The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “We can order it in, ah, butterscotch,” Felicia said, reading from the tag. “Or ivory crème. It’s a very popular choice with, ah . . .”

  Women who wanted to cover their arms, I guessed as Felicia opened and shut her mouth, then opened and shut it again. Old women.

  “That is hideous,” said my grandmother in a voice that was high and full of emotion. If you’d closed your eyes, you might have imagined that you were talking to a young bride getting ready for her first wedding, a woman with her whole life ahead of her, to whom men, and the world, were still mostly a mystery.

  “Why don’t you ladies have a seat?” Felicia stammered, evidently remembering that there was a protocol for these visits, a script she could stick to, even if the bride was fifty years older than the ones she usually saw and accompanied by a freakish-looking granddaughter. “May I offer you still or sparkling water?”

  We both asked for water and then took seats on a tufted beige velvet love seat. I gulped my drink when it arrived, wishing it was something stronger. I couldn’t get Annie’s face out of my mind, her quiet resignation when I’d told her she was being replaced. I suspected I wouldn’t have felt so torn up if she’d yelled, or been angry, or even just surprised . . . but her acceptance, her complete lack of indignation, her assertion that this was nothing new all drove home just how unfair the system was, and how complicit in that system I’d become. Should I have fought harder? Was it a fight I could have won?

  My grandmother pulled her crocheting out of the tote bag she carried along with her clutch. I got up and wandered around the store, ending up in front of a three-way mirror with a raised, carpeted stand in front of it. I could imagine the bride-to-be in the dressing room, zipped and pinned into a dress, eyes closed, her mother holding her elbow, guiding her up onto the platform, whispering, Keep your eyes shut. Don’t look, until the young woman was positioned in front of the mirrors. Then the bride-to-be would open her eyes and look at herself, radiant and blushing, her mother beside her, saying, This is it. This is the one.

  I looked at myself, in my striped jersey, my scarf, my hat pulled down in its jaunty tilt, casting a shadow that was not big or dark or deep enough to hide the whole side of my face. The mirrors were unforgiving. There was my left side, pretty enough, there was my body, strong and fit, and my hair, shiny and light brown. There was my right side, sunken and scarred, the eye that drooped, the jaw that looked foreshortened and wrong, the cratered pink skin that would cause grown-ups to stare and kids to whisper about Two-Face, the Batman villain. There was the truth of it: I would never stand on this podium with my mother, in a wedding dress, with my face bare and unblemished. All brides are beautiful, went the saying . . . but that would never be true for me.

  “Ruthie?”

  I turned to see my grandmother with a short gold dress in her arms. The dress had beading on the front, a pattern of black and gold and white beads that formed . . . I looked more closely for confirmation. Yep. A cougar. A crouching cougar, to be specific, a cougar that was poised to strike. I wondered if you’d turn the dress over and find a young man on the back, running away as fast as his feet would carry him.

  “Oh my God,” I managed . . . and I felt my heart unfold as Grandma smiled at me, fashioning her hands into claws.

  “Rrrawr!”

  I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. “Oh my God, do people buy that? And wear it?”

  “Ladies!” Felicia called. Grandma gave me a conspiratorial grin before we returned to the couch, as Felicia wheeled a rack of dresses in front of her.

  “Now,” she said. “This is actually a bridesmaid’s gown, but I think, in candlelight or a pale peach, it would be lovely.” She pulled out a slip-style, spaghetti-strapped dress with a plunging neckline that was made of silk so clingy that you’d have to have been a Victoria’s Secret model—or, better, a mannequin—to make it work. It was a dress for a sylph or a mermaid or a sixteen-year-old supermodel.

  Grandma shook her head. “Sleeves. I’ll need sleeves.”

  Felicia blinked as if she’d just heard a brand-new word in a brand-new language. “Beg pardon?”

  “Sleeves,” said my grandmother. “You know? The cloth that’s attached to the shoulder?”

  Felicia rifled through her rack again and came out with what appeared to be the store’s only garment with sleeves—the bandage dress that Grandma had considered and rejected five minutes ago.

  Grandma frowned. Felicia gulped. I cringed, knowing what was coming. Beside me, my grandmother drew herself up until she was at her very tallest, and started to speak.

  “Listen to me, missy,” she said. “I am an informed consumer. I have money to spend. And I’ve watched Pretty Woman.”

  “Many times,” I said.

  Felicia nodded, a frozen smile on her plasticized face.

  “I know my rights,” said Grandma.

  “She reads Consumer Reports,” I said.

  “And I have money,” she concluded.

  “Lots,” I said. “More than she needs.”

  Grandma pulled her American Express Platinum card out of her clutch and brandished it at Felicia, who cringed in the manner of a vampire confronted with a crucifix. “Do you have anything—anything at all—that I should spend my time trying on?”

  “Let me go take another peek,” Felicia said, and fled, taking her wheeled dress rack with her.

  My grandmother got to her feet. “Let’s go,” she said. “There’s nothing for me here.”

  “Thank you for your time!” I called as my grandmother heaved at the heavy glass-and-metal door until it opened and admitted us onto the Rodeo Drive sidewalk. We walked to the corner in silence. Then my grandmother turned to me.

  “I should have bought that cougar dress.”

  “You think?”

  “Can you imagine Maurice’s face? If I’d come down the aisle in that?”

  “It was a lot of look,” I acknowledged. This was one of my grandmother’s pet phrases, one she’d use about a young actress who’d show up at an awards show in an unfortunately slit or sheer gown, or when I’d shown her the picture of Cady from the Alcove, all bony cheekbones and hipster hat. That’s a lot of look.

  For the first time since I’d shown her the pilot, she took my arm. “Ruthie,” she said. “Are you really okay?”

  Before I could answer, she steered us across the street and into Le Pain Quotidien, where we took a table by the window. “We’ve got some time, don’t we?” she asked. I nodded.

  We ordered lemonades, just like we did when I was a girl. After my surgeries, my doctors’ visits, the times I’d have stitches removed or bandages replaced, we would go to a French patisserie on Newbury Street and order one dessert and two lemonades.

  Grandma crossed her legs and looked at me. “I’m worried,” she said simply.

  “Why?” I hadn’t told her anything about what had happened with Dave, or that I’d been requested-slash-forced to give Daphne a friend who would be played by Taryn Montaine. “I’m fine with you leaving. I’m happy for you! I know you and Maurice will have . . .” Many wonderful years together was what I was thinking, but I didn’t say it, because, given her age and his heart, who knew? “I know you’ll be happy,” I said. My words hung in the air as a waitress came over, holding a sweating metal pitcher of water aloft in one hand.

  “You ladies doing all right?” she asked. She had a curvy, compact body, in a black T-shirt, denim skirt, black apron, and clogs. Her hair was in a short bob. Her nose was pierced with a tiny, glittering stud. It took me about ten seconds to realize that she was one of the girls who’d come in to read for Daphne, and by the time I figured it out and had prepared a greeting that was equal parts professional and apologetic, she and her pitcher were gone. I looked away. How many women had I thrown under various buses since this process had begun, I wondered as I sipped my drink and nibbled at the apple-pear turnover my grandma had ordered. How many actresses, and my grandmother, too?

  “Ruthie,” sai
d Grandma. She put twenty dollars on the table and took my arm, pulling me onto my feet and then out to the sidewalk and the sunshine. We drove to the delectable-smelling bakery, where we sat at a glass-topped table and sampled slivers of a dozen gorgeously iced wedding cakes. It should have been wonderful . . . but all I could think of was the calm acceptance on Annie Tait’s face, her recognition that the world was ever thus and that Ruth Rachel Saunders was unlikely to change it, and all the flavors, lemon-poppy and vanilla and chocolate-pomegranate, tasted like ashes in my mouth.

  EIGHTEEN

  Pete?” I knocked on the dressing-room door, gently at first and then more firmly. “Hey, Pete, you in there?” It was Wednesday morning, ten minutes after the table read for the pilot reshoots was supposed to have begun. The executives had already gathered on the stage, in folding chairs in front of the set that depicted Daphne and Nana’s Miami apartment. Craft services had set out hot coffee, breakfast sandwiches, granola and yogurt and fresh fruit. Everyone was eating and chatting and waiting for us to begin.

  Cady Stratton, in leather leggings and a lace vest that let the world know that she’d lost even more weight since I’d last seen her, had teetered through the doors on skyscraping heels at nine-thirty on the dot and taken her place at the U-shaped arrangement of tables behind the placard that read CADY STRATTON/DAPHNE. Taryn Montaine had sauntered into the room a strategic thirty seconds behind her, in a white voile maxi dress that skimmed her flat gold sandals, with her honey-blond hair in a messy bun that had probably taken her twenty minutes to arrange, and an oversize pair of sunglasses shadowing her eyes. “Hi, baby,” she’d said, putting her hands on my shoulders and giving me a cool, impersonal brush of a kiss on the good side of my face. I’d worried about what it would be like when we saw each other again, how she’d look and what we’d say, but I saw immediately that I shouldn’t have wasted my time. Taryn clearly had no idea who I was, no recollection that we’d worked together, and no idea that I’d been in love with her husband. Maybe that was the beauty of self-absorbed people, I thought, as Taryn worked the room, dispensing hugs and kisses and squeals of greeting to the executives. Every time you met them, you got to start over again.

  Penny Weaver, Annie Tait’s replacement, had shown up next, with a basketful of homemade cranberry scones, which she’d distributed to the executives, and a handwritten note she’d given me that told me how thrilled she was to have the opportunity to play Nana. My grandma was in the audience, sitting just behind the executives, whispering into Maurice’s hearing aid, telling him who was who. Chad the director, as tanned and muscular as he’d been on pilot night, was working his morning wad of Dentyne and making notes on the script, and the women in charge of props and costumes were in the front row, scripts in hand, waiting to make their own notes, figuring out what clothes the actors would wear and what things they’d need on hand: a cell phone and laptop for Daphne, a teapot and iron for Nana.

  We had everyone except Pete. Five minutes before start time, I slipped off the stage to find him. I knew that he was on the lot, because Cliff the security guard, at my request, had called to tell me when he’d arrived. “Keeping him on a short leash, huh?” he’d said, and I’d given him a weak smile and said, “You know it.” Pete’s car was in its assigned spot, but his dressing-room door was locked. He hadn’t answered my calls, texts, or emails, and now he was even ignoring my knocks. This wasn’t good.

  I banged at the door some more. “Pete? Are you in there? Is everything all right?”

  Silence. I could feel my tea sloshing in my belly. We had precisely seven days to redo the pilot, at which point we’d start our normal workweek: table reads on Wednesday, rehearsals and run-throughs on Thursday and Friday, pre-shoots on Monday, live audience shoots on Tuesday nights. The network had graciously given us an extra week to add the new scenes to the pilot. Of course, the network couldn’t exactly refuse, because it was responsible for all the new stuff we’d be shooting—the new characters of Brad Dermansky and Veronica King, the new actress playing Nana.

  It would all work, assuming that I could keep things moving . . . which depended on my ability to get my star out of his dressing room. “Pete? Hey, listen. If there’s a problem with your lines, or wardrobe, or whatever, we can talk about it, but I need you to . . .”

  Come out of there, I was about to say, when the door swung open and there was Pete, in khakis and a polo shirt, combed and clean-shaven, looking like he was on his way to play a round of golf. He held the script in his hand. It looked, I noticed, with the first stirrings of unease, like he hadn’t so much as opened it, even though a PA had driven it to his house on Friday night, and I’d emailed him a backup copy myself the following morning. “Hey, Ruth!” he said.

  “Pete. Hi. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, still making no move to start covering the hundred yards between his door and the stage. “Just getting into character.”

  “Listen, I want to respect your process,” I began. After all my time working in television, I still had a hard time saying that phrase without laughing. Big Dave used to tell stories about Lorin Chatsworth, a classically trained Shakespearean actor who’d appeared on one of the dopiest sitcoms of the 1990s, a show set at a sports bar in Cleveland. Lorin disdained the company of his fellow thespians, preferring instead to hang out in the writers’ room. There, he’d sip Earl Grey tea and talk about his days at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He’d dish about Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson and Dame Judi Dench, until the writers’ assistant would stick her head through the doorway and say—in Big Dave’s recounting—“Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Chatsworth, they’ve finally got the sombrero on the pig.”

  “I need you to do me a favor,” said Pete. He grabbed my wrist. His hand was icy. I leaned in close and took a whiff, bracing for the scent of booze or dope or something worse, but all I got was Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and Dial. His sleek blond hair was neatly combed, his blue eyes weren’t bloodshot, and the pupils looked to be of normal size. Pete’s face was as pleasant as pie, a generically handsome assortment of features that could be used to sell anything from cars to banks to jokes. He was a safe choice, a guy who was compelling enough without being risky or edgy, and I’d stopped worrying about him the moment he’d been cast. Clearly, that had been a mistake.

  “Here’s the thing,” Pete began. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and I heard the click when he swallowed. “I’m more of an auditory learner than a reader.” He paused here and gave me his Level Six charming smile. Level One, I knew, was what he went around with most of the time, the grin he’d reflexively give to the cashier in the commissary and the girl whose job it was to pat powder on his cheeks. His charm ascended all the way to Level Ten, but that was reserved for the presidents of networks and, possibly, nations. “So, the way I get my lines is, I have my acting teacher, or a friend, or someone, read them to me until I’ve got them down.”

  He paused, looking at me expectantly. I stared at him, wondering, briefly, guiltily, whether Pete could read at all. I was thinking of a story I’d heard about Keshia Knight Pulliam, who’d been just six when she’d been cast as little Rudy on The Cosby Show. During table reads, she’d sit on her father-slash-manager’s lap, and he’d whisper her lines into her ear. One wintry day, instead of giving her the line, her father, sick with a cold, had coughed. Keshia, ever dutiful, had replicated the cough instead of the line. Bill Cosby had looked down the table, widened his eyes, and said in his drollest tone, “That one’s broken.”

  “So . . . you need me to read you your lines at the table?”

  Pete put his hand on my arm and ratcheted his smile up to Level Seven. “It’s just for the table read. I’ll have all my lines by the network run-through. I promise. This is just part of my process.”

  I thought fast, while grabbing his hand so that he couldn’t retreat back into his dressing room and waste even more of our time. Nobody expected an actor to be off-book at the table read. Plenty of actors too
k their time learning their lines, knowing that scripts could change right up until the moment shooting actually commenced, not wanting to peak at a run-through or a rehearsal, days before the audience arrived. Besides, however weird Pete’s request seemed, I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had to get him to the stage, by any means necessary.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s get going, though. We’re late.”

  He turned his grin up to Level Eight. “You’re my hero.”

  We hustled out of his dressing room and race-walked to the soundstage, a gigantic, echoing room with bleachers for two hundred on one side and forty-foot-high ceilings crisscrossed with metal support beams and ladders and lights. At the table, I quickly rearranged the placards so that Pete was sitting on my left. As the room settled down, I got to my feet. I’d seen the Daves do this a hundred times, before each table read for Bunk Eight. Now it was my turn. I straightened up and smoothed my hair, feeling a back-to-school kind of excitement. My hands were tingling, my face was flushed, and in spite of everything, all my fears and disappointments and everything that had gone wrong so far, I found myself smiling.

  I looked down the table, to my right, where Chad sat at one end, with Cady and Penny Weaver, each with a script on the table, with the words THE NEXT BEST THING, WRITTEN BY RUTH SAUNDERS in front of them. I looked out at the sea of faces until I found my grandmother, with Maurice sitting beside her. Then I began.

  “Everyone!” I said. “Welcome to the first of hopefully many, many table reads for The Next Best Thing!” The applause started slowly and then got louder. The executives were clapping; the actors were hooting; Chad actually cracked a smile. In her seat three rows back, my grandma was dabbing away tears. “It’s my pleasure to introduce our amazing cast. In the starring role of Daphne, last name To Be Determined, we have the irresistible Cady Stratton!” Cady got to her feet and sketched a curtsy. “Playing Brad Dermansky, we have the charming Pete Paxton!” Pete gave the room a salute. “In the role of Nana Trudy, the lovely and talented Penny Weaver!” Penny, who had bright-red hair and china-doll features, blew a kiss. “Playing Veronica King, the estimable Taryn Montaine!” Taryn had a puzzled frown on her face as she gave her little wave. It was evil of me, but I’d picked out that word, estimable, precisely because I knew that Taryn would have no idea what it meant.