The Swan Thieves Part 27

I must have looked more shocked than ever, because he put an arm around my shoulders. "Don't worry. It's all right. It was just about my paintings, and I'll explain it to you later."

"You drove all night," I said.

"Yes, and can I leave my car there?" He pointed to the street, its signs and litter and incomprehensible meters.

"Certainly," I said. "You can, and it will be towed sometime after nine." Then we both began to laugh, and he brushed my hair 437.

back again, the gesture I remembered from our encounter at the camp, and kissed me, kissed me, kissed me. "Is it nine yet?"

"No," I said. "We have more than two hours." We went upstairs with his heavy bag, and I locked the door behind us and called in sick.

438.

C HAPTER 76 Mary Robert didn't move in with me; he simply stayed on, with his big heavy bag and the other things he'd brought in his car, the easels and paints and canvases and extra shoes and a bottle of wine he'd picked up for me as an arrival gift. I would no more have dreamed of asking him his plans or telling him to find his own place to live than I would have moved out of the apartment myself. It was a kind of heaven for me, I admit, to wake up with his golden arm spread across my extra pillow, his dark hair in ringlets on my shoulder. I would go to cla.s.s and then come home without painting at school as I usually did, and we would go back to bed for half the afternoon.

On Sat.u.r.days and Sundays we got up around noon and went to the parks to paint, or drove out to Virginia, or visited the National Gallery if it was raining. I remember distinctly that at least once we went through that room in the NGA where Leda hangs, and those portraits, and that amazing Manet with the winegla.s.ses; I swear he paid more attention to the Manet than to Leda, which didn't seem to interest him--at least that's how he behaved when I was with him there. We read all the plaques, and he commented on Manet's brushwork, then wandered off shaking his head in a way that meant admiration beyond words. After the first week, he told me sternly that I wasn't painting enough and that he thought it was because of him. I'd come home regularly to find a canvas prepared for me, toned in gray or beige. I began to work harder, under his guidance, than I had in a long time, and to push myself to try more complicated subjects.

439.

I painted Robert himself, for example, sitting in his khakis on my kitchen stool, bare to the waist. He taught me how to draw hands better, noticing that I routinely avoided them. He taught me not to disdain flowers and flower arrangements in my still lifes, pointing out how many great painters had considered them an important challenge. Once, he brought home a dead rabbit--I still don't understand where he got it--and a big trout, and we piled up fruits and flowers with them and painted a pair of Baroque still lifes, each in our own kind of imitation, and laughed over them. Afterward he skinned the rabbit and cooked both it and the trout, and they were delicious. He said he had learned to cook from his French mother; he certainly almost never did it, to my knowledge. Often we would open cans of soup and a bottle of wine and leave it at that.

And we read together almost every night, sometimes for hours. He read his favorite Milosz aloud to me, and poems in French, which he translated for me as he went along. I read him some of the novels I had always loved, Muzzy's collection of cla.s.sics, Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, which he hadn't known growing up. We read to each other clothed or naked, rolled up together in my pale-blue sheets or sprawled in our old sweaters on the floor in front of my sofa. He used my library card to bring home books on Manet, Morisot, Monet, Sisley, p.i.s.sarro--he loved Sisley particularly and said he was better than all the rest of them put together. Occasionally he copied effects from their work, on small canvases he reserved for that purpose.

Sometimes Robert fell into a quiet or even sad mood, and when I stroked his arm he would say he missed his children, and even get out his photographs of them, but he never mentioned Kate. I was afraid that he could not or would not stay forever; I also hoped he might eventually find his way out of his marriage and into my life in a more settled sense. I didn't know that he had a new post office box, one in DC, until he mentioned one day that he'd picked up his mail there and read Kate's request for a divorce. He'd sent her 440.

a PO address, he said, in case she needed him in an emergency. He told me he'd decided to go home briefly to get through the initial paperwork and see the children. He told me he would stay in a motel or with friends--I think that was his way of making clear to me that he didn't plan to return to Kate. Something in his firmness about never returning to her chilled me; if he could feel that way about her, I knew, he could one day feel that way about me. I would have preferred to see regret in him, some ambivalence-- although not enough doubt to take him away from me.

But he seemed oddly certain about leaving Kate, saying that she didn't understand the most important thing about him, without saying what that was. I didn't want to ask, since that would make it look as if I didn't understand either. When he returned from five days in Greenhill, he brought me a biography of Thomas Eakins (he always said my work reminded him of Eakins's, that it was somehow wonderfully American in flavor) and told me with zest about his little adventures on the road, and that the children were well and beautiful and he'd taken lots of pictures of them, and said nothing of Kate. And then he drew me into what I thought of by then as our bedroom and pulled me down onto the bed and made love to me with insistent concentration, as if he had missed me the whole time.

None of this minor paradise prepared me for the gradual s.h.i.+ft in his mood. Autumn came on, and with it a dampening of his spirits; it had always been my favorite season, the moment of a fresh start, new school shoes, new students, glorious color. But for Robert it seemed a kind of wilting, an encroaching gloom, the death of summer and of our first happiness. The ginkgo leaves in my neighborhood turned into yellow crepe paper; the chestnuts scattered themselves in our favorite parks. I got out new canvases and tempted him on a midweek trip to Mana.s.sas, on my day off from teaching, to the battlefield there. But Robert for once refused to paint; instead, he sat under a tree on a historic hill and brooded, as if he were listening to ghostly sounds of the clash that 441.

had occurred there, the carnage. I painted in the field by myself, hoping he would get over it if I left him alone for a while, but that evening he was angry with me about almost nothing, threatened to break a plate, and went out for a long walk alone. I cried a little, in spite of myself--I don't like to do that, you know; it was just too painful to see him in that state, and to feel rejected by him after all our glorious times together.

But it also seemed to me natural that he would suffer an aftershock from his legal separation from Kate--they had another three months to go before the divorce -- and from the permanence of his departure from his old life. I knew he must feel under pressure to look for work in DC, although he didn't show any signs of doing that; I had the sense that he had some small independent income or pool of earnings, probably from selling his remarkable paintings, but it surely wouldn't last him forever. I didn't like to ask about his income either, and I had been careful to keep our money separate, although I was paying the rent as I always had, and buying our food. He often brought home a few groceries, wine, or some useful little gift, so I hadn't noticed any great strain, although I'd begun to wonder if I should eventually ask him to split the rent and the utilities with me, since I struggled at the end of each month. I could have gone to Muzzy for help, but she had not been encouraging in her response to my living with a soon-to-be divorced artist, and that stayed my hand. ("I know about love," she said mildly on one visit I paid to her during Robert's sojourn with me. It was before the horrifying spectacle of her tumor, her tracheostomy, her speaking box. "I do, dear, more than you might think. But you're so talented, you know. I've always wanted someone who would take care of you a bit.") Now Robert would surely need to pay child support, and I didn't dare ask him the details when he sat glowering on the sofa.

On sunny weekends, his mood would occasionally lift, and I would find myself hopeful, easily forgetting the previous days and convincing myself that these were growing pains in our 442.

relations.h.i.+p. I thought, you see, not of marriage, exactly, but of some kind of longer-term life with Robert, a life in which we would commit ourselves, rent an apartment with a studio, combine our strength and resources and plans, go to Italy and Greece on a pseudo-honeymoon so that we could paint there and visit all the great sculpture and painting and landscape I'd longed to see. It was a vague dream, but it had grown while I wasn't looking, like a dragon under my bed, and it had undermined my romance of "all by myself" before I'd realized what was happening. On those remaining happy weekends, we went on short trips, mostly at my insistence, and with picnics packed to save money--the happiest time was to Harpers Ferry, where we stayed at a cheap inn and walked all over the town.

One evening in early December, I came home to find Robert gone, and I didn't hear from him for several days. He returned looking oddly refreshed and said he'd been to visit an old friend in Baltimore, which did seem to be true. Another time he went to New York. After that visit he seemed not refreshed but actually elated, and that evening he was too busy to make love, something that had never happened before, and stood at his easel in the living room making sketches in charcoal. I did the dinner dishes, tamping down my annoyance--did Robert think the dishes did themselves, day after day?--and tried not to watch over the counter that divided my tiny kitchen from my tiny living room while he sketched in a face I hadn't seen since my impulsive trip to Greenhill for his college show: she was very beautiful, with her curling dark hair so like his own, her fine square jaw, her thoughtful smile.

I knew her immediately. In fact, when I saw her I wondered how I could not have noticed her absence all these happy months; I had never questioned Robert's leaving her entirely out of his paintings and drawings in the time he'd been staying with me. He had never even included the distant figures of mother and child I'd seen in some of his earlier landscapes, like the one he'd painted on the 443.

sh.o.r.e in Maine during our workshop. Her return that evening had a strange effect on me, a crawling fear like the sense you get when someone has entered a room too quietly and is standing behind you. I told myself it wasn't fear of Robert, but if it wasn't that, what was I afraid of?

444.

C HAPTER 77 1879.

She watches Olivier paint.

They are standing on the beach in the afternoon light, and he has begun a second canvas: one for morning, one for afternoon. He is painting the cliffs and two large gray rowboats the fishermen have pulled far up onsh.o.r.e, their oars stowed inside, the nets and cork floats catching an elusive sun. He sketches first with burnt umber on the primed canvas, and then begins to ma.s.s in the cliffs with more umber, with blue, a shadowy gray-green. She wants to suggest that he lighten his palette, as her teacher once told her; she wonders why this scene of s.h.i.+fting lights and sky looks to Olivier so somber underneath. But she believes that neither his work nor his life can change much now. She stands in silence beside him, about to set up her own work, her folding stool and portable wooden easel--delaying, observing. She wears a thin wool dress against the chill in the afternoon's brightness, and over that a heavier wool jacket. The breeze catches at her skirt, the ribbons of her bonnet. She watches him bring the churning water partly to life. But why doesn't he put more light into it?

She turns away and b.u.t.tons her smock over her clothes, arranges her canvas, unfolding the clever wooden stool. She stands before the easel as he does, instead of sitting, digging her boot heels in among the pebbles. She tries to forget his figure not far away, his silver head bowed over the work, his back upright. Her own canvas is already washed a pale gray; she has chosen this one for 445.

afternoon light. She puts in aquamarine, a heavy smudge on her palette, cadmium red for the poppies on the cliffs to the far left and right, her favorite flowers.

Now she gives herself thirty minutes by the watch on her chain, squints, holds the brush as lightly as she can, painting with wrist and forearm, quick strokes. The water is rose-colored, blue-green, the sky nearly colorless, the stones of the beach are rosy and gray, the foam at the edge of the waves is beige. She paints in Olivier's dark-suited form, his white hair, but as if he stands at a great distance, a minor figure on the strand. She touches the cliffs with raw umber, then green, then with the red specks of poppies. There are white flowers as well, and smaller yellow ones--she can see the cliff both up close and far off.

Her thirty minutes are gone.

Olivier turns, as if he understands that her first pa.s.s over the canvas is finished. She sees that he is still working slowly across an expanse of water, has not yet reached the boats again or even the cliffs. It will be a careful piece, controlled and even beautiful, and it will take days. He steps near to see her canvas. She stands staring at it with him, feeling his elbow brush her shoulder. She is conscious of her skill, as seen through his eyes, and of the painting's flaws: it is alive, moving, but too rough for even her taste, an experiment that fails. She wants him to be silent, and to her relief he doesn't interrupt the rumble of the waves on the heavy gravel, the wash of stones rolled over and out to sea. Instead he nods, looks down at her. His eyes are permanently reddened, a little loose around the edges. At that moment, she would not trade his presence for anything in the world, simply because he is so much closer to the edge of it than she is. He understands her.

That evening they eat with the other guests, sitting across from each other, pa.s.sing the dishes of sauce or little mushrooms. The landlady, serving veal to Olivier, says that a gentleman has come by that afternoon to ask if she had a famous painter there, a friend of his from Paris; he left no card. Is Monsieur Vignot famous? she 446.

asks. Olivier laughs and shakes his head. Plenty of famous painters have worked in etretat, but he is hardly one of them, he says. Beatrice drinks a gla.s.s of wine and regrets it. They sit in the main parlor, reading, with a mustached English guest who rustles the papers from London and clears his throat over something he sees there. Then she puts her book down and tries to write a second letter to Yves, without much success; her pen seems not to like the paper no matter how many times she dips and blots. The landlady's mandarin clock strikes ten, and Olivier rises to bow to her, smiles affectionately out of his wind-reddened eyes, seems about to kiss her hand but then does not.

When he has gone upstairs, she understands: he will never invite more from her. He will never visit her in private, will never propose that she visit him, will never make another move that a gentleman and relative should not. He will initiate nothing. The kiss in his studio was his first and last, as he promised; her kiss on the station platform was her own responsibility, as was their kiss on the beach. Both took him by surprise. He means this restraint as a gift, she is certain--a proof of his respect, his care. But the result is a cruel dilemma; whatever happens she must effect herself and live with later. Whatever they experience together will spring from her own desire, her comparative youth. She cannot imagine knocking on his door upstairs. He has left her a trail of bread crumbs, like the boy in the fairy tale.

Later, she hardly sleeps, in her white bed, watching the curtains move a little where she has left a window open to the menace of the night air, feeling the town around her, hearing the Channel maul the shale on the strand.

43 8.

447.

C HAPTER 78 Mary For weeks after the return of the dark-haired lady to his paintings, Robert was preoccupied, and not only preoccupied but also silent and touchy. He slept long hours and didn't bathe, and I began to feel repelled by his presence in a way I never had before. Sometimes he slept on the sofa. I'd made a date weeks earlier, for my sister and her husband to meet him, and Robert never showed up. I sat in humiliation at a table in a little Provencal place called Lavandou that my sister and I have always loved. I still wouldn't want to go back there now, even if I had money to throw away on fine dining.

The only thing he had energy for was his painting, and the only thing he painted was this woman. I knew better by then than to ask who she was, because this always elicited the vague, almost mystical answers that annoyed me so much. Nothing had changed, I once thought bitterly, since the days when I'd been a student and he'd been purposely mysterious about where he had seen this subject of his work and why he painted her.

I might have gone on believing forever that he had known her in life--face, dark curls, dresses, and all--if I hadn't looked through some of his books while he was out one day buying canvases. It was the first time he'd left the apartment in a while; I took it as a good sign that he'd had the energy to go on an errand and also to plan some new paintings. After he went out, I found myself hovering around the sofa, which had become a sort of Robert den, so that it even smelled like him. I threw myself down there and breathed in the smell of his hair and clothing, without 448.

the inconvenience of his irritable presence. It was littered, like a real den--sc.r.a.ps of paper, drawing supplies, books of poetry, cast-off clothing, and library tomes full of portraiture. Everything was portraiture now, and the dark lady was his only subject. He seemed to have forgotten his old love of landscape, his great skill at still lifes, his natural versatility. I noticed the shades were drawn in my small living room and had been down for days, while I'd been hurrying back and forth to my teaching.

It rushed over me like a proof of my own idiocy that Robert was depressed. What he called his "funks" were just good old garden-variety depression, and perhaps more serious than I'd been willing to contemplate. I knew he kept medications among his things and took them out now and then, but he'd told me they were to help him sleep occasionally after a long night of painting, and I never saw him take anything regularly. On the other hand, he never did anything at all regularly. I sat grieving over the transformation of my bright little apartment, mourning that loss so that I would not have to think about the transformation of my soul mate.

Then I began to clean up, putting all of Robert's mess into a basket, stacking the books neatly by the bed, folding the blankets, plumping the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, taking the dirty gla.s.ses and cereal bowls to the kitchen. And I had a sudden vision of myself, a tall, clean, competent person clearing up someone else's dishes from the rug. I think I knew in that moment that we were doomed, not because of Robert's idiosyncrasies but because of my own sense of self. I watched him shrink a little, felt my heart contract. I raised the shades and wiped the coffee table and brought a vase of flowers from the kitchen into the renewed sunlight.

I could have left the situation there, you know, left it at the normal must-we-break-up level. I sat on the sofa a little longer, feeling myself reclaiming something, sad, frightened. But because I was sitting there, I began to turn through Robert's books. The top three were library books on Rembrandt, and there was another on Leonardo da Vinci--Robert's taste seemed to be wandering a 449.

little from the nineteenth century. Underneath was a heavy book on Cubism, which I hadn't seen him open at all.

And near those were two books on the Impressionists, one about their portraits of one another--I flipped through the familiar images--and one, less predictably, a slim, ill.u.s.trated paperback about the women of the Impressionist world, running from Berthe Morisot's crucial role in the first Impressionist exhibition up into the early twentieth century and lesser-known, later female painters of the movement. I felt a flicker of respect for Robert's having such a book--it was his, not a library volume, I saw when I opened it--and a sense of wonder at its being worn with use; he had read it thoroughly, referred to it often, even smudged it a little with paint.

I enclose a copy of this volume, which I tracked down myself for you over the last month, since he took his away with him. Turn to page forty-nine, and you will see what I saw as I flipped through it--a portrait of Robert's lady and a seascape from the coast of Normandy by the lady herself. Beatrice de Clerval, I learned, was a highly gifted painter who had given up art in her late twenties; the short biographical text blamed this desertion on her having become a mother, which she'd done at the dangerously ripe age of twenty-nine, in an era when women of her cla.s.s were encouraged to concentrate solely on family life.

The reproduction of the portrait was in color, and her face was unmistakable to me; I even knew her ruffled neckline of pale yellow on pale green, the bow on her bonnet, the exact soft carmine in her cheeks and lips, the expression of mingled wariness and joy. According to the text, she had been very promising as a young artist, studying from the age of seventeen until her midtwenties with the academy instructor Georges Lamelle, had exhibited a painting just once at the Salon, under the false name of Marie Riviere, and died of influenza in 1910; her daughter, Aude, a journalist in Paris 450.

before the Second World War, died in 1966. Beatrice de Clerval's husband was a noted civil servant, establis.h.i.+ng the modern postal offices of four or five French cities. She was an acquaintance of the Manets, the Morisots, the photographer Nadar, and Mallarme. Work by Clerval can now be found in the Musee d'Orsay, the Musee de Maintenon, the Yale University Art Gallery, the University of Michigan, and several private collections, notable among them that of Pedro Caillet of Acapulco.

Well, you will see all that in the book, but I want to try to explain the effect this set of images and the biography that accompanied them had on my feelings. You'd think that knowing your partner is obsessed with a long-ago glimpse of a living woman, someone he's seen only once or twice, would make you uneasy; but you expect an artist, a fellow artist, to be obsessed with some image or other. Learning that Robert was obsessed with a woman whom he'd never seen alive caused me much greater unease--it was a shock, in fact. You can't be jealous of someone who's dead, and yet the fact that she had once been alive at all gave me a feeling perilously close to jealousy, and then the fact that she was long dead was somehow grotesque, as if I'd caught him in some vague act of necrophilia.

No, that's wrong. The living often still love the dead; we'd never criticize a widower for loving his wife's memory or even being rather obsessed with her. But someone Robert had never known, could not have known, someone who had died more than forty years before his own birth--it was stomach turning. That's too strong a description, I suppose. But I felt queasy. It was too strange for me. I had never thought he might be crazy when he'd been painting a living face over and over; but now that I knew it was the face of a long-dead woman, I wondered if there was something really wrong with him.

I read the biographical note several times to be sure I hadn't missed anything. Perhaps not much was known about Beatrice de Clerval, or maybe her retreat from painting into domesticity had 451.

bored all the art historians. She seemed to have lived decades after that without doing anything of note, until she died. A retrospective of her work had been held in the 1980s at a museum in Paris whose name I didn't recognize, the pictures probably borrowed from private collections, put up and taken down again before I'd even applied to college. I looked at her portrait again. There was the wistful smile, the dimple in the left cheek near the mouth. Even from the glossy page, her eyes followed mine.

When I couldn't stand this any longer, I closed the book and put it back in the stack. Then I got it out again and wrote down the t.i.tle and author, the publication information, some of the facts it contained about Clerval, and replaced it carefully, hiding my notes in my desk. I went into our bedroom and made up the bed and lay down on it. After a while, I went into the kitchen and cleaned that up, too, and made a meal out of whatever I could find in my cabinets. It had been a long time since I'd really cooked something. I loved Robert, and he would have the best possible treatment, care that would help him to get better; he had told me that he still had health insurance. When he came home, he looked pleased and we ate together by candlelight and made love on the living-room rug (he didn't seem to notice that I'd cleaned up the sofa), and he took a picture of me wrapped in a blanket. I didn't say anything about the book or the portraits.

Things were a little better that week, at least on the surface, until Robert told me that he was going to Greenhill again. He had to see the lawyer with Kate, he said, and to settle some financial matters, and he would be gone a week. I was disappointed, but I thought it might be best for his mood to get more of that work behind him, so I simply kissed him good-bye and let him go. He was flying; his plane left while I was teaching and I couldn't drive him to the airport. He did stay away only a week, showing up one evening very tired and smelling odd, like travel, a dirty but also somehow exotic smell. He slept for two days.

On the third day, he left the apartment to run some errands, 452.

and I went through all his things, shamelessly--or rather, with shame but determined to know more. He hadn't unpacked his bag yet, and in it I found receipts in French, some that said "Paris," a hotel, restaurants, De Gaulle Airport. There was a crumpled ticket for Air France in one of his jacket pockets, along with his pa.s.sport, which I had never seen before. Most people have terrifying-looking pa.s.sport photos; Robert's was gorgeous. Among his clothes I found a package wrapped in brown paper, and inside that a bundle of letters tied with ribbon, very old letters, apparently in French. I had never seen them before. I wondered if they might have to do with his mother, if they might be old family letters, or if he had gotten them in France. When I saw the signature on the first one, I sat there for a long nightmare moment, and then I folded them up again and put the package back into his luggage.

And then I had to decide what to say to him. Why did you go to France? That was only slightly less important than Why did you not tell me you were going to France, or even take me with you? But I couldn't bring myself to ask; it would have hurt my pride, and by that time my pride was very sore, as Muzzy would have said. Instead, we quarreled, or I quarreled with him, I picked a fight with him about a painting, a still life we'd both worked on, and I threw him out, but he went willingly enough. I cried to my sister, I vowed never to take him back if he showed up again, I tried to get over him, and that's an end to it. But I worried when he didn't get in touch with me at all. I didn't know for a long time that he had gone from me to the National Gallery--or just months later--and tried to hurt a painting. That was not like him. In no way was that like him.

453.

C HAPTER 79 Marlow Mary rejoined me at my hotel for breakfast, meeting me in the half-empty restaurant. It was a quieter meal than dinner had been the night before; the first flush of her excitement was gone, and I noticed again those violet smudges, shadows on snow, under her eyes. Her eyes themselves looked dark this morning, clouded. She had a few freckles on her nose that I hadn't registered before, tiny shavings, completely unlike Kate's. "Did you have a bad night?" I asked, at the risk of courting one of her stern glances.

"Yes," she said. "I was thinking about how much I've told you about Robert, so many private things, and how you were sitting there in your hotel room thinking about it all."

"How did you know I was thinking about it?" I pa.s.sed her a plate of toast.

"I would have been," she said simply.

"Well, I was. I think about this constantly. You are remarkable to let me see so much of him, and your doing that will help me more than anything has, to help Robert." I paused, feeling my way while she let her toast get cold. "And I see why you waited for him for a long time, when he was unavailable."

"Unattainable," she corrected.

"And why you love him."

"Loved him, not love him."

I hadn't hoped for this much, and I focused on my eggs Benedict so that I wouldn't have to meet her eyes. In fact, we finished our 454.

breakfast mainly in silence, but after a while the silence became comfortable.

At the Met, she stood looking at Portrait of Beatrice de Clerval, 1879, the picture she'd first encountered in a book Robert had left next to her sofa. "You know, I think Robert came back here and found her again," she said.

I was watching her profile; it was the second time, I remembered sharply, that we'd been in a museum together. "He did?"

"Well, he traveled to New York at least once while he lived with me, as I wrote to you, and he came back strangely excited."

"Mary, do you want to go see Robert? I could take you when we get back to Was.h.i.+ngton. On Monday, if you'd like." I hadn't meant to say it right away.

"Do you mean that you want me to find out more for you by asking him myself?" She stood straight and stiff, examining Beatrice's face one more time without looking at me.

It shocked me. "No, no--I wouldn't ask that of you. You've already helped me see him in a new way. I only meant that I don't want to keep you from him if you need to see him yourself."

She turned. Then she came closer, as if for protection, with Beatrice de Clerval watching us; in fact, she suddenly slipped one hand into mine. "No," she said. "I don't want to see him. Thank you." She took her hand away and walked around looking at the Degas ballerinas, and the nudes drying off with their big towels. After a few minutes she came back to me. "Shall we go?"

Outside, it was a bright, soft summer day, warm rather than hot. I bought each of us a hot dog with mustard at one of the stands on the street. ("How do you know I'm not a vegetarian?" said Mary, although we'd already had two other meals together.) We wandered into Central Park and ate on a bench, cleaning our hands with paper napkins. Mary unexpectedly wiped the mustard off my hands as well as hers, and I thought what a lovely mother 455.

of young children she might have made, but naturally I didn't say it. I spread out my fingers.

"My hand looks much older than yours, doesn't it?"

"Why shouldn't it? It is somewhat older than mine. Twenty years, if you were born in 1947."

"I won't ask how you know that."

"No need to, Sherlock."

I sat watching her. The shade from oaks and beeches dappled her face and short-sleeved white blouse, the fine skin of her throat. "How beautiful you are."

"Please don't say that," she said, looking down at her lap.

"I meant it only as a compliment, a respectful one. You're like a painting."

"That's idiotic." She crumpled up the napkins and aimed them into a wastebasket next to our bench. "No woman actually wants to be a painting." But when she turned back to me, our eyes met across the strange sound of what each of us had just said. She glanced away first. "Have you ever been married?"

"No."

"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 456.

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 pa.s.sionate 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.