The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 19

Our lives in New York went on and on, or went by in a flash. We lived three different places in five years--first at my apartment in Brooklyn for a while, and after that in an unbelievably small room on West 72nd near Broadway, a closet with a kitchen counter that folded down out of a smaller closet, and finally on the stifling top floor of a building in the Village. I loved all those places, their Laundromats and grocery stores and even their local homeless people--everything, everything that became familiar about them.

And then one day I woke up and thought, I want to get married. I want to have a baby. It was really almost as simple as that--one evening I went to bed young and free, carefree, disdainful of other people's conventional lives, and the next morning by six o'clock, when I got up to take my shower and dress for my editing job of those years, I had become a different person. Or maybe the thought came to me between drying my hair and pulling on my skirt-- I want to get married to Robert and have a ring on my finger and a baby, and the baby will have Robert's curly hair and my small hands and feet, and life will be better than it's ever been before. It was as if that vision was suddenly so real to me that all I had to do was cover the last bit of ground and make it reality itself and then I would be completely happy. It didn't occur to me just to get pregnant and have a little free-love baby--as my mother might have half humorously said--in Manhattan. I associated babies with marriage, marriage with the long-term, children growing up on tricycles and green lawns--after all, that's what I'd known in my own childhood. I wanted to be like my mother, bending over to put our socks on and tie our little dark-red oxfords. I even wanted to wear the dresses of her youth, which required squatting down with your legs folded neatly together to one side. I wanted a tree with a swing in the backyard.

And just as it wouldn't have occurred to me to produce babies without wearing a wedding ring first, it never occurred to me that I could raise a child in the overwhelming city I had come to love. It's hard to explain these things, because I'd been so sure I wanted nothing but this life of Manhattan and painting and meeting our friends after work at cafes and talking about painting and watching Robert paint in his blue oxford-cloth boxers at a friend's studio late at night while I drew on my lapboard, and then getting up in the morning, yawning before work, waking up as I walked under the stunted trees to the subway. That was my reality, and these curly-haired small people who didn't even exist yet, didn't even have the right to my daydreams, told me to leave it all. And, years later, they are the one thing--our bringing them into existence, despite all the grief, the fear, despite losing Robert, despite the overpopulation of this poor planet and the guilt I feel about having added to it--my children are the one thing I have never regretted.

Robert didn't want to give up any of that life we had in New York. I think it was the persuasion of the body that made him undo it, ostensibly for my sake. Men love to make babies, too, although they will tell you they don't feel the way women do. I think he was drawn in by my passion about the whole thing. He didn't really want the green small town or the job at a little college, but I suppose he knew, too, that sooner or later the postgraduate life we'd pieced together would give way to something else. He'd done well already, had a show with a faculty member from his department, sold a bunch of paintings in the Village. His mother, a widow living in New Jersey who still knitted him sweaters and vests and called him Bob -bee in her French accent, had decided he was going to be a great artist after all--she'd actually started sending him some of his inheritance from his father so he could use it to paint.

I think Robert felt invincible, with that much beginner's luck. It was beginner's talent, as well. Everyone who saw his work seemed to recognize the gift, whether or not they liked his traditionalism. He taught an entry-level class at the school he'd graduated from, and day after day he turned out those early paintings that are now in quite a few collections--they are wonderful, you know. I still think so.

Just about the time I proposed babies, Robert was working on what he rather seriously called his Degas series--the young girls warming up at the barre at the School of American Ballet, graceful and sexual but not really sexual, stretching their thin legs and arms. He spent hours at the Metropolitan Museum that winter, studying Degas's little ballerinas, because he wanted his to be the same and at the same time different. Each of Robert's canvases contained an anomaly or two -- a huge bird trying to get in at the ballet-studio window behind them, or a gingko tree growing up the wall and reflecting in the endless mirrors. A gallery in Soho sold two of them and asked for more. I was painting, too, three times a week after work, rain or shine--I remember the discipline I had then, the feeling that I might not be as good as Robert but that my work was getting stronger every week. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons we took our easels to Central Park and painted together. We were in love--we made love twice a day on the weekends, so why not make babies? He was caught up by the new way I made love to him, too, I'm sure, since that part of our lives was always extremely important to him, and he was intrigued by the feeling of a seed passing between us, the imminent flowering of our connection.

We got married in a chapel on 20th Street. I wanted to go to a justice of the peace, but instead we had a modest Catholic wedding to please Robert's mother. My own mother came from Michigan with my two best friends from high school, and she and Robert's mother liked each other and sat close together during the alien mass, two widows, Robert's mother adding a second child to the "only." My mother-in-law made a sweater for me as a wedding present, which sounds kind of awful, but it was one of my treasures for years--off-white, with a collar like dandelion down. I had loved her from our first meeting. She was a tall, gaunt, cheerful woman who approved of me for no reason I could discern and was convinced that my ten or twelve words of her native language could be transformed into fluency if I worked hard enough. Robert's father, a program officer of the Marshall Plan, had removed her from a postwar Paris she didn't appear sorry to have left. She had never been back, and her entire life revolved around the nursing job for which she'd trained in the United States, and around her prodigy son.

Robert seemed to me unchanged by and during the ceremony, the act of marriage, uncomplicatedly happy to be there with me, oblivious to wearing a suit, the one tie he owned crooked on his shirt front, paint under his nails. He had forgotten to get a haircut, which I'd particularly wanted him to do before we stood up in front of a Catholic priest and my mother, but at least he didn't lose the ring. Watching him as we said the unfamiliar vows, I felt he was as he'd always been--himself, eternally himself, that he could just as well have been standing with me and our friends at our favorite bar, having another beer and debating problems of perspective. And I was disappointed. I had wanted him to stand up next to me changed--transformed, even, by the opening note of this new era of our lives.

After the ceremony, we went to a restaurant in the heart of the Village and met our circle there--they looked unusually cleaned up, and some of the women were wearing high heels. My brother and sister were there, too, from out West. Everyone acted a little formal, and our friends shook hands with our mothers or even kissed them. Once some wine had gone around, Robert's classmates started making bawdy toasts, which worried me. But rather than being shocked, our mothers sat side by side, their cheeks flushed, laughing like teenage girls. I hadn't seen my mother so happy in a long time. I felt a little better then.

Robert did not trouble himself to apply for jobs elsewhere until I'd asked him for several months to do so--now I wanted us to find that cozy town with the houses we might someday be able to afford. In fact, he didn't really apply at all. A job at Greenhill came to him through one of his instructors because he happened to drop by that instructor's office to ask him to go out for an impromptu lunch, and at lunch the instructor happened to think about a job he'd just heard of, for which he could recommend Robert--he, the instructor, had an old friend, a sculptor and ceramist, who taught at Greenhill. It was a great place for an artist, he told Robert at their lunch: North Carolina was full of artists living the real, pure life, just doing their art, and this Greenhill College had ties to the old Black Mountain College because a few of Josef Albers's students had left Black Mountain when the place dissolved and founded an art department at Greenhill--it would be just right, and Robert could paint. Maybe I could, too, come to think of it, and the climate was good, and--well, he would send a letter on Robert's behalf.

In fact, Robert gets most of the good things in his life this way, by luck, and his luck is usually good. The police officer forgives his speeding and reduces the fine to $25 from $120. He's late turning in a grant proposal and he gets the grant, plus an extra grant for equipment. People love to do things for him because he seems so happy even without their help, so oblivious to his own needs and to their wish to help him. I've never understood this. I used to think he was kind of cheating, tricking people without meaning to, but now I sometimes think that life is simply compensating for what's missing in him.

I was pregnant by the time we moved to Greenhill. I pointed out to Robert that all the great loves of my life began with vomiting. In fact, I could hardly think about anything else. I packed everything in our Village apartment and gave away a lot of stuff to the friends who were staying (staying behind, I thought pityingly) in our old life there. Robert had said he would organize a bunch of them to help us load up the truck we'd rented, but he forgot, or they forgot, and in the end we hired a couple of teenagers right off the street to carry everything down from our walk-up. I'd done the packing myself, because he'd had a lot of last-minute something or other to do at school, in his studio. When the apartment was bare and we'd cleaned it so that the landlord wouldn't keep our deposit, Robert drove the truck over to his studio and dragged down boxes of painting supplies and armloads of canvases. He hadn't packed a single piece of his own clothing, a single pot or pan, I realized later--only those essential items from his studio. I went along to sit in the truck and move it if the police or the meter maid showed up.

As I sat there, with the August sun beating down on the steering wheel, I stroked my belly, which was swollen already, not with the peanut-sized baby in the clinic's wall charts but with my eating and throwing up, my new slackness and softness, my not caring to hold it all in. When I slid my hand over the spot, I felt a melting desire for the person growing inside, for the life ahead of us. It was not a feeling I'd ever had before--it was secret even from Robert, mainly because I wouldn't have been able to explain it even to him. When he came down with the last load of shabby boxes, the last easel, I glanced out the truck window at him and saw that he was cheerful and full of energy and selfhood that had nothing to do with me. He wasn't thinking about anything except getting those parts of his old life to fit into a pile with our hopeless furniture in the back. At that moment, more than at any other, I felt the beginning of a mistake, and it was as if my child had been whispering it to me: Will he take care of us?

Mon cher oncle:

Please do not take amiss my not answering you sooner; your brother, your nephew, and two of the servants have had bad colds--most of the household, in short -- and I have been very much occupied as a result. There is nothing serious to worry about, really, or I should have written you much sooner. Everyone is on the mend, and your brother has begun to take his constitutional in the Bois again with his manservant. I am sure Yves will go with him today; he, like you, always has Papa's health at heart. We have long since finished the new book you sent, and I am reading Thackeray to myself and also aloud to Papa. I cannot send much news now, as I am very busy, but I think of you fondly--

Beatrice de Clerval