The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  If ever.

  Bennett’s father studied me. A long beat of silence passed. “You are a romantic, Evangeline.”

  “And so are you, I believe,” I told him.

  One of Zelda’s musician friends came up to the appetizers table. “Hey, Evangeline, who did your catering today? Great food.”

  “Thanks.” I set down my wineglass and pulled out my phone. “Hmm, I don’t have it on here. Put in your number and I’ll text you their contact info—we have it on the fridge somewhere.”

  Once she’d entered her number, I excused myself and went to the kitchen. After I sent her the text, I turned around and was half startled to see Frances Somerset in the kitchen with me. “You need something, ma’am?”

  A word, most probably.

  “I hope you won’t think me terribly nosy, Evangeline,” said Mrs. Somerset, “but would you mind telling me the provenance of your ring?”

  A frisson of excitement shot up my spine. Even though I had mixed feelings about the ring, I’d put it on my right index finger as a sign of solidarity. But since I’d had a glass of wine in that hand most of the time, she probably saw it only a minute ago, when I finally set down the wineglass.

  “This? It’s a present from Bennett.”

  She inhaled audibly.

  “But it’s not an engagement ring,” I hurried to reassure her. “He just wanted me to have it.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Is it a family heirloom? If it’s meant to stay in the family I’ll be happy to return it. I don’t wear jewelry in any case—lab protocols and all that.”

  “Oh, no, absolutely not. Please keep it.”

  Before I could ask more questions, Mrs. Somerset patted me on the hand and left the kitchen. I looked at the ring for some time. When I returned to the living room, she had disappeared, though her husband was still there, talking to a musician.

  Zelda, too, was nowhere to be seen.

  The next time I saw Mrs. Somerset was twenty minutes later, right before she and her husband said their good-byes. Bennett not only remained to the end of the party, but stayed on afterward to help us tidy up. Zelda kept glancing at him—and then to my ring—Zelda, who didn’t normally pay much attention to accessories. When we’d put everything away she invited Bennett to stay for dinner, but he declined, saying he had to get ready for his shift.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said.

  “What do you think?” he asked, buttoning his coat outside the door.

  It was late in the afternoon. A few flakes of snow were again drifting down. One caught in the palm of the glove he was pulling on.

  “Your mom doesn’t care. You could release a sex tape at this point and it wouldn’t faze her.”

  “I don’t have a sex tape—shocking, I know.”

  “Color me staggered. As for your dad, he might be all right too if he took my advice and saw the exhibit.”

  Bennett arched a brow. “You recommended that they go see my bare ass?”

  “I recommended that they ignore your bare ass and look at the other pictures.”

  “You were looking at other pictures? My ass couldn’t hold your attention?”

  I flicked him on the front of his coat. “You’ve always known that deep down I’m a pervert who would rather look at your face than your ass.”

  His expression was one of mock horror. “My God, are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse already running loose in Times Square?”

  “Would you notice if they were?”

  He smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and started down the front steps. But then he turned around. “There’s something you want to say to me?”

  There were indeed things I wanted to say to him—Bennett was ever perceptive this way. “I worry that you and your dad have come to an impasse. The pattern is becoming clear. Your mom and I arrange these meetings. You and your dad show up—and proceed to make absolutely no progress.”

  But his making no progress with his father was what kept us going, said a part of me. What if he actually took my advice and succeeded? What would happen to us then?

  I pressed on. “You can keep meeting like this, but unless one of you comes right out and says those words—’I missed you. I’m sorry. Can we be a family again?’—I’m afraid nothing more will happen.”

  His scarf whipped in a gust of wind. “And you don’t think he’ll ever say those words.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not in his confidence. In fact, I can’t even be sure whether he meets us because he wants to or because your mom drags him along. I only know that you want this reconciliation. A lot. So you need to ask yourself, if you can’t have it on your terms, do you still want it?”

  He was silent a long moment, and then he raised the collar of his coat. “Let me think about it.”

  “I GAVE BENNETT THE FELLOWSHIP of the Ring to read,” Zelda told me when I came back into the living room.

  “Peddling your drug of choice again, I see.” I gave her a rub on the shoulder as I passed her on the way to our fireplace. The chill outside had been arctic and I was in need of warmth.

  “I told him once he’s done with all three books, he can join us for the marathon.”

  Our annual The Lord of the Rings movie marathon fell on Black Friday. We didn’t really do Thanksgiving—it wasn’t a holiday that Zelda had grown up with. But for the movie marathon we pulled out all the stops: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, and so on, in honor of the food-mad hobbits.

  “That’s planning really far ahead,” I said. “Black Friday is nine months away. How do you know Bennett and I will still be going out by then?”

  “Well, he gave you a ring.”

  So she had been talking to Frances Somerset, as I’d suspected. I gave the ring a turn. “It’s not an engagement ring.”

  “But it’s an important ring—Frances told me a good bit. In the family, it’s referred to as the Tremaine ring. Bennett’s great-great-grandfather, who was the Marquess of Tremaine before he became the Duke of Fairford, gave it to his fiancée. The marriage didn’t begin well—they were separated for ten years. But eventually they reconciled and had a long and happy life together, so the ring is considered lucky.

  “For years, Bennett’s grandmother had the ring. But after she died, nobody knew where it was. Until now.”

  “Still, it’s just a ring.”

  But even as I spoke those dismissive words, my heart, which had been everywhere this weekend—blocking my airway, down in my toes, or just plain careening about—settled back in place.

  My hypothesis was not wrong. And while Bennett might not have proposed, this was nevertheless a significant pledge on his part.

  We were together and we would continue to be together.

  “And I still have doubts about the movie marathon.” I smiled at Zelda, my heart as light and airy as the world’s most perfect soufflé. “After all, you told him he had to finish the books first. That could take him years.”

  Chapter 15

  THE MEDIA STORM STARTED TO taper off a few days into the week—Moira was already dead, Bennett wasn’t himself a celebrity, and these days nude pictures were a penny a gross. Bennett reported that his colleagues mostly took it easy on him—it helped that he’d already been at the hospital eight months and proved that he wasn’t a flake. He also reported some wackier outcomes, like getting offers to show his junk, to star in actual porn, and to peddle a line of high-end dildos—though not at the same time.

  And, of course, proposals and propositions flew in—from both sexes, domestic and abroad.

  Such things were more or less to be expected. What took us aback was a legitimate bid from a major fashion label, with very respectable money attached, for him to front a new campaign.

  I knew fame had its financial benefits—I failed to realized how much, he texted. If I were a better businessman, I’d have been posting naked selfies years ago.

  Not too late to start, I texted back.

  Same for you.

 
; Given his limited social media presence, online muckrakers scraped other people’s accounts for photographs that included him. I was half-afraid that there would be lots of shots floating around of him being young, drunk, and douchebaggy. Instead what had been dug up were largely from various volunteer missions, with a shovel or a stethoscope, rather than a bottle—or a breast—in his hand.

  Really? Building houses in third-world countries? What’s wrong with young people nowadays? What happened to booze and pussy?

  Booze and pussy happened away from cameras—Mrs. Asquith drove the point home when I was a kid.

  And it wasn’t just his person that did good work; his money, too, hadn’t been idle. His charitable foundation had won awards for experimenting with innovative ways to help people, such as buying medical bills from collection agencies for pennies on the dollar, so that uninsured patients could get out from underneath crushing health care–related debts.

  If ever a man caught literally with his pants down ended up smelling like roses…

  That Thursday I visited MoMA again—partly because I wanted to gauge attendance at the Moira McAllister exhibit, and mostly so that I could see more of his pictures for myself.

  The attention of the media might have begun to move on, but the general public was still turning out in droves. The exhibit was far more crowded than it had been the Saturday before. I finished reading several recent research articles before the line finally moved enough to get me into the Bennett room.

  Instead of being distracted by the acreage of skin, this time I zoomed in on the smaller pictures, the vast majority of which I’d missed earlier. And what should I see but Bennett sporting a plaid shirt and doing something Vermont farmer–adjacent in every third image: digging up a garden, turning a pile of compost, building a bean trellis from scratch—Moira’s backyard must have been fully utilized for urban agriculture.

  I held my breath as dozens and dozens of images piled into my head. How would my psyche interpret what I was seeing? Would it link Bennett to my old obsession? Would I then feel a familiar deflation of interest?

  Nothing.

  Or rather, the only thing I felt was a desire to step over the velvet rope and touch the photographs of my lover. Bennett in the rain, holding an umbrella in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. Bennett sitting on a picnic blanket, his shades down at the tip of his nose. Bennett, his hair long enough to be tied in a topknot, smiling into the camera, a hen under each arm.

  A hen under each arm?

  I was about to send him a mercilessly mocking text concerning the chickens when I spied Rowland Somerset. He had just come into the room and I was near the exit. But the velvet rope–barricaded path was in the shape of a horseshoe, and he stood only fifteen feet away.

  Recoiling.

  There was no other word to describe his reaction. My fingers closed hard around my phone. The young man in the biggest images was a blatantly sexual creature, not at all how any parent would want to see his child, even if they were on the best of terms.

  And then Mr. Somerset was looking around, not seeking out the smaller, more ordinary pictures as I’d asked him to, but studying the faces of the hundreds of people who were all there to see a naked Bennett.

  The crowd pushed me out of the room. I left the museum in a daze, walking into and out of the nearest train station two times before I remembered where I was headed.

  Had I given the worst possible advice? Had I done irreparable damage?

  I MIGHT NEED TO APOLOGIZE profusely, I texted Bennett later that day, from my office at the university.

  He was at work, but he texted me back within minutes. What happened?

  Saw your dad at MoMA. I don’t think it went well.

  I all but gnawed my knuckles as I waited for his response.

  Dad is a realist. He’d have gone to the exhibit at some point, whether you suggested it or not, to see what he was dealing with. And it was never going to go well. So don’t worry about it.

  I exhaled in gratitude. Thanks.

  I’m going back to my apartment on Saturday. Want to come over?

  My answer was short and to the point: Yes.

  OF COURSE, ONE OF THE reasons I agreed to go to Bennett’s apartment was that I wanted to take a good look at his great-great-grandmother’s portrait. Yep, the Marchioness of Tremaine had on the exact same ring he had given me.

  Needless to say, sex was raunchy and all-consuming. Afterward we showered together, had our dinner, and moved to the masturbation couch.

  I pulled out my laptop. I’d texted earlier in the day that I might stay only a short time, because I needed to finish drafting the next paper. He in turn had suggested that I bring work along instead—and I hadn’t needed much persuasion.

  He made the sign of the cross—which made me laugh—before sitting down at the other end of the masturbation couch. Outside wind howled; rain splattered against the windows. But under the big throw blanket Bennett had spread, we were as snug as two kittens in a basket.

  I lost myself in my work. Once I looked up to see my lover typing away on his own laptop. Another time he had a thick volume of medical reference on his lap. But when I was done for the evening, he was reading The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Not just any old copy—we had at least a dozen different editions—but Zelda’s precious, inscribed to her by none other than Professor Tolkien himself. The kind of loan one would make only to a beloved future son-in-law.

  “How come you never read it in high school?” I asked.

  “I was more into techno-thrillers, when I wasn’t busy trying to decide if I wanted to be the next Thoreau.” Bennett peered at me over the top of the book. “When did you get started on them?”

  “Zelda read them to me when I was little, starting with The Hobbit. Instead of playing dolls, we used to play Middle-earth—she was Frodo and I her faithful Sam. And we’d slog our way up Mount Doom to destroy the ring.”

  He set the book aside, went to the kitchen, and came back with a handful of tangerines. “She told me you surprised her with a trip to New Zealand for the premiere of The Return of the King.”

  “It was fun—Times Square on New Year’s Eve has nothing on that crowd.”

  He tossed me a tangerine. “So how come you don’t love The Lord of the Rings as much as she does?”

  No one had ever made such an observation, but it was true: Had I been as devoted a fangirl as Zelda, I’d have been the one urging the book on Bennett, not her.

  “It’s not that I don’t love it. I probably have a better grasp of the history of Middle-earth than she does. The map that came with”—I gestured toward the book with the tangerine I was peeling—”I can draw it from memory with ninety-seven percent accuracy and label all the place names in Elvish, Dwarvish, and Westron.”

  “I don’t know why, but that’s turning me on.”

  This made me giggle. He popped a tangerine segment into his mouth. I wondered how it would feel to kiss him and taste all that citrusy coolness.

  “You were saying?” he reminded me.

  “Right.” I had to think for a moment to remember what we were talking about. “So it’s not the world Tolkien created that I don’t love, but the story, I guess. Or maybe the themes. There is such a pervasive sense of loss in his writing—it’s all about the end of an age, about those who are leaving and not coming back. At one point Galadriel, the Elvish queen, says to Sam, ‘For our spring and our summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory.’”

  Bennett gazed at me thoughtfully. My cheeks warmed. “Sorry. Is that too much geekery?”

  “No, keep going.”

  “There’s not much else. Well, not much else without spoiling the whole thing.”

  “Come on. The books are sixty years old, and I’ve seen enough Internet memes to know that one does not simply walk into Mordor.”

  I chortled. “I’ll tell you a secret: Actually one does simply walk into Mordor. But carrying the burden
of the ring changes Frodo. It damages him so much that he can’t stay in Middle-earth anymore. He has to sail away with the last of the High Elves, leaving behind Sam and everything he’s ever known, because he can no longer bear the pain.”

  And Sam, for all his devotion, could not lessen Frodo’s torment or heal his wound. Could only stand by and watch as Frodo departed over the vast seas.

  Without warning, tears stung the back of my eyes. Hastily I looked up, and then down at my half-peeled tangerine. “I guess you can say I have mixed feelings.”

  Bennett scooted closer to me, took the tangerine from my hand, and finished peeling it. He divided the segments inside, took half, and gave the other half to me. We ate silently. I watched the storm outside—and his reflection in the window, which watched me.

  I felt as transparent as my own reflection. I should have become used to the sensation by now, since we never spent any significant amount of time together without my arriving at this state. But if anything, with repetition the naked vulnerability became more difficult to take, not less.

  When we were finished with the tangerine, he said, “Zelda told me you liked arcade games.”

  I was so grateful for the change of subject, I’d have gone down on him that instant. “Yeah, but I haven’t been to an arcade in years.”

  “Come with me.”

  He led me upstairs to his man cave, which I hadn’t seen before, with a pool table, a card table, and big, deep leather chairs next to two laden bookshelves. I blinked: At the far end of the room stood two old-fashioned arcade video-game machines. Bennett turned them on. The moment the music started blaring, I was swept back to my childhood: sneaking out of the house on Saturday afternoons in a baggy T-shirt, jeans, and a backward baseball cap—so as not to stand out as a girl—and heading to what Pater dismissively called “that dungeon.”

  “My God, what games are they?”

  “Everything,” Bennett replied proudly.

  For all the machines’ retro appearance, they were not actually vintage—and each came loaded with hundreds of different games.