The Blue Bath (4 page)

He fell silent. It seemed to have been too many words for him. Perhaps he had run out.

“Is that all?”

He thought for a moment, his silhouette defined by the soft glow of the first light on the bridge behind him. That was not all.

“Nothing great is created that suddenly.”

Perhaps it was the volume of wine. Or maybe the volume of words. Suddenly she felt that this mattered. That she could not let it pass unrefuted.

“What does time have to do with greatness or beauty? So much beauty is fleeting—it’s practically a defining characteristic of it. And what makes you think photographs are created suddenly? It is not just the click of a button. I think the best photographers create the picture in their minds before they ever see it. But then it can take a lifetime to find the precise moment, the right light, the exact perspective. Sometimes they never find it, but they know it is real because they can see it.”

She hesitated. He remained silent. She watched the cold night air playing with his hair. Lifting and then dropping it around his face.

“And really, what is beauty if it is not recognized? All joy comes from that. What could be more worthwhile? What is there except to recognize beauty?”

She looked up at him, watching her though his wounded eye. Then he smiled. Like fire from flint.

The darkness was draining out of the sky by the time she found herself across the wide boulevard in front of her flat. Just as she was about to start across the street, she turned back to him.

“How did you know I wasn’t French?”

He cocked his head at her and she wasn’t sure he had heard her. She took a step toward him and gestured in what she thought was the direction of the Tuileries.

“Under the tree. You spoke to me in English. How did you know I wasn’t French?”

After a moment he pointed to her head.

“Beret.”

Traffic was light at that time of morning and she crossed the wide avenue quickly. As she entered the doorway, she turned back and saw him leaning against the building across the street, watching her. Not in the protective, proprietary way that the boys at home did, waiting to see that she got in safely. In more of a saturnine, almost predatory way, as if the small distance across the street had changed him back into a stranger. Inside, she took the steps two at a time and, reaching the landing in front of her flat, breathless, peered out the window to the street below. He was gone.

*   *   *

S
HE SLEPT IN
the next morning, awaking just before ten o’clock. Something she hadn’t done since arriving in Paris. Emerging from her room, she nearly tripped over Elizabeth, who lay sprawled on her back on the floor of the drawing room, arms resting limply at her sides, head propped up on a pillow. Hearing Kat, she opened her eyes, focused briefly on her, and then closed them again.

“Well, hello, sunshine. And how was your evening?” Kat savored the extra syllables that the girl’s accent squeezed out of the words.

“How was yours?” Kat countered, stepping carefully over her supine form on the way to the kitchen.

“Let’s just say it was the epitome of a great party.” The girl pronounced the word “epitome” incorrectly. As someone who had only read it and never heard it spoken aloud might do.

Elizabeth waited to continue until Kat reentered the room a few minutes later to perch on the chair across from her, teacup balanced on her knee.

“And I couldn’t help noticing that you did, in fact, miss much of it.…”

Elizabeth turned onto her stomach slowly and propped herself up on her elbows, smiling mischievously at Kat, her round face oddly childlike with its smudged makeup and wine-dark lips. Thick tendrils of her hair had worked themselves loose from the bonds of their arrangement and, exhausted from the effort, hung limply down her back. “Last I saw you, you were engaged in conversation with the next senator from the great state of Massachusetts. Lucky girl. Did he get your phone number?”

“I’m sure Christopher Hastings has better things to do in Paris than spend time catching up with people from home.”

Elizabeth looked up at Kat with a mixture of disdain and disbelief. “My God. You have no idea what he is up to, do you?”

“He’s a Fulbright scholar.”

“Not that.” Kat could clearly see that she was trying her patience. “He is interviewing prospective wives.”

“What?”

“Oh, come on.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes, a rash act that proved unwise and seemed to throw her momentarily off balance. Once recovered, she continued. “Even you must know this. He needs a wife or, at the very least, a fiancée before he runs for office. Time is ticking. He identifies suitable candidates and takes them out and sees who he likes.”

“Well, I guess that is what everyone does, to some extent.” Kat blew gently on her tea, still too hot to drink. “Anyway, I don’t really know him. I only met him the once.”

“Well, apparently you made an impression.” Elizabeth rolled over, repositioning the pillow under her head, and addressed the ceiling. “He was getting serious with a Danish girl last summer. She was very, very pretty.” She uttered the last word reverentially. “But then he came to his senses. I hear she took it very hard.”

“You certainly know a lot about Chris Hastings.”

“It’s common knowledge. Anyway, since then he has limited himself to Americans, which is probably wise. Of course, there are only so many American girls of a certain age and family background in Paris.” She twisted her neck sideways and looked pointedly at Kat. “You, my dear, are fresh meat. I bet his family will do a background check on you. You know, your family, who you associate with, all that…”

Elizabeth’s voice trailed off and her hands moved distractedly to her neck, where they came upon a long strand of pearls left over from the previous night. The girl followed the trail of smooth spheres to the clasp, which she squeezed open deftly between practiced fingers. The beads slipped immediately from her and she caught them easily. Pausing, she seemed to consider the necklace idly for a moment, letting it flow from one hand to the other. When she continued her voice had a deliberately blasé tone.

“I wonder if they’ll contact me.”

After a moment, she turned back to Kat.

“When did you leave the party?”

“About two. After that fight broke out. Over a girl, I think.”

“I heard about that.” Elizabeth frowned. “So if you weren’t with Christopher and you weren’t here when I got in … where were you?”

“There was this guy I had met in the Tuileries—who was at the party—and we just ended up walking around the city.”

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow—half curious, half accusing. “What guy?”

“His name is Daniel. I think he knows Jean-Paul.” She hesitated, her cup warm on her knee. “Do you know him?”

Kat looked at Elizabeth intently, but the girl’s face was blank, except for the diaspora of eye makeup fleeing her lids. “I don’t think so. Is he in the program?”

“I don’t think so.” Kat frowned, realizing that she had never asked him.

“I don’t understand. What about Christopher?”

“What about Christopher?”

“You tossed him over for some guy who you met in the park?”

“I don’t think he was ever mine to toss. And anyway, we’re in Paris. Why come here and date boys from home?”

Elizabeth struggled to rearrange her robe, which had become twisted around her legs. Another lock of hair freed itself, landing soundlessly on her shoulder.

“Why? Because that is the world we live in. That is the world we are going back to.”

chapter three

When Kat finally left the flat that morning, the sun was up and the tourists filled the streets. She very nearly walked past him, leaning up against the wall in the exact spot where she had left him earlier that morning. How long had he been there, she wondered. Would he have let her walk by if she hadn’t noticed him?

They spent every day together that week. Daniel would meet her outside her flat in the mornings and they would walk. Along the banks of the Seine, pulled along by the gray-green water. Among the stalls at Les Puces, crowded with furniture and objects of forgotten beauty—mirrors, porcelain, silver, ancient maps of erstwhile places. Through the dark, silent catacombs below the streets, among walls of bone and incoherent graffiti—lamentations of the living or prayers for the dead. Although it seemed they talked about everything, never once did he ask her what she was doing in Paris or how long she would be there or where she was from or even her last name. He made no overtures toward her. To the contrary, he seemed to actively avoid any physical contact with her.

Facing into the sunset on the Pont Neuf at the end of that week, she saw that the Seine was on fire. Orange flames jumped from the waves to ignite the windows of the buildings facing the embankment. The melting blue sky dripped into the river, punctuated by the dots of the boats and the dashes of the bridges. She felt the warmth of the light on her skin and tasted the city in her mouth.

The light was changing so quickly. Feeling the urgency of the setting sun coloring the passing seconds, each different, Kat reflexively brought her camera to her eye. Standing behind her, Daniel moved his hands up on either side of her, pushing the camera down gently, away from her face. She felt his arms surrounding her, his hands on her hands, his breath in her ear. The sudden physical contact shocked her.

“If you really see it, then it becomes part of you.” His whisper made her shiver and he pulled her closer to him. “You can never lose it.”

She had half turned in to him by then. In the moment before she closed her eyes, she saw that the color around his right eye was now a sallow yellow, the last traces of it nearly gone from his skin. She thought that she would miss it—the daily newness of it.

She had never understood how people could kiss that way in public. She saw it all over Paris. Couples in the middle of the pavement, in crowds, pushed up against buildings, coiled around each other. The kind of kiss that could mean only one thing, that led to only one place. The kind of kiss that embarrassed you just to look at. Indecent, insistent, undeniable.

She didn’t think. About the people around them, about whether an appropriate amount of time had passed, or about the importance of making him understand that this was not something that she did regularly. She didn’t think about the larger questions or consequences. She had no idea how long the kiss lasted, but was slightly surprised to find that it was still light out when they broke apart—briefly, necessarily—to cross the wide boulevard in front of her building. The sun had sunk lower and the light seemed somehow to be emanating from under the pavements.

Inside they began the climb up the narrow staircase as his hands moved up her body. They were about five feet from her door. His shirt was open and the buttons on her dress were undone when one of them tripped and they both fell, landing hard and breathless on the tile floor. Her keys flew out of her hand and skittered across the floor. She listened to them bouncing off the railings on their way down the stairwell. And so then, on that particular evening, on the small landing outside her door, with the dust swirling in the waning light that shone through the small round window, the only sound was their breath.

In the weeks that followed they showed each other what they loved. Kat waited for a particularly bright morning and led Daniel over the little bridge that leapt the Seine in a single bound. The chestnut trees along the banks of the Île de la Cité were newly dressed and the wind sent their full skirts waving. They climbed the spiral stone staircase to the vaulted upper chapel of Sainte-Chapelle and stood under the soaring windows, the web of intricate, slender tracery all but obliterated by the sheer volume of radiance, any narrative shattered into pieces of pure color. Daniel stood silently, watching shafts of light illuminate faithful and unfaithful alike in otherworldly hues of rich red and blue. Kat watched his face.

Daniel took her to the Musée Rodin, sacred temple of flesh and stone. They stood together at the edge of a lofty room of bronze figures enlivened by various shades of patination. Sunlight from the unshuttered windows fell in long yellow stripes across the floor. She made a move toward the next room, but he took her hand to stop her.

“Watch.”

They waited, their backs to the window, as still and silent as the permanent residents, as the crowd filtered by. After a few moments, a wary-looking teenage girl entered the room and approached a felled bronze figure. Daniel shifted his weight from one foot to the other, nudging Kat softly with his shoulder. Kat watched the girl’s hand find the edge of the plinth and slide along the rough stone base, a somnambulist fog rising in her eyes as her fingers found the dark ankle before her and moved along the leg to the knee, tracing the smooth torsion of the burnished limb.

“It never takes long,” Daniel whispered. “They can’t help themselves. It’s instinct. Or compulsion. Something.”

As he spoke, Kat watched the girl’s other hand rise from her side and move over the dark metal figure. Alarmed, Kat glanced around the room, but no one seemed to be taking any notice. The girl continued to run her hands over the sculpture for several seconds, before bestowing a final pat on it and moving on. As they followed her out of the room, weaving among the dark figures, Kat understood completely. Who could resist the potent vitreous sensuality of their arched backs and outstretched limbs?

They wandered among the life-size casts in the walled garden behind the
musée
, the square and solemn thinker on his high perch; heavily draped Balzac, disappearing under his vestments; the six barefoot burghers. Daniel pointed out the slight seam lines where segments had been joined together and how some of the figures had identical heads, hands, and feet, modified only slightly by position or expression.

Of course it was only fitting that there be an Eve in this Eden. Head lowered, face hidden in shame after the fall from grace, she appeared rough and unfinished. Daniel explained that the story was that Rodin had been unable to complete the work, as his model had become pregnant and run off to Italy with one of his apprentices.