“At least.”
“I like us multiplied,” he said, soft.
“I’m not sure what you’re insinuating.”
“Nothing.” He smiled. “Nothing at all.”
* * *
On the way back through the main corridor, we popped into Gagosian, where I introduced Hayes to my friend Amara Winthrop. It was Amara I’d met for breakfast at the Peninsula the morning August Moon did the Today show and made me and everyone else in midtown Manhattan fifteen minutes late. But if she recognized him there in the Grand Palais, she did not let on. Even though I’d used his first and last name and presented him as my “friend.” Not my “client.” I was trying it on for size.
“You’re looking fabulous, as usual.”
I watched as Amara reconstructed her chignon. She wore a fitted peplum blazer over a pencil skirt. The tailoring impeccable, likely British. In grad school, she was the blonde from Bedford Hills who’d intimidated us all.
“Yes … well, you know the drill: multiple degrees, and it still all comes down to your legs. But must sell art, right?”
I smiled at that. Lulit and I had lamented the same on numerous occasions. “Yes. Must sell art.”
“You’re still coming to dinner tonight, yes?”
“I am.”
“Dinner?” Hayes cocked his head.
“I told you about it. It’s my one business dinner this week.”
“I think I conveniently forgot.”
There were two young women, early twenties, circling one of the John Chamberlain sculptures near the front of the booth. It was clear to me they’d recognized Hayes, as they’d kept sneaking looks in our direction. Hayes managed to ignore it.
“She keeps abandoning me,” he told Amara. Which pretty much laid out … everything.
She took a second to compute and then responded, “Well, then, you should come.”
He looked to me, a wry smile forming. “Maybe I’ll do that.”
“Pardon.” One of the young women finally made her approach. “Excusez-moi, c’est possible de prendre une photo? We can take a picture?”
“De l’art? Oui, bien sûr,” Amara replied.
“Non. De lui. Avec Hayes.” She had that adorable way the French had of not pronouncing the H. “You can take a picture with us, ’Ayes, please?”
Hayes obliged them, while Amara looked on, visibly confused. And when he returned to the conversation with “So, tonight…” as if posing for photos with total strangers who knew his name was not completely out of the ordinary, Amara stopped him.
“Oh. You’re somebody, aren’t you?”
“Somebody? Yes.” He smiled.
“Okay, I’ll figure it out. But yes, you should come. It’s a fun bunch. Bring him.” She turned to me before looking back toward my “somebody.” “Make her bring you.”
* * *
We had a late reservation at Market on Avenue Matignon. There were ten of us, and they gave us the large table in the back room. It was secluded, sleek, warmly lit. And following a dalliance and a shower at the hotel, I was happy Hayes had joined us. I feared he might be slightly out of his element. But surely all that fine breeding and three years as a world-class celebrity had to amount to something.
When we were still dressing at the George V, I received an amusing text from Amara:
Just googled your boy toy. WTF? How’d you swing that??? If you don’t want to come out with us old artsy-fartsy types, I will totes understand. I probably wouldn’t either. But I’m going to need details later. Many. Xoxo
But at the restaurant, she maintained her discretion. It was a lively group: Amara; Lulit; Christophe Servan-Schreiber, who owned galleries in Paris and London; the painter Serge Cassel, one of Christophe’s artists; Laura and Bruno Piagetti, collectors from Milan; Jean-René Lavigne, who was with Gagosian’s Paris outpost; Mary Goodmark, an art consultant from London; and us.
There was more wine than I could keep track of, and we were loud. The Italians especially. Hayes and I sat on the banquette side of the table, our backs to the window, flanked by Christophe, Lulit, and Serge. He managed to hold my hand the entire night. And I did not stop him.
“So how do you know Solène?” Christophe asked my date. We’d been there for the better part of an hour and were working our way through the shared appetizers: scallop tartare with black truffles and black-truffle-and-fontina pizza. Half of the table was discussing the sale of an Anish Kapoor the previous day for an alleged two million dollars. The others were trading war stories of art fairs past, Mary and Jean-René filling us in on what we’d missed at Frieze London. Which left Hayes fielding questions from the revered art dealer.
He grinned, turning toward me. “Solène”—his voice was deep, raspy, full of innuendo—“how do I know you?”
His fingers slipped between my knees then, and I could feel myself getting wet. It took so little with him.
He smiled and turned back toward Christophe. “We’re very good friends.”
“Are you a student?”
“No,” he laughed.
“An artist?”
Hayes shook his head. “A budding collector.”
“Have you seen anything special yet at the fair?”
“Hmm.” Hayes contemplated for a bit, and I feared he’d retained nothing from this afternoon. “The Basquiats were particularly compelling,” he said finally. “Angry, deranged. But he always seems to be that way, doesn’t he? His demons evident in his work.
“There were a couple pieces in Solène’s booth by Nira Ramaswami that I was quite keen on. Very poetic. Melancholy. And the Olafur Eliasson installations. You could lose yourself in those. Truly…”
If I could have buried myself in his lap and sucked his dick right then and there, I would have. Who was this person, and what had he done with my art neophyte? At best, I had expected him to regurgitate some of my interpretations, but these were all his own thoughts.
“Sì, mi piace molto. I love this, the Basquiat,” Laura spoke up from across the table. “How you can feel … il dolore. Come si dice?” She turned to Bruno beside her, her black bob swinging. Laura had alabaster skin and generous lips. She wore a gorgeous tomato-red dress, its deep neckline showcasing her swan-like throat.
“Pain,” Bruno said. He was older than Laura, more salt than pepper, with a distinct jaw and a villa on Lake Como.
“Sì. You feel the pain. I love.”
“I don’t need to feel the pain,” Lulit contributed. “I appreciate that most artists are a little crazy—no offense, Serge—but I don’t always need to feel that in the work. Sometimes I just want to look at it and be happy.”
“Like Murakami,” I said, “in certain doses.”
“Like Murakami, yes.” She smiled. “There’s so much negativity in the world, sometimes I need art to just lift me.”
Hayes was swishing his Cabernet Sauvignon around in his glass, in a manner that was slow, hypnotic. “Maybe there is pain in Murakami’s work, but we just don’t feel it because it’s his minions who carry out his genius.”
We all turned to look at him then, intrigued.
“What is it you do?” Christophe asked. He had one of those accents you could not quite put your finger on. A French father, British mother, Swiss boarding schools. An international soup, quite common in the art world.
“I’m a singer-songwriter. I’m in a band.”
“What kind of music?”
“Pop, mostly.”
Serge, Jean-René, and Lulit had continued on the negativity thread and begun discussing the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism in France over the past year and the large number of Jewish people who were migrating as a result.
“C’est horrible,” Jean-René said, leaning in from his far end of the table. “C’est vachement triste, et ça va continuer à se dégrader, c’est sûr. Si personne ne fait rien, ne dit rien … On va attendre jusqu’à quand? Comme la fois précédente? Non, pas question!”
“Pop music, that’s nice,” Christophe continued, ignoring the weight of the conversation at hand. “And do you have gigs?”
“I do. We do.” Hayes nodded.
“And do you play … what … like clubs?”
Amara spoke up from across the table. “Oh, Christophe, he’s humoring you. Hayes is in that pop group August Moon. They’ve sold a gazillion albums and have quite a following. Of teenage girls mostly.”
“That is you! I thought it was you!” Mary nearly spit out her wine. “I saw you boys on Graham Norton the other day. You were so charming. You made all the girls so happy. My nieces are going to flip.”
“Really?” Christophe was amused. “Are you famous? Is he famous, Solène?” He leaned across to me.
“In certain circles,” I said, squeezing my date’s hand.
“But clearly not this one,” Hayes laughed.
“Boy bands are like the Murakami of the music world.” Amara grinned, pleased with her observation. “No one focuses on the pain behind the genius. We can just look at you and be happy…”
Hayes contorted his face for a moment. “In certain doses?”
“In all doses.” She smiled.
“Thank you for that. That was awfully kind. I think…”
She nodded, sipping from her Vittel. “There’s a lot of good in what you do. You wouldn’t have that following otherwise. I mean teen girls and all their angst and craziness, that is the most difficult age to make happy…”
“Besides middle-aged women,” Mary added.
“Besides middle-aged women,” Amara laughed, “and you’ve clearly cornered the market.”
“No pressure,” he chuckled.