The Blue Bath

by Mary Waters-Sayer

  She had dismissed their driver early in the day. She seldom used him when Jonathan was out of town. Instead, she caught the number 9 bus to Mayfair. It was nearly full and she took a spot standing by the back door. She kept her long coat pulled tightly around her, hiding her dressy clothes. She very rarely bumped into anyone she knew on the bus in London. She felt that it was her own little secret world of public anonymity.

  Two young women got on at Palace Gate, tottering on spindly heels, talking animatedly about a party. Kat wondered briefly what she was doing, thinking that Jorie must have talked her into it and reasoning that she was just curious about his work. And maybe he wouldn’t be there at all. Daniel had never liked openings.

  An older woman in a bright red coat boarded at Exhibition Road and took a spot by the door, her long neck hidden under the folds of an expertly arranged Hermès scarf. Kat watched her as she swayed gracefully in sync with her fellow passengers as the bus stopped and started its way through traffic on Kensington Gore, her fluid movements elevating them to a corps de ballet.

  Her mother had loved spending time with them in London, visiting so frequently over the years that Kat would tease her that she knew the city better than Kat did. On the mornings that Will was at school and Kat had something in the diary, her mother would set out alone to the museums. She had fallen on the last visit. Misjudging the distance from the bottom step of the bus to the pavement, she had fallen. Kat had gotten the phone call from the National Gallery and had raced over to find her resting on a couch in the staff break room, a cup of Earl Grey by her side. If she was shaken by the incident, she had not shown it, insisting on viewing the Vermeers that she had come to see, and then maintaining that it would be rude not to pay her respects to the Turners, as if they were old family friends. And so Kat had followed along beside her as she moved from Canaletto to Rubens to Ingres to Goya. Watching the changing shapes of joy in her face as the paintings passed her from one to the next. Looking like a schoolgirl with plasters on her knees.

  Kat tightened her grip on the slick metal pole as the bus slid around Hyde Park corner, eliciting surprised giggles from the young women as it stacked them neatly against a stout man in a well-worn mac.

  Walking the few blocks from Green Park, she arrived at the gallery, immediately identifiable by the news trucks parked outside. She was surprised by the amount of media there was. Someone was doing their job well. She paused briefly outside the gallery to check her phone. There was a message from Will. As sad as she was to have missed his call, she was glad to have the message, a little piece of him that he had left behind.

  Making her way through the crowd on the pavement, she entered the handsome Georgian stone building and gave her name to the woman at the door, who found it on the list and waved her inside. There had been no hesitation, no resistance, when she had telephoned the gallery asking to be added to the guest list for tonight. She had used her married name.

  She was well aware of the effect that Jonathan’s surname had begun to have on people in London. She had become inured to the immediate, subtle change in attitude that it engendered. A strange mixture of curiosity and resentment. When she married Jonathan, she had opted to keep her maiden name, a decision she had stuck with even after the success of the company had imbued his surname with new prestige. Jorie, who collected her husbands’ names and wore them about her neck like so many trinkets, continued to be puzzled by this decision.

  Once inside, she declined to check her coat. The gallery was packed. She spotted Jorie waving to her from the less crowded side of the lobby and she made her way over, intercepting a flute of champagne on her way.

  Jorie took her arm in the way that only European women can.

  “Darling, it’s a madhouse. I swear that I just saw Richard Hawthorne.”

  As with many of the names Jorie dropped, Kat recognized it in a vague way, feeling that perhaps she had read it somewhere recently.

  It was sometimes difficult to tell predator from prey in the art world, but this crowd was all predator. Dressed to the nines in the type of vintage clothing whose value was detectable only to the trained eye—watches that cost more than most cars, handbags with two-year waiting lists. Nostrils flared, heads thrown back the better to look down their noses, they prowled the openings, sniffing out the latest prize. Daniel was nowhere to be seen.

  Observing the crowd as it funneled in through the door into the room on the right, Jorie guided Kat purposefully to the left. “It’s less crowded this way. Why follow the herd?”

  The canvases in the first room they entered were massive. Much larger than anything she had known him to paint. They certainly would not have fit into the rue Garancière studio. The first one confronted her immediately—a milk-white hand seen from above. Long, slender fingers clutching a fistful of cloth, tendons taut and straining, knuckles showing white through pale skin. The painting itself had to be eight feet tall—allowing even the detail of the thin, fair hairs and tiny creases between the thumb and forefinger to be seen clearly.

  It took her a moment to identify the next one. Her eye was drawn immediately to a sharp pink shape punctuating the lower edge of the expanse of pale canvas. Only when she recognized it as the corner of a mouth, barely open, did she see the rest of the canvas as cheek. The discoveries of the first two made the rest of the paintings in the room easier to decipher. Looking around, she saw that the room also contained a throat, stretched out in a way that suggested a head flung back just out of view; and a shoulder streaked by several loose strands of hair and the unmistakable curve of a female waist pushed back against a tangle of wrinkled fabric. There were others that she could not see, as they were obscured by the crowds.

  “Like pieces of a broken statue,” Jorie whispered, squeezing her arm.

  Kat nodded. Jorie was right. Taken alone, the individual pieces were like fragments of an unseen whole, strangely unsatisfying for all their detail. But together they had a distinctive narrative quality, coalescing into an undeniable portrait of a woman in the throes of passion. The individual paintings seemed to be glimpses of what a lover might see in the moments when he opened his eyes. The size of the paintings tested the limits of the space, filling it with what amounted to a fractured, flickering confession.

  And yet there remained a persistent sense of something that was absolutely broken. There was a strong incongruity between the heat of the subject and the cold, almost bloodless approach to it. Given the intimate nature of the subject, she found the scale and detail disturbing. She rubbed her fingertips up and down the cold glass in her hand, tracing paths in the condensation.

  Spotting a face she recognized at the far end of the room, Jorie gave Kat’s arm a quick squeeze before she dropped it with a murmured apology and pushed through the crowds, leaving Kat to navigate the gallery alone.

  Coming to the end of the room too quickly, Kat stopped to examine the canvas by the door. The long curving edge of a female form clung to one side of it, barely distinguishable from the pale sheet that occupied the rest of the canvas. The last glimpse of the figure before she moved off the canvas and out of view. Its vertical shape seemed to serve as punctuation at the end of the room.

  In an attempt to escape the current of the crowd around her, Kat stepped closer to it. From a few feet away she could clearly see the thin layers of paint, pulled taut across the canvas. As she followed the shape up the side of the canvas, a sharp jolt of cold made her aware that she had involuntarily brought her fingers, chilled from the glass, up to her neck. Suddenly alert, on the banks of the moving crowd, she became aware of distinct voices within the crowd directly behind her.

  “This is the one.” The male speaker was authoritative, demanding.

  After a moment, the same voice again, louder and more insistent. “Did you hear me, Martin? I want your word on it.”

  Before any reply could be made, a woman’s voice broke in, seemingly unaffected by her companion’s bluster. “How did you find him?”

  After
a moment, a second male voice—Martin, she presumed—responded to the woman in a soothing, indulgent tone. “He has been in the stable for years. Found him in Paris and then took him to New York with me. Had great success doing commissions—portraits of the glitterati. Women mostly.… Very technically adept, but missing that elusive something that separates the good from the great—that essential spark. Then about a year ago he calls and tells me he has something to show me. Tells me to meet him at this warehouse—in the middle of nowhere. Hands me a key to one of those awful rented storerooms.”

  Here the voice wavered and the speaker paused to collect himself before going on. When he began speaking again, his voice was lower. Kat took a step back toward the group.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. There were paintings everywhere—leaning against the walls, stacked on crates. I knew the moment I saw them that this was something special. That he had found his passion. I knew instantly that this was going to be the first line of my obituary.”

  The woman’s voice again, as soft as it had been, but with a hint of edge in it that had not been there before. “And his obituary.”

  There was a brief pause before the man replied. “Of course.” After a moment he went on. “I actually bought a painting from this series when he first came to see me about twenty years ago. One of the earliest ones he had done. The Blue Bath—the one I pointed out in the last room. It was the first one he sold to me. It was the piece that first made me take notice of him.”

  His voice grew quieter, and Kat took another step backward, straining to hear him. “I kept it, which is rather unusual for me. I had absolutely no idea there were more like it. At the time, he needed money, so I set him up to do a commissioned portrait. An ambassador’s daughter. Not very lucrative, I grant, but good money and a good entrée into that world, as the portrait would be seen by the right people. The art world is all about exposure to the right people. Began representing him shortly thereafter, but never saw any more like that first one until that day at the warehouse.”

  There was a pause, as the speaker and his audience considered his story, before the woman spoke again.

  “She is beautiful.”

  There was another pause before Martin responded, his voice slightly cold.

  “Perhaps. But the paintings are more beautiful.”

  The first voice again, impatient and a bit too loud. “How much did you pay for it? The blue one.”

  The second man chuckled softly, as if he felt the situation required it.

  “Now, Nicholas, do you think me cruel enough to tell you that? Suffice it to say that he was unknown at the time and as I said, he needed the money. But that painting was what got my attention, which is what ultimately led us to this.” Kat imagined the speaker gesturing to the crowd around him in a proprietary way as he continued. “So I would say it all worked out in the end.”

  Succumbing to her curiosity, Kat glanced furtively over her shoulder at the threesome. A tall man stood with his back to her and the painting, while a well-groomed brunette woman stood opposite him, squinting at it. Between them another man stood facing her, short and preemptively bald. In addition to setting him apart from the crowd, the particular shade of his dark green suit served to underscore the fact that he was shaped remarkably like an avocado.

  The tall man spoke again, still impatient. “How much is it worth? What’s its value today?”

  Kat watched the pale face atop the green suit and saw its features relax as its small eyes swept across the expansive canvas behind her.

  “Did you know, in painting, the term ‘value’ refers to the lightness or darkness of a color or a canvas? I have always thought that to be a marvelous way to regard the concept of value—the inherent darkness or lightness of a thing.” Kat thought that his voice sounded suddenly tired.

  “Are you interested in selling?” the tall man persisted.

  Kat saw the curve of his lips return as he replied. “You know me, Nicholas. For the right price…”

  Before she could look away, the small man caught her eye, shooting her a quick, sharp glance before turning back to the group.

  Scanning the crowd, Kat spied Jorie on the far side of the room, hand on hip, head tossed back in laughter, standing only slightly too close to someone else’s husband. The crowd was pushing Kat backward and she had to keep moving to avoid being forced back the way she came. So she left the room, the conversation dying behind her.

  * * *

  THE NEXT ROOM was populated with smaller canvases. At first she could see only bits of the paintings among the heads of the crowd. As she focused on the first one she could see whole, on the wall to her right, green eyes stared back at her from a pale face, appearing at once far away and very close. At once, her stomach lurched and the sounds of the room receded, replaced by a low buzzing in her head.

  She blinked, opening her eyes to find that the face before her remained. It looked different in the bright light of the gallery, over the bobbing heads of the crowd, but she recognized it immediately. It had lain on its side against the wall under the windows for months after he had finished it, looking up at the stained ceiling. Against the smooth expanse of immaculate white wall it seemed larger. More bold. Less warm. But she was certain it was the same one. The figure on the canvas looked sleepy and sensual, completely at ease lying across the unmade bed.

  Panicked, she cast her eyes over the surrounding crowd, and struggled to control her breathing. As her eyes panned around the room, she recognized another painting—a smaller study of the bath. An almost irresistible urge to run filled her, mitigated only by an equally strong impulse to move closer to it. A previous occupant of the studio had painted the inside of the bathtub a deep shade of blue. Although meant to be permanent, the paint still imparted a slight blue tint to the water when the tub was filled. For all its intimacy, the painting was quite discreet, as the water obscured most of her body. From where she was standing, she could see a finger smudge on the upper left side of the unframed canvas. Often, when finishing a detail, Daniel would grasp the upper left corner of the canvas, leaving smudged fingerprints on its edge, which he never bothered to remove.

  She met her own eyes—wide and wet—in the next canvas. She looked as if she had just finished laughing. And the next one—a close-up of her sleeping, the corner of the sheet brushing her cheek. And the next one—her eyes downcast as she sat curled in the fading pink sunshine of late afternoon, bent over a book, her hair held up by both of her hands, stray strands seeping out between her fingers.

  The painting in front of her was so close that she could reach out and touch it. Trace the lines of the body. There was something about it that seemed so real. Much more real than the crowded gallery that surrounded her now. It seemed that if she stood and looked long enough, the girl’s hand would move through the length of her hair, fingers disappearing among the soft strands. That the hint of smile in her eyes would spread slowly, inevitably, to the rest of her face. Kat felt a tightening in her chest. An ache.

  Backing away from the paintings, into the center of the room, she realized she was surrounded. She scanned the paintings that ringed the room. Her face. Her body. Made young again and laid bare around her. She wondered briefly if it was voyeurism if you were looking at yourself.

  Each of the paintings triggered a barrage of memories. They crashed into her, immediately more real to her than the crush of people brushing past her. She remembered the circumstances of each painting. The tepid water of the bath and the strange sensation of disconnection with her body while it was submerged unseen in the murky water. The warmth of the morning sun on her face, and the feel of the smooth cover of the book in her hands. She remembered how she felt when he was painting her. So safe. So understood. It was almost an abdication of herself. As if he held her and she was free to wander. Although she had not strayed far from the studio that summer.

  She remembered the smell of the paint and the slight damp of the studio in the mornings. The feel of the
cool wooden floorboards under her bare feet. Being woken by the sunlight coming through the thin glass panes in the windows.

  She remembered Daniel stretching the blank canvases, mixing the colors and then washing them off his brushes. Their traces on the edges of the drain—mingling briefly to become something other than what they had been separately and then fading, faded, into the worn porcelain basin. She remembered the clumps of paint, like dried leaves, on the rough wooden palette and all the colors that she had not known were in her—black, green, burnt and raw umber, ocher, white, and then more green or blue for shading.

  She remembered the strange silence of the studio. The paintings seemed out of place in this loud, crowded, windowless room. A man pushed by her roughly, mumbling a perfunctory apology through thick lips as he passed by, reminding Kat of where she was in the center of the room, her feet anchoring her to the floor as the crowd moved around her.

  She kept her head down, pulling nervously on the end of her long plait, taking small breaths. The air in the room felt too warm, heated to a viscous syrup by the movement of the crowd. Looking around, she realized that most of the people had their backs to the paintings, talking among themselves, while her face looked on from different vantage points on the walls. The current of people swelled against her, urging her back the way she had come. She had obviously come the wrong way, viewing the exhibit backward.

  There was something else in the air at the gallery. A different kind of excitement. Brash, eager, slightly tarnished, she recognized it in the excited laughter and conversation of the crowd. Money. The paintings had passed beyond what they had been in the studio on the rue Garancière, beyond even what the early critics had recognized in them, and were being regarded with a new kind of lust. They had become commodities. Looking more closely at the crowd, she was surprised to see so many familiar faces. These were the men and women who bought and sold things in London. Companies, property, buildings, art. He was in her world now.