The Year Of Living Famously. Laura Caldwell
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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