The Man Who Cancelled Himself Read Online Free Page A

guy.” Lyle ran a big pink hand over his big pink face, like he was washing it. “Hey, enough about the show. Let’s talk about you and me. You gonna do this book with me?”
    I stood up and smoothed my trousers. “I’d like to stretch my legs, Lyle. Can we take a stroll?”
    “Sure, sure.” Slowly and with great effort, he got to his feet. It was like watching someone trying to get his butt up out of a deep hole. “We’ll walk on the beach. C’mon, Katrina. We’re walking.”
    She stayed where she was, eyeing me shrewdly, her left eye drifting slightly. “No,” she concluded. “I have some phone calls to make. You boys go ahead.”
    “Aw, gee, ya sure?” He was whining, like a petulant, jumbo-sized kid.
    “I’m sure, Pinky.”
    “Okay. Oh, hey, that reminds me, Hoagy.” He cleared his throat uneasily. “Katrina has something she’s busting a gut to ask you. If ya don’t mind.”
    I did mind, but I owed her one now.
    “I heard the father of her baby was really Sam Shepard,” she blurted out eagerly. “Is that true?”
    “I only know what I read in the papers.”
    She frowned. “You mean Merilee won’t even tell you?”
    “I mean Merilee especially won’t tell me.”
    She tossed her blond mane. “Gee, I don’t understand.”
    “That makes two of us.” Lulu let out a low growl from next to me. “Correction—three of us.”
    And with that we walked down the sandy path to the beach. It was a weekday, and there were very few people out. There was a black nanny in a starched white uniform with a little blond boy, who was crying. There was a teenage girl in a T-shirt and cutoffs sitting on a towel writing someone a letter or a poem. There was us. The tide was out. The Great White Monk wheezed as he clomped through the wet sand, his arms swinging wildly back and forth. I had to walk three feet away from him to keep from getting belted. Lulu scampered down to the water’s edge and chased a gull away, arfing gleefully. Some of the happiest days of her puppyhood had been spent here on this very beach. That first summer, when Merilee and I were golden. But that was once upon a time.
    “I have the perfect woman, Hoagy,” Lyle Hudnut boasted, yet again. “We have unbelievable sex together. Woman’s a Hoover, y’know what I’m saying? She sucks up every last drop, is what I’m saying.” He had a smug, nasty little smirk on his face. I wanted to wipe it off. I would continue to want that the whole time I knew Lyle Hudnut. “And, whoa, you wouldn’t believe the clam she’s got on her.”
    “I didn’t come all the way out here to talk about Katrina Tingle’s clam, Lyle,” I said, to shut him up, and because I hadn’t.
    He stopped cold there in the sand, his face turning bright red again, as if clogged with blood. This time his eyes bugged out, too, and he began to breathe swiftly in and out, his thick lips pulled back from his teeth in a menacing grimace. Quite some intimidating presence, really. I doubted there was anyone in network television he didn’t scare the shit out of. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he bellowed, fists clenched tightly.
    “Which them is that, Lyle?”
    “Them who are always putting everyone else down. Them who are always criticizing. I can’t stand negativism! It’s a cancer. It spreads. It kills.” He shook a fat finger at me. “I’m totally serious about Katrina. I love her. And she loves me. She’s the real thing for me. I even changed my will. Katrina’s my sole beneficiary. If that’s not love, I’d like to know what is.”
    “Don’t look at me. I’m the wrong person to ask.”
    He snorted at me. We resumed walking, past the neighboring showplaces tucked back behind the dunes.
    “Geez, it’s so great here,” he observed contentedly. His mood swings were truly awesome. “Can’t believe I actually live out here. Me. Lyle Hudnut from Bay Shore. Of course, once we go into production I’m in the city full-time. Keep a suite at the