The One in My Heart (28 page)

And, of course, proposals and propositions flew in—from both sexes, domestic and abroad.

Such things were more or less to be expected. What took us aback was a legitimate bid from a major fashion label, with very respectable money attached, for him to front a new campaign.

I knew fame had its financial benefits—I failed to realized how much
, he texted.
If I were a better businessman, I’d have been posting naked selfies years ago.

Not too late to start
, I texted back.

Same for you.

Given his limited social media presence, online muckrakers scraped other people’s accounts for photographs that included him. I was half-afraid that there would be lots of shots floating around of him being young, drunk, and douchebaggy. Instead what had been dug up were largely from various volunteer missions, with a shovel or a stethoscope, rather than a bottle—or a breast—in his hand.

Really? Building houses in third-world countries? What’s wrong with young people nowadays? What happened to booze and pussy?

Booze and pussy happened away from cameras—Mrs. Asquith drove the point home when I was a kid.

And it wasn’t just his person that did good work; his money, too, hadn’t been idle. His charitable foundation had won awards for experimenting with innovative ways to help people, such as buying medical bills from collection agencies for pennies on the dollar, so that uninsured patients could get out from underneath crushing health care–related debts.

If ever a man caught literally with his pants down ended up smelling like roses…

That Thursday I visited MoMA again—partly because I wanted to gauge attendance at the Moira McAllister exhibit, and mostly so that I could see more of his pictures for myself.

The attention of the media might have begun to move on, but the general public was still turning out in droves. The exhibit was far more crowded than it had been the Saturday before. I finished reading several recent research articles before the line finally moved enough to get me into the Bennett room.

Instead of being distracted by the acreage of skin, this time I zoomed in on the smaller pictures, the vast majority of which I’d missed earlier. And what should I see but Bennett sporting a plaid shirt and doing something Vermont farmer–adjacent in every third image: digging up a garden, turning a pile of compost, building a bean trellis from scratch—Moira’s backyard must have been fully utilized for urban agriculture.

I held my breath as dozens and dozens of images piled into my head. How would my psyche interpret what I was seeing? Would it link Bennett to my old obsession? Would I then feel a familiar deflation of interest?

Nothing.

Or rather, the only thing I felt was a desire to step over the velvet rope and touch the photographs of my lover. Bennett in the rain, holding an umbrella in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. Bennett sitting on a picnic blanket, his shades down at the tip of his nose. Bennett, his hair long enough to be tied in a topknot, smiling into the camera, a hen under each arm.

A hen under each arm?

I was about to send him a mercilessly mocking text concerning the chickens when I spied Rowland Somerset. He had just come into the room and I was near the exit. But the velvet rope–barricaded path was in the shape of a horseshoe, and he stood only fifteen feet away.

Recoiling.

There was no other word to describe his reaction. My fingers closed hard around my phone. The young man in the biggest images was a blatantly sexual creature, not at all how any parent would want to see his child, even if they were on the best of terms.

And then Mr. Somerset was looking around, not seeking out the smaller, more ordinary pictures as I’d asked him to, but studying the faces of the hundreds of people who were all there to see a naked Bennett.

The crowd pushed me out of the room. I left the museum in a daze, walking into and out of the nearest train station two times before I remembered where I was headed.

Had I given the worst possible advice? Had I done irreparable damage?

I MIGHT NEED TO APOLOGIZE
profusely
, I texted Bennett later that day, from my office at the university.

He was at work, but he texted me back within minutes.
What happened?

Saw your dad at MoMA. I don’t think it went well.

I all but gnawed my knuckles as I waited for his response.

Dad is a realist. He’d have gone to the exhibit at some point, whether you suggested it or not, to see what he was dealing with. And it was never going to go well. So don’t worry about it.

I exhaled in gratitude.
Thanks.

I’m going back to my apartment on Saturday. Want to come over?

My answer was short and to the point:
Yes.

OF COURSE, ONE OF THE
reasons I agreed to go to Bennett’s apartment was that I wanted to take a good look at his great-great-grandmother’s portrait. Yep, the Marchioness of Tremaine had on the exact same ring he had given me.

Needless to say, sex was raunchy and all-consuming. Afterward we showered together, had our dinner, and moved to the masturbation couch.

I pulled out my laptop. I’d texted earlier in the day that I might stay only a short time, because I needed to finish drafting the next paper. He in turn had suggested that I bring work along instead—and I hadn’t needed much persuasion.

He made the sign of the cross—which made me laugh—before sitting down at the other end of the masturbation couch. Outside wind howled; rain splattered against the windows. But under the big throw blanket Bennett had spread, we were as snug as two kittens in a basket.

I lost myself in my work. Once I looked up to see my lover typing away on his own laptop. Another time he had a thick volume of medical reference on his lap. But when I was done for the evening, he was reading
The Fellowship of the Ring
.

Not just any old copy—we had at least a dozen different editions—but Zelda’s precious, inscribed to her by none other than Professor Tolkien himself. The kind of loan one would make only to a beloved future son-in-law.

“How come you never read it in high school?” I asked.

“I was more into techno-thrillers, when I wasn’t busy trying to decide if I wanted to be the next Thoreau.” Bennett peered at me over the top of the book. “When did you get started on them?”

“Zelda read them to me when I was little, starting with
The Hobbit
. Instead of playing dolls, we used to play Middle-earth—she was Frodo and I her faithful Sam. And we’d slog our way up Mount Doom to destroy the ring.”

He set the book aside, went to the kitchen, and came back with a handful of tangerines. “She told me you surprised her with a trip to New Zealand for the premiere of
The Return of the King
.”

“It was fun—Times Square on New Year’s Eve has nothing on that crowd.”

He tossed me a tangerine. “So how come you don’t love
The Lord of the Rings
as much as she does?”

No one had ever made such an observation, but it was true: Had I been as devoted a fangirl as Zelda, I’d have been the one urging the book on Bennett, not her.

“It’s not that I don’t love it. I probably have a better grasp of the history of Middle-earth than she does. The map that came with”—I gestured toward the book with the tangerine I was peeling—”I can draw it from memory with ninety-seven percent accuracy and label all the place names in Elvish, Dwarvish,
and
Westron.”

“I don’t know why, but that’s turning me on.”

This made me giggle. He popped a tangerine segment into his mouth. I wondered how it would feel to kiss him and taste all that citrusy coolness.

“You were saying?” he reminded me.

“Right.” I had to think for a moment to remember what we were talking about. “So it’s not the world Tolkien created that I don’t love, but the story, I guess. Or maybe the themes. There is such a pervasive sense of loss in his writing—it’s all about the end of an age, about those who are leaving and not coming back. At one point Galadriel, the Elvish queen, says to Sam, ‘For our spring and our summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory.’”

Bennett gazed at me thoughtfully. My cheeks warmed. “Sorry. Is that too much geekery?”

“No, keep going.”

“There’s not much else. Well, not much else without spoiling the whole thing.”

“Come on. The books are sixty years old, and I’ve seen enough Internet memes to know that one does not simply walk into Mordor.”

I chortled. “I’ll tell you a secret: Actually one does simply walk into Mordor. But carrying the burden of the ring changes Frodo. It damages him so much that he can’t stay in Middle-earth anymore. He has to sail away with the last of the High Elves, leaving behind Sam and everything he’s ever known, because he can no longer bear the pain.”

And Sam, for all his devotion, could not lessen Frodo’s torment or heal his wound. Could only stand by and watch as Frodo departed over the vast seas.

Without warning, tears stung the back of my eyes. Hastily I looked up, and then down at my half-peeled tangerine. “I guess you can say I have mixed feelings.”

Bennett scooted closer to me, took the tangerine from my hand, and finished peeling it. He divided the segments inside, took half, and gave the other half to me. We ate silently. I watched the storm outside—and his reflection in the window, which watched me.

I felt as transparent as my own reflection. I should have become used to the sensation by now, since we never spent any significant amount of time together without my arriving at this state. But if anything, with repetition the naked vulnerability became more difficult to take, not less.

When we were finished with the tangerine, he said, “Zelda told me you liked arcade games.”

I was so grateful for the change of subject, I’d have gone down on him that instant. “Yeah, but I haven’t been to an arcade in years.”

“Come with me.”

He led me upstairs to his man cave, which I hadn’t seen before, with a pool table, a card table, and big, deep leather chairs next to two laden bookshelves. I blinked: At the far end of the room stood two old-fashioned arcade video-game machines. Bennett turned them on. The moment the music started blaring, I was swept back to my childhood: sneaking out of the house on Saturday afternoons in a baggy T-shirt, jeans, and a backward baseball cap—so as not to stand out as a girl—and heading to what Pater dismissively called “that dungeon.”

“My God, what games are they?”

“Everything,” Bennett replied proudly.

For all the machines’ retro appearance, they were not actually vintage—and each came loaded with hundreds of different games.

I scrolled through the list of titles, squealing at regular intervals. Many of the games had become available online as browser emulations—but that wasn’t the same, was it?

“I brought the machines with me all the way from the West Coast,” said Bennett. “Promise me you won’t tell my dad.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” I promised, still scrolling down that magnificent list. “And I’ll sleep with you for playing time.”

“Of course you will.”

I played Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Bank Panic—the owner of “that dungeon” had a fondness for older games. I was about to start Galaga when Bennett hooked a finger in the waistband of my pajama bottoms. “Okay, Sam. Time to put out.”

I caressed the screen of my new best friend before I squeezed Bennett’s behind. “All right, you ugly Orc. Take me to your nasty cave and have your way with me.”

We did tremendous justice to interspecies captive sex.

As I was on the verge of falling asleep, Bennett said, “I could be wrong, since I’m barely a hundred pages in, but maybe the reason Zelda loves the story is that in the end, no matter his own fate, Frodo left everything better than he found it.”

I opened my eyes, but in the dark all I heard was his soft, even breathing.

THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, BENNETT
and I spent as much time together as our schedules allowed. We played Cards Against Humanity and laughed ourselves stupid. We gave his arcade machines another workout. One evening, when I had to stay late at the office, he came and read
The Fellowship of the Ring
in a corner. We even met the Material Girls for drinks again, during which Daff and Lara admitted shamefacedly that they’d been to the MoMA exhibit. Carolyn alone abstained from the museum, but not from the online coverage—so Bennett made them all compliment his ass while I choked laughing.

The notable cloud in our silver lining was the lunch with Zelda and his parents. Mr. Somerset didn’t recoil at the sight of him, but the meeting turned out to be as sterile as I’d warned Bennett it might be.

“I thought your dad couldn’t possibly fail to see the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful,” I said later that day, in his apartment.

We’d been silent for some time, me wondering, with a heavy heart, whether it was possible to recover from this misstep.

“So you think of the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful?” he asked softly.

Of course I did, but the thought of admitting it outright discomfited me. “Well,” I answered, drawing out that syllable, “actually, I always think of the hens. You were cuddling a pair of them in one of the pictures.”

“Oh, Lulu and Betty?” At my widened eyes, he grinned. “Did you think our egg hens didn’t have names?”

His experience with poultry fascinated me. I had lots of questions, from what the chickens ate to how many eggs they produced to what was done with the chicken poop.

“That went right into the compost.”

“Okay, that does it. Come the apocalypse, I’m sticking with you.”

A lighthearted conversation followed on how we could bunkerize his house in Cos Cob. By the time that wound down, I was almost entirely out of my gloom concerning his chances with his father.

But Bennett fell quiet again. And didn’t say anything else until I’d closed my laptop for good. And then it was only, “Come,” as he led me upstairs to bed.