The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 50

After Robert and I broke up, months ago, I started sketching in the mornings at a cafe I still frequent sometimes. I've always loved that phrase, to "frequent" a cafe. I needed a place to be away from the university studios where I now teach. Not many cafes in that area are private enough for faculty to sit around in them. You're too likely to run into your former (or, worse, current) students and get into conversation. Instead I found a cafe between where I live and where I work, at a metro stop with a chic address.

It's not that I don't like my students; on the contrary, they are my lifeblood now, the only children I will ever have, my future. I love them, with all their crises and their excuses and their selfishness. I love seeing them lifted into a sudden revelation about painting, or a sudden predilection for watercolors, a love affair with charcoal--or an obsession with azure, which starts to appear in all their paintings so that they have to explain to the rest of the class what's going on. "I'm just... into it." Usually they can't explain why; each new love simply takes them over. If it's not painting, it's unfortunately sometimes alcohol or coke (although they don't actually tell me about that), or a young woman or man in their history class, or rehearsals for a play; they have heavy smudges under their eyes, they slouch in class, they light up when I pull out a Gauguin they loved in high school. "That's mine!" they shout. They make me end-of-term presents out of painted egg cartons. I love them.

But you do have to get away from students, too, to do your own work, so for a while I was in the habit of sketching from life in my favorite cafe, just after breakfast, if I could spare time before my classes began. I sketched the rows of teapots on a shelf, the fake Ming vase, the tables and chairs, the exit sign, the too-familiar Mucha poster next to a newspaper rack, the bottles of Italian syrup with their different but almost matching labels, and finally the people. I got bold again about drawing strangers, the way I used to be when I was a student myself--three middle-aged Asian women talking fast over scones and paper cups, or a young man with a long ponytail, half asleep on his table, or a fortysomething woman with her laptop.

It made me see people again, and that made the hurt of Robert lessen a little, this feeling that I was one among many and that those other people--with their different jackets and glasses and variously shaped and colored eyes -- all had had their Roberts, their incredible disasters, their pleasures and regrets. I tried to put pleasure and regret into my sketches of them. Some of them liked being sketched and smiled sideways at me. Those mornings made it easier, in a small way, for me to accept that I was alone and didn't want to look at other men, although perhaps that would wear off eventually. After about a hundred years.

1879

I cannot understand why you have not written or visited these weeks. Have I done something to offend you? I thought you were away still, hut Yves says you are in town. Perhaps I have been wrong in assuming your affection as strong as I have, in which case please excuse the error of your friend

Beatrice de Clerval