The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  "Which floor? What number?" he said, and when we arrived in the long, smelly, carpeted hall, he found my other key on the ring and opened the door to my apartment. "Hello!" he shouted. "Nobody around, I guess." I said nothing--I didn't have the strength or inclination to tell him that I lived alone. He would have figured it out immediately anyway, because my apartment was one room, with a tiny kitchen area half screened by cupboards. My bed doubled as a sofa, some pathetic old pillows from my childhood piled up on the bedspread, and the top of my dresser held dishes I couldn't fit in the kitchen. There was a threadbare Oriental on the floor, from my aunt's house in Ohio, and my desk was scattered with bills and sketches, with a coffee cup on top as a paperweight. I glanced around at all this as if I'd never seen my room before, and I was struck by its shabbiness. Having my own place was very

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  important to me. In order to get one, I'd settled for a seedy building and a seedy landlord. The pipes above the sink were exposed, peeling paint--they wept steady tears of cold water that I had to soak up with a towel tucked behind them.

  The stranger helped me in and lowered me to the edge of my bed-sofa. "Would you like a drink of water?"

  "No, thank you," I groaned, watching him carefully. It was surreal, to have someone cross my threshold from the streets of New York. The only person who'd been there so far was my landlord, who'd come by once for two minutes to see why the oven wouldn't light and had shown me how to rattle the front of it with my foot. I didn't even know this man's name, and he was standing in the middle of my room, gazing around as if for something that would stop me from vomiting again. I tried not to breathe too deeply. "Could I just have a bowl from the kitchen, please?"

  He brought me one, and a wet paper towel to clean my face as well, and I leaned back a little on the sofa. He had his hands on his hips, and I saw his bright eyes travel over my gallery: a black-and-white photograph of my parents talking together on our front porch, which I'd taken in high school; several of my recent drawings of milk cartons; and a poster of a mural by Diego Rivera--three men moving a block of stone, their reddish bodies bulging with effort. He studied this for a moment. I felt a stab of uncertainty. Was he ignoring my sketches? Some people would have said, "Oh, did you do these?" But he only stood staring at Rivera's Mexican workers, their grimacing faces and huge Aztec bodies. Then he turned back to me. "Well, are you all set?"

  "Yes," I almost whispered, but something about the way he was standing in the middle of my room, this stranger with his baggy pants and snaky brown hair, filled me with nausea again-- or maybe it wasn't him--and I flew off the bed and dove for the bathroom. This time I vomited in the toilet, with the seat neatly up. It gave me a sense of safety and homecoming. I was finally throwing up in just the right place.

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  He came to the bathroom door, or near it, and I could hear his movements even though I couldn't look at him. "Do you want me to call an ambulance? I mean, do you think this is really serious? Maybe you have food poisoning. Or we could go get a taxi and just go to a hospital."

  "No insurance," I said.

  "Me neither." I heard him shifting his heavy shoes outside the bathroom.

  "My mother doesn't know that," I added, wanting for some reason to tell him at least one thing about myself.

  He laughed, the first time I ever heard Robert laugh. "Do you think mine does?" Looking sideways, I saw him laugh--he bared his teeth completely so that the corners of his mouth squared, wide open. His face was dazzling.

  "Would she be upset?" I found a washcloth and cleaned my face, then rinsed hastily with mouthwash.

  "Probably." I could almost hear his shrug. When I turned around, he helped me back to the bed without a word, as if we'd been doing this invalid thing for years. "Do you want me to stay for a while?"

  I assumed this meant he had other places to be. "Oh, no--I'm really fine now. I'm all right. I think that was the last round."

  "I didn't keep count," he told me, "but you can't have much left to throw up."

  "I hope I don't give you some contagious thing."

  "I never get sick," he said, and I believed it. "Well, I'm going to get going, if you're all right, but here's my name and number." He wrote it on the edge of a paper on my desk without asking whether I needed that paper for something else, and I told him my own name, awkwardly. "You can call me and tell me how you are tomorrow. Then I'll know you're really okay."

  I nodded, on the verge of tears. I was so, so far from home, and my home was one woman taking out the garbage alone, a $180 bus ticket from here.

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  "All right, then," he said. "See you. Be sure you drink something."

  I nodded and he smiled and was gone. I was amazed by how little hesitation there seemed to be in this stranger--he came in to help, then left without a fuss. I stood up and leaned against the desk to study his number. The handwriting was like him, a little rough but bold and firmly pressed into the page.

  By the next morning, I felt almost well, so I called him. I was calling, I told myself, just to say thank you.

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  Mon cher oncle:

  I am not your equal in assiduous correspondence, but I hasten to thank you for the thoughtful note, which arrived this morning and which I've shared with Papa. He sends you the message that a brother must visit somewhat more often in order to be counted as a family member at the dinner table; that is your scolding for the day, although it is a truly gentle and admiring one, and I pass it on to you in the same spirit, with a plea that you heed it for my sake, too. We are a little dull here, in this rain. I enjoyed the sketch very much -- the child in the corner is delightful--you catch life so wonderfully that the rest of us can only hope to do as well.... I returned from my sister's family with several sketches of my own. My eldest niece is now seven years old, and you would find her a model of the most engaging grace, I'm certain.

  Warm regards,

  Béatrice de Clerval Vignot

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  CHAPTER 14 Kate

  Robert and I lived together in New York for almost five years. I still don't know where that time went. I read once that there's a good probability that everything that's ever happened is stored somewhere in the universe, one's personal history--all history, I guess--folded away in pockets and black holes of time and space. I hope those five years survive out there somewhere. I don't know if I'd want most of our time together saved, because some of it was awful at the end, but those years in New York...yes. They went by in a flash, I thought afterward, but while we were in New York together, I was sure things would always be that way, on and on, until something vaguely like an adult life took over. It was before I began to long for children or to want Robert to have a stable job. Every day seemed both just right and exciting, or potentially exciting.

  Those five years happened because I did pick up the phone to call Robert the day after I stopped vomiting, and because I lingered long enough on the line for him to say that some of his friends were going to a play the next evening at their art school and I could go with them if I wanted. It wasn't exactly an invitation, but it was something like one, and it was also very close to the kind of offer I'd pictured filling my evenings in New York when I first moved there from Michigan. So I said yes, and of course the play was incomprehensible, a lot of art students reading from a script they tore up near the end and then decorating the faces of the people in the front row with white and green paint, a proceeding no one in the back rows could see very well. I was

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  sitting there myself, aware of the back of Robert's head, which was in a row closer to the stage--he had apparently forgotten to save me a seat next to him.

  Afterward, Robert's friends drifted away to a party, but he found me and we went to a bar near the theater, where we sat side by side on twirling stools. I had never been in a New York bar before. I remember there was an Irish fiddler playing into a microphone in the corner. We talked about the artists whose work we liked and why. I mentioned Mat
isse first. I still love his portraits of women because they're so quirky, and I don't apologize for it anymore, and I love his still lifes, full of swimming colors and fruit. But Robert discussed a lot of contemporary artists I'd never heard of. He was in his last year of art school, and in those days people were painting sofas and wrapping up buildings and conceptualizing everything and anything. I thought some of what he described sounded interesting and some of it sounded juvenile, but I didn't want to show my ignorance, so I listened while he went through a litany of works, movements, activities, points of view completely unfamiliar to me, all hotly contested in the studios where he worked and where his work was critiqued.

  I watched the edge of Robert's face as he talked. It oscillated between ugly and handsome, his forehead jutting in almost a ledge over his eyes, his nose predatory, one lock of hair falling in a corkscrew on his temple. I thought he looked like a bird of prey, but every time this occurred to me, he smiled in such a childlike, happy way that I wondered what I'd been seeing the moment before. His apparent unawareness of himself was mesmerizing. I watched him rub his index finger next to his nose, then rub the end of his nose with a flattened palm as if it itched, then scratch his head the way you might scratch a dog--absently, kindly--or the way a big dog might scratch itself. His eyes were sometimes the color of my glass of stout and sometimes olive green, and he had an unnerving way of suddenly fixing me with them, as if he were sure I'd been listening all along but wanted to know my reaction to the last point he'd

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  made and needed to know right away. His skin was a warm, soft color, as if it kept the sun even in November in Manhattan.

  Robert was in a very good art school, one I'd heard about for years. How had he gotten there? I wondered. After college, he had bummed around, as he put it, for nearly four years before deciding to go back to school, and now that he was almost done with it, he still wondered whether it had been a waste of time, you know? My mind wandered a little from the contemporary painters whose work he was arguing over, mostly by himself. I found myself imagining him with his shirt off and more of that warm skin showing. Then he was talking about me, out of the blue, asking me what it was that I wanted from my own artwork. I hadn't thought he'd even noticed my sketches when he'd taken me home to let me throw up safely at my apartment. I said as much, with a smile--conscious that it was about time I smiled at him and glad I'd worn the one shirt I had that I knew matched the color of my eyes. I smiled, I demurred, I thought he'd never ask.

  But he seemed unmoved by my attempt at charming modesty. "Sure, I noticed them," he told me flatly. "You're good. What are you doing about it?"

  I sat staring at him. "I wish I knew," I said finally. "I came to New York to find out. I was suffocating in Michigan, partly because I didn't really know any other artists." He hadn't, I realized, even asked me where I was from, and he hadn't told me anything about his background either.

  "Shouldn't a real artist be able to work anywhere? Do you need to know other artists in order to do good work?"

  It stung, and it whipped me into a rare pique. "Apparently not, if your assessment of my work is correct."

  For the first time, he seemed to see me completely. He turned and put one of his big unusual shoes--the one I'd vomited across, to judge by a fading stain--on the footrest of my stool. His eyes were edged with lines, old for his young face, and his wide mouth

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  curled up in a chagrined smile. "I made you mad," he said with a kind of wonder.

  I sat up straighter and took a sip of Guinness. "Well, yes. I've worked pretty hard on my own, even when there weren't art students for me to sit talking to in fancy bars." I wondered what had gotten into me. I was usually far too shy to snap at people like this. The bubbling stout, maybe, or his long monologue, or perhaps the sense that my little fit had caught his attention when all my polite listening had failed to. I had the feeling he was studying me carefully now--my hair, my freckles, my breasts, the fact that I hardly came up to his shoulder. He was smiling at me, and the warmth of his eyes with those premature wrinkles around them crept into my bloodstream. I had the feeling that it was that moment or never. I had to get and keep his full attention or it might never return. Otherwise, he would drift back into the vast city and I wouldn't hear from him again, he who had dozens of fellow art students to choose from. His solid thighs, his long legs in their eccentric trousers--pleated tweed this evening, with rubbed spots on the knees, surely a thrift-store purchase--kept him balanced in my direction on his bar stool, but he might lose interest at any moment and twirl back toward his drink.

  I turned on him and looked him in the eye. "What I mean is, how dare you walk into my apartment and analyze my work without saying anything? At least you could have said you didn't like it."

  His expression grew more serious, his eyes searching. Full-face, up close, he had lines in his forehead as well. "I'm sorry." I felt as if I'd struck a dog--the puzzled way his eyebrows worked on the problem of my annoyance. It was hard to believe that he'd been holding forth to himself about contemporary painters a few minutes before.

  "I haven't had the luxury of art school," I added. "I work ten hours a day at a soporific editing job. Then I go home and draw or

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  paint." This wasn't completely true, because I worked only eight hours, and often I went home exhausted and watched the news and sitcoms on the little television my great-aunt had bequeathed to me years before, or made phone calls, or lay on my bed-sofa in a stupor, or read. "And then I get up and go to work again the next day. On weekends I sometimes make it to a museum or paint in a park, or I draw inside if the weather is bad. Very glamorous. Does that qualify as an artist's life?" I put more sarcasm into the last question than I'd meant to, scaring myself. He was the only date I'd had in months and months, if you could even call this a date, and I was chewing him out.

  "I'm sorry," he said again. "And I have to say I'm impressed." He glanced down at his hand on the edge of the bar and at mine, wrapped around my Guinness. Then we sat looking at each other, longer and longer, a staring contest. His eyes under their thick brows were--perhaps it was the color that held me. It was as if I'd never really seen another person's eyes before. I felt that if I could name their color, or the shade of the flecks in their depths, I would be able to look away. Finally he stirred. "Now what do we do?"

  "Well," I said, and my boldness alarmed me because deep down I knew--I knew --that it was not me, that it was inspired entirely by Robert's presence and the way he was gazing into my face. "Well, I think this is where you invite me to come home and look at your etchings."

  He began to laugh. His eyes lit up, and his generous, ugly, sensual mouth brimmed with laughter. He slapped his knee. "Exactly. Will you come home with me now and see my etchings?"

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  Mon cher oncle:

  We have received your note this morning and will be delighted to welcome you at dinner. Papa hopes you will come early, with the papers to read to him.

  In haste, your niece,

  Béatrice de Clerval

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  CHAPTER 15 Kate

  Robert lived in an apartment in the West Village with two other art students, who were both out when we arrived. Their bedroom doors were open, floors strewn with clothes and books like in dorm rooms. There was a Pollock poster in the untidy living room, a bottle of brandy on the counter in the kitchen, and dishes in the sink. Robert led me to his bedroom, which was also a mess. The bed was unmade, of course, and there was dirty laundry on the floor, but he had hung a couple of sweaters neatly over the back of the desk chair. There were piles of books--I was impressed to see that some of them were in French, art books and perhaps novels, and when I asked Robert about this, he said that his mother had come to the United States with his father after the war, that she was French and he had grown up bilingual.

  The most striking thing, however, was that every surface was covered with drawings, watercolors, postcards of paintings. The wall
s were hung with what had to be Robert's own sketches -- pencil, charcoal, sometimes the same model over and over, studies of arms, legs, noses, hands, hands everywhere. I had assumed that his room would be a shrine to modern painting, full of cubes and lines and Mondrian posters, but no--it was an ordinary workspace. He stood watching me. I knew enough to understand that his drawings were astounding, technically assured and yet also full of life and mystery and motion. "I'm trying to learn the body," he said soberly. "It's still very hard for me to draw. I don't care about anything else."

  "You're a traditionalist," I said in surprise.

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  "Yes," he said shortly. "I actually don't care about concepts very much. Believe me, I'm taking a lot of shit for that at school, too."

  "I thought--when you were talking at the bar about all those great contemporary artists, I thought you admired them."

  He gave me a strange look. "I didn't mean to give you that impression."

  We stood staring at each other. The apartment throbbed with silence, that off-season feeling of a deserted space at the heart of a busy night in the city. We could have been alone on Mars. There was a secret feeling to it, as if we had been playing hide-and-seek and no one knew where we were. I thought briefly of my mother, already long since asleep in the big bed that had once contained my father as well, the cat at her feet, the front door sensibly locked and checked twice, the clock ticking in the kitchen below her. I turned to Robert Oliver. "So what do you admire, then?"

  "Honestly?" He raised his heavy eyebrows. "Hard work."

  "You draw like an angel." It popped out of me, and I said it as my mother might have said it--and I meant it.

  He seemed unexpectedly pleased, full of surprise at my words. "We don't hear that in critique very much. Actually, never."