The Swan Thieves

Chapter 17 Marlow

After a moment I sat down in Robert's desk chair. It was one of those ancient office chairs with cracked leather and rows of brass studs, turning unsteadily on wheels underneath or tipping back a little too far for stability--inherited, I guessed, from a grandfather or even a great-grandfather. Then I got up again and gently closed the door. I felt she wouldn't mind; she'd left me so completely to my own devices there as it was. It seemed to me that Kate Oliver was an all-or-nothing person. Either she was going to conscientiously show and tell me everything, or she was going to keep her privacy intact, and she'd decided on the former course. I liked her; I liked her very much.
I bent over the desk and pulled a wad of paper out of one of the pigeonholes--bank statements, half-crumpled receipts from water and electric bills, some blank notebook paper. It seemed odd to me that Kate had entrusted her scattered husband with the household finances, but perhaps he'd insisted. I shoved the collection back into place. A few of the slots were empty of everything except dust and paper clips; she'd been at work here already. I imagined her pulling all this out, filing it flat and orderly somewhere, eventually wiping the desk clean, polishing it, perhaps. Maybe she'd let me in here because she'd actually already removed anything personal; maybe it was an empty gesture, a false hospitality.
There was nothing of interest in the rest of the pigeonholes except a shriveled object in the far reaches of one that proved to be an ancient joint--I recognized the smell from long ago, as one recognizes a spice from a childhood dessert. I carefully put it back.
The top two desk drawers were stuffed with sketches--conventional figure-drawing exercises, none of them anything like the lady with whom he routinely filled his room at Goldengrove--and old catalogs, mostly for art supplies, a few for outdoor gear, as if Robert had also been a hiker or cyclist. Why did I persist in thinking of him in the past tense? He might get well and hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other, and it was my job to help him try to do that.
The bottom drawer was harder to open, overflowing with yellow legal pads on which Robert had apparently made notes for teaching ("Previous block sketches, some fruit--still life to end of class, two hours?"). I gathered from these notes that Robert had made only the roughest outlines for his classes, and most of the papers did not have dates on them. His presence alone must have filled the classroom or studio; apparently he hadn't planned for much else. Or had he simply been so gifted a teacher that he kept all his knowledge in his head and could release it in an organized way at will? Or perhaps teaching painting meant to him simply walking around critiquing students' ongoing work? I had had five or six studio courses like that myself, crammed in around the edges of my profession, and I loved them--that feeling of being alone and yet among other painters, left in peace even by the teacher most of the time but also observed, sometimes encouraged, at the odd moment, so that you focused all the harder.
I dug to the bottom of the bottom drawer and was about to turn away from all those legal pads interspersed with old phone bills when a sheet of handwriting caught my eye. It was lined white paper, wrinkled as if it had been wadded up and then partly smoothed out again, a corner torn off. It was the beginning of a letter, or a draft of a letter, written in a strong hand with big upright loops--here and there a word had been crossed out and another choice written in. I knew that handwriting already, from the nest of little notes all around me--it was Robert's, distinctly his. I picked the paper out of the drawer and tried to smooth it on the felt desktop.
You were constantly with me, my muse, and I thought of you with startling vividness, not only your beauty and kind company but also your laugh, your smallest gesture.
The next line was crossed out, scratched out viciously, and the rest of the page was blank. I listened in the direction of the kitchen. Through the closed door, I could hear Robert's former wife moving something--a stool dragged across linoleum, perhaps, a cupboard door being opened and shut. I folded the page into thirds and put it in my inside jacket pocket. Then I bent and dug a last time in the bottom drawer. Nothing--nothing else in his handwriting anyway, although there were tax statements that looked as if they'd hardly been removed from their envelopes.
It seemed silly, but since the door was firmly closed and Kate was still apparently busy in the kitchen, I bent over and began taking Robert's books off the shelves and reaching behind them. Dust streaked my hand. I came up with a rubber ball that might have belonged to one of the children and that had now caught some dust kittens--fluffy masses of human cells, I remembered with something like a shudder. I set four or five books at a time on the floor, so that if Kate opened the door without warning she wouldn't find much out of place and I could always say I'd been looking at the books themselves.
But there were no more papers; there was nothing behind the books, and apparently nothing--I flipped a couple of them open, rapidly--tucked inside. I saw myself for a moment as if from the doorway, an interior carefully composed of dark shapes with illumination from one bulb on the ceiling, a harsh light, a jarring, suggestive interior in the manner of Bonnard. For the first time, I noticed that there were no pictures on the walls of Robert's office, no postcards taped up, no announcements of exhibitions, no small paintings left unsold from gallery shows. That was strange in an artist's office, but perhaps he had saved them all for his studio.
Then, bending over the bookshelves again, I saw that there actually was something on one wall--not a picture of any sort, but a scrawl of numbers in pencil and a few words next to the shelves, so that the note couldn't have been seen from the door. I thought for a moment it might be the heights and ages of Robert's children, the dates when they had reached a certain stature, but it was down very low for even a small child. I crouched beside the books, still holding Seurat and the Parisians in my hand. It was pencil indeed, probably a 5B or 6B, dark and soft for heavy shading. I squinted at it. It said "1879." After that, two words: "etretat. Joy."
I read it a couple of times. The numbers and letters were untidy on the wall--he must have stretched out on the floor to write them, and it still would have been difficult to make it neat. His long legs would have been cocked behind him like a child's, the office was so small. Or had someone else written that smudge? I thought the looped "e" and "J," the length of the "y," looked like Oliver's hand, the baggy, strong writing on all the self-reminders I'd been reading, the canceled checks. I took the letter draft from my pocket and held it up to compare. The "y" was certainly the same, and the bold, clear lowercase "t." Why would a grown man, a tower of a man, lie down and write something on the wall of his office?
I carefully put the letter back in its hiding place in my pocket-- it was already warm from the heat of my body--and began to hunt around for a scrap of paper that wasn't written on. I remembered the yellow pads in the bottom drawer and helped myself to a piece of paper from one of them, recording carefully on it the message from the wall. I thought I knew this word, "etretat," but I would look it up later anyway.
My search for paper had given me another idea: pulling the wastebasket closer, I went through its contents, glancing at the door every couple of seconds. I wondered whether Kate or Robert himself had stuffed it full--Kate, probably, in the course of her cleanup. It contained more scraps in his handwriting, as well as a set of scribbles that could have been studies for a nude or doodles done in an idle moment, some of them torn in two--evidence at last of the artist. None of Oliver's notes to himself meant anything to me, especially since they tended to be a few words at most and often contained practicalities. I turned over another of them: "Pick up wine, beer for tomorrow night." I didn't dare keep any of them; if I filled my jacket pockets, Kate would hear me rustling, and beyond that very real and humiliating possibility, I would hear myself rustling and feel only ashamed. One shame was enough; I touched the letter through my jacket. "You were constantly with me, my muse." Who was his muse? Kate? The woman in his drawings at Goldengrove? Was that woman "Mary"? It seemed likely, and perhaps Kate would tell me about her if I asked without actually asking.
I went through the rest of the books a few at a time, always listening for the door, finding only some empty slips meant to mark a favorite page, or perhaps a passage or image for Robert's teaching--one such slip lay across a full-color reproduction of Manet's Olympia. I'd seen the original in Paris years earlier. She gazed up at me, naked and blankly insouciant, when I removed the paper. Behind the top row of volumes, I found a large white wadded-up sock. No other corner to search, unless I took up the carpet itself. I peered behind the shelves and desk, looked one more time at that date on the wall. A French word, "etretat," a place. What had been going on in France in 1879, if the name and the date were connected, at least in Robert's mind? I tried to remember, but I'd never known much French history, or I'd unmemorized it soon after my high-school class in Western civilization. Hadn't there been the Paris Commune, or was that earlier? Exactly when had Baron Haussmann designed all those great boulevards in Paris?
By 1879, Impressionism was alive and well, if heavily criticized-- that much I knew from going to museums and reading the odd book--so perhaps it had been a year of peace and prosperity.
I opened the door to the study, glad Kate hadn't beat me to it from the other side. The kitchen was unnaturally bright after Robert's office; the sun had come out and was making a little water glisten on the trees. It had rained, then, while I was going through Robert's papers. Kate stood at the counter, tossing salad in a bowl; she wore a blue chef's apron over her top and jeans, and her face was flushed. The plates were pale yellow. "I hope you like salmon," she said, as if daring me not to.
"I do," I said honestly. "I like it very much. But I never meant for you to go to such trouble for lunch. Thank you."
"It's no trouble." She was putting pieces of bread into a basket lined with a cloth. "I rarely get to cook for grown-ups these days, and the kids won't eat much except macaroni-and-cheese and spinach. Fortunately for me, they actually like spinach." She turned and smiled at me, and I was struck by this strangeness-- here was the former wife of my patient, a woman I'd met only a few hours earlier, a woman I barely knew and half feared, making me a meal. Her smile was friendly, spontaneous, reaching me across the kitchen. I wanted to hang my head.
"Thank you," I said again.
"You can take these plates to the table," she told me, holding them up in her slender hands.
Mon cher oncle:
I am writing you this morning to express all our thanks for your presence yesterday evening and for the pleasure you brought. Thank you also for your encouraging words about my drawings, which I wouldn't have wanted to show you had my father-in-law and Yves not insisted. I am working hard in the afternoons at a new painting, but it should be considered only a humble effort. I am pleased to think you liked my jeune fille so much -- as I told you, my niece posed and she is a little fairy. I hope to do a painting from that drawing as well--but in the early summer, so that I can use my garden for background; it is magnificent at that time of year, when the roses are overflowing.
Warm regards to you,
Beatrice de Clerval