Been There, Married That (ARC)

by Gigi Levangie

  “So uncool,” the boy said. His friends murmured approval.

  “Well, that’s one thing you’ve gotten right today,” I said.

  “Pep?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “See you soon,” he said. And winked.

  I dragged Pep out of the house, down the lawn, up the driveway, all the way to valet parking.

  “I never even got to see Ariana!” Pep wailed, tears streaming down her freckled face.

  That’s when I realized. Ariana wasn’t there. And I knew Trevor would deny he’d ever told her she was.

  Word spread even before the hunt was over. Trevor wouldn’t speak to me on the way home. I had done the unthinkable. I had criticized Hollywood progeny. I might as well have pushed my entire family out onto an ice floe in the middle of the climate-warmed Pacific where we’d be eaten by . . . kelp?

  The rules when it came to Hollywood offspring: 1. They were “charming,” not rude. 2. They were “creative,” not too soft and stupid for public school. And, 3. They were “stunning,” not “I’ve seen better features on an elephant seal.”

  Margaritas: The Glue That Held Our Marriage Together, Sort Of:

  Our first date was an accidental lunch; he’d been sitting at my table at Peroni’s by mistake and stayed. Our second date, at Rosalinda’s, was done by the time we’d reached the bottom of our margaritas. They’d been delivered to us over ice in thick blue glasses with salt on the rim and small straws, and they were the most delicious margaritas I’ve ever tasted, which is why I’ve tried to replicate them ever since. Or maybe I was just trying to replicate the feeling of that night.

  At some point in the conversation, Trevor stopped bouncing in his seat and kissed me. When I came up for air, I said, “You’d better be good.”

  Trevor and I tumbled through the entrance of his hotel suite, and he already had my (good) panties off and was giving me head before the door closed. He was the most exciting man I’d ever met, maybe the most exciting I’d ever spoken to.

  Then there was his penis, famous in these parts. There’d been a whisper campaign for the best and biggest penis in Hollywood; his was in the top three (Liam N**son and Milton B*rle rounded out the rest). This wasn’t my first dick rodeo; I’d experienced a comparison sample. Trevor’s wasn’t just smoke-and-mirrors huge, like the guys who Nair their pubes to make their dicks look like Louisville Sluggers. Trevor had washboard abs and a big dick, and he ate pussy. And he told funny stories and he laughed at my jokes, and to say he was perhaps a genius was no stretch. Here’s the kicker—he was rich and successful and ambitious for more riches and more successes. I was just hoping to make a living writing, maybe own a bookstore someday and a cabin in Carmel; my plans wouldn’t get in the way of his ambitiousness. We shared symbiotic futures—and symbiotic was the word that year.

  After we fucked, we reclined, sex-hausted, on sheets that were more expensive than anything I owned, including my car. I gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay, and I heard him say, “I’m finally dating someone I can introduce to my friends.”

  I looked back at him and smiled. He looked so happy. So relieved.

  I would have given him anything.

  5: Marital Purgatory

  Civil war had erupted in the dead zone. Pep was still not speaking to me. Her two-word sentences had devolved into hiccups and grunts. It was like living with a freckled pug. She ducked out of every room I entered, she turned her cheek when I said good night, and she refused to say goodbye when I dropped her at school.

  “Totally normal,” Liz said. “My older one didn’t talk to me for three years. It was heaven. Give her time.”

  “How about a spanking? Can I give her that?” I asked. “Is spanking legal?” And then I thought of all the parents who’d be in prison when I was growing up. Spankings were handed out like participation trophies today.

  Meanwhile, a battle had broken out (again) between Petra and the Triplets. The Triplets always blamed Petra for everything—the cracks in our marital (Easter?) egg, Pep’s elbow psoriasis, their checks being a day late, drought. The first shot had been fired across the bow of the French doorway the moment Petra stepped through, cardigan buttoned to her chin on a warm, cloudless day, no makeup on her sallow skin, trailed by a cloud of thick perfume. The Triplets had weaved in and out of the living room during Petra’s interview, eyes narrowed, whispering in Spanish, crows taking turns surveilling the nest.

  “I told you don’t trust her,” Gabriela, leader of the apron squadron said, her eyes red, eyeliner smudged. “What I tell you?” When Gabi was ticked off, she’d sometimes punish me, her recalcitrant daughter, with angry silences, the evil eye, misplaced toilet paper. Once, I disagreed with her on the best baby carrot brand to feed Pep and I couldn’t find toilet paper for a week.

  “What happens to us?” Caster demanded, Lola clinging to her side like a wet tissue with eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Don’t worry,” I tell them all. The Triplets, Esteban the gardener, the blond kid with the ponytail and lingering pot scent who drops off orchids twice a month, the lesbian dog walker with shaved head and dimples, the part-time handyman who just had a baby. But I am worried. I wonder and hope that everyone here (well, everyone except Petra) will have a job once the marital dust settles. The only person not worried, by the way, is my decorator—a Hollywood divorce typically doubles business.

  Playing cards were the latest weapon of mass distraction. Caster breathlessly pulled me aside one afternoon, waving playing cards at my nose. Caster, the Sexy Triplet, all full lips and bright smile and recent boob job, was going places. Mostly to the grocery store with that extra grand a week she was charging.

  “Las cartas, they were in the light,” she said, motioning skyward. “En la cocina.”

  The kitchen light fixture.

  “What were cards doing up there?” I shook my head. “Was someone cheating at poker?” Trevor held a monthly poker game when it was trendy, until all the Russians were deported.

  “Diabla,” she said. “Verdes ojos! She cursing you!”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. I fingered the cards. Joker, queen, king . . .

  “Missus, please,” she said, grabbing my hands, her big hazel eyes pleading. I dropped the cards.

  “I’ll find out what happened,” I said.

  “Fire her, missus,” she said, crossing herself and kissing the tips of her fingers. “Please, I beg you. Please.”

  I couldn’t fire Petra, my Single White Nanny. It was too late. I knew it. Everyone knew it.

  As Gabriela packed Trevor for his Farewell (to Me) Tour on a yacht with a Russian billionaire and several supermodel girlfriends, playing cards had multiplied like Kardashian pregnancies, dropped in my boots, shoved in a jeans pocket, tucked under my car visor.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, A-nus,” Petra said, flipping her (my) layered haircut as she painstakingly organized Trevor’s all black, all thin ties. I was living dangerously, breaching the blueprint, but I was feeling self-righteous.

  “If you’re trying to curse me, Petra, you’re too late; I was cursed at birth,” I said. “Also, it’s Ag-nes, not A-nus.” I flipped my hair back at her.

  Soon after, I started to find crucifixes hidden all over the house. Crucifixes everywhere, like a bad vampire movie. Or recent vampire movie. Plaintive Jesus staring up at me from our silver drawer. Beatific Jesus hiding under my pillow. Gloomy Jesus snuggled in my coat pocket.

  Hot Jesus stashed behind the toilet.

  I cornered Caster as she was taking a break in the poolroom.

  “No sé. Ask Gabriela.” She tossed her hair and sauntered off with Pep’s laundry folded in her arms. I tracked down Lola dusting the trophy case, but she ran for cover.

  I sequestered Gabriela in the pantry, dwarfed by our stock of canned beans and soup, ketchup, dry pasta, and a nuclear holocaust stockpile of Fiji water. The pantry had a steel-reinforced, triple-bolted door—an agent h
ad been hogtied and robbed inside his house a couple of years ago, and this one door made us feel safe. We could survive on ketchup and Fiji for at least a week while our house was being ransacked.

  “Gabriela, what’s with the crucifixes all over the house?” I asked. “I almost got stabbed this morning putting my Uggs on.”

  “Lo siento, missus, no comprendo,” Gabriela fibbed and crossed herself.

  “Comprendes estes,” I said as I opened my hand, revealing the CVS pharmacy crucifix I’d discovered in my underwear drawer next to the scratchy lace bras Trevor had bought over the years that I never wore.

  “You fire me, missus?” Gabi asked, her hand on her hip. Like I would ever.

  “No, Gabi, no, of course not; I’m the one who’s fired,” I said. “Is this like an exorcism? Para la casa? Does this have something to do with the playing cards?”

  “La Reina!” she said, grabbing my shoulders with her warm hands and staring me in the eyes. “Fight the black magic, missus! Ay dios mio!”

  Oh no! Ay dios mio? Anytime Gabriela had to call on “dios,” trouble was around the corner.

  Trevor marched out with Petra scurrying behind him, lugging his Louis Vuitton trunk. I waved goodbye at the kitchen window as Gabriela hummed and polished the counter to an impossible sheen. I watched Petra heave the trunk into the back of an awaiting black SUV, drop it, then heave it again, while Gabriela gave a sharp laugh, then polished some more.

  “Gabi. What did you pack in his trunk?” I asked.

  “Something muy especial,” she said with a Latina Cheshire cat smile. “Un poquito maleficio . . .”

  “Gabriela . . .”

  “I’ll be in the laundry room, missus,” she said as she walked away.

  I’d forgotten I was hosting our monthly book club / trunk show. Karyn was selling her designer jewelry that no one wanted but everyone would buy. Out of fourteen wives, eleven had canceled.

  “They’re idiots,” Liz said when I called her, gasping from her run up Temescal. “They’re afraid they’re going to catch divorce.”

  “Lip filler lemmings,” I said. “I’d tell them to jump off a cliff into the Pacific, but we all know silicone floats.”

  I finished the last chapter of our designated novel (a multigenerational family saga set in the Burmese mountains in the winter of 1806, written by a queer-leaning Bangladeshi paraplegic), set up a cheese-and-cracker spread, wine, glasses, more wine, and a bowl of M&Ms on the deck, and screamed into the canyon, just for fun. I turned on music (AMY WINEHOUSE / DECK). Gray dusk settled over the mansions that sat at the top of the hillsides, where the wealthiest of the Riviera inhabitants lived and pointed at the rest of us suckers.

  Amy wasn’t going to rehab.

  I knocked on Pep’s door. No answer.

  No, no, no.

  “Pep?” I said. “I bear M&Ms.”

  She opened the door a crack.

  “Blue ones,” she said.

  “I have blue,” I said. “May I enter?”

  Pep stepped aside and let me in. Books were open on her desk, her backpack at her feet. My tween was so much more organized than I, but I had proof she was my daughter because of her freckles and the space between her front teeth. I relished memories of squirting water into boys’ ears in third grade. Pep was almost my height, which was alarming, but as my dad had told me, the Scots Irish on his mother’s side were big-boned ladies. According to family legend, they’d lifted a Dodge off their family dog (who lived).

  Lucky, lucky Pep. So much to look forward to.

  She sat back in her chair, pushing away from her desk until I was sure she’d fall backward and crack her skull.

  “Can you help me with math?” she asked.

  “Is this a test?” I smiled. “How long have you known me? My math acuity ended in third grade—second for you.”

  “I was doing long division in second.”

  “Then kindergarten,” I said.

  “Mom,” she said. She rolled the eraser end of her pencil along her cheek. She paused, and I wanted to fill the space with a hug or just begging her to like me again. I couldn’t imagine my dad ever having these thoughts, and maybe I was better off for it. His job was to feed us, make sure we did our homework (with no help, certainly no tutors), and make sure we got enough sleep. That was it.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “Pretty? You’re beautiful!” I said.

  “Mom, seriously,” she said. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “I know you’re pretty. You’re a beautiful, smart, funny girl.”

  “Like these girls?” she asked, showing me her phone.

  “You’re on Instagram?”

  “Everyone is, Mom. Please, focus,” she said. “Do you think I’ll ever look like those dance girls?”

  I stared at the phone. The dance girls looked like their dance moms, but in miniature. I needed to retire from this world.

  “These tiny, filtered fairies?” I asked. “I mean, they’re adorable. But you have a different look.”

  “Will I ever be adorable like them?”

  “If you cut off your feet,” I said.

  “I have a pubic hair,” she said.

  Screech. Breathe through your nose, Agnes, breathe in through your nose and out your mouth,

  “Are you sure?” My baby was barely eleven. This is terrible, I thought. Menopause and puberty in the same house? At the same time?

  What kind of God . . .

  “Mo-om,” she said. “I know what a pubic hair looks like. Do you want to check?”

  I shook my head until it almost came off. “No, honey, you’re a smart girl. You know your own . . . body hair. I’m so sorry. I just think it’s so soon.”

  “Half the girls in my class have underarm hair,” she said. “Two are on their periods. I already looked it up. It doesn’t mean I’m going to have my period.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t . . .” I felt for the chair and sat down.

  “Are you okay, Mom? It’s just one little curly red hair,” she said, and she gave me that sweet gap-toothed smile I hadn’t seen in weeks. No wonder Pep was moody; she was hormonal. And add to that the divorce.

  I wiped my eyes and sprang up, grabbing Pep and hugging her and resisting the urge to stuff her back into a Babybjörn.

  The gate rang.

  The air was just starting to chill as Juliette, Liz, and Karyn arrived in a blur of floral scents, evening sunglasses, soft pastels, and, in Liz’s case, a tennis skirt, which she wore every day, in case a game ever broke out.

  We were missing somebody.

  “Where’s Mystery Asian?” I asked, my synapses snapping to attention.

  “Who?” Karyn asked, busily setting up velvet pads to display her jewelry line on the granite outdoor table.

  “What do you mean, ‘who’?” I asked. “The guy you bring to every brunch, lunch, and SoulCycle class. The guy you claim not to be screwing, but what else would you do with a limber hetero male with a twelve-pack and thick, hard thighs I hadn’t noticed?”

  “Oh, Kwan. Yeah. Your divorce,” Karyn said. “It’s difficult on him. He’s so sensitive. He would literally die if Michael and I got divorced.”

  “Would he?” I asked, my sarcasm dripping onto the redwood deck.

  “He’ll be fine,” Karyn said. “I’ll tell him you asked about him.”

  “I didn’t really,” I said. “I don’t know how I could care less.”

  “Did anyone read the book?” Liz asked. “I read thirty pages and then went into an Insta-spiral.” An Insta-spiral is when you look at a girlfriend (or ex’s) Instagram, then someone she tagged, then someone she tagged, and so on.

  “I read the book,” I said.

  “How? How do you do that?” Liz asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Agnes, you always read the book,” Juliette said, lying on a chaise with a sleep mask over her eyes. She appeared to be wearing a nightgown. Underwear? Not sure.

  “Because
. . . it’s a book club,” I said. “We’re supposed to read the book.”

  “That’s not what we do,” Karyn said. “That’s not how we operate.”

  “Take a break from overachieving,” Juliette said. “It would help your marriage.”

  “Let’s not all pile on at once,” Liz said. “We can’t blame Agnes for reading. Even if it’s weird.”

  “Guys. I’m not overachieving anything,” I said, taking a gulp of wine. “My life is this close to being rewritten. They’re about to recast the lead with a Slavic newcomer.”

  “Who’s going to buy these dazzling earrings? Just in time for the holidays!” Karyn asked, holding up a pair of layered gold hoop-upon-hoop earrings.

  “What holidays?”

  “Christmas, New Year’s,” she said, then added, “Rosh Hashanah . . .”

  “Karyn, it’s April,” Liz said.

  “I know,” Karyn said, “but I spent too much this month on my chaise collection. They’re French and important.”

  I sifted through her collection, peering at a pair of pink diamond studs.

  “You’ve worn these,” I said, examining them in my hand. “You’ve been wearing these for the past six months.”

  “Correction. Lovingly broken them in,” Karyn said.

  “We’re not going to talk about the book at all,” I said, “are we?”

  “I didn’t even buy it,” Juliette said. “Books depress me.”

  “Enough about the book,” Liz said to me. “Who’ve you hired?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your lawyer,” she said. “Your divorce lawyer?”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” I said.

  “You always have a lawyer, darling,” Karyn said. “I’ve had a lawyer since the wedding. I invited him to the wedding.”

  “Trevor hasn’t filed,” I said.

  “Interesting ploy,” Liz said.

  “We’re so cool. This divorce might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I said.

  Welcome, Divorce Dream State, where all matter of uncoupling transpires smoothly as Gwyneth and Chris’s silky unraveling.

  “Trevor and I will go our separate ways but live blocks from each other and raise our happy, well-adjusted, brilliant child. Just like BenJen but without the phoenix tattoo.”