The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 81

Chapter 82 1879

To: Yves Vignot

Passy, Paris

Mon cher mari,

I hope this finds you well and that Papa is mending. Thank you for the kind note. Papa's troubles worry me--I wish I were there to care for him myself. Warm compresses on his chest usually help, but I suspect Esme has already tried those. Please send him my fond greetings.

For myself, I cannot say I'm finding it dull here, although etretat is quiet before the season. I have completed one canvas, if you can call it complete, as well as a pastel and two sketches. Uncle is helpful, making suggestions about color--of course, our handling of the brush is so very different that there I always have to strike out on my own. I thoroughly respect his knowledge, however. Now he is talking with me about my doing a much bigger canvas, one with an ambitious subject, which I could submit to the Salon jury next year, although Mme Riviere would be its author. I do not know if I want such a large undertaking, however.

Having slept well the last two nights, I am quite refreshed.

She puts down her pen and looks around the wallpapered bedroom. The first night she has slept from pure exhaustion, and the third she has spent half awake, thinking of Olivier's firm, dry lips approaching her arm--the sensitive shape of the older man's mouth and the pale stretch of her own skin.

She knows the correct thing: she should tell Olivier that she feels unwell here--nerves, she can call it, the eternal excuse -- and that they must return home at once. But that is the reason Yves has sent her here to begin with. Even if she could muster this act, Olivier will see through it. She is blooming in the fresh wind from the Channel, with the expanses of water and sky coursing through her, a relief after stifling Paris. She loves working on the shore, wrapped in her warm cloak. She loves his company, his conversation, the hours they spend reading together in the evenings. He has made the world larger for her than she had ever thought possible.

Instead she blots the last word of her letter and considers the loop of the "d" in "dormi." If she claims that she must go back, Olivier will know that she is lying; he will think she is fleeing. It will hurt him. She cannot do that; she owes him trust in return for his vulnerability, his putting his hand in hers when it might be the last time he touches any woman. Especially when she could assail him from the vantage point of her youth.

She goes to the window and unlatches it. From above the street, she has an oblique view of the gray-beige expanse of beach and the grayer water. A breeze stirs the curtains, rifles the skirts of her morning dress where it lies, bent double, over a chair. She tries to think about Yves, but when she shuts her eyes, she sees an annoying caricature, like a political cartoon in one of his newspapers. Yves in hat and coat, his head enormous, out of proportion, holding a walking stick under one arm, putting on his gloves before kissing her good-bye. It is easier to picture Olivier: he is standing with her on the beach, upright and tall, subtle, with his silver hair, rosy lined face, watering blue eyes, his well-cut, well-worn brown suit, his craftsman's hands and square-tipped, slightly swollen fingers around the brush. The image makes her sad in a way she does not feel when he is actually with her.

But she can't sustain even this vision long; it is replaced by the street itself, the brick fronts and elaborate trim on a row of new shops blocking half her view of the beach. What lingers there for her is a question. How many nights can she pass in this suspended state? In the afternoon they will go somewhere in the bright expanse of beach to paint, return to their rooms to dress for dinner, share their public meal again, sit in the overfurnished hotel parlor and talk about their reading. She will feel she is already in his arms, in spirit; shouldn't that be enough? And then she will retire to her room and begin her nightly vigil.

The other question she asks herself, elbows propped on the sill, is still more difficult. Does she want him? Nothing in the stretch of shore, the upturned boats, hints at an answer. She closes the window, her lips pursed. Life will decide, and perhaps has already decided--a weak answer, but there is no other, and it is time for them to go paint.

Chapter 83 Marlow

One evening I came home to a letter--a very hospitable letter, to my surprise -- from Pedro Caillet. After I'd read it, I surprised myself in turn by going to the phone and calling a travel agent.

Dear Dr. Marlow:

Thank you for your note of two weeks past. You probably know more than I do about Beatrice de Clerval, but I would be happy to assist you. Please come to talk with me between March 16 and March 23, if that is possible. Afterward I will be traveling to Rome and cannot be your host. In answer to your other question, I have not heard of an American painter researching the work of Clerval; such a person has never contacted me.

With warmest wishes,

P. Caillet

Then I called Mary. "How about Acapulco, week after next?"

Her voice was thick, as if she'd been sleeping, although it was late afternoon. "What? You sound like a--I don't know what. A personal ad?"

"Are you asleep? Do you know what time it is?"

"Don't harass me, Andrew. It's my day off, and I painted until very late."

"Until when?"

"Till four thirty."

"Oh, you honest-to-God artists. I was at Goldengrove at seven this morning. Now, would you like to go to Acapulco?"

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Not for vacation. I have research to do there."

"Does your research have to do with Robert, by chance?"

"No. It has to do with Beatrice de Clerval."

She laughed. It warmed me, to hear her laugh so soon after she'd uttered Robert's name. Perhaps she really was getting over him. "I had a dream about you last night."

"About me?" My heart jumped, ridiculously.

"Yes. A very sweet one. I dreamed that I learned you were the inventor of lavender."

"What? The color or the plant?"

"The scent, I think. It's my favorite."

"Thank you. What did you do, in your dream, when you found this out?"

"Never mind."

"Are you going to make me beg?"

"All right--no. I kissed you, in thanks. On the cheek. That was all."

"So, do you want to come to Acapulco?"

She laughed again, apparently well awake. "Of course I want to go to Acapulco. But you know I can't afford it."

"I can," I said softly. "I've been saving for years because my parents told me to." And then I had no one to spend it on, I didn't add. "We could schedule it for your spring break. Isn't it the same week? Isn't that a sign?"

There was a hush between us on the phone, like the moment you pause to listen in the woods. I listened; I heard her breathing, the way you hear (after the first silence, after stilling and settling yourself) birds in the canopy of branches or a squirrel rustling in dead leaves six feet away.

"Well," she said slowly. I thought I detected in her voice years of saving because her mother had told her to also, but with almost nothing to save, her years of painting her way through each small bit of time or cash she could put aside for a few days or weeks or months, the fear and pride that kept her from borrowing, her mother's probably modest onetime gift to her out of the remains of her upbringing, the dedication that kept Mary from quitting her teaching, the students who had no idea how her bank account trembled on the verge of emptiness after she paid for her rent, heat, food--the whole constellation of miseries that I had avoided by going to medical school. Since then, I had done only ten paintings that I liked at all. Monet had painted sixty views of etretat alone in the 1860s, many of them masterpieces; I had seen the dozens of canvases stacked along Mary's studio walls, the hundreds of prints and drawings on her shelves. I wondered how many of them she still liked.

"Well," she said again, but with more light in her voice, "let me think about it." I could imagine her stirring in a bed I had never seen; she would be sitting up now to hold the receiver, maybe wearing one of her loose white shirts and pushing her hair aside. "But there is another problem if I go with you."

"Let me save you the trouble of saying it. You don't have to sleep with me if you accept my invitation," I said, feeling at once that it had come out more starkly than I'd intended. "I'll find a way for us to stay separately."

I could hear her breath drawn in as if she were on the verge of a gasp, or a laugh. "Oh, no. The problem is that I might want to sleep with you there, but I wouldn't want you to think it was a thank-you card for paying my way."

"Well," I said. "What can a fellow say?"

"Nothing." Mary was almost laughing, I felt sure. "Don't say anything, please."

But at the airport two weeks later, after a rare Washington snowstorm, we were quiet and constrained with each other. I began to wonder if this adventure had been a good idea or would prove an embarrassment on both sides. We had arranged to find each other at the gate, which was filled with students who could have been Mary's sitting in impatient rows, already dressed in summer clothes, although planes outside the window rolled past heaps of dirty snow. Mary met me with a canvas satchel over one shoulder and her portable easel in her hand, and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, but awkwardly. She had coiled her hair up in the back and was wearing a long navy sweater over a black skirt. Against the background of squirming teenagers in their shorts and brightly colored shirts, she looked like some sect of laysister leaving the convent for a field trip. It occurred to me that I hadn't even thought to bring my painting kit. What was wrong with me? I would only be able to watch her paint.

We chatted in a desultory way on the plane, as if we'd been traveling together for years, and then she fell asleep, sitting straight up in her seat at first but drooping gradually toward me, her smooth head touching my shoulder: I painted until very late. I'd thought that we would talk intensely on our first real trip together, but instead she was sleeping almost against me, pulling herself back from time to time without waking, as if she feared this creeping domesticity between us. My shoulder came alive under her nodding head. I carefully took out a new book on borderline-personality-disorder treatment, which I'd been trying for some time to get to--my professional reading had begun to suffer under the weight of my research on Robert and Beatrice--but I couldn't take in the words for more than a sentence at a time; after that, they unraveled.

And then that bad moment that always forced itself on me sooner or later: I imagined her head on Robert Oliver's shoulder, his naked shoulder--had she been telling me the truth when she'd said she didn't love Robert anymore? After all, he might get well under my care, or at least better. Or was the truth more complicated? What if I didn't feel like helping him anymore, given what might happen if he went back to a functional life? I turned another page. In the light through the clouds outside, Mary's hair was pale chestnut, golden on the surface under the feeble airplane reading light, and darker when she rolled away from the window; it shone like carved wood. I raised a finger and, with infinite lightness, stroked the part on the top of her head; she stirred and muttered something, still asleep. Her eyelashes were roseate, and they lay on pale skin. There was a small mole near the corner of her left eye. I thought about Kate's galaxy of freckles, about my mother's emaciated face and huge, still-compassionate gaze before she died. When I turned a page again, Mary sat up, hugged her sweater around her, and wedged herself against the window, fleeing me. Still asleep.