The One In My Heart

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.”