The Starter Wife (44 page)

Sam stood there for a moment, and just as his hand reached up—to knock, to ring the doorbell—he wasn’t sure how to make his next move—a man answered the door. He was wearing a suit with a high collar. His posture was so erect it had the effect of leaning back. He was old now, but he hadn’t always been.

“Charles,” Sam said.

“Sir,” said the butler. “May I say, it’s good to see you.”

Sam reached forward with his hand and gripped the old man’s hand, which was stronger than anyone had a right to expect. He had been middle-aged when Sam left; Charles had to be about eighty years old—

“Eighty on this very Sunday, sir,” Charles said.

“That’s what I figured,” Sam said. “Man, you’re old, Charles. But what does that make me?” He was feeling better about his mysterious homecoming.

“Not a young man anymore, sir,” Charles said. “Come inside, they’re expecting you.”

“Any idea what this is about?” Sam asked. As long as he focused on Charles, he resisted that dizzy feeling. Charles was his anchor here.

“I’m afraid it’s your mother, sir,” Charles said.

Sam drew a breath in slowly. “She’s not—”

“She’d like to see you,” Charles said. “And I wish you
would have shaved. That beard looks like roadkill. If I may say so, sir.”

H
E FOLLOWED
Charles past the living room, down a hall, past a powder room he dearly would have loved to use (but was too intimidated), past the old ballroom where he used to race Charles in go-carts, to the sitting room his mother preferred even as a young woman avoiding her husband (Sam didn’t blame her) and two children (Sam wasn’t too keen on this part) and making her way to the top of the various Bay Area charity boards.

She looked small. Shockingly small, to Sam. His mother was a larger-than-life person, always—not only in his memory but to anyone who came in contact with her. The tatty overstuffed chair nearly swallowed her body. There were tubes running from her nose to an oxygen tank. There were others in the room as well—those who were suits, but she was the center of his, and their, attention.

Her face was pale, covered with makeup and powder. Even at this age, the most beautiful debutante in San Francisco’s history had retained her vanity.

“You know I don’t like facial hair,” she said. And she had retained her sharp tongue. “Charles, you know I don’t like a beard.”

“I know, mum,” Charles replied in a long-suffering voice. “It would have been difficult to strap him down and straight-razor him, mum. He does look to have about forty pounds on me.”

Sam’s mother said something that sounded an awful lot like “harrumph” and waved her hand, and Charles left the room, but not before stealing a wink at his former charge. “Knock her dead,” he whispered as he passed by. “Please.”

Sam started laughing. His mother looked at him, her brilliant blue eyes having lost nothing of their sheen and well-bred intelligence—and overriding impatience.

“So. You’re alive,” she said. She coughed, and Sam saw the team of suits jump out of their chairs at once in a flurry to get her a glass of water.

“Sit!” she said after her coughing fit. Sam had stood still as the lawyer butterflies flapped around him.

Sam looked around for an appropriate spot.

“Not you,” she said. “You, come over here.” She tapped the floor next to her with her cane. “We’re going to have a little mother-son talk.”

She coughed again, and the lawyers jumped up again, and then she yelled “Leave!” and they scurried out the door, wordless, their briefcases attached to their ribs, carried like footballs. Sam started to leave. “Not you!” she said, pointing at him.

“You can’t spank me,” he found himself saying to his mother.

“Like hell I can’t,” she said. Her sudden flash of smile made Sam feel guilty as hell, and he wondered about what kind of son would leave his mother for as long as he had.

G
RACIE BREWED
coffee for Kenny in her former kitchen and watched him as he sat in the kitchen cubby, looking out the window into his beloved backyard, where, in his dreams and sometimes in reality, the famous and rich and fabulous would gather and drink and laugh and play a few sets.

She placed a cup of coffee (in his favorite massive white cup) in front of him, then sat quietly next to him, and waited. What am I doing? Gracie wondered. She wondered at this strange sense of loyalty she had to Kenny. Because the room
was silent, save for the buzzing sound coming from the deluxe, oversize (everything in the house was oversize, including the ex-husband) Sub-Zero refrigerator, Gracie could think out her actions; she could play amateur psychologist to herself. Finally, she smiled, a client she could relate to!

At the root of her sudden desire to take care of her husband was Lou’s death. She looked at Kenny, who sighed, then nipped at his coffee like a bird picking at a blade of grass. She was sitting there because she was concerned that Kenny, too, would kill himself. How could she live with herself if she’d driven off and he was discovered the next day with a belt around his neck, swinging from the showerhead? What would she tell her daughter?

Not that the showerhead could take that kind of weight, Gracie thought. Let’s be real.

She put her hand over his and squeezed. He looked at her and smiled a weak version of his lopsided grin.

“What kind of coffee did you use?” he asked.

“What?” Gracie asked.

“Was it in the white container or the black one?” he asked. “Because I like the black container better. The Kona—we fly it over from that place in Hawaii. Sherry Lansing told me about it. She loves her coffee. You know, she called me. To see how I was doing.”

Gracie yanked her hand back from his as though she’d been touching something disgusting. Like an ex-husband who can’t get out of the way of his marriage-eating narcissism.

“I think I’m going to go independent,” Kenny said. “Yeah, that sounds good.” He was nodding his head. He hadn’t noticed that Gracie had snatched her hand away.

“The studio’s folding?” Gracie asked. She wanted every last detail.

“No, no,” Kenny said. “Nothing like that. I mean, there don’t be a studio per se after all the … things are sold off.You know, the movies, the development, the phones, those bookshelves we put in, the, ah, staplers. Pencils. No, I’m going to form my own company. After all the, you know, legal stuff gets sorted out.”

“Legal stuff ?”

“Coupla lawsuits. Nothing that’ll stick. Let’s hope,” he said, crossing his fingers.

“So that’s good for you, then,”Gracie said.

“Great for me,” Kenny said. “You know, I was never really able to fly with Lou around. I feel like I can do anything now.”

“Wow,” Gracie said, her mouth hanging open just enough to make her look mentally challenged. “Wow, wow, wow,” she continued.

“You know,” Kenny said as he walked Gracie to the front door, “that Britney thing was meaningless. To me.”

Gracie looked at him.

“I hated to break her little heart. I mean, she’s just a kid,” he continued. “But like I told her, ‘Hey, I just can’t be, like, “The Wife Of,” you know?’”

“Right,” Gracie said, nodding. Was she starting to get a headache? She could hear her teeth grinding.

“I’m no Mr. Spears,” Kenny said.

“Certainly not,” Gracie said. She had a feeling of déjà vu and realized—this is how she felt when she fell into conversations with crazy people panhandling outside supermarkets.

“H
EY!”
Kenny called out to her as she started to drive away. He poked his head in the window. “How’s your guy, your man—what’s his name?”

“Sam,” Gracie said, “Sam Knight.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Kenny said. “Listen, I’m crazy busy, but I’d sure like to talk to him about, you know, an investment opportunity. There’s this film—Angelina Jolie is attached, she plays a World War II fighter pilot—”

“Kenny,” Gracie said. She wanted to finally come clean with him. And then she thought about the fact that there were likely
no
female fighter pilots in World War II. “Sam … has no money. And when I say
no
money, he literally doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket.”

Kenny looked at her. Gracie couldn’t read his expression. Disappointment? Disgust? Gas?

“Kenny, he’s homeless,” Gracie said finally. Kenny frowned, his lower lip curling out, like a rebellious five-year-old.

“Believe me, I know it sounds weird,” Gracie said. “But take it from me. The only things Sam has in this world are a sleeping bag and a few books. And, like, I’m not talking Hemingway or Proust. And yet I think I love him.”

Gracie thought it was a bold move to profess her love of someone else to her former husband. Bold and maybe a little mean. She smiled.

“Gracie,” Kenny said, “this is really low of you.”

Gracie nodded. She knew.

“And I don’t find it funny in the least. I know we’re broken up, but the least you can do is help out the father of your daughter.”

Gracie couldn’t believe it. Kenny was playing the Father-of-Your-Daughter card.

“Kenny, I’m not screwing with you,” she said, exasperated. “Sam Knight doesn’t have a penny to his name.”

“Gracie,” Kenny replied in his blustery studio-head manner. “Do you use lightbulbs?”

Gracie looked at him. It seemed an odd question, and she was again reminded of the crazy guy—

“How about razor blades?”

“Kenny … you’re scaring me—”

“And you’ve heard of polyester?”

Gracie nodded. Her fight-or-flight reaction was teeming—

“Velcro?”

“I really have to get back. Jaden’s waiting for me—” She started to roll away—

“Gracie.” Kenny put his arm in the window and grabbed the steering wheel. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Knight Industries.”

S
AM WAS BACK
in his hotel room, at the St. Francis on top of Nob Hill. Not two blocks from his childhood home (had he actually had a childhood). He looked down from his perch on the fourteenth floor and surveyed all that his family had once owned, generations ago. He could find all the answers to his life from up on his exalted perch. The vantage point brought him a degree of peace; looking down, he knew why he had escaped, first to Vietnam and then to a life without means.

He’d told his mother, in their quarter-century mother-son tête-à-tête, that growing up, listening to the adults argue about business, the onus of owning all they surveyed, left him with more than a bad taste in his mouth. As a child, he was ignored for such concerns. He learned to resent the fact that his parents cared more about what was going on outside their home than who was tucking their children in at night.

His mother had told him that she’d loved him, of course, but she had only raised him the way she’d been raised; she knew no better nor no worse. If he was neglected, she’d said, it’s only because she must have been herself.

He’d nodded; he knew this was true. “Age has a way of beating the truth into you,” she’d said. “The Great Humbler, the Powerful Humiliator—Age!” She shook her fist at the high stone ceiling.

And then she’d coughed until Sam had reached out to punch the bell to notify the nurse. She’d slapped his hand away.

Which is when she’d told her son she wanted to leave everything to him. Everything. All of it. The real estate, the majority shareholdership, the tangled mass of company titles. She’d spun the tale of the last twenty-five years, and it had become clear to Sam that she’d endured many heartaches—his leaving the family, her husband’s death, the disappointment his sister had brought to her.

“She wants it, you know,” his mother told him.

“I don’t believe that,” Sam said. He remembered his sister teaching him to read, though she was only a few years older than he; he remembered her tying his shoes, tucking his napkin under his chin; he remembered her letting him sleep next to her when he grew afraid in that big house—and there was much to be afraid of. He wasn’t the only beneficiary of her kindness; she saved wounded pigeons, she wouldn’t even take her shoe to a cockroach.

“She’s married for the third time,” his mother said, “and each time it gets worse. I don’t even know this one’s name.”

“What happened to her?” he asked. Suddenly his heart hurt. For himself, for his sister, for this woman, his mother.

His mother’s hand fluttered up by her face and made a gesture like a bird flying away. He could see that his sister had hurt her just as much as he had.

“She wants it all,” his mother said. “And I’m not going to give it to her.” She sniffed.

“She has children?” he asked.

“Three,” his mother said. “And two grandkids.”

“You miss them,” he said.

His mother shrugged and looked away; the way her mouth turned down at the corners told him everything.

“Great-grandkids, isn’t that something,” Sam said.

His mother grunted.

“Mother, I don’t want your money. You know me, I wouldn’t know what to do with all of it. I think about ‘stuff ’ and I get nervous. I’ve never settled down, never had children, never made a woman happy—”

He cut himself off.

“She hasn’t come to see me,” his mother said. “She doesn’t care. Look at me, all these tubes, strangers taking care of me, how can she not care?”

And then Sam heard a sound coming from his mother; it was a sound he was familiar with from war. All humans were capable of this sound; they just didn’t know it until they’d lost a beloved friend, a parent. Worse—a child.

Tears spilled out over her cheeks, taking the powder on her face with them, rolling down like tiny snowballs. She wiped furiously at her eyes with her fragile hands, as though angry at the outburst of unfamiliar emotion.

“I’m dying, you know,” she told her son.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he really was. He put his large, weathered hand over hers. The bones were tiny and her skin was thin and translucent; he felt as though he was holding a paper fan.

“Oh, I don’t want your pity,” she said. “Look at me, I’m so old. And I hate this place, frankly. You think I didn’t want to run off? I could’ve left … so many times. I could’ve left you and your sister.And you know what? I would have been happier.”