The Next Best Thing (18 page)

My concern about Carter was that she was too offbeat looking for prime time. She had what I’d call an interesting face, lovely from some angles, plain from others. She was also significantly heavier than the other girls, a size 22/24 where they were in the 14/16 range . . . but again, as with Allison’s skin color and Polly’s proportions, if she impressed the executives, we’d adjust.

On the couch, Carter gulped from her aluminum water bottle, then re-capped it and grinned. “Come on, Captain,” she said, hopping to her feet. “Let’s do this thing.” She held the stage door open for me, giving me a small, mocking bow, then bounded up onstage, hollering, “I’m going to Hollywood!” before turning, squinting into the lights, and saying, “Oh, wait, I’m already here.”

I took my seat, crossing and recrossing my legs while she did her scenes, the Daphne-loses-her-job and the Nana’s-got-a-crush. My heart was beating so hard, I was sure Dave could hear it. When I’d been watching Allison, she’d been my first choice. When I’d watched purple-haired Polly, I’d thought the same thing. But now, listening to Carter, the girl who’d probably shared more of my experiences than the other two, the one
who, unlike gorgeous Allison or plucky, punky Polly, actually had been a bit of an outcast, kind of a freak, I could imagine her, for example, standing outside a high school where a girl she’d thought was her friend walked right by, and in that moment I wanted her to get the part, wanted it so badly that it made me feel almost dizzy.

“We’re all right for now,” said Carter—the last line of the last speech in the script. She glanced down at the pages she’d kept in her hands and then lifted her head and looked out at the crowd.

“Thank you,” Lanny drawled, sounding monumentally ungrateful. Carter bobbed a brief nod and then walked quickly off the stage, leaving the room quiet. I hurried out to tell her how well she’d done. When I got back to the auditorium, the murmuring was still going on. After a few minutes of straining, and failing, to make out more than a few words, I turned to Dave.

“Do I say something?”

He shook his head. “They talk first.” He patted my knee, unaware of the way that simple gesture caused chills to race up my spine. “Deep breath, Ruthie. There’s no firing squad behind the curtain. The worst is over.”

I nodded, looking around the room. Maya had picked up her phone and was huddled in the corner, probably calling other actors about parts on other shows. When she saw me watching, she gave me a keep-your-chin-up wave, and I made myself wave back.

“You okay?” Dave asked.

“I feel like their mother!” I whispered back. “I’m a wreck. I want them all to get it.”

“Not going to happen,” Dave pointed out. “There can be only one.”

“I know,” I said, practically moaning, “but I just wish . . .”

Raised voices interrupted us, Lanny saying, “It won’t work,” then Lisa, with “I disagree. I disagree completely.”

I swallowed hard. “Does it always take this long?” I asked. I was hoping for another reassuring squeeze. I could barely keep still while Dave sat still, his hands in his lap, as if he was meditating and could stay that way, perfectly at ease, for hours, even for days. That was when Lanny started talking.

“Well. You’ve given us three very interesting choices.”

I turned around to look at them, forcing a smile. In the world of television,
interesting
was not a word that you wanted to hear. Maybe on cable, things were different, but interesting was not a good thing at the networks.

“How old is Allison?” Tariq began.

“Twenty-two,” I said. “She just graduated from NYU.”

“She looks older,” said Lanny. Lanny had a high, nasal voice, an Alabama accent, and a reputation, formed during his years in business affairs, of bedeviling creative types over the most trivial matters. He was, the Daves had told me, a guy who would scrutinize shows’ expense reports and make a fuss about the ten-dollar line item that showed what you spent on toilet paper or ink cartridges every week. Most showrunners simply ignored him, but one, a man who had enough money to buy his own island after creating successful, long-running shows in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, had gotten so frustrated with Lanny’s carping over the high price of flavored coffees that he’d hired an espresso cart to visit the set each afternoon, dispensing lattes, loose-leaf tea, artisanal gelato, and a variety of fresh-baked pastries.
How do you like me now?
read the note that he’d faxed to Lanny, attached to a copy of the bill for the cart, the previous week’s ratings, and what was reputed to be a Xerox of the showrunner’s bare ass.

“I think Allison has a kind of gravitas,” I said. I actually thought that her height and natural solemnity would play off her sweet smile and serve Daphne’s character well. Even when she was dithering over the wrong guy, screwing up at work, or
falling on her face on Rollerblades, you’d know that, deep down, Daphne was a girl who knew what she was doing in the world. Besides, she had dimples. How could you not smile when a girl with dimples was smiling?

Evidently Lanny could. “I just don’t buy her as a comic lead,” he drawled. “I mean, maybe Medusa . . .”

Medusa? “Medea,” Dave corrected quietly.

“Right,” said Lanny, entirely unfazed. “Big, dramatic roles, fine, I get it, but she’s not an ingénue.”

“Moving on,” said Joan, who was seated in the row in front of Lanny. I tried to hide my devastation, to look professional as Joan opened the notebook on her lap (the notebook had kittens with sparkly fur cavorting on the cover). “I thought Carter was hands-down the funniest.”

“I agree,” I said quickly.

“I wouldn’t fuck her,” Lanny said. I stared at him. He lifted his chin with a smug
Yeah, you heard me
expression on his face.

I felt my jaw drop.
Oh, no,
I thought.
I did not just hear that
. Someone—Lisa, I guessed—sucked in her breath, but nobody said
Excuse me
, or
What did you say,
or
Hello, sexual harassment lawsuit,
and Lanny didn’t apologize. The room had gone silent, except for the sound of my heart.

“What?” I finally managed.

“Her face,” Lanny explained—not to me, though; to Dave. Lanny seemed to have decided that even though I’d come up with the concept and written the script, Dave was really the one in charge, and thus he addressed all his remarks to Dave. Maybe he couldn’t stand to look at my face, or he was similarly dismissive to all young women, or to all women in general. As I sat there, stunned, Lanny picked up Carter’s head shot, a picture of a perfectly nice-looking girl with long dark hair and a wry, thin-lipped smile. “She’s got maybe two good angles.”

A flush was creeping up my neck. Daphne as I’d written her was never meant to be a beauty . . . in fact, it was important that she not be a beauty. She had other qualities, and her nothing-special looks were one of the reasons the regular girls would root for her. “So we’ll shoot her from her two good angles.”

Lanny was shaking his head. “That’s asking for trouble. Believe me. I went through this with Alyssa Rose.” Alyssa Rose was a former network star who, indeed, looked lovely when shot head-on, but in profile resembled nothing more than a long-faced, large-nosed Abraham Lincoln.

“What I think Lanny’s saying,” Tariq said hastily, “is that you need the lead of a comedy to have a kind of universal appeal.”

“What about Polly?” asked Lisa. “I thought she was solid.”

“She’s the second girl,” Lanny said. Meaning, Polly wasn’t a lead, but the lead’s best friend, the girl our male lead would date for three episodes before realizing he was meant to be with the headliner.

“Look,” I said. “As you guys know, I was going for something specific here. Daphne’s supposed to be a regular girl—”

“TV-regular,” Maya interjected.

I frowned, but kept going. “You know, an identifiable, relatable, normal—”

“TV-normal,” said Lanny.

I blinked at them both. “Does TV-normal mean regular-world gorgeous?”

The room got quiet again. In the silence, I heard my answer.
TV-normal
did, of course, mean regular-world gorgeous. Polly and Carter hadn’t been pretty enough, and Allison hadn’t been young enough or relatable enough or, possibly, white enough, even though none of them would ever say so. Not out loud. It was just understood . . . by everyone except me.

My heart sank. I was afraid to look at Maya.
Back to the
drawing board,
except who could we possibly see who we hadn’t auditioned already? What rock was left to kick over, what tree was left to shake?

That was when Joan started talking. “We have an idea,” she said. I turned toward her eagerly, thinking,
Yes, please, anything, you’re the experts, you fix this
. “We’d like to do the show with Cady Stratton,” she said. “Pending our executive producers’ approval, of course,” she added, giving Dave and me a bright smile. “We’ve had a holding deal with her since she left
All Our Tomorrows.
We’ve been looking for the right project, and we think this might be it.”

I kept my face immobile, trying to regroup as fast as I could. My sense of who Cady Stratton was—a pretty girl with Marilyn Monroe curves who’d been the costar of a long-running soap until a few years ago and hadn’t worked since—was dismayingly vague.

“Will she read?” I asked.

Joan shook her head. “She’s offer-only. We can send you tape . . .” She looked over at her assistant, who jumped out of her chair like it was spring-loaded and racewalked out of the room.

Dave put his hand on my arm and squeezed until I shut my mouth. While maintaining his grip on me, he maneuvered his chair so that he was facing the executives. “I’m sure,” he said, “that Cady Stratton will be just fine.”

*  *  *

Cady Stratton. I drove myself to the Two Daves’ offices, trying to remember exactly what Cady Stratton looked like, how her voice sounded, whether she could, conceivably, be a decent Daphne, even though I knew that these were, more than likely, rhetorical questions. When the network said, “We’d like to do the show with X,” even if X was a talking chimp or the executive producer’s talent-free first cousin, you smiled and said, “Of course, what a brilliant idea.” The chances were good that they’d had Cady in
mind before the auditions had even started . . . which meant, of course, that all three of our picks were losers before they’d said a single word.

I waved hello at Bradley, the Daves’ new assistant, and set up my laptop in the conference room. There, I provisioned myself with coconut water and energy bars from the pantry and devoted the next several hours to learning all I could about the star of my show.

Cady was easy to find on the Internet. She had a website, an IMDB page, and a Wikipedia entry. She was on Facebook, she was on Twitter, and a number of fans had set up their own sites in appreciation of her work—or, in the case of one terrifying Tumblr, in appreciation of her cleavage. In twenty minutes’ time, I learned that Cady had been the lead actress’s smart-mouthed, funny daughter on
All Our Tomorrows.
In her three years on the show, she’d been kidnapped by an Arab sheikh, struggled with agoraphobia, run off to join a cult (this, presumably, after conquering her fear of leaving the house), and given birth to her stepbrother’s twins. Cady had a heart-shaped face framed with strawberry-blond hair, and looked about as Jewish as a ham sandwich, but I could deal with that. I scrolled through years’ worth of reviews, articles that mentioned her expert timing, her wide-eyed cuteness, her combination of beauty and sass. She had the right body type, even if, at a curvy size ten, she wasn’t as big as I’d hoped my leading lady would be . . . but was she ready to carry a show?

“She’s funny,” said Dave as we sat in front of his jumbo-size computer screen and watched a teenage Cady poke her head, accented with a banana peel, out of the trash can where she and her best friend were hiding from their mothers in a Nickelodeon movie of the week. It was clear that Cady knew exactly where the camera was positioned, and exactly how to angle her face to find the light.

“She’s really good,” I said. Except for the goyische-looking thing—the pale skin and blond hair, the button nose and pert chin that, combined, said Straight Out of Mankato—Cady was all I could wish for, adorable and charming and at ease in her skin. “Look at this.” I tapped Dave’s mouse and called up an interview from some women’s magazine’s “Body Issue.” Cady had been featured and photographed in a red satin corset, her rounded bottom perched on the edge of an old-fashioned soda fountain stool, creamy-skinned breasts tilted toward the marble counter, cherry-colored lips wrapped around the candy-striped straw that was stuck into a chocolate shake. “It took me some time, but I’ve finally gotten comfortable with my curves,” Cady proclaimed in the copy. “I’ll never be a size zero, but as long as I’m happy and healthy, that’s fine.”

I snuck a look at Dave looking at her—those curves! that cleavage!—and was relieved when he didn’t seem especially impressed.

“Promising,” he said. He’d pulled his chair right up next to me, with Pocket curled in his lap, close enough that I could smell his scent—nutmeg and cloves, paper and ink, and the corn-chip smell that Pocket’s paws and fur exuded—as I clicked through pictures of Cady in a low-cut dress at a movie premiere, tabloid shots of Cady holding hands in the airport with an aged-out Mouseketeer, and a Q and A she’d done with
TV Guide
.