The Next Best Thing (32 page)

Stan had dutifully done a month at a facility in Montana. Now he was back, and all of Hollywood was waiting to see what kind of impact, if any, his tantrum would have on his career. Most people’s guess was none. As long as Stan was bankable, as long as his aquiline profile and lean, muscled torso put butts in movie-theater seats, he could say whatever he wanted to young female cops. “You don’t really get in trouble until you start up with someone who’s got more money or more power than you,” said Annie.

“Really?”

“Sad but true. Remember Tim O’Shea?” Tim had been a sitcom star who’d struggled with a cocaine habit and what could delicately be called “anger issues” for years. He’d held a girlfriend at gunpoint, assaulted one of his wives in their car, and tried to drown a date in the hot tub after, it was whispered, she’d declined his request for anal sex. A few years ago, one of the gossip websites had obtained a frantic 911 call from a ladyfriend who’d barricaded herself in a bathroom while Tim raged outside. Nothing ever happened to him—at least, nothing permanent. He’d get arrested; his grinning mug shot would be all over the Internet the next day; and then, a week later, he’d be back at work. “You know why?” asked Annie. Before I could answer, she said, “Because the women he hurt were disposable.” She waved one elegant, manicured hand. “Escorts, porn stars, wannabe actresses just as messed up on drugs as he was. You can do whatever you want to girls like that, but when he started insulting executives . . .”

“Ah.” I was remembering that Tim had finally lost his job, not after being jailed for assaulting a girlfriend with a pair of barbecue tongs, or being arrested when he was out on bail for threatening to throw a different girlfriend off a balcony, but for tweeting that his boss, the head of the network, wore a toupee. Which was true . . . but, evidently, saying so was a fireable offense. In a tersely worded statement, the network said that it “wished Mr. O’Shea the best in his future endeavors” but would no longer be working with him.

Annie looked toward the corner where Stan was holding court at a table full of supporters and employees and hangers-on: a young female assistant with two BlackBerrys, an agent I recognized from the trades, and a young man in a suit and tie who sat quietly next to the star, saying nothing, doing nothing, while the agent talked and the assistant texted and Stan ate his burger, chewing with his mouth open, just to show, in case the unbuttoned shirt didn’t quite prove it, that he’d attained a level
of being where the rules of civility and good behavior no longer applied.

“Know who that is?” Annie asked, nodding at the guy in the suit.

“Son from the first marriage?” I guessed.

“Good try, but nope. That’s his sober friend.”

“His what?”

“The guy they hired to stay with him twenty-four-seven and make sure Stan doesn’t drink, or drug, or look at any porn.” She gave me a wink. “I hear that’s one of his many problems.” Annie dipped the tines of her fork in her pitcher of dressing and then speared a chunk of turkey and a lettuce leaf. “Did you know that
I Love Lucy
was shot where we did the pilot?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So you know the story, right?”

“Which one?”

Annie gave a lascivious grin. “Okay. The way I heard it is, they’re shooting an episode, and they break for lunch. Everyone’s gone, except for one grip up in the rigging, hanging lights, and he looks down and sees Desi Arnaz getting”—she leaned in close and dropped her voice—“orally pleasured by an extra. So, he’s looking down, and Desi looks up and sees him, and there’s this moment of silence, and then . . .” Annie flapped her arms, waggling her brows, becoming, in that moment, Lucy’s beleaguered husband. “Desi looks down at the extra like he’s never seen her before in his life and says, ‘What are you DOOO-eeeng?’”

I laughed. Annie beamed, then reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I like you,” she said, and I said, “I like you, too,” and I smiled, thinking how putting a show together was sort of like building a family, and if you were lucky the way I’d been lucky with the Daves, at least some of the people you’d spend your days with would be people whose company you enjoyed.

Finally, there was Cady . . . or what Maya, my casting director, had taken to calling the Cady of It All. Setting a meeting with her proved, once again, complicated. Unfortunately, said her manager, a breathy-voiced fellow named Justin, she was busy all week, not free for lunch, or breakfast, or drinks, or a late-night snack.
Busy with what?
I wondered for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time, I restrained myself from asking. “How’s Sunday morning?” he’d asked.

“That could possibly work,” Justin allowed. I’d actually made plans on Sunday to accompany Grandma to the county arboretum, to see if it might be suitable for her wedding, after which I would take her to her favorite Mexican place for lunch, with hopes of thawing the chill that had grown between us since the night she’d seen the pilot, but we could reschedule. “Brunch?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Sure!” Justin finally chirped. Given his mannerisms, the way he dressed and moved and spoke, I’d assumed he was gay after my first fifteen seconds in his company, and had been surprised to learn that he was, in fact, married to his high-school sweetheart, and that they had three kids together. “We’ll do brunch.”

“Um,” I said, unclear on just who “we” was, and suspecting that Justin had just invited himself along. “I was hoping that Cady and I could just sit down together. You know,” I said, and attempted a giggle. “Girl talk!” The more time Cady and I had together one on one, I’d reasoned, the more chance I’d have of figuring out what made her tick, and whether she’d respond to praise or pressure when it came time for me to help craft her performance.

“And I understand
completely,
” said Justin. “I just think Cady might be more comfortable if I’m there.”

Pick your battles,
I told myself. “Okay,” I said. “That will be fine.”

*  *  *

On Sunday morning, I gave myself a pep talk as I dressed for the encounter. “Stars,” I murmured. “They’re just like us!” I opened my copy of
Us Weekly
and looked at a picture of Jennifer Aniston feeding a parking meter as supportive evidence. Then I wrapped my scarf, blue-and-white stripes, around my neck, hiding as much of the scars there as I could, and gave my makeup one final check. Grandma had spent the night at Maurice’s again, which meant I was on my own. There was no one to tell me that I’d gotten my outfit right, to run a thumb beneath my eyes to make sure my liner hadn’t smudged, and to tell me that I didn’t need to be scared of Cady. We were both, after all, young women trying to make it in Hollywood. True, only one of us had a grammatically incorrect ankle tattoo that had been featured in
People
magazine, but there had to be some common ground.

Ten minutes later, I’d pulled up to the curb in front of The Alcove and relinquished my key fob to the valet, who’d looked me up and down before visibly dismissing me as no one worthy of a greeting, let alone a call to the paparazzi. I bought myself a cup of tea, found a table in the front courtyard shaded by an umbrella, and sat there, sipping and waiting.

Cady and Justin were late, of course. Just as I was finishing my second mug of milky tea, sweetened with agave (a place like this knew its clientele and offered an array of non-sugar sweeteners), a black SUV rolled up to the valet stand. Justin got out first, dressed, as usual, in dark-rinse jeans and suede sneakers and an ironic T-shirt. Today’s was bright green.
I CAN DO ANYTHING
! it read, with a trefoil logo and the words
GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA
underneath. The passenger-side door opened and a wraith in high heels eased herself out of the seat and down to the sidewalk. Denim leggings clung to her stick-thin legs. Beneath them were five-inch stilettos, the kind that would turn even a casual stroll into an oversexed, swivel-hipped strut down
an invisible runway. The young woman wore a shirt made of fine cotton that clung to her torso, the better for viewers to appreciate every bone of her rib cage. A dozen thin steel bangles chimed and rattled around one wispy forearm, and she wore a straw hat with a red satin band, a hipster’s wink that said,
I’m too young and too cool for this hat, but look at me wearing it anyhow!

The stranger whispered something to Justin, and then came teetering toward me with a smile on her fleshless face. It wasn’t until she’d thrown her arms around me that I realized this starveling ghost-girl was my formerly robust star. I was hugging Cady Stratton.

I rocked back on my heels. My throat clenched, and I made a strangled sound, my attempt to say, then swallow, the words
What the fucking fuck?

“Hi, Ruth!” she said, and let me go. She smelled like cigarettes, and was so emaciated that I could see veins pulsing on the undersides of her pale wrists.

“Cady?” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Justin standing off to the side, hands clasped in front of his groin as if he thought I’d try to kick him, with a timid, placating expression on his face. “What happened?”

She danced away from me and whirled in a circle. “TrimQuick! I’m their new celebrity spokeswoman!” She dropped her tiny bottom into a metal chair—given the lack of padding, it must have hurt—and smiled. “I haven’t been out in, like, forever, because nobody’s supposed to see me until they unveil the new ads. It was like I had the plague or something. I missed three different premieres . . .”

“Coffee?” asked Justin, that dopey, please-Hammer-don’t-hurt-me grin plastered to his face, his body still hunched in a defensive crouch.

“Espresso,” Cady rapped. I shook my head. Justin pranced away. Cady leaned forward, the better to regale me with the details of her diet.

“They sent me this trainer who was, like, completely sadistic. Do you know what a kettlebell is? Anyhow,” she prattled, either ignoring my silence or failing to notice it, “obvs, not everyone who does the program gets a trainer twice a day, so they’ll, like, have to put a disclaimer at the bottom of the ads. ‘Results Not Typical.’ Something like that.” She eyed me. “Hey, you know, I bet I could get you on the program for free.”

“Cady.” My voice was low, and it must have sounded, if not scary, then arresting enough to get her to quit babbling about resistance bands and the glycemic index. “Why did you . . . what did you . . .” She was staring at me, obviously confused. She’d been expecting compliments, and I was failing to deliver. This constituted an inexplicable glitch in her personal Matrix. “This isn’t going to work.”

She blinked, with the first hint of a frown marring her smooth brow. “Huh?”

“The character you’re playing. Daphne. She’s supposed to be . . . you know. A normal-looking girl. A regular girl. An everygirl.” I felt my fingers moving to my cheek, my scars, and made myself rest them in my lap. “That’s why we cast you.”

“You cast me ’cause I was fat?” Now she wasn’t frowning, she was full-on scowling, her pretty features pretzeled in a sneer. “Wow. Really? Because I thought you hired me because you liked my acting. Because you thought I was funny.”

“Of course I liked your acting. Of course I think you’re funny. I’ve been a fan of yours for years.” Her expression softened with an actress’s reflexive pleasure at being praised, and I was amazed at myself. I lied as if I’d been living in L.A. for decades. “But this . . .” I waved my hands at her body, or what was left of it. “I
don’t know what we’re going to do. We start filming next week, and you can’t . . .”

“I’m not gaining the weight back.” Cady spoke flatly, in a tone that left no room for compromise. Justin, who’d been approaching with a dainty espresso cup in one hand, veered off sharply to the left, like a pilot who’d just gotten word from air traffic control about an explosion on the runway.
Thanks for your help,
I thought. “Do you know how long I’ve been the fat chick?” Cady demanded.

“Oh, come on! You were never fat! You just looked . . .”
Normal,
I was going to say, but Cady didn’t give me a chance to say it.

“Do you know how many movies I went out for where they’d say, ‘You need to lose twenty pounds’? Do you know how long I’ve been hearing that?” Her lips trembled. Her eyes filled with tears. It could have been acting, or it might have been actual pain, an up-close look at what happened to a Hollywood dream deferred. “I want to work, you know?”

My lips were numb as I forced out the words. “You are working. You have work. I gave you a job.”

She swiped one hand through the air, dismissing the show, my baby, my dream. “That’s nothing. That’s not where it’s at. The real money’s in movies. Endorsement deals. Do you know how much that bitch Kim Kardashian gets to tweet shit about her trainer on Twitter?”

I shook my head. I was not one of Miss Kardashian’s numerous Twitter followers.

“Fifty . . . thousand . . . dollars,” Cady said. She crossed her arms over her chest and sat back smugly. “That adds up.”

“I’m sure it does. And you can do whatever you want with yourself after the show. But for now, for the show, I need you to look the way you did when you were hired,” I said. Even as I spoke in my scolding schoolteacher’s voice, I knew it was impossible.
Network executives could move Cady into a Krispy Kreme shop and make her drink lard for dinner, and there’d still be no way she could gain enough weight back in time for the show’s start date . . . and that date, I knew, was nonnegotiable. If we didn’t start filming on time, we wouldn’t wrap on time, we wouldn’t deliver our episodes on time, and we’d have to give up our premiere slot, which had already been announced and published all over the Internet.