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.”
&n
bsp; 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.
The Year of Living Famously Page 5
