The Next Best Thing (39 page)

“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 took 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.

“Our pilot is directed by the Emmy Award–winning Chad Garson!” Chad, in the process of unwrapping another piece of gum, took the time to briefly lift his head.
Never mind him,
I thought, and intoned the phrase that had kicked off every show on every network since time untold: “And now, without further ado, the table read of
The Next Best Thing,
Episode 101: Pilot!” More applause. I sat down. The actors flipped their scripts open—Penny, I saw, had reprinted her lines in twenty-four-point typeface, while Cady’s pages were scribbled over with hot-pink and lime-green highlighter and dotted with Post-it notes. Pete’s script was, as I’d suspected, dismayingly pristine, and Taryn had
done the actor’s trick of drawing a line through everyone’s words but her own.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, me,
was how Big Dave described that move. “Everyone ready?” I asked quietly. They nodded. We began.

The first scene, a toned-down version of Nana’s getting kicked out of her ailing beau’s house, went smoothly. People laughed at Nana’s barbed insults to her boyfriend’s three sons, and while I hadn’t been able to get rid of every awful sex addict/Viagra joke, I’d rewritten enough to make it clear that Nana got the best of the middle-aged boys. In the crowd, I could see my own grandmother laughing as Penny read her lines, which meant that I’d fixed it enough that she’d be able to watch it on TV and brag about it to her friends without disowning me.

Then it was time for Pete’s scene, back at the apartment, the moment when he’d be meeting Daphne. I whispered his first line, which was “Hey, babe.” Pete looked at me, frowning. “What?”

I jerked my chin toward the page, then up at him, and whispered more urgently, “Hey, babe.”

“Oh, oh, right!” he said, and patted my arm. “Jeez. For a minute there I thought you were coming on to me!” He widened his eyes, giving the executives a
who, me?
smile. They ate it up, laughing and clapping. Then Pete said, “Hey, babe,” in the sleaziest, most construction-worker-with-his-hand-down-his-pants tone I could have conjured. Cady sat up straight. “Excuse me?” she said, in a high, quavering voice. “Are you speaking to me?”

“Nobody else here,” I whispered. “Nobody else here,” Pete said. “You new in town?” I whispered. “You new?” said Pete. “Because I haven’t seen you around.”

That wasn’t what I’d written, but it was close enough, and Cady slid right into her next line. “My grandmother and I just moved here. We’re in 6A.”

“And I’m in the basement,” I whispered to Pete. “I’m the handyman. Anything you need fixed, any lightbulbs burnt out, anything you need, you know, loosened, tightened . . .”

Pete read the line back flawlessly. Cady gave a prim shudder. “I think we’re okay on the loosening and tightening front,” she said. Without waiting for me to feed him his next line, Pete gave a dazzling smile.

“If anything changes . . .” he said, and lifted his hand to his ear in the universal gesture for “call me.” Laughter rippled through the room, and I scribbled a note to change the line from what I’d written—“give me a call”—to what Pete had just done.

“I have to go now,” Cady blurted, and Pete hollered, “I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.” It wasn’t on the page, but got a big laugh. I wrote it down and turned the page, and we were back in the apartment, where Nana was primping for a date and waiting to find out how Daphne’s first day at work had gone. As soon as Penny started reading her lines, Pete sagged back in his seat. Beneath his shock of shiny hair, his face was pale, and when I put my hand on his shoulder, I could feel him tremble. “Pete? Are you okay? Do you need some water?” I whispered.

He managed a smile. “Nah, I’m good. Just a little stage fright.”

That was puzzling. We weren’t even onstage, insofar as our sets were still in the process of being built. Performing in front of executives had to be nerve-racking, but these were the people who’d already liked Pete well enough to give him the role, which should have calmed him down. What if Pete fell apart in front of an audience? Hollywood was full of actors like that, people who could perform flawlessly when it was just the crew and the camera, but who’d experience professional vapor lock when the audience filed into its seats.

At the other end of the table, Penny Weaver was winding up
the speech I’d written imagining that Annie Tait would be the one to read it. “You’re going to let some plumber whose tattoos probably have their own Facebook page talk to you like that?” she demanded. “Honey, no. I didn’t raise a dishrag. You get back out there and you stake your claim! You plant your flag! You set up that StairMaster!”

“I don’t know,” Cady whimpered. Her hesitation, her obvious fear, should have made the audience want to give Daphne a firm shake and a pep talk. Given Cady’s emaciation, it probably made the audience want to give her a sandwich. I scribbled myself a note in the script—
fix this
—as Penny’s tone shifted from strident to sweet. At the table, she reached over to touch Cady’s chin. “Everyone’s scared,” she said gently, “but not everyone’s brave enough to say so.”

At the other end of the table, Taryn was getting ready for her big moment, squinting at her script, Botoxed brow attempting and failing to furrow. I smiled to myself. It was petty, and maybe pointless, but I’d taken care to use every SAT word I knew in describing Taryn’s speech and actions. When she met Daphne, she was supposed to glance at her
combatively,
and deliver her first line
stonily,
after which she’d
lope
out of the bathroom . . . and I was ninety-nine percent sure that she had absolutely no idea what any of those words meant, unless Rob had bought her a dictionary as a push prize.

Even though she might not have known the adverbs, Taryn had at least learned her lines, and the back-and-forth with Cady went smoothly. You got a sense of Daphne’s strength and generosity, the kindness she extended to strangers, the way she beat up on herself. If I just listened, it was fine, but when I watched sunny, skinny Cady acting awkward and insecure, it didn’t work at all.
More rewrites,
I thought, and began scribbling notes on my script.

We swung into Act Three. Nana went on her date. Daphne
charmed the pastry chef, flirted with a customer, and impressed her new friend Veronica with her humor, determination, and ability to fold napkins into swans. Back at the apartment building, she knocked briskly on Brad Dermansky’s door. “My pipes need cleaning,” she announced. “And there’s a piece of exercise equipment that I need your help with.” Pete gave her a lazy grin . . . and I got so caught up in the moment that I forgot to feed him his line.

“Baby, I will clean those pipes right now,” Pete improvised. It got a big laugh. Unfortunately, it was in no way related to what he was supposed to say, which was “I’ve got company.”

“But I’ve got company,” I whispered.

“But I’ve got some people over,” Pete said, waggling his eyebrows. “You, uh, want to join us? Come on in, maybe look at my etchings?”

In the front row, Lisa was laughing. Beside her, Joan smiled sweetly, and Tariq wore the expression of a man who’d just learned that his stage-four cancer had gone into miraculous remission.

“No, thanks,” Cady said, back on script, in a frosty tone. “I have plans with my grandmother.”

“Of course you do,” I whispered.

“Bring her, too,” said Pete.

Cady shot me a desperate look. I nodded at the script. “I’ll expect to see you first thing tomorrow morning,” she said, reading the line as I’d written it.

“I’ll be there,” said Pete, which was close enough. Then there was the final scene, the tag, the thirty seconds of show that would run alongside the credits. It ended with Cady saying, “This has been an interesting day,” and Nana lifting her glass in a toast to “many interesting tomorrows,” and Daphne’s final “We’re all right for now.”

There was a beat of silence. Then, as if we’d choreographed
the move, all of us, the actors and the directors and me, raised our heads as the executives started clapping. Pete squeezed my hand. Grandma blew me a kiss. I let my eyes roam past the audience, toward a seated figure by the door. It was Dave, in his wheelchair. My heart lifted.
He’s here for me
. As I watched, he lifted one hand, doffed an invisible hat, and mouthed two words:
nice job
. He must have sneaked in during the read, I thought as I tentatively waved back. I was out of my chair and halfway around the table, wanting to go to him, to ask him how it had been, if the show could still be saved in spite of everything, and if he’d been thinking about me the way I’d been thinking about him, whether I’d made a total fool of myself, and if, maybe, he could have feelings for me after all, before remembering that I needed to thank everyone for coming and tell them that I’d see them all soon . . . and after that there were a million things that needed doing.