The Next Best Thing (29 page)

I smiled. That joke was one of my favorites.

“We’d prefer you replace Barbra Streisand.”

I stopped smiling. “Seriously? Why?”

“She’s notoriously litigious,” Eric said primly.

“But we’re obviously kidding. I mean, nobody actually believes that we think she bought her husband at a souk, or whatever.”

Eric’s silence implied that, indeed, people would believe we thought that.

“Can we say Hillary Clinton?” Nancy ventured.

“Laura Bush,” called Sam.

“Why would Laura Bush want to pay money for George?” asked Paul. “The point of the joke is that it’s a woman buying something she wouldn’t be able to get on her own.”

“Have you seen Laura Bush?” Sam asked. “Fat ankles.”

“Hillary’s are worse,” said George.

“Do men actually care about ankles?” Nancy wondered out loud. “Because I’ve been told by many women’s magazines that all you really care about is seeing a woman naked, and that we’re the ones obsessing about our flaws. Like, are you seriously going to kick a woman out of your bed because you don’t like her ankles?”

The men looked at one another. “Probably not,” said Sam.

“I’m going to let you creative types sort this out,” said Eric, which was how he ended every phone call. “Peace,” he said, and we went back to what we’d been doing before his call: talking about our sex lives. This was how it went in most writers’ rooms, which were like rolling group-therapy sessions. You brought it all to the table: your family history, your relationships with your parents and your kids, the story of how you’d had your heart broken, met your spouse, discovered your mother was having an affair with her costar (in Ginger’s case) or your father had a secret family (in Nancy’s). All of that material became fodder for the show, stuff you could repurpose and use as your characters’ background, and none of it ever left the rooms, which existed under a cloak of secrecy. The writers’ room is a safe place, the Daves had always said, a line I’d heard echoed by other writers and showrunners through the years.

That morning we’d been working on a scene where Nana Trudy goes on Date Number Three with a man she’s met at the shuffleboard court, and learns he’s got a penchant for rough
sex . . . and, unfortunately for him, a heart condition. Ginger had been telling us the story of her college boyfriend, who had similar tastes but, sadly, not enough upper-body strength to fulfill his desires.

“So his big thing was, he wanted to rip my panties off me, right?” Ginger began.

“As you do,” said Sam, biting into his third Clif Bar of the morning. Sam was tall and lanky and ate more than any human being I’d ever seen. He’d start each morning with two packets of instant oatmeal topped with half-and-half and strawberries, a toasted bagel with butter and cream cheese, and hot chocolate. Then he’d munch granola bars and trail mix until lunchtime. At two o’clock he’d break for a yogurt topped with a fistful of almonds and a cup of granola, and at four he’d have a triple-decker peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. If he’d been a girl, I would have assumed he was bulimic. Because he was a twenty-four-year-old guy, I figured he was just still growing.

“Right,” said Ginger. “But he couldn’t actually, you know, rip them. So I’d have to pre-rip my own underwear. Just, you know, to get things started for him.”

“That’s pathetic,” George scoffed.

“Yeah,” said Ginger, spinning back and forth in her seat. “I guess it was kind of sad.”

“I had a girlfriend who used to buy underwear a size smaller than what she wore, and if she went home with a guy, she’d leave them in his bed,” Nancy volunteered.

“Thus making him think he got luckier than he actually got,” said Paul.

Claire swatted his upper arm. “You’re a pig,” she announced.

“Yeah, but I’m your pig. And you have to sleep with me. The
ketubah
says so.” This was an ongoing joke between the two of them: that Paul had gotten the rabbi to write up a wedding contract in which Clare promised to do all kinds of things, including
give him blow jobs whenever he wanted them, and allow him to spend up to five percent of their combined income on sports betting.

“One day I’m going to get that thing translated,” Claire muttered.

“So what happened to the guy?” I asked Ginger. “The panty-ripper?”

“He started working out. Then he got strong enough to rip my panties by himself. Then he moved on to T-shirts. Then we broke up.” She made a face, remembering. “By that point, he was so built, he could’ve had any girl he wanted. But it was kind of a relief. I couldn’t keep asking my parents for money for new clothes.”

Sam’s stomach made a noisy grumble. He patted it fondly. “Patience, my pet.” Then he looked at me. “Can we order Thai for lunch?”

“Streisand first.” I got up and stood in front of the whiteboard, which we’d divided into a grid. The vertical columns were for each episode, one through nine, with working titles. The horizontal ones named each character—Daphne, Nana, Brad, Veronica—and described what they’d each be doing. “Five minutes,” I said. “Oh, and we also need alts for Brad’s line in the A scene.” That was where Daphne expresses her appreciation at Brad’s scent—he’d spent the day repairing frozen-yogurt dispensers—and he replied, “Good thing you didn’t meet me that summer I was working in the fish cannery.”
Fish cannery
had gotten a decent laugh in the room, as had
mortuary,
but I thought we could do better. The writers bent down over their iPads as Amanda, my assistant, poked her head into the room.

“Hey, Ruth, I’ve got Joan and Lloyd from the network for you.”

“Ginger, you’re in charge,” I said, and went to my office to take the call.

“Hello?”

“Ruth!” bellowed Lloyd. I winced. Speakerphone again—I could hear the staticky echo. I’d come to hate Speakerphone, knowing that the executives all surfed the Net and checked their email during calls, so you never really had their whole attention. “How are things going?”

“Really well.” So far we were on schedule. We’d written one episode, were working on our second, and had gotten the studio’s and the network’s blessings for the outlines for Episodes Three and Four.

“It’s all good on our end,” said Joan. “We’re getting ready to take the pilot out for testing, and we had a thought.”

“Okay,” I said, hearing Big Dave’s voice in my head. Dave had kept a Sam’s Club–size jar of KY jelly displayed on his desk, and when he got calls like this, calls that included the dread phrase
we had a thought,
he’d make a show of uncapping the bottle, putting the call on “Mute,” and saying,
Bend over, here it comes again
.

“You know the alt we shot at the end of pilot night?” Joan asked. I grimaced, remembering. That had been Lloyd’s scene, complete with gross sex jokes about how Nana Trudy had basically fucked her boyfriend into the ICU, with the intention of taking over his house and taking all of his money. How could I forget?

“We went ahead and showed it to Chauncey, and he was a big fan,” said Joan. “So we cut a version using that scene, and that’s what we’d like to take out and test.”

“We’re having it messengered over to you this morning,” said Lloyd, sounding like he was doing me a big favor.

“I’m not comfortable with that,” I blurted . . . which, I figured, was more diplomatic than saying,
I hated it, it’s awful, and if you use it, you’re going to ruin my show.
Even as I said the words, I knew they wouldn’t do any good. Chauncey had spoken . . .
and once the president of the network decided he liked a line, or a scene, or an actress, as surely as day followed night, the showrunner would be stuck with that line, that scene, that actress. Still, I needed to make my case. I drew myself up tall in my chair, set my feet on the floor, and said, “If we’ve got people making fun of Nana Trudy in the first act, basically calling her an elderly nymphomaniac . . .”

Lloyd chuckled. “Elderly nymphomaniac. That’s a good line. We should have used that.”

I shut my eyes and pressed on. “The important thing in a pilot is telling the audience who they’re supposed to root for. If you’re making Nana a joke, they won’t want to root for her. They’ll just want to laugh at her.”

The silence on the other end of the line told me that my executives were perfectly content in a world where viewers were laughing
at
Nana instead of with her. I could feel my throat tightening as I imagined my own grandmother’s reaction to the scene, in which Annie Tait was called fat and ugly, an over-the-hill gold digger intent on getting her claws into any man who’d pay the deductibles for her doctors’ visits. “Did you guys ever watch
The Golden Girls
?” I asked.

“Of course,” Joan said promptly.

“I’ve seen it in reruns,” Lloyd said.

“Those women . . .” I pressed my fist against my right eye, then my left one. “They were the heroes of the show, you know? You loved them. You wanted them to win. If we start off the show with . . .”
Lloyd’s scene,
I almost said, and stopped myself just in time. “If we start
The Next Best Thing
with the scene you’re proposing, it makes it so that Nana’s not a hero. She’s just a punch line.” I paused and then added, “And it would break my grandmother’s heart.”

There was another beat of silence, during which I imagined Lloyd and Joan weighing possible ratings against one old
woman’s broken heart—one old woman who didn’t even have a Nielsen box. “Why don’t you take a look at what we’re sending over. It’s probably not as bad as you remember it,” said Joan.

It was, I knew, just as bad as I’d remembered it, and possibly worse . . . but I could hear in her voice that the battle was over, and that I’d lost.

“I think this is a mistake,” I said. My voice sounded high and wobbly, and I was, I knew, about ten seconds away from actually starting to cry. “I just need to be on record as saying that. I think it’s a betrayal of what this show’s supposed to be about.”
It’s a betrayal of me,
I thought.
My grandmother. My life. Everything we’ve lived through to get here.

I heard the
beep
of call waiting. “Ruth, I need to take this,” Joan said in her soft and placating voice. “Take a look at the cut. I hear that you’re upset, but I think that when you watch it back and take some time to sit with it you’re going to feel much better.”

Wrong,
I thought. “Okay,” I said. When the call ended, I put my forearm on the desk and rested my forehead against it, breathing in the scent of fabric softener and my own skin, hearing a lyric from
Les Misérables
in my head:
There was a time when it all went wrong.

*  *  *

“Ready?” I asked, and tried to smile. I had put off showing the pilot to my grandmother for as long as I possibly could.
I only have a rough cut,
I’d told her.
They haven’t temped in the music. We’re still making changes,
I’d said long after the point when we’d stopped making changes.
There might be reshoots,
I told her—true, but that didn’t change the fact that for the past ten days I’d had a close-to-finished copy of the pilot in my possession . . . and I didn’t want to show it to my grandmother.

She’d asked. Then she’d wheedled. At the dining-room table, draped in its white cloth, with my favorite dishes all in a row, she
had employed reverse psychology, airily claiming that she wasn’t interested, that she’d wait for the September premiere, just like everyone else. Finally, she met me at the door one night when I was coming home from work and said, “The longer you don’t let me look at it, the more worried I’m going to get.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I answered reflexively, even though I knew, or at least strongly suspected, that this was not the case. Lloyd’s scene was just as hateful as I’d remembered. It went against everything I believed about the Nana character, everything I believed, more generally, about comedy for women and comedy for older women especially. It turned Nana into a caricature, the cliché of a raunchy, sex-starved senior citizen . . . but I had stalled for as long as I possibly could. I couldn’t put this off any longer. “You can see it whenever you want to,” I told Grandma over dinner. She clapped her hands together with glee and announced her intention to throw a viewing party.

“Keep it on the small side,” I’d told her as she’d all but danced down the hall, talking to herself about menus and the guest list in between telling me, again, how proud she was. “I’m really not supposed to be screening it for people. I can’t have it leak.”

She stopped and turned, gazing at me, looking incredulous and hurt. “You think my friends would do that?” she demanded. “Bring their phones to our house, and tape your show, and put it on the Internet?”

“No, no,” I said, turning back toward the table and gathering an armload of dirty dishes. “It’s just, you know, they made me sign something . . . they take this all really seriously . . .”

Grandma stared at me a moment longer. I looked back and then put the dishes in the sink, turned on the hot water, and started rinsing. In that moment, I could have told her the truth:
They made me add a new scene, and you’re not going to like it; it’s going to hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t know how to stop it; I didn’t know how to tell them no
. Instead, I ducked down
to open the dishwasher, listening as Grandma got on the phone to tell Maurice she was having a party.