Chapter One
Married, with Onion Rings
Cellulite massage is not for the faint of heart.
Which is what Gracie Pollock was thinking as her
thighs were pounded by the grunting Russian
woman who left her bruised, swollen, and
otherwise disfigured every other Monday at three
o’clock for the last five years. Gracie’s
calendar was filled with benign-sounding yet
brutal “treatments”: Tuesdays were hair
(blow-dry, cut, and highlights, if needed),
Wednesdays were waxing or plucking, Thursdays
belonged to dermabrasion or acid peels or any
variety of activities involving needles and the
hope of Insta-Youth, Fridays were off days, save
for the second blow-dry of the week, when Gracie
would compare her week of treatments to her
friends’ week of treatments over lunch at The
Ivy.
You want irony? For the privilege of emerging
from a session with Svetlana looking like she’d
been locked in a freak dance with Mike Tyson,
Gracie would write a check out to “Cash” for
$250 and hand it over with shaking hands.
Svetlana left the room, leaving behind an
imprint of garlic cloves and generations of
suffering on the air. There were countless other
Wives Of to punish, those who bought into the
myth of defeating the onslaught of age with a
pair of hardened Russian fists. Gracie groaned
and leaned up from the damp, tacky massage table
(a nice way of putting the modern equivalent of
the rack) and onto her elbows. She willed her
eyes open, her lids feeling like the only part
of her body that had escaped Soviet vengeance.
She slowly twisted her head to the side to
assess the damage in the veined, mirrored tile
lining the walls. Mirrored tile, Gracie thought,
all the rage when Sylvester, the lisping Supreme
Ruler of Disco, was at the top of the charts.
“For a tax-free two-fifty a pop,” Gracie
muttered, “Svetlana the Terrible could swing a
subscription to Elle Decor.”
But the veined tile with the mirrored surface
served its purpose. Here’s the scoop. Gracie
Pollock looked ridiculously good in that her
polished exterior straddled the territories
claimed by both adjectives, ridiculous and good.
Each time Gracie peered at her reflection, she
was startled, as though she had run into a
formerly plain-wrapped high school friend who
had transformed herself into a middle-aged
version of Jessica Simpson. What are the odds of
looking better at forty than at sixteen? Gracie
thought to herself. About the same as crapping a
gleaming pile of Krugerrands.
Let’s start with the hair. Said hair being the
color of that expensive European butter no one
can pronounce. Domestic butter, according to
Gracie’s colorist, not being, well, buttery
enough. And this hair was thick. Thick, as
though somewhere in the Hamptons, Christie
Brinkley had awakened looking like Michael
Chiklis with hips. Gracie’s original mousy
brown, tongue-in-light-socket chicken wire had
been colored and wrestled and yanked and
stretched and stretched again into submission by
a fine-boned man of unknown sexual and other
identity named Yuko, then brightened with
highlights every three weeks and lengthened with
extensions, rewoven every twelve weeks. Her
forehead was as unlined as the hood of a new
Porsche, due to the same poison found in warped
green bean cans she was warned about as a child.
Her lips were soft and full. Thank you, the
pitiless Collagen God. The teeth? Straight and
white. The teeth were hers. The teeth, she’d
grown herself.
I did grow those teeth myself, right? Gracie
thought.
Yes, Gracie reassured herself as she bared her
teeth like a rich blond rottweiler into the
veined mirror. Those are my teeth.
She growled at her reflection.
Let’s move on. The breasts were a perfect full B
cup. Gracie had given birth and breast-fed – and
yet her nipples pointed due north. Nature?
Or the magic hands of Dr. Barbara Hayden? You
decide.
The tummy, save for the bumpy scar which Gracie
had not yet “done” above her pubic bone, was
hard and as hard earned as the diamond on her
left hand. The arms, brown and muscular and
hairless as newborn Chihuahuas. The legs,
Gracie’s bête noir throughout her teenage years,
were as sleek and taut as the skin on an apple.
Just looking at them made her weary.
Maintenance was a Mother Fucker.
Gracie stuck her tongue out at her reflection.
The blond, green-eyed, perky-breasted woman
rudely assessing her was not related to the
soft-fleshed, brown-eyed girl she’d been more or
less satisfied with for thirty years.
This Gracie, by all accounts, appeared perfect.
Media friendly. Easy on the eyes and hard on the
401(k).
Then she looked down at her hands. Good Lord,
not the hands, Gracie thought. The dead
giveaway. The Dorian Gray painting in the attic.
The skin on her hands was changing. Freckles
that had once been a badge of youth and vigor
were now a sign of encroaching age – the
inevitable, inexorable spiraling into the Martha
Raye Terra In-firma.
Gracie hadn’t told anyone, not even her close
friends, but in the last two years, she had
failed the pinch test. Failing the pinch test is
something best kept close to the bustier – if
Gracie pinched the back of her hand (which she
did several times an hour), the skin no longer
snapped back. It slid back.
Eventually.
And those freckles. What could blast them out?
Gracie hovered over her hands with a critical
eye. What could possibly eliminate the speckled
insurgents? Laser, acid peel, that pricey SPF
1,000 Greek sunscreen, bleaching creams,
fotofacial, collagen, harvested fat cell shots.
She had tried everything. And still the pinch
test failed. Still the freckles persisted.
Gracie tucked her hands away, hiding them like a
dreaded family secret. She sighed. And then she
thought about her elbows. Gravity is a bitch,
she thought.
“Do not” – she wagged her finger at her
reflection – “appraise the elbows!”
Gracie felt her body was a time bomb, just
waiting to jump back into its normal state,
should the narrowest opportunity appear. She
lived in a world where people fought their
natural condition on a daily basis – every day
in L.A. was Halloween. Those weren’t masks she’d
see in the women’s dressing area at Saks or in
the salon chairs at Cristophe or suspended over
glass noodles at Mr. Chow – those were faces.
Gracie feared she’d wake up one day and the skin
around her face would be pulled into a bow in
the back of her head.
Gracie was on the precipice. Was she going to be
the recently Asian Joan Rivers, or what once was
Brigitte Bardot? She’d have to make a choice.
One pull of the pin, Gracie knew as she peered
over her shoulder at her proto-human reflection,
and the whole thing would blow.
The trouble started with the earring. This
wasn’t just any earring – like that silver
Celtic cross Gracie had lost in a public toilet
at Santa Monica Beach because she was so freaked
out by the thought of homeless people wandering
in while she peed in a doorless stall. This
wasn’t one of the pair of pink diamond and
platinum three-carat studs Gracie and every other
stuck-in-a-loveless-marriage-but-with-a-generous-allowance
Wife Of had her eye on at the Loree Rodkin case
at Neiman Marcus, aka Needless Markup, just
waiting for her husband to slip up for an excuse
to buy. No, this wasn’t just any earring. This
was a delicate gold-wire hoop suddenly attached
to her husband’s heretofore unadorned,
exhibiting middle-aged tendencies (more hair,
additional length) right earlobe.
File Gracie Pollock’s story under “hindsight is
twenty-twenty,” with the understanding that her
sight was definitely up her hind end at the
time. But how was Gracie to know that the demise
of her nine-year, ten-month, three-day,
eighteen-hour marriage could have been foretold
mere weeks ago by a tiny piece of metal in a
middle-aged man’s ear?
“Yo, ho, ho, a pirate’s life for me,” sang
Gracie, wife of Kenny Pollock, president of
Durango Studios, as her ever-tardy husband loped
over to their usual corner table at Ivy at the
Shore, their (and every other Power Lister’s)
watering hole of choice. Kenny was twenty
minutes late, as always. Somewhere between
“punctual” and “rude” there was “Kenny time”:
twenty minutes late. Not ten minutes, not
fifteen minutes. Twenty. Sometimes Gracie
wondered if he waited out in the car until half
past nineteen minutes – his lateness was as
precise as the creases ironed into his jeans.
(How precise were those creases, you ask? So
precise that Kenny measured the creases himself,
with a carpenter’s measuring tape. If the crease
was off center, bodily threats would be faxed to
the dry cleaner.)
“Investors meeting at the studio,” Kenny said,
kissing Gracie’s upturned cheek, ignoring her
rendition of the Disney classic with a shrug of
his long-ago-college-football-player shoulders.
Gracie noted that he did not issue an apology
for his tardiness – another in a long line of
power moves. She knew the drill: “Sorry” is for
people who have to care. “Sorry” is for people
who may need a job someday. “Sorry” is for
Pussies. Kenny greeted their dinner guests. “Or
were we their guests?” Gracie asked herself.
“One forgets.” The dinner had been set in
November of the previous year. Most of their
dinners were set months in advance – Gracie and
Kenny could barely get through the first week of
January without knowing exactly how their year
would lay out. They knew exactly who they would
have drinks at the Four Seasons bar with on
March twelfth, who they’d be entertaining at
home with a chef’s barbecue on May seventh,
whose summer vacation home in the Hamptons or
Martha’s Vineyard or Point Dume they’d find
themselves watching fireworks from on July
fourth, whose winter vacation home in Aspen,
Telluride, or Sun Valley they’d find themselves
skiing out of come Thanksgiving Day weekend.
The pair they were eating dinner with tonight
was a married couple – the man, a slithery,
amphibious, soon-to-be-unemployed network chief
(everyone except for him, from the valet parkers
to the Sumner Redstones, seemed to know this)
and the wife, a former stripper and back-page
material Playboy Bunny trying to hide her past,
along with her overenthusiastic breasts, under a
serious blue, aching business suit. Last Gracie
checked, Jil Sander did not design in spandex.
Gracie had spent the last eighteen minutes
listening to the man brag about his new electric
car (to augment his fleet of Escalades and his
habitual use of private jets), his Tuesday-night
lineup, his resting heart rate, the view from
their newly remodeled Beverly Park home across
from Sly, and the number of Ivy League slots
taken up by his children’s private school each
year. His pace was breathless, skipping from
self-adoring subject to self-aggrandizing
subject, leaving poor Gracie to wonder what they
would have left to talk about over the
ubiquitous grilled vegetable salad dinner. And
then Gracie remembered that Kenny was no slouch
in the bragging game. Her work was done. She
could retire to the master bedroom in her head.
Gracie sat back and smiled, sipping her “rocks,
salt, and quick, please” Patron Margarita.
Gracie felt brave asking for salt, her guests
and Gracie knowing full well that she was
flirting carelessly with water retention. At her
age, two weeks shy of forty-one, Gracie
reckoned, retention of any kind – mental or
physical – was welcome. She threw caution to
the Santa Anas and indulged in her sodium-laced,
liquid escape hatch, as Kenny launched into a
soliloquy on the state of the three movies his
studio was currently shooting. He’d just flown
back from the set of the new $150 million Civil
War epic (a paean to American history filmed,
ironically, in Romania). Kenny was claiming to
have come up with the story for it himself one
day on the stationary bike, which he rode every
other morning, alternating with the dreaded
treadmill, at six-fifteen for not one minute
over twenty-two. He’d read in Men’s Health (the
only periodical he read religiously) that
maximum aerobic benefits start to trail off
after twenty-two minutes, and he was not one to
waste time – his time, specifically.
Gracie wondered what the well-respected
screenwriter (oxymoron?) of the epic would think
of the yarn Kenny was spinning – it felt as
though he was trying out an Oscar speech. But
Gracie was too grateful for her husband’s
appearance to quibble. It saved her from probing
haplessly for common ground with the
ex-stripper, whose breasts were threatening a
mutiny: Gracie was deathly afraid a button would
pop and ruin the results of her LASIK surgery.
Kenny had urged Gracie to correct her
nearsightedness; the glasses he’d once loved on
her made her look “like she read too much.” As
Kenny talked about the details of the Civil War
that were previously unbeknownst to him and no
one else on the planet (“Did you know brother
fought against brother?”) and the network
executive chewed the ice from his gimlet (sexual
frustration? Even with the boobage his
prosti-wife was sporting?) and patiently waited
his turn to talk about last week’s
rare-as-a-spotted-owl ratings win, Gracie
slipped into a self-imposed waking coma.
Occasionally, during business dinners, cocktail
parties, premieres, test screenings, and endless
christenings and bar mitzvahs, Gracie would
disengage herself from the physical world and
picture her body floating above the shiny,
glazed surface, gazing down upon her fellow
inmates who looked like so many sheep in a
Technicolor field. Gracie had learned years ago
that all that was required of her as a Hollywood
wife was to nod and smile and ask empty, flat
questions and make meaningless declarations, and
she had mastered those skills, which was harder
than one might think.
Try it. Think of 101 Ways to Say Hello and
Inquire about The Children. Or, more rash,
Inquire about The Movie. To do this, you must
remember who made what film. And then you must
remember what movies to bring up, what movies
never to mention. Otherwise, you could have a
conversation that goes something like this:
Gracie, to a famous director: “Hi, Fred. Wow, I
saw your movie The Toad in Spring last week. It
was wonderful.”
Fred, wielding a sneer, “I fucking hated that
movie.”
Becoming a Wife Of required almost as much
training as first violin in the London Symphony
Orchestra. Gracie often thought there should be
a Juilliard for power-wives-in-training.
Examples of the classes might be: “Your Interior
Decorator and You,” “Getting to Table One,” or,
a favorite elective, “Embracing Your Inner Self,
and Then Stomping It to Death.” Gracie was
currently enrolled in “Botox or Brow Lift: Stay
29 Forever or Be Replaced by Your Nanny!”
Gracie remembered that when she first started
dating Kenny, it had taken months to train
herself not to hurl a sarcastic comment when one
of about 200 million “Executive VPs” shook her
hand while looking over her shoulder for a more
important person to greet (and there was always
someone more important than The Girlfriend).
Continues…
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005
Last Punch Productions, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-6502-5
Excerpted from The Starter Wife
by Gigi Levangie Grazer
Copyright © 2005 by Last Punch Productions, Inc..
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
