The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 46

I took two years off to work at a downtown bookstore before starting college, to Muzzy's endless consternation, but then I went dutifully enough, and with cash of my own in my pocket. Barnett College was good to me. I ought to be able to say I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life--spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality. Or maybe spoiled sheltered rich girl realizes that Barnett is more of the same, sells possessions, and flees into world to see real life, sleeps on street with dog for ten years.

Maybe I hadn't been quite spoiled enough--Muzzy made it clear that Quaker Oats wouldn't buy us ski trips and fancy Italian shoes, and she put us on a strict clothing allowance. And maybe I hadn't been quite sheltered enough--the Friends' service projects, the North Philly housing, the shelter for battered women, the bloody vomit at Chestnut Hill Hospital, had all brought me news of a suffering world. Barnett's curriculum didn't hold great revelations for me, and I worked at the library to help Muzzy buy my textbooks and train tickets home. In fact, I didn't experience much more than the usual undergraduate crises about boys and term papers. However, I discovered one thing there that no one will ever take away from me, and in a way that was a crisis in itself, a crisis of joy.

I had always liked art class at the Friends' school--I liked our feisty little high-school art teacher and her stained purple smocks, and she liked my painted clay people, direct descendants of the fourth-grade hippopotamuses in Muzzy's treasure cabinet. I had never been one of the school's art stars, the group of loners who won state prizes and applied to RISD or Savannah College of Art and Design while the rest of us wondered if we could get into the Ivy League. But at Barnett I learned about the art inside myself.

Strangely, it began with a disappointment, almost a mistake. I had planned to be an English major, but I had to take some kind of distributional requirement in the arts. I can't remember what the distribution was--Creative Expression, maybe--and at the beginning of my second semester I signed up for a class in writing poetry, because the junior I thought I might soon be dating was a poet and I didn't want to feel completely ignorant with him.

As it turned out, this class was already full, and I was tracked over into a subdistribution called Visual Understanding. I found out much later that Robert Oliver, a pampered visiting painter whose punishment it was to teach the course that term, privately called it "Visual Misunderstanding." The college prided itself on giving non-art majors access to an established artist, and Visual Understanding was the only burden of his Barnett visit, an all-purpose painting and art-history class that drew unwilling students from across the curriculum. One January morning, I found myself among them at a long table in the painting studio.

Professor Oliver was late, and I sat there trying not to make eye contact with my classmates, none of whom I knew. I always felt shy at the beginning of any course; to avoid meeting anyone's eyes, I looked out the high grimy windows. Through them I could see white fields, the drift of snow on the window ledge. The sunlight fell in on a long clutter of easels and stools, the battered table, the nicked and paint-stained floor; on the still life of hats, puckering apples, and African statuettes arranged on a platform at the front; on the color wheels and museum posters. I recognized Van Gogh's yellow chair and a faded Degas, but not some squares within squares, vibrating with color, that Robert would later tell us were reproductions of the work of Josef Albers. My classmates talked to one another, popping their gum, scribbling in notebooks, scratching their midriffs. The girl next to me had purple hair; I'd noticed her in the dining hall that morning.

Then the studio door opened, and Robert came in. He was only thirty-four, although I didn't have any idea of that. I thought in the way undergraduates do that he and all my other instructors must be over fifty--ancient, in other words. He was a tall man, and he gave an impression of height and energy even greater than his actual size. He had rangy hands and a rather gaunt face without being gaunt in body; he was solid, strong (if probably elderly) under his clothes. He was dressed in heavy, smudged corduroy pants of a deep golden-brown, with rubbed spots on the knees and thighs. Over these he wore a yellow shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a threadbare olive sweater-vest that appeared to be hand-knitted. It was--his mother had knitted it for his father during his father's last years.

In fact, I knew so much about Robert later that it's hard for me to differentiate my first glimpse of him from all the rest of it. He was frowning deeply, his brow furrowed. He would have been interesting-looking if he hadn't been grouchy and disheveled, I thought in that first moment. His mouth was wide, loose, thick-lipped, his skin slightly olive, his nose fiercely long, his hair dark but also reddish and curly, poorly cut--it was partly this outdated bushiness that made me think he was older than he actually was.

Then he seemed to see us sitting around the table, and he stopped moving for a second and smiled. When he smiled I saw that I must have been wrong to think he was untidy and bad-tempered. He was so obviously pleased to see us. He was a warm person, a warm-skinned, warm-eyed person dressed in soft-colored old clothes. You could forgive him his out-of-date, rumpled look when you saw him smile.

Robert had two books under his arm; he closed the door behind him, went to the head of the table, and set the books down. We all stared expectantly at him. I noticed that his hands were a little gnarled, as if they were even older than he was; they were unusual hands, very large and heavy yet graceful. He wore a wide wedding ring of dulled gold.

"Good morning," he said. His voice was both sonorous and raspy. "This is painting for nonmajors, also known as Visual Understanding. I trust that you're all glad to be here, as I am"--an ironic lie, but he was convincing in the moment--"and that this is the class you're supposed to be in." He unfolded a sheet of paper and read off our names, slowly and carefully, stopping to check the way he should pronounce them and nodding at each of us when we confirmed. He scratched his forearms; he was still standing in front of us. He had dark hair on the backs of his hands, and paint clotted around his nails as if they never quite washed clean. "That's all the names I have. Any stowaways?"

One girl raised her hand; like me, she hadn't been able to get into another class, but unlike me she wasn't on his list and wanted to know if she could stay. He appeared to think this over. He scratched his hairline through the dark locks of hair that sprouted there. He had nine students, he said, which was fewer than he'd been promised. Yes, she was welcome to stay. She should get a note from the chair of the department. That wouldn't be a problem. No other questions? No worries? Good. How many of us had ever painted before?

A few hands went up, but hesitantly. Mine stayed firmly on the table. Only later did I know how those first days of teaching any beginning course made his heart sink. He was as shy, in his way, as I was in mine, although he hid it well enough in class. "As you know, there is no requirement of previous experience for this course. It's also important to remember that every painter is a beginner, in a real sense, every day of his life." This line was a mistake, as I could have told him; undergraduates particularly hate to be patronized, and the feminist elements in the class were sure to resent that "his" as a stand-in for all artists--I included myself among those elements, although I wasn't given to hissing aloud at lectures like some of the young women I knew. He was likely to let himself in for a rough time in this class. I watched him with increased interest.

But he seemed to be taking a different tack now. He tapped the books in front of him and sat down. He folded his paint-stained hands together as if about to pray. He sighed. "It's always hard to know where to begin with painting. Painting is almost as' old as human beings, if the caves of Europe are any indication. We live in a world of form and color, and of course we want to reproduce it--although the colors of our modern world have become a lot brighter since synthetic color was invented. Your T-shirt, for example" --he nodded at a boy across the table from me. "Or--if you'll excuse my using this example--your hair." He smiled at the girl with the violet tufts, gesturing loosely toward her with his big, ringed hand. Everyone laughed, and the girl grinned proudly.

I suddenly liked it there, liked the beginning-of-semester feeling, the smell of paint, the winter sunlight flooding the studio, the rows of easels waiting to receive our inept paintings, and this untidy but somehow debonair man offering to initiate us into all the mysteries of color, light, and form. Sitting in his classroom returned to me for a moment the pleasures of my high-school art studio, out of context among my other studies here but an important memory now that I'd gotten back to it.

I don't remember the rest of that day's class--I suppose we must have listened to Robert talk about the history of painting or some technical fundamentals of the medium. Maybe he passed around the books he'd brought with him, or gestured to the Van Gogh poster. We must have moved to the easels eventually, either in that class meeting or the next. At some point--maybe not until the next time--Robert must have shown us something about how to squeeze paint out of a tube, how to scrape a palette, how to sketch a figure onto canvas.

I do remember that he said once that he didn't know whether it was ridiculous or sublime for us to attempt oil painting when most of us hadn't taken courses in drawing or perspective or anatomy, but that we would at least understand something of what a difficult medium this was, and we would remember the smell of the paint on our hands. Even we could see that it had been an experiment, a departmental decision, not his, to expose a few non-majors to paint before anything else. He tried to convince us that he didn't really mind.

But I was more struck by his noting the smell of the paint on our hands, because this was one of my favorite parts of taking the Visual Understanding class, as it had been in high-school art; I loved sniffing my hands after I washed them for dinner, to prove to myself over and over that the smell of the paint was ineradicable. It really was. You couldn't wash it off with any kind of soap. I sniffed my hands during other classes and looked at the paint that clung to my fingernails if I didn't keep them safely clean, as Robert instructed us. I smelled my hands on my pillow when I went to sleep, or when they were clasped around the soft hair of the junior poet, whom I was now dating. No scent could mask or even overtake that pungent, oily odor, which was mixed every day on my skin with the equally sharp smell of the turpentine that didn't quite get the paint off.

This pleasure of smell was second for me only to the pleasure of applying the paint to the canvas. The forms I drew in Robert's class were certainly clumsy, despite my high-school teacher's previous efforts--I sketched the rough shapes of bowls and driftwood in the studio, the African statuettes, the tower of fruit Robert brought in one day, piling it up carefully in his almost-gnarled hands with their wedding band. Watching him, I wanted to tell him that I already loved the smell of paint on my hands and already knew I would never forget it, even if I didn't paint anymore after the class was over; I wanted him to know that we weren't all as insensitive to his lessons as he probably thought. I didn't feel I could tell him something like that in class; it would have invited the mockery of the girl with the purple hair and the track star who used his running shoes when we had to create our own still lifes. On the other hand, I couldn't go to Professor Oliver's office hours and sit down to tell him that I valued the smell of my hands--that would have been equally ridiculous.

Instead, I watched and waited for some real question to ask, something I might genuinely inquire of him. I hadn't had any questions until then. I knew only that I was clumsier with pencil and brush than my old teacher had ever pointed out to me, and that Professor Oliver hadn't really liked my blue bowl with the oranges in it; the proportions of the bowl were off, he'd told me one day, although the colors of the oranges were well mixed--and he'd gone on immediately to someone else's canvas, where there were even worse problems. I wished I had drawn the bowl better, spent more time on it, instead of being so eager to get to the oranges.

But there was no intelligent question I could ask about this. I had to learn to draw, and somewhat to my own surprise I began to apply myself to this enterprise, checking books out of the art library and taking them to my dorm room, where I could sit copying apples and boxes, cubes, the rumps of horses, an impossible drawing of a satyr's head by Michelangelo. I was fascinatingly bad at this, and I drew them over and over until some of the lines seemed to come more easily out of my hand. I began to indulge in dreams of art school, to Muzzy's concern; she approved my moving along the table that served up the liberal arts smorgasbord, trying something new every semester (music history, political science), but she hoped all of that sampling would lead to law or medicine in the end.

Since art school was clearly still far off, I began to draw actual objects in my room: the vase my uncle had brought me from Istanbul years before, the lattice of the window, neatly framed in for the dormitory around 1930. I drew sprays of forsythia my naturalist roommate brought home from her walks, and my poet's fine hand as he lay asleep in my bed while my roommate was at her four-hour Great Books seminar. I bought sketchbooks in different sizes so that I could keep them on my desk or carry them in my book bag. I went to the university art museum, a surprisingly fine collection for a college, and tried to copy what I saw there--a Matisse print, a drawing by Berthe Morisot. Each task I set myself had a special flavor, a flavor that got stronger whenever I made a new effort to learn to draw; I was doing it partly for myself and partly so that I would have a good question to take to Professor Oliver.

1878

My dearest one:

I am in receipt this very moment of your letter and am moved by it to write you at once. Yes, as you compassionately hint, I have been lonely these years. And strange as this may seem, I wish you had known my wife, although if that had been possible, then you and I would have come to know each other under proper circumstances and not in this otherworldly love, if you will permit me to call it that. It is the fate of every widower to be pitied, and yet I felt no pity emanating from your letter, but only a generous regret for my sake that does you honor as a friend.

You are correct: I mourn her and always will, although it is the manner of her death that has caused me the greatest anguish, not the mere fact of her not being still alive -- and that, I cannot speak about, even to you, at least not yet. One day I will, I promise.

I also will not try to tell you that you have filed this void, because no one fills the absence left by another; you have simply filled my heart again, and for that I am more indebted to you than your years and experience will permit me to explain. At the risk of sounding lofty, or even patronizing--you will find a way to forgive me--I assure you that you will one day understand the comfort that loving you has brought me. I'm quite certain that you think that your loving me is what comforts me, but when you have lived as long as I, you will know that it is your allowing me to love you, my dearest, that has eased the bleakness I carry inside me.

Finally, I am grateful that you accept my offer, and I only hope I have not been too insistent. And of course we will use the name you suggest--Marie Riviere will be my honored colleague henceforth, and this painting will go out to the jury from my own hand and with complete discretion. I shall take it myself tomorrow, since the time is short.

With gratitude, ton

O.V.

A postscript: Yves's friend Gilbert Thomas came by the studio with his rather silent brother--you know Armand as well, I believe--to buy one of my landscapes from Fontainebleau, which I agreed some time ago to sell through their gallery. He might be of assistance to you, don't you think? He admired your golden-haired girl exceedingly, although naturally I said nothing about her real creator; in fact he remarked once or twice that the style reminded him of something familiar, but he couldn't think what. I fear he is unscrupulous in raising the prices on the paintings in his gallery, but perhaps I am too particular. And his admiration of your brush speaks well for him, even if he doesn't know who holds it--you might one day sell him some work, if you wanted to.