The Swan Thieves Part 21

I put a hand on one of the trunks of our arborvitae. It had the hairy, peeling texture I remembered from my childhood, the hardness of the wood itself just underneath. "Yes. He gave me verbal consent, but--"

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"Do you mean because he doesn't know you're doing it, or because you aren't sure of your own motives?"

As always, when I approached him about something important, I was left a little speechless at his shrewdness. I hadn't actually told him either of those things. "Both, I guess."

"Look at your motives first, then, I think, and the rest will fall into place."

"I will. Thanks."

Over dinner, which I insisted on making for us, and our subsequent game at the chess table in the living room--he laid and lit a fire by sitting on a low chair near the fireplace and poking sticks into the grate--he told me about his writing projects and about a woman ten years younger than he was who drove over from Ess.e.x once or twice a month to read aloud to him, although he could still read to himself. This was the first he'd said about her, and I asked how he'd met her, a little surprised. "She used to live here and come to the church before I retired, and then she and her husband moved away, but not far, so later they would come to hear my annual emeritus sermon. He died and I didn't hear from her for a long time, but she finally sent a note and now we have these nice meetings. At my age, it can't be much, of course," he added, "or at hers, but it means a little companionship." I knew he was saying, too, that he could never love anyone but my mother and me enough to rearrange his short future. He reached for his queen and then changed his mind. "What sort of company do you keep these days?" he asked me.

This was a rare question from him, and I welcomed it. "You know I'm a worse old bachelor than you are, Dad. But I almost think I've met someone."

"The young woman, you mean," he said mildly. "Right? The one your patient abandoned most recently."

"I can't put anything over on you." I watched him move a 338.

bishop out of harm's way. "Yes. But she really is too young for me, and I think she's still wrapped up in what this other man did to her." I didn't add that my relationship with her was complicated by my having used her for professional research, or that even if she was now single, she had been my patient's lover and was therefore an ethical puzzle; all that would be equally obvious to my father. "Recently abandoned women can be complicated."

"And she's not only complicated but independent, unusual, beautiful," my father said.

"Of course." I pretended to be alarmed for my king's safety, to amuse him.

He wasn't fooled. "And you are worried, first of all, because she recently belonged to your patient."

"Well, it's hardly a matter to overlook."

"But she's single now, and done with him, in practical terms?" He gave me a sharp glance.

I was glad to be able to nod. "Yes, I very much think so."

"How old is she, exactly?"

"Early thirties. She teaches painting at a local university and paints a good deal on her own as well. I haven't seen her work, but I have the sense she's probably quite good. She's done all kinds of odd jobs in order to pursue her painting seriously. She has guts."

"Your mother was in her twenties when I married her. And I was quite a few years older than she was."

"I know, Dad. But that was a much smaller gap. And not everyone is meant for marriage the way you and Mother were."

"Everyone is meant for it," he observed with a flash of pleasure; in the gentle light from lamp and fire, he was calling my bluff. He knew I'd never risk my king, even to let him win. "The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need."

"I know, I know."

"And then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you.' "

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"I wouldn't have thought you had that in you, Dad." He laughed. "Oh, I could never have said it to any woman myself."

"But then you didn't need to, did you?"

He shook his head, his eyes bluer than usual. "I didn't need to. Besides, if I'd ever said such a thing to your mother, she'd have told me to pull myself together and take out the garbage for her."

And kissed you on the forehead as she said it. "Dad, why don't you come to New York with me tomorrow? I'm going to the museum, and there's an extra bed in my hotel room. It's been a long time since you got down there."

He sighed. "That's an unimaginably big trip for me now. I couldn't walk around properly with you. Even the grocery store is an odyssey these days."

"I understand." But I couldn't help persisting; I didn't want this to be the end, already, of his seeing the world. "Well, then, wouldn't you like to come visit me in Washington this summer? I'll come up and drive you down. Or maybe in the fall, when it cools off?"

"Thank you, Andrew." He put me in check. "I'll think about it." I knew he wouldn't.

"How about at least getting your gla.s.ses replaced, Cyril?" It was an old joke, that I could use his first name when I had a special request to make of him.

"Don't be a common scold, my boy." He was grinning at the board now, and I decided to let him win, which he almost had anyway; certainly he was having no problem seeing the pieces.

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CHAPTER 56 1879.

She wakes with a scream. Yves, in his nightcap, is shaking her shoulder, bringing her a little cognac from his dressing room. It is only a dream, she tells him, gasping. He says that of course it is only a dream. What did she dream about? Nothing, she says-- just a strange working of her imagination. Once he has comforted her, he is sleepy again; he has worked like a dray horse these last weeks, she knows; she lets him think she is calm so that he can burrow back into his own dreams. He breathes gently, in and out, while she lights a candle and sits in her rose-trimmed dressing gown on the edge of the bed until light begins to seep through the curtains.

Eventually she needs the chamber pot; she takes it carefully out from under the bed and uses it, her gown tucked up out of the way. When she wipes herself there is a streak like red cadmium, and she has to fumble in the bureau of her dressing room for the cloth pads Esme has left folded in the top drawer. Another month without hope. The blood itself is horrifying after her dream; she sees it bubbling over a white face, seeping onto the paving stones, a woman's blood mingling in the dirt with the blood of men who have died for their convictions.

She blows out the candle, afraid Yves will wake again; tears sting her eyes. She thinks of Olivier. She cannot tell him her dream--she would not give him such pain. But now she wishes he were here, sitting in the damask chair by the window, holding her. She finds a warmer robe and sits there alone, her hair loose and tears trickling down her neck. If he were here, he would 341.

sit down in her chair first, his long, rather spare body filling the s.p.a.ce; then she would curl up in his lap like a child. He would hold her, dry her face, draw the robe across her shoulders and knees. He is the most loving person she has ever known, this man who once dodged bullets with a sketchbook in his hand. But then, she wonders, why should he comfort her? Surely his own need is greater. This brings the dream back again, and she makes herself smaller in the chair, crushing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in her arms, waiting for his past to subside in her.

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CHAPTER 57 Marlow.

The ride into New York from that direction was, as always, kind of splendid, the tip of the skyline appearing before the city did, like a row of advancing lances: World Trade Center, Empire State, Chrysler, and a lot of towering nonent.i.ties whose names and functions I don't know and never will--banks, I suppose, and megalithic office buildings. It's hard to picture the city without that skyline, as it must have looked even forty years ago, and now it's Increasingly hard to imagine the Twin Towers back into it. But on the train that morning, I felt the buoyancy that comes with plenty of sound sleep and the antic.i.p.ation of the city's vitality. It was a feeling of being on vacation, too, or at least away from work--twice already in the s.p.a.ce of a couple of months. I checked my cell phone for the hundredth time; there were no pages from Goldengrove or from any of my private patients, so I was truly at liberty. It occurred to me that Mary might have called, but she hadn't, and why should she? I would have to wait at least a few weeks longer before I could call her again myself--I wished once more that she'd allowed me to interview her, as Kate had, but there was a particular pleasure in seeing her words on the page, and her story was possibly more candid than it would have been if she'd had to tell me face-to-face.

I didn't realize until I'd left my bags at the Washington Hotel and walked out into the Village why I'd chosen this area, if unconsciously. These were Robert's streets, and Kate's; he'd walked from here to school every day, sat in bars with the friends with whom he swapped opinions and sweatshirts, exhibited his work in little 343.

galleries not far away. I wished Kate had told me their address, although I couldn't quite see myself actually looking for the building, craning up at it: Robert Oliver slept here. But, strangely, I did feel his presence; it was easy to imagine him at twenty-nine or so, just as he was now but with no silver in his snaky hair. Kate was more of a puzzle; she'd surely been different then, but I couldn't picture how.

I searched the streets for them, as a game: that young woman with the blond crew cut and long skirts, the student with a portfolio slung by its strap over one shoulder--no, Robert was taller and more powerful-looking than anyone on this crowded sidewalk. He would have loomed here, as he did at Goldengrove, although New York would have better absorbed his vividness. I wondered for the first time if some of his depression had come from simple displacement: a person larger than life, larger than most, needed a setting to match his energy. Had he gradually wilted, away from Manhattan? It had been Kate who wanted the move to a quieter place, a haven for children. Or had his exile from this pulsating city simply increased his determination to pursue his calling-- was that the ferocity Kate had observed when he painted in the attic and slept through his cla.s.ses at Greenhill? Had he been trying to get himself actually fired from the college so he could justify a return to New York? Why, when he finally fled, had he gone to Washington instead of New York? His having chosen a different city argued for the strength of his bond with Mary, or perhaps it was proof that his dark mistress wasn't in New York anymore, if she ever had been.

I walked past the spot where Dylan Thomas had more or less died in the gutter, or at least been fished out of it for his last ride to the hospital, and the row of houses where Henry James had set Washington Square --my father had reminded me of that one this morning, pulling a copy down from his study shelves and eyeing me over his inadequate gla.s.ses-- "You do still find time to read, don't you, Andrew?" The heroine of that book had lived in one of 344.

the prim rows facing the square, and when she'd finally rejected her money-grubbing suitor, she'd sat down to her embroidery " 'for life, as it were,'" my father read aloud.

The late nineteenth century again; I thought of Robert and his mysterious lady, with her full skirts and tiny b.u.t.tons, her dark eyes more alive than paint was supposed to be. This morning Washington Square was tranquil with summer sun, people talking on the benches, as generations had before them, as I once had with a woman I'd thought I might marry, all this time slipping past everyone and disappearing, all of us disappearing with it. There was a comfort in the way the city went on and on without us.

I had a sandwich at a sidewalk cafe, then took the subway from Christopher Street up to West 79th and changed to a crosstown bus. Central Park was overflowing with green, with people Rollerblading and bicycling, joggers narrowly avoiding death by those on wheels--a sublime Sat.u.r.day, New York exactly as it should be, as I hadn't seen it in years. More than ever, I remembered my world here, its spokes radiating south from Columbia, from my undergraduate cla.s.srooms and dormitories. New York meant youth to me, as it had to Robert and Kate. I alighted from the bus and went up a couple of blocks to the Met. The museum steps were covered with visitors, settled there like birds, taking photographs of one another, noisy, fluttering down to buy hot dogs or c.o.kes from the food carts nearby, waiting for their rides, or their friends, or resting their feet. I threaded a path among them and up to the doors.

I hadn't walked in there in almost a decade, I realized now; how could I have let such acres of time stretch between me and this miraculous entrance, the soaring lobby with its urns of fresh flowers, the hubbub of people flowing through it, the entrance to ancient Egypt yawning at one side? Some years later, my wife went up for a visit to the museum by herself and told me that a new area had been opened just under the main staircase; she had turned in there, tired from wandering, and found an exhibition 345.

on Byzantine Egypt. Only two or three people at a time could fit in the s.p.a.ce; she'd come around a corner into it and found herself alone with just a few ancient objects, perfectly lit. And she told me afterward that her eyes had filled with tears because the sight had made her feel her connection to other human beings. (But you were by yourself there, I said. She said, Yes, alone with those objects someone had made.) I knew I'd want to stay all afternoon, even if my visit on Robert's behalf took only five minutes. I was remembering now treasures half forgotten: colonial furniture, Spanish balconies, Baroque cartoons, a big languid Gauguin I'd particularly liked. I shouldn't have come here on a Sat.u.r.day, when the crowds swelled to their peak; would I be able to see a thing up close? On the other hand, Robert had glimpsed his lady through a crowd, so perhaps it was appropriate that I was here as part of one. With a colored metal museum b.u.t.ton folded over the top of my shirt pocket and my jacket over my arm, I went up the great staircase.

I had forgotten to ask if the Degas collection was all in one place, and whether it had been moved since Robert's obsession with it in the '80s. It didn't matter much; I could always go back to the information desk, and perhaps I wasn't looking for information anyway. I found the Impressionist rooms where I'd remembered them, more or less, and was transfixed by their verdant expanse--the crowds were thick here, but I had sudden visions of orchards, garden paths, tranquil water, ships, Monet's regal arched cliffs. A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming. But every time I stepped closer to one of those canvases, the old tune was silenced by a swell of something enormous, color that really was almost melody, thick paint on surfaces that actually conveyed the smells of pasture and ocean. I remembered the stack of books Kate had found next to Robert's attic sofa, books that had inspired his vigorous painting of walls and ceiling. These works had not been dead for him, a contemporary artist, but somehow fresh and refreshing, even in 346.

glossy color reproductions from the library. He was a traditionalist himself, of course, but he'd seen through the endless exhibits and posters to something still revolutionary.

The Degas collection was mostly housed in four rooms, with a few other examples of his work--mainly large portraits I didn't remember--spilling into the halls of the nineteenth-century collection. I'd forgotten, too, that the Met's collection of his work must be one of the largest in any museum anywhere, perhaps the largest in the world; I made a mental note to check that. The first room contained a bronze cast of Degas's most famous sculpture, The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, with her skirt of real faded netting and the satin ribbon slipping off the braid down her back. She stood in the path of anyone who entered, her face turned up, blind and submissive but perhaps touched by a dream no non-dancer could understand, her hands clasped behind her, her lower back delicately arched, her right foot forward and impossibly turned out in the beautiful deformity for which she'd been trained.

The walls around her were dominated by Degas, with a few other painters here and there: his portraits of rather ordinary women smelling flowers in their homes, and canvases of dancers. The dancers filled the next two rooms almost completely, young ballerinas with feet on barre or chair, tying their shoes, their skirts upended as they leaned over, like the feathers of swans fishing underwater, the sensuality that made you scan the lines of their bodies just as you might have scanned them at the ballet itself, the heightened intimacy of seeing them in training, offstage, behind the scenes, ordinary, tired, shy, mutilated, ambitious, underage or overripe, exquisite. I made my way from one to another and then stopped in front of a third to look around.

Beyond the dancers was a little room of Degas nudes, women stepping from baths and swathing themselves in huge white towels. The nudes were heavily fleshed, as if the ballerinas had aged and gained weight, or turned out to be curvaceous after all under the discipline of their tight bodices and fluffy skirts. Nothing 347.

spoke to me of Robert's presence or the lady he'd once seen in these galleries; although perhaps she'd been here as a Degas fan herself. He'd had permission to sketch in the museum, he'd set up his easel or held his drawing pad before him on some busy morning in the late '80s, he'd seen a woman in the crowd and then lost her. If he'd wanted to sketch, why had he been there in a crowd? I didn't even know if these rooms had been arranged the same way then, and checking it would make me appear fanatical, if only to myself. This was a ridiculous pilgrimage to have made; I was already weary from the jostling of the crowd, all these people out gathering impressions of impressions of Impressionists, collecting firsthand images they already knew thirdhand.

I sent a thought out to Robert and resolved to go downstairs to some quiet room full of furniture or Chinese vases that fewer people cared about. Perhaps it had been like this for him; he'd been tired that day, turned and glanced through the crowd--I tried it myself, and my eyes lit on a gray-haired woman in a red dress holding a little girl by the hand, the child tired already, too, staring vacantly around her at people rather than paintings. But that day Robert had looked straight through the ma.s.s to a woman he could never forget, a woman possibly dressed up in nineteenth-century clothing for a rehearsal or a photograph or a prank-- these possibilities hadn't occurred to me before. Maybe he had gone up to her and talked with her, even in a crowd.

"Are there any more paintings by Degas?" I asked the guard in the doorway.

"Degas?" he said, frowning. "Yes, two more in that room." I thanked him and made my way there, to be thorough; perhaps Robert had had his epiphany, or his hallucination, here. There were fewer people in the next room, possibly because there were fewer Monets. I examined a pastel on brown, drawn in pink and white, a dancer stretching long arms down her long leg, and another of three or four ballerinas with their backs to the painter and their arms around one another's waists or their hands adjusting hair ribbons.

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I was done. I turned away, searched for an exit at the other end of the gallery, in the opposite direction from the crowds I'd left. Then she was there, across from me, a portrait in oils about two feet square, painted loosely but with absolute precision, the face I knew, the elusive smile, the bonnet tied under her chin. Her eyes were so alive that you couldn't turn around without meeting them. I went numbly across the room, which seemed huge; it took hours for me to reach her. It was indisputably the same woman, depicted from her blue-clad shoulders up. As I drew close, she seemed to smile a little more; her face was wonderfully alive. If I'd had to guess the painter, I would have said Manet, although the portrait didn't have his genius. It must be the same period, however: the careful strokes that made up the shoulders of her dress, the lace at her throat, the dark luxury of her hair, were not quite the domain of Impressionism; her face had some of the realism of earlier work. I scanned the plaque -- "Portrait of Beatrice de Clerval, 1879. Olivier Vignot." Beatrice de Clerval! And painted by Olivier! She was a real woman, all right. But not a living one.

The fellow at the information desk on the first floor helped as much as he could. No, they didn't have any other work by Olivier Vignot, nor any other t.i.tles involving Beatrice de Clerval. The piece had been in the collection since 1966, bought from a private collection in Paris. During Robert's tenure in New York City, it had been loaned for a year to a traveling exhibition, one on French portraiture during the rise of Impressionism. He smiled and nodded; that was all he had--did it serve my purposes?

I thanked him, my lips dry. Robert had seen it once or twice before it had been removed to travel with an exhibition. He had not hallucinated, only been struck by a marvelous image. Had he really not asked someone what had happened to the painting? Perhaps he had or perhaps he hadn't; what suited his myth about her was that she had disappeared. And if he had returned to the museum in the years since then, it had not mattered to him whether the painting was actually there or not; by then he'd been 349.

producing his own version of her. Even if he'd seen this painting only a few times, he had surely made a sketch of it, a very good one, for his later paintings to resemble her so accurately.

Or had he found the painting again in a book? Obviously, neither artist nor subject was well known, but the quality of Vignot's work had attracted the Met enough to make them purchase the portrait. I tried the gift shop as well, but there was no postcard of it, no book with a reproduction. I climbed the staircase again, went back into the gallery. She was waiting there, glowing, smiling, about to speak. I took out my sketch pad and drew her, the pose of the head--if only I could do it better. Then I stood looking into her eyes. I could hardly bear to leave without taking her with me.

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CHAPTER 58 Mary.

After art school I did any job I could find until I finally got some teaching in DC. Now and then I showed a piece of work, or received a small fellowship, or even got into a good workshop. The workshop I want to tell you about is one I went to a few years ago, late August. It was held at an old estate in Maine, on the coast, an area I had always wanted to see and maybe paint. I drove up there from Washington in my little pickup truck, my blue Chevy, which I've junked since then. I loved that truck. I had my easels in the back, my big wooden box of gear, my sleeping bag and pillow, the duffel bag from my father's military service in Korea stuffed full of jeans and white T-shirts, old bathing suits, old towels, old everything.

Packing that bag, I realized I had come a long way from Muzzy and her education; Muzzy would never have tolerated my packing job or what I'd packed, that nest of fraying clothes and gray tennis shoes and boxes of art supplies. She would have hated my Barnett sweatshirt with the cracked lettering across the front and my khakis with the torn pocket flap on the back. I was no grunge, however; I kept my hair long and shining, my skin supple, the ancient clothes very clean. I wore a gold chain with a garnet pendant around my neck, I bought new lace bras and underwear with which to adorn myself under the ratty surface. I loved myself like this, slim swelling roundness dressed up in secret, out of sight--not for any man (I was tired of them all, postcollege)--but for the moment at night when I took off my paint-stained white blouse and the jeans that my knees showed through. It was all for me; I was my own treasure.

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I started very early and followed back roads toward Maine, spending the night in Rhode Island at a half-empty roadside motel from the '50s, little white cottages with a sign in fancy black script, the whole place uncomfortably reminiscent for me of the motel in Psycho. There were no killers in the place, though; I slept peacefully until almost eight, and had fried eggs in the smoke-filled diner next door. I sketched a little in my notebook as I sat there, recording the fly-specked sheer curtains tied back on either side of window boxes full of artificial flowers, the people drinking coffee.

At the Maine border there was a sign for moose crossing, and the roadsides became crowded with evergreens, which pressed in on either side like armies of giants--no houses, no exits, just miles and miles of tall firs. And then the very edge of the road showed a drift of pale sand, and I realized that I was getting close to the ocean. It gave me a stabbing excitement, like what I used to feel when Muzzy drove us to Cape May in New Jersey for our annual vacation. I imagined myself painting the beach, the landscape, or sitting on rocks by water in the moonlight, all alone. In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then--ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

It took me some study to find the right road through that town and out to the retreat; the workshop flyers had a little map on them ending at an inlet away from civilization. The last couple of roads I took were dirt, pushed through dense pinewoods like logging cuts, but mellowed, too, pine seedlings springing up on the shoulder in the shadow of the forest. After a few miles of this, I came to a gingerbread house--it looked like one, anyway--a wooden gatehouse with a sign on it that said rocky beach retreat center , with no one around, and a little farther on I found myself rounding a bend toward a stretch of green lawn. I could see a big wooden mansion with the same gingerbread trim under the eaves, 352.

woods, and a glimpse of ocean just beyond. The house was enormous, painted a dull pink, and the lawn was not only a lawn but gardens, trellises, paths, a pink summerhouse, old trees, a flat area where someone had set up croquet, a hammock. I glanced at my watch; I was in plenty of time for registration.

The dining hall, where everyone met that night for the first meal, was in a carriage house with its dividing walls knocked out. It had high, rough rafters and windows edged with squares of stained gla.s.s. Eight or ten long tables were arranged on a peeling wood floor, and young men and women--college students; they already looked younger to me than myself--were moving around setting out water pitchers. There was a buffet at one end of the hall with a few bottles of wine on it, gla.s.ses, a bowl of flowers, and next to it open coolers full of beers. I had a queasy feeling; it was like the first day in a new school (although as a child I'd gone to the same school for twelve years), or like my college orientation, where you realize that you know no one at all and therefore no one there cares about you, and you're going to have to do something about it. I could see some people talking in little groups near the drinks. I made myself stride over toward those beers (I was proud of my stride in those days) and pluck one from its bed of ice without looking around. When I straightened up to search for a bottle opener, my shoulder and elbow hit Robert Oliver.

It was certainly Robert. He stood there in three-quarter profile, talking with someone, moving out of my way, sidestepping the interruption that was me without even glancing around. He was talking to another man--a man with a thin head and a graying thin beard. It was absolutely, positively Robert Oliver. His curly hair was a little longer in the back than I remembered, with some new silver making it glint, and one of his elbows showed brownly through the hole in his blue cotton shirt. There had been no mention of him in the workshop catalog; why was he here? He had 353.

paint or grease on the back of his light-colored cotton pants, as if he'd wiped his hand on his b.u.t.tocks like a little kid. He was wearing heavy slip-on sandals despite the cool of the New England summer evening already reaching in through the door. He had a beer in one hand and was gesticulating with the other to the man with the narrow head. He was as tall as I remembered, imposing.

I stood frozen, staring at his ear, at the heavy curl of hair around that ear, at his still-familiar shoulder, at the blade of his long hand raised in argument. He half turned, as if he felt my gaze, and then went back to the conversation. I remembered that solid, graceful balance from his perambulations around the studio. Then he glanced around again, with a frown, but it was no double take from the movies; it was more as if he had misplaced something, or was trying to remember what he'd come into a room to look for. He recognized me without recognizing me. I edged away, averting my face. I found it an alarming idea that if I wanted to, I could walk over and tap his shoulder through the blue shirt, interrupt his conversation more firmly. I dreaded his perplexity, the vague Oh, I'm sorry--where do I know you from?, the Good to see you again, whoever you are. I thought of the hundreds (thousands?) of students he had probably taught since then. Better not to speak to him than to find myself one more blur in the crowd.

I turned quickly to the first person whose eye I could catch, who happened to be a wiry young man with his shirt unb.u.t.toned to his breastbone. It was an impressive breastbone, tanned and prominent; it sported a big chain with a peace sign lying on it. His tanned, flat b.r.e.a.s.t.s curved away from it like two lean cuts of chicken. I raised my eyes, guessing he would have long retro locks to match the pendant, but his hair was shorn to a pale stubble. His face was as stark as the breastbone, his nose a beak, his eyes light brown, small, flickering uncertainly at me. "Cool party," he said.

"No, not particularly cool." I was filled with dislike, which I knew was unfairly left over from that moment of seeing Robert Oliver's shoulder turn toward me and then away.

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"I don't like it either." The young man shrugged and laughed; his bare chest caved in for a moment. He was younger than I'd thought, younger than I. His smile was friendly and it brightened his eyes. Perversely, I disliked him again; of course he would be too cool to like any gathering of human beings, or at least to admit that he did if someone else disagreed. "How do you do-- I'm Frank." He put out his hand, renouncing all the retro cool in a moment, a mama's boy, a gentleman. The timing was impeccable, disarming. There was deference in it that recognized my-- oh, six years -- seniority; there was a spark, too, that said I was a s.e.xy older woman. I had to admire the skill of his admiration. He seemed to know I was almost thirty, elderly, and to tell me in the dry warmth of his hand that he liked thirty, he liked it very much. I wanted to laugh, but I didn't.

"Mary Bertison," I said. Robert had moved, at the edge of my vision; he was making his way toward the dining-hall doors to talk with someone else. I kept my back turned. My hair made a partial curtain, a cloak, which protected me.

"So, what made you come here?"

"Confronting past lives," I said. At least he hadn't asked if I was one of the faculty. Frank frowned.

"Just kidding," I said. "I'm here to take the landscape workshop."

"Very cool." Frank beamed. "Me, too. I mean, I'm taking it, too."

"Where did you go to school?" I asked, trying to replace the distraction of Robert Oliver's profile with a sip of my beer.

"SCAD," he said casually. "MFA." The Savannah College of Art and Design was becoming quite a good school, and he seemed pretty young to have finished his degree already; I felt a flicker of respect in spite of myself.