The Swan Thieves

Chapter 64 Mary

I wish I could report that Robert Oliver and I became dignified friends from that moment, that from then on he was a mentor and wise voice and active proponent of my painting, that he helped my career along and I admired his in turn, and it was all very conscientious until he died at eighty-three, leaving me two of his paintings in his will. But none of this was the case, and Robert is still very much alive, with all of our actual strange history done and behind us. I don't know how much of it he remembers now; if I had to guess, I'd say not all, not none, but some. My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood. If he'd remembered everything, absorbed it right down into his pores, as I did, I wouldn't be explaining all this to his psychiatrist, or any psychiatrist, and maybe he wouldn't be insane. Insane -- is that the word? He was insane before, in the sense that he wasn't like other people, and that was why I loved him.
The evening after our first landscape excursion, I sat next to Robert at dinner and of course Frank sat next to me with his shirt unbuttoned. I wanted to tell him to button it up and get over it. Robert talked a good deal with a faculty member on his other side, a woman in her seventies, a grande dame of found art, but every now and then he glanced around and smiled at me, usually absently and once with a directness that shocked me until I realized he was turning it equally on Frank--it seemed that he'd liked Frank's treatment of water and horizon better than he'd liked mine. If Frank thought he was going to outpaint me in front of
Robert, he was dead wrong, I promised myself, listening to Frank help himself right across me to gobs of Robert's attention. When Frank had finished his prolonged brag in the form of technical questions, Robert turned to me again; I was right by his jawbone, after all. He touched my shoulder. "You're very quiet," he said, smiling.
"Frank's very noisy," I said in a low voice. I had meant to say it louder, to give Frank a little piece of my mind, but it came out low and harsh, as if meant only for Robert Oliver's ear. He looked down at me--as I said, Robert looks down at almost everyone. I'm sorry to use this cliche, but our eyes met. Our eyes met, and they met for the first time in our acquaintance, which after all had been interrupted by a hiatus of many years.
"He's just getting started on his career," he observed, which made me feel a little better. "Why don't you tell me something about how things are with you? Did you go to art school?"
"Yes," I said. I had to lean very close so that he could hear me; there was soft black hair in the opening of his ear.
"Too bad," he said, loud-soft in return.
"It wasn't so awful," I confessed. "I secretly enjoyed it."
He turned so that I could see him directly again. I felt that it was dangerous for me to see him that way, that he was much more vivid than a person ought to be. He was laughing, his teeth large and strong-looking but yellowing--middle age. It was wonderful that he didn't seem to care about anything, or even to know that his teeth were yellow. Frank would be whitening his a couple of times a month before he was thirty. The world was full of Franks, when it should be full of Robert Olivers.
"I enjoyed some of mine, too," he was saying. "It gave me something to be angry about."
I risked a shrug. "Why should art make anyone angry? I don't care what anyone else does."
I was imitating him, his own uncaring, but it seemed to strike him as unusual. He frowned. "Maybe you're right. Anyway, you get over that stage, don't you?" It was shared experience, not a real question.
"Yes," I said, daring myself to look him in the eye again. It wasn't hard, once I'd done it a time or two.
"You've gotten over it young," he said soberly.
"I'm not so young." I hadn't meant to sound aggressive, but he gazed at me even more attentively. His eyes strayed down my neck, flicked over my breasts--the masculine registering of female presence, automatic, feral. I wished he hadn't betrayed that look; it was impersonal. It made me wonder about his wife. Now, as at Barnett, he wore his wide gold band, so I had to assume he was still married. But his face was gentle when he spoke again. "Your work shows a lot of understanding."
Then he turned away, tugged somehow by the other people around us, and talked with the table in general, so that I didn't find out, at least then, what kind of understanding he had in mind. I concentrated on my food; I couldn't hear in all that noise anyway. After some of this, he turned to me, and there was that quietness between us again, that waiting. "What are you doing now?"
I decided to tell the truth. "Well, working two dull jobs in DC. Going to Philadelphia every three months to see my aging mother. Painting at night."
"Painting at night," he said. "Have you had a show?"
"Not a solo or even a joint one," I said slowly. "I guess I could have created some opportunity--somehow, maybe at school, but the teaching keeps me so busy that I can't think straight about that. Or maybe I don't feel quite ready. I just go on painting whenever I can."
"You should have a show. There's usually a way, with work like yours."
I wished he'd elaborate on "like yours," but I didn't look that gift horse in the mouth, especially since he'd already characterized my one landscape as having "understanding." I told myself not to fall for anything, although I knew from years before that Robert
Oliver did not hand out empty praise, and I knew instinctively that even if he had looked me over, a reflex, he wouldn't use praise to get anywhere with me. He was simply too dedicated to the truth about painting; you could see it in every line of his face and shoulders, hear it in his voice. It was the most reliable thing about him, I realized much later, that unvarnished praise or dismissal; it was, like his glance at my body, impersonal. There was a chilliness to him, a cold eye under his warm-colored skin and smile, a quality I trusted because I trusted it in myself. He could be relied upon to dismiss you with a shrug, to shrug off your work if he didn't think it was good. There was no effort in this, no struggle in him not to compromise for personal reasons. Face-to-face with work, painting, his own or other people's, he was not personal.
Dessert was bowls of fresh strawberries. I went to get a cup of black tea with cream, which I knew would keep me awake, but I felt too excited by the whole setting to think about sleep anyway. Possibly I could stay up and paint. There were studios open all night, not too far from the dormitory stables--garages that had probably once housed the estate's first Model Ts and were now equipped with big skylights. I could stay there and paint, perhaps produce a few more versions of that landscape from the first, unfinished one. And then, shamelessly, I could say to Robert Oliver at breakfast, or on our next hillside, "I'm a little tired. Oh, I painted until three this morning." Or maybe he would be out roaming the dark and would stroll by and see me in the garage window, working hard; he would wander in and touch my shoulder with a smile and tell me that the painting showed "understanding." That was all I wanted--his attention, and briefly, and almost but not quite innocently.
As I finished my tea, Robert was rising from the table, full height, his hips in their worn trousers at the level of my head; he was saying good night to everyone. He probably had more important things to do, like his own work. To my disgust, Frank followed him away from the table, his chiseled profile swiveling this way and that, talking Robert's ear off. At least that would keep Frank from following me instead, pulling his shirt aside a little farther or asking me if I wanted to take a walk in the woods. I felt a twinge of loneliness at this, deserted by not one but two men, and tried to gather my independence around me again, the romance of all by myself. I would go paint after all, not to keep Frank away or to draw Robert Oliver to me, but to paint. I was here to use my time well, to restart my sputtering engines, to savor my precious bit of vacation, damn all men.
That was why Robert did find me in the garage, so late that the other two or three people working here and there in the big musty space had already packed up and left, so late that I was woozy, seeing green instead of blue, putting in some yellow too quickly, scraping it off, telling myself to stop. I had reworked my landscape from the afternoon on a fresh canvas brought from my bed stall, with several differences. I had remembered the daisies in the grass, which I hadn't gotten to in daylight, and put them in on the surface of the hill, trying to make them float, although they sank instead. And there was another difference, too. When Robert came in and shut the side door behind him, I was already so tired of contemplating these changes that I saw him as a manifestation of my vision at dinner, my wish that he would appear here. I'd actually forgotten about him, although he had somehow filled my thoughts at the same time. I had been unaware, so that now I looked at him through blindness.
He stood in front of me, smiling a little, arms crossed. "You're still up. Working on your future show?"
I stood, staring. He was unreal, ringed with haze in the dangling ceiling lights. I thought in spite of myself that he was like an archangel in one of those medieval triptychs, larger than humanity, his hair longish, curly, his head ringed with gold, his huge wings folded out of the way for convenience while he delivered some celestial message. His faded, golden clothes, the dark brightness of his hair, the olive of his eyes, would all go with wings, and if Robert had had wings, they would have been immense. I felt outside the bounds of history and convention, at the rocky edge of a world that was too human to be real, or too real to be actually human: I felt only myself, the painting on my easel, which I no longer wanted him to see, and this big man with curly hair standing six feet away.
"Are you an angel?" I said. Immediately it felt false, silly.
But he scratched under his chin, which was growing dark stubble, and laughed. "Hardly. Did I startle you?"
I shook my head. "You looked radiant for a moment, as if you ought to be in cloth of gold."
He had the grace to appear confused, or perhaps he really was. "I'd make a bad angel by anyone's standards."
I forced myself to laugh. "I must be very tired, then."
"May I see?" He stepped toward my easel rather than exactly toward me. It was too late; I couldn't say no. He had already come around behind me, and I tried not to turn to watch his face, but I couldn't help watching, too. He stood looking at my landscape, and then his profile grew serious. He unfolded his arms, and they dropped to his sides. "Why did you put them in?"
He pointed at the two figures walking along my revised shore, the woman in her long skirts and the little girl beside her.
"I don't know," I faltered. "I liked what you'd done."
"Didn't you think they might belong to me?"
I asked myself whether there was something close to dangerous in his tone; his question was a little bizarre, but I felt mainly my own foolishness, and the foolish tears rising but still hidden under my chagrin. Was he going to actually chastise me? I rallied. "Does anything belong to one artist?"
His face was dark but also reflective, interested in my question. I was a little younger then; I did not understand how people can simply appear to be interested in something other than themselves.
Finally he said, "No, I suppose you're right. I suppose I just feel possessive of the images I've lived with for a long time."
All of a sudden I was back on that campus, so many years before; it was, weirdly, the same conversation, and I was asking him the identity of the woman in his canvases, and he was about to say, "If I just knew who she was!"
Instead, I touched his arm--presumptuously, maybe. "Do you know, I think we talked about this once before."
He frowned. "Did we?"
"Yes, on the lawn at Barnett, when I was a student there and you had exhibited that portrait of a woman in front of a mirror."
"And you are wondering if this is the same woman?"
"Yes, I am wondering that."
The light in the big open studio was harsh and bare; my body hummed with the late hour and the proximity of this strange man who had only increased in attractiveness with the elapsed years. I could hardly believe the fact that he had survived the passing of time in my own life to return to it. In fact, he was frowning at me. "Why do you want to know?"
I hesitated. There were many things I could have said, but in the rawness of that time and place, the unreality that seemed to have no future and no consequences, I said what was least thought-out, closest to my heart. "I have the feeling," I said slowly, "that if I knew why you were still painting the same thing after so many years, then I would know you. I would know who you are."
My words fell deep into the room, and I heard their starkness and thought I should feel embarrassed but didn't. Robert Oliver was frozen there, fixed on me, as if he had been listening all along and wanted to know my reaction to the point he was going to make. But instead of making a point, he stood there, silent--I even felt defiantly tall next to him, tall enough to reach his chin-- and at last instead of speaking he touched my hair with his fingers. He drew a long strand of it over my shoulder and smoothed it with just his fingertips, not really touching me.
I remembered with a jolt that this was Muzzy's gesture; I thought of my mother's hands, now so much older, picking up a lock of my hair when I was a teenager, telling me how glossy and straight and smooth it was, and letting it drop tenderly. It was her gentlest gesture, in fact, a silent apology for all the requirements, the molding against which I'd argued until I'd worn us both to resentment. I stood as still as I could, afraid I might begin to tremble visibly, hoping Robert would not touch me further because that could cause me to shake in front of him. He raised both hands and stroked my hair back, arranging it behind my shoulders, as if he wanted it that way for a portrait. I saw that his face was thoughtful, sad, full of wonder. Then he dropped his hands and stood there for a moment longer, as if he wanted to say something. And then he turned and walked away. His back was big and deliberate, his opening and closing of the door slow, polite; there was no farewell.
When he was out of sight, I cleaned my brushes, put my easel in the corner, turned out the glaring bulbs, and left the building. The night smelled dewy, dense. The stars were still thick -- stars that didn't exist in DC, apparently. In the dark, I put my hands to my hair and pulled it forward so that it fell to my breastbone, then lifted it up and kissed it where his hand had been.