The Next Best Thing (43 page)

I’d arrived at the lot early that morning, my car freshly vacuumed, hair straightened, makeup on, wearing the short-sleeved black cotton dress with a mock turtleneck that I’d bought for the occasion, carrying the lunch that Dave had packed for me, my body still ringing from our morning’s session in the shower. I strode across the parking lot and knocked on Cady’s dressing-room door, waiting for her wan “What?” before I stepped inside.

Cady was standing in front of the mirror, in paint, as I’d learned the actors said when they were made up for the cameras, and in costume: the navy-blue skirt, high-heeled pumps, and a white blouse with a froth of flounces covering the buttons that she’d worn in the first scene, the one at the restaurant in Boston, right before she got fired. Underneath the clothes she’d worn six weeks ago, Cady wore a padded corset, which returned her body to an approximation of what it had once been. Her waist,
cinched by a dark-blue leather belt, was still tiny, but she’d been amplified fore and aft, with the curves of her bosoms straining the buttons of the blouse, and a bottom round and ripe as a peach pushing at the seams of the skirt.

“You look . . .” I was about to say
amazing
. True, it was padding, a Hollywood lie, but Cady appeared just the way I’d hoped she would when I’d imagined the character, cute and curvy and, if you didn’t look too long at her scrawny, corded neck, or the sharp angles of her cheeks and her jaw, absolutely adorable. We had, after tense negotiation and lengthy phone calls, reached a compromise: She’d wear the padding for the first three episodes, then a little less padding for the next two, and so forth, until she wasn’t wearing anything extra at all. It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t what Cady wanted. It was only the best we could do.

“You look beautiful,” I said.

“I look
awful,
” said Cady, and burst into tears. She turned away from the mirror and collapsed onto the couch, sobbing and, undoubtedly, ruining the work it had taken the makeup artist an hour and a half to complete. Her mother shot me the look of You Have Made My Child Suffer and I Will See You Burn in Hell, then knelt beside her daughter, patting Cady’s shoulders and talking quietly.
Awful,
I thought as my fingertips went to my cheek. Cady Stratton wouldn’t know awful if it sat on her face . . . and here she was, whining about how horrible it was to wear padding that made her look no worse than normal, like the girl she’d been for most of her life.

“It’s like, I worked so hard . . . not to be that girl anymore,” Cady gasped between sobs. “And . . . now . . . I . . . have . . . to . . . be . . . her . . . again!”

I couldn’t keep from shaking my head. It was crazy. Even with the padding, Cady was still smaller than the average woman in America. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, tell her to quit crying, to grow
up already, to do her job and play the part that she’d signed up to play. Instead, I patted her back, feeling the straps of the corset, stiff underneath her blouse.

“I know that this isn’t what you want,” I said as her mother continued to scowl at me. “But Cady, this is what you agreed to.”

“I . . . can’t . . . stand . . . to see . . . myself . . . this way!”

“You look beautiful!”

“I . . . look . . . disgusting!” The walls of the dressing room echoed with the sounds of her despair. She lifted her head and glared at me, looking me right in the eye . . . but no, I realized. That was wrong. She was looking me right in the scars. “I look like a fat, disgusting
freak
!”

“Oh, sweetie,” said her mom. Cady’s mother’s name was Martha, and she’d worked at a Kroger supermarket when her children were young. When Cady had been cast on her first TV show, Martha had left her husband and younger children and moved to Los Angeles to be her daughter’s manager. She’d spent the past decade on Cady’s payroll, an unhealthy dynamic even for the most stable and well-adjusted of people, in whose company I wasn’t sure Martha belonged. Now Martha lived in a town house in Toluca Lake that Cady had paid for. She wasn’t a manager or an agent . . . more like a paid companion whose job—quote-unquote—was spending days with her daughter on the set. That, and shopping. As she hovered over Cady’s prone and weeping form, I noted that Martha’s sunglasses were Chanel, and her quilted white leather purse, on a length of gold chain, also sported the interlocking
C
s. She wore a Tory Burch caftan, white Prada jeans, and Kate Spade slides, all with their logos and brand names clearly visible. The Tiffany charm bracelet around her left wrist bore a silver heart engraved
Love Always, Cady
.

Cady sniffled. Martha glared at me, furious that I was upsetting her daughter, and, no doubt, terrified that the aforementioned
upset might bring the gravy train to a grinding halt, that Cady would cry herself out of a job and she’d be back to slicing honey ham in Minnesota.

None of this was my concern. Cady’s future, on the big screen or small, was none of my business. Nor were Martha’s feelings. All I cared about was getting Cady Stratton to play the part I’d written, and that meant sucking it up and wearing the goddamn pads that pushed her all the way to a goddamn size eight.

“Cady,” I began, “you look beautiful. A million girls in America would kill to look the way you do. And, like I keep saying, it’s so important for those girls to see someone on TV, someone who’s gorgeous and funny and smart . . .”
Or, at least, someone who can act smart on TV
. “A girl like you who’s the star of the show,” I concluded. At this point, I could recite the speech by heart. I’d given it to her, and to various executives, from Loud Lloyd on up the food chain, at least a dozen times in the weeks since brunch at The Alcove, making the case as to why skinny Cady Stratton needed to pretend to be at least slightly curvy, if only for the first few episodes.

“I hate this!” Cady wailed. “I can’t stand it!”

Her mother grabbed me by the elbow and steered me outside. “Are you sure we have to do it this way?” she asked, the way she’d asked me sixteen times before. “Cady worked so hard to lose the weight. Can’t you just let her be who she is?”

“Going forward, we can adjust the padding like we talked about, but for tonight she’s got to wear it, so we have at least a chance of matching the way she looked in the pilot.”

The two of us stared at each other, Martha in her thousands of dollars of designer finery, me in my clogs and the dress that I’d bought, online and on sale, on the off chance that anyone would be looking at me instead of at our stars when we taped.

“She’s not happy,” said Martha.

“I can see that. And I’m sorry. But this is the part—”

“That she signed up for. Right. She knows. We both know. You’ve made it very clear.” Martha turned on her heel and slammed the dressing-room door behind her. Approximately ten seconds later, my telephone buzzed. It was Cady’s manager, the breathy, useless Justin. I hit
IGNORE
and made my way to my third stop of the morning.

I knocked on the door of Pete’s trailer. No answer. I banged louder. Still nothing. “Hey!” I hollered, aware that grips and makeup artists and assorted extras were all staring, along with the cute guy driving the forklift filled with potted plants to the soundstage next to ours, where they shot
It Grows On You,
a comedy about three women who worked at a family nursery in Maine.

“
Pete!
” I yelled, past shame, past caring, and pounded at the door until my hands stung. One of the makeup artists poked her head out of the room next door.

“Hey,” she said. “You need a key?”

I took it gratefully and gave one final knock. “Pete!” I yelled. “It’s Ruth! I’m coming in now!” I unlocked the door and stepped into a marijuana-scented sauna. The smoke was so thick I could barely see my feet, the air so warm that my face and back were instantly running with sweat, and the music—I thought it might have been Phish—was so loud that every note made my bones ache. “Pete?” I called, coughing and squinting, fanning at the fog. “Pete?”

“Hey! Ruth! I’m over here!” he hollered above the booming bass. I blinked . . . and there was Pete, clad in a skimpy Speedo and nothing else, his torso gleaming with sweat and his arms stretched over his head. As I watched, he windmilled his arms down into triangle pose.

“Bikram yoga!” he yelled. “Clears my head!”

I located the stereo and turned the music down. I spied a
tiny window and cranked it open. I found a joint, still lit and resting on the lip of the clamshell that Pete used as an ashtray, and pinched it out. Pete appeared not to notice as he proceeded through a series of sun salutations.

“I do my own practice,” he said, positioning his right foot on the inside of his left thigh, then twisting his arms into a pretzel. “For a while, I was working with a yogini in Beverly Hills, but that got complicated.” From his leer, I deduced that the complications had something to do with sex.

“We need you onstage in an hour,” I told him, fanning at the air in a vain attempt to shoo the smoke out the window.

“No worries.” He nodded toward the coffee table, where he’d set out the classic stoner’s emergency kit: a bottle of Visine, a gallon jug filled with water, a towel, a Speed Stick, and the clothes, still in dry cleaner’s plastic, that he was supposed to wear for the first scene. He gave me a cheeky grin. “You don’t have to worry about me.” His smile widened. “I hear you’ve got other things to worry about.”

Reflexively I glanced at my phone, wondering why everyone on the show—the stars, their managers, their mothers—seemed to know what was going on before I did. In the five minutes since I’d left Cady’s dressing room, I’d logged five missed calls, four from Team Cady and the fifth from Loud Lloyd. As I watched, the screen lit up with another incoming call, this one from Joan at the network. I hit
IGNORE
as the door to the back room of Pete’s trailer opened and a face peeked out. I turned away, wanting to give him and his girl of the hour some privacy, but I’d seen enough to recognize Penny Weaver’s bright-red hair and guilty face.

I spun around in shock. The door was shut. Pete stood there, wearing nothing but his Speedo and a shit-eating grin. “No,” I said.

He shrugged modestly.

“No way,” I said.

“It’s show-mance,” he said, eradicating any hopes that what I’d glimpsed was innocent, simply one actor generously sharing his space with his castmate.

I took him by the hand, the way Grandma had done with me when I was young, and dragged him, still mostly naked, out into the sun. “Listen to me,” I hissed. “This is unacceptable.”

He gave me a lazy shrug. “I like older women.”

“She’s seventy-two.” At least that was what she admitted to. IMDB had her at seventy-four, the
Los Angeles Times
had printed that she was seventy-five. Was this some kind of dare? A bet? Was Pete trying to fill some kind of sexual bingo card?

“You ever read what Ben Franklin said about older women? ‘In the dark, all cats are gray.’”

“You aren’t a cat! And neither is Penny!”

“Whatever. Listen, don’t worry. We’re both grown-ups.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze and then turned, walking back into his dressing room.

“But she’s old enough to be your . . .” He waved at me, easing his dressing-room door shut. “Grandmother,” I finished. Pete was gone, no one was listening, and my telephone was ringing again, with Loud Lloyd’s name flashing on the screen. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or cut my losses and get in my car and start driving back to Hancock Park, maybe even back to Framingham. I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

I knew what he’d say before he said it: After sixteen times of telling Cady that she had to suck it up and play the part I’d written, the network had caved. Instead of redoing just the scenes with the recast Nana Trudy and the new characters the network had added, we’d be reshooting the entire pilot. “It’s easier this way,” Loud Lloyd boomed.
Easier for whom?
I wondered. Next door, my star was probably tearing off her padding, hugging her mother, and congratulating herself on how she’d defeated the
hateful and foolishly stubborn showrunner, not caring that
The Next Best Thing
was now just another sitcom starring just another pretty thin girl.

“It’s not such a big deal, really,” Joan said when she got on the line. I didn’t respond. She didn’t seem to notice. “You need to look at this as a blessing in disguise. You’ll get people tuning in just to see how Cady looks, or to figure out how she lost the weight.”

“I’m going to have to get started on the rewrites,” I said. There was no point in arguing, in making my case yet again. By now, I knew the sound of a done deal when I heard it.
Enjoy this,
I heard Dave saying in my head, back at the kickoff dinner, before things had started their downhill slide . . . and at that moment, I wished I could hit
REWIND
, send time spinning backward until I arrived at the moment when the story of Daphne and Nana existed only in my head. I wished it as fervently as I’d wished for the show to get picked up, what felt like such a long time ago.

“Take your time,” said Joan, all sweet accommodation. “Just send the pages as soon as you’ve got them.”

“Okay.” I hung up and walked into the writers’ bungalow, thinking longingly of the half-smoked joint in Pete’s dressing room. That, of course, was when Taryn Montaine came around the corner, wearing stovepipe jeans and a racerback tank top that left her arms and shoulders bare. A broad-brimmed straw sunhat shadowed her face; sunglasses covered her eyes. On her left ring finger was a diamond the size of a smallish walnut. Her right hand was entwined with the fingers of her husband, Rob Curtis.