The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  "If you weren't a spoiled brat, you certainly wouldn't be here in this totally inappropriate manner."

  "Come on," he said again. "You don't think about appropriate and inappropriate like that. I'm not here to jump your snotty bones anyway. I've just thought all along we could be friends, and

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  I thought you might talk with me if we were alone and you didn't have to show off to other people."

  I didn't know where to begin taking him apart. "Show off? I've never seen anyone more concerned with image than you seem to be, young man."

  "Oh, now we see your true colors. An anti-snob. That's better. After all, you went to art school yourself, and I know where. Not bad." He smiled and showed me his sketchbook. "Hey--I've been trying to do a self-portrait in your mirror. I was just touching it up. Do I look like a show-off?"

  I glanced at the drawing in spite of myself. It was wistful, quiet, a thoughtful face I wouldn't have associated with what I'd seen of Frank. It was good, too.

  "Very poor shading," I said. "And the mouth is too big."

  "Big is good."

  "Get off my bed, mister," I said. "Come over here and kiss me first."

  I should have slapped him, but I began to laugh. "I'm old enough to be your mother."

  "Not true," he said. He put his sketchbook down on the bed, stood up--he was exactly my height and width and shape--and put a hand on either side of me, against the wall, a gesture he had surely learned from Hollywood. "You are young and beautiful and you should stop being so cranky and have some fun. This is an art colony."

  "I should have you kicked out of this art colony, you child."

  "Let's see, you would be--what, eight years older than I am? Five? So dignified." He put one hand on my face and began to stroke my cheek, so that a flame leapt from my shoulder to my hairline. "Do you like to pretend you're self-sufficient, or do you really enjoy sleeping alone in this stall?"

  "Men are not allowed in here anyway," I said, removing his hand, which went right back to its gentle work around my temple

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  and down my jawbone. I began to long in spite of myself to put that fine, dexterous young hand elsewhere, to feel it everywhere.

  "That's only on paper." He leaned in, but slowly, as if to hypnotize me, a successful enterprise. His breath had a pleasant, fresh smell. He stayed there until I kissed him first, humiliating myself but hungry, and then his lips met mine thoroughly, with a restrained strength that made my stomach flip. I might have ended up spending the night against that silky chest if he hadn't put his hand to my hair and lifted a strand of it. "Gorgeous," he said.

  I slipped out from under his tanned arm. "You are, too, little boy, but forget it."

  He laughed with surprising good nature. "All right. Let me know if you change your mind. You don't have to be this lonely if you don't want to. We can just have a few of those good conversations you insist on avoiding."

  "Just leave, please. Jesus. Enough."

  He picked up his sketchbook and went out as quietly as Robert Oliver had from the studio the night before, even closing the door respectfully behind him, as if to show me the maturity I had underestimated in him. When I was sure he'd left the building, I threw myself down on my bed and wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve and even cried a little, but fiercely.

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  CHAPTER 67 1879

  By the time their train arrives at the coast, it is night and they have fallen silent; she is weary, her veil spotted with a little soot that makes her feel there is something wrong with her eyesight. At Fécamp they prepare to leave the train for a hansom cab to Étretat. Olivier collects their smaller bags from the shelf in the compartment where they have talked all day--the trunks will follow--and it seems to her when he stands up that he is stiff, that his body under his well-cut traveling suit is indubitably old, that he has no business touching her elbow when he speaks with her, not because he isn't Yves but because he isn't young. But he sits down again and takes her hand. They are both wearing gloves. "I am holding your hand," he tells her, "because I can, and because it is the most beautiful one in the world."

  She can't say anything to equal that, and the train is shivering, stopping. Instead she pulls herself free and peels off her glove, then returns her hand to his. He lifts it up to examine it, and in the dim compartment light she sees it objectively, noticing as always that the fingers are too long, the whole hand too big for the small wrist, that there is blue paint around the ends of her first and second fingers. She thinks he will kiss it, but he only bows his head, as if pondering something private, and lets her go. Then he stands, agile, picks up their bags, and invites her politely to leave the compartment ahead of him.

  The conductor helps her down into the night, which smells like coal and damp fields. The monstrous train behind them is still groaning, steam from the engine white against dark rows of

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  houses, the shapes of engineers and passengers vague. In their cab, Olivier settles her carefully on a seat beside him; the horses pull forward, and she wonders for the hundredth time why she has consented to such a journey. Is it because Yves insisted or because Olivier wanted her to come with him? Or is it because she herself wanted to and was too weak to talk Yves out of it, too curious?

  Étretat, when they arrive, is a blur of gas lamps and cobbled streets. Olivier offers a hand for her to alight, and she pulls her cloak around her, stretches discreetly--she is stiff herself, from traveling. The wind smells of salt water; somewhere out there is the Channel, making its lonely sound. Étretat has the injured air of a resort caught off-season. She knows that melody, knows this town from previous visits, but tonight it seems to her a new place, a wilderness, the edge of the world. Now Olivier is giving some orders about their things. When she allows herself a glance at his profile, she finds him distant, sad. What decades have brought him here? Did he visit this coast long ago with his wife? Can she ask him such a thing? Under the streetlamps, his face looks lined, his lips elegant, sensitive, wrinkled. In the first-floor windows of one of the tall, chimneyed houses across from the station, someone has lit candles; she can see a shape moving around inside, perhaps a woman straightening up a room before going to bed. She wonders what the life in that house is like and why she herself inhabits a different one, in Paris; she thinks how easily fate might have accomplished such a trade.

  Olivier does everything gracefully, a man long used to his own skin--accustomed, also, to having his own quiet way. Watching, she realizes with a sudden lurch of her insides that unless she tells him some kind of no, she will eventually find herself lying naked in his arms here, in this town. It is a shocking thought, but once it presents itself she can't turn away. She will have to find the strength to form that word, "non." Non --there is no such word between them, only this strange openness of spirit. He is closer to death than she is; he doesn't have time to wait for answers, and

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  she is far too moved by his desire. The inevitability of it catches tightly in her rib cage.

  "You must be tired, my dear," he is saying. "Shall we go straight to the hotel? I'm certain they will give us a little supper."

  "Will our rooms be nice?" It comes out more starkly than she intends, because she means something else.

  He looks at her, surprised, mild, amused. "Yes, they both are very nice, and I believe there is a sitting room for you as well." She feels a wave of shame. Of course; Yves has sent them here together. Olivier has the grace not to smile. "You will want to sleep late, I hope, and we can meet to paint tomorrow in the late morning, if you'd like. We shall see how the weather is--fine, I think, by the feel of this air."

  The man has moved up the street already with their luggage in a wheeled cart, their bags and boxes, her leather-strapped trunk. She and her husband's uncle are alone at the edge of another world, bounded by only the dark salt water, a place where she knows no one but him. She suddenly wants to laugh.

  Instead, she sets down the bag with h
er precious painting supplies in it and raises her veil; she steps close to him, her hands touching his shoulders. His eyes are alert in the light of the gas lamp. If he is surprised by her upturned face, her rashness, he hides it at once. She surprises herself in turn by accepting his kiss without reservation, feeling in it his forty years' experience, seeing the edge of his cheekbone. His mouth is warm and moving. She is one in a line of loves, but she is the only one at this moment, and she will be the last. The unforgettable, the one he takes with him to the end.

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  CHAPTER 68 Mary

  The third day was the surprising one. I could never describe all of the five hundred days I more or less spent with Robert Oliver, but the first days of loving someone are vivid; you remember them in detail because they represent all the others. They even explain why a particular love doesn't work out.

  On the third morning of the conference, I found myself eating breakfast at the same table as a couple of women faculty members who seemed not to notice my presence at the other end, which made it fortunate that I'd brought my book. One of them was a woman of about sixty whom I vaguely recognized as a teacher of printmaking at the retreat, and the other was perhaps forty-five, a painting instructor with short bleached hair who began by declaring that she wasn't finding the caliber of the painting students as high as last year's. Well, I'll be reading my book, then, ma'am, I thought. My eggs were runny, not the way I like them.

  "I'm not sure why that is." She took a big swallow of coffee, and the other woman nodded. "I hope the great Robert Oliver isn't disappointed, that's all."

  "I'm sure he'll survive. He teaches at a small college now, right?"

  "Well, that's true--I think it's Greenhill, in North Carolina. In all fairness, a very good department, but hardly what he would find at a real school. I mean, at an art program."

  "His students seem to like him," observed the printmaker mildly; she clearly hadn't associated the egg-picking reader at her own table with Robert's group. I kept my head down. It's not that

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  other people's idiocy makes me shy; it simply makes me want to walk away.

  "Of course they do." The bleached woman pushed her coffee cup around. "He's made the cover of ARTnews, he has work all over the place, and he's hip enough not to care and to go on teaching in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't hurt that he's six two and looks like Jupiter."

  Poseidon, in fact, I corrected silently, cutting my bacon. Or Neptune. You have no idea.

  "His female students run after him constantly, I'm sure," said the printmaker.

  "Naturally." Her companion seemed pleased by this opening. "And you hear things, but who knows what's true. He seems to me kind of oblivious, which is refreshing. Or he might be one of those men who just really don't notice anyone but themselves in the end. I think he has a youngish family, too. But you never know. The older I get, the more I think men in their forties are a complete mystery, usually an unpleasant one."

  I wondered what age she liked better. I could, for example, introduce her to the enterprising Frank.

  The printmaker sighed. "I know. I was married for twenty-one years-- was --and I still don't think I understood anything about my ex-husband."

  "Do you want to take some extra coffee with you?" asked the spiky woman, and they left together without glancing my way. I noticed as they walked off how graceful the younger woman was--lovely, actually, dressed in svelte black with a red belt, trimmer at forty-five than most women were at twenty. Maybe she would take up the Robert Oliver challenge herself, and they could compare their coverage in ARTnews. Except that Robert would never be interested in that kind of competition, I decided; he would scratch his head and fold his arms and think about something else. I wondered if my picture of him as incorruptible was correct; was he simply oblivious, as the woman had said? He hadn't been quite

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  oblivious to me two nights before, and yet nothing much had happened between us. I drank my tea in a rush and went back to the stables to get my gear. If he wasn't oblivious, it proved that I was probably unmemorable.

  Robert collected us near the vans again, but this time he said we would walk instead of driving. To my surprise he led us out the path through the woods that I'd taken to the water the first day, and we set up our easels on the rocky beach where I'd seen him first dive into the cold tide and then emerge from it. He smiled around the group, not excluding me, and gave us some directions about the angle of the light and the way we could expect it to change. We would do one canvas for morning, right here, take a lunch break back at the camp, and then do a second canvas for afternoon. That clinched it for me; if he could return to this spot and teach a landscape class here, he was truly oblivious, and to me in particular. I felt a kind of sad relief; I had been not only wrong, unethical, but also silly to believe he'd felt what I had. I could have cried for a moment, watching Robert move among his students, giving us a hint here and there about positioning our easels; at the same time, I felt my freedom begin to flood back, the romance of myself, the loneliness. I had been right to value that, and right to laugh Frank out of my room as well.

  I tied back my hair and set up facing the longest promontory into the ocean, where I could catch a big stand of firs with their roots on Atlantic rock. I knew right away that this would be a good canvas, a good morning; my hand moved easily through sketching the forms and my eyes were immediately filled with the underlying grays, browns, the green of firs that appeared black in the distance. Even Robert's presence, his moving off to set his own easel in plain sight, his bending and stooping in his yellow cotton shirt--none of that could interrupt me for very long. I painted hard until we broke for a snack, and when I looked up from cleaning my brushes, Robert was smiling at me from the middle of the group in an ordinary way that confirmed my conclusions. I began

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  to speak to him, to say something about the view and its challenges, but he had already turned to talk with someone else.

  We painted until lunchtime, and began again at one o'clock with fresh canvases. My morning's picture, propped against a tree to dry, had pleased me more than any I'd done in months; I promised myself I'd come back to finish it at the right time of day, maybe the morning everyone left the conference, which was only two more days away. I wished Robert had come over to see it, but he hadn't checked anyone's paintings today. In the afternoon, we worked in our silent spread, planting easels here and there; Robert went off to the edge of the woods with his, but he returned as the light began to deepen into late afternoon, talked with us a little about the view, and took us back to camp. I was less pleased with my second canvas, but he walked by and praised it a little, commented on everyone equally, then brought us together for a final critique. It had been a good couple of sessions, a pleasant workmanlike day, I thought, and I looked forward to the evening, to making myself drink a beer with a fellow painter or two, then going off to bed to sleep soundly.

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  CHAPTER 69 Mary

  I managed to have my beer early, over dinner, and then I sat near the fire for a while with two men taking the watercolor class. Their discussion of the relative merits of oils and watercolor for landscape painting was interesting and kept me there longer than I'd intended to stay. At last I excused myself and brushed off the seat of my jeans, preparatory to heading for my neatly made bed. Frank was talking with someone else by the fire, someone young and pretty, so I didn't have to worry about finding him sitting in front of my mirror again. I took a long detour around him anyway, and that was what put me at the edge of the yard, the deep dark where the firelight didn't reach.

  A man was standing there, almost in the woods, a tall man rubbing his eyes with his hands, then rubbing his head, as if weary and distracted, and he was looking toward the trees instead of back at the fire with its crowd of festive figures. After a few minutes he began to walk into the woods, along the path I already thought of as ours, and I followed him, knowing that I shouldn't. There was just en
ough twilight to show his stride ahead of me and assure me that he wasn't aware of being followed. I told myself a couple of times to turn back, to give him his privacy. He was going toward the shore where we'd worked that day; probably he wanted to see some of the forms we'd painted there, even if they would be half visible now, and if he'd left the camp alone, he probably didn't want company.

  At the edge of the woods I stopped and watched him go on down the stones of the beach, which clinked together under his feet. The

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  slop of the ocean was audible; the sheen of water stretched darkly to an even darker horizon. Stars were coming out, but the sky was still blue--sapphire--rather than black, and Robert's shirt pale, his form moving along the edge of the water now. He stood still, then stooped to pick something up, flung his arm back with the childhood gesture of baseball-in-hand, and hurled it away from land--a stone. It was a quick, furious gesture: anger, maybe despair, release. I watched him without moving, half frightened by his emotion. Then he crouched down, a strange gesture for such a large person, again a child's gesture, and seemed to put his head in his hands.

  I wondered for a moment if he was tired, irritated (as I was myself) by the lack of sleep and the endless necessity of being with other people at the conference, or if he might even be crying, although I couldn't imagine what someone like Robert Oliver would have to cry about. Now he was sitting down on the beach--it would be damp, I thought, hard and slippery--and he stayed there on and on, his head in his hands. The waves came forward smoothly, unfurling white half visible in the dark. I stood watching and he simply sat there, his shoulders and back glimmering. In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know. I started down the beach, hearing the stones rattle under my feet, once almost tripping.

  He didn't turn around until I was very close, and even then I couldn't see his expression. But he saw me, whether or not he recognized me in the first moment, and he stood up -- started up. At that moment I finally felt shame and real apprehension at having invaded his solitude. We stood looking at each other. And I could see his face now; it was dark, troubled, and my presence hadn't cleared it. "What are you doing here?" he said flatly.