The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “So, I know you like to cook,” I said, having read, in numerous magazine profiles, of Cady’s love for whipping up the scrumptious Swedish cookies her mother and aunts had made.

  She blinked at me. “What?” It turned out that the story of Cady in the kitchen, her love for baking, was just something her publicist told her to say—“especially when I’m being interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal or whatever.” The recipes that ran with the stories weren’t even her own, but were provided by the editors, or by what Cady referred to as her “people.” I felt my heart sink. Daphne was an aspiring chef. It would have helped if Cady had actually known something about cooking . . . and I would have felt better in general knowing that my star wasn’t a liar.

  “So what do you like to do?”

  Cady opened her jeweled minaudière, pulled out a mirrored compact and a lip brush and a tin of gloss, and started repainting her lips. “Oh, you know. Listen to music. Go out. I love the beach!” I tried not to wince or to flash back to every high-school senior whose essays had been similarly bland. She snapped her compact shut. “Tell me where Daphne came from.” When I answered, talking hesitantly about my own childhood, my parents’ death, my grandmother, she gave me listening eyes and tried to pay attention, or at least look like she was paying attention, but I caught her glancing at her iPhone as it thrummed constantly on the bar top. “Hey,” I said after she’d checked the clock for the third time in as many minutes, “do you need to be somewhere?”

  “No!” she said, but eventually she admitted that her boyfriend was outside, waiting in a cab at the curb. He’d fetched her at the airport and delivered her to me.

  “Invite him in!” I said. “We can all have a drink.”

  She frowned at something on her telephone’s screen and then gave me a brilliant smile. “Actually, I do need to run. We’re having drinks with my manager. Five minutes.”

  “Oh.” We made more awkward girl talk, moving from the brand of jeans Cady liked best (“Joe’s Jeans are the bomb,” she said, eyeing me critically. “And they’re great if, you know, you’re kind of on the hippy side”) to the restaurants Cady favored, none of which I’d ever visited, how her parents were divorced and how her father, who had once been her manager-slash-dialogue coach, “isn’t really a part of my life anymore.” At ten-thirty sharp, precisely thirty minutes after our meeting had begun, Cady had hopped off the barstool, given me a merry wave, and vanished, leaving me with the check and with very little idea of who she really was or what kind of performance she’d deliver, and how—or if—I could work with her. It was like trying to race a horse you’d never ridden, with no idea what kind of touch or talk it would respond to, and the whole thing had left me uneasy. The cast of Bunk Eight weren’t friends with the writers, exactly, but they were colleagues, and we’d all gotten to know one another over the seasons, from run-throughs and show nights to craft-service snacks. I had a sense of them. I had no sense of Cady Stratton at all.

  “Let her settle into it,” Dave said from his chair. “It’s her first time back in, what, three years?”

  “Two and a half.”

  He worked his wheels back and forth an inch, frowning. “Did you eat anything today?”

  “Um.” I’d had breakfast—Grandma wouldn’t let me leave the house without it—but I’d skipped lunch, running over to the set to sign off on costumes at noon, and I’d been too nervous to manage a bite of the staff meal served in the commissary before the shoot had begun. “Wait here.” He wheeled away and came back a minute later with a paper plate in his lap.

  He’d made a turkey-and-swiss sandwich, with the cheese protruding from the edges of the bread. There was a handful of pretzels, an apple, a bottle of water, the kind of wholesome lunch you’d send a kid off to school with . . . the kind of lunch, in fact, that my grandmother had sent me to school with.

  “You’re going to be a good father,” I said.

  “What?” he called back. My words had been lost in the blare of the music, the laughter of the crowd.

  Instead of yelling, I smiled, mouthed thank you, gave him a thumbs-up, and took a bite of the sandwich. I’d just finished my late-night dinner when the assistant director, a brusque woman in jeans and a denim workshirt, walked fast across the stage, calling, “Hold the work, please, hold the work . . . okay, quiet on the set,” letting us know that we were ready to start filming the next scene, in the office where Daphne’s soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend worked as a member of Nerd Alert, my script’s version of the Geek Squad. (This scene took place in the first act, but we were shooting out of order, doing the Rollerblade business first so the stunt people wouldn’t have to hang around, on the clock, all night long.)

  The designers and set dressers had built and furnished Nerd Alert’s offices perfectly, a cheerless, charmless space that spoke to the employees’ soullessness, their limited lives. “I want it to look like a Dilbert cartoon, only more grim,” I’d said, and that’s what I’d gotten.

  Now Cady, pretty and anxious in a ponytail and the trying-too-hard clothes I’d decided she’d wear for the breakup, stood on one side of his counter, and Phil, the ex-to-be, in khakis and a short-sleeved shirt and ironic clip-on tie, stood on the other.

  “On your mark . . . get set . . . action!” Chad bellowed.

  “So you see,” Cady began, “I have to go do this. I have to go. Because if I don’t, I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what could have been. Wondering, if I’d just found the courage to go out there and try, if maybe I could have been someone.”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” said Steve Levenbaum, the actor we’d cast as Phil. Steve was a twenty-eight-year-old actor-slash-waiter who’d had to switch his shifts at Home Depot to shoot the show. In my early drafts, Phil had been a two-dimensional asshole, a lazy guy willing to settle for whatever plums landed in his lap, but as I’d rewritten, I’d come to think of him as scared, a man who would hurt before he could get hurt himself, who kept a veneer of hipster cynicism and false bravado shellacked over his own insecurities. Phil would never be more than a middle manager, never move out of the town where he’d grown up, a guy who’d live in a featureless two-bedroom condo in a new development off the highway, with a mortgage and a car loan that he’d struggle to pay. In other words, he was a starter guy. I hadn’t consciously modeled him on Gary, but now that I heard the lines coming from an actor who bore a certain resemblance to my ex, I wondered if that had been my intention all along, if I’d written this scene as a way of telling myself to move on, that sweetness and compatability and a shared taste for sausage and mushroom pizza would get a couple only so far.

  “Why are you assuming I’ll get hurt?” asked Cady-as-Daphne. “Maybe I’ll be fine.”

  “And maybe I’ll be the pope.”

  Cady turned away, stung. Steve reached across the counter and grabbed her hands.

  “I love you, Daphne,” he said. His voice was raw. “I know maybe I haven’t said that as much as you needed to hear it, but it’s true. And maybe I’m being selfish . . .”

  “Maybe you are!” Cady said.

  “But I don’t want you to get hurt,” he continued. “Miami’s not the right place for a girl like you. It’s a place for people who are plastic . . . and, and stupid . . . and . . .”

  “Beautiful,” Cady said softly. I could feel the audience leaning forward, listening. She extracted her hands from Steve’s grip, and straightened, and turned, cheating slightly so that the camera caught her profile. “Do you think I haven’t thought about that? You think maybe the mirrors in my house don’t work? I know what kind of girl the world likes, and I know that maybe I’m not exactly her.”

  I got to my feet, slipping off my earphones, watching her on the monitors, reciting the words along with Cady, remembering being in my hospital bed, sitting on the low wall in front of my high school, or curled up on the office floor with Rob’s hands on my shoulders, recognizing the no in his touch.

  “But maybe I’ve got somet
hing those other girls don’t. Talent.” Cady spoke the word crisply, hitting the T’s hard at each end, delivering it like a benediction. “I’m a good cook, and I’ve done the work. I know I can run a restaurant, and make it a place people want to be, if someone gives me a shot. I have to go there. I have to try. I have to see if what I’ve got is enough. It’s what . . .” She swallowed hard. A flush crept up her cheeks, and her eyes were shining, and in that instant she was Daphne, with all of her doubts and all of her dreams, Daphne and me, too, getting ready to move to a strange place, jump out of the nest and take flight. Her voice thickened. My own throat got tight. “It’s what my mom would have wanted.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Steve said. “Six months from now you’re going to come crawling back home, and you know who’s got two thumbs and won’t be waiting?” He cocked his digits back at his own chest. “This guy.”

  Cady’s shoulders slumped. Her lips quivered. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. The audience was absolutely silent as she made her way slowly to the door. “Oooh, girl,” I heard someone murmur. Cady put her hand on the doorknob, and it seemed in that moment like she’d leave with his insult still hanging there, unanswered. Then she spun around, just as we’d rehearsed, looking Phil right in the eye.

  “I might be back,” she said. “But I won’t be crawling. And I won’t be coming back to you.” Then she turned again and, as the audience clapped and hooted, walked through the door.

  “And . . . cut!” The director turned to me. “Good?”

  “Very good.” I was hopping up and down, hugging myself, practically dancing. “Really good.” Cady walked off the set, carefully stepping over the camera cables, and stood in front of me, eyes shining, breathing hard.

  “Oh my God, that was amazing,” I said.

  She smiled more widely. “Do you think so?”

  “Oh my God,” I said again. “Perfection!”

  She tugged at her hair and twirled her toe. “It wasn’t too . . . I mean, do you think we need, like, a joke at the end? So the audience knows she’s going to win?”

  “They know you’re winning,” I assured her. “Did you hear them? They’re on your side! You’ve got them eating out of the palm of your hand!”

  Cady nibbled on her lip. “Like, what if I say, ‘Guess who’s got two thumbs and won’t be coming back to you?” Or, you know, my nana’s there with me, and she says, ‘You go, girl!’”

  I winced. I couldn’t help it. You go, girl? Was anyone still saying that? Were white people even allowed?

  “Or, okay, maybe not that.” She gave a little laugh. “I know I’m not a writer, but I just feel like there needs to be something else there so they know that he didn’t get the best of me.”

  “Trust me,” I said, parroting a line I’d heard the Daves give, over and over, to actors through the years. “Trust the words. Trust your performance. When you see this played back, you aren’t going to believe how powerful it is.”

  “I just think . . . ,” Cady said. If I’d been Big Dave, I would have cut her off right there, saying, “Thinking is not your job,” and Cady would have laughed, and then gone back to her mark, comfortable in the hierarchy and her own place in it. Big Dave could get away with a line like that because Big Dave was, well, big, and a man, a veteran producer and a powerful Hollywood player, and who was I? The showrunner, true, but also a woman, and not a pretty one, either, a young woman on the very first episode of her very first show, which meant that Cady probably believed she could get away with things that more experienced showrunners wouldn’t have allowed.

  “I mean, I just want . . . ,” Cady continued. She toyed with a lock of her hair and spun one toe on the floor, giving me a sampling of the repertoire of little-girl gestures she’d probably deployed to great effect with male directors and producers over the years.

  “Listen,” I said. The conversation would have been easier if I’d been slightly more fluent in girl talk . . . but if I couldn’t pull off the alpha-male stuff that the Daves did, I’d have to find my own way to deal with my star. I led Cady into a quiet corner of the stage and stood still, waiting until she’d stopped fidgeting and I had her full attention. “What you just did was so powerful. Every girl who’s ever wanted something and worried that she wasn’t good enough to get it is going to watch that and feel affirmed . . . and proud of who she is . . . and beautiful.”

  She looked at me long enough for me to wonder if she knew what affirmed meant. I put my hands on her shoulders again, copying something the Daves had done, and then turned her gently and steered her back toward the set. “Trust me,” I said again, and she moved away without looking back.

  Twenty minutes later, we were in the Boston house set shooting another pre-Miami scene. Annie Tait was giving herself a manicure on the couch when Cady, shoulders slumped, walked through the door.

  “Looks like that went well,” Annie observed.

  “Phil says I’m gonna get eaten alive,” Cady mumbled—but of course it was an actress-y mumble, each word clear and distinct and audible even to the people sitting in the farthest reaches of the back row.

  “Phil,” said Annie without looking up from her nail file, “is going to spend the rest of his life having his mother sew labels into his underpants. You’re better off without him.”

  “What if . . . ,” Cady began. “What if this is a mistake?”

  Annie set her file down on the coffee table. “What if what is a mistake, dear?”

  “Miami,” said Cady. “What if I can’t get a job in a restaurant down there? What if I’m not that good? What if I never make it?”

  Annie Tait stood up. She crossed the room in one, two, three steps and hit her mark, right in front of the armchair where Cady was slumped. She reached down, touched Cady’s chin, just the way I’d written, and lifted the younger woman’s face up toward hers. When she spoke her voice was the perfect mixture of sweetness and steel, and even though I’d heard the speech maybe fifty times from fifty different actresses, it still made me want to cheer.

  “Now you listen to me, Daphne Michelle. There are no quitters in this family. Do you think that I gave up when that tramp Mitzie Yosselman won the election for head of Hadassah?” I smiled—I couldn’t help it—as, from the front row, I heard my grandmother laugh. “Did your mother give up when your father said he wanted a small, intimate wedding? Did Barbra Streisand”—and here Annie did the same thing that Renée had done during her audition, resting her hand on her breast, just above her heart, and turning her eyes toward the heavens—“give up when they told her, after Funny Lady, that she needed a nose job if she wanted to be a star? No,” she said. “No, they did not.” She looked into Daphne’s eyes, holding her gaze. “And I’m not letting you give up, either. Now, you wipe that poor-me look off your face and you think about who you are and what you’ve got, and you get back out there and you use it.”

  “I will,” Cady whispered. She straightened her back and raised her voice. “I will.”

  “And . . . cut!” yelled Chad, bouncing to his feet as the audience burst into applause.

  We ran the scene twice more, but I knew we’d gotten it the first time, the heart and soul of The Next Best Thing, the love between the two women, Nana’s role in her granddaughter’s life, and the journey of the series, in which Daphne and her grandmother would master the world they had chosen, finding fame and fortune and love . . . everything I wanted for my grandmother and myself.

  The rest of the shoot zipped by as if the film had been sped up—Cady’s rejection and eventual triumph at the chichi Miami restaurant, Nana’s charming the building superintendent and sweet-talking him into moving a spare refrigerator up to their kitchen, and the final scene, with the two women at the end of their first day in Miami, together on the couch, and Cady delivering the final line of the pilot, the line I’d labored over for what felt like half my life: “We’re all right for now.”

  The director looked at me. “We good?” By then it was almost one in the
morning. Most of the audience—my grandmother included—had drifted out the door. I had opened my mouth to tell him it was a wrap when Loud Lloyd came bustling out of the greenroom with a sheaf of papers in his hands, in a blue suit that looked as if it had been bought for a bar mitzvah . . . possibly his.

  “I have a request from Joan,” he announced importantly.

  Chad rolled his eyes at me and said, “What’s that?”

  Lloyd pulled some folded pages from his clipboard. They were, I realized with a sinking heart, a version of the scene he’d written where Nana Trudy got dumped. When he’d emailed it over, I’d thanked him politely, had myself a laugh about his gross jokes about Viagra and Boniva and Nana’s sex life, then emailed it to the Daves, imagining they’d be just as amused by his clumsy jokes and leaden dialogue as I was. They were amused. They were also worried. “Beware the executive who thinks he can write,” Big Dave had said, and added in all caps, “DO NOT LET HIM ANYWHERE NEAR YOUR SET ON SHOW NIGHT.” But I hadn’t figured out how to keep Lloyd away . . . and now, here he was, script in hand, and a look on his face suggesting that he would not be stopped.

  “Joan wants to see it once this way,” he said, and tapped the pages. “The way I wrote it.”

  “I think we’re fine with what we’ve got,” I said. If I’d ever been this tired in my life, I couldn’t remember when. Every part of my body ached, and all I wanted was something hot to drink and then about twelve hours of sleep, and my grandmother and Dave to tell me that I’d done my job well; followed by more food and more sleep, and then maybe a massage.

  Lloyd was undeterred. “She thinks we need some bigger comic moments,” he said.

  Stalemate. I could fight him, could go back to the greenroom myself, find Joan, confirm that this was what she wanted, and try to talk her out of it . . . or I could indulge the Boy Wonder, shoot his stupid scene once, and pretend it had never happened. I certainly wouldn’t be using it in the final cut.