The Blue Bath (6 page)

“I’m not throwing anything away.”

“You haven’t told your mother about him.”

Kat looked up at her sharply.

“She calls. I am just suggesting that you might ask yourself why.”

In truth, it was a question she had been asking herself recently. Kat wrote her mother every week. Carefully crafted missives composed during classes as her professors discussed the intricate, nuanced worlds of Baudelaire and Sartre. The letters were filled with detail about her studies and about Paris. Artful renderings of a truth very nearly lived. Carefully skirting around the edges of him, so close as to nearly graze his skin. Almost. But not quite.

So carefully had she excised him from her daily life that she wondered whether her mother could see his outline framed on the page. Bordered by the beauty of the city and the small moments that she glimpsed on her way to and from him.

But her mother’s letters to her betrayed no hints of suspicion. No probing questions or veiled innuendo. They were not in contact as often as they always had been before. She could sense her mother giving her space. Holding back and allowing her to enjoy and explore on her own.

It had been the two of them for as long as Kat could remember. As the only child of an only parent, Kat had been spoiled by her attention and her interest. Her father had died before she was born. He was older than her mother. Their wedding had followed a whirlwind courtship of just three months. His family had disapproved of the match and had demonstrated their disapproval by cutting him off financially. They had been married for just over a year when he had been killed in a car accident. Two weeks afterward her mother had found that she was pregnant.

Kat looked up to find Elizabeth regarding her, suddenly still. “Do you know how they say love at first sight in French?”

“
Coup de foudre.
Bolt of lightning.”

Elizabeth shook her head sadly, her blond hair, newly cropped into a tidy bob, swinging forward to touch each cheek in turn. “Some things are just not built to last. That which burns brightest…”

That afternoon Kat took the long way back to the studio. Maybe Elizabeth was right about Daniel. They were both strangers in Paris. She knew little about him. She knew that he had left art school in London, and eventually made his way to Paris. He had been studying drawing and painting at the École Nationale, but had left that program as well. Artistic differences being the only explanation he provided. He had told her that his mother had died when he was a child. But other than that, he didn’t speak much about his family or his past.

When she turned onto Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the wide, light-filled boulevard ahead of her seemed to go on forever, extending past the horizon. The illusion was beautiful. She stopped at Les Deux Magots, where she sat surrounded by the strained and stilted sounds of the tourists’ elementary French. Watching the shadows of tiny birds’ feet on the awnings above her head, she thought that she knew the city from the inside. That while she might not know its face, she felt its beating heart every night in her ear.

chapter four

“Let me understand this. In all the hours that we’ve spent discussing my storied love life, you never thought to mention your dalliance with the famous artist?”

Jorie’s disgust showed clearly on her face.

“In my defense, he wasn’t famous when I knew him. And, until yesterday, I wasn’t even aware that he was famous now.”

On the word “famous” the waitress glanced down at her momentarily as she deposited their porcelain cups on the small, round marble-topped table. They were sitting by the back window in the small French café on Thackeray Street in Kensington. The air inside smelled like strong coffee and warm butter.

“
Merci
,” Jorie said, dismissing the waitress with a little wave.

Jorie spoke French to anyone who was not immediately identifiable as English. As it turned out, this was a great many people, including anyone who had not yet spoken to her.

Kat had acquired Jorie at a party during her first year in London. At the time, Jorie had been married to one of Jonathan’s clients. Jorie had approached her early in the evening, confiding that she had forgotten how dishy her husband was. She had then asked Kat what besides his good looks she found appealing about Jonathan, wondering aloud what was behind his “robot-like exterior.” After a few glasses of champagne, they had ended up talking in the kitchen until long after most of the guests, and indeed the caterers, had gone. Jorie perched on the edge of a countertop, whippet thin, her delicate legs like two matchsticks tipped in Louboutin red. When they parted, Jorie had told her that although she liked her, she simply didn’t have women friends, as she found little use for them and disliked the competition.

On the cab ride home, Jonathan had inquired about their conversation, expressing surprise that they had found so much to talk about and suggesting, half teasingly, that Jorie was a bad influence. She had asked him what he knew about her, what she was like.

He had frowned, considering for a moment before answering. “Sharp.”

“She didn’t strike me as the particularly brainy type.”

“Not clever sharp. Actual sharp. Pointy. Spiky.”

They had continued to run into each other at social events over the next few months and always enjoyed each other’s company. And so, despite intentions, they had become friends.

Jorie leaned forward, hands cradling her cup. “I’m picturing it now.… Young, provincial American girl. Brooding French artist type. Tell me more.”

“Not to mess with what you’ve got going on there, but actually he’s British.”

“I can work with that. Did you love him?”

“Yes,” she answered immediately. And then, “As much as you can at that age.”

“But that’s the only age when you can truly love someone. After that is when it gets complicated.”

“I don’t believe that. I wasn’t even sure of who I was then. I wasn’t fully formed.”

“Ah, first love.…” Jorie looked wistful for a moment, an emotion that seemed incongruous on her sharp features. “Doomed by definition to fail. And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

It was a lie, of course. Not that she thought about him often, and it was never really a fully formed thought. But sometimes, maybe twice a year, she was blindsided by a memory. Mostly, it was the silences that reminded her of him. The absences.

There weren’t even the usual artifacts of a love affair to trigger her recollection. She had no photos of him. No letters. No gifts or souvenirs. Just his drawing in the back of the book. Unsigned. Undated. Scant and accidental evidence of a significant passion.

Because of the lack of any real relics—with the exception of the drawing—she relied solely on memory to take her back to that time. She indulged in it very sparingly, though, aware of the delicate nature of memories and of how every time we take them off the shelf to examine them, we change them. We take something away with us or we add a little of whatever is on our hands or in our heart at that moment.

Jorie leaned forward again.

“And the sex?”

Kat looked down at the worn floorboards, blushing at the sudden memories. “We were nineteen.”

“I remember nineteen.” Jorie hesitated for a moment. “Just last Friday I was on the Eurostar and this buttoned-up banker type was seated across from me. The kind you want to unbutton.” She licked her lips. “And he looked right through me. No reaction whatsoever.”

She paused to consider this, frowning without the aid of the muscles in her forehead. “I think that might have been it for me.”

“Might have been what for you?”

“You know.” She looked pointedly at Kat, licking the froth off her spoon before setting it down beside her cup. “Every woman has that moment. When you suddenly realize that men no longer look at you with longing or desire.”

Kat chose a polite smile, rather than responding to the deliberate slight.

Jorie’s face grew thoughtful. “And then, of course, once you realize what has happened, you desperately try to recall that last time. The tragedy of it is that you never know when it’s happening that this will be the last kiss, the last touch, the last whispered indiscretion. You don’t have the chance to savor it.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The walls glowed pale yellow with reflected light. It was late morning and the café was nearly empty. Just a few Parisian expats in search of the smells and sounds of home. The two women behind the counter maintained a constant, lively conversation in French as they arranged new pastries in the display case. Kat half listened, catching bits of it. Her French was not what it had once been.

Kat considered the possibility that perhaps she had had her moment as well. It had been in her forties that her mother had lost her looks. At least her more obvious looks. She was always beautiful, with her singular, regal grace, not to mention the flame-colored hair that Kat had inherited. But the kind of raw, undeniable beauty that catches the eye of strangers the way a nail catches a thread—that had waned. Kat was coming up on forty herself. She could see it most around her eyes—the beginnings of a vaguely tired look. She wasn’t being dramatic. She knew she was still pretty. But for the first time, she truly understood that she wouldn’t be pretty forever.

She saw it in her friends as well. And, inevitably, the drastic measures had begun. The peels and the lasers and the injections, the nips and the tucks. Better living through science. But what science could not erase was the knowledge that the process had begun. And once begun, although its progress might be slowed, it could not be arrested.

Jorie sighed. “And so then I suppose the question becomes, what do you do now that no one is looking?”

*   *   *

L
EAVING
J
ORIE LINGERING
over a second café au lait, Kat stepped outside and dialed Jonathan’s parents, hoping to catch Will. She did. Breathless, he told her of the plans to build a dam across the small stream at the bottom of the garden. She listened to his voice, thin and slightly distant due to his tendency to hold the phone far away from his face. The last time she had heard him over the phone was when she had told him of her mother’s death. He had cried. Small wet sobs she heard on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the days since her return from New York she had been witness to him disseminating the news of his grandmother’s death several times. He had earnestly informed their housekeeper, who already knew; the elderly gentleman who walked his springer spaniels along the path just inside the park, who likely did not know; and most recently, the pretty woman they bought meringues from yesterday at Ottolenghi. After pronouncing the words with deliberate solemnity, eyes grave, he had accepted their condolences.

But even in his careful tellings of it, she saw her mother diminishing for him. He was so young. She wondered what of her he would retain. Kat thought of all her mother’s trips to London. All their time spent together. Countless hours feeding the ducks at the Round Pond, riding the double-decker buses, stalking the fat koi in the Kyoto Garden, catching tadpoles in the pond behind Lord Holland’s statue. What would he even remember of his first real loss?

Kat headed to High Street Kensington Station to catch the Circle line into the City. She came out of Bank tube station and made her way through the imposing shadow cast by the Bank of England and down Throgmorton Street. The morning commuter rush had ended some time ago and all who remained were decidedly late, although they seemed sharply divided between the concerned majority, who flowed along at a quick pace, and the unconcerned minority, who moved more slowly—small solids within the larger sea.

A rabbit warren of small winding streets, the area northeast of the Bank of England was populated with small brokerage houses, boutique investment banks, barristers’ chambers, and smaller law firms. It seemed to her to be an unusual place for an architect’s office.

She had worked a few streets away years ago in one of the older buildings, in a small office that seemed to smell perpetually of tea. In those days, she awoke in darkness, commuted in darkness, worked under the glare of overhead fluorescents, and then returned home in darkness. Any sunshine that might have occurred during the day was obscured behind the silhouettes of the taller buildings in the narrow streets.

It was there that she and Jonathan had first met, while working for the European office of an American investment bank. She remembered a particularly lengthy meeting about six months after she had joined the firm. The negotiation had been tense from the beginning. The bankers were clashing on the terms of the deal and the tempers of the management team of the target company were rising and falling in reverse proportion to the purchase price. Despite that, Jonathan maintained a firm hand on the meeting.

As negotiations escalated, he had jotted something down on a sheet of paper and folded it in half. Still addressing the room, he stood and walked around the table to where she was sitting and placed it in front of her. He frequently did this in meetings to consult with others on the finer points—the regulatory or tax ramifications—of something he was considering. She pulled the note into her lap discreetly and opened it. She read it once and then again. She could hear his voice as he continued to negotiate, calmly walking the target company back point by point. Without looking up, she wrote the word “yes” on the paper and refolded it. She stood and walked around the table to return it to his outstretched hand.

The note had been brief. “Have dinner with me tonight.”

Looking back, she saw how the long hours, the sleep deprivation and travel had created a kind of anticipatory intimacy between them. That overnight flights spent lying side by side, cocooned in semidarkness, separated by three inches of armrest, meant that she was already familiar with his face slack in sleep and the broken rhythm of his dreaming breath. So that she recognized the man who had said to her that night, “I think I could be happy with you for a long time.”