The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Okay,” I said, so softly that I could barely hear myself. The director whistled quietly under his breath.

  “What was that?” asked Lloyd.

  I lifted my head and said it again, louder. “Okay.”

  Forty minutes later, we were finished once more. The warm-up comedian used that tired old line: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” The DJ played “Hit the Road, Jack,” the executives applauded and then quickly filed out the door.

  I congratulated the actors and the writers and talked to the executives, including Loud Lloyd, who patted my back and told me, “I really think we’ve got something special here.” I conferred with the director about his availability for reshoots. “Honestly, I don’t think we’ll need ’em,” he said, tucking a fresh piece of gum into his mouth. “I’ve done a million of these, and I’ve gotta tell you, this was pretty tight.”

  I hung back in the greenroom as the props crew retrieved their stunt vases and Rollerblades, and the craft-services guy packed up the leftovers, and the janitors swept the floor. I waited until I was the only one left on the stage. Then I walked onto the apartment set and sat on the couch with my legs curled underneath me. The cork floor in the kitchen was a replica of what Grandma and I had had in the house in Massachusetts. The couch, upholstered in beigey-gold velvet, was a twin of the one that Grandma had found at a flea market in Santa Monica and wrestled onto a U-Haul to drive home. Next to the couch, on a little table in a simple gold frame, was a picture of my parents on their wedding day. I’d put it there to stand in as a picture of Daphne’s parents, and for good luck. There was my mother, her light hair falling from the widow’s peak high on her forehead, her pale eyes trusting, and my dad, one arm around her waist, grinning like the whole world had been spread before him. It all looked so real, like an actual house, until you looked up and saw that there were no ceilings and no roof: just empty space and metal walkways, lights and cords and cables.

  I picked up the photograph, wondering what my parents would have made of this: their daughter the showrunner, sitting at the center of a world she had dreamed up and called to life. “We’re going to get picked up,” I whispered into the darkness. Nobody answered, but still, I was convinced. The actors had been great; the story was solid; the executives even looked happy. I pulled off my hat, slid the elastic band off my hair, and shook it loose over my shoulders. Then I sat there, nerves singing with exhaustion, muscles quivering, a smile spread over my face, knowing that I was going to get to live in this world, this perfect world, for years to come. “We’re all right for now,” I said, and imagined Daphne and Nana, asleep in their beds, Daphne with a new job, Nana with new friends, and how I would guide the two of them like ships, like sailboats on a stormy sea, guide them until they reached port, guide them until they were safely home.

  THIRTEEN

  It took me a week in an editing bay to stitch together the pilot, picking the best takes of each scene, adjusting the laugh track and the music, arguing with and, for the most part, giving in to my friends at the network when we disagreed on a scene or a shot or a line reading. In the weeks since I’d delivered the final cut, Tariq and Lisa had been diligent about keeping in touch. Looks good, they would tell me. Still in the mix, they would say—a phrase that I knew from prior experience and the Daves’ counsel meant nothing, because shows that were “still in the mix” toward the end of pickup season could wind up on the reject pile as surely as shows that had gotten turned down on Day One. Chauncey really loves it. Everything seems positive. I would pass the good tidings along to my actors, talking to Annie on the phone, leaving texts and Twitter direct messages for Cady, who told me that she rarely checked either her email or her voice mail but could always be reached that way. Hang in there, I would tell them. Think good thoughts.

  Meanwhile, I was doing my best to keep busy. There was no point in trying to write something new while I was still waiting to learn the fate of the pilot, and going back to work for the Daves, even if they hadn’t replaced me, felt like a giant step backward, a premature admission of defeat. “Take a vacation,” Grandma said, but I was horrified by the idea of spending money without knowing for sure where my next paycheck would come from. So I banked the checks I’d gotten from the pilot and booked a daylong “intense relaxation” package at a local spa, even though intense relaxation sounded like an oxymoron. In the treatment room, I amused my masseuse by checking my BlackBerry not once but twice during my hourlong hot-stone reflexology session. “You seem a little tense,” she observed as she squeezed my toes and I peered at the screen.

  “Waiting to hear about my pilot,” I said, and she nodded, like I wasn’t the first would-be showrunner she’d worked on and I wouldn’t be the last.

  Back at home, smelling like sage and eucalyptus, I checked my messages again, then reposted my old Craigslist ad. For the next three weeks, I scheduled a client or two every morning: anxious teenagers who swore their lives would be over if they didn’t get into Amherst or UPenn, lonely singles who were always more interesting than their dating profiles made them seem. The guidance department at the public high school in my neighborhood was happy to accept my services for kids who needed help with their essays but couldn’t afford my fees. “A mitzvah,” Grandma called it, but I knew that it was less of a good deed than an offering to the Gods of the Network: Accept my good deed and pick up my show.

  I kept my phone in my bag while I conducted interviews in a coffee shop filled with my peers, writers thumping away at MacBooks or texting or tweeting. On a Wednesday afternoon, after I’d spent an hour with a skittish, gorgeous high-school junior who ran cross-country and was desperate to get into Brown, I pulled it out and saw that I had three missed calls—one from my agent, Shelly, one from Lisa at the studio, and one from Joan at the network.

  I straightened my hat, a gray fedora with a bright blue-and-red plaid brim, while my Converse-clad feet did a fast shuffle on the floor. Shelly first, I thought, and punched in her number. “Ruth Saunders,” she said. “Hey there, Miss Too-Fancy-to-Answer-Her-Own-Phone,” she said.

  “I was working.”

  “Uh-huh. Hang on, let me round up the troops. I’m gonna put you on—”

  Before she could say the word “hold,” I blurted, “Just tell me. Please. Are they . . . did we get . . .”

  “Good news,” she said. “But you didn’t hear that from me. Hang on now.” I sat there, stunned, joyous, feeling like I was flying. Somewhere there would be a girl, maybe in a hospital bed, maybe sick or hurt or lonely, maybe a girl without parents, and she would turn on the television set, and there would be my show, which would become her show, and she would lose herself inside it and dream that she belonged.

  One by one, the executives got on the line. Tariq, then Lisa, then Joan, and then Chauncey McLaughlin.

  “So,” Chauncey began. “How do you feel about making a TV show with us?”

  “I would be thrilled to make a TV show with you,” I said. My voice was solemn, normal-sounding, but it was all I could do to keep from yelling or bursting into song. The pair of writers at the table next to mine lifted their heads like lions at a watering hole and glared at me in unison. I ignored them, tugging my blue-and-white-striped jersey down over my jeans. My first haters, I thought. “Thank you,” I said into my telephone. “All of you. Thank you all so much.”

  “No, thank you,” said Chauncey.

  Joan took over. “It’s a nine-episode order. I’ll be sending you the schedule, but the plan is, we start shooting in May and premiere in September. And we’ll be screening the pilot, so we’ll probably have some notes from that.”

  “Of course!” I said. “Absolutely!” At that moment, they could have told me that the whole girl-and-grandma concept just wasn’t working for them and asked if I could possibly make the whole thing the story of two twenty-three-year-old strippers in Vegas, and I would have happily, joyously, eagerly agreed.

  “Congratulations,” said Joan, and I thanked her
.

  “Don’t tell Deadline,” said Lisa, and I promised that I wouldn’t say a word to the media until the network had issued its own press release.

  “But I can call the actors, right? And the Daves?”

  “Of course,” said Chauncey, avuncular as ever.

  “This is going to be fantastic,” said Tariq in a tone suggesting that he was trying to convince himself that what he’d said was true, and I swore that I would do whatever I could to make the show a success. A minute later, the phone call was over, and I was sitting there by myself. Nothing had changed. The same battered computer with its TRU (for Truro, where I’d been a lifeguard that long-ago summer) sticker was on the table in the same spot it had occupied ten minutes ago, along with the same watery cup of iced coffee, the same canvas tote bag I’d used during my lifeguarding summer, same sneakers, same hat, same me . . . but everything was different now.

  The laptop guys were still staring. “My show just got picked up,” I told them, because it seemed rude not to say something. “Don’t tell Deadline,” I added, even though they didn’t know my name or the name of the show.

  “Congratulations,” one of them muttered, and the second one managed a halfhearted thumbs-up. I picked up my phone. It wasn’t even a contest, deciding who, among my stars and relatives and loved ones, I would call first.

  “Two Daves Productions,” said Bradley.

  “I think that’s my line.”

  “Hey, Ruth!” he said. “Congratulations.”

  “What?”

  “I just saw the news on Deadline.”

  Unbelievable. “Are Themselves around?”

  “They are not,” he said. Of course they weren’t. Bunk Eight was still in production, which meant the two of them were not lounging around the bungalow waiting to take calls from the likes of me. “Big Dave’s on set, and Little Dave’s in the editing room. Want me to grab ’em?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Just have them call me when they can.”

  “Will do. And seriously, way to go. How many did they order?”

  “Nine.”

  He whistled. “You’re going to have to hire your staff pretty fast. When’s preproduction start?”

  I told him that I wasn’t sure, that all I knew was what Joan had told me—film in May, premiere in the early fall. “You probably know more than I do,” I said with a laugh, and he did a quick search of the pertinent websites and said that in fact our premiere date had been announced as the second Wednesday of September.

  “Shit. I need to call Cady before she sees this.” Cady, and Annie, and Steve all deserved to hear about the pickup from a live human person, not the Net.

  “You got it,” said Bradley. “See you soon.”

  None of my actors were answering their phones. I left voice mails for Annie and Steve, tapped out a text for Cady with the words CALL ME in all caps, followed by—I cringed before hitting send—a smiley-face emoticon. Then I hopped in my car and drove off in search of Grandma. She’d told me in the morning that she hadn’t booked any work that day, which meant that I could catch her on her way to the water aerobics class she took at the JCC. I wished it was nighttime, so we could celebrate properly—wine with dinner, maybe even Champagne, after which we’d retire to the couch with a few of the episodes of Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy or even old-school ER that we kept stored on our TV’s hard drive for special occasions.

  I drove to the JCC and waited in the hallway, underneath posters advertising craft fairs and book clubs, until I spotted her with her tote bag looped around her upper arm, dressed in a hot-pink tracksuit, a silver silk head wrap, Maurice’s enormous diamond on her left hand, and white mesh water shoes on her feet. I stood as she approached and flashed her a silent thumbs-up. She dropped her bag and started to cry.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, don’t. It’s good news!” I said, hugging her.

  “I can’t believe it!” She wept. “Your own show! Oh, Ruthie!” I hugged her hard, remembering my high school graduation and my graduation from college and the day I’d gotten my first television job, all the times I had wished for my parents and had only my grandmother instead . . . and how, in my mind, that had always been enough.

  “Ordered to series!” She sniffled, wiping her cheeks. I smiled, thinking that I couldn’t speak Girl, but somehow, my grandma had become fluent in Variety. With my arm around her shoulders I could feel how thin she was, in spite of her diet, and the water aerobics and the Pilates for Seniors classes. Grandma lived in fear of becoming one of the eggshell-frail ladies you’d see mincing through the supermarkets and movie theaters and museums in terror of breaking a hip. She exercised, she ate right, but she knew that none of it would stave off the inevitable. I won’t live forever, she would say, and I’d brush her words away, not wanting to think about them, not wanting to imagine a life without her.

  “I always knew,” she said. “I always knew you were special.” We sat together on a bench, holding hands, as little old ladies, some with canes, others with walkers, made their way past us toward the pool. Her voice thickened. “I wish . . . ,” she began. Then she stopped herself, even though I knew what she’d been about to say: that she wished her daughter, my mother, had lived to see this.

  “I know,” I said, and rested my cheek against the top of her head. I was thinking, as I’d often thought before, about deals: I do some work for charity, and the network picks up my show; I lose my parents but become a successful television producer. Was that really the way things worked? Was it a fair trade?

  While I’d waited for my news, I’d read one of the books I’d pulled off of Big Dave’s bookshelf and had never gotten around to reading: You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips. Phillips had been one of the first female producers with any power, the first to win an Oscar, for The Sting, and had been pitiless when it came to describing the types she’d encountered in Hollywood. Of female comedy writers, she’d noted:

  She was fat in high school. Whether she is still fat doesn’t matter. It had already colored her point of view and made her very mad. She will always be fat inside. She beats you to death with her brains, but you don’t know you’re being killed because you’re laughing so hard. Try to remember all humor starts with hostility (cf., comedy writer).

  She goes through a lot of therapy. Trying to get in touch with all those feelings nestled beneath all that fat. When she gets to them, and discovers she is as hideous on the inside as the outside, she becomes truly furious. The finding of these feelings gives her total permission to forget about yours.

  She makes serious money with some clever writing. But money is more often the scorecard for men. Sex is her scorecard, critical to her self-image, probably because she was laid so infrequently when it was first coming on . . . Now lots of men who eschewed her company in high school sleep with her to curry favor, but she never knows if they love her for herself or her one-liners. Too afraid to find out, she sharpens her skills, often on other women.

  I’d never been fat, although I was definitely bigger than the average actress (to be fair, out here in Hollywood, stop signs were bigger than the average actress). Still, I thought that Phillips, unsympathetic as she’d been, had correctly noted the essentially broken nature of most of the people—male and female—who’d ended up in the entertainment industry. If my parents had lived, if I’d grown up unscarred, with a mother and father who loved me and a grandmother I saw on school vacations, who’s to say what I would have become? Maybe Sarah and I would have stayed best friends, and I would have been her maid of honor when she’d gotten married (this had happened a year ago, and God bless Facebook for letting me and the rest of the world know). Maybe my grandma would have been congratulating me on my wedding or the birth of my first child. Maybe I’d still be in Massachusetts, with a husband and a starter house and plenty of friends, my sarcasm confined to emails I sent to the other moms in my kids’ nursery school, my relationship with TV limited to the shows I watched at night and t
alked about the next day, like a million other viewers.

  No point in dwelling. I hugged Grandma, kissed her temple, and then steered her toward the dressing room so she could tell her ladies. “What do you want for dinner?” she asked. “Whatever you want! I’ll make a feast!”

  “Breast of veal,” I told her, and drove home. There, in my sunny bedroom, with a glass brimming with ice and water and slices of lemon I picked from the little tree that grew in a pot on the porch, I took care of business.

  First: Twitter. Gone were the days when it was enough to make a good show and hope that viewers would find it. With cable and the Internet, with on-demand access and Hulu and television shows you could watch from your telephone, there were literally thousands of options and dozens of outlets, all clamoring for the viewers’ attention. If you wanted to get noticed, you had to interact with your audience on show nights and between shows. You had to keep them hooked and in-the-know, tantalizing them with behind-the-scenes details, Tweeting pictures from the set and discarded jokes and stories—preferably with pictures—about how your stars spent their spare time.

  So far, The Next Best Thing’s account had a scant ninety-two followers: my grandmother, of course, and then other writers, and network and studio executives. Cady didn’t follow us, but her manager did . . . and every one of them counted, and word would spread. I had tweeted, so far, four times: once when we’d gotten the green light, once when Cady had been cast, once when we’d landed Annie, and then, at three in the morning, when we’d finally wrapped the pilot shoot, I’d typed, “It is done.” Now I tapped out 140 exultant characters: The three most beautiful words in the English language are not I Love You but Ordered to Series. I hesitated a minute, then hashtagged it #thenextbestthing. My show’s first hash tag. It was almost enough to bring tears to my eyes.