. The last thing I want to do is humiliate myself by trying to jam my butt into it.”

Okay, so I didn’t really say that. What I said was, “No problem.”

I hauled myself up onto the kitchen counter, beginning to wonder if that beach house in Malibu was worth it.
Dear God,
I prayed as I lowered my butt into the sink,
please let it fit
.

And, I’m happy to report, it did.

Thank you, God
, I said wordlessly.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you—

Then, somewhere around the seventh thank-you, I began to hear a faint groaning sound.

“What’s that noise?” Audrey asked.

Oh, good Lord. The sink was about to collapse. It would be all over the studio by tomorrow: Jaine Austen sat in Muffy’s sink and broke it! This would be the most humiliating event of my life. I could see the headlines in
Variety
.
Big Butt Sinks Sink!

The groaning grew louder now, and I scrambled to get out of the sink before any more damage was done.

“It’s coming from over there,” Audrey said, pointing down to the other end of the stage.

Flooded with relief, I realized Audrey was right. The groaning wasn’t coming from the sink, after all.

I lowered myself back onto terra firma and followed the others as Audrey led the way to the other end of the stage.

As we walked, the sounds of the salsa music grew louder. And it soon became clear that the groans were not coming from an inanimate object, but from a human being: A man, in the throes of passion. We walked past the living room set, down to where Muffy’s bedroom was nestled in a remote corner of the stage. As we got closer to the bedroom, we could hear the breathy whimpers of a woman in ecstasy.

We peeked around the wall separating Muffy’s bedroom from the living room set.

And there on top of the pink chenille bedspread, surrounded by an audience of stuffed animals, Quinn Kirkland was doing to Vanessa Duffy what the network was about to do to Dale Burton.

Chapter Five

T
alk about your embarrassing moments. What exactly are you supposed to do when you walk in on two people boffing like crazed rabbits? The only polite thing to do, I guess, is walk back out again. But we all just stood there, frozen, staring at Quinn’s tanned tush as it bobbed up and down on top of Vanessa like an overheated piston.

Vanessa lay there, her long blond hair splayed out on the pillow, moaning in what I suspected was fake ecstasy. I don’t know about you, but the last time I was in the throes of passion (some time in the McKinley administration), I didn’t lie there with my eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. Which is what Vanessa was doing. Oh, sure, she was moaning stuff like
Oh, Quinn, baby, give it to me
, but I had the feeling it was just another acting job, and not a very good one at that.

Somewhere in the middle of her performance, her eyes wandered over in our direction.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “We’ve got company.”

Quinn looked over his shoulder and saw the four of us standing at the foot of the bed. He was uncomfortable for about a nanosecond; then he quickly regained his composure.

“Guess that’s a wrap, Vanessa,” he said, climbing off her perfect body and reaching for his briefs, not the least bit perturbed.

“Quinn!” Audrey gasped. “How could you?”

There was something about the way she said it, her voice husky with emotion, that roused my suspicions. Call me crazy, but she sounded a lot more like a betrayed lover than a disinterested head writer. Was it possible, I wondered, that Audrey had been having an affair with Quinn?

Quinn shrugged lazily. “Sorry, babe,” was all he offered by way of an explanation.

Audrey turned and marched out of the sound stage, her heels clicking angrily. Stan hurried after her.

I stood gawking, like a witness at the scene of an auto accident. Kandi grabbed me by the elbow and led me away. I turned back one more time to look at Quinn, zipping up his jeans. And to my utter amazement, he winked at me. Good Lord. He’d just finished boffing Vanessa, was possibly screwing Audrey, and now he was flirting with me. The man had the scruples of a gnat.

At that moment my Quinn fantasies bit the dust. I didn’t care how dazzling his smile was; the last thing I needed was an amoral sexaholic who had no qualms about sleeping with a minor. I was definitely going to have to kick him out of my Malibu beach house and find someone new to marry.