The Year of Living Famously (4 page)

“Kyra, Kyra.” Emmie's voice trilled from the hallway.

She stepped into the living room, wearing gray wool slacks pressed to a fine point and a black cashmere turtleneck. At that time, Emmie only worked two days a week, acting more as a figurehead at the literary agency than anything else, but she always dressed for the day like a professional. No bathrobes or sweats for Emmie. She has very short auburn-red hair (“I dye it, sweetie, so that I'll
die
a redhead” is what she's always said), and her eyes are still the most striking teal blue.

“Oh, and you've brought a friend! Delightful!” She wafted into the room and kissed me on the cheek, then Declan. “Welcome,” she said. “I'll get tea.” And then she was gone just as quickly, puttering away in her service kitchen.

“Nice to meet…” Declan said to her retreating back. He turned to me quizzically.

“She has a lot of visitors,” I said.

Soon Emmie was back, carrying a tea tray. Declan jumped off the couch to take it from her.

“Gallantry,” she said. “It's so rare these days.”

She sat on a maroon velvet chair, “the queen's chair” I used to call it as a kid, and began pouring tea. Her signature ring, a sapphire set in a gold braided band, glinted in the afternoon light that streamed in the windows. “I detected an accent,” she said to Declan. “Tell, tell.”

“Oh,” Declan said. He looked at me, then back at her. I nodded in encouragement. Emmie always just jumped right into conversations like this—she abhorred pleasantries—and I was used to her running the conversation from the get-go.

“All right,” Declan said. “Well, I'm Declan McKenna, and—”

“Declan McKenna? Oh!” Emmie interrupted. She looked at me and smiled. I had told her only a little about
our Internet and phone flirtations, but Emmie could read me well enough to know I'd been delighted.

I shot Declan an embarrassed smile. “We're just stopping by to say hello, Emmie.”

“Of course.” She handed Declan a cup. “Are you a writer?”

“No,” Declan said.

“Pity. You have the perfect name.”

“I'm an actor.”

“Ah.” Emmie sounded disappointed, and Declan, as all men do, rushed in to appease her, telling her how he'd moved to the States from Ireland and how he was in town shooting a film.

“Mmm,” Emmie said, sounding more impressed now. “And remind me how you two know each other.” Emmie would cut off an arm before she would read the
National Enquirer,
and I hadn't told her about my photo.

“We met in Vegas,” I said.

“When you were with darling Bobby?” she said.

I nodded.

“Interesting.” She patted the chair next to her. “Declan, move over here, won't you?”

I groaned a little, but God love him, he crossed the room without hesitation and sat next to her. I remember thinking they looked lovely together: Emmie with her cap of ginger hair and her lined, pale face; Declan with his amused grin, his white teeth, his golden-brown eyes.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Emmie said.

“Christ, no. I'll have one with you.” Out of his pocket, Declan pulled a red book of matches.

I left them alone for a moment. When I returned, Emmie was in her prime entertainer mode, telling the story of a dinner she'd had with Prince Charles when he was a teenager. Declan's quirky, rolling laugh filled the room. He cracked a joke about the royal family “splitting heirs.”

Emmie laughed and clapped her hands. Then she gave me a little bow of her head. Declan had been accepted.

 

When cocktail hour arrived (5:30 p.m., sharp, for Emmie), she whisked the tea tray away and brought out a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket.

“To Declan,” she said, raising her glass, “and the success of his film.”

Declan beamed. We all touched glasses.

Two hours and another bottle of champagne later, Declan and I left Emmie's apartment. It was dark already, in that strange, sudden way that darkness falls when you've been drinking in the late afternoon.

“She's fantastic,” Declan said. His hand was in mine again, and we were walking up Madison. We were moving in the direction of my apartment, although we hadn't planned anything yet.

“I'm glad you like her,” I said.

“Now don't get me wrong, here. She doesn't hold a candle to you.”

I sneaked a sideways glance at him. “Is that right?”

There was a second's pause, during which we kept walking, both of us looking straight ahead. “I don't mean to give you a fright saying that,” Declan said. “I'm not usually like this, you see?”

Have I already said that I was smiling so much that afternoon? It seemed I couldn't drag that grin off my lips, and right then it became wider. “Sure, I see,” I said.

Another pause. Declan held my hand tighter. “Where are we going?”

We'd reached my apartment by then. Without a word, I tugged him toward the door.

“Yeah?” he said, looking up at my brick building.

“Yeah,” I said.

 

Afterward, when we were lying in bed, he stared at my face. How strange to be studied like that, when there hadn't been a man in my bed for so long, but how amazing to be there next to him. It was simply right.

“What kind of name is Felis?” he said, surprising me. I thought he was working up to something sexier.

“It's Puerto Rican. My father was from there. My mother was Irish.” I said this proudly, though I'd never been to Ireland or even Puerto Rico, and I knew so little about my heritage.

“Thank God you're half-Irish! Now I can marry you,” he said in a jokey tone.

His words sent a zing up my spine—terror and thrill in equal parts.

 

The next morning, Declan slept later than me, and when he came into the kitchen, he found me standing naked at the counter, eating my normal breakfast—pickles and peanuts.

“Nude breakfast?” he said.

I nodded. He growled in return.

“Christ, what's this?” he said, walking to the counter. He glanced down at the two jars side by side. I had a small serving of peanuts poured into a cap. The pickles I pulled out one by one.

“Breakfast, just like you said.”

“What happened to oatmeal and runny eggs and slabs of bacon?”

“You must be thinking of breakfast in Dublin. But what you're seeing here is the perfect start to a morning.” I picked up the jar of pickles and waved my hand under it like a game-show hostess. “Vegetables,” I proclaimed. Then I lifted the peanuts, and with the same underwave, said, “Protein.”

“You can get vegetables and protein by having tomatoes and eggs.”

“Ah,” I said, popping a peanut in my mouth, “but those foods only keep for a week or two. Meanwhile, my breakfast foods last for months.”

“You mean you eat this every day?”

“Pretty much.” I offered him a pickle.

It snapped as he took a bite. “You're fecking weird,” he said between chews. “And I like it.”

To: Kyra Felis

From: Margaux Hutters

Hey, girl, what's up with no return phone calls? Don't you love me anymore? Wait, don't tell me—you're still running around with that actor. I thought he was leaving after a month or two. Hmm. Well, do tell, because I'm so bored. Peter is away again on a trial in Delaware, and he doesn't even know when it will end. Work is painfully dull. Meanwhile, Manuel, my massage therapist, still wants to help me “relieve more tension,” if you know what I mean. And I'm starting to consider taking him up on that offer.

 

To: Margaux Hutters

From: Kyra Felis

Don't you dare sleep with your massage therapist! You are married, for Pete's sake (pun definitely intended). And, yes, Declan is still in town. I'm sorry I haven't been calling you back. He's consumed me. You liked him when you met him, right?

 

To: Kyra Felis

From: Margaux Hutters

Of course I liked him! What's not to like about that sexy accent and that cute butt of his? It must be so glamorous, hanging out on a movie set. Maybe you'll be discovered. Speaking of which, did you hear from the catalog that was considering buying your trumpet skirts?

 

To: Margaux Hutters

From: Kyra Felis

Rejected by the catalog. Again. But I won't let it get me down. I'm too happy in other areas right now. I have to tell you, though, the movie set is anything but glamorous. Declan got me credentials to hang out for a few days, but it was like waiting at an airport. Declan shares a trailer with a bunch of other actors, and they sit in there all day playing Scrabble. Every once in a great, great while, someone knocks and tells them they're on. They do one short scene about fifty million times, then go back to the trailer. It was as painful as listening to someone tell you about their dream. You just keep wondering when it might end. But Declan is happy, so that's all that matters.

 

To: Kyra Felis

From: Margaux Hutters

Declan is happy, you're happy. My God, would you listen to yourself? What happens when the movie is over?

 

To: Margaux Hutters

From: Kyra Felis

I know, I know. Other people's glee can be so tedious, right? As for the movie, they're done shooting this week, but Declan's agent got him a bunch of auditions. In fact, he already landed one commercial, which shoots next week. So…drumroll, please…he's staying until September!

 

I
t was the everlasting summer. I've never felt that a summer was long, that it stretched on and on, that it was nearly all beautiful—sun and blue and street-side cafés—but that's what it was like for those first few months with Dec, as I'd begun calling him, and me.

It was a perfect time to wear my most feminine clothes. I broke out all my fifties-style dresses with the flounced skirts, and I wore them with polka-dot sandals. I've never been the girl who could get away with wearing cargo pants and a ripped T-shirt. At my size, I look too much like a boy with boobs. And so I carried my pink alligator clutch bag, and I wore my yellow twin set, my hair in a high, bouncy ponytail. Oftentimes it's hard to find occasions to dress so girlie, but falling in love gives you a built-in excuse.

 

Declan didn't look like a typical movie star, if there is such a thing. Tall and broad, yes. Wavy, longish, coppery-brown hair that women wanted to rake their fingers through, yes. Honey-brown eyes, sharp and knowing, yes. But his complexion was somewhat ruddy, and his waist became a little soft when he drank too much beer.

His coloring was all off, at least for me. I'd always preferred men who were dark. Bobby was just my type, in fact, with his inky-black curls, his olive skin and almost black eyes. I'd had a mad crush on Bobby after we met, when we were both in graduate school. The crush dissipated, mostly, and we became tight buddies. Years later, we had sex one night, something we needed to get out of our system. It had been lingering there, after all. But it was odd. He was too familiar and yet the intimate parts of him so male, so foreign. Luckily we were both stoned, and the whole experience is rather hazy.

Anyway, even though Declan wasn't necessarily my type, I adored the way he looked, even from the start. He was
taller than me by at least ten inches, yet he was always ducking down when we hugged, trying to place his head on my collarbone, as if sensing a warmth there and burrowing for that heat. But since he wasn't the Latin-lover type, the blond-surfer type or the tousled bad boy, I never really thought he'd be all that famous. That sounds terrible. It sounds as if I didn't have faith in him. That wasn't it. I just couldn't imagine someone like him, with the lilting brogue and the goofy laugh, being an international superstar. I don't think he could have imagined it, either.

That summer we talked about how much he simply wanted to make a living as an actor. I knew what he meant. I just wanted to make a living as a designer. I didn't want to be a famous designer; I wasn't bold enough to think it, I didn't need that. But when people asked, “What do you do for a living?” I wanted to be able to say, “I'm a designer” and I wanted that to be all. I didn't want to go into a lengthy explanation about how I was trained to be a fashion designer, how I was
trying,
but how I had a small trust fund and was doing freelance design jobs and temp work in the meantime.

I had started working at temp agencies in my early twenties, in order to fill out the periods when I couldn't sell a line of clothing or couldn't get a freelance design gig. At the time, many of the others who were sent on the same jobs were my age, at my stage in life—people I could run around with. We would go out for drinks at the end of the day and make fun of the stiffs in the office where we'd just worked, self-satisfied because we didn't have to make our livings there. But by the time I met Dec, I was often the elder. I was the one who was pitied. I saw it in the faces of the twenty-one-year-olds who had just migrated to the city, smug in the fact that they would move on shortly, that the temp jobs were just stopping grounds for their eventual
greatness. I knew them. I knew their misplaced arrogance, and I didn't blame them for their pity. I didn't even fight it, because I'd begun to look at myself the same way.

Declan understood all this. He'd folded jeans all day while working at the Gap; he'd suffered the humiliation of waiting on Al Pacino at a coffee shop and accidentally spilling steamed milk on him. He felt he might be on the verge of making a steady living, since he'd landed three roles over the last fourteen months, including the movie in Manhattan, but his family was still suggesting that maybe he should come home to Dublin and work with his dad as a courthouse clerk.

Luckily, I didn't have family pressure. Emmie would no sooner pressure me than she would move to Nebraska. To Emmie, each person is her own master. The only people she bossed around were her authors, and even then she trusted their judgment about the course of their careers and life. How lovely it was to have someone like Emmie who thought that you, and only you, could decide your fate. Occasionally, though, I thought about how nice it would be to have someone question me, give me a little push.

 

One night, Declan came to my apartment with a clumsily wrapped present, roughly the size of a softball.

“Open it,” he said, handing it to me. “Fast.”

The wrapping paper was green foil, obnoxious and yet seemingly perfect from him. “It's cold,” I said, feeling it.

“Hurry, gorgeous,” he said.

I tore off the paper. I could tell he'd wrapped it himself because of the long, tangled strips of tape that wound around the thing.

I saw what was inside and I giggled. “A pint of ice cream?”

“Not just any ice cream,” he said, sounding indignant. “This is Ben & Jerry's! There's more crap in here than you
can imagine. It's so American. Not a bit like our blocks of HB back home.” He withdrew two silver spoons from his pocket and handed one to me.

We stood at my kitchen counter eating runny spoonfuls of Chubby Hubby, and I smiled at him, thinking,
Who gives ice cream for a present?

My boyfriend,
I answered inside my head.
My boyfriend, my boyfriend, my boyfriend.

As it turns out, it was Declan, my boyfriend, who gave me the little push. Not explicitly. Not with words, but with the possibility of a new life.