Swim

I was too nervous to sit through a meal but I was snacking constantly, eating bags of pretzels and dehydrated carrot chips and Pirate’s Booty and sunflower seeds that I didn’t really want, and ignoring my boyfriend Gary’s phone calls, because there was, we’d learned, nothing he could say or do that would possibly calm me down.
    Now here was my news, I thought, waiting for Lisa to get on the line, and the news wasn’t good. Oh, well. At least I’d be disappointed in private. After I’d made the mistake of telling Grandma that I should be hearing something this week, she’d announced her intention of giving me my space. “You don’t need an old woman breathing down your neck,” she’d said, all the while hovering within five feet of my person, dressed in her at-home attire of lounging pajamas or a vividly embroidered silk robe, her slippered feet noiseless on the wooden floors as she found one task after another to keep her busy. So far she’d polished the silver, rearranged the china, emptied, scrubbed, bleached and refilled the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator, and regrouted the powder-room tile. That morning while we drank the smoothies she’d made of pineapple and mango and Greek yogurt, she’d announced her plans to rent a steamer and replace the dining-room wallpaper, even though I’d begged her to leave that job to the professionals.
    “ Nu? ” she’d ask casually, just once every night, as she served dinner to me and Maurice, her gentleman caller. As usual, her nerves were made manifest in the reemergence of her Boston accent and in her cooking. On Friday, when the first wave of pickups was announced, she’d prepared a standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes au gratin, and homemade horseradish sauce. On Saturday, she’d served a breast of veal stuffed with cornbread and sausage and studded with garlic and rosemary, and on Sunday, she’d produced an entire Thanksgiving dinner, complete with two kinds of potatoes and a turkey she’d brined in the hot tub (our down-the-hall neighbors, devoted fitness buffs, had howled when they’d gone up to the roof for a little post-hike relaxation and found, instead of clear water, a fragrant brew of bay leaves and garlic cloves and juniper berries, with a kosher turkey bobbing merrily in the middle).
    I would pick at my food, then excuse myself, telling Grandma and Maurice that I needed to work, closing my bedroom door behind me. Of course, I wasn’t working. I was staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring, and when I wasn’t doing that I was dialing the first nine of the ten numbers that would have connected me with Dave.
    “Ruth?” The voice on the other end of the line startled me so badly that I gave a little squeak. The assistant, who had probably grown accustomed to the quirks of neurotic writers, pretended not to notice. “I have Lisa on the line. Please hold for Tariq, and Lloyd and Joan from the network.” I got to my feet, my heart lifting as quickly as it had sunk. The network. Oh God oh God oh God. The network doesn’t call unless it’s a pickup, Dave had said. They give the bad news to the agent, not the writer, and probably you’ll read it online before someone has the decency of telling you to your face that your show is dead. But maybe Dave was wrong. It had been years since his own show was green-lit, years since he’d had to sit, in breathless, chest-pounding agony, waiting for the call, this call.
    Voices came back on the line, one after another, ringing like bells.
    “I have Tariq,” said Tariq’s assistant.
    “Holding for Joan,” said Joan’s.
    “Ruth?” asked Lisa. “Still there?”
    “I’m here.” My voice was faint and quivery. I stood up, clenching my fists, my jaw, my abdominal muscles, trying to keep from shaking.
    “Please hold,” said a new voice, male and brusque and impatient, “for Chauncey McLaughlin.”
    I reeled back toward the bed. It felt like Christmas morning, New Year’s Eve, a birthday cake blazing with candles, a man down on one knee with a diamond ring in his hand. Joan was ABS’s head of comedy, and Chauncey McLaughlin (rumor was, he’d been born Chaim Melmann, then changed it to Charles, then gone full WASP with Chauncey) was the president of the network, a man I’d glimpsed once at a holiday party and had spoken with precisely never. Chauncey McLaughlin was the man who ultimately decided which of the pilots would get shot and, of those, which would make it