The Starter Wife (18 page)

The Chumash put a whole new spin on Gracie’s outlook on Malibu. By all accounts, these people were the Cindy Crawfords of American Indians—tall, attractive, smart, and
well-adjusted. They were sophisticated artisans; their colorful, bold cave drawings were mainly abstract rather than figurative. They built canoes out of planks for as many as twelve people, rather than the more simplified hollowed-out tree trunk. They lived a relatively sophisticated existence, replete with uncomplicated divorce proceedings and the regular practice of abortion. Theirs was a privileged life filled with natural abundance and peace and shell money. These “chosen people” weren’t all that different from the current inhabitants, except they wore moccasins instead of Uggs and hunted deer instead of the latest iPod, and Christianity would not have a prayer of wiping out the current population.

Knowledge of local history had a soothing effect on Gracie’s state of mind. The decimation of an entire culture cheered her up, making her problems seem,well, irrelevant.

G
RACIE ADJUSTED
to her newly-single-with-child life by staying up late and taking long baths and supplementing her history education with fashion magazines. One evening, while reading the latest issue of the
Star
to Jaden, she realized she was exactly the same age as one Ms. Demi Moore. She found this bit of information useful in several ways: (1) Demi Moore with her preternaturally glossy black mane and superhero thighs never looked better. (2) Demi Moore seemed happier single than married (at least, according to reliable sources quoted in the
Star
and the
Enquirer
). (3) Demi Moore was in the throes of a love affair with a teenager—a Boylita, if you will.

The third tidbit of Demi-nformation blew Gracie off course. As much as Gracie was interested in dating, she was terrified of having sex with anyone under thirty-five. She was afraid of the shock value of the endeavor; what would a boy in his twenties have to say about falling knees? What would
he say about the flaps of skin bowing to Enemy Number One, Gravity, layered over her elbows? Elbows should not have layers. And was it just yesterday morning that she glanced in the mirror and noticed a sparkling new phenomenon: upper-arm dimples?

Gracie didn’t want to be entangled in sheets with a smooth, hairless body. She would, however, be willing to make him a hot chocolate. Was she any less of a feminist because she didn’t want to have sex with a boy whose first musical memory was “Mmm Bop”? Who didn’t have the vaguest notion who Walter Cronkite was or that Vietnam was not only a destination spot for sex tours but a war?

No, Gracie was far more interested in the men-over-forty demographic. If she could find a man over forty. In her travels through Los Angeles, she could divide them into categories: Married with Kids, Divorced with Kids, Not Married and Unavailable, and Gay. Within the category Divorced with Kids, there was a subcategory, which covered the 90 percent of men she’d found: only interested in younger women.

I
N
M
ALIBU,
Gracie had decided that though her new neighbors covered the spectrum of age demographics, from the babies in their Bugaboo strollers and sixty-dollar 98 percent Angel tie-dyed onesies to the lifers who’d lived in the Colony since the sixties, with their golf hats and Cadillac sedans, they had two things in common: They were bored, and they were rich. Gracie couldn’t comment on the movie-star neighbors, for they hadn’t moved in yet for the summer. But judging by the ones she believed lived there part-time, well, judging from movie posters and trailers, those people were at least busy.

Rich, bored people. Gracie, who was no longer rich and
never bored, would find herself wondering what all these people in all these hundred or so houses did for a living.

Gracie would stop at the guardhouse at the mouth of the Malibu Colony on Malibu Road and interrogate the security guards, all of whom were minorities and/or immigrants. The disenfranchised were charged with protecting the megafranchised—multimillionaires, and even a couple billionaires.

“C’mon, Lavender,” Gracie would say to the lady with the café au lait skin and blond cornrows, reading up on Thackeray for her English Lit class, “I know you want to tell me what number 228 does all day.”

“Two twenty-eight?” Lavender would say.-“That’s inherited. Mommy’s money.”

Two twenty-eight belonged to the only cute, seemingly single guy Gracie had seen in the Colony who was lingering in her thirty-five to one hundred and two target demographic. Gracie knew that in order to secure a date to Cross Creek’s Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf or Nobu, she’d have to shed that vision of herself with a man who was around her age, around her level of interest in news events, or around her, period.

She had spied 228 while having breakfast one morning on her glass-encased deck. 228 was long, 228 was lean, 228 knew his way around a surfboard, and 228 may have smiled at her as he passed her house on the way to Third Point, in front of Surfrider Beach.

Or he may have been squinting; Gracie was at the point at which even a grimace could constitute a come-on. She was not above false or even nonexistent flattery.

“Mommy’s money?” Gracie asked. She didn’t like the sound of that. No good came out of inheritance in her opinion. Not that she’d ever get to experience the concept of “inheritance.” She wondered if her daughter would, and what
that would do to her, how that would warp her concept of the world.

And then Gracie decided that Kenny would probably marry his assistant after Britney dumped him, and the assistant would have five children, and Jaden would never have to worry about that warped thing.

Back to inheritance.

“Are you sure?” Gracie said. “He drives an old Triumph. Plays eighties music. Seems kind of cool.” Why Gracie thought that driving an old Triumph and playing eighties music seemed cool, she couldn’t answer.

“Do you trust Lavender?” Lavender asked.

“I’ve known you all of a week and a half,” Gracie said. “So yes, of course. I was always gullible. Ask my soon-to-be ex.”

“Stay away from 228,” Lavender said. “Mommy’s money, mommy issues.”

Gracie nodded, taking in her new best friend’s sage advice. “You’re so lucky,” she said to Lavender. “I wish I could be a lesbian.”

“With what I’ve seen in this town, you probably will be someday,” Lavender said. “There’s hope for you yet.”

Gracie crossed her fingers and waved her hand in the air and walked off.

S
CARIER THAN
taking a midnight stroll through Fallujah with an American flag wrapped around one’s shoulders was accompanying one’s child to the kiddie park in the Cross Creek Shopping Center on a typically crowded Saturday morning.

Gracie had been pleased to find out there was a park across the highway from the Colony, and even more pleased to find out that it was adjacent to not one but two coffee establishments—Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf for their Iced Blendeds and
Starbucks for their Grande Soy Lattes. But such a slice of heaven could only come at a price, and the price Gracie would have to pay was obvious to her the moment she happened on the park with Jaden in tow on a weekend morning.

Gracie hoisted Jaden out of her stroller, took one look around, and realized that she was back in high school—if her high school had been chock-full of model-tall blondes wearing Ugg boots and white tank tops and Juicys that never looked that good on anyone human. Yes, she knew these women (mothers, in fact!) were people. She knew intellectually that she and they were of the same species, but there was no proof of that fact at first glance. Or even second glance. Gracie spied one mother performing a hatred-inducing flip on the monkey bars and almost coughed up her perfectly good latte all over her daughter’s curls.

Resigned to bystander status—Gracie would never be able to do any sort of flip anywhere anytime—she sat down on one of the wooden benches surrounding the small park, sipping her latte.

Gracie watched Jaden, with her curly blond hair and her bright blue eyes and her long legs, blending in with all the other towheaded, blue-eyed, long-legged children with an ease that Gracie had never experienced.

She didn’t know whether to be proud or frightened.

M
ALIBU WAS
exactly twenty-five minutes from where Gracie had lived with Kenny in El McMansion. But it may as well have been located in another dimension of time and space.

Gracie was quickly learning—from her travels in the ’bu, from the Cross Creek Shopping Center with John’s Garden (for sandwiches with sprouts, drinks with sprouts, sprouts with sprouts) to the Psychic Bookstore (there was, like Joan had
warned, no other kind) to Howdy’s Mexican food across the street, from Starbucks to PC Greens on Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) for organic produce (and if one was very lucky, a glimpse of a shockingly laid-back Sir Anthony Hopkins)—that, as in all of her past love affairs, Malibu was not going to change for her, so she was going to have to change for Malibu.

Physically, Gracie was going to have to get back into some semblance of shape. In a moment of weakness (there were many throughout the day), Gracie pondered applying to
Extreme Makeover,
the television show that took normal people with ordinary features and appendages and made them into that girl on
Access Hollywood.
Even the men, who seemed to hate their “man noses” and their Chia Pet hair, wound up looking like Leeza Gibbons.

Gracie had decided she was man enough—make that woman enough—to stand naked in front of a mirror and assess all of her recent damage.

There she was, in all her fifth-decade glory. Her shoulders were beginning to sag forward. Her breasts were still fine. They would be fine ten years after her death. Silicone never dies. But the bottom of her navel seemed to be drooping. And the area below her navel and above her C-section scar (for lack of a better word, her “abdomen”) looked like something she’d seen on the beach when her mother and her aunties would gather in their two-pieces. This was her mother’s stomach. Except her mother had had three children, not one.

Her legs still looked nice and smooth from the front. Gracie breathed a sigh of relief, her first breath in the last three minutes. Her toes, thankfully, were perfect, each one a pale gem. Men always complimented Gracie on her feet. It occurred to Gracie that perhaps she had only dated freaks.

Feeling brave, buoyed by the sight of her beautiful feet
(wait—were those wrinkles on her toes? When did that degradation occur?), she turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. Her fist flew to her mouth, stifling a scream.

“Mommy?!” she heard Jaden outside the door. “Are you breaking down?”

“Mommy’s fine!” Gracie yelled.

“Was it a monster?” Jaden said. She was trying to open the handle. “Mommy, you know I’m not scared of monsters.”

Gracie wrapped herself in her towel and opened the door. “Jaden, honey,” she said, crouching down to look her daughter in the eye. “Worse than a monster. Mommy saw her butt.”

Her daughter looked at her sideways. “Can I see it?”

“No,” Gracie said. “I’m putting it away in a safe place.”

Jaden’s eyes shot around. “Let’s put it under my bed!”

“Great idea,” Gracie said. “But first I need it to go shopping. Mommy’s will has weakened and Mommy needs to get Ugg boots.”

Jaden wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like that sound.”

“They’re called Ugg boots,” Gracie said, “because they’re ugly and they’re boots. And Mommy needs to get a pair. We’re living in Malibu now, Jaden. It’s the law.”

9
 
IT’S A (HOMELESS) MAN’S WORLD

S
IX TWENTY-EIGHT A.M.
Samuel Jonas Knight was greeted by the kind of view that shows up regularly on postcards and travel posters but rarely makes an appearance in real life. Except a life like his.

The sun had begun to cast its spell on the ocean, shooting the first morning rays across the dark waters of Malibu. He never tired of the view. Each morning he would look out, and whether he was tired or anxious or angry, he could stand in the sand and look out and instantly his mood would lift.

He had been swimming this ocean from this very spot for almost eight years; standing in front of #68 at low tide, he had trouble remembering a missed day. He was seldom sick, an amazing feat given the level of bacteria he’d read about in the waters of Malibu. He’d heard the tale of the Malibu surfer enduring that flesh-eating bacteria at a local hospital; there were more than a few stories about the strain of hepatitis
you don’t get from sex or needles; there was the rumor of a mysterious brain tumor found in a fellow early-morning swimmer.

Nothing in the water, save for a few dolphins, had ever touched him. He unwrapped his towel and let it drape on the railing above the stairs leading to the beach. He took off his T-shirt, an artifact from a Surfrider Foundation celebration given on the beach; immediately his skin chilled, goose bumps rising in formation, like tiny soldiers, in response to the chill. The curly salt-and-pepper hair adorning his wide chest stood on end. Without looking, he slipped off his well-worn huaraches, a throwback to an era in his life he had almost succeeded in forgetting. All that was left on his body were his orange shorts, the color of a lifeguard’s buoy. He tightened the drawstring around his waist, which was tanned a deep brown all year long. He patted his stomach, which was lean and bulky at the same time—a strong torso which enabled him to work long hours if need be, to lift heavy objects, to fix what needed fixing.