The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Listen to this,” said Dave. “The guy at the L.A. Times says that the writing has ‘a tart sharpness’ and ‘a refreshing verve.’”

  “Sounds like we’re a grapefruit,” I said. “And I feel a ‘but.’”

  “Do you want to read them yourself?” Dave demanded.

  “I promise you, I do not,” I said. The light changed, and I turned onto Ventura. My plan was to stop at Big Sugar Bake-shop to pick up a box of doughnut muffins for the writers’ room, and get to my office early enough to sit with a cup of tea and figure out what I’d say to all the people who had probably seen the same reviews I’d heard by now. “See you at the party?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” said Dave as I pulled up to the curb, plugged quarters into the meter, and walked into the store. The girl behind the counter smiled at me; the security guard, a guy named Cliff, didn’t look at me like I had a communicable disease; and I was feeling almost cheerful by the time the writers showed up. I greeted them with a calm look on my face and a box of baked goods in my hands. The truth was, the reviews might have been truly devastating if I didn’t know that at the end of the day I could go home to Dave and tell him all about it.

  “So listen,” I began. “I know that some of the reviews have been a little mixed, and I’m sure you guys all know that they don’t really matter much. People in Connecticut or Ohio aren’t going to tune in or not tune in because of what Variety says. They’re going to tune in because they want to see Cady Stratton looking skinny, or because Pete Paxton’s a hottie, or because the promos were funny, or whatever they normally watch on Wednesday nights is a rerun.”

  “Or because the batteries in their remote are dead, and they couldn’t change the channel even if they wanted to,” said George.

  “Hey. People who can’t figure out their remotes count, too. And the bottom line is this: We can’t worry about the things we can’t control.” I looked around the table, making eye contact with each one of them. “We did the best we could with what we had. And today we’re going to write the best script we can, and have the best run-through we can, and the best party. The rest of it’s out of our hands.”

  “Will there be a moon bounce?” asked Sam, who evidently had confused launch party with rave.

  “No, but there will be an open bar, and a face painter.” I’d been surprised to learn that the network was not throwing us a premiere party. I’d assumed that they’d footed the bill for the catered bashes I’d attended at the start of both seasons of Bunk Eight I’d been around for, but the Daves had been quick to inform me that they’d paid the bills themselves. The network couldn’t afford to drop thousands of dollars on each new show, especially since the majority of them wouldn’t last past a season. So I’d unlimbered my pen and my checkbook and invited everyone, cast and crew and writers and spouses and their kids, knowing, even though it hurt to think about it, that the party I was planning could be both a celebration and a farewell.

  Qué será, será, I told myself as we worked through the morning, the atmosphere strangely quiet, charged and subdued, like the calm before a thunderstorm rolls in, as if we were a room full of prisoners awaiting the executioner’s blade, or a phone call from the governor. When we broke for lunch, Reilly, my line producer, was waiting at my office door with folders in his hands. “We need to pick a goat,” he said.

  “Ah.” Next week we’d be shooting an episode in which Daphne dated a self-righteous locavore, a fellow who raised his own chickens and made his own goat cheese. In my office, Reilly fanned out a bunch of eight-by-eleven photographs on my desk. I looked down at them, puzzled.

  “The goats have head shots?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Reilly, who was excellent at his job but did not have much of a sense of humor. “Any specific look we’re going for?”

  “Goat-like. Goatish. Goatka-esque.”

  “How about a particular color? Do you want one with horns? Does the gender of the goat matter?”

  “Not really,” I said. “You can pick.”

  Reilly frowned. “You don’t want to watch their reels?”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. Of course the goats had reels. “You know what? Let’s just stick to Hollywood tradition. Hire the skinniest one.”

  He left my office. I shook my head, ordered my lunch, and tapped out a text to Dave. I just hired a goat.

  Replaced me already? he wrote back.

  I grinned. It’s a very talented goat. Good look. Good manners.

  He’s just using you, Dave wrote back. I’ve seen the goats out here. I know how they operate. Give him a day, he’ll be asking to be a series regular.

  I’ll watch my back, I wrote. See you tonight?

  I will be there, he wrote, and, beaming, I practically skipped back to the writers’ room. We stayed until five and then I sent everyone home to take a break and get dressed for the party and the premiere.

  Back at the apartment, my grandmother was waiting at the door, with her bulging makeup bag in her arms, like a doctor called out of bed to attend to a woman in labor. She shooed me into the shower, then had me sit at my desk with my damp hair twisted in a towel and the window shades open, to let in the last of the day’s light.

  “I hired a goat today,” I said as she went to work on my face, smoothing moisturizer over my cheeks and forehead and then dabbing on foundation with a sponge. She peered at me, her eyes narrowed in concentration, her hair pinned up in mother-of-pearl combs, her good ruby earrings in her ears, Maurice’s ring, which I was still getting used to seeing, on her finger.

  “Are congratulations in order?”

  “Who knows,” I said, and shut my eyes so she could brush on sparkling bone-colored shadow. “Who knows about any of it?”

  “Well, Maurice and I will keep a good thought.”

  “Mmm.” I couldn’t answer, because she was rubbing her homemade combination of brown sugar, kosher salt, and Vaseline on my lips, sloughing off dry skin. I wondered if she’d seen the reviews. I hoped that she hadn’t.

  Grandma went to work with her pencils and brushes, one hand gripping my chin lightly, moving my face this way and that. It could have been worse—so much worse. An acquaintance of mine named Ronni Josephson had written and was starring in a sitcom premiering right after The Next Best Thing. In spite of our publicist’s best efforts, Ronni was the one who’d landed a Q and A in the New York Times Magazine that weekend. I’d been jealous, until I’d seen the piece. The first question the reporter had asked her was “Your fellow comics joke about how you slept your way to the top. Did you?” “Ouch,” I’d said out loud, wondering whether the guy who’d written the piece had a sitcom or a novel or a screenplay in a box under his bed that he’d tried to sell and couldn’t, whether he reflexively hated anyone who’d gotten what he wanted, or whether it was just the women he loathed. At least no one had accused me of getting my show on my back, while that interview ensured that the suspicion of having done just that would follow poor Ronni all the days of her life.

  “What a jerk,” Dave had said, reading the screen over my shoulder. He’d brushed his lips against the back of my neck so sweetly that for the next hour or so I forgot about the Times and poor, unfortunate Ronni.

  Grandma tapped the tip of my nose with her brush—her signal that she was done. “Go take a look,” she told me.

  I walked to the mirror, in my white terry-cloth bathrobe and bare feet . . . and there I was. My eyes looked bigger and brighter, my lips were flushed and full, my lashes fluttered, sooty and mysterious, against my cheeks, but it was still my face: same not-quite-right eye, same stretched pink skin, same subtle wrongness to the angles of my jaw and the bones of my eye socket, which had been shattered then repaired. It was me, in other words: me at my best, but me, still. And yet, I thought. And yet. I’d gotten a show on the air, something thousands of writers (like Rob, my mind whispered cattily) dreamed of but never achieved. And I was in love.

  “Ruthie?” I turned. Grandma was dressed in a knee-length gold
sheath and high-heeled T-strapped shoes that matched the shade of the dress perfectly and shimmered in the twilight sun. The curtains stirred in the breeze. Beyond her, I could see the kitchen, the aloe and basil and parsley plants that grew on the ledge, my mother’s orange kettle that Grandma had brought from Massachusetts, the picture of my parents on their wedding day on the wall. She was leaving me all the furniture, the dining-room table and chairs, the couches with their knitted throws, the heavy gold-gilt mirror. Maurice had agreed to let her do whatever she wanted to his place, whatever redecorating or renovation, and I knew from the binders she’d started putting together, the magazines I’d seen in the house, and the telephone calls to decorators I’d overheard, that she was looking forward to the chance.

  She stood behind me on her tiptoes, with her hands on my shoulders. “We need to shake a tail feather.”

  “Ready in a minute,” I said. I’d tried not to think about it, had kept myself so busy that I barely had time to think of anything, but this would be our last week together. On Saturday, Grandma would be Mrs. Maurice Goldsman, and when she returned from her honeymoon, she’d move into Maurice’s house in Brentwood. We’d been cautious around each other, on our best behavior, trying to pretend that nothing had happened and that nothing would change. As always, though, the truth was in her cooking. In the week before the premiere she’d prepared all my favorites: roast turkey, stuffed breast of veal, hoisin-roasted duck and grilled scallops skewered on branches of rosemary, potato latkes and matzoh ball soup, and had left what appeared to be a year’s worth of foil-wrapped meals in the freezer.

  On my bed, draped across my mother’s old quilt, I found the outfit that Grandma had chosen: an A-line linen shift in pale pink, a long necklace of oversize golden beads, and a pair of gold sandals. Princess shoes, I’d called shoes like that when I was a little girl, and I would slip into my grandmother’s closet to try on her high heels, to smell the ghost of her perfume and run my fingers along the handbags and hatboxes she kept in neat rows on her shelves.

  “Beautiful,” she pronounced, spritzing me with Shalimar after I stepped into the living room.

  “I concur,” said Maurice, who looked dapper in a dark-gray suit.

  “I’ve got something for you,” said my grandma . . . and then, a little shyly, she handed me a velvet drawstring bag. When I opened it, a pair of diamond drop earrings fell out, sparkling in my hand.

  “Oh my God. They’re beautiful. This is too much.”

  “I’m so proud of you, Ruthie. So proud.”

  I ducked my head. “I just wish the show was a little better.” There were a thousand things I dreamed of having done differently—insisted on Annie Tait, banished Loud Lloyd’s jokey monstrosity to the fiery pits of hell, somehow convinced Cady that looking like a normal girl would mean so much to the girls who’d be watching . . . but at least I knew I’d tried. If the show succeeded . . . or if, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, someday I had another shot at another show, I’d know better what to do, the battles to pick, the people to approach, the words to use. Maybe it would be better . . . or maybe it would go exactly the way things had with The Next Best Thing, being thwarted and heartbroken at every turn. It was like Big Dave’s Magic 8-Ball, only instead of being customized to read Fuck yeah, each side of the triangle would read Who can say?

  I slid the earrings into my ears and left the bag on the kitchen counter. Maurice held out his arms. I took the left one, Grandma took the right, and he escorted the two of us down to his car.

  * * *

  I’d decided to have the party on the lot, in the commissary. There was plenty of parking, everyone knew how to find it, and the room came equipped with six big television sets mounted on the walls. I got there early, stopped by the bar for a Daphne’s Daiquiri (we were also offering Nana Trudy’s Sweet Tea, and Brad’s Home-brewed Beer). Then, like a bride in a receiving line, I stood by the door, waiting for the guests to arrive.

  Cady showed up first, holding hands with her new boyfriend, a hockey player from Canada who was roughly three times her size and looked as if he was having trouble walking and chewing his tobacco at the same time. “Ruth!” she squealed, and flung herself, all bony limbs and pointy elbows, against my chest. I wondered if she’d seen any of the reviews that had called her performance The Next Best Thing’s biggest problem, but I knew we didn’t have the kind of relationship where I could ask. “This is Lars.” She linked her arm through his, revealing, as she did, that her billowy knee-length dress of Champagne satin was so radically slit up the sides that I could see her entire teacup-size breasts when she leaned forward. Internally, I rolled my eyes . . . and then I made myself stop. As much as I thought that Cady had every advantage over me, she was trapped, too. Time was her enemy in a way it would never be mine. In ten years, she’d have passed her sell-by date. She’d have to fight the old familiar battle, spending untold time and money to continue looking like she was in her twenties when she was in her thirties, then her forties. By the time she was in her fifties, she’d have to either give up and age gracefully or turn into one of those sad, stretch-faced women who’d auditioned for the Nana Trudy role.

  Now she smiled up at a man whom she’d probably selected less for his conversation or the pleasure of his company than for his mass, which made her look tiny. “Lars plays hockey.”

  Lars grunted something that might have been a greeting or a death threat. Cady smiled at him sweetly. Lowering her voice, she whispered, “His English? Not so great.”

  “Nice to meet you. Go get a drink!” I gestured toward the bar. Cady giggled, snapped a shot of the room with her iPhone, and steered her barge-size boyfriend toward the booze.

  Taryn breezed into the commissary next, sunglasses in place, towing Rob with her right hand, and an adorable little boy toddler with Rob’s dark hair with her left. “Hi-i-i,” she drawled, presenting her smooth cheek for an air kiss.

  “Nice to see you,” I said, and smiled at the happy couple. “Bar’s right over there.”

  “Yummy,” she said, and drifted away, leaving Rob standing awkwardly in front of me, with his little boy beside him. Rob had gotten dressed up for the occasion, in pants that were not denim but linen, and a shirt that had buttons and did not have anything ironic written on it, and the little guy had on a sweater-vest.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I responded. To think, the two of us had once written dialogue.

  “This is Jackson.”

  I knelt down. “Hi, Jackson. I hope you have fun tonight.”

  The little boy didn’t answer as his eyes took in my face. “There’s a moon bounce,” I said, pointing (I’d caved in to Sam’s request after making him promise that he’d let whatever kids attended the party use it, too). Jackson raced away. I straightened up.

  “So,” Rob said, and jammed his hands in his pockets. “Is it everything you ever wanted?”

  I smiled. With Dave in my life and my show on the air, for however long both of those things lasted, it actually was most of what I’d ever wanted. Love. Success. Enough money to throw a party like this and send my grandmother and Maurice on a ten-day honeymoon in Hawaii (my wedding gift—they didn’t know yet). It wasn’t perfect, of course—the show wasn’t what I’d wanted, and it could get canceled, tomorrow Dave could dump me for a hotter, younger model—but, like Dave said, in this life you didn’t get “perfect.” And barring perfection, what I had was, to coin a phrase, the next best thing. “It’s not bad. How about you? How’s marriage? And parenthood?” I found, to my surprise, that I actually wanted to hear his answer, and that I hoped he was happy. I’d liked Rob once, liked him before I’d loved him. Then I’d hated him. Now I just felt mostly indifferent . . . and hadn’t I read somewhere that the opposite of love was not hatred but indifference?

  He gave a shrug. “Ah, you know. Ups and downs.”

  “Where are you working these days?” I asked him, thinking it would be a kindness if I changed the subject.

&n
bsp; Evidently not. Rob shrugged once more, looking uncomfortable. “I’m doing a rewrite for Paramount. This action thing. It’s a remake of a Japanese film. Will Smith was attached for a while, but . . .” He rocked back on his heels, then forward. “I had a pilot in the running at CBS, but it didn’t get picked up.”

  “Ah. Well, you know. Try, try again. Are you going out for staffing jobs?”

  He made a face. “I’m getting a little expensive.”

  I made a noncommittal noise, thinking that it would be the absolute height of ridiculousness if Rob expected me to feel sorry for him. Then again, at his age, with his years of experience, he was probably too pricy for most writers’ rooms to afford . . . and if he couldn’t get a show of his own off the ground, his options were limited to screenwriting (or rewriting) and traipsing around after his wife.

  “Hey, boss lady!” Both of us turned gratefully. Pete Paxton was ambling toward me, grinning, contented and possibly stoned. He was rolling with an entourage, his blond mom, blond sister and two blond brothers, and the obligatory beauty in a dress that advertised exactly the qualities that had attracted her TV-star boyfriend. I wondered if Penny Weaver had seen her yet and what would happen when she did. Never mind, I told myself. As of next week, the actors were officially not my problem anymore, and they wouldn’t be until—if—we got picked up for a second season.

  “We did good, huh?” said Pete, after trying and failing to engage me in a complicated handshake.