The Starter Wife (19 page)

He ran his fingers through the thickness of his black hair and down around his mustache, scraping his beard, then took a final look at the water before walking in and plunging.

The yellow Labrador that had been sitting beside Sam now serenaded him with his barks before he, too, finally dove in and followed, as though chasing a human ball.

7:00
PM.
There were two things Gracie could count on at this time of the evening, when the skies turned and daylight exploded in a symphony of color. Three things, if one counted her feeling of inadequacy in not being able to capture adequately the disappearance of the sun into the rocky, ragged cliffs
of Point Dume. As she watched the sunset, she often thought Van Gogh would have painted the scene perfectly, with the grays and blues and oranges and purples, the brilliant cusp melting slowly on the horizon. Peaceful and violent at once.

But then she comforted herself with the notion that she had both ears, was not in love with a prostitute (yet), and with any luck would probably not die penniless.

The two things she could count on were the sunset. And the stout, dark-haired, bearded man. The bearded man made his way through the path to Surfrider Beach every day around this time. He was large and lumbered rather than walked, as though every step were a test and he had to use brute strength to reach his destination, the old telephone pole just this side of lifeguard tower 2. His gait reminded Gracie of heavyweight champions as they lunged down the stairs into the ring, driving heavily forward.

The bearded man would stop at the pole, facing the gray, dreary, beautiful Pacific. She wondered if it looked the same to him as it did to her—like a woman who lets herself go but can still bring pleasure.

He would suddenly drop to his knees. And bring his thick hands together in prayer. Gracie couldn’t see them well but imagined his hands to be hardened by work and an unforgiving life. His clothes were worn; what was left of his hair a confusion.

She would watch him for long moments as she stirred something in a pot or talked on the phone. Or listened to Jaden singing to herself. Or did nothing at all. She wondered about this man, but mostly she wondered at how a stranger, someone whom she had never met at all, could bring her such solace.

WIFE NUMBER FOUR

Is married to a film director known for his soft romantic comedies. She was surprised to come home one day to him wearing not only her La Perla lingerie and her best Manolos but a blond wig she’d saved from a Halloween party.

She and “Marilyn” go out to lunch several times a week.

10
 
A SEA CHANGE

“Y
OU KNOW WHAT
makes the Malibu Colony so weird?” Will said. “It’s the only place in the world where you walk into the back of your house. Up is down, down is up—it’s all backwards.”

Gracie stared at him.

“Oh my God,” Will said as he fanned his face with his hand. “You would not believe what just happened to me. Seriously, this is life-changing.”

Will had just walked into the house, wearing oversize sunglasses and a scarf Isadora Duncan would have been honored to have broken her neck with. He and Cricket had demanded that Gracie go with them to Nobu, Malibu’s raw fish answer to Spago, for dinner. Will had heard that Suge Knight was recently spotted there. Much like Patty Hearst, he had a thing for the gangsta set.

“Did you take a ‘straight’ pill?” Gracie asked, regarding his obsession with all things hip-hop.

Will twisted his small, turned-up nose. “Eww. Bad picture. Change the channel.” He sat down with a flourish on Joan’s soft white overstuffed couch. Will tended to do everything with a flourish. Gracie wondered for a moment what he was like in bed—was he always this dramatic? She wiped the vision from her head with a mental squeegee.

“Why is it that every couch in Malibu looks like something out of
The Cat in the Hat?
It’s Shabby Chic Purgatory,” Will said, looking at her accusingly. “Where all the overstuffed couches go to die.”

“You’re just jealous of anyone who makes more money at the same profession as you,” Gracie replied.

“Of course,” Will said, “there’s not enough to go around, I don’t care what anyone says, gazillionaires with bad taste do not grow on trees.”

“You were about to tell me about your life-changing experience? Or would you rather I slip into a coma while you rant at other successful designers.”

“I was at Cross Creek, innocently picking up an Ice Blended and I saw”—he put his hand to his chest—“Pamela Anderson Lee Anderson … Lee Anderson Pamela.”

“No!” Gracie said, more excited than she meant to be. What was it about blond, bosomy celebrities? Could we not get enough? “How did she look?”

“In a word: You would hate her!” Will said.

“I knew it!” Gracie said, sitting down next to Will and getting swallowed by a man-eating pillow. “Go on,” she said as she offered him a bowl of M&Ms.

Will grabbed at them with his soft, childlike hand. “Cocoa butter tan. Not a stitch of makeup. And judging by her Juicys, full-on commando. I heard she waxes from here to Uranus.”

“If she’s single and out there, I should just retire my vagina.” Gracie asked, “How old do you think she is?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “Should we cut her open and count the rings?”

“Where is Cricket?” Gracie asked, realizing that the third member of The Coven had not shown up, even though she had driven with Will.

“Oh,” Will said, “I left her outside, crying. Question: Why do you people get married?”

“Hey,” Gracie said, “you people will be able to get married someday.”

“Never,” Will said. “I’m praying to the Gay Gods for that constitutional amendment. Why should we suffer like the rest of you? You will never see this girl before a minister reciting ‘love is patient, love is kind,’ et cetera, ad nauseous.”

Will was not a romantic; he even broke down the word one day for Gracie’s edification.“‘Roman’ and ‘tic,’” he said to Gracie. “One is an ancient Italian, the other is an insect that gives you Lyme disease. I want neither in my life, thank you.”

They were about to get up from the couch (this took a while—sitting on the couch was like skiing in four feet of powder) when Will looked down at Gracie’s feet.

“What are those?” he demanded, pointing.

Gracie looked at her new Ugg boots. “The Pamela wears them,” she protested.

“I’m not going out with you if you wear those,” he said. “They’re an abomination. You look like an albino Inuit, if there is such a thing.Which there shouldn’t be.”

“I’m trying to fit in!” Gracie said. “I have to have Uggs! People here practically sleep in them; infants wear them, grandmothers wear them. They’re the official footwear of the city of Malibu!”

But Will would not budge, so Gracie trudged upstairs and put on a pair of flat-soled metallic sandals.

“Much better,” he said as they walked outside. “I thought I lost you there for a moment.”

G
RACIE SAT
at a round table on the patio outside Nobu with Will and Cricket. Between sobs and passion-fruit martinis, Cricket laid out the map to her marriage, starting with her wedding day, when she knew something was hideously wrong because a crow had landed on the roof of her car that morning and pecked at her windshield, and ending with that very morning, when Cricket and Jorge, who had finally engaged in battle, had fought until three
A.M.

“What was the fight about?” Gracie asked, though she already knew and didn’t want to know more.

“Married people always fight about three things,” Will said. “It’s money, sex, or sex and money.”

“Sex. Jorge wants more sex, and I just want to nap,” Cricket said. She turned to Gracie. “You look so beautiful, by the way. What is going on? You never looked this good.”

Gracie shook her head. “I’d like more sex. Or any sex. I’m getting less sex than I did in the last year of my marriage.”

“Negative integers. Interesting,” Will commented. “There’s got to be someone in the Colony who fits the Gracie: A-Time-of-Crisis profile.”

“What profile would that be?” Gracie asked.

“Male,” Will said. “Human.”

“Just male?” Gracie asked. “Not even hetero?”

“Picky, picky, missy miss,” Will said. “Most married men tend to turn out gayish anyway after about ten years.”

“Jorge would be a great gay man.” Cricket perked up. “He likes shoes. And clean nails.”

“Well,” Gracie said to Will, “I have to confess, Mother Superior-to-me, I did do a little research.”

“And?” asked Will, his highlighted eyebrows hitting new heights.

Gracie had become close with several guards at the front gate, especially her favorite, Lavender. Somehow the guards knew she didn’t belong there—it could have been her earlier lack of Uggs and the confidence that comes from having a body that could withstand a thong in direct sunlight. She knew they didn’t belong there, either. Gracie believed that people who were not invited to the party tend to recognize one another.

Gracie had strolled over with Jaden one morning after an outing at the park, stopping as she regularly did to talk to Lavender, who was now halfway through
Pride and Prejudice
for her Women’s Studies class.

“Whattaya got for me this morning?” Gracie usually asked Lavender. To which Lavender would always say, “I got nothing.”

This morning was a little different in that Gracie had been doing “directed” research on the Colony. She’d been walking Jaden up and down the private street, studying each house and every car, looking for clues to their inhabitants. Were they male or female, were they single or a couple or a family, summer tenants or landowners? For the first week or so, the only other life form Gracie noticed was 228 and what seemed like a few thousand friendly construction workers and gardeners, who eyed her curiously but not covetously, the new (middle-aged) girl on the block, as she walked past with Jaden in a stroller.

Then in the last week, which marked the first week in June, there’d been a sea change of activity—black Mercedeses with expensive rims instead of pickup trucks on steroids, Toyota
Land Cruisers instead of forklifts. Gracie walked out her door and saw Tom Cruise instead of the telephone repairman; on her bike, she ran into Harrison Ford instead of the plumber.

The workingman had been replaced by the public man.

Gracie had decided to make a game out of her personal dilemma as she spent the summer drying out from the hangover of her marriage. She would perform a scientific study in which she herself would be both control group and guinea pig: Could a woman over a certain age in Los Angeles be able to find a (reasonable) date?

And to that end, she had made a list. Will had told her she needed to be “proactive” in her quest for, if not a new relationship, than a new conversation over a cup of coffee. Gracie agreed, even though she did not see the need to use the term “proactive.” (Why is that a word, anyway? Was “active” not a “proactive” word?)

Will told her she was getting offtrack, and she needed to get herself off her ass and go out and lasso a man, preferably a surfer with great abs, no work ethic, and a strong desire to screw anything short of a flagpole.

Back to her “secret” list: Gracie had taken mental notes of the information she’d compiled of the people living in the enclosed neighborhood. She viewed the Colony as her very own petri dish.

Gracie took the list out of her notebook, which she took to carrying around like Harriet the Spy without the concerned parents (unless one counted Will and Cricket), looking both ways for oncoming eyes before she began to read it to Lavender.

“One forty-six: double lot, one and a half story, bread-mold green [Gracie didn’t know any other way to put it] exterior—”

Lavender was looking at her over her black-rimmed glasses,
her chin on her chest, her mouth open; she appeared to be having a Whoopi Goldberg white-people-are-plumb-crazy moment.

“Mercedes 250SL in the driveway, no other cars present except from nine to four, presumably a housekeeper—”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Lavender said.

“You know everything that goes on around here. I’m just trying to narrow down the field,” Gracie said. “I have to attack this like a scientist.”

Lavender shook her head. “I could get fired.”

“For telling me if there’s a single male living on the premises?” Gracie asked.

“They’d fire me for less,” Lavender said.

Gracie shut her notebook. “Okay, fine, here’s what we’re going to do.” She was determined not to let her hard work go to waste. “I’ll call out a number, you give me a two-word assessment. Then I’ll let you get back to your book.”

Lavender leaned back and crossed her arms over her ample chest. She had recently dyed her hair a strawberry color; Gracie admired her courage.

She cleared her throat. “So, as I was saying, number 146?”

“Married,” Lavender said.

“That’s only one word, but an important one.” Gracie scratched that number off the list. “Number 148? White clapboard with blue trim. Funny mailbox.”

“Cute. Female,” Lavender said, looking at her closely. Smirking.