The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 74

Robert and I wrote to each other for a long time, and those letters are still one of the best things I've ever experienced. It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy. I would come home at the end of the day to find one -- or none, many days--or a sketch, or both, crammed into an envelope and scrawled with my address in Robert's looping hand. I made a collage of the drawings on the bulletin board above my desk. At home, my office is also my bedroom, or vice versa; I could see all his sketches, a growing exhibition, as I lay in bed with my book at night, or when I woke up in the morning.

Oddly, once I'd pinned up two or three of those sketches, I stopped having that sense one gets of being single and always watching out for someone, for the right person. I began to belong to Robert--I who had never wanted to belong to anything. I guess in the end we belong to what we love. It wasn't that I thought Robert was available or that I had some obligation to be faithful to him; at first it was just the feeling that I wouldn't have wanted any other pair of eyes to see those drawings from my bed. He drew trees, people, houses, me, from memory; he drew himself in a "funk" over his latest project. I still don't know what it meant to him to send me all those images, whether he would have done them anyway and stuffed them into a file drawer or dropped them on his office floor, or whether he did more of them or drew them with fresh inspiration because they were for me.

Once, he sent me part of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, with a note saying that it was one of his favorites. I didn't know whether or not to take it as a declaration from Robert himself, but I kept it in my pocket for several days before I tacked it on my bulletin board: O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

I didn't put his letters up on my bulletin board, however. Those sometimes arrived with the sketches, sometimes on their own, and they were often very brief, a thought, a reflection, an image. I think Robert was--is--a writer at heart, too; if someone had collected in order all those bits and pieces of his writing to me, they would have made a kind of short and impressionistic but very good novel about his daily life and the nature he was constantly trying to paint. I wrote him back every time; I had a rule for myself that I would mirror whatever he did, to keep things balanced, so that if he sent only a sketch, I sent only a sketch in return, and if he sent only a note, I sent only a note in response. If he sent both, my rule went, I could write him a longer letter and illustrate it right on the page.

I don't know if he ever noticed this pattern, and it was one of the things I didn't ask him. It kept me from writing him too often, and we exchanged letters or sketches several times a week once our correspondence was well under way. After our last fight, I made up a whole new rule: I would burn only the letters and keep the sketches, although I removed all but his very first sketch from my bulletin board. The first, the satyr and the maiden, I glued to cardboard, a few weeks after he left, and tinted with watercolor, and then I did a series of three small matching paintings based on it. I might as well have blended the colors with actual tears, they were so painful to work on.

I often imagined the post office box into which he put his hand every few days. I wondered what size the box was, and whether his hand fit or just the fingers; I imagined him feeling blindly inside it like Alice grown too large in Wonderland, groping up the chimney to catch whatever little character it was, a lizard or a mouse. He knew my address, of course, which meant he knew where I lived. And I saw Greenhill College once, as well; about halfway through our correspondence, Robert surprised me by inviting me to come to the opening of a show he was having there, his second since he'd started teaching. He said he was inviting me because of my support of his work and intimated that he couldn't give me a place to stay; I understood from this that he wanted to invite me but wasn't sure he wanted me to come.

I didn't wish to displease him, but I didn't like to displease myself either, so I drove down from DC--as you know, it's only a long day's trip -- and stayed at a Motel 6 outside the town. There was a wine-and-cheese reception at the new art gallery on the Greenhill campus. I didn't dare to call Robert, so I sent a note to the PO box several days before I arrived for the opening, which he didn't get until too late.

My hands were trembling when I walked into the reception. I hadn't seen Robert since Maine--and since we'd begun writing each other--and I already regretted having come at all; he might be offended, might think I'd come to disrupt his life in some way, which I honestly hadn't. I just wanted to see him, maybe from a distance, and to see the new paintings whose conception and execution I'd heard about week after week. I had dressed in a very ordinary way, in a black turtleneck and my usual jeans, and I got to the gallery a good half hour after the party started. I saw Robert at once, towering over the crowd in one corner; several guests with wineglasses in their hands seemed to be asking about his paintings. The place was mobbed, not only with students and faculty but also with a lot of elegant people who didn't look as if they belonged to a small rural college. There were probably buyers there, too.

The paintings, whenever you could get a glimpse of them, were riveting; for one thing, they were larger than any work by him I'd seen before, nearly life-sized scenes and portraits, often full-length depictions of the lady I remembered from his canvases at Barnett College, except that now she was not only bigger but also thrust into a terrible scene, holding what looked like the dead body of another, older woman in her arms, grieving over her. I wondered if this was supposed to be her mother. The older woman had a gruesome wound in the middle of her forehead. There were other dead bodies on the ground, I remember, some of them facedown on cobblestones, or with blood on their backs, but they were the bodies of men. The backgrounds were vaguer than the figures: a street of some sort, a wall, piles of rubble or garbage. The images were straight out of the mid-nineteenth century--I thought immediately of Manet's painting of the execution of Emperor Maximilian, the one that looks like Goya, although Robert's images were more detailed and realistic.

It was hard to tell what all this was about; I just know that the power of his fantasy swept over you as soon as you saw those scenes: the woman was as beautiful as ever, even with her face white and the front of her dress stained, but Robert had depicted something horrible. It was all the more horrible because she was lovely, as if he'd felt compelled to see her with blood on her gown, her face stark. I'd gathered from his notes to me that the paintings were fierce and strange, but seeing them in the flesh was completely different, shocking; I had a moment of feeling frightened, as if I'd been corresponding with a murderer. It was very jarring; it disoriented me in the midst of my growing love for Robert. Then I saw the tremendous sculptural quality of the figures, the sense of compassion, the grief that was deeper than the gore, and I knew I was looking at paintings that would last in importance long after we were all gone.

I almost left without greeting Robert at all, partly out of this shock, partly to keep the sense of privacy between us--and partly out of riveting shyness as well, I'll admit. But I'd driven so far that I finally made myself walk over to him when some of his admirers turned away. He saw me pushing through the crowd, and he froze for a moment. Then a startled, joyful expression flashed over his face--how I treasured the remembrance of that look afterward--and he collected himself and came forward to shake hands warmly with me, making it all very proper, making it work, managing to murmur to me first that he was very touched that I had come. I had half forgotten how large he was in person, how strangely handsome, how striking. He took my elbow in his hand; he began at once to introduce me to a shifting circle of people without explaining anything but my name and, in a couple of cases, that I was a painter as well.

Among these people, among these momentary introductions, was his wife, who shook my hand warmly, too, and tried to ask me something kind about myself, to make me welcome, whoever I was. Mercifully, someone else waylaid her a second later. I was stricken by my sudden recognition of her identity, flooded with something I would have called jealousy if I hadn't known how absurd that would be. I liked her instantly and, in spite of myself and forever after, at a distance. She was much smaller than Robert (I had imagined a sort of huntress for him, an Amazon, a larger-than-life Diana)--in fact, she just came up to my shoulder. She was tawny-haired, freckled, like a golden flower with a green-stemmed dress. If she'd been my friend, I would have asked her to let me paint her, just for the pleasure of choosing the colors.

I felt the warmth of her hand in my own for the rest of the evening, after I'd tactfully left early without speaking to Robert again so that he would not have to cope at all with the question of where I was staying and for how long, and also after I had driven a few hours back toward DC, when I lay curled, mute, in a motel bed in southern Virginia, full of having seen him. Having seen them--Robert and his wife.

May 1879

etretat

To: M. Yves Vignot

Rue de Boulogne, Passy, Paris

Mon cher mari:

I hope this finds you and Papa as well as can be expected. Have you had a great deal of work? Will you be returning to Nice or can you stay at home for some weeks, as you hoped? Is it still raining?

I am getting on perfectly here and have spent the first day painting on the promenade, as the weather is very bright for May, if cool, and am now resting before dinner. Uncle accompanied me. He is working on a large canvas of the water and cliffs. I confess I have done only one thing I like, and it is rather sketchy, at that--a couple of local women with delightful big skirts tucked up and a child wading alongside, but no doubt I will have to try something grander in order to keep up. The landscape is as lovely as I remember from our visit, although it is much changed by the season's difference--the hills are just greening now, and the horizon looks gray-blue, without those fluffy midsummer clouds. Our hotel is quite comfortable, so you should have no worries--it is spotless and well appointed, and I like the relative simplicity. I ate a hearty breakfast this morning--you would approve. The trip did not tire me at all, and I fell pleasantly asleep the minute I reached my room. Uncle has brought with him notes for some articles he is working on when we are not painting, so I shall be able to rest during those times, as you requested. I have also begun reading Thackeray for entertainment. There's no need for you to send anyone to me. I am managing perfectly and am pleased that Esme cares so tenderly for Papa even while she does other things. Please keep yourself very well--don't go out without your coat unless the weather becomes more springlike there. Know me to be your devoted

Beatrice