The Swan Thieves Part 25

The conductor helps her down into the night, which smells like coal and damp fields. The monstrous train behind them is still groaning, steam from the engine white against dark rows of 403.

houses, the shapes of engineers and pa.s.sengers vague. In their cab, Olivier settles her carefully on a seat beside him; the horses pull forward, and she wonders for the hundredth time why she has consented to such a journey. Is it because Yves insisted or because Olivier wanted her to come with him? Or is it because she herself wanted to and was too weak to talk Yves out of it, too curious?

etretat, when they arrive, is a blur of gas lamps and cobbled streets. Olivier offers a hand for her to alight, and she pulls her cloak around her, stretches discreetly--she is stiff herself, from traveling. The wind smells of salt water; somewhere out there is the Channel, making its lonely sound. etretat has the injured air of a resort caught off-season. She knows that melody, knows this town from previous visits, but tonight it seems to her a new place, a wilderness, the edge of the world. Now Olivier is giving some orders about their things. When she allows herself a glance at his profile, she finds him distant, sad. What decades have brought him here? Did he visit this coast long ago with his wife? Can she ask him such a thing? Under the streetlamps, his face looks lined, his lips elegant, sensitive, wrinkled. In the first-floor windows of one of the tall, chimneyed houses across from the station, someone has lit candles; she can see a shape moving around inside, perhaps a woman straightening up a room before going to bed. She wonders what the life in that house is like and why she herself inhabits a different one, in Paris; she thinks how easily fate might have accomplished such a trade.

Olivier does everything gracefully, a man long used to his own skin--accustomed, also, to having his own quiet way. Watching, she realizes with a sudden lurch of her insides that unless she tells him some kind of no, she will eventually find herself lying naked in his arms here, in this town. It is a shocking thought, but once it presents itself she can't turn away. She will have to find the strength to form that word, "non." Non --there is no such word between them, only this strange openness of spirit. He is closer to death than she is; he doesn't have time to wait for answers, and 404.

she is far too moved by his desire. The inevitability of it catches tightly in her rib cage.

"You must be tired, my dear," he is saying. "Shall we go straight to the hotel? I'm certain they will give us a little supper."

"Will our rooms be nice?" It comes out more starkly than she intends, because she means something else.

He looks at her, surprised, mild, amused. "Yes, they both are very nice, and I believe there is a sitting room for you as well." She feels a wave of shame. Of course; Yves has sent them here together. Olivier has the grace not to smile. "You will want to sleep late, I hope, and we can meet to paint tomorrow in the late morning, if you'd like. We shall see how the weather is--fine, I think, by the feel of this air."

The man has moved up the street already with their luggage in a wheeled cart, their bags and boxes, her leather-strapped trunk. She and her husband's uncle are alone at the edge of another world, bounded by only the dark salt water, a place where she knows no one but him. She suddenly wants to laugh.

Instead, she sets down the bag with her precious painting supplies in it and raises her veil; she steps close to him, her hands touching his shoulders. His eyes are alert in the light of the gas lamp. If he is surprised by her upturned face, her rashness, he hides it at once. She surprises herself in turn by accepting his kiss without reservation, feeling in it his forty years' experience, seeing the edge of his cheekbone. His mouth is warm and moving. She is one in a line of loves, but she is the only one at this moment, and she will be the last. The unforgettable, the one he takes with him to the end.

405.

CHAPTER 68 Mary.

The third day was the surprising one. I could never describe all of the five hundred days I more or less spent with Robert Oliver, but the first days of loving someone are vivid; you remember them in detail because they represent all the others. They even explain why a particular love doesn't work out.

On the third morning of the conference, I found myself eating breakfast at the same table as a couple of women faculty members who seemed not to notice my presence at the other end, which made it fortunate that I'd brought my book. One of them was a woman of about sixty whom I vaguely recognized as a teacher of printmaking at the retreat, and the other was perhaps forty-five, a painting instructor with short bleached hair who began by declaring that she wasn't finding the caliber of the painting students as high as last year's. Well, I'll be reading my book, then, ma'am, I thought. My eggs were runny, not the way I like them.

"I'm not sure why that is." She took a big swallow of coffee, and the other woman nodded. "I hope the great Robert Oliver isn't disappointed, that's all."

"I'm sure he'll survive. He teaches at a small college now, right?"

"Well, that's true--I think it's Greenhill, in North Carolina. In all fairness, a very good department, but hardly what he would find at a real school. I mean, at an art program."

"His students seem to like him," observed the printmaker mildly; she clearly hadn't a.s.sociated the egg-picking reader at her own table with Robert's group. I kept my head down. It's not that 406.

other people's idiocy makes me shy; it simply makes me want to walk away.

"Of course they do." The bleached woman pushed her coffee cup around. "He's made the cover of ARTnews, he has work all over the place, and he's hip enough not to care and to go on teaching in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't hurt that he's six two and looks like Jupiter."

Poseidon, in fact, I corrected silently, cutting my bacon. Or Neptune. You have no idea.

"His female students run after him constantly, I'm sure," said the printmaker.

"Naturally." Her companion seemed pleased by this opening. "And you hear things, but who knows what's true. He seems to me kind of oblivious, which is refres.h.i.+ng. Or he might be one of those men who just really don't notice anyone but themselves in the end. I think he has a youngish family, too. But you never know. The older I get, the more I think men in their forties are a complete mystery, usually an unpleasant one."

I wondered what age she liked better. I could, for example, introduce her to the enterprising Frank.

The printmaker sighed. "I know. I was married for twenty-one years-- was --and I still don't think I understood anything about my ex-husband."

"Do you want to take some extra coffee with you?" asked the spiky woman, and they left together without glancing my way. I noticed as they walked off how graceful the younger woman was--lovely, actually, dressed in svelte black with a red belt, trimmer at forty-five than most women were at twenty. Maybe she would take up the Robert Oliver challenge herself, and they could compare their coverage in ARTnews. Except that Robert would never be interested in that kind of compet.i.tion, I decided; he would scratch his head and fold his arms and think about something else. I wondered if my picture of him as incorruptible was correct; was he simply oblivious, as the woman had said? He hadn't been quite 407.

oblivious to me two nights before, and yet nothing much had happened between us. I drank my tea in a rush and went back to the stables to get my gear. If he wasn't oblivious, it proved that I was probably unmemorable.

Robert collected us near the vans again, but this time he said we would walk instead of driving. To my surprise he led us out the path through the woods that I'd taken to the water the first day, and we set up our easels on the rocky beach where I'd seen him first dive into the cold tide and then emerge from it. He smiled around the group, not excluding me, and gave us some directions about the angle of the light and the way we could expect it to change. We would do one canvas for morning, right here, take a lunch break back at the camp, and then do a second canvas for afternoon. That clinched it for me; if he could return to this spot and teach a landscape cla.s.s here, he was truly oblivious, and to me in particular. I felt a kind of sad relief; I had been not only wrong, unethical, but also silly to believe he'd felt what I had. I could have cried for a moment, watching Robert move among his students, giving us a hint here and there about positioning our easels; at the same time, I felt my freedom begin to flood back, the romance of myself, the loneliness. I had been right to value that, and right to laugh Frank out of my room as well.

I tied back my hair and set up facing the longest promontory into the ocean, where I could catch a big stand of firs with their roots on Atlantic rock. I knew right away that this would be a good canvas, a good morning; my hand moved easily through sketching the forms and my eyes were immediately filled with the underlying grays, browns, the green of firs that appeared black in the distance. Even Robert's presence, his moving off to set his own easel in plain sight, his bending and stooping in his yellow cotton s.h.i.+rt--none of that could interrupt me for very long. I painted hard until we broke for a snack, and when I looked up from cleaning my brushes, Robert was smiling at me from the middle of the group in an ordinary way that confirmed my conclusions. I began 408.

to speak to him, to say something about the view and its challenges, but he had already turned to talk with someone else.

We painted until lunchtime, and began again at one o'clock with fresh canvases. My morning's picture, propped against a tree to dry, had pleased me more than any I'd done in months; I promised myself I'd come back to finish it at the right time of day, maybe the morning everyone left the conference, which was only two more days away. I wished Robert had come over to see it, but he hadn't checked anyone's paintings today. In the afternoon, we worked in our silent spread, planting easels here and there; Robert went off to the edge of the woods with his, but he returned as the light began to deepen into late afternoon, talked with us a little about the view, and took us back to camp. I was less pleased with my second canvas, but he walked by and praised it a little, commented on everyone equally, then brought us together for a final critique. It had been a good couple of sessions, a pleasant workmanlike day, I thought, and I looked forward to the evening, to making myself drink a beer with a fellow painter or two, then going off to bed to sleep soundly.

409.

CHAPTER 69 Mary.

I managed to have my beer early, over dinner, and then I sat near the fire for a while with two men taking the watercolor cla.s.s. Their discussion of the relative merits of oils and watercolor for landscape painting was interesting and kept me there longer than I'd intended to stay. At last I excused myself and brushed off the seat of my jeans, preparatory to heading for my neatly made bed. Frank was talking with someone else by the fire, someone young and pretty, so I didn't have to worry about finding him sitting in front of my mirror again. I took a long detour around him anyway, and that was what put me at the edge of the yard, the deep dark where the firelight didn't reach.

A man was standing there, almost in the woods, a tall man rubbing his eyes with his hands, then rubbing his head, as if weary and distracted, and he was looking toward the trees instead of back at the fire with its crowd of festive figures. After a few minutes he began to walk into the woods, along the path I already thought of as ours, and I followed him, knowing that I shouldn't. There was just enough twilight to show his stride ahead of me and a.s.sure me that he wasn't aware of being followed. I told myself a couple of times to turn back, to give him his privacy. He was going toward the sh.o.r.e where we'd worked that day; probably he wanted to see some of the forms we'd painted there, even if they would be half visible now, and if he'd left the camp alone, he probably didn't want company.

At the edge of the woods I stopped and watched him go on down the stones of the beach, which clinked together under his feet. The 410.

slop of the ocean was audible; the sheen of water stretched darkly to an even darker horizon. Stars were coming out, but the sky was still blue--sapphire--rather than black, and Robert's s.h.i.+rt pale, his form moving along the edge of the water now. He stood still, then stooped to pick something up, flung his arm back with the childhood gesture of baseball-in-hand, and hurled it away from land--a stone. It was a quick, furious gesture: anger, maybe despair, release. I watched him without moving, half frightened by his emotion. Then he crouched down, a strange gesture for such a large person, again a child's gesture, and seemed to put his head in his hands.

I wondered for a moment if he was tired, irritated (as I was myself) by the lack of sleep and the endless necessity of being with other people at the conference, or if he might even be crying, although I couldn't imagine what someone like Robert Oliver would have to cry about. Now he was sitting down on the beach--it would be damp, I thought, hard and slippery--and he stayed there on and on, his head in his hands. The waves came forward smoothly, unfurling white half visible in the dark. I stood watching and he simply sat there, his shoulders and back glimmering. In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know. I started down the beach, hearing the stones rattle under my feet, once almost tripping.

He didn't turn around until I was very close, and even then I couldn't see his expression. But he saw me, whether or not he recognized me in the first moment, and he stood up -- started up. At that moment I finally felt shame and real apprehension at having invaded his solitude. We stood looking at each other. And I could see his face now; it was dark, troubled, and my presence hadn't cleared it. "What are you doing here?" he said flatly.

I moved my lips but no voice came out. Instead, I reached over and took his hand, which was very large, very warm, and closed automatically over mine. "You should go back, Mary," he said 411.

with (I thought) a quiver in his voice. It gratified me that he had used my name, and so naturally.

"I know I should," I said. "But I saw you and I felt worried about you."

"Don't worry about me," he said, and his hand closed more tightly over my hand, as if saying it made him worry about me in return.

"Are you all right?"

"No," he said softly, "but that doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters. It always matters if a person is all right or not." Idiot, I told myself, but there was the problem of his huge hand over mine.

"Do you think artists are really supposed to be all right?" He smiled, and I thought he might even begin to laugh at me.

"Everyone is supposed to be," I said staunchly, and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn't mind it.

He dropped my hand and turned to the ocean. "Have you ever had this feeling that the lives people lived in the past are still real?"

This was weird and out of context enough to give me a chill. I very much wanted him to be all right despite his strange a.s.sertion, so I thought about Isaac Newton. Then I thought about how often Robert Oliver painted historical or pseudo-historical figures, even those distant people I had seen in his landscape our first full day here, and realized that this must be a natural question for him. "Certainly."

"I mean," he continued, as if talking to the edge of the water, "when you see a painting that was painted by someone who's been dead for a long time, you know without a doubt that that person really lived."

"I think about that sometimes, too," I admitted, although his observation didn't fit my first theory about him, that he was simply interested in adding historical figures to his canvases. "Do you mean somebody in particular?"

412.

He didn't answer, but after a moment he put his arm around me as I stood beside him, then stroked my hair down my back, a continuation of his gesture of two nights earlier. He was stranger than I'd thought, this man--it was not simply eccentricity but genuine oddness, a sort of complete focus on the world of his own thoughts, a disconnect. My sister, Martha, would have given him a peck on the cheek and walked back up the beach, I'm sure, and so would any sensible person I know. But there is another meaning to sensible --Muzzy made us take years of French. He stroked my hair. I raised my hand to take his hand, and then I drew it to my face and kissed it in the dark.

Kissing someone's hand is more a man's gesture than a woman's, or a gesture of respect--for royalty, for a bishop, for the dying. And I did mean it respectfully; I meant that I was awed and thrilled by his presence, as well as a little afraid of it. He turned toward me and pulled me in, one of his arms crooked gently around my neck, and ran his other hand over my face as if wiping dust from it, and drew me up against him to kiss me. I hadn't been kissed like that, ever, not ever; his mouth had the feel of a completely unself-conscious pa.s.sion, a longing possibly unconscious even of me, full of the act itself. His hand caught the small of my back and lifted and pressed me against him, and I could feel the self-sufficient warmth of his chest through his worn s.h.i.+rt, the little b.u.t.tons pressing into me as if to mark my skin.

Then he slowly let me go. "I don't do this," he said, as if drunk. There was no alcohol on his breath, not even the beer I'd had myself. He put his hands on my face and kissed me again, quickly, and this time I felt he knew exactly who I was. "Please go back."

"All right." I, whom Muzzy had called willful, whom my high-school teachers had considered a little sullen and my art-school instructors had found trying, turned obediently away and walked, stumbling, up the dark beach.

413.

CHAPTER 70 1879.

Her room in their boardinghouse overlooks the water; his, she knows, is on the same floor at the other end of the corridor, so that it must have a view back into the town. Her furniture is simple, an a.s.sortment of old pieces. A polished sh.e.l.l sits on the dressing table. Lace curtains veil the night. The innkeeper has lit lamps and a candle for her and left a tray under a cloth: stewed fowl, a salad of leeks, a slice of cold tarte aux pommes. She washes in the basin and eats ravenously. The fireplace is dead, perhaps abandoned for the season, or to save fuel. She could request a fire, but that might involve Olivier--she prefers to remember their kiss on the station platform, not see him now, with his weary face.

She takes off her traveling dress and boots, pleased, glad she has not brought her maid. For once, she will do things for herself. Beside the cold fireplace, she removes her corset cover, unlaces her corset, and hangs it temporarily over a chair. She shakes out her chemise and petticoats and slips out of them, pulls the tent of her nightgown over her head, its scent her own, comforting, something from home. She begins to b.u.t.ton up the neck, then stops and takes it off again; she spreads it on the bed and sits down in front of the dressing table wearing only pantalets. The chill of the room makes her skin p.r.i.c.kle. It has been a year or more since she has sat looking at her body, bare from the waist up. Her skin is younger than she thinks of it; she is twenty-seven. She can't remember when Yves last kissed her nipples--four months, six months? During the long spring she has forgotten to coax him even at the right time of month. She has 414.

been distracted. Besides, he is usually traveling, or tired, or perhaps he has all he wants elsewhere.

She puts a hand over the swell of each breast, notes the effect of her rings catching the candlelight. She knows more now about Olivier than about the man she lives with. Olivier's decades of life lie open to her, while Yves is a mystery who shuttles in and out of her house, nodding and admiring. She squeezes hard with both hands. In the mirror, her neck is long, her face pale from the train trip, her eyes too dark, her chin too square, her curls too heavy. Nothing about her should add up to beauty, she thinks, taking the pins out of her hair. She uncoils the heavy knot at the back; she lets it fall over her shoulders and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, sees herself as Olivier might, and is ravished: self-portrait, nude, a subject she will never paint.

415.

CHAPTER 71 Mary.

Robert and I didn't look at each other the next day; actually, I don't know whether he looked at me or not, because by then the only thing I could think to do was to ignore everything around me except my hand on the brush. I still like the landscapes I did at that conference as much as anything I've painted. They are tense--I mean, full of tension. Even I can feel when I see them now that they have that little bit of mystery every painting needs to be successful, as Robert had once put it to me himself. That final day, I ignored Robert, I ignored Frank, I ignored the people around me at our last three meals, I ignored the dark and the stars and the bonfire and even my own body curled in the white bed in the stables. I slept deeply after my initial exhaustion. I didn't even know if I would see Robert the last morning, and I ignored my conflicting hopes of seeing and not seeing him. Anything else had to be up to him; that was how he had arranged things by not arranging them.

The departure morning of the conference was a busy one; everyone was supposed to clear out by ten o'clock, because a retreat for Jungian psychologists was arriving the next day and the staff had to clean our dining hall and stables to prepare for them. I methodically packed my duffel bag on my bed. At breakfast Frank clapped me on the shoulder, very cheerful; clearly he had gotten good and laid. I shook hands solemnly with him. The two nice women from my painting cla.s.s gave me their e-mail addresses.

I didn't see Robert anywhere, and this caused me a pang but also that strange relief again, as if I'd narrowly avoided sc.r.a.ping a 416.

wall. He had quite possibly left early, since he would have a long drive back to North Carolina. A caravan of artists' cars was pulling out onto the drive, many of them plastered with b.u.mper stickers, a couple of enormous old town cars loaded with equipment, one van painted with Van Gogh swirls and stars, hands waving out the windows, people shouting last good-byes to their workshop mates. I loaded my truck and then thought better of waiting in the line and went for a walk instead, out into the woods in a direction I hadn't yet taken; there were enough cleared trails for forty minutes of browsing without straying far from the estate. I liked the underbrush, with its lichened fir branches and s.h.a.ggy low bushes, the light filtering from the fields into the forest.

When I emerged, the traffic jam was gone and only three or four cars remained. Robert was loading one of them; I hadn't known that he drove a small blue Honda, although I could have thought to check around for North Carolina plates. His method of packing seemed to be to shove things into the rear storage area without putting most of them into bags or boxes; I could see him jamming in some clothes and books, a folding stool. His easel and wrapped canvases were already carefully stowed, and he seemed to be using the rest of his possessions to pad them. I was planning a silent stroll to my truck when he turned and saw me, and stopped me. "Mary--are you leaving?"

I went over to him; I couldn't help it. "Aren't we all?"

"I'm not." To my surprise, he had a grin on his face, com-plicit, a teenager sneaking out of the house. He looked refreshed and bright, his hair on end but still glistening damp as if from a shower. "I slept late, and when I woke up I decided to go paint."

"Did you go?"

"No, I mean I'm going now."

"Where are you going?" I had begun somehow to feel jealous, irritated, left out of his secret happiness. But why should it matter?

"There's a great stretch of state park about forty-five minutes 417.

south of here, right on the coast. Near Pen.o.bscot Bay. I checked it out on the way up."

"Don't you have to drive all the way to North Carolina?"

"Sure." He balled up a gray fleece sweats.h.i.+rt and used it to brace one leg of his easel. "But I have three days to do it, and I can make it in two if I push hard."

I stood there, uncertain. "Well, have a good time. And a safe trip."

"Don't you want to come?"

"To North Carolina?" I asked stupidly. I had a sudden vision of myself traveling home with him to see his life there, his dark-haired wife--no, that was the lady in the pictures -- and two children. I'd heard him tell someone in the group he had two now.

He laughed. "No, no--to paint. Do you have to rush off?"

I wanted less than anything in the world to "rush off." His smile was so warm, so friendly, so ordinary. There couldn't be any danger in it when he put it that way. "No," I said slowly. "I don't have to be back for two days myself, and I can make it in one if I push hard, too." Then I thought it must sound as if I were propositioning him, counting that night into the occasion, when it was probably not what he'd meant, and I felt my face getting warm. But he didn't seem to notice.

That was how we spent the day painting together on the beach somewhere south of--well, it doesn't matter; it's my secret, and almost all the Maine coast is picturesque anyway. The cove Robert picked was indeed beautiful--a rocky field crowned with blueberry bushes, summer wildflowers stretching down to low bluffs and piles of driftwood, a beach of smooth rocks in all sizes, the water broken darkly by islands. It was a bright, hot, breezy Atlantic day--that's how I remember it, at least. We braced our easels among the gray and green and slate-blue rocks, and we painted the water and the curves of the land--Robert commented that it 418.

was like the southern coast of Norway, which he had seen once just after college. I filed this away in my very small store of knowledge about him.

We didn't talk much, however, that day; mostly we stood a couple of yards apart and worked in silence. My painting went well, despite my divided attention, or perhaps somehow because of it. I gave myself thirty minutes for the first canvas, which was small, working rapidly, holding the brush as lightly as I could, an experiment. The water was deep blue, the sky a nearly colorless brightness, the foam at the edge of the waves ivory, a rich, organic hue. Robert glanced quickly at my canvas when I removed it and set it to dry against a boulder. I found I didn't mind that he said nothing, as if he were no longer teacher but simply company.

I worked my second canvas over more slowly and had finished only some background by the time we stopped for lunch. The dining-hall staff had graciously allowed me to load up on egg sandwiches and fruit. Robert seemed to have no food with him, and I'm not sure what he would have eaten if I hadn't provided his lunch. After we'd finished, I got out my tube of sunscreen and put some on my face and arms; the breeze came in cooling gusts out there, but I could feel I'd already let myself burn. I offered it to Robert, as I had my lunch, but he laughed and refused. "Not all of us are so fair." And then he touched my hair again with one hand, and my cheek, with his fingertips, as if merely admiring, and I smiled but did not respond, and we went back to our work.