“That it is.” I smiled over at him.
As always I was aware of the eyes on Hayes. Poufy curls, skinny jeans, boots. A walking exclamation mark. But for the first time, and I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination, it seemed that people were looking atmeas well.
When we finally snaked our way over to the Sadie Coles booth to see Urs Fischer’sSmall Raininstallation—a thousand cartoonish green plaster raindrops suspended from above—I leaned into him. “We’re a blind item.”
“You and I?”
“No, you and some other chick you were with the last couple of days in Miami.” I paused. “You weren’t with some other chick the last couple of days in Miami? Right?”
He smirked. “I’m trying to imagine when I would have squeezed that in. Perhaps when you passed out after your eighth orgasm? I slipped out and headed over to Soho House to see what troubleI could get into. By the way, that, I think, might be our new record. Although I can’t truly take credit for the first two because you were pretty much on your own… Can we do that again, tonight?”
“Can we not discuss this here?”
“You’re being very short with me.” He smiled. “Almost as short as this dress.”
“I’m a little on edge.”
“Because of the blind item?”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly. “Can I give you some advice? Ignore it. It’s going to get worse. It’s going to get really bad.”
I turned to him. “What do you mean? How bad is it going to get?”
“It’s going to get bad.”
Up until now I had assumed the worst that could happen was Isabelle finding out and losing her mind. And I had barely survived that. I could not envision how anything could possibly be more traumatic. Clearly, I had just been naïve.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me? You’re just going to send me out into the world with your psychotic fans and tell me, ‘It’s going to get bad, just ignore it’?”
He smiled, but there was something sad in his eyes. “Solène,” he whispered, taking my hands. “There’s no instruction manual for this. We make it up as we go. Here’s the deal: I don’t talk about my private life. Ever. I don’t release statements. I don’t comment on it. I don’t discuss it in interviews and I don’t address it on social media. You can choose what you want to do, but I find that’s the best way to deal with it. Otherwise, you’re just giving them fodder. Let them speculate. People are going to say a lot of things. Most of them will not be true. And much of it will not be nice. But you have to be strong enough to not acknowledge or address any of it. If you can ignore it completely, that would be best. But if you can’t, you just have to remember that these are people who don’t knowyou and don’t know me. And for the most part they’re just making things up to sell advertising. Got it?”
I nodded.
“And whatever you do, never ever, ever read the comments.”
“Okay.”
“You look terrified.” He smiled.
“Because Iam. I wish you’d told me all this before.”
“Before when? Before you started falling in love with me?”
“Who told you I was falling in love with you?”
“It’s just a hunch.”
“It was the eight orgasms that gave it away, wasn’t it?” I deflected. My eyes were threatening to tear. There, among raindrops the size of pears, in the middle of Art Basel. “Fuck, Hayes.”
“Shhh.” He held my head, kissing my cheek. “It’s okay. One day at a time. Today we ignore the blind item.”
“Today we ignore the blind item.”
When we returned to our booth, Lulit was in the midst of showing theInvisibleinstallation to a curator from the Whitney. They were deep in conversation about Anya’s work: part of a larger series of striking black-and-white portraits shot with either extremely high or low exposures, so her subjects, all women, were either blown out or reduced to shadows, both effectively rendering them near invisible.
“Lulit is soundingvery serious.” Hayes came up behind me, close.
