Laura Caldwell - The Year Of Living Famously

Right before the SUV struck her, she was on the arm of Gerald Tillingham, another literary agent who was a few years older than she, but who had retired over a decade ago. She and Gerald had been an item back in the sixties after his first wife died, but now they were just buddies, old cronies who saw each other once a month to drink Pimm’s and gossip about their friends. Sadly, the fact was that many of their friends had passed away.

Gerald had too much to drink, Emmie would tell me later when she was conscious and able to speak in coherent sentences. He had offered his arm to her like a gentleman, but it was he who needed support. They were crossing the street when Gerald faltered, one of his knees giving way. As Emmie struggled to catch him, the SUV turned the corner too fast. Startled by the car, Emmie lost her grip on Gerald and he fell again, and it was she who got hit. The SUV stopped immediately, but her leg was already broken, her lung punctured.

By the time I arrived at the hospital, Emmie was out of surgery, her leg pinned, her lung repaired. They said the lung would always trouble her and that I should get her to quit smoking. I said I would try, though I knew she would never do it. Despite the irony, Emmie would sooner die than give up cigarettes.

I pushed open the door quietly because the nurses said she was sleeping, and also because I was afraid of what I might see. And there she was, propped high on the bed to allow her lungs to drain, her leg huge and lumpen with plaster, metal prods piercing it. She was indeed asleep, the makeup on her papery cheeks faded, her dyed reddish hair fuzzy and misshapen by the pillow. Emmie would have hated how she looked. She took pride in her expensive cosmetics and the clothes she selected with care. The sapphire ring wasn’t on her right hand, and that absence was the most shocking of all. I’d never seen her without it.

I sat on the edge of her bed, half hoping the movement would wake her. It didn’t, and I couldn’t bear to sit there very long without helping her somehow, without doing something. To watch her sleep like that was an invasion of privacy, like spying on someone on the toilet.

I left the room and went in the stairwell to call Declan. I had a cell phone by then, which he’d bought me. I had been one of the lone holdouts in all of Manhattan, one of the few people who weren’t connected by the head to their cellular. But Declan said it made him “absolutely mad” when he couldn’t find me. So I let him buy it. Later in L.A., I became a master at the thing. I grew attached to it like other people to their pets. But in New York, it was still a novelty, and I felt a rush of gratitude that I had it, that I had Declan to call.

He came to see us in the hospital that night. I told him it wasn’t necessary, but he wanted to come. Emmie was groggy but awake by then, and he chatted with her as if she hadn’t nearly died; he brought her magazines and told her his awful jokes. But it wasn’t only that which made me say “I love you” in front of the hospital later that night. It was what happened when I left for ten minutes to go for coffee. I came back and found him feeding Emmie ice chips with a white plastic spoon. He was bent at the waist, his hair falling over his eyes, his arm outstretched. Emmie’s lips were pink and cracked; they were pursed and straining for that white spoon. His sweetness, his ability to do that, along with Emmie’s almost childlike response, undid me.

September came too fast, but Declan was back in L.A. for only three days before I was on a plane to spend a week with him. Those few days apart had been agonizing. The things that used to make me content—getting a coffee on the corner, seeing a movie at Bryant Park—seemed empty and flat without him there.

I arrived in L.A. for our visit on a Tuesday afternoon. Outside, I was buffeted with warmth and sunshine. I’d never been to Los Angeles, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

Declan pulled up in a rusty white hatchback. He leaped out of the car and ran around to the sidewalk. He picked me up and twirled me around, and I imagined we looked like the ending of an old movie.

“Kyr.” He nuzzled his face in my collarbone. “I’ve missed you.”

The car smelled strongly of mildew, and there were wrappers from bags of potato chips (crisps, Declan would call them) on the back seat. But it didn’t bother me. I was in love and it was sunny, and nothing else mattered. Until we got to the apartment.

Why is it that men will spend money on expensive dinners, work out for hours a day, and even wax the hair on their backs in order to attract and keep women, but they won’t do a thing to their home?

Declan’s apartment was in Venice Beach. It had a balcony with a plastic table and two mismatched chairs, and if you looked to the left, you could see the silvery blue of the ocean. But inside was chaos. Not a quirky, lovable chaos, the likes of Emmie’s place. No, this was a teenage-boy type of chaos that would have made any self-respecting woman flinch.

I knew about Declan’s first love, a girl from Dublin named Finnuala, and I knew he’d dated an ad exec in L.A. a few years ago. But maybe this was why he’d been single for a while. In New York, I’d assumed the mess was due to two men living in a small space. Apparently it was just Declan.

The carpet, a worn, dingy gray, was littered with gym shorts and T-shirts and old copies of Variety. The walls were contractor white and marked with greasy fingerprints. In the kitchen, crusted-over dishes and forks commandeered the sink. The bedroom had cardboard boxes instead of a dresser, and, worst of all, a futon.

My first sexual experience, an exchange of oral pleasantries, was held on a futon my freshman year at Vassar with a boy whose name was Thadeus Howler. Thadeus was from the South, had a slow rolling drawl and went by the nickname of Dixie. Dixie Howler, you might not be surprised to hear, came out of the closet a few years after our night together and is now one of New Orleans’s most celebrated cross-dressers.

Both Dixie and I, I believe, were on that futon that night because we were both late bloomers in the sexual arena. We both needed to get some experience, and you didn’t want to practice lingual technique on someone you actually liked. So there we were, fumbling and slobbering in the dark on his lumpy, cheap-cologne-smelling futon. I have never since been able to look at a futon without cringing.

And I did cringe in Declan’s bedroom that day. He could barely get me to take a step inside the doorway.

Next on the house “tour” was the bathroom.

“Sorry, love,” he said, flicking on the lights. The counter appeared encrusted in old, calcified dollops of toothpaste and shaving cream. The tub boasted a gray ring and little patches of black clinging to the grout.

“I was going to spend yesterday cleaning,” Declan said, “but I got a callback for this Denny’s commercial, and I had to see my acting coach, and… What? Is it that bad?”

“No,” I said. “It’s so much worse than that bad.”

I turned the lights off—too painful—and went back in the bedroom to stare at the futon.

“I’ve been meaning to hire a cleaning crew. You know, one of those all-day jobs,” Declan said.

“Okay.”

“And I’ll do…What else will I do?” He seemed to be talking to himself, walking through his apartment, like he was seeing it for the first time. “Christ, it’s horrible, I know. But I don’t know where to start.”

He came in the bedroom and put a hand on my shoulder. His eyes said, Help me.

“That’s got to go,” I said, pointing at the futon, buried under jeans and wet, crumpled towels.

“Right. Right. Good.” Declan nodded, his eyes excited, a man with a mission. “I’ll call the cleaning people, and there’s a bed store up the street. You’ll pick one out, okay? And we’ll stay at a hotel for a day or two.”