Praise for the novels of Laura Caldwell

The Year of Living Famously

“Sharply observed, fresh and compelling, The Year of Living Famously is a captivating look into the cult of celebrity.”

—Leslie Stella, author of The Easy Hour and Fat Bald Jeff

“A stylish, sassy novel that shows the dark side that haunts the world of glamour and glitz. Laura Caldwell paints a sensitive picture of two ordinary lives thrown into turmoil by the pressures of fame.”

—USA TODAY bestselling author Carole Matthews

“Hollywood power players, paparazzi and overzealous fans—Laura Caldwell takes readers inside the precarious world of celebrity with a captivating story about the cost of following your dreams and the high price of fame.”

—Jennifer O’Connell, author of Bachelorette #1

A Clean Slate

“Told with great energy and charm, A Clean Slate is for anyone who has ever fantasized about starting over—in other words, this book is for everyone!”

—Jill A. Davis, author of Girls’ Poker Night

“Weightier than the usual fare, Caldwell’s winning second novel puts an appealing heroine in a tough situation and relays her struggles with empathy.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A Clean Slate is Laura Caldwell’s page-turner about a woman with a chance to reinvent herself, something most of us have imagined from time to time….”

—Chicago Tribune

“A Clean Slate…told with a little mystery, a little humor, and more than a few twists and surprises.”

—News-Dispatch

Burning the Map

“This debut novel won us over with its exotic locales (Rome and Greece); strong portrayal of the bonds between girlfriends; cast of sexy foreign guys; and, most of all, its touching story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.”

—Barnes & Noble.com

(Selected as one of “The Best of 2002”)

“Caldwell’s debut is a fun, snappy read.”

—Booklist

“The author produces excellent settings and characters. It is easy to identify with her protagonist, Casey. We learn that maybe the rat race isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This is a very thought provoking book.”

—Heartland Reviews

The Year of Living Famously
Laura Caldwell

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you, thank you, thank you to my wonderful editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, my fantastic agent, Maureen Walters, and everyone at Red Dress Ink (especially Tania Charzewski, Laura Morris, Craig Swinwood, Donna Hayes, Isabel Swift, Margie Miller, Tara Kelly, Sarah Rundle, Don Lucey, Belinda Hobbs, Jessica Regante, Liba Berry and Carolyn Flear).

Thanks also to Kelly Harden, Ginger Heyman, Trisha Woodson, Beth Kaveny, Suzanne Burchill, Pam Carroll, Jim Lupo, Hilarie Pozesky, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Jane Hamill, Kris Verdeck, Ted MacNabola, Joan Posch, J. Erik Seastrand, Patrick Meade and Alisa Spiegel.

Once again, most importantly, thanks and my heart to Jason Billups.

LAURA CALDWELL

graduated from University of Iowa, before getting her law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Laura was a trial lawyer for many years, specializing in medical negligence defense and entertainment law. She is widely published in the legal field, as well as in numerous mainstream publications.

Laura is a writer and contributing editor at Lake Magazine, and an adjunct professor of legal writing at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Please visit her online at www.lauracaldwell.com.

I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

—Lord Byron

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Three

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Four

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part Five

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Book Club Questions

Part One

chapter 1

Until that night in Vegas, I was the girl in back of the nightclub line, the girl who always had to wait for a cab. I was ordinary. I was just like anyone else.

I was with my friend Bobby that night, and we were staying at Mandalay Bay, where Bobby’s talent agency had unknowingly sprung for a two-bedroom suite. Bobby’s a film agent, and he was there to watch one of his clients in some high-end cabaret show. Bobby and I met when we were in grad school in Manhattan (me at FIT for fashion design, he at NYU for creative writing). Although he lived in L.A. now, and we hadn’t seen each other in a year, we were fabulous purveyors of the witty voice mail and the novel-length e-mail, so we still knew all about each other; we felt as connected as we had back then.

We hit the Strip with a vengeance that Friday night, throwing ourselves headlong into the glitter and the lights, pretending we weren’t in our early thirties, that the vodka martinis wouldn’t make our heads scream the next morning. We roared with laughter at the stories we knew by heart and updated each other with new ones, our exaggerations and outlandish details showing how much we’d learned about creativity in grad school.

At midnight, we were fairly stumbling through the lobby of the Bellagio, past the jangling slot machines and the occasional shouts of triumph from the craps tables, when Bobby stopped and peered through the crowd, his dark eyes narrowing.

“Is it Trent?” I said, referring to Bobby’s friend we were supposed to meet. The guy’s full name was Trent Tanning, which sounded made up and Hollywood. I wondered whether I would like him at all.

Bobby shook his head, and his tight, black curly hair gleamed under the lights.

A pack of about ten people were moving through the tables and slots. Muscle-bound guys flanked the group, swiveling their heads menacingly, like they’d pummel you if you got too close. In the center was a woman who looked familiar—tall and model-thin with hair the color of oatmeal. The others gravitated toward her, glancing at her constantly, leaning in to whisper in her ear.

When they were about ten feet away, they turned and began walking in a different direction.

“Lauren!” Bobby yelled, and the entire entourage froze like deer that sense a rifle is near.

The big guys glared in Bobby’s direction and held out their arms as if to shield the group. The woman looked vaguely in Bobby’s direction, but then her studied expression shifted into a luminous smile.

“Bobby Minter!” she called. “What are you doing here?”

She wafted through her group, past the big men who appeared annoyed at the break in formation. She was wearing a vintage taupe dress with a cowl-neck.

By this time I had figured out that she was Lauren Stapleton, the actress. I’d seen a few of her films—romantic comedies, the type people see when they need one hundred and twenty minutes of escapism. Lauren played the geeky but gorgeous girl, the one you wanted the hero to fall for, which he certainly would in the last few scenes, leaving the audience feeling all was right with the world, that it was okay, in your own life, to be divorced, overweight and in debt.

Bobby hugged her. “I’m mixing business with a little too much pleasure. Lauren, this is my friend, Kyra Felis.”

She gave me the wide, toothy grin I’d seen on-screen. She towered over me in her blond greatness, making me feel tiny and dark. Of course, I am tiny and dark—about five-one with wide brown eyes and black-brown, shoulder-length hair. None of this has ever been a problem before, but beside Lauren it all felt inadequate.

“You’re in the business?” she asked me. Her voice was pleasant but bored, as if to say, Isn’t it all such a pain in the ass?

“Oh, God no,” I said.

Something snapped shut in her face, and she turned to Bobby. Soon, they were engaged in a serious discussion about whether a producer they knew had a heroin addiction or whether it was just cocaine. Bobby always got very dishy when he spoke to movie people, a trait that amused me, since Bobby’s real goal in life was to write quiet, literary novels.

As they talked, I noticed one of the men from their group, a tousle-haired brunette in a suede jacket, standing at a nearby blackjack table. He was making one of the normally stoic dealers bite his lip with laughter.

I wandered over to the guy, not even sure what drew me. I wasn’t looking for a pillow partner, and although I was bored by Bobby and Lauren, it was something more than that. I keep asking myself why I took those ten steps, because it seems to matter. Everything would be different if I hadn’t.

There I was, drawn to that slightly shaggy hair, the dark gold suede of his jacket, the glow that emanated from this guy as every player at the blackjack table gazed at him and laughed.

I heard the last lines of his joke as I neared. “So your man says, ‘No, I’ll shove it up your arse.’” Although I hadn’t heard the beginning, I could tell it wasn’t my type of humor. In fact, under normal circumstances, even if I had been looking for a little action, I would have turned around right then. But it was his elegant manner despite the crass words. It was his light Irish brogue that sounded, somehow, like warm caramel on the tongue. It was the good-natured, almost childlike, grin that made me chuckle along with the rest of the group.

“Like that one, did you?” he said when he saw me.

“I’ve heard better.”

“Yeah?” He smiled. His teeth were unnaturally white and straight. I should have known then he was an actor.

“Definitely,” I said.

“So let’s hear one.” He faced the blackjack table. “Lads, the lady has a joke to tell.”

There were two older men in golf shirts, a Hispanic guy who looked about fifteen and two mafioso types with slicked-back hair and jackets with huge shoulder pads. They all looked at me expectantly.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No jokes from me. I can’t remember them.”

“Bollocks,” the Irish guy said. “You can’t tell me that you’ve heard better and not tell one yourself.”

“That’s true,” said one of the mafia dudes. “Ya gotta tell one now.”

“Really, I don’t have any.” I hoped Bobby would call my name.

“We’re all waiting,” the Hispanic guy said.

I’m not normally a blusher, but I felt my face coloring. The golden Irish boy was grinning, his face bordering on a smirk, the two older men seemed impatient and the mafia guys looked as if they’d fit me with concrete boots if I didn’t get on with it.

The Irish guy leaned in. “Do you want me to save you?” he said in that wonderful voice, his breath warm in my ear. I felt like kissing him then. The desire came that quick.

“Um, sure,” I said, not clear what he meant. Not caring.

He leaned even closer, so the suede lapel of his jacket brushed against the skin at the scoop-necked opening of my dress. I was wearing one of my own designs, a fifties-inspired number with a high waist, and I wondered if he thought it attractive.

“I’ll give you a wee one,” he said, “and then you can tell them.”

I can no longer remember the beginning of the joke. Something about a priest in a rowboat. I was too aware of the nearness of him, too focused on that warm, smooth voice. Then there was a staccato of sounds like quiet gunfire and everything went white, white, white. It took me a moment to realize it was cameras flashing. In the next moment, the Irish guy was jerked away by one of Lauren’s bodyguards.

“Can’t you leave me alone?” Lauren said as she licked her lips prettily and shook her hair away from her face.

The photographers got a few more shots before the bodyguards grabbed Lauren, too. Within seconds, the pack of photographers was running after the group, leaving Bobby and me alone.

“Welcome to Hollywood,” Bobby said.

I laughed at the commotion. “What was that?”

“Paparazzi,” Bobby said. “Par for the course. I bet Lauren leaked where she would be.”

“She’d do that?”

“Lauren? Oh, sure. C’mon, let’s find Trent.” He took my arm and led me toward the bar.

“So, who was that Irish guy?”

I tried to sound only mildly interested. Bobby and I had fooled around once in grad school and since then we didn’t often talk about the people we were sleeping with or the ones we wanted to sleep with.

“Some actor. Declan something. He’s in her new film, so they’re dating now.” Bobby made air quotes with his fingers as he said the word dating. “She had to do something to deflect attention from that rapper business.” He named a rapper who Lauren used to be involved with, someone who was now in prison for drug trafficking and murder-for-hire.

By then Bobby’s eyes were darting around the room, looking for Trent, bored already with the topic of Lauren and the Irish guy. So I dropped it. I’d never see him again anyway.

I’m a minor celebrity now.

A minor celebrity should be distinguished from a true-blue-can’t-shop-for-Tampax-without-a-photo-being-taken celebrity. That’s not me, thank God, not anymore. I couldn’t stand the constant staring, the feeling that you always have to look presentable when you stop at a gas station. A minor celebrity, in contrast, is someone who gains notoriety for something quite small or, rather, on the coattails of someone else. In my case, I suppose both of these are true.

Only occasionally does anyone recognize the minor celebrity on the street, but once introduced at a party, people respond with, Oh, I know you. I read about you in People magazine. And suddenly others at the party who’ve heard the comment turn to catch a look at you, and the buzz slips through the party like smoke. Soon, people are watching how much salmon mousse you put on your cracker, whether you’re getting blotto on that red wine.

My celebrity status has been good for the sale of my designs, certainly. All my clothes with my diamond circle logo (some of them with real diamonds now instead of CZs) are moving fast. Still, I was never one of those people who worshipped celebrities, probably because I didn’t need it. I’ve always had at least a vague sense of who I am, where I’m going, what I want to do with the next minute of my life. This trait made me something of a freak when I was younger, one of those girls who was bored by the cliques in school, the sharing of nail polish and the double-dating for dances. I was more interested in reading the novels and short stories my parents left behind or making skirts from old tablecloths.

It’s not that I didn’t have friends throughout my life. There was Bobby. There was Margaux and the girls here in New York. And of course there was always Emmie, my godmother, who’s cared for me since I was a kid.

Anyway, I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that, relatively speaking, I had it together. I knew myself, my life, my place in it. So if you’re looking for a story about a poor neurotic girl who finally turned her life around, this isn’t it. This is about how I met Declan McKenna, and how my world went spinning.

chapter 2

As it turns out, the next place I saw Declan was in the National Enquirer. I knew the paper, of course. I’d seen it in the grocery store, but I’d never bought it, never thought I’d buy it.

The first of many phone calls that day came from Bobby. He was already at his L.A. office at 7:00 a.m., and he was going through the trades and all the papers, looking for mentions of his clients like he did every day.

“Kyr,” he said when I answered. “Go get the Enquirer, and call me back.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve got a job this morning, and I’m already late.” I was working for a few temp agencies at the time, doing meaningless, thankless jobs in places where no one wanted to get to know you, since you’d be gone in a few days anyway. The meager, occasional cash from my designs couldn’t sustain me, not in a city like New York, nor could the modest payments from the fund my parents had set up.

“Pick it up on your way,” Bobby said. “Trust me.”

And because I did trust him, I bought an Enquirer at the corner newsstand before I caught the subway to a marketing office in Midtown.

“Okay,” I said, calling Bobby from the copy room of the office, where, thankfully, you could call long distance. “What am I supposed to look at?”

“You didn’t find it?”

“Jesus, Bobby, I’m working,” I said, as though an entire corporation of employees waited for the decisions I would make that day.

He sighed. Bobby was a great sigher, a habit that had grown more pronounced since he’d become an agent. “Page twenty-four.”

I put the paper on the copy machine and flipped toward the end, ignoring stories about Cher’s latest surgical misadventure and a two-headed baby born to an ex-Bay-watch star.

“Oh my God,” I said when I found it.

“You’re famous,” Bobby said.

There, in grainy black and white, was a photo of me and the caramel-voiced Irishman. Our heads were close together, the blackjack table in the background. My fifties-style dress gave the photo a timeless quality. The Irishman and I were making what looked like secret smiles. In fact, from the angle the picture was taken, it appeared as if we were about to kiss.

Above the photo, the caption read, Is Lauren Losing Her Touch? and to the right was a tiny inset photo of Lauren Stapleton wearing an extremely annoyed expression. I could tell by the mandarin collar of her shirt that the photo hadn’t even been taken on that night in Vegas.

“Bobby, what is this?” I said.

He chuckled. “Isn’t it great? They call you ‘the mystery woman.’”

I scanned the article and caught the name of the rapper Lauren used to date, a handy list of her other ex-boyfriends and some speculation about how she’d lost her latest beau, the Irish actor, whose name was Declan McKenna.

When I got home that day, there were seven messages from people who’d seen the picture or heard about it. Who knew so many people read this stuff?

I called Margaux back immediately. “Isn’t it a riot?” I said to her.

“Your fifteen minutes of fame,” she said.

I never wanted to be famous. I had hoped to be a successful fashion designer someday, but I never desired celebrity.

Before all this started with Declan, I used to think about Michael Jordan, about how he couldn’t go anywhere in the world, not even the far reaches of Africa, without his iconic face being recognized, without someone, many people usually, scrambling for his autograph or snapshot. Michael Jordan, I thought, can’t do the things that make me happy—having a quiet glass of wine (or three or four) at a café, taking a stroll through my neighborhood in a pair of old jeans and no makeup. Of course, now I have some trouble with those things, too—people occasionally do double takes as I walk by, others sometimes come up and interrupt my glass of wine to ask for an autograph. But let’s face it, I could still go to Africa without a problem.

For weeks, I’ve done nothing but write this book, this story about Declan and me, but today, I put it away and went to lunch with Margaux and some girlfriends from my early days in Manhattan. We went to Gramercy Tavern, one of those places that feels so New York—old hardwood floors, worn Oriental carpets, a mahogany bar stacked high with spirits. It was precisely these places I missed desperately when I lived in L.A.

We were all dressed in slim pants and high shoes, perfect makeup adorning everyone’s faces. I noticed two of my friends were wearing structured blouses I had designed, the ones with the circle pin on the collar. It’s always exhilarating yet strange to see someone wearing my designs and even stranger to see that circle pin, exactly like the one my mother always wore. I wanted other people to wear these clothes with the circle pins, and yet still it was odd. I thanked them, but I wondered why they’d never worn any of my clothes before. I suppose it’s easier now that you can get them at Barney’s.

I had seen some of these girls individually since I moved back from L.A., but we hadn’t all been together like this. I was jumpy and jittery, for a reason I couldn’t ascertain, except maybe that I had been jumpy and jittery for so long now. I thought I would shake that anxiety when I came back to New York, but it lingers, the wonder of whether someone is waiting around the corner.

In the days of yore, we used to talk about the men we slept with, the parties we’d gone to, the handbags and shoes we’d bought. For the last few years, though, the primary topics of conversation have been babies, babies, babies, redecorating the apartment, babies, the house in East Hampton, and more babies.

Of the six of us, only Margaux and I aren’t on the mommy track. And as happy as Margaux and I are for the mommies, and they for us, there’s often a weird envy/disdain thing going on. It works both ways, as far as I can tell. I suspect the mommies pity us ignorant girls who don’t know the heart-soaring joy of seeing your baby fall asleep on your belly. But they envy us, too, for our unadulterated sleep, our still-intact sex lives and our ability to fly to Paris at the last minute just because we feel like it. Margaux and I, on the other hand, feel sorry for these women with their red-rimmed eyes and their talk of breast pumps, but we worry that we’re missing out on something big.

I had been opting out of these lunches since I got back to New York, because I wasn’t sure what to expect, and to be truthful, I have a low threshold for intense discourse about the jog-stroller market. Today, though, Margaux had talked me into it. Margaux is an intellectual-property attorney, and she called from work, even though it was a Saturday.

“You’ve got to come to lunch,” she said. “I need some support. I’m outnumbered by the mommies.”

I had nothing else planned, and once I got to the restaurant, despite my jitters, I was glad I’d joined them. It seemed my friends had come out of their maternal fog and were becoming interested in other things again. Lydia, a real estate agent turned full-time mom, told a story about a bat mitzvah where the guest of honor, a thirteen-year-old girl, wore five-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos.

“Honestly, she was gorgeous,” Lydia said, playing with the cigarette she was no longer allowed to smoke there. “But it was sick. I heard her talking about condoms.”

We shook our heads in wonder. Across the table, Margaux smiled at me big and deliberately, as if to say, See, this isn’t so bad. She took out a clip and pulled back her unruly blond-brown hair that she’s always struggling with.

After that, Darcy, a statuesque redhead, who’s an ex-model and rarely lets you forget it, talked about sitting courtside at a recent Knicks game after smoking pot in the bathroom. “I got so paranoid.” she said. “It was the first time I’d smoked since I had the baby, and every time some player came near me I thought they were going to attack me. I finally made Jake take me home at halftime.”

We laughed and called for more wine; it felt good to be with everyone again.

But eventually I noticed that the questions directed at me had begun to increase in number, and soon I felt as if I was being grilled by a pack of reporters. I knew my friends were simply interested in me—the new me who had seemingly emerged over the last year—but the attention made me uncomfortable. It’s one of the reasons why I left L.A. And yet this is my life now—for better or for worse—because of Declan. Everything lately has happened because of Declan.

But where am I in all this? This is the question I’m mining by writing this book. It’s not meant to capitalize monetarily on our relationship, although I’m sure many will accuse me of that, because it certainly will sell. Already, I’ve received calls from six literary agents who’ve heard from Emmie that I’m writing a book. They know that even with an unpublished writer like me, this book should skip off the shelves.

What I’m trying to figure out, I suppose, is if the me that I used to be—the one these women used to know—is still there, somewhere inside my shell, not a leaf in the wind, but a still-green bud on a tree somewhere in Manhattan.

chapter 3

If there was a Nobel Prize for dating, the inventor of e-mail would surely win. An e-mail is worlds better than that first phone call, one filled with odd starts and stops and shots of silence. E-mail allows you to be the witty person you wish you were. You can spend five hours on the perfect little quip, and yet once you type it and send it zinging across the country, it appears to the reader that it just flew from your fingers with complete ease.

To: Kyra Felis

From: Declan McKenna

Kyra, I hope you don’t mind that I got your e-mail address from Bobby Minter. What I’m supposed to say now is that I’m hugely sorry for the photo in the Enquirer, which made it look like you and I were about to snog, but truthfully it gives me the excuse I’ve been waiting for. We were never properly introduced. I’m Declan, and I’m the eejit who was telling the terrible jokes at the blackjack table. I had a jar or five too many, but I should let you know I’m like that a lot anyway. I hope the photo didn’t cause any problems for you. By the way, did you not want to hear the end of the joke I started telling you?

To: Declan McKenna

From: Kyra Felis

Hey, Declan, great to hear from you, but please, please, please don’t ever tell me the end of that joke. The beginning was painful enough. Speaking of pain, I assume the photo caused you many more problems than it did me. How are things with Lauren?

To: Kyra Felis

From: Declan McKenna

Ah, a crafty girl you are, getting in that question about Lauren. No, no, as I’m sure Bobby has told you, Lauren and I were business partners more than anything else, and now, as CEO and president of that business, she has summarily fired me. Can you provide comfort?

To: Declan McKenna

From: Kyra Felis

If by “comfort” you mean the pharmaceutical kind, alas, I am, unfortunately, not your girl, but let me know what else you had in mind. (Also, if you do find a pharmaceutical-comfort connection, let me know that, too.)

To: Kyra Felis

From: Declan McKenna

My mind reels at the potential comfort you might provide. You have created a monster.

To: Declan McKenna

From: Kyra Felis

I assume now that you mean comfort in only the most banal sense—the handing of slippers to place on the feet, the stoking of the fire.

To: Kyra Felis

From: Declan McKenna

Care to elaborate on your fire-stoking process?

By the way, can you provide any comfort in the real estate sense? I’ll be in New York this summer to shoot a picture (another earth-shattering part for me, where I shall probably be on-screen for two entire minutes). The production company wants to know what neighborhood I’d prefer, although they’ve warned me that my flat will be the size of a toothbrush, no matter the neighborhood. I suppose a more pointed question is this—what neighborhood do you live in?

And so it went. Soon, I had news that Declan was getting an apartment for the summer near mine in Carnegie Hill, and within weeks we had gotten enough banter out of our systems to actually chat on the phone, although chat seems a paltry word compared to what really occurred. We spent hours talking, like a couple of teenagers, about everything and nothing. We traded stories about growing up in the city (me in Manhattan, he in Dublin). He told me about his parents who had waited patiently for the Irish divorce laws to change, got the divorce decree and then promptly remarried each other seven months later. When Declan spoke about Dublin and his family, particularly his mother, it was in a tone so adoring that it made me adore him. He told me how he’d been in L.A. for three years, working at coffee shops and clothing stores in between the occasional commercial and bit film part. He had wanted to be an actor since a girlfriend brought him to an audition for the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. He was nineteen then, and he was hooked. Aside from being a great actor, he wanted nothing else, he said, except maybe a woman who would listen to his jokes.

That warm brogue of his did me in every time I heard it. Even the sound of it coming through my answering machine seemed to tinge my apartment with happiness.

Declan came into my world at exactly the same time I began wanting someone in my life, some man. Before that, I’d been alone for quite some time. By “alone” I mean that I didn’t have a boyfriend and hardly any dates. Part of the reason was that I had wasted a year and a half of my late twenties with a bar owner named Steven. I’d met him at his bar, of course, and let’s face it, a bar owner is a god in his own establishment. The place was called Red (it has since gone under and is now a rug store), and it was on one of the tight little streets that branch out from Times Square.

When I do get involved with someone, it happens fast, and Steven was no exception. Within a few months, I was spending most of my time at Red or his apartment in the West Village. But the glamour of hanging around the same club every night wears away quickly. I told Steven over and over that we had to spend time away from Red, away from the regulars who were always hitting him up for free drinks, the money pushers who shoved tens in his hand to get in the VIP room, the women who were always ready to sleep with him. He tried, but he always felt that no one could run the place like him. I’ve heard raising horses provides the same dilemma—no one can take care of them the same as you—but at least horses can spirit you away from a disaster.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to leave Steven, because despite his countless hours at the club and his drinking (which was starting to scare me) he was usually the sweetest person I’d ever met. He brought me flowers at four in the morning on his way home from Red. He would get up after only a few hours of sleep and drive me to some temp job so I didn’t have to take the subway. But Steven was one of those guys who doesn’t age well, cannot grasp the thought of getting old. As I started to tire of the bar scene, he seemed to cling to it, even though he was almost forty and his face was starting to look as leathered as a saddle.

We fought about it constantly until one night when, while he was drunk and I sober, he raised a hand to me. I mean just that. He raised his hand and drew it back, his face contorted with fury. I hate to say it, but my immediate reaction was to cower. I shrunk away from him; I held up an arm to cover my face.

Into my mind rushed a flurry of thoughts—Isn’t there a shelter for abused women down the street? No, that’s just for someone who’s abused all the time. I’ll call the cops. I’ll sue him. I’ll kill him. He must have seen my expression change from cowardice to anger then, because he dropped his hand and started to cry. I left that night.

After that ugliness, and until Declan, I spent most of my time by myself—I wanted it that way—but suddenly it changed, I changed, and I found myself wanting someone to fill the empty seat in my life. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I turned thirty-three a few weeks before I met Declan. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was almost halfway to seventy.

Whatever the reason, I hated myself for having that need. Yet it wouldn’t go away. I, Kyra Felis, who for the last few years had been so proud to be on my own, was beginning to have pangs of jealousy toward the couple picking over mangoes at the sidewalk market and the two men sharing a cup of coffee, their hands entwined on the table. When it came to couples, I was an equal-opportunity envier. Gay, straight, old, young, I wanted to be part of all of them. I wanted that witness to my day-to-day motion. I had begun to feel that without it, I might slide into obscurity, noticed by few, clothes worn by only one or two. What would remain of me but a couple of scribbled designs? I’m making it sound too dramatic, I see that, because I did have wonderful people in my life. Emmie, for example, was someone who told me to get it together when I was feeling sorry for myself, someone who would buy me a Pucci scarf at Bergdorf’s when my line of poet’s blouses was once again rejected by that boutique on Lex. But Emmie was a juggernaut, and so even in her early eighties, she was busy. She still worked occasionally for the literary agency, and she had her cronies, and her house in Nantucket for weekend getaways.

So I wanted that witness to my everyday life. And that’s exactly what I got. Times ten.

chapter 4

The phone rang on a Wednesday morning.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Declan said. “It’s me.”

“Where are you?” I wasn’t expecting to hear from him until the end of the day.

“I’m at the airport. I just got in and wanted to let you know. I’ll call you when I’m unpacked.”

“Okay,” I said warily.

Why was I the first one he was calling? Didn’t he have other friends to contact? People from the production company? But at the same time, my ego preened that it was me he couldn’t wait to see.

Four hours later he called again. “Christ,” he said, “I only brought two duffels with me, but there’s still no room for it all. The landlord is mad, and my roommate is an eejit.”

“You have a roommate?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.” Despite the fact that he’d warned me about how small his part in the movie was and the equally tiny size of his place, I’d envisioned a lovely, clean modern apartment, where I might spend a chunk of my summer. I’d been swayed by the fact that he was “shooting a movie.” It sounded so official, so important, so…magical.

“I want to see you,” he said in a low, undeniably sexy voice. He probably said it like that because his “eejit” roommate was near, but he snared me with those words, that voice.

I told him I’d meet him at a diner near 95th and Madison. I tripped around my apartment, changing my outfit three times, and finally settled on the first one, a flouncy, black A-line skirt I’d designed back in school and a light lavender sweater with a pair of black-and-white-checkered sandals. I applied lipstick and gloss, then wiped it off. What if he kissed me right away? I put my hair up in a ponytail, then dragged it out and fluffed my hair with my hands. I looked at my watch. The diner was only blocks from my place, but I had waited too long to leave. What if he was already there? What if he left because I was late?

That thought shot me out of the apartment. I hurried down the street as fast as my sandals would allow. Without the blind effortlessness of a phone conversation, without the unhurried ease of e-mail, I wasn’t sure how we’d get along. I dreaded seeing him again as much as I craved it. The end of dreams and assumptions is never pretty, and I feared that end.

It was a beautiful April day, the sky an aqua blue. Carnegie Hill is the neighborhood where Emmie had always lived, and therefore, the area where I grew up. Upper upper East Side, wonderfully close to the park, brick walk-ups, charming cafés.

After college, I lived in the Village. In retrospect, I see that I was trying to distance myself from Emmie, not for any scandalous reasons like child prostitution or wire hangers, but rather a need to establish myself in my own little world. But what I quickly realized was that I missed Carnegie Hill. I missed being close to Emmie. I missed the sense of space the park lent the neighborhood. My sporadic income from the occasional sale of my clothing lines, freelance-design gigs and temp jobs wouldn’t normally support a decent apartment here, but I had the very modest trust fund from my parents, which I used only for rent. I arranged for the bank to cut a check directly to my landlord every month, so I couldn’t screw it up, and I’d lived here ever since.

As I turned the corner onto Madison, I saw him. He was standing outside the diner, looking both ways, back and forth. He had on dark jeans, black leather shoes and a short-sleeve, untucked gray shirt. I thought he looked adorable, although fairly panicked, with his hands at his sides, clenching and unclenching. This somehow calmed me.

His perplexed face broke into a smile when he saw me. “I thought maybe I had the wrong one,” he said as I neared. “There are a million diners on this street.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I’d reached him by then, and we both seemed unsure of what to do. Kiss? Shake hands? Throw ourselves on the sidewalk and have at it?

Declan solved the problem. In a moment that was years long, but entirely too short, he put his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. I squeezed my eyes shut and hugged him back, letting him lift me off the sidewalk. His hair was wet at the back—he must have just taken a shower—and he smelled like shampoo and minty shaving cream. I hoped he would never put me down.

But he did. We stared at each other, both a little taken aback, I think.

“How are you?” I said, apropos of absolutely nothing.

“Shaggered. But happy to see you.”

“Me, too.”

“You look gorgeous.” He glanced at my outfit. “I love women in skirts.”

I smiled like the shy girl in a fifties movie who has just met the football star.

“What now?” Declan said.

Our e-mails had been so suggestive, our phone calls so flirty, and the hug so intense, that sitting in a diner making benign talk seemed so very wrong. I wanted to bring him back to my apartment and into my bed, but that seemed a tad quick. So I took him to meet Emmie.

Everyone adores Emmie, especially men. If she’d been younger, I might not have loved her as much because she would have constantly stolen my dates.

Declan and I walked down Madison. When a crowd of high-school students poured out of a shop, nearly charging into us, he put his hand on the small of my back and drew me close. A few steps later, he slipped his hand in mine. I stopped breathing for a moment. I placed my sandaled feet one after another, and acted as if nothing were new, as if this was all very commonplace. But I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt the grin spread across my face and stay there. I squeezed his warm hand a little more. When I glanced at him, he was grinning, too.

“All right, so you’ve mentioned Emmie before,” Declan said. “Is she your best pal?”

“Well, sort of.”

I hadn’t given him many details about Emmie or my family situation—it seemed too grave a story to drop on someone too quickly—but now I explained that Emmie had raised me after my parents died in a train wreck going from Manhattan to Philadelphia.

Both of my parents were writers, my father an author of historical memoirs, usually on presidents or war heroes, my mother a fiction writer of short stories and young-adult stuff. On that day, when I was eight years old, my mother had a reading at the main library in Philadelphia for her new story collection. She and my father always tried to accompany each other to author events. They were the most supportive couple, Emmie said. The Philadelphia trip was also intended to be their twelfth-anniversary celebration. They’d been married ten years, but they always celebrated the day they met, rather than the day they tied the knot.

They’d reserved seats in the first-class section. I imagine they went immediately to the dining car and ordered champagne, toasting each other as the concrete landscape gave way to the green hills of eastern Pennsylvania.

A half hour before reaching Philadelphia, the train encountered a semi stalled on the tracks. Encountered. Probably too tame a word, because the train slammed into it, killing the truck driver instantly, and crushing the first six train cars, including the dining car, like flattened beer cans.

“Jesus fecking Christ,” Declan said. He squeezed my hand tighter. “I’m so sorry. Is it still tough for you?”

“No. I wish I could say it was, but it was a long time ago. It gets harder to remember them all the time.”

I told Declan that Emmie was my godmother, as well as the literary agent for both my parents. I’m sure Emmie never thought that anything would happen to them. I mean, who ever truly envisions a married couple will die together? Emmie was single by choice. It must have been a great shock to her when she had to take delivery of a tiny eight-year-old too smart for her own good.

I didn’t tell Declan right then, but I found out years after my parents died that there was a custody battle for me. A few, actually. My mother’s sister, Donna, who lived in my mother’s hometown of Plano, Texas, lobbied the courts with her husband to take me into their home with their four boys. My father’s parents made a plea, too. They lived in New Jersey. But my parents’ wills had stipulated that Emmie be my guardian, and Emmie spent about a year’s salary making sure she got to keep me. As I said, I never knew this at the time, but I wish I had. It would have been nice to know, in that weird, confusing time after my parents died, that I was wanted so desperately.

My father’s parents died within a few years of his death, so it’s a good thing I didn’t live with them. I’ve visited my aunt Donna and her family a number of times. She is an unnaturally thin woman who grinds her teeth whenever her husband, a bearish man who owns a chain of gas stations, speaks in his loud drawl. Her sons seem to scare her. I can see now that she probably didn’t want me for the sake of taking care of her sister’s child, for my well-being. I think she just wanted a friend, some kind of buffer in that house full of testosterone.

Whenever I visit Aunt Donna, I take her old Ford Escort (her husband drives a Mercedes) and drive around her town, wondering what I would be like if I had been raised by her. Would I still be a designer? Would I be living in Manhattan? Or would I be working in the home office of my uncle Larry’s gas stations? Would I still be creative and sarcastic and melancholy at times, or would I have adopted a nonstop sunny, albeit fake, personality to offset Aunt Donna?

Anyway, by the end of my explanation about Emmie, Declan and I had reached her building, a place called Hortense Court on East 92nd, right by the park. Through the glass pane of the front door, you could see the lobby. The marble was chipping, and the paint on the ceiling peeled in thin strips, giving nothing away about what the apartments inside were really like.

“She’s like your mum, then?” Declan said. He had one foot on the stoop, but it seemed as if the other might be ready to run.

I almost laughed at his wary face. I could see him thinking that he’d only just got here and already he was forced to meet my de facto parent.

“Not exactly,” I said. “She fed and clothed me. She got me into school and signed me up for ballet classes. You know what I mean?”

“I understand food,” Declan said, “but not the ballet.”

“Well, she’s not really the mothering type, and believe me, she’s someone you should meet. She is the grande dame of New York.”

“I thought that was you.”

“I’m the second one.”

“Ah,” Declan said. “So I might fall for Emmie.”

I stood above him on the stoop so that I was a little taller than he. “I’ll fight her for you.”

His eyes widened in mock delight. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,” he said.

“C’mon.” I used my key and opened the lobby door.

He still didn’t move. “A little kiss for strength?”

I looked him up and down. “Why do I get the feeling you’ll want a grope next for good luck?”

“That’ll work.”

“I better just hold your hand for now,” I said coyly. I took his hand and pulled him inside.

“Emmie, it’s me!” I yelled as I stepped into her place.

“Kyra, sweetie!” I heard her call from the bedroom. “I’ll be there in a minute.” I hadn’t phoned Emmie to let her know we were coming, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. She was used to people stopping by all the time. She thrived on it.

“Come in,” I said to Declan.

He took a step in, glancing around the place.

Emmie has owned her apartment since the sixties. Sometime before I came along, she bought the apartment next to hers, knocked out the center wall and created a large, eclectic space where nothing matched, but everything had its place. One half of her living room, her original living room before she bought the other side, was lined with dark wood bookshelves from floor to ceiling. But even with all those shelves, books were stacked everywhere—under end tables, at the sides of the maroon velvet couches, on the wide round coffee table. This was Emmie’s side of the apartment. Her bedroom and kitchen lay behind the living-room wall.

On the other side of the living room, the books continued their dominance, but there the decor was more functional. Groupings of chairs and coffee tables took up most of the space, and the kitchen had been decked out with restaurant appliances for entertaining purposes. This side was where Emmie had her “salons,” as she called them, the gatherings of the crème de la crème of the New York publishing world. Famous authors, editors and fellow agents from work—they all came here to talk books, to gossip.

When I moved in as a child, Emmie gave me the tiny bedroom on the salon side of the apartment. That room was my own, papered with clippings from Vogue and my own childish sketches, but the rest of the place was decidedly Emmie’s. I knew how quickly people could be wrenched from your life, and I didn’t want to lose Emmie, too. So I learned fast to tiptoe around the Dresden figures on the end table and to always make sure there was scotch in the crystal decanters, ice in the silver bucket. There was no official bedtime at Emmie’s. If one of her salons was in full swing, I could slip through the apartment and stay up as late as I wanted. I liked it better when there was no one there with us, but that wasn’t often.

“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.”

chapter 5

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…drum-roll, please…he’s staying until September!

It 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.

chapter 6

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.

chapter 7

When 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.

Emmie. Have reached Paris but the books are not ready for my reading. Can you call Scribner? MacKenzie Bresner

Dearest Emmie. The QE2 is not all they say. Am bored already with two more weeks until we reach land. Will you send me a telegram? Say anything.

I simply need entertainment of your sort.

Britton Matthews

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.

Kyra. The telegram is not dead. I thought you should have your own, just like Emmie.

This is not a one-off. If you like, I will send you a telegram every week for the rest of time. But instead, why not come to L.A.? Our bed misses you and I am not the same anymore without you around. I’m not talking about a visit. Will you move in with me? I love you.

Declan

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 95th. 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 Declan 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 decades 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.

Part Two

chapter 8

“We should be landing in about twenty minutes,” the pilot said over the intercom. “That’s about five minutes early.” As if he should get a gold statuette.

I looked out the tiny oval window. Dirt-brown mountains. Arid stretches of sand interrupted by white ribbons of road. Soon there were grids of tiny houses, little blue squares of swimming pools. My new home.

The first few weeks were sparkly and wonderful. The ocean, viewed from Declan’s strip of balcony, was glittery blue, inviting. We spent the first few days in a sweaty, happy haze, unpacking all that I’d shipped from New York. Most of his “furniture” was tossed, and my eclectic mix of old wood pieces settled into place.

“God, it’s loads better now that you’re here,” Declan would say as he stopped and surveyed the living room. I kissed him when he said things like that. It seemed I kissed him all the time.

Once most of my stuff was in, and most of Dec’s in the garbage bin behind his house, the apartment wasn’t bad. It didn’t have the character of my place in New York, but the kitchen was now a sunny place that we’d painted yellow and white, and the living room was a cozy enclave with plump chairs and the low coffee table that had been my parents’. I’d splurged on new linens for the bed, four-hundred-thread-count sheets in a cool Zen green I felt was very L.A.

We fell into a pattern in those days. The late mornings and early afternoons, we spent at Cow’s End Coffee. First, we would read the papers, stopping every few minutes to read an article out loud to one another.

Later, we put away the papers and I worked on my designs, while Declan went over his lines for an audition or an acting class. Often, I raised my gaze from my sketch pad and watched him. His eyes narrowed and focused intently on the page; sometimes his lips moved as he read. I wondered, as I watched him, why he wanted to be an actor. He’d told me how he had fallen in love with acting, but I still puzzled over why anyone would want to spend their life pretending to be someone else. Did this represent a chink in his character? Something deficient? And yet I adored his devotion to his work. I loved how much he wanted to learn, to excel.

Nearly every night those first few weeks, we watched the sunset from the Venice pier, standing next to the Mexican fishermen and the families with strollers, our arms wrapped around each other. In Manhattan, sunset meant that the city turned orange and then navy blue for a few minutes, but here, it lasted forever. The ocean spread out like a vast liquid carpet, and the sun was a mammoth pink globe. Later, we ate somewhere in the neighborhood, laughing with the waiters and the other patrons, anyone who would smile back at us. And how could they not? We glowed.

I tried hard to make L.A. my new hometown. One day, when Declan was at an audition, I went to Fred Segal in Santa Monica. To me this outing smacked of something a true Los Angeleno would do. I knew of Fred Segal, the jeans designer, but I had never heard about his L.A. stores, and my ignorance had been met with abject horror by one woman.

“You’ve never been to Fred Segal?” said Tara, wife of Brandon, one of Declan’s acting friends. A week or so after I moved, Declan had invited the couple for dinner at a restaurant called C&O in Venice so that I could get to know some people. But Tara only wanted to lord over me how much I didn’t know about Los Angeles. She had already giggled maliciously when I said I didn’t have a car and didn’t think I would get one. (In retrospect, I can’t blame her.)

“They’re some kind of shops?” I said.

“Some kind of shops?” Tara sent Brandon a smug look, as if to say, Isn’t she just precious?

“Sweetie,” she said, placing a hand on mine. “Fred Segal is the place to shop. And for good reason. It’s casual, it’s delicious, and you will spend way too much money. Trust me. Just go.”

And so a few days later, after Declan left, I went to Fred Segal, and found that Tara was right. It was very L.A.—a glorified mall—but there was no Gap, no Barnes & Noble, just tiny boutiques filled with gauzy pink slip dresses, silver salad tongs in the shape of tree branches, decadent bath products that smelled like lavender.

Most of the boutiques were individually owned, and I tried to talk to the managers or owners about taking a look at my clothing line. The fact was, I had no such line ready at the time, but I figured I’d lure them in, then figure it out. But all I heard was, “No thanks, we only buy from a few reps.”

Dejected, I wandered the stores. I bought Declan some English shaving cream in a decorative can that set me back fifty dollars and a leather journal for Emmie, then I had lunch in an Italian café. I drank pinot grigio and ate salad with a crowd of people doing exactly the same thing. Except that all those people had lunch partners or spoke constantly into their cell phones.

I called Bobby from mine.

I’d seen him the previous week for drinks at the Sky Bar on a night when Declan had his acting class. There was a huge line stretching from the bar into the Mondrian Hotel lobby, and every beautiful person in line looked as if they were famous or counting on being famous soon. Bobby walked to the front, said hello to the bouncer with an ear-piece, and we sailed right in.

“You know him?” I said to Bobby.

“Not really. He knows I work for William Morris.” As if that said everything. And I soon came to understand that it did. Everyone in L.A. was “in the business” in one form or another, or if not, they were trying to get “in the business” or they had a friend or sister or roommate who was trying to get “in the business.”

“Wow,” I said as we got into the bar. It was open-air, the sky above us black and sparkling with stars. On one side, the lights of Los Angeles burned orange, competing with the stars and winning.

Bobby soon scored a low table surrounded by white plushy couches. We stretched out on them, ordered vodka martinis, just like we always did when we were together, and proceeded to get pleasantly boozy. But we were interrupted on a regular basis.

The first time, it was a short, muscled woman with spiky, cherry-cola hair. “Are you Bobby Minter?” she said.

Bobby nodded, but didn’t change his slouched position, which I thought was rude. I sat up straight and smiled at her, waiting to be introduced.

“I’m Rachel Tagliateri,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” Bobby said, although he didn’t sound as if it was all that nice.

I started to hold out my hand, but the woman barely looked at me and charged on. “Look,” she said, “I hate to interrupt you, but I was just wondering if I could send you my head shots and some tapes. I’m on a reality show, you know The Rat Race? I’m one of the few people left, right? But I want to bridge from this into acting. That’s where my true passion lies…”

She went on and on until Bobby sat up a little and raised his hand. “Rachel, was it?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not accepting new clients right now.”

Her smile dimmed. “Okay, well, I’ll just send you the head shots anyway, just in case—”

“Rachel, I’m sorry,” Bobby said. “They’ll just get thrown away. Best of luck.”

Rachel Tagliateri ran her hands through her cherry-cola hair and said, “Right. Great, thanks!” as if Bobby had just offered to take her to dinner.

“That was rude,” I said when she was gone. I watched her walk to a group of women and point to Bobby and me.

Bobby sighed. “Are you kidding? That was nice. I let her go on about that ridiculous reality show, as if she’s ever going to get an acting job after that. She’ll work for scale for the rest of her life.”

“Why couldn’t you at least talk to her, maybe give her some advice?”

“Because if I did that, I would have to do it twenty-four hours a day. Everyone is looking to get connected, Kyr. You have to know when to put your foot down.”

I made a face to show I didn’t agree and sipped my martini. I felt some kind of kinship with the cherry-cola Rachel, because although I wasn’t trying to be “in the business,” I was new in this town, and I already sensed how hard it was to break in, in any capacity.

But I soon saw what Bobby meant. Within fifteen minutes, one of Cherry-Cola’s gang came to our table and introduced herself.

“Olivia Tenson,” she said. “I’m on The Bold and the Beautiful. I’m looking for new representation.” She got a little more of Bobby’s attention, but he soon sent her packing. Same with the stunningly beautiful boy with the jet-black hair and the dimples as deep as craters. Same with the comedian who sidled up to us and launched into his stand-up act.

“You see why I’m so glad you’re here?” Bobby said. “You’re my one true friend in town.”

So I figured when I phoned Bobby that day from Fred Segal that he would call me back, maybe come meet me, but his assistant, Sean, said he was in a meeting that would last a few hours. I finished my wine and watched the rest of the patrons gossip with their friends or yammer into their phones. I made my daily phone call back to New York, but couldn’t get Emmie, Margaux or Darcy.

Finally, I left, strolling aimlessly, nothing planned for the rest of the day. I walked through Third Street Promenade and then down the Santa Monica pier. I waited for L.A. to seep into my bones.

When Declan got home that afternoon, we took a walk on the beach, making our way to the pier for sunset.

“What did you do today?” he said. He was always concerned about whether I was “fitting in,” whether I’d had enough activity. Every evening, he peppered me with questions and made suggestions about what I could do that week.

I told him about my day.

“Are you having me on?” he said. “You walked to Fred Segal?”

“It’s only a mile or two.”

“Bloody right. I can’t believe you walked.”

“You know how I feel about all the driving out here.”

In short, I wasn’t a big fan. Constant driving was required, since L.A. is really just a string of suburbs, not a city at all, and yet the need to drive everywhere killed any chance of spontaneity. Even if you were lucky to be with friends, and have someone suggest dropping by a party or a bar, there was the inevitable meeting in the parking lot where many important topics would be debated: Should we all drive? Can we take the 10 or will surface streets be better? How long will it take at this time of day? Does anyone have exact directions? Who’s going to be there anyway? Is the casting director from the WB really supposed to stop by?

“Love,” Declan said, “you’ve got to learn how to drive.”

“I will…someday.”

We walked for a few minutes in silence, the pier a short distance ahead of us, the sand cool under our feet.

Declan suddenly stopped and turned to me. He took both my hands in his; he looked very serious, which freaked me out.

“What?” I said.

“Kyra Felis,” he said somberly. “I have a question for you.”

My heart began to pound. “What?” I repeated.

He dropped on one knee. He kissed my hand.

“Kyra,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Will you have me as your driving teacher? Will you trust me enough to put your adorable bum on the driver’s seat of my car?”

I burst into laughter. “I don’t know. I haven’t known you all that long, and I don’t know if I’m ready. It’s a big decision and—”

He stood and interrupted me with a big, Fred Astaire–like dip. “We can do it. We can make this work.”

“The gas is on the right, Kyra! You have to keep your foot on it to make the car move!”

I shot him a murderous look, although I couldn’t blame him for yelling. I tried again. I stepped tentatively on the gas, but when the car shot forward, it scared the hell out of me, and I hit the brakes. Once more, gas…whoo, that weird power of the car lurching, tying my stomach in knots…and I pounced on the brakes.

I put the car in park, peeled away my death grip on the steering wheel and dropped my head. We were in a parking lot of a vacant strip mall, the only place Declan could find where I might attempt to drive and not maim the few pedestrians. I snuck a look at Dec. His face was flushed, his hair a little sweaty and pushed up in spikes. He looked, as he would put it, “shaggered.”

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

Dec didn’t look as if he thought I could do it, either, but he said, “Of course you can, love. If I can learn to drive on the right side of the road, you can learn to simply drive. Now let’s just sit here a bit and review the controls.” By that time, we’d “reviewed the controls” at least thirty times, but I was grateful for a task I could handle.

“What’s this?” He pointed to the dash.

“The gas gauge. It’s half-full.”

“Good, and this?”

He kept pointing to various instruments, and I answered dutifully. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to build up my confidence by mentioning things I knew and could answer. He didn’t understand that while I could also probably learn the controls of the space station, it didn’t mean I was ready to blast off.

“Okay, we’re trying again,” he said. He breathed out heavily, as if he was preparing to pick up a large couch and move it to a third-floor apartment.

I lurched and braked down the street, the car bucking like a rodeo bull.

“Get her to bloody go!” Declan yelled.

You can do this, I said to myself. Just do it.

With a burst of determination, I punched down on the gas pedal with my foot. The car shot forward in one swoop.

“Whoa!” Declan said. “Not so fast!”

Suddenly, looming in front of me was a yellow metal garbage can left too far into the street. I told my arms to turn the wheel, but I reacted too slowly, and the car hit the can with a loud thunk, sending it soaring into the air like a mini blimp.

I squealed to a halt as the can landed with a clatter behind the car.

With trepidation, I glanced at Declan. He looked as though he wanted to cry

“In my defense,” I said, “that yellow was a hideous color.”

He moaned. “Let’s go again.”

I sped forward in short bursts and halted with too much force all afternoon until, little by little, I could withstand the power of the moving car. Four hours later, I drove one block up the street, turned around and drove another block back to the parking lot. We practiced all the next day, too, when I advanced to going through stoplights and backing into parking spaces (I’m sure our neighbor didn’t need that ugly planter in the shape of a grizzly bear. Why put it in the parking lot, anyway?).

Two weeks later, I took my driver’s license test. In the hopes of flirting with the tester for special consideration, I wore a pink tulip skirt and gauzy white blouse. Unfortunately, my tester was a mean little woman named Barbara who used to be a gym teacher and still wore a whistle around her neck. Anytime I made what she called “an infraction” she blew the whistle. Lucky for me, and to Barbara’s chagrin, I passed by a hair. When I came into the waiting room, Declan was there, pacing like an expectant father.

“I got it!” I said. I waved my little plastic rectangle of a license, on which, I must say, was a rather fetching photo of me.

When we pulled into our parking lot at home, there was a car in our spot. A tiny, old, rusted, green convertible. I couldn’t have told you what type it was at the time; I still wasn’t so good at judging the makes or models of automobiles.

“Should I call someone?” I said, staring at the car, annoyed. I wanted to get inside our apartment and celebrate. I wanted a glass of wine or three, and yet here was this car, delaying my intended intoxication.

I glanced at Dec, who was staring at the car with a strangely fond expression. He reached into his pocket and took out a set of keys I’d never seen before.

“It’s for you,” he said.

“That car?”

He nodded.

“You got me a car?”

He smiled.

“We can’t afford that.”

“I got my check for Tied Up.” Tied Up was the movie Dec had shot that summer in Manhattan, but I knew that money had been earmarked for other things—paying off credit card bills, new head shots—and I told him that.

“That can wait,” he said. “My colleen has got to have her own wheels.”

I glanced back at the car. It now looked not so much old and rusted as it did charmingly antique, not so much tiny as it did delicate, and not so much green as it did jade.

I shrieked with delight, then crawled all over my new toy. Dec stood by, beaming.

“Wait right here,” he said after a few minutes.

He emerged from the house a moment later with two bottles of beer, and we sat inside my new car, top down, and toasted to us.

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