The Year Of Living Famously. Laura Caldwell
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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.
chapter 9
After a few weeks in L.A., the weather shuddered and stopped. Fog blew in from the ocean. It looked like wet smoke, and became thicker and thicker until I could only hear the waves. Next came a misty rain, skies that hung low and looked like powdered ash. Everyone I met commented on how bizarre the weather was, how it was sure to change, but it dug in its heels and clung to Los Angeles like an unwanted lover who refuses to give up.
The lack of sun seemed to steal some of the magic from my everyday life, although I suppose it could have been other factors, too. Declan had been cast in a voice-over role in an animated film that required him to act the part, at least vocally, of a sprightly Scottish chicken. He was so excited when he got the call from his agent.
“Kyr! Kyr! I got it!” he said, holding his cell phone aloft like a trophy.
“The Edith Wharton movie?” My voice matched his glee, although I suspected that Dec had auditioned for the adaptation of Old New York more for me than himself.
“No, no!” he said. “MacDaddy.”
“The one where you’d have to be a hen?”
“A rooster! The main rooster.”
“Well, congrats, baby!” I hugged him. Absently, I thought about telling Emmie and Margaux that my new boyfriend had a part as a barnyard animal.
I must not have appeared suitably impressed, because he said, “Kyr, this is massive. It’s a Disney film. You’ve seen Shrek and Anastasia, haven’t you? Lots of adults love them.”
“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. I was sure that the only adults who “loved” those movies were parents who knew they had to see the movie thirty more times before their kids left for college and were, therefore, deluding themselves in order to stay sane.
The role seemed somehow ridiculous, and every morning as I watched Declan go through his vocal exercises, chanting, “O-hello-oooo, Om, om om,” I found it more silly. It seemed beneath his talents, or at least the talents I assumed he had. But Max, his agent, had convinced Dec that this was a plum assignment, and Bobby, when I asked him, agreed. So I kept out of it, kissing Dec before he left, trying not to imagine him as a chicken. And then the whole dreary, powdered-ash day would open before me. I signed up with two temp agencies, but with all of the actors in town who also wanted temp work I rarely got any calls.
I tried to sleep. I love sleep. Have I mentioned that before? And I used to be very good at it. In New York, if I wanted, I could sleep for an entire day. I’ve always been that kind of person, even with the horns blaring outside my window in Manhattan, the scrape of metal cans in the alley. But in L.A., despite the crappy weather, I was restless.
I talked to Bobby nearly every day. He called me when he was having his morning coffee at the office, and I phoned him incessantly throughout the rest of the day for no reason, except that I was bored.
“Kyr, take up exercise or something,” Bobby said, exasperated with me one afternoon. “Your metabolism is bound to catch up with you, and you’re going to gain two hundred pounds.”
And so I started jogging. Another concession to the L.A. lifestyle. I’d never really worked out before. In New York, walking around the city and running after cabs was enough exercise. But it was hard to live near the Venice boardwalk with its in-line skaters and weight lifters and runners without joining them once in a while. I ran from our house down Washington, even in the rain, and then let myself get lost around the little side streets and the canals of Venice. On the way home, I usually ran along the sand. I watched the surfers, all of them in black bodysuits, bobbing on the water like a pack of beetles.
Jogging allowed me to explore Venice, an area I came to love, but I wasn’t very comfortable with the other places in L.A. There were too many people in the same biz, struggling for the same jobs. There was too much flesh, too much perfect skin, too many full heads of hair. But I liked Venice. It reminded me of New York—a ragtag amalgamation of people. Poor and rich; writers, artists and lawyers.
Still, I had too much time on my hands. Emmie told me I should sketch, that I should work on my designs, but new ideas, images, hemlines and sleeves stayed hidden from me.
I knew Emmie was right, though. Even if inspiration eluded me, I needed to find a new pattern maker, a new cutter, a new manufacturer for my designs. It’s not particularly difficult to locate these people. They are there for hire. Whether you ever sell your designs after they make them is irrelevant. But it’s important that you trust them, and that they don’t rob you blind.
I made a few calls to Manhattan and soon I had appointments in L.A.’s fashion district with a host of people. I drove the surface streets in my new car, too anxious to get on the highway. The fashion district was bordered by an industrial section of downtown that could’ve been Anywhere, U.S.A., but the district itself had sidewalks crowded with hot-dog stands and displays of luggage, nylon dresses and athletic shoes. Most of the people I met there weren’t right for me, or I for them. They were either astronomically expensive, or they specialized in sportswear, things with Lycra in it, while I designed with chiffon and silk and linen.
Finally, on a Tuesday afternoon, I found a pattern maker named Rosita, a sweet, kind Puerto Rican woman who had years of experience yet charged rates I could afford. Rosita then made a call and hooked me up with a cutter named Victor, and Victor, in turn, recommended a small factory that agreed, at a reasonable rate, to make my designs. That is, whenever I got my ass in gear and decided what my next line would be.
Poet’s blouses had been my thing for a long while—silky slips of fabric with my circle of fake diamonds pinned at the cuff of one puffed sleeve. I’d sold a few lines to Neiman Marcus, and a couple others to a boutique, but for the last few years, no one seemed interested. Ditto for the line of trumpet skirts I’d designed last spring. But my real passion was in the even girlier stuff—the halter dresses, the flounced party skirts, the elegant gowns. I wanted to design clothes I would wear myself. But in L.A., would I ever wear those things again? When we walked the beach, I wore a casual skirt and T-shirt. When we went to dinner, most places were much more casual than New York.
Yet as I pulled into the apartment parking lot after meeting Rosita and Victor, I remembered that I did have something to dress up for very soon. The premiere for Declan’s movie, the one he’d filmed with Lauren, was only a few weeks away.
I began to rework a dress I’d designed years ago in preparation for the premiere. Unfortunately, the work didn’t exhaust me as I’d hoped, and sleep continued its elusive hide-and-seek. Insomnia, I learned, is one of the most ghastly of all medical conditions.
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