The Starter Wife Read online

  It was March.

  Gracie smiled.The margarita was working its magic.

  GRACIE HAD TURNED LEFT from Sunset onto Rockingham when her cell phone rang, the recorded voice of her daughter repeating itself: Mommy, your cell phone is ringing. Mommy, your cell phone is ringing.

  The caller ID flashed Kenny’s car phone number.

  “Hello?” Gracie said. “Hello?” she repeated. She cursed; the reception in Brentwood was always bad.

  “Kenny?” All Gracie heard was the maddening staccato hiccups of a broken phone connection.

  “Kenny? I’m losing you,” Gracie said. She wondered why he didn’t wait to talk to her until they were both home. She hung up and tossed the phone in the passenger seat. And then she worried: What if he’d been in an accident?

  She was pulling into her driveway when the phone rang again. Three bars showed up on the cell phone. The reception would be clear.

  “Kenny?” Gracie asked. “Is everything all right?”

  “I said”—Kenny’s voice was finally clear—“I want a divorce.”

  The execution of their marriage was performed via Cingular Wireless.

  2

  THE SEVEN STAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD MARRIAGE

  KENNY HAD PROPOSED, as expected, on Valentine’s Day. After all, they were almost three years into his five-year plan, and Gracie knew he wanted to be married before he was thirty-two. They were staying at the Auberge du Soleil in Napa. Gracie knew that something was afoot because Kenny seldom took a day off from work. Even on weekends, he would read ten scripts to be ready with notes on Monday, and watch as many demo reels and videotapes to be up on the talent pool. Kenny and Gracie were living together in his small house in the Palisades, the miniaturized ultimate in Woman’s Day suburban living. Kenny hated the little house; Gracie thought it glorious. Kenny had his social (read: work-related social) routine: the business dinners during the week, followed by a breakfast meeting on Saturday, either at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills or Shutters in Santa Monica—there were stringent rules on where to hold breakfast or lunch meetings. Or since he’d taken up golf (“Eisner golfs!”), he’d be up and out early at the Riviera.

  But Sunday morning—that was their time alone. They would make love early in the morning, barely awake, dreamily groping for each other’s body under the covers. Time would evaporate. Troubles were shunted aside. All that existed were lips and skin and Kenny’s boyish scent. Gracie could have lived for days on Kenny’s scent.

  The sex was phenomenal. Gracie knew that she was unlike any other girl Kenny had ever dated. She saw the old pictures, the slender, dynamic blondes clutching a beer can and cigarette in one hand with troublesome ease, the tennis wrinkles already forming around their startling blue eyes. Kenny approached Gracie as though she were the northern tip of Africa, and he the Great White Hunter. She knew he’d never experienced ample thighs, her tangle of hair, her pale, giving skin. Kenny would fall asleep on top of Gracie’s stomach, purring into the well of flesh around her belly button.

  Gracie would run her fingers through his jock-cut hair as he slept. She would stare at the high Spanish ceiling with the watermarks and pass his locks through her fingers like a mantra. She found whole worlds in those moments.

  Hours later, they would rise and jog, unsteady, giddy, down to the beach. If they were very ambitious, they could make it all the way to Venice. But Gracie was not nearly as eager to exercise as Kenny, so often they’d just stop for coffee along the bike path, taking in the sights—overly tan girls in bikinis on roller skates, chubby men in Lycra shorts on blades, babies bouncing uncomfortably in jogging strollers as their stringy, stern mothers chugged behind them. During the week, it was easy for Gracie to lose Kenny. He was at the gym on Montana by 6:00 A.M. five times a week (Jerry Bruckheimer pumps iron at five-thirty!); they would often not see each other until seven-thirty in the evening, and that was usually in conjunction with another couple—or a hundred other couples. But Gracie could fill the hours with procrastination and sometimes even the writing itself. Gracie was proud that she made her own money, though it was nothing by Hollywood standards; more than that, Gracie loved that Kenny was proud of her. She knew she was different from the other women; Gracie would never become needy, Gracie would never mold herself into the image of the proper wife.

  There were a lot of things that Gracie told herself she’d never do.

  And then Gracie grew up. Oh, did Gracie grow up.

  Their last night at the Auberge, Kenny insisted on having dinner inside their room on the balcony. Gracie had to agree; it was a night consistent with the vestiges of winter—dark, cloudless sky, stars forming their own personal constellations. Kenny pointed his long, pitcher’s arm toward the sky. “There’s the constellation Batman” or “Do you see? There’s the constellation Swollen Penis!” They laughed like five-year-olds and Gracie held on to him and had never in her life been happier.

  Looking back, Gracie marveled at the fact that Kenny had picked a perfect night for a proposal. His timing had always been faultless; he knew just when to move out of one job and into another, he knew the right moment to court press, he knew when to cut losses and people.With every major life question, he was the Titan of Timing.

  They had just finished her favorite part of the meal, dessert—a molten chocolate soufflé. Gracie had eaten her half and Kenny’s when he dropped down to one knee. For a second, Gracie thought he had dropped his fork, but there it was, a solitaire diamond so beautiful that Gracie had almost forgotten about the chocolate.

  “Will you?” he asked.

  “Will I what?” Gracie teased.

  “Will you help me up?” he replied. “I’ve got a bad knee, remember?”

  Gracie laughed and said, “Yes, I will help you up, and yes, I will marry you.”

  He was putting the ring on her finger when Gracie asked, “You were asking me to marry you, right? I don’t want to look more foolish than I already do.”

  Kenny nodded and smiled, his big, trademark grin easing across his face. He looked so happy—almost, almost carefree. Gracie kissed his mouth and they smiled, nose-to-nose, and they kissed again and then they laughed and couldn’t stop laughing until Gracie cried like a baby, relieved that the world had suddenly opened its large, loving arms for her, and he begged her to stop or else he would take the ring back, and then they kissed more.

  Gracie had described the scene to friends and to acquaintances many times since, but never quite recaptured the moment. There was enough romance in that one night to last a lifetime. Whenever Gracie felt impatient with Kenny, which was often—with the demands of his job, the demands on his time, the bad romance novels Gracie read at night because there was no one to talk to—Gracie would think of that moment and hold it close. And remember why she had married him in the first place.

  PUKING IN an enclosed garage creates a surround-sound effect that George Lucas himself would be eager to copyright. Gracie wiped damp remnants of onion ring from her mouth when she realized, through her tequila-pending-divorce stupor, that she had lived through all seven stages of The Hollywood Marriage:

  STAGE ONE: Date the up-and-comer—this part can be eliminated if up-and-comer is already up and came (currently successful) or came and went (bilked studio out of hundreds of millions and living it up in Bel Air).

  STAGE TWO: Marry aforementioned.

  STAGE THREE: Swear you won’t give up your career.

  STAGE FOUR: Give up your career when the burden of being on what feels like thousands of charity boards becomes overwhelming. Children, memorize this equation before you begin Stage Four: One Charity Board = 240 uncomfortable phone calls (to ask for money), thirty lunches (to plan [some] and drink [more] Chardonnay), and one excruciatingly painful event night.

  STAGE FIVE: Two kids a must. Two, not one, two! Even if the second one has to be adopted, through a surrogate, or an adopted surrogate! Two kids = triple child support = a lifetime of yoga retreats.

  STAGE SIX: Begin drink
ing (if haven’t already. But you have, haven’t you. Good girl.) If possible, stick to Grandma’s good-old standby, vodka. No smell, no tell!

  Or: Begin Vicodin and/or Mexican Quaaludes. Or both. Why not?

  STAGE SEVEN: Decorate house(s). Hire decorator. Become decorator’s new best friend that you can’t live without. Pay decorator exorbitant sums to be new best friend. Fight with husband over new best friend. Husband complains to Wednesday-night poker buddies but secretly enjoys that he has money to burn on eighteenth-century Dutch étagères. Whatever that is.

  ALTERNATIVE TO STAGE SEVEN: Do yoga, then do yoga instructor.

  Gracie had chosen Stage Seven (A), and had “adopted” her decorator, Will. She steadfastly refused to have an affair with a yoga instructor until she had the self-esteem to attend a yoga class, which attracted as many nineteen-year-old actresses as an open casting call at The O.C.

  STAGE EIGHT: Divorce.

  “Over his cell phone?”

  Gracie had called her closest friend, Joan, right after she’d swung open the car door, threw up inside the carpeted three-car garage, and traversed, in the dark, the maze of sharp-cornered postmodern furniture in the living room. Gracie finally curled up in the corner of the couch shaped, mercifully, like a lima bean. She didn’t dare turn the light on and risk catching a glimpse of herself in the smoky mirror hanging above the granite fireplace. Gracie didn’t dare acknowledge the fact that here she was, on the precipice of forty-one and a widow. Well, not really a widow, Gracie thought, but one could hope. Perhaps Kenny would drive his convertible Mercedes (600 series, of course!) into an endangered California oak on the way to wherever he was going, leaving his boulder-sized head to roll down Sunset, where it would be picked up in the morning by a street sweeper.

  The thought of Kenny being decapitated made Gracie feel momentarily better. Her body warmed, she felt the blood return to her fingertips.

  As of fifteen minutes ago, Gracie had become a statistic. More than a statistic—Gracie was a woman who would probably never have sex again in her lifetime. Which could be some sort of statistic in itself.

  Gracie thought she should move to Paris. Didn’t Parisians take pity on middle-aged American women with freckles on their hands? Didn’t that Olivier Martinez live in Paris? How do you say “Take me, I’m old” in French?

  “He said he didn’t want to be married anymore!” Gracie screamed back.

  “Over his cell phone?” Joan yelled again. “Who breaks up with his wife over a cell phone? Who does he think he is, P. Diddy?” Gracie pictured her with her orange-red suicide bangs flipping up and down, down and up with each dramatic, exasperated breath. Joan had experienced every legal vice known to man and had stuck like glue to at least three of them, including yelling when talking would suffice.

  “It was very Hip-Hop of him,” Gracie acknowledged. “Do you realize you’re screaming?”

  “Calm down,” Joan yelled. “You’re hysterical!”

  “Oh, God. He said … he actually said … he said we’ve grown apart!” Gracie was now bawling and screaming at once. “It’s like something out of a Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas movie! He dialogued me!” A torrent of liquid snot poured out of her nose. Lights flashed before her eyes as Gracie lost all control of her senses.The last time Gracie had felt this way, the Republicans had gained control of the House and the Senate.

  “Bullshit!” Joan said. “The only thing that’s grown about Kenny is his head. His head is so much bigger than when I first met him. His head could eat other heads!”

  Joan was a former sitcom writer on a show about two blond twins who wind up living with their therapist; it was called Who’s the Crazy One? When the show was canceled, after the actor who played the therapist hung himself in his trailer (he was heavy into Vicodin, the Official Drug of the Millennium), Joan left the business and married a real estate magnate she’d met at a Funk Dance class at the Sports Club. An older real estate magnate. A much older real estate magnate. Who was bald. Not to mention older. Okay, he was freaking Methuselah. This is what happens to forty-year-old women in L.A. when they run out of dating options: they marry their grandfathers. Joan seldom wrote anymore, what with all the Georgian rooms that needed decorating and the French wine that needed drinking and the Ben Franklins that needed spending.

  “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand—” Now Gracie realized she sounded like she was starring in a movie. Take My Divorce, featuring Gracie Anne Pollock in her first ever starring role!

  “Oh God. I’m mewling!” Gracie banged her head against the arm of the couch. “I never mewl!”

  “Is it the baby?” Joan and Gracie still called her three-and-a-half-year-old, Jaden, “the baby.”

  “He loves the baby—he says he loves the baby.” Gracie thought about it. Did he really spend any time with our child? Any time at all? Didn’t Jaden seem, well, kind of scared of her father? Maybe not scared, Gracie thought, but definitely startled when he walked into a room. Jaden, who smiled and engaged in three-minute conversations with everyone—the gardener, the poolman, the UPS guy with the granite legs.

  Gracie wondered if the UPS guy was single.

  “Is it the sex?” Joan inquired. Bravely, Gracie thought.

  “Who? Where? What? When? How?”

  Gracie had been nauseous for nine months with her pregnancy; the only time they tried having sex when Gracie was pregnant, she had had to run to the bathroom and throw up. After the baby was born, things had picked up for a while. Hadn’t they picked up for a while? When was the last time they actually … picked up?

  Ah. Oh. Hmmm.

  Gracie figured Kenny was through with having sex, but maybe he was just through with having sex with her.

  Oh, thought Gracie, here comes the headache. Just waiting patiently behind the curtain for its cue—Kenny no longer wanted to have sex with her. Yep, there it was. Hello, Headache! Come on in, join Low Self-Esteem and, next up, Diarrhea! Doesn’t she look great?!

  “Look, everyone knows you don’t have sex after you have a kid,” Joan said. “That’s why Pappy and I are not having children.”

  “Joan, no offense, but your husband is old enough to remember the Alamo, the war not the movie, no one could remember the movie,” Gracie said. “And please, for the love of God and this one conversation, don’t call him Pappy.”

  “But that’s his name!” Joan’s husband was Mike “Pappy” McAllister of McAllister Realty, the second-largest real-estate agency in the Greater Western Los Angeles Area (according to the Paps himself, and the bus stops that bore his name and likeness from his Army photograph, circa 1944).

  “Make up something else. For me.”

  “Anyway, that’s reason number one why I’m not having a kid. Number two being that I already own yours; I bought her off with Malibu Barbie’s RV, remember?” Joan continued. Gracie had the distinct feeling she was not only talking to Joan, but to Joan plus three glasses of red. “Number three, my eggs have dust bunnies.”

  Gracie and Kenny had talked about having another baby. Kenny’s plan was to have two children, one of whom was to be a male child; Kenny applying the same rules for himself as, say, a monarchy. Gracie had resisted; it had been so tough for her to get pregnant. And then her pregnancy was not a time of spiritual enlightenment, of glowing skin and glossy hair and swelling bosoms, a time of feeling connected to the world; Gracie’s pregnancy was a time of elephant ankles, of hips that mushroomed into buildings overnight, of strange medical terms that required shots several times a week, of a nausea that lasted 238 days. The nausea, Gracie thought, when she envisioned another baby in her life. Imagine being seasick for thirty-four weeks, with no sign of land or medication. Now double that feeling. You’re almost there.

  She had brought up adoption; Kenny was adamant about passing on his genes. “What if we got a faulty one?” he’d say. “Didn’t you see that movie?”

  Gracie heard Joan’s voice, through the memory muck.

  “Okay, I know you’r
e not ready to hear this,” Joan said, “but I think you’ve got to ask yourself. Is it another—”

  “Don’t say it—”

  “Eighty percent of couples deal with infidelity at one point or another in their marriage,” Joan said, “which is why I married an older man. That and the fact that he was the first man I’d dated in five years who had his own transportation. Now, back to Kenny’s insensitivity and big head and infidelity.” Joan and Gracie’s friendship had no artificial flavors or colors. Sometimes this was a good thing; sometimes, Gracie could do with some fake vanilla.

  “I said, do not say it!” Gracie wasn’t ready to think about any other women just yet. Other younger women with pouty smiles and dewy skin and liquid eyes and dimples on their faces, where they should be, as opposed to where hers were starting to congregate—from the waist down, despite the hours of cellulite massage.

  Gracie started to gag like a dog who’s eaten too much front lawn. She decided to take solace in the fact that there was a one percent chance Kenny could be gay.Wasn’t every man in L.A.?

  “Can I be blamed for not having a penis?” Gracie asked.

  “What? You’re feeling guilty for not having a penis? I’m coming over right now,” Joan said. “Pappy’s asleep, he’ll never know I’m gone.”

  “No.” Although Gracie really did want someone to come over and rock her in their arms and stroke her hair and make her something sweet to eat that wouldn’t make her weigh one ounce more in the morning. Kenny had bought her a Tanita fat-measuring scale for last Christmas—the romantic fool! The gift that keeps giving (her a heart attack)! Gracie knew how much each item of clothing in her closet weighed, down to the last belt buckle (four ounces), down to the last knee-high nylons (two ounces). Gracie stopped weighing herself after she noticed that she was weighing herself after every trip to the bathroom, when Gracie knew how much a typical morning bowel movement weighed (think belt buckle).