jar or five too many, but I should let you know I’m like that a lot anyway. I hope the photo didn’t cause any problems for you. By the way, did you not want to hear the end of the joke I started telling you?
To: Declan McKenna
From: Kyra Felis
Hey, Declan, great to hear from you, but please, please, please don’t ever tell me the end of that joke. The beginning was painful enough. Speaking of pain, I assume the photo caused you many more problems than it did me. How are things with Lauren?
To: Kyra Felis
From: Declan McKenna
Ah, a crafty girl you are, getting in that question about Lauren. No, no, as I’m sure Bobby has told you, Lauren and I were business partners more than anything else, and now, as CEO and president of that business, she has summarily fired me. Can you provide comfort?
To: Declan McKenna
From: Kyra Felis
If by “comfort” you mean the pharmaceutical kind, alas, I am, unfortunately, not your girl, but let me know what else you had in mind. (Also, if you do find a pharmaceutical-comfort connection, let me know that, too.)
To: Kyra Felis
From: Declan McKenna
My mind reels at the potential comfort you might provide. You have created a monster.
To: Declan McKenna
From: Kyra Felis
I assume now that you mean comfort in only the most banal sense—the handing of slippers to place on the feet, the stoking of the fire.
To: Kyra Felis
From: Declan McKenna
Care to elaborate on your fire-stoking process?
By the way, can you provide any comfort in the real estate sense? I’ll be in New York this summer to shoot a picture (another earth-shattering part for me, where I shall probably be on-screen for two entire minutes). The production company wants to know what neighborhood I’d prefer, although they’ve warned me that my flat will be the size of a toothbrush, no matter the neighborhood. I suppose a more pointed question is this—what neighborhood do you live in?
And so it went. Soon, I had news that Declan was getting an apartment for the summer near mine in Carnegie Hill, and within weeks we had gotten enough banter out of our systems to actually chat on the phone, although chat seems a paltry word compared to what really occurred. We spent hours talking, like a couple of teenagers, about everything and nothing. We traded stories about growing up in the city (me in Manhattan, he in Dublin). He told me about his parents who had waited patiently for the Irish divorce laws to change, got the divorce decree and then promptly remarried each other seven months later. When Declan spoke about Dublin and his family, particularly his mother, it was in a tone so adoring that it made me adore him. He told me how he’d been in L.A. for three years, working at coffee shops and clothing stores in between the occasional commercial and bit film part. He had wanted to be an actor since a girlfriend brought him to an audition for the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. He was nineteen then, and he was hooked. Aside from being a great actor, he wanted nothing else, he said, except maybe a woman who would listen to his jokes.
That warm brogue of his did me in every time I heard it. Even the sound of it coming through my answering machine seemed to tinge my apartment with happiness.
Declan came into my world at exactly the same time I began wanting someone in my life, some man. Before that, I’d been alone for quite some time. By “alone” I mean that I didn’t have a boyfriend and hardly any dates. Part of the reason was that I had wasted a year and a half of my late twenties with a bar owner named Steven. I’d met him at his bar, of course, and let’s face it, a bar owner is a god in his own establishment. The place was called Red (it has since gone under and is now a rug store), and it was on one of the tight little streets that branch out from Times Square.
When I do get involved with someone, it happens fast, and Steven was no exception. Within a few months, I was spending most of my time at Red or his apartment in the West Village. But the glamour of hanging around the same club every night wears away quickly. I told Steven over and over that we had to spend time away from Red, away from the regulars who were always hitting him up for free drinks, the money pushers who shoved tens in his hand to get in the VIP room, the women who were always ready to sleep with him. He tried, but he always felt that no one could run the place like him. I’ve heard raising horses provides the same dilemma—no one can take care of them the same as you—but at least horses can spirit you away from a disaster.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to leave Steven, because despite his countless hours at the club and his drinking (which was starting to scare me) he was usually the sweetest person I’d ever met. He brought me flowers at four in the morning on his way home from Red. He would get up after only a few hours of sleep and drive me to some temp job so I didn’t have to take the subway. But Steven was one of those guys who doesn’t age well, cannot grasp the thought of getting old. As I started to tire of the bar scene, he seemed to cling to it, even though he was almost forty and his face was starting to look as leathered as a saddle.
We fought about it constantly until one night when, while he was drunk and I sober, he raised a hand to me. I mean just that. He raised his hand and drew it back, his face contorted with fury. I hate to say it, but my immediate reaction was to cower. I shrunk away from him; I held up an arm to cover my face.
Into my mind rushed a flurry of thoughts—Isn’t there a shelter for abused women down the street? No, that’s just for someone who’s abused all the time. I’ll call the cops. I’ll sue him. I’ll kill him. He must have seen my expression change from cowardice to anger then, because he dropped his hand and started to cry. I left that night.
After that ugliness, and until Declan, I spent most of my time by myself—I wanted it that way—but suddenly it changed, I changed, and I found myself wanting someone to fill the empty seat in my life. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I turned thirty-three a few weeks before I met Declan. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was almost halfway to seventy.
Whatever the reason, I hated myself for having that need. Yet it wouldn’t go away. I, Kyra Felis, who for the last few years had been so proud to be on my own, was beginning to have pangs of jealousy toward the couple picking over mangoes at the sidewalk market and the two men sharing a cup of coffee, their hands entwined on the table. When it came to couples, I was an equal-opportunity envier. Gay, straight, old, young, I wanted to be part of all of them. I wanted that witness to my day-to-day motion. I had begun to feel that without it, I might slide into obscurity, noticed by few, clothes worn by only one or two. What would remain of me but a couple of scribbled designs? I’m making it sound too dramatic, I see that, because I did have wonderful people in my life. Emmie, for example, was someone who told me to get it together when I was feeling sorry for myself, someone who would buy me a Pucci scarf at Bergdorf’s when my line of poet’s blouses was once again rejected by that boutique on Lex. But Emmie was a juggernaut, and so even in her early eighties, she was busy. She still worked occasionally for the literary agency, and she had her cronies, and her house in Nantucket for weekend getaways.
So I wanted that witness to my everyday life. And that’s exactly what I got. Times ten.
chapter 4
The phone rang on a Wednesday morning.
“Hey,
