The Swan Thieves

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  Then a strange thing happened--the first of many times. I wondered if Robert had paused here, and I felt his presence, or perhaps simply tried to guess what his experience must have been--here, where he had preceded me. Had he known he was going to stab a painting, and known which painting? That might have sent him past the rotunda's glories in a rush, his hand already in his pocket. But if he hadn't known ahead of time, if something had incited him to it once he was in front of the painting, he might well have lingered in that forest of marble trunks, too, as would anyone with a sense of surroundings and a love of traditional forms.

  In fact--I put my hands in my own pockets--even if his attack had been premeditated and he had felt confident in it, or savored the thought of the moment when he would draw out his knife and open it in his palm, he might still have stopped here for the pleasure of postponement. It was difficult, of course, for me to imagine wanting to damage a painting, but I was imagining Robert's urges, not my own. After another moment, I walked on, glad to leave that celestial, dim place and to be among paintings again, the long first galleries of the nineteenth-century collection.

  To my relief, I found the area free of visitors, although there was not one but two guards there, as if the museum administration expected a second attack on the same painting at any moment. Leda drew me across the room at once. I'd resisted the temptation to check for it in books or on the Internet before visiting today, and now I was glad--I could always read its history later, but the image was fresh for me, startling and real.

  It was a large canvas, frankly Impressionist, although the details were somewhat more in evidence than they might have been in a Monet or a Pissarro or a Sisley, and it was about five by eight feet, dominated by two figures. The central figure was a mainly nude female form, lying on beautifully real grass. She was supine, in a classical attitude of despair and abandonment--or

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  abandon?--her head with its burden of golden hair thrown back on the earth, a wisp of drapery caught over her middle and slipping off one leg, her shallow breasts bare, arms outspread. Her skin was numinously painted against the reality of that grass; it was too pale, translucent, like the sprout of a plant that has grown under a log. I thought at once of Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, although the figure of Leda was full of struggle, startled and epic--not calmly naked like Manet's prostitute, the skin cooler in tone, the brushwork looser.

  The other figure in the painting was not human, although it was certainly a dominant character--a huge swan, hovering over her as if about to land on water, its wings beating backward to slow the speed of its assault. The swan's long wing feathers curved inward like talons, its gray-webbed feet almost touched the delicate skin of her belly, and its black-circled eye was as fierce as the gaze of a stallion. The sheer force of its flight toward her, caught on canvas, was astonishing, and this explained visually and psychologically the panic of the woman in the grass. The swan's tail curled under it, a pelvic thrust, as if to further aid its impulsive slowing. You could feel that the bird had burst over those vague thickets only a moment before, that it had come upon the sleeping form suddenly, and just as suddenly had veered to land on it in a paroxysm of desire.

  Or had the swan been searching for her? I tried to remember the details of the story. The momentum of the great creature could have knocked her down, knocked her onto her back, perhaps, as she was rising from a nap en plein air. The swan needed no genitalia to make it masculine--that shadowed area under the tail was more than enough, as were the powerful head and beak as it bent its long neck toward her.

  I wanted to touch her myself, to find her sleeping there, to push the creature forcefully away. When I stepped back to see the canvas as a whole, I felt Leda's fear, the way she had started up and fallen backward, the terror in her very hands as they dug into the

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  earth--none of this had the voluptuous victimhood of the classical paintings that lined other galleries in this museum, the soft-porn Sabine women and Saint Catherines. I thought of the poem by Yeats I'd read several times over the years, but his Leda was a willing victim, too--"loosening thighs"--without many reactions of her own; I would have to find it again to be certain. Gilbert Thomas's Leda was a real woman, and she was really frightened. If I desired her, I thought, it was because she was real, and not because she had already been overpowered.

  The plaque for the painting was all too succinct: "Leda [Léda vainçue par le Cygne], 1879, purchased 1967. Gilbert Thomas, 1840-1890." Monsieur Thomas must have been a highly perceptive man, I thought, as well as an extraordinary painter, to put this sort of authentic emotion into the portrayal of a single moment. The rapidly worked feathers and the blurring of Leda's draperies recorded the advent of Impressionism, although it wasn't quite an Impressionist painting: the subject matter, to begin with, was the kind that the Impressionists had disdained--academic, a classical myth. What had made Robert Oliver draw a knife with the idea of plunging it into this scene? Was he, I wondered again, suffering from an antisexual derangement, or a condemnation of his own sexuality? Or had this act of his, which could have damaged these painted figures beyond repair if he hadn't been caught in time, been some strange defense of the girl flung helplessly back under the swan? Had it been gallantry of a twisted, delusional sort? He might simply have disliked the eroticism of the work. But was it an erotic painting, exactly?

  The longer I stood in front of it, the more it seemed to me to be a painting about power and violence. Staring at Leda, I didn't want so much to touch or defile her as to push away the huge feathered chest of the swan before it flew into her again. Was that what Robert Oliver had felt, pulling the knife out of his pocket? Or had he simply wanted to liberate her from the frame? I stood pondering this for some time, looking at Leda's hand digging into the grass,

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  and then turned to the next work, also by Gilbert Thomas. Here, maybe, was an answer to my growing question, curiosity beyond any thought of Robert Oliver and his knife: What sort of person had Thomas been? I read the title-- "Self-portrait with Coins, 1884"--and had just gotten an impression of firmly stroked-in black coat, black beard, smooth white shirt, when I felt a hand on my elbow.

  I turned, not wholly surprised--I've lived in Washington for more than twenty years now, and it is rightly called a small town-- but saw that I'd been mistaken. There was no one I recognized; someone had simply brushed against me by accident. In fact, there were now more than a few other people present: an elderly couple pointing out a painting to each other in low voices, a dark-suited man with a shiny forehead and long hair, some tourists speaking what was probably Italian.

  The person nearest me, whom I'd thought I felt at my elbow, was a young woman--youngish, in any case. She was looking at Leda and had stationed herself directly in front of the painting as if she intended to stay there for a few minutes. She was tall and lean, almost my own height, standing with her arms crossed in front of her, dressed in blue jeans and a white cotton blouse, brown boots. Her hair was artificially dark red and quite long, hanging straight down her back; her profile--cheek, three-quarters--pure and smooth, with a light-brown eyebrow and long lashes, no makeup. When she bent her head, I saw that her hair had blond roots; she had reversed the usual procedure.

  After a moment she stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans like a boy and leaned closer to the painting, studying something. I knew from the way she craned at the brushwork--can I be making this up, in retrospect?--that she was a painter herself. Only a painter would examine the surface from that angle, I thought, watching her turn and bend to take in the texture of the paint aslant, where the lighting hit it. I was struck by her concentration

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  and stood there observing her as discreetly as I could. She stepped back, studying the whole again.

  I felt that she stayed in front of Leda a moment too long, then another, and for some reason that was not a question of craft. She apparently sensed my gaze but didn't care ab
out it much. Then, in fact, she walked away--no glance for me, no curiosity. She shrugged it off: a handsome tall girl used to being stared at. Perhaps, I thought, she wasn't a painter but a performer, or a teacher, hardened to the gaze of others, even enjoying it. I waited for a glimpse of her hands, hanging now at her sides as she turned to the Manet still life on the far wall; she seemed to peer with less concentration at his luminous wineglasses, his plums and grapes. My eyesight, although still keen, is not exactly what it once was; I couldn't see whether or not she had paint under her nails. And didn't care to step closer to her shrug to find out.

  Suddenly she surprised me by turning all the way around and smiling in my direction, a bemused, noncommittal smile, but a smile nonetheless and one that even contained some conspiracy for a fellow close-to-the-picture gazer, a fellow lingerer in front of the view. Her face was an open one, made more alert by the absence of makeup, her lips pale, her eyes a color I couldn't figure out, her skin fair but also rosy next to the auburn hair; on her collarbone she wore a necklace of knotted leather strung with long ceramic beads that looked as if they could have had prayer parchments rolled up inside them. Her white cotton blouse showed possibly full breasts on an angular body. She held herself erect but not delicately, not so much like a dancer as like someone on a horse, exercising a grace that was partly caution. The old people were closing in on her, so that she had to edge away: Thomas, Manet, strange middle-aged man, farewell.

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  CHAPTER 7 Marlow

  She really was leaving--the young woman with the beautiful smile -- and I wondered whether I'd communicated anything to her without intending to; I would have liked to ask her about my hunch that she was a painter, too. There was a Renoir on the next wall, and she strode past it, unseeing--uncaring--and out of the room. This pleased me: I don't like Renoir either, with the exception of that canvas in the Phillips Collection, Luncheon of the Boating Party, where the people are almost eclipsed by sunlit grapes and bottles and glasses. I didn't trail her; noticing two young women in one day seemed to me tiresome, futile, without pleasure to the exact degree that it was without future or purpose.

  This had all taken only a second or two, and I went directly back to the Thomas self-portrait, where the man with the greasy forehead was now in the way. When he moved, I stepped forward to look more closely myself. Again, a painting that verged on Impressionist, particularly in the casual handling of some of the background--dark curtains--but quite different from the daring and grace of Leda. A painter of diverse abilities, I thought--or maybe Thomas had changed his style in the 1880s, progressed in a new direction. This painting owed something to Rembrandt: the brooding expression and somber palette, perhaps also the unsparing auto-portrayal of the subject's red nose and fleshy cheeks, the descent of a previously handsome man into less-flattering age, even the dark velvet cap and jacket--smoking jacket, it might have been called: the Painter as Old Master and aristocrat, all in one. The title of the self-portrait came from the foreground, where

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  Thomas had folded his elbows on a bare wooden table piled with coins--large coins and worn ones, bronze, gold, tarnished silver-- antiques of various shapes and sizes so skillfully painted that you could almost have picked them up one by one between your thumb and forefinger. I could see even the marvelous old writing on them, the characters of strange alphabets, the square holes, the knotted borders. Those coins were considerably better rendered than the image of Thomas himself; next to Manet's fruit and flowers, the painting was rather clumsy. Perhaps Thomas had cared deeply about money and not much about his own face. In any case, he had been striving for the look of the seventeenth century, turning his gaze two hundred years back, and I was staring at the nineteenth-century result, nearly a hundred twenty years later.

  There was one personal characteristic Thomas hadn't caught from all those smoky Rembrandt portraits, I thought: sincerity. He'd been harsh enough, apparently--or vain enough, or deluded enough--to paint a wily self-consciousness around his own eyes. That shrewdness was probably calculated to make the viewer uncomfortable, especially with the presence of the coins in the foreground. It was an interesting face, in any case. Had Thomas made a lot of money from his paintings, I wondered, or had he merely wanted to? Had he had some other sort of business, or a grand inheritance?

  I didn't know the answers, of course, so I went on to the Manet still life, admiring, as the girl I'd noticed a few minutes before also probably had, the glass with its white wine pooling inside, the light on the dark-blue plums, the corner of a mirror. There was a little canvas by Pissarro I remembered liking, too; I went into the next section of the gallery for a few minutes to see him and, while I was at it, his fellow Impressionists.

  It had been years since I'd looked really deeply into an Impressionist painting; those endless retrospectives, with their accompanying tote bags, mugs, and notepaper, had put me off Impressionism. I remembered some of what I'd read in the past: the small group of

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  the original Impressionists, including one woman--Berthe Mori-sot--who'd first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily. But they had been the radicals of their day, exploding traditions of brushwork, making subject matter of ordinary life, and bringing painting out of the studio and into the gardens, fields, and seascapes of France.

  Now I saw with fresh appreciation the natural light, the soft, subtle color of a scene by Sisley: a woman in a long dress disappearing down the snowy tunnel of a village road. There was something touching and real, or touching because it was real, in the bleakness of the trees along the lane, some of which towered over a high wall. I thought of what an old friend of mine once said, that a painting has to have some mystery to it to be any good. I liked this glimpse of the woman, her slim back turned to me in the twilight, more intriguing to me than Monet's endless haystacks--I was walking along a row of three that showed various stages of daybreak on their pink and yellow slopes. I slipped my jacket on and prepared to leave. I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

  In the lobby downstairs, the black-haired girl had disappeared. Miriam was deep in consultation with a man her own age who seemed to be having trouble reading the museum maps. I walked by, poised to smile if she glanced up, but she didn't see me, so I had to postpone my greeting. Pushing out through the doors, I experienced that mingled relief and disappointment one feels on departure from a great museum--relief at being returned to the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and disappointment at that world's lack of mystery. There was the ordinary street, without brushwork or the depth of oil on canvas. The traffic was roaring past in the usual Washington chaos, some driver trying to get over in front of another, a near miss, horns leaned on or punched. The

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  trees were beautiful, though, heavy with blossoms or new green; I'm always struck by their beauty after the nondescript winter that seems to be the best the mid-Atlantic can muster.

  I was thinking about a blend of colors that might express those bright-green and russet leaves against one another when I saw the girl again--the young woman who had been studying Leda ahead of me. She was standing at a bus stop. She looked very different now, not reflective or engaged but defiant, straight and tall, with a canvas bag over her shoulder. Her hair shone in the sun; I hadn't noticed before how much dark gold was mixed with the red. Her arms were folded across her white blouse, and her lips were pressed tightly together. I was seeing her profile again, and already I would have known it anywhere. Yes, she was self-sufficient, almost hostile, but for some reason the word "disconsolate" came to my mind. Perhaps it was just that she seemed thoroughly alone, even deliberately so, and she was of an age to have been standing there with a handsome young husband. I felt a pang, as if I'd seen an acquaintanc
e from a distance without having time to stop and speak; I had a sense of sneaking away before she could notice me.

  I went quickly down the steps, and she turned just as I reached the bottom. She saw me, half recognized me (the undistinguished fellow in a navy jacket, no tie). Why was I familiar to her? Was that what she was asking herself, not remembering me from our encounter inside? Then she smiled, as she had in the museum-- a sympathetic, almost embarrassed smile. She was mine for a moment, an old friend after all. I gave what was probably a ridiculous half wave with one hand. Strangers are strange to each other, I thought. Well, I had been stranger than she. I could see the lines around her eyes when she smiled; she might be over thirty after all. I tried to stand tall and straight, like her, as I walked away.

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  CHAPTER 8 Marlow

  I got up even earlier than usual the next morning, but not to paint; by seven I was at Goldengrove to use my office computer and have a cup of coffee before most of the day staff arrived. The art encyclopedia at home had revealed little more than I already knew about Gilbert Thomas, although my Classical Handbook gave me the story of Leda: She was a mortal woman ravished by Zeus, who visited her in the form of a swan. She had slept with her husband, Tyndareus, king of Sparta, on the same night. This explained her giving birth to two sets of twins at once, two immortal children and two mortal: Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux, the Roman version), and Clytemnestra and Helen, later held responsible for the troubles at Troy. Some versions of the myth, I learned, had Leda's children hatching from eggs, although they seemed to have gotten mixed up even in the shell, since Helen and Polydeuces, as children of Zeus, were divine, while Castor and Clytemnestra were doomed to mortality.

  I had also looked up paintings of Leda and the Swan while I was at it and found quite a tradition, including a copy after a highly erotic Michelangelo, a Correggio, a copy after Leonardo in which the swan appeared to be a kind of household pet, and a Cezanne that showed the swan seizing an apparently unconcerned Leda by the wrist as if begging to be taken out for a walk. Gilbert Thomas had not made it into this august company, but I thought there might be something more on the Web.