The Blue Bath

by Mary Waters-Sayer

  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?”

  * * *

  LEAVING JORIE 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.”

  Leaving the wider street, she turned in to the quiet of Angel Court. While the layout of the streets here remained mostly true to their medieval origins, the Blitz had transformed the buildings into a patchwork of old and new. While one side of the curved street belonged undeniably to modern times, on the opposite side, with its low Georgian buildings, fronted by a row of neat black bollards emblazoned with the crest of the City of London, it could easily have been the early 1900s.

  Jonathan’s idea for the company, a forum that allowed financial institutions to trade securities off the exchanges, was beautiful in its simplicity. She thought sometimes that ideas like that could occur only when people were somehow disconnected. That there must be some sort of alchemy, some sort of altered perspective, that came from intervals of forced stillness on airplanes, moving above the clouds at speeds approaching that of sound. These intervals also fed a fever to do more. To move. To make. Jonathan always walked very quickly after disembarking from airplanes.

  It had been a big risk when he had left the bank to start the company. The principals had not been pleased and had declined to make the hoped-for investment in his new venture. Bridges were burned.

  There had been many points, especially during the first year, when they had come close to losing it all. She remembered the early board meeting when the directors had advised them to shut the company down. She had listened in silence as the people whom they trusted the most, whom they respected the most, made the case, methodically, rationally, that they should cut their losses. And then she had listened as Jonathan refused, methodically, irrationally.

  Although it had been difficult and risky, she had enough perspective to know that it had also been quick. A few years of undeniable struggle, of hard work and no sleep, of blood, sweat, and takeaway food, had resulted in a viable, international company that was now listed on the LSE. So much had changed in such a short time. What hadn’t changed was the time commitment. Jonathan still worked constantly.

  She had left the company about a year before Will was born. The fertility specialist had suggested it as one of a litany of other measures. It wasn’t time to worry yet, he had assured them. They had been trying for less than a year and there was still a good chance that they would be able to conceive naturally. “Conceive” was not the word he had used. “Fall pregnant” was what he had said. As if it were a condition, a malady.

  And fall pregnant she had, although it had taken another eight months. And while she had tried to maintain a presence within the company for a time after Will was born, she found that her identity had been compromised. The company had moved to a larger building and the security guard at the front desk insisted on providing her with a visitor badge. The small adhesive rectangle proved prophetic as former coworkers smiled polite, impatient smiles at her and inquired about the baby. She was no longer a colleague, an insider. She was Jonathan’s wife. She was a mother. She was a reflection of someone else.

  Entering the newer building through its polished red marble facade, she took the small lift up to the twenty-first floor. After a brief journey in silence, the doors split apart like theater curtains, revealing the city, spread out in all directions. Her immediate impression was that there were no walls around her, such was the completeness of the view. It was only after a moment that she noticed the reception desk and the presence of the offices contained inside the view and judged it wise to step off the lift.

  She was led through a maze of low partitions and glass walls that dissolved into an immaculate corner office. Protruding into the sky like the prow of a ship, it offered unobstructed views of the city below, punctuated on one side by the pale, cross-topped catenary dome of Saint Paul’s. In the distance she could see moments of the Thames as it slunk through the City. It was low tide and the tiny shapes of birds were just visible as they moved over its wide banks. Turning from the windows, she laid her handbag gingerly on the large glass conference table, watching to see if it would cause a ripple in the smooth surface. It floated there, a singular spot of color in the room. After a moment, she removed it and placed it in the lap of a chair.

  She stood surveying the large monochromatic canvas that anchored the room. Hearing the door to the room click closed, she turned to find a man standing close behind her, small and tidy in his black polo neck and rimless glasses, arms folded and eyes fixed not on her, but on the artwork in front of her.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “I do. What is it?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It’s a Rorschach, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “One of the ten original inkblots. Number seven, in fact. It reminds me that things are as we perceive them to be. That all meaning is subjective.”

  He turned to her. “So what do you see?”

  She turned back to the large symmetrical shape. Almost immediately, a figure emerged within the gray.

  “It’s a woman.”

  “Just one?”

  “Yes. She is looking at her reflection in a mirror.”

  Kat looked at the figures. They seemed at first to be identical. Two articulated halves of the same whole, fused at the base. She took in the slight white spot behind the heart where the ink had not adhered to the paper, noting that this small emptiness was echoed in the other figure. As she studied the image more closely, she began to notice small differences between the figures. Imperfections in the jagged edges and the subtle shadows where the ink had bled beyond the margins of each figure. There was something about the opaque clouds gathered just below the surface that seemed at once ominous and vaguely familiar.

  She turned away from it. “I thought they were meant to be kept secret, so as not to compromise the general population.”

  He looked at her sideways and smiled, his eyes bright. “Consider yourself compromised. Mrs. Bowen, I presume…”

  “Lind,” Kat responded automatically. “But please call me Kat.”

  “Kat. I am Charles.” He shook her hand firmly. “Shall we discuss your home?”

/>   As she settled opposite him at the conference table, she tried to focus on him, and not on the view through the glass behind him. Sir Charles Eliasson was one of the most sought-after architects in London. She and Jonathan both loved his work—minimal and eclectic. A native of Sweden, he fused traditional with modern using practicality and beauty as glue. She had missed the first meeting with him. It had been in the diary for months. Before anything had happened. Jonathan had gone alone because she had been in New York.

  The glass tabletop prevented her from slipping her feet out of her shoes, as was her habit.

  He perched on the edge of his chair across from her and removed his glasses, placing them gently on the table, where they disappeared into the larger glass surface. His facial features immediately receded without their subtle definition.

  “Your house presents an interesting challenge. As a Grade II listed building, there is much that we cannot change. But I suspect that is one of the aspects of it that appealed to you. And sometimes the hardest decision is what to keep, so perhaps this is lucky for you.”

  As he spoke, Sir Charles slid a pile of thick, crisp white paper across the surface of the table until it came to rest between them. Kat glanced momentarily at the drawing on top, a massive, sprawling floor plan—precisely rendered and swaddled in detailed annotation. Replete with swatches of wood, marble, wallpaper, and paint arranged around the edges, it resembled a magpie’s nest.

  “There’s been a mistake. This is not my house,” Kat said, pulling back slowly from the drawing in front of her.

  Plunging his hand into the table to retrieve his glasses, Sir Charles leaned closer to the drawings, peering at them. After a moment he looked back up at her. “This is your house.”

  She looked down again at the busy black-on-white drawing. Slowly, a familiar image emerged from the thicket of computer-drawn lines on the page. She hadn’t recognized her own house. Embarrassed, she looked up at him, not knowing what to say. He leveled a knowing glance at her and after a moment pushed the materials to the side, clearing the space between them.