The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I know.” I’d loved my time in the writers’ room for The Girls’ Room, and had occasionally felt guilty that I was actually being paid to spend my days with funny people who basically sat around telling jokes. It didn’t feel like a real job. A real job was being a teacher or a nurse, or selling furniture, like my grandma had. Scrubbing floors, growing food, helping the sick, all of that was real work, and I’d endure pangs of guilt, or a sense that I was getting away with something, every time I got paid.

  “You sound like you need a break. Want to come over?” Dave asked. Before I had time to get my hopes up, he said, “Pool’s all yours. Shazia and I are going to Malibu this afternoon.”

  Of course they were, I thought, with my insides crumpling. I pictured them driving on curving roads along the cliffs, the top down, Shazia’s hair in the wind, her short skirt riding up her long legs.

  “I’ve got to keep reading,” I said.

  “Good luck,” he told me. “And don’t worry, you’re going to pick a great room.”

  “I am?” I asked.

  “People like you. They want to be around you. You’ll do fine.” Then as if he was worried he’d said too much, he gave me a quick “Gotta go” and hung up just as the brunch arrived.

  My grandmother watched me as I put the phone back in my purse and then spread my napkin on my lap.

  “You like him,” she said. Lifting her knife, she sliced off a bite of poached egg and smoked salmon. She was dressed in what, for her, were casual clothes—white cotton capris, a loose linen blouse in lemon yellow, pale-blue laced-up Converse sneakers.

  “Dave’s a good boss,” I said, taking a bite of my own breakfast and then quickly reaching into my own bag to retrieve a script before she could ask me anything else.

  FOURTEEN

  I’m sorry,” said the patient voice from the speakerphone in the center of the table in the writers’ room. The voice belonged to Eric Fein, the Standards and Practices lawyer who’d been assigned to The Next Best Thing. In our three weeks of work, I’d gotten familiar with his voice, and with his opinions on what was encouraged and permissible on network TV. “You can’t say ass-munch.”

  There was silence as six writers absorbed this. “Ass snack?” offered Sam, brushing his long hair out of his eyes. Sam was one of my baby writers. He’d had one job so far, on an MTV show that had lasted a single season, and he supported himself by tweeting in the persona of Softie, the anthropomorphized roll of toilet paper who was the brand ambassador for SilkSoft toilet tissue. “We love your ass” was SilkSoft’s slogan. During his job interview, Sam had told me, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, that he’d thought of it all by himself.

  “We’d prefer no ass at all,” Eric replied.

  “I don’t get it,” said Ginger Fairfax, the most senior of the writers. “Didn’t they say ‘douche juice’ on Cougar Town last night?”

  “I definitely heard ‘bitch, please’ on Two Broke Girls,” offered George, my Harvard guy. George was African-American, which meant that the network was paying his salary as part of its diversity initiative. This, in my opinion, made no sense. George’s mother was a surgeon, his father was a professor, both of his sisters were doctors, and George, who’d attended boarding school in New Hampshire before following both sisters to Cambridge, had grown up wealthy and well educated, in an atmosphere where racism and discrimination were the worst sins another kid could commit. I was glad to have him, even if he was funny in more or less the same way the privileged white Ivy Leaguers I’d known were funny, with his riffs about how his high-achieving relatives were scandalized by his decision to spurn the world of medicine and write jokes instead. “I’m the black sheep,” he’d told me during our interview. “Pun intended.”

  “There were dingleberries on Whitney,” said Nancy, who then covered her mouth with her fingers, like she was embarrassed to have even uttered the word. Nancy was my other baby writer, and I’d been thrilled to hire her and rescue her from Lanny Drew’s clutches. For the past two years, she’d been toiling as Mr. I-Wouldn’t-Fuck-Her’s assistant, and while she was far too discreet to bad-mouth a former boss, my guess was that she was as relieved to be out of there as I’d been happy to have her.

  The speakerphone sighed. “Guys, listen. I’m not responsible for those shows. I’m only responsible for you. And also, the action line on page three?” Thumbs flicked over iPads as we all flipped to page three. “Nana cocks her finger?” Eric read. “We need to make sure that doesn’t resemble oral sex.”

  I frowned at the script. “‘Cocks her finger’ just means pointing.”

  “Ah,” said Eric. “Oh, okay. Got it. Sorry. Our software’s a little sensitive about the word cock. Moving on,” he said before we could start teasing him about his software’s sensitivity. “When Veronica’s standing over the heating vent and her skirt blows up, make sure we can’t see anything.” He cleared his throat. “We’d like it if she could be wearing shorts under her skirt.”

  “Who does that?” asked Claire. Claire and her husband, Paul, were my writing team, married with a two-year-old daughter. They’d met in college and moved to Los Angeles right after they graduated. As a writing team, they counted as one entity and would be splitting one paycheck, which made them a bargain: two bodies for the price of one.

  “Sorry?” asked Eric.

  “No adult woman wears shorts underneath her skirts,” said Ginger. Ginger was the daughter of a television actress and her onetime director of photography, and, at forty, the most senior writer in the room. Friendly and easygoing, she’d been working for years and knew all of the executives and lots of the other writers on the lot, and what was worth eating at the commissary. “That’s more of a second-grade-girl-on-the-playground thing.”

  “Fine. No shorts. Just make sure we can’t see anything.”

  “No problem,” I told him, and wrote myself a note to call the stunt coordinator and be sure that Veronica’s underpants would remain invisible.

  “Okay, then, I think that’s it. Oh, one more thing,” said Eric. I braced myself. This was how Eric operated, with his “one more thing” usually being the problem that would demand the most effort and time to solve. “The scene where Nana’s joking about Barbra Streisand buying James Brolin from human traffickers?”

  I smiled. That joke was one of my favorites.

  “We’d prefer you replace Barbra Streisand.”

  I stopped smiling. “Seriously? Why?”

  “She’s notoriously litigious,” Eric said primly.

  “But we’re obviously kidding. I mean, nobody actually believes that we think she bought her husband at a souk, or whatever.”

  Eric’s silence implied that, indeed, people would believe we thought that.

  “Can we say Hillary Clinton?” Nancy ventured.

  “Laura Bush,” called Sam.

  “Why would Laura Bush want to pay money for George?” asked Paul. “The point of the joke is that it’s a woman buying something she wouldn’t be able to get on her own.”

  “Have you seen Laura Bush?” Sam asked. “Fat ankles.”

  “Hillary’s are worse,” said George.

  “Do men actually care about ankles?” Nancy wondered out loud. “Because I’ve been told by many women’s magazines that all you really care about is seeing a woman naked, and that we’re the ones obsessing about our flaws. Like, are you seriously going to kick a woman out of your bed because you don’t like her ankles?”

  The men looked at one another. “Probably not,” said Sam.

  “I’m going to let you creative types sort this out,” said Eric, which was how he ended every phone call. “Peace,” he said, and we went back to what we’d been doing before his call: talking about our sex lives. This was how it went in most writers’ rooms, which were like rolling group-therapy sessions. You brought it all to the table: your family history, your relationships with your parents and your kids, the story of how you’d had your heart broken, met your spouse, discovered your mot
her was having an affair with her costar (in Ginger’s case) or your father had a secret family (in Nancy’s). All of that material became fodder for the show, stuff you could repurpose and use as your characters’ background, and none of it ever left the rooms, which existed under a cloak of secrecy. The writers’ room is a safe place, the Daves had always said, a line I’d heard echoed by other writers and showrunners through the years.

  That morning we’d been working on a scene where Nana Trudy goes on Date Number Three with a man she’s met at the shuffleboard court, and learns he’s got a penchant for rough sex . . . and, unfortunately for him, a heart condition. Ginger had been telling us the story of her college boyfriend, who had similar tastes but, sadly, not enough upper-body strength to fulfill his desires.

  “So his big thing was, he wanted to rip my panties off me, right?” Ginger began.

  “As you do,” said Sam, biting into his third Clif Bar of the morning. Sam was tall and lanky and ate more than any human being I’d ever seen. He’d start each morning with two packets of instant oatmeal topped with half-and-half and strawberries, a toasted bagel with butter and cream cheese, and hot chocolate. Then he’d munch granola bars and trail mix until lunchtime. At two o’clock he’d break for a yogurt topped with a fistful of almonds and a cup of granola, and at four he’d have a triple-decker peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. If he’d been a girl, I would have assumed he was bulimic. Because he was a twenty-four-year-old guy, I figured he was just still growing.

  “Right,” said Ginger. “But he couldn’t actually, you know, rip them. So I’d have to pre-rip my own underwear. Just, you know, to get things started for him.”

  “That’s pathetic,” George scoffed.

  “Yeah,” said Ginger, spinning back and forth in her seat. “I guess it was kind of sad.”

  “I had a girlfriend who used to buy underwear a size smaller than what she wore, and if she went home with a guy, she’d leave them in his bed,” Nancy volunteered.

  “Thus making him think he got luckier than he actually got,” said Paul.

  Claire swatted his upper arm. “You’re a pig,” she announced.

  “Yeah, but I’m your pig. And you have to sleep with me. The ketubah says so.” This was an ongoing joke between the two of them: that Paul had gotten the rabbi to write up a wedding contract in which Clare promised to do all kinds of things, including give him blow jobs whenever he wanted them, and allow him to spend up to five percent of their combined income on sports betting.

  “One day I’m going to get that thing translated,” Claire muttered.

  “So what happened to the guy?” I asked Ginger. “The panty-ripper?”

  “He started working out. Then he got strong enough to rip my panties by himself. Then he moved on to T-shirts. Then we broke up.” She made a face, remembering. “By that point, he was so built, he could’ve had any girl he wanted. But it was kind of a relief. I couldn’t keep asking my parents for money for new clothes.”

  Sam’s stomach made a noisy grumble. He patted it fondly. “Patience, my pet.” Then he looked at me. “Can we order Thai for lunch?”

  “Streisand first.” I got up and stood in front of the whiteboard, which we’d divided into a grid. The vertical columns were for each episode, one through nine, with working titles. The horizontal ones named each character—Daphne, Nana, Brad, Veronica—and described what they’d each be doing. “Five minutes,” I said. “Oh, and we also need alts for Brad’s line in the A scene.” That was where Daphne expresses her appreciation at Brad’s scent—he’d spent the day repairing frozen-yogurt dispensers—and he replied, “Good thing you didn’t meet me that summer I was working in the fish cannery.” Fish cannery had gotten a decent laugh in the room, as had mortuary, but I thought we could do better. The writers bent down over their iPads as Amanda, my assistant, poked her head into the room.

  “Hey, Ruth, I’ve got Joan and Lloyd from the network for you.”

  “Ginger, you’re in charge,” I said, and went to my office to take the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Ruth!” bellowed Lloyd. I winced. Speakerphone again—I could hear the staticky echo. I’d come to hate Speakerphone, knowing that the executives all surfed the Net and checked their email during calls, so you never really had their whole attention. “How are things going?”

  “Really well.” So far we were on schedule. We’d written one episode, were working on our second, and had gotten the studio’s and the network’s blessings for the outlines for Episodes Three and Four.

  “It’s all good on our end,” said Joan. “We’re getting ready to take the pilot out for testing, and we had a thought.”

  “Okay,” I said, hearing Big Dave’s voice in my head. Dave had kept a Sam’s Club–size jar of KY jelly displayed on his desk, and when he got calls like this, calls that included the dread phrase we had a thought, he’d make a show of uncapping the bottle, putting the call on “Mute,” and saying, Bend over, here it comes again.

  “You know the alt we shot at the end of pilot night?” Joan asked. I grimaced, remembering. That had been Lloyd’s scene, complete with gross sex jokes about how Nana Trudy had basically fucked her boyfriend into the ICU, with the intention of taking over his house and taking all of his money. How could I forget?

  “We went ahead and showed it to Chauncey, and he was a big fan,” said Joan. “So we cut a version using that scene, and that’s what we’d like to take out and test.”

  “We’re having it messengered over to you this morning,” said Lloyd, sounding like he was doing me a big favor.

  “I’m not comfortable with that,” I blurted . . . which, I figured, was more diplomatic than saying, I hated it, it’s awful, and if you use it, you’re going to ruin my show. Even as I said the words, I knew they wouldn’t do any good. Chauncey had spoken . . . and once the president of the network decided he liked a line, or a scene, or an actress, as surely as day followed night, the showrunner would be stuck with that line, that scene, that actress. Still, I needed to make my case. I drew myself up tall in my chair, set my feet on the floor, and said, “If we’ve got people making fun of Nana Trudy in the first act, basically calling her an elderly nymphomaniac . . .”

  Lloyd chuckled. “Elderly nymphomaniac. That’s a good line. We should have used that.”

  I shut my eyes and pressed on. “The important thing in a pilot is telling the audience who they’re supposed to root for. If you’re making Nana a joke, they won’t want to root for her. They’ll just want to laugh at her.”

  The silence on the other end of the line told me that my executives were perfectly content in a world where viewers were laughing at Nana instead of with her. I could feel my throat tightening as I imagined my own grandmother’s reaction to the scene, in which Annie Tait was called fat and ugly, an over-the-hill gold digger intent on getting her claws into any man who’d pay the deductibles for her doctors’ visits. “Did you guys ever watch The Golden Girls?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Joan said promptly.

  “I’ve seen it in reruns,” Lloyd said.

  “Those women . . .” I pressed my fist against my right eye, then my left one. “They were the heroes of the show, you know? You loved them. You wanted them to win. If we start off the show with . . .” Lloyd’s scene, I almost said, and stopped myself just in time. “If we start The Next Best Thing with the scene you’re proposing, it makes it so that Nana’s not a hero. She’s just a punch line.” I paused and then added, “And it would break my grandmother’s heart.”

  There was another beat of silence, during which I imagined Lloyd and Joan weighing possible ratings against one old woman’s broken heart—one old woman who didn’t even have a Nielsen box. “Why don’t you take a look at what we’re sending over. It’s probably not as bad as you remember it,” said Joan.

  It was, I knew, just as bad as I’d remembered it, and possibly worse . . . but I could hear in her voice that the battle was over, and that I’d lost.

>   “I think this is a mistake,” I said. My voice sounded high and wobbly, and I was, I knew, about ten seconds away from actually starting to cry. “I just need to be on record as saying that. I think it’s a betrayal of what this show’s supposed to be about.” It’s a betrayal of me, I thought. My grandmother. My life. Everything we’ve lived through to get here.

  I heard the beep of call waiting. “Ruth, I need to take this,” Joan said in her soft and placating voice. “Take a look at the cut. I hear that you’re upset, but I think that when you watch it back and take some time to sit with it you’re going to feel much better.”

  Wrong, I thought. “Okay,” I said. When the call ended, I put my forearm on the desk and rested my forehead against it, breathing in the scent of fabric softener and my own skin, hearing a lyric from Les Misérables in my head: There was a time when it all went wrong.

  * * *

  “Ready?” I asked, and tried to smile. I had put off showing the pilot to my grandmother for as long as I possibly could. I only have a rough cut, I’d told her. They haven’t temped in the music. We’re still making changes, I’d said long after the point when we’d stopped making changes. There might be reshoots, I told her—true, but that didn’t change the fact that for the past ten days I’d had a close-to-finished copy of the pilot in my possession . . . and I didn’t want to show it to my grandmother.

  She’d asked. Then she’d wheedled. At the dining-room table, draped in its white cloth, with my favorite dishes all in a row, she had employed reverse psychology, airily claiming that she wasn’t interested, that she’d wait for the September premiere, just like everyone else. Finally, she met me at the door one night when I was coming home from work and said, “The longer you don’t let me look at it, the more worried I’m going to get.”