“I was just making some green juice. Can I interest you in one?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Anouk shakes her head, as if irritated. Shifts her weight from one bare pedicured foot to the other.
“Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind.” He smiles, and then turns to leave.
“Come,” she says, taking me by the wrist, and leading me across the atrium and into the office she and her husband share. It’s all greige on greige. Right down to the picture frames. There are a dozen or so photographs throughout the space. Two photos of Sacha, a few family shots (skiing in Aspen, boating in the Mediterranean, trekking in Nepal), a couple Ironman competition captures. But the majority are formal-looking photos of Frederick and Anouk—on red carpets, at galas, with the Obamas at a state dinner for François Hollande. The billionaire donor and “the glamorous wife.”
She pulls the door closed before leading me to the Roche Bobois sofa.
“I’m glad to hear things are still on track. I spoke with Keely, and she’s very excited.”
Keely is the curator from the Hammer Museum. In addition to multiple studio visits, she’s taken the initiative to familiarize herself with many of my past projects, including theFitzgerald Series, a group of conceptual pieces I’d exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2013. AndPortrait d’une FemmeandPortrait of a Man, a diptych that was part of my final project at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
“She’s been wonderful. And the work I did in New York is great. Lots of discussion on beauty and age, beauty and race, beauty and culture, et cetera. It opens up the conversation.”
“Great.” She smiles.
“But that’s not why I came here.” I steel myself, realizing that these next moments might change everything.
She nods, folding her long legs beneath her. She’s in yoga attire. Spandex that clings and accentuates just how perfectly proportioned she is, still, on the cusp of forty. Her stomach flat. Her ass and thighs and calves still firm. I wonder when mine stopped being so. Forty-two, perhaps? Forty-five? Was it all of a sudden, or a slow unraveling?
“Why didn’t you text?” she asks, lowering her voice. “I would have told you that Frederick was home. What’s going on?”
My eyes flit to the window, the view of the circular drive and front garden. The tennis court off to one side. The cluster of olive trees. The well-manicured shrubbery. This contemporary museum on the hill. She was so protected here. In her multimillion-dollar fortress. Who was I to come in and upset it all?
“Something happened with Didier. In Cabo, on that shoot.”
It takes a moment to register, and I see it for a second, a flinch, and then she recovers, giving me nothing.
“I know something happened, Anouk.”
“I blocked it,” she says, eventually.
“You what?”
“I blocked it. Or at least that’s what the therapist said right before I quit.”
“I didn’t know you were in therapy.” I am stunned. For all her mindful-awareness preaching, she has never mentioned therapy.
“I’m not. I quit.”
“Why did you quit?”
Anouk shakes her head, her shoulders. A desire to shake it all off, I imagine. Her focus shifts to the far wall. There’s a painting mounted there. Soothing, meditative. Tiny gray dots on white. Some kind of contemporary abstract pointillism. Yayoi Kusama’sInfinity Nets. Even the million-dollar art here is color coordinated.
“Because I didn’t want to know,” she says. “I didn’t want to remember all the details. Because I have a thousand incidents like what probably happened with Didier. And if I start unburying them all, I won’t recover. I’ll never be able to function. So I say, ‘Okay, I was young. I didn’t know better. I didn’t know I could say no. And now I do, and it won’t happen again.’ But I can’t go back and say no in the past, can I?”
The room is deathly quiet. I can hear the two of us breathing, feel my pulse thrumming in my temples.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
It has taken me twenty years to say these words. I don’t know that she will forgive me. I don’t know that it matters. I just know that it needed to be said.
She turns back to me then. “How are you so sure something happened?”
It takes a minute.
