*
Six minutes later we were back out in the gallery and no one was the wiser. At least I wanted to believe that.
“Will you do me a huge favor?” I asked him as we made our way into the crowd. “There’s a photographer here from Getty. I would love to get a shot of you with Joanna. But if you feel uncomfortable doing that, I completely understand.”
I hated asking him. I hated everything it insinuated. I did not want him to think for one second that I was taking advantage of our relationship and his celebrity to sell art.
“Solène.” He grabbed my wrist then, pulling me into him. “Why wouldn’t I do that for you?”
I turned to look at him, aware that he was touching me in this very public space. The boy who I had just let fuck me in the office.
“I came here for you, right?”
“You came here for me. You didn’t come here for Marchand Raphel.”
“I came here for you,” he repeated. “And last I checked, that was a huge part of you.”
*
We shot him along with Joanna and her husband before Low Tide at No. 24. Hayes insisted on there being a third person in the photograph because Joanna was “far too beautiful” for him to be pictured alone with her.
“They’ll assume I’m sleeping with her,” he had said when I questioned his reasoning.
“What? Who are ‘they’?”
“The press. The fans. The world.”
“She’s like twice your age, Hayes.”
“Yes, well, clearly that doesn’t stop me, right?” He smiled, salacious, chewing his gum. “Do you want to sell art, or do you want a scandal?”
Evidently, Hayes knew what he was doing.
Joanna’s husband was a chiseled Jamaican-Chinese model who had apparently spent some time at the gym and whose dimples rivaled those of Hayes. It only sweetened the photo op.
The photographer, Stephanie, posted a dozen photos of them on Getty Images the evening of the opening. By Sunday, they’d been picked up by numerous sources, including Hollywood Life and the Daily Mail, and by the following week they’d run in Us Weekly, People, Star, OK!, and Hello!. By then, our Sea Change show had long sold out. And the demand for Joanna’s work had far exceeded any of our expectations.
paris
In October, there was Paris.
Lulit and I went each year for the FIAC art fair, which typically overlapped with my birthday. When Hayes proposed to join us, I did not decline. That he was so intent on making it memorable awed me. The way he scheduled his TAG Heuer photo shoot to coincide. The way he booked the penthouse at the Four Seasons Hotel George V and insisted I stay with him instead of at the apartment in the 17th that we typically rented. The way he upgraded my and Lulit’s tickets from business class to first without either of us being the wiser—a lovely surprise greeting us at the Air France check-in. “I wanted you to be well rested when you arrived,” he cooed later, over Dom Pérignon in our hotel room. It was the most indulgent working holiday that I could recall, filled with wine and art and turning leaves. And like all time spent with Hayes, it passed too quickly.
He arrived from London Tuesday evening, hours after I did, having just returned from four days in the Dolomites, where the guys were shooting the music video for “Sorrowed Talk,” their planned first release from Wise or Naked.
“I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you,” he gushed. He was lying beside me, postcoital, propped up on one elbow, his fingers tracing my cheekbone.
And to me, it was clear: he was falling.
“I can’t do these long breaks. I think you’re going to have to quit your job, sell your gallery, and just travel around with me for the next few years.”
I laughed at that. “And what am I supposed to do with my daughter?”
He shrugged, smiling. “Daniel? Boarding school? I suppose we could always get her a room, hire her a proper tutor…”
“Yes, that sounds doable.”
“Truly. What thirteen-year-old girl wouldn’t want to come on tour with August Moon?”
“What mother in her right mind would allow her thirteen-year-old girl to go on tour with August Moon?”
“Hmm … Point taken.”
I saw Isabelle’s face clearly then as she bade me farewell the previous morning. Her wide blue eyes, her sweet smile. Clueless. She’d made me a card: “Have the Happiest Birthday ever!”
And I knew, no matter how delicately the news was delivered, it was going to shatter her.
I was going to shatter her.
Hayes was smiling, his fingers outlining my lips. “So plan A, then … Daniel? That’s not an option, I take it?”
“That’s not an option.”
“What if I quit the band?”
His voice was soft, so soft I was afraid to acknowledge it. For a moment, the two of us lay there in silence. The question hanging in the air. And then, without saying more, he rolled into me, kissing the corners of my mouth, his hand at my neck, my throat.
“I need more of you.”
“I don’t know that there’s more of me to give.”
“That’s not a good enough answer.”
I smiled, my legs wrapping around his waist, my hands in his hair. “What is it you want from me, then?”
He positioned himself. We’d become lax with the condoms. “Everything.”
*
I spent all Wednesday with Lulit on the second floor of the Grand Palais, where our booth was situated for the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. The VIP viewings began at ten a.m., and from that moment on our day was jammed with esteemed collectors and dignitaries, the crème de la crème of the art world. Each visitor slightly more fabulous and well-heeled than the next, speaking myriad languages, all slightly high in the presence of art. And once again I was reminded why I loved what I did. Because to be surrounded by such varied, intriguing types—to be a part of a community where it was admired for bending, nay, expected to bend the rules—was, for me, to be at home.
Hayes spent his day in a studio shooting portraits with a watch.
On day two of the fair, the first day it was open to the public and no fewer than 18,000 visitors filed through, Hayes’s shoot ended early, and he surprised me by dropping by the Grand Palais shortly after five. In a world of iPhones and texts, it was such a shock to see him pop into our booth unannounced, it took a full three seconds to register who this handsome stranger was, and it made me wonder how others saw him. His notable height, his hair, his eyes, his jaw, his broad mouth; black jeans, black boots, and a three-quarter-length dark suede coat. Even if he weren’t famous, he’d be difficult to overlook. And the fact that for this moment he was mine …
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see what you do when I’m not with you … And I thought perhaps you might like some macarons.” He smiled, proffering a Ladurée bag.
I hugged him then. Tightly. And in that brief moment I did not care who saw us. Or what they might have thought. “You know, you’re acting suspiciously like a boyfriend.”
He laughed at that. “As opposed to…?”
“As opposed to someone who just ‘really, really, really’ enjoys my company.”