The Year of Living Famously (29 page)

“I
can't believe you,” I said when Declan picked up the phone.

As usual, it was early, and he groaned. “What are you on about?”

I got up from the rumpled sheets of my bed. When was the last time I'd washed them? I kicked the door of the bedroom closed. Emmie was in the city for once, and I didn't want her to hear this. “Is she there?” I said.

“Who?”

“Don't give me that crap. You know who.”

He grunted, then breathed out long and slow. I could imagine him throwing back the Zen-green sheets, walking to the windows, opening the blinds and gazing out at the canyon. “Kyra,
you
told me to move on. You said we were over.”

“And you can just forget me after a few months?”

“I haven't forgotten you, and you know it.” His voice was quiet now, sad.

“But
Lauren?
” I said. “My God!”

“She's got a good side.”

“I must have missed that side.”

“Look, it's mostly business,” he said.

“Is it?”

“People love it,” he said without answering my question.

“What people?”

“I don't know, Kyra. I just do what I'm told. Angela and Graham tell me where to show up and who to take with me. I do my job.”

“You never used to do things like that for PR.”

“I did before I met you.” He coughed. It made him sound like an old man. “When you and I got together, I didn't have to do stuff like this. I wouldn't. Now that you're gone, I'll do whatever they want, and now that you've broken us, I can be with whoever I want.”

We were both silent for a moment.

“I don't care anymore,” he said. His voice had become hard.

 

I did not know it, but before all this—before I found and lost Declan—there was a certain levity to my heart. An innocent weightlessness. I hadn't known it because it was difficult to feel my heart when it was like that. Oh, I suppose I felt it when it soared—like when I said “I do” on that lawn in La Jolla—and I thought I knew sadness. But it turns out I was wrong. Even the loss of my parents didn't sink my heart when I was a child. I didn't know enough then to truly realize what I'd lost. But I recognized it on the phone with Declan that day. I knew what I had lost, and my heart was as heavy as stone.

 

Emmie took me to dinner. MacKenzie was on a book tour, but even without him by her side, Emmie glowed. Her red hair, which she'd just had touched up, was shiny and cut to perfection. She had on a creamy ivory blouse, with a
chunky silver necklace from Tiffany's. Her limp seemed less evident.

“Let's start with champagne, shall we?” She signaled the waiter before I could respond and ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

I sat back against the red leather booth and listened half-heartedly to Emmie's critique of MacKenzie's book reviews.

“It's true,” she said. “Ageism exists in the literary world, too. If Mac had written this book when he was forty, they would call it brave and subtle, but now they call it sentimental. It's
such
twaddle.”

I nodded once in a while. I murmured vague sounds of outrage.

“My dear,” she said when our champagne was poured, “I have a toast.”

“To the success of MacKenzie's book,” I said, raising my glass.

She touched the rim of her flute to mine. “Yes, yes, of course, that. But no, I have a different toast. Here's to you making it work.”

“What do you mean?”

“Toast, toast,” she said, waving her flute toward me.

I clinked glasses with her. “Okay, I give. Tell me.”

“My dear, you and Declan. You just need to make it work.”

I set my glass on the table. “God, Emmie. If you only knew how I tried. It's not something you can shape like a lump of clay.”

“Why not?”

“Because Declan's life is what it is. I know lots of people might love the celebrity life, but I just don't. I need my privacy. I need not to be followed all the time. I need to make mistakes that don't get broadcast around the country.
I won't ask Declan to change who he is or the way he's living his life. I have to either take it or leave it. And I can't take it—I really can't. So I had to leave.”

Emmie made a
pshh
sound of disgust. “You're being much too tragic.”

I laughed despite myself. “I've lost the love of my life, and you're telling me I'm being too tragic.”

“Well, it's true. You're rather catastrophic about this. It's not so black and white.”

“Of course it is. I either live in L. A. with Dec and put up with all the crap that goes with it, or I don't. I choose not to.”

“There are other options.”

“Like what?” I took a sip of my champagne. The bubbles tickled my nose. It seemed too whimsical a drink for my mood. I put the glass back on the table and pushed it away.

“I don't know, Kyra. That is for
you
to figure out. Just make it work.”

“Right. Okay.”

Emmie topped off my champagne glass. “There's no need to be patronizing. I think I know what I'm talking about.”

“Really? Did you make it work with Britton?” It was a low blow, but I was desperate to get off the topic.

Emmie gave me an intense look with her teal eyes. “He had a family. He had children. I could not make that work, because there were people who would have been gravely hurt. You, on the other hand, are hurting no one but yourself.”

I shook my head and glanced around the restaurant. It was early in the evening, and the place wasn't full, yet.

“Have you spoken to darling Bobby?” Emmie said. Despite what he'd done, she still had a soft spot for him. (“I always knew he was in love with you,” she'd said.)

“A few times.”

Bobby and I had talked twice since the Royalton Hotel.
He cried, he apologized, he explained, he said that the only thing he wanted in the world now was my friendship. He also said that he'd taken a leave of absence from work and was seeing a shrink three times a week. After forty-five minutes on the phone one night, Bobby near tears again, I forgave him. I had been feeling such a desperate loss of all things well and good in my life that I wasn't quite ready to chalk up Bobby as one of those losses, even if he had contributed to the overall picture. Plus, it's surprisingly hard to hate someone who says they love you.

“Well, there you go,” Emmie said. “You're making it work with Bobby.”

“Not quite. I forgave him, but Bobby and I will never be the same.”

“Perhaps not, but my point is that you're making an effort. You're looking for ways to remedy the situation. That's what you need to do with Declan.”

“Sure,” I said with very little life in my voice.

“Kyra.” Emmie pushed her glass aside and took my hand. “I haven't asked much of you over the years, isn't that true?” Something about her voice sounded grave.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“Answer the question.”

“Well, no. You've never pushed me to do anything.”

“And I'm not pushing now.” She squeezed my hand tighter. Her skin felt papery and cool. “I'm asking you to try. That's all. Take out what you have with Declan and gaze at it. Look at it from different angles. Do you see?”

“I don't know. I guess. I—”

“Kyra.” She smiled a little. She looked at me in the way she had when I was little, right after my parents died—with compassion, with sadness, with love. “Make it work.”

N
ot so long ago, right before I met Declan, I wanted a witness to my everyday life. I got what I asked for. Millions of people witnessed my life for a time. You were probably one of them. Oh, I know you don't buy those tabloid magazines, but you glance at them in the checkout line, just like I used to.

Today, when I went out for coffee, I looked at one of those magazines. I couldn't help it, because there was a picture of Dec and me, along with a bunch of other famous couples who've split up—Tom and Nicole, Meg and Dennis, Demi and Bruce.

What Is Wrong with Celebrity Marriages
? the headline read.

I glanced over my shoulder. I scanned the parked cars for the jut of a telephoto lens. I studied the open apartment windows across the street. Old habits die hard. Finally, I turned back to the paper and flipped it open.

The bit about Declan and me was in a section called “One-Minute Celeb Marriages,” where it discussed mar
riages that had happened and disintegrated “faster than you can boil water.” Declan and I were held up as the prime recent example of such a marriage. I began to feel shaky as I read the piece, almost faint. I couldn't blame anyone for seeing us like that. It's true that our marriage hadn't even lasted a year. Yet it was appalling just the same. I knew in my heart that ours wasn't simply a blip on the Hollywood marriage scene. It is—
was,
I should say—so much more than that.

If we'd been a regular couple—maybe if he was a teacher and I a boutique owner—would we still be together? My initial reaction is to say yes. If it weren't for those photographers, those reporters, those fans, if it weren't for Amy Rose, if it weren't for Bobby, then we would be happy. But that's putting too much blame on other people. I was there; Declan, too. We aren't blameless. If anything, maybe fame was a test of our marriage and, so far, we had failed.

 

After I saw that article, I went to the public library at Bryant Park. It's where I used to study and sketch. It was Bobby who introduced me to the genealogy room. Long, carved wood tables with low reading lamps; huge arched windows that overlook the street; a golden glow imbuing the whole room with warmth. I used to love to sit there, letting myself be lulled by the soft
tap tap tap
of footsteps on the marble floor, the murmured voices at the desk. The place drew me into a space where my designs flowed, my mind flowered—shade that bodice, pull the sleeves a little longer, drop the hem. It all came so easily when I was there in the past, so I went back today, thinking the same thing would happen to my writing. I needed help. I have become blocked in the telling of this story as I get to the end of what I know to be true. As I get to the present.

It's been a catharsis to write this, to chart the past that I've lived for the last year or so, but as I get to the end of
that past, to now, I find myself stalling. Because it seems as if I should decide. I should be able to take that history and apply it to a decision about the present. And yet I wonder if I am too late. Declan doesn't call as often as when I first moved back to New York, and when he does he sounds resigned and distant. I fear he is taking me at my word and leaving me alone.

The genealogy room isn't helping today. Cell phones ring from inside bags. A bum to my left snores so loudly, it's hard to ignore. Likewise, it's impossible to ignore thoughts of Declan. Even when he is no longer leaving messages for me, I hear him calling. Now that my story has lost some of its steam and I'm a bit flattened by the telling of it, I don't know if I can ignore that call. I don't know that I want to.

What do you do when the person you love leads a life you hate? Do you make them give up that life just to make you happy? No, I couldn't do that, because it wouldn't make me happy—if he's miserable, so am I. It's all a terrible conundrum, a cluster fuck of an emotional riddle.

I get up from the table and wander the bookshelves. I find a book listing Irish passenger arrivals into the Port of New York from 1820–1829. I look to see if there are any McKennas there, maybe one of Declan's ancestors, and sure enough I find a listing for a thirty-year-old woman named Mary McKenna, a “spinster” it says, who came over from Ireland in 1828.

I trace Mary McKenna's name with my finger for a moment, then I close the book and leave.

 

Kendall's assistant tells me that she's “on set” and won't be returning calls for six weeks. My cell phone rings forty-five minutes later. “Where the hell have you been?” she says.

“Taking a break, but I'm on my way to the airport now.”
I tuck the phone under my chin and throw my bags into the trunk of a cab.

“Where are you running off to?”

“Back to L. A.” I slide into the cab seat and tell the driver, “LaGuardia.”

“Good girl,” Kendall says. “Does Declan know?”

“Not yet, and I need a favor so I can make a very splashy entrance.”

“My favorite kind.” I hear someone talking to her in the background. She yells, “Give me five minutes!”

“Sorry to bother you,” I say.

“Oh gosh, don't be. I need a time-out. So what's up?”

“Well, actually, I just need some advice. Do you remember the first time we met, you told me to manage the paparazzi?”

She laughs. “It's how I stay sane.”

“Well, that's what I need advice about. I need to control the paparazzi to my advantage.”

“Kyra,” Kendall says. “You've come to the right person.”

 

It's 7:00 p.m. when I arrive at LAX—I'm on schedule, but just barely. Since no one but Kendall knows I'm flying in, there are no photographers when I arrive. I get in a cab and take it to Shutters. I'm told there are no rooms available, but then the hotel manager spots me, pulls away his front-desk clerk and produces a key to a suite.

“We're happy to have you, Ms. Felis,” he says. I remember that there are benefits to fame.

The room is monstrous and yet tasteful with Frette linens on the bed and a balcony looking onto the Pacific. I stand out there remembering how awed I used to be by this view when I first moved to L. A. I have been awed by so little lately. Except Declan, and how much I need him.

As planned, I call Kendall's cell phone. “I'm at Shutters, and I'll be heading out in thirty minutes,” I say.

She reminds me about the plan. She gives me a rousing, “You can do this.”

I change into one of my Kendall dresses, this one with a yellow and pink print. Perfectly splashy. I step into pink kid-leather sandals with a flower on the toe. I pull my hair up in a high ponytail and swipe some pink gloss on my lips. My pulse starts to pick up when I lift my purse off the bed. Ready to go. As ready as I'll ever be. If this fails, if I've misread the situation, or bungle what happens tonight, I will be publicly humiliated like no one has ever been.

“Can we get you a car?” the manager says when I step out of the elevator into the lobby.

“No, thank you. I'm just going around the corner to Capo. I think I'll walk.”

“Oh, I wouldn't do that, Ms. Felis. Word of your arrival has gotten out, and there are already a number of media-type persons outside.”

“Good,” I say. I try to look confident, but I have to fight my usual desire to run.
They are here because you want them here,
I remind myself.

I thank the manager and walk slowly to the door. I review Kendall's instructions in my head. I pray that the information I was able to pry out of Denny proves correct.

When I step outside, it's dusk, and the sky has a beautiful navy blue sheen to it. But within a second, it is eclipsed by flashes and the glaring lights of video cameras.

“Ms. Felis! Kyra!” they yell. “Give us a smile!”

I battle the urge to hold up a hand and hide myself. Instead, I throw back my shoulders and think,
Declan, Declan, Declan
. This puts a legitimate smile on my face. The photographers go crazy. There are at least fifteen.

“Any chance of a reconciliation with Declan?” one of them yells.

“Why don't you come with me and find out.” I begin walking up the street.

The photographers and videographers move with me. Some run ahead, shooting footage of my face. Others trail behind, documenting the whole scene. A white van pulls up, and two others jump out. Another few run down the street toward us. I am the Pied Piper of the paparazzi.

I am so nervous I have to concentrate on each step.
Do not trip,
I say to myself.
Keep smiling. They are here because you want them here.
I'm trying to use something that's made me unhappy—in this case, the paparazzi—as a tool for happiness.

By the time I reach the entrance of Capo, there are at least twenty-five people trailing me. I stand for a moment looking at the restaurant that Declan and I so often came to. And according to Denny, he's here now, with
her.

I think of Kendall's directions—
Don't hesitate outside the restaurant or the manager will shoo the photographers away.

“Um…hello. Hi,” I say, turning to the photographers, standing on my tiptoes and waving my purse. “I'd like you to come inside with me,” I say when they have quieted down. “There's something you should witness.”

“We can't go in there,” one of them calls out. “They'll have us arrested.”

Kendall told me this would happen. She told me what to say. “If you come with me, you will get a money shot. One of the biggest of all time, and it will pay your legal bills plus so much more.”

“I'm in,” says a videographer.

“Me, too,” others call out.

I take a huge breath. I tuck my purse under my arm. “Let's go, gentlemen.”

When I step inside the restaurant, nearly everyone turns. The room grows silent. For a second, I don't see Declan, and I panic. Did Denny give me bad information to throw me off? God, no. Please, no. But then I spot Dec and Lauren in a little alcove near the front windows. Lauren sees me first. Her mouth opens, and she scoffs, an annoyed expression on her face. But then she sees the gaggle of photographers and videographers behind me, and she puts on a practiced, pleasant look. This is what Kendall and I were counting on—Lauren being such a media slut that she wouldn't put up a public fight. My goal is twofold: disgrace Lauren and get my husband back, all at the same time.

But if my plan fails, if Declan makes the wrong decision, it will be me who is disgraced.

A manager in a black suit with slicked-back hair hurries up to me. “Ma'am, please. What are you doing?” To the photographers, he says in a low, threatening tone, “Out.
Now.
The police are on the way.”

I pat him on the arm. “This should only take a minute.” I glance over my shoulder at the wolf pack. “Follow me.”

Declan has seen me now, and as I walk toward them, he watches me, clearly confused. He stands, one hand still on the table. It's that hand, too close to Lauren, that terrifies me. I nearly falter. I want to run back to my Frette linens and hide. But I've come this far, and there are dozens of paparazzi blocking my path back to the door, so I keep putting one foot in front of another, until, at last, I'm standing at their table.

“Kyra?” Declan says, not
Kyr
or
love
. “What's going on?” He's wearing a black sport coat with flecks of gold in it. His brown hair curls over the collar, and I want to run my fingers through that hair. I want to throw my arms around him.

Lauren stands, towering over me. “Well, well, well,” she
says. “Hi, boys!” she trills to the men behind me, waving. Their cameras go
click, click, click.

“Declan,” I say. “I've got something to ask you.”

“Better make it fast,” one of the photographers says. “The fuzz is pulling up.”

I glance out the front windows and see a police car speeding down the street, a swirling blue light on its roof. I look back at Declan, then Lauren, who now has her arms crossed and is looking at me, like,
This should be good
. Her confident posture frightens me. The rest of the patrons have stopped eating and watch us expectantly. Now or never.

I cough to clear my throat. “Declan,” I say again. “I've come to take you home. Not to Mulholland Drive or Manhattan, but someplace that is truly home. I need you to trust me on this. Can you do that?”

“Kyra,” he says. His eyes are puzzled. He glances from me to Lauren. “What are you talking about?”

“Good question,” Lauren mutters. But she smiles again because the press is near.

“I want to be your wife again.” Saying the word
wife
makes me glow. I miss that word. “I want to be your wife forever. And I've made a decision. I can't tell you what that means right now because there's no time.” I look out the front windows and see two cops leaping from their car.