The downstairs dining room at the Stanhope was more formal than Kat remembered, although she was sure that it was the fault of her memory and not due to any change in the decor. The Mayfair institution remained utterly indifferent to fashion. She was one of only three women seated in the dimly lit room and the only one not clad entirely in shades of black or gray. A tall waiter in a white jacket approached and leaned down into the incandescent glow of the white tablecloth to take her drink order, his eyes catching momentarily on her brightly patterned scarf. After he left, she removed the scarf, tucking it into her handbag. However, she could do nothing about her hair color, which remained an affront to the muted color scheme.
Kat saw there was a message from Jonathan’s parents’ number. Willfully defying the Stanhope’s ban on mobile phones in the dining room, she brought hers to her ear to listen. It was a chatty message from Will, but she was unable to make out everything he was saying. She pressed the phone closer to her ear in an effort to compensate for the distance between the phone and his mouth.
Secreting the phone back in her bag, she waited, cocooned in the plush brown banquette and the hushed tones of conversation, brought low by the ecclesiastic atmosphere of the room. She could actually feel the heat from the lamp above her. In the whispered voices around her, she thought she might have heard her name. She pushed back further into her cushion.
A few tables away, a young couple was seated opposite each other in high-backed, mushroom-colored fabric chairs. They talked quietly in a Slavic language Kat could not identify, leaning toward each other into the glow of the lamp that hung low above the table. The man seemed to be endeavoring to explain something, while the woman nodded solemnly, interjecting the occasional syllable. Although Kat could not understand what they were saying, she noted the way that their hands remained on their respective sides of the table, and how the woman toyed with the stem of her water glass.
She remembered another overheard conversation in a foreign tongue. She and Daniel had stopped briefly at a small café on a side street in Saint-Germain. It was early in the afternoon and only one other table was occupied. A young couple sat tucked against the side of the building. As their voices rose with emotion in the nearly empty café, Kat could not help but hear.
“But you love me.…” The girl said it over and over in French.
Glancing around the empty café, the boy shushed her, half soothing, half smothering.
After some more hushed conversation, the boy left. The girl sat alone in silence for a while, and then rose and made her way out of the café, blinking in the bright sunlight, her tears still wet on her cheeks. Wounded, she moved slowly down the street while people flowed around her. Seeing her watch the girl leave, Daniel asked what was wrong.
“It’s just sad.”
“What?”
Kat regarded him, suddenly wide-eyed. “You don’t speak French.”
He appeared unbowed by her incredulity. “I know enough to get by.”
“I could teach you.”
“I don’t want to learn. I like that I am disconnected. I think I see things differently that way.”
“Perhaps. But speaking another language is also a disconnection. It’s like a mask. The things that I say in French, even the things that I think, are all slightly different from what they are in English, and so while it’s still me, it’s a slightly different version of me.”
He had looked at her quizzically. “There are no other versions of me.”
A slight rustling noise brought Kat back to the red brick town house on Upper Brook Street. She looked up, suddenly aware of a large fur coat motionless next to the table. Long slim claws clutched at its edges. Were it not for the manicure, they might very well have been feline. A waiter appeared and grasped the edge of the low-hanging pendant light above the table, moving it aside to allow the coat and the small, slender woman inside it to slide in beside Kat, trapping them together.
“Christ, it is cold,” Jorie said by way of greeting.
Satisfied that she had been seen in the coat, Jorie divested herself of it, relinquishing it to a waiter along with her drink order. She appeared unfazed by Kat’s confession, delivered in hushed, rushed tones. Kat didn’t tell her everything there was to tell. But she told her some things, which was more than she had ever done.
“Well, of course it is you in the paintings, my dear. I knew that the minute I saw them.”
Kat pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater as the waiter returned with their drinks. “Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe not if you don’t know that you two have a history. After all, it has been a while and even you have aged.” Kat let the comment pass. “Although in future it’s probably best to avoid standing next to them.”
“Do you think Daniel knew what Martin was going to say to me? Do you think he sent him to say those things?”
Jorie swirled the wine in her glass, the bright ruby liquid passing dangerously close to the rim. “Depends. Do you think he could hate you that much?”
Kat looked down, unwilling to answer. Jorie waited, taking a sip from her glass before setting it down on the table. “What exactly went down with you two?”
Kat watched a single drop of Bordeaux slip slowly down the outside of Jorie’s glass, tracing the gentle curve of the bowl, then sliding elegantly down the stem and out onto the foot before sinking into the parched tablecloth, its bright hue immediately reduced to a spreading suggestion of pink, half hidden under the edge of the glass.
“Kat? Hello?” Jorie was waving her hand back and forth in front of her, a vexed expression on her face.
Looking up to meet her friend’s eyes, Kat opted for the lesser of the questions.
“Yes, I think it is entirely possible that he hates me that much.”
“I saw the paintings. Hate is not the emotion that comes immediately to mind.”
Smoothing the folded newspaper on the starched white tablecloth between them, Kat’s hand brushed lightly over the image of the painting of herself on the unmade bed. She turned the paper around so that it faced Jorie. The painting appeared both small and significant inside the bright white circle of light.
“If I asked you how I was different from the girl in this painting, what would you say?”
Jorie raised an eyebrow and then glanced down at the picture. “Well, clothed springs immediately to mind.…”
“Just, please. Tell me what you see.”
Jorie sighed and pulled the paper closer to her, looking intently at it for a moment. “I don’t know.” She pushed it back at Kat. “Young.”
“Can you tell that I’m in love?”
“I don’t think love is an emotion you can see on someone’s face. I mean, happiness or anger or fear, yes. But love? I don’t know what love looks like.”
Jorie paused on hearing her words and laughed lightly. “Maybe that is my problem.”
Neither one of them spoke for a moment. “At the gallery…” Kat began hesitantly. “It was like seeing someone I hadn’t seen in such a long time…”
“Well, yes.… When did you last see him?”
“No. Not Daniel.”
Kat looked at her friend for a moment, considering whether to go on. Jorie regarded her over the rim of her wineglass, waiting.
“Honestly, what is with you lately? It’s like talking to a mute.”
“It’s just that I remember everything.” Kat let the words tumble out of her. “I remember every moment. Every day. Every night. I remember every inch of his body, the way he felt, the way he tasted, the smell of his skin. But even more than all of that, and even more clearly, I remember the girl in the paintings. Who she was and what she wanted and what she knew for sure. And I don’t know that anymore. Not lately, anyhow.”
Jorie was silent long enough for Kat to begin to regret what she had said.
“I haven’t asked you how you are doing. About your mother.”
Kat hesitated, caught off guard by the sudden shift in subject. “Haven’t you?”
Jorie shook her head.
“I’m fine.”
“Yes. I can see.”
Kat sat in the awkward silence. Silhouettes of waiters glided silently among the tables.
When Jorie spoke again her voice was impatient. “What is it that you want from him?”
“I don’t want anything. Certainly not money.”
“Brilliant. Sign the papers and it’s over.” Jorie tilted her head back and drained the remainder of the wine from her glass, replacing it firmly on the table as if to signal that it was sorted. There was something in her eyes that Kat did not recognize. Not quite anger, but its close kin.
“It was over a long time ago,” Kat mumbled, leaning back into the banquette, away from the light.
* * *
THERE WERE SURPRISINGLY few questions about her early return from Paris that spring. People seemed all too willing to make their own assumptions. Homesickness, trouble with the academic program, a simple change of heart. Any one of the fickle reasons of youth.
Her time there had always hovered noiselessly over her history. A gap defined only as her year in Paris. Eliciting wistful smiles and nods of understanding, it seldom called for any additional explanation. People were happy to fill it in with their own memories, their own fantasies. Talking of the food and the wine and the cafés, all the things that had existed in the background of her time there.
Although no one ever admitted it, she was fairly certain that she had some help getting into business school. After all, while her grades were good, she doubted that as a French-literature major she was at the top of their wish list. To this day, she couldn’t fully answer why she had chosen business school, but it probably had something to do with the fact that it was the furthest thing from what she had thought she wanted.
She had been more surprised than most to find that she excelled at it. Once she realized that the quantitative aspect was in fact only a small part of it, it had come quite easily to her. But the real key, she knew, was that she had let go of fear. On some basic level, she understood that it couldn’t hurt her. That none of it was real.
After Paris, New York provided the chaos that she needed to hide herself in. It seemed at first to be peopled not by individuals, but by archetypes. Were one to vanish, she felt certain that another would simply take its place. In the beginning, she found it nearly impossible to do things that required stillness or reflection. Listening to music, reading, going to the theater. The nights were the most difficult. There was only the sound of the cars moving unseen in the streets below her window. In her second year of school she took on an internship with a large bank and threw herself into it. She was looking for something to fill her up. To fill up the hole that she could feel inside of her.
She had several offers on graduation. She took the riskiest and most demanding one with a precocious, precarious start-up. Things moved quickly. There was ample room for creativity and little time for fear. It ate up her days and her nights and she became hooked. Addicted to the adrenaline and to the constant future focus. There was no today and there had certainly not been a yesterday. What mattered was only tomorrow and tomorrow.
* * *
SHE HAD SEEN Elizabeth at a party in New York about a year after she came back from Paris. Someone’s birthday at the Plaza. Elizabeth had just returned, having stayed on to complete the second year of the program. Kat had almost not recognized the slender, elegant blonde who had greeted her. There was considerably less of her than there had been in Paris. The two had made small talk, discussing their summer plans and sharing information about people they knew in common, politely skirting around the edges of her early departure. Kat noticed that almost all traces of her Southern accent were gone. She seemed to be, Kat thought with a smile, the epitome of New York style. Later on, as Kat was leaving the party, Elizabeth intercepted her by the door.
“I don’t know if telling you this is the right thing to do.” Elizabeth spoke quickly. “I saw Daniel.”
Kat didn’t respond immediately. It had been so long since she had heard his name spoken out loud. Elizabeth hesitated, her hands clasped in front of her. She seemed to be looking for an indication of whether she should go on. Kat wasn’t sure whether she should give it to her, but the lure of hearing something—anything—about him proved too strong to resist.
“It didn’t end well.”
Kat surprised herself. A very tidy dismissal.
Elizabeth nodded sympathetically. After all, she had warned her of as much. “It was a few weeks after you left. He came to the flat. At first I wasn’t sure it was him. He looked so … different.”
She glanced at Kat and gave a small nervous laugh before looking away again. “Anyway, like I said, he came to the flat. It was late. He asked for you and I told him you weren’t there—that you had gone back home. I didn’t tell him where you were, just like you asked. And he left.”
Here she paused again, eyes still downcast, the color rising in her cheeks. “And then about an hour later he came back, asking for you again. I assumed he was drunk or something. Obviously. And that maybe he had forgotten that he had been there before and so I told him again. That you were not there. That you had gone home. And he left.” Elizabeth’s voice was increasing in pitch, but her words were slowing down, as if they somehow weighed more now than when she had begun the story and she was having trouble getting them out.
“And then there was another knock on the door, just seconds after I had closed it. And there he was, just standing there, like it was the first time.” She was no longer looking at Kat, but instead looking down as she clasped and unclasped her hands. “He just kept coming back.…”
Kat shivered, but said nothing, thinking of Daniel at the door, playing out the scene over and over again. Elizabeth looked up at her, finally meeting her eyes. And in the small silence between them, two things happened at once. Elizabeth decided not to finish her story and Kat guessed its ending. That Daniel would have continued to come back until he found a different conclusion.
“Oh Kat, I didn’t mean for it to happen. Really, I didn’t. I honestly don’t know what got into me.” Her face furrowed with desperation. “You won’t … you won’t say anything, will you? I mean, you wouldn’t, would you?”
After a moment, the music started up again in the ballroom and Elizabeth looked toward it, regaining her composure. “I never saw him after that.” She shrugged, in a small, quick way that looked like a twitch. “I thought you should know…” Her voice trailed off as she stood, sad and triumphant, uncharacteristically still inside the warm embrace of the Plaza’s gilded grand ballroom, under the soft glow of its glittering chandeliers. After a moment, a small smile returned to Elizabeth’s face and she turned back to Kat.
“Anyway. I guess you made the right choice.”
Kat nodded. She should say something. It was her turn to do so. But she couldn’t think what. A man in a dark suit hovered near them for a moment, slightly agitated, and then approached, placing a hand proprietarily on Elizabeth’s shoulder. Kat looked up into a familiar face.
“There you are,” Elizabeth said delightedly, reaching up to squeeze his hand. “Christopher, you remember Kat?”
“I do. Kat Lind. How are you? Haven’t seen you since Paris.” Kat leaned in for the obligatory double-kiss greeting of the recently repatriated. “Sorry to interrupt. Darling, would you come say hello to the Fiskes before they leave?”
Elizabeth startled at the name and hurried to excuse herself. Kat watched the pair dissolve into the crowded ballroom and turned to leave, letting go of the back of the delicate gilt cane chair she had been clutching.
It was at about this time that she had come upon her old camera in the back of her closet in her mother’s house. There was unprocessed film in it. Standing in the darkroom, she watched as the curtain of rain appeared under the bath of chemicals. The last photos she had taken. She hadn’t used her camera again after that day in the Tuileries. There were several shots like that, followed by a number that she had taken at high speed with the wider aperture. These were completely different, showing the shape of the individual raindrops. Elongated on the way down and fat and round as they bounced off the ground. All that had not been apparent in the moment.
The last photo on the roll showed the clear lines of trees against a fence as ghostlike figures moved in the foreground. She studied it closely. The focal point of the photo was beyond the figures, rendering them oddly distant despite their relative proximity. She knew that one of the blurred figures was Daniel, leaving the Tuileries after their brief shelter under the tree. But she couldn’t tell which one.