The Starter Wife (2 page)

The freshly divorced divorcée had the nerve to walk into the party without a Westside passport and, worse, without a proper escort—a current Wife Of. She now lived in a condo on the east side of the universally recognized border of La Cienega Boulevard, and seemed to be unaware that her Westside friends had abandoned her. She had boldly, improperly, assumed that the gilded invitation sent to her before her separation still held two months later.

“The nerve,” the tall one sniffed, and sucked down her daiquiri, the straw disappearing momentarily into the recesses of her giant, giant mouth before popping out suddenly, causing Gracie to jump back. The bruises around the rim of her oversize lips stubbornly showed through the inch-thick smear of industrial-strength MAC Lipglass; she must have had her collagen shots just that morning, Gracie thought. A violation of the coda—no shots on the day of an event.

“She used to be The Wife Of,” the medium one oozed. “Now, she’s just another Starter Wife.”

Cluck. Gracie heard chickens whenever she bumped into the three. She knew it had something to do with her nerves, and would probably require a pill and an afternoon of needles punctured into her forehead at Dr. Zhu’s. Luckily, she could score an emergency appointment; having sent Dr. Zhu on the requisite first-class weekend trip to Punta Mita, Gracie was at the top of the VIP list.

“Gracie.” The short one turned on her and narrowed her steel, bullet-slug orbs. “What do you think of her?”

“Well,” said Gracie, caught between a rock and a hard-ass. She stared at the divorcée, hesitant to add to the venal brew. Time slowed. She could hear herself breathing. “She doesn’t look the same,” was what Gracie finally declared.

The three clucked with vigor and bobbed their blond
heads, and Gracie asked, “You girls want anything?” (Translation: “Steal me away from Satan’s Brides!”) She scurried off not toward the bar but the freeway, serenaded by the sound of Cyndi and her band setting up. Cyndi screeched into the popping microphone, “Forty ROCKS!” as Gracie’s three-and-a-half-inch heels sank into a lawn that had obviously been watered several hours ago. For that, Gracie thought, my husband would have fired the gardener.

Gracie waited for her car in the circular driveway, watching the college-student valets run and park, run and park, and wondered about the divorcée. She
didn’t
look the same, Gracie thought. She looked … older. She looked … not so blond. She looked … rounder, softer …

And something else, Gracie thought. She didn’t look mean.

She looked, Gracie thought, could it be?

Normal.

“Girls just wanna have fu-un!” Cyndi sang, her signature voice and song somehow dancing around the stone, pillared behemoth, ten thousand square feet of home to two children, two parents, and nine “staff.”

“Hi, Mrs. Pollock,” said the valet with the blue blazer and the cloying expression that telegraphed he was looking for his Mrs. Robinson, as he jogged toward her. “Leaving already?”

“Oh-oh, girls just wanna have fun!”

Y
OU CAN’T AVOID THEM.
Don’t even try. They’re everywhere. Polished hair, polished nails, tucked, sucked, blown, bleached, waxed, Martin Katzed, and decked. Early morning? They’re piloting their Navigators with the backseat DVDs blasting
Finding Nemo
in the car-pool lane at the Brentwood School, or crouching in a toddler circle at Mommy and Me at Bright Child comparing diamond ring settings.Ten-ish? They’re IMing
their Realtors searching for the illusory two-acre flat before twisting their limbs into erotic poses at Hot Tub Tony’s class at Maha Yoga; after a bout of ujjayi breathing, they’re hoisting soy green tea blendeds at Coffee Bean on San Vicente. At lunch, they’re raking a carbless chicken-pecan salad with sterling forks at Barney Greengrass or draining Chardonnay decanters at the Ivy. Post-perc aperitif, you’ll spy them trolling a Tuleh or Valentino trunk show on the second floor of Neiman’s, assisted by a fluttering personal shopper. In late afternoon, the devotional worship at the Church of the Holy Mother of Upkeep: hair blown stick straight at Chris McMillan, nails French manicured at Jessica’s on Sunset Plaza, Botox injected by dermos Arnie or Harold (after trying to decipher, say, Jennifer Aniston’s name on the blacked-out patient sign-in board). Perhaps later they’ll have their auras read by Lola the Chiropractor on West Pico, or while away the late afternoon firing a nanny because the baby called her “Mommy” and then complaining about the ensuing trauma to the tennis coach who has taught them everything but the serve. Evening? Unearth them at a Cedars Sinai fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton, swaying to the pop stylings of Miss Natalie Cole, or posing for a picture for
Angeleno Magazine
in the matron-chic Chanel suits their husbands loathe (they paid too much for the new breasts to keep those puppies imprisoned in tweed). Another night, they’ll be attending the Holmby Hills version of the Oprah Book Club, hosted by a gaggle of blond doppelgängers eager to appear knowledgeable about something other than who the go-to girl is this week at Louis Vuitton.

And sometimes they even put their children to bed.

In the morning, the cycle begins again.

Among the numerous subcultures found in Los Angeles—the Sunset Strip Euros, the La Cañada skatepunks, the Hollywood
Hills posers, the Encino Valley girls (yes, they still exist), the Echo Park graffitos, the Montebello gangsters, the Zuma surf rats, the West Hollywood buff boys, the Palisades breeders, the Santa Monica socialists, the Pasadena neocons, the Armenians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, Filipinos, Koreans, Russians, Hasids—there exists one civilization specific to its geographic origin, one which does not exist anywhere else.

The Wife Of.

The Wife Of could be married to the suit who runs the World Bank or the impotent action movie star, the elderly real estate magnate or the philandering studio chief. Powerful men may run the world, but the “Wives Of” run the powerful men.

At least, until their worst fear happens—the divorce that turns a Wife Of into a mere Starter Wife.

E
NTER
G
RACIE
P
OLLOCK.
At every breakfast, lunch, dinner, party, school, or charity event for close to ten years, she’d been introduced as the “wife of …” In the beginning, this dubious title riled her. In one fell swoop, the wife of negated not only Gracie’s existence prior to marriage, but her own contributions to the world (however feeble they may appear to, say, Doctors Without Borders). In the beginning, she would fight back by wielding her maiden name like a discus, throwing it out at whomever she met. But the hard truth was “Gracie Peters” would draw blank stares. After a stretch, she attempted to clarify, tacking her husband’s last name onto hers. Gracie became a thing unwieldy and confusing: the three-named woman.

And the blank stares persisted.

Finally, after several years of valiant resistance against the social mores, Gracie was beaten; she became so inculcated into the Wife Of culture that, like a dog who rolls onto his back at the first whiff of confrontation, she succumbed completely.
The facts were cold and brutal: The Wife Of could get an eight o’clock reservation at Spago on a Friday night; The Wife Of could line jump at Disneyland; The Wife Of got 20 percent off at any of the designer boutiques on Rodeo Drive; The Wife Of got her kid into the school of her choice.

The Wife Of attained admission to The Club.

The Wife Of existed.

In the post—“Gracie Peters” epoch, if Gracie were to have met you, at a political luncheon, a school fair, or restaurant opening, she would have automatically, graciously, casually, introduced herself as the “Wife of …”

But there was nothing casual about her decision.

WIFE NUMBER ONE

The former soap star married to an Oscar-winning producer was looking forward to an annual Oscar party. There was only one glitch: She had gained fifteen pounds in the last year. “Baby weight,” she sighed to her stylist as she struggled into a Narciso Rodriguez floor-length gown. “You have no idea how hard it is to lose.”

Her bouncing baby girl was almost nine months old.

She had been born to a surrogate.

1
 
MARRIED, WITH ONION RINGS

C
ELLULITE MASSAGE
is not for the faint of heart. Which is what Gracie Pollock was thinking as her thighs were pounded by the grunting Russian woman who left her bruised, swollen, and otherwise disfigured every other Monday at three o’clock for the last five years. Gracie’s calendar was filled with benign-sounding yet brutal “treatments”: Tuesdays were hair (blow-dry, cut, and highlights, if needed),Wednesdays were waxing or plucking,Thursdays belonged to dermabrasion or acid peels or any variety of activities involving needles and the hope of Insta-Youth, Fridays were off days, save for the second blow-dry of the week, when Gracie would compare her week of treatments to her friends’ week of treatments over lunch at The Ivy.

You want irony? For the privilege of emerging from a session with Svetlana looking like she’d been locked in a freak dance with Mike Tyson, Gracie would write a check out to “Cash” for $250 and hand it over with shaking hands.

Svetlana left the room, leaving behind an imprint of garlic cloves and generations of suffering on the air. There were countless other Wives Of to punish, those who bought into the myth of defeating the onslaught of age with a pair of hardened Russian fists. Gracie groaned and leaned up from the damp, tacky massage table (a nice way of putting the modern equivalent of the rack) and onto her elbows. She willed her eyes open, her lids feeling like the only part of her body that had escaped Soviet vengeance. She slowly twisted her head to the side to assess the damage in the veined, mirrored tile lining the walls. Mirrored tile, Gracie thought, all the rage when Sylvester, the lisping Supreme Ruler of Disco,was at the top of the charts. “For a tax-free two-fifty a pop,” Gracie muttered, “Svetlana the Terrible could swing a subscription to
Elle Decor.”

But the veined tile with the mirrored surface served its purpose. Here’s the scoop. Gracie Pollock looked ridiculously good in that her polished exterior straddled the territories claimed by both adjectives,
ridiculous
and
good.
Each time Gracie peered at her reflection, she was startled, as though she had run into a formerly plain-wrapped high school friend who had transformed herself into a middle-aged version of Jessica Simpson. What are the odds of looking better at forty than at sixteen? Gracie thought to herself. About the same as crapping a gleaming pile of Krugerrands.

Let’s start with the hair. Said hair being the color of that expensive European butter no one can pronounce. Domestic butter, according to Gracie’s colorist, not being, well, buttery enough. And this hair was thick. Thick, as though somewhere in the Hamptons, Christie Brinkley had awakened looking like Michael Chiklis with hips. Gracie’s original mousy brown, tongue-in-light-socket chicken wire had been colored and
wrestled and yanked and stretched and stretched again into submission by a fine-boned man of unknown sexual and other identity named Yuko, then brightened with highlights every three weeks and lengthened with extensions, rewoven every twelve weeks. Her forehead was as unlined as the hood of a new Porsche, due to the same poison found in warped green bean cans she was warned about as a child. Her lips were soft and full. Thank you, the pitiless Collagen God. The teeth? Straight and white. The teeth were hers. The teeth, she’d grown herself.

I did grow those teeth myself, right?
Gracie thought.

Yes,
Gracie reassured herself as she bared her teeth like a rich blond rottweiler into the veined mirror.
Those are my teeth.

She growled at her reflection.

Let’s move on.The breasts were a perfect full B cup. Gracie had given birth and breast-fed—and yet her nipples pointed due north. Nature? Or the magic hands of Dr. Barbara Hayden? You decide.

The tummy, save for the bumpy scar which Gracie had not yet “done” above her pubic bone, was hard and as hard earned as the diamond on her left hand. The arms, brown and muscular and hairless as newborn Chihuahuas.The legs, Gracie’s bête noire throughout her teenage years, were as sleek and taut as the skin on an apple.

Just looking at them made her weary.

Maintenance was a Mother Fucker.

Gracie stuck her tongue out at her reflection. The blond, green-eyed, perky-breasted woman rudely assessing her was not related to the soft-fleshed, brown-eyed girl she’d been more or less satisfied with for thirty years.

This Gracie, by all accounts, appeared perfect. Media friendly. Easy on the eyes and hard on the 401(k).

Then she looked down at her hands.
Good Lord, not the hands,
Gracie thought. The dead giveaway. The Dorian Gray painting in the attic. The skin on her hands was changing. Freckles that had once been a badge of youth and vigor were now a sign of encroaching age—the inevitable, inexorable spiraling into the Martha Raye Terra In-firma.