The Next Best Thing (35 page)

Afterward, he sat on the steps and held me, floating, in his arms. I could barely open my eyes. I felt as lazy and sated as a cat asleep in the sunshine, or little Pocket, curled up and dozing in one of the cushioned lounge chairs. My bathing suit was drifting in the center of the pool, and everything that had happened with Cady and the show seemed very far away. I wrapped one arm around his waist and thought about dipping my fingers beneath the waistband . . . but what would I find? And what if, like Rob, he told me no?

I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t risk it. I’d barely survived that kind of rejection once. I couldn’t go through it again. So I turned, hopping quickly out of the water, grabbing a towel and wrapping myself up, leaving my swimsuit floating in the water. Never mind. He probably had people to pick up after him.

“Ruth?” Dave was looking at me, his expression puzzled. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine! Great! Everything’s fine!” Even as I was speaking, and trying to ignore the look of hurt and surprise on his face, I was coming up with a plan. I would pretend that this was a casual encounter, a fling, a one-time-only event. I would pretend that I was a girl who had casual encounters and flings. I wouldn’t tell him how I really felt, or how wonderful it had been, there in the water, the slow liquid lapping of his tongue, his hands strong against my skin. Heaven. It had been heaven. And, I realized, with my heart wrenching, it would be a heaven I’d never experience again. “You’re really good at that, you know.”

I made myself look away, remembering a term I’d heard in the
Bunk Eight
writers’ room—
pity fuck.
Probably, that’s what this had been—pity head. He couldn’t be heartbroken. Probably he was just relieved that I was leaving with so little fuss, leaving him to the quiet of his afternoon; to Shazia. “Years of practice,”
he said, looking at me steadily. He was looking at me, puzzled, patient, and it was all I could do not to drop the towel, get back into the water, swim to him, and let him hold me, the way he had so many times in my dreams. But no. I knew what I wanted, and I strongly suspected it was much, much more than he was prepared to give me. Besides, there was the not inconsiderable issue of his beautiful girlfriend. What would she do if she found out?
I adore you,
he’d written. What if I ruined that for him?

I gave my body orders, short tasks that I could accomplish, one by one.
Dry off your arms. Now your legs. Wrap the towel around you. Now sit down on one of the chairs. Make sure no skin is showing. You’re colleagues. That’s all
. With each step, the events of the day, and then the month, came crashing back: Cady’s weight loss. My grandmother’s heartbreak. That terrible scene that Lloyd had written and the network had forced me to shoot and then include. Justin’s tittering revelation about how they were planning on replacing Annie Tait, the only thing in the show that was working. I could remember the feeling of Rob’s hands on my shoulders as he hauled me to my feet, the way his face had tightened as he’d kissed my cheek but not my lips, and I could hear my grandmother’s voice:
Don’t be the same fool twice.

By the time I was sitting, wrapped in a towel, Dave had worked himself back into his chair, with his own towel in his lap. Beads of water glistened on the light coat of brown hair on his chest, and for a moment, I could feel my palm there, flat against the muscles. He was so strong, and his kisses had been like nothing I’d experienced, nothing I’d even imagined. Then I remembered Shazia on his lap, head thrown back, and Taryn Montaine, all long, tanned legs and cleavage in a hundred pictures in
People
magazine. Those were the girls who got guys like Dave. Not me. Never me.

“So what are we going to do about Cady?” I asked, and was proud when my voice came out steady. We could have been in
the writers’ room after we’d shared lunch, instead of him in a swimsuit and me naked under a towel, still weak-kneed and swoony from my orgasm.

“You aren’t going to like it,” he said after a moment. “But the truth is, Cady’s going to get a ton of press about this, and the network’s going to be thrilled.”

I knew that he was right. I also suspected that any effort I could mount would be worthless in the face of free publicity.

“The thing is . . .” I crossed my legs, taking care not to let the towel slip. “If Cady’s skinny, then I don’t know what the show’s about anymore.”

“Beg pardon?” My heart broke a little bit at his words, the sound of his voice. Other guys would say
huh?
or
what?
or
how’s that again?
With Dave you got
beg pardon
. He’d hold doors, I knew, and introduce you to strangers at a party and make sure your drink was always full (Gary had an unpleasant tendency to leave me on my own at parties and drift away toward whoever had the pot).

“There’re three major themes in literature, right? Man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself, or herself.”

Dave nodded. “That’s what I remember from English class.” He folded his towel in halves, then quarters. I watched his hands moving, remembering them on my thighs, pushing them apart as he lowered his lips to the slick seam between my legs. Oh, God. My face was getting hot. I made myself turn away, furious at myself. How had I let this happen? And how could I go on with my life, knowing it would never happen again?

“Right. So this show was supposed to be man—woman—versus herself.” I waited for his nod before I went on. “It was Daphne’s coming-of-age. Would she find the strength to make the kind of life she deserves? And her obstacle was herself. Her looks. Her weight. Her crappy self-esteem. Not being able to get out of her own way.” The words came slowly because, while
I was talking about Daphne-maybe-Dannhauser, really, I was describing myself. Daphne Dannhauser,
c’est moi,
with the fractured family, the absent parents, the grandmother, the romantic missteps, the brokenness . . . only instead of scars, I’d given her pounds. “If she’s thin, Daphne has no obstacles,” I said. “She has no reason to feel insecure. There’s nothing keeping her from getting what she wants. So what’s the show about?”

Dave shrugged. “Sometimes baggage can be internal. There are pretty girls who can’t get out of their own way.”

“But nobody identifies with them,” I said. “And nobody believes it, either. Not really. You can put Drew Barrymore in glasses, but nobody actually thinks she was a nerd in high school. Not anyone who actually was a nerd, anyhow. It’s a Hollywood lie.”

He drummed his fingers on his knees. “So maybe the show’s a little less specific than you intended. Maybe it’s more a girl and her grandmother coming of age than woman versus herself.”

“Anyone could write a show about a girl and her grandmother,” I said. Dave didn’t answer. In the silence, I heard the hum of traffic in the foothills, the rustle of something creeping in the underbrush beyond the pool’s fence, a skunk or a coyote or a raccoon, one of the wild things that lived out here. “Anyone,” I repeated, and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, Dave had wheeled himself into the shade of the pool house. It was a scene David Hockney could have painted—the slanting shadows, the cool blue rectangle of the pool, the man in the wheelchair looking out over the water.

“I should go home,” I said. Dave nodded without speaking, without trying to stop me, confirming my belief that when you were a man who could get women like Shazia Khan, you had no romantic use for a woman who looked like me. I walked toward the pool house, wondering why I’d wanted this life in the first place. It was so fraught, so hard.
I should have been a pair of ragged
claws
. . . or a cook, in chef’s whites and clogs, my hair pulled back under a bandana, hidden in a kitchen, far from diners’ eyes, following recipes where things always turned out the way they were supposed to and nobody from the network or the studio came along and said,
Try it like this
or
Do it like that
or
We want it with gravy on top.
I could have stayed in Boston, maybe had a boyfriend and a blog. Maybe that would have been enough for me.

The shower in the pool house had a wide plastic stool inside, its metal legs centered on the tiled floor, with a showerhead wide as a dinner plate hanging from the ceiling, a handheld nozzle attached to a hook at chest height, and more nozzles bristling from the walls. I found a shelf full of shampoo and body wash, a pink mesh sponge hanging from a cord, shaving gel, razors, everything a girl could want. On the marble counter were makeup remover and moisturizer. Glass jars of cotton balls were arranged next to a lighted mirror; toothbrushes, still in their plastic wrappers, were lined up in a stainless-steel cup. I slipped a file and a razor and a toothbrush into my pocket. I shouldn’t leave without a parting gift, I told myself, feeling low and mean and miserable.

Dave was waiting for me by the pool. He’d put on a shirt but was still in his swimsuit, dark hair clinging damply to his pale legs. “You okay?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“I’ll give Tariq a call in the morning, just to give them a heads-up.”

I nodded, even though I was sure that the network, the studio, and the entire rest of the world already knew what had happened.

“We’ll come up with a plan,” he said.

I nodded again, although I knew there would be no plan. The network would be as thrilled as I was heartbroken by Cady 2.0. Maybe they’d even be willing to suck up the expense and reshoot
the entire pilot, like she’d requested. The show would turn into something different, something that was not what I’d intended, not what I’d meant at all.

“So . . . ,” I said. I was hoping for reassurance, maybe even a kiss, a sign that, in spite of what he’d said, there was hope after all; for the show, and maybe even for the two of us, even though I knew better.

Dave turned his chair so that he was facing away from me. “Take care of yourself,” he said. I waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to say anything more or do anything else, and then, without another word, I let myself out the front door.

W
e have a few suggestions,” Loud Lloyd boomed.

Big surprise,
I thought, picturing Big Dave’s big canister of KY jelly, hearing him say,
Bend over, here it comes again.
It had been a week since I’d seen Cady’s transformation, a week since the episode in Dave’s pool. Now I was in a conference room in Burbank, where executives from the network and studio had gathered to go over the test results for the pilot.

“No Dave?” Lisa had asked when I’d walked through the door.

“No Dave,” I said shortly, knowing my response was probably on the wrong side of rude, but also aware that I couldn’t say anything else without my voice cracking or my face turning red. I’d sent Dave an email the day after our afternoon in the pool, telling him, in a fourteen-word message that had taken me two hours to compose, that it would probably be best if I handled the meeting on my own. Dave’s response had trumped mine for brevity. “Okay,” he’d written . . . and that had been that.

I pulled out my laptop—unnecessary, but I felt the need for a prop—and got ready for what I knew would be one of the less enjoyable parts of the development process. Last week, emissaries from a research firm had taken DVDs of the pilot of
The Next Best Thing
to fourteen malls in medium-to-large cities all over
the country, and had shown it to audiences consisting mostly of women ages eighteen to thirty-four, who’d been lured to a conference room with the promise of pizza and soda and gift certificates. These women had watched the show with dials in their hands, dials they could turn down when they were bored or displeased by what they were seeing and turn up when they were amused, and turn off entirely when they decided that the show was too horrible to be endured, even for free pizza and twenty-five dollars’ worth of free stuff from the Gap.

The comments had been compiled, the numbers crunched, and now everyone was looking at a graph projected onto a screen at the front of the room, a graph with a line that rose and dipped and rose again, charting viewers’ second-by-second reaction to
The Next Best Thing.