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thirty-, forty-year plans. Kenny knew what studio he wanted to run, he knew the types of movies he wanted to make, he knew who he wanted his lieutenants to be. Kenny knew what he wanted in a wife and he knew how many children he wanted (two: one boy, one girl) and where he wanted them to go to school (preschool, elementary school, high school, college—graduate school!). He knew what street he wanted to live on (“Rockingham—the best views in Los Angeles”); he knew what car he’d be driving in five years (Mercedes 600SL). The man knew where he’d end up after Alzheimer’s hit him in his old age (the Motion Picture Home).
    Kenny, who had barely made a dent into his thirtieth year, knew he’d be cremated and where his ashes would be scattered (in the Pacific, off the Baja Peninsula).
    On the surface, nothing about “The Kenny Package” would seem to appeal to a person like Gracie. She had never shared a tuna roll with anyone who seemed untouched by the Human Condition. He had emerged from his first thirty years unscathed. Of course Kenny had been a college athlete; of course he had been treasurer of his fraternity (better access to beer funds than the president); of course he had grown up in the suburbs in a two-parent household with a younger sister and a dog named Rusty.
    And of course he drove a BMW, in the L.A.-biquitous black. He took one sidelong look at her Toyota Cressida, as though afraid of infection by the working class, and told her she’d have to sell it and buy something more hip. Gracie toldhim the only thing more hip she could afford would be a skateboard.
    That afternoon he sent her a brand-new skateboard with hot pink wheels. She’d hugged the gift card to her chest. She could still remember the words scribbled onto the tiny card: “To Gracie, who deserves better wheels. Love, Kenny ‘The Artist’ Pollock.”
    Love!
    Gracie had been Kenny-fected.
    So despite her qualms, Gracie dated Kenny anyway and got attached to his goofy charm anyway and slept with him on the third date anyway—after all, they’d already had their first kiss at the sushi bar. Maybe she was a sellout. Maybe Gracie should have stuck out her existence on the wrong side of town, driving the wrong car and wearing the wrong clothes. (“It’s a good thing you’re so cute,” Kenny told her the first morning after they’d slept together as Gracie was getting dressed in her baggy corduroys and long-sleeved T-shirt, “because your clothes suck.”) But Kenny represented what Gracie felt was missing in her life—stability. He could take charge, he knew where he was going; Gracie had no idea where her life was headed. There was no five-year plan; there wasn’t even a three-week plan. Gracie, who always prided herself on her independence, who had never depended on anyone, much less a man, secretly longed to be taken care of.
    With Kenny, Gracie would emerge from the shell of the studious UCLA student who watched from the bus stop as sorority girls whizzed by her in their convertible Cabriolets; with Kenny, she would no longer have her nose pressed up against the plate-glass Prada window. (Except that as she got older, she no longer “understood” Prada; what could those odd shoes and unflattering dresses mean?)
    In fact, sometimes Gracie wondered if the main reason she married Kenny was to seek vengeance upon Cabriolet-driving, MasterCard-hoarding sorority girls. Not that that was a terrible reason to get married. In Los Angeles, it could be the raison d’être; anyone would understand. In India and Pakistan, they had arranged marriages; in Los Angeles, marriages were arranged by the color of your American Express card.
    Back to Kenny’s business dinner: Emerging from her Past Life Regression, Gracie sipped her margarita and leaned back, sucking in her lower stomach as she always did when she heard her Pilates instructor’s voice egging her on in her mind—“strengthen the core, and the rest follows.”
    Thank God,