The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 26

All that summer Robert slept off and on, taught, painted at odd hours, and held me at arm's length. After a while I stopped crying in secret and began to get used to it. I hardened myself a little, in the midst of my love for him, and waited.

In September the rhythm of the school year resumed. When I took Ingrid for tea and conversation with faculty-wife friends, I listened to them chat about their husbands and contributed innocuous tidbits myself, to show how normal things were at home. Robert was teaching three studio classes this term. Robert liked chili. I should get that recipe.

I secretly gathered information, too, for comparison. Their husbands apparently got up in the morning when they did--or earlier, to go out running. One of them had a husband who cooked on Wednesday nights, since he had fewer classes to teach that day. When I heard that, I wondered if Robert had ever noticed which night was Wednesday and which was any other day of the week. He had certainly never cooked a meal, unless you counted opening cans. One of my friends swapped off child care with her husband two evenings a week, so that she could have a little time to herself. I had seen him swooping in at just the right hour to pick up their two-year-old. How did he know what time it was, where he was supposed to be? I kept myself to myself and smiled with the rest of them about their husbands' little foibles. He doesn't pick up his clothes? I wanted to say. That's nothing. And for the first time I wondered how the women who were actually on the faculty managed their lives--I knew one who was also a single mother, and I felt unexpectedly sad and guilty that the rest of us met in this pleasant group while she was teaching her classes. We had never made an effort to include her. Our own lives were so free--we counted pennies but didn't work for them. But my life did not seem quite as free as my friends', and I wondered how that had happened.

One day that fall, Robert came home almost exhilarated and kissed the top of my head before telling me he'd accepted an invitation to teach up north for a semester--soon, in January. It was a good position, good money, at Barnett College, in striking distance of New York. Barnett had a famous art museum and a guest lectureship for painters--he named some of the great ones who'd preceded him there. He would have to teach only one class, and the rest was essentially a painting retreat. He would be able to paint full-time, more than full-time.

For a minute, I couldn't understand what he meant, although I got the part about being happy for him. I put down the dish towel I was holding. "What about us? It's not going to be easy moving a toddler to a new space for just a few months."

He stared at me as if this hadn't occurred to him. "I guess I thought--," he said slowly.

"What did you think?" Why was I so angry at him for even a look, a crumpling of his eyebrows?

"Well, they didn't say anything about bringing a family. I thought I would go by myself and get some work done."

"You could at least have asked them if they'd mind your bringing along the people you happen to live with." My hands had begun to shake, and I put them behind my back.

"There's no need to be hostile. You don't know what it's like not to be able to paint," he said. As far as I knew he'd been painting for weeks.

"Well, then don't sleep all the time," I suggested. In fact, he hadn't been sleeping during the day. I was actually getting worried again about his staying up at night, staying out at the studio, his seeming to sleep so little, although my picture of him now, indelibly, was of a body sprawled horizontal.

"You have no idea how to be supportive." Robert's nose and cheeks were white and pinched. At least he was truly paying attention. "Of course I would miss you and Ingrid a lot. You could come up with her in the middle, for a visit. And we'd be in touch all the time."

"Supportive?" I turned away. I fixed my gaze on the woodwork and asked myself what sort of husband would elect to leave for a semester for the sake of his own work without even consulting me or asking me if I wanted to be alone with a small child. What sort. What sort. The kitchen cupboards were all neatly shut. I wondered if looking at them long enough would keep me from exploding. I wondered if it was possible to live with someone crazy without becoming crazy oneself. Maybe I could become a genius, too, although I wasn't sure I wanted to be one if this was what they were like up close. The truth was that I would have let him go without a murmur if he'd asked me, if he'd checked with me. I pushed down an image of the dark-haired muse--why did she have to be so vivid? Why did he want to be in striking distance of New York? He might well go away and focus and feel accomplishment and finish his big series, and be healed by that.

"You could have asked me," I said, and I heard my own voice as a growl, the nasty nipping to the bone, one member of the pack finally turning on another. "As it is, do whatever you want. Help yourself. I'll see you in May."

"The hell with you," Robert said slowly, and I thought I'd never seen him so enraged, or at least so quietly enraged. "I will." Then he did a strange thing. He got up and turned around slowly two or three times, as if he wanted to leave the room but had lost track of the direction of the kitchen door. It was somehow more frightening to me than anything that had happened yet. Suddenly he found his way out, and I didn't see him again for two days. Whenever I picked up Ingrid, I started to cry and had to hide my tears from her. On his return, he never mentioned our conversation, and I didn't ask where he'd been.

Then one morning Robert appeared at breakfast while I was making it--making it for me and for Ingrid, that is. His hair was wet and clean and smelled of shampoo. He put some forks on the table. The next day he got up in time for breakfast again. The third day he kissed me good morning, and when I went into the bedroom for something I found he had made our bed--crookedly, but he had made it. It was October, my favorite month, the trees golden, leaves streaming off them in the wind. He seemed to have come back to us--how or why I didn't know, but I gradually became too happy to ask. That week he came to bed on time--or, rather, when I did--for the first time in longer than I could remember, and we made love. It was astonishing to me that his body had not changed from having a child. It was as handsome as ever: big, warm, sculpted, his hair wild on the pillow. I felt ashamed of my own compromised, baby-gnawed flesh and whispered that to him, and he silenced my doubts with his ardor.

In the weeks that followed this, Robert began to paint after class instead of working at night, and to come down to eat when I called. Sometimes he worked in his studio on campus, especially on larger canvases, and Ingrid and I wandered down with the stroller to pick him up for dinner. That was a blissful moment, when he put away his brushes and walked home with us. I was happy when we passed friends and they saw us together, the three of us, organized and complete and on our way home for the meal I had already left warm under secondhand china covers. After dinner he painted in the attic, but not very late, and sometimes he came to bed and read while I dozed with my head tucked under his chin.

At the studio and in his attic (I checked now and then when he wasn't there), Robert was working on a series of still lifes, beautifully rendered and often with some comical element in them, something out of place. The strange brooding portrait and the big painting of the dark-haired woman holding her dead friend stood turned against the attic wall, and I was careful not to ask him about them. The attic ceiling was still festive with her clothes and body parts. The books next to his sofa were again exhibition catalogs, or an occasional biography, but nothing about the Impressionists or Paris. I thought sometimes I had dreamed his chaotic obsession, invented it myself, whatever it meant. Only the too-colorful attic reminded me of its reality. I avoided going up there whenever I felt new doubts.

One morning when Ingrid was already crawling, Robert did not get up until noon, and that night I heard him upstairs pacing around, painting. He painted for two nights without sleeping, and then he took the car and disappeared for a day and a night, returning just after breakfast. While he was gone I did not sleep much either, and I wondered several times with tears in my eyes whether to call the police, but the note he'd left prevented me from doing that. "Dear Kate," it said. "Don't worry about me. I just need to sleep in the fields. It's not too cold. I'm taking my easel. I think I'll go crazy otherwise."

It was true that we'd been having mild weather, one of those occasional gifts of warmth in the late Blue Ridge autumn. He came home with a new landscape, a subtle one showing fields just under the fringe of the mountains, the sunset. Walking in the brown grasses was a figure, a woman in a long white dress. I knew her form so well that I could have felt it under my own hands, the line of her waist, the drape of her skirt, the swell of her breasts below lovely wide shoulders. She was just turning around, so that her face showed, but she was too far away for any expression other than a hint of dark eyes. Robert slept until twilight, missing his morning studio class and an afternoon faculty meeting, and the next day I called the doctor at the campus health center.