The Year Of Living Famously. Laura Caldwell

low threshold for intense discourse about the jog-stroller market. Today, though, Margaux had talked me into it. Margaux is an intellectual-property attorney, and she called from work, even though it was a Saturday.

      “You’ve got to come to lunch,” she said. “I need some support. I’m outnumbered by the mommies.”

      I had nothing else planned, and once I got to the restaurant, despite my jitters, I was glad I’d joined them. It seemed my friends had come out of their maternal fog and were becoming interested in other things again. Lydia, a real estate agent turned full-time mom, told a story about a bat mitzvah where the guest of honor, a thirteen-year-old girl, wore five-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos.

      “Honestly, she was gorgeous,” Lydia said, playing with the cigarette she was no longer allowed to smoke there. “But it was sick. I heard her talking about condoms.”

      We shook our heads in wonder. Across the table, Margaux smiled at me big and deliberately, as if to say, See, this isn’t so bad. She took out a clip and pulled back her unruly blond-brown hair that she’s always struggling with.

      After that, Darcy, a statuesque redhead, who’s an ex-model and rarely lets you forget it, talked about sitting courtside at a recent Knicks game after smoking pot in the bathroom. “I got so paranoid.” she said. “It was the first time I’d smoked since I had the baby, and every time some player came near me I thought they were going to attack me. I finally made Jake take me home at halftime.”

      We laughed and called for more wine; it felt good to be with everyone again.

      But eventually I noticed that the questions directed at me had begun to increase in number, and soon I felt as if I was being grilled by a pack of reporters. I knew my friends were simply interested in me—the new me who had seemingly emerged over the last year—but the attention made me uncomfortable. It’s one of the reasons why I left L.A. And yet this is my life now—for better or for worse—because of Declan. Everything lately has happened because of Declan.

      But where am I in all this? This is the question I’m mining by writing this book. It’s not meant to capitalize monetarily on our relationship, although I’m sure many will accuse me of that, because it certainly will sell. Already, I’ve received calls from six literary agents who’ve heard from Emmie that I’m writing a book. They know that even with an unpublished writer like me, this book should skip off the shelves.

      What I’m trying to figure out, I suppose, is if the me that I used to be—the one these women used to know—is still there, somewhere inside my shell, not a leaf in the wind, but a still-green bud on a tree somewhere in Manhattan.

      chapter 3

      If there was a Nobel Prize for dating, the inventor of e-mail would surely win. An e-mail is worlds better than that first phone call, one filled with odd starts and stops and shots of silence. E-mail allows you to be the witty person you wish you were. You can spend five hours on the perfect little quip, and yet once you type it and send it zinging across the country, it appears to the reader that it just flew from your fingers with complete ease.

      To: Kyra Felis

      From: Declan McKenna

      Kyra, I hope you don’t mind that I got your e-mail address from Bobby Minter. What I’m supposed to say now is that I’m hugely sorry for the photo in the Enquirer, which made it look like you and I were about to snog, but truthfully it gives me the excuse I’ve been waiting for. We were never properly introduced. I’m Declan, and I’m the eejit who was telling the terrible jokes at the blackjack table. I had a 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