And the canvases. What she had loved most of all in the studio on the rue Garancière were the blank canvases. Stacked neatly against the wall, they were possibility incarnate. His ability to fill them amazed and delighted her. And what he had filled them with, that long dusty summer, was her. She had imagined that in order for it to be possible for him to transfer her to the canvas, she must exist—if only fleetingly—inside him. She entered him through his eyes and then escaped via his hands. She could feel him take possession of her as he painted her. It was, she thought, more intimate than sex.
For a moment, she watched him moving around the studio, remembering more than seeing the way that his hands remained at his sides, how he seemed reluctant to use them. As if he had seen what they could do and was chastened by it. A deliberate, self-imposed impulse, born of its opposite.
As she watched, he turned suddenly to face her. He reached behind his head and pulled his sweater off with one swift movement, momentarily lifting the shirt underneath it to reveal the bare skin above his waist. The sudden movement and the brief flash of flesh panicked her, and she turned away abruptly. The gesture was so familiar that it felt aggressive. In the silence, she heard the faraway sound of her heart beating.
Turning her back on him, she was confronted by an unfinished canvas propped up against the wall, partially hidden behind an empty vase. She took in the smooth, sleek thighs and the long, impossibly slender waist. The long line of her torso. The improbable red hair against the undeniably white skin. The details of her incomplete body captivated her. Looking at herself unfinished, she saw what could have been as clearly as she saw what had been.
How many times had he traced the contours of her body over these past years? Contemplated the fine hairs at the nape of her neck and the stippled trail of freckles on her shoulders, and recalled the exact way that the lines formed at the corners of her eyes? As he had consumed her in his presence, so she had consumed him in her absence. But perhaps no longer. What was she doing behind the vase? Who was the girl in the sketches? Was she the girl from the gallery?
In an effort to drown out her thoughts, Kat spoke. “So, did you bring me here to paint me?”
“I can paint you anytime I want.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder at him as he tapped his head and smiled. She had forgotten how boyish he looked when he smiled. A real one—connecting the corners of his mouth to his eyes. She smiled back.
“Right. Memory is far better than the real thing, I suppose.”
“Unless I have a choice.”
She turned back to the painting, addressing it.
“I used to wonder what it would be like to see you again.”
His ghost had walked the streets of New York when she had returned that spring. In the wide avenues so full of empty faces, she would feel his eyes on her. She could feel his eyes on her now. After a moment, he spoke. His voice was low, as if he was uncertain whether he wanted to be heard.
“The thing is, you are all that I paint, really. I think maybe you are all that I can paint.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can paint whatever you want to paint.” She gestured vaguely to the canvases on the opposite wall, but did not turn around to look at him.
“Can I?” His voice contained a quiet note of sarcasm now. “How would you know?”
She turned to face him. He was nearer than she had thought. She immediately averted her eyes, looking down at a neat stack of unread newspapers that sat under the table. She remembered the yellowing pages of Le Monde that Daniel had used for cleaning brushes in Paris. The distinctive curving type of its masthead brazenly announcing its intent—to bring the world to her. How instead of turning away, she had stared directly at it. Willfully transforming the rounded letters into decoration. Until they became, to her eyes, part of the scenery, dancing black forms dressed in crude smears of color.
She kept her eyes on the newspapers. The words they were saying now seemed to demand a degree of privacy. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I guess I wouldn’t know.”
In fact she knew nothing about his life now or his life for the past twenty years. And yet, she found that she wasn’t interested. It hadn’t mattered then and it didn’t matter now.
She looked up again and he met her eyes. “You know, there was a lot you didn’t know about me even in Paris. You never asked too many questions.”
“You didn’t seem to like questions very much.”
“That stopped you?”
She was silent. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “Don’t pity me, Kat. You didn’t break me, if that is what you think.”
“Of course not.”
“And I didn’t break you.” He looked closely at her, examining her in the reflected glow off the walls. “Didn’t even make a dent. To be honest, sometimes I think I did my best work after you left.” His face was thoughtful. The remark was not meant to be anything but truthful.
“Just as well. That girl in your paintings—she’s gone now.” She felt her words melt into the large silence in the room.
“I don’t believe that.”
And maybe he was right. When he looked at her like that, she wasn’t gone. In his eyes, she was still the girl in his paintings. The girl with the knowing eyes and the smooth skin and the impossibly slender waist. The girl who was all white flesh and red hair and possibility and passion.
They were straying into dangerous territory. She could barely make out the warning signs as they sped past them. She was aware only of the narrow corridor of his gaze, as if there was nothing outside of it. The shadows of clouds moved slowly over his face. She spoke, trying to fill the space between them with her words—but empty and brittle, they fell to the ground as soon as they passed her lips.
“Where did you go after … Did you stay in Paris?”
“After you left? Does it matter?”
He was moving closer to her now. Holding her in place with his pale blue eyes and his still hands that hung at his sides. She knew that maybe she should go. But she also knew that maybe it was too late. He moved slowly. He knew it, too.
Somehow, in this place—with the taste of paint on her tongue and a view of only sky. With the blank canvases stacked against the wall and the thick metal bolt holding the door shut, it seemed all things were possible again.
He took another step toward her. Rain drummed impatiently on the windows. Time was slipping away and she could do nothing to stop it. All of this would be gone. Or maybe it already was. And then his hands were in her hair. She could feel his heart beating through his fingertips. He was so close she could smell him now. Not the paint, not coffee, but Daniel.
She took a step back to steady herself against the table. As she reached behind her, her hands collided noisily with the crisp, dry tissue surrounding the lilies. The sudden crunching sound arrested her movement. They didn’t belong here. They belonged in the vase on the side table in the drawing room. She didn’t belong here either. She pulled away from him, his fingers brushing the side of her face before she turned and made her way out into the hallway. The metal door was heavy, but the lift was waiting for her. As it descended, she glimpsed the triangle of light extruded from the still-open door and realized that she had left the flowers behind. She did not go back.
chapter eleven
Sitting alone in the half-light of her empty house, Kat wondered at how close she had allowed herself to come to it before regaining her senses. She blamed the studio and its attendant vapors. That familiar light-headedness. Maybe it had all been a kind of delirium, even all those years ago. An intoxication brought about by the fumes. She thought about the way it had been in Paris. The two of them, alone in that small airless room for hours, for days. Seeing no one but each other. She shook her head. It had passed now.
On the phone later that afternoon, she asked if he had made a decision.
“You know what the absurd thing is? It’s not mine anymore. Any of it. The decision, the company—it belongs to the board. To the
shareholders.”
“You knew that.” Kat said it quietly.
“I did. I knew it so clearly when we did the IPO. But you forget. You live with something every day and it just feels like it’s yours. Although, apparently I am not the only one to have made that mistake. According to the Mail, not only was I the lone savior of the British tech industry, I am now also solely responsible for its demise.” The anger was gone from his voice. Replaced by an uncharacteristic weariness.
Before she could respond, he continued. “Listen, I want to say I am sorry. I’ve not been there for you.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“I know you do. But I don’t want you to have to. This whole thing … everything … has made me realize what matters and it is not the company and it is not the deal.”
“So, you’re coming home?”
“Yes.”
“When?” She took note of her quickening pulse and the overwhelming disorientation about what answer she was hoping for.
“Soon.” A brief pause elongated into something else altogether, prompting him to speak again. “You’re so quiet. Are you still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“We can keep the house. We’ll be in London, most likely, for some of the year.”
It would become another place where she half belonged. She thought of all the places that she belonged more than she belonged here. She belonged to the cold, hard edges of New York; the soft, bruised Paris mornings; the salt air on her tongue and the tickle of sand on her skin. She belonged with her mother. She belonged pressed up against Will’s back, feeling the sweet swell of his breath. But where did she belong now?
Kat put the phone down and glanced at the clock, amazed to find that it was late afternoon. The black-tie fund-raiser for the British Cancer Foundation was tonight.
On her way out of the kitchen to get dressed upstairs, her eye caught on the bright spot provided by a colorful drawing of Will’s taped to the kitchen wall, and she smiled. A rare decorative touch, it provided a sharp contrast to the expanse of empty walls, punctuated only by the four squares of dried paint in the drawing room, their differences indistinguishable in the low light of morning. Underneath it on the counter was a thick green file folder. Her smile disappeared.
A reminder. A relic. She picked it up and carried it upstairs, determined to find a place for it. To put it away somewhere that she did not have to see it. It was all in there. The test results, MRIs, blood work, prescriptions, and chemo schedules traced the arc of her mother’s illness from shock to hope to despair. From the first nagging symptoms and the resulting tests, to the diagnosis, delivered along with a heavy measure of hope—optimistic percentages and new drugs were cited. To the relief from the initial success of treatment, to the despair at its subsequent failure, to the more extreme treatment options—followed by the slow, creeping dawn of realization—heels dug firmly into the ground on the excruciating slide into the end. She knew how this story ended, although the ending itself was not in the file.
The obituary had made her angry. One hundred and fifty-three black words in eight-point type. The number of words, the size of the words, but mostly, the words themselves. Words that had little to do with her mother and the extraordinary woman she had been.
This was a woman who had learned how to ride a bicycle at the age of fifty, who had told bedtime stories so vividly that as a child Kat could still hear the wail of the wind in the trees and smell the yeasty smell of the forest floor while drifting to sleep. A woman whose face, in repose, had an expression that she had only ever seen on the tall porcelain statues in church alcoves. A new bride who had found herself widowed at the age of twenty-nine. Two weeks later, she had discovered that she was pregnant. A woman whose smile hid nothing and whose laughter was so clear to her now, but would fade, she knew.
It is a formula, Jonathan would say to her. There are rules for writing these things. No one expected an obituary to be the measure of a person. It was not even a eulogy. It was simply meant to report certain facts. It did not matter. But it did matter. The audacity of it—these marks on paper—trying to convey a lifetime, or even a moment.
She just wanted them to know all that had been lost on that cold December morning in the sun-filled room with the dark green wallpaper overlooking the park. In the big bed, next to the table filled with the framed photos. Her mother had died on December 21. The winter solstice. She knew from studying Latin that the literal translation of solstice was that the sun stood still. The sun had stood still on the day her mother died. Why hadn’t they said that in the obituary?
chapter twelve
Opening her closet, Kat was surprised to find that one of her gowns had been steamed and left out, as well as shoes and accessories to go with it. The housekeeper must have done it that morning. There beside the long jade-green dress was a neat list—gown, jewelry, shoes, bag—in her own handwriting. She had written it before she had gone to New York. She looked at it curiously. An artifact of another time. A time when her mother was still alive.
Impulsively, Kat retrieved the green file from the bottom drawer where she had placed it just moments before. She opened it to reveal an MRI. Maybe the last one? Kat looked down at the filmy white shadows. The cold, austere, pure beauty of science. Beauty that hid in soft and secret places. Places that defined her, that sustained her and that had failed her. Places that she would never see and that held mysteries only a stranger could divine. Kat thought that she was not what others saw when they looked at her. She was not what she saw in the mirror. There were shapes and shades in her that she would never know. Kat closed the file and dropped it back in the open drawer.
She usually wore her hair up to these events, but there was no time. She showered quickly and left it loose around her face. She paused briefly before the mirror in the front hallway, momentarily halted by her fading resemblance to the girl in the paintings. She had thought that she would skip the event. It was likely that many of the same people who had been at Daniel’s opening would be there this evening. But this was, after all, an important cause.
She retrieved the invitation from its resting place on the corner of the mirror and glanced at it. The Dorchester. The ball was at the Dorchester. She laughed, the unfamiliar noise echoing off the walls.
Kat left her car with the valet and crossed the smooth semicircular drive of the hotel. She walked quickly past the small group of photographers, their flashbulbs a fraction of what they would have been had Jonathan been with her.
Was Daniel upstairs in the suite overlooking the park? Walking though the lobby she was suddenly certain he would appear in front of her. She set about deciding how she should handle this. She could pretend not to know him—probably the safest option, but was that level of subterfuge necessary? Perhaps a casual acknowledgment. But what exactly? A smile? A wave? A kiss on both cheeks? She thought of how close he had been last night. She thought of his fingers slipping from her hair and grazing the edge of her jaw as she had stepped back from him.
She was not sure how many times her name had been called, but by the time she became aware of it, other people in the lobby had turned to look. For a woman so skilled in the art of ignoring people, Margaret Browning seemed to have surprisingly little appreciation for being ignored herself and her face puckered with annoyance. Kat tucked her thoughts tidily into place and brought out the most brilliant smile she could find. Her eyes strayed to the pearls the size of a baby’s fists around Margaret’s neck. All the beauty that money could buy, shining defiantly against her crepey skin.
“Margaret. How are you?”
“Well, I’m fine.” Margaret’s voice was tight. “I must have called your name five times just now. I saw you from the other side of the lobby, of course. You can’t hide with hair that color, you know,” she accused.
“It’s a wonderful turnout for you tonight. Better than last year.”
“Yes. Well, we will just see about that. You might have let me know that yo
ur husband wouldn’t be here so I could have filled his seat,” Margaret scolded her. “Never mind. I’m sure you will make amends during the auction. Or have you spent your allowance already? I saw you at Penfields the other night. I only ask because Clemmie was desperate to get one and she wasn’t able—poor thing.” Margaret seemed genuinely delighted by this. “She was after the nude sitting by the window for their new place on Montpelier Square. Her designer thought all the flesh tones would go perfectly with the curtains.”
Kat nodded mechanically, willing herself to remain calm as Margaret continued to expound on the nude portrait of her. She and Jonathan had recently made a large donation to the foundation and Kat knew that she was merely a name on a list of people whom Margaret needed to chat with this evening. In point of fact, she knew that the name on the list was actually Jonathan and that she was merely his proxy. If she could just get through her allotted amount of time and conversation, then Margaret would move on to the next name on her list.
“So you did get one?” Margaret’s face registered uncharacteristic surprise.
“Oh, no. No.”
Margaret seemed relieved. “Shame.… Of course, you know how it is—I hear that the good ones were all sold before the show opened anyway. Penfields gives its best customers a preview and everything goes before you can even get a look at it.” Margaret pouted.
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