The Blue Bath Read Online Free PDF Page A

mattered. That she could not let it pass unrefuted.
    “What does time have to do with greatness or beauty? So much beauty is fleeting—it’s practically a defining characteristic of it. And what makes you think photographs are created suddenly? It is not just the click of a button. I think the best photographers create the picture in their minds before they ever see it. But then it can take a lifetime to find the precise moment, the right light, the exact perspective. Sometimes they never find it, but they know it is real because they can see it.”
    She hesitated. He remained silent. She watched the cold night air playing with his hair. Lifting and then dropping it around his face.
    “And really, what is beauty if it is not recognized? All joy comes from that. What could be more worthwhile? What is there except to recognize beauty?”
    She looked up at him, watching her though his wounded eye. Then he smiled. Like fire from flint.
    The darkness was draining out of the sky by the time she found herself across the wide boulevard in front of her flat. Just as she was about to start across the street, she turned back to him.
    “How did you know I wasn’t French?”
    He cocked his head at her and she wasn’t sure he had heard her. She took a step toward him and gestured in what she thought was the direction of the Tuileries.
    “Under the tree. You spoke to me in English. How did you know I wasn’t French?”
    After a moment he pointed to her head.
    “Beret.”
    Traffic was light at that time of morning and she crossed the wide avenue quickly. As she entered the doorway, she turned back and saw him leaning against the building across the street, watching her. Not in the protective, proprietary way that the boys at home did, waiting to see that she got in safely. In more of a saturnine, almost predatory way, as if the small distance across the street had changed him back into a stranger. Inside, she took the steps two at a time and, reaching the landing in front of her flat, breathless, peered out the window to the street below. He was gone.
    *   *   *
    S HE SLEPT IN the next morning, awaking just before ten o’clock. Something she hadn’t done since arriving in Paris. Emerging from her room, she nearly tripped over Elizabeth, who lay sprawled on her back on the floor of the drawing room, arms resting limply at her sides, head propped up on a pillow. Hearing Kat, she opened her eyes, focused briefly on her, and then closed them again.
    “Well, hello, sunshine. And how was your evening?” Kat savored the extra syllables that the girl’s accent squeezed out of the words.
    “How was yours?” Kat countered, stepping carefully over her supine form on the way to the kitchen.
    “Let’s just say it was the epitome of a great party.” The girl pronounced the word “epitome” incorrectly. As someone who had only read it and never heard it spoken aloud might do.
    Elizabeth waited to continue until Kat reentered the room a few minutes later to perch on the chair across from her, teacup balanced on her knee.
    “And I couldn’t help noticing that you did, in fact, miss much of it.…”
    Elizabeth turned onto her stomach slowly and propped herself up on her elbows, smiling mischievously at Kat, her round face oddly childlike with its smudged makeup and wine-dark lips. Thick tendrils of her hair had worked themselves loose from the bonds of their arrangement and, exhausted from the effort, hung limply down her back. “Last I saw you, you were engaged in conversation with the next senator from the great state of Massachusetts. Lucky girl. Did he get your phone number?”
    “I’m sure Christopher Hastings has better things to do in Paris than spend time catching up with people from home.”
    Elizabeth looked up at Kat with a mixture of disdain and disbelief. “My God. You have no idea what he is up to, do you?”
    “He’s a Fulbright scholar.”
    “Not that.” Kat could clearly see that she was trying her