The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 69

I managed to have my beer early, over dinner, and then I sat near the fire for a while with two men taking the watercolor class. Their discussion of the relative merits of oils and watercolor for landscape painting was interesting and kept me there longer than I'd intended to stay. At last I excused myself and brushed off the seat of my jeans, preparatory to heading for my neatly made bed. Frank was talking with someone else by the fire, someone young and pretty, so I didn't have to worry about finding him sitting in front of my mirror again. I took a long detour around him anyway, and that was what put me at the edge of the yard, the deep dark where the firelight didn't reach.

A man was standing there, almost in the woods, a tall man rubbing his eyes with his hands, then rubbing his head, as if weary and distracted, and he was looking toward the trees instead of back at the fire with its crowd of festive figures. After a few minutes he began to walk into the woods, along the path I already thought of as ours, and I followed him, knowing that I shouldn't. There was just enough twilight to show his stride ahead of me and assure me that he wasn't aware of being followed. I told myself a couple of times to turn back, to give him his privacy. He was going toward the shore where we'd worked that day; probably he wanted to see some of the forms we'd painted there, even if they would be half visible now, and if he'd left the camp alone, he probably didn't want company.

At the edge of the woods I stopped and watched him go on down the stones of the beach, which clinked together under his feet. The slop of the ocean was audible; the sheen of water stretched darkly to an even darker horizon. Stars were coming out, but the sky was still blue--sapphire--rather than black, and Robert's shirt pale, his form moving along the edge of the water now. He stood still, then stooped to pick something up, flung his arm back with the childhood gesture of baseball-in-hand, and hurled it away from land--a stone. It was a quick, furious gesture: anger, maybe despair, release. I watched him without moving, half frightened by his emotion. Then he crouched down, a strange gesture for such a large person, again a child's gesture, and seemed to put his head in his hands.

I wondered for a moment if he was tired, irritated (as I was myself) by the lack of sleep and the endless necessity of being with other people at the conference, or if he might even be crying, although I couldn't imagine what someone like Robert Oliver would have to cry about. Now he was sitting down on the beach--it would be damp, I thought, hard and slippery--and he stayed there on and on, his head in his hands. The waves came forward smoothly, unfurling white half visible in the dark. I stood watching and he simply sat there, his shoulders and back glimmering. In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know. I started down the beach, hearing the stones rattle under my feet, once almost tripping.

He didn't turn around until I was very close, and even then I couldn't see his expression. But he saw me, whether or not he recognized me in the first moment, and he stood up -- started up. At that moment I finally felt shame and real apprehension at having invaded his solitude. We stood looking at each other. And I could see his face now; it was dark, troubled, and my presence hadn't cleared it. "What are you doing here?" he said flatly.

I moved my lips but no voice came out. Instead, I reached over and took his hand, which was very large, very warm, and closed automatically over mine. "You should go back, Mary," he said with (I thought) a quiver in his voice. It gratified me that he had used my name, and so naturally.

"I know I should," I said. "But I saw you and I felt worried about you."

"Don't worry about me," he said, and his hand closed more tightly over my hand, as if saying it made him worry about me in return.

"Are you all right?"

"No," he said softly, "but that doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters. It always matters if a person is all right or not." Idiot, I told myself, but there was the problem of his huge hand over mine.

"Do you think artists are really supposed to be all right?" He smiled, and I thought he might even begin to laugh at me.

"Everyone is supposed to be," I said staunchly, and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn't mind it.

He dropped my hand and turned to the ocean. "Have you ever had this feeling that the lives people lived in the past are still real?"

This was weird and out of context enough to give me a chill. I very much wanted him to be all right despite his strange assertion, so I thought about Isaac Newton. Then I thought about how often Robert Oliver painted historical or pseudo-historical figures, even those distant people I had seen in his landscape our first full day here, and realized that this must be a natural question for him. "Certainly."

"I mean," he continued, as if talking to the edge of the water, "when you see a painting that was painted by someone who's been dead for a long time, you know without a doubt that that person really lived."

"I think about that sometimes, too," I admitted, although his observation didn't fit my first theory about him, that he was simply interested in adding historical figures to his canvases. "Do you mean somebody in particular?"

He didn't answer, but after a moment he put his arm around me as I stood beside him, then stroked my hair down my back, a continuation of his gesture of two nights earlier. He was stranger than I'd thought, this man--it was not simply eccentricity but genuine oddness, a sort of complete focus on the world of his own thoughts, a disconnect. My sister, Martha, would have given him a peck on the cheek and walked back up the beach, I'm sure, and so would any sensible person I know. But there is another meaning to sensible --Muzzy made us take years of French. He stroked my hair. I raised my hand to take his hand, and then I drew it to my face and kissed it in the dark.

Kissing someone's hand is more a man's gesture than a woman's, or a gesture of respect--for royalty, for a bishop, for the dying. And I did mean it respectfully; I meant that I was awed and thrilled by his presence, as well as a little afraid of it. He turned toward me and pulled me in, one of his arms crooked gently around my neck, and ran his other hand over my face as if wiping dust from it, and drew me up against him to kiss me. I hadn't been kissed like that, ever, not ever; his mouth had the feel of a completely unself-conscious passion, a longing possibly unconscious even of me, full of the act itself. His hand caught the small of my back and lifted and pressed me against him, and I could feel the self-sufficient warmth of his chest through his worn shirt, the little buttons pressing into me as if to mark my skin.

Then he slowly let me go. "I don't do this," he said, as if drunk. There was no alcohol on his breath, not even the beer I'd had myself. He put his hands on my face and kissed me again, quickly, and this time I felt he knew exactly who I was. "Please go back."

"All right." I, whom Muzzy had called willful, whom my high-school teachers had considered a little sullen and my art-school instructors had found trying, turned obediently away and walked, stumbling, up the dark beach.