Free The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer

staying ahead of the curve, but keeping your balls ahead of the curve could be seen as overkill. Gracie couldn’t imagine that the real power players shaved their balls—Spielberg, Katzenberg, Murdoch …
    She had wiped her mind of those images and tried to go about her day.
    But now Gracie could see, this “mowing the lawn” thing had been a sign, as clear as if Kenny had printed up bright yellow T-shirts saying I’M LEAVING YOU, SPRING 2005 in block letters.
    “B UT YOU
can’t
get a divorce,” Cricket sobbed when Gracie broke the news. “What’s going to happen to every third Tuesday?”
    Gracie had called together two more friends, the final componentsof The Coven. Kenny had bestowed Gracie’s circle with this nickname, which Gracie once thought was funny but now just viewed as rude.
    “Why,” Gracie had asked, “do you insist on calling my circle of friends The Coven?”
    “Because they hate men,” Kenny had said. “They remind me of the witches in that play.”
    “Double, double, toil and trouble?
Macbeth?”
Gracie had asked. “Well, at least it’s Shakespeare. I guess I should take that as a compliment.”
    “I love that you’re so smart,” Kenny had said, genuinely admiring. “You make me look good.”
    Gracie had smiled at his remark. On a scale of one-to-ten, in a two-hundred-year-old classroom at an Ivy League college, her brains were about a seven—maybe a six and a half since her daughter was born. But at a Coffee Bean on the west side of L.A., she was pushing a nine, nine and a half, easy.
    “My friends don’t hate men,” Gracie had said. “One of them is a man.”
    “Yeah, right,” Kenny had said, and snickered like an underage frat boy boozing it up at a strip club. Translation of Super Hetero remark? Will was that rarest of creatures, a gay interior decorator; therefore, Will was not entirely a man. Kenny was not waving a banner at the forefront of the P.C. Revolution.
    Back to Cricket, whose remarkably large green eyes were spitting tears into her grilled chicken salad, which remained otherwise untouched.
    “Apparently, I can get divorced. It’s not illegal in the United States—yet,” Gracie said. “And I’ve decided to title it: Operation Gracie’s Divorce!”
    Day 1.5, Post-Catastrophic Phone Call. Gracie, Cricket, and Will were at Barney Greengrass, the rooftop Upscale-Restaurant-Professing-to-Be-a-Deliat Barneys Beverly Hills. Gracie had wanted to go somewhere where she could see people. Well, not real people, fake people: Agent People, Writer People, Development People, Manager People, B-Level Celebrity People, Studio Executive People. A place where Gracie could put on her one Chanel suit and try out her brave face. This was a mistake. The Chanel suit had been bought a few years before her current feeding frenzy, which hadn’t abated since the double-sesame-bagel blitz, and she wound up feeling like a carpeted sausage.
    Cricket was sobbing about their monthly double date. “You and Kenny are The Perfect Marriage,” she sniffed. “Jorge and I count on you, we look up to you, you keep us in line, you’re like our Elmer’s glue!”
    “It wasn’t a perfect marriage,” Will said. “It was a mixed marriage. He’s an asshole and she’s not.”
    “Thank you,” Gracie said, reaching over to squeeze Will’s hand.
    “Now,” Will continued to Cricket, “quiet yourself. Gracie’s life is in the dumper and I want to be a supportive friend and digest every last tragic morsel.”
    Why Gracie had chosen to tell her fragile friend Cricket, wife of Jorge—you know, Jorge Stewart, the whiz kid former Green Beret who became a TV producer of the raging hybrid, legal/military dramas—in a public forum, now revealed itself to be another in a long line of strategic mistakes. Cricket, mother of three children under four, was not known for her emotional or otherwise stability. Weighing in at just over 106 pounds, with not one ounce of muscle tone, she had the physical