The Blue Bath (14 page)

“Yes.” She smiled. “Daniel Blake.”

“I see.” He nodded. “Here is what I am going to do. I am going to put him in touch with an agent I know in the city who specializes in this sort of thing. Someone who has the collector base to support this type of work.”

Extracting a business card from his breast pocket, he turned it over and wrote out a name and a phone number, speaking as he wrote. “He’s an eager young fellow, but particularly good at nurturing the fragile temperament of the young artist. And this…” He looked toward Daniel’s painting. “… deserves to be nurtured. I am quite surprised that he does not have representation. He is at the École, you said?”

“He was at the École.”

He held out the card to her. “Of course.”

Kat reached to take the card from his fingers. “I can’t thank you enough for this.”

But he was no longer listening to her. Still grasping the card with one hand, he reached up in a fluid motion with the other and touched her cheek softly. His eyes were no longer focused on her, but rather seemed to be looking through her, somewhere into the dark street behind her, his intent gaze impossible to define. She thought she detected the faintest trace of a smile on his face, but when she looked closer it was gone.

Just as Kat was about to fill the silence, he abruptly dropped his hand from her face and relinquished the card. “I am sure that many people have told you that you have your mother’s eyes. As you do. But it would seem that you also have your mother’s eye.”

He smiled. A little sadly, she thought. “Give her my regards.”

Kat had collected her coat and was about to leave when the seventh visitor came through the door. She saw Kat and for the smallest moment her face registered what looked like disappointment, but it was replaced immediately by something else. Something she had prepared earlier.

Elizabeth smiled and made her way across the empty room, pulling at the fingers of her gloves. Kat was struck by how different she looked. Her ample curves swathed in a stylish long black coat, she seemed slighter.

“Kat!” she exclaimed, leaning in to kiss her on both cheeks. “I saw some flyers for the show at school and I took a chance you would be here.”

“I didn’t realize there were flyers done for this show.”

Elizabeth dismissed the comment blithely. “Oh, well, maybe one of the other artists had them done. Never mind.” She smiled brightly, her face flushed from the cold. “I came to see you. How are you?”

“Well,” Kat replied. The word hung in the air between her and the expectant look on Elizabeth’s face until Kat caved. “How are you?”

“Fantastic.” Elizabeth exhaled. “Just finished my paper on Rimbaud. Early, if you can believe that! So now I’m free to have a little fun.”

Kat suppressed a smile. Elizabeth finished every assignment early.

“I’ve come to make you an offer you cannot refuse. Some of us are going to Prague this weekend. If we catch a flight after class tomorrow afternoon, we can be there in time for dinner. Jean-Paul has a cousin whose flat we can use. You should come.”

“This weekend?”

“This weekend.”

Kat pursed her lips in the manner of someone considering something and waited what seemed to her to be the appropriate amount of time before replying.

“Thanks. It sounds fun, but I think I am going to pass.”

“Oh, come on. It will be divine. The flat is in the Castle District. Jean-Paul says it has the most fantastic view of the Charles Bridge and the city.” She grinned at Kat. “If all of that doesn’t convince you, I hear that a certain aspiring senator may be in Prague this weekend.… Who knows? If you aren’t there, someone else may very well snap him up. Come on, what else are you going to do this weekend?”

“Thanks, but I still think I am going to say no.”

Elizabeth paused and regarded her for a long moment. She seemed to be choosing her next words carefully.

“What are you doing, Kat?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you doing? You do realize that you have not been out of Paris since we got here in April?” Elizabeth’s tone was accusatory. “You are barely present in classes and no one ever sees you outside of school. I just don’t get it. You come three thousand miles to Paris and spend all your time locked up in a studio.”

Elizabeth paused momentarily before continuing. “You must know who he is by now.”

Kat held her gaze. “I do.”

Elizabeth shook her head and adjusted her handbag, slipping its delicate chain-link strap farther up on her shoulder. She turned and took a step away, but stopped and looked back, a rueful smile on her face. “Suit yourself. I just think you are going to regret this—not traveling, not taking advantage of being here and experiencing everything.”

As she heard the words, she knew that Elizabeth was right. Paris was meant to have been about her. The program, travel, adventure. Although she was doing well in school, she was aware that rather than immersing herself in it, she was focusing on it impatiently in order to devote the remainder of her time to Daniel.

She had come all this way to Paris only to see the inside of her classrooms and a small studio tucked under the eaves on the rue Garancière. To rush from one to the other through the sunlight on the wide boulevards and to gaze out at the rooftops of the city at night through a grimy window. Paris, which had been her focus for so long, had become peripheral. Certainly her plans for travel had fallen away. Rome, Barcelona, Prague—were all abandoned. She gave them up for something that burned more brightly.

After that day, Elizabeth stopped trying.

Daniel had taken the business card with the name and phone number scrawled on the back in Harry Harper’s angular hand. He didn’t ask how or where she had gotten it. She did not tell him. She had not waited for, nor had she expected, any response from him. She simply wanted him to have it and now he did. Some months later she had seen the card, streaked and creased, under some crushed tubes of paint in a bowl on the windowsill. She had been pleasantly surprised that he still had it.

chapter nine

The downstairs dining room at the Stanhope was more formal than Kat remembered, although she was sure that it was the fault of her memory and not due to any change in the decor. The Mayfair institution remained utterly indifferent to fashion. She was one of only three women seated in the dimly lit room and the only one not clad entirely in shades of black or gray. A tall waiter in a white jacket approached and leaned down into the incandescent glow of the white tablecloth to take her drink order, his eyes catching momentarily on her brightly patterned scarf. After he left, she removed the scarf, tucking it into her handbag. However, she could do nothing about her hair color, which remained an affront to the muted color scheme.

Kat saw there was a message from Jonathan’s parents’ number. Willfully defying the Stanhope’s ban on mobile phones in the dining room, she brought hers to her ear to listen. It was a chatty message from Will, but she was unable to make out everything he was saying. She pressed the phone closer to her ear in an effort to compensate for the distance between the phone and his mouth.

Secreting the phone back in her bag, she waited, cocooned in the plush brown banquette and the hushed tones of conversation, brought low by the ecclesiastic atmosphere of the room. She could actually feel the heat from the lamp above her. In the whispered voices around her, she thought she might have heard her name. She pushed back further into her cushion.

A few tables away, a young couple was seated opposite each other in high-backed, mushroom-colored fabric chairs. They talked quietly in a Slavic language Kat could not identify, leaning toward each other into the glow of the lamp that hung low above the table. The man seemed to be endeavoring to explain something, while the woman nodded solemnly, interjecting the occasional syllable. Although Kat could not understand what they were saying, she noted the way that their hands remained on their respective sides of the table, and how the woman toyed with the stem of her water glass.

She remembered another overheard conversation in a foreign tongue. She and Daniel had stopped briefly at a small café on a side street in Saint-Germain. It was early in the afternoon and only one other table was occupied. A young couple sat tucked against the side of the building. As their voices rose with emotion in the nearly empty café, Kat could not help but hear.

“But you love me.…” The girl said it over and over in French.

Glancing around the empty café, the boy shushed her, half soothing, half smothering.

After some more hushed conversation, the boy left. The girl sat alone in silence for a while, and then rose and made her way out of the café, blinking in the bright sunlight, her tears still wet on her cheeks. Wounded, she moved slowly down the street while people flowed around her. Seeing her watch the girl leave, Daniel asked what was wrong.

“It’s just sad.”

“What?”

Kat regarded him, suddenly wide-eyed. “You don’t speak French.”

He appeared unbowed by her incredulity. “I know enough to get by.”

“I could teach you.”

“I don’t want to learn. I like that I am disconnected. I think I see things differently that way.”

“Perhaps. But speaking another language is also a disconnection. It’s like a mask. The things that I say in French, even the things that I think, are all slightly different from what they are in English, and so while it’s still me, it’s a slightly different version of me.”

He had looked at her quizzically. “There are no other versions of me.”

A slight rustling noise brought Kat back to the red brick town house on Upper Brook Street. She looked up, suddenly aware of a large fur coat motionless next to the table. Long slim claws clutched at its edges. Were it not for the manicure, they might very well have been feline. A waiter appeared and grasped the edge of the low-hanging pendant light above the table, moving it aside to allow the coat and the small, slender woman inside it to slide in beside Kat, trapping them together.

“Christ, it is cold,” Jorie said by way of greeting.

Satisfied that she had been seen in the coat, Jorie divested herself of it, relinquishing it to a waiter along with her drink order. She appeared unfazed by Kat’s confession, delivered in hushed, rushed tones. Kat didn’t tell her everything there was to tell. But she told her some things, which was more than she had ever done.

“Well, of course it is you in the paintings, my dear. I knew that the minute I saw them.”

Kat pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater as the waiter returned with their drinks. “Is it that obvious?”

“Maybe not if you don’t know that you two have a history. After all, it has been a while and even you have aged.” Kat let the comment pass. “Although in future it’s probably best to avoid standing next to them.”

“Do you think Daniel knew what Martin was going to say to me? Do you think he sent him to say those things?”

Jorie swirled the wine in her glass, the bright ruby liquid passing dangerously close to the rim. “Depends. Do you think he could hate you that much?”

Kat looked down, unwilling to answer. Jorie waited, taking a sip from her glass before setting it down on the table. “What exactly went down with you two?”

Kat watched a single drop of Bordeaux slip slowly down the outside of Jorie’s glass, tracing the gentle curve of the bowl, then sliding elegantly down the stem and out onto the foot before sinking into the parched tablecloth, its bright hue immediately reduced to a spreading suggestion of pink, half hidden under the edge of the glass.

“Kat? Hello?” Jorie was waving her hand back and forth in front of her, a vexed expression on her face.

Looking up to meet her friend’s eyes, Kat opted for the lesser of the questions.

“Yes, I think it is entirely possible that he hates me that much.”

“I saw the paintings. Hate is not the emotion that comes immediately to mind.”

Smoothing the folded newspaper on the starched white tablecloth between them, Kat’s hand brushed lightly over the image of the painting of herself on the unmade bed. She turned the paper around so that it faced Jorie. The painting appeared both small and significant inside the bright white circle of light.

“If I asked you how I was different from the girl in this painting, what would you say?”

Jorie raised an eyebrow and then glanced down at the picture. “Well, clothed springs immediately to mind.…”

“Just, please. Tell me what you see.”

Jorie sighed and pulled the paper closer to her, looking intently at it for a moment. “I don’t know.” She pushed it back at Kat. “Young.”

“Can you tell that I’m in love?”

“I don’t think love is an emotion you can see on someone’s face. I mean, happiness or anger or fear, yes. But love? I don’t know what love looks like.”

Jorie paused on hearing her words and laughed lightly. “Maybe that is my problem.”

Neither one of them spoke for a moment. “At the gallery…” Kat began hesitantly. “It was like seeing someone I hadn’t seen in such a long time…”

“Well, yes.… When did you last see him?”

“No. Not Daniel.”

Kat looked at her friend for a moment, considering whether to go on. Jorie regarded her over the rim of her wineglass, waiting.

“Honestly, what is with you lately? It’s like talking to a mute.”

“It’s just that I remember everything.” Kat let the words tumble out of her. “I remember every moment. Every day. Every night. I remember every inch of his body, the way he felt, the way he tasted, the smell of his skin. But even more than all of that, and even more clearly, I remember the girl in the paintings. Who she was and what she wanted and what she knew for sure. And I don’t know that anymore. Not lately, anyhow.”

Jorie was silent long enough for Kat to begin to regret what she had said.

“I haven’t asked you how you are doing. About your mother.”

Kat hesitated, caught off guard by the sudden shift in subject. “Haven’t you?”

Jorie shook her head.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes. I can see.”

Kat sat in the awkward silence. Silhouettes of waiters glided silently among the tables.