The Blue Bath (16 page)

The car was small and the stick shift meant that his arm regularly moved rather close to hers, occasionally brushing lightly against it. She concentrated on ignoring this, focusing instead on the interior of the car, which was very tidy. From the lack of personal items or clutter, she concluded that it probably wasn’t his. Rented? Unlikely—such a beautiful and unique car. Martin’s? Possibly. It started to rain. Daniel fumbled to find the windshield-wiper controls.

The scent of the flowers had quickly permeated the small space, the stiff green paper crinkling softly under her touch every time she shifted in her seat. It was her ritual to buy a bunch of lilies every week. She found something so fragile and beautiful, so very unlikely and heroic in the way they bloomed, literally turning themselves inside out. She should have left them at home before getting into the car. Put them in water.

She glanced out the window. By now, they had moved out of the London that she knew well. The buildings here were larger and more industrial. There were fewer trees. Although there was a familiar sense of place, she recognized none of the streets. It seemed as though it was a different possibility of what London could be. She thought that it was always surprising how close the unknown was. How short a distance you had to go from the familiar to be lost. She relaxed. There was no one here to recognize her.

Listening to the steady sound of the rain hitting the windshield, punctuated by the low rhythmic swish of the wiper blades, she surreptitiously studied his profile while his eyes watched the road. His closely cropped hair had hints of gray mixed in with the dark blond. Gone were the long, slightly wavy locks that used to frame his eyes and brush the back of his neck. His face was more exposed and seemed larger somehow, especially in the small space of the car. She had long ago lost any ability to judge whether he was handsome or not. His cheeks were more lined than she remembered and were covered with the beginnings of stubble that was not yet long enough to be soft.

He was more muscular than she remembered. His thighs and his forearms were thicker. He had always been lean and sinewy. She smiled to herself—the starving artist no more. His sleeves were pushed up and she watched the tendons moving under his skin as he changed gears. His hands were the same. His left hand rested lightly on the gear shift next to her. Traces of paint embedded in the creases and under his nails. No ring. She felt for hers. It lay flat against her finger. She used to be under his nails, with the paint.

“You all right?” He spoke softly, but his voice startled her, the stiff paper around the lilies crinkling loudly under her hands, betraying her sudden movement. She looked up to meet his eyes.

“Fine.”

“Almost there.” He smiled, turning back to the road ahead. The corners of his mouth stretched sideways, making creases back toward his ears.

They drove on through Clerkenwell and into Shoreditch with its hulking red brick buildings from another age. Daniel parked in front of a nondescript brick building. A former factory, she guessed. Like many in this area that had been converted into lofts and studios, it deliberately retained its rough edges. Inside, they entered a large goods lift. As they stood on opposite sides of the wide space, she listened to the din of the ancient machinery straining to lift them to the top floor. Stained brick walls slid down the front of the lift—visible between the slats of the cage. Kat followed him out of the lift and as they walked down the tall, wide hall she heard it returning noisily to the ground floor, leaving them stranded in the dusty space.

Reaching into his pocket to retrieve his keys, Daniel stopped in front of a large brushed-metal doorway at the end of the hall. Its surface reflected nothing. She stood apart from him, regarding him from the opposite side of the doorframe with a familiarity she could no longer help.

“So, are you taking me to see your etchings?”

Daniel smiled without looking at her and pushed open the heavy door. Immediately, the smells of paint and turpentine brushed past Kat’s face, making their escape from the darkened room. As they stepped inside, the door swung closed behind them with a heavy thunk, trapping them in semidarkness. Daniel made his way along the inside wall. In his footsteps, she recognized the familiar way sound echoed in large, mostly empty spaces. Seconds later, this was confirmed, as lights revealed a pale, cavernous studio with scarred concrete floors and whitewashed cinder-block walls.

Large fans stood like sentinels in the four corners of the room—circulating air and emitting a low, steady purr that made the vast space seem volatile and alive. As she moved deeper into the room, several intricately colored canvases caught her eye. The largest, resting on paint cans and leaning back against the wall directly in front of her, was a mixture of fine, delicate lines in grays and yellows. It looked like feathers and it seemed to have been made by small, sharp knives. To its right was a winter landscape. The stark outline of tapering branches was shaped solely by what surrounded it—thick ribbons of paint pulled taut against the canvas. A thing defined entirely by its absence. It seemed to Kat to be perfect.

Shrugging off his coat, Daniel tossed his keys on a table. He turned back to Kat and gestured to the paintings, his hand brushing lightly against the edge of the winter landscape.

“You see, I paint other things as well. They just didn’t want them for this show. Martin wanted to keep it cohesive.”

The room suddenly stilled. Glancing back, she saw that he had switched off the large fans. He frowned, shaking his head.

“I can’t stand the noise. Do you want anything?”

She could not help a small smile as she held his gaze over her shoulder.

“Got any pie?”

He smiled back. Turning her back on him, Kat stopped in front of the unfinished winter landscape. Without the fans, the odor of paint settled comfortably around her and she breathed it in deeply. The studio’s large, high windows provided no context. Letting in only light and revealing only sky.

She turned her attention back to the winter landscape. “I think my biggest problem would be knowing when it was finished.”

“That’s only because you can’t see what is missing.”

As she left the landscape and moved farther into the room, Kat’s gaze fell on the low line of a narrow bed crouched against the far wall. Looking up, she saw that the wall was in fact an enormous vertical blank canvas, reaching almost to the ceiling. The lower part of the wall adjacent to it was papered with sketches—overlapping studies of a young woman’s body, held up with blue tape. Pieces of a girl—the curve of a breast, the nape of a neck, fingers wound around a section of hair. Rough and ragged, but alive.

She turned to Daniel, the question in her eyes remaining unspoken. He looked up at the canvas and the sketches, taking them in as if he were seeing them for the first time as well.

“It’s not you. It’s a commission. It’s not certain yet. I don’t know if I want to do it. Martin thinks I should.” He paused. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” His eyes found hers. “But I know you’re good at keeping secrets.”

She turned away from him, taking in the rest of the studio. The long, low tables. The brace of brushes, standing at the ready in their jar. Round, bright, flat, filbert. The words came out of her memory stiff with disuse. The palette knives arrayed on trays like weapons, smudged with the remains of their last victims. Their various sizes and shapes—broad and flat, long with a rounded nose, small sharp diamond. The linseed oil and the smudged and dimpled tubes of paint. Their names long since forgotten, but at once immediately familiar to her—cadmium red light, rose madder, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, yellow ocher. Who said she had not seen Europe that year? She had seen all the colors of the hills above Florence, the flesh of odalisques, the Arno at sunset, and the soft verdant gardens at Giverny.

And the canvases. What she had loved most of all in the studio on the rue Garancière were the blank canvases. Stacked neatly against the wall, they were possibility incarnate. His ability to fill them amazed and delighted her. And what he had filled them with, that long dusty summer, was her. She had imagined that in order for it to be possible for him to transfer her to the canvas, she must exist—if only fleetingly—inside him. She entered him through his eyes and then escaped via his hands. She could feel him take possession of her as he painted her. It was, she thought, more intimate than sex.

For a moment, she watched him moving around the studio, remembering more than seeing the way that his hands remained at his sides, how he seemed reluctant to use them. As if he had seen what they could do and was chastened by it. A deliberate, self-imposed impulse, born of its opposite.

As she watched, he turned suddenly to face her. He reached behind his head and pulled his sweater off with one swift movement, momentarily lifting the shirt underneath it to reveal the bare skin above his waist. The sudden movement and the brief flash of flesh panicked her, and she turned away abruptly. The gesture was so familiar that it felt aggressive. In the silence, she heard the faraway sound of her heart beating.

Turning her back on him, she was confronted by an unfinished canvas propped up against the wall, partially hidden behind an empty vase. She took in the smooth, sleek thighs and the long, impossibly slender waist. The long line of her torso. The improbable red hair against the undeniably white skin. The details of her incomplete body captivated her. Looking at herself unfinished, she saw what could have been as clearly as she saw what had been.

How many times had he traced the contours of her body over these past years? Contemplated the fine hairs at the nape of her neck and the stippled trail of freckles on her shoulders, and recalled the exact way that the lines formed at the corners of her eyes? As he had consumed her in his presence, so she had consumed him in her absence. But perhaps no longer. What was she doing behind the vase? Who was the girl in the sketches? Was she the girl from the gallery?

In an effort to drown out her thoughts, Kat spoke. “So, did you bring me here to paint me?”

“I can paint you anytime I want.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder at him as he tapped his head and smiled. She had forgotten how boyish he looked when he smiled. A real one—connecting the corners of his mouth to his eyes. She smiled back.

“Right. Memory is far better than the real thing, I suppose.”

“Unless I have a choice.”

She turned back to the painting, addressing it.

“I used to wonder what it would be like to see you again.”

His ghost had walked the streets of New York when she had returned that spring. In the wide avenues so full of empty faces, she would feel his eyes on her. She could feel his eyes on her now. After a moment, he spoke. His voice was low, as if he was uncertain whether he wanted to be heard.

“The thing is, you are all that I paint, really. I think maybe you are all that I can paint.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can paint whatever you want to paint.” She gestured vaguely to the canvases on the opposite wall, but did not turn around to look at him.

“Can I?” His voice contained a quiet note of sarcasm now. “How would you know?”

She turned to face him. He was nearer than she had thought. She immediately averted her eyes, looking down at a neat stack of unread newspapers that sat under the table. She remembered the yellowing pages of
Le Monde
that Daniel had used for cleaning brushes in Paris. The distinctive curving type of its masthead brazenly announcing its intent—to bring the world to her. How instead of turning away, she had stared directly at it. Willfully transforming the rounded letters into decoration. Until they became, to her eyes, part of the scenery, dancing black forms dressed in crude smears of color.

She kept her eyes on the newspapers. The words they were saying now seemed to demand a degree of privacy. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I guess I wouldn’t know.”

In fact she knew nothing about his life now or his life for the past twenty years. And yet, she found that she wasn’t interested. It hadn’t mattered then and it didn’t matter now.

She looked up again and he met her eyes. “You know, there was a lot you didn’t know about me even in Paris. You never asked too many questions.”

“You didn’t seem to like questions very much.”

“That stopped you?”

She was silent. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “Don’t pity me, Kat. You didn’t break me, if that is what you think.”

“Of course not.”

“And I didn’t break you.” He looked closely at her, examining her in the reflected glow off the walls. “Didn’t even make a dent. To be honest, sometimes I think I did my best work after you left.” His face was thoughtful. The remark was not meant to be anything but truthful.

“Just as well. That girl in your paintings—she’s gone now.” She felt her words melt into the large silence in the room.

“I don’t believe that.”

And maybe he was right. When he looked at her like that, she wasn’t gone. In his eyes, she was still the girl in his paintings. The girl with the knowing eyes and the smooth skin and the impossibly slender waist. The girl who was all white flesh and red hair and possibility and passion.

They were straying into dangerous territory. She could barely make out the warning signs as they sped past them. She was aware only of the narrow corridor of his gaze, as if there was nothing outside of it. The shadows of clouds moved slowly over his face. She spoke, trying to fill the space between them with her words—but empty and brittle, they fell to the ground as soon as they passed her lips.

“Where did you go after … Did you stay in Paris?”

“After you left? Does it matter?”

He was moving closer to her now. Holding her in place with his pale blue eyes and his still hands that hung at his sides. She knew that maybe she should go. But she also knew that maybe it was too late. He moved slowly. He knew it, too.

Somehow, in this place—with the taste of paint on her tongue and a view of only sky. With the blank canvases stacked against the wall and the thick metal bolt holding the door shut, it seemed all things were possible again.