The Next Best Thing Read online

  I leaned forward as Polly glided into the spotlight. Her hair was purple—she was playing a corpse on the episode of NCIS they were filming that week—and one ear glittered with half a dozen studs. I rolled my eyes at Maya, who gave me a What can you do? shrug. We’d asked Polly to look as conservative as possible, as close to the girl she’d be playing, but maybe she’d forgotten.

  “Honey, I’m home!” she called, slipping across the stage on stockinged feet (in the script, at the start of the second act, after she and her Nana had moved to Miami, she was wearing Rollerblades). Joan smiled. Lisa actually laughed out loud. That was good, I thought: that even the people who’d read the script a dozen times still thought the funny parts were funny.

  “Look out,” drawled deadpan Lanny, who, in this scene, was reading the part of Nana. “I’ve got a cake in the oven.”

  “And I,” said Polly, with a nifty little twirl, “have got a job interview at Emeril’s!” She skated up to the edge of the stage and dropped her voice. “Did you see the guy in 11E? Hair,” she said temptingly. “Teeth.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Lanny droned.

  “You like him,” said Polly, and hugged herself. “Oh, this is perfect! It’s all going to work out! I’ll get a great job, you’ll fall in love . . .”

  Lisa cleared her throat and picked at her thumbnail. Joan, with her eyes still fixed intently on the stage, shifted in her seat. Lanny pulled out his BlackBerry. I snuck a look at Dave, whose face was maddeningly unreadable. Was this going well? Horribly? I watched as Polly finished her scene and took her bow. Again, the executives gathered, whispering and gesturing. I walked up the aisle again to say my good-byes to Polly, who was pulling on a leather jacket and a knitted newsboy’s cap. “Gotta run,” she said.

  “Date?” I asked. It was, after all, Friday night.

  She gave me a weary smile and pulled something out of her handbag. An apron. “I’m already late for my shift,” she said. “Hey, you should come in sometime. We’ve got five-dollar small plates during happy hour.” With that, she was gone, off to Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she’d been working as a waitress when she wasn’t singing “Good Morning, Baltimore,” or pretending to be dead in a Dumpster. It was heartbreaking . . . but, I thought, it also meant she’d bring a certain verisimilitude to the part of a restaurant kitchen rat.

  Joan stuck her head back into the hallway. “We’re ready, Ruth.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Where was Carter? I looked around at the empty cubicles, the vacant couches, the quiet corridors. By the time I’d turned back to the doors, Carter DeVries was charging through them, red-faced and breathless, her hair pulled into a ragged ponytail, with her script in one hand and her cell phone in the other. “Oh my God, did I miss it? Are they still here? There was this huge accident on Barham, and I was going to ditch my car and, like, run here. Please tell me I didn’t miss it.” She wiped her forehead, then tugged at her hair. “I think I parked in a handicapped spot.”

  “They’re waiting for you. But don’t worry. Take a minute. Give me your keys,” I said. Carter handed me her keys and then collapsed on her back on the couch, hot-pink Keds waving disconsolately in the air as she groaned out loud. Carter was twenty-two, the veteran of an improv troupe who’d won awards for a one-woman show she’d written and performed called Time of the Month. She was, in my opinion, the funniest of the would-be Daphnes. Every time she read Daphne’s lines about the Walk of Shame, Senior Version, where Nana Trudy’s peers made their way back to their condo in last night’s clothes, with their orthopedic shoes in their hands, their teeth in their pocket, and last night’s Depends in their purse, she found different inflections, different places to pause, a way to make each take fresh and funny. She struggled with the more serious parts—her natural inclination was to make a joke of everything—but Dave, in his quiet, persistent way, made the case that drama was easier to learn than comedy. “Let’s give her a chance,” he’d said. Give me a chance, I’d thought before I’d been able to stop myself, and I’d smiled and said, “How can I refuse you?”

  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 fu
ss 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 ligh
t.

  “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.

  “You don’t think she’s too pretty?” I asked. Dave stroked Pocket’s back, and I watched the dog wriggle in pleasure. He shook his head.

  “Visual medium,” he reminded me, and I nodded. My heart was breaking for the girls I’d found on my own, but some of that was about me, not them. I’d wanted to be the fairy godmother, waving my magic wand over an unknown, transforming her pumpkin into a carriage and her rags into a ball gown, turning her into a star. In my imagination, the girl who won the role would be a girl like me, broken in some essential way, moving through a world that didn’t want her. But even more than any of that, I wanted the show to succeed. I wanted the pilot to get picked up, to make it on the air, to be admired by critics and beloved by viewers, and eventually, to run for seven seasons. With Cady on board, the chances of all that happening would increase exponentially, and I was enough of a pragmatist to see it.