The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  None of this was my concern. Cady’s future, on the big screen or small, was none of my business. Nor were Martha’s feelings. All I cared about was getting Cady Stratton to play the part I’d written, and that meant sucking it up and wearing the goddamn pads that pushed her all the way to a goddamn size eight.

  “Cady,” I began, “you look beautiful. A million girls in America would kill to look the way you do. And, like I keep saying, it’s so important for those girls to see someone on TV, someone who’s gorgeous and funny and smart . . .” Or, at least, someone who can act smart on TV. “A girl like you who’s the star of the show,” I concluded. At this point, I could recite the speech by heart. I’d given it to her, and to various executives, from Loud Lloyd on up the food chain, at least a dozen times in the weeks since brunch at The Alcove, making the case as to why skinny Cady Stratton needed to pretend to be at least slightly curvy, if only for the first few episodes.

  “I hate this!” Cady wailed. “I can’t stand it!”

  Her mother grabbed me by the elbow and steered me outside. “Are you sure we have to do it this way?” she asked, the way she’d asked me sixteen times before. “Cady worked so hard to lose the weight. Can’t you just let her be who she is?”

  “Going forward, we can adjust the padding like we talked about, but for tonight she’s got to wear it, so we have at least a chance of matching the way she looked in the pilot.”

  The two of us stared at each other, Martha in her thousands of dollars of designer finery, me in my clogs and the dress that I’d bought, online and on sale, on the off chance that anyone would be looking at me instead of at our stars when we taped.

  “She’s not happy,” said Martha.

  “I can see that. And I’m sorry. But this is the part—”

  “That she signed up for. Right. She knows. We both know. You’ve made it very clear.” Martha turned on her heel and slammed the dressing-room door behind her. Approximately ten seconds later, my telephone buzzed. It was Cady’s manager, the breathy, useless Justin. I hit IGNORE and made my way to my third stop of the morning.

  I knocked on the door of Pete’s trailer. No answer. I banged louder. Still nothing. “Hey!” I hollered, aware that grips and makeup artists and assorted extras were all staring, along with the cute guy driving the forklift filled with potted plants to the soundstage next to ours, where they shot It Grows On You, a comedy about three women who worked at a family nursery in Maine.

  “Pete!” I yelled, past shame, past caring, and pounded at the door until my hands stung. One of the makeup artists poked her head out of the room next door.

  “Hey,” she said. “You need a key?”

  I took it gratefully and gave one final knock. “Pete!” I yelled. “It’s Ruth! I’m coming in now!” I unlocked the door and stepped into a marijuana-scented sauna. The smoke was so thick I could barely see my feet, the air so warm that my face and back were instantly running with sweat, and the music—I thought it might have been Phish—was so loud that every note made my bones ache. “Pete?” I called, coughing and squinting, fanning at the fog. “Pete?”

  “Hey! Ruth! I’m over here!” he hollered above the booming bass. I blinked . . . and there was Pete, clad in a skimpy Speedo and nothing else, his torso gleaming with sweat and his arms stretched over his head. As I watched, he windmilled his arms down into triangle pose.

  “Bikram yoga!” he yelled. “Clears my head!”

  I located the stereo and turned the music down. I spied a tiny window and cranked it open. I found a joint, still lit and resting on the lip of the clamshell that Pete used as an ashtray, and pinched it out. Pete appeared not to notice as he proceeded through a series of sun salutations.

  “I do my own practice,” he said, positioning his right foot on the inside of his left thigh, then twisting his arms into a pretzel. “For a while, I was working with a yogini in Beverly Hills, but that got complicated.” From his leer, I deduced that the complications had something to do with sex.

  “We need you onstage in an hour,” I told him, fanning at the air in a vain attempt to shoo the smoke out the window.

  “No worries.” He nodded toward the coffee table, where he’d set out the classic stoner’s emergency kit: a bottle of Visine, a gallon jug filled with water, a towel, a Speed Stick, and the clothes, still in dry cleaner’s plastic, that he was supposed to wear for the first scene. He gave me a cheeky grin. “You don’t have to worry about me.” His smile widened. “I hear you’ve got other things to worry about.”

  Reflexively I glanced at my phone, wondering why everyone on the show—the stars, their managers, their mothers—seemed to know what was going on before I did. In the five minutes since I’d left Cady’s dressing room, I’d logged five missed calls, four from Team Cady and the fifth from Loud Lloyd. As I watched, the screen lit up with another incoming call, this one from Joan at the network. I hit IGNORE as the door to the back room of Pete’s trailer opened and a face peeked out. I turned away, wanting to give him and his girl of the hour some privacy, but I’d seen enough to recognize Penny Weaver’s bright-red hair and guilty face.

  I spun around in shock. The door was shut. Pete stood there, wearing nothing but his Speedo and a shit-eating grin. “No,” I said.

  He shrugged modestly.

  “No way,” I said.

  “It’s show-mance,” he said, eradicating any hopes that what I’d glimpsed was innocent, simply one actor generously sharing his space with his castmate.

  I took him by the hand, the way Grandma had done with me when I was young, and dragged him, still mostly naked, out into the sun. “Listen to me,” I hissed. “This is unacceptable.”

  He gave me a lazy shrug. “I like older women.”

  “She’s seventy-two.” At least that was what she admitted to. IMDB had her at seventy-four, the Los Angeles Times had printed that she was seventy-five. Was this some kind of dare? A bet? Was Pete trying to fill some kind of sexual bingo card?

  “You ever read what Ben Franklin said about older women? ‘In the dark, all cats are gray.’”

  “You aren’t a cat! And neither is Penny!”

  “Whatever. Listen, don’t worry. We’re both grown-ups.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze and then turned, walking back into his dressing room.

  “But she’s old enough to be your . . .” He waved at me, easing his dressing-room door shut. “Grandmother,” I finished. Pete was gone, no one was listening, and my telephone was ringing again, with Loud Lloyd’s name flashing on the screen. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or cut my losses and get in my car and start driving back to Hancock Park, maybe even back to Framingham. I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  I knew what he’d say before he said it: After sixteen times of telling Cady that she had to suck it up and play the part I’d written, the network had caved. Instead of redoing just the scenes with the recast Nana Trudy and the new characters the network had added, we’d be reshooting the entire pilot. “It’s easier this way,” Loud Lloyd boomed. Easier for whom? I wondered. Next door, my star was probably tearing off her padding, hugging her mother, and congratulating herself on how she’d defeated the hateful and foolishly stubborn showrunner, not caring that The Next Best Thing was now just another sitcom starring just another pretty thin girl.

  “It’s not such a big deal, really,” Joan said when she got on the line. I didn’t respond. She didn’t seem to notice. “You need to look at this as a blessing in disguise. You’ll get people tuning in just to see how Cady looks, or to figure out how she lost the weight.”

  “I’m going to have to get started on the rewrites,” I said. There was no point in arguing, in making my case yet again. By now, I knew the sound of a done deal when I heard it. Enjoy this, I heard Dave saying in my head, back at the kickoff dinner, before things had started their downhill slide . . . and at that moment, I wished I could hit REWIND, send time spinning backward until I arrived at the moment when the story of Daphne and Nana existed only in m
y head. I wished it as fervently as I’d wished for the show to get picked up, what felt like such a long time ago.

  “Take your time,” said Joan, all sweet accommodation. “Just send the pages as soon as you’ve got them.”

  “Okay.” I hung up and walked into the writers’ bungalow, thinking longingly of the half-smoked joint in Pete’s dressing room. That, of course, was when Taryn Montaine came around the corner, wearing stovepipe jeans and a racerback tank top that left her arms and shoulders bare. A broad-brimmed straw sunhat shadowed her face; sunglasses covered her eyes. On her left ring finger was a diamond the size of a smallish walnut. Her right hand was entwined with the fingers of her husband, Rob Curtis.

  A jolt went through me, and my hand went reflexively to my hair, tugging it against my cheek. I hadn’t seen Rob in person since our night together. I’d seen pictures in magazines, You-Tube videos, and interviews he’d done on red carpets, at Taryn’s side. If I’d been hoping for physical devastation, a bald spot, weight gain, maybe the loss of a limb or two, I’d have been disappointed. Rob looked the way he always did—tanned and fit and handsome, with a curving, cynical smile. His hair was still dark and thick, his chest solid underneath his T-shirt. His jeans and unlaced black Chuck Taylors could have been the same pants and shoes he’d worn when we’d worked on The Girls’ Room, but I knew that he ordered them in bulk and replaced them every six months. Once, I’d been the one to place the orders, sign for the boxes, unwrap the clothes and shoes, and recycle the cardboard. Once.

  “Hi, boss!” Taryn called, making me think yet again that she hadn’t bothered to learn my name.

  “Hi, Taryn.” Then, because I saw no way of avoiding it, I made myself face him. “Hi, Rob.” I waited for my stomach to clench, for my face to get hot, for my eyes to start burning with shameful tears, but instead I felt nothing . . . nothing but the memory of Dave’s arms around me, his lips against my neck, whispering, Good morning, beautiful, and me, not doubting for an instant that he meant it. He doesn’t get to win, I thought, and straightened my back. I had a man, and I had a show, and he had nothing except a future with the unpleasant ditz he’d chosen over me.

  He had the good grace to look embarrassed as he lifted a hand in greeting. “Hey, Ruth. Congratulations on everything.”

  “You, too,” I said. Rob squirmed. He didn’t look like the happily married husband and father, a TV writer on top of the world. He looked like a man with no job except holding his wife’s purse while she went to work.

  Taryn, meanwhile, was looking from her husband to me. “Omigod,” she said. “Do you two know each other?”

  “We worked together,” I said. “I was a writer on The Girls’ Room a while back.”

  You could almost hear the wheels turning ever so slowly as she considered what was clearly new information. “Omigod,” she said again. “I remember you!”

  “Great,” I said, not adding that she’d found my face so offensive that she’d asked the showrunner to have someone else deliver her scripts to her dressing room.

  Taryn was frowning, her brain, such as it was, still hard at work. “So, you were an assistant? And then you wrote for The Girls’ Room? And then you wrote this show?”

  “You got it.”

  “Ro-ob,” she said, turning to her husband with a whine it was hard to imagine even the most besotted man could find charming. “Why don’t you write me a show?”

  His smile thinned, and his voice sounded strained as he answered, “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  “Then,” she said, “we could be together every day!” She swung their linked hands upward, pretending to smack him in the nose, giggling. From the way he winced, I wondered how hard that fake smack had been. Then I wondered what he was doing here. Didn’t he have work of his own, an office to go to? I was startled to realize that I didn’t know the answer. I hadn’t checked. I knew that The Girls’ Room had been canceled after eight so-so seasons, but I hadn’t taken the step of Googling to figure out where Rob had landed, or if he was working anywhere at all. Which meant that time had done what time was supposed to do. My wounds were healed. I’d moved on. It was almost enough to make me smile. It was the brightest moment of my day . . . that, and when we’d finally finished the reshoots, and my grandmother had gotten out of her seat in the front row with a bouquet of roses in her arms.

  Standing on her tiptoes, in a vintage shirtwaist of crisp pale-blue cotton, she’d hugged me, whispering, “I’m so proud,” in my ear. At that moment, whatever hard feelings were left between us, the lingering anger over my failure to be ecstatic about her wedding, or the changes Nana Trudy’s character had undergone, seemed to finally disappear. Grandma turned, with her arm around my waist, guiding me to the center of the stage, into the spotlight where the actors stood. “Hey, Ruthie!” said Pete, amiable as ever. Cady had narrowed her eyes, clearly unhappy about sharing the attention, and Taryn had shot us a poisonous glance before continuing to wave at the crowd. Grandma ignored them both. She raised her voice over the audience members and extras, the blare of the music and the executives’ conversation. “Everyone!” she’d yelled. “This is my granddaughter. She wrote the show!” For one moment, I basked in the applause, halfhearted and puzzled though it was, and let myself imagine that things had gone better: that I’d gotten the star I’d wanted, that Cady hadn’t gotten skinny and then ruined multiple takes by giggling and posing like she was at a photo shoot for Playboy, that Pete, God love him, with his lines scribbled on his hands and his wrists, hiding pages of his script in the newspaper he was leafing through onstage, had learned the words he was supposed to say.

  Little victories. Small moments. I’d tucked my grandmother’s roses into a vase and set them on my desk, a visible reminder that this endeavor had not been a complete disaster. I had written a show that would be on TV. That was something. I poured myself another drink and stared up at the poster on my wall. There was Cady Stratton standing in the living room, one arm flung over her head in carefree, girlish abandon. She wore an apron and held a whisk in one hand and a mixing bowl tucked against her hip. Penny Weaver stood slightly behind her, looking on with an expression of mingled anxiety and pride. Cady’s hips had been Photoshopped to reflect a compromise between the girl I’d hired and the girl I’d wound up with (cost of said digital manipulation: $30,000), and I’d spent three tense hours on the phone with Penny’s management, negotiating the size of the font in which her name would appear, and precisely how far behind Cady she would be standing. “They’re Going to Make It After All!” read the copy over their heads, in what I worried was a blatant and lawsuit-baiting rip-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (the executives had assured me it was fine). Underneath Cady’s skirt was the title of the show: THE NEXT BEST THING. My name appeared nowhere on the poster, because people didn’t tune in to TV shows because of their creators; they came for the same reasons they went to planetariums—in short, to see the stars.

  I wandered out to my assistant’s desk and sat in her chair. There was an economy-sized jar of Advil in her drawer. I took two, then a bottle of water from the pantry. My phone trilled in my purse.

  “Ruthie?”

  I felt myself smile, and suddenly everything I’d been worried about—the taping, the ratings, whether we’d last past our initial airing—didn’t seem to matter as much. “Hey.”

  “You coming home?”

  I grabbed my keys, my water, and flicked out the lights. “As soon as I can.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first review of The Next Best Thing appeared in Variety the morning of our premiere. “The Next Best Thing,” read the headline. “If the Title’s True, We’re All in Trouble.” I was at home, in my bedroom, where I’d returned after spending two nights in a row at Dave’s house, telling myself that I needed to play at least the tiniest bit hard to get. Besides, he had his poker game, and I could watch Grey’s Anatomy with my grandmother, let her feed me, and smile, looking smug, when she asked about my “young man.�
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  I clicked away from the page as fast as I could and collapsed onto my bed, the very spot where I’d gotten the news about our pickup, with my fists pressed against my eyes, trying to un-see what I’d seen. Then, feeling numb, I made my way to my car, put my cell phone on speaker, and dialed Two Daves Productions as I began my drive to the lot. “Help,” I said when Big Dave got on the line.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said in disgust. “Are you reading the reviews? Have we taught you nothing?”

  “Where are you? Can I stop by the offices?”

  “I’m meeting Dave at a thing,” said Big Dave. “Pitch meeting.”

  “Time-Share?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, no. It’s a new reality show. Scripted reality. Well, semi-scripted. Butterface.”

  I pulled onto the freeway. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Nope. It’s The Biggest Loser meets Extreme Makeover meets The Bachelor. Twelve women with great bodies but, um, less attractive facial features live in a house together, where they compete for dates and plastic surgery.”

  “And this is going to be a Two Daves show?”

  “Hey, listen, if we’re involved, at least it won’t be totally degrading. And quit with the reviews! They don’t matter,” he said. “People just tune in because they want to see the stars, or because someone told them it was interesting.”

  “Butterface.”

  “Shut up,” said Dave. “Word of mouth matters. Ad campaigns matter. Name recognition matters. Not reviews. Not for TV.”

  “I know.” I pulled onto the exit for Ventura Boulevard and then stopped at the light. “So how bad is it?”

  “Hang on,” Dave grumbled. I waited, my heart beating painfully, while he accessed his iPhone and then hummed as he read. “It’s actually not terrible,” he finally reported. “I’ve seen worse. The Times thinks you’re solid. Variety, not so much.”

  “So is there any kind of consensus?” I asked, thinking that if all the critics said the same thing—that Cady was terrible, that Penny was written too broadly, that the music wasn’t right or the laugh track was too intrusive—it would actually be helpful. I could fix the things that everyone agreed were wrong. But as I suspected and Dave confirmed, there was no agreement among the half-dozen outlets that had reviewed the pilot. A few of the critics had loved Cady’s performance; a few had found it grating and lazy. For everyone who’d written that the show was cheesy and obvious, someone else had found it a charming throwback. Everyone had picked on something different . . . and no one, I discerned, had said that it was great.