He stood there in black dress pants and a white shirt still unbuttoned, his hair blown dry and uncharacteristically neat. Gone were the boyish curls.
“What are you thinking over there?”
He shook his head, smiling. “I was thinking that you putting on makeup was somewhat redundant.”
I laughed, applying eye shadow. “It’s not a lot.”
“I like when I can see your skin. I like your skin.”
“My skin likes you.” This was not untrue. It may have been Paris, or the change in climate, but it seemed to me that I was glowing.
He smiled, absorbing the process. The liner, the curling, the mascara. “You’re unfolding the flower again.”
“Am I?”
He nodded. “Even though you’re covering yourself up … Watching you do it reveals more of you.”
I put the mascara wand down then, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Thankful that, despite all the reflective surfaces in this gleaming salle de bains, the lighting design was particularly warm. It made my lingerie considerably more forgiving. Although I was not going to focus on that, because forty did not look terribly different than thirty-nine.
“Who are you, Hayes Campbell?”
He smiled, his hands burrowing in his pockets. “I’m your boyfriend.”
“My twenty-year-old boyfriend?”
“Your twenty-year-old boyfriend. Are you okay with that?”
I grinned. “Do I have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.” He’d appropriated my words, which I found amusing.
“Then, yes … I am very okay with that.”
“Come here.”
I inched over to him. I had grown to love his “come here” and where it often led.
He took my wrists in his hands then, his thumbs on my pulse points. “No watch?”
I shook my head, holding his gaze.
“Just as well,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. And then I felt it, a slight pinching on my right wrist.
Eventually, he pulled away and I glanced down to discover an exquisite gold cuff bracelet adorning my arm. A one-inch band of delicate filigree work, Indian in design, intricately wrought and trimmed with pavé diamonds. Arguably the most singularly beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen.
“Happy Birthday,” he said, soft.
My eyes met his. There were a thousand and one things I could have said, but none of them would have been quite right. And so I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him, close. For a very long time.
When we finally parted, I saw it—just beyond his shoulder, and in every corner of the room. Us, multiplied.
malibu
It was not supposed to happen this way. Our dalliance was supposed to be easy and casual and fun. It was not supposed to entail me wringing my hands about how and when exactly to break my daughter’s heart. But that is how I spent most of November. When the group’s first single from the new album was released and it felt as if suddenly they were everywhere. On the radio, on the TV, on a massive billboard on Sunset that made me simultaneously giddy and nauseated every time I drove past. Hayes, six stories high. When Isabelle was listening to “Sorrowed Talk” on repeat and I could not share with her that Hayes had given me six additional tracks from Wise or Naked for fear that she would tell her friends and somehow they might be leaked. Apparently this—leaking an album—was a thing. And I could not share with anyone how somehow their songs had gone from feeling like harmless pop ditties to inspired, earnest compositions. His words, his voice, affecting me in ways I could not have foreseen, profound. None of this was supposed to happen.
They were performing at the American Music Awards. They were scheduled for several days of press leading up to the show, and Hayes arranged to arrive earlier than the rest of the group and rent a house in Malibu for a few days before heading down to the Chateau Marmont to stay with the others.
I’d had every intention of breaking the news to Isabelle before then, but at each turn my attempts were thwarted.
* * *
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I said. We were hiking in Temescal Canyon the Sunday before Hayes’s arrival. She was leading.
“Me, too.” She smiled back at me, eyes alight.
“You wanna go first?”
“I kind of like this guy, but he barely knows I exist.” The words spilled out of her mouth so quickly, it took me a second to register.
And then I panicked. She’d been raving about him since the Sea Change opening. “Who?”
“Avi Goldman. He’s a senior. He’s on the soccer team. He’s like perfect.”
Oh, sweet relief. “That’s great, Izz.”
“It’s not great, Mom. He sees me, but he looks right through me.” She was walking faster now, the narrow path winding. “It’s like I don’t even register.”
“That’s likely in your head, peanut. You can always introduce yourself, say hi.”
“It won’t matter. He only dates cool, pretty, popular girls. And I’m like…” She shook her head, trailing off.
“You’re what?”
“I’m an eighth-grade fencer with braces.”
“Are you trying to tell me that’s not cool?” I smiled up at her.
She stopped walking suddenly, her eyes welling with tears.
“Oh, Izz, I’m sorry … It’s not going to always be this way. I promise you. You will not always feel this way.”
“You can say that, because look at you.”
I hesitated then. I did not want her making comparisons. “What is he, Avi? Seventeen? Eighteen? Boys that age don’t always have the best judgment. They don’t necessarily know what they want or what’s best for them. And even if he did, Izz, he’s not exactly age appropriate. Your father and I would never agree to that.” The irony of this was not lost on me.
“I know. I just hate feeling invisible.”
I hugged her then, close. “You will not always feel invisible, peanut. I promise.”
She calmed down, and after sometime we began walking again. “So what’s your news?”
“You know what? It can wait.”
* * *
And so it was that Hayes was coming to Los Angeles and I had failed him in the first thing he’d asked me to do. And then I failed in the second.
He was flying in on Sunday and picking me up en route to the house in Malibu, and we were going to shack up there for the next three days, cut off from the rest of the world.
And so I’d planned for Isabelle to stay with Daniel. “I need a couple of days to decompress,” I’d said to him, vague. But on Sunday morning he called to tell me he was flying to Chicago last minute for a deal and that he could not take Isabelle after all.
I was irate.
“Are you kidding me? We made arrangements.”
“What do you want me to do, Sol? I didn’t choose this. Have Maria come.” His voice on the line sounded distant, removed. The idea that he would suggest our housekeeper move in for three days, as if she did not have other responsibilities, boggled the mind. But Daniel had grown up with live-in help. Daniel wrote the book on privilege.
“Maria has kids of her own, Daniel. I can’t ask her to sit on a school night.”
“What about Greta?”
“I checked with Greta. She’s working.”
“What is it you’re doing? Where are you going?”
I hesitated. I was not ready.
“Fuck. Is this the kid? Are you planning something with that kid? Solène…”
I did not answer.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “I’m sorry. I would tell you to just drop her here, but … Eva’s sick. And I don’t think you’d be comfortable with that arrangement anyway. I’ll be back on Tuesday—”
“Forget it,” I said. “Forget it.”
Hayes, as I expected, was not so understanding.
Landed.
He’d texted shortly before three-thirty.
Need to talk. Change of plans. Call me.
Will do.
And then, much later:
Fucking paps. Sorry. Ringing you soon.
“Hi.” He called after what seemed an eternity.
“Hi, yourself. How was your flight?”
“Long.” His voice was hoarse, raspy.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. Why? Are we doing phone sex stuff again?”
I laughed. “No. Just wanted to know where you were.”
“I’m in the car. I’m coming to get you.”
“About that…” I said, and then I told him. That Daniel had flaked, that Daniel knew, that I could join him in Malibu for the evening, but that I could not stay because Isabelle would be home alone. And that I could come up during the day on Monday, but in the evening I would have to return again.
He was not happy. “What? What kind of rubbish is that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve been on a bloody plane for eleven hours and you’re telling me you’re not coming?”
“I’m coming. I’m just not staying.”
“Can’t she sleep at a girlfriend’s or something?”
“It’s a school night.”
He paused; I could picture him at the end of the line. Fingers pulling at his hair. “Fuck Daniel.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry … And Hayes, you can’t pick me up here. Isabelle is here and I don’t want her to see you.” This last bit I whispered, from my hiding space, tucked away in the confines of my bedroom closet. This is what it had come to. “I’ll just meet you in Malibu. Okay?”
He took a moment to respond, and even in his breathing I could hear the frustration. “You still haven’t told her? Solène, what are you waiting for?”
“I tried. I couldn’t—”
“You promised—”
“I know. I will.”