The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “How long will all that take?” he asked as we walked across Beverly. The dinner was at a steakhouse called Mastro’s, a few blocks from Rodeo Drive, with its boutiques and jewelry stores, close to where Grandma and I had stayed when we’d first come to town.

  “Depends. Six weeks, eight weeks, something like that.” The wind gusted, threatening to blow open my wrap dress and dislodge my hat. I clamped one hand down on top of my head, and struggled with my skirt with the other.

  “So you’re going to be waiting all over again?”

  “Yup,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about the prospect. “The network will make holding deals with the actors, so they can’t go off and work on something else. Say we get picked up in May. I’ll hire writers and bring back everyone I worked with on the pilot, assuming I liked them and the network or studio doesn’t want to replace them. We’ll start shooting in June and shoot all summer, depending on the order: if they want nine episodes, or eleven, or thirteen. The new shows premiere in September, unless we’re a midseason replacement, in which case January. And . . . that’s it.”

  “That’s it?” His voice was flat, his tone uninterested, his expression impossible to read in the darkness as he walked with his hands jammed in his pockets and his head down. He looked like a guy being led to the guillotine instead of to a party.

  “That’s it. Then you have to wait to see if you get good reviews, and if you find an audience, and if you get renewed.”

  “It’s a lot of waiting,” Gary observed.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. All I wanted was for Gary to be happy for me, to be as thrilled as I’d felt since I’d gotten the pickup, and all he’d done was ask picky questions, pointing out the problems, prodding at the soft spots, how long it would take to hear from the network or the audience, and how brutally the odds were stacked against me.

  It was January in Los Angeles, still warm enough to go out at night with only a light wrap. After a childhood in New England, I missed the seasons—the crisp fall air, the showers of dogwood and magnolia blossoms in May—but I’d grown to love L.A.’s weather—the warm winter days, the cool desert nights, the weeks that could pass without a cloud in the sky (except for the ever-present smog). Gary handed his leather jacket to the coat-check girl, I tucked my cashmere wrap into my bag, and we followed a hostess up the stairs covered in carpeting the color of rare prime rib, past a man playing Cole Porter on the piano and a line of beautiful women—escorts, I guessed—who were sitting at the bar, long legs crossed, glossy hair and perfect bodies on display. Every one of them had probably been the prettiest woman in her high school, her college, her hometown. Here in Los Angeles, though, beauty was as common as the oranges that grew on the trees everyone had in their backyards. As we walked past, I imagined their eyes on me, wondering what had happened to my face, grateful that it hadn’t happened to them. The high-ceilinged room was noisy with the sounds of conversation, silverware, and the muffled pop of a Champagne cork, and the air smelled like seared meat.

  “Here we are,” said the hostess, dropping us off at the entrance to a wine room toward the back of the second floor. When I walked in, the executives started clapping and I bent my head, embarrassed. There was a sign on the wall that read THE NEXT BEST THING. I wanted to take a picture, freeze the moment, live in it forever.

  “How about a toast!” said Lisa from the studio. She was dressed in her usual loose-legged trousers and high-heeled boots, a sweater and a chiffon scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck. Today the pants were pale gray, the sweater was black, and the scarf was shades of green from emerald to mint. There were ten of us at what had been billed as a small getting-to-know-you dinner, a celebration before we’d officially begin the work of building The Next Best Thing. Lisa and Tariq were there representing Lodestar, the studio that had produced my show, then sold it to ABS. From the network, there were Joan and Lloyd, who until the previous week had been Joan’s assistant, but had since been promoted to vice president of comedy. Both of my former bosses, the Daves of Two Daves Productions, were there—David Lieberman, with his wife, Molly, and David Carter, with his girlfriend, an entertainment lawyer named Shazia Khan, who was possibly the most beautiful woman in the room, if not the entire restaurant.

  Shazia’s skin was honey brown, her wide eyes were accented with perfectly arched brows, and her teeth glowed a bluish white that made them look slightly radioactive. She wore a red dress with gold accents, an outfit that was not exactly a sari but that somehow managed to suggest a sari, and jeweled gold sandals on her high-arched feet. Shazia’s father was Persian, a philosophy professor at Princeton, and her mother was Swedish, an actress in art-house films. Shazia was what you got when you combined those two exemplary gene pools. Not only was she beautiful, but she had an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degree from the University of Chicago, and was regularly named as one of the most powerful attorneys in town. None of the men in the room could take their eyes off her. David Lieberman—Big Dave—was especially solicitous.

  “Is he ignoring you?” he asked Shazia, gesturing toward his partner, who sat in his wheelchair. Dave Carter—Little Dave—wore a tweed sportsjacket, a white button-down shirt, and khaki pants. His shoes—brown leather loafers—were perfectly pristine, because Dave had never taken a step in them. He was paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a boating accident he’d had the summer after college. Paralysis had not prevented him from becoming one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, or from dating a parade of women, each one more lovely and accomplished than the one before.

  “Do you need anything?” Big Dave asked. Shazia gave him a patient, practiced smile, the kind of smile she must have dispensed a dozen times every day to parking-lot attendents, waiters, and deliverymen and just random male strangers on the street. “Another drink?” Big Dave persisted. “Something to eat? Want to wear my jacket? Take all my money? Anything?”

  “Honey,” said Big Dave’s wife. “Put your tongue back in your mouth and get Ruthie some wine.” Molly Lieberman smiled at me. Molly could afford to be indulgent. Her blond hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and Barbie-doll body might have made her looks a little more pedestrian than Shazia, but she was a former Miss Teen America who’d worked steadily on TV shows and in films, mostly horror movies, where she’d be chased through a dark house and murdered in the first ten minutes. At twenty-six, she’d married Dave Lieberman. At twenty-eight, she’d had twins and had since all but retired from acting. Like many Hollywood wives, she worked as a decorator. Unlike many Hollywood wives, who treated their job as a hobby and spent their time redecorating one another’s houses, Molly was actually good at her job—she’d taken classes, done an internship at Elle Décor, apprenticed herself to one of the top commercial designers in town, and now made more money than she had as an actress. Molly moved with the confidence of a woman who never doubted her place in the world, her good looks, her husband’s love and loyalty. That night, she was dressed in her usual surfer-girl chic, a floor-skimming halter-style maxi dress in a floaty chiffon, with a slightly threadbare lavender sweater wrapped loosely around her shoulders. She had Havaiana flip-flops on her feet, and a necklace bearing diamond charms that spelled the initials of one of her sons’ names around her neck. Her hair hung in loose, beachy waves that floated down to the center of her back.

  After she’d dispatched Dave to the bar, Molly reached over and adjusted the brim of my hat. I tried not to blush, or to grin like an idiot—a real live movie star, touching my things, treating me as if I belonged! “How are you?” Molly asked, sounding as if she actually cared. “Are you thrilled?”

  “Thrilled,” I repeated. The truth was, I was still in a state of disbelief that something I’d written, something I’d thought up in the privacy of my own bedroom, and on long walks, and while I was in the pool or the shower, was actually going to be cast and shot and might, if everything went well, someday be shown on TV.

  Molly loo
ked over my shoulder. “And how about you, Gary?” she asked. “Your girlfriend’s blowing up!”

  Gary managed a smile and bobbed his head in a quick nod.

  “Who’s going to be there?” he’d asked when I’d told him about the dinner. “Nobody special,” I’d said, knowing that if he’d known that Molly and Shazia, both the Daves, and the head of comedy for the network were coming, he’d find a way to be busy, or sick, or out of town. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d come,” I told him. “It’ll be fun,” I’d said. I’d emailed him reviews of the restaurant, which was supposed to have the best rib eye in town, extra-strong martinis, and warm butter pound cake for dessert, and I had been extra-solicitous in bed. Finally I’d given him what amounted to an ultimatum: Please come. I need you there. He’d squirmed, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. “It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” he’d said.

  “But it’s my kind of thing,” I’d pointed out, and added that I’d gone to his school’s end-of-year potluck picnic, that I’d chatted with his colleagues and even gotten into the principal’s swimming pool, scars and all. Why is it not your thing? I wanted to ask . . . but part of me didn’t want to know the answer and just hoped that he’d be a good boyfriend and come with me.

  Gary and I had met in the coffee shop where I’d retreated after things had fallen apart with Rob and I’d left The Girls’ Room. I’d run ads on Craigslist advertising my services—for a fee, I’d help high-school seniors craft their college essays. Gary had watched me working and asked if I could help him with his personal ad on Match.com, where he was flying, unnoticed and un-dated, under the handle “Lonelyguy.” (“Why?” I’d asked him. “Was ‘Desperate, Creepy Stalkerguy’ taken?”)

  We’d agreed on a fee. I’d interviewed him and learned that he was a high-school teacher, the middle of three children from St. Louis, that he’d come to Los Angeles with a girlfriend, that things hadn’t worked out but he didn’t regret the move, because he loved the California weather, the chance to spend most of his time in shorts and sandals and see the ocean every day. The ad I’d written spelled out his good qualities, his patience and consideration, his dry sense of humor, and then I discovered that I had feelings for him, and, much to my surprise, that he had feelings for me, too.

  Gary was my first real boyfriend, the first man I’d gone to bed with, and things had been wonderful. At least, they’d been wonderful when I was just the Two Daves’ assistant. When I’d realized I was thinking about Little Dave more frequently, and in different ways than an employee should think about her boss, I’d told myself it was just a workplace crush, destined to go nowhere. David Carter was ten years older than I was, and in a wheelchair, and the women he dated were so far out of my league that they might as well have represented some evolutionary leap forward from human females as I knew them. Gary was steady and funny and reliably kind. We’d bring in a pizza and watch movies on a Friday night, take trips on the weekends to the zoo or the park or the beach. I thought—when I wasn’t fantasizing about Dave dumping Shazia, or the gorgeous research cardiologist he’d dated before her, or the stunning actress who’d preceded the doctor, and declaring that I was the one he loved—that maybe someday Gary and I would get married. We’d buy a house in the Valley, where you could get more for your money, a place convenient to the private school where he taught, with a swimming pool and a guest house where Grandma could stay. I’d write screenplays, he’d teach history, and we would live out the non-glamorous Hollywood version of happily ever after. I would think about it . . . but it would be like thinking in outline, life as a series of occasions without any of the dialogue or description filled in. I could name the orderly procession of events—getting married, buying a house, having children—I just couldn’t imagine actually doing them with Gary. There was no reason why this should be: I loved him, I enjoyed his company, his sense of humor, his good looks . . . but when I tried to imagine the specifics—standing under a chuppah with him, or greeting him with a positive pregnancy test—my mind would shut down. When my pilot had been ordered, it felt like a good excuse to stop thinking about why that was, to simply apply myself to the work at hand and hope that my romantic future would sort itself out while I tended to my show.

  Ever since I’d gotten the call, though, things had gotten worse, not better. I’d thought that Gary, who’d always been supportive, my biggest cheerleader, my number one fan, would be thrilled for me, and that maybe I’d be able to picture more of a future together when I had the grown-up job title “executive producer and showrunner.” Instead of being an assistant, I’d have assistants of my own, and responsibility for a staff of actors and directors, gaffers and grips, set decorators and stand-ins that would eventually number close to two hundred. None of this would change the content of my character, just the size of my bank account. I would be, still, the woman I’d always been: same personality, same dreams, same face. But Gary had changed, becoming quiet and sullen and hard to reach. I’d dial his number and be sent straight to voice mail. Or we’d make plans and then he’d cancel at the last minute. In the past few weeks, he’d taken on extra work at school, agreeing to coach the chess club, offering extra Spanish tutoring sessions. He’d said that he could use the money, but that made no sense: I’d be earning four times what I’d be making as an assistant if the show got picked up, and the pilot shoots alone would give me more than enough to pay for our usual entertainments, and even fund a few weekends out of town, if we found time to take them . . . but when I pointed this out, he got even quieter, and every time I’d started to ask my grandmother what it meant, and why he was behaving as he was, I’d stopped before I’d started, part of me convinced that I did not want to know the answer. At least he’s here, I thought, and told myself that Gary’s presence in a roomful of executives and showrunners meant that he was coming around to accepting my new role . . . but the look on his face before he brought his wineglass to his mouth and drained it strongly suggested that he’d rather be anywhere else, anywhere but in this room, with these people.

  Waiters bustled to refill glasses and set out wooden platters of appetizers, sliced cured meats and house-made buffalata, ceramic dishes of glossy rosemary-brined olives, warm Parker House rolls with ridged pats of butter and silver-dollar-size mother-of-pearl dishes of sea salt on the side. Lisa beamed at me. “To Ruthie,” she said, with her glass held aloft, “and to The Next Best Thing. May it run for a hundred episodes.”

  “A hundred episodes!” everyone echoed. Glasses were clinked. More wine was poured. Little Dave, sitting in his chair with a glass of wine in one hand and his arm unself-consciously around his date’s waist, gave me a smile and lifted his glass. “Enjoy this,” he said. “It’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  I bent down to hear him better, glad for the excuse to get close. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he said in his calm, cultured voice, still with its hint of a New England accent, even though it had been years since he’d come west, “that they haven’t made a hash of it yet.”

  “Made a hash of it?” I must have sounded skeptical, because Dave gave me a wry smile.

  “I forget. You weren’t around when The Girls’ Room got off the ground. Or Bunk Eight. You don’t know what it’s like to have your vision . . .” He paused, letting his gaze rest on each of the executives as he sought out the right word. “Adulterated,” he finally said.

  I took another sip of wine, conscious of Gary, who was standing in the corner with one of the waiters. “I know things change once you’re in production,” I said. “I’ve been working in the business for five years, you know. Remember? I’m the one who sits at the desk outside your office? Reads the scripts? Sets up your lunches? Listens in on the notes calls? Goes to all the tapings?”

  “Ah,” said Dave. “But it’s different when it’s yours.” Before I could ask him to explain or tell him the seventeen reasons I believed my show would not, in fact, be adulterated, the waiters ushered us to
ward the table. Dave wheeled himself into the space left empty between Shazia and Lloyd. I took a spot at the foot of the table. In spite of Dave’s warning, in spite of Gary’s obvious unhappiness, I couldn’t stop smiling. My show, I thought, picturing the sign taped to the door, as I chatted with Joan, discussing actresses who might be right to play Daphne Danhauser, the lead, and her Nana Trudy. My show.

  There was roasted pork loin with fennel, seared rib eyes with truffle butter, and whole grilled branzino for the main course. Bottles of Riesling and Malbec were emptied and replaced and emptied again. Then came coffee and cordials and the famous butter pound cake, served with mounds of whipped cream, and salt-sprinkled dark-chocolate brownies on a wheeled cart. Afterward, groaning and vowing not to eat for a week, we all walked out to the valet stand, and I waited, thanking everyone, until the executives had departed and Big Dave had eased his frame into the tiny sports car he drove and Molly, who, sensibly, refused to contort herself into the passenger seat, had hopped into her Range Rover, and Little Dave had wheeled himself up the ramp of his Mercedes van, after holding the door for Shazia and closing it once she was in. Then, finally, it was just me and my boyfriend, standing in the windy street.