The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 15

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 assumed that his room would be a shrine to modern painting, full of cubes and lines and Mondrian posters, but no--it was an ordinary workspace. He stood watching me. I knew enough to understand that his drawings were astounding, technically assured 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.

"Yes," he said shortly. "I actually don't care about concepts very much. Believe me, I'm taking a lot of shit 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 space 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 assume 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 class. 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 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 prickling 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, reassuring. 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 compassion 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 passion. 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 analyzed 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 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 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.