The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  “When can I meet him?”

  “He seems a little shy.”

  “Bullshit,” Joan said. “I’m going to have a dinner party and he’s going to come because you’re going to tell him I’m despondent over my spouse ancien, and he needs to entertain me.”

  “That seems like a tall order for anyone,” Gracie said.

  “This Saturday,” Joan said. “I need to be cheered up.”

  Gracie smiled. And nodded. “I’ll tell him. After all, he handled Will under difficult, semi-naked circumstances. He can handle anything.”

  “Where does he live?” Joan asked.

  “In the Colony,” Gracie said.

  “Ooh,” Joan said. “He has money.”

  Gracie shrugged.

  “What does he do?” Joan asked. “Besides making out with lonely divorcées?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Gracie asked. “What’s with all the questions?”

  “I have to know who my daughter’s going to marry.”

  “I don’t know what he does for a living.”

  “I’ll bet it’s something unusual—like that man who used to live here who made shoe boxes for a living. The guy was a gazillionaire. Shoe boxes!” Joan exclaimed. “You know, he always took up more than his share of parking spaces.”

  “Not a great trait,” Gracie agreed.

  Joan thought about it, then looked at Gracie. “Leave it to me, I’ll find out everything.”

  “You won’t scare him off?” Gracie asked. “I really want to keep him, Mommy.”

  “I won’t scare him off,” Joan said. “Just make sure he eats meat. I’ll put some steaks on the grill, which won’t be my grill after the summer. We’ll have some wine, we’ll have a great time.”

  Joan loved to plan a party, even under dire circumstances.

  “All right, all right,” Gracie said. “I’ll tell him today.”

  They watched as a triangle of pelicans flew past, diving like feathered kamikazes in the water in front of the house.

  “Who told you?” Gracie asked nonchalantly. “Who told you about Lou?”

  “Lavender at the gate,” Joan said. “She was pretty upset.”

  Joan smoothed the sheet over her body. Her throat made a gargling sound. She looked up at Gracie, the sheen of tears in her eyes.

  “They found his body this morning,” she said.

  GRACIE FLEW, flew on her bike to see Lavender. She didn’t remember running down the stairs and spinning out the front door; she didn’t even remember jumping on her bike.

  “Lou, Lou, Lou,” Gracie murmured to herself. And then, louder, until she was screaming—“Lou! LOU!”

  She soared over the speed bumps and turned the corner toward the security gate, narrowly missing a black Range Rover that seemed to speed up as they closed in on each other.

  Gracie slowed down and let the Range Rover pass. She tried to catch her breath and started hiccupping instead. Gracie made a mental note, scoring her reaction: “Handling bad news—C-minus at best.”

  She got off the bike, left it by the side of the road, on its side, the wheels spinning. She walked toward the security quarters, a small white structure, just big enough for two people with pleasant personalities, three people if one happened to bring enough food for all of them.

  “Lavender!” Gracie called out. “Lavender!” She was leaning against the outside wall.

  Lavender was directing someone in a red Ferrari on the other side of the white structure, holding a clipboard in her hand.

  Lavender turned and looked at her.

  Her eyes were pink underneath the black-rimmed glasses. Her light cocoa skin was ashen. This gave the effect of making her look blond all over.

  She waved the car past without looking back, then walked around the structure, meeting Gracie at the back.

  They looked at each other.

  “Is it true?” Gracie whispered. Then, “It can’t be true.”

  Lavender just looked at her, the wrinkles in her forehead showing the sense of stress and anguish.

  Gracie grabbed her by her arms, jerking her body.

  “Lavender, it’s not true.”

  “He’s dead,” Lavender said. She sighed and Gracie could feel the rattle in her chest.

  “Not Lou,” Gracie said. “It’s someone else.” Her head shook back and forth, the word “NO” repeating itself inside her brain. NO NO NO NO NO NO!

  “Number 152,” Lavender said. “Lou Manahan. He drowned.”

  Gracie’s hand went to her mouth; she felt her face pull back into a grimace. She bit down so hard she cried out—Lavender grabbed her as Gracie’s knees buckled beneath her.

  “I got you,” Lavender said, “I got you, I got you.”

  Gracie cried into her shirtsleeve, tears streaming down Lavender’s arm. Gracie held on to Lavender as she bent over her, guiding her slowly to the ground, the loving act of a good mother.

  Gracie’s eyes closed. “Did you see a body?”

  “What?” Lavender asked.

  “Did you see a body?” Gracie opened her eyes. “Are you sure it was him, Lavender? Are you sure?” She was looking up at her, her vision glazed and foggy.

  “Gracie.”

  “It was an accident!” Gracie yelled, pulling back. “He didn’t mean to kill himself—he didn’t want to kill himself. It was just a stupid—”

  Lavender’s eyes were tracking her,watching her, listening.

  Gracie stopped. She threw up her hands and looked up to the overcast sky.

  “I hate you,” she screamed and shook her fist at a sky seldom filled with dread. “I hate you!”

  Lavender stood there with her, oblivious to the cars piling up in front of the security station until the first several started honking their horns in a cacophonous opus.

  GRACIE WALKED her bike back to Joan’s house and left it in the driveway, bereft of the energy it would take to pull it over the doorway.

  She dragged her body up the stairs to the front door and willed her way to the couch and was grateful for its overstuffed cushions and the ridiculous number of pillows because now she needed the comfort of ridiculously expensive, ridiculously comfortable furnishings.

  She became aware of her breath, jagged as a patient in an emphysema ward.

  So this is what it feels like, Gracie thought. This is what tragedy feels like.

  Shortly after sadness and disbelief came anger, the second-cousin emotion. And with anger came energy.

  A half hour later, Gracie found herself in the kitchen filling a blender with ice cubes and frozen strawberries and vodka from an old bottle in the freezer.

  Yes, it was still morning. But Gracie needed a drink—just not a stiff one. Stiff drinks scared her. She didn’t like the taste of hard liquor—she’d never been a scotch rocks kind of girl. A daiquiri would fill the bill nicely, even under these circumstances.

  She wondered if it seemed pussy of her, having a daiquiri when she should have been waving a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around. “Geez,” she could hear herself say to others, “I was so despondent I made myself a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris.”

  Also, she wondered if vodka was in fact the proper liquor to make daiquiris with.

  Either way, she decided that no one had to know; and after all, Lou might actually find it funny.

  She turned on the blender and stood in her favorite spot in the kitchen from which she could see everything—Palos Verdes, Catalina Island, post-adolescent surfer musculature molded from too many days on the beach and too few days working—

  And … the familiar green blanket. The familiar frantic yet surprisingly rhythmical pop-pop-pop underneath.

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” Gracie said. “That is so inappropriate!” She opened the kitchen window—a fancy, expensive window from Germany which, like all the other fancy, expensive windows from Germany in the house, served only one purpose fine-to look through. Otherwise, it was impossible to open, and would leak whenever there was rainfall.

 
; She opened it barely two inches, with much effort—“Have you no shame?!” she yelled at the offending figure under the blanket, wondering why she had chosen words appropriate for a Catholic school nun annoyed at a rambunctious student.

  There was not a moment lost in the vigorous activity taking place.

  “Have you no decency?!” she yelled, continuing on her Catholic school rampage.

  No response. If anything, the tempo had stepped up a bit.

  Gracie shook her head.

  “What’s your goddamned secret?!” she finally screamed before shutting the instrument-of-Satan German window.

  WIFE NUMBER NINE

  Married to a famous action-movie producer with an exciting, masculine style. She reluctantly agreed not to have children, because he wanted to have all of her attention. Ten years into the marriage, after it was too late for her to bear children, he impregnated another woman.

  He never acknowledged his illegitimate son, who also became a famous action-movie producer with an exciting, masculine style.

  20

  THE KING IS LAID TO REST

  “SLOW NEWS DAY,” Will commented as Gracie tracked news of Lou’s death throughout the day. CNN, all the local channels, even the major networks and their major anchors had all mentioned his untimely demise. Gracie was particularly impressed with the saddened expressions gracing Katie Couric’s and Diane Sawyer’s gorgeous mugs. They appeared to have lost their best friend, not a studio head whom they had never met and would not know if they bumped into him on Madison Avenue.

  “He was important,” Gracie said.

  “Yes,” Will said. “Without Lou, we wouldn’t have had the sixth Godzilla.”

  Will was still pissed off that Lou had not hired him to decorate his ski house in Sun Valley—even death would not protect him from Will’s surly comments. Never cross a decorator with attitude.

  And they all had attitude.

  Gracie turned off the television set. She was obsessing over the news. Obsessing over the facts. Would they explain what had happened? Could they explain what had gone wrong? Surely he had hit his head, Gracie thought. Maybe it was one of those sandbanks that haunted surfers, turning them from bronzed gods into pale quadriplegics with one bad dive. The sandbanks would have been well hidden beneath the dark water, especially with the fireworks going off overhead. That must be it, Gracie thought, he dove in and hit his head and never recovered.

  Lou didn’t want to die. He had everything to live for.

  If Lou had wanted to check out so badly, Gracie thought, what was the point for the rest of us? Was it like that poem Gracie had loved when she was in high school—the one about the handsome man with all the money who shoots himself in the head one day? Gracie loved that poem, not for its artistic merit, hell no, but because it made her feel good about herself—that even the beautiful people had bad days.

  Thoughts like these brought her comfort when she had to read about Gwyneth Paltrow’s career, husband, mother, new baby, diet.

  During the morning, Gracie had noted all the snippets in the news coverage that Lou would appreciate—and all those that would have made him cringe.

  Every headline mentioned him being the King of Hollywood. Lou would have loved that (even though he had pretended to find the label annoying). There were many movie stars who agreed to be interviewed on camera: George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts. Lou, the son of, literally, no one, would have appreciated seeing their faces—knowing they had to get up at 4:30 A.M. for the New York feed.

  At the same time, he would have noted who had declined to be interviewed—or worse, who had simply dialed in their thoughts and remembrances—Catherine Zeta-Jones (“I knew her when she had one last name!” Lou would growl), Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston (“Stop them before they procreate!” Lou would yell).

  And what about the “no comment” from the bubbly movie star he’d dated a decade ago? Surely Lou would have had something to say about that.

  Joan came downstairs, finally, still wrapped up in her down quilt.

  “Anything on the news?” she asked.

  “No,” Gracie said. “Not counting CNN,ABC, NBC, FOX, BET, Nickelodeon, and I’m betting the Playboy Channel as well.”

  “Wow,” Joan said. “Impressive.”

  “Maybe it’s even on the Tennis Channel,” Gracie said. “I haven’t checked.”

  “Ooh,” Will said, grabbing the remote and turning on the TV. “Let’s turn on the Korean channel—I want to see them talk about Lou in Korean.”

  Joan sat down in her overstuffed chair as Will flipped through channels. “I wish he were still alive,” she said, sounding wistful.

  Gracie shook her head and rubbed her face with her hands. “I know, I know. It’s crazy.”

  “Because then I could’ve dated him,” Joan continued. Gracie looked at her.

  “I mean, when you were done with him,” Joan clarified.

  “It wasn’t a date,” Gracie said. “I was way out of all his demographics—age, weight, height—”

  “Okay, enough about dating dead guys,”Will said. “I have to take Gracie shopping. I’ve looked through her closet—there’s no fabulous, sexy, King of Hollywood-appropriate funeral frock to be seen.”

  “I told you, I’m not even sure I’ll be invited to the funeral,” Gracie said.

  “Of course you’re invited,” Will said.

  “I might not be—after all, Kenny worked for him. I’m leaving it up to Kenny. And he won’t be comfortable with me there.”

  “Honey,” Will said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “I already put it out on the Gay Network. Not only are you going, you’re seated in primo territory.”

  Gracie surprised herself by crying. “Thank you,” she sniffed. “That is so sweet.”

  “Sweet, nothing,” Will said. “I’ll just need a play-by-play later,” he continued. “This is the hottest ticket in town. It’s like when The Artist Formerly Known As Prince did his comeback tour, but without the music. I got you front row center.”

  “That is the most jaded thing I have ever heard,” Gracie said. “Even from you.”

  “So you’re not going to attend?” he asked.

  “You pushed her too far this time,” Joan said, shaking her head. “Even Gracie has her limits.”

  Gracie looked at Will, serious. “Not in the wrong dress, I’m not.”

  “That’s my girl!” Joan said, clapping her hands together.

  FUNERALS. The idea of attending a funeral inevitably made Gracie think of her father’s. But she could not, for the life of her, remember that day. She remembered the day her mother showed up on her apartment doorstep, she remembered what her face looked like. Who is this old woman on my doorstep? Gracie had thought as she’d climbed the stairs. Who is she waiting for? She didn’t recognize her own mother until she stood and fell into Gracie’s arms and told her that her father was dead. Grief had sent her mother into a state of disrepair.

  Gracie remembered the day her mother called two weeks later to tell her she was heading back to Seattle, as though she’d just settled into Los Angeles six months ago rather than twenty-five years ago. She remembered cleaning out her father’s closet and drawers and ashtrays because her mother could not move from the couch. But she could not remember the day of her father’s funeral.

  SHE AND WILL drove Will’s brand-new black Prius (which he claimed was Liberal Gay catnip) and parked in the lot outside Forest Lawn on the east side of Hollywood. Will had been able to reserve a spot based on a promise extracted from him that he would give someone’s assistant free advice on the design of his condo’s dining room.

  It was a heavy price to pay, pimping out his art for a ticket to a funeral, but fortunately Will was unburdened by such ethical and other qualms in general.

  As soon as she left the car, Gracie started to observe as though she were using Lou’s senses, watching for what he would have looked for, hearing what he would have been listening for. Feeling what he would have felt.r />
  They walked past the news vans and news cameras and news anchors (de rigueur for celeb sightings—they’d camp out at funerals as easily as camping out at the newsstand in Malibu) to the funeral home and paced themselves, moving up the steps to the front doors while taking in as much information as possible, but for separate reasons. Will hunted gossip—under his black, reflective Marc Jacobs, his mind was working like a FOX News video cam, picking up a Leo appearance here, a Farrah spotting (girlfriend, early 1973) there, an Aniston tear—his concentration was so complete, he would, for the first time since they’d met, not utter a word.

  Gracie and Will found their seats—not front row center as Will had promised, but no matter. They squeezed into the third row, where they had ample access to all visual and oratory ejaculation.

  At least that’s how Will put it, when he finally spoke, in a hushed voice.

  Her first sense of the funeral was that it was surprisingly subdued. There were no Armani-suited agents at the doors, greeting people as though it were a premiere instead of a memorial service. To a man (and woman), all heads were bowed at 45-degree angles. The sounds that she heard were murmurs, the hum of people offering support under difficult circumstances.

  There was no mention of basketball scores, or “the numbers” (what the new releases had made the night before), or “the overnights” (television ratings), or whether Eisner was keeping his job.

  Gracie tried to put her finger on the feeling she was experiencing, past the sadness, past the shock. And then there it was, emerging fully formed and rare and gorgeous:

  Respect.

  Jesus Christ, Gracie thought, people are actually here to pay their respects. They actually care. They care that Lou’s dead. They are experiencing his loss. They are in the moment. They are not onto the next big thing, the coming news flash, tomorrow’s Peter Bart column.

  “Holy shit,” Gracie actually said out loud. If she could have, she would have grabbed at the air and shoved the ill-chosen words back down her throat.

  Several people turned to look at her. She bowed her head, burrowing into Will’s shoulder. “Keep it down,” Will whispered, “some people are trying to mourn and others are trying to watch them do it.”