The Blue Bath (24 page)

There were no curtains to close, so she switched off the lights. The vast room seemed even darker against the brightness of the garden lights, which threw lewd shadows onto the walls. Watching his silhouette against the illuminated garden, she let her fingers linger on the light switch and allowed herself to imagine that if she switched the lights back on it could be another life. That they could be together. She let herself believe this for just a moment. All things seem possible in the darkness. Then she thought of Will asleep upstairs. Removing her fingers from the switch, she moved toward Daniel, her silhouette joining his against the backdrop of the garden.

She fought the instinctive impulse to touch him. Martin’s words still rang in her ears. “Myth,” that was the word he had used. Was it all a myth invented to sell the paintings? Had she simply been reference material? She didn’t know what to believe anymore.

“You can’t be here.” She kept her voice a low whisper.

He turned toward her, his face so familiar in the half-shadow, half-light. “I know. I’m sorry. But I needed to be sure you were all right. You’re not answering your phone. You didn’t come to the hotel.”

She didn’t contradict him.

“Look, the press don’t know who you are yet, but Martin says that it is only a matter of time before they find out. He says we need to be prepared.” His words were measured. “I need to know what you want to do. What you want to say.”

“Why would I say anything to these people I don’t even know?” She felt her face flush being made to answer to Martin.

Daniel hesitated for a moment. She couldn’t see his eyes, just the hard planes of his face. When he spoke, his voice seemed disconnected from him.

“What about the people you do know?”

Standing here in her home, with Will asleep upstairs, she was being reminded of her family. She turned and took a few steps deeper into the house, her blood pounding in her temples. Stopping abruptly, she turned and addressed his dark shape before the window.

“Do you really think Martin is looking out for anyone other than himself? Have you ever asked yourself how they knew we were going to be there? At your studio?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were never that naive. A little scandal would bring quite a bit more attention to your show.”

She waited for him to respond, but he was silent, watching her from inside the shelter of the shadows.

“How easy do you think it was to follow Martin’s car?” she persisted.

“Martin’s car? What are you talking about? The Porsche? It isn’t Martin’s car. It’s my car. Why would you think it was Martin’s car?”

“It doesn’t…” She fumbled over her words. “It just doesn’t seem like something you would have.”

“You don’t understand. None of this would be happening for me without Martin. He kept me painting. He kept me alive. I owe him everything.”

She recognized the words that Martin had spoken to him behind the closed door of the hotel room.

“You don’t owe him anything. All of this happened because of you. Not Martin. And not me.”

She flinched at the loud crack of his hand striking the wall next to where he stood. The sound of the fugitive blow rang in her ears. Three separate thoughts entered her consciousness—forced together unnaturally by the impact. The feel of his hands on her skin. Will asleep upstairs. The thin icing sugar of the walls.

“All of this happened because of a sacrifice that I never chose to make. You think this is the life that I wanted? I didn’t choose this life. You chose it for me.”

She could see the tendons in his neck as he moved closer to her. Here then were all the words that had not been spoken in all the hours they had spent together in the past week.

“You never answered my question. Why you did it. And don’t tell me it was what you said at the hotel—because I didn’t have money. I would have done whatever I had to do. I could have changed, Kat. I have changed. You never gave me the chance. You expected so little of me.”

“No!” It came out as a sob, so sudden and ragged that he took half a step back. “I expected everything from you. I believed in you and I believed you—everything you said. You said you wanted to be great. More than anything.” Her voice began to waver, but she went on. “I saw your face. When I told you. I only did what I thought you wanted.”

He stepped closer to her now, his face a mask of barely contained pain. “That was just one moment. That was just the shock of it.” His voice was a hoarse whisper now. “I wanted you. I’ve filled a hundred canvases with moments from that year. How is it that is the only one you choose to believe?”

When she spoke again, she could no longer keep her voice steady. She spoke her words into the shadows. “You don’t know how it ate me alive when I had Will. That in that instant and in every day since then, I’ve come to know just what I have done. Just what I sacrificed.”

Even as she said it she knew that although maybe it had once been true, it wasn’t true anymore. That months often passed now when she didn’t think about it. It had simply grown smaller the further she moved away from it. Even now, she knew that the memories she had of her mother that were so vivid, so immediate, would begin to fade. Imperceptibly at first, but inevitably. And that her recollections would come to be based on photographs, on the repetition of stories, rather than on actual moments.

“I’m so sorry. Tell me what you want me to say.” She was pleading.

“I want you to say that you’ve been pretending. In an empty house, in somebody else’s bed. That you don’t belong here. That you belong with me.”

“I do. I just … I just don’t want to hurt him more than I have to.”

Silence descended between them. He shook his head and looked away. In profile against the garden lights, he seemed only partially there.

“I’m asking you for time. Please.… I just need more time. I have a child.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t.”

Forgive me everything. The three words had reduced the sharp point on the soft pencil to a stub as she wrote them on his sketch pad. She had pulled the ring over her knuckle and laid it on the pad, placing the appointment card from the clinic next to it. So that he would know what she had done. So that he could hate her. So that he would not try to find her. So that he would not compromise.

She took only what she had brought with her. It fit easily into her two small suitcases. It was only as she turned and stood in the open doorway, allowing herself one last look, that she noticed the unfamiliar pattern of stains on the wall under the window. Peering past her abandoned, half-read books, stacked neatly in their piles, she saw the empty space where the painting of the blue bath had been. Having lived with its presence for so long, she was surprised to find that in recalling it she saw it more clearly, more vividly than she had done while it had been there. Its gray-blue hues lingered within the confines of the newly empty space. The smooth, rounded edges of the tub separating the elements of water and air.

And then she was in a taxi in the soft light of dawn, watching the darkness drain from the sky into the Seine. The rain had stopped. And then she was in Charles de Gaulle Airport among the pinstriped men sipping their tiny cups of coffee and the tourists arriving from far away to see Paris in the springtime. And then she was in her seat on the plane.

She felt the wheels of the plane lift off the ground and saw the city receding beneath her, its suddenly unfamiliar boulevards and buildings filling the window. They were no longer connected. She could not touch it. Soon she could no longer see it through the thick double glass as they rose through the clouds. And as new air was pumped into the plane, she could no longer taste it or smell it.

She could hear his breathing in the darkened room and then the ringing phone intruded into the silence, so loud it seemed almost a physical thing. She cast a panicked glance over her shoulder as they stood in the darkness, waiting for the barrage to stop. Without the noise pressing on her, holding her up, the silence that followed felt so empty that she felt as if she might collapse.

He was so close. Unwilling to stop herself anymore, she reached for him. He took a step toward her, but the floor creaked loudly under his foot and she flinched at the noise. A small, instinctive movement. His face had passed into shadow, but she knew from his arrested motion that he had seen her reaction and she was sorry for it.

“I’ll go.” He said it quietly, almost a whisper.

“I’ll come to the studio. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

He reached into his pocket and brought out a curled fist. She extended her hand and he dropped her ring and earrings into her palm without touching her. He looked at her for a long time, his eyes searching hers. All their colors lost in the low light. As his hands returned to his sides, she looked at them and she felt how it was not to have him touch her. She thought about what Jorie had said about not knowing when it is going to end and only recognizing in hindsight that it was the last kiss, the last touch.

He slipped so easily back into the darkness. Seconds after he walked out the door he was lost to the night. He reappeared momentarily under a streetlight—and then was lost to the blackness.

Kat stood unwatched under the lintel. Amber light spilled from the open doorway behind her, lengthening her shadow and drawing her eye to a quickening in the low hedge that separated the front garden from the street. A chaffinch perhaps, or a collared dove. Looking closer, she could make out a small twiggy clot near the heart of the squat shrub. It looked like the outline of a nest. The start of one. Although more likely it was the ruin of one.

She remembered it had been about a month after she had returned from Paris. It was the first weekend of the season at their summer house and she could feel the house expanding in the late-spring warmth after the long winter. Her mother stood in the kitchen, her back to her as she finished washing the lunch dishes.

“I think I know what happened to you in Paris.”

Kat looked up from the book she had been reading. Her mother had not turned to face her. Watching, instead, a lark, in the tree on the other side of the window.

“I think you were pregnant and I think you had it taken care of.”

Kat waited. The lark coming and going on the other side of the thin pane assured her that time was passing.

“What would make you think that?” She tried for surprised, but fell short.

“A mother knows.”

Kat hesitated. Fearful that time itself was answering for her. That the silences contained more truth than her words ever could. She wanted so much to say yes. Yes. You are right. She desperately needed the protection, the solace of her mother. Her grace. Her forgiveness. The absolution of her love. She needed a witness. A savior. And yet equally, she desperately needed her mother not to know what she had done.

“That isn’t what happened.”

Her mother’s eyes remained on the bird. Kat could see it on the other side of the thin pane, moving from branch to branch in a flurry of feathers.

“Would you tell me, if it was?”

“I don’t know.”

Her mother had still not turned from the window. The steam from the warm water had fogged the lower part of it. When she finally spoke, her voice seemed to come from far away.

“I want you to know that I understand. That I know you did what you thought was right.”

She turned and looked at Kat. And Kat looked back into the same eyes that had watched her throughout her life.

“I understand,” she said again.

Kat shifted her gaze to the window. There was no movement in the tree and for a moment she thought the bird had gone, but then she saw it. Detectable solely as a small pocket of stillness among the dynamic branches swaying in the light breeze. Kat watched the lark stay. The human eye is drawn to motion, but in this moment, her eye seemed capable of seeing only stillness.

Kat thought about her mother, at this same window, years earlier. Widowed. Alone. Pregnant. She searched the empty space, straining to see her again. Measuring her loss in the erstwhile silhouette against the window.

*   *   *

S
HE HEARD IT
later that same day as she sat on the edge of the deck, her legs dangling over the side, feet brushing the tops of the tall dune grass below. It was a small sound. A dull thud that contained within it the timbre of something important. Something connected to a larger whole. Although of a similar pitch and volume, it stood apart from the constant, oscillating growl of the ocean and the attendant fretful shushing of the dune grasses.

She found the bird just below the window. It lay on the deck where it had fallen, rendered unnaturally still by the impact. She approached it tentatively. Was it dead? Moving closer, she crouched down and lightly touched a jagged wing with her finger. It did not stir. Lying on the worn boards, it seemed like something discarded.

After a moment, she took it into her hands, awkwardly. Gathering it and re-forming it between her palms. Smoothing the feathers and folding the wings along their natural creases. Shaping it back into a bird. As her fingers moved along the animal’s distal edges, its small, warm stillness bled into her. And in this stillness she was able to feel its hidden heart beating in her hands. It was alive.

She knelt on the hard boards, her fingers gently encircling the bird, conforming to its shape. Only its smooth head was visible above her thumbs, which bent around its throat. As she watched, a single obsidian eye flickered on and gazed at her in her supplicant’s posture. Destroyer. Savior. Captor. The choice was hers.

And within that moment, she saw fully all that was hidden inside her hands. The perfect symmetry of each feather, the curve of its passerine beak, the slender, slack beauty of each furled toe. The small, complete miracle of its being. And at once she opened her hands. She blinked and it was gone. A suggestion of feathers above her flattened palms.

Looking up, she expected to see it in the sky above her, transformed into something different in flight. Something other than what it had been between her hands. Something sleek and sharp—that which drew the shape, rather than the shape itself. But the sky was as empty as her hands. Looking down, she saw a small, bloodless scratch on the outermost layer of the skin on her palm. As she rubbed at its rough edges, feeling for any pain, she remembered that the bird had not struggled. That it was she who had opened her hands. And maybe she was sad. But as she gazed up at the possibility of the empty sky—a shallow, blue division between something and nothing—she was not sorry.