The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  “Before I went into construction, I was a short-order cook at a twenty-four-hour diner for a few months.”

  “Tough work.”

  “It was. But I was thrilled to find out that I could handle it. Up to that point in my life, someone else had always footed the bill. Bringing home a check made me feel like a man.”

  “Did you feel like a hundred times the man when the millions started rolling in?”

  “You’d think, but I treasured my grease-smudged checks more. That was an honest exchange of labor for remuneration; the investment income felt like Monopoly money. Especially since I wasn’t even that good an investor.”

  “You made a twenty-fold return on your original investment. No need to be modest.”

  “I’m not modest. I put half the money I cleared from the auction into start-ups my financial advisers recommended. The other half I put in random ones—like, pulling-names-out-of-a-hat kind of random—because I wanted to see whether my advisers would get me better returns than a dart-throwing monkey.

  “And guess what? Seven of the nine companies that later sold for big bucks were out of the control group. So when I say I’m no Warren Buffett, I’m not being self-effacing; I was literally the dart-throwing monkey. Not exactly the sort of accomplishment to make me feel like I’m swinging a twelve-inch dick.”

  “You aren’t?” I said, my eyes very wide.

  He laughed—and maybe blushed a little. Then he leaned forward. “You know what does make me feel like ten times the man?”

  I rubbed the pad of my thumb against his stubble. “What?”

  “When I can get you to say yes to anything.”

  My heart skidded. Twenty-four hours ago I wouldn’t have understood. Twenty-four hours ago I’d have pointed out that I caved in to his demands every step of the way. But then again, twenty-four hours ago my grasp of the situation had been as backward as when people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.

  But now I was following proper scientific procedures. Now I saw how much effort he had put in where I was concerned. Now I knew I’d been given yet another piece of proof that my new hypothesis was not only sound, but ironclad.

  “Well,” I murmured, “you’ve found Chinatown. I always say yes to Chinatown.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST WE RESTARTED THE movie. But the poor flick didn’t stand a chance once I showed Bennett what I was wearing under the pajamas he’d loaned me. In nothing but those fuck-me bits of transparent fabric, I went down on him with an almost trembling greed.

  I’ll never forget the reaction I wrought from him—his head thrown back, his pelvis coming off the bed, his hands knotted tightly in my hair. And the sounds he made, so much raw lust, a cascade of filthy imprecations that turned me on unbearably even as I drove him out of his mind.

  He returned the favor and ate me until I was limp from my orgasms. And then we made love playfully, rolling around the bed, kissing, nibbling, and exploring at will.

  The lunch crowd had half dispersed by the time we arrived in Chinatown, which meant we didn’t need to eat with the speed of a house on fire. So we lingered over our lunch and talked, with Bennett asking me lots of questions.

  I told him how the Material Girls came to be, and how we all ended up in the five boroughs. He laughed at our antics surrounding the Annual Boyfriend Roundup.

  “STEM girls know how to have fun,” he said.

  “Absolutely. When nerds let loose, they really let loose.”

  For a moment he looked as if he might lean in and whisper something naughty in my ear. But he only said, “I remember you telling me that your father didn’t care for your interest in the sciences. Was it ever a matter of contention between the two of you?”

  I thought back. “Not really. I mean, he couldn’t help letting you know how he felt, so I always understood it wasn’t what he would have wanted. But there wasn’t a sexist element in his desire for me to be a Manhattan hostess—he’d have loved to be its male equivalent, if he’d managed to marry a woman of sufficient means and status.

  “And in a way, it was how we connected with each other. Nobody ever did anything to his standards, which meant that he was the one who stood over me as I practiced my handwriting. He was the one who gave me an education in art. And he was the one who taught me about fabrics and construction of garments, among other things.”

  “Did you enjoy your lessons?” asked Bennett.

  Hmm, my inquisitive lover was feeling his way around me, but it was all right. Pater was not where my weakness lay.

  “Not always,” I answered. “He could be moody, and I never quite knew from day to day whether he’d be cheerful or glum or outright bad-tempered. But looking back I’m really glad we spent all those hours together, especially since he passed away so unexpectedly.”

  In my mind I saw my bouquet shivering before his gravestone. He was the parent I’d counted on to stay around the longest, and yet he was gone in the blink of an eye. For weeks following his funeral I’d remained in a state of shock. Every time a car screeched to a stop somewhere I’d start violently, my head flooding with imagined details of the crash that took his life.

  My fingers tightened around my chopsticks. Perhaps I wasn’t as immune as I’d thought.

  “He was very proud of you, you know,” Bennett said softly.

  “It’s what Zelda tells me.” Though I wasn’t sure whether I believed Zelda one hundred percent.

  “I told you I introduced my brother to him, right?”

  “Yeah, when you asked him about your grandmother’s Pissarro. You said he was taken with Prescott.”

  “Taken enough to tell him, ‘Keep it up, young man, and maybe someday you’ll be good enough to meet my daughter.’”

  “Really?” I was astounded. Pater never had such compliments for me. That’s not too bad was about as extravagant as his praises went.

  “Really.”

  I half shook my head, then laughed, still incredulous. Bennett peered at me, his curiosity evident not so much in his expression as in the tilt of his head and the forward angle of his shoulders.

  Instinctively I turned away from him. I was wrong. My lover had an intuitive sense of where all my weaknesses lay. I know people who genuinely delight in being unattached. They are not the ones who get melancholy at weddings. What do you do when you despair, and there isn’t an August rain to drown your sorrow? So you told him to stay away from Zelda?

  To cover for my abrupt motion, I dug into my purse, pulled out my phone, and looked at the time. Four o’clock exact. “It’s getting late,” I said. “We should go.”

  BY THE TIME WE STARTED in the direction of the Canal Street train station, the snow, which had stopped when we left Bennett’s apartment, was coming down again. The day was bitterly cold, but I was warm in the clothes he’d selected for me: stylish, well-made pieces in camel and grey, plus a spectacularly comfortable pair of shearling boots.

  We were at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, when Bennett took my hand in his and looked up at the darkening sky. I thought of my Munich scenario, the bit with us standing on the hotel’s observation deck as snow fell all about us.

  I was already living in my fantasy. So what if Bennett saw through me from time to time? I could cope with a little imperfection on the part of my fantasy lover.

  “Is that your phone ringing?” asked said lover.

  It was, the Rohan theme that signaled Zelda. “Excuse me,” I said to Bennett. And then, to Zelda, “Hello, my love.”

  “Darling, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past hour. Where are you?”

  I saw then that I’d missed a number of calls and texts. “Chinatown. Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. But you won’t believe the news coming out of MoMA.”

  Shit. The Moira McAllister retrospective.

  “At least two of my friends have called me,” Zelda went on, “to ask whether I knew that there are pictures of Bennett at the retrospective, very artistic pictures but
still, very naked pictures.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “He was her tenant for a while when he was on the West Coast and he modeled for her.”

  “Well, my friends said there are thousands and thousands of pictures of him—their words, not mine.”

  Fuck. “Ah, in that case we’d better go take a look. I’ll call you later.”

  “MoMA?” asked Bennett, not particularly perturbed. “The cat out of the bag?”

  “Sounds like it.” I took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, this cat might be the size of King Kong.”

  THERE WAS A LINE TO enter the Moira McAllister special exhibit. First-day crowd or onlookers drawn by the news of nudity where none had been expected?

  Bennett had been quiet on the train ride uptown. He was equally quiet as we stood in line. But as we entered the first exhibit room, with no images of his naked body leaping out at us, he exhaled audibly.

  We passed several more rooms without seeing body parts that belonged to him. I too began to relax. What thousands and thousands? At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if it were only a few snapshots tucked away in a corner.

  We entered the next room and my jaw dropped. The other rooms were done up fairly typically for an exhibit, with one or two rows of framed prints on each wall, more or less at eye level. But this room, a sizable one, had its walls—and ceiling—papered over with images.

  Literally thousands and thousands of black-and-white photos, fitted together like a huge mosaic, with some images as big as Oriental rugs, others barely larger than a thumbprint. And they were all Bennett, every single one.

  Not all of them were nude pictures—even a quick sweep revealed that he was perfectly decent in many. But the biggest ones had him in various state of undress: Bennett standing before a window, a joint in hand, his back to the camera, his gluteal muscles astonishing in their perfection; Bennett sprawled facedown on a mussed bed, sleeping, all long arms and legs; a very much awake Bennett gazing into the camera, eyes heavy-lidded with lust and anticipation, his hand reaching south of the edge of the photograph, which ended a bare millimeter short of showing everything.

  I turned around—everyone else in the room too seemed to be slowly spinning about, while whispering to one another, What is this? Who is this?

  Bennett in the shower, water sluicing down his lanky form. Bennett lying on the carpet, wearing nothing except a strategically placed copy of L’Étranger. Bennett in the arms of a woman, equally naked, her face turned away from the camera.

  Moira.

  Seven years was a lot of time for her camera to be pointed squarely at Bennett. Bennett cooking, Bennett eating, Bennett brushing his teeth. Bennett driving, Bennett looking at a map, Bennett checking under the hood of a classic Thunderbird. Bennett washing dishes, Bennett vacuuming the carpet, Bennett putting together a bookshelf, a hammer in hand, several nails clenched between his teeth.

  And it went on and on, the camera’s—and the photographer’s—profound interest in this beautiful young man.

  The tide of visitors gradually pushed us out of the room into the next. And the next. There were no more images of Bennett. His years with Moira had been confined to one room and did not overlap with her other creative output—an accurate portrayal of the isolation of their affair, an intense experience she’d been forced to keep a complete secret.

  The museum was closing when we left. Without speaking to each other, we walked into a nearby espresso bar and sat down.

  Was Bennett shocked to see so much of his old life put up for public consumption? Did he feel betrayed, or did he understand that it was inevitable, that an artist who strove for expressions of truth would never consent to keep so much of her own life forever a lie by omission?

  And how had he felt, inundated by so many moments from the past?

  “Was that too much for you?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  It had been too much for me. Not because he was naked for all the world to see, but because now I truly understood how much he had invested in that life. Beyond the first visual blast of nudity, everything was overwhelmingly domestic. And in every image he had looked…settled. For someone that young, there had been no restlessness in his eyes, no itch to be somewhere else, someone else.

  I shrugged. “It isn’t my ass up there. How are you?”

  He set his palms against his temples. “On the one hand, Moira and I didn’t part very well. After everything we’d been through together—her first bout of cancer, the embezzlement by her agent, the ups and downs of her career—I was resentful for a long time afterward that she just let go of me. So the exhibit is actually kind of nice seen from that angle, a public tribute to my place in her life.

  “On the other hand, whether she meant it that way or not, it’s also a giant middle finger to my dad. And the timing…shit.”

  The timing really was shit. Eighteen months ago Bennett probably wouldn’t have cared. And if he and his father had successfully reconciled, it also wouldn’t have mattered as much. But now, at this critical juncture, having his naked pictures splashed all over MoMA—and all over the Internet soon, if not already…

  In this day and age, a few naked pictures—or even an exhibit room plastered with them—didn’t constitute a deal breaker, especially not for a man with a shit-ton of money. But Mr. Somerset was old-fashioned. Such a display might tilt his opinion of his son irrevocably in the wrong direction. And if he were to come to the belief that Bennett had something to do with it…

  “I wonder if he’ll feel like a laughingstock,” said Bennett, his thoughts proceeding in the same direction as mine. He exhaled slowly. “It’s going to be awkward tomorrow at Zelda’s party.”

  It was probably going to be awkward for a long time to come—the elephant in the room now the size of a blue whale.

  I added another packet of sugar to my coffee. “Your strategy was all wrong. Instead of a fake girlfriend, you should have knocked up someone for real. Nothing brings a family together like a baby.”

  Bennett looked into my eyes. “Can I knock you up for real?”

  My heart thudded. It shocked me how much I wanted to say yes. If I were pregnant, of course we’d have to get married. And who wouldn’t want to get married if marriage consisted mainly of hot sex, pancake breakfasts, and lunches in Chinatown?

  “That’s the nuclear option. That’s for when the world finds out that Moira was actually your father’s mistress and your mother’s half sister.”

  Bennett shook his head, a reluctant smile curving his lips. “Is there a slightly-short-of-nuclear option?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Would I sound too crazy? Like, batshit insane?

  “You have an idea,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m already having second thoughts.”

  “Let’s hear it anyway.”

  I threw caution to the wind. “Next to a baby, the second-most-effective diversionary tactic is a wedding.”

  Bennett sat up straighter, his expression that of a lost traveler in the desert, unsure whether he was seeing a real oasis or a mirage. “Keep talking.”

  Something in his eyes made me almost reluctant to say, “But we’re not going to do that, because it’s too unhinged even for us.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  His shoulders slumped: He was disappointed that we wouldn’t be staging a wedding. My heart melted into a puddle—could there ever be a better feeling in the world?

  “We can do a fake engagement. You say you already have a ring picked out. If that’s the case, we can announce it at Zelda’s party—and that should preempt any other topic.”

  He might not have shown me any ring. But at this point, I was willing to bet a month’s salary that such a thing existed. That he had again been telling the truth under the guise of plausible deniability.

  He looked a little stunned. “You’re willing to go that far?”

  Doubt wedged into my happiness. He wasn’t saying that the idea was demented, was
he? “It’s a lot less drastic than having your baby,” I said, hanging on to my own plausible deniability.

  He was silent for moment. Then he reached across the table and took my hands. “That’s a wonderful idea. Thank you.”

  Did I blush? And could he tell, from his grip on my wrists, how fast my heart was racing? “That’s a plan then.”

  We looked at each other and laughed at the same time. “God, it’s nuts,” I said.

  “Hey, crazy situations demand crazy solutions,” he replied. “Thanks for rising to the occasion.”

  He was glad. I could feel the contentment wrapped around us like a force field as we walked hand in hand to Broadway and 50th. Before I headed down into the station to catch the 1 train uptown, I laid my hand on the lapel of his coat. “Look after yourself.”

  He kissed me on my cheek. “I’ll be just fine, now that we’re engaged.”

  It was very possible that I floated all the way to the university, my feet a few inches off the ground.

  Chapter 14

  I DIDN’T STAY IN THE lab long: After an hour of bumbling inattention, I decided I’d better leave before I botched an experiment or lost valuable data.

  On the train home my head swam with visions of Bennett and me as a companionable older couple: cycling along the winding country lanes of Vermont during peak foliage; strolling down a decked-out Madison Avenue at Christmas; doing the Sunday crossword puzzle together before a roaring fire while a blizzard plowed through the city.

  Truly, a montage worthy of an AARP commercial.

  I waltzed into the house. Zelda rushed up from her studio to meet me. But as she saw me, the anxiety on her face turned into puzzlement. “You don’t seem particularly upset, darling.”

  Belatedly I realized that I’d been whistling. Rearranging my features into what I hoped was a more serious expression, I answered, “Well, you know, what’s there to do but wait for the whole thing to blow over?”

  “True, true. But I don’t know…you don’t even seem shocked about him and Moira McAllister.”