The Starter Wife (22 page)

That something grabbed her around the waist, pulling her to the surface. Gracie had a split second to look down, registering the tanned, bulky forearm circling her waist. It made her think of baseball, those professional players with forearms like Popeye, great for hitting balls out of the park. And encircling waists.

Gracie finally broke the surface. She coughed and spat water, trying to get out some semblance of a thank-you (having not let her manners go along with her pride), and then leaned back into what felt like a wall of human sinew as she was pulled closer to shore. Once this human wall found his bearings in the sand, he picked her up as though she weighed as little as Helen the dachshund and held her tight against his chest as he walked onto the dry sand. Gracie’s arms were curved around his neck; they couldn’t be pried from him with a crowbar.

Gracie had met men when she was younger in several ways: in a college class, a popular bar, standing in line at a restaurant. She had never met a man while drowning. As this particular man set her down on the dry sand and hovered over her, she wondered why she’d never tried it before.

She wiped the salt water from her face and peered up at him, her eyes half closed, keeping her knees together and her legs bent to the side to appear sexy yet demure, like a newspaper hosiery ad.

He stood with his legs apart, his arms crossed over his chest,watching her with the kind of attention, Gracie thought, a doctor gives to a patient who’s trying to kill herself.

Gracie noticed several things about him at once. He was tall; he was built; he was tan; he had a strong jawline and wideset dark eyes, my God, he had great hair; and he was in her demographic.

And there was no wedding ring.

Gracie felt like one of them should speak, since obviously they were going to be married. After all, they had practically had sex. Being saved was the closest she’d been to a man since she chased the masturbator off the beach a couple weeks ago.

“Thuidnk yduo,” she said. She realized she hadn’t spat all of the water out of her mouth. She coughed again.

He looked at her, cocking his head slightly to one side. He seemed to be taking his time, assessing her with a sort of detached amusement. His eyes weren’t exactly warm, but they weren’t cold, either. He reminded Gracie of a younger Clint Eastwood. Standing before her was the classic reluctant hero. Maybe he wasn’t used to seeing soaking wet divorcées starting a new life by baptizing themselves from the inside out.

A moment passed. Clint (her pet name for him) turned back to look at the ocean. Gracie wondered if he was planning his escape. Was she so scary that she could frighten off a man with abnormally strong forearms and a torso like a brick wall? She pictured Kenny in his bathing suit, Kenny who worked out every morning but was never quite able to leave the sheen of the upper-middle-class boyhood behind. There would always be a fine, soft layer above the muscles nurtured by the latest protein drink and a personal trainer named Gunnar. Kenny had a nice body, there was no doubt, but the man Gracie was staring at could eat him for breakfast, stationary bike and all.

Gracie shuddered. Maybe her new boyfriend even ate bread!

“Thank you, I mean,” Gracie said, trying to amend her earlier communication breach. And then, “Oh, no, no—the kayak!” She had lost the kayak and the oar. So much for making friends with the neighbors.

Clint hadn’t moved; he was standing, still as a rock, now
looking out at the ocean. Then he turned and started walking toward the water, slowly, then picking up speed. Suddenly he dove in, leaving Gracie in her lingerie-model position, wondering who the hell had just saved her life.And confident that she had just met the most attractive man she’d ever seen without the help of artificial light.

“Would it have killed you to get a name?” she said to herself as she got up, brushing sand from her bottom and watching him as he swam with long, strong strokes away from the potential disaster scene. Her life.

Gracie turned and ran to the house; she’d have to get dried and dressed and talk to Lavender.

Gracie knew she had found 152.

G
RACIE WASTED
an entire hour before she finally biked down to the guard station to see Lavender. First of all, she felt as nervous as she would for a first date—what could she change into that would be casual enough for a drop-in visit and yet pretty enough to be attractive to the age/geography-appropriate man who had saved her life?

She thought about the proverb “Once you save a life, it is yours to keep.” She wondered if her mystery man, 152, knew the proverb. She wondered if he was thinking about it when he stood there,watching her with what she realized now was a sort of practiced wariness.

She wondered if he would have looked at her with those eyes if she were Pam Anderson.

You can see why she changed her clothes about twenty times.

Then to the gift. What kind of gift should she bring him? Wine? Great idea. Unless he was an alcoholic—and might he think the same of her for bringing a bottle of red to his house
on a hot afternoon. How about food? When was the last time she baked? And what if he didn’t eat sugar or flour or—like those people who were sprouting up in Northern California—what if he didn’t eat anything cooked, period?

Oh my God, Gracie suddenly thought, what if he doesn’t speak English? After all, Gracie couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he’d understood her when she thanked him. What if he was embarrassed that he couldn’t speak English?

Gracie was at a loss. And was no closer to being dressed and ready to bike down to see Lavender than when she started.

Finally she decided to throw caution (and her future dating life) to the wind; she would bring him a book. A simple book. Her favorite one, the one she never tired of reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.

Even if he didn’t speak English, he would have surely heard of Fitzgerald. And he would think her worldly and intelligent.

Or a freak, Gracie thought, as she pulled on her never-worn pareo and a tank top, blocking out her fear of flabby upper arms with the vain hope that her ten-thousand-dollar breasts would be a viable distraction.

L
AVENDER WAS
not there. At the moment that Gracie needed her most, Lavender had taken a sick day. Gracie bit her lip and wondered if she should consult the current security guard. He was a younger white man with a heavy accent and the kind of look on his face that said he was an engineer in his mother country and here he was working for peanuts as a security guard of all things.

Gracie decided not to ask him about 152.

But she did spend the next forty-five minutes biking up and down the half-mile stretch of Malibu Colony, back and forth and back and forth, F. Scott’s beauty of a novel safely strapped
into the basket between her handlebars. Forty minutes into her endless loop, she saw a new Jaguar drive up to #152 and park in front. Her heart started beating faster immediately. Sweat droplets formed under her arms. She wished she’d worn a white top. She wished she was ten pounds skinnier. She wished she were ten years younger. She wished she’d find that lotion that would finally, finally, get rid of the wrinkles on her hands (why were her hands so much bonier than the rest of her body?).

She wished she could change many things except one: her newfound valor. Perhaps coming so close to death (okay, maybe not so, so close to death)—anyway, coming so close to almost drowning had changed her. Gracie had never been that most brave of souls when it came to the outside, physical world; she had no desire to climb a mountain using ropes and pulleys, none at all to scuba-dive in a shark tank, nothing at all registered in her as excitement in regard to jumping out of an airplane over the desert.

But she had never been afraid of confrontation.

And this factor of her personality, combined with the adrenaline rush of her morning activities, spurred her along as she rode up to the Jaguar, spinning her wheels soundlessly, with her feet stuck out at the sides, then raising one leg over the bike to settle both feet on the ground, stopping the bike directly in front of #152. And just as Clint stopped the car and got out, Gracie grabbed the book and turned to greet him and heard,“Well, goddamn, look who’s here.”

Gracie’s eyes had to refocus, for whom she was standing in front of was not Clint, the man who saved her life and as a result owed her his, but Lou, the man for whom Kenny worked. Lou Manahan was #152.

Gracie stood for a moment, frozen smile on her lips, hands
frozen around a paperback edition of F. Scott’s masterpiece, voice box seized up, knees locked.

Lou came toward her and gave her a bear hug, which, frankly, went a long way to helping her thaw. The hug felt like a strange hybrid of fatherly touch and “old friend” touch mixed with a subtle patina of “you’re divorced, let’s have sex” touch.

True, an alarm went off somewhere south of her belly button (did she even have sex organs anymore? And were they called organs?), but Gracie didn’t trust her own instincts. Weren’t they the instincts that had her marry Kenny in the first place? The instincts that let her down when she first spied that (
MOTHERF-CKING
) earring in his left ear? The instincts that told her that the rapturous Clint was #152, not the old-enough-to-be-your-father-if-your-father-were-a-teenager-when-you-were-conceived Lou?

Lou was standing, smiling at her, the deep wrinkles around his green-gray eyes at once inviting and off-putting. “You staying in the Colony, Gracie?” he asked.

It seemed like a simple enough question—unless you were Gracie and felt the need to nervously overexplain in charged situations.

“I am, on the far south side, but only temporarily. I mean, a few months, sort of like marriage rehab. I’m not paying rent, the house belongs to a friend of mine. It’s good to have rich friends, right?” she asked, looking at him, hoping that her expression could convey her thoughts better than anything coming out of her mouth.

Lou nodded, thoughtfully. Thankfully he seemed distracted. “What’s that you got there?” he asked.

Gracie looked at her hand; she’d forgotten about the book. “Just some … reading material.”

He took it from her outstretched hand. “That’s for Clint,” she wanted to say. “Clint, you know, the man I thought was waiting here for me.”

“Much better than what I have waiting for me this weekend.” He glanced toward his briefcase.

Gracie nodded. Everyone complained about reading scripts over the weekend, but she was surprised and pleased that Lou still bothered reading. Usually men of his station left that thankless task to underlings. Kenny claimed he only read certain pages of a script: the first page, page 10, and pages 30, 60, 90, and the last, 120.

Why had she been married to such a bozo?

“You want to have dinner tomorrow night?” Lou asked.

Gracie just looked at him. “I usually have dinner every night,” she said.

“Great. How about a little Italian. I prefer the Italian to the sushi.”

Kenny’s boss was asking her out. Where was The Coven at a moment like this? What were the ramifications? Where would they live once they were married? Would Lou fire Kenny after their wedding? Would the kids bunk up together or have separate bedrooms? And since when was Gracie such catnip for men?

“Okay,” she said.

“Saturday night. I’ll pick you up. After all, I know where you live. Temporarily. During your marriage rehab.”

He smiled his famously charming smile and handed her back her F. Scott and headed into his house. Number 152.

14
 
BRITNEY SPEARS HAS KIDNAPPED MY DAUGHTER

B
RITNEY
S
PEARS
had moved into Kenny’s house. Gracie had learned this from her daughter when Kenny’s assistant dropped her off in Malibu after spending the weekend at what was now her father’s home.

Gracie knew that something (more) was rotten in the State of Kenny when Jaden showed up wearing a tight pink T-shirt with the words
PORN STAR
on it, tied and knotted up under her rib cage, and tiny pink shorts that looked like they had come from Barbie’s closet. Gracie chewed through her knuckle to keep from screaming as Jaden jumped from the assistant’s VW Bug, bounding toward her mother, looking not unlike a midget hooker, which, according to her Internet spam, was easily attainable and at low prices.

Moreover, Jaden smelled like cologne—a sweet vanilla tincture, appropriate for pop stars like Britney or Ricky Martin or
even that Justin Timberlake guy, but not, dear God, her three-year-old daughter.

Gracie hugged her daughter and kissed her cheek, then looked at her upturned face.

Oh my God, thought Gracie, was that lip gloss?

Gracie immediately looked at her daughter’s nails, and yes, they, too, were pink.

“Mommy, we had so much fun!” Jaden said. “We went to Disneyland and we went on the rides and we didn’t even have to stand in line—”

“You went to Disneyland?” Gracie had been meaning to take Jaden to Disneyland again. She’d taken her once. Jaden had screamed throughout the entire Small World ride and then had thrown up her hot dog lunch.
This experience is yours for ninety-eight dollars (not counting gas) and three hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic!