The Swan Thieves Part 13

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His students were mostly ungifted, if interesting. The studio s.p.a.ce was too small, but he was painting. He'd gone to bed at four that morning.

Then a little s.p.a.ce, a short silence, and the notes would begin again. I liked his postcards better than his calls, which were full of unspoken tension between us, a chasm even harder to cross when we couldn't see each other's face. I tried not to call him any more often than he called me. Once, he sent a sketch for Ingrid, as if he knew she could understand this language best. I taped it to the wall of the nursery. It showed Gothic buildings and heaps of snow, bare trees. If Ingrid cried in the night, I brought her into bed with me, and we woke the next morning in a tangled pile. In late February, Robert flew home for his winter break and Ingrid's birthday. He slept a great deal, and we made love but didn't talk about anything difficult. He would have a break in early April as well, he said, but he'd decided to spend it painting up north. I didn't protest. If he returned in the summer with more work done, he might be easier to live with.

"When Robert was gone again, my mother came for a stretch and sent me to the campus pool to swim every day. I'd lost much of my baby weight that year, and the rest came off as I plowed through the water, remembering how it had felt, such a short time ago, to be young and optimistic. On that visit, I first saw the trembling of my mother's hands and the little burst capillaries in her cheeks, the slight swelling of her ankles. She hadn't slowed in her helping me--when she was there, the dishes were always clean and drying in the rack, Ingrid's endless cotton suits washed and folded, and Ingrid read to as much as she could wish for.

But something had begun to slip in Mom's physical confidence, and after she went back to Michigan she started telling me she was afraid to walk on the ice. She would step out the front door to go to the grocery store, or to the dentist, or to volunteer at the library, and she would see the ice--and then she would go back inside and eventually call me. One day she told me she hadn't been 187.

out of the house in nearly a week. I didn't want to wait, alone, with the question that woke me in the early mornings now, and when I asked Robert, he said yes, without hesitation, that Mom should come to live with us.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I think I had forgotten his quick generosity, his use of yes instead of no, his habit of giving jackets to friends or even strangers. It made love quicken in me as I stood there waiting for him, far away from that cold New York State campus. I thanked him from my heart, told him about the azaleas beginning to bloom, the green leaves everywhere. He said he'd be home quickly, and we both seemed to be smiling over the phone.

When I called Mom, she didn't protest as I'd thought she would--instead she said she would think about it, but that if she came, she would want to help us buy a bigger house. I had never known she had that much money, but she did, and someone had offered to buy her house in Ann Arbor the year before, as well. She would think about it. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. How was Ingrid's cold?

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CHAPTER 32 1878.

In May, Yves insists that his uncle accompany them to Normandy, first to Trouville and then to a village near etretat, a quiet place they have visited several times in the past and loved. It is Papa's idea to return with his brother, but Yves puts his own force behind it. Beatrice demurs; why should it not be just the three of them, as before? She can look after Papa by herself, and the house Yves always rents has only one small room for guests, with no parlor for Uncle Olivier if Papa stays in his usual quarters. If they move Papa, he will not be able to find anything, or might fall down the stairs in the night. It is hard enough for Papa to travel at all, although he is patience itself and relishes the feeling of the Channel sun and breeze on his face. She begs Yves to reconsider.

But Yves is firm. He may be called away on business in the midst of the vacation, so she will at least have Olivier to a.s.sist her. Strange -- Olivier is even older than Papa, but he seems fifteen years Papa's junior in health and agility. Olivier's hair was not white before the death of his wife, Yves told her once, but that occurred a couple of years before she met the family. Olivier is strong, vibrant for his age; he can be helpful. Insisting that Olivier accompany them is the closest Yves ever comes to complaining about having the care of Papa on their shoulders.

She protests again--feebly this time--and three weeks later they are on a train moving slowly out of the Gare Saint-Lazare, Yves tucking a lap robe over Papa's legs and Olivier reading aloud the art news in the paper. He seems to avoid Beatrice's eye. She is 189.

grateful, since his presence fills the small s.p.a.ce until she wishes she could sit in another car. He appears to have grown younger in the months since their correspondence began; his face looks tanned even before they reach the coast. His beard is thick silver, neatly trimmed. He tells them he has been painting in the Foret de Fontainebleau, and she wonders if he thought about her as he walked along those paths with his easel or stood in glades she will probably never see. For a moment she envies the trees that gathered around him, the gra.s.s that probably lay under his long frame when he rested, and she turns her mind at once to other thoughts. Is she merely jealous of his ability to travel and paint at will, his constant freedom?

Outside the train window, cinders blow by between her and the newly green fields, the glimpses of winding water. Yves keeps the window shut against the coal smoke and the dust, although the compartment grows too warm. She watches cows under a grove of trees, the dusting of red poppies, white and yellow daisies across a field. She has removed her gloves, her hat, and its matching jacket, since they are alone, all family, and the curtains are drawn between them and the corridor. When she leans back and closes her eyes, she senses Olivier's gaze and hopes her husband will not notice. But what is there to notice? Nothing, nothing, nothing, and that is the way she will keep it--nothing between her and this white-haired man Yves has known since birth, now her own relative.

The steam whistle blows far ahead, at the front of the train, a sound as hollow as she feels. Life is going to be long, for her at least. Is that not a good thing? Hasn't she always felt time stretching ahead of her in a lovely expanse? What if--she opens her eyes and keeps them resolutely on a distant village, a pale smudge, a church tower far away in the fields--what if that expanse contains neither children nor Olivier? What if it contains no more of Olivier's letters, his hand on her hair--she looks directly at him 190.

now, while Yves opens a second newspaper, and is gratified to see she has startled him. He turns his handsome head toward the window, picks up his book. There is so little time. He will die decades before she does. What if that in itself were enough to compromise her resistance?

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CHAPTER 33 Kate.

It actually took Mom several years to decide what to do, then to sell her house and go through all those books. Robert and I stayed in the cottage on campus during that time. Once, I went up to Michigan to help her give away most of my father's possessions, and we both wept. I left Ingrid with Robert, and he seemed to take good care of her, although I worried that he would forget where she was or let her wander around alone outside.

In the fall, Robert went to France for ten days, his turn to get away. He wanted to see the great museums again, he said--he hadn't been there since college. He came back so refreshed and excited that I felt it had been worth the money. He also had a rather grand show in Chicago the following January, an invitation of one of his former instructors--we all flew up there at horrifying cost, and I saw in the course of a day or two that he was becoming something bordering on famous.

In April the flowers Robert and I liked came out on campus again. I went into the woods to find the wild ones, and we walked around the college gardens so Ingrid could see the blooming beds. At the end of the month, I bought a little kit in the supermarket and watched a pink line soak across a white oval. I dreaded telling Robert, although we'd agreed to try for another child. He was so often tired or discouraged, but he seemed pleased with my news, and I felt that Ingrid's life would be complete. What was the point of having only one child? This time we found out it was a boy, and I got a boy doll for Ingrid to hold and to diaper. In December we drove to the birth center again. I had the baby with a kind of 192.

fierce, efficient concentration, and we brought him home--Oscar. He was fair-haired and looked like my mother, although Robert insisted he looked more like his own mother. Both mothers came to help for a few weeks--mine was still in Michigan--staying in our neighbors' spare rooms, and they enjoyed debating the question. Now I was pushing the stroller again, and my arms and lap were constantly full.

I have an indelible picture of Robert from the time when our children were small and we were living at the college. I'm not sure why I remember him so well from that period, except that that time was a kind of perfect peak of our lives, although it was also the time when Robert began to really go to pieces inside, I think. Even someone you've inhabited rooms with, and seen naked every day, seen sitting on the toilet through a half-opened door, can fade out after a while and become an outline.

But Robert, from that whole time when the children were toddlers and before Mom came to live with us, is all filled in for me, color and texture. He had a thick brown sweater that he wore almost daily in cool weather, and I can remember the strands of black and chestnut, seen up close, and the other things that got caught in it--lint and sawdust, sticks, all kinds of little bits of roughness that came from his studio at school, from his walks and painting excursions. I bought that sweater for him secondhand soon after we met--it was in great condition, from Ireland, knitted by someone's actual strong hands, and it lasted for years and years--outlasted us, in fact. The sweater filled my arms when he came home. I stroked its sleeves when I stroked his elbows. Under it, he wore an old long-sleeved T-shirt or a stretched cotton turtle-neck, always in a color that vibrated with the sweater--frayed scarlet or deep green, not necessarily matching but compelling somehow. His hair got long or short--it curled over the collar of the sweater or it was shorn in soft bristles across the back of his neck, but the sweater was always the same.

My life was mostly touch in those days--I suppose his was 193.

color and line, so that we couldn't see each other's worlds very-well, or he couldn't quite feel my presence. All day long I touched the clean plates and bowls as I put them away, and the children's heads slimy under shampoo in the tub, and the softness of their faces, and the sc.r.a.pe of p.o.o.p off their goose-pimpling backsides, the hot noodles, the heavy wet laundry as I threw it into the dryer, and the brick front steps as I sat reading to myself for eight minutes while they played just beyond the page in the p.r.i.c.kling new gra.s.s, and then when one of them fell down I touched the gra.s.s and the mud and the sc.r.a.ped knee, and the sticky Band-Aids, and the wet cheek, and my jeans, and the dangling shoelace.

When Robert came home from teaching, I touched his brown sweater and his curling, separating locks of hair, his stubbly chin, his back pockets, his calloused hands. I watched him lift up the children and felt just by seeing it how his rough face brushed their delicate ones and how that pleased them. He seemed completely there with us at those moments, and his touch was the proof of this. If I wasn't exhausted from the day, he touched me to keep me awake a little longer, and then I reached for his smooth, hairless flanks and the soft, crisp hair between his legs, his flat, perfect nipples. He seemed to stop looking at me then and to finally enter my world of touch, in that moving s.p.a.ce between us, until we closed the gap with a fiery familiarity, a routine of release. In those days I always felt covered with secretions, the dripping milk, the spray on my neck when I changed Oscar a few minutes too early, the foam on my thighs, the saliva on my cheek.

Maybe this was why I was converted to touch and left the world of vision, why I stopped drawing and painting after all those years of doing it nearly every day. My family, the way they licked and chewed me, kissed me and pulled at me, spilled things on me--juice, urine, s.e.m.e.n, muddy water. I washed myself again and again, I washed the mountains of laundry, I changed the beds and the breast pads, I scrubbed and wiped the bodies. I wanted to get clean again, to clean all of them, but in the moment before I 194.

had the energy to wash everything, there was always another kind of goodness, an immersion.

Then we were shopping for real estate, like grown-ups, and sending my mother photos of front porches, and finally we moved into our house the summer Ingrid was five and Oscar was one and a half. It was what I had wanted in the first place--two lovely children, a yard with a swing that Robert finally put up after I'd asked him for a couple of months to please do it, a small town whose very name was green, and at least one of us employed at a good job. Should we ever get what we think we want? And I had my mother. In the first years with us, she gardened and vacuumed and read for an hour or two a day in the shade on the terrace, where an elm tree threw the shadows of small leaves over her silvery head and the white pages of her book. From there she could even watch Ingrid and Oscar hunting for caterpillars.

In fact, I think those years were good ones for us because my mother was here. I had company, and Robert was at his best in her presence. Occasionally he stayed up for a couple of nights or slept at school and seemed tired afterward, and now and then he went through a period of irritability and then slept late for a few days. On the whole, things were peaceful. Robert had voluntarily painted over the chaos of his studio attic before we'd left the campus. I didn't know how much of that was due to the orange plastic bottles in our medicine cabinet. Once in a while he mentioned that he'd been to see Dr. Q, and that was enough for me -- Dr. Q couldn't help me, of course, but he was apparently helping my husband.

During our second year in the new house, Robert taught at a painting retreat in Maine. He didn't talk about it much, but I thought it had done him good. We laughed together about the children, and sometimes at night, if I was not too tired, Robert reached for me, and things were the way they had always been. I 195.

used some of his shirts, torn into thirds, to dust the furniture--I could have pulled one of them out of any pile of rags and known it was his, known it was him, his lingering smell, his fabric. He seemed happy in his work, and I had started some part-time editing, mostly from home, to help with our part of the mortgage while my mother watched the children.

One morning after she had taken them to the park and I had done the breakfast dishes, I went upstairs to make beds and start work at the desk in the hall, and I saw the door to Robert's studio open. He had left with his coffee mug in one hand as I was getting up--he was in a phase of waking very early and going to school to paint. This morning I noticed he'd dropped something on the floor, a sc.r.a.p of paper, which lay near the open door. I picked it up without thinking about anything in particular. Robert often scattered paper--notes, reminders, bits of drawings, crumpled napkins.

What I found on the floor was about a quarter of a sheet of writing paper, torn off, as if the writer had gotten frustrated. The writer was Robert--it was his handwriting, but neater than usual. I still have those lines hidden in my desk, not because I kept the original piece of paper--in fact, I eventually wadded it up and threw it at his head, and he caught it and put it in his pocket, and I never saw it again. I have those lines still because some instinct made me sit down at my desk and copy them over for myself and hide them before I confronted Robert. I suppose I was thinking vaguely that I might need them in court someday, or at the very least want to have them for myself later and might begin to forget some of the details. "My dearest one," the note said, but it was not a letter to me, nor had I ever seen any of those words before, lined up in this particular order and flowing from Robert's black pen.

My clearest 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.

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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.

I hadn't known that Robert could be so flowery in a letter, or anywhere else--his notes to me had always been short and brisk. For a moment I felt more sickened by this surprise than by the fact that it was a love letter. The courtly, almost old-fashioned tone of it was a Robert I could hardly recognize, a gallant Robert who had never wasted his gallantry on his wife, whom he wished the addressee of the letter knew, or had known at some point.

I stood holding his words in the sunny library and wondered what I was reading. He had been lonely. He had fallen in otherworldly love. Of course it had to be "otherworldly," since he was married and had two children and was also possibly crazy. And what about me? Had I not been lonely? But I didn't have anything otherworldly, only all the reality of the world to cope with: the children, the dishes, the bills, Robert's psychiatrist. Did he think I liked the real world any more than he did?

I went slowly into his studio and looked at the easel. The woman was there. I thought I'd gotten used to her, to her presence in our lives. It was a canvas he'd been working on for weeks -- she was alone in it, and her face was not yet fully painted, but I could have filled in that rough pale oval myself with the right features. He had placed her at a window, standing, and she was wearing a revealing, loose robe, pale blue. She held a paintbrush in one hand. Within another day or two she would be smiling at him, or gazing seriously, steadily, her dark eyes full of love. I had come to believe that she was imaginary, a fiction, part of the vision that drove his gifts. That had been trusting, too trusting, because it turned out my first instincts had been correct. She was real, and he wrote to her.

I had a sudden desire to wreck the room, tear up his drawing 197.

pads, knock the lady-in-progress to the floor, smear her and stamp on her, rip the posters and chaotic postcards from the wall. The cliche of it stopped me, the humiliation of being like a jealous wife in a movie. And a kind of sneakiness, too, a stealth that crept over my brain like a drug--I could learn more if Robert didn't know I knew. I put the sc.r.a.p of paper on my desk, already planning to copy the words for myself and put it back on the floor at the open door of his studio in case he missed it. I pictured him stooping for it, thinking, I dropped this? That was a close call. And putting it in his pocket or in the drawer of his table.

Which was my next move--I went delicately through the drawers of his studio table, replacing with the care of an archivist anything I moved: big graphite pencils, gray erasers, receipts for oil paints, a half-eaten chocolate bar. Letters in the back of one drawer, letters in a handwriting I didn't recognize, replies to letters like his. Dear Robert. Darling Robert. My dear Robert. I thought of you today while I worked on my new still life. Do you think still lifes are worth doing? Why paint something that is more dead than alive? I wondered how to put life into something with just your hand, this mysterious force that jumps like electricity between the sight and your eye, and then your eye and your hand, and then your hand and the brush, and so on. And back to your eye; it all comes down to what you can see, doesn't it, because no matter what your hand can do, it can't fix dimness of vision. I have to run to cla.s.s now, but I think of you constantly. I love you, you know. Mary.

My hands shook. I felt nauseated, felt the room trembling around me. I knew her name, then--and knew she must be a student, or possibly a faculty member, although in that case I would probably have recognized the name. She had to run to cla.s.s. The campus was full of students I hadn't met and hadn't even seen--I wouldn't have seen all of them even in the time we lived there. Then I remembered the sketch I'd found in his pocket during our move to Greenhill several years earlier. This had been going on a 198.

long time; he had surely met her in New York. He had traveled north often since then, including his long semester away--had he gone so he could see her? Had that been the reason for his sudden leave of absence, his reluctance to take us with him? Of course she was another painter, an art student, a working painter, a real painter. He was painting her himself with her brush in hand. Of course she was a painter, as I had once been.

And yet--Mary--such an ordinary name, the name of the person with the little lamb, the name of the mother of Jesus. Or Queen of Scots, or b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, quite contrary, or Mary Magdalene. No, it didn't always guarantee blue-and-white innocence. Her handwriting was large and girlish but not crude, the spelling correct, the turns of phrase intelligent and sometimes even striking, often humorous, sometimes a little cynical. Sometimes she thanked him for a drawing or added a skillful sketch of her own--one took up a whole page and showed people sitting around in a cafe with mugs and teapots on the tables. One of the notes was dated from a few months earlier, but most had no dates and none had envelopes. He had somehow thought to throw those out, or perhaps he'd opened the letters elsewhere and not cared about the envelopes, or carried them around without envelopes -- a few of them were frayed, as if they'd been in a pocket. She didn't mention any meetings or plans to see him, but she wrote once about a time they had kissed each other. There was nothing else really s.e.xual in those letters, in fact, although she said often that she missed him, loved him, daydreamed about him. In one she referred to him as "unattainable," which made me think that maybe nothing more had ever happened between them.

And yet everything had happened, if they loved each other. I put the notes back in the drawer. It was Robert's letter that upset me most--but there were no others from him, only from her. And I found nothing else in the studio, nothing in his office, nothing in his extra jacket, nothing in his car when I searched that, too, 199.

that evening, on the pretext of looking for a flashlight in the glove compartment--not that he would have followed me or noticed much. He played with the children, smiled at dinner--he was energetic, but his eyes were distant. That was the difference, the proof.

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CHAPTER 34 Kate.

I confronted him the next day, asking him to stay home for a few minutes after my mother had gone out with the children--I knew it was a day when he didn't have cla.s.s until afternoon. I had hidden the letters in the dining-room sideboard, with the exception of the one in Robert's handwriting, which I put in my pocket, and I sat him down at the table to talk. He was impatient to be off to school, but his body stilled when I asked him if he realized that I knew what was going on. He frowned. Now I was the one trembling--with rage or fear, I wasn't yet certain. "What do you mean?" His frown seemed genuine. He was wearing something dark, and his remarkable handsomeness leapt out at me, as it sometimes did, without warning--the regal body, the strong features.

"First question--do you see her at school? Do you see her every day? Did she come here from New York, maybe?" He leaned back. "See who at school?"

"The woman." I said. "The woman in all your paintings. Does she model for you at school or in New York?"

He began to glower. "What? I thought we'd been through this before."

"Do you see her every day? Or does she send you letters from a distance?"

"Send me letters?" He looked flabbergasted at this, pale. Guilt, surely.

"Don't bother to answer. I know she does."

"You know she does? What do you know?" There was anger in his eyes but also bewilderment.

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"I know because I found her letters to you."

Now he was staring at me as if he had no words, as if he actually didn't know what to say. I had seldom seen him so disoriented, at least not in response to something from outside himself. He put both hands on the table, where they rested against the sheen of the grain, Mom's polishing. "You found letters from her to me?" The strange thing was that he didn't sound ashamed. If I'd had to characterize his voice and face at that moment, I would have said he seemed somehow eager, alarmed, hopeful. It enraged me--the note in his voice made me realize that he loved her uncontrollably, loved even the mention of her.

"Yes!" I shouted, jumping to my feet and pulling the pile of notes from under the place mats in the sideboard. "Yes, I even know her name, you stupid fool! I know it's Mary. Why did you leave them in this house if you didn't want me to find out?" I dropped them in front of him on the table, and he picked one up.

"Yes, Mary," he said, and then he glanced up and began almost to smile, but sadly. "That's nothing. Well, not nothing, but not so important."

I began to cry in spite of myself, and I felt it was not because of what he'd done so much as what he'd seen me do, that dramatic pulling out of letters and tossing them down in front of him. It was as humiliating as I ever could have dreamed. "You think it's nothing that you love another woman? What about this?" I pulled his own sc.r.a.p of letter from my pocket, the one indisputably in his handwriting, crumpled it up, and hurled it at him.

He caught it and smoothed it out on the table. I thought I read disbelief in his face. Then he seemed to rally. "Kate, what the h.e.l.l do you care? She's dead. She's dead!" He was white around the nose and lips, his face rigid. "She died. Do you think I wouldn't give anything to have saved her, to have let her go on painting?"

Now I was sobbing in confusion as much as anything else. "She's dead?" The one dated letter from Mary meant she must have been alive even a couple of months before. I had the weird 202.

social impulse to say, Oh, I'm so sorry. Had she been in a car accident? Why had he not acted traumatized these last months or weeks? Nothing had seemed different. Perhaps whatever the relationship had been, he'd cared so little, actually, that he hadn't grieved for her. But this struck me as terrible in itself--could a person be that coldhearted?

"Yes. She is dead." He gave the word a bitterness I wouldn't have thought him capable of. "And I still love her. You're d.a.m.n right about that, if that satisfies you. I don't know why you should care. I love her. And if you don't understand the kind of love I mean, I'm not going to explain." He stood up.

"It doesn't satisfy me." Now that I had started weeping, I couldn't stop. "It makes it all worse. I don't know what you've been up to or what you mean. You have no idea how hard I've tried to understand you. But we're done, Robert, and that satisfies me--that does satisfy me." I picked up our Chinese vase from the sideboard, where it had always sat well out of child-reach, and threw it across the room. It smashed to heartrending bits on the hearth, under the portraits of my father's parents, stalwart people from Cincinnati. I regretted its destruction already. I regretted everything, except my children.

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CHAPTER 35 1878.

The village where they stay is quieter than nearby etretat, but Yves says he likes it better for that very reason; their day in Trouville he found even more unsettling--in summer there must be as many people on the promenade there as on the Champs-elysees, he tells Beatrice. They can always take a horse-drawn cab to etretat for some quiet elegance, if they like, but this hamlet of houses in walking distance of the broad beach pleases all of them, and most days they stay there in serenity, walking the pebbles and the sands.

Every evening Beatrice reads Montaigne aloud to Papa in the rented parlor with its cheap damask chairs and shelves full of sea-sh.e.l.ls. The other two men listen or talk in low voices near them. She has started a new piece of embroidery as well, to be sewn into a cushion for Yves's dressing room, a birthday present. She applies herself to this task day after day, straining her senses over the fine, small flowers in gold and purple. She likes to work on it while she sits on the veranda. When she raises her head, there is the sea, the gray-brown, green-topped cliffs off to the left and far right, the peeling fishermen's shacks and the boats pulled up on the beach, the clouds above a bl.u.s.tery horizon. Every few hours it rains, and then the sun breaks through again. Every day is a little warmer until a stormy morning suddenly keeps them inside; the next day is brighter still.

Her pastimes all help her avoid Olivier, but one afternoon he comes to sit beside her on the veranda. She knows his habits, and this is a change. In the mornings and again in the late afternoons, 204.

when the weather is fine, he paints on the beach. He has invited her to accompany him, but her hurried excuses--she doesn't have a canvas prepared--always put a stop to that, and he goes by himself, cheerfully, whistling, touching his hat as he pa.s.ses her in her chair on the porch.

She wonders if he walks more briskly because she is watching; she again has that strange sense that he is shedding years under her gaze. Or is it merely that she has learned to look through his years, now more transparent to her--that she sees through them to the person they have made him? Whenever he takes leave of her, she watches his straight back, his favorite old painting suit retreating down the beach. She is trying to unlearn what she knows about him, to view him again as her husband's elderly relation who happens to be on holiday with them, but she knows too much about his thoughts, his turns of phrase, his dedication to his work, his regard for hers. Of course, he doesn't send her letters here in this house, but words linger between them--his slanting handwriting, the sudden leap of his mind on paper, his caressing "tu" on the page.

Today there is a book instead of an easel under his arm. He settles down next to her in a big chair as if determined not to be rebuffed. She is glad in spite of herself that she has put on her pale-green dress with the yellow ruching at the neck, which a few days before he said made her look like a narcissus; she wishes he were even nearer so that his gray-jacketed shoulder could brush hers, wishes he would go away, wishes he would get on a train back to Paris. Her throat tightens. He smells of something pleasant from his toilette, some unknown soap or eau de cologne; she wonders if he has worn this scent for many years, whether it has changed with time. The book in his lap stays closed, and she is certain that he doesn't intend to read it, a suspicion borne out when she sees the t.i.tle, La loi des Latins; she recognizes it from the dull shelf just inside. He obviously s.n.a.t.c.hed it up before coming to sit with her, a ploy that makes her smile down at her needlework. "Bonjour," she says with what she hopes is a housewife's neutrality.

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"Bonjour," he answers. They sit in silence for a moment or two, and that, she thinks, is the proof, even the problem. If they were genuine strangers or ordinary family members, they would already be chatting about nothing in particular. "May I ask you a question, my dear?"

"Of course." She finds her tiny scissors with their stork's beak and embossed legs; she cuts her thread.

"Do you intend to avoid me for a full month?"

"It's been only six days," she says.

"And a half. Or six days and seven hours," he corrects her. The effect is so droll that she glances up and smiles. His eyes are blue, not elderly enough to put her off as they should. "That's much better," he says. "I had hoped the punishment would not last four weeks."

"Punishment?" she asks as mildly as she can. She tries in vain to rethread her needle.

"Yes, punishment. And for what? For admiring a young painter from a distance? After all my good manners, you could surely afford to give me a little cordiality."

"You understand, I think," she begins, but the needle is giving her unusual trouble.