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 thereispain 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’shumoring you. Hayes is in that pop group August Moon. They’ve sold a gazillion albums and have quite a following. Of teenage girls mostly.”
“Thatisyou! I thought it was you!” Mary nearly spit out her wine. “I saw you boys onGraham Nortonthe other day. You weresocharming. You made all the girlssohappy. My nieces are going to flip.”
“Really?” Christophe was amused. “Are you famous? Is he famous, Solène?” He leaned across to me.
