The Next Best Thing (25 page)

“Why are you assuming I’ll get hurt?” asked Cady-as-Daphne. “Maybe I’ll be fine.”

“And maybe I’ll be the pope.”

Cady turned away, stung. Steve reached across the counter and grabbed her hands.

“I love you, Daphne,” he said. His voice was raw. “I know maybe I haven’t said that as much as you needed to hear it, but it’s true. And maybe I’m being selfish . . .”

“Maybe you are!” Cady said.

“But I don’t want you to get hurt,” he continued. “Miami’s not the right place for a girl like you. It’s a place for people who are plastic . . . and, and stupid . . . and . . .”

“Beautiful,” Cady said softly. I could feel the audience leaning forward, listening. She extracted her hands from Steve’s grip, and straightened, and turned, cheating slightly so that the camera caught her profile. “Do you think I haven’t thought about that? You think maybe the mirrors in my house don’t work? I know what kind of girl the world likes, and I know that maybe I’m not exactly her.”

I got to my feet, slipping off my earphones, watching her on the monitors, reciting the words along with Cady, remembering being in my hospital bed, sitting on the low wall in front of my high school, or curled up on the office floor with Rob’s hands on my shoulders, recognizing the
no
in his touch.

“But maybe I’ve got something those other girls don’t. Talent.” Cady spoke the word crisply, hitting the
T
’s hard at each end, delivering it like a benediction. “I’m a good cook, and I’ve done the work. I know I can run a restaurant, and make it a place people want to be, if someone gives me a shot. I have to go there. I have to try. I have to see if what I’ve got is enough. It’s what . . .” She swallowed hard. A flush crept up her cheeks, and her eyes were shining, and in that instant she was Daphne, with all of her doubts and all of her dreams, Daphne and me, too, getting ready to move to a strange place, jump out of the nest and take flight. Her voice thickened. My own throat got tight. “It’s what my mom would have wanted.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Steve said. “Six months from now you’re going to come crawling back home, and you know
who’s got two thumbs and won’t be waiting?” He cocked his digits back at his own chest. “This guy.”

Cady’s shoulders slumped. Her lips quivered. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. The audience was absolutely silent as she made her way slowly to the door. “Oooh, girl,” I heard someone murmur. Cady put her hand on the doorknob, and it seemed in that moment like she’d leave with his insult still hanging there, unanswered. Then she spun around, just as we’d rehearsed, looking Phil right in the eye.

“I might be back,” she said. “But I won’t be crawling. And I won’t be coming back to you.” Then she turned again and, as the audience clapped and hooted, walked through the door.

“And . . . cut!” The director turned to me. “Good?”

“Very good.” I was hopping up and down, hugging myself, practically dancing. “Really good.” Cady walked off the set, carefully stepping over the camera cables, and stood in front of me, eyes shining, breathing hard.

“Oh my God, that was amazing,” I said.

She smiled more widely. “Do you think so?”

“Oh my God,” I said again. “Perfection!”

She tugged at her hair and twirled her toe. “It wasn’t too . . . I mean, do you think we need, like, a joke at the end? So the audience knows she’s going to win?”

“They know you’re winning,” I assured her. “Did you hear them? They’re on your side! You’ve got them eating out of the palm of your hand!”

Cady nibbled on her lip. “Like, what if I say, ‘Guess who’s got two thumbs and won’t be coming back to you?” Or, you know, my nana’s there with me, and she says, ‘You go, girl!’”

I winced. I couldn’t help it.
You go, girl?
Was anyone still saying that? Were white people even allowed?

“Or, okay, maybe not that.” She gave a little laugh. “I know
I’m not a writer, but I just feel like there needs to be something else there so they know that he didn’t get the best of me.”

“Trust me,” I said, parroting a line I’d heard the Daves give, over and over, to actors through the years. “Trust the words. Trust your performance. When you see this played back, you aren’t going to believe how powerful it is.”

“I just think . . . ,” Cady said. If I’d been Big Dave, I would have cut her off right there, saying, “Thinking is not your job,” and Cady would have laughed, and then gone back to her mark, comfortable in the hierarchy and her own place in it. Big Dave could get away with a line like that because Big Dave was, well, big, and a man, a veteran producer and a powerful Hollywood player, and who was I? The showrunner, true, but also a woman, and not a pretty one, either, a young woman on the very first episode of her very first show, which meant that Cady probably believed she could get away with things that more experienced showrunners wouldn’t have allowed.

“I mean, I just want . . . ,” Cady continued. She toyed with a lock of her hair and spun one toe on the floor, giving me a sampling of the repertoire of little-girl gestures she’d probably deployed to great effect with male directors and producers over the years.

“Listen,” I said. The conversation would have been easier if I’d been slightly more fluent in girl talk . . . but if I couldn’t pull off the alpha-male stuff that the Daves did, I’d have to find my own way to deal with my star. I led Cady into a quiet corner of the stage and stood still, waiting until she’d stopped fidgeting and I had her full attention. “What you just did was so powerful. Every girl who’s ever wanted something and worried that she wasn’t good enough to get it is going to watch that and feel affirmed . . . and proud of who she is . . . and beautiful.”

She looked at me long enough for me to wonder if she knew
what
affirmed
meant. I put my hands on her shoulders again, copying something the Daves had done, and then turned her gently and steered her back toward the set. “Trust me,” I said again, and she moved away without looking back.

Twenty minutes later, we were in the Boston house set shooting another pre-Miami scene. Annie Tait was giving herself a manicure on the couch when Cady, shoulders slumped, walked through the door.

“Looks like that went well,” Annie observed.

“Phil says I’m gonna get eaten alive,” Cady mumbled—but of course it was an actress-y mumble, each word clear and distinct and audible even to the people sitting in the farthest reaches of the back row.

“Phil,” said Annie without looking up from her nail file, “is going to spend the rest of his life having his mother sew labels into his underpants. You’re better off without him.”

“What if . . . ,” Cady began. “What if this is a mistake?”

Annie set her file down on the coffee table. “What if what is a mistake, dear?”

“Miami,” said Cady. “What if I can’t get a job in a restaurant down there? What if I’m not that good? What if I never make it?”

Annie Tait stood up. She crossed the room in one, two, three steps and hit her mark, right in front of the armchair where Cady was slumped. She reached down, touched Cady’s chin, just the way I’d written, and lifted the younger woman’s face up toward hers. When she spoke her voice was the perfect mixture of sweetness and steel, and even though I’d heard the speech maybe fifty times from fifty different actresses, it still made me want to cheer.

“Now you listen to me, Daphne Michelle. There are no quitters in this family. Do you think that I gave up when that tramp Mitzie Yosselman won the election for head of Hadassah?” I smiled—I couldn’t help it—as, from the front row, I heard my
grandmother laugh. “Did your mother give up when your father said he wanted a small, intimate wedding? Did Barbra Streisand”—and here Annie did the same thing that Renée had done during her audition, resting her hand on her breast, just above her heart, and turning her eyes toward the heavens—“give up when they told her, after
Funny Lady,
that she needed a nose job if she wanted to be a star? No,” she said. “No, they did not.” She looked into Daphne’s eyes, holding her gaze. “And I’m not letting you give up, either. Now, you wipe that
poor-me
look off your face and you think about who you are and what you’ve got, and you get back out there and you use it.”

“I will,” Cady whispered. She straightened her back and raised her voice. “I will.”

“And . . .
cut!
” yelled Chad, bouncing to his feet as the audience burst into applause.

We ran the scene twice more, but I knew we’d gotten it the first time, the heart and soul of
The Next Best Thing,
the love between the two women, Nana’s role in her granddaughter’s life, and the journey of the series, in which Daphne and her grandmother would master the world they had chosen, finding fame and fortune and love . . . everything I wanted for my grandmother and myself.

The rest of the shoot zipped by as if the film had been sped up—Cady’s rejection and eventual triumph at the chichi Miami restaurant, Nana’s charming the building superintendent and sweet-talking him into moving a spare refrigerator up to their kitchen, and the final scene, with the two women at the end of their first day in Miami, together on the couch, and Cady delivering the final line of the pilot, the line I’d labored over for what felt like half my life: “We’re all right for now.”

The director looked at me. “We good?” By then it was almost one in the morning. Most of the audience—my grandmother included—had drifted out the door. I had opened my mouth
to tell him it was a wrap when Loud Lloyd came bustling out of the greenroom with a sheaf of papers in his hands, in a blue suit that looked as if it had been bought for a bar mitzvah . . . possibly his.

“I have a request from Joan,” he announced importantly.

Chad rolled his eyes at me and said, “What’s that?”

Lloyd pulled some folded pages from his clipboard. They were, I realized with a sinking heart, a version of the scene he’d written where Nana Trudy got dumped. When he’d emailed it over, I’d thanked him politely, had myself a laugh about his gross jokes about Viagra and Boniva and Nana’s sex life, then emailed it to the Daves, imagining they’d be just as amused by his clumsy jokes and leaden dialogue as I was. They were amused. They were also worried. “Beware the executive who thinks he can write,” Big Dave had said, and added in all caps, “DO NOT LET HIM ANYWHERE NEAR YOUR SET ON SHOW NIGHT.” But I hadn’t figured out how to keep Lloyd away . . . and now, here he was, script in hand, and a look on his face suggesting that he would not be stopped.

“Joan wants to see it once this way,” he said, and tapped the pages. “The way I wrote it.”

“I think we’re fine with what we’ve got,” I said. If I’d ever been this tired in my life, I couldn’t remember when. Every part of my body ached, and all I wanted was something hot to drink and then about twelve hours of sleep, and my grandmother and Dave to tell me that I’d done my job well; followed by more food and more sleep, and then maybe a massage.

Lloyd was undeterred. “She thinks we need some bigger comic moments,” he said.

Stalemate. I could fight him, could go back to the greenroom myself, find Joan, confirm that this was what she wanted, and try to talk her out of it . . . or I could indulge the Boy Wonder,
shoot his stupid scene once, and pretend it had never happened. I certainly wouldn’t be using it in the final cut.

“Okay,” I said, so softly that I could barely hear myself. The director whistled quietly under his breath.

“What was that?” asked Lloyd.

I lifted my head and said it again, louder. “Okay.”

Forty minutes later, we were finished once more. The warm-up comedian used that tired old line: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” The DJ played “Hit the Road, Jack,” the executives applauded and then quickly filed out the door.

I congratulated the actors and the writers and talked to the executives, including Loud Lloyd, who patted my back and told me, “I really think we’ve got something special here.” I conferred with the director about his availability for reshoots. “Honestly, I don’t think we’ll need ’em,” he said, tucking a fresh piece of gum into his mouth. “I’ve done a million of these, and I’ve gotta tell you, this was pretty tight.”

I hung back in the greenroom as the props crew retrieved their stunt vases and Rollerblades, and the craft-services guy packed up the leftovers, and the janitors swept the floor. I waited until I was the only one left on the stage. Then I walked onto the apartment set and sat on the couch with my legs curled underneath me. The cork floor in the kitchen was a replica of what Grandma and I had had in the house in Massachusetts. The couch, upholstered in beigey-gold velvet, was a twin of the one that Grandma had found at a flea market in Santa Monica and wrestled onto a U-Haul to drive home. Next to the couch, on a little table in a simple gold frame, was a picture of my parents on their wedding day. I’d put it there to stand in as a picture of Daphne’s parents, and for good luck. There was my mother, her light hair falling from the widow’s peak high on her forehead, her pale eyes trusting, and my dad, one arm around her waist,
grinning like the whole world had been spread before him. It all looked so real, like an actual house, until you looked up and saw that there were no ceilings and no roof: just empty space and metal walkways, lights and cords and cables.

I picked up the photograph, wondering what my parents would have made of this: their daughter the showrunner, sitting at the center of a world she had dreamed up and called to life. “We’re going to get picked up,” I whispered into the darkness. Nobody answered, but still, I was convinced. The actors had been great; the story was solid; the executives even looked happy. I pulled off my hat, slid the elastic band off my hair, and shook it loose over my shoulders. Then I sat there, nerves singing with exhaustion, muscles quivering, a smile spread over my face, knowing that I was going to get to live in this world, this perfect world, for years to come. “We’re all right for now,” I said, and imagined Daphne and Nana, asleep in their beds, Daphne with a new job, Nana with new friends, and how I would guide the two of them like ships, like sailboats on a stormy sea, guide them until they reached port, guide them until they were safely home.