The Next Best Thing (23 page)

“No, I’m still here. Are you okay?” I said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just sort of . . . stuck.”

“Where are you?”

“In the men’s room, at the end of the hall. Same floor we were on. I’ve been waiting for someone to come get me unstuck, but I think everyone’s gone to lunch.”

“Okay. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Take your time,” Dave said. I hung up, stashed my phone, and started trotting back across the lot, stopping to pull off my heels and trade them for the flip-flops I had in my bag. I’d dressed in what had become my work uniform—jeans and a T-shirt, for comfort, with a blazer on top, for polish, and a scarf around my neck and a hat on my head, for camouflage. In my mind, I was composing the letter I’d send to that idiot assistant who’d assured me that,
oh, fer shur,
the building was just fine for a man in a wheelchair.
The nerve of her
, I thought as I race-walked to the end of the hall, where, just as he’d said, Dave’s wheelchair had gotten wedged in the doorway to the men’s room.

I came up behind him, trying not to pant. “Hi.”

“Ah,” he said. “The cavalry.” He sounded the way you’d expect a man stuck in a bathroom door to sound—stressed and embarrassed and trying to sound brave. I wondered how badly he needed the bathroom. Then I wondered how, exactly, Dave used the bathroom. Like normal people? With a catheter? Some system I’d never even considered? “Thank you for coming back.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It was no problem. So, um . . .”

“I think,” he said, “if you just gave me a good push, I’d make it.”

I looked down and saw that the hubs of each wheel had actually dug slightly into the wood of the doorframe. “Maybe if I tilted you backward a little . . .”

“Sure,” he said. His lips were pressed together, his face was
calm and relaxed, and I noticed how his shoulders strained the seams of his shirt, as well as the thick tracery of blue veins on his forearms as he rested them in his lap. I bet he looked like a superhero with his shirt off, I thought, and felt my heart beat faster at the thought of it.

There were no handles on the back of the chair—Dave had told me once that handles encouraged people to help, to push or guide him when he didn’t need pushing or guidance. I gripped the back of the seat gently, gingerly tilting his weight back on the wheels, and pushed forward. Nothing happened. I pushed harder, and the chair inched forward with a screeching sound of metal on wood.

“I think I can get this,” I said. Dave had closed his eyes. They weren’t squeezed shut in an expression of misery, but they were definitely not open. It was as if he was meditating, as if he’d sent his mind someplace else while his body was trapped in this indignity.

I decided that small talk was in order. “So how about that meeting?
Time-share
? I wonder if that’s what Vince Raymer does all day. Just sits around and thinks up things that sound like they could be titles.”

Dave’s eyes didn’t open. “Shows have been sold on less than that,” he said. Half a beat later, we both said “
Cougar Town
” at the exact same time. Dave smiled, and I felt warmth surge through me.

“Do you think anybody’s ever pitched
Co-op Board
?” I asked. “Or
Air Traffic Control
?”

“Probably. I know last year there were three different shows making the rounds with
Fantasy League
in the title.”

While we were talking, I was pushing the chair back and forth, back and forth, working it forward in incremental notches, as gently as if it was carrying a basket of eggs. I’d probably been this close to Dave before—at the table in the writers’ room, shaking hands during my job interview—but I’d never
seen him from so intimate an angle. I could smell him—warm hay, strawberries, hints of something dry and papery, like books in a library—and could make out faint freckles on the bridge of his nose.

“I’m going to murder that Alice,” I said. “These buildings are supposed to be up to code. How is this fair to people who use wheelchairs?”

“Take it easy, Gandhi.” Still with his eyes shut, Dave sounded faintly amused. Finally the wheels spun free of the wall. I set the chair down gently on the tiled bathroom floor. He opened his eyes and said without looking at me, “Thank you.”

“I’ll wait.” I gestured vaguely toward the hallway, long and dim and strangely empty. What was going on here? Had there been a fire drill that I’d missed? Where was everyone, and why hadn’t anyone helped him? “Take your time. I’ll be right here.”

He nodded, hands on the wheels, and pushed himself deeper into the bathroom. I walked down the hallway, trying to catch my breath from my half-walk-half-run over and the effort it had taken to free up the chair. My face felt hot.
Gary,
I told myself.
Think of Gary,
who was sweet and good, and who loved me. I tried . . . but my mind kept wandering back to Dave, sitting so still in his chair, the calm expression on his face, the sweetness exuding from his pores . . . and I could remember, too, how my grandmother had known her husband was the man for her. “He smelled right,” she’d said. That was when I’d known. Never mind that he was older, or that he couldn’t walk. Dave was the one I wanted; the one, I thought, I loved.

C
ut!” yelled the director, and turned to me, teeth bared in an approximation of a smile. “We good?”

I knew my lines. “We’re good!” I was supposed to say. As soon as I’d said it, we’d move on to the next scene, which we desperately needed to do. We were almost two hours into the pilot shoot, and we’d gotten through precisely three pages of the pilot forty-page script. At this rate, we were on schedule to finish somewhere around three in the morning.

The problem was, I wasn’t happy with what we’d done, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to improve the situation. Tentatively I reached out and put my hand on the director’s shoulder. It was like touching a side of beef in a linen shirt, all sweaty muscle, even though the stage, with its ceilings that stretched forty feet high, was so vigorously air-conditioned that I could almost see my breath. The room was awash in noise—the warm-up comedian’s patter, the audience’s chatter, the calls of the assistant director, and the whine of a blow-dryer. Somewhere, in the crowd of about a hundred people, tourists and Cady Stratton fans and people who’d been pulled in off the streets to come watch us tape, was my grandmother—I’d cast her as an extra, a customer in Daphne’s restaurant, in the first scene we’d shot, and when it was over she’d taken a reserved seat in the audience to watch
the rest of the show. “I don’t know. I just . . . I think it’s still a little . . .” I groped for the right words, looking around for Dave. When I spotted him, he was talking with the DP. I watched as Dave gestured up toward a light, and then pointed back down at the script, and I knew that if I fetched him, the director would lose whatever respect he had for me.

So I straightened up and said, “It’s too big.”

The director’s face didn’t move. He was a laconic fellow named Chad, a veteran whom the network had been ecstatic to hire. Now, two hours and three pages into what was shaping up to be an all-night adventure, he stared down at me, expressionless. “You understand,” he finally said, “that it’s hard to be small when you’ve got your star on Rollerblades and an old lady who’s talking about fucking a man to death.”

I tried not to wince at his language, either the
old lady
or the
fucking.
Putting Daphne on Rollerblades had been my idea, added at the studio’s urging, their insistence that I needed some big physically funny moment in Act One. The joke about Nana Trudy’s sex life was courtesy of the network, which had wanted something broadly comic enough to play in the previews and commercials. I’d fought, thinking that the inference was broad to the point of being disgusting, but I’d lost. “I know. I get it. But if maybe we could just try it with Cady doing a little less of a pratfall?” As it was, Cady had turned what was supposed to be a cute little tumble into a Cirque du Soleil–style split, prompting hollers and wolf whistles from the audience. Dave had grabbed me the first time she’d done it.
”
Don’t let her get away with that,” he’d said. “Pull her back.” I was trying to do it, trying to tell her as effectively as I could that her gestures were too big, her voice was too loud, that all of the eye-bugging and neck-rolling she was doing made her look like a cartoon, not a real person. But the director, who was obviously ready to go to the next scene and send the stunt double and the stunt coordinator
home for the night, wasn’t helping. He’d laughed appreciatively at each of Cady’s whoopsies, and the bigger they’d gotten, the more amused he’d become.

“One more time,” I said as firmly as I could. “Less vaudeville. More nuance.”

“You got it, boss,” he said.

He turned on his heel, and I walked over to Cady, who was perched on the edge of the set’s sofa, her legs crossed and Rollerblades swinging, waving to the guys in the front row who were whooping, “We love you, Cady!”

“Hey there!” she said, all shiny eyes and stage makeup.

“You’re doing great,” I said. “I’m just wondering if we can do one more take a little differently.”

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

I told her what I wanted. I reiterated my wishes to the director. I told Annie Tait, who was playing the part of Nana Trudy, to pull it back by about thirty percent. When Annie agreed, I knew that thirty percent was exactly what I’d get—not twenty-nine percent, not thirty-one percent, but a precisely calibrated performance that would be exactly thirty percent more subdued than what she’d done in the previous take. Annie Tait didn’t resemble my grandmother at all. She was statuesque where Nana was tiny, and her features were patrician and WASPy—pale-blue eyes and a narrow, high-bridged nose, in contrast with my grandmother’s larger features—but somehow, none of that had mattered. When she’d given what I’d come to think of as the
Buck up, li’l camper
speech to Daphne, it was like I was in the room with my grandmother, like she was talking to me. “She’s fantastic,” I’d said as soon as she was gone . . . and everyone, from Maya to Dave to the studio to the network, had agreed.

In her canary-yellow silk robe and heeled slippers, with a feather hair clip in her wig, Annie had once again become my grandmother, a funny and for-public-consumption version of
my grandmother, the woman I’d written as a response to the stereotypical dirty-joke-spouting senior who afflicted the average sitcom. Nana Trudy was, I hoped, something new, a lady of a certain age with heart and a history and a genuine sense of humor and a sex drive that wasn’t a punch line, a quirky woman with demons to conquer and wisdom to share.

Annie patted my arm. “Hang in there. It’s always a little rough, starting out.”

“Thanks,” I said, and hurried back to my director’s chair behind the monitors that displayed the footage each of the four cameras was shooting. The hair and makeup people fussed over Annie. The props assistants came onto the set with a new fake vase for Cady to shatter. The warm-up guy brayed jokes at the audience.
Hurry up and wait.
That was TV. “Ready . . . and . . .
action!
” the director finally called. Cady glided into the living room, dressed in what a Boston girl would think of as Florida clothes and Florida colors—yellow shorts, a cream-colored bodysuit, a turquoise headband in her hair. “Okay,” she said. “My new commitment to healthy living begins . . .” She staggered, elbows flailing, catching herself on her grandmother’s antique desk. The vase resting on the desk fell to the ground and shattered. Nana scowled. The audience howled. And Cady, unable to help herself, responding to their cheers like a flower turning toward the sunshine, launched herself into the same kind of crotch-on-the-floor split she’d been doing, only this time she pressed her hands against her mouth and said, “Oopsies!”

I held my breath, waiting for Chad to yell, “Cut,” thinking,
No, that’s not what I meant, that’s not what I wanted
. The director, chuckling from his chair, kept the cameras rolling. “Careful, dear,” said Annie Tait, “you still want to have children someday, don’t you?” The line prompted more laughter from the audience, which led, inevitably, to more mugging from Cady . . . and was
I imagining it, or was the director actually slapping one oak-trunk-size thigh? “Hey,” I said, and tapped Chad’s shoulder. He ignored me. I tugged at his sleeve. “Hey!”

He gave me a
What can you do?
shrug. “They’re locked in,” he said. My heart sank. Was he right? Cady hadn’t been nearly this broad at the run-through . . . but I knew that this happened sometimes when a live studio audience is involved.
“
They can’t help themselves,” Little Dave had said, as if the actors were a bunch of addicts and the audience members, mostly superfans and tourists bussed in from Hollywood Boulevard, were their drug. At our taping the audience was packed with Cady groupies. She’d used her website and Twitter account to invite her fans to her “triumphant return” to the world of TV. The bigger she got, the louder they got, on and on in a spiraling loop of awfulness. I could almost hear the critics from
Variety
and
People
sharpening their knives, waiting to cut into this tempting pie.