The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 78

For weeks after the return of the dark-haired lady to his paintings, Robert was preoccupied, and not only preoccupied but also silent and touchy. He slept long hours and didn't bathe, and I began to feel repelled by his presence in a way I never had before. Sometimes he slept on the sofa. I'd made a date weeks earlier, for my sister and her husband to meet him, and Robert never showed up. I sat in humiliation at a table in a little Provencal place called Lavandou that my sister and I have always loved. I still wouldn't want to go back there now, even if I had money to throw away on fine dining.

The only thing he had energy for was his painting, and the only thing he painted was this woman. I knew better by then than to ask who she was, because this always elicited the vague, almost mystical answers that annoyed me so much. Nothing had changed, I once thought bitterly, since the days when I'd been a student and he'd been purposely mysterious about where he had seen this subject of his work and why he painted her.

I might have gone on believing forever that he had known her in life--face, dark curls, dresses, and all--if I hadn't looked through some of his books while he was out one day buying canvases. It was the first time he'd left the apartment in a while; I took it as a good sign that he'd had the energy to go on an errand and also to plan some new paintings. After he went out, I found myself hovering around the sofa, which had become a sort of Robert den, so that it even smelled like him. I threw myself down there and breathed in the smell of his hair and clothing, without the inconvenience of his irritable presence. It was littered, like a real den--scraps of paper, drawing supplies, books of poetry, cast-off clothing, and library tomes full of portraiture. Everything was portraiture now, and the dark lady was his only subject. He seemed to have forgotten his old love of landscape, his great skill at still lifes, his natural versatility. I noticed the shades were drawn in my small living room and had been down for days, while I'd been hurrying back and forth to my teaching.

It rushed over me like a proof of my own idiocy that Robert was depressed. What he called his "funks" were just good old garden-variety depression, and perhaps more serious than I'd been willing to contemplate. I knew he kept medications among his things and took them out now and then, but he'd told me they were to help him sleep occasionally after a long night of painting, and I never saw him take anything regularly. On the other hand, he never did anything at all regularly. I sat grieving over the transformation of my bright little apartment, mourning that loss so that I would not have to think about the transformation of my soul mate.

Then I began to clean up, putting all of Robert's mess into a basket, stacking the books neatly by the bed, folding the blankets, plumping the sofa cushions, taking the dirty glasses and cereal bowls to the kitchen. And I had a sudden vision of myself, a tall, clean, competent person clearing up someone else's dishes from the rug. I think I knew in that moment that we were doomed, not because of Robert's idiosyncrasies but because of my own sense of self. I watched him shrink a little, felt my heart contract. I raised the shades and wiped the coffee table and brought a vase of flowers from the kitchen into the renewed sunlight.

I could have left the situation there, you know, left it at the normal must-we-break-up level. I sat on the sofa a little longer, feeling myself reclaiming something, sad, frightened. But because I was sitting there, I began to turn through Robert's books. The top three were library books on Rembrandt, and there was another on Leonardo da Vinci--Robert's taste seemed to be wandering a little from the nineteenth century. Underneath was a heavy book on Cubism, which I hadn't seen him open at all.

And near those were two books on the Impressionists, one about their portraits of one another--I flipped through the familiar images--and one, less predictably, a slim, illustrated paperback about the women of the Impressionist world, running from Berthe Morisot's crucial role in the first Impressionist exhibition up into the early twentieth century and lesser-known, later female painters of the movement. I felt a flicker of respect for Robert's having such a book--it was his, not a library volume, I saw when I opened it--and a sense of wonder at its being worn with use; he had read it thoroughly, referred to it often, even smudged it a little with paint.

I enclose a copy of this volume, which I tracked down myself for you over the last month, since he took his away with him. Turn to page forty-nine, and you will see what I saw as I flipped through it--a portrait of Robert's lady and a seascape from the coast of Normandy by the lady herself. Beatrice de Clerval, I learned, was a highly gifted painter who had given up art in her late twenties; the short biographical text blamed this desertion on her having become a mother, which she'd done at the dangerously ripe age of twenty-nine, in an era when women of her class were encouraged to concentrate solely on family life.

The reproduction of the portrait was in color, and her face was unmistakable to me; I even knew her ruffled neckline of pale yellow on pale green, the bow on her bonnet, the exact soft carmine in her cheeks and lips, the expression of mingled wariness and joy. According to the text, she had been very promising as a young artist, studying from the age of seventeen until her midtwenties with the academy instructor Georges Lamelle, had exhibited a painting just once at the Salon, under the false name of Marie Riviere, and died of influenza in 1910; her daughter, Aude, a journalist in Paris before the Second World War, died in 1966. Beatrice de Clerval's husband was a noted civil servant, establishing the modern postal offices of four or five French cities. She was an acquaintance of the Manets, the Morisots, the photographer Nadar, and Mallarme. Work by Clerval can now be found in the Musee d'Orsay, the Musee de Maintenon, the Yale University Art Gallery, the University of Michigan, and several private collections, notable among them that of Pedro Caillet of Acapulco.

Well, you will see all that in the book, but I want to try to explain the effect this set of images and the biography that accompanied them had on my feelings. You'd think that knowing your partner is obsessed with a long-ago glimpse of a living woman, someone he's seen only once or twice, would make you uneasy; but you expect an artist, a fellow artist, to be obsessed with some image or other. Learning that Robert was obsessed with a woman whom he'd never seen alive caused me much greater unease--it was a shock, in fact. You can't be jealous of someone who's dead, and yet the fact that she had once been alive at all gave me a feeling perilously close to jealousy, and then the fact that she was long dead was somehow grotesque, as if I'd caught him in some vague act of necrophilia.

No, that's wrong. The living often still love the dead; we'd never criticize a widower for loving his wife's memory or even being rather obsessed with her. But someone Robert had never known, could not have known, someone who had died more than forty years before his own birth--it was stomach turning. That's too strong a description, I suppose. But I felt queasy. It was too strange for me. I had never thought he might be crazy when he'd been painting a living face over and over; but now that I knew it was the face of a long-dead woman, I wondered if there was something really wrong with him.

I read the biographical note several times to be sure I hadn't missed anything. Perhaps not much was known about Beatrice de Clerval, or maybe her retreat from painting into domesticity had bored all the art historians. She seemed to have lived decades after that without doing anything of note, until she died. A retrospective of her work had been held in the 1980s at a museum in Paris whose name I didn't recognize, the pictures probably borrowed from private collections, put up and taken down again before I'd even applied to college. I looked at her portrait again. There was the wistful smile, the dimple in the left cheek near the mouth. Even from the glossy page, her eyes followed mine.

When I couldn't stand this any longer, I closed the book and put it back in the stack. Then I got it out again and wrote down the title and author, the publication information, some of the facts it contained about Clerval, and replaced it carefully, hiding my notes in my desk. I went into our bedroom and made up the bed and lay down on it. After a while, I went into the kitchen and cleaned that up, too, and made a meal out of whatever I could find in my cabinets. It had been a long time since I'd really cooked something. I loved Robert, and he would have the best possible treatment, care that would help him to get better; he had told me that he still had health insurance. When he came home, he looked pleased and we ate together by candlelight and made love on the living-room rug (he didn't seem to notice that I'd cleaned up the sofa), and he took a picture of me wrapped in a blanket. I didn't say anything about the book or the portraits.

Things were a little better that week, at least on the surface, until Robert told me that he was going to Greenhill again. He had to see the lawyer with Kate, he said, and to settle some financial matters, and he would be gone a week. I was disappointed, but I thought it might be best for his mood to get more of that work behind him, so I simply kissed him good-bye and let him go. He was flying; his plane left while I was teaching and I couldn't drive him to the airport. He did stay away only a week, showing up one evening very tired and smelling odd, like travel, a dirty but also somehow exotic smell. He slept for two days.

On the third day, he left the apartment to run some errands, and I went through all his things, shamelessly--or rather, with shame but determined to know more. He hadn't unpacked his bag yet, and in it I found receipts in French, some that said "Paris," a hotel, restaurants, De Gaulle Airport. There was a crumpled ticket for Air France in one of his jacket pockets, along with his passport, which I had never seen before. Most people have terrifying-looking passport photos; Robert's was gorgeous. Among his clothes I found a package wrapped in brown paper, and inside that a bundle of letters tied with ribbon, very old letters, apparently in French. I had never seen them before. I wondered if they might have to do with his mother, if they might be old family letters, or if he had gotten them in France. When I saw the signature on the first one, I sat there for a long nightmare moment, and then I folded them up again and put the package back into his luggage.

And then I had to decide what to say to him. Why did you go to France? That was only slightly less important than Why did you not tell me you were going to France, or even take me with you? But I couldn't bring myself to ask; it would have hurt my pride, and by that time my pride was very sore, as Muzzy would have said. Instead, we quarreled, or I quarreled with him, I picked a fight with him about a painting, a still life we'd both worked on, and I threw him out, but he went willingly enough. I cried to my sister, I vowed never to take him back if he showed up again, I tried to get over him, and that's an end to it. But I worried when he didn't get in touch with me at all. I didn't know for a long time that he had gone from me to the National Gallery--or just months later--and tried to hurt a painting. That was not like him. In no way was that like him.