I spied the attendant a couple of times during the reception, and once, when he offered me a glass of champagne, he had on such a conspiratorial look that I couldn’t help but try to read his mind. He was queer, clearly, soft in both manner and body, his cheeks mildly flushed. It seemed like he got a vicarious thrill from this secret we shared, something the rest of the room didn’t know about. I wondered whether he thought Richard knew, and if the attendant thought he didn’t, whether that was part of the conspiracy in his mind, that we were toying with this straight man together. Because it seemed to me like that was how he saw me, someone pretending, maybe because he saw himself in me and, like I began with Ben, that was how his feeling of connection must have started. But even as I smiled back at that attendant, a nascent part of me already knew that the line between pretend and real had grown porous for me, especially with Richard by my side. The two of us planned to have dinner afterward, but I asked Richard if it would be all right for us to go back to my studio first so I could take pictures there.

When we returned to the loft, I turned on the track lights that illuminated a brown leather couch and chair dividing the darkroom area and the shooting space. I sat on the couch and hoped Richard would sit next to me, but he sat on the chair instead, as we talked about the show, other exhibitions we’d recently seen, and art in general.

“The pictures are going to be beautiful,” he said. It was the closest he’d come to complimenting how I looked, which gave me courage to say the hardest words.

“I wanted to be beautiful for you.”

It took him a few seconds—too long—to respond. “I don’t understand.”

“I wanted you to see me as a woman because I love you.”

His face expressed a mixture of emotions—puzzlement, concern, but not joy, and yet joy was not something I expected. I knew that it would take effort to get Richard to understand that we were meant to be together.

“You know I can’t—”

“We’re so much better for each other,” I insisted. I went over the history of our friendship, how the two of us could talk about anything, how our emotional and intellectual sides were well balanced. What I left unspoken, what I’d tried to communicate through the effort I’d taken, was that I was more beautiful than Lenora, so he wouldn’t have to feel like he would need to make that particular sacrifice to be with me. “I know you feel it too when we’re alone together.”