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hair and perfect bodies on display. Every one of them had probably been the prettiest woman in her high school, her college, her hometown. Here in Los Angeles, though, beauty was as common as the oranges that grew on the trees everyone had in their backyards. As we walked past, I imagined their eyes on me, wondering what had happened to my face, grateful that it hadn’t happened to them. The high-ceilinged room was noisy with the sounds of conversation, silverware, and the muffled pop of a Champagne cork, and the air smelled like seared meat.
    “Here we are,” said the hostess, dropping us off at the entrance to a wine room toward the back of the second floor. When I walked in, the executives started clapping and I bent my head, embarrassed. There was a sign on the wall that read THE NEXT BEST THING . I wanted to take a picture, freeze the moment, live in it forever.
    “How about a toast!” said Lisa from the studio. She was dressed in her usual loose-legged trousers and high-heeled boots, a sweater and a chiffon scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck. Today the pants were pale gray, the sweater was black, and the scarf was shades of green from emerald to mint. There were ten of us at what had been billed as a small getting-to-know-you dinner, a celebration before we’d officially begin the work of building The Next Best Thing. Lisa and Tariq were there representing Lodestar, the studio that had produced my show, then sold it to ABS. From the network, there were Joan and Lloyd, who until the previous week had been Joan’s assistant, but had since been promoted to vice president of comedy. Both of my former bosses, the Daves of Two Daves Productions, were there—David Lieberman, with his wife, Molly, and David Carter, with his girlfriend, an entertainment lawyer named Shazia Khan, who was possibly the most beautiful woman in the room, if not the entire restaurant.
    Shazia’s skin was honey brown, her wide eyes were accented with perfectly arched brows, and her teeth glowed a bluish white that made them look slightly radioactive. She wore a red dress with gold accents, an outfit that was not exactly a sari but that somehow managed to suggest a sari, and jeweled gold sandals on her high-arched feet. Shazia’s father was Persian, a philosophy professor at Princeton, and her mother was Swedish, an actress in art-house films. Shazia was what you got when you combined those two exemplary gene pools. Not only was she beautiful, but she had an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degreefrom the University of Chicago, and was regularly named as one of the most powerful attorneys in town. None of the men in the room could take their eyes off her. David Lieberman—Big Dave—was especially solicitous.
    “Is he ignoring you?” he asked Shazia, gesturing toward his partner, who sat in his wheelchair. Dave Carter—Little Dave—wore a tweed sportsjacket, a white button-down shirt, and khaki pants. His shoes—brown leather loafers—were perfectly pristine, because Dave had never taken a step in them. He was paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a boating accident he’d had the summer after college. Paralysis had not prevented him from becoming one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, or from dating a parade of women, each one more lovely and accomplished than the one before.
    “Do you need anything?” Big Dave asked. Shazia gave him a patient, practiced smile, the kind of smile she must have dispensed a dozen times every day to parking-lot attendents, waiters, and deliverymen and just random male strangers on the street. “Another drink?” Big Dave persisted. “Something to eat? Want to wear my jacket? Take all my money? Anything?”
    “Honey,” said Big Dave’s wife. “Put your tongue back in your mouth and get Ruthie some wine.” Molly Lieberman smiled at me. Molly could afford to be indulgent. Her blond hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and Barbie-doll body might have made her looks a