The Swan Thieves Part 23

I had waited a long time to ask these questions. "Did you know that Robert had a package of old letters on him when he attacked that painting? Letters between Beatrice de Clerval and Olivier Vignot, who painted the portrait?"

She sat frozen for a moment, then nodded. "I didn't know they were also from Olivier Vignot."

"You saw the letters?"

"Yes, a little. I'll tell you more later."

I had to leave it there. She was looking directly into my eyes; her face was clear, devoid of hatred. I thought that perhaps what I was seeing, naked in front of me, was what her love for Robert had represented to her. I'd never known anyone as striking as this girl, who stared obliquely at the paint on a museum canvas, ate like a well-bred man, and stroked her hair back like a nymph. The one exception might have been a woman I knew only from old letters and from paintings--Olivier Vignot's and Robert Oliver's. But I could understand why Robert might have loved the living woman in the midst of loving the dead one, to the best of his ability.

I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for the pain her words encompa.s.sed, but I didn't know how to say it without sounding patronizing, so I concentrated instead on sitting there, regarding her as gently as I could. Besides, I knew from the way she was 372.

finishing her coffee and rummaging for her jacket that our meal was over. But there was a last problem for this evening, and I had to think how to address it. "I've checked at the front desk, and they have extra rooms available. I'd be happy--"

"No, no." She was putting a couple of bills under her plate, sliding out of the booth already. "I have a friend on Twenty-eighth who's expecting me already--I called her earlier. I'll come by, say, nine o'clock tomorrow morning."

"Yes, please do. We can have coffee and go uptown."

"Perfect. And these are for you." She thrust a hand into her bag and gave me a thick envelope--hard and bulky this time, as if it contained a book as well as papers.

She had herself gathered together now, and I hastened to my feet. She was hard to keep up with, this young woman. I would have called her p.r.i.c.kly if she hadn't been so graceful, or if she weren't smiling a little now. To my surprise, she put one hand on my arm to steady herself, then reached over to kiss me on the cheek; she was almost my height. Her lips were warm and soft.

When I reached my room, it was still early; I had the evening ahead of me. I'd thought about getting in touch with my one old friend in the city--Alan Glickman, a high-school buddy with whom I'd managed to keep up, mostly thanks to our calling each other a couple of times a year. I enjoyed his keen sense of humor, but I hadn't managed even to phone him ahead, and he was probably already busy. Besides, Mary's package rested on the edge of the bed. Walking out and leaving it here for even a few hours would be like leaving a person behind.

I sat down and opened it and drew out the pile of typed sheets and a thin paperback filled with color reproductions. I lay down across the bed with Mary's pages. The door was locked and the shades were drawn, but I felt the room full of a presence, a longing through which I could have pa.s.sed my hand.

373.

CHAPTER 6 1 Mary.

Frank cornered me at breakfast. "Ready?" he said, balancing a tray that held two bowls of cornflakes, a plate of eggs and bacon, and three gla.s.ses of orange juice. We were serving ourselves this morning--democracy. I had found a sunny corner and was on my second cup of coffee and a fried egg, and Robert Oliver was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he didn't eat breakfast. "Ready for what?" I said.

"For the first day." He put his tray down without asking if I wanted company.

"Help yourself," I said. "I was just wishing for some companionship in this beautiful, lonely spot."

He smiled, apparently pleased with my feistiness; why had I thought sarcasm would work? His hair was crafted into a couple of spiky tufts at the front, and he wore graying jeans and a sweatshirt and frayed basketball sneakers, a red-and-blue bead necklace. He bent from a lithe waist and flexed his shoulders over the cornflakes. He was perfect in his immature way, and he knew it. I pictured him at sixty-five, gaunt and stringy-armed, with bunions and probably a wrinkled tattoo somewhere.

"The first day is going to be long," he said. "That's why I asked if you're ready for this. I hear Oliver's going to work us out there for hours and hours. He's intense."

I tried to get back to my coffee. "It's a landscape-painting cla.s.s, not football practice."

"Oh, I don't know." Frank was mashing his way through his breakfast. "I've heard about this guy. He never stops. He made 374.

his name as a portrait painter, but he's really into landscapes right now. He's outdoors all day long, like an animal."

"Or like Monet," I said, and immediately regretted it. Frank was looking away from me as if I'd begun picking my nose.

"Monet?" he murmured, and I heard the disdain, the puzzlement, through his mouthful of breakfast. We finished our eggs in not-quite-friendly silence.

The hillside where Robert Oliver set us our first landscape exercise commanded a view of ocean and rocky islands; it was part of a state park, and I wondered how he'd known to come exactly here, to this tremendous setting. Robert drove his easel legs into the ground. We all gathered around, holding our gear or dropping it on the gra.s.s, watching while he demonstrated a sketch, showed us how to focus on form first, without considering yet what the forms represented, and then made suggestions about color. We would need a grayish ground, he said, to reproduce the bright cold light all around us, but also some warmer brown tones under the tree trunks, gra.s.s, even the water.

His presentation in the cla.s.sroom that morning had been minimal: "You're all accomplished, working artists, and I don't see the need to talk a lot--let's just get out in the field and find out what happens, and we can discuss composition later, when we've got some pictures to take a look at." I'd been glad, after that, to escape to the out-of-doors. We'd driven to this area, then walked up through the woods from the parking lot, carrying our gear. The conference had provided sandwiches and apples; we hoped it wouldn't rain later in the day.

I was remembering a lot about Robert Oliver now, standing close enough to see his demonstration but not so close as to seem eager; I recognized that pa.s.sionate insistence on form, the way his voice deepened to conviction when he told us to ignore everything except the geometry of the scene until we got it right, the 375.

way he stood back, weight on his heels, examining his work every few minutes, then leaned into it again. Robert made some sort of contact with everyone, I noticed; more than ever, he had that easy, disheveled gift for hospitality, as if wherever he taught was a dining room instead of a cla.s.sroom, and we were all eating at his table. It was irresistible, and the other students seemed drawn in by him at once, crowding trustingly around his canvas. He pointed out some views and the shapes they might form on a canvas, then roughed in the forms of the view he'd chosen and laid on color, much of it burnt umber, a deep-brown wash.

There were enough level places on the hillside for six people to set up easels and find easy footing, and we all spent some time hunting for views. It was hard to go wrong, actually--hard to choose which of 180 degrees of natural splendor to paint. I finally settled on a long vista of firs creeping down to the beach and water, with the bulk of Isle des Roches in the far right and a flat horizon of water meeting the sky to the left. It wasn't quite balanced; I moved my easel a few degrees and caught a frame of evergreens by the beach at far left, to give my canvas extra interest on that side.

Once I'd chosen my spot, Frank planted his easel enthusiastically near mine, as if I'd invited him and would be honored by his company. Some of the other students seemed quite pleasant; they were my age or older, mainly women, which made Frank look like a precocious child. Two of the women, who said they already knew each other from a conference in Santa Fe, had engaged me in friendly talk in the van. I watched them putting easels into the lower reaches of the hillside, conferring with each other about their palettes. There was also a very shy elderly man whom Frank told me in a whisper had exhibited at Williams College the year before; he set up near us and began to sketch with paint rather than pencils.

Frank had not only shoved the legs of his easel into the ground near mine but also pointed it more or less in the same direction; 376.

I noted with annoyance that we'd be doing very similar views, which put our skills into direct compet.i.tion. At least he was immediately absorbed and probably wouldn't bother me; he already had his palette set up with a few basic colors and was using graphite to outline the distant ma.s.s of the island and the edge of the sh.o.r.e in the foreground. He was quick, sure, and his lean back moved under its shirt in graceful rhythm.

I looked away and began to prepare my palette: green, burnt umber, a soft blue with some gray to it, a squeeze of white and one of black. I was already wishing I'd replaced two of my brushes before the conference; they were superb ones, but I'd had them so long that they'd lost some hairs. My teaching job didn't cover much in the way of expensive painting supplies, once I'd paid rent and groceries, and DC wasn't cheap, although I'd found an apartment in a neighborhood Muzzy never would have approved of and fortunately never came to see. I wouldn't have dreamed of asking her for money either, after disappointing her in her career choice for me. ("But lots of people with degrees in art become lawyers these days, don't they, darling? And you've always been such an arguer.") I renewed my vow, as I did daily: I would keep trying to build enough of a portfolio, partic.i.p.ate in enough shows, ama.s.s enough excellent references, to apply for a real teaching job. I glared at Frank, since he wasn't looking. Perhaps Robert Oliver could help me somehow, if I did well in this workshop. I checked, covertly, and discovered that Robert was painting with absorption, too. I couldn't see his canvas from where I stood, but it was large and he'd begun to fill it with long strokes.

The color of the water changed from hour to hour, of course, making it difficult to catch, and the peak of Isle des Roches proved a challenge; my version of it was a little too soft, like custard or whipped cream rather than pale rock, the village at its lowest sh.o.r.e smudgy at best. Robert painted for a long time, down the slope from us, and I wondered if he'd ever come up to see our work, and dreaded that.

377.

At last we broke for lunch, Robert stretching, joining his great hands inside out high above his head and the rest of us imitating, in one way or another, looking up, putting down brushes, raising our arms. I knew we'd eat quickly, and when Robert sat down in a sunny spot farther down the hill and drew his lunch out of a big canvas bag, we all followed, huddling around him with our own sandwiches. He gave me a smile; had he been glancing around for me a second before? Frank began to talk with the two friendly women about the success of his recent show in Savannah, and Robert leaned across to ask how my landscape was shaping up. "Very poorly," I said, which for some reason made him grin. "I mean," I said, encouraged, "have you ever had that dessert called Floating Island?" He laughed and promised he'd come take a look at it.

378.

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 a.s.sessment 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 379.

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 s.p.a.ce. "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 sc.r.a.pe 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 380.

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l of a view," he said companionably. "And I guess we should clear out for dinner now." It was a h.e.l.l of a view, I could have pointed out, but it didn't include any figures in long dresses skirting the tide. No sh.o.r.e could have been more strikingly empty--a landscape without people, which had been the point of the exercise, hadn't it?

381.

CHAPTER 63 1879.

At the end of March, her painting of the golden-haired maid is accepted for the Salon, under the name Marie Riviere. 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 Beatrice 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 382.

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 Riviere. Curious, how the picture reminds him of something. Annoying, too, that Vignot refuses to reveal Madame Riviere's ident.i.ty; surely it isn't her real name.

Gilbert turns to Yves when he speaks, then to Beatrice. 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 Beatrice 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 secretive. 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 Beatrice'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, Beatrice feels alarmed. But what harm could it really cause for Gilbert Thomas to discover her ident.i.ty, 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 383.

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. Beatrice 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.

384.

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 unb.u.t.toned. I wanted to tell him to b.u.t.ton 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 385.

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 cliche, 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 386.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s--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 a.s.sume 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 387.

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 388.

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, d.a.m.n all men.