My Wild Night With Edna O’Brien

I was terrified the first time I had to pick up the phone to call Edna O’Brien at her house in London. I pictured a grande dame in a Georgian manse.

At the time, the mid-90s, I was a 28-year-old senior publicist in the publishing business, working for Dutton and its paperback line, Plume, and Ms. O’Brien was more than three decades into a storied  writing career.

But she was easy to talk to, and we became fast phone friends. As we discussed  plans for promoting her most recent novel, “House of Splendid Isolation,” we found we had something in common: men. The unavailable kind, in particular.

Ralph Fiennes had, unbeknown to him, captured our hearts. That year he was playing Hamlet on Broadway, and so in love was I that I saw the play four times.

I’d buy a cheap seat high in the balcony and spend the first act searching out empty spots in the orchestra. At intermission, I’d steal one to watch the rest of the play — and the blessed spit flying from Mr. Fiennes’s mouth with every “fie” — in style.

I thought about Ralph like he was actually in my life, which is probably why I mentioned him to Edna on the phone. While I was busy arranging her tour stops and dates, The New York Post’s Page Six was reporting on the backstage romance blooming between Mr. Fiennes and Francesca Annis, an actress 18 years his senior who played Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. I’d share these updates with Edna who, I sensed, was a bit envious of Ms. Annis.

If Ralph was going to date a much older woman, why not her? When Edna came to New York, she stayed at a hotel just west of Bergdorf Goodman, where Ralph and other English demigods would sojourn when they were in town. Edna was hoping to run into him with the idea that he might play the lead in a film adaptation of her new book. Not that there was a movie in the works but there could be, if Ralph was attached.

Not much later, Page Six reported that he and Ms. Annis had been spotted together at the Blue Angel, some kind of trying-to-be-highbrow burlesque club in Lower Manhattan. Edna was intrigued. We should go there, she said, when she was next in town.

It was a date.

We met at the Odeon. Edna’s red hair, pinned up in a chignon, made her even taller than she was, and the long silky bias-cut skirts she always wore further accentuated her stature, not to mention glamour.

I got the cheeseburger. Edna had a big salad that she ate with her hands. That summer, Page Six had reported that Madonna and her girlfriend at the time, Ingrid Casares (reportedly stolen from Sandra Bernhard), had eaten salad sans utensils while dining at the Odeon. Maybe Edna had seen the same item, or maybe she was just in tune with hot-girl eating techniques. I wasn’t all that hot, myself: I was between boyfriends and by the standards of the time needed to eat more salad.

“Andrew Wylie is for the boys,” Edna said at one point.

She was speaking of her agent, whom she was thinking of leaving. Had she been one of his other clients — Philip Roth or Martin Amis — she would have been getting better deals. Perhaps.

We skipped dessert and headed north a few blocks to our next stop, the Blue Angel. Edna gracefully treaded over the cobblestones of TriBeCa’s side streets in her high-heeled lace-up boots.

The Blue Angel was situated in a hot basement on Stanton Street. They didn’t serve drinks, to our disappointment. And when the show began, Edna took care of the tips, sliding dollar bills into thongs like a regular.

The performers all seemed to be graduate students. They tried to be heady, not sexy; they were going for performance art. There was shaving cream involved.

Edna was not impressed. Francesca and Ralph deserved each other, if this was their idea of eros. “Those women were amateuuuuuuurs,” Edna declared with long vowels on the way out the door. “They haven’t read the Marquis de Sade or the ‘Story of Ooooooooooooooo’!”

I eventually managed to get a copy of “House of Splendid Isolation” into the hands of Ralph by busting into the V.I.P. section at Roseland at the after-party for “Strange Days,” a movie I despised. That stunt got me banned from 20th Century Fox premieres for life. No matter. I wanted to please Edna — though, in retrospect, I don’t understand why she couldn’t have left one for him at the hotel.

We stayed in touch, talking on the phone and meeting for dinner whenever she was in New York. And we found new fascinations. On our next evening out, Edna kept bringing up Gerry Adams but was maddeningly opaque about just what was going on between her and the man, who at the time was the leader of Sinn Fein. I wanted to get her take on my latest crush, a man of my own ilk with no bombs in his background (to the best of my knowledge).

Dining early was essential to Edna’s regimen. She wrote all day and didn’t eat until cocktail time. I’d take the hand-cranked elevator to her hotel suite, where we’d have a little sauvignon blanc before heading to Jean Lafitte, just downstairs, or to the Ocean Club across the street.

On one occasion, Edna presented me with a beribboned box from Charvet Place Vendôme. Inside were two scarfs, one in light pink silk, the other in ivory wool. Those scarves would have made Daisy Buchanan weep, but I never knew how to wear them.

At some point during our friendship, I took up running — and then I fell in love with running. Edna seemed still besotted with Adams.

One spring evening, in the throes of my new passion, I tried to squeeze a jaunt around the loop in Central Park between work and dinner with Edna. It was one of those great runs where my body and mind felt at ease, where thoughts and limbs flowed, so I went a little farther than I had intended.

After a quick shower, I frantically headed across town to Edna’s hotel. I was 30 minutes late but consoled myself with the certainty that she’d be perched on the sofa in her suite, wine glass in hand.

No. Edna was waiting for me on the sidewalk, and she was furious. She was also hangry — a word, like smartphone, that didn’t exist at the time.

Once she got some crab cake in her (we opted for the Ocean Club), she was less crabby, but our rapport was off.

“I liked you better when you were fat,” she said.

That was our last dinner.

There was one more phone call, early one Saturday morning.

“He ignored me,” Edna said. “He looked right past me.”

The night before, it seemed that she was at a party in Washington with Adams. It hadn’t gone the way she had hoped, and she was devastated.

Even when Edna was no longer calling or inviting me to dinner, I was still trying to work those scarves into my wardrobe. I’d take them out of the box every now and then to try them on in front of the mirror in my bedroom. Would they work as a belt for a dress? Tucked into the neck of a sweater? Were they meant to be worn together or on their own? I could never bring myself to leave the house with them on.

Edna O’Brien was my friend. I was her confidant. I thought that was so cool. But our relationship was never the same after I chose to spend a little more time on the trail that day in Central Park. I’ve regretted it ever since.

Since she died last month, I’ve been thinking about those scarves. Pity I threw them out. I think I have finally figured out what to do with them.

Giulia Melucci is the author of “I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends.”