The Blue Bath (5 page)

They tried other museums—the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, even Pompidou—arriving at odd hours in an attempt to avoid the summer tourists, but Daniel never took to them. They seemed to overwhelm him in a way that Rodin and his gardens did not. And so they spent much of their time in the garden behind the
musée
, a fine film of chalk accumulating on their shoes from the gravel paths. It was there that Daniel made his first drawing of her on the end pages of Baudelaire. She had fallen asleep under the warm sun, the book prone on the grass between them, and had found the drawing later that week.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME
she started school, in August, they were living together in his studio, under a sloping roof on the top floor of an ancient building on the rue Garancière. The studio, reached by a narrow spiral staircase, was smaller than her kitchen was now. It was not what it had been before for her. For perhaps the first time, she had met someone completely disconnected with her world. They had no mutual friends, hadn’t gone to the same schools or summered in the same places. He came without shared experiences and without references. And because of this there were no second opinions, no background knowledge, and no expectations. So much of her life was shared. But it was different with him. He was hers alone.

She had brought very little with her to Paris in anticipation of a peripatetic existence, and she took even less to the studio. She packed as if she were going on a short trip, leaving most of her things behind in the rue Saint-Honoré flat. She would maintain her address there. There was no need to worry her mother. Her stripped-down existence included her books, some clothing, the minimal toiletries that would fit in the small cabinet above the sink alongside his toothbrush and razor. As time passed, she found it increasingly difficult to remember exactly what she had left behind.

She had spent her first afternoon alone in the studio going through the kitchen cupboard, searching through the contents of the small wardrobe, and even looking carefully among his paints and canvases. Tentatively at first, stopping to listen for footfalls on the stairs or a key in the door. And then boldly. For what, she was not certain. Evidence of who he was or who he had been? Remnants of prior lovers, maybe? But the studio revealed few clues. Most of the stories it told were enigmatic. Mounds of wax on the windowsills and faint scorch marks on the walls. Crimson crescent moons on the floorboards by the bed, and the beautiful, strange cerulean bath. Evidence of others, now known only by the marks that they had left behind.

Daniel’s legacy was already apparent. Dripped and spilled paint was everywhere. The sill of the window was feathered with cast-off brushstrokes—myriad greens and reds and pinks that had fallen outside the canvas. Evidence that an artist had once lived there. But try as she might, she could foresee no legacy of her time there. She would leave no trace.

The bed took up most of the room. Besides it and the small wardrobe, the only other sizable objects were an easel, his canvases, and the paintings themselves, which lived with them in the studio long after they were completed. She grew accustomed to the smell of the paint and the linseed oil. She learned to slip past the canvases as they leaned against the walls and he learned to avoid the stacks of her books on the floor. So many books. Occasionally she wondered how she would ever get them home.

She learned that oil paint dries not by evaporation, but by oxidation. That despite the fact that the paintings might feel dry to the touch just days after they were completed, they could take up to a year to dry fully. She learned that under certain circumstances drying oil paints could generate enough heat to spontaneously combust and so it was important that the studio be properly ventilated. Daniel was careless about this and seemed not to notice when the small room became suffused with the odor of paint. Coming home from classes, she would open the windows, allowing the cool, soft air of evening to permeate the room.

There was much that he seemed not to notice that summer. He had lived rough before and was accustomed to it. For her, it was new. It would have been understandable to think that she took no notice of it either. That she didn’t see the dirty paint peeling in large, rounded flakes from the walls and ceiling, or didn’t feel the drafts coming through the cracks in the windowpanes. That she was unaware of the erratic nature of the hot water or blind to the dark, persistent stains in the corners of the bathroom. But she did notice. She noticed everything that warm, dusty summer. She read Proust and Baudelaire and Rimbaud in their original tongue and fell asleep tangled up with Daniel in the narrow bed, listening to the sounds of mice scratching in the roof above them. Most mornings she woke to feel his eyes on her.

Daniel’s studio was closer to the Sorbonne than the rue Saint-Honoré flat had been. Kat walked to her classes through the Luxembourg Garden, often waiting in the early mornings for the gates to be unlocked. Several times at the start of the term Jean-Paul stopped to offer her a ride on his Vespa, removing his own helmet to proffer it to her, but she declined, preferring the walk.

On her way home in the afternoons, Kat shopped at the street markets, often making her selections solely by color, drawn by heaps of dusty blue plums, punnets of glossy red cherries, and tangerines so bright they seemed to blur at their edges. Each week, she would buy a small loaf of walnut bread from Poilâne, waiting in the queue on the rue du Cherche-Midi with Parisians and tourists alike, feeling the heat from the ancient wood-burning ovens below the street.

Sometimes the food she brought home was all he ate. Other times she would return from class to find it undisturbed—the fruit exactly where she had left it, the bread still wrapped in cellophane. On these evenings, Daniel would surface from his work, famished, and allow himself to be coaxed out for a proper meal. There were only two ways into or out of the rue Garancière, both of which entailed some degree of contortion: around the jutting protrusion of the corbeled chapel of Saint-Sulpice or under the high arch at the rue de Vaugirard. Passing underneath the arch, Daniel never failed to duck as its shadow reached down to brush against him, which never failed to make Kat laugh. They avoided the cafés and restaurants frequented by students. Daniel seemed to know exactly which ones they were.

When she wasn’t in class or after the light was gone they would walk, often through Montparnasse or the endless meandering narrow alleys of the Marais. Regardless of where they went, they never came back the same way that they had gone, so that occasionally she was surprised when she spotted the familiar mismatched towers of Saint-Sulpice or came upon the curved iron fence surrounding the Luxembourg Garden.

Returning from Passy Cemetery one afternoon, they found themselves between distinctive rows of pruned and pleached trees of the Champs-Élysées. Kat hadn’t been there since her very early days in Paris. She slowed down, taking in the fanciful shopwindows where shoes and handbags were animated and elevated to art in opulent displays. The wide windows also provided brief glimpses of their reflections sliding across the glass. She stopped to admire a quartet of intricately beaded minaudieres hung like sighs above an ocean of scarlet silk tulle. After a moment Daniel’s reflection appeared among the waves, arms crossed impatiently where he stood just behind her.

Maybe it was the slight downward slope of the pavement, but Daniel quickened his pace as they moved toward the place de la Concorde. He seemed eager to leave the shops behind, steering them off the broad boulevard, past the Grand Palais and then over the Pont des Invalides just as it swallowed an open-topped tourist boat headed downstream. Daniel eyed the shadows cast by the bridge across the water below.

“Let’s go to Rodin. There’s time.”

The wind had picked up and the rows of chestnut trees in the esplanade in front of the Invalides swayed in languid, exaggerated waves, releasing showers of late petals that clung to her hair and his shoulders.

It was Wednesday, so the
musée
was open late, but they arrived just before closing time, entering under the stern eye of the guard. She thought that he should know them by now. As they settled themselves on a wooden bench, Daniel reached down to retrieve a brown stone from the gravel, placing it in his palm and peering at it curiously before holding it out to her.

“A snail. A live snail,” she clarified, the latter being the more surprising reality.

She could see its horns waving just inside the shell. Daniel placed it in the grass beside a bed of tulips. Kat watched the variegated blooms sway forward in the wind in extended arabesques, as if to get a better view of the tiny creature.

“You think he’ll be safe there?”

“You want to take him home with us?”

“I feel like we should put him on a plane. Get him out of Paris.”

Daniel laughed and she lay back, settling her head in his lap and watching the long shadows spilling across the lawn. Over his shoulder, unseeing Eve stood mute with her barely rounded belly. Daniel’s hands moved in her hair.

“They don’t rust?”

“Hm?” He glanced down at her briefly, his hair falling into his face.

“The bronzes. They don’t ever rust?”

“I don’t know.”

She squinted up at him. “Really?”

“It’s not my medium.”

“You seem to know a lot about them.”

He shrugged. “I mostly know what I can see.”

“And what is it that you can see?”

She could tell he was smiling before he turned his face back down to her.

“You.”

Beyond him the gilded dome of Les Invalides and the distant spire of the Eiffel Tower were visible over the top of the wall. She shivered, thinking perhaps winter was crouched just beyond the wall as well. He moved his hands to her bare shoulders and shifted underneath her.

“It’s not always going to be like this, you know.”

“Like what?”

“I know this isn’t the kind of life you’re used to.”

Before she could respond, he continued. “The paintings I’m making of you are the best work I’ve ever done. I used to believe it was all craft—all hand and eye. Subject was almost irrelevant. But with you I can see things that I never could.” He leaned in closer, blocking out the surrounding garden. “I can see a future for us. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I don’t want to look away.”

“I don’t want you to look away.”

And in that moment she saw that they were like the others. Two frozen figures inside the fluttering whole. Here in this sacred place of ordinary moments around which the world turned, they had become the art. And in that moment she knew that it was true.

The quick, purposeful footsteps of the approaching guard emerged from the silence and she sat up. Closing time. Daniel took her hand, still focused on her.

“If you ever doubt my feelings for you, that’s where you should look. The paintings.”

“I don’t doubt.”

“But if you ever do.”

They walked back the same way they had come, leaving the guard behind them to make his final sweep of the grounds, checking among the statuary and between the conical hedges before locking the doors and gates for the evening. The pavement was freshly spattered with the spent finery of chestnut trees, creamy petals heaped along curbs and in corners like rice after a wedding. The wind had calmed, but she felt its steady hand pressed against her back, hurrying her along.

*   *   *

E
LIZABETH HAD ARRANGED
to meet her for an early drink in the bar at the Ritz Hotel. Emerging from the arcaded passage of the rue de Castiglione, Kat found the place Vendôme transformed into an enormous sundial, bisected by the shadow of the bronze column at its center. Age and oxidization had covered the unlikely gnomon in a soft green patina. It struck her that somehow the shadow falling across the cobblestones and up the face of the building seemed more solid than the thing itself.

Spying Elizabeth nestled in a cozy chair against the interior wall of the sparsely populated bar, she made her way past the grand piano and across the expanse of patterned carpet. The weather was warm and the doors to the terrace were open. Elizabeth greeted her with the customary double cheek kiss and pushed a menu across the table at her. As Kat opened it, Elizabeth regarded her coolly, fingers tracing the edge of her collar, feeling for loose threads.

“So, as the spurned roommate I feel I am entitled to ask. What exactly is going on with this one?”

Keeping her eyes on the menu, Kat couldn’t help but smile.

“Which one is that?”

She could feel Elizabeth’s frown.

“How much do you know about him?”

Kat ignored her, continuing to peruse the menu instead. She noticed how quiet it was. People here spoke in the muted voices of those accustomed to being listened to.

“Every artist has a day job. Do you even know what his is?”

Kat thought fleetingly about Elizabeth and Jean-Paul closing the door behind themselves and Daniel in Jean-Paul’s flat. She looked up at her roommate, meeting her eyes.

“Do you?”

Elizabeth leaned forward and glanced around the bar in a way that almost made Kat giggle. “He may not be who you think he is.”

Kat leaned in, mock conspiratorially. “Who is he?”

Elizabeth’s voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Let’s just say, he may run with our crowd, but he is not one of us.” The girl raised an eyebrow emphatically and sat back in her chair, casting a brief critical glance at her fingernails. Finding them wanting, she frowned and began to pick delicately at them.

“Maybe I like that.”

Elizabeth looked up at her and sighed heavily, overcome by either the state of Kat’s situation or by the condition of her nails. “Don’t get me wrong, Kat—I can see the attraction.” She smirked wickedly before regaining her composure and continuing. “But this is not someone who you have a relationship with. A fling—sure. But don’t kid yourself that this is going somewhere. He is collecting you. You are a pretty thing he can put on canvas. There were more before you and there will be many more after you. All I’m saying is don’t get hurt. And don’t throw away your scholarship.”