The One In My Heart

“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.