The Starter Wife Read online

  Svetlana left the room, leaving behind an imprint of garlic cloves and generations of suffering on the air. There were countless other Wives Of to punish, those who bought into the myth of defeating the onslaught of age with a pair of hardened Russian fists. Gracie groaned and leaned up from the damp, tacky massage table (a nice way of putting the modern equivalent of the rack) and onto her elbows. She willed her eyes open, her lids feeling like the only part of her body that had escaped Soviet vengeance. She slowly twisted her head to the side to assess the damage in the veined, mirrored tile lining the walls. Mirrored tile, Gracie thought, all the rage when Sylvester, the lisping Supreme Ruler of Disco,was at the top of the charts. “For a tax-free two-fifty a pop,” Gracie muttered, “Svetlana the Terrible could swing a subscription to Elle Decor.”

  But the veined tile with the mirrored surface served its purpose. Here’s the scoop. Gracie Pollock looked ridiculously good in that her polished exterior straddled the territories claimed by both adjectives, ridiculous and good. Each time Gracie peered at her reflection, she was startled, as though she had run into a formerly plain-wrapped high school friend who had transformed herself into a middle-aged version of Jessica Simpson. What are the odds of looking better at forty than at sixteen? Gracie thought to herself. About the same as crapping a gleaming pile of Krugerrands.

  Let’s start with the hair. Said hair being the color of that expensive European butter no one can pronounce. Domestic butter, according to Gracie’s colorist, not being, well, buttery enough. And this hair was thick. Thick, as though somewhere in the Hamptons, Christie Brinkley had awakened looking like Michael Chiklis with hips. Gracie’s original mousy brown, tongue-in-light-socket chicken wire had been colored and wrestled and yanked and stretched and stretched again into submission by a fine-boned man of unknown sexual and other identity named Yuko, then brightened with highlights every three weeks and lengthened with extensions, rewoven every twelve weeks. Her forehead was as unlined as the hood of a new Porsche, due to the same poison found in warped green bean cans she was warned about as a child. Her lips were soft and full. Thank you, the pitiless Collagen God. The teeth? Straight and white. The teeth were hers. The teeth, she’d grown herself.

  I did grow those teeth myself, right? Gracie thought.

  Yes, Gracie reassured herself as she bared her teeth like a rich blond rottweiler into the veined mirror. Those are my teeth.

  She growled at her reflection.

  Let’s move on.The breasts were a perfect full B cup. Gracie had given birth and breast-fed—and yet her nipples pointed due north. Nature? Or the magic hands of Dr. Barbara Hayden? You decide.

  The tummy, save for the bumpy scar which Gracie had not yet “done” above her pubic bone, was hard and as hard earned as the diamond on her left hand. The arms, brown and muscular and hairless as newborn Chihuahuas.The legs, Gracie’s bête noire throughout her teenage years, were as sleek and taut as the skin on an apple.

  Just looking at them made her weary.

  Maintenance was a Mother Fucker.

  Gracie stuck her tongue out at her reflection. The blond, green-eyed, perky-breasted woman rudely assessing her was not related to the soft-fleshed, brown-eyed girl she’d been more or less satisfied with for thirty years.

  This Gracie, by all accounts, appeared perfect. Media friendly. Easy on the eyes and hard on the 401(k).

  Then she looked down at her hands. Good Lord, not the hands, Gracie thought. The dead giveaway. The Dorian Gray painting in the attic. The skin on her hands was changing. Freckles that had once been a badge of youth and vigor were now a sign of encroaching age—the inevitable, inexorable spiraling into the Martha Raye Terra In-firma.

  Gracie hadn’t told anyone, not even her close friends, but in the last two years, she had failed the pinch test. Failing the pinch test is something best kept close to the bustier—if Gracie pinched the back of her hand (which she did several times an hour), the skin no longer snapped back. It slid back.

  Eventually.

  And those freckles. What could blast them out? Gracie hovered over her hands with a critical eye. What could possibly eliminate the speckled insurgents? Laser, acid peel, that pricey SPF 1,000 Greek sunscreen, bleaching creams, fotofacial, collagen, harvested fat cell shots. She had tried everything. And still the pinch test failed. Still the freckles persisted.

  Gracie tucked her hands away, hiding them like a dreaded family secret. She sighed. And then she thought about her elbows. Gravity is a bitch, she thought.

  “Do not”—she wagged her finger at her reflection—“appraise the elbows!”

  Gracie felt her body was a time bomb, just waiting to jump back into its normal state, should the narrowest opportunity appear. She lived in a world where people fought their natural condition on a daily basis—every day in L.A. was Halloween. Those weren’t masks she’d see in the women’s dressing area at Saks or in the salon chairs at Cristophe or suspended over glass noodles at Mr. Chow—those were faces. Gracie feared she’d wake up one day and the skin around her face would be pulled into a bow in the back of her head.

  Gracie was on the precipice.Was she going to be the recently Asian Joan Rivers, or what once was Brigitte Bardot? She’d have to make a choice.

  One pull of the pin, Gracie knew as she peered over her shoulder at her proto-human reflection, and the whole thing would blow.

  THE TROUBLE started with the earring. This wasn’t just any earring—like that silver Celtic cross Gracie had lost in a public toilet at Santa Monica Beach because she was so freaked out by the thought of homeless people wandering in while she peed in a doorless stall. This wasn’t one of the pair of pink diamond and platinum three-carat studs Gracie and every other stuck-in-a-loveless-marriage-but-with-a-generous-allowance Wife Of had her eye on at the Loree Rodkin case at Neiman Marcus, aka Needless Markup, just waiting for her husband to slip up for an excuse to buy. No, this wasn’t just any earring. This was a delicate gold-wire hoop suddenly attached to her husband’s heretofore unadorned, exhibiting middle-aged tendencies (more hair, additional length) right earlobe.

  File Gracie Pollock’s story under “hindsight is twenty-twenty,” with the understanding that her sight was definitely up her hind end at the time. But how was Gracie to know that the demise of her nine-year, ten-month, three-day, eighteen-hour marriage could have been foretold mere weeks ago by a tiny piece of metal in a middle-aged man’s ear?

  “Yo, ho, ho, a pirate’s life for me,” sang Gracie, wife of Kenny Pollock, president of Durango Studios, as her ever-tardy husband loped over to their usual corner table at Ivy at the Shore, their (and every other Power Lister’s) watering hole of choice. Kenny was twenty minutes late, as always. Somewhere between “punctual” and “rude” there was “Kenny time”: twenty minutes late. Not ten minutes, not fifteen minutes. Twenty. Sometimes Gracie wondered if he waited out in the car until half past nineteen minutes-his lateness was as precise as the creases ironed into his jeans. (How precise were those creases, you ask? So precise that Kenny measured the creases himself, with a carpenter’s measuring tape. If the crease was off center, bodily threats would be faxed to the dry cleaner.)

  “Investors meeting at the studio,” Kenny said, kissing Gracie’s upturned cheek, ignoring her rendition of the Disney classic with a shrug of his long-ago-college-football-player shoulders. Gracie noted that he did not issue an apology for his tardiness—another in a long line of power moves. She knew the drill: “Sorry” is for people who have to care. “Sorry” is for people who may need a job someday. “Sorry” is for Pussies. Kenny greeted their dinner guests. “Or were we their guests?” Gracie asked herself. “One forgets.” The dinner had been set in November of the previous year. Most of their dinners were set months in advance—Gracie and Kenny could barely get through the first week of January without knowing exactly how their year would lay out.They knew exactly who they would have drinks at the Four Seasons bar with on March twelfth,who they’d be entertaining at home with a chef’s barbec
ue on May seventh, whose summer vacation home in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard or Point Dume they’d find themselves watching fireworks from on July fourth, whose winter vacation home in Aspen, Telluride, or Sun Valley they’d find themselves skiing out of come Thanksgiving Day weekend.

  The pair they were eating dinner with tonight was a married couple—the man, a slithery, amphibious, soon-to-be-unemployed network chief (everyone except for him, from the valet parkers to the Sumner Redstones, seemed to know this) and the wife, a former stripper and back-page material Playboy Bunny trying to hide her past, along with her over-enthusiastic breasts, under a serious blue, aching business suit. Last Gracie checked, Jil Sander did not design in spandex. Gracie had spent the last eighteen minutes listening to the man brag about his new electric car (to augment his fleet of Escalades and his habitual use of private jets), his Tuesday-night lineup, his resting heart rate, the view from their newly remodeled Beverly Park home across from Sly, and the number of Ivy League slots taken up by his children’s private school each year. His pace was breathless, skipping from self-adoring subject to self-aggrandizing subject, leaving poor Gracie to wonder what they would have left to talk about over the ubiquitous grilled vegetable salad dinner. And then Gracie remembered that Kenny was no slouch in the bragging game. Her work was done. She could retire to the master bedroom in her head.

  Gracie sat back and smiled, sipping her “rocks, salt, and quick, please” Patrón Margarita. Gracie felt brave asking for salt, her guests and Gracie knowing full well that she was flirting carelessly with water retention. At her age, two weeks shy of forty-one, Gracie reckoned, retention of any kind—mental or physical—was welcome. She threw caution to the Santa Anas and indulged in her sodium-laced, liquid escape hatch, as Kenny launched into a soliloquy on the state of the three movies his studio was currently shooting. He’d just flown back from the set of the new $150 million Civil War epic (a paean to American history filmed, ironically, in Romania). Kenny was claiming to have come up with the story for it himself one day on the stationary bike, which he rode every other morning, alternating with the dreaded treadmill, at six-fifteen for not one minute over twenty-two. He’d read in Men’s Health (the only periodical he read religiously) that maximum aerobic benefits start to trail off after twenty-two minutes, and he was not one to waste time—his time, specifically.

  Gracie wondered what the well-respected screenwriter (oxymoron?) of the epic would think of the yarn Kenny was spinning—it felt as though he was trying out an Oscar speech. But Gracie was too grateful for her husband’s appearance to quibble. It saved her from probing haplessly for common ground with the ex-stripper, whose breasts were threatening a mutiny: Gracie was deathly afraid a button would pop and ruin the results of her LASIK surgery. Kenny had urged Gracie to correct her nearsightedness; the glasses he’d once loved on her made her look “like she read too much.” As Kenny talked about the details of the Civil War that were previously unbeknownst to him and no one else on the planet (“Did you know brother fought against brother?”) and the network executive chewed the ice from his gimlet (sexual frustration? Even with the boobage his prosti-wife was sporting?) and patiently waited his turn to talk about last week’s rare-as-a-spotted-owl ratings win, Gracie slipped into a self-imposed waking coma.

  Occasionally, during business dinners, cocktail parties, premieres, test screenings, and endless christenings and bar mitzvahs, Gracie would disengage herself from the physical world and picture her body floating above the shiny, glazed surface, gazing down upon her fellow inmates who looked like so many sheep in a Technicolor field. Gracie had learned years ago that all that was required of her as a Hollywood wife was to nod and smile and ask empty, flat questions and make meaningless declarations, and she had mastered those skills, which was harder than one might think.

  Try it. Think of 101 Ways to Say Hello and Inquire about The Children. Or, more rash, Inquire about The Movie. To do this, you must remember who made what film. And then you must remember what movies to bring up, what movies never to mention. Otherwise, you could have a conversation that goes something like this:

  Gracie, to a famous director: “Hi, Fred. Wow, I saw your movie The Toad in Spring last week. It was wonderful.”

  Fred, wielding a sneer, “I fucking hated that movie.”

  Becoming a Wife Of required almost as much training as first violin in the London Symphony Orchestra. Gracie often thought there should be a Juilliard for power-wives-in-training. Examples of the classes might be: “Your Interior Decorator and You,” “Getting to Table One,” or, a favorite elective, “Embracing Your Inner Self, and Then Stomping It to Death.” Gracie was currently enrolled in “Botox or Brow Lift: Stay 29 Forever or Be Replaced by Your Nanny!”

  Gracie remembered that when she first started dating Kenny, it had taken months to train herself not to hurl a sarcastic comment when one of about 200 million “Executive VPs” shook her hand while looking over her shoulder for a more important person to greet (and there was always someone more important than The Girlfriend). It had taken weeks to recover from having to reintroduce herself to a satellite player fifteen times in the same year. Finally Gracie had mastered introducing herself by name to anyone she ran into, even people who were friends.You never knew who would draw a blank at the appearance of your nonfamous face.

  In the beginning, Gracie had considered herself one of the lucky ones, and not for the reasons one would think—sure, there was the money. But Hollywood was not unlike Major League Baseball: the players had a short shelf life; once a studio executive started striking out on a regular basis, they were relegated to the Minors.They elected (were fired) to move on to their own production shingles, often housed in off-the-beaten-track office buildings above Sofa-U-Love or Jacopo’s pizza shop. In the milliseconds between the words “You’re” and “out!” uttered merrily by a superior, they went from buyers to sellers, and for the most part never made another movie in their lives.The local college extension courses were full of former executives teaching “Screenwriting 101” and “An Insider’s Guide to Hollywood II” (with prerequisite).

  But even if one were a success in Hollywood, try keeping up with the Joneses (there are no Joneses in Hollywood) when the Joneses are chauffeured in their Maybachs to the Polo Lounge for breakfast. Try keeping up with the Joneses when a beach house in the Malibu Colony costs $80,000 to rent in July (which is when everyone who is anyone is there). Try keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses haven’t set foot in LAX in a decade, because they’ve got their G-5 gassed up and awaiting flight plans at the Avjet terminal in industrial Burbank.

  There was not enough money in the world for people in Hollywood; someone always had more.

  And they were building their mega-mansion right next door to yours.

  Gracie had been able, at least for their dating years, to hang on to her own identity, separate from Kenny’s. It was rare for a Hollywood girlfriend or wife to have a job—rarer still to have a career. Kenny seemed to love that she’d had both. For a time, he’d brag to his coworkers, stating that he was planning on retiring on Gracie’s income—that maybe she’d be the one to ask for a pre-nup. She didn’t. Kenny did.

  Through a lot of luck and a little hard work along with what Gracie claimed was a modicum of talent, she had become a semipopular children’s book author. Right after college, she’d written and illustrated books like Question Boy and Curiosity and Question Boy, the sequel, based on an autistic boy she’d befriended at a bus stop. All of six or seven, he questioned her about the nature of the “square-not-round” buttons on her coat, why her hair was curly and his was straight, and why her left front tooth was slightly crooked and a bit yellow. His mother shushed him, but Gracie realized that here was a boy for whom every moment at a bus stop was discovery, every bus ride an adventure. She was fascinated. She’d started the book literally out of nowhere, with no background in illustration or writing, the minute she stepped into her apartment. The first words she’d written do
wn, without taking off that square-not-round-buttoned coat, were:

  Do you like buttons? I like buttons. Mommy says buttons attach our warm coats to our bodies. Do belly buttons hold our bodies together? What if we unbuttoned our belly buttons? Would we explode? What if … ?

  Gracie created a series based on little people who were left a half-step behind on the evolutionary scale (they were light green and covered in a soft, downy fur and survived, like frogs, both in water and on land) called The Frugs. She considered herself a writer more than an artist: her drawings were simple, childlike; her colors bold and rudimentary. She drew and painted quickly before she lost interest, like the pint-size audience she was striving to reach. And then she would settle into the words.

  Gracie made enough money at her career to support herself—the only goal she’d set. She could afford a car, gas, insurance, an unfurnished one-bedroom apartment in the Fairfax district, enough dinners out at cheap, exotic, out-of-the-way places to encourage a weight issue. She made more than a schoolteacher and less than an accountant; she was satisfied.

  But she was also a vessel of that most common of human afflictions, loneliness. Gracie didn’t work in an office where she could commiserate about the horrible boss over one-hour lunches at the Olive Garden; she didn’t have a dog—wasn’t allowed one in her apartment. She would write, take a walk, go get a cup of coffee, come back, write, go get some lunch … return. Gracie would walk into her apartment and say “I’m home” as a joke, but also as a prayer; maybe, if she said those words often enough, someone someday would answer.

  Yes, Gracie had friends, writer friends—or the occasional oddball who had a trust fund that was barely enough to pay rent on a studio apartment. But the majority of her friends worked two or three jobs, keeping themselves solvent until the big payday when their scripts would be optioned, that network pilot would be picked up, or they packed it in and went back to graduate work—or to marrying the high school sweetheart they left behind somewhere in the middle of the country.