The Year of Living Famously

by Laura Caldwell

  “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 j
okes 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 eej
it.”

  “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.