“No. It’s a little different news.” She paused. “I’m trying to get pregnant.”
“You’re what?” My voice went from excited to confused, almost mad. Margaux and I were a team of sorts, the ones who weren’t going to have kids. You needed someone on that team to back you up against the wave of societal guilt-tripping that inevitably soaked you on occasion.
“I know it’s weird to hear,” Margaux said, “but Peter and I need something new. We’re bored with each other.”
“So learn how to play tennis! But a baby?”
“Well, it’s not for sure we’ll have a baby. We’re just trying.”
There was a silence that was uncomfortable and unusual for Margaux and me.
“At least you’re having sex with your husband, right?” I said, trying to make light. Margaux was always complaining about the lack of coital relations between her and Peter.
“Yeah,” she said, “but it’s rather militaristic. You know, charts and stopwatches and all that.”
“Ah.”
“Enough of that topic. What did Emmie say about your engagement?”
“I haven’t talked to her yet. We keep missing each other.”
But an hour later, Emmie called me back.
“So it happened,” she said. “Oh, my.”
“Emmie, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing, dear.”
“Emmie,” I said in a tone that said spill it.
“Well, it’s wonderful,” she said. “It truly is. I knew it would happen soon, I just never imagined the exact moment.” She coughed.
“Are you sick?”
“I don’t get sick,” she said. Which was what she always said, and, thus far, had blessedly been true. “Kyra, you deserve to be married to a man as delightful as Declan. Every woman deserves that.”
I knew she was probably thinking about Britton Matthews.
As an early wedding gift, Emmie gave us a small donation to help with the costs. I told her no over and over, but she wouldn’t relent, and secretly I was relieved. Declan had received only a small advance for the Scottish-hen job, and we had so little money to throw this party ourselves.
The exact location was also a problem. Although Declan had been raised Catholic, he found the concept of going to mass every Sunday (or even every month) as mystifying as American football. So no church wedding for us. We investigated a few restaurants, a few hotels, but we’d have to go deep into debt for those places, not to mention we couldn’t book them for another year.
One Sunday, we drove to La Jolla to attend an outdoor concert of some band that Dec had followed in Dublin and that was playing at a music festival. We sat on the field of rich green grass alongside a thousand other people. We drank beer and got sunburned and made out on our blanket. A few times, Declan pulled me up to dance to his favorite songs, but I always laughed so hard at his bunny-hop dance style that I’d have to sit down and have a slug from my Miller can.
When the next act came on, some grunge garage band, we took a walk. On the other side of the park, we found a small pond. The surface gleamed light green and mirrored the yellow willow trees hanging over it. To the side, we spotted a white pergola with vine-covered latticework for its roof.
As we walked toward it, Declan squeezed my hand. “Love?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. Somehow I knew what he was saying without him having to speak it.
We walked under the vines of the pergola. It was cool and airy.
“Can’t you see it?” Declan said. He led me to the center and took both of my hands in his.
“Yes,” I said again.
We stayed the night in a motel, and the next morning we tracked down the city’s park manager. At three o’clock on Monday afternoon, we were handed a permit, which allowed us to have our wedding under the pergola in six short weeks.
The flurry of wedding planning left me so stimulated during the day and so exhausted at night that I finally started sleeping again. My days fell into a routine. Early morning, I’d throw on shorts, a tank top and my New York Fire Department cap, and I’d take a run along Venice Beach, the canals or the ocean.
Late morning, I’d work on my wedding-dress design at Cow’s End Coffee. I usually sat at one of the dark wood tables in their loft, which felt like someone’s open-air living room. I wanted a girlie dress, but it had to be elegant, too, something light and flowy, but not too princessy. I drew hundreds of designs, studying each to determine what I liked, then moving on to integrate that detail into a new sketch.
There were so many other issues to decide, too. Did we need flowers when the ceremony and cocktail party would be outside in the middle of all that nature? And what kind of cocktails should we have? Guinness for Dec, vodka for Bobby and me, and champagne for Emmie, of course, but what else? And then there was the issue of food. A small buffet or passed hors d’oeuvres?
In the afternoons, I usually headed back to the apartment, ready to spend hours manning the phone, trying to nail down the wedding details. One day, when I got home from Cow’s End, I was wrestling with our mailbox in the lobby, pulling out the thirty or so flyers from San Diego caterers and the three bride’s magazines, when I heard a little laugh behind me.
I turned to see a woman in a pair of tight white yoga pants, stretched across her full hips, and a blue camisole top that barely contained her breasts. She looked a few years younger than me. She had streaked hair in a ponytail on top of her head and a tiny, pushed-up nose, with a sprinkle of freckles across it. She looked like a 1970s Playboy bunny named Barbi.
“Getting married?” she said.
“How could you tell?”
She laughed again. “I just did it myself last year. It’s a part-time job. I’m Liz Morgan. I live on the first floor.” She held out her hand.
“Kyra Felis. Third floor.”
“Oh, you’re with the Irish guy, right?”
“Yeah. Declan.”
“He’s a cutie. Congrats. Isn’t he an actor?”
I nodded.
“Is he getting any parts?” Liz crossed her arms and brought one thumb to her mouth, biting at the flesh by her nail.
“He is, actually. He was in that Lauren Stapleton movie that just came out.”
“Oh, that’s right. I’ve seen the pictures of them. And I’ve heard she’s impossible.”
“She is.” I told Liz about the comment Lauren had made about my “homemade” dress.
“That fucking wench!” Liz said.
“Completely,” I said, pleased. “But, anyway, Declan’s got two other movies coming out, too. Tied Up he filmed this summer, and Normandy, he filmed a year or two ago, but it’s going to be released in a few months.”
“Hmm. A long release date like that usually isn’t a good sign.”
“I’ve heard, and it’s too bad, because it’s his one leading role.”
Liz shook her head. “God, I would kill to have any role.” She filled me in on the auditions she went to weekly, usually without callbacks, the few commercials she’d shot, and the one role on a sitcom as the main character’s crazy cousin.
“It’s a shitty business,” she said. “So, anyway, when’s the wedding?”
“Three weeks, five days, and—” I checked my watch “—two hours.” I felt a flush as I spoke. Why had we decided to have this thing so fast?
“Wow,” Liz said. “Are his parents coming in?”
“No, unfortunately. We only gave them a month and a half notice, and the airline tickets are all sky high. They really don’t have the money, so we’re going to visit them in Dublin over New Year’s.”
“Are you ready for everything?”
“Not at all. I mean, we’ve got the place and the guest list and a bartender and a band, but there’s so much still to do.”
“What about invites, did you send those out yet?”
“Well, most people know the date.” I slumped against the bank of mailboxes. “To be honest, I haven’t even picked out the invitations.�
��
“Oh, honey. You better come with me. I’ve got a friend who’s a graphic designer, and she can do them for you cheap and fast.”
Liz took the stack of magazines from my hand and led me down the hall. Her place had the same layout as ours, but Liz’s apartment was painted bright white and filled with such a proliferation of white wicker—wicker chairs, wicker couches, wicker lamps, wicker picture frames—that it seemed as if the wicker had somehow mated and reproduced.
She directed me onto her balcony and sat me at the table made of—what else?—white wicker. “My God, your balcony is huge,” I said. It was at least three times the size of ours.
“I know,” Liz said. “It’s the only one like it. Apparently, they built this one first, then started running out of money, so they scaled back the others.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Almost seven years. Jamey moved in last year when we got married.”
“And what does Jamey do?” I wondered what her husband thought of living in a Pier One Imports store.
“He’s a deejay. Need one for the wedding?”
“We’re going with a jazz trio.”
“Too bad. Well, here’s Bridget’s card.” She handed me a heavily embossed business card in pale blue. “We’ll call her while you’re here. Do you know what style of invites you’re looking for?”
“Definitely ivory, heavy paper, simple, elegant.”
Liz went back inside to find her own invitations. She brought them out with a pitcher of iced tea and a basket of cookies in—surprise!—a wicker basket. A half hour later, we’d talked to her friend Bridget, who promised to meet me the next day and get the invitations done in a week. I pulled my dress designs out of my bag then and showed Liz. She gasped appreciatively at all of them. I smiled and thanked her for her help with the wedding, but silently I also thanked her for acting like a girlfriend, my first one in L. A.
We got it all done, somehow. Or I should say I got it all done. It wasn’t that Declan didn’t want to be involved, but he had the voice-over job, and even when I did give him a project to handle, it was never done exactly right.
“Sure,” he’d say as he talked on the phone to the bartending service. “A hundred dollars a head sounds all right.”
“For the booze?” I yelled from across the room, where I was on my cell phone with Rosita discussing the pattern for my dress.
I wasn’t sure if he still had trouble converting dollars or if he just didn’t have a good sense of negotiations (the latter, I learned, was the truth and the reason why actors have agents). I would have to grab the phone out of his hand and argue with the bartending service (or the limo company or the San Diego B and B) until we got a price we could afford to put on our credit cards. And so in the end, I did most of it myself.
Four nights before the wedding, Declan’s best friends, Tommy and Colin, whom he called the Evil Twins, arrived from Dublin. Tommy and Colin weren’t really twins but they looked very much alike—wiry, rock-hard bodies, sharp jawlines, green eyes—except for the fact that Tommy had red hair and Colin black. The resemblance between the two was helped out by the fact that they dressed, acted and talked precisely the same. They both had big, raucous laughs too booming for their bodies. They both wore faded jeans and big black boots. They were both outrageously flirtatious and could melt the hearts of even the coolest L. A. women (which they did continually during the days they were in town). And they both loved Declan like a brother.
“I can’t believe you’re marrying this jumped-up piece of shit,” Tommy said to me the first day I met him. He had Declan in a headlock and was pounding on his shoulder in a way that looked painful, but Declan was only too happy to take their punishment.
“He’s a little feck, he is,” Colin said. Both he and Tommy let forth with their operatic laughs, punched Declan some more and kicked off their black boots.
It was the Evil Twins who indirectly caused the first real fight between Declan and me and made me realize that it’s no fun being in a skirmish with Declan. Absolutely no fun. Not that I ever thought brawling with my old boyfriends was, technically, a walloping good time, but there was some satisfaction there. They would actually fight with me. Steven, especially, in his coked-up, alcoholic way would dramatically throw gin bottles and smash framed pictures. There was an order to our fights—the initial accusations, the yelling, the smashing, the crescendo and then eventually the promises to change and the electrifying make-up sex.
Declan, on the other hand, merely listened to me rail, announced that I was right, and promised that things would change. Where’s the gratification in that?
The day the Evil Twins arrived, the four of us hung out on our balcony drinking beers and trading stories, but I could tell they needed guy-time, so I sent them off into the night and told them to have fun. At two in the morning, I woke up and started to wonder. At 4:00 a.m., I started to worry. By six, I was in an utter panic. It’s the usual story—I called his cell phone and left ten million messages that progressed from a chipper, if slightly nervous, “Hi, give me a buzz,” to a bellowing, “You asshole! If you don’t call me to let me know you’re okay, I’ll call off the wedding!”
By the time he strolled in with the Evil Twins at seven in the morning, all of them reeking of cigarettes and alcohol and Mexican food, I was on the phone with the police department, sure that he’d either been arrested for DUI or was in a body bag waiting for me to identify him.
The Evil Twins took one look at my bulging eyes and the prominent veins in my neck and ambled right back out the door to get coffee.
“Where the hell were you?” I screamed.
Declan paused, as if considering what the right answer might be. “Well, uh…” He stopped and began to yawn, but when he caught my expression, he clapped his mouth shut. “We went to the Whiskey,” he said, “and then some other bar on Sunset, and then we left and got something to eat at—”
“I don’t care where you were!” I yelled, although I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I’d just demanded that information. “I want to know why you didn’t call me to tell me you weren’t dead! I thought you were on the side of the fucking road!”
For emphasis, I picked up the coffee mug Declan loved so much, the one that had been his grandfather’s, and hurled it across the room. (It landed short of the wall and bounced lamely on the carpet, not even chipping). And then I waited for Declan to pounce back at me. I was a boxer in a ring, having landed the first blow, waiting to take one myself.
But instead, Declan said, “You’re absolutely right,” while he rubbed his red eyes in a desultory way. “I should have called. God, I’m sorry I made you worry.”
“You should be!” I said, still yelling, although there was no reason.
“I’m so lucky to have you,” he said, completely undefensive.
There was little else to say except, “Mmm, hmm. That’s right. You are lucky.” I looked around, but there was nothing else in proximity that would break if I threw it. And then I looked at Declan, who was so hungover, it was painful to gaze at him. “So anyway…” I said, itching for another point I could bring up, something I could shout about.
“You’re the best, love,” he said, pecking me on the cheek before he hustled into the bathroom to throw up.
chapter 12
On the morning of the wedding, Margaux came to my room. We were at the bed-and-breakfast, where most of the guests were staying as well. I felt as if I was hopped up on speed. My eyes were too big when I looked in the mirror; I was too aware, moving too fast.
“What’s going on downstairs?” I asked her. The B and B served breakfast in their sunroom, and I knew Declan was probably there, along with our thirty or so guests.
“The twins are in the kitchen bugging the cook, and Declan is pacing around the lawn.”
I peeked out the curtained window of my room, hoping for a glimpse of him, but saw nothing except the rubbery grass of the backyard.
“
So are you sure you’re ready to do this?” Margaux said. She flopped onto my bed and leaned back on her hands. She was wearing jeans and a white tank top over her too-thin frame, her fuzzy blondish-brown hair tousled around her head.
“What are you talking about?” I said, skittering around the room.
“You know. Do you want to do this so fast?”
I froze with my hand on the closet door, then spun around to face her. “Are you kidding? You know I want to do this. Why are you asking me this now?”
She shrugged and picked at the bedspread.
“Is it Peter?” I’d been friends with Margaux long enough to know that she often projected her worries, her concerns, her neuroses on to other people and their situations. We’d had fifteen years of friendship at that point, fifteen years since Margaux first cozied up to a bar stool near mine and gave me her story.
It was Christmas Eve, and we were both home from college in our junior year. We’d grown up only blocks from each other, but because she’d attended private schools and I public, we’d never met. I had gone to the bar that evening after the solitary celebration Emmie and I shared. Emmie had four brothers, and often we went to one of their places for the holidays, but she wanted to stay home that year. Having nothing better to do, I walked into the chilly night and landed at the corner bar, sitting on a stool, eating peanuts, making sporadic conversation with the bartender.
I was just about to leave when Margaux burst in. “I’ll have gin and tonic,” she said to the bartender, throwing her slouchy brown purse on the bar.
“Lemon or lime?” he said.
“Neither, and now that I think about it, hold the tonic, too.”
The bartender gave her the drink. She took two gulps and turned toward me. “I hate my family.”
I would later learn that her dad was a meek science professor at a private boys’ school in the city, and her mother a perpetually depressed, passive-aggressive woman who said little, but was able to make scores of people unhappy. Her mother was the one with the money, having inherited it, and so the whole family kowtowed to her.
The Year of Living Famously Page 8