The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  "Why not?"

  "Oh, a lot of medical school, and then I didn't meet the right person."

  She crossed her legs in their jeans. "Well, have you ever been in love?"

  "Several times."

  "Recently?"

  "No." I considered. "Maybe yes. Almost yes."

  She raised her eyebrows until they disappeared under her short bangs. "Make up your mind."

  "I'm trying to," I said as evenly as I could. It was like conversing with a wild deer, some animal that could start up and spring away. I stretched one arm across the back of the bench without touching her, and looked out into the park, the bends of gravel path, boulders, green hills under patrician trees, the people

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  walking and biking along a nearby route. Her kiss caught me by surprise; at first I understood only that her face was very close. She was gentle, hesitating. I sat up slowly and put my hands on her temples and kissed her back, also gently, careful not to startle her further, my heart pounding. My old heart.

  I knew that in a minute she would draw away, then lean against me and begin to sob without making a sound, that I would hold her until she was finished, that we would soon part with a more passionate kiss for our separate journeys home, and that she would then say something like, I'm sorry, Andrew -- I'm not ready for this. But I had the long patience of my profession on my side, and I already understood certain things about her: she loved to go out to Virginia for the day to paint, as I did; she needed to eat often; she wanted to feel in control of her decisions. Madame, I said to her, but silently, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you.

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  C HAPTER 80 1879

  She can't stop thinking about her own body. Surely she should think a little of Olivier's, which has lived in so many interesting ways. Instead, she considers the bug bite on the inside of her right wrist, scratches it, shows it companionably to him as they paint on the beach the second morning. They gaze together at the white forearm, where she has rolled back the sleeve of her linen smock. Her wrist, with that tiny red mark, the long hand and its rings--she regards them herself, as he must, with desire. They are working at their easels on the beach; she has set down her brushes, but Olivier still holds a small one wet with dark-blue paint.

  They stand looking at the curve of her arm, and then she raises it slowly toward him, toward his face. When it is so close that he can't mistake her meaning, he presses his lips to the skin. She shivers, more from the sight than from sensation. He lowers her arm gently and their eyes meet. She can't think of any words to fit this situation. His face is reddened against his white hair, from emotion or from the Channel wind. Does he feel embarrassment? It is the sort of thing she might ask him at an intimate moment she won't yet let herself picture.

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  C HAPTER 81 Marlow

  Sometime after this, I tried the experiment of staying in Robert's room with him in silence for an hour; I brought a sketch pad with me and sat in my chair with it, drawing him as he sat drawing Béatrice de Clerval. I wanted to tell him that I knew who she was, but, as usual, caution stayed my hand. After all, I might need to learn more about her before I did that, or about him. After a first look of annoyance at my presence and a second glare that showed me he'd registered the fact that he was the subject of my drawing, Robert ignored me, but a faint sense of companionship crept into the room, if I wasn't simply imagining that. There was no sound but the scratching of our respective pencils, and it was peaceful.

  The escape of drawing in the middle of the morning gave the day a kind of harmony I rarely experience at Goldengrove. Robert's face, in profile, was very interesting; and the fact that he didn't show anger or get up and move away or otherwise disrupt my work pleased and rather surprised me. It was possible he had withdrawn further and simply didn't care, but I felt he was actually tolerating my gesture. When I had finished the effort, I put the pencil in my jacket pocket and tore the drawing out of my book, laying it silently on the end of his bed. It wasn't half bad, I thought, although of course it lacked the brilliant expressiveness of his portraits. He didn't look up as I left, but when I checked a couple of days later, I saw that he had taped my gift up in his gallery, although not in a place of prominence.

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  As if she'd somehow known about my hour with Robert, Mary called that very evening. "I want to ask you something."

  "Anything. That's only fair."

  "I want to read the letters. Béatrice's and Olivier's." I hesitated for only a moment. "Of course. I'll make you a copy of the translations I have so far, and the rest as I get them."

  "Thank you."

  "How've you been?"

  "I'm fine," she said. "Working, I mean painting, since my semester is over now."

  "Would you like to go out to Virginia to paint this weekend? Just for an afternoon? It's supposed to be springlike, and I was thinking of going. I can bring you the letters then."

  She was silent for a beat. "Yes, I think I'd like that."

  "I wanted to call you before this. You've stayed away."

  "Yes, I know. I'm sorry." She did sound sorry, genuinely so.

  "It's quite all right. I can imagine what a hard time you've had this last year."

  "You mean, you can imagine it as a professional?"

  I sighed in spite of myself. "No, as your friend."

  "Thank you," she said, and I thought I heard the choke of tears in her voice. "I could use a friend."

  "I could, too, actually." It was more than I would have said to anyone six months earlier, and I knew it.

  "Saturday or Sunday?"

  "Let's say Saturday but watch the weather."

  "Andrew?" Her voice was gentle, and on the edge of smiling.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. Thank you."

  "Thank you, instead," I demurred. "I'm glad you want to go." On Saturday she wore a thick red jacket, her hair twisted up

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  and pinned with two sticks, and we painted together much of the day. Later, in the unseasonably warm sun, we picnicked and talked. There was color in her face, and when I leaned over the blanket to kiss her, she put her arms around my neck and pulled me close--no tears this time, although we only kissed. We ate dinner outside the city, and I dropped her off at her apartment on a litter-strewn block in Northeast. She had the copy of the letters in her bag. She didn't invite me up, but she came back from her front door to kiss me again before going inside.

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  C HAPTER 82 1879

  To: Yves Vignot

  Passy, Paris

  Mon cher mari,

  I hope this finds you well and that Papa is mending. Thank you for the kind note. Papa's troubles worry me--I wish I were there to care for him myself. Warm compresses on his chest usually help, but I suspect Esmé has already tried those. Please send him my fond greetings.

  For myself, I cannot say I'm finding it dull here, although Étretat is quiet before the season. I have completed one canvas, if you can call it complete, as well as a pastel and two sketches. Uncle is helpful, making suggestions about color--of course, our handling of the brush is so very different that there I always have to strike out on my own. I thoroughly respect his knowledge, however. Now he is talking with me about my doing a much bigger canvas, one with an ambitious subject, which I could submit to the Salon jury next year, although Mme Rivière would be its author. I do not know if I want such a large undertaking, however.

  Having slept well the last two nights, I am quite refreshed.

  She puts down her pen and looks around the wallpapered bedroom. The first night she has slept from pure exhaustion, and the third she has spent half awake, thinking of Olivier's firm, dry lips approaching her arm--the sensitive shape of the older man's mouth and the pale stretch of her own skin.

  She knows the correct thing: she should tell Olivier that she feels unwell here--nerves, she can call it, the eternal excuse -- and that they must return home at once. But that is the reason Y
ves

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  has sent her here to begin with. Even if she could muster this act, Olivier will see through it. She is blooming in the fresh wind from the Channel, with the expanses of water and sky coursing through her, a relief after stifling Paris. She loves working on the shore, wrapped in her warm cloak. She loves his company, his conversation, the hours they spend reading together in the evenings. He has made the world larger for her than she had ever thought possible.

  Instead she blots the last word of her letter and considers the loop of the "d" in "dormi." If she claims that she must go back, Olivier will know that she is lying; he will think she is fleeing. It will hurt him. She cannot do that; she owes him trust in return for his vulnerability, his putting his hand in hers when it might be the last time he touches any woman. Especially when she could assail him from the vantage point of her youth.

  She goes to the window and unlatches it. From above the street, she has an oblique view of the gray-beige expanse of beach and the grayer water. A breeze stirs the curtains, rifles the skirts of her morning dress where it lies, bent double, over a chair. She tries to think about Yves, but when she shuts her eyes, she sees an annoying caricature, like a political cartoon in one of his newspapers. Yves in hat and coat, his head enormous, out of proportion, holding a walking stick under one arm, putting on his gloves before kissing her good-bye. It is easier to picture Olivier: he is standing with her on the beach, upright and tall, subtle, with his silver hair, rosy lined face, watering blue eyes, his well-cut, well-worn brown suit, his craftsman's hands and square-tipped, slightly swollen fingers around the brush. The image makes her sad in a way she does not feel when he is actually with her.

  But she can't sustain even this vision long; it is replaced by the street itself, the brick fronts and elaborate trim on a row of new shops blocking half her view of the beach. What lingers there for her is a question. How many nights can she pass in this suspended state? In the afternoon they will go somewhere in the bright expanse of beach to paint, return to their rooms to dress for

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  dinner, share their public meal again, sit in the overfurnished hotel parlor and talk about their reading. She will feel she is already in his arms, in spirit; shouldn't that be enough? And then she will retire to her room and begin her nightly vigil.

  The other question she asks herself, elbows propped on the sill, is still more difficult. Does she want him? Nothing in the stretch of shore, the upturned boats, hints at an answer. She closes the window, her lips pursed. Life will decide, and perhaps has already decided--a weak answer, but there is no other, and it is time for them to go paint.

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  C HAPTER 83 Marlow

  One evening I came home to a letter--a very hospitable letter, to my surprise -- from Pedro Caillet. After I'd read it, I surprised myself in turn by going to the phone and calling a travel agent.

  Dear Dr. Marlow:

  Thank you for your note of two weeks past. You probably know more than I do about Béatrice de Clerval, but I would be happy to assist you. Please come to talk with me between March 16 and March 23, if that is possible. Afterward I will be traveling to Rome and cannot be your host. In answer to your other question, I have not heard of an American painter researching the work of Clerval; such a person has never contacted me.

  With warmest wishes,

  P. Caillet

  Then I called Mary. "How about Acapulco, week after next?"

  Her voice was thick, as if she'd been sleeping, although it was late afternoon. "What? You sound like a--I don't know what. A personal ad?"

  "Are you asleep? Do you know what time it is?"

  "Don't harass me, Andrew. It's my day off, and I painted until very late."

  "Until when?"

  "Till four thirty."

  "Oh, you honest-to-God artists. I was at Goldengrove at seven this morning. Now, would you like to go to Acapulco?"

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  "Are you serious?"

  "Yes. Not for vacation. I have research to do there."

  "Does your research have to do with Robert, by chance?"

  "No. It has to do with Béatrice de Clerval."

  She laughed. It warmed me, to hear her laugh so soon after she'd uttered Robert's name. Perhaps she really was getting over him. "I had a dream about you last night."

  "About me?" My heart jumped, ridiculously.

  "Yes. A very sweet one. I dreamed that I learned you were the inventor of lavender."

  "What? The color or the plant?"

  "The scent, I think. It's my favorite."

  "Thank you. What did you do, in your dream, when you found this out?"

  "Never mind."

  "Are you going to make me beg?"

  "All right--no. I kissed you, in thanks. On the cheek. That was all."

  "So, do you want to come to Acapulco?"

  She laughed again, apparently well awake. "Of course I want to go to Acapulco. But you know I can't afford it."

  "I can," I said softly. "I've been saving for years because my parents told me to." And then I had no one to spend it on, I didn't add. "We could schedule it for your spring break. Isn't it the same week? Isn't that a sign?"

  There was a hush between us on the phone, like the moment you pause to listen in the woods. I listened; I heard her breathing, the way you hear (after the first silence, after stilling and settling yourself) birds in the canopy of branches or a squirrel rustling in dead leaves six feet away.

  "Well," she said slowly. I thought I detected in her voice years of saving because her mother had told her to also, but with almost nothing to save, her years of painting her way through each small bit of time or cash she could put aside for a few days or weeks

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  or months, the fear and pride that kept her from borrowing, her mother's probably modest onetime gift to her out of the remains of her upbringing, the dedication that kept Mary from quitting her teaching, the students who had no idea how her bank account trembled on the verge of emptiness after she paid for her rent, heat, food--the whole constellation of miseries that I had avoided by going to medical school. Since then, I had done only ten paintings that I liked at all. Monet had painted sixty views of Étretat alone in the 1860s, many of them masterpieces; I had seen the dozens of canvases stacked along Mary's studio walls, the hundreds of prints and drawings on her shelves. I wondered how many of them she still liked.

  "Well," she said again, but with more light in her voice, "let me think about it." I could imagine her stirring in a bed I had never seen; she would be sitting up now to hold the receiver, maybe wearing one of her loose white shirts and pushing her hair aside. "But there is another problem if I go with you."

  "Let me save you the trouble of saying it. You don't have to sleep with me if you accept my invitation," I said, feeling at once that it had come out more starkly than I'd intended. "I'll find a way for us to stay separately."

  I could hear her breath drawn in as if she were on the verge of a gasp, or a laugh. "Oh, no. The problem is that I might want to sleep with you there, but I wouldn't want you to think it was a thank-you card for paying my way."

  "Well," I said. "What can a fellow say?"

  "Nothing." Mary was almost laughing, I felt sure. "Don't say anything, please."

  But at the airport two weeks later, after a rare Washington snowstorm, we were quiet and constrained with each other. I began to wonder if this adventure had been a good idea or would prove an embarrassment on both sides. We had arranged to find each

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  other at the gate, which was filled with students who could have been Mary's sitting in impatient rows, already dressed in summer clothes, although planes outside the window rolled past heaps of dirty snow. Mary met me with a canvas satchel over one shoulder and her portable easel in her hand, and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, but awkwardly. She had coiled her hair up in the back and was wearing a long navy sweater over a black skirt. Against the background of squirming teenagers in their shorts and b
rightly colored shirts, she looked like some sect of laysister leaving the convent for a field trip. It occurred to me that I hadn't even thought to bring my painting kit. What was wrong with me? I would only be able to watch her paint.

  We chatted in a desultory way on the plane, as if we'd been traveling together for years, and then she fell asleep, sitting straight up in her seat at first but drooping gradually toward me, her smooth head touching my shoulder: I painted until very late. I'd thought that we would talk intensely on our first real trip together, but instead she was sleeping almost against me, pulling herself back from time to time without waking, as if she feared this creeping domesticity between us. My shoulder came alive under her nodding head. I carefully took out a new book on borderline-personality-disorder treatment, which I'd been trying for some time to get to--my professional reading had begun to suffer under the weight of my research on Robert and Béatrice--but I couldn't take in the words for more than a sentence at a time; after that, they unraveled.

  And then that bad moment that always forced itself on me sooner or later: I imagined her head on Robert Oliver's shoulder, his naked shoulder--had she been telling me the truth when she'd said she didn't love Robert anymore? After all, he might get well under my care, or at least better. Or was the truth more complicated? What if I didn't feel like helping him anymore, given what might happen if he went back to a functional life? I turned another page. In the light through the clouds outside, Mary's hair

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  was pale chestnut, golden on the surface under the feeble airplane reading light, and darker when she rolled away from the window; it shone like carved wood. I raised a finger and, with infinite lightness, stroked the part on the top of her head; she stirred and muttered something, still asleep. Her eyelashes were roseate, and they lay on pale skin. There was a small mole near the corner of her left eye. I thought about Kate's galaxy of freckles, about my mother's emaciated face and huge, still-compassionate gaze before she died. When I turned a page again, Mary sat up, hugged her sweater around her, and wedged herself against the window, fleeing me. Still asleep.