The Swan Thieves Part 8

curled up in a chagrined smile. "I made you mad," he said with a kind of wonder.

I sat up straighter and took a sip of Guinness. "Well, yes. I've worked pretty hard on my own, even when there weren't art students for me to sit talking to in fancy bars." I wondered what had gotten into me. I was usually far too shy to snap at people like this. The bubbling stout, maybe, or his long monologue, or perhaps the sense that my little fit had caught his attention when all my polite listening had failed to. I had the feeling he was studying me carefully now--my hair, my freckles, my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the fact that I hardly came up to his shoulder. He was smiling at me, and the warmth of his eyes with those premature wrinkles around them crept into my bloodstream. I had the feeling that it was that moment or never. I had to get and keep his full attention or it might never return. Otherwise, he would drift back into the vast city and I wouldn't hear from him again, he who had dozens of fellow art students to choose from. His solid thighs, his long legs in their eccentric trousers--pleated tweed this evening, with rubbed spots on the knees, surely a thrift-store purchase--kept him balanced in my direction on his bar stool, but he might lose interest at any moment and twirl back toward his drink.

I turned on him and looked him in the eye. "What I mean is, how dare you walk into my apartment and a.n.a.lyze my work without saying anything? At least you could have said you didn't like it."

His expression grew more serious, his eyes searching. Full-face, up close, he had lines in his forehead as well. "I'm sorry." I felt as if I'd struck a dog--the puzzled way his eyebrows worked on the problem of my annoyance. It was hard to believe that he'd been holding forth to himself about contemporary painters a few minutes before.

"I haven't had the luxury of art school," I added. "I work ten hours a day at a soporific editing job. Then I go home and draw or

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paint." This wasn't completely true, because I worked only eight hours, and often I went home exhausted and watched the news and sitcoms on the little television my great-aunt had bequeathed to me years before, or made phone calls, or lay on my bed-sofa in a stupor, or read. "And then I get up and go to work again the next day. On weekends I sometimes make it to a museum or paint in a park, or I draw inside if the weather is bad. Very glamorous. Does that qualify as an artist's life?" I put more sarcasm into the last question than I'd meant to, scaring myself. He was the only date I'd had in months and months, if you could even call this a date, and I was chewing him out.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "And I have to say I'm impressed." He glanced down at his hand on the edge of the bar and at mine, wrapped around my Guinness. Then we sat looking at each other, longer and longer, a staring contest. His eyes under their thick brows were--perhaps it was the color that held me. It was as if I'd never really seen another person's eyes before. I felt that if I could name their color, or the shade of the flecks in their depths, I would be able to look away. Finally he stirred. "Now what do we do?"

"Well," I said, and my boldness alarmed me because deep down I knew--I knew --that it was not me, that it was inspired entirely by Robert's presence and the way he was gazing into my face. "Well, I think this is where you invite me to come home and look at your etchings."

He began to laugh. His eyes lit up, and his generous, ugly, sensual mouth brimmed with laughter. He slapped his knee. "Exactly. Will you come home with me now and see my etchings?"

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Mon cher oncle: We have received your note this morning and will be delighted to welcome you at dinner. Papa hopes you will come early, with the papers to read to him.

In haste, your niece, Beatrice de Clerval

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CHAPTER 15 Kate.

Robert lived in an apartment in the West Village with two other art students, who were both out when we arrived. Their bedroom doors were open, floors strewn with clothes and books like in dorm rooms. There was a Pollock poster in the untidy living room, a bottle of brandy on the counter in the kitchen, and dishes in the sink. Robert led me to his bedroom, which was also a mess. The bed was unmade, of course, and there was dirty laundry on the floor, but he had hung a couple of sweaters neatly over the back of the desk chair. There were piles of books--I was impressed to see that some of them were in French, art books and perhaps novels, and when I asked Robert about this, he said that his mother had come to the United States with his father after the war, that she was French and he had grown up bilingual.

The most striking thing, however, was that every surface was covered with drawings, watercolors, postcards of paintings. The walls were hung with what had to be Robert's own sketches -- pencil, charcoal, sometimes the same model over and over, studies of arms, legs, noses, hands, hands everywhere. I had a.s.sumed that his room would be a shrine to modern painting, full of cubes and lines and Mondrian posters, but no--it was an ordinary works.p.a.ce. He stood watching me. I knew enough to understand that his drawings were astounding, technically a.s.sured and yet also full of life and mystery and motion. "I'm trying to learn the body," he said soberly. "It's still very hard for me to draw. I don't care about anything else."

"You're a traditionalist," I said in surprise.

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"Yes," he said shortly. "I actually don't care about concepts very much. Believe me, I'm taking a lot of s.h.i.t for that at school, too."

"I thought--when you were talking at the bar about all those great contemporary artists, I thought you admired them."

He gave me a strange look. "I didn't mean to give you that impression."

We stood staring at each other. The apartment throbbed with silence, that off-season feeling of a deserted s.p.a.ce at the heart of a busy night in the city. We could have been alone on Mars. There was a secret feeling to it, as if we had been playing hide-and-seek and no one knew where we were. I thought briefly of my mother, already long since asleep in the big bed that had once contained my father as well, the cat at her feet, the front door sensibly locked and checked twice, the clock ticking in the kitchen below her. I turned to Robert Oliver. "So what do you admire, then?"

"Honestly?" He raised his heavy eyebrows. "Hard work."

"You draw like an angel." It popped out of me, and I said it as my mother might have said it--and I meant it.

He seemed unexpectedly pleased, full of surprise at my words. "We don't hear that in critique very much. Actually, never."

"Nothing you've told me so far makes me want to go to art school," I noted. He hadn't asked me to sit down, so I wandered around once more, looking at the drawings. "I a.s.sume you paint, too?"

"Of course, but at school. Painting's the main thing, as far as I'm concerned." He lifted a couple of loose sheets from the desk. "These are a study for a model we've been working with in studio, a big oil on canvas. I had to fight to get that cla.s.s. This guy, the model, has been very challenging for me. He's an old man, actually--incredible, tall, with white hair, kind of ropy muscles, but also deteriorating. Do you want something to drink?"

"I don't think so." I was beginning to wonder, in fact, exactly what I wanted from this encounter and whether I shouldn't go home. It was so late already that I was going to have to take a taxi

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to be safe when I got to my street in Brooklyn, and that would eat up any savings I'd set aside from the week. Perhaps Robert had a trust fund and wouldn't understand. I was wondering, also, where my pride was. Probably Robert Oliver cared mainly about himself and his paintings and had liked me because I'd been a good listener, at least at first. That was what my instinct told me, the p.r.i.c.kling instinct girls develop about boys, women develop about men. "I think I'd better go. I'm going to need to catch a cab to get home."

He stood in front of me, in the middle of his untidy, window-less bedroom, imposing and yet somehow cowed, vulnerable, his hands hanging at his sides. He had to stoop a little to see into my face at all. "Before you go home, may I kiss you?"

I was shocked, not so much by his wanting to kiss me as by his asking, his inept delivery. I felt sudden pity for this man who looked like a conquering Hun and yet was asking me timidly for-- I stepped forward and put my hands on his shoulders, which felt solid and trustworthy, the shoulders of an ox, a worker, rea.s.suring. His face blurred to shadow in its closeness, his eyes a smudge of color in my nearest vision. Then he touched my lips with his firm ones. His mouth felt like his shoulders, warm and muscular, but hesitant, and he seemed to wait there for me for a second until I felt again something like compa.s.sion and kissed him back.

Suddenly he put his arms around me--the first time I felt his vastness, his whole huge, tall body--and almost picked me up, kissing me with unself-conscious pa.s.sion. There was nothing timid about him after all. It was as if he simply did not know how not to be himself, and I felt his selfhood go down through me like lightning--I who doubted and second-guessed and a.n.a.lyzed every second of my own life. It was like drinking a potion when I hadn't known that potions existed: every drop of it, the whole elixir, went to the back of my head and deep into my rib cage, then shot to my feet. I had an urge to pull back and examine his eyes again, but it wasn't the urge of fear. It was more like a kind of wonder

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that someone could be so complicated and yet so simple, as it turned out. His hand moved to the small of my back and gathered me harder against him--he pressed me to him as if I were a package he'd been eagerly waiting for. He lifted me off my feet and literally held me in his arms.

I expected that after that there would be the click of the door closing, the smell and feel of a bed with unwashed sheets, where I would wonder if anyone else had lain under him there recently, the rummage for condoms in the bedside drawer--this period was the first panic of the AIDS epidemic--and my half-fearful, half-eager consent. But instead he kissed me once more and set me down on the floor. He held me against his sweater. "You are lovely," he said. He stood there stroking my hair. He took my head awkwardly in his hands and kissed my forehead. It was such a tender, domestic gesture that I felt a lump rise in my throat. Was this rejection? But he was putting big hands on my shoulders, caressing my neck. "I don't want you to feel rushed. Or me. Would you like to get together tomorrow night? We could go have dinner at this place I know in the Village. It's cheap and it's not noisy like the bar."

I was his, from that moment--he had me in his pocket. No one had ever not wanted me to feel rushed. I knew that when the time came, whether it was the next night, or the night after, or the next week, I would feel him stretch out above me not as an intruder but as a man I could fall in love with, or already had. That simplicity--how did he keep feeling it in the midst of my wariness? When he found me a cab, we kissed lingeringly on the street, which made my stomach lurch, and he laughed with what sounded like joy and hugged me, making the driver wait.

I didn't hear anything from him the next morning, although he'd promised to call me at work first thing, to give me directions to the restaurant. The euphoria drained slowly from my limbs as noon

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approached. His not sleeping with me had been an easy way to let me down, a kind way--he hadn't intended for us to have dinner after all. I had a long article on spinal-tap procedures to correct, and it faintly nauseated me, as if some of the sickness I'd felt when I'd first met Robert in the department store had returned, a mild relapse. I ate lunch at my desk. At four my phone rang, and I grabbed it. No one else but my mother had my direct work number, so I knew it could be only one of two people. It was Robert. "Sorry I couldn't call sooner," he said without further explanation. "Do you still want to go out tonight?"

That was the second evening of our five years in New York.

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CHAPTER 16 Marlow.

Kate rose from the sofa in her quiet living room and actually paced a little, as if I'd caught her in a cage. She walked to the windows and back, and I watched, feeling a sort of pity for her, for the position in which I'd placed her. She hadn't gotten close, in her story, to the things I most needed to know, but I didn't feel like pressing her at that moment.

It struck me what a good wife she would have made--must have been--a woman not unlike my mother in her uprightness, her organization and neat gestures of hospitality (it wasn't the first time I'd thought it), although she lacked my mother's good-natured confidence, her ironic sense of humor. Or perhaps whatever Kate's sense of humor was, it had been erased by her separation from her husband. A temporary lapse of happiness, I hoped. I had seen so many women emotionally knocked off their feet by a divorce. There were a few who did not recover, in the sense that they sank into permanent chronic bitterness or depression, especially if the divorce became linked to some previous trauma or to an underlying condition. But most women were remarkably strong, I'd always thought; those who healed themselves were full of a deeper life afterward. Intelligent Kate, with the light from the windows catching her smooth hair, would go on to something or someone else better and be content, and wise.

As I was thinking this, she turned to me. "You believe it really couldn't have been so bad," she said accusingly.

I felt myself gaping. "Not exactly," I told her. "But you're 102.

almost right. I'm sure it was bad, but I was thinking how strong a person you seem."

"So I'll get over it."

"I believe so."

She looked as if she might be about to reproach me, but then she said only "Well, you've seen a lot of patients, I guess, and you must know."

"I never feel I know anything about human beings, ultimately, but it's true that I've observed a lot of people." It was an admission I wouldn't have made to a patient.

She turned, her little collarbones catching the light. "And do you like people, Dr. Marlow, after observing so many?"

"Do you? You seem extremely observant yourself."

She broke into a laugh, the first I'd heard since I'd walked into her living room. "Let's not play games with each other. I'll show you Robert's office."

This surprised me considerably, on two counts: first, that he'd had an office, and second, that she was that generous in the midst of her grief. Perhaps it had doubled as a home studio. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said. "It's not much of a room, and I've started cleaning it out because I want to use the desk for a place to pay bills and organize my own papers. I still have to clean out his studio, too."

In this house with Robert, she had had neither an office nor a studio of her own, while he'd had both. Robert Oliver had taken up considerable s.p.a.ce in her life, literally. I hoped she would show me the studio as well. "Thank you," I said.

"Oh, don't be too grateful," she rejoined. "His office is a mess. It's taken me a long time even to open the door to that room, but I feel better now that I've started sorting through it. You can look at anything you like. I'm saying that because I don't care about anything in there now. I really don't."

Kate stood and collected our cups, glancing back over her 103.

shoulder. "Come with me," she said. I followed her into a dining area as neat and restful as the living room--high-backed chairs grouped around a gleaming table. Again, the pictures were water-colors, this time of the mountains, and a couple of old bird prints, cardinals and blue jays, in the Audubon manner. No Robert Oliver paintings in here either. She led me momentarily into a sunny kitchen, where she deposited our cups in the sink, and then past the kitchen into a room not much bigger than a large closet. It was furnished, or rather completely crammed, with a desk and shelves and a chair. The desk was an antique, like most of Kate's furniture, a huge rolltop open to show pigeonholes stuffed with papers--a mess, as she'd promised.

Here, much more than in the living room, I felt Robert Oliver's presence, imagined his big hand shoving bills and receipts and unread articles into the desk sections. There were a couple of plastic bins on the floor, neatly labeled to receive various kinds of files, as if Kate had been sorting. There was no file cabinet in sight--nothing else would have fit in the room--although perhaps Kate had one tucked away somewhere else. "I hate this job," she said, again without further explanation. The bookshelves contained a dictionary, a movie guide, crime novels -- some of them in French--and many works on art. Pica.s.so and His World, Corot, Boudin, Manet, Mondrian, the Postimpressionists, Rembrandt's portraits, and a surprising number of works on Monet, p.i.s.sarro, Seurat, Degas, Sisley--nineteenth-century-France dominated. "Did Robert like the Impressionists best?" I asked.

"I guess." She shrugged. "He liked everything best at one time or another. I couldn't keep up with all his enthusiasms." Her voice held a nasty note, and I turned to the desk. "You're welcome to look through it, as long as you keep things in order. Order--" She rolled her eyes, an afterthought. "Anyway, just keep things together because I'm trying to get all the financial information straight, in case I'm ever audited."

"This is very kind of you." I wanted to be certain I had her 104.

permission; I pressed down my distinct thought that looking through a living patient's papers without his own consent was a serious step, even if his ex-wife was encouraging me, bitterly, to do it. Especially if she was encouraging me. But Robert had told me I could talk with anyone I wanted to. "Do you expect there's anything here that would help me?"

"I doubt it," she said. "Maybe that's why I'm feeling so generous. Robert didn't really have personal papers--he didn't write about his emotions or keep a journal or anything like that. I like to write myself, but he said he couldn't really understand the world through words--he had to look at it and get the colors down, paint it. I haven't found much of anything here except his colossal disorganization."

She laughed, or snorted, as if she liked her own description: colossal. "I guess it's not quite true that he didn't write things down--he made all these little notes to himself, and lists, and lost them in the mess." She pulled a sc.r.a.p out of an open box. " 'Rope for scenery,' she read aloud. 'Back gate lock, buy alizarin and board, check to Tony, Thursday.' He was always forgetting everything anyway. Or how about this one: 'Think about turning forty.' Can you believe that? Having to remind yourself to think about something so basic? When I see all this junk, I'm glad not to have to deal with the rest of it--I mean, not to deal with him anymore. But help yourself." She smiled up at me. "I'm going to make us some lunch so we can eat in peace before I go get the children. There's tomorrow, too, of course." She left the room without waiting for my response.

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CHAPTER 17 Marlow.