“Oh, we won’t win. Boy bands don’t win Grammys. This alone is huge. I’m rather chuffed.” He beamed. “It might earn us a bit more respect. But still, we are pretty much at the bottom of any respectability charts.”
Dawn laughed loudly, raising her glass. “I love that you’re so good-humored about it. And you, Anya, kudos to you.”
Artnet had posted a favorable write-up on Anya’s installation that morning. Invisible was a conceptual video exploring how women of a certain age cease to be seen. How society sweeps them under a rug, ignores them, discards them once past their prime. She’d curated a series of portraits of women middle-aged and older, spliced with media images and common advertising tropes, and layered a soundtrack above of real women speaking about their experiences, their fears, their insecurities. It was painfully, brutally honest.
“My friends and I discuss this all the time. It’s like you cease to exist,” Dawn continued. Dawn was a patrician blonde, New York born and bred. Tall, capable. If she was older than me, it was not by much. “How many times do you find yourself in a room or at a party and you’re thinking, ‘Am I here? Can anyone see me? Hello!’”
Karl, quiet, bookish, wrapped his arm around her, smiling. “I see you, hon.”
“You know what I mean, Karl.” She turned to me then. “Like the guys who typically talk to you on the streets … Not the catcalling construction workers, but the doormen who generally say ‘Good morning’ … That just stops. It stops. Do I no longer warrant a ‘Good morning’? There’s something very disturbing about them not even registering you anymore. Like shit, when did this happen?”
Hayes was holding my hand beneath the table. He squeezed it suddenly, and I looked over to him, wondering what it was he’d read on my face. The uncertainty of it all. The idea that my own invisibility might be around the corner. Around the block. Miles away. But still, inevitable.
“It’s groundbreaking what you’re doing, Anya,” I said.
“Thank you, Solène.” She was sitting across from me, nursing a vodka tonic. Anya’s features were sharp, memorable. Fair skin, black hair, red lips. She had a few years on me, but she seemed to have it figured all out. While I was still reeling from the news about my ex-husband’s pregnant fiancée and trying to hold together a heartbroken teen while bedding her twenty-year-old idol, Anya was taking on the future of womankind.
“We sent out press releases to the women’s magazines in addition to the usual art publications because they’re in a unique position,” I continued. “Sure, some are partly to blame, but they have this opportunity now to kind of turn it on its head. To further the discussion. The fact that we continuously equate beauty and desirability with youth. That we beat ourselves up instead of embracing the inevitable. And these are women running these magazines. Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“Because we’ve been brainwashed,” Lulit said, sipping her mojito. “But this is the beauty of art, right? We hold up a mirror to ourselves and say, ‘Who the hell have we become?’ That’s what we do.”
I looked to her then, my partner in crime, my best friend. “That’s what we do.”
*
After dinner, the others decided to head over to Soho House for a party where the Roots’ Questlove was spinning, but Hayes assumed it would be too much of a scene and so we opted out.
“I’m seeing him next week. We’re doing The Tonight Show,” he said, as if that were a normal thing.
“What a thrilling life you lead.” Dawn smiled. We were standing by the valet, waiting for their Uber. “Well, you two have fun. I’m going to go be invisible at Soho House.”
I laughed at that. “You’re not invisible, Dawn. You’re wearing Dries Van Noten.”
“Ha!” She threw back her blonde head, her punchy floral dress in high relief. “Thank you for noticing! Thank you for seeing me.”
“I see everything,” I said. “That’s my job.”
*
“I love that you love what you do,” Hayes said, sometime later. We were tucked into a corner of the Setai’s courtyard bar—low lights, reflecting pool, palm trees. The vibe more Mooréa than Miami.
He was sipping from his Scotch. Laphroaig 18. “What do Isabelle’s friends’ mums do? Do they work?”
“The majority of them, no.”
“My mum didn’t go back to work after I was born. She rode horses and did charity stuff and … had lunch,” he laughed. “I don’t know what she did, come to think of it. I don’t know how she filled her days.”
“Would you describe her as a good mum?”
“I guess so. I turned out all right. I mean, you like me.”
“I do.” I smiled. “Do you think she was happy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Are you happy?”
“Right this moment? Yes.”
He was quiet for a minute, watching me. “Do you think you’d be as happy if you weren’t working?”
I shook my head. “Maybe if I’d gotten married and had kids older, I would have felt the pull to settle down. But I had all this education and energy and desire and there was more life to live than that. And now it’s so much of my identity. And yeah, sometimes I feel guilty that I wasn’t the mom serving hot lunch at private school. But who’s to say that would have made me a better mom? I probably would have just been restless and unhappy. And resentful.”
He nodded, his fingers tracing over my cuff. “Yeah, I get that.”
“If you hadn’t done this, what would you be doing?”
“Ha! Press junket questions. I’d be at Cambridge with half my year, sleeping in the same five-hundred-year-old college four generations of Campbells have slept in, playing football, chasing skirts, rowing, and having a grand time.”
“Interesting,” I said. I could not picture him doing any of that. “Hard or soft-shell tacos?”
He laughed. “Soft.”
“Ever been in love?”
“No.”
I stopped. It was not what I was expecting. “No?”
He sipped from his drink, placed the glass on the table before us. “No.”
“Never? Really? Wow.”
“Do I strike you as someone who’s been in love?”
“You strike me as someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“I’ve had some good teachers. Some of whom have said, ‘Don’t fall in love with me.’” He let that stand in the air, accusatory.
“Did I say that? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t really listen to you anyway.” He said it with no pretense. His hand had found its way beneath the table, to my knee, to the scalloped lace hem of my dress. “I’ve thought I was in love. Turns out I was wrong.”
“Penelope?”
“Penelope.”
My mind paged through the times he’d said he was falling, at the Chateau Marmont, at the George V. I was weighing them differently now, those proclamations. I’d written them off as infatuation. Things a young boy might say. But perhaps he’d been revealing more of himself all along.
A sultry breeze blew up from the ocean. The air was moist, balmy. Hayes’s fingers slipped beneath my hem and I flinched. For a long time neither of us spoke. He held my gaze as he forced my knees apart, uncrossed my legs, pried open my thighs.