The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 47

Finally, I realized that I didn't have a question for Professor Oliver: I had a portfolio of sorts. I had my sketchbook, a largish one filled with the satyrs and boxes, the still lifes. I had individual sheets on which I'd drawn one of Matisse's women, made up of just six lines, dancing with abandon on the page (I couldn't make her actually dance, no matter how many times I copied those lines), and five versions of the vase with a shadow on the table next to it. Was the shadow in the right place? Was that my question? I bought a heavy cardboard sleeve at the art shop and put everything in it, and at our next class I watched for an opportunity to schedule a meeting with Professor Oliver.

He was setting a new lesson for us--we were going to paint a doll this week and a live model the next. The doll had to be finished outside of class time and brought in for critique. I didn't like the idea of painting a doll, but when he got her out and set her in a wooden doll chair, I felt a little better. She was an antique, slender and stiff, apparently made of painted wood, with matted old-gold hair and staring blue eyes, but there was something canny and observant in her face that I liked. He put her stiff hands in her lap, and she faced us, wary and half alive. She wore a blue dress with a ragged red silk flower pinned to the collar. Professor Oliver turned toward the class. "She belonged to my grandmother," he said. "Her name is Irene."

Then he got a sketch pad and silently demonstrated how we should articulate her form as related limbs--the oval head, the jointed arms and legs under the dress, the upright torso. We should look carefully at the foreshortening of the knees, he said, since we would see her head-on. Her skirt would hide her knees, but they were still there--we should find a way to show the front of the knees under her dress. This got into the area of drapery, he said, which we wouldn't study that semester--it was simply too involved. But the exercise would give us a feel for limbs under fabric, for the solidity of a body in its clothes. Not a bad thing for a painter to think about a little, Robert assured us.

He set to work on a demonstration, and I watched him; I watched his faded shirtsleeve rolled up on his sketching arm, his green-brown eyes flicking back and forth to the doll while the rest of his body was still and focused on its quarry. The back of his curly hair was flattened as if he'd slept on it and then forgotten to brush it, and a lock at the front stuck up, growing like a plant. I could see that he was unaware of us and of his hair, unaware of anything but the doll with her knees rounding the front of her fragile dress. Suddenly, I wanted that unawareness for myself. I was never unaware. I was always watching other people; I was always wondering if they were watching me. How could I become an artist like Professor Oliver unless I could lose myself in front of a whole group of people, lose myself like that to everything but the problem at hand, the sound of my pencil on the page and the flow of line emerging from it? I felt a wave of despair. I focused so hard on his long-nosed profile that I started to see a halo of daylight around his whole head. I couldn't possibly ask him my nonquestion, bring him my pretend portfolio to look at. It would be more mortifying to me if he saw the rest of my work than if he never saw it at all. I hadn't even taken my first art-major drawing class yet--I was an example of art-for-nonmajors, a dilettante who knew how to upholster little chairs and play Beethoven sonatinas on the piano. For people like me, he provided this sampler of the difficulties of real painting--there's anatomy, there's drapery, there are shadows, there is light, there is color. At least you will all know how difficult this really is.

I turned to my canvas and got ready to pretend to sketch the jointed doll and put some color over her. Everyone set to work, even the flippant students taking it seriously out of relief at being somewhere quiet, in a class where you didn't have to speak, a little space away from talking, away from dorm life. I worked, too, but blindly, moving my pencil and then squeezing oil onto my carefully scraped palette only because I didn't want anyone to see me standing still. Inside I was standing still. I felt tears come to my eyes.

I might have quit painting forever that day, before I really got started, but suddenly Robert, who had been moving from easel to easel, stopped just behind me. I hoped I wouldn't start trembling; I wanted to ask him please not to look at what I was doing, and then he leaned over and pointed one of his strangely large fingers at the head I had sketched in. "Very nice," he said. "You've come an impressively long way with this." I couldn't speak. His yellow cotton shirt was so close that it filled my vision when I turned my head to try to acknowledge those words. His arm and pointing hand were tanned. He was amazingly real, ugly, vivid, confident. I felt that who I was, everything I had been brought up with, was all puny, boring, but his presence made it important for a moment.

"Thank you," I said bravely. "I've been working hard--in fact, I was wondering if I could come to your office hours and ask you some questions, show you some other things I've been doing to get ready for my drawing class in the fall."

As I spoke, I turned farther and looked at him. His angular face was softer than I'd noticed before, a little fleshy around nose and chin, the skin just beginning to slip -- a face that would age quickly because its owner was unaware of it. I felt how firm my own smooth face was, my curve of chin and neck, the gloss of my hair, carefully brushed and cut with a shining straight edge. He was frightening, but he was old and battered. I was new and ready for the world. Perhaps I had the advantage. He smiled, a kind smile, although not a personal one--a warm smile, the smile of a man who didn't actually dislike people, even if he could forget all about them while he sketched a doll. "Certainly," he said. "You're welcome to stop by. I have office hours Monday and Wednesday from ten to twelve. Do you know where my office is?"

"Yes," I lied. I would find it.

About a week after Robert Oliver had invited me to stop by his office, I got up enough courage to bring him my portfolio. The door, when I arrived clutching my big cardboard folder, was ajar, and I could see his large figure moving around inside a tiny room. I pushed timidly past the bulletin board on his door--postcards, cartoons, and, oddly, a single glove tacked up with a nail--and entered without knocking. I realized I should have knocked, and I turned back, then gave up because Robert had already seen me. "Oh, hello," he said.

He was putting some papers into a file cabinet, and I noticed that he shoved them into the drawer in flat piles because there were no standing files inside, as if he just wanted to hide them or get them off his desk and didn't care about finding them ever again. His office was a jumble of notebooks, drawings, painting supplies, odds and ends from still lifes (some of which I recognized from our class), boxes of charcoal and pastels, electric cords, empty water bottles, sandwich wrappers, sketches, coffee mugs, university paperwork--papers everywhere.

The walls were almost as littered: postcards of places and paintings taped above his desk, memos, quotations (I couldn't get close enough to read any), the few big art posters half obscured by them. I remember one of the posters was from the National Gallery for the exhibition Matisse in Nice, which I'd seen myself on a trip with Muzzy. Robert had slapped Post-it Notes covered with handwriting all over Matisse's lady in her open striped robe.

I also remember that, for some reason (that was how I thought of it), there was a book of poetry lying on top of the mess on his desk--it was Czeslaw Milosz's Collected Poems in translation, new--and I was surprised to think that a painter read poetry, my poet boyfriend having convinced me temporarily that only poets were allowed to do so. That was the first time I had ever heard of Milosz's poetry, which Robert loved and later read to me; I still own that very volume, the one I saw lying on his desk that day. It's one of the only gifts from him I've kept; he gave possessions away as casually as he helped himself to other people's, a characteristic that looked at first glance like generosity, until you realized he never remembered anyone's birthday and never paid off small debts.

"Please come in." Robert was clearing a chair in one corner, which he did by shuffling the papers from it into the drawer of the file cabinet. He shut the drawer again. "Sit down."

I sat obediently, between an aloe plant in a tall pot and some kind of native drum that he'd used once in our studio still life. I knew the beads and shells around it by heart. "Thank you for letting me drop by," I said as easily as I could. His physical presence in the crowded little room was even more intimidating than it was in the classroom; the walls seemed to curve in around him, as if his head brushed the ceiling, dislodged it. He certainly could have reached out and touched opposite walls at the same time, with his great wingspan. I was reminded of our childhood book of Greek myths, in which the gods were described as being a lot like human beings but larger. He twitched his khaki pants at the thighs and sat down in the desk chair, swiveling around to look at me. His face was kind and teacherly, interested, although I sensed his distraction; he already wasn't really listening.

"Absolutely. My pleasure. How is the class going and what can I do for you?"

I fiddled with the edges of my portfolio, then tried to sit still. I had thought many times of what he would say to me, especially when he saw the hard work I'd put into my drawings, but I had forgotten to rehearse what I was going to say to him--strange, when I'd dressed so carefully and brushed my hair one more time before walking into the building.

"Well," I said. "I really like the class--in fact, I love it. I've never thought before about being an artist, but I'm working on--I mean, I'm starting to see things differently. Everywhere I look." This wasn't what I'd meant to say, but with his narrow eyes fixed on me, I felt that I was discovering something and it tumbled out. His eyes were remarkable, especially up close, not large unless he opened them wide, but beautifully shaped, green-brown, the color of green olives; they put to shame his unkempt hair and what seemed to me then his aging skin--or was it that the contrast between those perfect eyes and his rumpled self was so astonishing? I never figured that out, even much later when I'd been allowed to scrutinize them and him with every cell of my being. "I mean, I'm starting to look at things instead of just seeing them. I walk out of my dorm in the morning and I notice the tree branches for the first time. I make a note to myself and then I go back later and sketch them."

He was listening now. His gaze was intent, not on that inward voice he often seemed to hear in the midst of class; he was no longer handsomely uncaring, no longer casual. His huge hands lay on his knees, and he looked at me. He wasn't being charming; he wasn't concerned with himself; he was not even concerned with me and my perfectly brushed hair. He was caught by my words, as if I'd offered him a secret handshake or uttered a phrase from the language he'd known in childhood and hadn't heard in years. His tangled dark eyebrows went up, surprised. "Is that your work?" He pointed to the cardboard folder.

"Yes." I handed it to him, fumbling the edges. My heart was pounding. He opened it across his lap and studied the first drawing: my uncle's vase, standing next to a bowl of fruit stolen from the dining hall. I saw it upside down on his knee; it was terrible, a travesty. He sometimes turned our work upside down in class, so that we would think about arranging forms, working on a composition rather than a lamp or a doll--he did that to show us pure shape, to flush out our inaccuracies. I wondered why I had shown that sketch to anyone at all, let alone Robert Oliver. I should have hidden from him, hidden everything. "I know I have to work for at least ten more years."

He said nothing in response, holding my sketch a little closer to his eyes, then moving it slowly away. I realized that ten years might actually sound too optimistic. At last he spoke. "This is not very good, you know," he said.

My chair seemed to heel like a boat in rough water. I didn't have time to think.

"However," he said, "it is alive, and that's something that can't be taught. That's a gift." He turned through a few more sketches. I knew he must be studying my tree branches now, and the junior poet with his shirt off--I had ordered the big sheets carefully. Now my copy of some Cezanne apples, and then my roommate's hand, held obligingly still on a table for me. I had tried a little of everything, and for each of the sketches I'd included, I'd discarded ten others; I'd had that much sense, at least. Robert Oliver looked quickly up again, not seeing me but seeing into me. "Did you take art in high school? Have you been drawing a long time?"

"Yes and no," I said, feeling that here were some questions I could actually answer. "We had an art class every year, but it was pretty lax. We didn't really learn to draw. Apart from that, I've had just this class--yours -- and I started drawing on my own a few weeks ago because I couldn't paint things right, just like you said. You said we couldn't really paint until we learned to draw."

"That's right," he muttered. He turned slowly back through my sketches. "So you just started this?" He had this way of fixing his eyes on you suddenly, as if he'd just found you--it was unnerving and thrilling. "You are really rather talented." He turned a page around again, as if puzzled, then closed the portfolio. "Do you love doing this?" he asked gravely.

"I love it more than anything I've ever found," I said, realizing as I said it that it was true and not merely the right answer.

"Then draw everything. Do a hundred drawings a day," he said fiercely. "And remember that it's a hellish life."

How could the heaven yawning above me be hellish? I didn't like being commanded to do anything--that always got something stirring in my stomach--but he had made me happy. "Thank you."

"You won't thank me," he said, not grimly but sadly. Has he forgotten about joy? I wondered. How terrible it must be to get older. I felt very sorry for him, very glad for myself, for all my youth and optimism and my sudden knowledge that my life was going to be magnificent. He shook his head, smiled--an ordinary, tired smile. "Just work hard. Why don't you apply to the summer painting workshop here? I can put in a word for you."

Muzzy will love that, I thought, but I said, "Thank you--I was considering applying." I hadn't even been planning to stay on campus for the summer; all my friends were going to New York to get jobs, and I had almost decided to do the same. "Are you teaching the workshop?"

"No, no," he said. He seemed absentminded again, as if he had things he needed to get back to--more papers to stuff into drawers, maybe. "I'm here just this semester. Visiting. I have to get back to my life." I had forgotten that. I wondered what his life could be, apart from the paintings and drawings he could do anywhere and of course his all-important students, like me. There was the wedding ring on his left hand, but probably his wife was here with him, although I'd never seen her. "Do you usually teach somewhere else?" I realized too late that I probably should already know this about him, but he didn't seem to notice my ignorance.

"Yes--I'm at Greenhill College in North Carolina. Nice little place with good studios. I've got to get home." He smiled. "My daughter misses me."

This was rather shocking. I'd thought artists didn't have children, certainly that they shouldn't. It gave him a mundane existence

I didn't think I liked very much. "How old is she?" I asked, to be polite.

"One and two months. A budding sculptor." His smile deepened; he was far away, some domestic place where he felt he belonged.

"Why didn't they come with you?" I asked this to punish him a little for having them at all.

"Oh, they're so settled there--good nursery co-op at the college, and my wife just started working part-time. I'll be back down there soon."

He looked wistful; he loved his baby, I saw, in that mysterious realm, and perhaps he loved the diligent wife as well. It was disappointing, the way older people always turned out to have these ordinary lives. I thought I shouldn't overstay my welcome or court any further disillusionment. "Well, I'd better let you get back to your work. Thank you very much for looking at my sketches and for--and for your encouragement. I really appreciate it."

"Any time," he said. "I hope it goes well for you. Feel free to bring me some more, and remember to sign up for that workshop. James Ladd is teaching it, and he's terrific."

But he's not you, I thought. "Thanks." I put out my hand, wanting to close this meeting with some ritual. He stood up, very tall once more, and accepted my grasp. I shook his hand firmly, to show I was serious, grateful, maybe even a future colleague. It was wonderful, that hand; I'd never touched it before. It engulfed mine. The knuckles were thick and dry, his grip strong in return, if automatic--it felt like an embrace. I swallowed hard to make myself let go. "Thanks," I said, turning incoherently toward the door with my portfolio under my arm.

"See you soon." I felt rather than watched him return to some sort of work at his desk. But I had seen, also, in that last second, something in him that I couldn't name--possibly he had been moved by my touch, too, or--no, perhaps he'd just noticed that

I'd been moved by his. I was covered with shame at the thought; it took half the walk back to my dorm, under the windy, bright sky and past throngs of students going to lunch, to cool my face. Then I remembered: Do a hundred drawings a day.

Robert, I remembered it for nearly ten years. I remember it still.

I do not know where to begin writing you, except to say that your letter moved me very much. If it would bring you relief to tell me about your beloved wife, you may be certain you will find me ready. Papa told me once, but ever so briefly, that you had lost her unexpectedly, and had grieved almost to the point of illness before your departure from the country. I can only assume that your years abroad were solitary because of this and that you left Paris partly to mourn her. If it eases you to talk with me, I will listen as well as I can, although I know little of such loss myself thank heaven. That is the least I can do for you after what you have done for me, your encouragement and faith in my work. I find myself going eagerly to my studio-porch every morning now, knowing that these paintings have at least one kind admirer. In other words, although I shall wait with as much eagerness as you do for the jury's verdict, your words mean more to me than good news or bad from that source ever will. Perhaps you think this the bravado of the young artist, and perhaps you will be right, in part. But I am also sincere.

With deepest affection,

Beatrice