The One In My Heart

It was dinnertime. Zelda had already made a salad and pastrami sandwiches. We sat down at the table, busied ourselves with our food, and didn’t speak for a couple of minutes.

In the silence, my conscience twinged. Larry de Villiers’s e-mail still sat in my inbox, its humble sincerity a reproach every time I came across it. I didn’t know how to answer him—or how to bring up the subject with Zelda.

It was a relief when she said, “You’re taking everything in stride, darling. I guess MoMA doesn’t change anything for you and Bennett?”

“Not really.” But yes, really. How did a fake engagement proceed? Would we throw a party? Send an announcement to the Times? Would I actually wear an engagement ring everywhere? “It’s not as if he’d been caught clubbing baby seals. He was just mostly naked in some of the pictures.”

“I hope his parents will feel the same way you do.”

That poured cold water on my frothy hopes. “Have you talked to his mom?”

“I thought of telephoning her. But what would I say?”

I set down my sandwich. I’d been so cocooned in that distant, beautiful future spun of my own dreams and wishes that I hadn’t given any real thought to the here-and-now of the situation. And it wasn’t only his parents Bennett had to worry about. “Oh, God. It’s going to be messy, isn’t it? I hope people at his hospital aren’t going to be dicks.”

“I hope people in your department aren’t going be dicks,” said Zelda, reaching for a pickle spear.

I hadn’t even thought of it from that perspective—academia did not like to grant permanent membership to candidates with any personal notoriety. “Screw the tenure committee. They can—”

The doorbell rang.

“Delivery for the party?” I asked Zelda.

“No, everything is scheduled for tomorrow.”

I went to the door and looked out the peephole. Bennett! I yanked the door open. “Come in! You look cold.” He had on the same grey overcoat and blue scarf that he’d worn earlier, but now his nose and ears were all red and his boots looked as if they’d been left in the snow for hours. “Have you been out walking all this time?”

“Wasn’t exactly in the mood to do anything else.” He kissed me on my cheek. “Hi, Zelda. How are you?”

Zelda, who had peeked out from the dining room, glanced at me. I looked back at Bennett. “We’re both doing better than you at the moment.”

He smiled a little. “Well, thanks for that.”

“Would you like to join us for dinner?” asked Zelda. “We have salad and some nice ciabatta rolls.”

“I’m fine. I just came for a word with Evangeline.”

“In that case,” said Zelda, “you children have a lovely chin-wag and I’ll see you later, Bennett.”

When we were alone again he kissed me, the kind of kiss better suited for lovers reunited after long and hopeless separations, like Aragorn and Arwen at the end of the trilogy. Needless to say, I, who last saw him only hours ago, relished the hell out of it.

“You okay?” I asked, breathless.

“I was going to say it could be better. But then I remembered that I had sex with you four times in the last twenty-four hours, so maybe it doesn’t get any better than that.”

I might have preened a little. “I know. It’s all downhill from there.”

He smiled again and I was weightlessly happy—he had walked all over Manhattan and had come here, to my door.

I rubbed his cold hands with my palms. “Have you talked to your sister? Do your parents know yet?”

He nodded.

“What does Imogene make of all this?”

“Her current boyfriend is a lawyer, so she was going on about ways we can try to get the pictures taken down.”

“Can you?” I felt a quick jolt of hope.

“I doubt it. I’ve signed any number of model releases for Moira, and the pictures I saw were all from when I was in California, after I turned eighteen.”

Of course MoMA’s lawyers would have done their due diligence.

“Besides, it’s already all over the Internet—no use trying to latch that barn door.”

“We’ll tough it out,” I told him, and pressed a kiss to the center of his palm.

He looked at me oddly. Was that too intimate an act? Or was it my use of the collective pronoun that had caught his attention? But of course it was “we” now, we who were on the verge of announcing our “engagement.”

He reached into his pocket. “Anyway, I came to give you this.”

“This” was a simple, antique ring with filigree work on the band and a modest, round-cut sapphire. “The one you picked out?” I said, trying not to squeal like a girl half my age.

“Yes. But I’ve reconsidered the engagement idea.”

My hand tightened around the velvet box. What?

“It was a tremendous offer and I’m very grateful,” he said quietly. “But my parents would rightly see the timing as suspect—as would Zelda. And I don’t want anyone, especially not Zelda, to worry.”