The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  This was serious. Kenny never missed an appointment with his trainer, a bald egomaniac with the features of a Weimaraner. Gracie was almost afraid—and Will was almost buoyed—by the thought that Kenny might have offed himself.

  At that moment Gracie had decided she would make the ultimate sacrifice for someone living in Malibu: She would get into her car and drive to where she figured she could find Kenny—under the sheets in their old bed at the house in Brentwood. Thirty minutes later, she drove up to the large wooden gates, which were closed, and tried to remember the numbers to the gate code. She pushed the intercom button. No one answered.

  Finally she remembered. The gate code corresponded to Kenny’s birthday. She wondered why she never thought this strange, why, in all the years they’d been together, her birth date had never been considered.

  She pushed the buttons and waited for the gates to slowly open.

  GRACIE KNOCKED on the front door, then let herself in. The house appeared empty, but as she listened she could detect the whir of the dishwasher in the kitchen. She thought that Ana must be there and felt a surge of nostalgia. She was surprised at the tears she felt welling in her eyes. She missed her housekeeper more than she missed her house—more than she missed her husband.

  She walked into the kitchen, and there Ana was, absent-mindedly wiping the kitchen counter as she stared out into the backyard, at the tennis court. She hadn’t heard Gracie walk in.

  “What does a girl have to do to get a cup of coffee around here?” Gracie asked.

  Ana turned and looked at her, her face glowing from the exertion of wiping the same counter for what Gracie would guess (if her past job performance was any indication of her present one) was about twenty minutes. Gracie loved Ana for many reasons; her work ethic was not one of them.

  Ana swooped Gracie up in her arms, then grabbed her hands and did a little dance.

  “You’re coming back to Mr. Kenny?” she asked, as she held Gracie’s face in her hands.

  Gracie tried to shake her head no, but Ana was holding firm.

  “He need you, Miss Gracie,” she said.

  “Kenny’s divorcing me, Ana,” Gracie reminded her.

  “Men,” Ana said, releasing her. “You see that girl?”

  Gracie nodded.

  “She not bad girl, Miss Gracie,” Ana said, “but she so young.” She shook her head. “Men.”

  “She was nice?” Gracie had to know.

  “Oh yes, Miss Gracie,” Ana said. “And very beautiful, no?”

  “No,” said Gracie. She was beginning to sour on the whole Ana thing.

  “Very young,” Ana said, as though this would make Gracie feel better.

  “I have diaphragms older than her,” Gracie agreed. Which would have been true, had she still been using one. Ana smiled and nodded.

  “Is the mister around?” Gracie asked.

  Ana’s face went dark. She shook her head again and said something in Spanish which included a lot of “por Dios” allusions.

  “Upstairs?” Gracie asked.

  Ana said a few more “por Dios’s” and then pointed toward Heaven.

  30

  THE HOUSE THAT CRIME BUILT

  HE HATED THAT HOUSE. The black car had driven up past the iron gates, past that lawn that the 49ers could’ve played their games on. Sam had avoided looking up at what he regarded as the Forbidding Fortress until the car stopped. And then. He peered at it through the tinted windows, like an anxious child. There it was. Almost two hundred years old. Made of stone brought over from Nevada. Built by itinerant workers. Survived earthquakes. Survived fires. Survived his family. Hell, generations of the San Francisco Knights.

  He’d forgotten how big it was.

  Sam had dressed in a suit and tie to accommodate the lawyers, who’d double-teamed him as he was taken to the Malibu Sheriff Station. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum—speaking at a clip, their small, shiny shoes distracting him with their nervous tap-tap-tapping as he signed himself out. These midgets-in-pinstripes represented other midgets, in the Bay Area, who represented his family. The law firm had more than four names. He dearly wanted them to stop talking.

  They’d put him on a plane, alone, after he reassured them that he was capable of reading his given name on a white card, which a driver would be holding up in the San Francisco airport. Sam didn’t ask questions. He would have gone anywhere to have avoided further contact.

  The suit was waiting for him in the hotel. As were the shoes, which pinched his ankles with every step. They were his size, the size that he once was, anyway. Years of walking on the beach had thickened his soles. His feet had spread.

  The shoes were pretty, though. An Italian name was embossed on the bottom. And the leather was thick. If he wore them down, they could probably get him through the next winter. He wondered if he could keep them.

  As he’d gotten dressed that morning, he thought again about what that sheriff had told him.

  “Your family’s looking for you.”

  Sam had looked at him. Puzzled. Twenty years without a family makes one forget. What family? he thought. Not my family.

  “They want you to come home,” he said.

  Sam tried to listen to him talk. But he felt sorry about the pockmarks. This boy’s life must have been miserable in high school, he thought. He looked at the nameplate on that chest. FERRIS. O. T. FERRIS.

  What name starts with an O? Sam thought. Otis? Oral? (Oh, good Christ.)

  “Plane leaves tonight,” the sheriff said. “We’ve been charged with babysitting.” He spit out that last part. “Like we got nothing better to do.”

  “What’s your name?” Sam asked. He wasn’t thinking straight yet—and also, he wanted to avoid the topic of his family. At least until the mental picture became clearer. Who was his family? Who was left?

  “Omar,” the sheriff said.

  “Thank God,” Sam replied as the sheriff pushed him into the back of his patrol car.

  SAM LOOKED AT THE DRIVER, who had leaped from the car and was walking over to his door. The man wore a dark hat and had an unreadable face. Sam wondered if he was in on it.

  The driver opened the door.

  Sam stayed in the backseat.

  “Sir?” The driver stuck his head in the open door. Sam wondered how much he knew.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Sam said.

  The driver stood, chewing his lower lip, as though weighing his options. Sam knew this was bothersome to the man—after all, he was just doing his job.

  “C’mon, now,” the driver finally said. “They’re not going to hurt you.”

  The thought occurred to Sam that the driver must work for his family—and that he might think that Sam, given the evidence of the last twenty-five years or so, was crazy.

  “I’m not crazy,” Sam said as he remained seated, his arms folded against his chest. He longed to be back on that plane. He should have taken another of those little gin bottles. They were cute, those bottles. But were they practical? Could he have used them for something else? What could they possibly store?

  He wanted to go home.

  “Oh, I’ve been working for your family for fifteen years,” the driver said, chuckling. “I know you’re not crazy.”

  “ARE YOU CRAZY?” Gracie had asked Kenny. She could see the tips of his hair pointing out from beneath the sheets. He groaned and turned over.

  “Get up,” she said, pulling the sheet down. Frette sheets, she thought, as she tugged on them. The finest money can buy. She wondered if she could make off with a couple of them.

  “The dailies look great.” His voice came out in shards. “D’you see those numbers?”

  Gracie shook her head, then pushed at Kenny’s big, lumpy body. He was wearing boxer shorts and a tank top. He’d gained weight. He looked like Tony Soprano, without the body hair, and more important, without the animal sex appeal.

  She wondered at the fact that she used to have sex with this man. It was like looking at your childhood
home—what once seemed so overwhelming was now small and inconsequential.

  “See you at the Oscars,” Kenny said, his words a slur.

  She rolled him, using all of her strength, off the edge of the bed. He hit the floor. The ground shook. She heard a slight groan.

  “Film’s going all the way,” he continued.

  By the time she’d hopped off the bed, Kenny had fallen back asleep. Gracie sat on the floor next to what used to be their marriage bed and stared at her sleeping almost-ex husband.

  Finally she spoke. “Kenny,” Gracie said, “I want to talk to you. I—we never really talked. You wanted out. I was in shock. I just … felt I had to agree. And the truth was, I did have to agree. What kind of marriage did we have, anyway? Kenny, I have grown up. And it’s been an eye-opener, a real kick in the face. But you know what? I like myself now. I didn’t like myself when I was with you. It’s not like you abused me. You weren’t a bad guy, really. You never hit me or called me names. But every day, there was just a little more flesh cut from my body, every day, just a tiny piece of my soul would splinter. I was breathing, moving, talking, smiling. (Did you ever look at my smile, Kenny? I was all teeth. All teeth and my eyes were like coal, lifeless.) I was living. But I didn’t live. It’s almost as though I was dying, one cell at a time. There goes a brain cell, there goes my skin, my muscle, my bone. My heart. So I want to thank you. I really do. When you asked me for a divorce, I thought I would die. I thought it was the end. That no one would want me around. That I could never be without you. Without your name. But I lived, Kenny. I live now. I lost everything I didn’t need. And I found everything I ever wanted.”

  Gracie looked over at Kenny as a tear rolled down her cheek. Kenny snorted and rolled over. “Also, I hate you,” she said to him. “And I’m having sex with the most extraordinary man,” Gracie continued. “Five times—well, a little less than five times …”

  She shuddered as the nerve endings along her spine awakened at the memory. She savored the feeling for a moment—how many women her age were having the kind of sex that made her feel like listening to Grace Jones albums and smoking Marlboros?

  “Later,” she said at the jolt of electricity between her legs.

  Gracie looked back at Kenny, on his side, fetal position. And wonder of wonders, she felt sorry for him. She crawled on her hands and knees over to him and reached out, her fingers lightly skimming the top of his hair.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said to the man who had broken up their marriage via cell phone and left her for a chicklet. “It’s going to be okay,” she continued softly, her hand on his face. He turned and snuggled his cheek into her palm and stayed there.

  SAM WALKED up the stairs to the immense front doors and hesitated. He turned back to look at the driver before knocking. The driver nodded his head, like a father to a son just starting first grade.-“Go ’head,” he seemed to say.

  Sam stood there for a moment, and just as his hand reached up—to knock, to ring the doorbell—he wasn’t sure how to make his next move—a man answered the door. He was wearing a suit with a high collar. His posture was so erect it had the effect of leaning back. He was old now, but he hadn’t always been.

  “Charles,” Sam said.

  “Sir,” said the butler. “May I say, it’s good to see you.”

  Sam reached forward with his hand and gripped the old man’s hand, which was stronger than anyone had a right to expect. He had been middle-aged when Sam left; Charles had to be about eighty years old—

  “Eighty on this very Sunday, sir,” Charles said.

  “That’s what I figured,” Sam said. “Man, you’re old, Charles. But what does that make me?” He was feeling better about his mysterious homecoming.

  “Not a young man anymore, sir,” Charles said. “Come inside, they’re expecting you.”

  “Any idea what this is about?” Sam asked. As long as he focused on Charles, he resisted that dizzy feeling. Charles was his anchor here.

  “I’m afraid it’s your mother, sir,” Charles said.

  Sam drew a breath in slowly. “She’s not—”

  “She’d like to see you,” Charles said. “And I wish you would have shaved. That beard looks like roadkill. If I may say so, sir.”

  HE FOLLOWED Charles past the living room, down a hall, past a powder room he dearly would have loved to use (but was too intimidated), past the old ballroom where he used to race Charles in go-carts, to the sitting room his mother preferred even as a young woman avoiding her husband (Sam didn’t blame her) and two children (Sam wasn’t too keen on this part) and making her way to the top of the various Bay Area charity boards.

  She looked small. Shockingly small, to Sam. His mother was a larger-than-life person, always—not only in his memory but to anyone who came in contact with her. The tatty overstuffed chair nearly swallowed her body. There were tubes running from her nose to an oxygen tank. There were others in the room as well—those who were suits, but she was the center of his, and their, attention.

  Her face was pale, covered with makeup and powder. Even at this age, the most beautiful debutante in San Francisco’s history had retained her vanity.

  “You know I don’t like facial hair,” she said. And she had retained her sharp tongue. “Charles, you know I don’t like a beard.”

  “I know, mum,” Charles replied in a long-suffering voice. “It would have been difficult to strap him down and straight-razor him, mum. He does look to have about forty pounds on me.”

  Sam’s mother said something that sounded an awful lot like “harrumph” and waved her hand, and Charles left the room, but not before stealing a wink at his former charge. “Knock her dead,” he whispered as he passed by. “Please.”

  Sam started laughing. His mother looked at him, her brilliant blue eyes having lost nothing of their sheen and well-bred intelligence—and overriding impatience.

  “So. You’re alive,” she said. She coughed, and Sam saw the team of suits jump out of their chairs at once in a flurry to get her a glass of water.

  “Sit!” she said after her coughing fit. Sam had stood still as the lawyer butterflies flapped around him.

  Sam looked around for an appropriate spot.

  “Not you,” she said. “You, come over here.” She tapped the floor next to her with her cane. “We’re going to have a little mother-son talk.”

  She coughed again, and the lawyers jumped up again, and then she yelled “Leave!” and they scurried out the door, wordless, their briefcases attached to their ribs, carried like footballs. Sam started to leave. “Not you!” she said, pointing at him.

  “You can’t spank me,” he found himself saying to his mother.

  “Like hell I can’t,” she said. Her sudden flash of smile made Sam feel guilty as hell, and he wondered about what kind of son would leave his mother for as long as he had.

  GRACIE BREWED coffee for Kenny in her former kitchen and watched him as he sat in the kitchen cubby, looking out the window into his beloved backyard, where, in his dreams and sometimes in reality, the famous and rich and fabulous would gather and drink and laugh and play a few sets.

  She placed a cup of coffee (in his favorite massive white cup) in front of him, then sat quietly next to him, and waited. What am I doing? Gracie wondered. She wondered at this strange sense of loyalty she had to Kenny. Because the room was silent, save for the buzzing sound coming from the deluxe, oversize (everything in the house was oversize, including the ex-husband) Sub-Zero refrigerator, Gracie could think out her actions; she could play amateur psychologist to herself. Finally, she smiled, a client she could relate to!

  At the root of her sudden desire to take care of her husband was Lou’s death. She looked at Kenny, who sighed, then nipped at his coffee like a bird picking at a blade of grass. She was sitting there because she was concerned that Kenny, too, would kill himself. How could she live with herself if she’d driven off and he was discovered the next day with a belt around his neck, swinging from the sh
owerhead? What would she tell her daughter?

  Not that the showerhead could take that kind of weight, Gracie thought. Let’s be real.

  She put her hand over his and squeezed. He looked at her and smiled a weak version of his lopsided grin.

  “What kind of coffee did you use?” he asked.

  “What?” Gracie asked.

  “Was it in the white container or the black one?” he asked. “Because I like the black container better. The Kona—we fly it over from that place in Hawaii. Sherry Lansing told me about it. She loves her coffee. You know, she called me. To see how I was doing.”

  Gracie yanked her hand back from his as though she’d been touching something disgusting. Like an ex-husband who can’t get out of the way of his marriage-eating narcissism.

  “I think I’m going to go independent,” Kenny said. “Yeah, that sounds good.” He was nodding his head. He hadn’t noticed that Gracie had snatched her hand away.

  “The studio’s folding?” Gracie asked. She wanted every last detail.

  “No, no,” Kenny said. “Nothing like that. I mean, there don’t be a studio per se after all the … things are sold off.You know, the movies, the development, the phones, those bookshelves we put in, the, ah, staplers. Pencils. No, I’m going to form my own company. After all the, you know, legal stuff gets sorted out.”

  “Legal stuff ?”

  “Coupla lawsuits. Nothing that’ll stick. Let’s hope,” he said, crossing his fingers.

  “So that’s good for you, then,”Gracie said.

  “Great for me,” Kenny said. “You know, I was never really able to fly with Lou around. I feel like I can do anything now.”

  “Wow,” Gracie said, her mouth hanging open just enough to make her look mentally challenged. “Wow, wow, wow,” she continued.