Free The Bones by Seth Greenland Page A

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