The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  At 9:45, we were ready to go. The actors were in costume, the cameras were loaded, the lights, rigged and run by Ginger’s spry-looking eighty-year-old father, were shining brightly onto the apartment set. Sam was getting into character, swaggering around backstage like he was twenty percent more muscular than he was in real life, and Leanna Fairfax was fussing with her wig, murmuring her lines under her breath. Your mother didn’t want you to have a little life, Daphne. She wanted the world for you.

  I stuck my head outside the stage doors, certain that we were on the verge of being busted. At any moment security guards with flashlights and walkie-talkies and cell phones connecting them to Chauncey McLaughlin himself would shut us down and drag me off to showrunner prison. So far, though, the night was quiet, with just the usual cars and pedestrians moving around the lot, a breeze rustling the palm fronds, the Los Angeles river flowing through the concrete channel behind the bungalows. Was it possible that we’d get away with this? I thought of Big Dave’s Magic 8-Ball: No matter how you shook it, all signs always pointed to yes.

  “Hey, Ruthie?” Ginger was calling me. “You gonna say something before we get started?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Oh, come on. Give us a speech!”

  “Speech!” called Sam, and then Nancy and the rest of the writers took up the chant, and I found myself center stage, under the lights, in front of the camera.

  “Wait, she needs makeup!” Grandma said as I took a seat in the couch of the apartment set. Carter’s friend hurried over with concealer and foundation and pots of powder and color. “Beautiful eyes,” he said as he lined and shadowed them, one hand resting lightly on my scarred cheek. “By the way, I think this is fantastic. Like, let’s put on a show!”

  “I wish,” I said, and didn’t continue. I wished that I’d stood up for Carter and fought harder for Annie Tait; that I’d figured out how to get a decent performance out of Pete Paxton and that I’d told the network to find another show, possibly even another planet, for Taryn Montaine to inhabit. It was too late for any of that, but maybe this could be at least a gesture toward making it right.

  “All set,” said Matt.

  “On three,” said Ginger’s father. The cast and crew and extras gathered around. I watched Ginger’s dad lift three fingers, then two, then one.

  “Good evening. My name is Ruth Saunders. I’m the creator of the show some of you may have seen, a show called The Next Best Thing that starred Cady Stratton and Penny Weaver, and ran for three episodes on ABS this fall.” I should have been nervous. I hated being photographed, couldn’t stand being on-camera. Day to day, if I stayed away from mirrors and glass and anything that might give me back my reflection, I could imagine—as long as I wasn’t meeting new people—that I looked fine . . . and of course, I always gave the stage a wide berth on shoot nights because I was terrified at the thought of even just my elbow or the back of my head accidentally appearing on TV. Tonight felt different. Maybe it was adrenaline, or the combination of despair over being canceled and the audacity of hijacking the sets and the show, but I felt as calm as if I were sitting in my own chair, in my own apartment, talking to friends.

  “I think I speak for everyone involved in The Next Best Thing when I tell you that we are proud of the work we did. But as anyone who’s worked out here will tell you, television’s full of compromises. The Next Best Thing was supposed to be the story of a regular girl and her grandma trying to make it in Miami . . . two normal women in search of happy lives. When we cast Cady Stratton, she was that regular girl, but by the time we started shooting . . .” I lifted my hands, palms open, toward the sky. “Things had changed. By the time we started shooting, the show I wrote wasn’t the show that ended up on the air. It happens. Out here, it happens a lot.” I swallowed. With the lights shining, I couldn’t see any of the other people on the set, so I had no idea whether they were laughing, or rolling their eyes at how naive I’d been, or just ignoring me completely. I tugged my hair against the side of my face. Then I made myself stop. Warts and all, I thought.

  “Anyhow. We’re here in Studio City, on the ABS lot, on the set of The Next Best Thing, which is probably going to be struck tomorrow. We’ve gone rogue, I guess you could say. We’ve got Carter DeVries playing the role of Daphne Dannhauser. In the role of Daphne’s Nana Trudy, we’re lucky enough to have Lee-anna Fairfax, whose daughter, Ginger, was one of our writers. Sam King, another writer, is going to play the role of Brad Dermansky, and my grandmother, Rachel Scheft, appears in the opening scene. And now, without further ado, we’re going to start shooting the pilot of The Next Best Thing, 2.0: The Next Next Best Thing.”

  “The Best Thing!” someone called . . . and I smiled and said, “The Best Thing.”

  * * *

  We shot from ten o’clock at night until two in the morning. I kept my promise to do one take per scene, except for the scene we had to do over, after Carter wiped out on her Rollerblades and the cameras hadn’t caught her fall.

  Ginger and I walked the tapes over to the editing bay, where her friend Kevin sat, sipping Red Bull. “You gonna want music with this?” he asked, pulling out his earbuds and letting them rest around his neck.

  “Anything that’s in the public domain,” said Ginger.

  I looked at her. “We’re worrying about the legal stuff now?”

  She shrugged. “I’m okay if ABS gets pissed, but I’d rather not spend the rest of my life in court with Coldplay.”

  Kevin said something under his breath.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I could score it for you. I’ve got some original stuff.”

  “That would be excellent,” I said. Kevin swigged from his bottle and then plugged in his earbuds. “See you in the morning,” he said.

  Back onstage, there was a party going on. Someone had brought wine, and someone else had picked up a case of beer. Music played from the speakers, boxes of pizza were strewn across the apartment set, and on a table in the restaurant set, some extras were playing a noisy game of quarters. George offered a solemn high-five. Nancy shook my hand. Ginger hugged me.

  “That was fun.”

  “It was.” By now I was so tired I felt dry-eyed and shaky, and doubts were starting to creep in. I couldn’t get fired—that had already happened—but what if I got blacklisted and ended up never working again? When Sam handed me a beer, I took it and drank half of it down, fast. A few beers later, I’d decided that maybe not working in television again wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

  “Title sequence!” said Nancy, and pressed a button on her phone. I looked at her screen and laughed in delight when I saw what she and George and Paul and Claire had been working on in the greenroom while we shot: a twenty-second stop-motion masterpiece in which a dozen frosted cupcakes chased one another around a table before calming down and spelling out the words The Next Best Thing, 2.0 and Created by Ruth Saunders.

  “You guys are the best,” I said, and hugged her.

  “We all already filed for unemployment,” Sam explained.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll disavow you. This one is all on me.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I took my time cleaning out my office, piling my books and scripts and photographs into a box, cleaning up my computer’s hard drive, erasing the Internet history, trashing drafts of scripts and memos and emails I’d sent, making sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind. When I was done, I curled up on the couch to grab a few hours of sleep. I woke up at seven, took a shower, changed into the clothes I’d kept in my desk drawer, packed my towel and last night’s outfit in my gym bag, and locked the door behind me, leaving my keys in an envelope in the mailbox outside the bungalow door. When I was halfway to my car, my telephone rang. It was Kevin, calling to say that he’d emailed me his final cut.

  The doors to our set were still unlocked. I took a seat on Nana Trudy’s couch, pulled my laptop out, downloaded the file, and watched, impressed, almost amazed at what we’d done. If it wasn
’t a professionally produced half hour of television, it was so close that casual viewers would have a hard time telling the difference. Kevin had spliced in the title sequence and added my intro, and had our theme music playing as the show began. I watched it straight through, laughing, wiping tears from my eyes, knowing that I could not objectively say whether it was good or bad or even in English. I had lived my own version of the story—girl and grandma cut their ties, move to a strange new world, and try to make it. I’d lived it, then written it, and rewritten it, over and over, and taped it once, then again, and then a third time last night. After draft after draft and take after take, weeks of editing and reediting, and then last night’s fast, frenzied, seat-of-our-pants shoot, all the words and actions had turned into Kabuki and nonsense. Whether it was decent TV, whether it was funny, would be for other people to decide. I logged on to YouTube, my finger hovering over the UPLOAD button. “What the hell,” I murmured, and hit the button that would send our show—my show—out into the world.

  Then I went to The Next Best Thing’s Twitter account and typed what would probably be the account’s final tweets. “The Next Best Thing was axed yesterday. Thanks if you watched. Want to see it the way we dreamed it?” I added the link and posted the same message to the show’s Facebook fan page. Finally I packed up my laptop and walked through the empty stage. There was the living room, so like the one I’d grown up in back in Massachusetts. There was the restaurant’s kitchen, the hostess stand, the ladies’ room, the places where Daphne was to have had her misadventures, her setbacks, her triumphs. There, on an end table in the apartment set, was my parents’ wedding photograph, the two of them impossibly young, impossibly happy.

  This is where the magic happens, I thought, and pulled out my phone, snapping pictures of everything so I would always remember. At least now I knew I’d done what I could. I’d given it my best shot, I’d created something I could be proud of, and even if ABS pulled the video down thirty seconds after realizing it was there, the evidence would live on my hard drive forever. All things considered, it was a happy ending, I decided. I put my parents’ picture in my bag and walked offstage, letting the door slam shut behind me.

  * * *

  “Ruth?”

  “Sleeping,” I said, and rolled over, with my eyes squeezed shut.

  “Honey, it’s ten o’clock at night.”

  “Tired,” I insisted. I’d gotten back to Dave’s place a little after nine o’clock in the morning. There, I’d cooked us an enormous breakfast, scrambling a half-dozen eggs with chives and cheddar cheese, toasting four slices of bread, pouring a pitcher of orange juice, and slicing brick-size wedges of coffee cake. We’d eaten together, and when he’d asked how my grandmother’s procedure had gone, I’d chirped, “Just fine,” before piling the dishes in the sink and crawling into bed without washing my face or changing my clothes. There I’d stayed, sound asleep, for the past nine hours.

  Now Dave was shaking my shoulder, fully dressed and in his chair, looking at me with an expression somewhere between bemused and impressed. “You could have told me what you were doing. I could have helped.”

  So word was out. “I wanted . . .” I said, and yawned. “. . . you to keep your hands clean. So one of us could eat lunch in this town again.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Huh?”

  “What do you want first? The good news or the bad news?”

  “Bad news,” I said. I’d always been a pessimist, or maybe the accident had made me one.

  He folded his hands in his lap. “Okay. ABS’s attorneys sent you what I’m guessing is a cease-and-desist letter. A process server stopped by. I told him you were sleeping. He said he’d come back.”

  “I got served!” I said, and giggled. It was what I’d expected, no more and no less. “I should call my lawyer.” I swung my legs onto the floor, thinking. “I don’t actually have a lawyer. Do you know anyone?” I was walking toward the front door, where I’d left my laptop, trying to remember my password for YouTube, thinking that the faster I took down the video, the less trouble I’d be in.

  Dave came wheeling after me. “Wait. Don’t you want the good news?”

  “Okay.”

  “The show’s already gotten more than two hundred thousand hits.” I stopped in the middle of the hallway. Dave rolled up behind me, still talking. “Carter DeVries and The Next Best Thing have been trending on Twitter all day. Shelly’s been calling for hours. You’ve gotten interview requests from the Today show, Good Morning America, Deadline Hollywood, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter . . .”

  “Not Variety,” I said. “They gave us a bad review.” I went to the end of the hall and found my bag, which I’d left on the floor, underneath the Warhol. I unzipped my laptop’s case and unfurled the plug, carrying them both to the living room. Dave wheeled forward, bumping my hip with his chair, forcing me to stop.

  “Hey!” I said, and swatted at him. Then I yawned again. Everything felt like a dream.

  “Ruth,” he said, and took my hands, “I don’t think you get it. You’ve gone viral. Everyone in Hollywood is talking about The Next Best Thing. And you got a call from the head of the CW. They’re interested in picking up the show, with Carter as the star.”

  I waved my hand, not letting myself get excited. “It won’t happen. They say they’d do it the way I want, but they’ve got advertisers to answer to, same as ABS. They’d want a thin girl, and a big name to play Nana Trudy.”

  Dave was shaking his head. “I don’t think so. I think now that everyone’s seen the potential—what the show could have been—they’ll want to do it right. Especially since you put the network on notice. If they mess it up, people will have a template to look at. They’ll know how it should have been.”

  I sat back down on the white linen couch, with my legs curled underneath me. The room was so beautiful, every time I was there I just wanted to sit and look, to flip through the stacks of art books or mix myself something grown-up from the drinks cart. “Could it even happen? Would ABS turn over the rights? What if they decide they want a do-over?”

  “Would that be the worst thing in the world?” Dave asked.

  I didn’t answer. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through that process again: the auditions, the rejections, the inevitable compromises, the way, last night excepted, the thing you wrote was never the thing you ended up shooting; what you dreamed was never what you got.

  “Cady’s going to kill me,” I said.

  “Hey,” said Dave. “She had her shot. It’s not your fault she wanted to get skinny. Or that she wasn’t as good as Carter.” He smiled, remembering something. “Sam, your writer, called, too. He says his rates have gone up and to call his manager’s manager’s manager if you need him.”

  I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. Then I leaned my head on his shoulder. “So what would you do?” I asked. “If you were me.”

  “If I had a chance to do exactly the show I wanted? If I had a guarantee that I could cast whoever I wanted, that I’d have final cut? Are you kidding?” He looked so handsome with his faintly freckled skin, his light-brown hair; and I loved him so much, his calm, steady nature, his good humor, his competence and even temper, his strength. “I can’t believe you did this. I think you’re amazing.”

  I smiled at him. “Do I have to decide right now?”

  Dave considered, looking at me more intently. “I bet it can wait an hour or two.”

  “Come to bed,” I said, and a few minutes later we were chest to chest, face to face, with his lips on mine, with the covers over our heads, in a world we’d made for two. Let the process servers ring the doorbell, let my in-box overflow, let the the agents and managers and reporters call until my voice mail was too full to even take their messages. For the next little while, I had everything I wanted, right in this bed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As hard as it is for me to believe, what you h
old in your hands is my tenth book . . . the tenth book I’ve written with the help and encouragement and guidance of my wonderful agent, Joanna Pulcini, and my amazing editor, Greer Hendricks.

  All those years ago, when I was a young woman with a full-time job and a manuscript for a book called Good in Bed, I remember hoping that some agent somewhere would be interested, and that she’d be able to get some editor somewhere to bite. I could never have imagined ending up as part of such a great team, with two smart, funny women who became not just colleagues but friends.

  I am also lucky enough to be published by some of the best in the business: Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, and Carolyn Reidy, CEO and president of Simon & Schuster.

  Marcy Engelman, my publicist, is another woman I was lucky to find, and am lucky to have in my corner and call my friend. She and Dana Gidney Fetaya and Emily Gambir work so hard to make sure the world knows about my books, and I’m so impressed by them, and grateful for everything they do.

  Special thanks to Greer’s assistant, Sarah Cantin, and Joanna’s assistant, Katherine Hennes, for their patience and enthusiasm, and to the team at Atria, who publish me so well: Chris Lloreda, Lisa Sciambra, Craig Dean, Lisa Keim, Hillary Tisman, and Julia Scribner.

  Nancy Inglis has the ungrateful task of copyediting my books and saving me from myself. Anna Dorfman gave this book its beautiful cover, and my friend Andrea Cipriani Mecchi, who takes my author photos, somehow makes me look good, too.

  At Simon & Schuster UK, I’m grateful for the support of Suzanne Baboneau, Ian Chapman, Maxine Hitchcock, and Nigel Stoneman.

  Jessica Bartolo and her team at Greater Talent Network make my speaking engagements a joy. I am also grateful to the fine work of DriveSavers Data Recovery in Novato, California, especially Chris Lyons, Joe Novoa, and Bodhi Nadler. Fellow writers—if you ever turn on your computer on Deadline Day, only to be greeted with a gray screen, a question mark, and an ominous clicking noise, these guys will save your life.