The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 14

Robert and I lived together in New York for almost five years. I still don't know where that time went. I read once that there's a good probability that everything that's ever happened is stored somewhere in the universe, one's personal history--all history, I guess--folded away in pockets and black holes of time and space. I hope those five years survive out there somewhere. I don't know if I'd want most of our time together saved, because some of it was awful at the end, but those years in New York...yes. They went by in a flash, I thought afterward, but while we were in New York together, I was sure things would always be that way, on and on, until something vaguely like an adult life took over. It was before I began to long for children or to want Robert to have a stable job. Every day seemed both just right and exciting, or potentially exciting.

Those five years happened because I did pick up the phone to call Robert the day after I stopped vomiting, and because I lingered long enough on the line for him to say that some of his friends were going to a play the next evening at their art school and I could go with them if I wanted. It wasn't exactly an invitation, but it was something like one, and it was also very close to the kind of offer I'd pictured filling my evenings in New York when I first moved there from Michigan. So I said yes, and of course the play was incomprehensible, a lot of art students reading from a script they tore up near the end and then decorating the faces of the people in the front row with white and green paint, a proceeding no one in the back rows could see very well. I was sitting there myself, aware of the back of Robert's head, which was in a row closer to the stage--he had apparently forgotten to save me a seat next to him.

Afterward, Robert's friends drifted away to a party, but he found me and we went to a bar near the theater, where we sat side by side on twirling stools. I had never been in a New York bar before. I remember there was an Irish fiddler playing into a microphone in the corner. We talked about the artists whose work we liked and why. I mentioned Matisse first. I still love his portraits of women because they're so quirky, and I don't apologize for it anymore, and I love his still lifes, full of swimming colors and fruit. But Robert discussed a lot of contemporary artists I'd never heard of. He was in his last year of art school, and in those days people were painting sofas and wrapping up buildings and conceptualizing everything and anything. I thought some of what he described sounded interesting and some of it sounded juvenile, but I didn't want to show my ignorance, so I listened while he went through a litany of works, movements, activities, points of view completely unfamiliar to me, all hotly contested in the studios where he worked and where his work was critiqued.

I watched the edge of Robert's face as he talked. It oscillated between ugly and handsome, his forehead jutting in almost a ledge over his eyes, his nose predatory, one lock of hair falling in a corkscrew on his temple. I thought he looked like a bird of prey, but every time this occurred to me, he smiled in such a childlike, happy way that I wondered what I'd been seeing the moment before. His apparent unawareness of himself was mesmerizing. I watched him rub his index finger next to his nose, then rub the end of his nose with a flattened palm as if it itched, then scratch his head the way you might scratch a dog--absently, kindly--or the way a big dog might scratch itself. His eyes were sometimes the color of my glass of stout and sometimes olive green, and he had an unnerving way of suddenly fixing me with them, as if he were sure I'd been listening all along but wanted to know my reaction to the last point he'd made and needed to know right away. His skin was a warm, soft color, as if it kept the sun even in November in Manhattan.

Robert was in a very good art school, one I'd heard about for years. How had he gotten there? I wondered. After college, he had bummed around, as he put it, for nearly four years before deciding to go back to school, and now that he was almost done with it, he still wondered whether it had been a waste of time, you know? My mind wandered a little from the contemporary painters whose work he was arguing over, mostly by himself. I found myself imagining him with his shirt off and more of that warm skin showing. Then he was talking about me, out of the blue, asking me what it was that I wanted from my own artwork. I hadn't thought he'd even noticed my sketches when he'd taken me home to let me throw up safely at my apartment. I said as much, with a smile--conscious that it was about time I smiled at him and glad I'd worn the one shirt I had that I knew matched the color of my eyes. I smiled, I demurred, I thought he'd never ask.

But he seemed unmoved by my attempt at charming modesty. "Sure, I noticed them," he told me flatly. "You're good. What are you doing about it?"

I sat staring at him. "I wish I knew," I said finally. "I came to New York to find out. I was suffocating in Michigan, partly because I didn't really know any other artists." He hadn't, I realized, even asked me where I was from, and he hadn't told me anything about his background either.

"Shouldn't a real artist be able to work anywhere? Do you need to know other artists in order to do good work?"

It stung, and it whipped me into a rare pique. "Apparently not, if your assessment of my work is correct."

For the first time, he seemed to see me completely. He turned and put one of his big unusual shoes--the one I'd vomited across, to judge by a fading stain--on the footrest of my stool. His eyes were edged with lines, old for his young face, and his wide mouth 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 breasts, 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 analyze 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 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?"

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