The One In My Heart

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.