The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  "I don't either," he said, turning his uncomplicated smile on me. "Except the director, and he's an incredible bore."

  I needed to flee, to be alone for a few minutes, not to have to walk into a public meal beside a man I'd just seen coming out of the ocean naked--he seemed already to have forgotten this incident, as if it had happened as long ago as our Visual Understanding class. "I've got to grab some things from my room," I told him.

  "See you in class." He seemed about to pat me on the shoulder or to slap me on the back, man-to-man, then apparently thought better of it and let me go. I walked slowly to the stables and shut myself in my whitewashed stall for a few minutes. I sat still, feeling the blessing of the locked door. Huddled there, I remembered how, on a hard-earned trip to Florence three years before, my first and only time in Italy, I'd gone to the monastery of San Francesco and seen the Fra Angelico murals in the former cells of the monks, now empty. There were tourists in the halls, and modern monks on guard here and there, but I had waited until no one was looking, gone into a small white cell, and illegally closed the door. I'd stood there, finally alone, guilty but determined. The tiny room was bare except for a Fra Angelico angel, radiant gold and pink

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  and green on one wall, its wings folded behind it, and sunlight coming in through the grated window. I had understood even then that the monk who had once lived alone in that space, which was otherwise like a prison, had wanted nothing else, nothing but to be there -- nothing, not even his God.

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  CHAPTER 60 Marlow

  Outside the Metropolitan Museum, I walked up a block and into the edge of Central Park. It was glorious there, green and full of blooming flower beds, as I'd hoped it would be. I found a clean bench and took out my cell phone, dialed the number I hadn't called for a couple of weeks. It was Saturday afternoon; where would she be on a Saturday? I actually knew nothing about her current life, except that I was trespassing on it.

  She answered after the second ring, and I could hear sounds in the background, a restaurant, some public place. "Hello?" she said, and I remembered the firmness of her voice, the spare look of her long hands.

  "Mary," I said. "It's Andrew Marlow."

  It took Mary about five hours to reach me in Washington Square; she arrived in time for dinner, which we ate together in the restaurant at my hotel. She was famished after her unplanned bus ride--she had taken the bus rather than the train because it was cheaper, I was sure, although she didn't say that. As she ate, she told me about her comic struggles to obtain the last ticket for that departure. I'd been surprised by her insistence on coming up at all. Her face was flushed with the excitement of having done something spontaneous, her long hair caught back at the sides with little clips; she wore a thin turquoise sweater and heavy ropes of black beads around her throat.

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  I tried not to mind that the exquisite color in her face was for Robert Oliver, for the relief or possibly even the pleasure of uncovering something about his life that would explain his defection and justify her previous devotion to him. Her eyes were blue this time--I thought of Kate--because of the sweater. Apparently they changed like the ocean; they depended on the sky, the weather. She ate like a polite wolf, using her knife and fork with grace and putting away an enormous plate of chicken and couscous. At her bidding, I described in greater detail Béatrice de Clerval's portrait and the loan that must have removed it just after Robert had seen it.

  "Odd that he should have remembered it well enough from one or two viewings to paint her for years afterward, though," I added. My elbows were already on the table, and I'd ordered coffee and dessert for both of us, over her protestations.

  "Oh, he didn't." She laid her knife and fork to rest together on the plate.

  "Didn't remember? But he painted her so accurately that I recognized her on sight."

  "No--he didn't have to remember. He had her portrait in a book."

  I put my hands in my lap. "You knew about this."

  She didn't flinch. "Yes. I'm sorry. I was planning to tell you, when I got to that part of the story. I've actually written it down for you already. But I didn't know about the painting at the museum. The book didn't say where the painting was; in fact, I assumed it must be in France. And I was going to tell you about it. I brought you the rest of my reminiscences, or whatever you want to call them. It's taken me time to write them all down, and then I sat on it all for a while." There was no apology in her tone. "He had piles of books by his sofa while he was living with me."

  "Kate described the same thing--I mean about the piles of books. I don't think she ever saw that portrait in one of them,

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  though, or she would have told me." Then I realized that I'd reported on Kate directly to Mary for the first time. I told myself silently not to do it again.

  Mary raised her eyebrows. "I can imagine what Kate lived with. I have imagined it, many times."

  "She lived with Robert," I pointed out.

  "Yes, exactly." The brightness was gone now, or had slipped behind a cloud, and she fiddled with her wineglass.

  "I'll take you tomorrow to see the painting," I added, to cheer her.

  "Take me?" She smiled. "Don't you think I know where the Met is?"

  "Of course." I had forgotten for a moment that she was young enough to offend. "I mean that we can go look at it together."

  "I'd like that. That's what I came for."

  "Only for that?" I immediately regretted it; I hadn't meant to sound arch or flirtatious. My conversation with my father came back to me, unbidden: Recently abandoned women can be complicated/And she's not only complicated but independent, unusual, beautiful I Of course.

  "You know, I assumed that portrait was what took him to France without me, that it was there and he'd gone to see it again."

  I kept my face calm. "He went to France? While he was with you?"

  "Yes. He got on a plane and went to another country without telling me. He never explained why he'd kept it a secret." Her face was tight, and she drew her hair back from it with both hands. "I told him I was angry that he'd spent money on a trip alone when he hadn't seemed to have enough to help much with my rent or food, but I was really angrier about the fact that he'd kept it secret from me. That made me realize that he was treating me just as he had treated Kate, being secretive. And it was as if it had never occurred to him to invite me along either. Our biggest fight was about that, although we pretended it was about painting, and

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  when he came back from his trip, we lasted for only a few days and then he moved out."

  There were tears gathering in Mary's eyes now, the first I'd seen since the night she'd cried on my sofa. So help me, if I'd been outside Robert's door at that moment, I would have walked in and punched him instead of sitting down in the armchair. She wiped her eyes. Neither of us had drawn breath in a couple of minutes, I think. "Mary, may I ask--did you tell him to leave? Or did he walk out on you?"

  "I told him to leave. I was afraid that if I didn't, he might do it on his own, and then I would lose the rest of my self-respect as well."

  I had waited a long time to ask these questions. "Did you know that Robert had a package of old letters on him when he attacked that painting? Letters between Béatrice de Clerval and Olivier Vignot, who painted the portrait?"

  She sat frozen for a moment, then nodded. "I didn't know they were also from Olivier Vignot."

  "You saw the letters?"

  "Yes, a little. I'll tell you more later."

  I had to leave it there. She was looking directly into my eyes; her face was clear, devoid of hatred. I thought that perhaps what I was seeing, naked in front of me, was what her love for Robert had represented to her. I'd never known anyone as striking as this girl, who stared obliquely at the paint on a museum canvas, ate like a well-bred man, and stroked her hair back like a nymph. The one exception might have been a woman I knew only from old letters and from paintings--Olivier Vignot's and R
obert Oliver's. But I could understand why Robert might have loved the living woman in the midst of loving the dead one, to the best of his ability.

  I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for the pain her words encompassed, but I didn't know how to say it without sounding patronizing, so I concentrated instead on sitting there, regarding her as gently as I could. Besides, I knew from the way she was

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  finishing her coffee and rummaging for her jacket that our meal was over. But there was a last problem for this evening, and I had to think how to address it. "I've checked at the front desk, and they have extra rooms available. I'd be happy--"

  "No, no." She was putting a couple of bills under her plate, sliding out of the booth already. "I have a friend on Twenty-eighth who's expecting me already--I called her earlier. I'll come by, say, nine o'clock tomorrow morning."

  "Yes, please do. We can have coffee and go uptown."

  "Perfect. And these are for you." She thrust a hand into her bag and gave me a thick envelope--hard and bulky this time, as if it contained a book as well as papers.

  She had herself gathered together now, and I hastened to my feet. She was hard to keep up with, this young woman. I would have called her prickly if she hadn't been so graceful, or if she weren't smiling a little now. To my surprise, she put one hand on my arm to steady herself, then reached over to kiss me on the cheek; she was almost my height. Her lips were warm and soft.

  When I reached my room, it was still early; I had the evening ahead of me. I'd thought about getting in touch with my one old friend in the city--Alan Glickman, a high-school buddy with whom I'd managed to keep up, mostly thanks to our calling each other a couple of times a year. I enjoyed his keen sense of humor, but I hadn't managed even to phone him ahead, and he was probably already busy. Besides, Mary's package rested on the edge of the bed. Walking out and leaving it here for even a few hours would be like leaving a person behind.

  I sat down and opened it and drew out the pile of typed sheets and a thin paperback filled with color reproductions. I lay down across the bed with Mary's pages. The door was locked and the shades were drawn, but I felt the room full of a presence, a longing through which I could have passed my hand.

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  CHAPTER 6 1 Mary

  Frank cornered me at breakfast. "Ready?" he said, balancing a tray that held two bowls of cornflakes, a plate of eggs and bacon, and three glasses of orange juice. We were serving ourselves this morning--democracy. I had found a sunny corner and was on my second cup of coffee and a fried egg, and Robert Oliver was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he didn't eat breakfast. "Ready for what?" I said.

  "For the first day." He put his tray down without asking if I wanted company.

  "Help yourself," I said. "I was just wishing for some companionship in this beautiful, lonely spot."

  He smiled, apparently pleased with my feistiness; why had I thought sarcasm would work? His hair was crafted into a couple of spiky tufts at the front, and he wore graying jeans and a sweatshirt and frayed basketball sneakers, a red-and-blue bead necklace. He bent from a lithe waist and flexed his shoulders over the cornflakes. He was perfect in his immature way, and he knew it. I pictured him at sixty-five, gaunt and stringy-armed, with bunions and probably a wrinkled tattoo somewhere.

  "The first day is going to be long," he said. "That's why I asked if you're ready for this. I hear Oliver's going to work us out there for hours and hours. He's intense."

  I tried to get back to my coffee. "It's a landscape-painting class, not football practice."

  "Oh, I don't know." Frank was mashing his way through his breakfast. "I've heard about this guy. He never stops. He made

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  his name as a portrait painter, but he's really into landscapes right now. He's outdoors all day long, like an animal."

  "Or like Monet," I said, and immediately regretted it. Frank was looking away from me as if I'd begun picking my nose.

  "Monet?" he murmured, and I heard the disdain, the puzzlement, through his mouthful of breakfast. We finished our eggs in not-quite-friendly silence.

  The hillside where Robert Oliver set us our first landscape exercise commanded a view of ocean and rocky islands; it was part of a state park, and I wondered how he'd known to come exactly here, to this tremendous setting. Robert drove his easel legs into the ground. We all gathered around, holding our gear or dropping it on the grass, watching while he demonstrated a sketch, showed us how to focus on form first, without considering yet what the forms represented, and then made suggestions about color. We would need a grayish ground, he said, to reproduce the bright cold light all around us, but also some warmer brown tones under the tree trunks, grass, even the water.

  His presentation in the classroom that morning had been minimal: "You're all accomplished, working artists, and I don't see the need to talk a lot--let's just get out in the field and find out what happens, and we can discuss composition later, when we've got some pictures to take a look at." I'd been glad, after that, to escape to the out-of-doors. We'd driven to this area, then walked up through the woods from the parking lot, carrying our gear. The conference had provided sandwiches and apples; we hoped it wouldn't rain later in the day.

  I was remembering a lot about Robert Oliver now, standing close enough to see his demonstration but not so close as to seem eager; I recognized that passionate insistence on form, the way his voice deepened to conviction when he told us to ignore everything except the geometry of the scene until we got it right, the

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  way he stood back, weight on his heels, examining his work every few minutes, then leaned into it again. Robert made some sort of contact with everyone, I noticed; more than ever, he had that easy, disheveled gift for hospitality, as if wherever he taught was a dining room instead of a classroom, and we were all eating at his table. It was irresistible, and the other students seemed drawn in by him at once, crowding trustingly around his canvas. He pointed out some views and the shapes they might form on a canvas, then roughed in the forms of the view he'd chosen and laid on color, much of it burnt umber, a deep-brown wash.

  There were enough level places on the hillside for six people to set up easels and find easy footing, and we all spent some time hunting for views. It was hard to go wrong, actually--hard to choose which of 180 degrees of natural splendor to paint. I finally settled on a long vista of firs creeping down to the beach and water, with the bulk of Isle des Roches in the far right and a flat horizon of water meeting the sky to the left. It wasn't quite balanced; I moved my easel a few degrees and caught a frame of evergreens by the beach at far left, to give my canvas extra interest on that side.

  Once I'd chosen my spot, Frank planted his easel enthusiastically near mine, as if I'd invited him and would be honored by his company. Some of the other students seemed quite pleasant; they were my age or older, mainly women, which made Frank look like a precocious child. Two of the women, who said they already knew each other from a conference in Santa Fe, had engaged me in friendly talk in the van. I watched them putting easels into the lower reaches of the hillside, conferring with each other about their palettes. There was also a very shy elderly man whom Frank told me in a whisper had exhibited at Williams College the year before; he set up near us and began to sketch with paint rather than pencils.

  Frank had not only shoved the legs of his easel into the ground near mine but also pointed it more or less in the same direction;

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  I noted with annoyance that we'd be doing very similar views, which put our skills into direct competition. At least he was immediately absorbed and probably wouldn't bother me; he already had his palette set up with a few basic colors and was using graphite to outline the distant mass of the island and the edge of the shore in the foreground. He was quick, sure, and his lean back moved under its shirt in graceful rhythm.

  I looked away and began to prepare my palette: green, burnt umber, a soft blue with some gray to it, a squeeze of white and one of black.
I was already wishing I'd replaced two of my brushes before the conference; they were superb ones, but I'd had them so long that they'd lost some hairs. My teaching job didn't cover much in the way of expensive painting supplies, once I'd paid rent and groceries, and DC wasn't cheap, although I'd found an apartment in a neighborhood Muzzy never would have approved of and fortunately never came to see. I wouldn't have dreamed of asking her for money either, after disappointing her in her career choice for me. ("But lots of people with degrees in art become lawyers these days, don't they, darling? And you've always been such an arguer.") I renewed my vow, as I did daily: I would keep trying to build enough of a portfolio, participate in enough shows, amass enough excellent references, to apply for a real teaching job. I glared at Frank, since he wasn't looking. Perhaps Robert Oliver could help me somehow, if I did well in this workshop. I checked, covertly, and discovered that Robert was painting with absorption, too. I couldn't see his canvas from where I stood, but it was large and he'd begun to fill it with long strokes.

  The color of the water changed from hour to hour, of course, making it difficult to catch, and the peak of Isle des Roches proved a challenge; my version of it was a little too soft, like custard or whipped cream rather than pale rock, the village at its lowest shore smudgy at best. Robert painted for a long time, down the slope from us, and I wondered if he'd ever come up to see our work, and dreaded that.

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  At last we broke for lunch, Robert stretching, joining his great hands inside out high above his head and the rest of us imitating, in one way or another, looking up, putting down brushes, raising our arms. I knew we'd eat quickly, and when Robert sat down in a sunny spot farther down the hill and drew his lunch out of a big canvas bag, we all followed, huddling around him with our own sandwiches. He gave me a smile; had he been glancing around for me a second before? Frank began to talk with the two friendly women about the success of his recent show in Savannah, and Robert leaned across to ask how my landscape was shaping up. "Very poorly," I said, which for some reason made him grin. "I mean," I said, encouraged, "have you ever had that dessert called Floating Island?" He laughed and promised he'd come take a look at it.