The Swan Thieves

Chapter 68 Mary

The third day was the surprising one. I could never describe all of the five hundred days I more or less spent with Robert Oliver, but the first days of loving someone are vivid; you remember them in detail because they represent all the others. They even explain why a particular love doesn't work out.
On the third morning of the conference, I found myself eating breakfast at the same table as a couple of women faculty members who seemed not to notice my presence at the other end, which made it fortunate that I'd brought my book. One of them was a woman of about sixty whom I vaguely recognized as a teacher of printmaking at the retreat, and the other was perhaps forty-five, a painting instructor with short bleached hair who began by declaring that she wasn't finding the caliber of the painting students as high as last year's. Well, I'll be reading my book, then, ma'am, I thought. My eggs were runny, not the way I like them.
"I'm not sure why that is." She took a big swallow of coffee, and the other woman nodded. "I hope the great Robert Oliver isn't disappointed, that's all."
"I'm sure he'll survive. He teaches at a small college now, right?"
"Well, that's true--I think it's Greenhill, in North Carolina. In all fairness, a very good department, but hardly what he would find at a real school. I mean, at an art program."
"His students seem to like him," observed the printmaker mildly; she clearly hadn't associated the egg-picking reader at her own table with Robert's group. I kept my head down. It's not that other people's idiocy makes me shy; it simply makes me want to walk away.
"Of course they do." The bleached woman pushed her coffee cup around. "He's made the cover of ARTnews, he has work all over the place, and he's hip enough not to care and to go on teaching in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't hurt that he's six two and looks like Jupiter."
Poseidon, in fact, I corrected silently, cutting my bacon. Or Neptune. You have no idea.
"His female students run after him constantly, I'm sure," said the printmaker.
"Naturally." Her companion seemed pleased by this opening. "And you hear things, but who knows what's true. He seems to me kind of oblivious, which is refreshing. Or he might be one of those men who just really don't notice anyone but themselves in the end. I think he has a youngish family, too. But you never know. The older I get, the more I think men in their forties are a complete mystery, usually an unpleasant one."
I wondered what age she liked better. I could, for example, introduce her to the enterprising Frank.
The printmaker sighed. "I know. I was married for twenty-one years-- was --and I still don't think I understood anything about my ex-husband."
"Do you want to take some extra coffee with you?" asked the spiky woman, and they left together without glancing my way. I noticed as they walked off how graceful the younger woman was--lovely, actually, dressed in svelte black with a red belt, trimmer at forty-five than most women were at twenty. Maybe she would take up the Robert Oliver challenge herself, and they could compare their coverage in ARTnews. Except that Robert would never be interested in that kind of competition, I decided; he would scratch his head and fold his arms and think about something else. I wondered if my picture of him as incorruptible was correct; was he simply oblivious, as the woman had said? He hadn't been quite oblivious to me two nights before, and yet nothing much had happened between us. I drank my tea in a rush and went back to the stables to get my gear. If he wasn't oblivious, it proved that I was probably unmemorable.
Robert collected us near the vans again, but this time he said we would walk instead of driving. To my surprise he led us out the path through the woods that I'd taken to the water the first day, and we set up our easels on the rocky beach where I'd seen him first dive into the cold tide and then emerge from it. He smiled around the group, not excluding me, and gave us some directions about the angle of the light and the way we could expect it to change. We would do one canvas for morning, right here, take a lunch break back at the camp, and then do a second canvas for afternoon. That clinched it for me; if he could return to this spot and teach a landscape class here, he was truly oblivious, and to me in particular. I felt a kind of sad relief; I had been not only wrong, unethical, but also silly to believe he'd felt what I had. I could have cried for a moment, watching Robert move among his students, giving us a hint here and there about positioning our easels; at the same time, I felt my freedom begin to flood back, the romance of myself, the loneliness. I had been right to value that, and right to laugh Frank out of my room as well.
I tied back my hair and set up facing the longest promontory into the ocean, where I could catch a big stand of firs with their roots on Atlantic rock. I knew right away that this would be a good canvas, a good morning; my hand moved easily through sketching the forms and my eyes were immediately filled with the underlying grays, browns, the green of firs that appeared black in the distance. Even Robert's presence, his moving off to set his own easel in plain sight, his bending and stooping in his yellow cotton shirt--none of that could interrupt me for very long. I painted hard until we broke for a snack, and when I looked up from cleaning my brushes, Robert was smiling at me from the middle of the group in an ordinary way that confirmed my conclusions. I began to speak to him, to say something about the view and its challenges, but he had already turned to talk with someone else.
We painted until lunchtime, and began again at one o'clock with fresh canvases. My morning's picture, propped against a tree to dry, had pleased me more than any I'd done in months; I promised myself I'd come back to finish it at the right time of day, maybe the morning everyone left the conference, which was only two more days away. I wished Robert had come over to see it, but he hadn't checked anyone's paintings today. In the afternoon, we worked in our silent spread, planting easels here and there; Robert went off to the edge of the woods with his, but he returned as the light began to deepen into late afternoon, talked with us a little about the view, and took us back to camp. I was less pleased with my second canvas, but he walked by and praised it a little, commented on everyone equally, then brought us together for a final critique. It had been a good couple of sessions, a pleasant workmanlike day, I thought, and I looked forward to the evening, to making myself drink a beer with a fellow painter or two, then going off to bed to sleep soundly.