The Next Best Thing (8 page)

That was not what happened. What happened was that Rob
didn’t show up at my grandma’s party the night our episode debuted. When I got to work the next day, the showrunner called me into his office and asked if I’d heard the happy news. Rob and Taryn had eloped the day before . . . and Taryn, Steve told me as gently as he could, was pregnant.

I sat there, stunned, speechless, reeling, ashamed beyond comprehension. I had never suspected that Rob and Taryn had shared so much as a sandwich. (Not that Taryn ate sandwiches. Not that Taryn, as far as I could tell, ate anything—she was slim as a ribbon, with long arms and coltish legs and not a single ripple of cellulite.) “But he hates her,” I’d said, thinking of the hours upon hours, the days upon days that Rob had spent making fun of Taryn: her complete ignorance of world history and current events, her inability to memorize any speech more than two lines long, the way she acted mostly with her hair and her cleavage, her default pose of breasts sticking east and ass jutting west.

“I guess maybe he doesn’t hate her that much,” Steve had said. The way he’d spoken, the look he’d given me, all of it announced, as clearly as if he’d said it out loud, that everyone in the office knew the way I felt about Rob. Maybe they even knew what had happened between us the night we’d both stayed late after the read-through of the script we’d written together.

I’d made my way back to my desk, trying to convince myself that it couldn’t be true. It had to be some kind of elaborate writers’ room prank, like the time Steve had told the writers that Trojan was giving away ten-thousand-dollar prizes to the person who made the best video about his first time using what he referred to solemnly as “the product.” Steve had generously agreed to let the writers use his flipcam to tape their entries. Then, after they’d emailed their submissions to an in-box he’d set up, he’d compiled them all and posted them on YouTube under the headline “There Is Hope,” with a note that read, “Attention,
geeks of America. As this video clearly reveals, geeks grow up and have sex, too!” The writers had responded by having Steve’s Bentley bronzed like a pair of baby shoes (the bronze was a special-effects shell that peeled right off, but when Steve saw his car, he fell to his knees in the parking lot, wailing, “My baby! My baby!” . . . a moment that the writers, of course, had captured on camera and posted on YouTube). Maybe it was finally my turn to get pranked. In five minutes, the door would swing open, and there would be Rob, with a pie box in his hands and a delighted grin on his face. “Fooled ya! Fooled ya!” he’d chant, and then he’d take me by the hand to a room at the Regent Beverly Wilshire and do to me what I’d done to him. I waited five minutes. I waited an hour. I waited all morning. The door never opened. Rob never came back.

S
o tell me the timeline,” my boyfriend, Gary, said as he walked out of the parking garage on Camden Street, on our way to the kickoff dinner the network was throwing for
The Next Best Thing
. I reached for his hand and was pleased and a little relieved when he let me take it and gave me a reassuring squeeze. When we stopped at the light, I looked at him, marveling, as I often did, that he was actually interested in me, that we were actually a couple. Gary had pale skin, dark hair and dark eyes, and a cleft in his chin that I would jokingly suggest filling with various dips and toppings for my snacking pleasure. He’d gotten dressed up—or at least his version of dressed up—for the occasion, wearing a belt with his jeans, black leather shoes instead of sneakers, and a sportscoat instead of a fleece. True, there was an ink stain on his cuff, but he was here and he was trying, and I felt lucky, loved and lucky, with him at my side. I had a show. I had a great guy. What more could I, could any woman, want?

“The timeline for tonight or the timeline for the show?” I asked. The light turned green. Gary dropped my hand and started walking, so that I had to half run to catch up.

“Show,” he said.

“Okay. Well, let’s see. We start pre-production next week, and for the next eight weeks I’ll be working on the pilot. I’ll have
to cast it, of course, and hire a director, and a DP—a director of photography—and a line producer . . .” I paused, waiting for him to ask what a line producer did, so I could tell him that a line producer handled all the details related to the business side of shooting a show, but Gary didn’t ask. My voice was high and chirpy, slightly breathless from hurrying, as I kept talking. “So. We’ll hire people, and build the sets, and rewrite and rehearse, and then we’ll shoot it over two days, and edit it, and turn it in to the network, and wait for them to decide if they’re going to pick it up and order it to series . . . and if they do, we’ll make more.”

“How long will all that take?” he asked as we walked across Beverly. The dinner was at a steakhouse called Mastro’s, a few blocks from Rodeo Drive, with its boutiques and jewelry stores, close to where Grandma and I had stayed when we’d first come to town.

“Depends. Six weeks, eight weeks, something like that.” The wind gusted, threatening to blow open my wrap dress and dislodge my hat. I clamped one hand down on top of my head, and struggled with my skirt with the other.

“So you’re going to be waiting all over again?”

“Yup,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about the prospect. “The network will make holding deals with the actors, so they can’t go off and work on something else. Say we get picked up in May. I’ll hire writers and bring back everyone I worked with on the pilot, assuming I liked them and the network or studio doesn’t want to replace them. We’ll start shooting in June and shoot all summer, depending on the order: if they want nine episodes, or eleven, or thirteen. The new shows premiere in September, unless we’re a midseason replacement, in which case January. And . . . that’s it.”

“That’s it?” His voice was flat, his tone uninterested, his expression impossible to read in the darkness as he walked with his
hands jammed in his pockets and his head down. He looked like a guy being led to the guillotine instead of to a party.

“That’s it. Then you have to wait to see if you get good reviews, and if you find an audience, and if you get renewed.”

“It’s a lot of waiting,” Gary observed.

“It’s not so bad,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. All I wanted was for Gary to be happy for me, to be as thrilled as I’d felt since I’d gotten the pickup, and all he’d done was ask picky questions, pointing out the problems, prodding at the soft spots, how long it would take to hear from the network or the audience, and how brutally the odds were stacked against me.

It was January in Los Angeles, still warm enough to go out at night with only a light wrap. After a childhood in New England, I missed the seasons—the crisp fall air, the showers of dogwood and magnolia blossoms in May—but I’d grown to love L.A.’s weather—the warm winter days, the cool desert nights, the weeks that could pass without a cloud in the sky (except for the ever-present smog). Gary handed his leather jacket to the coat-check girl, I tucked my cashmere wrap into my bag, and we followed a hostess up the stairs covered in carpeting the color of rare prime rib, past a man playing Cole Porter on the piano and a line of beautiful women—escorts, I guessed—who were sitting at the bar, long legs crossed, glossy hair and perfect bodies on display. Every one of them had probably been the prettiest woman in her high school, her college, her hometown. Here in Los Angeles, though, beauty was as common as the oranges that grew on the trees everyone had in their backyards. As we walked past, I imagined their eyes on me, wondering what had happened to my face, grateful that it hadn’t happened to them. The high-ceilinged room was noisy with the sounds of conversation, silverware, and the muffled pop of a Champagne cork, and the air smelled like seared meat.

“Here we are,” said the hostess, dropping us off at the entrance to a wine room toward the back of the second floor. When I walked in, the executives started clapping and I bent my head, embarrassed. There was a sign on the wall that read
THE NEXT BEST THING
. I wanted to take a picture, freeze the moment, live in it forever.

“How about a toast!” said Lisa from the studio. She was dressed in her usual loose-legged trousers and high-heeled boots, a sweater and a chiffon scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck. Today the pants were pale gray, the sweater was black, and the scarf was shades of green from emerald to mint. There were ten of us at what had been billed as a small getting-to-know-you dinner, a celebration before we’d officially begin the work of building
The Next Best Thing.
Lisa and Tariq were there representing Lodestar, the studio that had produced my show, then sold it to ABS. From the network, there were Joan and Lloyd, who until the previous week had been Joan’s assistant, but had since been promoted to vice president of comedy. Both of my former bosses, the Daves of Two Daves Productions, were there—David Lieberman, with his wife, Molly, and David Carter, with his girlfriend, an entertainment lawyer named Shazia Khan, who was possibly the most beautiful woman in the room, if not the entire restaurant.

Shazia’s skin was honey brown, her wide eyes were accented with perfectly arched brows, and her teeth glowed a bluish white that made them look slightly radioactive. She wore a red dress with gold accents, an outfit that was not exactly a sari but that somehow managed to suggest a sari, and jeweled gold sandals on her high-arched feet. Shazia’s father was Persian, a philosophy professor at Princeton, and her mother was Swedish, an actress in art-house films. Shazia was what you got when you combined those two exemplary gene pools. Not only was she beautiful, but she had an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degree
from the University of Chicago, and was regularly named as one of the most powerful attorneys in town. None of the men in the room could take their eyes off her. David Lieberman—Big Dave—was especially solicitous.

“Is he ignoring you?” he asked Shazia, gesturing toward his partner, who sat in his wheelchair. Dave Carter—Little Dave—wore a tweed sportsjacket, a white button-down shirt, and khaki pants. His shoes—brown leather loafers—were perfectly pristine, because Dave had never taken a step in them. He was paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a boating accident he’d had the summer after college. Paralysis had not prevented him from becoming one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, or from dating a parade of women, each one more lovely and accomplished than the one before.

“Do you need anything?” Big Dave asked. Shazia gave him a patient, practiced smile, the kind of smile she must have dispensed a dozen times every day to parking-lot attendents, waiters, and deliverymen and just random male strangers on the street. “Another drink?” Big Dave persisted. “Something to eat? Want to wear my jacket? Take all my money? Anything?”

“Honey,” said Big Dave’s wife. “Put your tongue back in your mouth and get Ruthie some wine.” Molly Lieberman smiled at me. Molly could afford to be indulgent. Her blond hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and Barbie-doll body might have made her looks a little more pedestrian than Shazia, but she was a former Miss Teen America who’d worked steadily on TV shows and in films, mostly horror movies, where she’d be chased through a dark house and murdered in the first ten minutes. At twenty-six, she’d married Dave Lieberman. At twenty-eight, she’d had twins and had since all but retired from acting. Like many Hollywood wives, she worked as a decorator. Unlike many Hollywood wives, who treated their job as a hobby and spent their time redecorating one another’s houses, Molly was actually good at her
job—she’d taken classes, done an internship at
Elle Décor,
apprenticed herself to one of the top commercial designers in town, and now made more money than she had as an actress. Molly moved with the confidence of a woman who never doubted her place in the world, her good looks, her husband’s love and loyalty. That night, she was dressed in her usual surfer-girl chic, a floor-skimming halter-style maxi dress in a floaty chiffon, with a slightly threadbare lavender sweater wrapped loosely around her shoulders. She had Havaiana flip-flops on her feet, and a necklace bearing diamond charms that spelled the initials of one of her sons’ names around her neck. Her hair hung in loose, beachy waves that floated down to the center of her back.

After she’d dispatched Dave to the bar, Molly reached over and adjusted the brim of my hat. I tried not to blush, or to grin like an idiot—a real live movie star, touching my things, treating me as if I belonged! “How are you?” Molly asked, sounding as if she actually cared. “Are you thrilled?”

“Thrilled,” I repeated. The truth was, I was still in a state of disbelief that something I’d written, something I’d thought up in the privacy of my own bedroom, and on long walks, and while I was in the pool or the shower, was actually going to be cast and shot and might, if everything went well, someday be shown on TV.

Molly looked over my shoulder. “And how about you, Gary?” she asked. “Your girlfriend’s blowing up!”

Gary managed a smile and bobbed his head in a quick nod.

“Who’s going to be there?” he’d asked when I’d told him about the dinner. “Nobody special,” I’d said, knowing that if he’d known that Molly and Shazia, both the Daves, and the head of comedy for the network were coming, he’d find a way to be busy, or sick, or out of town. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d come,” I told him. “It’ll be fun,” I’d said. I’d emailed him reviews of the restaurant, which was supposed to have the best
rib eye in town, extra-strong martinis, and warm butter pound cake for dessert, and I had been extra-solicitous in bed. Finally I’d given him what amounted to an ultimatum:
Please come. I need you there
. He’d squirmed, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. “It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” he’d said.