The Year of Living Famously

by Laura Caldwell

  chapter 24

  On the day of the Oscar nominations, Declan’s alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. He knew the nominations would be read at five that morning, but he had turned off our bedroom phone, just as he always did, and set the alarm for one hour before he was due on the set of his new film, Liquid Glass. His costar in Liquid was Tania Murray, a girl of twenty-two who had just moved from the teen shows on the WB to grown-up roles. The fact that she would play Declan’s love interest irked me. She was a decade younger than him. She looked more than a decade younger than him, with her tiny nose and shining blue eyes. But Graham and Max were convinced that Tania was the “It” girl of the next generation, and Declan had told me she seemed like a “lovely lass.”

  I’d asked Declan the night before if we shouldn’t get up early and watch the nominations on TV.

  “God, no, love,” he had said. He’d looked horrified. “That would jinx it.”

  Clearly, though, he’d been awake for a long while, because when the shrill beep of the alarm shot through our bedroom he bounded up and into a standing position at the foot of the bed.

  “What should I do?” he said. He was naked, his brown hair shooting up at odd angles.

  I pushed myself onto my elbows and blinked at him to clear the sleep from my eyes and my brain. “You should turn on the TV.”

  He started for the armoire, which held our new plasma screen, but then he stopped and swiveled around. “What if it’s bad news? Shouldn’t I hear that from someone I know?”

  “Do you want to call Graham or Max?”

  He twisted his hands together. “No, no. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Then check the phone messages.”

  “Right, right.”

  He scooted his naked self back to the bed and sat on his side, grabbing the phone. He dialed our voice-mail number and held it to his ear. “Fuck,” he said. “Thirty-three messages.” He slammed the phone down and turned to me. He bit the corner of his lip, which made me want to kiss him. “Do you think that’s good or bad?”

  I smiled.

  “What?” he said.

  “You got it.”

  “What? Why would you say that?”

  “Thirty-three messages? No one gets thirty-three messages before seven in the morning to say, ‘Sorry you weren’t nominated.’ You got it. You got it!”

  “God, don’t say that, you’re jinxing me.”

  “I can’t jinx you when it’s already happened! Check the damn messages.”

  He pulled me onto his lap and sat back against the headboard. With one hand, he dialed the phone. He bit his lip again as he put the phone to his ear.

  “God, I feel sick,” he said. And then five seconds later, “Oh shit, oh shit. Oh God.”

  “Dec?”

  Still he listened, his face one of shock. He shook his head and clicked the off button on the phone.

  “I got it,” he said.

  I screamed with joy. “Of course you did!”

  “I got it,” he said, disbelief riding his voice. “I got it. I got it,” he repeated as if to make it real.

  I squeezed him around the neck, squealing.

  “I fucking got it!” he yelled, as if it had finally sunk in. He picked me up and, both of us naked, he twirled me around the room.

  With Dec on the phone in the bedroom, and me on a cordless extension seated next to him, we called Graham (“I’m so proud of you, kid,” he said, as if Declan were his child), Declan’s actual parents in Dublin (his mother cried, his father said “bloody brilliant” at least fifty times), the twins (who kidded that he’d only gotten the nomination because they needed an Irishman), Emmie (who was at MacKenzie’s house again and told Declan he deserved every accolade he got), Margaux (who yelled, “You rock!” into the phone), Bobby (who said, “I knew it, dude”) and about fifty other people.

  The producer called from the set of Liquid Glass and told Declan to take the day off. When Declan’s publicist heard that news, she immediately asked if they could send over reporters from a number of TV shows who’d been begging for interviews.

  “Why do they want to come here?” I asked Declan. We were by the pool at that point, eating pancakes (one of the few things I know how to cook) and drinking coffee. We were both moving at hyperspeed—shoving food into our mouths, smiling at each other quick before slurping coffee and picking up the phone again.

  “They want an unscripted reaction with me in the place I heard the news.”

  “Our bedroom?”

  “Well, at least our house.”

  “I don’t know.” I sat back away from the table and gazed at the Japanese waterfall. It made a soothing continual shoosh as the water hit the pool. “One of the reasons we moved to this place was to get away from the press. Now we’re going to invite them in?”

  “Look, love, it’s not like we’re going to invite those paparazzi eejits. This is just going to be a few reporters from the news shows.”

  “I don’t like people being in our house.”

  “We have a mad amount of people here all the time.”

  He was right. Already, Trista was cleaning up my pancake mess in the kitchen, Uki was working in my office and Berry and Tracy in Dec’s, and Liz Morgan was on her way over to man the phones. Alicia would be stopping by to go over numbers for my new collection. The bodyguards, Denny and Adam, had arrived for the day and were in the kitchen drinking soda and watching CNN on the little TV.

  “You don’t even have to see them, love,” Declan said. “If you want to, just work in your office, and I’ll tell you when they’re gone.”

  I stared some more at the waterfall. I was thrilled for Declan, and I didn’t want to rain on his very large, twenty-block-long parade. “All right,” I said.

  But it wasn’t just a few reporters from one or two of the news shows. Declan’s publicist saw an opening where there hadn’t been one before, and she invited over people from the national morning shows, the local morning shows, the noon-news programs, the late-night shows, the entertainment-news shows and the talk shows.

  I tried to stay in the office, as Dec suggested, but it was impossible to ignore the hum of people, the stomping foot-falls. When I emerged, I found the main floor of our home covered under a tangle of wires and cords. People were everywhere, speaking on their cell phones, testing cameras and lights. Reporters discussed camera angles and possible questions with their producers; waiting cameramen slouched by their equipment, drinking coffee out of the daisy-yellow mugs I’d bought in Brentwood. Trista scurried through the crowd with a look of intense panic on her face. She wiped up a spill of coffee from the floor, threw a coaster under someone’s mug.

  In the middle of the chaos was Declan, seated on a tall stool that had been taken from our kitchen. A makeup person powdered his face, while Angela stood nearby with a clipboard, calling out the order of the next few interviews. Dec looked perfectly in his element. A content expression played over his features; his body was relaxed.

  “Hi, Kyra!” Angela said, looking up to see me sneaking through the chaos. “Why don’t we get you in one of the interviews.”

  “No, no,” I said, surprised that she’d asked after the Kate magazine debacle. I dashed away before she could try to cajole me.

  In the kitchen, Trista furiously scrubbed dishes. “You didn’t hire me to handle parties,” she said, her head still in the sink. It was one of the first sentences I’d heard her put together.

  “It’s not a party, but you’re right, and I’m sorry. If you want to do the usual and leave the rest for me, I’ll take care of it later.”

  She scoffed as if she seriously doubted my abilities. “Just give me notice next time. And you should try to keep people out of the bedrooms.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, but she hurried past me with a huge sponge, muttering something.

  I pushed through the camera crews and reporters again and made my way to our bedroom. The scripts on Declan’s nightstand were organized too perfectly, when
usually he left them in a muddled stack and asked Trista not to touch them, and the design notebook that I kept by my nightstand was closed when I was sure I’d left it open that morning—another thing Trista usually left alone. My jewelry box was at a slightly odd angle on our dresser. In our bathroom, our medicine chest looked somehow altered, as if the birth control pills and Declan’s allergy medications had each been lifted and set back down in a faintly different place.

  I went back to the living room, negotiating the cords and light stands and waiting reporters with hurried, angry steps. Wasn’t it enough that these people were all over house? Our lives? Was there nothing that was sacred?

  “Angela,” I said. She was wearing head-to-toe baby pink today, which, combined with her freakishly thin frame, made her look like an aging ballerina. “Someone has been in our bedroom.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Trista saw people going into our bedroom, and it’s clear that things have been moved around.”

  She started to laugh, then covered her mouth when she caught my furious look. “I’m sure no one would do that.”

  Without another word to her, I walked to the other side of the room, interrupting Declan’s interview with a diminutive reporter who looked as if he was about to slide off his director’s chair.

  “Can I see you?” I said.

  “What is it, love?” Dec said, not seeming in the least irritated by the disruption.

  “Can I see you?” I repeated.

  “A little break, eh?” Declan said to the reporter. He got off his chair and slid an arm around my shoulder.

  “I want everyone out,” I said, trying to keep my voice low.

  “What?”

  “People have been in our bedroom, going through our stuff.”

  “No, I’m sure—”

  “I know this for a fact, Dec. I want these people out of the house.”

  “I can’t bloody call off these interviews now.” He blinked rapidly, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying, and I felt guilty for a moment. This was his big moment after all. But then I thought of our bedroom, the one room in the whole damn house that was solely ours.

  “They’ve got to go.”

  “No…I mean, look love, I’ve committed to these people. I can’t just cancel.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “I…I mean…” He trailed off and shrugged, as if to say, What do you want from me?

  I turned away. I went back to the bedroom again. But this time, I locked the door.

  A few days later, after Declan had promised never again to hold an interview in our house, he and I finally found a free hour to go furniture shopping. We’d bought a few pieces when we moved in, but we still needed so much more. Our ice-rink living room, in particular, which had a few couches, a coffee table and a plant, was begging for a table and chairs in the corner, some reading lamps, rugs, art, you name it. I’d seen a butcher-block table with black Queen Anne legs in the window of a place on Melrose, so a few days after the Oscar nominations on a Saturday morning, we headed there in Declan’s Jag. I convinced him to leave Adam and Denny at home. It was only ten in the morning, I said. We shouldn’t have any trouble. The truth was, I was desperate for a normal weekend morning with him, an average couple of hours that any husband and wife across the country might have shared.

  We parked about two blocks away. Both of us wore baseball caps and sunglasses. I have always thought that no one should ever wear a cap outside a stadium, but they are truly one of the best ways to hide your face, and so I’d adjusted my fashion moral code and acquired three.

  We walked the few blocks to the showroom without a problem. The salesman, a guy with dyed blond hair and a retro brocade vest, was on the phone. He waved at the floor, put his hand over the receiver and said, “Look around. I’ll be right with you.” He went back to a discussion about some club he’d been to the night before and the guy whose phone number he had gotten but somehow lost on the way home. By the time he hung up, Declan and I had already found the table I’d seen in the window, a few end tables we liked and a huge reading chair with ottoman.

  The salesman sauntered up to us. “You have any questions?”

  I pointed to the reading chair. “Can you get this in a gold linen kind of fabric?”

  “Oh, we’ve got lots of fabrics. Let me grab the book.”

  He took his time making his way back to his desk and finding it. When he got back to us, he handed us the closed book in a lazy way. “There you go.”

  As Declan and I flipped through the book, talking quietly, I could feel the shift in the salesman’s attitude as he recognized Declan. He had been leaning against a nearby bookshelf, chatting again on his cell phone, but soon he had slipped the phone into his pocket. Soon, he was standing straight, away from the shelf. In the next instant, he was at our side, fully at attention, pointing out fabrics, rattling off dollars per square foot.

  “I loved Normandy,” he said at one point. He spoke this sentence in a hushed tone, slipping it between, “It usually takes six to eight weeks to special order the chair,” and “I can throw in free delivery for you.”

  “Thanks, man,” Declan said, heartfelt.

  Within fifteen minutes, we’d picked out our fabric for the chair and bought it, along with eight more pieces. Delivery was arranged for the tables, and they’d call us about the chair. It was at this point I noticed the store had filled up with people, and yet no one was doing much shopping.

  “I will personally call you and take care of everything,” the sales guy said, now the picture of efficiency and attentiveness. “You will not have to worry about this. You have my promise.” As he gave us this earnest speech, his eyes caught on something at the front of the store, and he squinted. “What the…?” he said almost under his breath.

  Declan and I turned. Outside were hordes of people.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Declan said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  But we couldn’t move two feet outside the door. Immediately, we were swarmed by photographers, guys with video cameras and people yelling for Declan’s autograph. Declan tried signing one or two, but then others pushed themselves toward us, nearly pinning us to the side of the store.

  Declan threw his arm around me and pulled me into his chest. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Declan said. “Thanks for your support, but it’s time for everyone to go home now.”

  “Please,” I said. “Let us through.” I could feel people pulling at my clothes. I could hear the fast click, click, click, click of cameras.

  “Let them be! Now!” I heard behind us.

  I turned to see our furniture salesman looking very red in the face and ready to hurt someone. “The police are on the way, so move!”

  A few people scrambled at the word police, but the paparazzi didn’t budge. They’d heard these threats before and knew they couldn’t be arrested for taking a photo on the street. The video cameras kept rolling, the photographers kept shooting. “Declan, Kyra! Give us a break!” one of them yelled. “Just smile, for Christ’s sake!”

  I wished I could. I often wondered if I had given in easier, if I had forced myself to be a media whore, if I had always smiled for the cameras, maybe the whole thing would have died. They might have gotten tired of us. But at that moment, I felt irrationally panicked, as if this crowd of people might crush us, swallow us whole.

  Soon, a few jaded cops shoved their way through the crowd. “All right, break it up. Let’s go,” one of them said.

  The crowd parted reverently, and the cops led us away from the store. “You all right?” they asked us.

  “Fine, fine,” Declan said. “We appreciate your help.”

  “You should have your own security.”

  “We do, but we didn’t think we’d need it today.”

  “This is just my opinion, sir,” one of the cops said when we reached the car, “but I wouldn’t leave home without them.”

  chapter 25

  E
ver since the Kate article, I had tried to avoid reading the press about Declan, about us. For one thing, there was simply too much of it. For another, most of it was fabrication. Yet I changed my mind one night, about a week after the nominations.

  Dec and I went to dinner at a tiny, upscale Chinese restaurant. There were two photographers outside the restaurant. How they knew we were going to be there, I had no idea.

  “Mr. McKenna!” one yelled, apparently trying the polite approach. “How about a picture with Kyra?”

  Declan, ever obliging, stopped and told Adam and Denny it was okay. He put a hand on the small of my back. My body and smile were both stiff as the cameras flashed.

  “No more,” Adam said after a few seconds. He stepped in front of us and hustled us into the restaurant.

  Even when we were seated at a secluded corner table it was hard to relax. Adam and Denny were already devising an enthusiastic plan to get us out the back door, but like sand in a beach house, the photographers tended to accumulate, and we knew we probably wouldn’t escape without more attention. Within the restaurant, there was also the staring by other patrons, the ingratiatingly nice waiter with the screenplay in his bag if Dec wanted to see it, the overly deferential manager who was always watching from across the room.

  We were halfway through our kung pao chicken when the manager came over and told us that Todd Wilmingham, the director, and his wife were in the restaurant and wondered if they could stop by to say hello. Declan beamed and nodded vigorously. He’d always wanted to work with Wilmingham.

  Soon, they were leaning over our table, both extremely nice and extremely normal. I wondered how they’d managed it, when Declan and I had felt, as a couple, rather abnormal lately. Todd was a slightly overweight man with thick black hair and a chubby, cherubic face. His wife, Pamela, was a tiny woman with pencil-straight brown hair. She wore a small wedding ring on her left hand, the diamond rather dull, the setting an outdated bicolored affair. It was obvious that this had been her original ring. There was something so sweet about the fact that she wore it, rather than trading up for a multi-carat monstrosity.