The Half Life and Swim (6 page)

For months I’d been writing, holed up in my bedroom, or doing the clichéd thing of bringing my laptop to a neighborhood coffee shop, where I was surrounded by my more attractive peers, the ones who carried on long, loud telephone conversations in which they used the words
my agent
as often as possible, and did everything but prop tip cups and WRITER AT WORK signs in front of their laptops. I wrote draft after draft, turning each one over to the studio that had funded my efforts and to the network that would, I hoped, eventually air them. I considered each round of notes; I cut and edited, rewrote and rewrote again. I pored over books for expectant parents to give my characters just the right names, and spent days in the kitchens of local restaurants so I could nail the details of my heroine’s job.

Two weeks ago I’d delivered the absolutely, positively final final draft. I’d brushed my lips against every single one of the pages, kissing each one lightly before I slid the script into the hole-puncher, then slipped the brass brads through the holes and pushed them shut.. To celebrate, I’d taken Grandma out to lunch at the Ivy, at her insistence. My grandmother, a petite and stylish woman of a certain age, was a great fan of the tabloids. Any restaurant where the paparazzi were a regular presence on the sidewalk was a place she wanted to be.

When we walked up to the stand, the maitre d’ looked at me—in a plain cotton shift dress and five-year-old zippered black leather boots, with my laptop tucked under my arm—and gave a small but discernible shrug. My grandmother stepped toward him, smiling. If I dressed to maximize comfort and minimize attention, in shades of black and gray and blue, with a single necklace or a single bracelet and sensible shoes, my grandmother had style enough for the both of us. That day she wore a black-and-white cotton dress with a black patent-leather belt and black canvas espadrilles with bows that tied at her ankles. Her necklace was made of vintage Bakelite beads in poppy red, and she had a matching red patent-leather clutch in her hand and a red silk flower tucked behind one ear.

“How are you today?” she asked.

“Fine.” The host’s eyes lingered on her face as he tried to figure out if she was someone he should know, a screen star of yesteryear or one of the Real Housewives’ mothers. “This is my granddaughter,” said Grandma, and gave me a brisk poke in the small of my back. I stumbled obediently toward the podium with a
can-you-believe-her
look on my face, wishing I’d worn a necklace or a flower, or had thought to carry a pretty purse, or to have purchased one in the first place. “Ruthie is a writer.” The man behind the podium could barely suppress his wince.
Writer,
of course, was not the magic word that would cause him to usher us to the finest table in the restaurant and send over a bottle of free Champagne. Maybe writing for TV was a big deal elsewhere in America. In Hollywood, it meant less than nothing. Television writers were as common as cat dirt, and anyone with a working laptop and a version of Final Draft on her hard drive could claim to be one. You could almost see the word
nobodies
in a balloon floating above the man’s neatly barbered head as he led us to a table so far in the back it was practically in the kitchen. “Ladies,” he said.

Grandma paused and rested her hand on the man’s forearm. She tilted her face up toward his, batted her eyelashes, and gave him her gentle smile.

“Would it be possible for us to have a booth? Or a table with a little more light?” Even at her age—seventy-six, although she’d have shot me if I’d said it out loud—her skin was still smooth, her eyes still bright, face vivid with rouge and lipstick, eyeliner and curling false lashes. Her waist was still slim, and her teeth were all her own. “We’re celebrating.”

He smiled back—it is, I have learned over the years, almost impossible to resist my grandma’s smile—and led us to a booth halfway between the open front porch, where the stars would pose and preen for the cameras, and the dim back room, where the nobodies were sequestered. We shared pasta and a chopped salad, had a glass of wine apiece, and split tiramisu for dessert. As we ate, Grandma told me stories from the set of
OR,
the medical drama where she’d been working as an extra that week. “The kids they bring in,” she complained, running the edge of her spoon along the ridge of whipped cream that topped the tiramisu. “They’re out partying all night, so by the time they get in their gurneys they’re exhausted. One of the ADs has to run around set five minutes before every take just making sure they’re not sleeping.”

“Tough gig,” I said. Grandma herself was spending eight hours a day sitting in the fake OR’s fake waiting room. Every day, from ten in the morning until six o’clock at night, with union-mandated breaks for lunch and snacks, she’d get paid to do what she might have done for free on a normal day—sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair with a tote bag of knitting in her lap, looking somewhere between bored and worried as she waited for her name to be called.

“You have to respect them,” she said, nibbling at the strawberry that sat on the side of the dessert plate. “Finding a way to get paid for sleeping. That’s initiative.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” I said, and flagged down our waiter, and paid the bill. Then Grandma had gone back to the Radford lot in the Valley, a neighborhood ten miles away from and ten degrees hotter than Hollywood, where a number of television shows and movies were shot, and I drove back to Hancock Park, a pretty neighborhood with spacious sidewalks and green lawns, to our apartment in an Art Deco building called the Moroccan, to wait.

The network had started picking up its comedies a week after our lunch. I’d spent my days with my phone in my hand, from the moment I opened my eyes to the moment I closed them. I would perch it on the edge of the sink while I showered or brushed my teeth, and sleep with it plugged in underneath my pillow. My thumb was permanently attached to the screen, hitting “Refresh” on
Deadline Hollywood
and
L.A. Confidential
and all of the websites that covered the industry. I’d quit going to the gym after I realized how much I was annoying my fellow swimmers by pausing at the end of each lap to check my phone, which I’d stowed in a waterproof plastic Ziploc bag and left by the deep end. I was too nervous to sit through a meal but I was snacking constantly, eating bags of pretzels and dehydrated carrot chips and Pirate’s Booty and sunflower seeds that I didn’t really want, and ignoring my boyfriend Gary’s phone calls, because there was, we’d learned, nothing he could say or do that would possibly calm me down.

Now here was my news, I thought, waiting for Lisa to get on the line, and the news wasn’t good. Oh, well. At least I’d be disappointed in private. After I’d made the mistake of telling Grandma that I should be hearing something this week, she’d announced her intention of giving me my space. “You don’t need an old woman breathing down your neck,” she’d said, all the while hovering within five feet of my person, dressed in her at-home attire of lounging pajamas or a vividly embroidered silk robe, her slippered feet noiseless on the wooden floors as she found one task after another to keep her busy. So far she’d polished the silver, rearranged the china, emptied, scrubbed, bleached and refilled the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator, and regrouted the powder-room tile. That morning while we drank the smoothies she’d made of pineapple and mango and Greek yogurt, she’d announced her plans to rent a steamer and replace the dining-room wallpaper, even though I’d begged her to leave that job to the professionals.

“
Nu?
” she’d ask casually, just once every night, as she served dinner to me and Maurice, her gentleman caller. As usual, her nerves were made manifest in the reemergence of her Boston accent and in her cooking. On Friday, when the first wave of pickups was announced, she’d prepared a standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes au gratin, and homemade horseradish sauce. On Saturday, she’d served a breast of veal stuffed with cornbread and sausage and studded with garlic and rosemary, and on Sunday, she’d produced an entire Thanksgiving dinner, complete with two kinds of potatoes and a turkey she’d brined in the hot tub (our down-the-hall neighbors, devoted fitness buffs, had howled when they’d gone up to the roof for a little post-hike relaxation and found, instead of clear water, a fragrant brew of bay leaves and garlic cloves and juniper berries, with a kosher turkey bobbing merrily in the middle).

I would pick at my food, then excuse myself, telling Grandma and Maurice that I needed to work, closing my bedroom door behind me. Of course, I wasn’t working. I was staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring, and when I wasn’t doing that I was dialing the first nine of the ten numbers that would have connected me with Dave.

“Ruth?” The voice on the other end of the line startled me so badly that I gave a little squeak. The assistant, who had probably grown accustomed to the quirks of neurotic writers, pretended not to notice. “I have Lisa on the line. Please hold for Tariq, and Lloyd and Joan from the network.” I got to my feet, my heart lifting as quickly as it had sunk. The network. Oh God oh God oh God.
The network doesn’t call unless it’s a pickup,
Dave had said. They give the bad news to the agent, not the writer, and probably you’ll read it online before someone has the decency of telling you to your face that your show is dead. But maybe Dave was wrong. It had been years since his own show was green-lit, years since he’d had to sit, in breathless, chest-pounding agony, waiting for the call, this call.

Voices came back on the line, one after another, ringing like bells.

“I have Tariq,” said Tariq’s assistant.

“Holding for Joan,” said Joan’s.

“Ruth?” asked Lisa. “Still there?”

“I’m here.” My voice was faint and quivery. I stood up, clenching my fists, my jaw, my abdominal muscles, trying to keep from shaking.

“Please hold,” said a new voice, male and brusque and impatient, “for Chauncey McLaughlin.”

I reeled back toward the bed. It felt like Christmas morning, New Year’s Eve, a birthday cake blazing with candles, a man down on one knee with a diamond ring in his hand. Joan was ABS’s head of comedy, and Chauncey McLaughlin (rumor was, he’d been born Chaim Melmann, then changed it to Charles, then gone full WASP with Chauncey) was the president of the network, a man I’d glimpsed once at a holiday party and had spoken with precisely never. Chauncey McLaughlin was the man who ultimately decided which of the pilots would get shot and, of those, which would make it onto the air in the fall and which would die quietly in the springtime.

“Who’ve I got?” he asked in a booming voice. Names were reeled off—Tariq, Lisa, Lloyd, Joan. “And Ruth, of course.”

“Hi,” I managed.

“Chauncey McLaughlin. I don’t want to keep you waiting. We’re going to go ahead and shoot
The Next Best Thing.
”

I closed my eyes. My legs went watery with relief. “Thank you,” I said. With the phone still pressed to my ear, I got up and unlocked the bedroom door to find my grandmother standing there. Evidently she’d given up even pretending that she wasn’t waiting for the call. I flashed her a thumbs-up. She sprang into the air and actually clicked her heels together, a feat she couldn’t have managed before her hip replacement two years before. Then she held my face in both of her hands. I could feel her hand on my left cheek and felt, as usual, nothing on my scarred right side.

Grandma kissed me, first on one cheek, then the other, before stowing her cell phone in her brassiere (“God’s pocket,” she called it) and hurrying off to the kitchen, undoubtedly to start giving her hundred closest friends and relations the news. A moment later, Maurice appeared in the living-room doorway, dressed for golf, with his tanned hands clasped over his head. He stood on his tiptoes to kiss me—Maurice, while not technically a little person, is a long way from tall, and a good six inches shorter than I am—then turned back down the hallway. Maurice had two sons, no daughters, and even though he’d never said so, my sense was that he liked having a young lady in his life. He’d pull out my chair, hold doors open for me, ask me if my boyfriend was treating me well, and say that if he wasn’t, he, Maurice, would be happy to talk to him about it.

As congratulations spilled over the line, from Lisa and Tariq and Chauncey, I found myself wishing not for my boyfriend, Gary, but for Dave. Dave, one of the Two Daves, was my boss and my mentor, the one who’d helped me craft the concept for
The Next Best Thing,
who’d overseen each revision of the script and assured me that I had just as good a shot at writing my own show as any other writer in Hollywood, even if I’d never even been a staff writer, even if I was only twenty-eight. Dave’s promise to serve as my co-executive producer had gotten me the meeting with Joan, and Dave’s involvement, I was sure, had gotten the network to take a chance on an unknown quantity. A Hollywood veteran who’d cocreated and run a successful sitcom for the past five years, Dave would know what to do next. And Gary. I’d have to call Gary, my boyfriend, and let him know.

“Ruth?” Chauncey’s voice was deep and warm, the sound of your favorite uncle who’d come for the holidays with fancy barrettes and foil-wrapped chocolate kisses and the latest Baby-sitter’s Club book. “Did we lose you?”

“No, I’m still here. I’m just a little overwhelmed. I . . . oh, God, I don’t even know what to say except thank you.”

“And that the show will be brilliant,” Lisa quickly added.

“We’re counting on it,” said Tariq. I could hear, or thought I could, the edge of desperation in his voice. Last year, Tariq shepherded five pilots through the development process. The network had green-lit only one of them, a trippy hourlong dramedy set in an alternate universe where the dinosaurs were not extinct. The network had lavished millions of dollars on the sets and had cast a big-name former movie star as the lead. Even with all that, the show had lasted for exactly three episodes. Dave had told me, and the commentators on
Deadline
had confirmed, that if Tariq failed to improve his game, he’d be looking for a new job by the fall.