LITMIR.BIZ

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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.”

      “You’d do that?” I knew his agent had received a check from the movie this summer but hadn’t paid Declan his part yet. I knew he didn’t have money for cleaning crews and new beds and hotels. But Declan was always going out of his way to make me happy.

      “Of course, Kyra,” he said. “It’s worth the interest on my Visa, and this is your home, too.”

      I didn’t know what he meant—I was only visiting for six days, after all—but I liked the sound of his words, the sound of his brogue when he said my name. So I put my arm around his waist, and we headed downstairs to the mildewy hatchback.

      A few days later, after the place had been scrubbed and organized by women from a company aptly named Angel Maids, Declan and I lay in his new bed. Our new bed, he kept saying. It was almost eleven in the morning, and we were meeting Bobby for lunch in an hour, but we were languid in each other’s presence. The ocean air puffed in the window (finally opened for the first time after one of the Angel Maids chipped off the dried paint that had sealed it). The air was like a balm, making us even more lazy.

      Declan rolled over and ran his hand over my bare belly. “Let’s go to the beach today after lunch, shall we?”

      “Yes, please!” I said. It was a joke between us. We’d overheard a mother the day before telling her little boy that if he was going to say the word yes, he should instead say, “Yes, please,” but if he was going to say no, he should say, “No, thank you.”

      Declan chuckled and snuggled his face into the crook of my shoulder.

      “I’m having such a good week because of you,” I said.

      Dec pulled his face back and studied me. “I’m having a good life because of you.”

      He put his face back on my shoulder, nuzzling me there.

      I knew then that I would do almost anything, go almost anywhere, even sleep on a futon or keep my clothes in cardboard boxes to be with him.

      On the plane ride on the way home, I sat across the aisle from an older woman. She was probably around Emmie’s age, but she didn’t carry her years as well. She wore brown perma-press pants and a cheap pink sweater that had pilled from too much wear. Her bifocals were affixed to a green cord that hung around her neck. Her shoes were ugly, tan orthopedic ones with a rubbery ivory sole. She had on nylons, too, a deceptively invisible garment of torture, in my opinion.

      At one point, she crossed her legs, and that’s when I saw the most striking thing. She wore a thin gold chain around her right ankle, under those beige nylons. A clandestine piece of jewelry. She had a secret, it seemed to me, and I felt the same way. But my secret was Declan. I was in love. In the very grip of it. No one on the plane could see it, at least not at first glance. But if they looked closer, they might have seen my too-wide eyes, my frequent glances at the card he’d given me at the airport, my secret anklet of a smile.

      chapter 7

      When I got back to New York, it was fall. I’d left in eighty-degree weather only seven days earlier. My cab to LaGuardia had been hot and stinky, the driver wearing a sweat-stained white shirt. And yet when I returned, there was an unmistakable crispness in the air. Women wore camel boots and thin leather jackets; the men were in cable-knit sweaters. Everything felt different, too—the fall always ushers in a sense of purpose to New York—and so everyone bustled by me on that first morning back as I strolled to my coffee shop, debating whether to call the temp agency today or wait until tomorrow. The sudden introduction of fall, like the drop of a heavy red curtain onto a Broadway stage, seemed a betrayal to me. It was as if the city already knew what I didn’t—that I would soon be leaving for the sunny, synthetic shores of la-la land.

      Emmie used to keep a collection of telegrams in old candy tins. These tins were stacked in the corner of one of her bedroom closets, and when I had the apartment to myself, which was often, I sometimes liked to extract them from her closet, feeling the swish and rustle of her clothes brush by my face as I dug for them. I would sit on her bed with its purple velvety spread, the apartment large and silent around me. With great anticipation, I took the telegrams out one at a time, making sure not to disturb the order. I was enamored with the precise folds, the thick, yellowing paper, the Western Union banner across the top.

      Emmie. Have reached Paris but the books are not ready for my reading. Can you call Scribner? MacKenzie Bresner

      Dearest Emmie. The QE2 is not all they say. Am bored already with two more weeks until we reach land. Will you send me a telegram? Say anything.

       I simply need entertainment of your sort.

       Britton Matthews

      MacKenzie Bresner and Britton Matthews were Emmie’s star authors, and those telegrams from Britton were my favorites. He was famous, of course; even at age nine I knew that, even with him being dead for at least five years. But more than being a famous writer, he was Emmie’s true love, the reason she’d never married. They had had an affair that went on for a decade, well before I came along. It was the old story, Emmie told me (although at the age I was at, no story was old). He had refused to leave his wife, and Emmie refused to stop loving him. And so those telegrams from him were illicit and old-fashioned and fascinating.

      I had told Declan about Emmie’s telegrams when I was in L.A. We were sitting on his balcony in the rickety plastic chairs, reading the Sunday paper.

      “I think people should still send telegrams,” I said. I was reading a piece about the telegrams Harry Truman had sent around the world on a regular basis.

      “I’m serious,” I said when he made a goofy face at me. “They’re so much more romantic, and they’re more permanent than e-mails. They have substance.” I explained about Emmie’s tin of telegrams then.

      “Well, love,” Dec said, “I don’t think it’s possible to send telegrams anymore. They’re extinct.”

      His comment put me in a momentary funk. The death of telegrams. Could it be true? But I quickly forgot about it, because soon Dec was pulling me back into his apartment, into our new bed.

      Back in New York, back in the fall season that had taken me by such surprise, I only remembered that conversation when someone buzzed my apartment one day.

      “Who is it?”

      “Western Union,” said a man’s voice through the crackling intercom.

      I stood up straight and looked around my apartment, as if I might find that I’d been transported back in time to the forties.

      I pressed the intercom again. “I’ll be right down.”

      I raced down the three flights of stairs, forgoing the elevator. Outside, I expected to see a man in a pressed Western Union uniform with a jaunty khaki hat, but he was a bike messenger with a large silver nose ring and a blue helmet.

      “Kyra Felis?” He handed me a large yellow envelope. “Have a good one.” He trotted back to his bike and was gone.

      I sat down on the

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