The Year of Living Famously (12 page)

His assistant answered, but he put me through right away.

“Kyr,” Bobby said, “I've been meaning to call you all day. The buzz about Declan is off the hook.”

“I know. Can you believe it?”

“No, I mean seriously off the hook,” he said. “Everyone over here is talking about it, and you better tell Declan that I'm calling him soon. William Morris wants him.”

“But he's already got an agent. He has Max.”

Bobby scoffed. “Max is two-bit. Declan needs to be with a big-time agency now.”

I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair. “I don't think he's going to make changes like that anytime soon.”

“Are you kidding, Kyr?
Everything
is going to change for him. It's a whole different ball game.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Trust me on this. I know what I'm talking about.”

I took a sip of my wine and didn't say anything.

“Look, I don't mean to freak you out,” Bobby said, “but don't be surprised if Declan's not around much anymore. He's going to be pulled in a lot of different directions.”

“Jesus, Bobby. It's a movie! Just a movie. And he was great in it. He'll have some different opportunities now, but we'll take it one day at a time.” I glugged more of my wine.

“All right. Whatever you say. Hey, what are you doing tonight? I can get out of here in about fifteen minutes. Want to have a drink?”

“I'm meeting Dec, but thanks. I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Tell Declan I'll be calling him, too.”

After I got off the phone with Bobby, I ordered another glass of wine for myself and one for Declan.

Six o'clock came and went, and still Declan wasn't there. The café was full by then. “Would you like to at least order appetizers?” the waitress said, annoyed, no doubt, that I was commandeering the table only to swig sauvignon blanc by my lonesome.

“No thanks,” I said. The thought of food was wholly un-appealing. It would sober me up.

As six-thirty neared, I pulled Declan's glass of wine toward me and dialed his cell phone number. It went to his voice mail.

At six forty-five, I paid the bill and drank the last of Dec's wine. Feeling light-headed and drunk and pissed off
at being stood up, I wandered through the stores. I was in a destructive mood. I fingered a hand-blown glass bowl with a price tag of six hundred dollars. I was torn between smashing it or buying it.

Behind the counter, the clerk was watching a small TV while she folded linen napkins. I was about to turn away, when something caught my eye. I focused in on the TV's tiny screen, and saw my husband's face.

I
was sitting on our balcony, another glass of wine in front of me, when Declan bounded noisily into the apartment.

“Kyr!” he yelled. “Kyra?”

I heard him tromp into the bedroom, then the bathroom. I stayed silent, fixing a steely,
you-asshole
expression on my face. Finally, he peeked his head out the sliding glass doors.

“I am so sorry, love,” he said. “You have every right to leave me for good, but please, please don't.” He walked around the table to my chair and sank to his knees, clasping my hands.

I stayed silent, watching him. He looked freakishly alive and legitimately remorseful at the same time. His hair was a little crazy, his eyebrows furrowed and…did he have makeup on?

“Look,” he said, “I've been in meetings all day with managers. And I have to decide which one I want to go with.
I
have to decide. I mean, do you get that? I've never been the one to decide anything since I was in this business. You just beg people to take you on, and they say, ‘We'll see.' But
here are these guys who've worked with everyone, asking
me
to work with
them.
”

A little flame of happiness flickered at his news, but I mentally extinguished it. “So what does this have to do with the fact that you stood up your wife?”

“Okay, get this. After I met with all these managers at Max's office, I went to the
Entertainment Tonight
set and…” He got off his knees and stood up with his hands outstretched, as if he were singing the last number of a Broadway musical.

Again, that flame of excitement. “And?” I said.

“I did an interview!” He opened his hands wider.

My heart leaped for him. I wanted to squeal. But I couldn't let him off the hook. “And?” I said again, a little testier this time.

“And my cell phone died, and then after I left, I had to meet the publicists. They were making all these plans. It's crazy what they're saying, and the time just got away from me. I'm so sorry, love. I truly am. I wish you could have been with me.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said sarcastically.

“I'm an egregious arsehole. I don't deserve you. Please forgive me.”

I sighed. I pined for Steven, who would defensively throw a lit candle at my head. “I saw part of the interview.”

“You did? What did you think?”

“You were handsome and charming,” I said grudgingly.

“Thank you, Kyr. And I honestly am sorry. Will you forgive me?”

I crossed my leg and swung it back and forth, turning to stare out at the ocean. “I've got one question for you,” I said. “Did you meet Mary Hart?”

As an adolescent, I hadn't watched much television, since Emmie didn't own a set, but I had a junior-high friend
named Colleen, who'd been strangely fascinated with Mary Hart. It had something to do with the rumors that the sound of Hart's voice could send dogs barking and electrical equipment malfunctioning. Whenever I was at Colleen's house, we watched
Entertainment Tonight,
and held Colleen's little terrier in front of the TV to see if he'd go insane. The poor dog was annoyed, but never suicidal.

“I met her briefly,” Declan said.

“What's she like?”

“Unbelievably, scarily positive. I wonder what she's like at funerals.”

“What about her hair?”

“Rather like a helmet, but quite nice.”

“And what did you tell her about your love life?”

“Well, I didn't tell her anything, she didn't do the interview. Some bloke did. But I told him that I had a wife who was a brilliant fashion designer and the sweetest, most adorable woman on the planet.”

I stood up. “All right, now you can take me to dinner.”

 

On Monday, Declan hired a manager named Graham Truro. Graham had started his career as an assistant for a very young Robert Redford. He eventually rose to the role of Redford's manager, and later took on everyone from Goldie Hawn to Brad Pitt. Graham looked more like a school principal than a Hollywood manager. He wore suits that appeared to have been bought off the rack at Target and ties that were perpetually stained with coffee. He was balding like a monk, and he had a large red nose, which made me wonder if he put too much Kahlua in his coffee. And yet Graham Truro had shrewd eyes and, I would later learn, an even shrewder mind.

Graham's skill was not just in handling actors or considering what projects might be good for them. No, the skill
Graham Truro was known for was being able to chart the potential trajectory of a star and being able to take that star even higher. He mused over what role a star should have next, then packaged that movie and made sure the star got it. He glad-handed and wheeled 'n' dealed and sold his soul to get his stars the roles, the movies, the images he thought they deserved.

The first thing Graham did for Declan was work with the PR people and Kaz Lameric's company to set up press junkets for
Normandy,
which would allow TV and newspaper reporters to interview the actors and directors. Normally, such events would have taken place before the movie came out, but because of the low budget and the low expectations, none had been arranged. Now there would be a local one in L. A. After the holidays, international junkets would follow in Tokyo, London, Rome and Cannes, all accompanied by premieres in those cities.

The first one took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I spent most of that week watching the interviews of Declan on TV. He was on the morning shows; he was on the noon news; he was on the entertainment “news” programs. I taped these shows religiously, marking each one with the name of the show, the date and the approximate time Dec was on. Meanwhile, I sat on the couch and perused magazines and newspapers, clipping out items about Dec and how he was the “new hot property” in Hollywood.

I was thrilled for him, but I missed him. Between Max and Graham and the PR people and the seemingly hundreds of others who now wanted a piece of him, he was busier than he had ever been in his life. I grew lonely in the apartment, but it wasn't solely because I was there by myself. It had more to do with the chilly realization that I didn't know my husband as well as I had thought. Oh, I don't mean that he wasn't devoted when he got home, or that he was acting
differently. What I mean is that I truly didn't know as much about Dec as I'd assumed I did, and this became painfully obvious watching him being interviewed on all those shows.

“What is your ultimate goal, in terms of acting?” he was asked by the
Today Show
correspondent.

“Theater is my passion,” Declan answered. On the screen, he sat on a black director's chair, a
Normandy
movie poster behind him. “And so my ultimate goal would be to write a play and star in it.”

I blinked a few times from my position on the couch.
That
was his big acting goal? Why didn't I know that? Or had I heard it and forgotten?

“And in your dream world,” the interviewer continued, “what theater would be lucky enough to get this play?”

Somewhere on Broadway, I thought.

“Somewhere in Dublin,” Declan said.

And later, I saw Declan being interviewed by the blonde on
E! News Daily.
“So, Dec,” she said chummily. I had noticed that chummy and irreverent was this woman's M. O. “You've been linked with Lauren Stapleton, who's such a great actress.”

“Ha!” I shouted from the couch.

“And I know you've worked with her,” the chummy blonde said. “But if you could work with any actress in the world right now, who would it be?”

Declan made a show of pulling on his chin as if this was a tough, tough question. Jesus, if he says he wants to work with Lauren again, I thought, I will move out right now.

“Katharine Hepburn,” he said with finality. “I wish I could have been acting while she was here.”

“Huh,” I said. I had no idea he was a fan of hers. I apparently had no idea about so many things in Dec's head.

“But wait a minute,” the chummy blonde said, interrupting Declan's poetic riff about the late Ms. Hepburn. “I said,
‘right now.' If you had to work with any woman
right now,
who would it be?”

“
Any
woman?” Dec said, shifting in his seat. Was he flirting with the chummy blonde? “Well, then I'd have to make my wife an actress, because truly she's the only woman I want to work with.”

I sat up straighter on the couch and smiled. Maybe I didn't know everything about him, but I'd heard what I needed.

 

Two weeks after
Normandy
came out, I got a call from my ex-boyfriend, Steven. Emmie had given him my number. Emmie always liked Steven because he was charming and would stay up all night listening to her stories about working with authors like Britton Matthews and Mackenzie Bresner. I realized later that Steven was probably so charming and able to stay up so late because of the coke habit he hid relatively well, but I never told Emmie that. And I never told her about that last big fight Steven and I had.

In fact, Steven and I hadn't spoken since two weeks after that fight when I went back to his apartment to gather my shoes from his closet, my makeup from his bathroom drawer.

“Don't forget this,” he'd said with sarcasm, holding aloft a lace thong with one finger. He was dressed all in black that day—black pants, black long-sleeved T-shirt and a black baseball cap. He looked like a modern-day Satan.

When I went to take it from him, he held it high over my head.

“Jump,” he said, a sneer on his face.

“Fuck you.” I turned and left the apartment.

But years had passed by the time I got his call in L. A. It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and I had just come in from visiting Rosita with a design for a gauzy slip dress. I
told Rosita that the dress was something I wanted to wear to one of the many events Dec now had on his calendar, but the truth was, I hoped to try to make the dress part of my new collection. I hadn't admitted that to Rosita, though, and not even to Declan, because it was such a toss-up as to whether the line would sell. I would develop it—maybe four dresses, three different blouses, a few skirts and some pants. I would beg and plead buyers from department stores, boutiques and catalogs to view the clothes. And then I would wait to see if anyone was in a buying mood. If not, all that work would have been for naught, something I was all too familiar with.

When I came back from seeing Rosita that day, I couldn't stop thinking about all the collections I had designed before that didn't make it. Would this be yet another in that long tradition?

I took off my structured white shirt and black gabardine slacks. I changed into a pair of shorts and one of Declan's T-shirts and sat on the balcony. I had the phone on the table with me, but lately I'd been letting voice mail pick up. The calls were so rarely for me. Yet I felt a deep desire for human contact of any kind right then, so when the phone rang, I snatched it immediately.

“Felicity,” Steven said. It had been his nickname for me, a play on my last name.

“Jesus, what are you doing?” I said. I couldn't help but smile a little. I was needy, and I was all too happy to let time work its magic, leaving behind more good memories than bad. In that instant, I remembered when Steven and I first dated, and how his voice on the phone could make me smile. I remembered how he used to study my designs and make incisive comments I didn't expect from him. I remembered the linguine with lemon cream sauce he would make for us when he got home from the bar.

“I'm calling you,” he said. “It's been too long.”

“Oh, I don't think it's been long enough.”

He laughed. “God, you were always a pain in the ass.”

“Me? Don't get me started, Steven.”

“Yeah, right. So what's going on out there? I can't believe you abandoned New York.”

“Love makes you do strange things.”

“So you're in love, huh?”

“I'm married.”

“Maybe you're not aware, but love and marriage don't always equate.”

“In this case they do.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, I'm glad for you, Felicity.”

“Thanks,” I said, because I believed him. He sounded calmer than I remembered, somehow older and wiser.

We talked for at least twenty minutes. We caught up on each other's friends and families. Steven promised to look in on Emmie for me. I told him about L. A., how I loved certain things—the ocean, my jogs around Venice, Declan. I told him how I
didn't
love so many other things—the driving, the annoying newness of the city, the “business” everyone was in but me.