The Next Best Thing (27 page)

No point in dwelling. I hugged Grandma, kissed her temple, and then steered her toward the dressing room so she could tell her ladies. “What do you want for dinner?” she asked. “Whatever you want! I’ll make a feast!”

“Breast of veal,” I told her, and drove home. There, in my sunny bedroom, with a glass brimming with ice and water and slices of lemon I picked from the little tree that grew in a pot on the porch, I took care of business.

First: Twitter. Gone were the days when it was enough to
make a good show and hope that viewers would find it. With cable and the Internet, with on-demand access and Hulu and television shows you could watch from your telephone, there were literally thousands of options and dozens of outlets, all clamoring for the viewers’ attention. If you wanted to get noticed, you had to interact with your audience on show nights and between shows. You had to keep them hooked and in-the-know, tantalizing them with behind-the-scenes details, Tweeting pictures from the set and discarded jokes and stories—preferably with pictures—about how your stars spent their spare time.

So far,
The Next Best Thing
’s account had a scant ninety-two followers: my grandmother, of course, and then other writers, and network and studio executives. Cady didn’t follow us, but her manager did . . . and every one of them counted, and word would spread. I had tweeted, so far, four times: once when we’d gotten the green light, once when Cady had been cast, once when we’d landed Annie, and then, at three in the morning, when we’d finally wrapped the pilot shoot, I’d typed, “It is done.” Now I tapped out 140 exultant characters:
The three most beautiful words in the English language are not
I Love You
but Ordered to Series.
I hesitated a minute, then hashtagged it #thenextbestthing. My show’s first hash tag. It was almost enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I @-signed Cady, who, I noted, had not yet shared the news with her three hundred thousand followers, although so far that afternoon she’d found time to send out four pictures of herself posing in the mirror, one hand in her rumpled hair, wearing a sequined minidress, her mouth in a Betty Boop pout. I didn’t understand why so many people would want these breathless, minute-by-minute updates of the minutiae of Cady’s life, especially because it had been years since she’d been on TV . . . but clearly, plenty of them did. They welcomed her tweets about “Just got up! Coffee, please!” and “I am in a BAD MOOD,” her
Spotify playlists and the links she posted from gossip websites, prefaced by smug declarations like “Knew that,” and “Toldja,” and “Not surprised,” and her endless series of self-portraits, typically snapped in bathroom mirrors.

I hit refresh, waiting to see if I’d been retweeted, if Cady had replied, if I’d gained any new followers, if anyone on the Internet had noticed my good news. So far, nothing.

Worry about it later,
I told myself as my phone started ringing, flashing the name
PETE
on its screen.

“Hey, Pete!”

“Yuh?” he said, sounding confused and like he’d just woken up. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. This was troubling but not entirely surprising. Plenty of the television people I’d known back on
Bunk Eight
kept strange hours.

“Pete? Hey, it’s Ruth.” No answer. “You called me back?” Still nothing. Pete Paxton hadn’t appeared in the pilot, but he’d been cast, pending a pickup, and would appear in a few scenes we’d add to the pilot later, after Chauncey had decided that the show needed more male energy. “Write a part for a guy,” he’d said, via Loud Lloyd, and I’d said, “Absolutely.”

So, in between the college applicants and the senior singles, praying that the request meant that we were, in fact, getting the nod, I’d written the part of a handsome, salt-of-the-earth sort of guy, the hunky neighbor who lived down the hall. I’d decided to make him a construction worker, because what’s more manly than that? I’d named him Brad Dermansky and given him tattoos and a clingy ex-girlfriend, and I’d decided that when they met, he’d think of Daphne as a little sister, not the kind of girl he’d ever date. They’d be friends, and then her wit and smarts would wear him down, until he realized that she was all he’d ever wanted, that he was hopelessly in love.

For the first season, I figured, I could do will-they-or-won’t-they,
Moonlighting
style. Brad and Daphne could date in the
middle of Season Two and break up over a misunderstanding in Season Three. In Season Four I’d give Daphne a new boyfriend and Brad a new girlfriend, and Daphne would get engaged, and I’d write an episode where she’d be walking down the aisle, about to say her vows, and the officiant would ask if anyone had any objections, and Brad, unable to stand it a moment longer, would spring up from his folding chair in the back of the synagogue (or the church, depending on how Jewish Daphne could be) and declare his love in a scene that would leave not a dry eye in the house and possibly win him his second Emmy. They’d be engaged by Season Five, which would end with their nuptials, and which would bring the show to its hundredth episode, at which point
The Next Best Thing
would be eligible for syndication, and I’d be able to do whatever I wanted for the rest of my life.

“Hey, Ruthie,” Pete slurred.

“Hi there, Pete. We got picked up!”

There was a long pause, followed by a rustling sound. I could hear giggling of the female variety in the background, which meant that Pete had company. “Oh. Oh, hey. That’s . . . um. Wait, who is this? Is this Ruth?”

I took a deep breath. “Ruth Saunders. Executive producer. Brown hair, hats? Thing on my face?”

“Oh. Ruthie!”

“There you go.” Like the character he’d be playing, Pete was lovely to look at, but unlikely to win the
Jeopardy!
Tournament of Champions anytime soon.

Pete yawned and then cleared his throat noisily. “Wow. Cool. Um.”

I knew better than to ask, but I couldn’t help myself. “Were you asleep?”

“Kinda.”

“Up late watching that
Real Housewives
marathon?” That was what I’d been doing the night before . . . that, and pacing
the length of my living room, hitting refresh on
Deadline Hollywood
once per lap. I should have told him I was out partying at a club (after, of course, I learned the name of the right club to mention). Maybe that’s what it would take to earn his respect, or at least get him to see me as a peer, instead of a scolding old lady with a Boston accent. Although maybe scolding old lady could work for me. Maybe Pete would be more likely to take my notes if he didn’t see me as an equal.

No answer. “Pete.
Pete!
Are you there?”

He managed a mumbled assent.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah! Fine! You bet!”

I wondered if he was on drugs, or if this was just the way most twenty-four-year-old male actors sounded. “Well, listen. Congratulations, and I’ll see you soon!”

“Uh-huh.” Pause. “Ruth-bo-Booth.”

“Right. That’s me.”

“Boston.”

“There you go.” I could almost hear the pieces clicking together—Ruth-bo-Booth, Ruth from Boston.

“That’s awesome. Your first show!”

“Thanks.”

“No, thank you,” said Pete. “I’ll see you soon.”

“You bet.”

I hung up the phone and saw that my email was blinking. “Potential Writers” read the memo line of the email that Tariq’s assistant had sent me. There was an attachment, which, when opened, yielded more than three hundred names and five dozen scripts, hundreds and hundreds of pages of work. “You’ll need to hire a staff in the next two weeks,” the note said.

“Oof,” I murmured as my phone rang again, with Pocket’s picture flashing. Dave. I grabbed it, punching the green button, lifting the phone to my ear.

“Hey, you!”

“Ruthie! Congratulations!” From the echo, I could tell that he’d put me on speakerphone.

“Way to go, sister!” called Big Dave.

“We’re so happy for you.”

“Don’t forget about us when you’re big,” Big Dave cautioned. “You still have to take our calls.”

Tears were running down my cheeks. I wiped them away. “I can never thank you guys enough. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for thinking I could do this. I want to take you to dinner.”

“We’ll put that on the books,” said Little Dave. “How are you? Did you tell your grandmother yet?”

“Remember when
Bunk Eight
got green-lit?” Big Dave asked his partner. “My mother hung up on me.”

“She did?” I asked.

“Yep. She kept saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe it, oh, I can’t believe it,’ and then she hung up.” He paused. “We have a difficult relationship.”

“I know.” He’d told me, and many, many therapists, all about it.

“How about your parents, Dave?” I asked.

“They were pleased,” he said.

Big Dave snorted. “They gave him a golf clap.” To me, he said, “Sidney and Sandra are not what you’d call demonstrative.”

“But they were happy for you, right?”

“They were,” said Little Dave.

Big Dave snorted again. “Bitch, please,” he said. “They’re still waiting for you to quit playing and go home and take the LSATs.”

“Can we focus?” asked Little Dave. “This is about Ruthie.”

“We’re thrilled,” said Big Dave. “We couldn’t be prouder.”

“Seriously, Ruthie,” said Little Dave—my Dave. “Anything we can do, just let us know.”

Anything,
I thought to myself, and imagined what my version
of
anything
would be: Dave and I in the water, his arms strong around me, his voice in my ear, saying
Ruthie, you’re the one I always wanted, you’re the one I love.

*  *  *

Thanks to my experience with
The Girls’ Room
and the Daves, I knew the rules of putting together a writers’ room, or at least the most important one:
Don’t hire yourself
. You wanted people whose strengths and skills and senses of humor would complement your own, not echo them. In my case, that meant no broken girls—well, maybe just one. Or two. Maybe two. It could be my own form of affirmative action. I would not hire anyone who’d been stuffed in a locker . . . although, given the way most comedy writers tended to be refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys, formerly fat girls and currently gay guys, people who looked like Ewoks and ate like Wookies, wouldn’t that eliminate ninety percent of the pool?

“I liked this one!” Grandma said brightly on Saturday morning as we made our way down Los Feliz Boulevard. On the East Coast, word was that nobody in Los Angeles ever walked anywhere, that it was all cars and underground parking structures and valets, but my grandmother had been a walker all her life, and a new city wasn’t going to stop her. She had her recycled shopping bags slung over her shoulder and her shopping list tucked in her purse. We were off to the farmers’ market, where she would gather supplies for the coming week, and then we’d have brunch.

She reached into her bag and handed me the first script she’d read. I saw that she’d purchased gold stars somewhere and had affixed one to the script’s title page.

“Thanks!” I said, hoping that she’d be more discerning than I was.

“These were good, too,” she said, passing me scripts two, three, and four. She’d spent the previous evening in her armchair,
with an afghan on her lap, classical music playing softly, flipping through the pages with a red pen in her hand, sometimes clucking her tongue, sometimes laughing out loud, with a mug of tea at her elbow and a plastic binder labeled
WEDDING
on her lap, practically buried beneath hundreds of pages of sitcom. I felt a pang of guilt at the sight of it. I’d promised that I’d help her plan the menu, find a band, taste cakes, and narrow down the guest list, but so far, I hadn’t done a thing.
Next week,
I told myself, and had gone back to my reading, with the increasing awareness that I was in trouble. Most of what I’d read had been good, and some of it had been great. A few of the scripts had been written on spec, for demonstration purposes only, to show that a writer could build and populate a world, but others had been written and developed under studio deals. They’d been contenders once. These shows, about divorced guys moving back in with their parents, and teenage girls in fat camps and senior citizens discovering they had superpowers, had once had the same chance as
The Next Best Thing
of actually getting cast and shot and making it onto TV. Reading them was like spending hours each day in a graveyard, visiting with the restless corpses of characters who’d never lived out their brief, imaginary lives. It was also depressing, because some of those scripts, maybe even most of them, were at least as good as what I’d written.

I bought an iced Thai coffee, made with condensed sweetened milk, and, while Grandma poked at bunches of basil and cilantro and quizzed the vendors on the diet of their chickens, I sat on a bench, flipping through my script stack. It was another gorgeous Los Angeles morning, the sky clear blue, a light, dry breeze swaying the fronds of the palm trees, the day a total contrast to my mood, which was depressed and heading quickly toward terrified. As an icy droplet made its way down my spine, and another curled from behind my ear to run down my neck, I plucked my phone out of my bag and called Little Dave.