The Starter Wife (9 page)

She grabbed the last two breadsticks and ate them.

“Gracie, maybe I shouldn’t bring this up, but now’s as good a time as any,” Cricket said. “There’s a whole new world out there, and I want to talk to you about labial rejuvenation.”

“CHECK!” Will screamed.

“I’m trying to save her marriage!” Cricket said. And then, in hushed tones, “I’m thinking about doing it myself. I heard Courtney Love did it. I hear her vagina looks like a rosebud.”

Will put his head in his hands; Gracie was afraid he would start sobbing.

And then Cricket said quietly, “My waxer, Janusz, told me …” She pointed to her Dolce’d crotch.

Her voice choked up. Gracie handed her a glass of water.

“Is this FIJI?” Cricket asked before she drank.

“For God’s sake, what did Janusz say about your …” Will said, then waved his hand down there.

“He said …” Cricket hesitated. “He said …” she continued in a voice that sounded somewhere between Gorbachev (remember him?) and the guy who pumped Gracie’s gas, “‘she-a looks like-a Dumbo.’”

Will looked at her, aghast. “The very best argument for male homosexuality,” he finally said.

“I don’t care what
Redbook
says,” Cricket said. “The vagina is never the same after having kids—”

“Mom!” Will said to Gracie, “Cricket’s reading
Redbook!”

“Back to the topic at hand,” Gracie said, herding the strands of conversation like errant sheep. “Cricket, it’s really important to me that you keep this to yourself. No one else can know about this. It’s entirely possible that Kenny and I can work this all out.” For now, Gracie thought she should stick to the abridged “Kenny and Gracie Divorce Story”—the
Reader’s Digest
version.

“Your alarm clock’s ringing,” Will said helpfully. “Wake up. Kenny and I have a better chance of exchanging vows at the Bel Air, giving birth to five biracial puppies, and working out our marital issues than Kenny and you.”

Gracie snapped Will in the arm with her knuckle while Cricket zipped her collagened upper lip, the one her husband thought was hers and hers alone, though mysterious bruises appeared on them every three months. “Your secret is safe with me,” she whispered at Broadway-stage levels. “I won’t tell a soul!”

“I
S IT TRUE?”
Sharon Adler, wife of Kenny’s business attorney, Mervin, widened her already preternaturally wide eyes at Gracie—wider even in the last year because of the Brentwood essential, thirty-eight-years-and-counting eye lift. If they were any wider, Gracie would be looking at the back of her head. Moments like these made Gracie wonder why she bothered with mascara. How could one compete by using the usual, pedestrian eye-widening tools?

Gracie was picking Jaden up from her preschool class at Tiny Miracles, the nursery school Kenny insisted Jaden attend even though the class interfered with her naptime. The place was indeed tiny, with a dirt yard spotted with tufts of dying grass that was barely big enough to accommodate five or six children, much less the fifteen connected kids in her class.
Worse, it stood next to a dry cleaner that had steadfastly refused to use environmentally safe cleaning agents. Smoke billowed out from the top of the square, windowless concrete building, forming perc clouds over the preschoolers playing in dirty sand with the school mascot, the nursery founder’s ancient, ornery rabbit.

So why attend? Kenny and Gracie had come to this school for a tour when Jaden was barely three months old. Kenny had immediately scoured the room for the presence of excellent trade placement; he was looking for anyone who would warrant a front-page story in the
Daily Variety
or
Hollywood Reporter.
Kenny wanted Jaden to be at a school where he could schmooze. If there was no schmooze factor at the school—for example, if the parents were mostly in finance rather than entertainment—well, then, Kenny couldn’t be bothered.

Tiny Miracles’ schmooze factor was off the charts. In Jaden’s class alone, there was an Oscar-winning director’s child, an action-producer’s child, and most important, a movie star’s child. Who did Jaden prefer to hang out with? The scholarship child, the daughter of a local housekeeper. Gracie called it Divine Social Justice; Kenny called it annoying and grumbled at every check they wrote out to Tiny Miracles, as though the schmooze factor should have made the tuition tax deductible.

So there Gracie was, performing her motherly duties with one other mother and thirteen nannies, even though her world was crumbling around her like an Irwin Allen movie.

And now, she had run into the rumor-mill generator, Patient Zero of The Gossip Pool.

“Is what true?” Gracie asked Sharon. “Are you talking about global warming? Or the brave new direction of the Democratic Party?”

Sharon Adler was also known as The Local National Enquirer.
Having a conversation with her was like looking at the cellulite-ridden celebrity photographs inside the
Star
—you were just happy the story wasn’t about you.

But this time it was.

Sharon focused on her, and Gracie suddenly felt a familial empathy toward shark bait. “Cricket told me,” she said. “I can’t believe it—I heard Julia Roberts left her husband for Kenny.”

“That’s ridiculous. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gracie said. But Sharon the Great White smelled blood in the water, so Gracie added, “Kenny and I are just taking a little break.”

What she really wanted to say was: “Kenny and I are just taking a little break of his neck.”

Gracie looked at her daughter, finishing up a sand pie in the crowded sandbox. Gracie wondered what the real estate market was like in Costa Rica. She wondered what the food was like in Costa Rica. She wondered what the men were like in Costa Rica.

“Jaden doesn’t know anything,” Gracie admitted, “so I appreciate you keeping this quiet.”

“You know I’d never say anything to anyone,” Sharon replied.

“I know,” Gracie lied back.

“Someone said Kenny was gay. Is he gay?” Sharon asked.

“Sharon!” Gracie said. And then she thought for a moment.

“Actually,” Gracie said. And then she didn’t say anything. But she posed a philosophical question in her mind: If a lie falls in a preschool sandbox without making a noise, is it really a lie?

“Y
OU ARE A
bitter, hateful, pathetic—” Kenny was calling Gracie on her cell phone. Gracie was heading back to the house from Whole Foods, an upscale, organic-enough-to-feel-good-about-yourself
grocery store she was now drawn to on a daily basis.

Whole Foods had become Gracie’s crack.

“And hello to you, my young friend,” Gracie said. She realized, as she swallowed the remainder of a yogurt pretzel, that she’d forgotten her thrice-weekly training session.

“Did you tell Sharon Adler that I was gay?” he said in his best demanding studio-exec tone.

“No.”

“You didn’t say I was gay.”

“Absolutely not.”

“She told Ben that you said I was gay.”

“I don’t know how she would have picked that up,” Gracie said, “unless …”

She dipped her hand back into the yogurt pretzel bag. She reminded herself to call her trainer.

“You are a sad, sad person.”

“Actually, I’m feeling a bit better, thanks for asking.”

He hung up on her.

The truth is, Gracie was crushed. She didn’t know why, but somehow, talking to Kenny was better than not talking to him. Even if they were unhappy together, even if they rarely had intimate conversations anymore, much less sex. Gracie didn’t know her life without Kenny.

Gracie would have to learn.

She ate the rest of her pretzel, washed it down with the protein smoothie that tasted suspiciously (and gloriously) like a Jack in the Box milkshake, then dialed her personal trainer and told her she was taking the next rest of her life off.

H
OW COME
Gracie felt so much older at forty-one than she had at forty? She surmised it was because forty-one is closer to sixty
than to twenty. Gracie remembered twenty well, as though she had been sitting in a creative writing class at UCLA just last week, but she had trouble imagining what sixty could be like. Sure, Gracie had seen pictures of Gloria Steinem, but Gracie didn’t have Gloria’s impressive genetics and style and more impressive sense of indignation. Gracie would have to creep into old age with her shortish legs and chronic sense of doom.

Doom. Perhaps it was postpartum depression run amok, but doom had been a shadow of her every waking moment for the last few years. Doom would greet her quietly at daybreak, seeping into her consciousness like the fog draped over Santa Monica on most mornings. Doom would wake with her, nestled comfortably in her head, assuring her gently that all would end in catastrophe. Doom had been her companion since shortly after the birth of her child, when Gracie realized that, after wanting a baby for so long, she had made a huge mistake in actually creating one. If a woman who has all the advantages finds the world a scary place, what hope does a seven-pound baby have?

Besides which, in Gracie’s view, a forty-one-year-old broad with an almost-four-year-old is not a pretty picture. So why take so long to make a baby? The first answer is that Gracie forgot. Gracie was into her thirties before she and Kenny got serious about having a family. Her friends were starting to have babies, friends who once had careers and now had husbands, or friends who still had careers and wanted the added stress of motherhood. One of her friends at the time,Victoria, a former trial lawyer who now worked overtime at her children’s private school (for nothing), was first pregnant at thirty-five. Gracie had experienced one of those maddening Oprah “aha!” moments. Gracie thought,
Damn, of course, I knew I was forgetting something.

That something was children.

Gracie called Kenny on the way home from Vicki’s house to tell him that they needed to make a baby, and soon. The reports were out, the news was in: At the age of thirty-five, a woman’s fertility drops precipitously. It was time to get on the stick. So to speak.

Three and a half years later, after six months with no luck and almost three years of assistance, with mixed results and her (un)fair share of miscarriages, Kenny and Gracie finally had their baby. What they didn’t have was their marriage.

Gracie dropped Jaden at her class (avoiding Sharon Adler’s piercing stare like a dose of smallpox) and drove to Starbucks and sat with her hands wrapped around a Venti something and pondered her next move. Gracie knew something about spirituality, a smattering about I Ching, a bit about the flexibility of the universe. And so, Gracie wondered what lesson the last thirteen, fourteen years could provide her.

Gracie actually wondered why she wasn’t more present, more upset about her impending divorce. She felt as though she were in a fog, as though she were living out someone else’s story line. Maybe Gracie felt like she deserved unhappiness in her life. Or maybe Gracie felt like she deserved more happiness. Either way, the fateful (cell) phone call from Kenny had been a signal to her.

That maybe, for good or bad, her life was about to begin.

A
MAN
sat down two tables from Gracie’s, carrying a laptop and a latte in a ceramic mug. He wore glasses. He had a cap of thinning hair. He was in that male netherworld in terms of age and looks, somewhere between forty and fifty, and neither attractive nor unattractive. Gracie looked at him, stared really, and wondered what it would be like for her to start dating.
Gracie hadn’t exercised her “dating muscle,” hadn’t sent any mating signals out to men, except for that one spinning class with that one spinning instructor. But her signal got crossed with every other sweating, angry-at-her-husband female in the class. The signal hadn’t been picked up.

Gracie decided to try out her somewhat rusty signal on this unsuspecting writer-type. He looked unhappy enough to actually respond; Gracie had sized him up pretty quickly. She suspected he wrote hour dramas. Or, more likely, had written hour dramas, a format being overrun by the less-pricey reality shows. He had a condominium in Santa Monica and drove a late-model Volvo. He voted Independent but thought Democrat and shopped at Whole Foods. He masturbated five times a week to DIRECTV porn but didn’t feel good about it.

There. He finally looked up at her. Gracie smiled, cocking her head in a friendly, unthreatening manner. Did she look like a Labrador retriever? Gracie suspected she did. But this was only a run-through. A rehearsal. This was not her life.

The middle-aged writer adjusted his glasses and looked down. Gracie was suspended in midcock. Her smile hardened and had become painful, an emblem of humiliation. She let her eyes drift upward, toward the ceiling. Gracie was now smiling at the ceiling. Gracie prayed for a bolt of lightning to hit her between the eyes.

How could Gracie not even merit a smile out of a middle-aged, out-of-work writer?

Gracie dropped her rictus grin and tried to not pinch her lips together, as the vertical wrinkles surrounding them had recently reached critical mass.

This is not my life, she thought to herself. I am not trying to pick up men at Starbucks.

A young woman walked in.“Young” to Gracie meant anyone
from three years old to three days after she was born; a subset of the population which included a lot of people. Far too many people for her liking. This particular form of infant looked to be in her twenties, but then most people look to be in their twenties to Gracie. What is it her father used to say? “Growing old is not for sissies.” Maybe for men. For women, it’s more like “Growing middle-aged is not for sissies.”

So back to this girl. This fetus, really. She was all of about twenty-one, judging by the angle of her backside jut. Gracie’s backside no longer jutted—it leaned. And there she was, Gracie thought, look at her, how cute she is. Jesus. Keep me from vomiting. The girl danced over to the counter, and what was that? A yoga mat curled under her supple arm. How lovely. Really. Spectacular. Couldn’t be happier for her.And a ponytail in her hair.And look at how much hair she has, and so shiny. And so hers. Isn’t that wonderful.