The Blue Bath by Mary Waters-Sayer

reply, if there was one.
    After a few blocks she slowed down and walked for a while through Mayfair, drinking in the cold air. Above the constellations of Christmas lights on Oxford Street, the sky was leaden and still. The streets were slick. It must have rained earlier. The reflected light off the pavement seemed somehow brighter than the streetlamps themselves. She was flooded with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and regret for a delicate and vanished time. For the brief, fragile peace of simply being seen.
    She recalled her astonishment standing in front of the first completed painting of herself in Paris. It was evening and the studio was wrapped in blue darkness. After a moment, she had turned to Daniel.
    “Is that who you see when you look at me?”
    He had looked around the room briefly, searching for something. Then, laying his hands on her shoulders, he had steered her to the window and indicated her reflection in the glass pane.
    “That is not what you look like. At least not to others. We are not what we see in the mirror—our images are, in fact, reversed. We are not what we appear to be, even to ourselves.”
    It was true. While immediately familiar, the face in the painting was not quite the same face she saw in the mirror or in photographs. Nor somehow did she believe that it was the face that others saw. Yet the feeling of recognition was overwhelming. The only way she could think to describe it was that girl he captured on canvas looked the way that she felt. And that sense of shared truth was more seductive than being admired or even being loved. And unlike love, which often engendered a broader affinity for others, its sharp edge severed all other connections, leaving only the two of them.
    He had painted her whenever the urge struck him. She would suddenly hear the pages on the sketch pad being flipped over or the crisp sighs of the charcoal on paper. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice at all, discovering it only when she moved and heard his urgent whisper for her to stay where she was. Half prayer, half command. He often drew her while she was sleeping.
    And slowly, she had begun to become more aware of herself. Of the pleasing shape her neck made as she bent forward over a book. Of the way the shadows fell beside her as she sat or reclined on the bed, and the varying effects of sunlight in her hair at different times of the day. She became conscious of the way different textures of clothing or blankets looked against her bare skin and she began to pay more attention when buying books at the markets, selecting the ones with the most interesting covers, soft, mottled linens and rich, distressed leathers.
    Daniel would sometimes begin to sketch her in the early morning, drawing her outline swiftly, without taking his eyes off her. Often turned away, she could not see him, but she could feel his eyes just beyond her view, moving over her, holding her to her spot. And when he had enough, when she was free to go, she would feel him release her. Daniel hardly acknowledged her departure when she left. When she returned to the studio in the early evening she would find herself taking form on the canvas. It was as if time obeyed different rules in the little room under the eaves of the ancient building on the rue Garancière. He didn’t need her to be physically present to paint her. When he was painting her, she remained with him.
    As she made her way past the shuttered shops, Kat thought about Daniel at the gallery in his immaculate dark gray suit, its carefully cut lines betraying it as bespoke, a perfect complement to the confident smiles and brief greetings, the earnest eye contact, the seemingly effortless charm. Playing the artist. And he was good at it.
    She supposed it wasn’t really surprising. After all, she had gotten better at it, too. She could sit through the endless dinners and cocktail parties. She could make conversation with the nervous first wives and the defensive trophies. She could