The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  I looked down and saw that the hubs of each wheel had actually dug slightly into the wood of the doorframe. “Maybe if I tilted you backward a little . . .”

  “Sure,” he said. His lips were pressed together, his face was calm and relaxed, and I noticed how his shoulders strained the seams of his shirt, as well as the thick tracery of blue veins on his forearms as he rested them in his lap. I bet he looked like a superhero with his shirt off, I thought, and felt my heart beat faster at the thought of it.

  There were no handles on the back of the chair—Dave had told me once that handles encouraged people to help, to push or guide him when he didn’t need pushing or guidance. I gripped the back of the seat gently, gingerly tilting his weight back on the wheels, and pushed forward. Nothing happened. I pushed harder, and the chair inched forward with a screeching sound of metal on wood.

  “I think I can get this,” I said. Dave had closed his eyes. They weren’t squeezed shut in an expression of misery, but they were definitely not open. It was as if he was meditating, as if he’d sent his mind someplace else while his body was trapped in this indignity.

  I decided that small talk was in order. “So how about that meeting? Time-share? I wonder if that’s what Vince Raymer does all day. Just sits around and thinks up things that sound like they could be titles.”

  Dave’s eyes didn’t open. “Shows have been sold on less than that,” he said. Half a beat later, we both said “Cougar Town” at the exact same time. Dave smiled, and I felt warmth surge through me.

  “Do you think anybody’s ever pitched Co-op Board?” I asked. “Or Air Traffic Control?”

  “Probably. I know last year there were three different shows making the rounds with Fantasy League in the title.”

  While we were talking, I was pushing the chair back and forth, back and forth, working it forward in incremental notches, as gently as if it was carrying a basket of eggs. I’d probably been this close to Dave before—at the table in the writers’ room, shaking hands during my job interview—but I’d never seen him from so intimate an angle. I could smell him—warm hay, strawberries, hints of something dry and papery, like books in a library—and could make out faint freckles on the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m going to murder that Alice,” I said. “These buildings are supposed to be up to code. How is this fair to people who use wheelchairs?”

  “Take it easy, Gandhi.” Still with his eyes shut, Dave sounded faintly amused. Finally the wheels spun free of the wall. I set the chair down gently on the tiled bathroom floor. He opened his eyes and said without looking at me, “Thank you.”

  “I’ll wait.” I gestured vaguely toward the hallway, long and dim and strangely empty. What was going on here? Had there been a fire drill that I’d missed? Where was everyone, and why hadn’t anyone helped him? “Take your time. I’ll be right here.”

  He nodded, hands on the wheels, and pushed himself deeper into the bathroom. I walked down the hallway, trying to catch my breath from my half-walk-half-run over and the effort it had taken to free up the chair. My face felt hot. Gary, I told myself. Think of Gary, who was sweet and good, and who loved me. I tried . . . but my mind kept wandering back to Dave, sitting so still in his chair, the calm expression on his face, the sweetness exuding from his pores . . . and I could remember, too, how my grandmother had known her husband was the man for her. “He smelled right,” she’d said. That was when I’d known. Never mind that he was older, or that he couldn’t walk. Dave was the one I wanted; the one, I thought, I loved.

  TWELVE

  Cut!” yelled the director, and turned to me, teeth bared in an approximation of a smile. “We good?”

  I knew my lines. “We’re good!” I was supposed to say. As soon as I’d said it, we’d move on to the next scene, which we desperately needed to do. We were almost two hours into the pilot shoot, and we’d gotten through precisely three pages of the pilot forty-page script. At this rate, we were on schedule to finish somewhere around three in the morning.

  The problem was, I wasn’t happy with what we’d done, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to improve the situation. Tentatively I reached out and put my hand on the director’s shoulder. It was like touching a side of beef in a linen shirt, all sweaty muscle, even though the stage, with its ceilings that stretched forty feet high, was so vigorously air-conditioned that I could almost see my breath. The room was awash in noise—the warm-up comedian’s patter, the audience’s chatter, the calls of the assistant director, and the whine of a blow-dryer. Somewhere, in the crowd of about a hundred people, tourists and Cady Stratton fans and people who’d been pulled in off the streets to come watch us tape, was my grandmother—I’d cast her as an extra, a customer in Daphne’s restaurant, in the first scene we’d shot, and when it was over she’d taken a reserved seat in the audience to watch the rest of the show. “I don’t know. I just . . . I think it’s still a little . . .” I groped for the right words, looking around for Dave. When I spotted him, he was talking with the DP. I watched as Dave gestured up toward a light, and then pointed back down at the script, and I knew that if I fetched him, the director would lose whatever respect he had for me.

  So I straightened up and said, “It’s too big.”

  The director’s face didn’t move. He was a laconic fellow named Chad, a veteran whom the network had been ecstatic to hire. Now, two hours and three pages into what was shaping up to be an all-night adventure, he stared down at me, expressionless. “You understand,” he finally said, “that it’s hard to be small when you’ve got your star on Rollerblades and an old lady who’s talking about fucking a man to death.”

  I tried not to wince at his language, either the old lady or the fucking. Putting Daphne on Rollerblades had been my idea, added at the studio’s urging, their insistence that I needed some big physically funny moment in Act One. The joke about Nana Trudy’s sex life was courtesy of the network, which had wanted something broadly comic enough to play in the previews and commercials. I’d fought, thinking that the inference was broad to the point of being disgusting, but I’d lost. “I know. I get it. But if maybe we could just try it with Cady doing a little less of a pratfall?” As it was, Cady had turned what was supposed to be a cute little tumble into a Cirque du Soleil–style split, prompting hollers and wolf whistles from the audience. Dave had grabbed me the first time she’d done it.” Don’t let her get away with that,” he’d said. “Pull her back.” I was trying to do it, trying to tell her as effectively as I could that her gestures were too big, her voice was too loud, that all of the eye-bugging and neck-rolling she was doing made her look like a cartoon, not a real person. But the director, who was obviously ready to go to the next scene and send the stunt double and the stunt coordinator home for the night, wasn’t helping. He’d laughed appreciatively at each of Cady’s whoopsies, and the bigger they’d gotten, the more amused he’d become.

  “One more time,” I said as firmly as I could. “Less vaudeville. More nuance.”

  “You got it, boss,” he said.

  He turned on his heel, and I walked over to Cady, who was perched on the edge of the set’s sofa, her legs crossed and Rollerblades swinging, waving to the guys in the front row who were whooping, “We love you, Cady!”

  “Hey there!” she said, all shiny eyes and stage makeup.

  “You’re doing great,” I said. “I’m just wondering if we can do one more take a little differently.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

  I told her what I wanted. I reiterated my wishes to the director. I told Annie Tait, who was playing the part of Nana Trudy, to pull it back by about thirty percent. When Annie agreed, I knew that thirty percent was exactly what I’d get—not twenty-nine percent, not thirty-one percent, but a precisely calibrated performance that would be exactly thirty percent more subdued than what she’d done in the previous take. Annie Tait didn’t resemble my grandmother at all. She was statuesque where Nana was tiny, and her features were patrician and WA
SPy—pale-blue eyes and a narrow, high-bridged nose, in contrast with my grandmother’s larger features—but somehow, none of that had mattered. When she’d given what I’d come to think of as the Buck up, li’l camper speech to Daphne, it was like I was in the room with my grandmother, like she was talking to me. “She’s fantastic,” I’d said as soon as she was gone . . . and everyone, from Maya to Dave to the studio to the network, had agreed.

  In her canary-yellow silk robe and heeled slippers, with a feather hair clip in her wig, Annie had once again become my grandmother, a funny and for-public-consumption version of my grandmother, the woman I’d written as a response to the stereotypical dirty-joke-spouting senior who afflicted the average sitcom. Nana Trudy was, I hoped, something new, a lady of a certain age with heart and a history and a genuine sense of humor and a sex drive that wasn’t a punch line, a quirky woman with demons to conquer and wisdom to share.

  Annie patted my arm. “Hang in there. It’s always a little rough, starting out.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and hurried back to my director’s chair behind the monitors that displayed the footage each of the four cameras was shooting. The hair and makeup people fussed over Annie. The props assistants came onto the set with a new fake vase for Cady to shatter. The warm-up guy brayed jokes at the audience. Hurry up and wait. That was TV. “Ready . . . and . . . action!” the director finally called. Cady glided into the living room, dressed in what a Boston girl would think of as Florida clothes and Florida colors—yellow shorts, a cream-colored bodysuit, a turquoise headband in her hair. “Okay,” she said. “My new commitment to healthy living begins . . .” She staggered, elbows flailing, catching herself on her grandmother’s antique desk. The vase resting on the desk fell to the ground and shattered. Nana scowled. The audience howled. And Cady, unable to help herself, responding to their cheers like a flower turning toward the sunshine, launched herself into the same kind of crotch-on-the-floor split she’d been doing, only this time she pressed her hands against her mouth and said, “Oopsies!”

  I held my breath, waiting for Chad to yell, “Cut,” thinking, No, that’s not what I meant, that’s not what I wanted. The director, chuckling from his chair, kept the cameras rolling. “Careful, dear,” said Annie Tait, “you still want to have children someday, don’t you?” The line prompted more laughter from the audience, which led, inevitably, to more mugging from Cady . . . and was I imagining it, or was the director actually slapping one oak-trunk-size thigh? “Hey,” I said, and tapped Chad’s shoulder. He ignored me. I tugged at his sleeve. “Hey!”

  He gave me a What can you do? shrug. “They’re locked in,” he said. My heart sank. Was he right? Cady hadn’t been nearly this broad at the run-through . . . but I knew that this happened sometimes when a live studio audience is involved. “They can’t help themselves,” Little Dave had said, as if the actors were a bunch of addicts and the audience members, mostly superfans and tourists bussed in from Hollywood Boulevard, were their drug. At our taping the audience was packed with Cady groupies. She’d used her website and Twitter account to invite her fans to her “triumphant return” to the world of TV. The bigger she got, the louder they got, on and on in a spiraling loop of awfulness. I could almost hear the critics from Variety and People sharpening their knives, waiting to cut into this tempting pie.

  Chad called, “Cut!” again, and turned to me, his face expressionless once more. “Are we good now?” he asked. I looked at the clock, feeling sick as I saw how much time had passed. If I didn’t keep things moving, we’d never finish. The audience would leave, the actors would start flagging, the executives would freak—already, Lloyd had emerged from the greenroom twice, once to ask when we thought we’d be wrapping the scene, and again to warn the editors not to use any of the takes where you could see Cady’s underwear.

  Lloyd was another thorn in my side. He was technically an executive, but so far, I’d found him hard to take seriously. The scene he’d written—“Just a few ideas,” he’d said modestly, in the attached email—had been all but unreadable, the dialogue flat as cardboard, the jokes juvenile and cruel. Even worse, Lloyd seemed to have decided that the key to being respected by the studio and its employees was to deliver all of his remarks at a volume that could blow your hair back, even when all he was doing was saying hello. After ten minutes of his company, the Daves and I had nicknamed him Loud Lloyd.

  “Everything okay?” he bellowed, and stared at me. The director, still working his wad of gum, stared at me. The cameramen, all four of them, stared, too.

  “Good,” I said, and tried to muster a smile. “We’re good.” Maybe one of the earlier takes wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered, I thought, as pop music came booming out of the speakers and the warm-up comedian cried, “We are moving on!” and started pulling pretty girls out of their seats to dance. Besides, even if it was a bad scene, it was just one scene, and maybe the rest of the show would be so good that the viewers and the critics wouldn’t notice. I slumped in my chair as people bustled around me, moving cameras, adjusting lights, the hair and makeup people hurrying onstage with brushes and blow-dryers in leather belts slung around their waists like gunslingers. The director was chatting with the cameramen about cars, if chatting could be applied to a discussion conducted entirely in shouts. Onstage, Annie Tait was deep in conversation with her wig wrangler, and Cady, still in her Rollerblades, had glided over to the front row to sign autographs. In the front row, Grandma waved.

  “Ruth.” I looked up. Dave was sitting next to me in his chair, with his hands folded, Zen-like, in his lap.

  “When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” I said. It was one of our old office jokes, something I used to say to him, typically when he wheeled himself out of the bathroom.

  He smiled and said nothing.

  “This isn’t going well,” I said.

  “Oh, no, it’s going fine,” he said.

  I stared at him. Was he watching the same show I was? Was he teasing me? “They’re finding their levels,” he said, patting my knee. “And remember, you can’t look at each take as its own thing. As long as you’ve got the right moments, it’ll come together in the editing room.”

  I let myself feel a spark of hope. I had seen it happen a hundred times on Bunk Eight. You’d do three okay-to-terrible takes, but in every one of them there’d be a flash of greatness, or at least decency. The editors would snip those moments out, stitch them together, and voilà: a perfect scene.

  “I don’t think Cady and I are communicating,” I said. It was frustrating, because I felt that if I knew her better, I’d have more of a sense of how to modulate her performance. Unfortunately, prior to tonight’s shoot Cady and I had spent only thirty minutes in each other’s company, when we’d finally had that hard-to-arrange drink the night before. My leading lady had arrived fifteen minutes late, making a true movie-star entrance, in sunglasses and bee-stung red lips, a white chiffon dress with a sweetheart neckline that put the skin of her shoulders and the tops of her breasts on display, with half her face hidden behind dark glasses, wearing heels so high I knew that even my grandmother in her prime would have looked at them, shaken her head regretfully, and put them back on the shelf. When I’d climbed off my barstool, waving at her, Cady had embraced me as if we were the very best of friends.

  “Ruthie!” she squealed. Her eyes flickered over my face as she kept her own expressionless. I guessed her agent or manager or someone had told her about the situation and urged her not to stare. “Come on,” she said, and grabbed my hand, “they make the yummiest sidecars here!”

  At the bar, I spent ten minutes listening to her murmured conference with the bartender about exactly how to prepare a yummy sidecar. Finally she snapped a picture of the drink, posted the picture to Twitter and Facebook, took a single sip, then swiveled her stool so that our knees were bumping, and gave me a Serious Listening expression, head tilted, eyes wide, like she was playing a hard-hitting journalist interrogating a crooked politician. “So. Te
ll me all about you.”

  “Oh, there’s not much to tell. I grew up in Boston—”

  “Boston! Like, Harvard? Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd?”

  “Right.”

  “Did you go to Harvard?”

  “Nope.”

  She patted my arm in a consoling fashion. “That’s okay.” Glancing down at my lap, where I’d been perusing scripts on my e-reader, she said, “Is that one of those e-book things? A Kendall?”

  “Kindle,” I said. Was she kidding?

  “Kindle,” she repeated. “Do you like to read?”

  “It’s my favorite thing,” I said.

  Cady considered this remark. “Not me, so much. I mean, I like self-help books. Deepak Chopra? Have you ever heard of him?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wondered again if she was kidding and decided that probably she was not. “Yes, I have.”

  “He’s really good. Oh, and Skinny Bitches Don’t Get Fat. Did you read that one?” She looked at me, wide-eyed, lips slightly parted, waiting for an answer. When none came, she grabbed my hand.

  “You need to read it. It’s, like, amazing.” She pulled her phone out of her bag and started typing. “There! See! I just tweeted about it!”

  I checked my phone and there it was, hashtag and everything. “I highly recommend it,” Cady had written. “Good one,” I said.

  “You follow me!”

  “I’m one of your minions,” I said. “You’re really dedicated to the whole social-media thing.” This seemed like the most diplomatic way I could tell her that I was both impressed and slightly horrified at the eighty thousand random thoughts and photographs she’d sent out into cyberspace in the two years since she’d joined Twitter.

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she said. “You’ve got to keep your fans invested. You have to let them into your world.” As if to prove her point, she struck a pose, painted lips pouting, cheeks sucked in, and snapped a picture with her phone. “There! Tweeted!” she said, and waited until I’d dutifully picked up my phone, checked out the shot, and told her she looked beautiful.