Swim (5 page)

Back at the valet stand, I wished him good luck with his date.

“It’s not too late,” he said. He pumped my hand up and down once, and then he just held it.

“Too late for what?” “We could go back in there. Buy that puppy. I’ll ditch the d-girl. You’ll forget about your unfortunate time behind bars. We could go to the beach and let the little guy run around.”

I shook my head. “You need practice, and I’ve got plans.” I retrieved my hand and put it in my pocket. “You might want to take a shower first, though. You smell kind of confusing.”

“Can’t have that,” he said cheerfully, and handed the valet his parking stub. “See ya.”

“Good luck,” I said, leaving him to his date as I headed for the pool.

“Phone for you, Ruthie,” my grandmother announced, clutching the cordless as if it were a wild animal she’d managed to subdue with her bare hands. “It’s a man,” she emphasized in a loud whisper, as if I’d missed the manic glee in her eyes. It was Saturday, six days after I’d left Lonelyguy at the mall. We’d been e-mailing. His date, he told me, had been a disaster. Dana the d-girl had ordered a salad and spent the entire dinner shifting the leaves around her plate and complaining about, in order, her producer bosses, her most recent ex-boyfriend, her father, and her allergies. “By coffee, I was feeling like I was responsible not only for my entire gender, but the atmosphere, too,” he’d said. But it hadn’t stopped him from lining up somebody else. Actually, two somebody elses—a pediatric resident on Friday, for drinks, and a public relations executive for Saturday-afternoon coffee. I’d advised him on clothing, scents, and topics of conversation.
Make eye contact,
I said.
Look at them like they matter, like they’re the only one in the room.
He’d thanked me and mailed me a check. No matter what my grandmother wanted to believe, it was a business relationship, nothing more.

I took the telephone, assuming that it was Gary, wanting to debrief in real time. “Ruthie?”

His voice, as always, went straight to my heart and my knees, making the first one pound and the second two quiver. I sank onto Grandma’s fringed apricot velvet fainting couch, displacing two doilies on my way down. “Rob,” I said faintly. “How are you?”

“Good,” he said. Then, “Busy.”

“I bet.” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sound snide or sympathetic. My voice cracked on the last word.
Pull yourself together,
I told myself sternly, picking doilies up off the floor.

“With a new show, actually,” he said. “Oh?” My tone was polite. I’d quit reading
Variety
in the wake of our whatever-it-was, and I’d assumed that Rob was still working on
The Girls’ Room,
which should just be gearing up for its next season.

I leaned my cheek against the soft nap of the couch as he went into his pitch: a family dramedy he was preparing for pilot season. Hot mom, recovering alcoholic dad, dysfunctional sisters who managed a Miami lingerie boutique.

“Are you interested?” “Do you mean, would I watch it?”

He chuckled. “No. I know you’re not that much of masochist. Would you write it? We could use you, Ruth. We could use your voice.”

“You can’t have it,” I blurted.

Rob’s laughter was warm and indulgent, the sound of a father’s amusement at a cute but willful child. “Well, not for keeps. But you’re not working . . .” He let his voice trail off, turning it into a question. When I didn’t reply, he pressed on. “Look, you can’t just sit around all day. There’s only so many laps you can swim.” His voice softened. I pictured him in one of his ratty see-through T-shirts, five days’ worth of stubble, his glasses, and his rare, delicious grin. “And I miss working with you. We were good together.”

“We were nothing,” I said. My grandmother was staring at me from the kitchen with a cordial glass of crème de menthe in her hand, eyebrows raised
.

“Ruth... look. I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry if it gave you the wrong idea.”

“Sure thing. Well, okay then! Thanks for calling!” I kept my voice upbeat. Maybe Grandma would think my gentleman caller was a telemarketer.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” he said. “No,” I said, and then, because I was nothing if not polite, I said, “No thank you.”

“Big surprise, Ruth,” he said. Then he was gone.

I swam for hours that night, tracing the tiled lap lane back and forth until my arms were numb. When I got home, Lonelyguy had e-mailed. “Is it just me,” he’d asked, “or is every woman out there a freak?”

“I’m not,” I whispered at the screen. But I didn’t write it. I typed in “See you tomorrow,” shut off the laptop, and crawled into bed.

The next morning I drove back to the Beverly Center for a new swimsuit, thinking that maybe I’d stop by the pet shop and see if the skinny puppy was still there. I was walking down the bright, bustling corridor toward the escalators when I saw a familiar figure—long, denim-clad legs; skinny shoulders; a swing of shiny dark-brown hair. “Caitlyn?”

She turned around. “Oh, hi, Ruth.” She was wearing a big gray hoodie that enveloped her torso and had “Berkeley” written across the chest, and she was pushing a small, candy-apple-red wheelchair that carried the twisted frame of a little boy. The boy wore a Berkeley sweatshirt, too, and stiff blue jeans that looked like they’d never been washed, or worn, or walked in. His head rested against the wheelchair’s padded cradle; the mall’s lights glinted off his glasses. He made a hooting noise. Caitlyn looked down at him, then up at me.

“This is my brother, Charlie. Charlie, this is Ruth? She’s helping me with my essays?”

“Hi.” I bent down so I was at eye level with Charlie. I looked up at Caitlyn, who nodded, then extended my hand and touched it to his. His fingers were folded tightly against his palms, and his skin was so pale I could see the veins underneath it. “Nice to meet you.”

He gave another hoot, his lips working, eyes focused on my face. Caitlyn reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and wiped his lips. “Do you want lunch now?” she asked. I wondered whether Charlie was the reason she always talked in questions, the way she left her sentences open-ended, blanks that would never get filled in. “We’re going to go to the food court?”

“Oh. Well, have fun.”

Charlie moaned again, more loudly, struggling hard to make himself understood. Caitlyn bent her shining head to his, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. Her brother’s eyes stayed locked on mine, and I thought I could see where he was pointing, where he was going.

When Caitlyn lifted her head her fair skin was flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I told her.

Charlie’s fist bounced on his chest. “He has cerebral palsy,” she said.

I nodded, looked at Charlie, and touched my cheek. “It’s a scar from an accident. A long time ago.”

Caitlyn sighed, then straightened up. “Do you want to get some lunch with us?” The three of us walked to the food court and sat at a metal-legged plastic-topped table, surrounded by chattering teenagers, mothers and daughters, women in suits and hose and sneakers lingering on their lunch breaks. Caitlyn bought herself a Diet Coke, and, for Charlie, a paper cone of french fries. She dipped each one into ketchup and lifted it to his lips with the same absentminded love as the mothers feeding their toddlers at the neighboring tables.“When
I was three my parents were driving on the Mass Pike to Boston for Thanksgiving. They were both teachers, they’d gone to school in Boston, and they were going to have Thanksgiving with some friends. Their car hit a patch of ice and rolled over into a ditch. They died, and I went through the windshield, in my car seat. That’s what happened to my face.”

Charlie twisted his head toward his sister, his mouth working. “Do you remember it?” Caitlyn translated.

I shook my head. “I really don’t remember it much.”

Caitlyn wiped Charlie’s face with a napkin. “So who took care of you?”

“My grandmother. She was living down in Coral Gables, but she didn’t think that was a good place to raise a little girl, so she moved up to my parents’ house in Framingham, and we lived there.”

They seemed to think this over while Charlie chewed another french fry. He had the same brown eyes and rounded chin as his sister. There was a smear of pink glitter on his cheek, where, I thought, she’d kissed him.

I got up.

“Well, Caitlyn, I’ll see you on Saturday. Nice to meet you, Charlie. Have a good day.” It sounded so stupid, so trite. I wondered what Charlie’s life was like, trapped in a body he couldn’t control, able to understand what he was seeing and hearing, unable to communicate. I was halfway out of the food court when I turned around and went back to their table and tapped Caitlyn on the shoulder. “You should write about this,” I blurted. She looked up at me with her shiny brown eyes. Her tiny pink purse was hooked over one of the arms of Charlie’s wheelchair, which had NASCAR stickers on the sides. “I was wrong about you,” I said.

She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s okay,” she said.

I skipped my swim that night.
After it got dark, I pulled on a sweater that had been my mother’s. It was frayed at the elbows and unraveling at the hem. In a few of the pictures I had, she was wearing this sweater, and I imagined that even after all this time it still held some trace of her—a strand of her walnut-colored hair, the lavender smell of her skin, invisible handprints where my father had touched her, pulling her close. I curled up in a corner of the couch and told my grandmother about Caitlyn and Charlie. Halfway through the story I started to cry. Grandma pulled a wad of tissue paper from her sleeve and handed it to me.

“What’s wrong, honey?” She was dressed in a white nightgown with mounds of lace at the neck and the wrists, and she looked like a baby bird peeking out of its nest.

“I don’t know.” I wiped my eyes. “People surprise me sometimes.”

She considered this. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “As long as people can still surprise you, it means you’re not dead.”

At midnight I was still awake, nerves jangling, muscles twitching, missing the water. I flipped open my laptop, clicked on “Documents,” double-clicked on the file called “The Little Family.” It was a screenplay I’d started years ago. I read through the first ten pages slowly. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared, either. It had potential. I hit “save” and then scrolled through my in-box, opening a missive from Lonelyguy that had arrived the day before. “Maybe we should have dinner.”

I hit “reply,” then scrolled up to find an e-mail from Caitlyn that had come that afternoon. “New Essay,” the subject line read.

“My eleven-year-old brother Charlie will never visit Paris,” she’d written. “He won’t play Little League baseball or run on the beach. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was three months old.
Cerebral: of or pertaining to the brain. Palsy: a disorder of movement or posture.
My brother sees the world from his wheelchair. When I grow up, I will see things for him. I will go to all the places he can’t go, places where they don’t have curb cuts or wheelchair ramps, to flea markets and mountaintops, all the places in the world.”

I buried my face in my hands. How did Caitlyn get so brave? Why was I so afraid? I opened my eyes and closed the window containing Caitlyn’s essay, leaving up my unwritten reply to Lonelyguy’s letter and remembering what I’d told her the first time we’d met.
We’re still early in the process. It’s not too late to change your mind.

THE NEXT BEST THING

Actors aren’t the only ones trying to make it in Hollywood . . .

At twenty-three, Ruth Saunders left her childhood home in Massachusetts and headed west with her seventy-year-old grandma in tow, hoping to make it as a screenwriter. Six years later, she has hit the jackpot when she gets The Call: the sitcom she wrote,
The Next Best Thing,
has gotten the green light, and Ruthie’s going to be the showrunner. But her dreams of Hollywood happiness are threatened by demanding actors, number-crunching executives, an unrequited crush on her boss, and her grandmother’s impending nuptials.

Set against the fascinating backdrop of Los Angeles show business culture, with an insider’s ear for writer’s room showdowns and an eye for bad backstage behavior and set politics, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel is a rollicking ride on the Hollywood roller coaster, a heartfelt story about what it’s like for a young woman to love, and lose, in the land where dreams come true.

Read on for a look at Jennifer Weiner’s new novel

Available in July 2012 from Atria Books

Jennifer Weiner THE NEXT BEST THING Click here to purchase.

Excerpt from
The Next Best Thing
copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Weiner

Chapter One

The telephone rang.

If it’s good news, there’s going to be a lot of people on the call,
Dave had told me. Bad news, it’ll just be one person from the studio, the executive in charge of the project. I lifted the phone to my ear, feeling like the air had gained weight and my arm was moving through something with the consistency of tar. My heartbeat hammered in my ears. My jeans and T-shirt felt too small, my bedroom looked too bright, and the atmosphere felt thin, as if I was working harder than I normally did to pull oxygen into my lungs.
Please, God,
I thought—me, the girl who hadn’t been in a synagogue since my grandma and I had left Massachusetts, who’d barely remembered to fast last Yom Kippur. But still. I was a woman who’d lost her parents, who’d survived a dozen surgeries and emerged with metal implants in my jaw, the right side of my face sunken and scarred, and an eye that drooped. In my twenty-eight years, I hadn’t gotten much. I deserved this.