by Robinne Lee
miami
Things were not perfect. I did not kid myself into believing that Isabelle would miraculously be okay with the idea of Hayes and me, just because Hayes had willed it so. But I had hoped she would ease into it. Make her peace, gradually. Like she had with the divorce. But she had been younger then, less sensitive, less likely to view things as a personal affront. It had been surprisingly easy to rationalize with her. Now everything was the end of the world. Battle Hymn of the Teenage Girl.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, at least once a day.
“No,” she said each time, slipping into her room. “I’m okay.” And then the door would close and the Taylor Swift would begin.
We were not yet out of the woods.
* * *
Daniel broke the news to her about Eva. According to him, she’d sobbed and wailed that everything was changing. And he’d agreed that it was, but that we would never love her any less and that she would always be our firstborn. She would always be the first best thing that had happened to the two of us. She would. She was.
That Sunday evening, after he’d dropped her off, she came into my room and curled up on my bed like a snail and cried. And the fact that she let me comfort her was progress. The fact that she let me hold her and breathe her in and marvel at the beauty of her was its own sweet reward.
“I’m sorry,” she said eventually. Her voice hoarse, broken. “I’m sorry about Daddy. I’m sorry about Eva. I’m sorry about everything.”
My heart ached for her. Her world was shattering, unrecognizable, and there was little I could do to fix it. I lay there, my body curled around hers, wondering at how we’d gotten here. Our family so fractured and rearranged. Like the faces in a Picasso.
“I love you,” I said.
She nodded, threading her fingers slowly in between mine. “I love you, too.”
“We’re going to be okay, Izz. We’re going to be okay.”
* * *
We spent the first week of December in Miami for Art Basel. On the flight out, Lulit gave me a stern talking-to.
“You’re not leaving me this go-round,” she said. “We’re a team. No afternoons off to go gallivanting with your boyfriend.”
“Okay.” I nodded.
Hayes was in New York that week doing the press junket for August Moon: Naked. But he was slipping out on Thursday to spend the weekend in South Beach.
“I know you’re totally into each other, and I know you don’t see him that often, but I need your help,” Lulit continued. “I need you. I didn’t get into this to do it by myself. We’re a team. We work well as a team. We have fun as a team.”
“Okay,” I repeated. “I get it.”
* * *
She was right. We had fun. Miami was one nonstop party: cocktails and dinner and ridiculously late nights. Having Matt on hand made juggling the workload that much easier. We wined and dined and schmoozed and sold art. And it was good.
I booked an ocean view suite at the Setai while the rest of the team set up camp in a rental. I knew Hayes would appreciate the relative calm and privacy. He showed up in Miami on Thursday evening, a little weary from the onslaught of press. Interviews, photo shoots, answering the same questions over and over. If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing? Would you ever date a fan? Have you ever been in love? What’s your favorite word for boobs? Soft-shell tacos or hard?
“It’s such mindless drivel,” he said, watching me dress for dinner. “Kind of makes me envy my mates at uni.”
“Who I’m sure envy you…”
“Because I’m in South Beach with the world’s hottest gallerist?” He smiled.
“Yes,” I laughed. “Because of that.”
He paused then, taking a deep breath. “So I have something of interest to tell you … My parents are coming to the premiere.”
I spun to look at him. He was reclining on the bed, long legs crossed, hands folded behind his head, completely at ease. A pose incongruous, I thought, with the subject matter at hand.
“Fuck.” It was barely a whisper.
“It’s okay, I’ve already prepared them.”
“You told them how old I was? You told them about Isabelle?”
He nodded slowly.
“Did they freak out?”
“Define ‘freak out’ exactly … No, I’m playing with you. They did not freak out. They were surprisingly … okay.”
“‘Okay’?”
“Okay,” he repeated, a small smile on his lips. “It’s going to be okay.”
But I doubted that. Highly.
* * *
We decided to skip the flurry of industry parties that night and went to a late dinner at Casa Tua on James. We’d only just arrived at the restaurant and were snaking our way through the candlelit tables in the courtyard garden when someone called Hayes’s name. I turned to find him stopped alongside a table of what looked to be three young models. Accompanying them was a middle-aged gentleman. Perhaps an agent, a father, a predatory paramour. It gave me pause. Was this what I had become? Middle-aged?
The girl closest to Hayes was fine-boned, blonde, beautiful. Her thin hand was wrapped around his wrist. “Amanda,” she was saying. “We met at the Chateau a couple of weeks ago.”
I watched him register, smile. “Amanda. Yes. Hi. How are you?”
“Wonderful,” she said. Of course she was. She had flawless skin and a smattering of freckles over her delicate nose. And she was young enough that she could get away with going out at night in South Beach with not a lick of makeup.
“We were just talking about you,” she cooed. “I believe you know my friend Yasmin.” She gestured to the girl seated across from her.
A brunette, slightly older, vaguely ethnic, large wide-spaced eyes and a pornographic mouth.
Hayes took a moment, placing her, and then he nodded, slow. “I do.”
“Hi.” Yasmin smiled, flicking her hair.
“Hi.” He grinned. He’d fucked her. That much was apparent.
It was in the shift in his body language, and the way she refused to hold his gaze. And it struck me, that I was able to tell so quickly, that I knew him that well. My boyfriend.
I had not, for the most part, expended much energy worrying about the women of Hayes’s past. Because the past was the past. And since September, I had tried not to worry about the women of the present, because he promised me there were none. He’d asked me to stay off the Internet and not read tabloids and to trust him, and for the most part I did. But all I had was his word.
* * *
“Do we need to use a condom?” I had asked him earlier that evening. It had become something of a ritual.
He had cocked his head, wily. “I don’t know. Do we?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Have you done something you’re not proud of?”
“No,” I’d said. “But I’m not the one in a band.”
“If I do something I’m not proud of, I’ll let you know,” he’d said, flipping me onto my stomach.
“I’m trusting you, Hayes.”
“I know you are.”
* * *
But there, in the garden of Casa Tua, beneath the stars and the sprawling trees and the Moroccan lanterns, the reality hit me. That there had been many, that there would always be, that they would be everywhere. Hayes’s conquests. Creeping, entangling him, like ivy.
“Are you here for Basel?” Amanda asked. She’d pronounced it basil, which was irksome.
“Yes,” Hayes said.
“Cool.” Her skinny fingers were still encircling his wrist, serpentine. “Where are you staying?”
He paused for a moment, his eyes scanning the faces at the table and then landing on me. “With a friend … I’m sorry, I’m keeping her waiting.” His attempt to untangle. “Good to see you. Yasmin. Amanda. Enjoy your dinner.” He waved at the others and pulled away.
* * *
Later, over the burrata and a bold Cab, Hayes felt the need to
explain himself. “So, Amanda … She’s Simon’s friend.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know you didn’t. But I didn’t want you wondering.”
“And Yasmin? Simon’s friend, too?”
He swished his wine in his glass. “No. Yasmin wasn’t Simon’s friend.”
“Yeah, that was evident.”
“Sorry … It was a long time ago.”
I nodded, swilling from my wine. “I thought you didn’t like models.”
He laughed. “I’m pretty sure I never said that. Who doesn’t like models?”
“Oliver.”
Hayes grew serious, fast. “Yes, Oliver. He knows his art and he’s too sophisticated for models.”
The way he’d said it surprised me.
He reached out then and grabbed my hand on the table. “I don’t have a problem with models. They are, for the most part, quite pretty. But given the choice, I’d rather be with someone who’s lived a little, has something interesting to say, and isn’t just eye candy.
“Do you know what girls like that talk about? Instagram and Coachella … That’s good for like a night. Which was what Yasmin was. A night.”
My eyes were on his hand holding mine. His long, thick fingers. His two rings: silver, patterned, one on his ring finger, one on the middle. He switched them up so often.
“I thought you loved Instagram,” I said.
“I do Instagram because our team makes us. You know what I like about you? That you’ve never been to Coachella and the only thing you Instagram is art.”
“You were looking at my Instagram?”
“Maybe…” He smiled, coy. “I’m thinking about taking a page out of your book and segueing into artsy photos.”
I laughed. “What? No more body parts? No more ‘Hayes, can I sit on your big toe?’”
He shuddered. “That’s really … I don’t quite have the words for what that is. Sometimes our fandom scares me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Me, too.”
* * *
I awoke the next morning to a phone vibrating. The shades were drawn and I could not determine the time, but it felt early. Too early for the phone. After numerous rings, Hayes answered, annoyed. There was a pause and then he bolted upright.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
“What happened?”
He looked to me, eyes wide. His hair was unruly and his voice croaked, but his smile was glorious. “It appears I’ve been nominated for a Grammy.”
* * *
August Moon was in the running for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for their song “Seven Minutes.” The ballad, which Hayes alone had written with one of their producers, was also up for Song of the Year. It was, in every way, a big deal.
* * *
We dined at the Bazaar at SLS that night with Lulit, Matt, our artist Anya Pashkov, and Dawn and Karl Von Donnersmarck, a couple of New York collectors. The mood was decidedly festive.
“Your life, Hayes, will be even crazier if you win?” Lulit said over cocktails, her pitch rising at the end. As if at the last moment she’d decided to make it a question.
“Oh, we won’t win. Boy bands don’t win Grammys. This alone is huge. I’m rather chuffed.” He beamed. “It might earn us a bit more respect. But still, we are pretty much at the bottom of any respectability charts.”
Dawn laughed loudly, raising her glass. “I love that you’re so good-humored about it. And you, Anya, kudos to you.”
Artnet had posted a favorable write-up on Anya’s installation that morning. Invisible was a conceptual video exploring how women of a certain age cease to be seen. How society sweeps them under a rug, ignores them, discards them once past their prime. She’d curated a series of portraits of women middle-aged and older, spliced with media images and common advertising tropes, and layered a soundtrack above of real women speaking about their experiences, their fears, their insecurities. It was painfully, brutally honest.
“My friends and I discuss this all the time. It’s like you cease to exist,” Dawn continued. Dawn was a patrician blonde, New York born and bred. Tall, capable. If she was older than me, it was not by much. “How many times do you find yourself in a room or at a party and you’re thinking, ‘Am I here? Can anyone see me? Hello!’”
Karl, quiet, bookish, wrapped his arm around her, smiling. “I see you, hon.”
“You know what I mean, Karl.” She turned to me then. “Like the guys who typically talk to you on the streets … Not the catcalling construction workers, but the doormen who generally say ‘Good morning’ … That just stops. It stops. Do I no longer warrant a ‘Good morning’? There’s something very disturbing about them not even registering you anymore. Like shit, when did this happen?”
Hayes was holding my hand beneath the table. He squeezed it suddenly, and I looked over to him, wondering what it was he’d read on my face. The uncertainty of it all. The idea that my own invisibility might be around the corner. Around the block. Miles away. But still, inevitable.
“It’s groundbreaking what you’re doing, Anya,” I said.
“Thank you, Solène.” She was sitting across from me, nursing a vodka tonic. Anya’s features were sharp, memorable. Fair skin, black hair, red lips. She had a few years on me, but she seemed to have it figured all out. While I was still reeling from the news about my ex-husband’s pregnant fiancée and trying to hold together a heartbroken teen while bedding her twenty-year-old idol, Anya was taking on the future of womankind.
“We sent out press releases to the women’s magazines in addition to the usual art publications because they’re in a unique position,” I continued. “Sure, some are partly to blame, but they have this opportunity now to kind of turn it on its head. To further the discussion. The fact that we continuously equate beauty and desirability with youth. That we beat ourselves up instead of embracing the inevitable. And these are women running these magazines. Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“Because we’ve been brainwashed,” Lulit said, sipping her mojito. “But this is the beauty of art, right? We hold up a mirror to ourselves and say, ‘Who the hell have we become?’ That’s what we do.”
I looked to her then, my partner in crime, my best friend. “That’s what we do.”
* * *
After dinner, the others decided to head over to Soho House for a party where the Roots’ Questlove was spinning, but Hayes assumed it would be too much of a scene and so we opted out.
“I’m seeing him next week. We’re doing The Tonight Show,” he said, as if that were a normal thing.
“What a thrilling life you lead.” Dawn smiled. We were standing by the valet, waiting for their Uber. “Well, you two have fun. I’m going to go be invisible at Soho House.”
I laughed at that. “You’re not invisible, Dawn. You’re wearing Dries Van Noten.”
“Ha!” She threw back her blonde head, her punchy floral dress in high relief. “Thank you for noticing! Thank you for seeing me.”
“I see everything,” I said. “That’s my job.”
* * *
“I love that you love what you do,” Hayes said, sometime later. We were tucked into a corner of the Setai’s courtyard bar—low lights, reflecting pool, palm trees. The vibe more Mooréa than Miami.
He was sipping from his Scotch. Laphroaig 18. “What do Isabelle’s friends’ mums do? Do they work?”
“The majority of them, no.”
“My mum didn’t go back to work after I was born. She rode horses and did charity stuff and … had lunch,” he laughed. “I don’t know what she did, come to think of it. I don’t know how she filled her days.”
“Would you describe her as a good mum?”
“I guess so. I turned out all right. I mean, you like me.”
“I do.” I smiled. “Do you think she was happy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Are you happy?”
“Right this moment? Yes.”
He was quiet for a minute, watching me. “Do you think you’d be
as happy if you weren’t working?”
I shook my head. “Maybe if I’d gotten married and had kids older, I would have felt the pull to settle down. But I had all this education and energy and desire and there was more life to live than that. And now it’s so much of my identity. And yeah, sometimes I feel guilty that I wasn’t the mom serving hot lunch at private school. But who’s to say that would have made me a better mom? I probably would have just been restless and unhappy. And resentful.”
He nodded, his fingers tracing over my cuff. “Yeah, I get that.”
“If you hadn’t done this, what would you be doing?”
“Ha! Press junket questions. I’d be at Cambridge with half my year, sleeping in the same five-hundred-year-old college four generations of Campbells have slept in, playing football, chasing skirts, rowing, and having a grand time.”
“Interesting,” I said. I could not picture him doing any of that. “Hard or soft-shell tacos?”
He laughed. “Soft.”
“Ever been in love?”
“No.”
I stopped. It was not what I was expecting. “No?”
He sipped from his drink, placed the glass on the table before us. “No.”
“Never? Really? Wow.”
“Do I strike you as someone who’s been in love?”
“You strike me as someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“I’ve had some good teachers. Some of whom have said, ‘Don’t fall in love with me.’” He let that stand in the air, accusatory.
“Did I say that? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t really listen to you anyway.” He said it with no pretense. His hand had found its way beneath the table, to my knee, to the scalloped lace hem of my dress. “I’ve thought I was in love. Turns out I was wrong.”
“Penelope?”
“Penelope.”
My mind paged through the times he’d said he was falling, at the Chateau Marmont, at the George V. I was weighing them differently now, those proclamations. I’d written them off as infatuation. Things a young boy might say. But perhaps he’d been revealing more of himself all along.
A sultry breeze blew up from the ocean. The air was moist, balmy. Hayes’s fingers slipped beneath my hem and I flinched. For a long time neither of us spoke. He held my gaze as he forced my knees apart, uncrossed my legs, pried open my thighs.