The Next Best Thing (7 page)

I started my job search in January, acutely aware that I was looking for employment in a land where beauty was the norm and that, here more than anywhere else, my face might work against me. Sitting in the waiting rooms, listening to the rustle of résumés, the weight of someone else’s body shifting in a seat, I’d sneak looks at my competition’s faces and wonder, with a sinking heart, whether everyone out here was beautiful, whether they’d all started out wanting to be actors and decided to be writers only after that hadn’t worked out. Who’d want to have to look at someone like me every day when they could hire an assistant who was bright and diligent and qualified and also easy on the eyes?

It took me four months to get hired as the assistant to the writer’s assistant on a show called
The Girls’ Room.
In spite of its name, the show, an hourlong soapy drama-with-jokes about four
girls who attended a posh New England boarding school, was created, run, and written almost entirely by men, which nobody seemed to find problematic. “I’ll do anything,” I’d told Steve Deylin, the showrunner, when he interviewed me. Steve, I knew from the Internet, had started as a writer-producer and moved up steadily until, when the man who created
The Girls’ Room
moved on, he was ready to be in charge of the whole thing—the other writers, the directors, the cast, and the crew. “Whatever you need, and I won’t complain. I just want to learn.”

I showed up early, stayed until the last writer had gone home, paid attention, and never remarked about how, as a graduate from a well-regarded East Coast college, I was surely qualified to do more than fetch sandwiches, schedule haircuts, book Steve’s NetJets, and cover for him on the one afternoon when he mistook his NyQuil for DayQuil. The only favor I asked for was to be allowed to sit in the writers’ room whenever I could, listening and taking notes and figuring out how a television show came together.

I worked on
The Girls’ Room
for three years. I got raises and promotions, and eventually I got to write my own episode. By union rules, sitcoms had to farm out a certain number of episodes each season to freelancers, and after I bombarded my bosses with my spec scripts and pitched jokes whenever they’d let me, they agreed to give me a shot, as long as one of the staff writers signed on to supervise.

The writer who took the assignment was Rob Curtis. Rob was a few years older than I was. He had dark hair laced with gray, ironic oversize horn-rimmed glasses, and an assortment of leather jackets rivaled only by his collection of ex-girlfriends. By the end of my first week as an assistant, I’d learned that women who came to read for Diner Waitress One or Busty Woman on Subway were also unwittingly auditioning for the part of Girl Who Will Sleep with Rob This Weekend. I also learned that
Rob was not very good at closure. He’d love them and leave them, usually so abruptly that the woman didn’t realize she’d been left. At least once a month, one of Rob’s ladies would call the show’s offices demanding, in tones that ranged from screechy to weepy, to speak with him. “Who?” Rob would ask when I’d relay the message. He’d stroke his chin thoughtfully, making a show of trying to remember Jane or Joelle or Jessica. “Can you tell her I’m in a meeting?” he’d ask in a winsome tone that stopped working on me after the first dozen times he’d used it. I decided that cleaning up a staff writer’s romantic messes was not part of my job. “I’m transferring you right now,” I’d say, and give Rob a hard look. He’d drag his feet as he made his way to his office, eyes on the carpet, and shut the door before picking up his extension.
Sweetheart! How are you doing? Yeah, I meant to call, it’s just been crazy-busy over here . . . Hey, can you send me your new head shots? Because I really think you’ve got something special.

Sitting at my desk, where the hole-puncher stood at right angles to my computer screen, where there were extra umbrellas and Advil and cell phone chargers and a binder full of takeout menus stowed in my deep bottom drawer, I would think, smugly, that I’d never fall for someone like Rob, with his smooth talk and his good looks and his obvious
Sure we’ll cast you
lies. I wasn’t that shallow, I told myself, and I wasn’t that dumb. But Rob snuck up on me, not with his looks or his charm but with the seductive notion that we were both Hollywood outsiders, that the two of us had our faces pressed up against the glass as we stood in the rain and looked in at a party to which we hadn’t been invited, interlopers in a world that didn’t really want us there.

Rob had grown up in Los Angeles, but his parents weren’t industry people. His father owned a car wash, his mother did hair in Beverly Hills. Rob went to not-great public schools and then got an athletic scholarship to USC. Like me, like almost
every writer I knew, he’d started his career as an assistant . . . but because of his talent, combined with his visible indifference to the opinions of others (which, of course, made everyone work harder to earn his approval), he moved up fast. By the time he was twenty-eight, he was a co-executive producer of
The Girls’ Room.
He had a house on Topanga Canyon with three bedrooms and a pool. He drove a black Audi with a series of numbers and letters after its name that meant something to people who knew about cars, and he sent his parents money every month, which I knew because I’d heard him mention it on the phone. By all visible signs, Rob had made it . . . but when we were together, he’d let me know he wasn’t one of them, a child of privilege. He’d roll his eyes at one writer’s mention of his prep school or another’s stories about her parents, both psychiatrists on New York’s Upper West Side. He made me believe that it was us against the world, that we were two outsiders plotting our takeover of an industry determined to keep us down.

“So what do you think?” he would ask the room as we worked on a scene where the girls of
The Girls’ Room
were dealing with a romantic crisis, the way they did most weeks. Technically, he was asking the whole room, but his eyes would go to me first, as if he knew that I was the one who could be counted on to come up with something that would work. He’d rock back in his chair, long legs extended, taking up space while we pitched ideas. Maybe Cara could plan a surprise party for Lily? Maybe there could be some kind of Cyrano action, one of the girls hiding somewhere, feeding the other one her lines? He’d nod silently, or not nod, holding still, and we’d all try again and try harder, until we came up with the idea or scene or bit of dialogue that finally got him to smile.

When we have our own show, it’ll be different,
Rob would tell me when I’d mention, in as non-whiny a tone as I could, that there was something deeply suspect about a show about women,
that starred women, that purported to tell women’s stories, and was written almost entirely by men.
That’s a one-percenter,
he’d say quietly after the yeast-infection joke I’d pitched was met with groans and grimaces instead of laughter (a one-percenter, in writers’ room parlance, was a joke that only one percent of viewers could be expected to understand). Rob and I were united in our desire to change the world, or at least our little piece of it; unwavering in our belief that we could write something more true, more funny, more meaningful than the soap-opera antics put on every week by
The Girls’ Room,
a show that depended largely on love triangles and a Mysterious Stranger from the Past showing up. In the three years the show had aired, all but one of the four starring girls had learned she’d been adopted. One of the writers’ room jokes was that the show should have really been called
Which One of You Bitches Is My Mother?
We shared a common distaste for Taryn Montaine, the beautiful, stupid, black-hearted, and abusive star of the show.

“You know, she did porn,” Rob told me, straight-faced and matter-of-fact, at the end of three painful hours the writers’ room had spent rewriting a script after it became obvious that Taryn, like the presidents Bush before her, could not, under any circumstances, pronounce the word
nuclear.

“She did not,” I said.

“Well, not porn, exactly. Soft-core stuff. Like on late-night cable.” Rob turned his laptop around to face me, eyebrows raised in a wordless challenge, and we spent the next hour online, slipping down the rabbit hole of blurry close-ups of what may or may not have been nipples. “That,” he would say, tapping the screen with the cap of a Sharpie, like a historian reviewing the Zapruder tape; “that is, conclusively, her ass.”

“How would you know?”

“Because she flashes all the boy writers whenever she can. You know that, right?”

I nodded. I’d never seen firsthand evidence of Taryn’s much-discussed penchant for coming to her dressing-room door wrapped in just a towel (which would ride up or slip down) or showing up on set in tops that were low-cut, see-through, or both, but I’d been around long enough to know that it had made her a great favorite with the show’s carpenters and electricians.

“Also, her name used to be Terry Mastrontonio.”

“Shut up.”

“Check it out,” he said. “Next time you print the budget, take a look. We’re still cutting checks to her name. And,” he continued gleefully, “she’s got a mustache.” Fingers thumping over my keyboard, he logged on to
TMZ
and pulled up a picture of Taryn on vacation, sprawled on a beach in a remote part of Mexico, miles away from civilization and, evidently, her waxer.

“Oh, dear,” I said, looking, as my heart lifted. Whatever was wrong with my appearance, facial hair wasn’t one of my problems.

I knew it was ungenerous and unkind; that picking on Taryn made me no better than the people who stared at my face and whispered behind my back; but the truth was, it felt good to be part of a conspiracy of two writers bonded by their mutual loathing of an overpaid and undertalented TV actress. Rob and I could riff for days on Taryn’s shortcomings . . . or, rather, Rob could riff, and I would laugh, all notions of sisterhood and solidarity abandoned because, really, would Taryn have defended me if the tables had been turned? Doubtful. This was a woman who hadn’t bothered to learn my name; a woman who’d asked her agent to ask the showrunner if some other assistant could drop off scripts and wardrobe at her dressing room because—and I quote—“the one with the messed-up face kind of freaks me out? Like, no offense? But it’s bad energy, y’know?”

Rob and I were sent out on script for ten days, which meant we weren’t expected in the office and could just write. It was
Rob’s idea that we meet each morning at the pool at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, where I’d stayed with Grandma when we’d gotten to town and where, it turned out, he’d worked as a busboy when he was a teenager. Each morning, we’d take over one of the tables for four and order lavish brunches (charged to the show, of course): lobster eggs Benedict, bowls of fruit salad and house-made granola and yogurt, berry smoothies and iced coffees. Then, with the plates cleared and our laptops open, we’d work until we hit our seven-page-per-day quota. Our episode was entitled “Gone to the Dogs.” The premise was simple: Taryn and her classmates help out a teacher by dog-sitting her pup. On a trip to the park, they lose the dog. Hilarity ensues. The high point of the show, at least from my perspective, was that Taryn would spend the entire second act locked in a Porta-Potty. Petty, yes, but I’d take my revenge where I could find it.

“So how would she walk, exactly?” Rob asked me after I’d pitched a scene where Taryn’s character was describing a too-ambitious bikini wax.

“You just want to see me look foolish,” I said. Then I pushed my chair back, stood up, and made my way around the edge of the pool in a bow-legged waddle. Rob laughed and then grabbed my hand and waddled along with me. “Like this?”

“Perfect.” He was flirting with me. No big deal. Rob flirted reflexively with everyone, including the sixtysomething cleaning lady named Dolores who pushed her trash can into our bungalow at eight o’clock every night, and the cashier at the commissary who’d dyed her hair the color of meringue and spit when she gave you your change. But I had never had a boyfriend, had never really dated, and I was so taken with him, his handsome face, his charm, that I decided, over the ten days we spent together, we were in love.

The day we turned in our script, we went back to the office and spent an afternoon in the writers’ room, reading through
what we’d written, with each writer playing a part (typically, I read Taryn’s lines, in a not-nice Valley Girl drawl). “Good stuff,” said Steve, which, from him, counted as a ticker-tape parade. Rob rummaged in the pantry refrigerator until he found a bottle of wine left over from our premiere party. Together, we drank most of it as the sun went down and the lot emptied, until finally I found the courage to make the move I’d rehearsed a hundred times in my head. We’d been talking about nothing—Rob’s plans for the weekend, his parents’ upcoming anniversary—when I’d crossed the room and kissed him, first his cheek, then his neck, then his lips.

“Hey, whoa there,” he said, laughing, holding my wrists in a playful grip.

“I love you,” I told him—words that would stab at me every time I thought about that night. Before he could answer, and before I could look at the expression on his face and see if it was shocked or, worse yet, horrified, I went down on my knees on the scratchy industrial carpet and proceeded to give him the first-ever blow job of my life (I’d perfected my technique by downloading some of the soft-core movies we’d surfed in search of Taryn).

He didn’t say anything, but I heard him groaning and felt his hands in my hair, holding me in place. “Oh, God,” he sighed as his hips thrust forward and he came in my mouth. I gulped—the porn hadn’t told me that semen would taste like hot, salted Clorox—coughing and sputtering but determined to do this right. With my scarred cheek resting against his thigh, I tried not to think about how he hadn’t said my name, or offered to reciprocate in any way, or how he hadn’t even tried to kiss me. We were a couple. The sex—such as it was—proved it. Now we could launch our future together, our brilliant and funny future as writing partners and partners in life.