The Starter Wife Read online

  Gracie could go days without saying more than “I’ll have the chicken soup, please,” to one of the gruff elderly waitresses at Canter’s. She was an only child; her gentle, beloved father had died suddenly of a heart attack when Gracie was in her senior year at college, living off-campus. Her mother, the youngest of four girls, had never lived alone and was not prepared to do so now, in her fifties. She had moved shortly thereafter to Seattle, where her favorite older sister lived, away from the smog and the freeways and the memories and the crime. But also away from her daughter. They rarely talked. Gracie thought of herself, when dreariness and self-pity consumed her thoughts (she allowed herself this luxury about once a week), as the world’s oldest living orphan.

  When Kenny appeared in Gracie’s life, with his grand plans, his sheer velocity, she was swept up like a tumbleweed in a desert windstorm. Gracie went quietly, as resistant as melted butter, a shining example of Stockholm syndrome. “Tell me where to go,” her brain whispered as she looked at Kenny speaking with conviction, with energy, with life, on any given subject, any at all. “I’ll go,” her eyes revealed.

  On her first date with Kenny, he’d picked her up at her apartment, knocking on her door like machine-gun fire. He was five minutes early and her dating clock was five minutes late—she’d taken a full hour to get dressed. Not counting the make-out session with the lanky college student from Germany who lived across the street, this was her first date in six months.

  Gracie had quickly tugged Kenny in, away from the prying eyes of her widowed neighbor, and he’d waited in what she called her living room—a plaster square replete with a two-seater couch, a small TV on a stand, and a coffee table.

  She heard him poking around the kitchen as she slipped on her heels, cognizant of the scuffs that pinned her as a girl on the rise or slipping badly. She came out to find Kenny looking into her minirefrigerator and shaking his head.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had a good meal?” he’d asked. She looked at him, her mouth open. Gracie had almost burst into tears, for it was a question a mother would ask. A question no one had asked her in a long, long time.

  Kenny had taken her to legendary Spago, where he was greeted by “Wolfie” and where they had eaten foie gras four ways and crab cakes and some kind of architecturally challenging beet salad and drank a bottle (two bottles?) of Cabernet and platefuls of desserts, and when she spied the bill, before Kenny flipped his American Express (business) card onto it, she was shocked to see the price of the meal.

  She had eaten two months’ rent. And had been completely seduced. She felt like Pretty Woman; but instead of the hottest hooker on the planet, Gracie was an attractive, if a bit mousy, scribe.

  Once they were married, having her own identity set her apart from her peers, her fellow wives. Sure, there were a few wives who had outside interests—baby photography, a clothes boutique—and they talked about their interests at length in various fashion magazines, where they would be photographed in the glamorous setting of the studio they rarely used, the eponymous boutique they seldom frequented.Their jobs were more like very expensive, well-publicized hobbies.

  Gracie surmised that Hollywood Wives had the highest unemployment rate in the country.

  Let it be said that Gracie hadn’t written anything in a while. “A while” translated into half a decade, give or take a year. She hadn’t been seized with an idea that demands you run to your computer before it recedes into the fabric of what Hollywood people loved to call their “crazy busy” lives. She hadn’t met the boy at the bus stop, so to speak. Gracie had sat in front of her computer many days, jabbing at keys, willing an idea to fall out of the sky and drizzle out through her fingertips.

  At first, Gracie figured it must be the demands of having a baby. She and Kenny had a baby girl almost four years ago, after years of trying. Of course a baby is a distraction. Of course a baby makes life more full, and of course a mother has less time to write than a nonparent.

  But deep down, Gracie knew her dry spell, the endless desert of her unproductive days, had a different genesis. It wasn’t pregnancy brain, it wasn’t postpartum, and it wasn’t her beautiful Jaden.

  (Okay, the name. Time to come clean. Jaden was named after Jada Pinkett and Will Smith’s child. Kenny, at the time, was casting a Vietnam War movie that needed a young, black, powerful lead. Will didn’t wind up taking the role, of course, and Gracie in the meantime had a child whose name was looted from movie-star off-spring.)

  Gracie’s well of ideas had run dry. Gracie’s talent, her personality, her gumption, even her anger, were fading. She felt like a pencil drawing that was being slowly, methodically erased.The demands of a life filled with petty concerns—Why are the tennis court lights on at eight a.m.? The air-conditioning went above 72 degrees in the guesthouse sitting room! We need new flower arrangements twice a week.Why won’t the remote (that cost as much as a new Toyota) turn off the Flat Screen TV in the bar? What is the proper ratio of studio to talent for a dinner party? The orchids in the foyer are dying. Should we serve lamb or salmon at our third dinner party this month? I want a phone on the left side of the master toilet. Who has (imaginary) food allergies? The pool is overflowing. Who doesn’t eat meat? That painting doesn’t work with the new couch. Who doesn’t eat bread? I need another iPod (preprogrammed with Julia Roberts’s favorites). The gardener cut the grass too low. The made-in-Tibet screening-room curtains won’t open—had devoured not only Gracie’s creativity but, more important, her spirit.

  Gracie’s comatose state was starting to lift as she looked up at the ex-stripper, whose full figure and full attention were on Kenny as she bobbled her head like the dog figurines Gracie would see in the back of the rusty Toyotas owned by the Latina nannies in her neighborhood.

  The Stepford wives had nothing on the Wives Of, Gracie thought ruefully. Amateurs.

  Onion rings that everyone agreed to order but no one would eat, thanks to Zone oppression, arrived at the table. Kenny stood to greet someone famous whom Gracie didn’t recognize—Gracie could tell this person was famous because Kenny had forgotten to introduce his wife. He wasn’t trying to be rude. Kenny had Celebrity Alzheimer’s: His brain went on the blink when approached by a celebrated face. Kenny was blinded by fame, fascinated by those on the lit side of the camera. He would often forget that his civilian wife, who would never be found in the pages of People’s 50 Most Beautiful! edition, was standing right next to him.

  Gracie stared at this girl, a petite, anemic, pretty blonde like so many petite, anemic, pretty blondes on screen, and made a game out of trying to place her. She considered celebrity naming a sort of virtual crossword puzzle: Is she on a sitcom? In a movie? Action movie? Romantic comedy? Is she British? One of the hundreds of Australians? (Does anyone in that country not act?) Does she sing? Under thirty? Over thirty? Dating a tennis star? Dating Ben Affleck? Just broken up with Ben Affleck? Pregnant with Ben Affleck’s twins?

  After she’d turned forty, Gracie realized that she was recognizing fewer and fewer “recognizable faces.” Gracie had no interest in a network called the WB—Gracie wasn’t even sure what WB stood for—and they had no interest in her. FOX left her cold, except for that show with Kiefer Sutherland, whom Gracie still expected to look like the Lost Boy she lusted after when she was young, not the grizzled Manly Man (whom she still lusted after) he’d become. NBC and ABC were passable. CBS? Gracie didn’t know what that was, but apparently she would in her retirement years. And Gracie didn’t understand—was it her, or were there just so many more “famous” people than there were fifteen years ago?

  And was Gracie the only one who wasn’t famous?

  Gracie was midway through dinner by the time she was up to her third witty remark—she had finally met her self-imposed quota. Maybe Gracie would go beyond the expected and dole out four, although she usually kept herself to three per dinner, so as to not appear as detached as she felt. During their years of courtship and marriage, Kenny and Gracie had attend
ed hundreds of affairs and endured endless hours of small talk. So much small talk that Gracie had developed a foolproof method for dealing with it. She’d even broken down the elements of these nights into categories of engagement:

  You Had Me at “I Made the Cover of Variety”: Always greet with a warm smile (bonded is good, veneers are better), a litany of your recent successes (ignore flops and wayward children), a full-body-slam hug, and finally a kiss—a double kiss if in vogue.As in dancing, let the man lead.

  They will, anyway.

  Hair, Wardrobe, Vacation Homes: After the greet, the first ten minutes of conversation must center on these three items. As in: “Love, love, love your new hair” (meaning, literally, “new hair”—Japanese extensions still stubbornly all the rage), “Where did you get that belt?” (Garage sale? Your mother’s closet? Prada?), and “Have you been to your second home in (Sun Valley, Aspen, Telluride, Park City, Martha’s Vineyard, Promises rehab in Malibu) lately?”

  Where are you going for (fill in the blank): Christmas vacation? New Year’s? Spring break? Presidents’ Day weekend? Where are you summering?

  3a. Where are you staying? (See above.)

  The Democrats: Politics is a fine topic to bring up in Hollywood—everyone is in agreement over who is good and who is bad. In fact, politics is considered a polite topic of conversation, and also a way to work in that one knows who the current president is.

  The Republicans: They eat babies; they steal from grandmothers; they are awful; everyone hates them. Repeat ad infinitum. Unless, say, you are in the presence of the few Red Celebs: Arnold, Mel, the still controversial Charlton Heston.

  Where do your kids go to school? It is assumed that the child or children attends a private school, though rarely has a parent attended one. And the parents of children in one private school are suspicious of parents of children in a different private school. Why are they in that school? Why are we not in that school? Are we wait-listed for that school? Why? How many hours of homework does your kid have? (Why doesn’t our kid have that much homework?)

  There are no parents more obsessed with getting their kids into Harvard than the Hollywood parent, though few had gone there themselves, and if they had, had probably been fired from their jobs by now. Here’s a tip: Moving to Hollywood? Keep your Ivy League degree to yourself.

  Religion? Seldom brought up unless someone was trying to get his child into a private school with a religious affiliation. For example, a person could say, “I’m trying to get into Wilshire Boulevard, but I have to join the Temple.” Or, “I need to be a parishioner for two years before I get into St. Stephen’s.”

  Kenny and Gracie had scrambled onto the guest list of every party for those between the ages of twenty-five and seventy five. For the last few years, they had attended, without fail, four events or dinners a week.

  Gracie calculated as the network executive jumped into the conversation guns blazing—four times fifty-two weeks equals two hundred and eight, multiplied by ten equals two thousand and eighty outings, not including this one.

  As the network executive labored through his dubiously masculine account of a recent white-water rafting trip, Gracie experienced Past Life Regression.

  Kenny wasn’t always so very Kenny. Gracie was clearheaded enough to remember when Kenny would groan about having to go out all the time, even if Gracie never quite believed that he resented the demands on his time. Gracie never really bought that he hated talking marketing with David Geffen or Barry Diller. Did Gracie wonder that he was miserable being away from her on her thirtieth birthday because he had to catch a private jet with Spielberg to see a screening in San Diego? No. Did Gracie think for a moment that he hated going back to work an hour after their daughter was born because Billy Bob Thornton was fighting with the director on his Western? Not a chance.

  Kenny was a low-man-on-the-totem-pole development executive when Gracie met him. He had phoned her out of the blue. “Kenny Pollock here,” he’d said, “Pollock like the fish.” “Not the artist?” Gracie had asked. She’d recently been to a LACMA exhibition of the artist’s most famous works. She’d stood for hours, staring at … what? Drops, lines, webs, colors, streams … And yet, she stood. Mesmerized. She’d gone back twice. The greatest emotional involvement she’d had in years—and it was with a painting.

  “Artist?” Kenny had cracked. “Don’t tell anyone in Hollywood I’ve got an artist’s name, they’ll run me out of town.” He talked her up for half an hour about optioning her first children’s book for no money for a never-to-be-made movie. Gracie was charmed by the way his voice cracked while toiling under the tenor of false bravado. Gracie had no idea what he looked like; she imagined he was small boned and fidgety and dark—just her type. He invited her for sushi in a place called Brentwood. Gracie had never had sushi and had rarely ventured west of La Cienega. When Gracie met him for this sushi lunch, she walked right past him toward another man sitting at the bar. Kenny tapped her on the shoulder, and Gracie turned around, stunned to see a tall galoot with football player shoulders and a child’s grin, and more stunned when he bear-hugged her and planted a big kiss on her cheek. Gracie wasn’t yet accustomed to the typical Hollywood greeting; she generally consigned her kisses and hugs to family members and lovers. Gracie soon learned she was a prude, that in Hollywood a kiss carries as little weight as a blow job from a call girl. Gracie learned to hand out kisses to maître d’s and studio chiefs as easily as she’d kiss her own mother. Except that she had never kissed her own mother on the lips.

  Kenny wasn’t her type. Period. Not least because he was the King of Exclamation. No person or activity was too prosaic to elude the Kenny Howl of Enthusiasm. Then there were his looks. Gracie didn’t like handsome, didn’t trust handsome, was never even a fan of handsome movie stars. Why would Gracie drool over Brad Pitt when Gracie would rather look like Brad Pitt? Kenny was too tall, too good-looking, and, she learned as their lunch wore on, too ambitious. Gracie had heard of five-year plans, even ten-year plans—but he had twenty-, thirty-, forty-year plans. Kenny knew what studio he wanted to run, he knew the types of movies he wanted to make, he knew who he wanted his lieutenants to be. Kenny knew what he wanted in a wife and he knew how many children he wanted (two: one boy, one girl) and where he wanted them to go to school (preschool, elementary school, high school, college—graduate school!). He knew what street he wanted to live on (“Rockingham—the best views in Los Angeles”); he knew what car he’d be driving in five years (Mercedes 600SL). The man knew where he’d end up after Alzheimer’s hit him in his old age (the Motion Picture Home).

  Kenny, who had barely made a dent into his thirtieth year, knew he’d be cremated and where his ashes would be scattered (in the Pacific, off the Baja Peninsula).

  On the surface, nothing about “The Kenny Package” would seem to appeal to a person like Gracie. She had never shared a tuna roll with anyone who seemed untouched by the Human Condition. He had emerged from his first thirty years unscathed. Of course Kenny had been a college athlete; of course he had been treasurer of his fraternity (better access to beer funds than the president); of course he had grown up in the suburbs in a two-parent household with a younger sister and a dog named Rusty.

  And of course he drove a BMW, in the L.A.-biquitous black. He took one sidelong look at her Toyota Cressida, as though afraid of infection by the working class, and told her she’d have to sell it and buy something more hip. Gracie told him the only thing more hip she could afford would be a skateboard.

  That afternoon he sent her a brand-new skateboard with hot pink wheels. She’d hugged the gift card to her chest. She could still remember the words scribbled onto the tiny card: “To Gracie, who deserves better wheels. Love, Kenny ‘The Artist’ Pollock.”

  Love!

  Gracie had been Kenny-fected.

  So despite her qualms, Gracie dated Kenny anyway and got attached to his goofy charm anyway and slept with him on the third date anyway—after all, they’d already had their fir
st kiss at the sushi bar. Maybe she was a sellout. Maybe Gracie should have stuck out her existence on the wrong side of town, driving the wrong car and wearing the wrong clothes. (“It’s a good thing you’re so cute,” Kenny told her the first morning after they’d slept together as Gracie was getting dressed in her baggy corduroys and long-sleeved T-shirt, “because your clothes suck.”) But Kenny represented what Gracie felt was missing in her life—stability. He could take charge, he knew where he was going; Gracie had no idea where her life was headed. There was no five-year plan; there wasn’t even a three-week plan. Gracie, who always prided herself on her independence, who had never depended on anyone, much less a man, secretly longed to be taken care of.

  With Kenny, Gracie would emerge from the shell of the studious UCLA student who watched from the bus stop as sorority girls whizzed by her in their convertible Cabriolets; with Kenny, she would no longer have her nose pressed up against the plate-glass Prada window. (Except that as she got older, she no longer “understood” Prada; what could those odd shoes and unflattering dresses mean?)

  In fact, sometimes Gracie wondered if the main reason she married Kenny was to seek vengeance upon Cabriolet-driving, MasterCard-hoarding sorority girls. Not that that was a terrible reason to get married. In Los Angeles, it could be the raison d’être; anyone would understand. In India and Pakistan, they had arranged marriages; in Los Angeles, marriages were arranged by the color of your American Express card.

  Back to Kenny’s business dinner: Emerging from her Past Life Regression, Gracie sipped her margarita and leaned back, sucking in her lower stomach as she always did when she heard her Pilates instructor’s voice egging her on in her mind—“strengthen the core, and the rest follows.”

  Thank God, Gracie thought. Thank God I’m married. I don’t have to worry about a little extra tummy.

  “Where are you going this Christmas?” the ex-stripper asked, jamming an ice pick through the fragile surface of Gracie’s reverie.