The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “They made her a development executive,” said Big Dave, in the mournful tones someone else might have used to announce that a dear friend had become a vampire or a Republican. “And we were told not to hire another girl.”

  “We were told no such thing,” Little Dave said.

  “It was suggested,” Big Dave said.

  “It was not,” Little Dave told me.

  “You don’t have to worry about offending me. I’m down with anal,” I said, and immediately began wondering what kind of treatment I’d opened myself up to with that statement.

  “Writers’ rooms are dirty places,” Little Dave said.

  “Oh, believe me, I know. I worked right outside of one for three years. I’m a dirty girl,” I promised. I kept my legs crossed in case they were trembling and held my arms stiffly against my sides, convinced that I’d sweated through my silk blouse. “I can do gross, believe me. I once wrote a whole bit about how annoying it is when the adhesive from the maxi-pad sticks to your pubic hair.”

  Little Dave looked mildly repulsed. Big Dave looked actively interested. My face felt like it was on fire, but I pressed on. “Seriously. Whatever you guys need . . .” Oh, God. I shoved my hands against my skirt. “I mean, don’t worry if you think it’s, you know, demeaning . . .” Oh, God. Ruth, stop talking.” I’ve been an assistant before. I know the drill. I’ll get coffee or lunches. I’ll pick up your dry cleaning . . . photocopy your scripts . . . make your reservations. If you need notes dropped off at home, at night . . .”

  Big Dave was chuckling.

  “Okay, I realize that I’m babbling, and also that I sound like a whore. This is my first job interview in a while, and I’m a little out of practice, and that light saber’s making me nervous . . .”

  “Oh, it’s not a working light saber,” said Big Dave, not without regret.

  “I’d work really hard. I’d be a good assistant. Thank you. That is all.” And, with that, I finally managed to close my mouth.

  Little Dave gave me a friendly smile. “I think she’ll do,” said Big Dave. He put down his juggling balls and headed into his office. Through the open door, I saw him open a toy chest with his name painted on the lid and began looking for something else to play with. But his partner wasn’t done with me yet.

  “Your scripts were good,” Little Dave said. He patted his thigh, and Pocket hopped out of her bed and hopped up into his lap.

  “Oh! Thanks!” I’d submitted my episode of The Girls’ Room, the dog-walking show where Taryn’s character had been locked in the bathroom, and a spec script I’d written about a girl who goes off to college and meets the ghost of her dead mother.

  “And I read your short story.”

  I had to work hard to keep my mouth from falling open. “You did?” I’d published a single short story, in an online journal called Room & Board, which had paid me in contributor’s copies. The story had been rejected without comment from The New Yorker, but the fiction editor at The Atlantic had sent a brief handwritten note: “You’re obviously a writer, but this isn’t quite right for us.” The story, called “Drive,” was about a young woman, recently dumped and hitchhiking home from college, who gets picked up by a woman on her way to meet the death row prisoner she married without ever having touched him. As the miles pass, the two of them have a long conversation about love and obligation and the Meaning of It All while sharing a bag of Cheetos on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. As an undergraduate, I’d thought it was very profound . . . but it had only been published online, six years ago, which meant that Dave Carter would have had to have done some serious digging to find it.

  “You liked it?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “I liked the dialogue. Writing the way people really talk isn’t easy. I thought you nailed it.”

  “Thanks,” I said, blushing with pleasure.

  Dave stroked his little dog’s back. She looked at him adoringly, as if there was no place she’d rather be than curled in his lap, and I thought, and quickly made myself stop thinking, that I could guess at how she felt. “You probably don’t want to be an assistant forever,” he said.

  “Maybe not forever,” I said. “It’s not such a good look when you’re fifty.”

  He nodded. “How does this sound: Let’s plan on you being around to help us when we need help. When we don’t need you, you’re free to do your own thing, write your own stuff. And if you want our help, we’ll help you.”

  This was unexpected and generous. “You will?”

  “We’ll supervise,” said Little Dave. “And if it’s good, we can open some doors. Bring it to the networks. They’ll take our calls.” Of course they would—when you had run one of the most successful sitcoms on the air for the past five years, of course networks would take your calls. Probably the president would take your calls, too, if you came up with some ideas for peace in the Middle East and wanted to bounce them around.

  “You’d do that?” I felt like I might cry. I’d wanted a job, any job, and had found mentors—saints!—instead of mere employers.

  “People helped us,” called Big Dave, who’d left his office door open and had, I guessed, heard the whole thing. “We want to pay it forward.”

  “And in spite of what Mother Teresa back there will tell you, it’s not entirely selfless,” said Little Dave. “If we bring something good to the studio, and they sell it to the network, that works to our benefit. They’d attach us. We’d get paid.”

  “Makes us useful to keep around,” said Big Dave, stretching his arms over his head and yawning noisily. “Even after we’ve stopped being productive and just show up in our offices to have a change of scene and use the bathrooms. Which Dave here does most mornings at around eleven. Just FYI.”

  “Ignore him,” said Little Dave, wincing.

  “That’s . . . wow. That’s incredibly nice of you. So . . .” I wasn’t sure if I was hired or how to ask. Little Dave sensed my discomfort and stepped in.

  “We’ll have HR give you a call and send over the paperwork. Can you start Monday?”

  “Of course,” I said. “And thank you. So much. You won’t regret hiring me,” I told them, and promised myself that I would work as hard as I could to make it true.

  EIGHT

  I spent the next year discovering that the Daves were as good as their word. Being their assistant involved plenty of scut work: copying and collating scripts, picking up sandwiches and coffee, ordering holiday cards, fetching dry cleaning and food for the office pantry, and taking Pocket to the groomer’s, but it also left me plenty of free time to work on the show that would become The Next Best Thing. Best of all, whenever there was an intern to watch the phones, the Daves would invite me into the Bunk Eight writers’ room. There I’d have a seat at the table with eight other writers, and all of us would pitch jokes and bits. A few of mine even made it on the air. At least once a week, one of the Daves would make a point of asking me what I was working on, which meant I had no excuse not to start writing my own thing.

  I’d had the idea for a long time, probably since I’d first decided to move to Los Angeles. I wanted to write about a girl who was kind of like me, and an older woman who was a lot like my grandmother, and describe their adventures, which would be fictionalized versions of our own. It would be a coming-of-age story, where the women coming of age would be twenty-eight and seventy-five, both of them falling in love, having their hearts broken, and learning, and mending, and moving along . . . and it would be set in Miami, as my own personal, secret homage to The Golden Girls.

  The Daves encouraged me as I wrote, offering notes and feedback and, best of all, free time to work. As the months went by, my crush on Little Dave only intensified. Big Dave was fun and funny, but Little Dave was the one I daydreamed about. I’d arrive at my desk before eight-thirty most mornings so I could be there when he wheeled through the door, and I’d stay until he’d left for the night. At any moment of the day, I had a kind of preternatural awareness of where he was: onstage, in his office
, on the phone, in the pantry, fixing himself a bowl of cereal or refilling his water bottle, and on weekends, when I didn’t see him, I stored up observations, anecdotes, stories I could tell. I thought of him when I should have been thinking of Gary, even when I was with Gary. At the movies, holding Gary’s hand, or at a restaurant, listening to him talk about his latest run-in with the head of the Language Arts department or the parents who’d tried to bribe him to raise their kid’s B+ to an A–, I’d find myself imagining what it would be like to be with Dave: his calm regard, his reticent, tucked-in smile.

  On the first Christmas I worked for Two Daves, I came to the office to find an elaborately gift-wrapped box on my desk. Inside, there was a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the Burke Williams spa (Big Dave’s doing, I guessed) and a wrapped first edition of what I’d told Little Dave was one of my all-time favorite books: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

  I stretched my budget and bought Big Dave the state-of-the-art video-game remote controls he’d wanted and mentioned at least once a day since November. That was the easy part. I spent hours thinking about what to buy his partner, who was hard to shop for, even in the notoriously difficult category of single men rich enough to buy themselves whatever they wanted. Little Dave didn’t care much about his clothes. He held season tickets for all the teams in town, so I couldn’t wow him with box seats to the big game. He played poker in Las Vegas, where he’d travel via private jet, and the hotel would comp his rooms and meals. He had enough money to get himself whatever he wanted, to go anywhere in style, and I didn’t want to go with the obvious choices: a scarf or gloves for his trip back east or, worse yet, a gift card for a bookstore or a restaurant.

  After extensive deliberation, I picked out two books: a coffee-table collection of Francis Bacon’s paintings, and one of my favorite novels, a book called Body by Harry Crews that I must have wrapped and unwrapped half a dozen times before deciding to just give it to him without comment or any kind of inscription beyond a generic, cheery “Happy Holidays.” It was a provocative choice, given my face, given his wheelchair. Body was a book about freaks: a female bodybuilder, one of the best in the world; her enormously obese older sister; her boyfriend named Nail Head, who’d come back from Vietnam with a deep suspicion of humanity and a tattoo of a fly on the head of his penis; and a bulimic male bodybuilder named Billy Bat, who’d earned his nickname for having the best back in the business, latissimi dorsi that flared out like bat wings. Body also had one of the sweetest sex scenes I’d ever read. About halfway through the story, set at the bodybuilding championships in a Florida hotel, the heavy sister seduces the male bodybuilder, who adores her for everything her flesh represents, all the things she could enjoy that he was forced to avoid—or eat, then purge. It was about love transcending appearance, about how beauty was a shifting line, arbitrarily dictated, easily changed, and how two people could connect in spite of physical differences, how they could fall in love in spite of appearances that set them apart from the rest of the world.

  “Hey,” said Dave, wheeling into the office the day after New Year’s. He was tanned from ten days in Hawaii, the hair on his forearms lightened from the sun, and as always, I felt my heart lift when I saw him. Any day when I got to see him, to talk with him or even just be around him, was a good day. “Thanks for that book. I really enjoyed it.”

  “You did? I know it’s a little out there . . .”

  “No, no, it was great. The voice was fantastic. I read the whole thing on the flight over. Couldn’t put it down.” I wondered how his traveling companion had felt about that. For the past few months, Dave had been dating Shazia Khan, who wore her black hair almost to her waist, along with killer spike heels that I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure for fifty yards. Once, during taping, I’d seen her perched on Dave’s lap, one leg slung over the armrest of his wheelchair, one arm coiled around his neck, her long hair covering his face like a veil as they kissed.

  “Did you have a good vacation?” I asked.

  He rubbed at his nose, which was slightly sunburned. “I did. The ocean was perfect.”

  “Do you swim?” I asked, surprised.

  Dave nodded. “It’s kind of a trick. Wheelchairs and sand aren’t a great combination. But once I’m in the water, I can still . . .” He mimicked a paddling motion, and I saw how strong his arms were, and couldn’t help but imagine him pulling me onto his lap, like he’d done with Shazia, and how it might feel to spread my hand against his neck.

  “I’ve never been to Hawaii,” I said.

  “It’s an easy trip. Quick flight. Let me know if you ever want advice on where to stay.”

  “Thanks.” I got busy behind my desk, turning on my computer, straightening the stack of scripts, slipping on my headset so I could collect the voice mails that had arrived overnight. Dave would normally begin his morning by wheeling into the pantry for a cup of coffee, black with one sugar, and a Clif Bar, either the carrot cake or brownie flavor. But that morning, he stayed in his chair in front of my desk, watching me as I lifted the receiver.

  “Do you need something?” I asked, setting the receiver back down.

  He was looking at me so intently I wondered if there was something on my face. That had happened before. The nerve endings on the right side weren’t as sensitive as those on the left, so I was always careful to check for stray toothpaste or lipstick or breakfast debris before I left the house and again before I got out of the car, but maybe I’d missed something.

  “Dave?” I asked, feeling my skin getting hot.

  He shook his head like he was trying to wake himself from a dream. “Sorry. Senior moment.” He touched his forehead and then put his hands on his wheels, shifting himself backward, as if going to the pantry. Then he stopped and said, “You know I’ve got a pool at my house, right?”

  “Right.” I’d talked with his pool maintenance people a few times, arranging for cleanings and deliveries of chemicals.

  “Maybe, if you wanted, you could come over for a swim.”

  “Really?” Dave knew that I was a swimmer. He’d spotted my gym bag, my goggles and suit tucked into its mesh pockets, and I’d told him how I loved the water, that I’d been a lifeguard for a summer on the Cape, that it had been one of the best summers of my life. (And also, although I didn’t tell him, one of the worst. In my National Seashore–issued red racerback bikini and a baseball cap pulled low, between my tan and all the running and swimming I did to stay in shape, I looked as close to a Bay-watch babe as I ever would in my life. Jogging across the beach sometimes, in that red bikini, tanned legs flashing, I’d notice the appreciative gazes of boys and men and the jealous glances of women—all gone the instant they got a look at my face.)

  “Yes.” He turned his chair so that he was facing the pantry. “I’m usually away most Sundays, playing poker. If you wanted to stop by . . .” He let his voice trail off, maybe wondering if this was a good idea, if it somehow crossed the employer-employee line.

  “My gym has a pool,” I told him. “So it’s not like I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  “Swimming outside’s different.”

  I found myself nodding in spite of myself. I swam at my gym all the time, of course, but the only outdoor swimming I’d gotten to do in Los Angeles was at Maurice’s club, and the pool there was on the small side, more for kids, or for tennis players to take a dip in, too short for me to get a decent workout. Still, I loved the feeling of swimming in the outdoors, the contrast of the air and the water on my skin.

  “You’d be helping me with my WASP guilt,” Dave said. “I’m the only one who ever uses the pool. It feels wasteful.”

  “Shazia doesn’t swim?” I asked casually, as if I wasn’t angling for information about how much time she was spending at Dave’s house and how serious they were.

  “Not much. It’s a hair thing, I guess,” he said. “Anyhow. There’s a key underneath the welcome mat . . .”

  “I heard that!” Big Dave sang out from his office.
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  Little Dave shook his head fondly. “Just shoot me a text ahead of time.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s really nice of you.”

  He ducked his head. “No problem.”

  I spent the rest of the week replaying the conversation, wondering whether he’d been serious or had just made the offer on the spur of the moment, never imagining that I’d follow through. I had a boyfriend, I told myself sternly, even though I suspected if I mentioned Dave’s offer to Gary, he’d just shrug and tell me to have fun. On Friday I decided that Dave was just being polite . . . but then, on Saturday afternoon, I remembered how he’d looked when he’d been talking about Body, how intently he’d stared at me, and I felt my stomach do a slow flip-flop. He wants to be my friend, I told myself. I could use friends. I’d made a few at The Girls’ Room, but since my abrupt exit from the show I hadn’t kept in touch, so now my circle was small: Gary, Grandma and Maurice, the Daves, the Bunk Eight writers, Caitlyn, who emailed from Berkeley, and a few of my college-bound clients who’d kept in touch.

  I texted his cell phone at eleven o’clock the next morning, after telling Gary I’d be spending the day with my grandmother. “I’m actually in Vegas,” Dave wrote back. “Stop by whenever you like—I won’t be home until eight or nine tonight.”

  I thanked him, plugged his address into my GPS, and drove, trying not to imagine that Dave had invited me over for drinks, or dinner, or to watch a DVD of one of the Oscar-nominated films that he got each year as a voting member of the Writers Guild and cuddle on his couch. Dave lived in a sprawling single-story modern house perched high on a hill near the Getty Museum, just off the 405. The key was where he’d told me it would be, and the wooden door, set in a frame that I guessed had been widened to accommodate his wheelchair, swung open easily. Pocket gave me a welcoming yip before curling back up on her dog bed in a patch of sunshine in the living room. Don’t snoop, I told myself . . . but it was hard not to stare, not to wander through the beautifully designed and decorated home and marvel at the way it had all been put together.