The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  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 "É" 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, "Étretat," but I would look it up later anyway.

  My search for paper had given me another idea: pulling the

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  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, "Étretat," 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?

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  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.

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  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,

  Béatrice de Clerval

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  CHAPTER 18 Marlow

  After lunch, which was on the whole silent (but companionably so, I thought), Kate told me she would have to get to work soon, and I took the hint and left, although only after we'd agreed to meet again the next morning. She closed the big front door behind me, but when I turned around on the front walk, she was still gazing out through the glass. She smiled at me, then ducked her head as if regretting the smile, waved once, and vanished before I could even wave in return. Her brick walk was bright with rain, and I picked my way carefully back to the gravel drive. I touched my breast pocket as I got into the car, checking the crinkling sheet there.

  I hadn't felt so sad in a long time, somehow. My patients, when they saw me or when I saw them, were surrounded by the uniform setting of my office or the doggedly cheerful rooms at Goldengrove. Now I had talked with a woman who was alone, alone and maybe depressed enough so that she could reasonably have come to my practice herself as a patient, but instead I'd seen her surrounded by her own life, the enormous holly near the front door, the garden beds with her tulips blooming in them, the furniture her grandmother had left her, the smell of salmon and dill in her kitchen, the ruins of her husband's life in evidence behind her. She had still been able to smile in my direction.

  I drove back on the springtime roads of her neighborhood, the woods and glimpses of interesting houses, feeling my way along the route I'd come. I pictured Kate putting on a canvas jacket and getting her car keys off a hook, locking the door behind her. I

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  thought about how she must look bending to kiss her children in their beds at night, her small waist flexible under her blue clothes. The children would both be blond, like her, or one would be pale-haired and the other crowned with Robert's heavy dark locks--but here my mind drew back. She would kiss them every time she saw them again, even after a short absence. That I was sure of. I wondered how Robert could bear to be away from these three exquisite people he had made his own. But what did I know? Maybe he couldn't bear it, actually. Or maybe he had forgotten how exquisite they were. I had never had a wife or a child, or two children, or a large old house with a living room full of sunlight. I saw my own hand taking the plates from Kate's -- she wore no rings, just a thin gold chain on one wrist. What did I know?

  At the Hadleys', I again opened all the windows, then put the scrap of letter from Robert's office on the bureau, lay down on the ugly twin bed, and fell into a doze. At one point, I actually slept for a few minutes. Deep down in my dream was Robert Oliver, telling me about his life with his wife, but I couldn't hear a word and I kept asking him to speak more clearly. There was something else buried in that dream, a memory: Étretat, the name of a coastal town in
France--where, exactly?--the scene of Monet's famous cliff paintings, those iconic arches, blue-and-green water, green-and-purple rock.

  Finally I got up, unrested, and put on an old shirt. I took my current reading, a biography of Newton, and drove down to the town to hunt for dinner. I found several good restaurants; in one of them, which had tiny white lights in all the windows as if it were Christmas, I had a plate of potato pancakes with various garnishes. The woman sitting at the bar smiled at me and recrossed lovely legs, and the man who joined her a few minutes later looked like a New York businessman. A strange little town, I thought, liking it even more as my Pinot Noir took effect.

  Walking around the streets after dinner, I wondered if I might encounter Kate, and if so what I would say to her, how she would

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  react if we ran into each other after this morning's conversation, then remembered that she would surely be at home with her children. I pictured myself driving back into her neighborhood to peer through those huge windows. They would be softly lit, the bushes around them already dark, the roof floating above. Inside, a box of gems: Kate playing with two beautiful children, her hair shining under the lamp. Or I would see her at the kitchen window where she'd made me salmon; she would be washing dishes after the children were in bed, reveling in the silence. I imagined in a rush her hearing me among the bushes, calling the local police, the handcuffs, the fruitless explanations, her anger, my disgrace.

  I stopped to compose myself for a moment in front of a boutique window full of baskets and what appeared to be handwoven shawls. As I stood there, I began to long for home. What on earth, after all, was I doing here? It was lonely in this pretty town; at home, I was used to being alone. I kept seeing the words in pencil on Robert's wall. Why had he filled his library with the Impressionists? I made myself walk a little farther, pretending that I hadn't given up on the evening already. Soon I would go home--to the Hadleys', in other words -- and lie in bed reading about Newton, who was comfortably from another world, an era without modern psychiatry. Tragically without it, of course. Before Monet, before Picasso, before antibiotics, before my own life. Comfortably dead Newton would keep me better company than these twilit streets, with their restored buildings, café tables, young couples draped in scarves and earrings who went by holding hands in a cloud of musky scent. It was already a long time since I'd been young, and I didn't know how the distance had crept over me, or when.

  At the end of the block, the boutiques gave way to a parking lot and then, rather surprisingly, to a festive-looking club that turned out to be a topless bar. Despite the presence of a bouncer at the door, the place had none of the sordid appearance of such operations in Washington. Not that I had been in one in many decades, and then only once, in college, but I had driven past them

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  here and there and noted, at least, their existence. I hesitated for a moment. The man at the door was neatly dressed, gentlemanly, as if even the strip shows in this town had been gentrified. He turned toward me with a friendly, expectant, understanding smile, like a financial consultant at a bank. Was he inviting me in? Did I want to apply for a mortgage?

  I stood there wondering if I should indeed go in, because I couldn't think why I shouldn't. I remembered, too, the one really beautiful model from my classes at the Art League School at home--remote, balanced nude before the group, her mind far away and probably going over her college homework or her next dental appointment, her breasts lifted delicately in front of her, her professionalism, the slight quiver that was the only betrayal of her need to move at all during the long, long pose.

  "No, thank you," I said to the fellow at the door, but my voice seemed muffled by age and embarrassment. He hadn't invited me in, he hadn't handed me any kind of flyer, so why was I speaking to him? I tucked the biography firmly under my arm and walked on, then turned the next corner so that I wouldn't have to pass him again--him and his festive doorway. Had he long ago grown used to the sights and sounds within, so that it was no chore to him to have to sit outside in the gathering dark, no hardship to miss it all? Did his mind wander away at last, bored even by what was supposed to excite?

  At the Hadleys' quiet house, I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded?

  Standing on Kate's porch the next morning, I felt not increased embarrassment but a kind of familiarity, an actual ease, as if I'd

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  arrived to see an old friend or as if I were an old friend myself, stepping up to ring the bell. She answered promptly, and again it was like walking onto the set of a play, except that I'd seen the show once now and knew where all the props would be. Today the sun was fully out, streaming through the room. There were only two other changes: one, a great bowl of floating blooms, pink and white, arranged with care on the table by the windows; and Kate herself, who wore a blouse of saffron cotton over her jeans, with the same tourmaline jewelry. Yesterday I had thought her eyes were blue; now they were turquoise, wide and clear. She smiled, but it was a reserved, polite smile, the acknowledgment of a problem, and the problem was me, my renewed presence in her house, my need to ask her more questions about the husband who no longer lived here.

  When she'd finished serving our coffee, she sat down on the opposite sofa. "I think we should plan to kind of wrap this up today," she said mildly, as if she'd studied how to say it without hurting my feelings or revealing her own.

  "Yes, of course," I said, to show I could take a hint with alacrity. "Of course. You've been very hospitable already. Besides, I should get back to Washington tomorrow night, if possible."

  "Then you won't be going out to the college?" She balanced her cup on her neat, small knee, as if to show me how it could be done. Her tone was courteous, conversational. I wondered if I would get less from her today, not more.

  "Do you think I should? What would I find there?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "I'm sure there are still plenty of people there who knew him, but I wouldn't feel comfortable putting you in touch with them myself. And I doubt he showed his moods much at school. But his greatest painting is there. It should be in a first-class museum--he should have sold it well. I'm not the only one who considers it his greatest, although I've never really liked it."

  "Why not?"

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  "Go see it for yourself."

  I sat considering her elegant, small presence across the room. I felt that I needed to know how Robert's illness had first manifested itself, and we were running out of time. And I needed, or at least wanted, to know who his dark-haired muse was. "Would you like to go on with your story from yesterday?" I asked her as gently as I could. If it didn't lead soon enough to information about the onset of his problems and his subsequent treatment, I could steer her carefully to those more important matters when she was warmed up. I nodded without speaking, although she hadn't said anything more yet. Outside a cardinal landed in the sunlight; a branch swayed.

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  CHAPTER 19 Kate

  Our lives in New York went on and on, or went by in a flash. We lived three different places in five years--first at my apartment in Brooklyn for a while, and after that in an unbelievably small room on West 72nd near Broadway, a closet with a kitchen counter that folded down out of a smaller closet, and finally on the stifling top floor of a building in the Village. I loved all those places, their Laundromats and grocery stores and even their local homeless people--everything, everything that became familiar about them.

  And then one day I woke up and thought, I want to get married. I want to have a baby. It was really almost as simple as that--one evening I went to bed young and free, carefree, disdainful of other people's conventional lives, and the next morning by six o'clock, when I got up to
take my shower and dress for my editing job of those years, I had become a different person. Or maybe the thought came to me between drying my hair and pulling on my skirt-- I want to get married to Robert and have a ring on my finger and a baby, and the baby will have Robert's curly hair and my small hands and feet, and life will be better than it's ever been before. It was as if that vision was suddenly so real to me that all I had to do was cover the last bit of ground and make it reality itself and then I would be completely happy. It didn't occur to me just to get pregnant and have a little free-love baby--as my mother might have half humorously said--in Manhattan. I associated babies with marriage, marriage with the long-term, children growing up on

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  tricycles and green lawns--after all, that's what I'd known in my own childhood. I wanted to be like my mother, bending over to put our socks on and tie our little dark-red oxfords. I even wanted to wear the dresses of her youth, which required squatting down with your legs folded neatly together to one side. I wanted a tree with a swing in the backyard.

  And just as it wouldn't have occurred to me to produce babies without wearing a wedding ring first, it never occurred to me that I could raise a child in the overwhelming city I had come to love. It's hard to explain these things, because I'd been so sure I wanted nothing but this life of Manhattan and painting and meeting our friends after work at cafés and talking about painting and watching Robert paint in his blue oxford-cloth boxers at a friend's studio late at night while I drew on my lapboard, and then getting up in the morning, yawning before work, waking up as I walked under the stunted trees to the subway. That was my reality, and these curly-haired small people who didn't even exist yet, didn't even have the right to my daydreams, told me to leave it all. And, years later, they are the one thing--our bringing them into existence, despite all the grief, the fear, despite losing Robert, despite the overpopulation of this poor planet and the guilt I feel about having added to it--my children are the one thing I have never regretted.