The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer Read Free Book Online

up your career when the burden of being on what feels like thousands of charity boards becomes overwhelming. Children, memorize this equation before you begin Stage Four: One Charity Board = 240 uncomfortable phone calls (to ask for money), thirty lunches (to plan [some] and drink [more] Chardonnay), and one excruciatingly painful event night.
    STAGE FIVE: Two kids a must. Two, not one, two! Even if the second one has to be adopted, through a surrogate, or an adopted surrogate! Two kids = triple child support = a lifetime of yoga retreats.
    STAGE SIX: Begin drinking (if haven’t already. But you have, haven’t you. Good girl.) If possible, stick to Grandma’s good-old standby, vodka. No smell, no tell!
    Or: Begin Vicodin and/or Mexican Quaaludes. Or both. Why not?
    STAGE SEVEN: Decorate house(s). Hire decorator. Become decorator’s new best friend that you can’t live without. Pay decorator exorbitant sums to be new best friend. Fight with husband over new best friend. Husband complains to Wednesday-night poker buddies but secretly enjoys that he has money to burn on eighteenth-century Dutch étagères. Whatever that is.
    ALTERNATIVE TO STAGE SEVEN: Do yoga, then do yoga instructor.
    Gracie had chosen Stage Seven (A), and had “adopted” her decorator, Will. She steadfastly refused to have an affair with a yoga instructor until she had the self-esteem to attend a yoga class, which attracted as many nineteen-year-old actresses as an open casting call at
The O.C.
    STAGE EIGHT: Divorce.
    “Over his cell phone?”
    Gracie had called her closest friend, Joan, right after she’d swung open the car door, threw up inside the carpeted three-car garage, and traversed, in the dark, the maze of sharp-cornered postmodern furniture in the living room. Gracie finally curled up in the corner of the couch shaped, mercifully, like a lima bean. She didn’t dare turn the light on and risk catching a glimpse of herself in the smoky mirror hanging above the granite fireplace. Gracie didn’t dare acknowledge the fact that here she was, on the precipice of forty-one and a widow. Well, not really a widow, Gracie thought, but one could hope. Perhaps Kenny would drive his convertible Mercedes (600 series, of course!) into an endangered California oak on the way to whereverhe was going, leaving his boulder-sized head to roll down Sunset, where it would be picked up in the morning by a street sweeper.
    The thought of Kenny being decapitated made Gracie feel momentarily better. Her body warmed, she felt the blood return to her fingertips.
    As of fifteen minutes ago, Gracie had become a statistic. More than a statistic—Gracie was a woman who would probably never have sex again in her lifetime. Which could be some sort of statistic in itself.
    Gracie thought she should move to Paris. Didn’t Parisians take pity on middle-aged American women with freckles on their hands? Didn’t that Olivier Martinez live in Paris? How do you say “Take me, I’m old” in French?
    “He said he didn’t want to be married anymore!” Gracie screamed back.
    “Over his cell phone?” Joan yelled again. “Who breaks up with his wife over a cell phone? Who does he think he is, P. Diddy?” Gracie pictured her with her orange-red suicide bangs flipping up and down, down and up with each dramatic, exasperated breath. Joan had experienced every legal vice known to man and had stuck like glue to at least three of them, including yelling when talking would suffice.
    “It was very Hip-Hop of him,” Gracie acknowledged. “Do you realize you’re screaming?”
    “Calm down,” Joan yelled. “You’re hysterical!”
    “Oh, God. He said … he actually said … he said we’ve grown apart!” Gracie was now bawling and screaming at once. “It’s like something out of a Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas movie! He dialogued me!” A torrent of liquid snot poured out of her nose. Lights flashed before her eyes as Gracie lost all control of her senses.The last time Gracie