by Robinne Lee
He smiled, even as his breath was quickening, his hands cupping my breasts. “I’m not sure. I can’t read you.”
I didn’t respond, but the thought went through my head that maybe it was better that way.
When it was over and I lay on top of him, feeling the layer of sweat between us and drinking in his four-times-over postcoital scent, he held me, tighter than he ever had, and said nothing.
* * *
In the morning Hayes blew off an appointment with his trainer and chose to come with me to the gallery instead. “I want to see what you do when I’m not with you,” he’d said at some point during our debauched night. He’d uttered it at a moment in which its meaning could have been taken in a variety of ways. But when we awoke, he made himself clear. “So it’s Take Your Lover to Work Day, right?”
I had an unexpected surge of nerves driving down La Cienega with him in the front seat of the Range Rover. The idea that I had his life in my hands, this irreplaceable commodity, and that should anything happen to him on my watch I would be forever culpable. It was like driving with Isabelle as a newborn all over again: the pressure, the fear.
It is likely I had never seen Lulit’s eyes as wide as when I walked into the gallery with Swagger Spice. I had not warned her or the others. It was the day before our July opening, and I knew they’d be swamped with detailing the show. I did not want to give her something else to think about until he was already there.
Her jaw dropped and she moved to fix her hair, which was in a perfectly messy topknot. She was in jeans and no makeup and she was still flawless. Her enviable brown skin that would not age.
“You’ve brought … company.”
“I have.” I smiled, wide. A whole conversation transpired between us then without a word spoken. “Hayes, this is my partner, Lulit Raphel. Lulit, Hayes.”
“So this is the famous Lulit. It’s a pleasure. I’ve heard plenty about you.” Hayes’s voice sounded particularly deep in the cavernous space. Gravelly. As if he’d been up eating pussy until four in the morning. Which, indeed, he had.
“Lovely to meet you, Hayes.”
“God, this space is brilliant.” He began walking around, admiring the layout, the art. The juxtaposition of Cho’s atmospheric images and James’s emotional landscapes. Both abstract, more metaphoric than literal. Smoke and mirrors.
“You want a guided tour, or you want to wander on your own?”
“I want to wander first.”
“Okay, I’ll be in the office. It’s toward the back, off to the right.”
Matt popped his head out from his office in the rear, and Josephine exited the kitchen as I was approaching.
“Who is that?” Matt raised a wily eyebrow. “Client? This early?” It was not quite ten.
“Potentially,” I said.
Josephine headed out toward the reception desk, sipping from her mug of green tea, and then very quickly turned around and headed back to us. “Holy shit, is that Hayes Campbell? Is he a client now?” Josephine was twenty-four.
“Who’s Hayes Campbell?”
“Only like the hottest guy in the hottest band. In the world. Where have you been?”
“In my thirties, clearly.” Matt smirked. “What band, now?”
“August Moon,” Josephine whispered. “Holy shit.”
“The boy band? Those adorable posh boys from Eton…”
“Only one went to Eton,” Josephine said matter-of-factly.
“Who went to Eton?” I asked.
“Liam.”
“He did?” This was news to me.
“Yes. And the others all went to a posh school in London. Except for Rory, he’s the bad boy.”
“You know all their names?” Matt asked.
“All whose names?” Lulit joined us in the kitchen and made a beeline to the espresso machine.
“August Moon. Our newest client is from August Moon.”
Lulit threw me a seemingly casual look, and I shrugged in response. She understood: she was not to say a word.
“Well, I’m going to offer our boy band visitor some Pellegrino,” Matt said, grabbing a small bottle from the fridge. “We’re being rude here.”
“Forget it, you’re not his type.” Josephine swiped the bottle from him.
Matt was stocky, sardonic, Korean-American, male. I doubted highly he was Hayes’s type.
“He only dates older women. Don’t you watch Access Hollywood?” She started out of the kitchen and then suddenly stopped, swiveling around, her eyes landing on me. “How do you know him exactly?”
Lulit pressed the button on the espresso machine just then, filling the space with a welcome roar.
“He’s a client.”
* * *
I barely had the time to process all that Josephine had said—who knew she was such a wealth of boy band information?—before Hayes came looking for me. I could hear them in the hall: Lulit making introductions, Hayes’s not-enough-sleep voice, Matt and Josephine sounding not at all like themselves.
He popped his head into the office eventually. “Hi. I’m looking for the boss lady.”
“There are two of us here.”
“I’m looking for the one I came with.” He smiled, sly, sliding the door shut behind him. “This is a cool space.”
Lulit and I shared the oversized box. White walls, cement floors, like the rest of the gallery, except the lighting here was warmer and there were personal touches throughout.
“Is that Isabelle?” He came up behind me, admiring the photos on my desk. Two of Isabelle: one as a toddler, dressed as a ladybug for Halloween; the other at age seven, a snapshot taken on the Vineyard, my little bird. And a black-and-white of me, captured by Deborah Jaffe, one of our photographers, at her opening earlier that year. Close up, in profile. I’m laughing and my hair is still long.
“I like this.” Hayes lifted it from the desk. “Solène Marchand,” he said softly.
“We are not having sex.”
“I … wasn’t expecting us to…”
“No, I don’t mean now, I mean in general. They cannot know that we are having sex.” I pointed to the door.
Hayes’s expression was contrite. “But Lulit knows, right?”
“Lulit knows. The others do not. And we’re keeping it that way. And later you can tell me why you only date older women.”
“Who said that?”
“Access Hollywood apparently.”
* * *
Hayes followed me around the gallery while I gave him a brief overview of the exhibit. The work of the two artists, how they were similar, how they were not. How Ailynne worked with film and created ethereal nature stills by experimenting with depths of field and focus. And how Tobias’s prints were done digitally, playing with shutter speed and then further manipulated in post. How his captures managed to look like the world flying by at sixty miles per hour. Both artists’ works: blurred, evocative.
He was quiet for the most part, attentive, like a young student. His hands clasped behind his back, his face open. I imagined this was what he looked like at his posh school. Minus the skinny jeans, of course.
“How do you find them? Your artists?”
“Different ways. Some we plucked straight from grad school and have been with us since we first started. Tobias was at CalArts. Ailynne came over recently from a smaller gallery.”
“I really like this one,” he said, pausing in front of a large James print. A moody seascape, at once peaceful and aggressive.
“It’s very masculine.”
“Is it?” Hayes cocked his head. “What makes it masculine?”
“The energy, the mood, the colors. It’s just a feeling I get.”
“I thought water was feminine.”
“I think art can be whatever you want it to be.” I reached out to grab his hand and then remembered where we were and who he was, and so quickly retreated, crossing my arms.
He laughed softly. “What are you so afraid of? You ashamed of me?”
> “I’m not ashamed of you.”
“You don’t want your friends to know about us.”
“I don’t want my employees to know about us.”
He leaned into me, suggestive. “They’re going to figure it out. And then you’re going to have to admit that you like me. And then maybe you’ll realize that’s not such a bad thing. Boy band and all. I want this. I’m going to buy it.”
He pulled away from me, stepping to the middle of the room for perspective, while I pondered what he’d said.
“They’ll ship it to London?”
“They will.”
“Do you like it?”
“I do.”
“Do you love it?”
“I like it a lot.”
“Is there anything here that you love?”
I nodded. “In the front room, in Gallery 1.”
“Show me.”
He followed me to the Cho piece that I most coveted. An image so blown out it appeared almost translucent. Sunlight in a garden, and the vague silhouette of a woman, nude, her features blurred and indeterminate, lying in the grass, bleeding into the atmosphere behind her. A faded anemone, the one certainty in the foreground. Unclose Me, it was titled.
“This…” he said, tugging on his lip, pensive. “This is what you love?”
“This is what I love.”
He nodded, slow. “What do you feel when you look at it?”
“Everything.”
His eyes caught mine then, and he held my gaze and smiled. “Yeah.”
* * *
He did not stay for long. He had meetings starting at twelve and scheduled throughout the afternoon, and that evening he boarded a plane to London. I would not see him for a few more weeks. And each day was agony.
the hamptons
Visiting Day at Isabelle’s camp was the last weekend of July. In the early years, Daniel and I would go together, a forced show of solidarity. But eventually that ended. And now I handled drop-off and Parents’ Weekend, and he did the pickup. The arrangement seemed to work best for all parties.
My parents made the trip with me in Daniel’s absence. We’d drive up together from Cambridge and stay in a quaint B&B not more than an hour from the camp, each time exploring some hitherto unchartered territory. Strolling in Ogunquit, scouting small galleries in Portland. It was the one time I felt most like a daughter, when all the other labels and the weight of them seemed to fade. I welcomed it.
On that Saturday, we spent a leisurely afternoon in Boothbay Harbor. Following a fish-and-chips lunch, we popped into a very local gallery and just as quickly popped out.
“Beh,” my father grunted in that very French way of his. “Blown glass and lighthouses.”
After thirty-six years in Harvard’s art history department, my dad was almost as much of an institution as the department itself. He had opinions on such things. He’d met my mother when they were both students at the École du Louvre in Paris, the two sharing an intense love of art. He: European modern and contemporary. She: American. In the late sixties they’d arrived in New York, where he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia before they eventually settled in Cambridge. There was much they embraced about the U.S., but they were never going to not be French.
“We’re in a tiny little seaside town, Dad. What were you hoping to find?” I asked. “Koons?”
“What I am always hoping to find,” he said, stroking his once-roguish beard. “Someone who goes against the grain. Who doesn’t seem to care what everyone else thinks.”
“Ha!” I said. This from the man who did not speak to me for a week when I chose Brown over Harvard. Who cried actual tears when I moved to the West Coast. And who, in the three years since the end of my marriage, had to repeatedly stop himself from saying “I told you so.”
“He thinks you are beautiful and he thinks you are smart,” he’d surmised about Daniel, that first weekend I’d brought him to Boston, when we had been dating for seven months. “But he has no real appreciation for what you are passionate about, who you are on the inside.”
It had angered me when he said it, but much of it turned out to be true.
“Your father is full of contradictions in his dotage,” my mom contributed, clutching his arm. “C’est vrai, Jérôme?”
“I always said this, ‘not to care.’ But I also said, ‘Be respectful.’ Yes?” He angled his head in toward my mom, and she stood on her toes to kiss his brow. All these years later, they were still in love.
“The best artists, they are like this. You don’t shock just to shock. You create beauty, you create art. You don’t do it for attention.”
I made note of that as we negotiated the narrow sidewalk. My father and his digestible morsels of art critique.
As we approached the intersection at the corner, a family of five made their way in our direction. The youngest, a girl of about nine, caught my eye immediately. There was no missing her August Moon shirt.
My heart was audible in my chest. I had made great efforts not to think about him constantly, and yet here he was coming toward me via some tween’s printed jersey. Hayes’s face plastered over where her left breast would one day be.
“Do you know that girl?” my mom asked when we’d passed them in the crosswalk.
“No.”
“Tu en fais, une tête!” she said. Rough translation: That’s an odd face you’re making.
“Sorry,” I said. “It happens.”
“Sometimes, you give away everything on your face.” She frowned. “It is when you are least French.”
This, from my mother, was not a compliment.
* * *
I had made the decision that I would tell Isabelle about Hayes that weekend. Not everything in its entirety, but—as the experts suggested when teaching one’s child about sex—just as much as she needed to know.
It was after lunch, and we were winding our way down toward the lake, surrounded by mature maples and pines, the smell of summer in New England. My parents had wandered up to the stables to see the horses, and for the first time that day it was just the two of us. Isabelle had been so excited to show us all that she’d mastered in her short time there (zip-lining, waterskiing, tennis), that I’d had to wait for her to settle a bit before bringing it up.
“So,” I said, as casually as I could muster, “wanna hear something really cool?”
“Did you meet someone?” she asked. We were approaching the boathouse, and only a handful of other campers and their parents were in sight.
“Did I meet someone?”
“Yeah, like a guy, a boyfriend. I was hoping that’s what you were going to say.”
I stopped. I could feel my face flushing. Oh, that she was so close. And that this was what she wanted for me. Although certainly not with him. “No. No boyfriend. Something you’ll think is much cooler. Guess who my new client is?”
Her eyes grew wide. “Taylor Swift? Zac Efron?”
“Cooler than that.”
“Cooler than Zac Efron?” She looked at me, doubtful, and then: “Oh my God, oh my God…”
I waited for it to register.
“Barack Obama?!”
“Yes,” I laughed. “He called and said he needed something special for the Oval Office. No, not Barack Obama. In what world would that happen?”
“Ours,” she said, “because we shouldn’t put limits on ourselves. Remember?”
I smiled at her then. It was something I had said often. I was pleased to see it had stuck.
“Hmm.” She was twirling her new ring around her middle finger. The gift from Eva was a thin Jennifer Meyer creation. Gold with emeralds in a circle pavé setting. Delicate, simple … easily five hundred dollars.
“Is it? Is it…?” Isabelle’s voice grew very tiny, as if saying it any louder would kill the possibility. “August Moon?”
I smiled, nodding. My gift to her. “Hayes Campbell.”
Isabelle’s entire body seemed to alight from within. She had Daniel’s blue eyes. But my hair, m
y nose, my mouth … “Oh my God! You saw him? He came to the gallery?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Did he remember you? Did he remember us? Did you remind him that we’d met?”
“Yes,” I laughed. “He remembered us. He remembered you. He sends his regards.”
“Oh my God—”
“Stop with the ‘Oh my Gods’—”
“Sorry. I love him. Did you tell him I love him? No, you wouldn’t do that. Did you?”
“No,” I said, uneasy. We’d begun walking again, the pine needles crunching beneath our feet. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Are you going to see him again? Do you think he’ll come back to the gallery?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. This was a lie. I’d already made tentative plans to see him the following weekend. I did not like lying to her. It was time to change the subject.
“So how’s the sailing going?”
“Good. Really good. I can take the Sunfish out by myself now.”
“That’s great, Izz.”
“Yeah. Even better, I can get it back in,” she laughed, referencing a mishap from the previous summer. It was a great big belly laugh: happy, unaffected, carefree. The laugh of a girl on the brink of all things good.
Dear God, what kind of animal was I?
* * *
They were spending the weekend in the Hamptons. The boys were in New York for two weeks, finishing up their album. They’d been in the studio round the clock. Hayes, longer than the rest. While the others typically laid their tracks and left, he tended to linger during the sessions. (“They’re singing my words,” he relayed. “I feel like I have a vested interest in making sure they don’t fuck it up.”) They were exhausted, but they had three days off and they wanted out of the city. Dominic D’Amato, one of the heads of the record company, had offered up his place in Bridgehampton, and Hayes insisted that I join them.
“I don’t want to infringe,” I’d said on the phone Monday night when I was back in Los Angeles from Maine.
“You’re not infringing, you’re coming as my guest.”
“I know. But I would feel uncomfortable with your record exec there—”