The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  GRACIE HAD FORGOTTEN all about Kenny. She’d forgotten that he’d spent the night. She awakened a little late, given the events of the night before, and padded down to the kitchen to make coffee.

  She was shocked into an alert state by sensory overload—the smell of eggs, the sizzle of bacon. The sound of toast popping up out of the toaster. Kenny was standing in the kitchen with an apron on, humming to himself.

  After a moment, he felt her presence and turned to look at her—

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “What are you doing?” Gracie asked, although she accepted the coffee. She took a sip. Damn, it was good. Who was this man and when did he learn to make coffee?

  “I was hungry, I didn’t feel like going to Marmalade,” Kenny replied. “You know, I’ve had the paparazzi—”

  “Chasing you,” Gracie said, “I know.”

  Kenny sighed. “It’s so hard for her, you have no idea,” he said, shaking his head.

  Despite the taste of the coffee, the smell of bacon and eggs, Gracie was suddenly losing her appetite. Her brain was fighting her senses.

  “You’re going to have some, of course?” Kenny asked.

  “Of course,” Gracie acquiesced. She had to think of her health, after all. She was a mother. She could not live on caffeine and candy corn alone. Though she had made a valiant attempt to.

  She sat down and put a napkin on her lap and waited as Kenny served her.

  He watched her as she ate. Gracie suddenly grew self-conscious.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You look good” was all he said.

  Gracie’s hand went automatically to her hair. “Oh, no,” she said, “my hair, it’s too—and I’ve gained weight, you know, and—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “You’re not great at taking compliments, you know that?” Kenny said, motioning for her to stay seated.

  SAM WAS so relieved at being relieved of his obsession with having sex with Gracie that he actually found himself at her house, ringing the doorbell, wishing to apologize for his weird behavior the night before. And he knew she probably hadn’t heard about Lavender. He felt strangely possessive that he should be the one to tell her. He had been deliberating for several moments on how to best express himself that he didn’t notice that the door had opened and that there was a man standing in front of him.

  “Hey,” the man said. He was tall, with a wide, loopy grin, clean-cut except for the wire earring. Sam had witnessed the earring stage on middle-aged men—the look ranked right up there with stringy, gray ponytails on men, as far as he was concerned. But the grin was engaging—the guy seemed nice enough.

  A small girl with sleepy eyes, a mess of blond curls and a pink Cinderella nightgown suddenly poked her head under the man’s arm. The man curved his arm around the girl and absentmindedly kissed the top of her head.

  “Help you?” the man asked, looking up at Sam. Sam realized he hadn’t spoken yet. People skills were not his strongest attribute. “Hey,” Sam tried. Saying “hey” was about as foreign to him, with its implied ease of communication, as Ukrainian. “Hey,” he repeated, as stilted as the first time. “Hey,” the man said back to him. Sam took note of the spatula in his hand and wondered what kind of domestic scene he had interrupted.

  “Is Gracie home?” Sam asked, realizing he didn’t know her last name.

  “Why do you have hair all over your face?” The little girl looked up at him. “Are you cold?”

  “Gracie? Sure,” the man replied to Sam, after a pause and a look Sam caught (because he was as sensitive as a fly to such looks), that said “Who is this guy and why is he asking for Gracie.” Then there was another moment—and at these times Sam really thought he might have superhero powers—the glimmer of an expression that could not be read as anything other than self-interest.

  “I’m Kenny,” Kenny said, “Kenny Pollock.” He said the last part with just a little more weight than the words warranted, as far as Sam was concerned. Then he reached out and shook Sam’s hand. Judging by the crush of the handshake and the particular enthusiasm with which it was unleashed, Sam knew he hadn’t misread anything. Spider-Man had nothing on Sam Knight.

  But he wondered as he stepped inside, guided by Kenny with the earring and spatula, what on earth a frat boy like Kenny could find interesting about him. The little girl, still hovering under her father’s arm, steadily eyed Sam and his beard. “Can I touch it?” she finally asked after what Sam could feel was much deliberation.

  “Are your hands clean?” Sam asked the girl, who nodded and then paused to examine her tiny hands.

  “Gracie!” Kenny yelled. “Got a young man here for ya.” Kenny turned and winked at Sam, a choice so shocking to Sam he almost jumped.

  The three rounded the corner into the kitchen. Gracie was finishing off the last of the three pieces of bacon Kenny had placed on her plate. The eggs were already a memory. Jaden ran to her mother, who hugged and kissed her and then looked up guiltily. “I guess I was really hungry,” she almost said. Instead she blurted out, “Oh,my God.”

  “Hey, Gracie,” Kenny bubbled, “your friend—” Kenny turned to him. “Sorry, buddy, your name again?”

  “Sam,” Sam said, his eyes only on Gracie. She was wearing a robe. She had probably changed her nightgown. Her toes were poking out of her slippers. Her hair was half in her face.

  She was blushing furiously. She looked like a teenager. God, I want to kiss her, Sam thought. His further thoughts were more advanced, along the lines of disrobing her with his teeth, slowly licking her entire body, and politely screwing her brains out. The image of Gracie’s lush, welcoming naked body stayed with Sam until Kenny had the nerve to break his trance by actually speaking. Why do people need to talk so much? Sam asked himself.

  “So, Sam,” Kenny said to him, then turned to Gracie. “This is the guy, right, Gracie? This is the one?”

  Gracie was looking into Sam’s eyes, sinking into his gaze. Did he ever blink? She’d read something about Scientologists not blinking; so when she and Kenny attended a Christmas party at the giant Church of Scientology in Hollywood (Kenny was wooing John Travolta to play the role of Madame Curie’s husband, Mr. Curie) Gracie made a point of not blinking the whole night.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s the one.” Oh, screw it, Gracie thought, so I’m in love with a homeless man. There are worse tragedies.

  “Do you like to play?” Jaden asked Sam.

  He looked down at her, sitting in her mother’s lap, and smiled. “My sister used to make me play with dolls,” he said, wincing at the memory, “for hours and hours and hours. Days!”

  Jaden burst out in giggles at her vision of his memory and burrowed deeper into her mother’s robe.

  “Great, listen.” Kenny turned to Sam. “Gracie told me all about you, and, you know, your background, and I’d love to talk to you sometime. In fact I made a little breakfast here, as you can see. Why don’t you join us?”

  “I’m going to get dressed,” Jaden said. “I’m not proper.” She didn’t take her eyes off Sam as she slid from her mother’s embrace and breezed sideways past him. And then, finally, she turned on her tippy toes and ran up the stairs.

  “Kenny and I …” Gracie wanted to explain to Sam. She pointed at Kenny, then to herself, then back and forth again.

  “What she’s trying to tell you is that we’re married,” Kenny said. “But not for much longer. I’ve got a serious, serious girlfriend, who’s incidentally an international superstar, but that’s not why I love her, not even a little bit, and well, look at you and Gracie, this is great. Really great.”

  Gracie realized that Kenny still thought Sam was the “rubber man”—the man who made hundreds of millions in rubber, the man who owned his own G-5.

  Gracie burst out laughing.

  “What?” Kenny asked, befuddled, looking at her with a slightly wounded expression.

  Gracie just shook her head. She couldn’t answer him and laugh and swallow t
he rest of her food at the same time.

  The two men watched her laugh, her hands flat on the counter, her head shaking from side to side.

  And then Sam started to smile.

  “Sam,” Gracie said, looking at him. Her eyes were red, rimmed with tears. “Kenny wanted to talk to you, you know, about business. Your business.”

  “My business,” Sam said rather than asked.

  Gracie smiled. He was game.

  “Yes, you know, rubber,” she said.

  “Oh, the rubber business,” Sam said. “Oh, I couldn’t. It’s far too dull.”

  “Not at all,” Kenny said. “I, personally, would be fascinated. I’m interested in all kinds of … rubber … things.”

  “Kenny would be fascinated,” Gracie promised.

  “Not many people are.” Sam shrugged. “But I’d be happy to bring you up to speed. You know, we’re having a little problem on the manufacturing side. The Indonesians, you know.”

  Kenny put his arm around him. “This is gonna be great,” he said. “You ever think about the film business?”

  “All the time,” Sam said.

  “Are you kidding?” Gracie asked. “He doesn’t stop talking about the film business.”

  Kenny rubbed his hands together. “This is great,” he repeated.

  Sam put his hand on Kenny’s shoulder. “Listen, Kenster,” he said, not knowing where the moniker had come from. “You think I could talk to Gracie here for a minute?”

  Kenny nodded eagerly. And stood there.

  “Alone?” Sam asked. Kenny put his hands up (including the one still holding the spatula).

  “Right, right, no problem, take your time.” He scooted out of the kitchen and onto the deck, where Gracie could see him pretending to find the Pacific Ocean interesting.

  “Listen—” Gracie turned back to Sam. “—I want to apologize again—”

  “Lavender got hurt last night,” Sam said.

  Gracie’s face traversed a spectrum of emotions until it landed on panic.

  “This morning. They said she’s going to be all right,” he said. “She’s in the hospital. I thought you should know.”

  Gracie’s mouth squeezed into a grimace. “How?”

  “She got hit by a car. Early this morning.” Even as he said the words, he felt the muscles in his throwing arm twitch.

  “The ambulance,” Gracie said. Her hand found her mouth and she began to cry. Sam put his arms around her as she buried her face into his chest.

  “She’s going to be fine,” he said. Why was he promising her what he didn’t know to be true?

  Gracie nodded. “She’s going to miss her graduation,” she said.

  “You knew about that?” he asked. It wasn’t like Lavender to trust the residents with personal information.

  Gracie nodded, then let her head submerge into his chest once more.

  Sam stroked her hair as her breathing eventually settled. Even now, surrounded by the taint of tragedy, he felt a burgeoning feeling—

  Oh, fuck, Sam thought to himself. How can I be horny at a time like this?

  He let Gracie go. “I’ve gotta run,” he said. She was staring at him with her big, dark eyes. He wanted to stay there and stroke her hair and kiss her eyelids and run his hands all over her body. And that’s why he was leaving.

  Gracie nodded and listened to his footsteps as he walked away; she heard the clap of the door closing behind him.

  She stared for what felt like a long time out the kitchen window when she noticed, there for all to see, the green blanket.

  Sitting on top of the blanket was a lanky, well-dressed blond man, hooked up to an iPod. The Malibu Masturbator. His hands were seated nicely on his knees.

  There was something on his face.

  Gracie got out Joan’s binoculars, always at the ready on the kitchen counter should someone really interesting (read: gorgeous and male) turn up on the beach.

  She looked through the binoculars, finally finding her subject after drifting back from the pier.

  He had a bandage across his nose. His eyes were bruised.

  “Hey,” Kenny said, as he loped back into the kitchen, swinging the spatula like a baseball bat. “Where’d your friend go?”

  “He had to run,”Gracie said. “Business to attend to.”

  Kenny nodded solemnly. He looked about as disappointed as a child who’s dropped ice cream out of his cone. “Of course. But I want to set something up with him. Hook me up. Can you put together a dinner or something?”

  Gracie shrugged.

  “Do this for me,” Kenny said. “Come on.” Apparently Gracie didn’t respond fast enough. “You know, this was the problem with our marriage. You just didn’t support me enough.”

  “I didn’t … what?” Gracie turned toward him.

  “It’s the wives who decide everything.” Kenny was making a point with his spatula. “It’s the wives who determine the social status of the husband—the wives who can make or break a man. And you just didn’t try hard enough.”

  He punctuated his point, brandishing the spatula like a sword.

  “I didn’t try hard enough,” Gracie said.

  “That’s right, you didn’t,” Kenny said, jumping in. “We should have had dinner parties once a week. We should have had people over to play tennis every Sunday. And not just any people, like your friends—real people, like the Murdochs, the Spielbergs, the Katzenbergs, all the damned ’bergs—”

  “Being head of a studio isn’t good enough for you?” Gracie asked.

  “Gracie. Don’t be stupid,” Kenny snorted. “All studio heads get fired. It’s just a matter of time. But if I were friends with Rupert or Steven or Jeffrey, well, that goes a long way in this town. Why do you think I fell in love with Britney?”

  “To help your career?” Gracie asked. She had passed anger and was now heading into bemusement.

  “Damn right,” Kenny said. “I mean, I do love her with all my heart, but, you know, this is going to blow me up big-time.”

  Gracie nodded and wondered if she appeared at all interested.

  “Did Spielberg date Madonna?” Gracie finally asked.

  “He’s been married to two actresses,” Kenny said.

  “Geffen?”

  “Married to Cher, I think.”

  Gracie nodded, again. “Maybe you’re on to something, Kenny,” she finally said.

  “It’s got nothing to do with the movies, you know,” Kenny said. She realized he was being defensive. Kenny’s last two pictures had been major flops. A third one? He’d be packed up and sent on his way.

  “Sure,” Gracie said. “It never does.”

  Gracie thought about the demise of her marriage, she thought about Lavender’s accident. She thought about her age.

  She decided that she was going to sleep with Sam tonight, whether he wanted to or not. All of the signs could be read. There was no time to waste.

  28

  LOTS OF STUFF TO DO TONIGHT

  GRACIE RECALLED the conversation she’d had with Joan as she left the house that evening.

  “Where are you going?” Joan asked. She was on the couch, her reading glasses on. Gracie couldn’t tell if she was reading The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, but she looked vaguely annoyed as she often did when reading about social injustice or governmental abuse. Gracie was dressed casually but carefully—she had chosen clothes she could take on a hike, but made sure they were in colors flattering to her skin tone and body type.

  She looked good enough, she knew, to raise the question of suspicion in Joan’s mind.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Gracie had said.

  “A walk,” Joan repeated back to her, as if informing her friend that the mere thought of going for a walk on a balmy, slightly breezy evening in Malibu was suspect.

  “I’m going to sleep with the homeless man,” Gracie admitted. Lying was not her strength.

  “Oh, okay, fine,” Joan said, getting back to whatever magazine article was provo
king her. “Just make sure you’re back at a decent hour.”

  “If you need me, I’ll be lying on the trail behind the Colony,” Gracie called out as she opened the front door, “screwing my brains out.”

  Joan raised her hand over her head, her fingers and thumb forming the universal “okay” sign.

  SAM HAD a few loose ends to tie up at the Kennicot house, so he stopped there before heading home.

  He let himself in through the back door, as he had done for almost fifteen years. The silence in the home told him that Mrs. Kennicot was upstairs, presumably taking a nap. He looked for the little Filipino nurse, who never left her side, except to come downstairs to watch her Spanish-language soap operas if Mrs. Kennicot was sleeping during the day.

  The Filipino nurse had left some food out for him on the kitchen table. Mostly, she made hot dogs. He was kind of hoping when they hired her that she’d be making some more, well, cultural fare.

  Sam sat down and ate two of the hot dogs with no bun, nothing. She had made six for him—she was a bad cook, but she was a generous bad cook.

  He was stuck. He wanted to go upstairs to say good-bye to Mrs. Kennicot. He had come to the conclusion that he had to take care of business tonight—if he waited any longer, the kid would probably be on a plane to another state, even another country. The sheriff, at the very least, had to keep him in town for two, three days to determine, to the best of his ability, what went down. After that, the kid would be free as a bird. The parents would buy their way into a college, maybe even buy a whole fucking building, and their little darling would get off scot-free.

  While Lavender would miss her graduation.

  Sam had checked in with J.D. earlier that day. J.D. had been on the phone to the nurses at the hospital every hour. Lavender’s vital signs were steady, but she hadn’t awakened yet. Not unusual when there’s bleeding on the brain. They said she would, they said they thought she would. For sure.

  Sam decided to leave a note for Mrs. Kennicot. She was going blind now, but the nurse could read it to her. He was pretty sure the nurse could read it to her. Her English was okay. Maybe she was smart enough to give J.D. the note if she couldn’t read it.