The Next Best Thing (21 page)

“Tell me everything,” she said.

I shook my head, embarrassed.

“It is someone you work with?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Which is the problem. I mean, I had a crush on a guy I worked with once. It didn’t end well.” I imagined that someone had probably filled her in on my history with Rob. It was too juicy a bit of gossip to remain in the small orbit of
The Girls’ Room.

Maya adjusted her serape. “It happens. People deal.” This was true. I knew of a few formerly married couples, actors and agents and talent managers, who’d managed to continue running film production companies side by side even after they’d broken up. I also was remembering the rest of Maya’s story, which I’d heard years ago from Big Dave. For ten years, Maya had dated an actor named Wes who spent half the year acting and auditioning in Los Angeles and the other half doing television and theater in Canada, where he’d been born and where he still maintained a residence (and got health insurance). Spotting this fellow in the shows Maya cast became an insider’s game of “Where’s Waldo?” He’d appear as a bartender, a party guest, a bouncer, a chauffeur, a well-meaning uncle on a Very Special Episode of a sitcom, the lead singer of the wedding band during sweeps week for a prime-time soap.

The year that Maya turned thirty-nine, she presented Wes with an ultimatum, in the form of a positive pregnancy test. He told her he wanted to take the weekend to think about the life changes a family would entail. “And you can probably guess how
that story ended,” Big Dave said. “He hightailed it up to Montreal and never came down again.” Now Maya had a son named Andrew and was raising him alone. Somehow, none of this had made her bitter. She was still cheery, always smiling, energetic enough to greet every actor who came through the door with a hug and a kiss and a compliment on the last thing she’d done, even if the last thing she’d done was a showcase that played in the basement of the Scientology Center or a direct-to-video remake of the horror film
Swamp Thing.

“A guy’s a guy,” she told me. “Whether you work with him or not. And be honest. Where else are you going to meet someone?” Maya asked. “Working the hours we do?”

I didn’t answer. The truth was, I hadn’t built much of a social life during my years in Los Angeles, even though I did what the experts suggested, putting myself in places where there were other young people around. I swam, I walked, I did yoga and went to the gym, but everyone I saw there seemed to have arrived with an existing circle of acquaintances, and I’d never figured out how to jump into conversation or even just say hi to the other women I’d see in the locker rooms, especially when we were all in the process of getting dressed, or undressed, and they could see my scars. I knew, too, from watching the Daves when
Bunk Eight
was in production, that my life was only going to get crazier when the pilot shoot began, and busier still if we got picked up. When shows were in production, showrunners had to keep a number of balls in the air. There was the episode that was being shot, the one you’d just shot and were editing, and the one being prepped for the following week . . . and it was almost a guarantee that if the network was okay with all three of them, the studio would have a problem, or the network would decide to flip the order, or the actor you’d cast for the crucial guest role who’d been so great during the audition would be awful in front of the cameras. There was always a crisis to handle, a fire to put
out. Twelve-hour days were the norm, and it wasn’t unusual to hear about a showrunner grabbing a few hours’ sleep on an office couch, showering in the office gym, and not making it home for days at a time. If my life was a little empty, a little bereft of friends and confidantes, this wasn’t the time to fix it.

“So who is it?” asked Maya, leaning forward, smiling. “Spill!”

But before I could decide if I wanted to tell her, Deborah knocked at the door. “Oops! Renée’s here. More later.” Maya hopped off the couch and swung open the door to admit Renée, an actress who’d jettisoned her last name in the early 1990s, back when she’d starred as the straight-talking neighborhood matriarch in the sitcom
’Round the Way.

“Ladies!” Renée sang, sashaying—that was really the only word to describe the way she moved—to the center of the room. She wore lizard-skin spike heels and a brilliant purple dress that clung to every curve of her ample figure. A mink stole draped her shoulders, and false eyelashes easily the length of my little finger fluttered against her cheeks. Renée was a woman of color—if she was great, the Daves and I had decided, we’d just say that Nana Trudy was a lifelong friend of the family rather than Daphne’s actual grandmother. “Welcome,” said Maya as Renée beamed at us. Glossy black curls—a wig, I figured—cascaded down her back. Her eyelids were shadowed in vivid purple, her lipstick was the shiny red of a Vaseline-coated stop sign, and beneath the mink, her V-neck dress was cut low, revealing a seam of cleavage deep enough to hide an iPad. Maya arched her eyebrows and pressed her lips together as Renée tossed her fur onto a chair in the corner. “You ready for me?” she asked. Her voice was the same girlish trill she’d had back in the day, and she was using all the cutesy-coy mannerisms that somehow still worked, even though she was old enough to be, and play, a grandmother.

“The room is yours,” said Maya, spreading her hands wide with a welcoming smile on her clean-scrubbed face. In contrast
with the women we saw all day long, Maya never wore makeup except a light lip gloss. It was as if, in response to all that artifice and beauty, the plastic surgery, the wigs, and the worked-on hair, she’d simply decided to take herself out of the game, wash her skin with Ivory, and go about her business.

We sat on the couch, both of us with a copy of the script in our lap. Renée took a seat on the chair in the corner, clasped her hands at her bosom—her nails, I noticed, were painted three different shades of purple and sparkled with glitter—and began Nana’s speech to Daphne. “Hello, darling. Oh, now, what are you looking all downhearted about?”

“I don’t think that interview went very well,” Maya mumbled, in character as Daphne, downhearted after confessing that she’d been turned down at a fancy French restaurant where she’d applied.

“Sit down and tell Mama all about it,” said Renée, and then glanced at her watch. “Actually, can you give Mama the hundred-and-forty-character version? No offense, but this whole traveling-pants thing you’ve got going gets a little tired.”

Maya-as-Daphne sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe Florida was a bad idea. Maybe we should just go home.”

“What was that?” When no answer came, Renée straightened her shoulders, gave her glossy curls a toss, stood, and marched into the center of the room. “You’re giving up on Miami after four hours and one job interview? I didn’t raise you any better than that?” Without waiting for the answer, she said, “Your mother—God rest her soul—didn’t want you to have a little life, Daphne. She wanted you to have a big life. She wanted you to go out into the world and push yourself, and get your heart broken, and fail, and fall down, and get hurt, and get up again.”

“It’s too hard,” said Maya-as-Daphne.

“Too hard?” Renée repeated. “Too hard?” At this point, her voice had risen to the point that I would not have been shocked
to see the windows shaking in their casings. I glanced at Renée’s résumé and was unsurprised to see that she’d been touring with various Broadway productions since her show had been canceled. She was playing to the cheap seats, except there weren’t any cheap seats in Maya’s office, and there wouldn’t be any on our stage.

Renée pulled in a deep breath. She tossed her head. One of her false eyelashes slowly unpeeled itself from her eyelid and fell, tumbling first onto her cheek, then into the crevasse of her cleavage. Maya pressed her lips together and leaned forward as if she’d suddenly been seized with a stomach cramp. I made myself look away, forcing myself not to laugh. “Do you think,” Renée began, in pealing, bell-like tones, “that I gave up when that tramp Mitzie Yosselman beat me in the election for head of Hadassah?” I bit back a smile. This was a line, and an incident, I’d stolen from my grandma’s life, although the names had been changed to protect the guilty, and it sounded very strange coming from Renée’s shiny red lips. “Did your mother give up when your father said he wanted a small, intimate wedding? Did Barbra Streisand”—and here, Renée rested one hand on the vertiginous slope of her bosom and looked up, as if she’d invoked God—“give up when they told her that she needed a nose job if she wanted to be a star? No,” she said. “No, they did not.” She planted her fists on her hips, rolled her neck, and declaimed at top volume, “And I’m not letting you give up, either. Now, you wipe that poor-me look off your face, and you think about who you are and what you’ve got, and you get back out there and you use it.”

“You’re right,” said Maya. “You’re right. I will.”

Renée held her pose for a beat and then relaxed, fanning her chest (she didn’t seem to have registered the eyelash’s escape). “Whew!” she said. “How’d I do?”

“That was great!” I said.

“Want it again?” she asked. “Any notes?”

Maya started shaking her head before Renée finished speaking, possibly because she was worried about the structural integrity of her office and whether it would withstand another go-round. “No, no, that was just fine. Any questions for us?”

“What’s Hadassah?” Renée asked.

“Um, it’s a Jewish women’s organization,” I answered. “They get together and, you know, raise money for charity.” Renée stared at me blankly. “We’d be open to changing it to something else, obviously.”

“Got it,” said Renée. She pulled on her wrap and sailed out the door. My telephone buzzed, and Dave’s face flashed on the screen. “Excuse me,” I murmured. “Hello?”

“Good morning, Ruth. Do you have a moment to talk?” That was Dave—a little bit formal, invariably polite.

“Sure,” I said. “Dave,” I mouthed to Maya, pointing at my phone.

“Take your lunch,” she whispered back. I pushed through the door, out of the dim hallway and into the sunshine.

There was the usual cluster of actors hanging around Maya’s back porch: Today it was a clutch of reedy twentysomething guys in statement eyeglasses and scruffy plaid shirts who were probably auditioning to play Hipster Number One (or, barring that, his line-free friends Hipsters Two, Three, and Four) on the nighttime soap that Maya cast. There were also three little boys, ten-year-olds who could play seven or eight, bright-eyed and meticulously groomed, hair combed, fingernails clean, each with a parent nearby. The hipsters smoked and paced and muttered their lines. The boys bent over schoolbooks or gaming devices. The boys’ parents ostentatiously fanned smoke away from their children’s paycheck-earning lungs and worked their phones, having conversations with agents and spouses, looking for Junior’s next gig.

I edged through the crowd, murmuring, “Excuse me.” Kids and hipsters and parents parted, eyeing me hopefully: Was I a producer? Maya’s new assistant? Someone worth flirting with or sucking up to? One of the moms, a streaked blonde whose spandex skirt strained over her hips, looked sharply at her towheaded son, who’d been staring at my face, until he gave me a lisping “Good afternoon.” A hipster offered me an American Spirit cigarette. I declined, unlocked my car, and took a seat behind the wheel with the phone against my ear.

“I just watched Renée’s false eyelash fall into her cleavage,” I began. This had become my habit: I’d find an anecdote from my day, polish and smooth it until I deemed it Dave-worthy, and then have it ready for the next time we’d talk.

“Lucky eyelash,” said Dave. “I got in touch with Cady’s people to set up the meeting.”

“Ah. The meeting.” The one the network executives had promised us, so we’d at least get to say hello to the new star of our show before the pilot shoot began.

“I’m sorry to say that the news is not good,” Dave continued. “She’s out of town for the next two weeks.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Her manager was a little vague on that point.” I could tell, from his dry tone and the pause before he answered, that whatever Cady’s manager had told him hadn’t impressed him much. “The bottom line is, she’s in Hawaii, and she’s not coming back until the day before we’re scheduled to start shooting. The best they can do is make her available for a drink that night.”

I tugged at my hair, thinking. The meeting, as I well knew, was a formality. Cady would be our star, even if she showed up for the first day’s filming having sustained a major head trauma and forgotten every word of English she’d ever known. But this bit of Cady’s-on-vacation nonsense was also the first move in the Hollywood game that everyone played, the game of Who’s Got
the Power. Cady’s team telling us that she could give us only thirty minutes’ worth of her time less than twelve hours before we started taping was a preemptive strike, their way of letting us know that they mattered more than we did, that Cady’s plans and desires were more important than ours. It was their way of establishing the hierarchy without saying a word.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We could push back,” Dave said. “We could tell them it’s not good enough and that she needs to get off the beach, get on a plane, and at least sit down for lunch.”

“Hmm.” I wondered if I’d have to make that call or if I could get Dave to do it for me.

“Or,” he continued, “we could let her win this round. Make her feel like she’s got the upper hand, then use it as leverage when we really need her to do something.”