The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  “You know,” Kenny said as he walked Gracie to the front door, “that Britney thing was meaningless. To me.”

  Gracie looked at him.

  “I hated to break her little heart. I mean, she’s just a kid,” he continued. “But like I told her, ‘Hey, I just can’t be, like, “The Wife Of,” you know?’”

  “Right,” Gracie said, nodding. Was she starting to get a headache? She could hear her teeth grinding.

  “I’m no Mr. Spears,” Kenny said.

  “Certainly not,” Gracie said. She had a feeling of déjà vu and realized—this is how she felt when she fell into conversations with crazy people panhandling outside supermarkets.

  “HEY!” Kenny called out to her as she started to drive away. He poked his head in the window. “How’s your guy, your man—what’s his name?”

  “Sam,” Gracie said, “Sam Knight.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Kenny said. “Listen, I’m crazy busy, but I’d sure like to talk to him about, you know, an investment opportunity. There’s this film—Angelina Jolie is attached, she plays a World War II fighter pilot—”

  “Kenny,” Gracie said. She wanted to finally come clean with him. And then she thought about the fact that there were likely no female fighter pilots in World War II. “Sam … has no money. And when I say no money, he literally doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket.”

  Kenny looked at her. Gracie couldn’t read his expression. Disappointment? Disgust? Gas?

  “Kenny, he’s homeless,” Gracie said finally. Kenny frowned, his lower lip curling out, like a rebellious five-year-old.

  “Believe me, I know it sounds weird,” Gracie said. “But take it from me. The only things Sam has in this world are a sleeping bag and a few books. And, like, I’m not talking Hemingway or Proust. And yet I think I love him.”

  Gracie thought it was a bold move to profess her love of someone else to her former husband. Bold and maybe a little mean. She smiled.

  “Gracie,” Kenny said, “this is really low of you.”

  Gracie nodded. She knew.

  “And I don’t find it funny in the least. I know we’re broken up, but the least you can do is help out the father of your daughter.”

  Gracie couldn’t believe it. Kenny was playing the Father-of-Your-Daughter card.

  “Kenny, I’m not screwing with you,” she said, exasperated. “Sam Knight doesn’t have a penny to his name.”

  “Gracie,” Kenny replied in his blustery studio-head manner. “Do you use lightbulbs?”

  Gracie looked at him. It seemed an odd question, and she was again reminded of the crazy guy—

  “How about razor blades?”

  “Kenny … you’re scaring me—”

  “And you’ve heard of polyester?”

  Gracie nodded. Her fight-or-flight reaction was teeming—

  “Velcro?”

  “I really have to get back. Jaden’s waiting for me—” She started to roll away—

  “Gracie.” Kenny put his arm in the window and grabbed the steering wheel. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Knight Industries.”

  SAM WAS BACK in his hotel room, at the St. Francis on top of Nob Hill. Not two blocks from his childhood home (had he actually had a childhood). He looked down from his perch on the fourteenth floor and surveyed all that his family had once owned, generations ago. He could find all the answers to his life from up on his exalted perch. The vantage point brought him a degree of peace; looking down, he knew why he had escaped, first to Vietnam and then to a life without means.

  He’d told his mother, in their quarter-century mother-son tête-à-tête, that growing up, listening to the adults argue about business, the onus of owning all they surveyed, left him with more than a bad taste in his mouth. As a child, he was ignored for such concerns. He learned to resent the fact that his parents cared more about what was going on outside their home than who was tucking their children in at night.

  His mother had told him that she’d loved him, of course, but she had only raised him the way she’d been raised; she knew no better nor no worse. If he was neglected, she’d said, it’s only because she must have been herself.

  He’d nodded; he knew this was true. “Age has a way of beating the truth into you,” she’d said. “The Great Humbler, the Powerful Humiliator—Age!” She shook her fist at the high stone ceiling.

  And then she’d coughed until Sam had reached out to punch the bell to notify the nurse. She’d slapped his hand away.

  Which is when she’d told her son she wanted to leave everything to him. Everything. All of it. The real estate, the majority shareholdership, the tangled mass of company titles. She’d spun the tale of the last twenty-five years, and it had become clear to Sam that she’d endured many heartaches—his leaving the family, her husband’s death, the disappointment his sister had brought to her.

  “She wants it, you know,” his mother told him.

  “I don’t believe that,” Sam said. He remembered his sister teaching him to read, though she was only a few years older than he; he remembered her tying his shoes, tucking his napkin under his chin; he remembered her letting him sleep next to her when he grew afraid in that big house—and there was much to be afraid of. He wasn’t the only beneficiary of her kindness; she saved wounded pigeons, she wouldn’t even take her shoe to a cockroach.

  “She’s married for the third time,” his mother said, “and each time it gets worse. I don’t even know this one’s name.”

  “What happened to her?” he asked. Suddenly his heart hurt. For himself, for his sister, for this woman, his mother.

  His mother’s hand fluttered up by her face and made a gesture like a bird flying away. He could see that his sister had hurt her just as much as he had.

  “She wants it all,” his mother said. “And I’m not going to give it to her.” She sniffed.

  “She has children?” he asked.

  “Three,” his mother said. “And two grandkids.”

  “You miss them,” he said.

  His mother shrugged and looked away; the way her mouth turned down at the corners told him everything.

  “Great-grandkids, isn’t that something,” Sam said.

  His mother grunted.

  “Mother, I don’t want your money. You know me, I wouldn’t know what to do with all of it. I think about ‘stuff ’ and I get nervous. I’ve never settled down, never had children, never made a woman happy—”

  He cut himself off.

  “She hasn’t come to see me,” his mother said. “She doesn’t care. Look at me, all these tubes, strangers taking care of me, how can she not care?”

  And then Sam heard a sound coming from his mother; it was a sound he was familiar with from war. All humans were capable of this sound; they just didn’t know it until they’d lost a beloved friend, a parent. Worse—a child.

  Tears spilled out over her cheeks, taking the powder on her face with them, rolling down like tiny snowballs. She wiped furiously at her eyes with her fragile hands, as though angry at the outburst of unfamiliar emotion.

  “I’m dying, you know,” she told her son.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he really was. He put his large, weathered hand over hers. The bones were tiny and her skin was thin and translucent; he felt as though he was holding a paper fan.

  “Oh, I don’t want your pity,” she said. “Look at me, I’m so old. And I hate this place, frankly. You think I didn’t want to run off? I could’ve left … so many times. I could’ve left you and your sister.And you know what? I would have been happier.”

  Maybe, thought Sam, there’s a time in the lives of all parents when they feel they can be honest with their children. It’s a shame it usually comes too late.

  “I’m a prisoner. Worse—I’m a goddamned cliché—an old bird in a gilded cage,” she coughed. She looked him in the eye and he saw the strength of the life that was still there. Her tears had dried. There was a spark. “So tell me. What’s it like out there in the big
world?”

  For the next hour, he regaled her with tales of the life he’d chosen. He had been the closest of observers; what he hadn’t known until that moment was that he could also tell the stories of the people whose lives crisscrossed his own—whether he had just watched them, conversed superficially with them, befriended them. Or slept with them. He knew the rich as well as the poor, the relentlessly happy (his mother said, “Ooh, I hate that kind! What’re they so goddamned happy about?”) as well as the deeply depressed (to which she said, “Ugh. Depression means too much time on your hands!”); he knew their dreams, their aspirations, their darkest desires, regrets, their fears. He was a walking encyclopedia of the knowledge that comes from living by one’s wits, surviving on the edge of civilization, being a part of it, and yet apart from it. He knew many things about the human experience, but not so many on a personal level. He had not experienced heartbreak, had not experienced fatherhood, was not a veteran of domesticity.

  He paused for a moment.

  “Samuel? What is it?” his mother asked. She peered at him with the eyes he was so afraid of as a child, for he knew they saw everything.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, shaking off the feeling.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “you can’t get away with that. I don’t see you for twenty-five years and you shut down? You dare close yourself off to a dying woman?”

  She leaned in. “Who’m I gonna tell? Saint Peter?”

  “You’ve got a point, Mother,” he said. And then. “I’ve found someone. Or, really, she found me.”

  “Who’s her family?” The old lady couldn’t stop herself. She raised one of those fan hands to her mouth and shook her head.

  Sam laughed. “She’s got a four-year-old daughter,” he said. “And an ex-husband. I guess that’s family.”

  “A divorcée?” The old woman acted shocked, put her hand to her chest. He could see her blood beating through the veins under her blouse.

  “Afraid so.” He leaned in to his mother. “You know, there’s a lot of that going around.”

  His mother clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shook her head disapprovingly. And then laughed.

  “Thank God your father died before I could divorce him,” she said. “That’s one less sin for me.”

  Then her hand shot out and grabbed his, and Sam was surprised by the intensity of her grip. For that moment, she was not old and frail—for that moment, she was strong.

  “Grab her,” she said to him, staring holes into his eyes. “You grab that girl.”

  And then she leaned back again.

  “And for God’s sakes, shave that beard. You were my beautiful, beautiful boy, you look like a damned grizzly.”

  Before he left, Sam kissed his mother’s upturned cheek, as tender an act as they’d ever experienced. She made him promise to return to her, with “his girl.” She asked him a few more questions about her, and then her aqua eyes drooped. She didn’t fight him when he hit the bell. The nurse came in, glared at Sam, and wheeled her away.

  He watched her, trailed by tubes and the large tank, looking like an amateur underwater diver, and Sam knew in his soul that this was the last time he would see his mother.

  Charles slipped his sister’s phone number into Sam’s hand before the driver whisked him back to the hotel.

  31

  JUST WHO IS THIS GUY?

  GRACIE DROVE DOWN Pacific Coast Highway from Brentwood. The sky had turned gray and cloudy, blending in with the water so that it was difficult to know where one ended and the other began.

  Okay, she thought, so maybe it’s true. Maybe Sam Knight does come from a successful family. Not just a successful family, but one of those families who owned part of American History. She pictured an old San Francisco family—what would that mean? Nob Hill society? All the Ghirardelli chocolate you could ask for? She shook her head. It couldn’t be.

  Kenny had dragged her back inside the house to show her the research his assistant had compiled. The day she told him that she’d been “dating” a “billionaire,” he was determined to find out exactly who this guy was. Once he got a name, he started with the search engines … et voilà, pages upon pages about the Knight family, long of San Francisco and environs. They owned everything from a macaroni and cheese empire to several TV stations. The woman who ran the family with an iron fist (Forbes, March ’82) was Sam’s mother, according to Kenny. Her great-grandfather had staked his claim in the gold rush, then started buying up property in San Francisco. He had lost his fortune and gained it back three times. Their family home was the oldest standing building in the area—it had survived the Great Fire, several earthquakes, the sixties.

  Gracie had looked at the older woman’s picture. She had Sam’s forehead and possibly his chin—though his was hidden under a blanket of hair. There was something steely about her gaze that looked eerily familiar.

  Was she reading into this?

  The Forbes List stated that Sam Mère had two children—Sam Jr. and Penelope. Sam was thirty in 1982. There were no pictures of either.

  The mere mention of the name “Sam” was enough evidence for a dreamer like Kenny, someone who made his living making fake stories seem real—but not to Gracie. Until now she wondered why she hadn’t asked Sam much about his past—and then the thought occurred to her: she’d been afraid to ask. What could he possibly tell her? About some horrible event that finally pushed him over the edge? About a long period of drug abuse? (Oh, my God, Gracie thought—needles!) His drinking problem? The family he left behind?

  He was running away from something. That’s all she had thought she needed to know.

  She laughed at herself as the highway curved toward Big Rock and droplets of water hit her windshield. What kind of pathetic, desperate loser forgets to ask her homeless boyfriend about his past?

  “Me,” she said out loud. “Gracie Anne Peters.” Gracie hesitated before she said the name “Pollock.” She didn’t need it anymore; she wasn’t that person, she didn’t wear the same size, like the same clothes, have the same hair, know the same acquaintances. So why would she keep the name?

  Gracie Peters sped up, running a light at Carbon that was bent on turning red. Time to ask questions, she thought. Then, she said out loud, “Time to get answers.”

  GRACIE PARKED HER CAR in Joan’s driveway, stepped outside, and was immediately set upon by the dogs whose names resembled expensive jewelry stores.

  One was wagging its tail at Gracie even while depositing a steaming pile right in front of her passenger-side door.

  “Cartier!” she heard Mrs. Boner exclaim. “Come to Mommy!”

  Gracie had had enough. She stomped over to where Mrs. Boner was bent over a chocolate Lab, smiling with her eyes closed as the dog tongue-kissed her cheek.

  “You,” Gracie said to that face with the slash of frosted lipstick dividing her features in half. “You, Monique Boner, will clean up your dog shit. Or I will—”

  The woman looked at her. Her eyebrow cocked, her slash of a mouth twisted in a superior leer.

  Gracie stuttered. “I will—”

  The woman looked off to the side and discharged a bored sigh.

  “I will kill you,” Gracie said with a level of commitment she hadn’t felt since her wedding vows.

  The woman’s eyes snapped back to face her.

  “I will sneak into that mausoleum of yours when you and your husband are tucked away in your separate beds. I will poison your dogs. And I will slit your throat.”

  The pink lower lip danced. She bit it to keep it from shaking. Her eyes stayed on Gracie.

  “Tiffany,” she whispered. “Cartier …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Lock your doors,” Gracie hissed. And then she walked back toward the house, veering around the side of the house toward the beach. The tide was high, even more so than normal, and she had to roll up her jeans and run to avoid getting drenched.

  The beach was empty as far south as she could see.
The lifeguard tower looked lonely in the gray afternoon, surrounded by empty trash cans. Even the ocean, moodier than usual because of the change of weather, was bereft of intrepid surfers bobbing in the tantrum of the storm waves.

  Her feet made their way through the damp sand and onto the muddy path that Sam called home. She found herself walking past the old tennis court on the other side of the fence topped with barbed wire, which was so decrepit, the rusty spikes would have broken off in one’s hand. She must have missed his spot, she thought. She backtracked a few steps.

  Nothing.

  Gracie kneeled in the dirt and spread the underbrush with her hands. There was nothing there. She walked in circles, surveying the place she was sure to find Sam’s sleeping bag, the cardboard box, his silly books.

  There was nothing.

  Gracie walked twenty feet in the other direction and then back again, then retraced her steps. She looked like an old hound dog with a busted sense of smell searching madly for the bird that dropped from the sky.

  The gray clouds above her head had closed ranks, turning the sky almost black, dumping rain on Gracie as she slowly walked the path back to the beach. Her hair was slick against her cheeks as she found herself teetering toward the old telephone pole outside the lifeguard station.

  At first she did not see him. The rain was coming down too hard and fast. Wiping it from her eyes served little purpose. Then there he was. Kneeling at his usual spot, but this time his head was tilted back, his arms wide open to the sky. The rain beating on his chest.

  He looked like a human sacrifice.

  She walked, dragging her body up beside his. She looked over briefly, but he did not look back. His eyes were closed, he swayed slightly to some inner melody.

  Gracie dropped to her knees, sinking into the damp sand. She closed her eyes. And clasped her hands together.

  SAM WAS NEVER really one for prayer. Even in his darkest moments; even when he could hear the whir of bullets as they flew by his good-for-nothing helmet. Even when all around him boys were screaming for God’s mercy.

  But this flight had changed all that. The San Francisco to LAX route couldn’t be more than forty-five minutes, but he could swear he lost about ten years of his life somewhere above Santa Cruz. A storm had hit suddenly and fiercely, forcing the plane into wind shear. They’d dropped from the sky—peanuts flew up in the air and rained down upon passengers, drinks went airborne, a stewardess hit the ceiling of the plane. “What is happening?!” she screamed. “What is happening?!”