The Starter Wife (6 page)

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’re 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).

“You sure?”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine,” Gracie said. “I’m going to kill myself.” Gracie was joking, of course. She’d never kill herself over Kenny; she’d heard the story of The Westside Widower, the
handsome, young L.A. widower (Kenny at forty-one was young; Gracie at forty-one was middle-aged—such was L.A. math). The minute his lovely wife died of cancer, leaving him with two young children to raise, he went on a dating rampage, turning up on the mattress side of Frette sheets everywhere from Silver Lake to Point Dume. He covered more area of Los Angeles than Onstar.

The Widower’s wife’s death was like Viagra, without side effects. Gracie wondered if such a thing could be prescribed. “Take one dead wife and call me in the morning. From your new girlfriend’s futon.”

“I’m driving over right now—”

“What’re you talking about? You’re way out in Malibu. By the time you got here they’d be zipping up the body bag.”

“Where is the Kenny right now?”

“The Kenny is staying at a friend’s house, some director who’s going through a divorce,” Gracie said. “Apparently it’s in the water at The Ivy.”

She sat up as a realization reared its ugly head. “He planned this out. You know Kenny. He probably knew he was going to do this years ago. He probably has another family. Maybe he’s leading a double life.”

“This is crazy, it can’t be over, just like that. What about counseling? Have you been to counseling?”

Gracie thought about it; they’d never been to marriage counseling. Gracie had gone to counseling in the beginning of their marriage—there were many personality issues to overcome. More or less her personality issues—the fact that Gracie had too much personality. Gracie said and did pretty much what Gracie pleased, in the beginning. Before Gracie learned The Way of the Wife.

“He just wants out,” Gracie concluded. “He just wants
out.” Without thought, her hand opened, palm up, as though she were freeing a living thing.

“You’re going to need a lawyer.”

“Oh, God, I don’t want lawyers. Lawyers will only make things ugly.”

“Guess what, Princess. Things are as ugly as Tony Soprano in a Wonder Bra. Tell me you don’t have a pre-nup.”

Gracie paused. She and Kenny were to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary in a month. “Oh my—”

“God! You have a pre-nup?!”

“With a ten-year expiration date—”

The pre-nup was about to be annulled. In one month plus change, it would have been null and void.

Instead, her marriage was.

“I’ve been Cruised!” Gracie, slurring, meant being left by one’s spouse before the ten-year anniversary mark. She’d heard that in California, if a couple has been married ten years, the wife is entitled to spousal support for the rest of her life. Allegedly, Tom Cruise had asked for divorce prior to the ten-year mark when he divorced Nicole Kidman.

Gracie burped, which she sometimes did when she was under extreme duress. How attractive. How very attractive. Men like middle-aged, freckly handed alcoholics.

“I can have him killed,” Joan offered. “Pappy knows people. Westside real estate is a very rough business.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Gracie said.

“Seriously, Gracie,” Joan said, “make up your story. Make it up tonight. Before Kenny has a chance to.”

“My story?” Gracie asked.

“Not too many details, keep it on the surface. I’m a little rusty, but I can help you. Include the words: ‘impotence’ and ‘bad investments.’ ”

Gracie kissed Joan good-bye and hung up. When she had handed her valet ticket to the nice young Peruvian boy (single?) at the valet station, she’d still been married. Before she’d answered that call, she’d still been married. What would have happened, Gracie wondered, had she still been in a bad reception area? Or had she had the cell phone on vibrate?

She would still be married. Until the morning, maybe. But at least she would have had a good night’s sleep.

Gracie looked at her ring. She forgot to ask Joan when she was supposed to slip it off her finger. Now, tonight? After the divorce was final? When?

She sat there, alone in her bad-cell-phone-call grief, wondering who else she could burden. Joan was an easy call—she had no children, and her husband, much like an infant, was asleep by eight-thirty. Most of her other friends had kids and marriages held together by duct tape. Gracie wondered at the marriage she’d thought she had. She and Kenny were supposed to be the happily married couple, they were the ones other people talked about in their thrice-weekly therapy sessions, they were the ones who were called The Power Couple in
L.A. Confidential.
How could The Power Couple break up? The Power Couple cannot break up! Gracie thought, mocking herself.We can’t break the hearts of our millions of followers!