The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 73

'he restaurant we found, caravanning a few miles farther south with our cars smelling of fresh paint, was faux Italian of the straw-plaited-bottle variety, red-checked cloths and curtains, a pink rose in a vase on our table. It was a Monday night, and the place was empty except for one other--couple, I almost wrote-- and a man dining alone. Robert asked for a candle. "What color would you call that?" he said when the underage waiter had lit it.

"The flame?" I said. I was already learning that often I couldn't understand Robert, couldn't follow his private and sometimes chaotic train of thought. But I liked where it led, usually. "No. The rose."

"It would be pink if everything else weren't red and white," I guessed.

"Correct." And then he told me the paint he would use for that rose, the brand, the color, the amount of white to be added. We ordered the same lasagna, and he ate with gusto while I picked at mine, hungry but self-conscious. "Tell me something else about yourself."

"You know more about me than I do about you," I demurred. "There's not much to tell anyway--I go to my job, do the best I can for my dozens of students of all ages, come home, and paint. I don't have a--family, and I don't especially want one, I guess. That's it. Very dull story."

He drank the red wine he'd ordered for both of us; I'd hardly touched mine. "That's not dull. You paint with dedication. That's everything."

"Your turn," I said, and made myself eat some lasagna.

He was relaxing now; he put down his fork and leaned back, rolled up a fallen sleeve. His skin was just at the point of fine tracery on the surface, good leather worn for a while. His eyes and hair looked the same color in that light, and there was something alert and a little wild in both. "Well, I am also very boring," he said. "Except that my life is not as well organized, I suppose. I live in a small town, from which I escape occasionally but which I actually like. I teach endless studio courses to mainly untalented or slightly talented undergraduates. I'm fond of them, and they like my classes. And I show my work here and there. I like not being a New York artist anymore, although I miss New York."

I didn't interject that his "here and there" was adding up to a rather extraordinary career. "When did you live in New York?"

"Graduate school and after." Of course; he'd been a rebel at one of the New York schools that had turned down my own portfolio. "I was there for about eight years, total. Got a lot of work done, actually. But Kate, my wife, wasn't very happy in the city, so we moved. I don't regret it. Greenhill has been a good place for her and the children." He said this guilelessly. For a long moment that was like falling from a tree, I wished that someone were sitting in a restaurant far away, saying such matter-of-fact, devoted things about me and the children I didn't want to have.

"How do you make time for your own work?" I thought a change of subject was the best idea.

"I don't sleep much--sometimes. I mean, sometimes I don't need to sleep very much."

"Like Picasso," I said, smiling to show that I didn't mean this seriously.

"Exactly like Picasso," he agreed, also smiling. "I have a studio at home, and that means I can just go upstairs to work at night, instead of going back to school and dealing with a lot of locked doors."

I pictured him hunting through all his pockets for a key.

He finished his wine and poured more, but moderately, I noticed; he must have been planning to drive, and safely. There was no motel attached to our Italian haven. "Anyway," he finished, "we moved out of the college a while ago, and we have a lot more space. That's been good, too, although now the commute to school is twenty minutes by car instead of four minutes on foot."

"Too bad." I ate the rest of my lasagna so that I wouldn't later regret being hungry as well as whatever else I was going to be. I still had Isaac Newton to finish, and he was turning out to be very interesting, more than I might have predicted. Reason versus belief.

Robert ordered dessert, and we talked about favorite painters. I confessed my love of Matisse and speculated aloud about how our jaunty table and curtains and rose could all have ended up coming off Matisse's brush. Robert laughed and didn't confess to being more traditional than that and to having an interest in the Impressionists; it was obvious, perhaps, or his awareness of the critical coverage of his work had made him stop justifying it. His acclaim was growing nicely; he had paid back his instructors and jeering conceptual-artist classmates. I read these things between the lines as he spoke. We talked about books, too; he loved poetry and quoted Yeats and Auden, whom I'd read a little in school, and Czeslaw Milosz, whose collected poems I had read through once, long ago, because I'd seen a volume of them on Robert's desk. He didn't like most novels, and I threatened to send him a long Victorian one like a bomb in the mail, The Moonstone or Middlemarch. He laughed and promised not to read it. "But you should like nineteenth-century literature," I added. "Or at least the French authors, since you love Impressionism."

"I didn't say I love Impressionism," he corrected. "I said I do what I do. For my own reasons. Some of it happens to resemble Impressionism."

He hadn't said that either, but I didn't correct him in turn. I remember he also told me a story of having been on a plane that seemed about to crash. "I was flying back to New York from Greenhill once, while I had that teaching job at your college, actually--at Barnett. And something happened to one of the engines, so the pilot got on the intercom and announced that we might have to make an emergency landing, although we were almost to LaGuardia. The woman sitting next to me got very frightened. She was a middle-aged woman, kind of ordinary. Before that she'd been talking with me about her husband's job or something. When the plane lurched and the seat-belt sign started flashing, she reached out and grabbed me around the neck."

He rolled his napkin into a heavy tube. "I was frightened, too, and I remember thinking that I just wanted to live--it panicked me to have her gripping my neck like that. And--I'm sorry to say this--I pushed her off me. I had always thought I would be naturally brave in a crisis, that I would be someone who pulls other people out of burning wrecks, as an automatic response." He lifted his head, raised his shoulders. "Why am I telling you this? Anyway, when we landed safely a few minutes later, she wouldn't look at me. She was turned away, crying. She wouldn't even let me help her with her bag and wouldn't look at me."

I couldn't think of anything to say, although I felt a piercing sympathy. His expression was dark, heavy; it reminded me of that moment in college when he'd told me about the woman whose face he couldn't forget.

"I could never tell my wife about that." He flattened the napkin with both hands. "She already thinks I don't take good enough care of anybody." Then he smiled. "Look what ridiculous confessions you bring out in me."

I was content.

At last Robert stretched his big arms and insisted on paying the bill, then let me insist on splitting it with him, and we stood up. He excused himself to go to the restroom--I had already been twice, mainly to be alone for a couple of seconds and question myself in the mirror--and the restaurant seemed even emptier without him. Then we went out into the dark parking lot, which smelled like ocean and fried food, fishy, and stood next to my car. "Well, I'm going to start driving," he said, but this time not matter-of-factly, which would have stung more. "I like to drive at night."

"Yes, you've got a long trip, I guess. I'm going to start mine, too." I planned instead to let him pull out ahead of me and drive faster. Then I would hunt for the first decent motel in the first town; it was too late to make Portland, or I was too tired, or too sad. Robert looked ready to drive to Florida by himself.

"This has been lovely." He put his arms slowly around me, and I was struck by the feminine word. He held me for a moment and kissed my cheek, and I was careful not to move. I had to memorize him, after all.

"It has been." Then I released him and unlocked my truck.

"Wait--here's my address and phone number. Let me know if you come south."

Like hell. I didn't have a business card with me, but I found a piece of paper in my glove compartment and wrote my e-mail address and phone on it.

Robert glanced at it. "I don't do e-mail much," he said. "I use it for business, if I have to, but that's about it. Why don't you give me your real address, and I'll send you a drawing sometime?"

I added my real address.

He stroked my hair, as if for the last time. "I guess you understand."

"Oh, yes." I kissed his cheek rapidly. It was sharp-tasting, even very slightly oily, the finest extra-virgin, cold-pressed--the traces of it were on my lips for hours. I got in my truck. I drove away.

His first drawing arrived in my mailbox ten days later. It was just a sketch, whimsical, hasty, on folded paper; it showed a satyrlike figure rising from waves and a maiden sitting on a rock nearby. The note enclosed said that he'd thought about our conversations and enjoyed them, that he was working on a new canvas based on his painting of the beach. I wondered, immediately, if he'd included the figure of the woman and child. He gave a PO box, and he wrote that I should use that address, and that I should send him a better drawing than his, to put him in his place.