The Starter Wife

by Grazer, Gigi Levangie

  Cricket stayed a little while longer, running back and forth, chasing this blur and that until she had to depart to a birthday party, which would hopefully solidify her chances of getting her oldest into an exclusive Brentwood private school. She had bought a three-hundred-dollar cashmere sweater at Fred Segal for the little girl, though she was unsure of the spelling of the child’s name. And really, unsure whether the child was in fact a girl or a boy.

  Cricket fretted until Gracie unwrapped the gift and reassured her that the sweater was unisex. Finally she gathered up her brood and left. The house had never been more peaceful.

  A moment later, Jaden insisted on visiting the dreaded pet store across the highway. The pet store, which sported several signs that read: OUR CAMERAS ARE THEIR [SIC] WATCHING YOU!, featured purebred puppies in glass containers. Gracie called them puppy-quariums. Jaden loved to press her nose up against the glass and tap her fingers on the smudged surface and “play” with the muted, high-priced fur balls on the other side. Gracie wasn’t crazy about the place; the signs were not only misspelled but offensive to Gracie’s sensibilities, and a chew toy there could easily cost twenty dollars. She rarely ventured near it.

  Sam was not yet back from his morning swim, so there was no one to back Gracie in her argument against visiting the pet store.

  “Don’t you like puppies, Mommy?” Jaden asked. “Who doesn’t like puppies?” She seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “Can you say ‘puppy mill,’ Jaden?” Gracie tried to joke as she tossed out bagel remnants.

  But Jaden just stared at her and crossed her skinny arms over her chest and stared some more, and Gracie finally buckled after twenty minutes of silent, relentless staring.

  The pet store was filled with browsers. Jaden tapped on the glass cage of a particularly adorable mini-dachshund until Gracie was finally able to drag her away with the promise of a gumball from a machine outside.

  Jaden ran toward the gumball machine, then stopped. “Mommy, books!” Jaden cried, pointing her arm toward the once-empty establishment next door.

  Gracie caught up to her and looked inside. There was new life and a new sign: MALIBU BOOKS. She peered through the windows, expecting to see mostly spiritual titles or self-help books for one’s colon but instead saw … Philip Roth. Richard Russo. Coffee table art books. The new Anne Tyler title.

  She grabbed Jaden’s hand and pushed the door open. And exhaled. For here was a genuine bookstore. Intimate as a dear aunt’s living room. A tall, angular fellow wearing a fedora at the register. Jaden ran toward the back, where Gracie could see a whimsically decorated children’s section.

  “Nirvana,” Gracie whispered to herself.

  She followed Jaden, who had already opened a book and was being complimented on her choice by a woman with a gray bob and reading glasses sliding down her nose.

  There was another mother there, holding her child on her lap, reading to her. Gracie was bending over Jaden’s shoulder to examine her choice when she heard:

  “ ‘Do belly buttons hold our bodies together? What if we unbuttoned our belly buttons? Would we explode? What if … ? ’”

  Gracie’s words to Jaden caught in her throat. She looked over at the woman sitting next to her. The woman was reading her book. Gracie’s book. Gracie scooped Jaden up with the promise of buying the book that was still in her hand and made her way to the front of the store. The tall fellow at the cash register, the type that should be seen at any self-respecting bookstore, had flung off his hat and was running his fingers through his hair and muttering to himself.

  “Excuse me,” Gracie said, “I couldn’t help noticing …” He looked up at her.

  “You have some titles by … Gracie Peters?”

  “Children’s books,” he said. He started tapping away at his computer. “Yes, we have a few of her titles. Ah, Question Boy. Quite a few people like that one.”

  Gracie grinned at him. And grinned.

  “Is it out of stock?” he asked. “Would you like to order it? We can have it for you within—”

  “Mommy, you’re Gracie Peters!” Jaden declared.

  “I’m Gracie Peters,” Gracie said to the clerk. She could not stop herself from grinning. She looked like one of those dullards who stands behind the president at town hall meetings.

  “A local author!” the clerk said, showing signs of life. “Listen, we’re new here. If you want to do a book signing sometime …”

  “A book signing?” Gracie asked.

  “You’re not supposed to write in books,” Jaden said.

  “Are you working on something new?” the clerk asked.

  Gracie looked at him. And then she heard a tapping at the picture window facing the parking lot. She and the clerk looked up. Sam was standing outside the bookstore waving to her. His hair was combed back, still wet from the ocean. Grooves formed around his eyes at the sight of her.

  “Sam!” Jaden said before she ran out the door and into his arms.

  Gracie looked over at her daughter, laughing as she was being hoisted onto Sam’s shoulders. She looked back at the clerk. She wondered if he sensed why she was crying now. There was no sadness. Her sadness had been replaced by something infinitely more powerful.

  “I am writing a new book,” Gracie said finally. “It’s called What Do I Love?”

  Really … The End.

  UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH THE AUTHOR

  WHAT IS A STARTER WIFE?

  A Starter Wife is the first wife—but in my book, I specifically use the term to apply to the first wife of a powerful man. A Trophy Wife is the second wife of a powerful man—younger, fetching, hairless, able to maneuver her body like a Cirque de Soleil extra. A Finisher Wife is either the woman who stays married to a powerful man for all eternity (as rare as a dry handshake in Hollywood) or the last wife a powerful man marries. I have had a Starter Husband; I highly recommend them. I think everyone should have a Starter Marriage—how else are we supposed to learn, if not from mistakes? (By the way, I’m sure he would say the same!)

  HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR THE STARTER WIFE?

  I saw a woman on the beach in Malibu—a very attractive woman in her fifties, who’d just been publicly dumped by her powerful husband—and she was flirting with a tanned, handsome, strapping man of her age who just happened to be homeless. She had no idea. Here she is living in a tenmillion dollar beach house, and the only man in her demographic who will take her seriously as a woman is a homeless man who can offer her nothing but himself. The picture was burned into my brain. I loved the idea of a woman of means falling for a man of no means. I couldn’t rid myself of it, so I wrote it.

  I also wanted to comment on the fact that in Los Angeles there is so much eye candy. A woman who has lived a life and has a few folds and maybe a few crow’s feet, and has stories to tell, has about as much a chance of getting a date as Britney Spears has of getting on a best-dressed list. If I ever wind up single, I’m heading East—to St. Petersburg, Russia.

  DO YOU BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE CAN FALL IN LOVE WITH STRANGERS?

  Yes. In fact, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen marriages happen as a result, and babies—and not necessarily in that order.

  HOW DOES THE STARTER WIFE REFLECT THE STATE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MARRIAGE?

  Hollywood marriages have always been and will always be even more difficult than marriage between “civilians.” Imagine being in the public eye all the time. Imagine your husband and you having a heated discussion at The Coffee Bean and then seeing it digitally reproduced in Us magazine. I mean, it’s great for us mortals—of course we love seeing the beautiful people experiencing a dash of angst. But I’m sure it’s not great for stars, especially the young ones. They’re dealing with their blossoming careers and working their way through the Hollywood fun house maze, and now they have to fend off the vultures waiting to pick over the remnants of their failed unions. But, hey, they still look better than the rest of us. That’s gotta help.

  HAVE YOU GOTTEN INTO TR
OUBLE OVER PEOPLE WHO MAY RECOGNIZE THEMSELVES? ARE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE “REAL”?

  To the contrary, I’ve had people running at me with their personal stories since I’ve started writing novels with a Hollywood backdrop. Seriously, I’ve stepped into parties and had to stop people from telling me about their husband’s latest affair or their teenage daughter’s third rehab stint. There’re a lot of people out there starving for attention, and I’m happy to give it to them—but I always warn them that, after all, I am a writer.

  And, by the way, most of the time I have enormous affection for my characters and the people who may inspire them, and I think that comes out in my writing. I would hate to truly offend someone, unless it’s a politician. Politicians and political talk show hosts are open game.

  WHAT IS UP NEXT FOR YOU? ARE YOU WRITING A NEW BOOK?

  I am. I’m writing a novel set in New York City. It’s a love story. I’m happy to get out of Los Angeles, and specifically Hollywood for a while. I need a little breathing room, and I think people here in Los Angeles need it as well! You have no idea how happy my husband is that my next novel has nothing to do with Hollywood!

  If you loved Gracie’s story in THE STARTER WIFE, wait till you meet Clarissa Alpert in Gigi Levangie Grazer’s novel

  MANEATER

  Here’s an excerpt from Maneater, available from Downtown Press.

  One The Meet

  My God, the wedding was beautiful. So what if the bride with the translucent skin and white-gold hair (courtesy of the ex-gay-porn-star hairdresser with the pregnant Amazonian wife) had fucked every one of the groomsmen at one point or another in her short life.

  Back up. Clarissa Alpert’s life wasn’t actually as short as she liked to let on. She deemed herself twenty-eight, which was a surprise to everyone who’d grown up with her in the relative impoverishment of the (Lower) Beverly Hills flats, where bungalow after bungalow had trudged only recently into the halfmillion dollar range. In fact, she was thirty-one, but to her twenty-seven-and-a-half- (“halves” were still important to the boy) year-old bridegroom, the damaged scion of an old-money family, she was twenty-eight. Even her brittle-boned, anorexic, four-pack-a-day-smoker, Jewish mother, confused by the conviction of her daughter’s lie, came to believe she had given birth to this unnatural force twenty-eight years ago.

  Clarissa had set her sights on Aaron not long after dumping Sean Penn.

  She hadn’t really dated Sean Penn. However, Aaron Mason, of the Mason Department Stores, the largest midlevel chain in the South, idolized Sean Penn. Aaron, an SMU film school grad, was a nascent producer, new to Hollywood and its ways. Clarissa had discovered him tripping off the bus (in this case, out of his 2002 Bentley at valet parking in front of the Ivy). She always had had a thing for handicapped men, and finding one who happened to be driving her favorite luxury vehicle was enough to make Clarissa, confirmed atheist, a Sunni.

  Clarissa had dated all kinds of men with various afflictions—they ranged from dyslexics to a blind Moby-knockoff singer for a techno band to a wheelchair-bound Emmy-winning screenwriter. Clarissa had found herself, unfortunately, in like-plus with the screenwriter: she had enjoyed wiping spittle from his face, she had treasured his incoherent affections.

  But a screenwriter? And a television screenwriter at that? Clarissa was only twenty-eight (she insisted); she was not ready to give up the brass (platinum, Tiffany) ring quite yet.

  Aaron’s affliction was a clubfoot. Clarissa watched him like a tiger eyeing a fatted wildebeest as he made his way from his navy Bentley up the ziggurat-like patio steps of the Ivy to his awaiting table, where three men with chubby egos yelled obscenities into tiny cell phones.

  The limp cinched the deal.

  Their romance was short; two weeks longer, it could have been called “whirlwind.” Clarissa squired her prized cabbage to parties from the graffitied, Ecstasy-laden banks of Silverlake to the gilded, coke-encrusted shorelines of Malibu. Aaron could not have known what hit him, though he may have known (as we’ll later learn) that Clarissa had slept her way, without mercy, regret, mourning or conscience, through Greater Los Angeles. But he could not have known that she lied about her age, religion (Episcopalian at the Bel Air country club, Jewish at Hillcrest), mating habits, hair color, plastic surgeries, level of education, her mother’s nose job, her upbringing, her downfall, her rehab stay(s), the number of pregnancies she’d experienced—three—without an actual birth, and that she lied to anyone at any time for any reason.

  At least, in the beginning, he could not have known Clarissa was a sociopath-in-training, as common to L.A. as envy and palm trees. He could not have known, emerging from the relative norm that is suburban Georgia, that sociopaths are even more prevalent in Los Angeles than in Washington, D.C.—and more celebrated.

  And here, Clarissa Alpert was very celebrated, indeed.

  Prologue, or How This Whole Mess Got Started

  10:42 P.M., New Year’s Eve. The following was being scribbled onto a Le Domaine cloth napkin:

  January 1, 2003, Wish List: Men I, Clarissa Alpert, being of soundish mind and incredible (aux natural!) body, would like to acquire this year:

  Bruce Springsteen (too old, married, children [ugh], probably happy. Level of difficulty: 9+)

  Peter Morton (rich, Hard Rock (Planet Hollywood?)restaurants, etc., divorced … rich, rich, rich, engaged. Level of difficulty: 6)

  Ted Field (rich, heir, ext. rich, likes tall, skinny, beautiful blondes. Who are 18. Who have proof of being 18. May be difficult: 10)

  Graydon Carter (ink-hasn’t-dried-divorced, dozen or so kids). Powerful, underlined. Semi-British accent—yummy AND peculiar. Level of difficulty: 8+—P.S. Prefers classy girls with exquisite taste … UGH.)

  Clarissa Regina Alpert was making up her yearly to-do list. Lists, she knew, were important to the goal-oriented life; writing them imbued focus and direction. She had learned this lesson from an ex-ex-ex … ex boyfriend bartender/actor/stuntman with a permanently curled lip who learned it from a Dianetics course at the giant, Smurf-blue Church of Scientology (which he’d joined to meet Tom Cruise, John Travolta, or, at the very least, Jenna Elfman, better known as “Dharma”).

  Clarissa tried to learn one tidbit of knowledge from every man she’d ever dated; though she was never a great student of school or life, she happened to be the Valedictorian of Men.

  She had written her “Man List” every year, on the New Year, since she had turned eighteen (twenty-one). Most of her waking minutes were spent in the company of girlfriends, but this was one tradition Clarissa saved for her own company; planning her future demanded her full and immediate attention.

  She scribbled on, using Larry the Waiter’s chewed pen. She was on her third Kir Royale, and work was to be done …

  “You a screenwriter?” said a voice. Male. (No one in Los Angeles who appeared to be a writer could be anything but a screenwriter. Poets and novelists, much like vampires, hate the sun. Even if it’s shrouded behind a smog burkha.)

  A gorgeous “hairless” was standing in front of Clarissa. “Hair-less” or “Leos” or “Preschoolers” were terms Clarissa and her girlfriends used for men under twenty-five.

  However, Clarissa looked not at his unmarked, eager face, but at his shoes.

  They were not Prada. They were not Gucci. They were not even Kenneth Cole.

  They looked suspiciously like Hush Puppies. Vomit, Clarissa thought. Sherman Oaks studio apartment, music industry mailroom—or worse, agent-in-training …

  “You may leave,” Clarissa said, and went back to her mad scribbling.

  “Excuse me? You don’t even know—”

  “Go. Away. Now. Take your ball, go on …” she said, with the warmth of an injured cobra.

  Poor boy; he looked shocked. He almost frowned, but, unused to the expression, settled for a pout.

  He made the mistake of trying to talk again.

  “Look, I’ve eaten at your table, comprendez-vous? Not interested.” Clarissa cut h
im off.

  “Bitch.” But he used the invective under his breath; the Leo was afraid.

  Clarissa emitted a proper bobcat hiss, her precisely bonded teeth briefly displayed.

  Back to the list. This year, the list had taken on greater importance.

  “Think, Princess,” she said to herself. Clarissa checked her watch. She had many, many girlfriends but they weren’t to be trusted with her secret list. Much as she loved and adored them, why should she give her friends any ideas? However, she had promised to meet up at the Playboy Mansion (Silicone Valley, Tits Central, Home of the Free and the Laid) with her girls later. There was much fun to be had there among the cheesy food, the failed sitcom stars, the dank, infamous grotto that reeked of semen, desperate laughs, and cash, and then, the endless river of gorgeous women, so many they had to be bused in, and all so aggressively beautiful that ugliness itself became a welcome commodity.

  But right now, there was work to be done.

  5 …

  5. There has to be more than four.

  Clarissa thought, out loud, “Have I dated everyone on the bicoastals?”

  Larry the Waiter came by again, lanky as a rubber band. “Si, oui, affirmative—that would be a yes in any language,” he said, and set down another champagne cocktail. Without having to be asked.

  All men, Clarissa thought, should be gay waiters.

  “You should know, Mother,” Clarissa agreed.

  Clarissa wrote a name down.

  “Larry the Waiter knows all, Miss All-That-and-More. You’ve been sliding in here since you were legal.”

  5. John F. Kennedy, Jr. (rich, good family, married [unhappily?]. Dead. Level of Difficulty: … 8)

  “Correction. Before I was legal.” Clarissa loved Larry the Waiter. He was gay, smart, bitchy, and bald. A yummy combo.

  “Listen, honey, if you don’t land one of these jumbo jets soon, I’m going to tie a yellow ribbon around your head and declare you a national emergency.”

  “I’m not interested in landing just any foolish rich man. Where’s the sport, I ask you?” Clarissa said. And then she added, softly, “There’s a small part of me that wants to fall in love.”