Free The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner Page B

standing in the windy street.
    “That,” said Gary, “was awful.”
    I turned toward him, the frustration I’d ignored all night bubbling up. “Why? What was so awful about being in a roomful of people I’m going to be doing my show with? People who are actually, oh, I don’t know, happy for me?”
    Gary ducked his head. “This isn’t working,” he said in a low voice.
    I felt my chest contracting, as if I’d been punched. “What?”
    Gary pulled off his glasses and blinked at me as he rubbed the lenses on his shirttail. “I’m proud of you. Or I’d like to be. I can’t ask you to go backward, to just be an assistant for the rest ofyour life. You want bigger things.” He spread his hands, smiling sheepishly. “Me, I’m just a teacher.”
    “What do you mean, just a teacher? That’s the most important work there is.” No, I thought. Oh, please, no . I was remembering our two-year anniversary, a trip we’d taken to Desert Springs. We’d taken side-by-side mud baths, giggling in the steamy, sulfur-scented weedy water, Gary grumbling about how he was going to be picking twigs out of various crevices for weeks to come. We’d had dinner in a fancy restaurant at what used to be Cary Grant’s estate, sitting outside, and when I’d gotten cold, Gary had gone inside and come back out with a wool blanket for my lap.
    The wind gusted. I yanked my hat down around my ears and reached for him. He stepped backward and then held my hands, taking pains to keep plenty of space between our bodies.
    “You’re important,” I told him. “What you do is so incredibly important. It matters more than anything, more than any dumb TV show, and I’m sorry if I haven’t been making you feel that way.”
    He shook his head and dropped my hands, running his fingers through his hair. “It’s not you. It’s not that. You haven’t done anything wrong. Those people,” he said, tilting his head up toward the restaurant, “they’re, like, a different species or something.”
    “The women, maybe,” I muttered.
    Gary kept talking. “They’re just so different. They don’t care about the same things that I do.”
    “What do they care about?” I asked. I was simultaneously feeling panicky sorrow and honest curiosity. How did Gary see himself in relation to the executives and showrunners and Hollywood girlfriends and wives we’d just shared a meal with? How did he really see me?
    Gary spread his hands wide again. “Ah, you know. They careabout making money. It’s not about art, or drama, or telling the best stories, or trying to make the world a better place. It’s just selling stuff. Selling airtime to the advertisers. Selling stories to the viewers. Like that.”
    I stared at him, wondering when he’d turned into a communist, or whatever he’d become, and how I’d failed to notice. “Is that what you think I am?” I asked. “That I don’t care about art or craft or storytelling? That I’m just a sellout?”
    He shook his head . . . but he didn’t do it immediately, and he didn’t do it very hard.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. My voice was raw, and my belly was knotted. Everything hurt. “I wrote something people like, and now a network wants to put it on the air. What did I do . . .” I felt my throat tighten as I forced the words out. “What did I do that’s so wrong?”
    “Nothing,” said Gary, sounding tired. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me.” He made a sweeping gesture, one that took in the restaurant, the road, the valet stand, the glitter of the shops, the high-end sedans and SUVs and sports cars stopped at the traffic light, cars that each cost more than he’d make in three years of teaching. “This isn’t the kind of life I want for myself, and those aren’t the kind of people I’m ever going to be comfortable with.”
    And now I’m one of them, I thought. One of those people. When I’d been an assistant, or when I’d supported myself editing kids’ college essays