The Starter Wife (23 page)

“And I got twelve whole stuffed animals!” Jaden exclaimed. Gracie looked at Jaden’s pink and white overnight case, bursting at the seams.

“And we got a man-cure and we went to a nightclub!” Jaden said.

Gracie thought she must have made a mistake. You know, kids …

“Nightclub?” Gracie asked. “I don’t think you mean nightclub, honey.”

“Oh, yes, Mommy. That’s what Daddy and Britney called it,” she said. “They let me stay up late.”

Now, she was looking at Gracie with accusing eyes. Her mood had suddenly changed. It was Hate Mommy Time.

“Britney says I’m the prettiest girl in the whole world,” she said, twirling. Gracie’s mind went to the film starring a prepubescent Brooke Shields,
Pretty Baby.
“Do you think I’m the
prettiest girl in the whole world, Mommy?” she asked, twirling, twirling.

Kenny and Britney Spears are turning my baby, Gracie thought, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, into a child prostitute.

“I think you’re beautiful inside and out,” Gracie said.

Jaden gave her a look which, translated from the three-year-old-ese, said: That isn’t good enough.

“Britney says I can go to her concerts anytime I want,” Jaden said. “She says she’ll even bring me up onstage. I can be one of her dancers!”

Gracie could not keep Kenny from dating Britney Spears—the lure of young skin and an
Us Magazine
cover were too great—but she could keep him from turning her lovely, smart daughter into a stripper.

Couldn’t she?

“Honey, you’re the smartest little girl I know,” Gracie said, her voice straining. Her daughter finally stopped twirling and landed in a heap on the ground, her legs splayed in front of her. “See, there is more to life than beauty. There’s intelligence, kindness—”

“Britney is so pretty, huh, Mommy?” Jaden looked up at her mother.

“She is. She’s definitely pretty. If you like that sort of thing. I personally prefer, like, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Mommy prefers classic, ageless beauty.”

“She’s almost my age, Mommy!” Jaden said. “She said she’s gonna be my new best friend! She moved in and everything!”

Gracie knew that God had big, big plans for her, based on this conversation. He/She would never let Gracie suffer through this for no apparent reason.

“I’m glad you like her, Jaden,” Gracie said. “I’m sure she’s a very nice person. Where, exactly, did she move into?”

“You know, your old room. With Daddy. You don’t need it anymore, right, Mommy? Daddy says you want Daddy to be happy. I want you to meet her, Mommy,” Jaden said.

“I would like nothing more, except maybe a root canal … without Novocain.”

“I learned about canals,” Jaden said. “What’s No-Caine?”

“Oh, honey,” Gracie said, wrapping her arms around her daughter and holding her against her chest. “It’s just something Mommy needs every once in a while for her heart.”

“Mommy, I think you’re beautiful,” Jaden said.

Gracie smiled. Jaden was her daughter, probably the only child she’d ever have. Of course she would never turn her back on her mother. Of course she would never really prefer Britney over Mommy, except for short periods of time. And that would wear off, at least until the next twenty-year-old child came along in Kenny’s life.

She knew Jaden would never abandon her mother, the woman who knew her true heart. What was it Gracie’s father had told her years ago? “Love expands,” he said. “Love doesn’t subtract.”

“But not like new-beautiful,” Jaden said, stroking Gracie’s cheek. “Like old-beautiful.”

“Jaden, have Daddy and Britney told you what vodka is?” Gracie asked. Her daughter shook her head.

“Good,” Gracie said, and she got up to make herself a drink. Sure, eleven
A.M.
was a little early for a screwdriver, but when the going gets tough, the tough get tipsy.

H
OW DOES ONE
have dinner with her ex-husband’s boss, Gracie wondered, as Saturday night loomed ever closer.

“You don’t,” Will said. “Isn’t he, like, a hundred years old?”

“He’s barely into his sixties,” Gracie said. “And you can’t deny he’s still sexy. You’re just mad at him because he didn’t hire you to redo his house.”

“He is so Tom Jones, don’t you think, with just a sprinkling of Jack Nicholson?” Cricket said.

Cricket and Will were soaking in the sun outside the deck on the beach side of the house, though there wasn’t any sand to rest their chairs on. They were actually sitting on the steps leading to the beach. The tide was high, and Joan’s beachfront house had become, instead, a boat.

“How much does it cost to rent this house?”Will asked. “This is like an episode of
Gilligan’s Island,
seriously.”

“Can we talk about important things?” Gracie said, as all three of them lifted their feet on cue as a wave splashed over them.

Earlier, they had been sitting a few houses down, on the dry beach in front of the Boners, until their housekeeper had trotted down the stairs and, while apologizing profusely in Spanish, informed them that this beach was private and they’d have to move. Gracie said she wasn’t aware of any private beaches in California—the entire coastline was in fact public—but the maid was obviously in fear of losing her job. And so, grumbling, they moved their beach towels and chairs a few feet north, and made camp in front of the neighbor who, according to Lavender, preferred hookers to conversation.

The hooker-preferring neighbor came out on his deck a moment later, followed by a girl in the smallest bikini possible, with doll thighs and the biggest tits of anyone Gracie had ever seen. Gracie would have listened closer to what he was saying (yelling), but she was waiting for the girl to tip over the railing headfirst onto the beach. Even now she couldn’t recall the
girl’s hair color; when boobs are that big, hair color is superfluous. Everything else is superfluous.

The gist of his emoting was that this beach was private and you can’t sit in front of my house and it’s private here and don’t you read the signs and my beach is a private beach and I’ll call the security guards, and on and on and on and so forth …

Will stared at him, the stare of the gay and perpetually bored with heterosexual men who have obvious sexual hang-ups. Cricket just giggled hysterically.

Gracie, tired of having to move, said, “Get security.”

The man huffed and walked away.

A few minutes later, Lavender came walking down the beach, wearing her regulation dark khakis and short-sleeved white shirt, her badge and forehead shining in the midday sun.

Gracie rose to greet her, immediately sorry that she was the cause of Lavender’s long trek. “Are you here to arrest me?” she asked.

“This guy has a major stick up his behind,” Lavender said, waving and smiling toward the man now standing, hands on his hips, on his deck.

“Well, doesn’t that young lady get paid to work it out for him?” Will asked, taking a long sip of iced tea.

“I have to ask the question,” Lavender said.

“Please don’t,” said Gracie. “We’ve already moved once, for the Boners.”

“He’s just going to keep calling me out here and I’m gonna have to keep coming out and pretending to chastise you until you finally leave,” Lavender replied. “Now, you know it’s too hot for my liking and it’s too hot for me to be taking a walk.”

“What’re you reading?” Gracie asked.

“Science fiction,” Lavender said. “This black woman author. There’s a test next Thursday.”

“Cool,” Gracie said. “Okay, I don’t want you to have to walk down here anymore. We’ll leave.”

Lavender nodded her thanks and waved again to the man who hadn’t moved from the deck, and turned and walked back up the beach. The man walked into his house. He would probably not even come out for the rest of the afternoon, Gracie thought. She had never even seen him on his deck before.

Cricket and Gracie started gathering up their towels and chairs and drinks and magazines when they noticed that Will was no longer standing next to them.

They looked up to see Will standing on a boulder with his back toward them, facing the man’s deck, swaying side to side, peeing on #228’s chaise lounges.

G
RACIE HAD
been nervous about getting ready for her “date” with Lou Manahan. She shouldn’t have been, really—she’d known him for over ten years. They’d shared meals and laughs and compared cold, hard appraisals of the people they ran into every day. In a town where friendship meant little and love meant less, they were a rarity: two people who couldn’t help each other who enjoyed each other’s company anyway.

Well, that’s not actually true, Gracie thought. Lou was Kenny’s boss; of course it had mattered to her to make a good impression on Lou.

But now she found herself analyzing. What would Lou like to see her in? What item of clothing made her look taller?

Skinnier? Voluptuous? At all, perish the thought, classy? She didn’t even want to think of all the women Lou had dated; there was a list as long as the metropolitan phone book, minus all the dental offices and legal services. In the last three decades, Lou had dated only the most ravishing women in the world: Ali MacGraw and Dyan Cannon in the seventies, Farrah Fawcett
and Jacqueline Bisset in the eighties, Madonna and a postop Courtney Love (but only once) in the nineties.

His most recent fling—the one Gracie had only heard about through the Hollywood grapevine because Lou was never one to kiss and tell—had been with Demi Moore. The only girls Gracie had ever seen him with had one thing in common, and it was enough: extraordinary beauty.

What Gracie was looking at when she looked in the mirror could be extraordinary (as in, “What extraordinarily wrinkled elbows you have,” or “How extraordinary that your three-year old C-section scar still looks like an old bicycle tire”), but not necessarily associated with “beauty.” At most, Gracie believed, she could be associated with extraordinary stability and pleasantness.

She reminded herself that she was a fine-looking woman with many attributes. And besides, Will was right, why was she nervous when, really, she was going on a date with someone who was old enough to have voted for McGovern?

Unless he voted for Nixon, Gracie thought as the doorbell rang.Then she would really have problems.

WIFE NUMBER SIX

Is a scientist. She likes to mix just the right amount of vodka with Mexican Quaaludes before she goes out dancing with her child’s swim instructor.

She trusts him.He knows mouth-to-mouth.

15
 
PLANNING YOUR OWN FUNERAL

L
OU
M
ANAHAN
was so often called the King of Hollywood in the media that people had taken simply to calling him “King” or “El Rey” or “Your Highness.” Honestly, he didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or pleased. If he’d had a mother, he would have believed his mother wouldn’t have raised him to take pride in false flattery. Sure, he could feel a little pride in his accomplishments. Lou, who hadn’t even graduated from high school, who joined the Marines at seventeen lying about his age just so he could catch a ride to the front lines, where he could shoot a gun—and it was
legal!

And then he became the prince in an urban fairy tale. He had taken some shrapnel, caught a train from Pendleton back to Brooklyn, and was riding in a taxi, sharing it with some older fancy guy who said, after a minor conversation about the sorry state of the world, that he saw in Lou what he himself had when he was young. The guy had been in World War II, the last good war, a tail gunner. They wound up being friends.
More than friends, really, the man was like Lou’s father. And he got Lou work in a mailroom at the biggest agency in New York, made him wear a suit and tie, taught him to control his mouth but not his mind.

He taught Lou to keep coiled, like a snake, to pounce only when absolutely necessary, to talk softly and move quietly; to read up on all the ancient methods of war, to incorporate them into his thoughts and actions, and then to forget them, as though they never existed.

Lou still kept the old man, now living in an old folks’ home on Long Island, on payroll.

Lou poured himself a scotch rocks and walked out onto his deck and looked out at the immense stretch of water and thought about how people always complained that “things have changed, the business has changed,” and that it was true. In came the accountants, and gone were the perks. Lucky for Lou, he had lived through the best of it. He’d had a string of hits, both commercial and critical, while he was at Paramount in the late seventies and early eighties that had yet to be duplicated by any other studio, and now, working for himself, he had proven to be both a good studio chief and a great producer. He had experienced it all: the money, the girls, the magazine covers, the notoriety. He was known as a drinker in a sober world, a smoker in a nonsmoker’s universe, a slut in a place where people talked only about sex.

But as he grew older, and as he had experienced not one but two heart attacks (which were quickly downplayed in the press as gastric episodes), he was thinking about something bigger than his rep, bigger than his movies: he was thinking about his life; he was thinking about his legacy.