The Starter Wife (21 page)

Still Gracie was not deterred. She tried the Zone, Atkins, South Beach—any diet, in fact, that was sponsored by someone who once had a medical degree but hadn’t practiced medicine in twenty years.

Gracie started working out; to augment the slow rate of weight loss, she chose to exercise. She joined a gym that was more like a bar—Sports Club, Los Angeles. She got a writer-director-trainer. She tried the treadmill, she tried the elliptical (why?), she tried the exercise bike, she tried the StairMaster, she tried the one with the giant steps, she tried the rowing thing. There were 368 different ways to sweat in this gym, but the most surefire method was to walk into the women’s locker room, where Gracie would be surrounded by women halfway out of their knickers, standing around like Victoria’s Secret models on a coke break.

Gracie had emerged, like a butterfly from a cocoon, with a new face, a new body. And the same old personality.

All she had left of her painful, hard-won transformation was her character.

And a few errant hairs on her chin.

S
AM
K
NIGHT
hadn’t been able to get to the water right away that morning. Mrs. Kennicot, who lived in #191, had tripped over a warped plank of wood in her old floor when she got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night. Sam had been on his hands and knees early, sanding the warped spot down to a smooth finish. Mrs. Kennicot hired him for various odd jobs—moving furniture, building a chest of drawers, snaking a plugged toilet. Before they met, he used to watch her, eighty years old and still swimming in the lagoon every morning, oblivious to the chill or the pollution. She inspired him, and later they became friendly; unusual for strangers, more unusual for an old lady and a homeless man. She was the first to hire him in the Colony. He felt beholden to her in more ways than he could articulate; she’d fed him when he was hungry, she paid him for a job well done, and even though she’d been
widowed, even though she’d watched her husband sink into the morass of Alzheimer’s, she made Sam believe that while life was not just, it was pretty good. Better than the alternative. And so he did his best to keep her safe—sanding down warped planks was just part of it.

The Kennicots’ house was on the “street side” of the Colony, next to their faded tennis court with the deeply cracked surface, where no one had played since their grown sons had moved away. Behind the house, there was an overgrown trail, hidden from view. Sam became aware of the trail when he grew tired of sleeping in the open, on the beach. He had been comforted by the sound of the ocean at night, but he could feel the eyes on him. Not just of the residents of the Colony, but the unseen, those who slept in the bushes along the pathway leading to Surfrider Beach.

He discovered the trail on a hot day, searching for a cool spot to eat a sandwich he’d found tossed in a garbage pail festooned with the numbers of a local radio station. To him, the trail was serene; in reality, it was moderately untraversed. He set up shop there for his first night, and from his vantage point he could see the lights of the houses along the street side of the Colony. He could watch a family eat dinner, enjoying their interactions without imposing. From here, sitting on his rolled-up sleeping bag, he had watched Mrs. Kennicot wheel Mr. Kennicot to the table, wiping his mouth between bites. Discussing that which was no longer understood. Holding a hand and laughing, alone, at a memory. The trail became his home. All who passed there, whether or not they saw the navy blue blanket folded neatly under the bush, the long pieces of cardboard ripped every other week from refrigerator boxes, the Tupperware bowl tucked away for washing, knew that they were walking through someone’s home.

Occasionally Sam was forced to defend his prime territory, much as a man in one of the fancier living quarters in the parallel world, both literally and figuratively, would defend entrance to his home. Sam didn’t consider himself a violent man, a consideration that would have been laughed at by both his compatriots and his superiors. He had given up his Purple Heart; the Silver Star had been stolen long ago. He wasn’t sad to see it go, though it had been his only possession of worth; its only value to him was that he could have sold it for a sandwich at John’s Garden, a cup of coffee, clean socks for the winter months. Despite his protests that he was a peace-loving man, he would not tolerate an incursion into his space.

There was this one, who all the guys knew. The story was this creep had come off a bus from Ohio after doing time for assault. He was younger, he reeked of alcohol and poor hygiene, he had a smirk on his face and an attitude to go with it, and Sam knew from other acquaintances that this one stole. All the guys knew who stole. People who have nothing material to speak of are sensitive to this type of behavior; the lawless don’t take criminal behavior lightly.

A missing pair of Adidas, someone’s headphones—the men who “lived” in Malibu, around the Colony, were very specific about their belongings. You didn’t need to see Hog’s name scratched into an iPod (taken from a surfer’s backpack, of course) to know it was his, and so it was with Sam’s blue blanket and army-issue sleeping bag. And so it was with Sam’s books.

Eight-thirty in the morning, Sam had come back from a swim. Even before he saw, walking down the trail and brushing back the branches with his outstretched hand, he knew. Everything was gone. No blanket. No sleeping bag. Not one damn book.

He went looking for the guy with the smirk. It didn’t take long to find him, huddled under the surf shack, empty bottle of cheap amber liquid by his feet, passed out under the familiar sleeping bag, snoring like an old dog.

Sam knew better, but he picked the young man up by his hair and threw him onto the sand. The guy was airborne before he was awake. He got to his feet, and Sam squared off before him, waiting for the first punch. Sam never unleashed the first punch. He was a last-punch kind of guy.

He didn’t have to wait long. The man aimed at Sam’s stomach and landed surprisingly hard. Sam bent over and noticed a glint of something, a knife in the man’s hand, winking, approaching …

Sam flicked the knife out of his hand and broke his wrist, the snap scaring off a flock of pelicans that had been watching, a curious, winged band of spectators.

The man screamed and went to his knees, cradling his hand. Sam calmly collected his belongings; the books were out of their bag, moist and sandy, and his sleeping bag would never smell the same. But Sam knew he wouldn’t have to deal with this one again.

Except when he turned up dead a couple weeks later, and Sam, along with the myriad of other homeless, was questioned and released.

Sam combed his hair back and took a swig of water and headed to the beach access next to #184. He had overslept; he had been dreaming in memory. He wondered what that meant as he opened the gate to the beach.

13
 
SAVED

T
HE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR,
an elegant older woman with an old California name, arms wrapped in gold bangles and a full glass of amber liquid in her hand every evening, had regaled Gracie with stories about the Malibu before the railroad, before Pacific Coast Highway, before movie stars. Before all of this, there had been May Rindge, a feisty widow whose family had owned all twenty-six miles of Malibu. She’d kept out government officials and trespassers by hiring armed guards and dynamiting highway construction attempts. Finally May had exhausted her fortune and was forced to rent out plots of coastal land to entertainers. And thus the Colony was born. In 1926, the woman told her, her bangles serenading her as they slid down her arm, the first white surfer had ridden his first wave at what was then Malibu Ranch.

Gracie looked out from her deck and saw every day what was worth protecting.

Her neighbor had often invited Gracie to use her kayak
anytime she wanted, as long as she put it back under the house when she was done with it. Gracie was heartened by the neighborly gesture but had never taken the woman up on her offer. Frankly, kayaks scared Gracie. Was it natural, she wondered, for a human being to kayak? And why were they called kayaks? Did the word mean “compact drowning tool”? Gracie had never actually been in a kayak, and had no idea how to maneuver the thing into the water, much less how to actually bring it back to shore.

But after studying the display of kayakers streaming down the Pacific from Point Dume every morning, wrapped in their life vests and sporting bright baseball caps, Gracie had the unfortunate idea that kayaking looked easy. She reminded herself that tennis looked easy, too, when Agassi played; Christ, gymnastics looked easy when she went to Cirque du Soleil. She had pulled her back out trying to touch her toes after a particularly inspiring performance by a Chinese tumbler.

Jaden had taken up residence with Kenny (i.e., Ana and her sisters) for the weekend and so was not around to act as her mother’s natural deterrent. And Gracie had come up with a plan to try one new thing in her life every day (a plan devised twenty minutes ago over coffee). So Gracie decided that she would learn to kayak.

Wearing a baseball cap with the title of one of Kenny’s movies across the bill, she dragged the green plastic ten-foot flotation device out from under her neighbor’s house and pulled it down to the beach to an area she thought looked most inviting to someone who was completely unskilled and ignorant of this fact.

She pulled the kayak to the shore break and got in, holding the oar in both hands. She was wearing a T-shirt over her bathing suit, recalling the days when, as a chubby preadolescent,
she lived in the T-shirt-over-bathing-suit look over the long hot inner-city summers at the public swimming pool.

It wasn’t her best look, as she remembered. Her father’s long white T-shirts would stick to her protruding belly, accentuating what she hoped would be eliminated. Why, she thought, had no one warned her?

But no matter. Here she was, sitting in a kayak on the beach feeling the spray in her face, the wind in her hair—why, Gracie was practically the female Kelly Slater!

Except that she was marooned. The water was moving away from the kayak. She had not even set foot in the ocean and already she was stranded. She got out and pushed the kayak forward toward the surf. And got in again. The water merely teased the bottom of the kayak. There was not enough pressure to pull her in.

She got out again, pushed the kayak farther in, and, in a feat of human physicality she’d not experienced since sex with a javelin thrower in her freshman year of college, she jumped in the kayak at the same time the water rose, buoying the contraption. Then she grabbed her oar and did some sort of waving thing with it in the water, hoping she looked like the professional she knew she could be, and actually
moved forward.
She was
kayaking!
She was an
athlete!
She was One with Nature!

After twenty exhilarating seconds, a wave suddenly rose in front of the kayak. Gracie, in a panic, turned sideways instead of moving straight into the oncoming charge of water. In that moment, she deeply regretted the fact that she had neglected to ask her neighbor about a life jacket because she’d been too ashamed to admit she needed one.

She was no longer an athlete! She was drowning! This was two new things in life that she had accomplished in one day!

A second wave followed the first rush of water, knocking her from the kayak and unscrewing the oar from her clenched hands. She thought this was totally unnecessary on the part of Mother Nature, to leave her without any hope of surviving, a mere thirty feet from a lineup of the most expensive beach houses on the planet. She would only be a footnote to her death. She could just see the news headline: “Forty-ish Woman Drowns in Front of Celebrity Homes.”

She thought about Jaden. She thought about what dead bodies look like after they drown. Closed casket, she hoped. No sense in scaring the child.

And as she was sinking down in the water, gulping salty liquid rather than the preferred oxygen, she thought about Kenny. She wondered how he would feel, knowing he’d left Gracie and then she’d drowned in front of the Malibu Colony. Would he feel shame? Remorse? Anguish at how he broke up with her, and for whom?

The answer came fast. Kenny would dine out on Gracie’s death for months. Even if Britney left him after a few weeks, women would be flocking to him forever. Everyone in town loved a widower!

Gracie couldn’t leave on those terms. She made a decision to live. She was not going to be the one to bring Kenny that level of happiness.

Her feet touched the sandy bottom and she pushed up, propelling herself through the water, spinning upwards. Feeling her lungs exploding, she reached up with her arms. Then her head was above the water for a moment, and she made the most of it. She
screamed!

Another wave went over her head and she was forced under again. She feared the worst was going to happen, no matter how strong her motivation to live in order to make Kenny unhappy.
And then she felt something tug at her T-shirt sleeve.