You are the woman folded inside a bathtub. Arms across your chest and head turned towards thoughts I wish I knew the contour of. No eyes to see with. I can only imagine. A splatter of white water dribbling from the shower head. It reminds me of milk. Stands out against the dark blue of the background and it fades into your oily brown limbs, stacked and piecemeal in the foreground. She is alone in a vast canvas of blue. Do you see yourself there? Do you, too, come apart in the bathtub? It’s easier to fall apart when no one is looking.
For the past few minutes our hands almost touched as we walked through the gallery, and that’s a feeling I want again. I might hold you in one piece. Keep you together.
‘Do you see yourself in her?’ I ask. It’s a bold thing to say, and there are too many people in the gallery, but we’ve talked enough today that you can be open with me. Or opening. ‘Do you—’
‘Q doesn’t take baths,’ you deflect. ‘Thinks they’re disgusting. Souping in warm water thick with dead skin cells and soap.’
I don’t want to hear more about Q. Q is a prick. He has what I want, and he doesn’t treat that with deference. I want to hear about you. I want you to say that, yes, you are the woman in the painting who lies in the bathtub with nothing but her own stinging numbness and a disjointed realisation that she might never leave him because she cares to a fault. Caring can be a fault. Bizarre that things should be that way, but it’s true. People without empathy take what they want, and empaths go without. A full heart leaves an empty hand.
‘He’s taken so much from you that you don’t know how not to give,’ I want to say but don’t. Instead: ‘But if you were in that painting, what would you be thinking?’
You tilt your head a little to tell me you’re entertaining the thought so please don’t interrupt me. Then you say, ‘I’d be wondering where my husband is.’ Then you look at me and lift one eyebrow. ‘Where are you while I’m taking a bath?’
‘I’m not your husband.’
‘I know, but just say you were somewhere in there too.’
I’m now looking at all the blue oil-paint and thinking beyond it. About what’s outside the frame, unseen. What could be.
‘I’ve just slid my key from the front door. I don’t realise you’re in the bath. You’re home early from work.’
‘Where have you been?’
I tilt. ‘Beach?’
‘Good. We live across from the beach. Lots of water in this scenario.’
‘True. And there’s a towel over my shoulder and a book in my hand.’
I shouldn’t have gone there…
‘I hope it’s not one of his books.’ Q is an author. It’s one of the issues.
‘Something cheap and light then.’
‘But you’ve not been reading it. You fell asleep after the first page, and there’s still sand in your hair even after a swim.’
Q takes his career too seriously, as he does the weight of public criticism. Drinking has stretched further than being part of his persona – it drowns him for days, and you don’t know where he goes or what he’s doing there. If he’ll come home safely or at all. You give and you give and your well just keeps offering. But you can’t scoop compassion from a dry well.
‘So if you don’t realise I’m home already,’ you continue, ‘what are you going to do?’
I don’t know how to reply to this prompt – is it a tease? When we first met, ducking away from a public reading event – you leaving because you’d heard Q doing his schtick too many times and me because, well, writers reading their work on stage sometimes come across as too arrogant for my taste; plus, there’s jealousy, etc. – when we found each other outside and exchanged guilty excuses, you asked me something similar. ‘So, what are we going to do?’ I felt just as creatively void then as I do now. ‘Walk?’ I’d suggested, and we ended up in that antique store where the old man behind the counter smiled genuinely at us while we pointed at and picked up his elderly things. And as we went past the counter and said hello, he told us we make a lovely couple, the kind that last. At the time, I wondered why neither of us corrected him; played it straight. I relive that moment a lot, but I never change the outcome – I only change the truth.
‘Well, I’d get a start on dinner, I guess.’
I wish I were him. No… I do not want to be Q, but I ache to be with you. For a moment I give air to the thought of telling you outright how I feel.
‘You’re sandy,’ you say. ‘And it’s too early for dinner.’
I glance at my watch, play-acting. ‘Yep, too early for dinner. And sand is in all the places it shouldn’t be.’ You laugh, and I like to see you taking the world lightly for a change. ‘I guess I’m walking into the bathroom to take a shower…’
‘Which is when you find me.’
‘And I discover you.’
I’m not sure what I mean by ‘discover’, but I figure it has to do with what I feel I might be able to give you. Pour back down the well. Fill you again. To the brim. You’d be a miracle. Pilgrims would trek to witness and bathe with water from the well that does not empty.
‘What happens next?’ you ask.
This is my opening to tell you. You have led me to this point in our hypothetical life. You want this as much as I do; I know this now. You want me to see you in the bath, pick up the pieces of you and puzzle them back together.
I shift my weight onto the foot closest to you so my hand is an inch away from yours. We can meet in the middle. It’s only a matter of centimetres. Even as gallery goers – families, so many families – usher each other around the couple fixed in front of the Whiteley.
But I falter. My own fundamental fault pulls the weight of this moment down onto you.
‘That all depends on you,’ I blurt. Disowning the moment. And I hate myself.
Your hand is no longer beside mine. It’s adjusting the shoulder strap of your bag, and now you’ve folded both arms across your chest. You look at me squarely. You’re breathing deeply. Your folded arms help suppress all the words that could otherwise come tumbling out of you right now. I see this. Until I turn back to the woman in the bath, ashamed because I have done this to you. I’m no better than Q. I know that now.
‘I just…’ You look at her, the woman in the bathtub, and then elsewhere, somewhere beyond the gallery’s pallid walls. ‘I just want to feel something,’ you say, then I watch as you walk away from me and the Whiteley. I close my eyes. I imagine what the old man in the antique store would think now. He must have sage advice for such a moment. Perhaps he would beckon for me to go seek you out and make up for my lack of courage with words or a gesture of some sort. Gift water back to the well…
I catch up, and you make it clear you don’t want to talk. You’re not seeing any of the artworks now, even though you’re looking at them. We’re going too fast. Art isn’t meant to be walked past like this, but that’s irrelevant.
I say I’m sorry and you slow, finally, a veil of hair falling from the tuck of your ear. You shake your head, saying, ‘You don’t have to apologise. For anything.’ I want to correct you on that, but you add, ‘I’m the one who should be apologising. My head is a mess right now. I find it difficult to talk.’
I hear you clearly. The noise of families is thinning. I realise we’re near the exit.
‘Let’s keep walking then,’ I say, but we don’t move. And it’s not fair that I want to kiss you right now, so I brush my fingers against the palm of your hand, testing, and you take my hand, and you look down at the skin of it, at my lines, the shapes my fingers make, and I look at the oily light brown of yours. We admire the way our hands fit together.
And this could be it. Us. For a moment I believe it.
But you lower my hand and let go, and soon enough – too soon – we’re walking beside each other through the security gates of the gift shop where you go down one aisle, and I go down another.

You’re waiting for me on a bench seat outside. It’s too warm out here, but you laze in it.
‘What did you buy?’ you ask, and as I make my way across the square, I realise the sun has somehow brought us back to who we were. Or who we are.
I shade my eyes with the paper bag you’re pointing at.
‘Saw something you like?’ you say.
‘Not for me,’ I say.
I sit next to you on the bench seat and give you the bag. You smile awkwardly and say, ‘Why?’
‘You’ll see,’ I say.
You slip from the bag a print of Whiteley’s ‘Woman in Bath’. You glance at me, then back to her. Your thumb rubs the clear plastic slip protecting her head, her breasts, and the dribbling shower hanging over.
‘Thank you,’ you say. ‘Honestly, thank you for the thought, but I want you to have it.’
You push it back into the paper bag, then place it in my hands, and under the genuine light of the afternoon, I understand why. Not all gifts can be accepted, for fear of what they might mean.
So we stand and leave, our hands as far from each other’s as they’ve ever been. And behind us, on the bench seat, is a paper bag with a story inside that someone else will live.