The Blue Bath

by Mary Waters-Sayer

  She parked several blocks away and walked quickly through the empty streets. She saw no one and there was no one to see her. The sharp sounds of her heels on the pavement dissolved immediately into the silence. The bottom half of her long green gown glowed as she walked through the pools of light under the streetlamps, the sudden flashes of color reminding her that she did not belong—in this place, in this dress.

  Reaching the building, she saw Martin’s sleek silver car parked in front, gleaming softly under a streetlight. A small pile of broken glass from a shattered car window, or maybe just a bottle, glinted dangerously on the pavement in front of her. She slowed down, stepping easily around the shards. She reached the wooden door, worn smooth, its small glass panels protected behind a metal grid, and pressed the button beside it with a naked finger. Inside, the building appeared empty once more, its silence disturbed only by the sound of the lift as it carried her to the top floor. Leaving the cage, she heard the deadbolt slide open at the end of the hallway. The heavy metal door opened before she reached it. It was that easy.

  She entered the darkened studio, breathing in the scent of paint. The ferrous tang clung to the inside of her nose and mouth, insinuating itself into the soft, wet membranes, seeking them out and mixing easily with them.

  She felt him move up behind her. She started to turn around, but he caught her shoulders, his strong hands holding her still. Gathering her hair in his hands, he swept it to one side of her neck. He lifted the clasp of the heavy necklace away from her skin and unfastened it. The sudden sound as it hit the floor was dampened by the feel of his fingers moving on her skin. Bringing his hands up the sides of her neck, he removed each of her earrings in turn and they fell from his hands to the floor by her feet. His fingers ran down her arms to find the flat gold band on her limp left hand and wiggled it off over her knuckle. Eyes closed now, she heard it rolling across the concrete as his hands traveled to her back to undo the covered buttons along her spine, starting at the top and moving down.

  She thought of her mother in hospital. Stripped of everything, even her wedding band. The most basic things that identify us, that anchor us to our lives. That speak to us and that speak for us. She wondered at how easily even the things that we cling to fall away. So that we cease being mother, daughter, wife. Squeezing her eyes shut to banish the thought, she took a step back and leaned her head against his chest. She felt him nudge the straps of her dress off her shoulders and felt it slip to the floor.

  They reclaimed each other. Memory and desire sweeping away time and distance. So that there were only her fingers pulsing in the hair at the back of his neck, the weight of his body pressing down on her. They lay together afterward until one of them moved. Adjusted a leg or turned slightly and the sensation of skin moving on skin set them off again. For an hour, maybe less, she was asleep. She awakened warm and encircled in the narrow bed. Opening her eyes wide, she looked down at their bodies, melted into each other in the murky predawn light.

  For a moment, she did not move, did not adjust her position, savoring the perfect way that they fit together. And then she rolled over so that she was lying on top of him, her hair falling down around the sides of his head, so all she could see was his face. She felt the heat of his body pressing up into her. He was so familiar this way. Close-up, it was so easy to see him. He still turned back into a stranger when they were separate. He opened his eyes.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  They were the first words that had passed between them. She whispered them into the small space between them, breathing in the brief pause before his answer.

  He closed his eyes and she moved even closer, so that when he spoke, his lips brushed against hers. “I see the exact shade of blue under your skin, the coppers and pinks in your hair in the morning light, the way the dust moved in your breath, the shadow under your jaw, the curve of your hips.”

  She closed her eyes, listening as he painted pictures for her.

  “But I could never see you whole.”

  She gave herself up to him as wholly as she gave herself up to the darkness. Both took her without hesitation.

  The second time she woke, she surfaced alone. The darkness was already diluted and what little remained was fast escaping through the high windows. It surprised her that while the light in London was so different than it had been in Paris, the darkness would be exactly the same. That specific diffuse quality that reduced things to their elements, as if she were seeing the atoms themselves. She remembered the way the light used to define them in the morning. How they would emerge from the darkness, two fuzzy figures entangled in each other, like the Seurat paintings in the Louvre. In the changing light, she would watch as the particles of darkness slowly moved apart. There was almost no moon. She lay still as the thin light dropped from the windows and crept under the locked door, watching as their figures emerged from the darkness. She thought that she could see time passing.

  A faint, familiar dry scratching was just audible in the room. Turning, she saw that Daniel had moved a chair close to the bed and sat sketching her. She felt his eyes running over the contours of her body as his hands had done only hours before. He leaned forward, his left forearm supporting the sketch pad, fingers curled into a fist over its top edge. He gazed at her with such intensity that he seemed not to notice that she had moved.

  The bare part of the wall over his shoulder was scarred with the ends of broken brushstrokes begun elsewhere. Trace evidence of what had been there, like blood from erstwhile limbs. So here was the place outside of the frame. She noticed the lilies, still wrapped in their paper, lying on the table by the wall, their limp white petals creased and tinged with brown. Suddenly self-conscious, she sat up and started to pull the sheet around herself.

  “Don’t.” The word was hard and blunt. A single syllable laid at her feet.

  Kat watched him turn the page and start a new drawing. The expression of concentration on his face was one she remembered. His hands moved above the paper with a restless energy. The pent-up force of the coiled spring—released. All motion, all control and energy—lit up and alive. It astonished her, igniting a half-forgotten ache that burned just under her skin.

  Still feeling his eyes on her, Kat let the sheet drop from her fingers and lay back, snaking her arms over her head, allowing the fear and the freedom of being seen wash over her. Above her a black bird, elongated in flight, passed by the window. The small intermittent sounds of pencil scratching on paper stopped. She smiled, not unaware of the image she presented. She heard him drop the pad and pencil at his feet and turned to see him pulling open drawers, searching for something.

  When he found what he was after, he moved past her, one hand curled into a loose fist at his side. What was he doing? Reaching the wall behind the bed he turned back to her. There was no sound, only stillness. She felt the weight of his gaze on her bare skin. Abruptly, he started to move, drawing his hand across the wall in slow, smooth arcs, each scrape of charcoal trailing a shower of black dust that dissipated in the light.

  Stretched out on the sheets, Kat watched the rhythm of his body as he began to describe her figure on the rough concrete, eyes flickering between her and the wall. She recognized the gentle curve of her lower back as it rippled across the wall and the loose tangle of arms around her head. She could almost feel the soft edges of the charcoal brush her skin. As each piece was worn away he took up another from his fist. Her body at once weightless and rooted to the spot, her breath began to come quickly and before long she started to stir, driven by some intrinsic impulse, some wave of instinct and appetite.

  “Don’t move.”

  Kat stilled herself willfully as she took shape under his fluent hands, the charcoal adhering tenuously to the rough surface, line by line, curve by curve. She felt the distance between them stretching and contracting like a physical thing every time he moved. His long, sweeping strokes became shorter, quicker movements as the restlessness built inside her. The air was cold on her war
m skin. His eyes lingered on her body before he turned back to the wall and slowly rubbed the flat of his palm along the line of her thigh. Her pulse quickened.

  “Daniel.” His name mingled with a breath.

  “Wait.”

  The recumbent figure on the wall beyond him was almost complete now. Anchored at one end by delicate tapering legs bent at the knee, the color of bone inside its edges. As he used his thumb to smudge and thicken the shadows under her chin, she felt the exquisite friction and pushed her head back into the sheets. Just as she thought she couldn’t take it any longer, he let the last bits of charcoal drop from his fingers and came toward her, eyes wild, hands smudged with cinders.

  * * *

  KAT WOKE TO Daniel getting out of the bed. Since her arrival they had clung to it like a lifeboat. Never venturing too far from it, always returning to it quickly. She moved into the space he had left, feeling his residual heat on the sheets. From where she lay, she could see the charcoal outline on the wall above the bed. Brushing the hair from her face, she regarded her likeness. The rough silhouette was almost primitive. Not far removed from the prehistoric figures found on the walls of caves in southern France. Cryptic drawings made by the glow of ancient fires, their true meanings obscured by time. She couldn’t help but smile, remembering the caves as one of the places she had planned to visit during her student days in Paris. It was the first time since arriving at the studio that she had thought of anything outside of the four walls around her.

  She sat up and swung her legs to the floor, wrapping the sheet around her, waiting for the slight spinning sensation to cease. The floor was cold and the soles of her feet felt soft and slightly swollen. The sky was dark through the windows. Could it be late afternoon?

  “You hungry?” His voice came from the far corner of the room.

  “Starving,” she said, realizing that she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Her voice echoed off the walls and she felt herself blush. They had not done much talking in the last few hours, certainly not above a whisper, and the full light of day combined with the distance between them made her suddenly shy. He stood up and she saw that he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She pulled the sheet more tightly around her.

  He came toward her, carrying a bowl of apples in one hand. She had seen it in the room before, but assumed it was fake, a decorative prop, so uniformly red and round were the apples. In his other hand was a short, wooden-handled knife. He sat down on the floor beside the bed. She slid down beside him, pressing her shoulder against his, reestablishing contact.

  “Just what every artist needs, a bowl of fruit.”

  “I’ve no idea how this got here,” he said, taking an apple from the bowl. “I think it’s meant to be reference material.”

  “Right.” She smiled. “I imagine there must be some sort of ordinance requiring every studio to have at least one bowl of fruit.”

  “And now we know why.”

  Daniel cradled the apple within his palm. She watched as he worked the knife through the fruit, the blade disappearing into its flesh, scant white froth bubbling at the incision. When the blade touched his palm, he withdrew it and raised his hand to his mouth to catch a rivulet of juice that was making its way down his wrist. He extended her half of the apple, balanced lightly on wet fingertips.

  She could smell it already, the crisp scent at odds with the other dense odors of the studio. It tasted like the edge of the knife—sharp and hard—the flavor mixing with the taste of him. She tucked her toes underneath his leg and they sat together on the floor, their backs against the bed.

  Daniel gestured at the figure on the wall, the knife still in his hand. “That’s the first complete figure of you I’ve been able to do since Paris.” He looked stunned.

  “I wouldn’t say complete.”

  “Not yet. But whole.”

  They ate in silence for a moment.

  “You told me once that if you really see something, then it never leaves you.”

  “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything.”

  And she did. A startling sense of clarity had lodged itself behind her heart.

  He thought for a moment. “It’s different. Painting from memory. You were always there, but just out of reach. I could only see pieces of you. Fragments. A shoulder, a cheek, an open eye. But so clearly.” He lightly touched the back of his hand to the side of her face. “It drove me mad at first, but then I started to paint the parts that I could see. I felt like if I did that, then maybe I could bring you back, bit by bit. It was just for me. I never showed anyone.” He paused, turning back to the figure on the wall. “Until Martin.”

  She cringed. Martin. Small and sharp like the man himself, the name produced a precise, narrow rupture in the protective veil they had drawn about themselves. She looked away. It was all so fragile. Didn’t he know that?

  She finished her half of the apple and stood up. Wrapping the sheet more tightly around herself, she moved over to the drawing on the wall, stopping only inches away. Close-up, it dissolved into the lines themselves, the thin deposit of charcoal on concrete. She wondered at how something could be so altered solely by her relation to it. Drawing her fingers lightly across the uneven surface, she traced the figure, softening the lines. Removing her fingers, she saw faint smudges of black dust on her fingertips. Traces of something that had once burned so brightly, now distilled to its essence. Still organic, even after the fire. Something diminished only by contact. Leaving evidence of itself on whatever it touched. Paper. Skin.

  “Are you trying to erase it?”

  She turned to him. “What? No. I love it.” She watched him finish his apple and lick the juice from his fingers. After a moment she smiled.

  “What?”

  “We’re eating your reference material.”

  “Yes.” One corner of his mouth curved upward. He pushed himself up off the floor with one hand and started toward her, laying the knife down on a table. “What will I paint now?”

  He ran his finger up and down her arm. She glanced up at the windows and frowned. Time was passing.

  “Dark already.”

  “It’s not dark.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Get dressed. I’ll show you.”

  She hesitated. Surely he knew that they shouldn’t go out in public. But she pulled on her clothes as he waited. It wasn’t likely anyone she knew would be walking the streets of Shoreditch. He handed her his coat and on her way to the door she grabbed her purse, but he shook his head.

  “You won’t need that.”

  She followed him down the long hallway away from the lift. Where was he taking her? At the far end of the passage, a metal ladder rose into the ceiling. Daniel stepped onto the second rung and began to climb. Kat watched him vanish into the darkness until a sliver of dim light appeared, waxing into a larger rectangle as he pushed open a hatch to the roof. As he disappeared through it, she took hold of the thick rails and followed him up. Her arms felt weak and her hands scraped against scabs of corroded paint.

  When she reached the top of the ladder, Daniel grasped her forearms and pulled her up through the hatch. For an instant she hung suspended, her toes pointed down into the mouth of the passage, the full weight of her body in his hands, before he swung her to the side and set her down gently.

  The flat roof was covered in flaking tar paper. So wide and dark that it seemed to lose mass in places. Kat moved instinctively to its center, planting her feet wide and keeping her eyes down. She could hear the distant hum of traffic. The wind rushed past her, lifting her hair off her face. A faint geometric pattern emerged on the ancient tar paper under her feet. A heap of tiles, cracked and chipped around their edges, lay nearby. She matched their shape to the pattern etched on the paper.

  After a moment, she realized that she was half crouching and willed herself to stand straight, immediately dizzy under the vaulted gray sky. Daniel stood at the edge of the expanse. She watched him move along the perimeter, his eyes on the horizon. He stopp
ed and kicked lightly at the low wall beside him, the brick flaking and crumbling, and then glanced back at her.

  “You have to look hard to find darkness in cities. There is always light. And London is so far north that in the winter you can always see the red glow of the sun just below the horizon.”

  She forgot that he had grown up here. It was a part of him she knew nothing about. As he rested one foot on the low wall that bordered the roof, he became the darkness, blocking out the lights behind him, his broad shoulders spanning city blocks, obliterating entire neighborhoods. As he leaned out over the edge, Kat found herself involuntarily leaning backward, as if to balance the building.

  She took a few steps toward him, wishing he would come away from the edge. After a moment, he turned to face her. He said something, but the wind took the sound.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s changed. The city.”

  “Maybe you have.”

  He smirked at her, his face coming into sharper focus as she moved closer to him.

  “Peut-être.”

  She stopped where she stood, mouth open. “Je ne crois pas! You learned French!”

  “Je te jure. Someone once suggested I should.”

  “How long have you been waiting to show me that?”

  He laughed and held out his hand to her. “A long time. Come closer.”

  She edged nearer to him, lifting her feet deliberately, the roof rough and blistered under them. She felt light-headed. From the elevation or from having eaten only half an apple all day. He stood motionless, watching her. She tried to keep her eyes on him, ignoring the city beyond and below. When she was within reach, he grasped her hand and led her the final few steps. They stood together balanced on the rim of the building. Kat held her breath and looked out over the city. She took in the pale gleam of streetlights, the phosphorescent glow from windows, the sustained voltaic arcs of headlights. Daniel was right. There was light everywhere. The city fizzed and burned with it.