The Swan Thieves Part 18

"Good morning," he said. His voice was both sonorous and raspy. "This is painting for nonmajors, also known as Visual Understanding. I trust that you're all glad to be here, as I am"--an ironic lie, but he was convincing in the moment--"and that this is the cla.s.s you're supposed to be in." He unfolded a sheet of paper and read off our names, slowly and carefully, stopping to check the way he should p.r.o.nounce them and nodding at each of us when we confirmed. He scratched his forearms; he was still standing in front of us. He had dark hair on the backs of his hands, and paint clotted around his nails as if they never quite washed clean. "That's all the names I have. Any stowaways?"

One girl raised her hand; like me, she hadn't been able to get into another cla.s.s, but unlike me she wasn't on his list and wanted to know if she could stay. He appeared to think this over. He scratched his hairline through the dark locks of hair that sprouted there. He had nine students, he said, which was fewer than he'd been promised. Yes, she was welcome to stay. She should get a note from the chair of the department. That wouldn't be a problem. No other questions? No worries? Good. How many of us had ever painted before?

A few hands went up, but hesitantly. Mine stayed firmly on the table. Only later did I know how those first days of teaching any beginning course made his heart sink. He was as shy, in his way, as I was in mine, although he hid it well enough in cla.s.s. "As you know, there is no requirement of previous experience for this course. It's also important to remember that every painter is a beginner, in a real sense, every day of his life." This line was a mistake, as I could have told him; undergraduates particularly hate to be patronized, and the feminist elements in the cla.s.s were sure to resent that "his" as a stand-in for all artists--I included myself among those elements, although I wasn't given to hissing 276.

aloud at lectures like some of the young women I knew. He was likely to let himself in for a rough time in this cla.s.s. I watched him with increased interest.

But he seemed to be taking a different tack now. He tapped the books in front of him and sat down. He folded his paint-stained hands together as if about to pray. He sighed. "It's always hard to know where to begin with painting. Painting is almost as' old as human beings, if the caves of Europe are any indication. We live in a world of form and color, and of course we want to reproduce it--although the colors of our modern world have become a lot brighter since synthetic color was invented. Your T-s.h.i.+rt, for example" --he nodded at a boy across the table from me. "Or--if you'll excuse my using this example--your hair." He smiled at the girl with the violet tufts, gesturing loosely toward her with his big, ringed hand. Everyone laughed, and the girl grinned proudly.

I suddenly liked it there, liked the beginning-of-semester feeling, the smell of paint, the winter sunlight flooding the studio, the rows of easels waiting to receive our inept paintings, and this untidy but somehow debonair man offering to initiate us into all the mysteries of color, light, and form. Sitting in his cla.s.sroom returned to me for a moment the pleasures of my high-school art studio, out of context among my other studies here but an important memory now that I'd gotten back to it.

I don't remember the rest of that day's cla.s.s--I suppose we must have listened to Robert talk about the history of painting or some technical fundamentals of the medium. Maybe he pa.s.sed around the books he'd brought with him, or gestured to the Van Gogh poster. We must have moved to the easels eventually, either in that cla.s.s meeting or the next. At some point--maybe not until the next time--Robert must have shown us something about how to squeeze paint out of a tube, how to sc.r.a.pe a palette, how to sketch a figure onto canvas.

I do remember that he said once that he didn't know whether it was ridiculous or sublime for us to attempt oil painting when 277.

most of us hadn't taken courses in drawing or perspective or anatomy, but that we would at least understand something of what a difficult medium this was, and we would remember the smell of the paint on our hands. Even we could see that it had been an experiment, a departmental decision, not his, to expose a few non-majors to paint before anything else. He tried to convince us that he didn't really mind.

But I was more struck by his noting the smell of the paint on our hands, because this was one of my favorite parts of taking the Visual Understanding cla.s.s, as it had been in high-school art; I loved sniffing my hands after I washed them for dinner, to prove to myself over and over that the smell of the paint was ineradicable. It really was. You couldn't wash it off with any kind of soap. I sniffed my hands during other cla.s.ses and looked at the paint that clung to my fingernails if I didn't keep them safely clean, as Robert instructed us. I smelled my hands on my pillow when I went to sleep, or when they were clasped around the soft hair of the junior poet, whom I was now dating. No scent could mask or even overtake that pungent, oily odor, which was mixed every day on my skin with the equally sharp smell of the turpentine that didn't quite get the paint off.

This pleasure of smell was second for me only to the pleasure of applying the paint to the canvas. The forms I drew in Robert's cla.s.s were certainly clumsy, despite my high-school teacher's previous efforts--I sketched the rough shapes of bowls and driftwood in the studio, the African statuettes, the tower of fruit Robert brought in one day, piling it up carefully in his almost-gnarled hands with their wedding band. Watching him, I wanted to tell him that I already loved the smell of paint on my hands and already knew I would never forget it, even if I didn't paint anymore after the cla.s.s was over; I wanted him to know that we weren't all as insensitive to his lessons as he probably thought. I didn't feel I could tell him something like that in cla.s.s; it would have invited the mockery of the girl with the purple hair and the track star who 278.

used his running shoes when we had to create our own still lifes. On the other hand, I couldn't go to Professor Oliver's office hours and sit down to tell him that I valued the smell of my hands--that would have been equally ridiculous.

Instead, I watched and waited for some real question to ask, something I might genuinely inquire of him. I hadn't had any questions until then. I knew only that I was clumsier with pencil and brush than my old teacher had ever pointed out to me, and that Professor Oliver hadn't really liked my blue bowl with the oranges in it; the proportions of the bowl were off, he'd told me one day, although the colors of the oranges were well mixed--and he'd gone on immediately to someone else's canvas, where there were even worse problems. I wished I had drawn the bowl better, spent more time on it, instead of being so eager to get to the oranges.

But there was no intelligent question I could ask about this. I had to learn to draw, and somewhat to my own surprise I began to apply myself to this enterprise, checking books out of the art library and taking them to my dorm room, where I could sit copying apples and boxes, cubes, the rumps of horses, an impossible drawing of a satyr's head by Michelangelo. I was fascinatingly bad at this, and I drew them over and over until some of the lines seemed to come more easily out of my hand. I began to indulge in dreams of art school, to Muzzy's concern; she approved my moving along the table that served up the liberal arts smorgasbord, trying something new every semester (music history, political science), but she hoped all of that sampling would lead to law or medicine in the end.

Since art school was clearly still far off, I began to draw actual objects in my room: the vase my uncle had brought me from Istanbul years before, the lattice of the window, neatly framed in for the dormitory around 1930. I drew sprays of forsythia my naturalist roommate brought home from her walks, and my poet's fine hand as he lay asleep in my bed while my roommate was at her four-hour Great Books seminar. I bought sketchbooks in different 279.

sizes so that I could keep them on my desk or carry them in my book bag. I went to the university art museum, a surprisingly fine collection for a college, and tried to copy what I saw there--a Matisse print, a drawing by Berthe Morisot. Each task I set myself had a special flavor, a flavor that got stronger whenever I made a new effort to learn to draw; I was doing it partly for myself and partly so that I would have a good question to take to Professor Oliver.

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1878.

My dearest one: I am in receipt this very moment of your letter and am moved by it to write you at once. Yes, as you compa.s.sionately hint, I have been lonely these years. And strange as this may seem, I wish you had known my wife, although if that had been possible, then you and I would have come to know each other under proper circ.u.mstances and not in this otherworldly love, if you will permit me to call it that. It is the fate of every widower to be pitied, and yet I felt no pity emanating from your letter, but only a generous regret for my sake that does you honor as a friend.

You are correct: I mourn her and always will, although it is the manner of her death that has caused me the greatest anguish, not the mere fact of her not being still alive -- and that, I cannot speak about, even to you, at least not yet. One day I will, I promise.

I also will not try to tell you that you have filed this void, because no one fills the absence left by another; you have simply filled my heart again, and for that I am more indebted to you than your years and experience will permit me to explain. At the risk of sounding lofty, or even patronizing--you will find a way to forgive me--I a.s.sure you that you will one day understand the comfort that loving you has brought me. I'm quite certain that you think that your loving me is what comforts me, but when you have lived as long as I, you will know that it is your allowing me to love you, my dearest, that has eased the bleakness I carry inside me.

Finally, I am grateful that you accept my offer, and I only hope I have not been too insistent. And of course we will use the name you suggest--Marie Riviere will be my honored colleague henceforth, and this painting will go out 281.

to the jury from my own hand and with complete discretion. I shall take it myself tomorrow, since the time is short.

With grat.i.tude, ton O.V.

A postscript: Yves's friend Gilbert Thomas came by the studio with his rather silent brother--you know Armand as well, I believe--to buy one of my landscapes from Fontainebleau, which I agreed some time ago to sell through their gallery. He might be of a.s.sistance to you, don't you think? He admired your golden-haired girl exceedingly, although naturally I said nothing about her real creator; in fact he remarked once or twice that the style reminded him of something familiar, but he couldn't think what. I fear he is unscrupulous in raising the prices on the paintings in his gallery, but perhaps I am too particular. And his admiration of your brush speaks well for him, even if he doesn't know who holds it--you might one day sell him some work, if you wanted to.

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CHAPTER 47 Mary.

Finally, I realized that I didn't have a question for Professor Oliver: I had a portfolio of sorts. I had my sketchbook, a largish one filled with the satyrs and boxes, the still lifes. I had individual sheets on which I'd drawn one of Matisse's women, made up of just six lines, dancing with abandon on the page (I couldn't make her actually dance, no matter how many times I copied those lines), and five versions of the vase with a shadow on the table next to it. Was the shadow in the right place? Was that my question? I bought a heavy cardboard sleeve at the art shop and put everything in it, and at our next cla.s.s I watched for an opportunity to schedule a meeting with Professor Oliver.

He was setting a new lesson for us--we were going to paint a doll this week and a live model the next. The doll had to be finished outside of cla.s.s time and brought in for critique. I didn't like the idea of painting a doll, but when he got her out and set her in a wooden doll chair, I felt a little better. She was an antique, slender and stiff, apparently made of painted wood, with matted old-gold hair and staring blue eyes, but there was something canny and observant in her face that I liked. He put her stiff hands in her lap, and she faced us, wary and half alive. She wore a blue dress with a ragged red silk flower pinned to the collar. Professor Oliver turned toward the cla.s.s. "She belonged to my grandmother," he said. "Her name is Irene."

Then he got a sketch pad and silently demonstrated how we should articulate her form as related limbs--the oval head, the jointed arms and legs under the dress, the upright torso. We 283.

should look carefully at the foreshortening of the knees, he said, since we would see her head-on. Her skirt would hide her knees, but they were still there--we should find a way to show the front of the knees under her dress. This got into the area of drapery, he said, which we wouldn't study that semester--it was simply too involved. But the exercise would give us a feel for limbs under fabric, for the solidity of a body in its clothes. Not a bad thing for a painter to think about a little, Robert a.s.sured us.

He set to work on a demonstration, and I watched him; I watched his faded s.h.i.+rtsleeve rolled up on his sketching arm, his green-brown eyes flicking back and forth to the doll while the rest of his body was still and focused on its quarry. The back of his curly hair was flattened as if he'd slept on it and then forgotten to brush it, and a lock at the front stuck up, growing like a plant. I could see that he was unaware of us and of his hair, unaware of anything but the doll with her knees rounding the front of her fragile dress. Suddenly, I wanted that unawareness for myself. I was never unaware. I was always watching other people; I was always wondering if they were watching me. How could I become an artist like Professor Oliver unless I could lose myself in front of a whole group of people, lose myself like that to everything but the problem at hand, the sound of my pencil on the page and the flow of line emerging from it? I felt a wave of despair. I focused so hard on his long-nosed profile that I started to see a halo of daylight around his whole head. I couldn't possibly ask him my nonquestion, bring him my pretend portfolio to look at. It would be more mortifying to me if he saw the rest of my work than if he never saw it at all. I hadn't even taken my first art-major drawing cla.s.s yet--I was an example of art-for-nonmajors, a dilettante who knew how to upholster little chairs and play Beethoven sonatinas on the piano. For people like me, he provided this sampler of the difficulties of real painting--there's anatomy, there's drapery, there are shadows, there is light, there is color. At least you will all know how difficult this really is.

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I turned to my canvas and got ready to pretend to sketch the jointed doll and put some color over her. Everyone set to work, even the flippant students taking it seriously out of relief at being somewhere quiet, in a cla.s.s where you didn't have to speak, a little s.p.a.ce away from talking, away from dorm life. I worked, too, but blindly, moving my pencil and then squeezing oil onto my carefully sc.r.a.ped palette only because I didn't want anyone to see me standing still. Inside I was standing still. I felt tears come to my eyes.

I might have quit painting forever that day, before I really got started, but suddenly Robert, who had been moving from easel to easel, stopped just behind me. I hoped I wouldn't start trembling; I wanted to ask him please not to look at what I was doing, and then he leaned over and pointed one of his strangely large fingers at the head I had sketched in. "Very nice," he said. "You've come an impressively long way with this." I couldn't speak. His yellow cotton s.h.i.+rt was so close that it filled my vision when I turned my head to try to acknowledge those words. His arm and pointing hand were tanned. He was amazingly real, ugly, vivid, confident. I felt that who I was, everything I had been brought up with, was all puny, boring, but his presence made it important for a moment.

"Thank you," I said bravely. "I've been working hard--in fact, I was wondering if I could come to your office hours and ask you some questions, show you some other things I've been doing to get ready for my drawing cla.s.s in the fall."

As I spoke, I turned farther and looked at him. His angular face was softer than I'd noticed before, a little fleshy around nose and chin, the skin just beginning to slip -- a face that would age quickly because its owner was unaware of it. I felt how firm my own smooth face was, my curve of chin and neck, the gloss of my hair, carefully brushed and cut with a s.h.i.+ning straight edge. He was frightening, but he was old and battered. I was new and ready for the world. Perhaps I had the advantage. He smiled, a kind smile, although not a personal one--a warm smile, the smile of a man who didn't actually dislike people, even if he could forget all 285.

about them while he sketched a doll. "Certainly," he said. "You're welcome to stop by. I have office hours Monday and Wednesday from ten to twelve. Do you know where my office is?"

"Yes," I lied. I would find it.

About a week after Robert Oliver had invited me to stop by his office, I got up enough courage to bring him my portfolio. The door, when I arrived clutching my big cardboard folder, was ajar, and I could see his large figure moving around inside a tiny room. I pushed timidly past the bulletin board on his door--postcards, cartoons, and, oddly, a single glove tacked up with a nail--and entered without knocking. I realized I should have knocked, and I turned back, then gave up because Robert had already seen me. "Oh, h.e.l.lo," he said.

He was putting some papers into a file cabinet, and I noticed that he shoved them into the drawer in flat piles because there were no standing files inside, as if he just wanted to hide them or get them off his desk and didn't care about finding them ever again. His office was a jumble of notebooks, drawings, painting supplies, odds and ends from still lifes (some of which I recognized from our cla.s.s), boxes of charcoal and pastels, electric cords, empty water bottles, sandwich wrappers, sketches, coffee mugs, university paperwork--papers everywhere.

The walls were almost as littered: postcards of places and paintings taped above his desk, memos, quotations (I couldn't get close enough to read any), the few big art posters half obscured by them. I remember one of the posters was from the National Gallery for the exhibition Matisse in Nice, which I'd seen myself on a trip with Muzzy. Robert had slapped Post-it Notes covered with handwriting all over Matisse's lady in her open striped robe.

I also remember that, for some reason (that was how I thought of it), there was a book of poetry lying on top of the mess on his desk--it was Czeslaw Milosz's Collected Poems in translation, 286.

new--and I was surprised to think that a painter read poetry, my poet boyfriend having convinced me temporarily that only poets were allowed to do so. That was the first time I had ever heard of Milosz's poetry, which Robert loved and later read to me; I still own that very volume, the one I saw lying on his desk that day. It's one of the only gifts from him I've kept; he gave possessions away as casually as he helped himself to other people's, a characteristic that looked at first glance like generosity, until you realized he never remembered anyone's birthday and never paid off small debts.

"Please come in." Robert was clearing a chair in one corner, which he did by shuffling the papers from it into the drawer of the file cabinet. He shut the drawer again. "Sit down."

I sat obediently, between an aloe plant in a tall pot and some kind of native drum that he'd used once in our studio still life. I knew the beads and sh.e.l.ls around it by heart. "Thank you for letting me drop by," I said as easily as I could. His physical presence in the crowded little room was even more intimidating than it was in the cla.s.sroom; the walls seemed to curve in around him, as if his head brushed the ceiling, dislodged it. He certainly could have reached out and touched opposite walls at the same time, with his great wingspan. I was reminded of our childhood book of Greek myths, in which the G.o.ds were described as being a lot like human beings but larger. He twitched his khaki pants at the thighs and sat down in the desk chair, swiveling around to look at me. His face was kind and teacherly, interested, although I sensed his distraction; he already wasn't really listening.

"Absolutely. My pleasure. How is the cla.s.s going and what can I do for you?"

I fiddled with the edges of my portfolio, then tried to sit still. I had thought many times of what he would say to me, especially when he saw the hard work I'd put into my drawings, but I had forgotten to rehea.r.s.e what I was going to say to him--strange, 287.

when I'd dressed so carefully and brushed my hair one more time before walking into the building.

"Well," I said. "I really like the cla.s.s--in fact, I love it. I've never thought before about being an artist, but I'm working on--I mean, I'm starting to see things differently. Everywhere I look." This wasn't what I'd meant to say, but with his narrow eyes fixed on me, I felt that I was discovering something and it tumbled out. His eyes were remarkable, especially up close, not large unless he opened them wide, but beautifully shaped, green-brown, the color of green olives; they put to shame his unkempt hair and what seemed to me then his aging skin--or was it that the contrast between those perfect eyes and his rumpled self was so astonis.h.i.+ng? I never figured that out, even much later when I'd been allowed to scrutinize them and him with every cell of my being. "I mean, I'm starting to look at things instead of just seeing them. I walk out of my dorm in the morning and I notice the tree branches for the first time. I make a note to myself and then I go back later and sketch them."

He was listening now. His gaze was intent, not on that inward voice he often seemed to hear in the midst of cla.s.s; he was no longer handsomely uncaring, no longer casual. His huge hands lay on his knees, and he looked at me. He wasn't being charming; he wasn't concerned with himself; he was not even concerned with me and my perfectly brushed hair. He was caught by my words, as if I'd offered him a secret handshake or uttered a phrase from the language he'd known in childhood and hadn't heard in years. His tangled dark eyebrows went up, surprised. "Is that your work?" He pointed to the cardboard folder.

"Yes." I handed it to him, fumbling the edges. My heart was pounding. He opened it across his lap and studied the first drawing: my uncle's vase, standing next to a bowl of fruit stolen from the dining hall. I saw it upside down on his knee; it was terrible, a travesty. He sometimes turned our work upside down in cla.s.s, so 288.

that we would think about arranging forms, working on a composition rather than a lamp or a doll--he did that to show us pure shape, to flush out our inaccuracies. I wondered why I had shown that sketch to anyone at all, let alone Robert Oliver. I should have hidden from him, hidden everything. "I know I have to work for at least ten more years."

He said nothing in response, holding my sketch a little closer to his eyes, then moving it slowly away. I realized that ten years might actually sound too optimistic. At last he spoke. "This is not very good, you know," he said.

My chair seemed to heel like a boat in rough water. I didn't have time to think.

"However," he said, "it is alive, and that's something that can't be taught. That's a gift." He turned through a few more sketches. I knew he must be studying my tree branches now, and the junior poet with his s.h.i.+rt off--I had ordered the big sheets carefully. Now my copy of some Cezanne apples, and then my roommate's hand, held obligingly still on a table for me. I had tried a little of everything, and for each of the sketches I'd included, I'd discarded ten others; I'd had that much sense, at least. Robert Oliver looked quickly up again, not seeing me but seeing into me. "Did you take art in high school? Have you been drawing a long time?"

"Yes and no," I said, feeling that here were some questions I could actually answer. "We had an art cla.s.s every year, but it was pretty lax. We didn't really learn to draw. Apart from that, I've had just this cla.s.s--yours -- and I started drawing on my own a few weeks ago because I couldn't paint things right, just like you said. You said we couldn't really paint until we learned to draw."

"That's right," he muttered. He turned slowly back through my sketches. "So you just started this?" He had this way of fixing his eyes on you suddenly, as if he'd just found you--it was unnerving and thrilling. "You are really rather talented." He turned a page around again, as if puzzled, then closed the portfolio. "Do you love doing this?" he asked gravely.

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"I love it more than anything I've ever found," I said, realizing as I said it that it was true and not merely the right answer.

"Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day," he said fiercely. "And remember that it's a h.e.l.lish life."

How could the heaven yawning above me be h.e.l.lish? I didn't like being commanded to do anything--that always got something stirring in my stomach--but he had made me happy. "Thank you."

"You won't thank me," he said, not grimly but sadly. Has he forgotten about joy? I wondered. How terrible it must be to get older. I felt very sorry for him, very glad for myself, for all my youth and optimism and my sudden knowledge that my life was going to be magnificent. He shook his head, smiled--an ordinary, tired smile. "Just work hard. Why don't you apply to the summer painting workshop here? I can put in a word for you."

Muzzy will love that, I thought, but I said, "Thank you--I was considering applying." I hadn't even been planning to stay on campus for the summer; all my friends were going to New York to get jobs, and I had almost decided to do the same. "Are you teaching the workshop?"

"No, no," he said. He seemed absentminded again, as if he had things he needed to get back to--more papers to stuff into drawers, maybe. "I'm here just this semester. Visiting. I have to get back to my life." I had forgotten that. I wondered what his life could be, apart from the paintings and drawings he could do anywhere and of course his all-important students, like me. There was the wedding ring on his left hand, but probably his wife was here with him, although I'd never seen her. "Do you usually teach somewhere else?" I realized too late that I probably should already know this about him, but he didn't seem to notice my ignorance.

"Yes--I'm at Greenhill College in North Carolina. Nice little place with good studios. I've got to get home." He smiled. "My daughter misses me."

This was rather shocking. I'd thought artists didn't have children, certainly that they shouldn't. It gave him a mundane existence 290.

I didn't think I liked very much. "How old is she?" I asked, to be polite.

"One and two months. A budding sculptor." His smile deepened; he was far away, some domestic place where he felt he belonged.

"Why didn't they come with you?" I asked this to punish him a little for having them at all.

"Oh, they're so settled there--good nursery co-op at the college, and my wife just started working part-time. I'll be back down there soon."

He looked wistful; he loved his baby, I saw, in that mysterious realm, and perhaps he loved the diligent wife as well. It was disappointing, the way older people always turned out to have these ordinary lives. I thought I shouldn't overstay my welcome or court any further disillusionment. "Well, I'd better let you get back to your work. Thank you very much for looking at my sketches and for--and for your encouragement. I really appreciate it."

"Any time," he said. "I hope it goes well for you. Feel free to bring me some more, and remember to sign up for that workshop. James Ladd is teaching it, and he's terrific."

But he's not you, I thought. "Thanks." I put out my hand, wanting to close this meeting with some ritual. He stood up, very tall once more, and accepted my grasp. I shook his hand firmly, to show I was serious, grateful, maybe even a future colleague. It was wonderful, that hand; I'd never touched it before. It engulfed mine. The knuckles were thick and dry, his grip strong in return, if automatic--it felt like an embrace. I swallowed hard to make myself let go. "Thanks," I said, turning incoherently toward the door with my portfolio under my arm.

"See you soon." I felt rather than watched him return to some sort of work at his desk. But I had seen, also, in that last second, something in him that I couldn't name--possibly he had been moved by my touch, too, or--no, perhaps he'd just noticed that 291.

I'd been moved by his. I was covered with shame at the thought; it took half the walk back to my dorm, under the windy, bright sky and past throngs of students going to lunch, to cool my face. Then I remembered: Do a hundred drawings a day.

Robert, I remembered it for nearly ten years. I remember it still.

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I do not know where to begin writing you, except to say that your letter moved me very much. If it would bring you relief to tell me about your beloved wife, you may be certain you will find me ready. Papa told me once, but ever so briefly, that you had lost her unexpectedly, and had grieved almost to the point of illness before your departure from the country. I can only a.s.sume that your years abroad were solitary because of this and that you left Paris partly to mourn her. If it eases you to talk with me, I will listen as well as I can, although I know little of such loss myself thank heaven. That is the least I can do for you after what you have done for me, your encouragement and faith in my work. I find myself going eagerly to my studio-porch every morning now, knowing that these paintings have at least one kind admirer. In other words, although I shall wait with as much eagerness as you do for the jury's verdict, your words mean more to me than good news or bad from that source ever will. Perhaps you think this the bravado of the young artist, and perhaps you will be right, in part. But I am also sincere.

With deepest affection, Beatrice 293.

CHAPTER 48 Mary.

That was not the last time I was alone with Robert Oliver before he left Barnett; we had one more encounter, but first I have to tell you about a few other things. Our cla.s.s was finished; we had painted, mostly badly, three still lifes, one doll, and one model-- discreetly robed, not nude, a muscular male chemistry student. I couldn't help wis.h.i.+ng Robert would paint and draw more along with us, so that we could watch how it was really done. Some of his work was included in the faculty spring show, and I went to see it. He had contributed four new canvases, all painted--where? at home? at night?--during the term he'd been with us. I tried to see in them the lessons he taught in cla.s.s: form, composition, color choices, mixing the paint. Had he turned them upside down while he was working on them? I tried to find triangles in them, verticals, horizontals. But they were so strong in their subject matter, their living, breathing brushwork, that it was hard to look behind the scenes.

One of Robert's paintings in the show was a self-portrait (I saw this again years later, before he destroyed it) full of detached intensity, and two others were almost Impressionist and showed mountain meadows and trees, with two men in modern clothes walking off the edge of the canvas. I liked the contrast between the nineteenth-century brushwork and the contemporary figures. I was learning that Robert did not care whether or not people thought he had a style; he considered his work one long experiment and rarely used a single look or technique for more than a few months.

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Then there was the fourth painting. I stood in front of that one for a long time because I couldn't help it--you see, I encountered her long before Robert and I were lovers ourselves; she was already there, always there. It was the portrait of a woman in a low-cut, old-fas.h.i.+oned dress, a sort of ball gown, holding a closed fan in one hand and a closed book in the other, as if she couldn't decide whether to go out to a party or stay home and read. Her hair was thick and dark, piled in soft curls and ornamented with flowers. I thought her expression was musing and deeply intelligent, a little wary. She'd been pondering something and then had suddenly become aware that she was being watched. I remember wondering how he could have caught such a fleeting expression.

She must be his wife, I thought, posing in costume--the portrait had that kind of intimacy. I didn't like meeting her that way, for some reason, especially since I'd already imagined her as dull and hardworking, with her toddler, her practical job. I found it a vaguely unpleasant surprise to think she might be this vital and lovely to Robert. She was young, but not too young to belong to Robert, and so full of subtle suspended movement that you felt in another moment she would smile -- but only once she'd recognized you. It was eerie.

The other thing that was remarkable about the painting was the setting. The lady sat on a great black sofa, leaning back a little, with a mirror on the wall behind and above her. The mirror was so skillfully rendered that I expected to catch myself reflected there. Instead, at a distance, I saw Robert Oliver with his easel, in his rumpled modern clothes, painting himself painting her, and at the center of the mirror was the back of her softly coiffed hair and slender neck. His face was serious and preoccupied as he glanced up at her--she was model as well as wife.

So he was the one at whom she would smile in a moment. I felt a stab of actual jealousy, although I couldn't have said whether it was because I'd expected her to smile at me instead or didn't want Robert to smile back at her. The mirror showed him and his easel 295.

further framed by a window that was the source of light behind him as he painted, a latticed window bordered by stonework. Barnett had some Gothic Revival buildings from the 1920s and '30s; he might have gone to a dining hall or one of the old cla.s.sroom buildings to find those details. Through the window reflected in the mirror, you could see what looked like a beach, cliffs off to one side, blue sky coming down to the horizon of water.

Portrait and self-portrait, subject and viewer, mirror and window, landscape and architecture: it was an extraordinary painting, one that messed with your mind, to use the lingo of our dorms and dining halls. I wanted to stand in front of it forever, trying to decipher the story. He had called it Oil on Canvas, although the other three canvases had real t.i.tles. I wished Robert would stroll into the gallery so that I could ask him what it meant, tell him how chokingly lovely and puzzling it was. I felt a kind of anguish at walking out and leaving it--I checked the catalog in my hand, but the college gallery had chosen to reproduce one of his other paintings and discuss it in detail, while this work was simply listed and dated. Once I left, I might never see it again, might never see this woman whose gaze met mine with such longing--that was probably why I went back to it a couple of times before the show was taken down.

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CHAPTER 49 Mary.