The Swan Thieves Part 28

She can't stop thinking about her own body. Surely she should think a little of Olivier's, which has lived in so many interesting ways. Instead, she considers the bug bite on the inside of her right wrist, scratches it, shows it companionably to him as they paint on the beach the second morning. They gaze together at the white forearm, where she has rolled back the sleeve of her linen smock. Her wrist, with that tiny red mark, the long hand and its rings--she regards them herself, as he must, with desire. They are working at their easels on the beach; she has set down her brushes, but Olivier still holds a small one wet with dark-blue paint.

They stand looking at the curve of her arm, and then she raises it slowly toward him, toward his face. When it is so close that he can't mistake her meaning, he presses his lips to the skin. She shivers, more from the sight than from sensation. He lowers her arm gently and their eyes meet. She can't think of any words to fit this situation. His face is reddened against his white hair, from emotion or from the Channel wind. Does he feel embarra.s.sment? It is the sort of thing she might ask him at an intimate moment she won't yet let herself picture.

458.

C HAPTER 81 Marlow Sometime after this, I tried the experiment of staying in Robert's room with him in silence for an hour; I brought a sketch pad with me and sat in my chair with it, drawing him as he sat drawing Beatrice de Clerval. I wanted to tell him that I knew who she was, but, as usual, caution stayed my hand. After all, I might need to learn more about her before I did that, or about him. After a first look of annoyance at my presence and a second glare that showed me he'd registered the fact that he was the subject of my drawing, Robert ignored me, but a faint sense of companionship crept into the room, if I wasn't simply imagining that. There was no sound but the scratching of our respective pencils, and it was peaceful.

The escape of drawing in the middle of the morning gave the day a kind of harmony I rarely experience at Goldengrove. Robert's face, in profile, was very interesting; and the fact that he didn't show anger or get up and move away or otherwise disrupt my work pleased and rather surprised me. It was possible he had withdrawn further and simply didn't care, but I felt he was actually tolerating my gesture. When I had finished the effort, I put the pencil in my jacket pocket and tore the drawing out of my book, laying it silently on the end of his bed. It wasn't half bad, I thought, although of course it lacked the brilliant expressiveness of his portraits. He didn't look up as I left, but when I checked a couple of days later, I saw that he had taped my gift up in his gallery, although not in a place of prominence.

459.

As if she'd somehow known about my hour with Robert, Mary called that very evening. "I want to ask you something."

"Anything. That's only fair."

"I want to read the letters. Beatrice's and Olivier's." I hesitated for only a moment. "Of course. I'll make you a copy of the translations I have so far, and the rest as I get them."

"Thank you."

"How've you been?"

"I'm fine," she said. "Working, I mean painting, since my semester is over now."

"Would you like to go out to Virginia to paint this weekend? Just for an afternoon? It's supposed to be springlike, and I was thinking of going. I can bring you the letters then."

She was silent for a beat. "Yes, I think I'd like that."

"I wanted to call you before this. You've stayed away."

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry." She did sound sorry, genuinely so.

"It's quite all right. I can imagine what a hard time you've had this last year."

"You mean, you can imagine it as a professional?"

I sighed in spite of myself. "No, as your friend."

"Thank you," she said, and I thought I heard the choke of tears in her voice. "I could use a friend."

"I could, too, actually." It was more than I would have said to anyone six months earlier, and I knew it.

"Sat.u.r.day or Sunday?"

"Let's say Sat.u.r.day but watch the weather."

"Andrew?" Her voice was gentle, and on the edge of smiling.

"What?"

"Nothing. Thank you."

"Thank you, instead," I demurred. "I'm glad you want to go." On Sat.u.r.day she wore a thick red jacket, her hair twisted up 460.

and pinned with two sticks, and we painted together much of the day. Later, in the unseasonably warm sun, we picnicked and talked. There was color in her face, and when I leaned over the blanket to kiss her, she put her arms around my neck and pulled me close--no tears this time, although we only kissed. We ate dinner outside the city, and I dropped her off at her apartment on a litter-strewn block in Northeast. She had the copy of the letters in her bag. She didn't invite me up, but she came back from her front door to kiss me again before going inside.

461.

C HAPTER 82 1879.

To: Yves Vignot Pa.s.sy, Paris Mon cher mari, I hope this finds you well and that Papa is mending. Thank you for the kind note. Papa's troubles worry me--I wish I were there to care for him myself. Warm compresses on his chest usually help, but I suspect Esme has already tried those. Please send him my fond greetings.

For myself, I cannot say I'm finding it dull here, although etretat is quiet before the season. I have completed one canvas, if you can call it complete, as well as a pastel and two sketches. Uncle is helpful, making suggestions about color--of course, our handling of the brush is so very different that there I always have to strike out on my own. I thoroughly respect his knowledge, however. Now he is talking with me about my doing a much bigger canvas, one with an ambitious subject, which I could submit to the Salon jury next year, although Mme Riviere would be its author. I do not know if I want such a large undertaking, however.

Having slept well the last two nights, I am quite refreshed.

She puts down her pen and looks around the wallpapered bedroom. The first night she has slept from pure exhaustion, and the third she has spent half awake, thinking of Olivier's firm, dry lips approaching her arm--the sensitive shape of the older man's mouth and the pale stretch of her own skin.

She knows the correct thing: she should tell Olivier that she feels unwell here--nerves, she can call it, the eternal excuse -- and that they must return home at once. But that is the reason Yves 462.

has sent her here to begin with. Even if she could muster this act, Olivier will see through it. She is blooming in the fresh wind from the Channel, with the expanses of water and sky coursing through her, a relief after stifling Paris. She loves working on the sh.o.r.e, wrapped in her warm cloak. She loves his company, his conversation, the hours they spend reading together in the evenings. He has made the world larger for her than she had ever thought possible.

Instead she blots the last word of her letter and considers the loop of the "d" in "dormi." If she claims that she must go back, Olivier will know that she is lying; he will think she is fleeing. It will hurt him. She cannot do that; she owes him trust in return for his vulnerability, his putting his hand in hers when it might be the last time he touches any woman. Especially when she could a.s.sail him from the vantage point of her youth.

She goes to the window and unlatches it. From above the street, she has an oblique view of the gray-beige expanse of beach and the grayer water. A breeze stirs the curtains, rifles the skirts of her morning dress where it lies, bent double, over a chair. She tries to think about Yves, but when she shuts her eyes, she sees an annoying caricature, like a political cartoon in one of his newspapers. Yves in hat and coat, his head enormous, out of proportion, holding a walking stick under one arm, putting on his gloves before kissing her good-bye. It is easier to picture Olivier: he is standing with her on the beach, upright and tall, subtle, with his silver hair, rosy lined face, watering blue eyes, his well-cut, well-worn brown suit, his craftsman's hands and square-tipped, slightly swollen fingers around the brush. The image makes her sad in a way she does not feel when he is actually with her.

But she can't sustain even this vision long; it is replaced by the street itself, the brick fronts and elaborate trim on a row of new shops blocking half her view of the beach. What lingers there for her is a question. How many nights can she pa.s.s in this suspended state? In the afternoon they will go somewhere in the bright expanse of beach to paint, return to their rooms to dress for 463.

dinner, share their public meal again, sit in the overfurnished hotel parlor and talk about their reading. She will feel she is already in his arms, in spirit; shouldn't that be enough? And then she will retire to her room and begin her nightly vigil.

The other question she asks herself, elbows propped on the sill, is still more difficult. Does she want him? Nothing in the stretch of sh.o.r.e, the upturned boats, hints at an answer. She closes the window, her lips pursed. Life will decide, and perhaps has already decided--a weak answer, but there is no other, and it is time for them to go paint.

464.

C HAPTER 83 Marlow One evening I came home to a letter--a very hospitable letter, to my surprise -- from Pedro Caillet. After I'd read it, I surprised myself in turn by going to the phone and calling a travel agent.

Dear Dr. Marlow: Thank you for your note of two weeks past. You probably know more than I do about Beatrice de Clerval, but I would be happy to a.s.sist you. Please come to talk with me between March 16 and March 23, if that is possible. Afterward I will be traveling to Rome and cannot be your host. In answer to your other question, I have not heard of an American painter researching the work of Clerval; such a person has never contacted me.

With warmest wishes, P. Caillet Then I called Mary. "How about Acapulco, week after next?"

Her voice was thick, as if she'd been sleeping, although it was late afternoon. "What? You sound like a--I don't know what. A personal ad?"

"Are you asleep? Do you know what time it is?"

"Don't hara.s.s me, Andrew. It's my day off, and I painted until very late."

"Until when?"

"Till four thirty."

"Oh, you honest-to-G.o.d artists. I was at Goldengrove at seven this morning. Now, would you like to go to Acapulco?"

465.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Not for vacation. I have research to do there."

"Does your research have to do with Robert, by chance?"

"No. It has to do with Beatrice de Clerval."

She laughed. It warmed me, to hear her laugh so soon after she'd uttered Robert's name. Perhaps she really was getting over him. "I had a dream about you last night."

"About me?" My heart jumped, ridiculously.

"Yes. A very sweet one. I dreamed that I learned you were the inventor of lavender."

"What? The color or the plant?"

"The scent, I think. It's my favorite."

"Thank you. What did you do, in your dream, when you found this out?"

"Never mind."

"Are you going to make me beg?"

"All right--no. I kissed you, in thanks. On the cheek. That was all."

"So, do you want to come to Acapulco?"

She laughed again, apparently well awake. "Of course I want to go to Acapulco. But you know I can't afford it."

"I can," I said softly. "I've been saving for years because my parents told me to." And then I had no one to spend it on, I didn't add. "We could schedule it for your spring break. Isn't it the same week? Isn't that a sign?"

There was a hush between us on the phone, like the moment you pause to listen in the woods. I listened; I heard her breathing, the way you hear (after the first silence, after stilling and settling yourself) birds in the canopy of branches or a squirrel rustling in dead leaves six feet away.

"Well," she said slowly. I thought I detected in her voice years of saving because her mother had told her to also, but with almost nothing to save, her years of painting her way through each small bit of time or cash she could put aside for a few days or weeks 466.

or months, the fear and pride that kept her from borrowing, her mother's probably modest onetime gift to her out of the remains of her upbringing, the dedication that kept Mary from quitting her teaching, the students who had no idea how her bank account trembled on the verge of emptiness after she paid for her rent, heat, food--the whole constellation of miseries that I had avoided by going to medical school. Since then, I had done only ten paintings that I liked at all. Monet had painted sixty views of etretat alone in the 1860s, many of them masterpieces; I had seen the dozens of canvases stacked along Mary's studio walls, the hundreds of prints and drawings on her shelves. I wondered how many of them she still liked.

"Well," she said again, but with more light in her voice, "let me think about it." I could imagine her stirring in a bed I had never seen; she would be sitting up now to hold the receiver, maybe wearing one of her loose white shirts and pushing her hair aside. "But there is another problem if I go with you."

"Let me save you the trouble of saying it. You don't have to sleep with me if you accept my invitation," I said, feeling at once that it had come out more starkly than I'd intended. "I'll find a way for us to stay separately."

I could hear her breath drawn in as if she were on the verge of a gasp, or a laugh. "Oh, no. The problem is that I might want to sleep with you there, but I wouldn't want you to think it was a thank-you card for paying my way."

"Well," I said. "What can a fellow say?"

"Nothing." Mary was almost laughing, I felt sure. "Don't say anything, please."

But at the airport two weeks later, after a rare Washington snowstorm, we were quiet and constrained with each other. I began to wonder if this adventure had been a good idea or would prove an embarra.s.sment on both sides. We had arranged to find each 467.

other at the gate, which was filled with students who could have been Mary's sitting in impatient rows, already dressed in summer clothes, although planes outside the window rolled past heaps of dirty snow. Mary met me with a canvas satchel over one shoulder and her portable easel in her hand, and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, but awkwardly. She had coiled her hair up in the back and was wearing a long navy sweater over a black skirt. Against the background of squirming teenagers in their shorts and brightly colored shirts, she looked like some sect of laysister leaving the convent for a field trip. It occurred to me that I hadn't even thought to bring my painting kit. What was wrong with me? I would only be able to watch her paint.

We chatted in a desultory way on the plane, as if we'd been traveling together for years, and then she fell asleep, sitting straight up in her seat at first but drooping gradually toward me, her smooth head touching my shoulder: I painted until very late. I'd thought that we would talk intensely on our first real trip together, but instead she was sleeping almost against me, pulling herself back from time to time without waking, as if she feared this creeping domesticity between us. My shoulder came alive under her nodding head. I carefully took out a new book on borderline-personality-disorder treatment, which I'd been trying for some time to get to--my professional reading had begun to suffer under the weight of my research on Robert and Beatrice--but I couldn't take in the words for more than a sentence at a time; after that, they unraveled.

And then that bad moment that always forced itself on me sooner or later: I imagined her head on Robert Oliver's shoulder, his naked shoulder--had she been telling me the truth when she'd said she didn't love Robert anymore? After all, he might get well under my care, or at least better. Or was the truth more complicated? What if I didn't feel like helping him anymore, given what might happen if he went back to a functional life? I turned another page. In the light through the clouds outside, Mary's hair 468.

was pale chestnut, golden on the surface under the feeble airplane reading light, and darker when she rolled away from the window; it shone like carved wood. I raised a finger and, with infinite lightness, stroked the part on the top of her head; she stirred and muttered something, still asleep. Her eyelashes were roseate, and they lay on pale skin. There was a small mole near the corner of her left eye. I thought about Kate's galaxy of freckles, about my mother's emaciated face and huge, still-compa.s.sionate gaze before she died. When I turned a page again, Mary sat up, hugged her sweater around her, and wedged herself against the window, fleeing me. Still asleep.

469.

C HAPTER 84 1879.

She goes to the wardrobe and chooses between two day dresses, blue or soft brown, finally deciding on the brown, with warm stockings and st.u.r.dy shoes. She pins up her hair and takes her long cloak, her bonnet lined with crimson silk, and her old gloves. He is waiting for her in the street. She smiles at him without restraint, happy in his pleasure. Perhaps nothing matters but this odd joy they give each other. He carries their two easels, and she insists on taking the bags. His is a battered leather musette de cha.s.se he has had since he was twenty-eight--one of the many things she knows about him now.

When they reach the sh.o.r.e, they put their equipment in a neat pile under the seawall and set off for a short walk without having to discuss it. The wind is strong but warmer today, with a smell of gra.s.ses; the poppies and daisies are out in great profusion. She takes his hand whenever she needs help over a rough spot on the path. They climb up the eastern bluffs to a plateau midway above the Channel, where they can look down the beach to the more dramatic arches and pillars at the other end. She is afraid of heights and stays back from the edge, but he peers over and reports the spray splashing high today, dramatic, wetting the cliff below.

They are completely alone, and the setting is so splendid that she feels nothing else matters, certainly nothing as small as the two of them; even her yearning for children, that sore spot under her rib, has no significance for a few moments. She cannot remember the shape of guilt or its purposes. His closeness is her comfort, the small human note in a sublime landscape. When he comes back to 470.

her, she leans against him. He keeps her shoulders nestled against the breast of his painting jacket, his arms folded around her as if to hold her back from the cliff's edge. Simple relief floods her, then pleasure, then desire. The wind pulls hard at them. He kisses the side of her neck below her bonnet, the edge of her pinned-up hair; perhaps because she cannot see him, she forgets to measure the years between them.

This is what it might be like with the lights blown out, the two of them together without any barrier, darkness hiding their differences. The thought makes a vein of heat run through her toward the rock under their feet. He must sense it; he holds her against him. She knows the heavy curve of her skirts, the bulk of petticoats, feels what he must feel, and inside of that their strange belonging to each other, sea and horizon, their holding on to each other in the middle of immensity. They stand like this for so long that she loses track of the pa.s.sing of her life. When the wind begins to chill them, they make their way back down to the beach without speaking and set up their easels.

471.

C HAPTER 85 Marlow The streets of Acapulco seemed dreamlike to me; I felt only-disbelief that in my fifty-two years I'd never before made it south of the border. The long, divided highway into town was familiar as a film, with its mixture of concrete and steel under construction, ramshackle two-story houses decorated with bougainvillea and rusting auto parts,, bright-colored little restaurants and huge date palms, also rusty-looking, waving in the wind. The taxi driver spoke broken English to us, pointing out the old city, where we would go tomorrow for my appointment with Caillet.

I had booked us a room in a resort hotel that John Garcia had told me was the world's best place for a honeymoon--he'd been there for his. He'd said this with no ribbing, no humor, no curiosity in his voice when I'd called to ask his advice and told him I'd fallen in love. I didn't tell him who she was, of course; that would have to come later, with explanations. "That's good news, Andrew" was all he said; behind it I heard probable past conversations with his wife: Marlow's not getting any younger--is he ever going to find anyone, poor guy? And behind that the self-congratulation of the long-married, the still-married. But he hadn't said anything more, except to give me the name of the hotel, La Reina. I thanked him silently as I watched Mary walk into the lobby, which was open on all sides to views of palms crowding in, the ocean beyond, warm wind sweeping through it. The wind smelled soft and tropical and impossible for me to identify, like ripe fruit of a sort I hadn't eaten before. She had removed her long nun's sweater and stood there in a thin blouse, her skirt catching the breeze, her head tipped back 472.

to see up to the roof of the enormous courtyard, the pyramidal rows of balconies draped with vines.

"It's like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon," she said, glancing sideways. I wanted to come up behind her and put my arms comfortably around her waist and hold her against me, but I felt she wouldn't like this familiarity in a new place, a strange place, where we were alone among strangers. Instead I looked up at the skylight with her. Then we went to the long black marble counter and got two keys to one room--with a moment of hesitation, during which she seemed to comprehend, then accept, my having taken her at her word. We went silently up in the elevator together. It was gla.s.s, and the courtyard rushed away at our feet until we were near the top. I thought, not for the last time, how inappropriate it was to stay in this kind of hotel in a country so desperately poor that millions of its people were pounding at our own nation's doors in hope of finding a living wage. But it was not for me, I told myself; this was for Mary, who turned the heat in her apartment down to fifty-five degrees at night in order to lower the heating bill.

Our room was large and simple, full of elegant design: Mary walked around touching the lantern of square translucent marble, the soft stucco of the walls. The bed--I turned away--was broad and made up with a spread of beige linen. Our single large window looked across to other balconies with similar vines and black wooden chairs, down the dizzying well of the central court. I wondered if I should have gotten a room with an ocean view, despite the extra expense--had that been stingy of me, given the cost I'd already incurred? Mary turned to me, smiling, diffident, embarra.s.sed; I guessed that she didn't want to seem to thank me for conjuring all this luxury, and yet wanted to say something. "Do you like it?" I asked, to put myself in the wrong instead.

She laughed. "I do. You are impossible, but I do love it. I feel as if I'm going to have a good rest here."

"I'll make sure of it." I put my arms around her and kissed her 473.

forehead, and she kissed me on the mouth, then drew away and busied herself with her luggage. We didn't touch each other again until we'd strolled out together to the beach, where she took my hand, with her shoes in her other hand, and we waded through the incoming tide. The water was astoundingly warm, like tea left in a pot. The beach was edged with towering palms and filled with little thatched huts and people speaking English and Spanish, playing radios and running after their tanned children. The sun splashed over everything, an unquenchable joy. I hadn't waded into an ocean in several years--six or seven, actually, I thought with a sudden shock--and I hadn't seen the Pacific since I was twenty-two. Mary tucked her skirt up a little, so that her thin knees and long shins glistened bare in the water, and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. I felt her trembling next to me in the wind, or perhaps simply vibrating with it. "Do you want to come with me tomorrow?" I called over the huge sound of the waves.

"To see what's his name? Caillet?" She waded into a finger of tide. "Do you want me to?"

"Unless you'd like to stay and paint."

"I can paint the rest of the time," she said reasonably.