The Year of Living Famously (5 page)

I
knew that I was in love with him for certain when Emmie got hit by that car.

She was on Astor Place by her office, coming out of the little wine bar that used to be a speakeasy. She liked to tell people that she could remember drinking there during Prohibition, which was a complete fabrication. Emmie was barely out of the womb when Prohibition began, but she was one of those people who took pride in her age, rather than hiding it. She expected complete respect for living as long as she had.

Right before the SUV struck her, she was on the arm of Gerald Tillingham, another literary agent who was a few years older than she, but who had retired over a decade ago. She and Gerald had been an item back in the sixties after his first wife died, but now they were just buddies, old cronies who saw each other once a month to drink Pimm's and gossip about their friends. Sadly, the fact was that many of their friends had passed away.

Gerald had too much to drink, Emmie would tell me later when she was conscious and able to speak in coherent sentences. He had offered his arm to her like a gentleman, but it was he who needed support. They were crossing the street when Gerald faltered, one of his knees giving way. As Emmie struggled to catch him, the SUV turned the corner too fast. Startled by the car, Emmie lost her grip on Gerald and he fell again, and it was she who got hit. The SUV stopped immediately, but her leg was already broken, her lung punctured.

By the time I arrived at the hospital, Emmie was out of surgery, her leg pinned, her lung repaired. They said the lung would always trouble her and that I should get her to quit smoking. I said I would try, though I knew she would never do it. Despite the irony, Emmie would sooner die than give up cigarettes.

I pushed open the door quietly because the nurses said she was sleeping, and also because I was afraid of what I might see. And there she was, propped high on the bed to allow her lungs to drain, her leg huge and lumpen with plaster, metal prods piercing it. She was indeed asleep, the makeup on her papery cheeks faded, her dyed reddish hair fuzzy and misshapen by the pillow. Emmie would have hated how she looked. She took pride in her expensive cosmetics and the clothes she selected with care. The sapphire ring wasn't on her right hand, and that absence was the most shocking of all. I'd never seen her without it.

I sat on the edge of her bed, half hoping the movement would wake her. It didn't, and I couldn't bear to sit there very long without helping her somehow, without doing
something.
To watch her sleep like that was an invasion of privacy, like spying on someone on the toilet.

I left the room and went in the stairwell to call Declan. I had a cell phone by then, which he'd bought me. I had
been one of the lone holdouts in all of Manhattan, one of the few people who weren't connected by the head to their cellular. But Declan said it made him “absolutely mad” when he couldn't find me. So I let him buy it. Later in L. A., I became a master at the thing. I grew attached to it like other people to their pets. But in New York, it was still a novelty, and I felt a rush of gratitude that I had it, that I had Declan to call.

He came to see us in the hospital that night. I told him it wasn't necessary, but he wanted to come. Emmie was groggy but awake by then, and he chatted with her as if she hadn't nearly died; he brought her magazines and told her his awful jokes. But it wasn't only that which made me say “I love you” in front of the hospital later that night. It was what happened when I left for ten minutes to go for coffee. I came back and found him feeding Emmie ice chips with a white plastic spoon. He was bent at the waist, his hair falling over his eyes, his arm outstretched. Emmie's lips were pink and cracked; they were pursed and straining for that white spoon. His sweetness, his ability to do that, along with Emmie's almost childlike response, undid me.

 

September came too fast, but Declan was back in L. A. for only three days before I was on a plane to spend a week with him. Those few days apart had been agonizing. The things that used to make me content—getting a coffee on the corner, seeing a movie at Bryant Park—seemed empty and flat without him there.

I arrived in L. A. for our visit on a Tuesday afternoon. Outside, I was buffeted with warmth and sunshine. I'd never been to Los Angeles, and I couldn't have been more thrilled.

Declan pulled up in a rusty white hatchback. He leaped out of the car and ran around to the sidewalk. He picked
me up and twirled me around, and I imagined we looked like the ending of an old movie.

“Kyr.” He nuzzled his face in my collarbone. “I've missed you.”

The car smelled strongly of mildew, and there were wrappers from bags of potato chips (crisps, Declan would call them) on the back seat. But it didn't bother me. I was in love and it was sunny, and nothing else mattered. Until we got to the apartment.

Why is it that men will spend money on expensive dinners, work out for hours a day, and even wax the hair on their backs in order to attract and keep women, but they won't do a thing to their home?

Declan's apartment was in Venice Beach. It had a balcony with a plastic table and two mismatched chairs, and if you looked to the left, you could see the silvery blue of the ocean. But inside was chaos. Not a quirky, lovable chaos, the likes of Emmie's place. No, this was a teenage-boy type of chaos that would have made any self-respecting woman flinch.

I knew about Declan's first love, a girl from Dublin named Finnuala, and I knew he'd dated an ad exec in L. A. a few years ago. But maybe this was why he'd been single for a while. In New York, I'd assumed the mess was due to two men living in a small space. Apparently it was just Declan.

The carpet, a worn, dingy gray, was littered with gym shorts and T-shirts and old copies of
Variety.
The walls were contractor white and marked with greasy fingerprints. In the kitchen, crusted-over dishes and forks commandeered the sink. The bedroom had cardboard boxes instead of a dresser, and, worst of all, a futon.

My first sexual experience, an exchange of oral pleasantries, was held on a futon my freshman year at Vassar with a
boy whose name was Thadeus Howler. Thadeus was from the South, had a slow rolling drawl and went by the nickname of Dixie. Dixie Howler, you might not be surprised to hear, came out of the closet a few years after our night together and is now one of New Orleans's most celebrated cross-dressers.

Both Dixie and I, I believe, were on that futon that night because we were both late bloomers in the sexual arena. We both needed to get some experience, and you didn't want to practice lingual technique on someone you actually
liked.
So there we were, fumbling and slobbering in the dark on his lumpy, cheap-cologne-smelling futon. I have never since been able to look at a futon without cringing.

And I did cringe in Declan's bedroom that day. He could barely get me to take a step inside the doorway.

Next on the house “tour” was the bathroom.

“Sorry, love,” he said, flicking on the lights. The counter appeared encrusted in old, calcified dollops of toothpaste and shaving cream. The tub boasted a gray ring and little patches of black clinging to the grout.

“I was going to spend yesterday cleaning,” Declan said, “but I got a callback for this Denny's commercial, and I had to see my acting coach, and…What? Is it that bad?”

“No,” I said. “It's so much worse than that bad.”

I turned the lights off—too painful—and went back in the bedroom to stare at the futon.

“I've been meaning to hire a cleaning crew. You know, one of those all-day jobs,” Declan said.

“Okay.”

“And I'll do…What else will I do?” He seemed to be talking to himself, walking through his apartment, like he was seeing it for the first time. “Christ, it's horrible, I know. But I don't know where to start.”

He came in the bedroom and put a hand on my shoulder. His eyes said,
Help me.

“That's got to go,” I said, pointing at the futon, buried under jeans and wet, crumpled towels.

“Right. Right. Good.” Declan nodded, his eyes excited, a man with a mission. “I'll call the cleaning people, and there's a bed store up the street. You'll pick one out, okay? And we'll stay at a hotel for a day or two.”

“You'd do that?” I knew his agent had received a check from the movie this summer but hadn't paid Declan his part yet. I knew he didn't have money for cleaning crews and new beds and hotels. But Declan was always going out of his way to make me happy.

“Of course, Kyra,” he said. “It's worth the interest on my Visa, and this is your home, too.”

I didn't know what he meant—I was only visiting for six days, after all—but I liked the sound of his words, the sound of his brogue when he said my name. So I put my arm around his waist, and we headed downstairs to the mildewy hatchback.

 

A few days later, after the place had been scrubbed and organized by women from a company aptly named Angel Maids, Declan and I lay in his new bed.
Our
new bed, he kept saying. It was almost eleven in the morning, and we were meeting Bobby for lunch in an hour, but we were languid in each other's presence. The ocean air puffed in the window (finally opened for the first time after one of the Angel Maids chipped off the dried paint that had sealed it). The air was like a balm, making us even more lazy.

Declan rolled over and ran his hand over my bare belly. “Let's go to the beach today after lunch, shall we?”

“Yes, please!” I said. It was a joke between us. We'd overheard a mother the day before telling her little boy that if
he was going to say the word
yes,
he should instead say, “Yes, please,” but if he was going to say
no,
he should say, “No, thank you.”

Declan chuckled and snuggled his face into the crook of my shoulder.

“I'm having such a good week because of you,” I said.

Dec pulled his face back and studied me. “I'm having a good life because of you.”

He put his face back on my shoulder, nuzzling me there.

I knew then that I would do almost anything, go almost anywhere, even sleep on a futon or keep my clothes in cardboard boxes to be with him.

 

On the plane ride on the way home, I sat across the aisle from an older woman. She was probably around Emmie's age, but she didn't carry her years as well. She wore brown perma-press pants and a cheap pink sweater that had pilled from too much wear. Her bifocals were affixed to a green cord that hung around her neck. Her shoes were ugly, tan orthopedic ones with a rubbery ivory sole. She had on nylons, too, a deceptively invisible garment of torture, in my opinion.

At one point, she crossed her legs, and that's when I saw the most striking thing. She wore a thin gold chain around her right ankle, under those beige nylons. A clandestine piece of jewelry. She had a secret, it seemed to me, and I felt the same way. But my secret was Declan. I was in love. In the very grip of it. No one on the plane could see it, at least not at first glance. But if they looked closer, they might have seen my too-wide eyes, my frequent glances at the card he'd given me at the airport, my secret anklet of a smile.

W
hen I got back to New York, it was fall. I'd left in eighty-degree weather only seven days earlier. My cab to LaGuardia had been hot and stinky, the driver wearing a sweat-stained white shirt. And yet when I returned, there was an unmistakable crispness in the air. Women wore camel boots and thin leather jackets; the men were in cable-knit sweaters. Everything felt different, too—the fall always ushers in a sense of purpose to New York—and so everyone bustled by me on that first morning back as I strolled to my coffee shop, debating whether to call the temp agency today or wait until tomorrow. The sudden introduction of fall, like the drop of a heavy red curtain onto a Broadway stage, seemed a betrayal to me. It was as if the city already knew what I didn't—that I would soon be leaving for the sunny, synthetic shores of la-la land.

 

Emmie used to keep a collection of telegrams in old candy tins. These tins were stacked in the corner of one
of her bedroom closets, and when I had the apartment to myself, which was often, I sometimes liked to extract them from her closet, feeling the swish and rustle of her clothes brush by my face as I dug for them. I would sit on her bed with its purple velvety spread, the apartment large and silent around me. With great anticipation, I took the telegrams out one at a time, making sure not to disturb the order. I was enamored with the precise folds, the thick, yellowing paper, the Western Union banner across the top.

MacKenzie Bresner and Britton Matthews were Emmie's star authors, and those telegrams from Britton were my favorites. He was famous, of course; even at age nine I knew that, even with him being dead for at least five years. But more than being a famous writer, he was Emmie's true love, the reason she'd never married. They had had an affair that went on for a decade, well before I came along. It was the old story, Emmie told me (although at the age I was at, no story was old). He had refused to leave his wife, and Emmie refused to stop loving him. And so those telegrams from him were illicit and old-fashioned and fascinating.

I had told Declan about Emmie's telegrams when I was
in L. A. We were sitting on his balcony in the rickety plastic chairs, reading the Sunday paper.

“I think people should still send telegrams,” I said. I was reading a piece about the telegrams Harry Truman had sent around the world on a regular basis.

“I'm serious,” I said when he made a goofy face at me. “They're so much more romantic, and they're more permanent than e-mails. They have substance.” I explained about Emmie's tin of telegrams then.

“Well, love,” Dec said, “I don't think it's possible to send telegrams anymore. They're extinct.”

His comment put me in a momentary funk. The death of telegrams. Could it be true? But I quickly forgot about it, because soon Dec was pulling me back into his apartment, into our new bed.

Back in New York, back in the fall season that had taken me by such surprise, I only remembered that conversation when someone buzzed my apartment one day.

“Who is it?”

“Western Union,” said a man's voice through the crackling intercom.

I stood up straight and looked around my apartment, as if I might find that I'd been transported back in time to the forties.

I pressed the intercom again. “I'll be right down.”

I raced down the three flights of stairs, forgoing the elevator. Outside, I expected to see a man in a pressed Western Union uniform with a jaunty khaki hat, but he was a bike messenger with a large silver nose ring and a blue helmet.

“Kyra Felis?” He handed me a large yellow envelope. “Have a good one.” He trotted back to his bike and was gone.

I sat down on the front steps. A crisp wind whipped my hair. For some reason, my heart was pounding. I pulled the tab to open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of thick paper.
Petal-soft yellow instead of age-old like those in Emmie's candy tins.

Margaux and I played phone tag for days. I couldn't bear to break the news on voice mail.

I did reach my model friend, Darcy. “You're leaving the city?” she said incredulously, as if I were moving to one of the outer rings of Jupiter.

I called Bobby, who whooped and yelled. “Finally!” he said. “You're coming to the right coast. God, it's going to be amazing!”

When I did get ahold of Margaux, she had a coughing fit on the phone.

“Are you smoking again?” I said.

“As if that's important!” She choked some more. “L. A.? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“You know, I could use a little support here.”

“
I'm
the one who needs support. You're leaving me alone with the mommies!”

“You'll come visit me,” I said.

I prayed she would. I prayed
anyone
would visit me. Emmie rarely left Manhattan anymore, except to go to her house in Nantucket, and so the possibility of getting her to travel to the West Coast was slim. It had been twenty-four
hours since I'd called Declan and sang, “Yes, yes, yes!” in a gleeful voice, but since that time, I'd been plagued by nagging thoughts—I would have no girlfriends, I would have no job, I didn't even know how to drive.

I reminded myself that most of the time I communicated with my friends by phone or e-mail, and that wouldn't change. I had no real job in Manhattan that would make it hard to leave. I could continue working on my designs in L. A., and I could always look for freelance or temp jobs there. And Dec promised to teach me how to drive, although this thought irrationally terrified me. I was fine in the back of a cab, but operating an enormous vehicle (they all seemed enormous to me) was conceptually like manning an F-16 fighter jet.

“I guess I do like L. A.,” Margaux said, “and I'm supposed to take a deposition there in six months or so. But hey, you'll probably be back by then anyway.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Could you be less helpful?”

“I'm sorry, Kyr, but you know…”

“No, I don't know.”

“It's just that you barely know the guy, and you're moving across the country. It's like when you had only known Steven for so long and then you were with him every second of the day.”

“Declan is not like Steven.”

“Of course not.” She coughed again. “I'm sorry. I'm just being a bitch because I don't want you to go. I can't believe you're leaving New York.”

I looked out my window, at the cabs rumbling down 95
^th
. I thought of Central Park and Emmie's salons. I thought of my spot in the Bryant Park Library where I liked to sketch. I thought of lunches with the girls in Gramercy Park and bottles of wine at 92, my favorite neighborhood place. I could barely believe I was leaving, either. But I knew De
clan was different than my ex, Steven. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that Declan was the man. He was it. And so, if I had to spend my life in L. A. to be with him, if I had to leave New York, I would do it.

 

I took Emmie out to dinner to tell her I was moving. In the past, she'd always had a sprightly walk, a lively air about her, even as her back became slightly stooped and the wrinkles set into her face with more determination. Now, she walked slowly and cautiously, leaning hard on her cane, and it took us forever to walk the few blocks to the restaurant. Each plodding step seemed a trial for her, but she refused a cab.

“I'm not going to take a taxi around my own neighborhood,” she said proudly.

I asked Emmie about the woman we had hired to help her around the house since the accident.

“She wears
ponchos,
” Emmie said derisively.

Other than that, she didn't talk much on the way to dinner. It was too hard for her to concentrate on her footing and to converse at the same time. The silence was torturous. I became increasingly nervous about delivering my news. With each slow, painful step, I felt more and more like I was abandoning her, although she would probably hate that thought. Emmie hated pity.

Finally we reached the restaurant and tucked ourselves into a booth, Emmie's leg raised to the side and propped on a folded towel by the proprietor. We ordered a bottle of champagne, Emmie's perpetual favorite.

In my early adulthood, I used to say I hated champagne, refused to drink it, but really it was just a way of establishing my independence. I needn't have worried. Emmie and I are so very different. She is strong and cheerful to a fault, while I am more moody. Emmie has spent the last few de
cades free from entanglements with the opposite sex, and yet aside from the few years before Declan, I moved from one man to another.

I wondered, as I sat across from her, watching her readjust her leg and take a sip of champagne, what my mother would have thought about me moving to L. A. Would she have been supportive? Maybe disapproving and telling me it was my life to ruin? It was a futile exercise, this trying to imagine my parents in the present. I had no groundwork for envisioning myself as an adult in their world. They were forever frozen in their thirties, and when I thought of me with them, I was still eight years old.

“I'm moving in with Declan,” I blurted out.

Emmie raised the champagne flute to her mouth again, as if she'd heard nothing surprising. Her sapphire ring glittered navy blue with the movement.

“Will you have enough room in that place of yours?” she said.

“I'm moving to L. A.”

Emmie put her glass down. “Why?”

“He needs to be there for his acting.” And then, because that wasn't enough, “I'm in love with him.”

She took a deep breath. She put a hand to her chest, as if something had caught there.

“Are you all right?” I started to stand from the table.

“Of course, sit down,” she said, irritated. She moved her glass away. She signaled the waiter and asked for another towel to put under her leg. “My, how I hate getting old. It's making me sentimental.”

“Oh, come on,” I said in a kidding tone, hoping to lighten the mood. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Everyone is leaving me,” she said. Her voice was small. In fact, her whole body had seemed tiny since the accident.

“Emmie.” I reached over to touch her hand.

She pulled it away and shook her head. “I don't want sympathy. I'm just stating a fact. I've run around my whole life with too many people to see and too many things to do, and now there's barely anything left. Britton is gone, your parents, most of my writers…now you.”

“I'm not gone in that sense, and hey, you still have the agency.”

“Kyra, dear, they keep me on because I helped build that place. They can't oust me unceremoniously, and I won't leave. But don't think they aren't hoping I'll die quietly in the middle of the night.”

“It's not true.”

“It is,” she said definitively. She tried not to seem upset by this, but I knew better. The agency had been Emmie's life.

Emmie lifted the bottle out of the bucket, spraying water over the table.

“Let me do it.” I took the bottle.

I expected her to protest, to say that she could do it herself, but instead she let me take it from her.

“You know what?” I said. “Maybe I won't go. I don't need to move.” I was in agony at that moment. I wanted desperately to be with Declan every day, but how could I leave Emmie?

When she heard my words, she pushed herself up and sat straighter. She threw her shoulders back, as if throwing off her earlier words and thoughts.

She lifted her glass. “Kyra,” she said, “you've got to follow love if you can find it. I won't have it any other way. Now, from what I recall, Los Angeles is a cesspool, but if you
must
live there, it might as well be with an Irishman who loves you. I want you to tell him something, though. If he doesn't take care of you, if he wounds you in any way, I will find ways to grievously injure him. Agreed?”

It was Emmie's way. I lifted my glass and touched it to hers.