The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  Piss to hell, Sam thought, this shit is so complicated. All I want to do is beat up the little fucker! Why should that be so hard?

  He wrote the note quickly, possibly illegibly. It said he had to leave suddenly, that he was sorry, that he would be grateful to her for the rest of his life. And he gave instructions to the nurse—where to find that thick lotion Mrs. Kennicot liked that they didn’t stock at Sav-on, who to call to fix the old pipes under the kitchen sink (because he wouldn’t be able to anymore). He left the name of the medication that worked best on her stomach problems. He thought the nurse might know, but just in case. He left the name of a lady in the Colony who could walk the dog.

  Oh, fuck, Sam thought. The fucking dog. I love that fucking dog. The dog’s going to cry, I know it. Fucking Baxter.

  Sam wiped his nose on the back of his hand as the screen door closed behind him.

  The breeze hit him, raising the fine hairs on his forearms. He could hear the dog, his whine reaching him over the waves. The dog wanted to take a walk.

  Do I have to say good-bye to Gracie? he asked himself. After all, he barely knew her. Wouldn’t she think it was odd that he thought himself so important as to tell her he’d be leaving for a, well, extended period of time? But wouldn’t she think it odd if she never saw him again?

  Sam thought about it as he hopped the fence behind the tennis court and made his way down the trail behind the Colony.

  He decided he wouldn’t say good-bye. He’d let J.D. explain what had happened. It’d be better for her if he just disappeared.

  GRACIE MADE herself comfortable, pulling out the sleeping bag, draping a blanket she’d brought over it before settling down. Her first moments there could be broken down, incrementally—excitement brought on by lack of judgment, followed by self-doubt, followed by an increasing sense of dread, followed by fear, then terror, and finally, in a gesture of abandonment of what was left of her common sense, she decided that all was fine, she was perfectly safe, and it was normal for her to be sitting on top of this man’s sleeping bag, waiting for him to return from wherever he’d gone.

  After a while, she lay back, watching the evening turn to night.

  SAM WALKED up the trail. Besides packing, he wanted to dismantle his “den,” take down the cardboard, the tent, roll up his sleeping bag nice and tight.

  What he didn’t expect to see were two white legs poking out from under his pup tent. He stopped. Then sighed and shook his head, but he could feel the smile creep onto his lips; he could feel it radiate into his chest.

  Why was he smiling? He’d have to get rid of her. He had a job to do. Now he’d have to say good—bye.And now he was annoyedhe should be annoyed—she shouldn’t just turn up any old time she pleased. It showed a lack of judgment, a lack of respect. A lack of common—

  Geez, her legs look good, Sam thought as he came closer. He appreciated her small ankles. And those toes. He could see she was lying still, her face toward the sky. For a morbid moment, steel pierced his heart, and he thought she might be dead.

  Then he heard the snoring.

  He came upon her and watched her sleep. The small curve of her lips. The furrow between her brows softened. Her hands cupped over her belly, modest even in sleep.

  He would have fallen in love with her right then, had he not already done so.

  Sam sat down on the sleeping bag next to her. She moaned softly. He stretched out his legs and leaned back. She turned to her side, her back toward him. She snorted.

  Ever so gently, in the smallest of motions, he maneuvered his body into a position he hadn’t realized he’d missed so badly until he found himself in it.

  He spooned her. He buried his nose in her hair; his lips were a breath away from her neck. He placed his arm around her waist and slid his hand beneath her breasts, curving under her belly.

  Spooning, he thought, was dangerous business.

  The comfort level was almost unbearable. Sam had to fight the surge of adrenaline that told him this situation was fight or flight, code red, highest alert.

  He was in the middle of the wrestling match between emotion and physiology when she spoke.

  “For crying out loud, just enjoy it,” she said.

  His laugh came out like a bark. “You are one scary woman,” he said.

  Gracie turned her whole body toward his. “Oh, you have no idea,” she said. “There are women out there who make me look like a lost kitten.”

  “Don’t introduce me to them,” he said. They were face-to-face. Sam could feel her breasts pushing against his chest. He was lucky to be able to talk at this point.

  He didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud that he was sporting a hard-on that would’ve been able to chop wood.

  He chose proud. He maneuvered himself into her hip.

  “Not a chance,” she said, “they’d eat you alive. And what would be left for me?”

  “Only this,” he said, and he took her hand and placed it on his chest.

  “Chest hair?” Gracie teased. “No, they’d take that out, too. With their teeth.”

  “My heart,” he said.

  He left her hand on his chest and put his hand on her face and drew her in, and she wondered how long she had lived without a kiss like that and how she didn’t want to live without that kiss again.

  “MAYBE YOU should start up a dating service for women who want to date homeless men?” Will said. “Call it ‘Homeless Hunks,’ ‘Babelicious Bums.’”

  “I think she should keep it her very own secret,” Joan said. “Why should anyone else have all the fun?”

  Gracie had wandered in at about ten o’clock that morning. Will had already dropped in with a tray of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (because that’s where all the cute guys landed in the morning after their Malibu overnights) and Joan had made scraps out of the New York Times. First she divided the paper into sections. Then sections into piles. Then, she read each pile. Then, she took out her orange-handled shears and cut out the articles that would be most likely to push her into a suicidal funk, and she’d proceed to paste those to the refrigerator, which at this point seemed to groan under the weight of headlines such as REFUGEES KILLED AT CHECKPOINT, or JOBLESS RATE SOARS. Abu Ghraib had its own section, on the freezer.

  Now, Gracie wasn’t what you’d call an oversexed person. She hadn’t been to a Sting concert since his famous quote claiming to have sex for three hours at a time, which seemed both painful and wasteful—why, you could learn rudimentary Spanish in three hours—you could knit a baby blanket—cook a four-course meal! She was at the high middle of the bell curve in terms of sexuality—she’d never tried sex with a woman (they don’t have penises, unless they purchase them—and then, what’s the point?), she wasn’t familiar with vibrators and was, frankly, scared of electrocuting herself, or whatever happens to someone if a battery falls out within a three-inch radius of her vagina. She had never tried a threesome. She’d never been to a swingers party. She’d never even had a one-night stand.

  But what she had under her belt now was that the night before, and into the wee hours of the morning, she’d had between four and five bouts of sex. Not just sex—but outdoor sex! She’d turned from a relative prude into a crazed exhibitionist.

  “What’s this ‘between four and five’?” Joan asked.

  “Let me answer,” Will said, raising his hand before Gracie had a chance to speak. “He didn’t come on the fifth time.”

  “You are good,” Gracie said.

  “I’m a man,” Will said. “A man who regularly has between four and five bouts of sex. The only problem is, I never get taken out to dinner. Lefty’s cheap.”

  Joan looked at him.

  “His hand won’t pay,” Gracie explained. Joan nodded, her mouth forming a perfect O. “Sad,” she said.

  “Not really,” Will said. “I don’t have to kick myself out of bed early in the morning because I’ve made yet another horrible mistake.”

  Gracie settled down on a stool. The pleasan
t but very real soreness between her legs caused her to stand suddenly.

  Will looked at her knowingly. “You might want to take it a little more slowly,” he said.

  “Wow,” Joan said. “It hurts to sit. Lucky for you.”

  Gracie held on to the kitchen counter and lowered herself onto the stool. She felt as though the inside of her body was now on the outside. She remembered feeling this way once or twice before—in high school, and then again, in the early days with Kenny.

  The very early days.

  “I’ll be needing coffee,” she said, reaching her hand out while Will slipped a cup of coffee into it.

  “And Tylenol?” Joan asked.

  “No,” Gracie said thoughtfully. “You play, you pay.”

  Will and Gracie touched their coffee mugs together in an uncivilized toast.

  “Oh, by the way, girls,” Gracie said, “Sam is definitely not a murderer. We chatted in between rounds.”

  “Quite the opposite, I think,” Will said. “He’s the architect of your pleasure.”

  And then he sighed.

  THERE ARE ALWAYS signs, Gracie thought, that marked the end of an era. And as Gracie perused the latest Us Magazine, she could feel that this was the beginning of the end.Will was standing next to her, holding her up. She stared through her sunglasses, taking in the disaster unfolding before her. Her hands were shaky, her knees weak. Her breathing had become shallow and labored.

  “It says here he’s a dancer,” Will said. “She’s getting plump—she should really stay away from those Whoppers.”

  Gracie and Will were standing in front of the Malibu newsstand. Us Magazine had arrived moments before; the clerk had just cut the twine wrapped around the stack of new magazines.

  On the cover was Britney Spears. And her new love, a boy dancer with the plucked appearance of someone who often finds vaginas none too interesting. A boy dancer named “Billy.”

  “Billy, don’t be a hero,” Will said, having opened the magazine and begun devouring its contents. “It says here he is five-nine and 146 pounds. And he likes chocolate. And doing The Vogue.”

  He looked at Gracie. “We’re perfect for each other.”

  Nowhere in the magazine was a mention of Britney’s former beau, Gracie’s soon-to-be ex, Kenny Pollock. What the magazine did say was that Britney had been lying low for the last month or so, nursing herself back to health after a bad bout of food poisoning combined with a sprained ankle.

  “He’s going to kill himself,” Gracie said.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know yet,” Will said.

  “Maybe,” Gracie said. But she knew that Kenny knew—and she wondered why she cared.

  29

  THE BLOODY DENOUEMENT

  SAM WAS NO break-and-enter artist, and never had been. Burglary wasn’t in his nature. He didn’t have the gene and hadn’t experienced the deprivation that would cause him to steal. He was fine with having few possessions of his own; he knew what too many possessions did to a person. The more possessions one had, the more headaches. The math was simple.

  But here he was, wearing a pair of Mrs. Kennicot’s nylons over his head, crawling through a half-open window on the side of a house. Here he was, creeping down a hallway, looking like Freddy Krueger’s less stable cousin. Here he was, opening first one door, then another, searching for his stinking-rich, stinking-asshole quarry.

  Sam had been watching the house since late afternoon. He had parked his bike outside of the Colony gate at the north end and had sat across from the house, hidden by trees and trash cans. He had even packed a sandwich, to stave off hunger as he hunkered down.

  The father had left with his driver at about six o’clock in the evening. Word from the security gate, from a nervous Tariq, was that the father was headed on an unexpected business trip, leaving his only, felonious son to fend for himself. How would he survive, Sam wondered, with only two fully stocked refrigerators, a brand-new Range Rover, cash, credit cards, and a wine cellar filled with exclusive California cabernets and sublime Bordeaux? The kid didn’t stand a chance.

  Sam didn’t see a clock, but he knew it was after midnight; he was intimately acquainted with the changing colors of the night sky. Sam crept past the living room, where he saw a body lying on the couch. He went closer, out of a sense of keen curiosity and sexual interest. She was a beautiful girl, young, soft skin, long legs akimbo. Her cell phone resting open on her stomach. A half-empty (or could it be seen as half-full? Sam wondered) bottle of vodka on the floor, leaning against the couch.

  Sleeping Beauty was out for the night.

  Sam continued on, up a flight of stairs. He figured the kid would be staying in a bedroom with a view. He didn’t figure wrong.

  The view was spectacular. It was the first thing he’d noticed. There was the Pacific Ocean in widescreen. The windows curved up so that even stars were visible beyond the moonlight.

  Motherfucker, thought Sam. I sleep outside, and his view is better than mine.

  Sam could see the black spikes of hair with bleached tips, slick with gel, sticking up over a large chair that was more expensive, Sam knew, than it looked. The kid was facing the ocean. The tableau felt strangely pensive to Sam, and looking back, he should have felt something. There was no music on. No light except for the half moon.

  It was at this moment that Sam should have put it all together. The mood was wrong. The atmosphere did not correspond to the subject matter.

  The last thing he remembered was taking two steps forward before he felt the blow to the back of his head.

  No, thought Sam, that’s not really true. He remembered thinking as his legs gave out from underneath him, betraying him, he remembered thinking—Shit. Somebody’s going to see me with Mrs. Kennicot’s nylons on my head.

  Sam did not want to be seen as a pervert.

  “WHAT’D YOU EXPECT me to think?” J.D. said, as he brought him water. “You’re wearing Mrs. Kennicot’s drawers on your head. A grown man.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sam said, rubbing the knot at the base of his skull. “What the hell did you hit me with?”

  J.D. lifted his industrial-strength black loafer before slipping it onto his foot.

  “A shoe? I was knocked out by a shoe?”

  J.D. shrugged. “It’s all I had. You work with what you got. You okay?”

  J.D. was standing over Sam, who was sitting against a wall in the kid’s room. Sam could see his reflection in J.D.’s thick glasses. The nylons were up on top of his head. He knew he looked about as ridiculous as he could without actually being in a parade.

  Sam looked over toward the chair. The kid hadn’t moved. It suddenly occurred to Sam that J.D. had killed him. J.D. had beaten Sam to the punch.

  “He’s not dead,” J.D. said, reading Sam’s mind. Sam noticed he was wearing gloves—the kind that women wash their dishes with. Sam would bet a fifty that those gloves would be missed by J.D.’s wife come the morning.

  Sam looked at him, questioning.

  J.D. walked over to the chair and spun it around so that the boy was facing Sam.

  Except his eyes were turned up toward the back of his skull. His mouth was hanging open in time-honored village-idiot fashion. Sam could detect a bit of drool where his lips met in the corner.

  Sam was struck by how young he looked without the ubiquitous dark sunglasses.

  “Not even seventeen yet,” J.D. said, reading his mind again. Sam saw the small box on the floor beside the chair. Took in the rubber band tied around the kid’s arm. He knew there was a needle lying on the floor somewhere.

  Then it occurred to Sam. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked J.D. “And why the fuck did you hit me?”

  J.D. smiled. “This little bastion of society here called this veteran of a foreign war a nigger once,” he said, pointing at his chest. “My plan was to wait ’til after retirement to do some collateral damage on his ass, but then there was the incident with Lavender. It just needed to be done.”

  Sam put
up his hand.

  “And you?” J.D. asked.

  “I don’t like the way he drives,” Sam said. “So I thought I’d break his hands for him.”

  J.D. sniffed. “Lord, this does have some impact on my plan.” He nodded his head toward the kid, who was on a sightseeing tour of Heroin Town.

  They looked at each other.

  “He’s going to lose that arm eventually,” Sam said. “See that?” He pointed to the kid’s arm, which was noticeably smaller than the other. “The muscles’re atrophied. He’s got about six more months.”

  J.D. smiled.

  “You ever going to come to my house for barbecue?” J.D. asked as they exited through the front door.

  “I might just do that.”

  They looked up at the sky.

  “It’s always beautiful here,” J.D. said.

  Sam nodded.

  SAM AWAKENED to a boot on his chest. The boot was attached to the leg of one of the largest examples of masculinity he had ever seen. Even from his vantage point, staring up at this redwood of a man, he could see the chest as wide as the front end of a truck, the neck so large it made him think of Earl Campbell’s thighs, the curved, reflective sunglasses, the shaved head, all pockmarks and sunburned skin.

  “Morning,” Sam said as the boot slid up to the vicinity of his Adam’s apple.

  “You’re trespassing,” the sheriff said. He had a surprisingly gentle voice. Sam wondered if the voice served as the raison d’être for the rest of his appearance.

  “Not to be a bother, but … you’re standing on my throat,” Sam coughed. He squinted, not so much for the reflection of the sunlight in the sheriff ’s glasses, but the pain in the back of his head that reminded him of a time not so long ago when he’d been accosted with a different type of footwear.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” the sheriff said. He didn’t move.

  Sam stared at his reflection in the sunglasses and found himself wishing he’d gotten rid of that damned knife.

  GRACIE HAD CALLED and left messages for Kenny at work, in his office, on his cell phone, at what once was the house they shared together. His assistant didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t shown up to the staff meeting this morning—which wasn’t an entirely unusual occurrence. But then, in a fit of genius, Gracie had called his trainer and found out he hadn’t shown up at their regularly scheduled appointment, either.