Steven Bochco Read Online Free Page A

mind reader! If you want to fuck,
say
so,” Vee shouts, trying to match Bobby’s rising volume.
    â€œWhich is why I said let’s take a shower!”
    â€œAnd I said okay! And
you
said forget it!”
    â€œJesus Christ, this is where I came in,” Bobby says.
    Now Vee starts to cry, as much out of frustration as from hurt. “Why are you doing this to me?”
    â€œRight. It’s always about you,” Bobby says.
    â€œDid it ever occur to you that maybe I’d feel like having sex more often if you actually did something productive once in a while instead of getting shit-faced at four o’clock in the afternoon and picking a fight?”
    â€œFuck you, Vee,” Bobby says, and throws the contents of his wineglass at her crotch.
    â€œYou are such an asshole,” Vee says, and slams the shower door shut on him.
    â€œMaybe your boyfriend’ll lick it off for you,” Bobby says, and walks out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind him, not sure if she heard him or not and not wanting to stick around to find out.

CHAPTER 4
    The next morning, Bobby wakes up on the couch, dehydrated and hungover, and by the time he’s chewed three aspirins and taken a hot shower, Vee’s headed out the door, her voice as cold as a well-digger’s ass, informing Bobby she’s going over to Paramount for an audition.
    And because writers like to torture themselves, Bobby quickly gets dressed and drives over to the Peninsula Hotel, where he parks across the street, waiting an hour and a half till he sees his wife exiting the hotel with the same guy from the day before, watching them as they kiss and grab-ass each other good-bye.
    The toughest part of finding out your wife is cheating on you is not being able to get the picture of it out of your head. You see them in your mind’s eye making love, your wife—your fucking
wife,
for God’s sake!—opening her legs to this prick, saying intimate things in his ear, touching his body, touching his cock, doing things with him she won’t do with you anymore. Or maybe never has.
    You see him touching her, putting his hands on her, in her, all over her, invading
your
territory. And as each obsessive image mocks you, insults you, violates you, you experience what’s commonly referred to as jealous rage, and you realize you’re actually capable, in that moment, of murder. They used to call it a crime of passion, and under the right circumstances, no jury in the world would convict.
    By way of example, there was a guy—this is years ago—named Jennings Lang, who was a big-shot talent agent at MCA (which later became Universal Studios in the days before the studio morphed into a multinational entertainment conglomerate).
    Jennings Lang was supposedly having an affair with one of his clients, a beautiful movie star by the name of Joan Bennett, who was married to a producer named Walter Wanger. The story goes that Walter Wanger found out about the affair, confronted the two of them in flagrante delicto, as they say, pulled out a pistol, and shot off one of Jennings’s balls.
    Needless to say, he never spent a day in jail for what he did, and the guy who told me that story, a director named Jack Smight, swore to me that from that day on, he called Jennings
Jenning.
    Anyway, Bobby drives around nursing his jealous, obsessive rage, killing time until his two-thirty meeting with Jared Axelrod, and when he finally works his way through the Twentieth Century Fox studio security barricades at the front gate, parks his car halfway across the lot, and gets lost looking for this guy’s bungalow, who do you think this Axelrod turns out to be?
    If you guessed the guy his wife’s been banging at the Peninsula Hotel, you’d be right. If you also guessed the meeting was a total disaster, that would be right, too.
    For all the reasons I mentioned before about why I think Bobby didn’t confront Vee, he’s not