The Starter Wife (5 page)

Kenny wasn’t her type. Period. Not least because he was the King of Exclamation. No person or activity was too prosaic to elude the Kenny Howl of Enthusiasm. Then there were his looks. Gracie didn’t like handsome, didn’t trust handsome, was
never even a fan of handsome movie stars. Why would Gracie drool over Brad Pitt when Gracie would rather look like Brad Pitt? Kenny was too tall, too good-looking, and, she learned as their lunch wore on, too ambitious. Gracie had heard of five-year plans, even ten-year plans—but he had twenty-, thirty-, forty-year plans. Kenny knew what studio he wanted to run, he knew the types of movies he wanted to make, he knew who he wanted his lieutenants to be. Kenny knew what he wanted in a wife and he knew how many children he wanted (two: one boy, one girl) and where he wanted them to go to school (preschool, elementary school, high school, college—graduate school!). He knew what street he wanted to live on (“Rockingham—the best views in Los Angeles”); he knew what car he’d be driving in five years (Mercedes 600SL). The man knew where he’d end up after Alzheimer’s hit him in his old age (the Motion Picture Home).

Kenny, who had barely made a dent into his thirtieth year, knew he’d be cremated and where his ashes would be scattered (in the Pacific, off the Baja Peninsula).

On the surface, nothing about “The Kenny Package” would seem to appeal to a person like Gracie. She had never shared a tuna roll with anyone who seemed untouched by the Human Condition. He had emerged from his first thirty years unscathed. Of course Kenny had been a college athlete; of course he had been treasurer of his fraternity (better access to beer funds than the president); of course he had grown up in the suburbs in a two-parent household with a younger sister and a dog named Rusty.

And of course he drove a BMW, in the L.A.-biquitous black. He took one sidelong look at her Toyota Cressida, as though afraid of infection by the working class, and told her she’d have to sell it and buy something more hip. Gracie told
him the only thing more hip she could afford would be a skateboard.

That afternoon he sent her a brand-new skateboard with hot pink wheels. She’d hugged the gift card to her chest. She could still remember the words scribbled onto the tiny card: “To Gracie, who deserves better wheels. Love, Kenny ‘The Artist’ Pollock.”

Love!

Gracie had been Kenny-fected.

So despite her qualms, Gracie dated Kenny anyway and got attached to his goofy charm anyway and slept with him on the third date anyway—after all, they’d already had their first kiss at the sushi bar. Maybe she was a sellout. Maybe Gracie should have stuck out her existence on the wrong side of town, driving the wrong car and wearing the wrong clothes. (“It’s a good thing you’re so cute,” Kenny told her the first morning after they’d slept together as Gracie was getting dressed in her baggy corduroys and long-sleeved T-shirt, “because your clothes suck.”) But Kenny represented what Gracie felt was missing in her life—stability. He could take charge, he knew where he was going; Gracie had no idea where her life was headed. There was no five-year plan; there wasn’t even a three-week plan. Gracie, who always prided herself on her independence, who had never depended on anyone, much less a man, secretly longed to be taken care of.

With Kenny, Gracie would emerge from the shell of the studious UCLA student who watched from the bus stop as sorority girls whizzed by her in their convertible Cabriolets; with Kenny, she would no longer have her nose pressed up against the plate-glass Prada window. (Except that as she got older, she no longer “understood” Prada; what could those odd shoes and unflattering dresses mean?)

In fact, sometimes Gracie wondered if the main reason she married Kenny was to seek vengeance upon Cabriolet-driving, MasterCard-hoarding sorority girls. Not that that was a terrible reason to get married. In Los Angeles, it could be the raison d’être; anyone would understand. In India and Pakistan, they had arranged marriages; in Los Angeles, marriages were arranged by the color of your American Express card.

Back to Kenny’s business dinner: Emerging from her Past Life Regression, Gracie sipped her margarita and leaned back, sucking in her lower stomach as she always did when she heard her Pilates instructor’s voice egging her on in her mind—“strengthen the core, and the rest follows.”

Thank God, Gracie thought. Thank God I’m married. I don’t have to worry about a little extra tummy.

“Where are you going this Christmas?” the ex-stripper asked, jamming an ice pick through the fragile surface of Gracie’s reverie.

It was March.

Gracie smiled.The margarita was working its magic.

G
RACIE HAD TURNED LEFT
from Sunset onto Rockingham when her cell phone rang, the recorded voice of her daughter repeating itself:
Mommy, your cell phone is ringing. Mommy, your cell phone is ringing.

The caller ID flashed Kenny’s car phone number.

“Hello?” Gracie said. “Hello?” she repeated. She cursed; the reception in Brentwood was always bad.

“Kenny?” All Gracie heard was the maddening staccato hiccups of a broken phone connection.

“Kenny? I’m losing you,” Gracie said. She wondered why he didn’t wait to talk to her until they were both home. She
hung up and tossed the phone in the passenger seat. And then she worried:
What if he’d been in an accident?

She was pulling into her driveway when the phone rang again. Three bars showed up on the cell phone. The reception would be clear.

“Kenny?” Gracie asked. “Is everything all right?”

“I said”—Kenny’s voice was finally clear—“I want a divorce.”

The execution of their marriage was performed via Cingular Wireless.

2
 
THE SEVEN STAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD MARRIAGE

K
ENNY HAD PROPOSED,
as expected, on Valentine’s Day. After all, they were almost three years into his five-year plan, and Gracie knew he wanted to be married before he was thirty-two. They were staying at the Auberge du Soleil in Napa. Gracie knew that something was afoot because Kenny seldom took a day off from work. Even on weekends, he would read ten scripts to be ready with notes on Monday, and watch as many demo reels and videotapes to be up on the talent pool. Kenny and Gracie were living together in his small house in the Palisades, the miniaturized ultimate in
Woman’s Day
suburban living. Kenny hated the little house; Gracie thought it glorious. Kenny had his social (read: work-related social) routine: the business dinners during the week, followed by a breakfast meeting on Saturday, either at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills or Shutters in Santa Monica—there were stringent
rules on where to hold breakfast or lunch meetings. Or since he’d taken up golf (“Eisner golfs!”), he’d be up and out early at the Riviera.

But Sunday morning—that was their time alone. They would make love early in the morning, barely awake, dreamily groping for each other’s body under the covers. Time would evaporate. Troubles were shunted aside. All that existed were lips and skin and Kenny’s boyish scent. Gracie could have lived for days on Kenny’s scent.

The sex was phenomenal. Gracie knew that she was unlike any other girl Kenny had ever dated. She saw the old pictures, the slender, dynamic blondes clutching a beer can and cigarette in one hand with troublesome ease, the tennis wrinkles already forming around their startling blue eyes. Kenny approached Gracie as though she were the northern tip of Africa, and he the Great White Hunter. She knew he’d never experienced ample thighs, her tangle of hair, her pale, giving skin. Kenny would fall asleep on top of Gracie’s stomach, purring into the well of flesh around her belly button.

Gracie would run her fingers through his jock-cut hair as he slept. She would stare at the high Spanish ceiling with the watermarks and pass his locks through her fingers like a mantra. She found whole worlds in those moments.

Hours later, they would rise and jog, unsteady, giddy, down to the beach. If they were very ambitious, they could make it all the way to Venice. But Gracie was not nearly as eager to exercise as Kenny, so often they’d just stop for coffee along the bike path, taking in the sights—overly tan girls in bikinis on roller skates, chubby men in Lycra shorts on blades, babies bouncing uncomfortably in jogging strollers as their stringy, stern mothers chugged behind them. During the week, it was easy for Gracie to lose Kenny. He was at the gym on Montana by 6:00
A.M.
five times a week (Jerry Bruckheimer pumps iron at five-thirty!); they would often not see each other until seven-thirty in the evening, and that was usually in conjunction with another couple—or a hundred other couples. But Gracie could fill the hours with procrastination and sometimes even the writing itself. Gracie was proud that she made her own money, though it was nothing by Hollywood standards; more than that, Gracie loved that Kenny was proud of her. She knew she was different from the other women; Gracie would never become needy, Gracie would never mold herself into the image of the proper wife.

There were a lot of things that Gracie told herself she’d never do.

And then Gracie grew up. Oh, did Gracie grow up.

Their last night at the Auberge, Kenny insisted on having dinner inside their room on the balcony. Gracie had to agree; it was a night consistent with the vestiges of winter—dark, cloudless sky, stars forming their own personal constellations. Kenny pointed his long, pitcher’s arm toward the sky. “There’s the constellation Batman” or “Do you see? There’s the constellation Swollen Penis!” They laughed like five-year-olds and Gracie held on to him and had never in her life been happier.

Looking back, Gracie marveled at the fact that Kenny had picked a perfect night for a proposal. His timing had always been faultless; he knew just when to move out of one job and into another, he knew the right moment to court press, he knew when to cut losses and people.With every major life question, he was the Titan of Timing.

They had just finished her favorite part of the meal, dessert—a molten chocolate soufflé. Gracie had eaten her half and Kenny’s when he dropped down to one knee. For a second,
Gracie thought he had dropped his fork, but there it was, a solitaire diamond so beautiful that Gracie had almost forgotten about the chocolate.

“Will you?” he asked.

“Will I what?” Gracie teased.

“Will you help me up?” he replied. “I’ve got a bad knee, remember?”

Gracie laughed and said, “Yes, I will help you up, and yes, I will marry you.”

He was putting the ring on her finger when Gracie asked, “You were asking me to marry you, right? I don’t want to look more foolish than I already do.”

Kenny nodded and smiled, his big, trademark grin easing across his face. He looked so happy—almost, almost carefree. Gracie kissed his mouth and they smiled, nose-to-nose, and they kissed again and then they laughed and couldn’t stop laughing until Gracie cried like a baby, relieved that the world had suddenly opened its large, loving arms for her, and he begged her to stop or else he would take the ring back, and then they kissed more.

Gracie had described the scene to friends and to acquaintances many times since, but never quite recaptured the moment. There was enough romance in that one night to last a lifetime. Whenever Gracie felt impatient with Kenny, which was often—with the demands of his job, the demands on his time, the bad romance novels Gracie read at night because there was no one to talk to—Gracie would think of that moment and hold it close. And remember why she had married him in the first place.

P
UKING IN
an enclosed garage creates a surround-sound effect that George Lucas himself would be eager to copyright. Gracie
wiped damp remnants of onion ring from her mouth when she realized, through her tequila-pending-divorce stupor, that she had lived through all seven stages of The Hollywood Marriage:

STAGE ONE:
Date the up-and-comer—this part can be eliminated if up-and-comer is already up and came (currently successful) or came and went (bilked studio out of hundreds of millions and living it up in Bel Air).

STAGE TWO:
Marry aforementioned.

STAGE THREE:
Swear you won’t give up your career.

STAGE FOUR:
Give up your career when the burden of being on what feels like thousands of charity boards becomes overwhelming. Children, memorize this equation before you begin Stage Four: One Charity Board = 240 uncomfortable phone calls (to ask for money), thirty lunches (to plan [some] and drink [more] Chardonnay), and one excruciatingly painful event night.

STAGE FIVE:
Two kids a must. Two, not one, two! Even if the second one has to be adopted, through a surrogate, or an adopted surrogate! Two kids = triple child support = a lifetime of yoga retreats.

STAGE SIX:
Begin drinking (if haven’t already. But you have, haven’t you. Good girl.) If possible, stick to Grandma’s good-old standby, vodka. No smell, no tell!

Or: Begin Vicodin and/or Mexican Quaaludes. Or both. Why not?