The Swan Thieves

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  CHAPTER 62 Mary

  When lunch was over, Robert left us and strolled off into the woods--to pee, I realized eventually, something I managed myself as soon as the three men were all safely at work again; I had a bit of tissue in my pocket, which I buried under the damp leaves and lichen-covered branches. After lunch we started new canvases to accommodate the change in light, and then painted for hours more. I began to realize that Frank's assessment of Robert's dedication to nature was an accurate one. He didn't come over to look at anyone's work after all, and I was relieved as well as a little disappointed. My legs and back ached, and I began to see plates of dinner in front of me rather than the textures of water and firs.

  Finally, just before four o'clock, Robert circulated slowly among us, making suggestions, listening to problems, calling us together once to ask what we thought about the differences between morning and afternoon light in that landscape, commenting that painting a cliff was no different than painting an eyelid--we had to remember that light revealed form no matter what the object. He finally stopped by my easel, and stood examining the canvas with his arms folded. "The trees are very good," he said. "Really very good. Look, if you put a darker shadow on this side of the island--do you mind?" I shook my head, and he borrowed a brush. "Don't be afraid to make a shadow darker if you need contrast," he murmured, and I saw my island swell into geological reality under his hand. And didn't mind his improving my work. "There. I won't mess with it any more--I want to let

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  you get on with it." He touched my arm with his big fingers and left me, and I worked deeply, almost blindly, until the sun began to sink enough to interfere with true visibility.

  "I'm hungry," Frank hissed, leaning over into my space. "This guy is a crazy man. Aren't you starving? Cool trees," he added. "You must like trees."

  I tried to make some sense of his words but couldn't, couldn't even say, "What?" I was completely stiff, chilled under my sweatshirt and the cotton scarf I'd wrapped around my neck as the ocean breeze grew cooler; I hadn't painted this hard in a long, long time, although I worked almost every day, around the edges of my job. I had one other thing to ask Robert, now that I'd concentrated so deeply on my shadows and needed to add some flecks of white to the whole scene, to brighten it. Should I wait and add the white tomorrow, in something closer to the light with which we'd begun, or do it now--quickly, from memory?

  I made my way down the slope to Robert's easel, where he was beginning to clean his brushes and scrape his palette. He stopped every few seconds to look back at his canvas and out at the view. It occurred to me that he'd forgotten for a while to teach us anything, and I felt a pang of sympathy; he, too, had been absorbed, beyond consciousness, in the movement of brush and hand, fingers, wrist. We could learn just from being near that kind of obsession, I thought. I stood in front of his work. He made it seem easy, this viewing of basic forms and blocking them in, adding color, touching them with light--the trees, the water, the rocks, the narrow beach below. The surface wasn't finished; he, like us, would probably be working on this same canvas at least another whole afternoon, if there was time. The forms would expand later to full reality; the details of branch, leaf, and wave would be touched in here and there.

  But one section of his canvas was beautifully complete. I wondered why he had finished it ahead of the rest: the rugged beach and pale rocks stretching out into the ocean, the soft colors of stone

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  and reddish seaweed. We were at some height from the edge of the water, and he'd caught that sense of looking down, or aslant, at the two distant figures walking hand in hand along the shore, the smaller bent over as if to pluck something from a tidal pool, the taller upright. They were just clear enough, close enough, so that I could see the woman's long skirts pulled back in the wind, the child's bonnet hanging by its blue ribbons, two people companion-ably alone where there had been no one but a painting class on the hill above all afternoon. I found myself staring at them, then at him; Robert touched the woman's minuscule shoe with a brush, as if polishing its toe, then wiped the sable hairs again. I'd forgotten what my question had been--something about the changing light.

  He turned to me with a smile, as if he'd known I was there and had even known who I was. "Have you had a good afternoon?"

  "Very good," I said. His relaxed manner made me feel it would be silly to ask him why he'd put two fictional figures into the summer scene before us. He was known for his nineteenth-century references, and he had every right, as Robert Oliver, to stick whatever he wanted into a lesson in landscape. I hoped someone else would ask him instead.

  Then I hoped something different: that I would someday know him well enough to ask him anything. He glanced at me, the friendly, distant expression I remembered from college--a puzzle, a cipher of a face. Where his shirt collar parted over his chest, I saw tufts of silvered dark hair. I wanted to reach out and touch that hair, to see if age had softened it or made it wiry--which? He had rolled his sleeves almost to the elbow. Now he stood in his familiar tall-man's pose, his arms crossed, hands holding up his bare elbows, his legs braced against the hill's slant. "It's a hell of a view," he said companionably. "And I guess we should clear out for dinner now." It was a hell of a view, I could have pointed out, but it didn't include any figures in long dresses skirting the tide. No shore could have been more strikingly empty--a landscape without people, which had been the point of the exercise, hadn't it?

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  CHAPTER 63 1879

  At the end of March, her painting of the golden-haired maid is accepted for the Salon, under the name Marie Rivière. Olivier comes to tell them the news in person. He and Yves and Papa drink her health around the dining table from their best crystal, while she bites back the smile on her lips. She tries not to look at Olivier and succeeds; already she is growing accustomed to seeing all these loves gathered around one table. She cannot sleep that night for happiness, a complicated joy that seems to rob her of some of the original exhilaration of the painting. Olivier tells her in his next letter that this is a natural reaction. He says that she feels exposed as well as jubilant, and that she must simply go on painting, like any artist.

  She begins a new canvas, this one of the swans in the Bois de Boulogne; Yves finds time to accompany her on Saturdays so that she need never walk or paint alone. Sometimes Olivier goes with her instead, helps her mix colors, and once he paints her sitting on a bench near the water, a little portrait of her from the lace at her throat to the top of her bonnet, which is pushed back to show her wide gaze. He says it is the best portrait of his career. He marks it in bold strokes on the back, Portrait of Béatrice de Clerval, 1879, and signs a corner.

  One night when Olivier is not there, Gilbert and Armand Thomas come to dinner again. Gilbert, the older brother, is a handsome man with calculated manners, good company in a drawing room. Armand is quieter, as elegantly dressed as Gilbert but with a certain listless tendency. They complement each other, Armand

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  setting off Gilbert's intensity, and Gilbert making Armand's silence seem refined rather than dull. Gilbert has special access to the juried works of the Salon now being hung; when the other guests have left and the four of them linger together in the drawing room, he claims to have seen Olivier Vignot's submission, the young man under the tree, as well as the mysterious work Monsieur Vignot has submitted on behalf of an unknown painter, a Madame or Mademoiselle Rivière. Curious, how the picture reminds him of something. Annoying, too, that Vignot refuses to reveal Madame Rivière's identity; surely it isn't her real name.

  Gilbert turns to Yves when he speaks, then to Béatrice. His large, handsome head inclines to one side as he asks them if they know this painter--perhaps young and timid. How brave of an unknown woman to submit work to the Salon! Yves shakes his head, and Béatrice turns away; Yves has never been good at hiding things. Gilbert adds that it is a pity none of them has more information, and that Monsieur Vignot is so secreti
ve. He has always believed there is more to Olivier Vignot than meets the eye; he has a long history--as a painter. The room is pleasant, as always, the furniture upholstered in new colors, Papa's great andirons, the light from the fire and the fine candles catching Béatrice's painting of her garden, framed in gold across the room. Gilbert's tone is measured, his manner respectful and cultivated; he glances at the painting and at her, and straightens his perfect cuffs. For the first time since she gave Olivier permission to submit her work, Béatrice feels alarmed. But what harm could it really cause for Gilbert Thomas to discover her identity, since the piece has been accepted?

  He seems to be driving at something deeper, and now she is really uneasy. Perhaps it is a compliment, a graceful hint that he might be able to sell her work if she is willing to continue the ruse. She might be willing to continue it but is not willing to ask him what he means. Just as she has felt Olivier's goodness, his idealism, from his first evening by this fireside, she senses something out of

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  place in Gilbert Thomas, something loose and hard that rattles around inside him. She wishes he would leave but cannot explain to herself why. Yves finds him clever; he has bought a painting from him, a lovely image from the rather radical Degas, a little dancer standing with hands on hips, watching her fellow dancers at the barre. Béatrice turns the conversation to this purchase, and Gilbert responds enthusiastically, joined by Armand--that Degas will be a great one, they are sure of it, he has been a good investment already.

  She is relieved when they depart, Gilbert kissing and pressing her hand and asking Yves to remember them to his uncle.

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  CHAPTER 64 Mary

  I wish I could report that Robert Oliver and I became dignified friends from that moment, that from then on he was a mentor and wise voice and active proponent of my painting, that he helped my career along and I admired his in turn, and it was all very conscientious until he died at eighty-three, leaving me two of his paintings in his will. But none of this was the case, and Robert is still very much alive, with all of our actual strange history done and behind us. I don't know how much of it he remembers now; if I had to guess, I'd say not all, not none, but some. My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood. If he'd remembered everything, absorbed it right down into his pores, as I did, I wouldn't be explaining all this to his psychiatrist, or any psychiatrist, and maybe he wouldn't be insane. Insane -- is that the word? He was insane before, in the sense that he wasn't like other people, and that was why I loved him.

  The evening after our first landscape excursion, I sat next to Robert at dinner and of course Frank sat next to me with his shirt unbuttoned. I wanted to tell him to button it up and get over it. Robert talked a good deal with a faculty member on his other side, a woman in her seventies, a grande dame of found art, but every now and then he glanced around and smiled at me, usually absently and once with a directness that shocked me until I realized he was turning it equally on Frank--it seemed that he'd liked Frank's treatment of water and horizon better than he'd liked mine. If Frank thought he was going to outpaint me in front of

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  Robert, he was dead wrong, I promised myself, listening to Frank help himself right across me to gobs of Robert's attention. When Frank had finished his prolonged brag in the form of technical questions, Robert turned to me again; I was right by his jawbone, after all. He touched my shoulder. "You're very quiet," he said, smiling.

  "Frank's very noisy," I said in a low voice. I had meant to say it louder, to give Frank a little piece of my mind, but it came out low and harsh, as if meant only for Robert Oliver's ear. He looked down at me--as I said, Robert looks down at almost everyone. I'm sorry to use this cliché, but our eyes met. Our eyes met, and they met for the first time in our acquaintance, which after all had been interrupted by a hiatus of many years.

  "He's just getting started on his career," he observed, which made me feel a little better. "Why don't you tell me something about how things are with you? Did you go to art school?"

  "Yes," I said. I had to lean very close so that he could hear me; there was soft black hair in the opening of his ear.

  "Too bad," he said, loud-soft in return.

  "It wasn't so awful," I confessed. "I secretly enjoyed it."

  He turned so that I could see him directly again. I felt that it was dangerous for me to see him that way, that he was much more vivid than a person ought to be. He was laughing, his teeth large and strong-looking but yellowing--middle age. It was wonderful that he didn't seem to care about anything, or even to know that his teeth were yellow. Frank would be whitening his a couple of times a month before he was thirty. The world was full of Franks, when it should be full of Robert Olivers.

  "I enjoyed some of mine, too," he was saying. "It gave me something to be angry about."

  I risked a shrug. "Why should art make anyone angry? I don't care what anyone else does."

  I was imitating him, his own uncaring, but it seemed to strike him as unusual. He frowned. "Maybe you're right. Anyway, you

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  get over that stage, don't you?" It was shared experience, not a real question.

  "Yes," I said, daring myself to look him in the eye again. It wasn't hard, once I'd done it a time or two.

  "You've gotten over it young," he said soberly.

  "I'm not so young." I hadn't meant to sound aggressive, but he gazed at me even more attentively. His eyes strayed down my neck, flicked over my breasts--the masculine registering of female presence, automatic, feral. I wished he hadn't betrayed that look; it was impersonal. It made me wonder about his wife. Now, as at Barnett, he wore his wide gold band, so I had to assume he was still married. But his face was gentle when he spoke again. "Your work shows a lot of understanding."

  Then he turned away, tugged somehow by the other people around us, and talked with the table in general, so that I didn't find out, at least then, what kind of understanding he had in mind. I concentrated on my food; I couldn't hear in all that noise anyway. After some of this, he turned to me, and there was that quietness between us again, that waiting. "What are you doing now?"

  I decided to tell the truth. "Well, working two dull jobs in DC. Going to Philadelphia every three months to see my aging mother. Painting at night."

  "Painting at night," he said. "Have you had a show?"

  "Not a solo or even a joint one," I said slowly. "I guess I could have created some opportunity--somehow, maybe at school, but the teaching keeps me so busy that I can't think straight about that. Or maybe I don't feel quite ready. I just go on painting whenever I can."

  "You should have a show. There's usually a way, with work like yours."

  I wished he'd elaborate on "like yours," but I didn't look that gift horse in the mouth, especially since he'd already characterized my one landscape as having "understanding." I told myself not to fall for anything, although I knew from years before that Robert

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  Oliver did not hand out empty praise, and I knew instinctively that even if he had looked me over, a reflex, he wouldn't use praise to get anywhere with me. He was simply too dedicated to the truth about painting; you could see it in every line of his face and shoulders, hear it in his voice. It was the most reliable thing about him, I realized much later, that unvarnished praise or dismissal; it was, like his glance at my body, impersonal. There was a chilliness to him, a cold eye under his warm-colored skin and smile, a quality I trusted because I trusted it in myself. He could be relied upon to dismiss you with a shrug, to shrug off your work if he didn't think it was good. There was no effort in this, no struggle in him not to compromise for personal reasons. Face-to-face with work, painting, his own or other people's, he was not personal.

  Dessert was bowls of fresh strawberries. I went to get a cup of black tea with cream, which I knew would keep me awake, but I felt too excited by the whole setting to think about sleep anyway. Possibly
I could stay up and paint. There were studios open all night, not too far from the dormitory stables--garages that had probably once housed the estate's first Model Ts and were now equipped with big skylights. I could stay there and paint, perhaps produce a few more versions of that landscape from the first, unfinished one. And then, shamelessly, I could say to Robert Oliver at breakfast, or on our next hillside, "I'm a little tired. Oh, I painted until three this morning." Or maybe he would be out roaming the dark and would stroll by and see me in the garage window, working hard; he would wander in and touch my shoulder with a smile and tell me that the painting showed "understanding." That was all I wanted--his attention, and briefly, and almost but not quite innocently.

  As I finished my tea, Robert was rising from the table, full height, his hips in their worn trousers at the level of my head; he was saying good night to everyone. He probably had more important things to do, like his own work. To my disgust, Frank followed him away from the table, his chiseled profile swiveling this

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  way and that, talking Robert's ear off. At least that would keep Frank from following me instead, pulling his shirt aside a little farther or asking me if I wanted to take a walk in the woods. I felt a twinge of loneliness at this, deserted by not one but two men, and tried to gather my independence around me again, the romance of all by myself. I would go paint after all, not to keep Frank away or to draw Robert Oliver to me, but to paint. I was here to use my time well, to restart my sputtering engines, to savor my precious bit of vacation, damn all men.

  That was why Robert did find me in the garage, so late that the other two or three people working here and there in the big musty space had already packed up and left, so late that I was woozy, seeing green instead of blue, putting in some yellow too quickly, scraping it off, telling myself to stop. I had reworked my landscape from the afternoon on a fresh canvas brought from my bed stall, with several differences. I had remembered the daisies in the grass, which I hadn't gotten to in daylight, and put them in on the surface of the hill, trying to make them float, although they sank instead. And there was another difference, too. When Robert came in and shut the side door behind him, I was already so tired of contemplating these changes that I saw him as a manifestation of my vision at dinner, my wish that he would appear here. I'd actually forgotten about him, although he had somehow filled my thoughts at the same time. I had been unaware, so that now I looked at him through blindness.