The Swan Thieves Part 15

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CHAPTER 39 Marlow.

I followed him into the log-cabin gallery next door, which turned out to be large and sophisticated inside, with a hidden back wing of gla.s.s and whitewashed frames, an addition some architect had nurtured toward a local prize. The skylighted entryway was lined with canvases and softly bright gla.s.s cases filled with ceramics.

Arnold indicated a big painting opposite the door, and I saw at once what he meant--it was bizarre, terribly alive and yet over-dramatic, stilted like a Victorian stage piece. It showed a woman in billowing skirts and fitted bodice, her slender body bent over. She was kneeling on a roughly cobbled street; as Arnold had promised, she cradled in her arms an older woman, sickeningly dead. The older woman's face was ashen, her eyes closed, her mouth slack, and through her forehead was a bullet hole, a distinct horrible tunnel drilled there, so that a gush of blood was already drying down one side of her loosened hair and shawl.

The younger woman had been elegantly dressed, but her pale-green gown was dirty and torn, stained with blood on the front where she clasped the murdered woman's head against her. Her own l.u.s.trous, curly hair had come undone, her hat fell by its ribbons onto her shoulder, her face was bent over the dead woman's so that I couldn't see the luminous eyes I was already so used to meeting. The background was hazier, but it seemed to be a wall, a narrow city street, one storefront overhung with words whose letters blurred in the paint, unreadable, figures in red and blue crouching nearby but indistinguishable. There were piles of something at one end--brown, beige--chopped wood? Sandbags? A lumberyard?

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The whole thing was riveting but also purposely overdone, it seemed to me, appalling as well as moving. It smelled of fear and hopelessness. The pose, the grief in it, made me remember my first glimpse of the Michelangelo Pieta--a work too famous for anyone to look at it clearly anymore, except perhaps when one is young enough. I'd seen it on my trip to Italy after college; at that time it was not yet behind gla.s.s, so I was separated from the figures by only a rope and a distance of five feet or so. The daylight coming down on Mary and Jesus touched them with different tones, and it was as if both bodies were alive, the blood pulsing in their veins--not only the grieving mother but also the freshly dead son. The incredibly touching thing was that he wasn't dead. For me, without faith, it was not a prediction of resurrection but a portrayal of Mary's shock, and of the lingering aliveness one sees in the hospital when a young person is wrested out of life by some terrible injury. I learned, in that moment, the difference between genius and everything else.

What struck me most about Robert's painting, apart from the horror of the scene, was that it was narrative, whereas all the images I'd seen of his lady before this were portraits. But what was the story? Possibly Robert hadn't been using any models at all; I remembered what Kate had said about how he sometimes drew and painted from his imagination. Or perhaps he'd been using models but had invented the story--the nineteenth-century dress would support this idea. Had he dreamed up his lady character holding her murdered mother? Perhaps he'd even been painting his own bright and dark sides, the two parts of his psyche divided by illness. I hadn't expected Robert Oliver to come up with actual stories.

"You don't like it either?" Arnold looked pleased.

"It's very skillful," I said. "Which one of these is yours?"

"Oh, on this wall," Arnold said, gesturing toward a large canvas behind us, next to the door. He folded his arms in front of it. It was abstract, large soft squares of pale blue melting into one another, a 226.

silver sheen over it all, as if you could drop a square pebble in water and it would make concentric squares. It was rather appealing, actually. I turned to Arnold and smiled. "I do like this."

"Thanks," he said cheerfully. "I'm doing yellow now." We stood gazing at the blue, Arnold's child of a couple of years earlier, Arnold with his head fondly to one side; I could see he hadn't really looked at it in a while. "Well," he said.

"Yes, I should let you get back to office hours," I told him gratefully. "You've been very kind."

"If you talk with Robert again, tell him I said h.e.l.lo," he prompted. "Tell him he's not forgotten here, no matter what."

"I'll certainly tell him," I--lied?

"Send me a copy of that article if you think of it," he added, waving me out the door.

I nodded and then shook my head and covered my error with some return waving before I got into my car, but he was gone. I sat behind the steering wheel for a moment, trying not to actually put my head in my hands. Then I got out again, slowly, feeling the eyes of the building on me, and went back into the gallery. I walked deliberately past the paintings in the entryway, the platforms of glowing bowls and vases, the linen and wool tapestries. I went into the main hall and viewed one by one the student paintings hung on show there, reading the placards without remembering them, staring at the glaze of red, green, gold--trees, fruit, mountains, flowers, cubes, motorcycles, words, a jumble of work, some of it excellent, some of it surprisingly clumsy. I looked at every item until the colors whirled, and then, slowly, I went back to Robert's painting.

She was still there, of course, bending over her terrible burden, pressing the loosened floppy head with its bullet hole against the green curve of her breast, her own face concentrated with grief rather than slack, her jaw set against tears, her dark eyebrows drawn together in a fine, furious, unbelieving misery, her anger showing also in the line of her shoulder, her skirts still trembling 227.

from her swift movement: she had knelt on the dirty street and seized the precious body. She knew and loved the dead woman; this was no abstract mercy. It was an incredible painting. With all my training, I couldn't begin to figure out how Robert had conveyed such emotion, such motion, in paint; I could see some of the strokes he'd used, the blends of color, but the life with which he'd imbued the living woman and the lifelessness with which he portrayed the dead one were beyond my understanding. If it was a work of the imagination, that made it all the more horrifying. How could the college bear to have this image hanging in front of its students day after day?

I stood gazing at her until she seemed about to start up with a cry of anguish or a call for help, or run, or brace her lovely back and waist to try to raise and carry the heavy body. At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. I put my hand to my throat and felt my own warmth there. I waited for her to lift her head. Would I--this was the question--would I be able to help her if she looked up? She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.

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CHAPTER 40 Marlow.

It took me hours, that afternoon, to make up my mind. By the time I reached Kate's door again, it was dark; I'd lost another day and would have to drive to DC starting early in the morning, drive hard to make an evening appointment. Instead of leaving Greenhill, I'd taken a restless walk and eaten dinner in town, then turned my wheels away from the Hadleys' mountain road, at the last moment, and back toward the other side of the valley. The trees loomed around me in Kate's neighborhood, and there were lights in the windows of the Tudor houses; a dog barked. I pulled slowly up her drive. It wasn't late, but it wasn't courteously early either. Why the h.e.l.l hadn't I called ahead? What was I thinking? By then, however, I couldn't stop myself.

When I reached her porch, the light went on automatically, and I almost expected an alarm to sound. One lamp was lit in the living room. There was no other sign of life, although I could see a glow in the back rooms as well. I raised my hand to ring the bell, then changed my mind with my last bit of sense and knocked firmly instead. A shadow came out of the far interior doorway and approached--Kate, her delicate body pa.s.sing into and again out of the lamplight, her hair glinting, her movements wary. She peered through the gla.s.s with a tense face and then, apparently recognizing me but all the more cautious because of that, came to the door and opened it slowly.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I'm sorry to disturb you this late, and I haven't lost my mind--" Although I wasn't completely sure about that, and it sounded worse than if I hadn't said it, once it was out.

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"I'm leaving in the morning, you know, and--please show me the other paintings."

She let her hand drop from the door handle and turned her head to look fully at me. It was an expression of sorrow, of disdain, a last-straw look but full of an infinite patience as well. I stood my ground, losing hope every second. In a moment she would deny me, tell me I had indeed lost my mind, remark that she didn't know what I was talking about, that I had no real business here, that she wished I would leave. Instead, she moved aside to let me in.

The house was deeply peaceful, and I felt like the worst kind of intruder, clumsy and heavy-footed. At what cost had she created this peace? There was comfort around me, lamplight, perfect order, a gentle breathing of wood and flowers that could have been the breathing of the children themselves; presumably they were asleep upstairs, and their unseen vulnerability made me feel all the guiltier. I dreaded going up those stairs and hearing their actual soft sighs, but to my surprise Kate opened a door in the dining room instead and led me down steps: the bas.e.m.e.nt. It smelled of dust, dry dirt, old dry wood. We went slowly down the stairway; despite one lightbulb overhead, I had the feeling that we were descending into darkness. The smell reminded me of something from my childhood--oddly pleasant, someplace I'd visited or played. Kate's slender shape moved ahead of me; I looked down on the top of her gold-brown head in that bare yet inadequate lighting, and she seemed to slip away from me into a dream. There was a woodpile in one corner, an ancient spinning wheel in another, plastic buckets, empty ceramic flowerpots.

Kate led me without words to a wooden cabinet at the other end of the one room. I opened the door, still as if in a dream, and saw that it had been specially built to hold canvases neatly and separately, like a drying rack in a studio, and that it was full of paintings. She held the door ajar for me, her hand white against the wood. I reached in and carefully took out a painting 230.

in the thrumming dimness and set it against the wall nearby, then another, then the next, and another, until the cabinet was empty and eight big framed canvases stood against the walls. Some of these must have been from Robert's shows; I wondered if he'd sold many others there and to what homes and museums they'd gone.

The light was bad, as I mentioned, but that only made them more real. Seven of the paintings showed some version of the scene I'd encountered that afternoon at the Greenhill College gallery-- my lady bent over a beloved corpse, sometimes a close-up of the two faces near each other, huge on the canvas, the still-young, strong-featured face hovering over the older ashen one. Sometimes it was a similar scene, but she had buried her sobs in the dead woman's neck as if drinking her blood or mixing it with her tears--melodramatic, yes, but also wrenchingly moving. In another she stood upright with a handkerchief pressed over her lips, the body at her feet, looking wildly around for help--was this the moment before or after the one depicted in the painting at Greenhill College? Over and over, the curly-haired woman was taken by surprise, horrified, grieving. The story never moved forward or backward; she was caught forever in that one event.

The eighth painting was the largest, and quite different, and Kate had already moved to stand in front of it. It was a full-length view of three women and a man, in a weirdly formal arrangement, breathtaking realism, with none of Robert's usual stamp of the nineteenth century--no, this one was unmistakably contemporary, like the sensuous painting I'd seen in Robert's home studio two floors above us. The man stood in the foreground, two of the women behind him to his right and one to his left, all four figures gravely facing the viewer and dressed in modern clothing. The three women wore jeans and pale silky s.h.i.+rts, the man a ripped sweater and khaki pants. I recognized all but one of them. The smallest of the women was Kate, her old-gold hair longer than she now wore it, her blue eyes wide and sober, every freckle in its place, her body upright. Beside her stood a woman I didn't know, 231.

also young, and much taller, long-legged, with straight reddish hair and a sharp face, her hands jammed in the front pockets of her jeans. Or had I seen her somewhere? Who could she be? To the man's left was a familiar figure, womanly under unfamiliar modern gray silk and faded denim, her feet bare, her strong face as I saw it in my dreams, her curly dark hair falling past her shoulders. Seeing her in the clothes of my own era made my heart contract with the possibility of actually finding her.

The man in the painting was Robert Oliver, of course. It was almost like having him present: his rumpled hair and worn clothes, his greenish eyes huge. He seemed only half aware of the women around him; he was his own main subject, the foreground, gazing out with flat resistance, refusing to relinquish anything of himself even to the viewer. Alone, in fact, despite the three Graces around him. It was an embarra.s.sing painting, I thought--blatant, egocentric, puzzling. Kate stood staring at it almost the way she stood looking out of it, her eyes wide, her little body straight as a dancer's. I moved hesitantly over to her and stood against her shoulder, then put my arm around her. I meant only to comfort. She turned to me with something cynical in her expression, almost a smile.

"You didn't destroy them," I said.

She looked steadily up at me, not resisting my arm. She had the shoulders of a bird, hollow little bones. "Robert is a great artist. He was a pretty good father and a pretty bad husband, but I know he is great. It's not my place to destroy these."

There was nothing n.o.ble in her voice; it was a matter-of-fact, bald statement. Then she drew back, disengaging herself gracefully from my arm: closed door. She didn't smile. She smoothed her hair, staring at the largest painting.

"What will you do with them?" I said finally.

She understood. "Keep them until I know what to do."

This made so much sense that I didn't ask her further questions. It seemed to me that these disturbing images might one day put her children through college, if she handled them well. She helped 232.

me set the paintings back in their tracks, and we shut the door together. Finally I was following her again, up the wooden stairs, across the living room, and onto the porch. There we paused. "I don't mind what you do," she said. "Whatever you think is right." I knew this meant that I had her permission to eventually tell Robert that I had seen his wife, that I had not seen his children except in picture frames, that I had seen the gracious clean house in which he'd once lived, the paintings she was saving for a future she could not look far into.

Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then she stood a little taller--although not the stretch it must have been to Robert Oliver's cheek--and kissed me sedately. "Have a safe trip back," she said. "Drive carefully." She did not send any message.

I nodded, unable to speak, and went down the stairs, hearing her door close behind me for the last time. Once I was out on the road, I turned up my car radio, then switched it off and sang loudly into the silence, more loudly, thwacked my hand against the steering wheel. I could see Robert's paintings s.h.i.+ning under the bare bulb, and I knew I might never view them again. But I had broken open my life, or perhaps she had done it for me.

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CHAPTER 41 1878.

The outside of his studio building in the rue Lamartine is unprepossessing. She sits looking at it from her carriage. She has told herself since yesterday that she will bring her maid up with her. But at the last minute, before leaving her house, she realizes she wants no witness at all. Her unnecessary note to the housekeeper explains that she will be calling on a friend and orders a tray to be taken up to her father-in-law at midday.

The facade of the building is thoroughly real, and she swallows hard under the bow of her bonnet; she has tied it too tightly. Late morning--the streets are full of the bustle of carriages, the heavy clopping of paired horses, the delivery wagons. Waiters push the chairs outside their cafes into straight lines, and an old woman sweeps up rubbish at the curb. Beatrice watches as the woman, who wears tattered gloves and a patched skirt, accepts a few coins from a man in a long ap.r.o.n and moves on down the street with broom and pail.

The note in Beatrice's little bag contains a street number and a sketch of the building. His invitation is to see a new large canvas, which he would like to send to the Salon jury next week, so that she must view it now or wait until then--and who knows if it will be accepted? It is a flimsy pretext; she will see the painting later with Yves, she knows, whether or not it is hung in the Salon. But Olivier has mentioned the submission several times, an unwieldy canvas, his uncertainty. The thought of the painting, his struggles with it, have become their mutual concern, almost a shared project. It is the portrait of a young woman, he has most 234.

recently told her. Beatrice dares not ask who she is -- a model, no doubt. He has also thought about sending an earlier landscape instead. She knows all this and feels the pride of involvement, of being consulted--that is her thin justification for appearing alone there in a new bonnet. Besides, it is not as if she is going to see him at his home; he has only lured her to his studio, and perhaps there will be others there as well, taking refreshments and studying the paintings.

She excuses the carriage for an hour and lifts her skirts to descend. She has dressed herself in a walking suit the color of plums, and over it a cloak of blue wool trimmed with gray fur. Her bonnet goes with the cloak; it has the new shape for hats, in blue velvet lined with silver and heavy with blue silk forget-me-nots, chicory, lupine--marvelously real, like a hat decorated in a field. The mirror at home has told her that her cheeks are already flushed, her eyes bright with something like guilt.

She watches her own foot in black leather leave the carriage first, step onto the paving stones, avoiding some slimy water. This is a part of town where some of the troubles occurred, she realizes, and tries to imagine it eight years before, piled with barricades and perhaps even bodies, but her imagination will not quite be diverted; she is thinking only about the man waiting for her somewhere above. Can he see her? She is careful not to glance up again. With skirts gathered in one gloved hand, she makes her way to the entrance, knocks, then realizes that she must simply walk in--there is no servant to answer. Inside, a worn staircase leads her to the third floor, to his studio. None of the closed doors on the other floors open as she pa.s.ses them. She stands looking at his name and catching her breath--her stays are tight--before knocking.

Olivier answers at once, as if he has been just behind the door, listening for her, and they regard each other without speaking. They have not been face-to-face in more than a week, and during 235.

that time something has deepened between them. Their eyes meet, inevitably, across this knowledge, and she sees that he is aware of the change. For her part, she feels the shock of his age, because she hasn't seen him recently and she knows him more and more as a man, objectively; he is handsome, only a little past middle age, but there are deep vertical lines from the corners of his nose to the corners of his mouth and beneath his eyes, and his hair is pale silver.

Under his face she sees the younger man he must once have been, and this young man gazes back at her as if through a mask he never wanted to wear, vulnerable and expressive, revealing eyes still bright--but not as they must once have been; they droop redly in the lower rims and their blue is compromised, diluted. He has combed his hair away from a pink parting, which she can see when he bows over her hand. His beard still has some brown in it, a warmth at the roots, and his lips are also warm as they touch the back of her hand. In their brief contact, she feels his essence--neither the boy in love looking out of his eyes nor the aging man. She feels instead the artist himself, ageless and in the midst of a long acc.u.mulated life. His presence goes through her like the unexpected sound of a bell, so that she cannot catch her breath after all.

"Please, come in," he says. "Entrez, je vous en prie. My studio." He does not call her "tu." He holds the door for her, and she realizes now that he is wearing an old suit, shabbier than what she has seen him in before, with an open linen smock over the jacket. The sleeves of the smock are rolled back, as if they are too long even for him. His white s.h.i.+rt has a few spatters of paint on the breast, and his four-in-hand tie is black silk, also threadbare. He has not dressed up for her visit; he is allowing her to know him as he actually works. She pa.s.ses into the room, noting that no one else is there, feeling his proximity at the door. He shuts it behind her gently, as if not wis.h.i.+ng to draw attention to the point they both understand, the possible compromise to their two 236.

reputations. The door is shut. It is done. She wishes she felt more regret, more shame; she reminds herself that the outside world can still consider him merely a relative, a dignified elder who might well invite his nephew's wife to see a painting.

But it is as if instead of shutting a door he has opened one, making a long s.p.a.ce of daylight and air between them. After a moment, he moves, saying, "May I take your cloak?"

She remembers the ordinary gestures, unties her bonnet and lifts it straight up and off so as not to disarrange the coils of her hair. She unfastens her cloak at the throat and folds it once, vertically, inside out, to protect the delicate fur. She hands him both, and he carries them away through another door. Standing alone in the studio, she feels the increased intimacy of a room without its occupant. It is full of light from long windows, clean inside and badly streaked on the outside, and there is an ornate skylight above her. She can hear the sounds of the street below--m.u.f.fled thumps; rattling, screeching iron; horses' hooves -- all so faint that there is no need for her to believe in its existence anymore, nor to think about her coachman taking a hot drink at a stable up the street, where perhaps he knows other coachmen and will not think of her for an hour. Olivier returns and gestures toward his paintings; she has deliberately not looked at them. "I have censored nothing," he says. "You are a fellow artist." He says it without ostentation, almost shyly, and she smiles and glances away.

"Thank you. You have done me an honor by leaving your studio as it is." But she needs some courage to view the paintings.

He points. "Here is the one that hung in the Salon last year. Perhaps you remember it, if I am not flattering myself." She remembers well; it is a landscape three or four hand-lengths across, a subtle piece, a floating field with a layer of white and yellow flowers on the surface, a cow grazing at the far edge, brown trees mixed with green. It is a little bit old-fas.h.i.+oned, rather in the style of Corot, she thinks, and chides herself--he paints the way he has always 237.

painted, and he is good. But it is another reminder of the years that separate them. "You like it, but you think it pa.s.se," he says.

"No, no," she protests, but he puts up a hand to stop her.

"Between friends," he says, "there can be only honesty." His eyes are very blue; why has she thought them old? Now they radiate a vigor that is better than mere youth.

"Very well," she says. "Then I like the bravery of this one more." She has turned to a large canvas standing on the floor. "Is that the one you will submit?"

"No, alas." He is laughing now--the reality of his body next to hers. As long as she doesn't actually look at him, she feels again the presence of the young man inside that body. "This one is a little too brave, as you say--they might not take it." The painting shows a tree in the foreground, a fellow in an elegant suit and hat seated beneath it on the gra.s.s, his legs crossed negligently and his long hands hanging down over his knee. It is done in a skillful perspective that makes her want to walk around behind the tree to see what is on the other side. The brushwork is more modern than that in the cow painting--here she can see an influence.

"This one shows an admiration of the work of Monsieur Manet?"

"A grudging admiration, my dear, yes. You have a sharp eye. At the Salon, they might say that it is offensive because it has no purpose."

"Who is the boy?"

"The son I never had." He speaks lightly, but she studies his face, feeling puzzled, afraid of revelations. "Oh, I simply think of him that way--my G.o.dson from Normandy, who lives in Paris now--I see him several times a year, and we go for a long walk or two. A dear boy, son of some young friends. He will make a good doctor in a few years--he studies incessantly. I am the only one who can get him out to the country for exercise, and I believe he thinks it does me good, his poor old G.o.dfather--that's why he 238.

goes, pretending to take my orders for his health. Thus each of us attempts to fool the other."

"It's very fine," she says in earnest.

"Ah, well." He touches her plum-colored sleeve. "Come, I'll show you the rest, and then we'll have some tea."

The other paintings are harder for her to look at, but she does it unflinchingly; models half-dressed, the back of a nude woman, graceful, unfinished--does that mean the woman will return to the studio one of these days and take off her clothes for him again? Has she ever been his lover? Isn't that the way of artists? She tries not to think of it except as a fellow painter, not to mind. Models are often women of loose conduct, as everyone knows, but she herself has come alone to a man's private rooms, his studio -- is she any better? She hardens herself against her own fear and turns to examine his still lifes, fruit and flowers, which he explains are youthful works. To her they appear a little dull, but skillful, delicate; she sees the Old Masters. "I had been to Holland just before I painted these," he says. "I took them out the other day to see how they had held up. They are antiques, aren't they?"

She is careful not to answer. "And your submission for this year? Have I seen it?"

"Not yet." He crosses the long room, beyond the two shabby armchairs and little round table where, she a.s.sumes, he will serve tea. Leaning against the wall is a canvas draped in cloth, a large one; he has to lift it with both hands. He leans it against a chair. "You are sure you want to?"

For the first time she is frightened, almost afraid of the man himself, this familiar figure whom she understands now in a wholly new way because of his letters, his forthrightness, the revelation of himself, the strange response of her own heart as she stands at his shoulder. She turns to him questioningly but can't think of the question. Why is he hesitant to show her his painting? Perhaps it is a genuinely shocking nude or some other subject she can't imagine. She has a sense of her husband's presence, disapproving, his 239.

arms folded to indicate that she has gone too far. But Olivier has told her in his letter that Yves wants her to see this painting. She doesn't know what to think or say.

When Olivier lifts the sheet, she catches her breath, the sound audible to them both. It is her painting, her golden-haired maid seated at work, her own rose-colored sofa, the brushwork she tried to make loose and free and yet seeing, all-seeing. "You understand why I have chosen this one to submit to the Salon this year," he says. "It is by a better artist than I."

She puts her hands to her face, and her vision is smeared, embarra.s.singly, with tears. "What do you mean?" Her own voice sounds weak in her ears. "Are you playing with me?"

He turns to her, swift in his concern. "No, no--I didn't mean to offend you. I took it home with me last week, after you had said good night to us. You must let me submit it for you. Yves approves completely and asks only that you protect your privacy a little by using another name. But it is remarkable--you have merged in it something old and something very new. When you showed it to me, I understood that the jury must see this painting, even if it turns out to be too modern for them. I wanted only to persuade you."

"And Yves knows that you took it?" She somehow does not want to say her husband's name here, in this other man's rooms.

"Yes, of course. I asked him first, but not you--I knew he would say yes and you would say no."

"I do say no," she tells him, and the tears brim over and run down her face. She is humiliated, she who seldom cries, even in front of her husband. She can't explain how it feels to see this private painting in strange surroundings, or--above all--to hear it praised. She wipes her face, searches for a handkerchief in the velvet bag at her wrist. He has moved closer, pulling something from inside his jacket. Now he is carefully wiping her face--patting, drying, arranging with hands that have spent years holding brush and pencil and palette knife. He takes her elbows deliberately in 240.

his cupped palms, as if weighing them, and then he draws her toward him.

For the first time she puts her head against his neck, his cheek, feeling that it is permissible to both of them because he is comforting her. He strokes her hair and the back of her neck, and at his touch a network of cool strands runs down it. His fingertips move over the ma.s.s of braids at the back of her head, touching them without disturbing their meticulous arrangement, and his arm goes around her shoulders. He pulls her against his chest, so that she has to put one hand on his back to steady herself. He strokes her cheek, her ear; he has already come very close, so that his mouth finds her mouth before his hand does. His lips are warm and dry but rather thick, like softened leather, and his breath tastes of coffee and bread. She has been kissed many times, but only by Yves, so it is the alien nature of these new lips she understands first; only after that does she realize that these lips are more skilled than her husband's, more insistent.

The impossibility of his kissing her and of her wanting him to kiss her puts a wave of heat into her face and down her neck, a fist clenching inside her, desire that she hasn't known before to a.s.sociate with desire. He holds her by the upper arms now, as if afraid she will pull away. His grip is strong, and again she feels the years when she hasn't known him, when he built up that strength simply by living and working.

"I can't let you," she tries to say, but the words disappear under his lips, and she doesn't know whether she means that she can't let him send her painting to the Salon or that she can't let him kiss her. He is the one who gently puts her away from him. He is quivering, as nervous as she is.

"Forgive me." His words come out choked. His eyes hold hers but blindly. Now that she can look at him again, she sees he is indeed old. And brave, she realizes. "I didn't mean to offend you further. I have forgotten myself."

She believes him; he forgot himself, remembering only her.