The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  "The flame?" I said. I was already learning that often I couldn't understand Robert, couldn't follow his private and sometimes chaotic train of thought. But I liked where it led, usually. "No. The rose."

  "It would be pink if everything else weren't red and white," I guessed.

  "Correct." And then he told me the paint he would use for that rose, the brand, the color, the amount of white to be added. We ordered the same lasagna, and he ate with gusto while I picked at mine, hungry but self-conscious. "Tell me something else about yourself."

  "You know more about me than I do about you," I demurred. "There's not much to tell anyway--I go to my job, do the best I can for my dozens of students of all ages, come home, and paint. I don't have a--family, and I don't especially want one, I guess. That's it. Very dull story."

  He drank the red wine he'd ordered for both of us; I'd hardly touched mine. "That's not dull. You paint with dedication. That's everything."

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  "Your turn," I said, and made myself eat some lasagna.

  He was relaxing now; he put down his fork and leaned back, rolled up a fallen sleeve. His skin was just at the point of fine tracery on the surface, good leather worn for a while. His eyes and hair looked the same color in that light, and there was something alert and a little wild in both. "Well, I am also very boring," he said. "Except that my life is not as well organized, I suppose. I live in a small town, from which I escape occasionally but which I actually like. I teach endless studio courses to mainly untalented or slightly talented undergraduates. I'm fond of them, and they like my classes. And I show my work here and there. I like not being a New York artist anymore, although I miss New York."

  I didn't interject that his "here and there" was adding up to a rather extraordinary career. "When did you live in New York?"

  "Graduate school and after." Of course; he'd been a rebel at one of the New York schools that had turned down my own portfolio. "I was there for about eight years, total. Got a lot of work done, actually. But Kate, my wife, wasn't very happy in the city, so we moved. I don't regret it. Greenhill has been a good place for her and the children." He said this guilelessly. For a long moment that was like falling from a tree, I wished that someone were sitting in a restaurant far away, saying such matter-of-fact, devoted things about me and the children I didn't want to have.

  "How do you make time for your own work?" I thought a change of subject was the best idea.

  "I don't sleep much--sometimes. I mean, sometimes I don't need to sleep very much."

  "Like Picasso," I said, smiling to show that I didn't mean this seriously.

  "Exactly like Picasso," he agreed, also smiling. "I have a studio at home, and that means I can just go upstairs to work at night, instead of going back to school and dealing with a lot of locked doors."

  I pictured him hunting through all his pockets for a key.

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  He finished his wine and poured more, but moderately, I noticed; he must have been planning to drive, and safely. There was no motel attached to our Italian haven. "Anyway," he finished, "we moved out of the college a while ago, and we have a lot more space. That's been good, too, although now the commute to school is twenty minutes by car instead of four minutes on foot."

  "Too bad." I ate the rest of my lasagna so that I wouldn't later regret being hungry as well as whatever else I was going to be. I still had Isaac Newton to finish, and he was turning out to be very interesting, more than I might have predicted. Reason versus belief.

  Robert ordered dessert, and we talked about favorite painters. I confessed my love of Matisse and speculated aloud about how our jaunty table and curtains and rose could all have ended up coming off Matisse's brush. Robert laughed and didn't confess to being more traditional than that and to having an interest in the Impressionists; it was obvious, perhaps, or his awareness of the critical coverage of his work had made him stop justifying it. His acclaim was growing nicely; he had paid back his instructors and jeering conceptual-artist classmates. I read these things between the lines as he spoke. We talked about books, too; he loved poetry and quoted Yeats and Auden, whom I'd read a little in school, and Czeslaw Milosz, whose collected poems I had read through once, long ago, because I'd seen a volume of them on Robert's desk. He didn't like most novels, and I threatened to send him a long Victorian one like a bomb in the mail, The Moonstone or Middlemarch. He laughed and promised not to read it. "But you should like nineteenth-century literature," I added. "Or at least the French authors, since you love Impressionism."

  "I didn't say I love Impressionism," he corrected. "I said I do what I do. For my own reasons. Some of it happens to resemble Impressionism."

  He hadn't said that either, but I didn't correct him in turn. I remember he also told me a story of having been on a plane

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  that seemed about to crash. "I was flying back to New York from Greenhill once, while I had that teaching job at your college, actually--at Barnett. And something happened to one of the engines, so the pilot got on the intercom and announced that we might have to make an emergency landing, although we were almost to LaGuardia. The woman sitting next to me got very frightened. She was a middle-aged woman, kind of ordinary. Before that she'd been talking with me about her husband's job or something. When the plane lurched and the seat-belt sign started flashing, she reached out and grabbed me around the neck."

  He rolled his napkin into a heavy tube. "I was frightened, too, and I remember thinking that I just wanted to live--it panicked me to have her gripping my neck like that. And--I'm sorry to say this--I pushed her off me. I had always thought I would be naturally brave in a crisis, that I would be someone who pulls other people out of burning wrecks, as an automatic response." He lifted his head, raised his shoulders. "Why am I telling you this? Anyway, when we landed safely a few minutes later, she wouldn't look at me. She was turned away, crying. She wouldn't even let me help her with her bag and wouldn't look at me."

  I couldn't think of anything to say, although I felt a piercing sympathy. His expression was dark, heavy; it reminded me of that moment in college when he'd told me about the woman whose face he couldn't forget.

  "I could never tell my wife about that." He flattened the napkin with both hands. "She already thinks I don't take good enough care of anybody." Then he smiled. "Look what ridiculous confessions you bring out in me."

  I was content.

  At last Robert stretched his big arms and insisted on paying the bill, then let me insist on splitting it with him, and we stood up. He excused himself to go to the restroom--I had already been twice,

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  mainly to be alone for a couple of seconds and question myself in the mirror--and the restaurant seemed even emptier without him. Then we went out into the dark parking lot, which smelled like ocean and fried food, fishy, and stood next to my car. "Well, I'm going to start driving," he said, but this time not matter-of-factly, which would have stung more. "I like to drive at night."

  "Yes, you've got a long trip, I guess. I'm going to start mine, too." I planned instead to let him pull out ahead of me and drive faster. Then I would hunt for the first decent motel in the first town; it was too late to make Portland, or I was too tired, or too sad. Robert looked ready to drive to Florida by himself.

  "This has been lovely." He put his arms slowly around me, and I was struck by the feminine word. He held me for a moment and kissed my cheek, and I was careful not to move. I had to memorize him, after all.

  "It has been." Then I released him and unlocked my truck.

  "Wait--here's my address and phone number. Let me know if you come south."

  Like hell. I didn't have a business card with me, but I found a piece of paper in my glove compartment and wrote my e-mail address and phone on it.

  Robert glanced at it. "I don't do e-mail much," he said. "I use it for business, if I have to, but that's about it. Why don't you give me your real address, and I'll send you a drawing sometime?"

  I add
ed my real address.

  He stroked my hair, as if for the last time. "I guess you understand."

  "Oh, yes." I kissed his cheek rapidly. It was sharp-tasting, even very slightly oily, the finest extra-virgin, cold-pressed--the traces of it were on my lips for hours. I got in my truck. I drove away.

  His first drawing arrived in my mailbox ten days later. It was just a sketch, whimsical, hasty, on folded paper; it showed a satyrlike

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  figure rising from waves and a maiden sitting on a rock nearby. The note enclosed said that he'd thought about our conversations and enjoyed them, that he was working on a new canvas based on his painting of the beach. I wondered, immediately, if he'd included the figure of the woman and child. He gave a PO box, and he wrote that I should use that address, and that I should send him a better drawing than his, to put him in his place.

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  CHAPTER 74 Mary

  Robert and I wrote to each other for a long time, and those letters are still one of the best things I've ever experienced. It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy. I would come home at the end of the day to find one -- or none, many days--or a sketch, or both, crammed into an envelope and scrawled with my address in Robert's looping hand. I made a collage of the drawings on the bulletin board above my desk. At home, my office is also my bedroom, or vice versa; I could see all his sketches, a growing exhibition, as I lay in bed with my book at night, or when I woke up in the morning.

  Oddly, once I'd pinned up two or three of those sketches, I stopped having that sense one gets of being single and always watching out for someone, for the right person. I began to belong to Robert--I who had never wanted to belong to anything. I guess in the end we belong to what we love. It wasn't that I thought Robert was available or that I had some obligation to be faithful to him; at first it was just the feeling that I wouldn't have wanted any other pair of eyes to see those drawings from my bed. He drew trees, people, houses, me, from memory; he drew himself in a "funk" over his latest project. I still don't know what it meant to him to send me all those images, whether he would have done them anyway and stuffed them into a file drawer or dropped them on his office floor, or whether he did more of them or drew them with fresh inspiration because they were for me.

  Once, he sent me part of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, with a

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  note saying that it was one of his favorites. I didn't know whether or not to take it as a declaration from Robert himself, but I kept it in my pocket for several days before I tacked it on my bulletin board:

  O my love, where are they, where are they going

  The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

  I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

  I didn't put his letters up on my bulletin board, however. Those sometimes arrived with the sketches, sometimes on their own, and they were often very brief, a thought, a reflection, an image. I think Robert was--is--a writer at heart, too; if someone had collected in order all those bits and pieces of his writing to me, they would have made a kind of short and impressionistic but very good novel about his daily life and the nature he was constantly trying to paint. I wrote him back every time; I had a rule for myself that I would mirror whatever he did, to keep things balanced, so that if he sent only a sketch, I sent only a sketch in return, and if he sent only a note, I sent only a note in response. If he sent both, my rule went, I could write him a longer letter and illustrate it right on the page.

  I don't know if he ever noticed this pattern, and it was one of the things I didn't ask him. It kept me from writing him too often, and we exchanged letters or sketches several times a week once our correspondence was well under way. After our last fight, I made up a whole new rule: I would burn only the letters and keep the sketches, although I removed all but his very first sketch from my bulletin board. The first, the satyr and the maiden, I glued to cardboard, a few weeks after he left, and tinted with watercolor, and then I did a series of three small matching paintings based on it. I might as well have blended the colors with actual tears, they were so painful to work on.

  I often imagined the post office box into which he put his hand every few days. I wondered what size the box was, and whether his

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  hand fit or just the fingers; I imagined him feeling blindly inside it like Alice grown too large in Wonderland, groping up the chimney to catch whatever little character it was, a lizard or a mouse. He knew my address, of course, which meant he knew where I lived. And I saw Greenhill College once, as well; about halfway through our correspondence, Robert surprised me by inviting me to come to the opening of a show he was having there, his second since he'd started teaching. He said he was inviting me because of my support of his work and intimated that he couldn't give me a place to stay; I understood from this that he wanted to invite me but wasn't sure he wanted me to come.

  I didn't wish to displease him, but I didn't like to displease myself either, so I drove down from DC--as you know, it's only a long day's trip -- and stayed at a Motel 6 outside the town. There was a wine-and-cheese reception at the new art gallery on the Greenhill campus. I didn't dare to call Robert, so I sent a note to the PO box several days before I arrived for the opening, which he didn't get until too late.

  My hands were trembling when I walked into the reception. I hadn't seen Robert since Maine--and since we'd begun writing each other--and I already regretted having come at all; he might be offended, might think I'd come to disrupt his life in some way, which I honestly hadn't. I just wanted to see him, maybe from a distance, and to see the new paintings whose conception and execution I'd heard about week after week. I had dressed in a very ordinary way, in a black turtleneck and my usual jeans, and I got to the gallery a good half hour after the party started. I saw Robert at once, towering over the crowd in one corner; several guests with wineglasses in their hands seemed to be asking about his paintings. The place was mobbed, not only with students and faculty but also with a lot of elegant people who didn't look as if they belonged to a small rural college. There were probably buyers there, too.

  The paintings, whenever you could get a glimpse of them, were riveting; for one thing, they were larger than any work by him I'd

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  seen before, nearly life-sized scenes and portraits, often full-length depictions of the lady I remembered from his canvases at Barnett College, except that now she was not only bigger but also thrust into a terrible scene, holding what looked like the dead body of another, older woman in her arms, grieving over her. I wondered if this was supposed to be her mother. The older woman had a gruesome wound in the middle of her forehead. There were other dead bodies on the ground, I remember, some of them facedown on cobblestones, or with blood on their backs, but they were the bodies of men. The backgrounds were vaguer than the figures: a street of some sort, a wall, piles of rubble or garbage. The images were straight out of the mid-nineteenth century--I thought immediately of Manet's painting of the execution of Emperor Maximilian, the one that looks like Goya, although Robert's images were more detailed and realistic.

  It was hard to tell what all this was about; I just know that the power of his fantasy swept over you as soon as you saw those scenes: the woman was as beautiful as ever, even with her face white and the front of her dress stained, but Robert had depicted something horrible. It was all the more horrible because she was lovely, as if he'd felt compelled to see her with blood on her gown, her face stark. I'd gathered from his notes to me that the paintings were fierce and strange, but seeing them in the flesh was completely different, shocking; I had a moment of feeling frightened, as if I'd been corresponding with a murderer. It was very jarring; it disoriented me in the midst of my growing love for Robert. Then I saw the tremendous sculptural quality of the figures, the sense of compassion, the grief that was deeper than the gore, and I knew I was looking at paintings that would
last in importance long after we were all gone.

  I almost left without greeting Robert at all, partly out of this shock, partly to keep the sense of privacy between us--and partly out of riveting shyness as well, I'll admit. But I'd driven so far that I finally made myself walk over to him when some of his

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  admirers turned away. He saw me pushing through the crowd, and he froze for a moment. Then a startled, joyful expression flashed over his face--how I treasured the remembrance of that look afterward--and he collected himself and came forward to shake hands warmly with me, making it all very proper, making it work, managing to murmur to me first that he was very touched that I had come. I had half forgotten how large he was in person, how strangely handsome, how striking. He took my elbow in his hand; he began at once to introduce me to a shifting circle of people without explaining anything but my name and, in a couple of cases, that I was a painter as well.

  Among these people, among these momentary introductions, was his wife, who shook my hand warmly, too, and tried to ask me something kind about myself, to make me welcome, whoever I was. Mercifully, someone else waylaid her a second later. I was stricken by my sudden recognition of her identity, flooded with something I would have called jealousy if I hadn't known how absurd that would be. I liked her instantly and, in spite of myself and forever after, at a distance. She was much smaller than Robert (I had imagined a sort of huntress for him, an Amazon, a larger-than-life Diana)--in fact, she just came up to my shoulder. She was tawny-haired, freckled, like a golden flower with a green-stemmed dress. If she'd been my friend, I would have asked her to let me paint her, just for the pleasure of choosing the colors.