The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
I moved my lips but no voice came out. Instead, I reached over and took his hand, which was very large, very warm, and closed automatically over mine. "You should go back, Mary," he said
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with (I thought) a quiver in his voice. It gratified me that he had used my name, and so naturally.
"I know I should," I said. "But I saw you and I felt worried about you."
"Don't worry about me," he said, and his hand closed more tightly over my hand, as if saying it made him worry about me in return.
"Are you all right?"
"No," he said softly, "but that doesn't matter."
"Of course it matters. It always matters if a person is all right or not." Idiot, I told myself, but there was the problem of his huge hand over mine.
"Do you think artists are really supposed to be all right?" He smiled, and I thought he might even begin to laugh at me.
"Everyone is supposed to be," I said staunchly, and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn't mind it.
He dropped my hand and turned to the ocean. "Have you ever had this feeling that the lives people lived in the past are still real?"
This was weird and out of context enough to give me a chill. I very much wanted him to be all right despite his strange assertion, so I thought about Isaac Newton. Then I thought about how often Robert Oliver painted historical or pseudo-historical figures, even those distant people I had seen in his landscape our first full day here, and realized that this must be a natural question for him. "Certainly."
"I mean," he continued, as if talking to the edge of the water, "when you see a painting that was painted by someone who's been dead for a long time, you know without a doubt that that person really lived."
"I think about that sometimes, too," I admitted, although his observation didn't fit my first theory about him, that he was simply interested in adding historical figures to his canvases. "Do you mean somebody in particular?"
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He didn't answer, but after a moment he put his arm around me as I stood beside him, then stroked my hair down my back, a continuation of his gesture of two nights earlier. He was stranger than I'd thought, this man--it was not simply eccentricity but genuine oddness, a sort of complete focus on the world of his own thoughts, a disconnect. My sister, Martha, would have given him a peck on the cheek and walked back up the beach, I'm sure, and so would any sensible person I know. But there is another meaning to sensible --Muzzy made us take years of French. He stroked my hair. I raised my hand to take his hand, and then I drew it to my face and kissed it in the dark.
Kissing someone's hand is more a man's gesture than a woman's, or a gesture of respect--for royalty, for a bishop, for the dying. And I did mean it respectfully; I meant that I was awed and thrilled by his presence, as well as a little afraid of it. He turned toward me and pulled me in, one of his arms crooked gently around my neck, and ran his other hand over my face as if wiping dust from it, and drew me up against him to kiss me. I hadn't been kissed like that, ever, not ever; his mouth had the feel of a completely unself-conscious passion, a longing possibly unconscious even of me, full of the act itself. His hand caught the small of my back and lifted and pressed me against him, and I could feel the self-sufficient warmth of his chest through his worn shirt, the little buttons pressing into me as if to mark my skin.
Then he slowly let me go. "I don't do this," he said, as if drunk. There was no alcohol on his breath, not even the beer I'd had myself. He put his hands on my face and kissed me again, quickly, and this time I felt he knew exactly who I was. "Please go back."
"All right." I, whom Muzzy had called willful, whom my high-school teachers had considered a little sullen and my art-school instructors had found trying, turned obediently away and walked, stumbling, up the dark beach.
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CHAPTER 70 1879
Her room in their boardinghouse overlooks the water; his, she knows, is on the same floor at the other end of the corridor, so that it must have a view back into the town. Her furniture is simple, an assortment of old pieces. A polished shell sits on the dressing table. Lace curtains veil the night. The innkeeper has lit lamps and a candle for her and left a tray under a cloth: stewed fowl, a salad of leeks, a slice of cold tarte aux pommes. She washes in the basin and eats ravenously. The fireplace is dead, perhaps abandoned for the season, or to save fuel. She could request a fire, but that might involve Olivier--she prefers to remember their kiss on the station platform, not see him now, with his weary face.
She takes off her traveling dress and boots, pleased, glad she has not brought her maid. For once, she will do things for herself. Beside the cold fireplace, she removes her corset cover, unlaces her corset, and hangs it temporarily over a chair. She shakes out her chemise and petticoats and slips out of them, pulls the tent of her nightgown over her head, its scent her own, comforting, something from home. She begins to button up the neck, then stops and takes it off again; she spreads it on the bed and sits down in front of the dressing table wearing only pantalets. The chill of the room makes her skin prickle. It has been a year or more since she has sat looking at her body, bare from the waist up. Her skin is younger than she thinks of it; she is twenty-seven. She can't remember when Yves last kissed her nipples--four months, six months? During the long spring she has forgotten to coax him even at the right time of month. She has
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been distracted. Besides, he is usually traveling, or tired, or perhaps he has all he wants elsewhere.
She puts a hand over the swell of each breast, notes the effect of her rings catching the candlelight. She knows more now about Olivier than about the man she lives with. Olivier's decades of life lie open to her, while Yves is a mystery who shuttles in and out of her house, nodding and admiring. She squeezes hard with both hands. In the mirror, her neck is long, her face pale from the train trip, her eyes too dark, her chin too square, her curls too heavy. Nothing about her should add up to beauty, she thinks, taking the pins out of her hair. She uncoils the heavy knot at the back; she lets it fall over her shoulders and between her breasts, sees herself as Olivier might, and is ravished: self-portrait, nude, a subject she will never paint.
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CHAPTER 71 Mary
Robert and I didn't look at each other the next day; actually, I don't know whether he looked at me or not, because by then the only thing I could think to do was to ignore everything around me except my hand on the brush. I still like the landscapes I did at that conference as much as anything I've painted. They are tense--I mean, full of tension. Even I can feel when I see them now that they have that little bit of mystery every painting needs to be successful, as Robert had once put it to me himself. That final day, I ignored Robert, I ignored Frank, I ignored the people around me at our last three meals, I ignored the dark and the stars and the bonfire and even my own body curled in the white bed in the stables. I slept deeply after my initial exhaustion. I didn't even know if I would see Robert the last morning, and I ignored my conflicting hopes of seeing and not seeing him. Anything else had to be up to him; that was how he had arranged things by not arranging them.
The departure morning of the conference was a busy one; everyone was supposed to clear out by ten o'clock, because a retreat for Jungian psychologists was arriving the next day and the staff had to clean our dining hall and stables to prepare for them. I methodically packed my duffel bag on my bed. At breakfast Frank clapped me on the shoulder, very cheerful; clearly he had gotten good and laid. I shook hands solemnly with him. The two nice women from my painting class gave me their e-mail addresses.
I didn't see Robert anywhere, and this caused me a pang but also that strange relief again, as if I'd narrowly avoided scraping a
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wall. He had quite possibly left early, since he would have a long drive back to North Carolina. A caravan of artists' cars was pulling out onto the drive, many of them plastered with bumper stickers, a couple of enormous old town cars load
When I emerged, the traffic jam was gone and only three or four cars remained. Robert was loading one of them; I hadn't known that he drove a small blue Honda, although I could have thought to check around for North Carolina plates. His method of packing seemed to be to shove things into the rear storage area without putting most of them into bags or boxes; I could see him jamming in some clothes and books, a folding stool. His easel and wrapped canvases were already carefully stowed, and he seemed to be using the rest of his possessions to pad them. I was planning a silent stroll to my truck when he turned and saw me, and stopped me. "Mary--are you leaving?"
I went over to him; I couldn't help it. "Aren't we all?"
"I'm not." To my surprise, he had a grin on his face, com-plicit, a teenager sneaking out of the house. He looked refreshed and bright, his hair on end but still glistening damp as if from a shower. "I slept late, and when I woke up I decided to go paint."
"Did you go?"
"No, I mean I'm going now."
"Where are you going?" I had begun somehow to feel jealous, irritated, left out of his secret happiness. But why should it matter?
"There's a great stretch of state park about forty-five minutes
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south of here, right on the coast. Near Penobscot Bay. I checked it out on the way up."
"Don't you have to drive all the way to North Carolina?"
"Sure." He balled up a gray fleece sweatshirt and used it to brace one leg of his easel. "But I have three days to do it, and I can make it in two if I push hard."
I stood there, uncertain. "Well, have a good time. And a safe trip."
"Don't you want to come?"
"To North Carolina?" I asked stupidly. I had a sudden vision of myself traveling home with him to see his life there, his dark-haired wife--no, that was the lady in the pictures -- and two children. I'd heard him tell someone in the group he had two now.
He laughed. "No, no--to paint. Do you have to rush off?"
I wanted less than anything in the world to "rush off." His smile was so warm, so friendly, so ordinary. There couldn't be any danger in it when he put it that way. "No," I said slowly. "I don't have to be back for two days myself, and I can make it in one if I push hard, too." Then I thought it must sound as if I were propositioning him, counting that night into the occasion, when it was probably not what he'd meant, and I felt my face getting warm. But he didn't seem to notice.
That was how we spent the day painting together on the beach somewhere south of--well, it doesn't matter; it's my secret, and almost all the Maine coast is picturesque anyway. The cove Robert picked was indeed beautiful--a rocky field crowned with blueberry bushes, summer wildflowers stretching down to low bluffs and piles of driftwood, a beach of smooth rocks in all sizes, the water broken darkly by islands. It was a bright, hot, breezy Atlantic day--that's how I remember it, at least. We braced our easels among the gray and green and slate-blue rocks, and we painted the water and the curves of the land--Robert commented that it
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was like the southern coast of Norway, which he had seen once just after college. I filed this away in my very small store of knowledge about him.
We didn't talk much, however, that day; mostly we stood a couple of yards apart and worked in silence. My painting went well, despite my divided attention, or perhaps somehow because of it. I gave myself thirty minutes for the first canvas, which was small, working rapidly, holding the brush as lightly as I could, an experiment. The water was deep blue, the sky a nearly colorless brightness, the foam at the edge of the waves ivory, a rich, organic hue. Robert glanced quickly at my canvas when I removed it and set it to dry against a boulder. I found I didn't mind that he said nothing, as if he were no longer teacher but simply company.
I worked my second canvas over more slowly and had finished only some background by the time we stopped for lunch. The dining-hall staff had graciously allowed me to load up on egg sandwiches and fruit. Robert seemed to have no food with him, and I'm not sure what he would have eaten if I hadn't provided his lunch. After we'd finished, I got out my tube of sunscreen and put some on my face and arms; the breeze came in cooling gusts out there, but I could feel I'd already let myself burn. I offered it to Robert, as I had my lunch, but he laughed and refused. "Not all of us are so fair." And then he touched my hair again with one hand, and my cheek, with his fingertips, as if merely admiring, and I smiled but did not respond, and we went back to our work.
As the light began to deepen and fail, the shadows changed on the face of the islands and I began to wonder about the night. We would have to spend it somewhere--not we, but I, and I could make it to Portland if I set out by six or seven, and find a motel there. It had to be cheap, and I had to have time to hunt for cheap. And I was not going to think about Robert Oliver and his plans or--I'd begun to suspect--lack thereof. It was enough, it had to be enough, to have had this day of working more or less at his elbow.
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Robert slowed at the canvas; I sensed the fatigue in his brush before he stopped or spoke. "Have you had it?"
"I could stop," I admitted. "Maybe fifteen minutes more, so I can remember some colors and shadows, but I've lost my original light."
After a while he began to clean his brush. "Shall we go eat?"
"Eat what? The rose hips?" I indicated the bluff just behind us. They were gorgeous, larger than any I'd ever seen, rubies against the green of the wild rose hedges. Looking straight up from there, you saw only blue sky. We stood staring together at that triad of colors: the red, the green, the blue, surreally bright.
"Or we could eat seaweed," Robert said. "Don't worry--we'll find something."
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CHAPTER 72 1879
Afternoon, Étretat: the light stretches grandly across the beach, but her painting has not gone well. It is her second attempt at this scene -- overturned fishing boats on the shingle. She wants a human figure for it and has finally settled for the effect of two ladies and a gentleman strolling down by the cliffs, city ladies with light-colored parasols who strike a perfect note against the darker, colonnaded arch in the distance. Another painter is present today, too, a bulky man with a brown beard who has set the legs of his easel almost in the tide; she regrets not having chosen him for a subject instead. She and Olivier glance at each other when he passes them on his way to the water's edge, silent company for their silence.
Her sky won't go right today, even when she adds more white and a fine blending of ocher. Olivier leans over to ask her why she is shaking her head. The ocher in the vast, real light touches his bristling hair, his mustache, his pale shirt. She doesn't intend it, but when he bends close she puts one hand to his cheek. He catches and holds her fingers, kisses them with a warmth that courses through her. In sight of the windows of the town, in sight of the heavy back of the stranger painting the cliffs, the ladies under their distant parasols, they kiss each other for an endless moment, their third kiss. This time she feels his mouth insisting, opening hers as Yves would have tried only in the darkness of their bedroom. His tongue is strong and his mouth fresh; she understands then, with her arms around his neck, that his youth really is still inside him and that this mouth is the passage into it, a tunnel for the tide.
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He stops just as abruptly. "My dearest." He puts down his brush and walks a few paces away, stones sliding audibly under his boots. He stands looking out to sea, and she sees no melodrama, only his need for a greater distance to collect himself. She follows him anyway and s
"I love you." An explanation. He is still gazing out toward the horizon. His voice sounds bleak to her.
"And why is that so hopeless?" She watches his profile for a response. In a moment he turns and takes her other hand.
"Be careful what you say, my dear." His face is composed now, gentle, completely his own. "An old man's hope is more fragile than you imagine."
She suppresses the urge to stamp her foot on the loose shingle-- that would only make her look childish. "Why do you think I can't understand that?"
He is gripping her hands, still facing her. For once, she likes his disregard of any possible onlookers. "Perhaps you can," he says. He is beginning to smile, his affectionate, grave smile, his teeth yellowed but even. When he smiles she knows where the lines of his face have come from; it solves a mystery every time. She knows now that she loves him, too, not only for who he is but for who he was long before she was born, and because he will someday die with her name on his lips. She puts her arms around him without any invitation, around his lean body, his ribs and waist, under the layers of clothes, and holds him tightly. Her cheek rests on the shoulder of his old jacket, where it fits. His arms go around her completely in return; they are full of living warmth. In that moment, it will later seem to her, all the rest of his brief future is settled, and even the longer reach of hers.
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CHAPTER 73 Mary
'he restaurant we found, caravanning a few miles farther south with our cars smelling of fresh paint, was faux Italian of the straw-plaited-bottle variety, red-checked cloths and curtains, a pink rose in a vase on our table. It was a Monday night, and the place was empty except for one other--couple, I almost wrote-- and a man dining alone. Robert asked for a candle. "What color would you call that?" he said when the underage waiter had lit it.