The Blue Bath by Mary Waters-Sayer Page A

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