The Next Best Thing (24 page)

Chad called, “Cut!” again, and turned to me, his face expressionless once more. “Are we good now?” he asked. I looked at the clock, feeling sick as I saw how much time had passed. If I didn’t keep things moving, we’d never finish. The audience would leave, the actors would start flagging, the executives would freak—already, Lloyd had emerged from the greenroom twice, once to ask when we thought we’d be wrapping the scene, and again to warn the editors not to use any of the takes where you could see Cady’s underwear.

Lloyd was another thorn in my side. He was technically an executive, but so far, I’d found him hard to take seriously. The scene he’d written—“Just a few ideas,” he’d said modestly, in the attached email—had been all but unreadable, the dialogue flat as cardboard, the jokes juvenile and cruel. Even worse, Lloyd seemed to have decided that the key to being respected by the studio and its employees was to deliver all of his remarks at a volume
that could blow your hair back, even when all he was doing was saying hello. After ten minutes of his company, the Daves and I had nicknamed him Loud Lloyd.

“Everything okay?” he bellowed, and stared at me. The director, still working his wad of gum, stared at me. The cameramen, all four of them, stared, too.

“Good,” I said, and tried to muster a smile. “We’re good.”
Maybe one of the earlier takes wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered,
I thought, as pop music came booming out of the speakers and the warm-up comedian cried, “We are moving on!” and started pulling pretty girls out of their seats to dance. Besides, even if it was a bad scene, it was just one scene, and maybe the rest of the show would be so good that the viewers and the critics wouldn’t notice. I slumped in my chair as people bustled around me, moving cameras, adjusting lights, the hair and makeup people hurrying onstage with brushes and blow-dryers in leather belts slung around their waists like gunslingers. The director was chatting with the cameramen about cars, if
chatting
could be applied to a discussion conducted entirely in shouts. Onstage, Annie Tait was deep in conversation with her wig wrangler, and Cady, still in her Rollerblades, had glided over to the front row to sign autographs. In the front row, Grandma waved.

“Ruth.” I looked up. Dave was sitting next to me in his chair, with his hands folded, Zen-like, in his lap.

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” I said. It was one of our old office jokes, something I used to say to him, typically when he wheeled himself out of the bathroom.

He smiled and said nothing.

“This isn’t going well,” I said.

“Oh, no, it’s going fine,” he said.

I stared at him. Was he watching the same show I was? Was he teasing me? “They’re finding their levels,” he said, patting my knee. “And remember, you can’t look at each take as its own
thing. As long as you’ve got the right moments, it’ll come together in the editing room.”

I let myself feel a spark of hope. I had seen it happen a hundred times on
Bunk Eight.
You’d do three okay-to-terrible takes, but in every one of them there’d be a flash of greatness, or at least decency. The editors would snip those moments out, stitch them together, and voilà: a perfect scene.

“I don’t think Cady and I are communicating,” I said. It was frustrating, because I felt that if I knew her better, I’d have more of a sense of how to modulate her performance. Unfortunately, prior to tonight’s shoot Cady and I had spent only thirty minutes in each other’s company, when we’d finally had that hard-to-arrange drink the night before. My leading lady had arrived fifteen minutes late, making a true movie-star entrance, in sunglasses and bee-stung red lips, a white chiffon dress with a sweetheart neckline that put the skin of her shoulders and the tops of her breasts on display, with half her face hidden behind dark glasses, wearing heels so high I knew that even my grandmother in her prime would have looked at them, shaken her head regretfully, and put them back on the shelf. When I’d climbed off my barstool, waving at her, Cady had embraced me as if we were the very best of friends.

“Ruthie!” she squealed. Her eyes flickered over my face as she kept her own expressionless. I guessed her agent or manager or someone had told her about the situation and urged her not to stare. “Come on,” she said, and grabbed my hand, “they make the yummiest sidecars here!”

At the bar, I spent ten minutes listening to her murmured conference with the bartender about exactly how to prepare a yummy sidecar. Finally she snapped a picture of the drink, posted the picture to Twitter and Facebook, took a single sip, then swiveled her stool so that our knees were bumping, and gave me a Serious Listening expression, head tilted, eyes wide,
like she was playing a hard-hitting journalist interrogating a crooked politician. “So. Tell me all about you.”

“Oh, there’s not much to tell. I grew up in Boston—”

“Boston! Like, Harvard? Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd?”

“Right.”

“Did you go to Harvard?”

“Nope.”

She patted my arm in a consoling fashion. “That’s okay.” Glancing down at my lap, where I’d been perusing scripts on my e-reader, she said, “Is that one of those e-book things? A Kendall?”

“Kindle,” I said. Was she kidding?

“Kindle,” she repeated. “Do you like to read?”

“It’s my favorite thing,” I said.

Cady considered this remark. “Not me, so much. I mean, I like self-help books. Deepak Chopra? Have you ever heard of him?”

“Yes,” I said. I wondered again if she was kidding and decided that probably she was not. “Yes, I have.”

“He’s really good. Oh, and
Skinny Bitches Don’t Get Fat.
Did you read that one?” She looked at me, wide-eyed, lips slightly parted, waiting for an answer. When none came, she grabbed my hand.

“You need to read it. It’s, like, amazing.” She pulled her phone out of her bag and started typing. “There! See! I just tweeted about it!”

I checked my phone and there it was, hashtag and everything. “I highly recommend it,” Cady had written. “Good one,” I said.

“You follow me!”

“I’m one of your minions,” I said. “You’re really dedicated to the whole social-media thing.” This seemed like the most diplomatic way I could tell her that I was both impressed and slightly
horrified at the eighty thousand random thoughts and photographs she’d sent out into cyberspace in the two years since she’d joined Twitter.

“Oh, you know how it is,” she said. “You’ve got to keep your fans invested. You have to let them into your world.” As if to prove her point, she struck a pose, painted lips pouting, cheeks sucked in, and snapped a picture with her phone. “There! Tweeted!” she said, and waited until I’d dutifully picked up my phone, checked out the shot, and told her she looked beautiful.

“So, I know you like to cook,” I said, having read, in numerous magazine profiles, of Cady’s love for whipping up the scrumptious Swedish cookies her mother and aunts had made.

She blinked at me. “What?” It turned out that the story of Cady in the kitchen, her love for baking, was just something her publicist told her to say—“especially when I’m being interviewed by
Ladies’ Home Journal
or whatever.” The recipes that ran with the stories weren’t even her own, but were provided by the editors, or by what Cady referred to as her “people.” I felt my heart sink. Daphne was an aspiring chef. It would have helped if Cady had actually known something about cooking . . . and I would have felt better in general knowing that my star wasn’t a liar.

“So what do you like to do?”

Cady opened her jeweled minaudière, pulled out a mirrored compact and a lip brush and a tin of gloss, and started repainting her lips. “Oh, you know. Listen to music. Go out. I love the beach!” I tried not to wince or to flash back to every high-school senior whose essays had been similarly bland. She snapped her compact shut. “Tell me where Daphne came from.” When I answered, talking hesitantly about my own childhood, my parents’ death, my grandmother, she gave me listening eyes and tried to pay attention, or at least look like she was paying attention, but I caught her glancing at her iPhone as it thrummed constantly on the bar top. “Hey,” I said after she’d checked the
clock for the third time in as many minutes, “do you need to be somewhere?”

“No!” she said, but eventually she admitted that her boyfriend was outside, waiting in a cab at the curb. He’d fetched her at the airport and delivered her to me.

“Invite him in!” I said. “We can all have a drink.”

She frowned at something on her telephone’s screen and then gave me a brilliant smile. “Actually, I do need to run. We’re having drinks with my manager. Five minutes.”

“Oh.” We made more awkward girl talk, moving from the brand of jeans Cady liked best (“Joe’s Jeans are the bomb,” she said, eyeing me critically. “And they’re great if, you know, you’re kind of on the hippy side”) to the restaurants Cady favored, none of which I’d ever visited, how her parents were divorced and how her father, who had once been her manager-slash-dialogue coach, “isn’t really a part of my life anymore.” At ten-thirty sharp, precisely thirty minutes after our meeting had begun, Cady had hopped off the barstool, given me a merry wave, and vanished, leaving me with the check and with very little idea of who she really was or what kind of performance she’d deliver, and how—or if—I could work with her. It was like trying to race a horse you’d never ridden, with no idea what kind of touch or talk it would respond to, and the whole thing had left me uneasy. The cast of
Bunk Eight
weren’t friends with the writers, exactly, but they were colleagues, and we’d all gotten to know one another over the seasons, from run-throughs and show nights to craft-service snacks. I had a sense of them. I had no sense of Cady Stratton at all.

“Let her settle into it,” Dave said from his chair. “It’s her first time back in, what, three years?”

“Two and a half.”

He worked his wheels back and forth an inch, frowning. “Did you eat anything today?”

“Um.” I’d had breakfast—Grandma wouldn’t let me leave the house without it—but I’d skipped lunch, running over to the set to sign off on costumes at noon, and I’d been too nervous to manage a bite of the staff meal served in the commissary before the shoot had begun. “Wait here.” He wheeled away and came back a minute later with a paper plate in his lap.

He’d made a turkey-and-swiss sandwich, with the cheese protruding from the edges of the bread. There was a handful of pretzels, an apple, a bottle of water, the kind of wholesome lunch you’d send a kid off to school with . . . the kind of lunch, in fact, that my grandmother had sent me to school with.

“You’re going to be a good father,” I said.

“What?” he called back. My words had been lost in the blare of the music, the laughter of the crowd.

Instead of yelling, I smiled, mouthed
thank you,
gave him a thumbs-up, and took a bite of the sandwich. I’d just finished my late-night dinner when the assistant director, a brusque woman in jeans and a denim workshirt, walked fast across the stage, calling, “Hold the work, please, hold the work . . . okay, quiet on the set,” letting us know that we were ready to start filming the next scene, in the office where Daphne’s soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend worked as a member of Nerd Alert, my script’s version of the Geek Squad. (This scene took place in the first act, but we were shooting out of order, doing the Rollerblade business first so the stunt people wouldn’t have to hang around, on the clock, all night long.)

The designers and set dressers had built and furnished Nerd Alert’s offices perfectly, a cheerless, charmless space that spoke to the employees’ soullessness, their limited lives. “I want it to look like a
Dilbert
cartoon, only more grim,” I’d said, and that’s what I’d gotten.

Now Cady, pretty and anxious in a ponytail and the trying-too-hard clothes I’d decided she’d wear for the breakup, stood
on one side of his counter, and Phil, the ex-to-be, in khakis and a short-sleeved shirt and ironic clip-on tie, stood on the other.

“On your mark . . . get set . . . action!” Chad bellowed.

“So you see,” Cady began, “I have to go do this. I have to go. Because if I don’t, I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what could have been. Wondering, if I’d just found the courage to go out there and try, if maybe I could have been someone.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” said Steve Levenbaum, the actor we’d cast as Phil. Steve was a twenty-eight-year-old actor-slash-waiter who’d had to switch his shifts at Home Depot to shoot the show. In my early drafts, Phil had been a two-dimensional asshole, a lazy guy willing to settle for whatever plums landed in his lap, but as I’d rewritten, I’d come to think of him as scared, a man who would hurt before he could get hurt himself, who kept a veneer of hipster cynicism and false bravado shellacked over his own insecurities. Phil would never be more than a middle manager, never move out of the town where he’d grown up, a guy who’d live in a featureless two-bedroom condo in a new development off the highway, with a mortgage and a car loan that he’d struggle to pay. In other words, he was a starter guy. I hadn’t consciously modeled him on Gary, but now that I heard the lines coming from an actor who bore a certain resemblance to my ex, I wondered if that had been my intention all along, if I’d written this scene as a way of telling myself to move on, that sweetness and compatability and a shared taste for sausage and mushroom pizza would get a couple only so far.