The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  I gave my body orders, short tasks that I could accomplish, one by one. Dry off your arms. Now your legs. Wrap the towel around you. Now sit down on one of the chairs. Make sure no skin is showing. You’re colleagues. That’s all. With each step, the events of the day, and then the month, came crashing back: Cady’s weight loss. My grandmother’s heartbreak. That terrible scene that Lloyd had written and the network had forced me to shoot and then include. Justin’s tittering revelation about how they were planning on replacing Annie Tait, the only thing in the show that was working. I could remember the feeling of Rob’s hands on my shoulders as he hauled me to my feet, the way his face had tightened as he’d kissed my cheek but not my lips, and I could hear my grandmother’s voice: Don’t be the same fool twice.

  By the time I was sitting, wrapped in a towel, Dave had worked himself back into his chair, with his own towel in his lap. Beads of water glistened on the light coat of brown hair on his chest, and for a moment, I could feel my palm there, flat against the muscles. He was so strong, and his kisses had been like nothing I’d experienced, nothing I’d even imagined. Then I remembered Shazia on his lap, head thrown back, and Taryn Montaine, all long, tanned legs and cleavage in a hundred pictures in People magazine. Those were the girls who got guys like Dave. Not me. Never me.

  “So what are we going to do about Cady?” I asked, and was proud when my voice came out steady. We could have been in the writers’ room after we’d shared lunch, instead of him in a swimsuit and me naked under a towel, still weak-kneed and swoony from my orgasm.

  “You aren’t going to like it,” he said after a moment. “But the truth is, Cady’s going to get a ton of press about this, and the network’s going to be thrilled.”

  I knew that he was right. I also suspected that any effort I could mount would be worthless in the face of free publicity.

  “The thing is . . .” I crossed my legs, taking care not to let the towel slip. “If Cady’s skinny, then I don’t know what the show’s about anymore.”

  “Beg pardon?” My heart broke a little bit at his words, the sound of his voice. Other guys would say huh? or what? or how’s that again? With Dave you got beg pardon. He’d hold doors, I knew, and introduce you to strangers at a party and make sure your drink was always full (Gary had an unpleasant tendency to leave me on my own at parties and drift away toward whoever had the pot).

  “There’re three major themes in literature, right? Man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself, or herself.”

  Dave nodded. “That’s what I remember from English class.” He folded his towel in halves, then quarters. I watched his hands moving, remembering them on my thighs, pushing them apart as he lowered his lips to the slick seam between my legs. Oh, God. My face was getting hot. I made myself turn away, furious at myself. How had I let this happen? And how could I go on with my life, knowing it would never happen again?

  “Right. So this show was supposed to be man—woman—versus herself.” I waited for his nod before I went on. “It was Daphne’s coming-of-age. Would she find the strength to make the kind of life she deserves? And her obstacle was herself. Her looks. Her weight. Her crappy self-esteem. Not being able to get out of her own way.” The words came slowly because, while I was talking about Daphne-maybe-Dannhauser, really, I was describing myself. Daphne Dannhauser, c’est moi, with the fractured family, the absent parents, the grandmother, the romantic missteps, the brokenness . . . only instead of scars, I’d given her pounds. “If she’s thin, Daphne has no obstacles,” I said. “She has no reason to feel insecure. There’s nothing keeping her from getting what she wants. So what’s the show about?”

  Dave shrugged. “Sometimes baggage can be internal. There are pretty girls who can’t get out of their own way.”

  “But nobody identifies with them,” I said. “And nobody believes it, either. Not really. You can put Drew Barrymore in glasses, but nobody actually thinks she was a nerd in high school. Not anyone who actually was a nerd, anyhow. It’s a Hollywood lie.”

  He drummed his fingers on his knees. “So maybe the show’s a little less specific than you intended. Maybe it’s more a girl and her grandmother coming of age than woman versus herself.”

  “Anyone could write a show about a girl and her grandmother,” I said. Dave didn’t answer. In the silence, I heard the hum of traffic in the foothills, the rustle of something creeping in the underbrush beyond the pool’s fence, a skunk or a coyote or a raccoon, one of the wild things that lived out here. “Anyone,” I repeated, and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, Dave had wheeled himself into the shade of the pool house. It was a scene David Hockney could have painted—the slanting shadows, the cool blue rectangle of the pool, the man in the wheelchair looking out over the water.

  “I should go home,” I said. Dave nodded without speaking, without trying to stop me, confirming my belief that when you were a man who could get women like Shazia Khan, you had no romantic use for a woman who looked like me. I walked toward the pool house, wondering why I’d wanted this life in the first place. It was so fraught, so hard. I should have been a pair of ragged claws . . . or a cook, in chef’s whites and clogs, my hair pulled back under a bandana, hidden in a kitchen, far from diners’ eyes, following recipes where things always turned out the way they were supposed to and nobody from the network or the studio came along and said, Try it like this or Do it like that or We want it with gravy on top. I could have stayed in Boston, maybe had a boyfriend and a blog. Maybe that would have been enough for me.

  The shower in the pool house had a wide plastic stool inside, its metal legs centered on the tiled floor, with a showerhead wide as a dinner plate hanging from the ceiling, a handheld nozzle attached to a hook at chest height, and more nozzles bristling from the walls. I found a shelf full of shampoo and body wash, a pink mesh sponge hanging from a cord, shaving gel, razors, everything a girl could want. On the marble counter were makeup remover and moisturizer. Glass jars of cotton balls were arranged next to a lighted mirror; toothbrushes, still in their plastic wrappers, were lined up in a stainless-steel cup. I slipped a file and a razor and a toothbrush into my pocket. I shouldn’t leave without a parting gift, I told myself, feeling low and mean and miserable.

  Dave was waiting for me by the pool. He’d put on a shirt but was still in his swimsuit, dark hair clinging damply to his pale legs. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll give Tariq a call in the morning, just to give them a heads-up.”

  I nodded, even though I was sure that the network, the studio, and the entire rest of the world already knew what had happened.

  “We’ll come up with a plan,” he said.

  I nodded again, although I knew there would be no plan. The network would be as thrilled as I was heartbroken by Cady 2.0. Maybe they’d even be willing to suck up the expense and reshoot the entire pilot, like she’d requested. The show would turn into something different, something that was not what I’d intended, not what I’d meant at all.

  “So . . . ,” I said. I was hoping for reassurance, maybe even a kiss, a sign that, in spite of what he’d said, there was hope after all; for the show, and maybe even for the two of us, even though I knew better.

  Dave turned his chair so that he was facing away from me. “Take care of yourself,” he said. I waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to say anything more or do anything else, and then, without another word, I let myself out the front door.

  PART THREE

  The Next Best Thing

  SIXTEEN

  We have a few suggestions,” Loud Lloyd boomed.

  Big surprise, I thought, picturing Big Dave’s big canister of KY jelly, hearing him say, Bend over, here it comes again. It had been a week since I’d seen Cady’s transformation, a week since the episode in Dave’s pool. Now I was in a conference room in Burbank, where executives from the network and studio had gathered to go over the test results for the pilot.

  “No Dave?” Li
sa had asked when I’d walked through the door.

  “No Dave,” I said shortly, knowing my response was probably on the wrong side of rude, but also aware that I couldn’t say anything else without my voice cracking or my face turning red. I’d sent Dave an email the day after our afternoon in the pool, telling him, in a fourteen-word message that had taken me two hours to compose, that it would probably be best if I handled the meeting on my own. Dave’s response had trumped mine for brevity. “Okay,” he’d written . . . and that had been that.

  I pulled out my laptop—unnecessary, but I felt the need for a prop—and got ready for what I knew would be one of the less enjoyable parts of the development process. Last week, emissaries from a research firm had taken DVDs of the pilot of The Next Best Thing to fourteen malls in medium-to-large cities all over the country, and had shown it to audiences consisting mostly of women ages eighteen to thirty-four, who’d been lured to a conference room with the promise of pizza and soda and gift certificates. These women had watched the show with dials in their hands, dials they could turn down when they were bored or displeased by what they were seeing and turn up when they were amused, and turn off entirely when they decided that the show was too horrible to be endured, even for free pizza and twenty-five dollars’ worth of free stuff from the Gap.

  The comments had been compiled, the numbers crunched, and now everyone was looking at a graph projected onto a screen at the front of the room, a graph with a line that rose and dipped and rose again, charting viewers’ second-by-second reaction to The Next Best Thing.

  “Hey!” said Tariq, hurrying into the room. He glanced around the table before taking a seat. “Is Dave coming?”

  “No Dave,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice.

  The test results had been okay. Good, not great. The show’s overall score—the percentage of viewers who’d said that they would definitely watch or would be likely to watch The Next Best Thing—was in the seventies. The low seventies. Shelly, my agent, had called with the news. I hadn’t said anything except for a quiet “Okay” when she’d told me the numbers, but they’d felt like a punch to the gut. A seventy-two was the worst grade I’d gotten since a pop quiz in tenth-grade geometry after I’d been out for a week with strep throat. Shelly was quick to reassure me, explaining that, in TV land, a seventy-two wasn’t that bad. Friends, one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, had clocked in at forty-one. In contrast, the best-testing show in network history, a post-Seinfeld spinoff starring Michael Richards and another bunch of bold-faced names, had notched an unheard-of ninety-one and still had lasted for only three episodes. A seventy-two was fine. And I’d be fine, too, with whatever the research revealed, and with Dave as nothing more than a colleague and a friend. I’d survived worse.

  “Shall we begin?” The vice president in charge of the research firm, a middle-aged, heavyset lady named Marcia, got to her feet. She wore low heels, pale-blue eye shadow, and a strand of pearls. Her suit had shoulder pads the size of throw pillows, her lipstick was the bright pink of cheap bubble gum.

  Joan, who’d been on a call, slipped her telephone into its pink knitted cozy, put the cozy into her blue felt purse, and peered around the table. “Maybe we should wait for Dave.”

  “Dave’s not coming,” I said.

  Joan smiled at me, holding her hands up, palms out, in front of her, as if I’d thrown something at her face. “Easy, easy.”

  “Sorry,” I said as Marcia stood at the front of the room, smiling benignly, as if she’d seen this all before.

  “People enjoyed The Next Best Thing,” she began. “They liked the central dynamic, the relationship between the grandmother and her granddaughter. Seventeen percent of viewers compared it favorably to The Golden Girls. As you know, there’s a great deal of residual affection from people who remember Cady Stratton from All Our Tomorrows and are curious to see what she’s been doing.” As I smiled, she clicked a button and read off some of the viewers’ comments that appeared on the screen. “‘Funny!’” Marcia read. I felt myself relax. “‘It could be funnier,’” Marcia read. My hands clenched into fists. Marcia hit a button, and more comments filled the screen. “‘Cady’s character complains too much,’” she read.

  “But they’re funny!” I protested. “Funny complaints!” Marcia gave me a look. “Sorry,” I said again, feeling my face burn. “Sorry.”

  “Let me get right to what our audience identified as our biggest issue.” Another click, and Annie Tait’s face—warm, weathered, familiar, kind—filled the screen. I smiled, feeling my shoulders descend from where they’d been hovering, tensed, around my ears. I loved Annie.

  “Here’s our problem,” Marcia said. Around the table, heads were nodding—network heads, studio heads, and the lank brunette ponytail of Alice, who was no longer Vince Raymer’s assistant and was now the assistant to the vice president of comedy for ABS, despite having no discernible sense of humor.

  “Annie?” I said. “Annie’s our problem? Annie’s great!”

  “She was fine,” said Loud Lloyd. “But we think that we could be getting more bang for our buck.”

  “A bigger name,” amplified Joan, who’d dressed for the meeting in a sweater vest of alternating pink-and-blue stripes, with a turtleneck patterned with tiny whales underneath. She looked like she was ready to lead a group of preschoolers in a singalong. I wondered again how someone who seemed so sweetly inoffensive could have attained and held a position of power in such a cutthroat world.

  “You’ve written a great part,” said Tariq, running his palms over his bald head. He was dressed as sharply as ever, in a perfectly creased shirt made of finely woven cotton, with dark-blue pants and a black leather belt with a rectangular silver buckle, but one of his shoelaces was untied, and he’d spilled something sticky on his iPad’s cover. “There are probably a hundred actresses the right age who’d kill to play it.”

  “Okay.” I spoke slowly, but my brain was churning as I tried to figure out how to make the case for Annie. “But we went to all the big names when we were casting the pilot. Are we sure there’s going to be new interest, given our budgetary constraints?” “Budgetary constraints” was code for “cheapness.” ABS was notoriously parsimonious in launching its new shows, paying actors as little as possible for as long as it could. Which was why, of course, all those big names had turned us down in the first place.

  “Signing on to a pilot’s different than a show that’s been ordered to series,” said Loud Lloyd in the scolding tone he might use to remind a kid who should have known better that two times two is, indeed, four. “We’re fishing in a different pond now that actors know they’ll be getting a guaranteed nine episodes’ worth of work.”

  “Hang on.” My armpits were getting clammy, and I could smell the acrid tang of flop sweat. If Annie was replaced, that would mean that all her work was for nothing. The great performance she’d turned in would serve as a first draft for the actress who would eventually be cast as Trudy. It also meant that horrible Justin was right. One of my stars was being replaced, and I, the showrunner, the woman ostensibly steering the ship, was the last to know.

  Choose your battles, I told myself before raising my chin. The Daves, had they been here, might have told me otherwise, but as far as I was concerned, this was a battle worth fighting. “Annie was fantastic,” I said.

  “People don’t know her,” Marcia countered.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Joan. “Let’s make a wish list of, say, six actresses we think would give us the kind of buzz we’re looking for. We’ll put the word out—”

  I interrupted. “Do we tell Annie this is happening?” Thinking: Do I tell Annie this is happening? It was a conversation I couldn’t imagine having: You were amazing, everyone loved you, but too bad, so sad, you’re just not quite famous enough. “Listen, I know she’s not the biggest name,” I said. “But she was hands-down the best person for this part. She killed it in the room. She nailed it onstage. And if the show’s a hit
. . . I mean, who was Estelle Getty before Golden Girls?”

  “Estelle Getty,” Lisa mused, and tapped at her handheld before turning to Tariq. “You think we could get her?”

  “She’s dead.” My voice was shrill. How on earth would I tell Annie she’d been axed? And how would I tell my grandmother, who’d adored Annie Tait since her debut in the 1960s and had been thrilled to have Annie playing the television version of herself, even a radically and unpleasantly altered version?

  “Annie will understand,” said Joan. “Annie’s a pro. She’s been through this before.”

  But I haven’t. I sat there, fuming, as Marcia proceeded through a minute-by-minute dissection of the show, pointing out each instance where the dials had dipped down. “People really responded to the physical humor,” she said, tapping the graph where Cady did her Rollerblade split.

  “And we’ll have that in every episode. I promise. But it’s not going to be all just girl-stuck-on-a-balcony. Or girl-trapped-in-a-closet. Or girl-with-her-butt-sticking-out-of-the-doggie-door.”

  Loud Lloyd boomed laughter, until he noticed that no other executives were laughing, at which point he clamped his mouth shut. Alice yawned. Tariq rubbed his head wistfully. “Could we maybe do girl-with-her-butt-stuck-in-a-doggie-door once? Like, for sweeps?”

  “No,” I said, a little too sharply.

  “We had another thought,” said Joan. The room got quiet. Joan hadn’t said much so far—she had, in fact, spent most of the meeting tapping away at her BlackBerry, causing me to wonder if she’d already given up on The Next Best Thing. I leaned forward, waiting.

  “We’ve been tossing around the idea of Daphne having a friend.”