The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  Robert didn't want to give up any of that life we had in New York. I think it was the persuasion of the body that made him undo it, ostensibly for my sake. Men love to make babies, too, although they will tell you they don't feel the way women do. I think he was drawn in by my passion about the whole thing. He didn't really want the green small town or the job at a little college, but I suppose he knew, too, that sooner or later the postgraduate life we'd pieced together would give way to something else. He'd done well already, had a show with a faculty member from his department, sold a bunch of paintings in the Village. His mother,

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  a widow living in New Jersey who still knitted him sweaters and vests and called him Bob -bee in her French accent, had decided he was going to be a great artist after all--she'd actually started sending him some of his inheritance from his father so he could use it to paint.

  I think Robert felt invincible, with that much beginner's luck. It was beginner's talent, as well. Everyone who saw his work seemed to recognize the gift, whether or not they liked his traditionalism. He taught an entry-level class at the school he'd graduated from, and day after day he turned out those early paintings that are now in quite a few collections--they are wonderful, you know. I still think so.

  Just about the time I proposed babies, Robert was working on what he rather seriously called his Degas series--the young girls warming up at the barre at the School of American Ballet, graceful and sexual but not really sexual, stretching their thin legs and arms. He spent hours at the Metropolitan Museum that winter, studying Degas's little ballerinas, because he wanted his to be the same and at the same time different. Each of Robert's canvases contained an anomaly or two -- a huge bird trying to get in at the ballet-studio window behind them, or a gingko tree growing up the wall and reflecting in the endless mirrors. A gallery in Soho sold two of them and asked for more. I was painting, too, three times a week after work, rain or shine--I remember the discipline I had then, the feeling that I might not be as good as Robert but that my work was getting stronger every week. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons we took our easels to Central Park and painted together. We were in love--we made love twice a day on the weekends, so why not make babies? He was caught up by the new way I made love to him, too, I'm sure, since that part of our lives was always extremely important to him, and he was intrigued by the feeling of a seed passing between us, the imminent flowering of our connection.

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  We got married in a chapel on 20th Street. I wanted to go to a justice of the peace, but instead we had a modest Catholic wedding to please Robert's mother. My own mother came from Michigan with my two best friends from high school, and she and Robert's mother liked each other and sat close together during the alien mass, two widows, Robert's mother adding a second child to the "only." My mother-in-law made a sweater for me as a wedding present, which sounds kind of awful, but it was one of my treasures for years--off-white, with a collar like dandelion down. I had loved her from our first meeting. She was a tall, gaunt, cheerful woman who approved of me for no reason I could discern and was convinced that my ten or twelve words of her native language could be transformed into fluency if I worked hard enough. Robert's father, a program officer of the Marshall Plan, had removed her from a postwar Paris she didn't appear sorry to have left. She had never been back, and her entire life revolved around the nursing job for which she'd trained in the United States, and around her prodigy son.

  Robert seemed to me unchanged by and during the ceremony, the act of marriage, uncomplicatedly happy to be there with me, oblivious to wearing a suit, the one tie he owned crooked on his shirt front, paint under his nails. He had forgotten to get a haircut, which I'd particularly wanted him to do before we stood up in front of a Catholic priest and my mother, but at least he didn't lose the ring. Watching him as we said the unfamiliar vows, I felt he was as he'd always been--himself, eternally himself, that he could just as well have been standing with me and our friends at our favorite bar, having another beer and debating problems of perspective. And I was disappointed. I had wanted him to stand up next to me changed--transformed, even, by the opening note of this new era of our lives.

  After the ceremony, we went to a restaurant in the heart of the Village and met our circle there--they looked unusually cleaned

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  up, and some of the women were wearing high heels. My brother and sister were there, too, from out West. Everyone acted a little formal, and our friends shook hands with our mothers or even kissed them. Once some wine had gone around, Robert's classmates started making bawdy toasts, which worried me. But rather than being shocked, our mothers sat side by side, their cheeks flushed, laughing like teenage girls. I hadn't seen my mother so happy in a long time. I felt a little better then.

  Robert did not trouble himself to apply for jobs elsewhere until I'd asked him for several months to do so--now I wanted us to find that cozy town with the houses we might someday be able to afford. In fact, he didn't really apply at all. A job at Greenhill came to him through one of his instructors because he happened to drop by that instructor's office to ask him to go out for an impromptu lunch, and at lunch the instructor happened to think about a job he'd just heard of, for which he could recommend Robert--he, the instructor, had an old friend, a sculptor and ceramist, who taught at Greenhill. It was a great place for an artist, he told Robert at their lunch: North Carolina was full of artists living the real, pure life, just doing their art, and this Greenhill College had ties to the old Black Mountain College because a few of Josef Albers's students had left Black Mountain when the place dissolved and founded an art department at Greenhill--it would be just right, and Robert could paint. Maybe I could, too, come to think of it, and the climate was good, and--well, he would send a letter on Robert's behalf.

  In fact, Robert gets most of the good things in his life this way, by luck, and his luck is usually good. The police officer forgives his speeding and reduces the fine to $25 from $120. He's late turning in a grant proposal and he gets the grant, plus an extra grant for equipment. People love to do things for him because he seems so happy even without their help, so oblivious to his own needs and to their wish to help him. I've never understood this. I used to

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  think he was kind of cheating, tricking people without meaning to, but now I sometimes think that life is simply compensating for what's missing in him.

  I was pregnant by the time we moved to Greenhill. I pointed out to Robert that all the great loves of my life began with vomiting. In fact, I could hardly think about anything else. I packed everything in our Village apartment and gave away a lot of stuff to the friends who were staying (staying behind, I thought pityingly) in our old life there. Robert had said he would organize a bunch of them to help us load up the truck we'd rented, but he forgot, or they forgot, and in the end we hired a couple of teenagers right off the street to carry everything down from our walk-up. I'd done the packing myself, because he'd had a lot of last-minute something or other to do at school, in his studio. When the apartment was bare and we'd cleaned it so that the landlord wouldn't keep our deposit, Robert drove the truck over to his studio and dragged down boxes of painting supplies and armloads of canvases. He hadn't packed a single piece of his own clothing, a single pot or pan, I realized later--only those essential items from his studio. I went along to sit in the truck and move it if the police or the meter maid showed up.

  As I sat there, with the August sun beating down on the steering wheel, I stroked my belly, which was swollen already, not with the peanut-sized baby in the clinic's wall charts but with my eating and throwing up, my new slackness and softness, my not caring to hold it all in. When I slid my hand over the spot, I felt a melting desire for the person growing inside, for the life ahead of us. It was not a feeling I'd ever had before--it was secret even from Robert, mainly because I wouldn't have been able to explain it even to him. When he came down with the last load of shabby boxes, the last easel, I glanced out the
truck window at him and

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  saw that he was cheerful and full of energy and selfhood that had nothing to do with me. He wasn't thinking about anything except getting those parts of his old life to fit into a pile with our hopeless furniture in the back. At that moment, more than at any other, I felt the beginning of a mistake, and it was as if my child had been whispering it to me: Will he take care of us?

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  Mon cher oncle:

  Please do not take amiss my not answering you sooner; your brother, your nephew, and two of the servants have had bad colds--most of the household, in short -- and I have been very much occupied as a result. There is nothing serious to worry about, really, or I should have written you much sooner. Everyone is on the mend, and your brother has begun to take his constitutional in the Bois again with his manservant. I am sure Yves will go with him today; he, like you, always has Papa's health at heart. We have long since finished the new book you sent, and I am reading Thackeray to myself and also aloud to Papa. I cannot send much news now, as I am very busy, but I think of you fondly--

  Béatrice de Clerval

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  CHAPTER 20 Kate

  We stopped for lunch a few miles north of DC, pulling off at a rest area and stretching our legs. I was starting to get foot cramps just from thinking about them. The rest area had picnic tables and a grove of oaks--Robert checked the ground for dog piles and then lay down and went to sleep. He'd been out late, packing his studio, and then up late, apparently drawing something and drinking cognac, which I'd smelled on him when he'd tumbled into the not-yet-packed sheets of our bed. I should be driving, I thought, in case he was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel.

  I felt actively annoyed--I was pregnant, after all, and had he helped with any of the preparations, even the modest one of getting enough sleep before a long, tough trip? I stretched out next to him in the grass without touching him. I'd be too tired to drive at the end of the day, but if he slept now he might be able to take over again for me when I faded. He wore an old yellow shirt with the button-down collar unbuttoned and curling up unevenly on the right side--probably one of his thrift-store purchases, something that had once been fine fabric and was now worn to a pleasant softness. There was a piece of paper tucked in his shirt pocket, and lying there with nothing else to do, yet not wanting to wake him, I carefully reached over and pulled it out. It would be a drawing, of course, and it was. I unfolded it--skillful, heavy pencil, a sketch of a woman's face.

  I knew immediately that I'd never seen her before. I knew the friends he'd used as models in the Village, and the baby ballerinas

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  whose parents had signed forms saying that Robert could draw or paint them, and I knew the improvisations of his brain. This woman was a stranger to me, but Robert understood her well--that thought leapt at me from the page. She glanced up at me as she would have at Robert, under his hand--with recognition, her eyes luminous, her look serious and loving. I could feel his artist's gaze on her. His talent and her face were indistinguishable from each other, and yet she was a real woman, someone with delicately shaped nose and cheeks, the chin a little too square, the hair dark, rumpled and curly like Robert's own, the mouth about to smile but the eyes intense. Those eyes burned from the page--they were large and shining and without any attempt at self-disguise. It was the face of a woman in love. I felt myself falling for her. She was a person as likely to reach out and touch your cheek without warning as to speak.

  I had always been certain of Robert's devotion to me, as much because of his obliviousness to his surroundings as because of any sort of innate responsibility on his part. Studying this face, sketched with love, I felt myself jealous, huge with jealousy and yet small, demeaned by my own insistence that Robert was mine. He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self. Who was she, this nobody? Had he met her at school? Was she one of his students, or a young colleague? Or had he simply been copying some other drawing, someone else's work? The face was not youthful, actually--it said instead that age was not a question once the question of beauty had been answered so fully. Was she actually older than Robert, who was older than I was, perhaps a model about whom he'd had some special feeling of kinship but whom he'd never touched, so that if I accused him of doing that I would only be belittling myself? Or had he touched her as well as sketched her and thought I wouldn't understand, because I was less of an artist?

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  Then I realized with a pang of anger that I hadn't picked up a brush or pencil in the three months since I'd become pregnant and since I'd starting packing and cleaning up our physical, practical lives. I hadn't missed it, which was worse. The last months of my job had been frantic, and my home life filled to exhaustion with planning and doing. Had Robert been out drawing this beauty while I was busy arranging everything? When and where had he met her? I sat in the neatly mown rest-area grass, feeling sticks and ants through my thin dress, the soothing shade from the oaks over my head and shoulders, and I asked myself over and over what I should do.

  Finally the answer came to me. I didn't want to do anything. If I thought hard enough, I might be able to convince myself that she was a being from his imagination, since he occasionally drew from that as well. If I asked Robert leading questions, I would make myself less desirable in his eyes. It would make me the pregnant, pestering, paranoid wife, especially if the woman meant nothing, or maybe I would find out something I didn't want to know about, just didn't want to know, didn't want wrecking our new lives.

  If she was in New York, we were leaving her already, and if Robert went back there for any reason, I would go with him. I folded the lovely face again and tucked her back into Robert's pocket. He slept so deeply that you could shake him or speak to him for long minutes with no result, so I wasn't afraid of waking him.

  The drive into North Carolina the next day was spectacular--I was at the wheel and I shouted with happiness, then leaned over and woke Robert. We came in on the north side of Greenhill, over a long pass in the Blue Ridge, and headed east on a smaller highway toward Greenhill College. The college is actually in the town of Shady Creek, in a range called the Craggies. Robert had

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  passed through the region on vacation with his parents long ago but remembered very little, and I had never been this far south. He said he wanted to drive the rest of the way, and we traded places. It was early afternoon, and the countryside seemed asleep in the sun, with its big, old farmhouses and river-valley fields and spreading trees, the haze of ridges in every distance, the sudden roar of a streambed under rhododendron as we climbed onto a back road. The air that came into the sweltering cab was cool, cooled as if from a cave or a refrigerator--it trembled on our faces and caressed our hands.

  Robert slowed at a turn, leaned out his window, and pointed to a carved sign: greenhill college, founded as craggy farm school in 1889. I snapped a picture with the camera my mother had given me before I moved to New York. The sign was framed with gray fieldstones, and it sat in a meadow of grasses and ferns with dark bushes just beyond, a trail leading into woods. It was, I thought, as if we'd been invited into a rustic paradise--I expected to see Daniel Boone or someone like that walk out of the woods with his gun and his dog. It was hard for me to believe that we'd been in New York City the day before, or even that New York existed. I tried to picture our friends walking home from work or waiting in the overheated subway, the constant screech of traffic, the voices in the air. That was all gone. Robert pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the truck, and we got out without speaking. He walked over to the hand-carved sign with its carefully painted letters--made by art students? I took a picture of him leaning against it with his arms crossed in triumph, a hillbilly already. The truck ticked and steamed in the dust. "We can still turn around and go back,
" I said mischievously, to make him laugh.

  He did laugh. "To Manhattan? Are you kidding?"

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  Cher oncle et ami:

  Please don't think that because I haven't written I have forgotten you! Your notes are very sweet and bring us all joy, and I treasure the ones you sent to me--yes, I am quite well. Yves will be in Provence for two weeks, which means many preparations in the household. The Ministry is sending him to create a plan for the post office they will give over to him next year. Papa is quite anxious about Yves's departure and says we must find a way to get the government to excuse those with blind fathers from traveling jar away. He tells us that Yves is his walking stick and I am his eyes. Perhaps you will assume this is some sort of burden, but please do not think so for an instant -- never has any young woman had a kinder father-in-law than I, as I well know. I fear he will languish without Yves, even for this relatively short time, and I do not dare go to see my sister while Yves is gone. Perhaps you will come cheer us some evening -- in fact, Papa will insist, I'm sure! In the meantime, thank you also for the brushes you sent me in your package. They are the finest I have seen, and Yves is pleased to think I'll have something new to work with while he's away. My portrait of little Anne is done, and so are two garden scenes showing the approach of winter, but I can't seem to begin anything new. Your brushes will be my inspiration. The modern natural style of landscape pleases me immensely, perhaps more than it does you, and I try to capture it, although of course one can't do much at this season.

  In the meantime, warmest greetings from your affectionate

  Béatrice de Clerval

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  CHAPTER 21 Marlow