The Swan Thieves Part 9

After a moment I sat down in Robert's desk chair. It was one of those ancient office chairs with cracked leather and rows of bra.s.s studs, turning unsteadily on wheels underneath or tipping back a little too far for stability--inherited, I guessed, from a grandfather or even a great-grandfather. Then I got up again and gently closed the door. I felt she wouldn't mind; she'd left me so completely to my own devices there as it was. It seemed to me that Kate Oliver was an all-or-nothing person. Either she was going to conscientiously show and tell me everything, or she was going to keep her privacy intact, and she'd decided on the former course. I liked her; I liked her very much.

I bent over the desk and pulled a wad of paper out of one of the pigeonholes--bank statements, half-crumpled receipts from water and electric bills, some blank notebook paper. It seemed odd to me that Kate had entrusted her scattered husband with the household finances, but perhaps he'd insisted. I shoved the collection back into place. A few of the slots were empty of everything except dust and paper clips; she'd been at work here already. I imagined her pulling all this out, filing it flat and orderly somewhere, eventually wiping the desk clean, polis.h.i.+ng it, perhaps. Maybe she'd let me in here because she'd actually already removed anything personal; maybe it was an empty gesture, a false hospitality.

There was nothing of interest in the rest of the pigeonholes except a shriveled object in the far reaches of one that proved to be an ancient joint--I recognized the smell from long ago, as one recognizes a spice from a childhood dessert. I carefully put it back.

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The top two desk drawers were stuffed with sketches--conventional figure-drawing exercises, none of them anything like the lady with whom he routinely filled his room at Goldengrove--and old catalogs, mostly for art supplies, a few for outdoor gear, as if Robert had also been a hiker or cyclist. Why did I persist in thinking of him in the past tense? He might get well and hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other, and it was my job to help him try to do that.

The bottom drawer was harder to open, overflowing with yellow legal pads on which Robert had apparently made notes for teaching ("Previous block sketches, some fruit--still life to end of cla.s.s, two hours?"). I gathered from these notes that Robert had made only the roughest outlines for his cla.s.ses, and most of the papers did not have dates on them. His presence alone must have filled the cla.s.sroom or studio; apparently he hadn't planned for much else. Or had he simply been so gifted a teacher that he kept all his knowledge in his head and could release it in an organized way at will? Or perhaps teaching painting meant to him simply walking around critiquing students' ongoing work? I had had five or six studio courses like that myself, crammed in around the edges of my profession, and I loved them--that feeling of being alone and yet among other painters, left in peace even by the teacher most of the time but also observed, sometimes encouraged, at the odd moment, so that you focused all the harder.

I dug to the bottom of the bottom drawer and was about to turn away from all those legal pads interspersed with old phone bills when a sheet of handwriting caught my eye. It was lined white paper, wrinkled as if it had been wadded up and then partly smoothed out again, a corner torn off. It was the beginning of a letter, or a draft of a letter, written in a strong hand with big upright loops--here and there a word had been crossed out and another choice written in. I knew that handwriting already, from the nest of little notes all around me--it was Robert's, distinctly 107.

his. I picked the paper out of the drawer and tried to smooth it on the felt desktop.

You were constantly with me, my muse, and I thought of you with startling vividness, not only your beauty and kind company but also your laugh, your smallest gesture.

The next line was crossed out, scratched out viciously, and the rest of the page was blank. I listened in the direction of the kitchen. Through the closed door, I could hear Robert's former wife moving something--a stool dragged across linoleum, perhaps, a cupboard door being opened and shut. I folded the page into thirds and put it in my inside jacket pocket. Then I bent and dug a last time in the bottom drawer. Nothing--nothing else in his handwriting anyway, although there were tax statements that looked as if they'd hardly been removed from their envelopes.

It seemed silly, but since the door was firmly closed and Kate was still apparently busy in the kitchen, I bent over and began taking Robert's books off the shelves and reaching behind them. Dust streaked my hand. I came up with a rubber ball that might have belonged to one of the children and that had now caught some dust kittens--fluffy ma.s.ses of human cells, I remembered with something like a shudder. I set four or five books at a time on the floor, so that if Kate opened the door without warning she wouldn't find much out of place and I could always say I'd been looking at the books themselves.

But there were no more papers; there was nothing behind the books, and apparently nothing--I flipped a couple of them open, rapidly--tucked inside. I saw myself for a moment as if from the doorway, an interior carefully composed of dark shapes with illumination from one bulb on the ceiling, a harsh light, a jarring, suggestive interior in the manner of Bonnard. For the first time, I noticed that there were no pictures on the walls of Robert's office, 108.

no postcards taped up, no announcements of exhibitions, no small paintings left unsold from gallery shows. That was strange in an artist's office, but perhaps he had saved them all for his studio.

Then, bending over the bookshelves again, I saw that there actually was something on one wall--not a picture of any sort, but a scrawl of numbers in pencil and a few words next to the shelves, so that the note couldn't have been seen from the door. I thought for a moment it might be the heights and ages of Robert's children, the dates when they had reached a certain stature, but it was down very low for even a small child. I crouched beside the books, still holding Seurat and the Parisians in my hand. It was pencil indeed, probably a 5B or 6B, dark and soft for heavy shading. I squinted at it. It said "1879." After that, two words: "etretat. Joy."

I read it a couple of times. The numbers and letters were untidy on the wall--he must have stretched out on the floor to write them, and it still would have been difficult to make it neat. His long legs would have been c.o.c.ked behind him like a child's, the office was so small. Or had someone else written that smudge? I thought the looped "e" and "J," the length of the "y," looked like Oliver's hand, the baggy, strong writing on all the self-reminders I'd been reading, the canceled checks. I took the letter draft from my pocket and held it up to compare. The "y" was certainly the same, and the bold, clear lowercase "t." Why would a grown man, a tower of a man, lie down and write something on the wall of his office?

I carefully put the letter back in its hiding place in my pocket-- it was already warm from the heat of my body--and began to hunt around for a sc.r.a.p of paper that wasn't written on. I remembered the yellow pads in the bottom drawer and helped myself to a piece of paper from one of them, recording carefully on it the message from the wall. I thought I knew this word, "etretat," but I would look it up later anyway.

My search for paper had given me another idea: pulling the 109.

wastebasket closer, I went through its contents, glancing at the door every couple of seconds. I wondered whether Kate or Robert himself had stuffed it full--Kate, probably, in the course of her cleanup. It contained more sc.r.a.ps in his handwriting, as well as a set of scribbles that could have been studies for a nude or doodles done in an idle moment, some of them torn in two--evidence at last of the artist. None of Oliver's notes to himself meant anything to me, especially since they tended to be a few words at most and often contained practicalities. I turned over another of them: "Pick up wine, beer for tomorrow night." I didn't dare keep any of them; if I filled my jacket pockets, Kate would hear me rustling, and beyond that very real and humiliating possibility, I would hear myself rustling and feel only ashamed. One shame was enough; I touched the letter through my jacket. "You were constantly with me, my muse." Who was his muse? Kate? The woman in his drawings at Goldengrove? Was that woman "Mary"? It seemed likely, and perhaps Kate would tell me about her if I asked without actually asking.

I went through the rest of the books a few at a time, always listening for the door, finding only some empty slips meant to mark a favorite page, or perhaps a pa.s.sage or image for Robert's teaching--one such slip lay across a full-color reproduction of Manet's Olympia. I'd seen the original in Paris years earlier. She gazed up at me, naked and blankly insouciant, when I removed the paper. Behind the top row of volumes, I found a large white wadded-up sock. No other corner to search, unless I took up the carpet itself. I peered behind the shelves and desk, looked one more time at that date on the wall. A French word, "etretat," a place. What had been going on in France in 1879, if the name and the date were connected, at least in Robert's mind? I tried to remember, but I'd never known much French history, or I'd unmemorized it soon after my high-school cla.s.s in Western civilization. Hadn't there been the Paris Commune, or was that earlier? Exactly when had Baron Haussmann designed all those great boulevards in Paris?

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By 1879, Impressionism was alive and well, if heavily criticized-- that much I knew from going to museums and reading the odd book--so perhaps it had been a year of peace and prosperity.

I opened the door to the study, glad Kate hadn't beat me to it from the other side. The kitchen was unnaturally bright after Robert's office; the sun had come out and was making a little water glisten on the trees. It had rained, then, while I was going through Robert's papers. Kate stood at the counter, tossing salad in a bowl; she wore a blue chef's ap.r.o.n over her top and jeans, and her face was flushed. The plates were pale yellow. "I hope you like salmon," she said, as if daring me not to.

"I do," I said honestly. "I like it very much. But I never meant for you to go to such trouble for lunch. Thank you."

"It's no trouble." She was putting pieces of bread into a basket lined with a cloth. "I rarely get to cook for grown-ups these days, and the kids won't eat much except macaroni-and-cheese and spinach. Fortunately for me, they actually like spinach." She turned and smiled at me, and I was struck by this strangeness-- here was the former wife of my patient, a woman I'd met only a few hours earlier, a woman I barely knew and half feared, making me a meal. Her smile was friendly, spontaneous, reaching me across the kitchen. I wanted to hang my head.

"Thank you," I said again.

"You can take these plates to the table," she told me, holding them up in her slender hands.

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Mon cher oncle: I am writing you this morning to express all our thanks for your presence yesterday evening and for the pleasure you brought. Thank you also for your encouraging words about my drawings, which I wouldn't have wanted to show you had my father-in-law and Yves not insisted. I am working hard in the afternoons at a new painting, but it should be considered only a humble effort. I am pleased to think you liked my jeune fille so much -- as I told you, my niece posed and she is a little fairy. I hope to do a painting from that drawing as well--but in the early summer, so that I can use my garden for background; it is magnificent at that time of year, when the roses are overflowing.

Warm regards to you, Beatrice de Clerval 112.

CHAPTER 18 Marlow.

After lunch, which was on the whole silent (but companionably so, I thought), Kate told me she would have to get to work soon, and I took the hint and left, although only after we'd agreed to meet again the next morning. She closed the big front door behind me, but when I turned around on the front walk, she was still gazing out through the gla.s.s. She smiled at me, then ducked her head as if regretting the smile, waved once, and vanished before I could even wave in return. Her brick walk was bright with rain, and I picked my way carefully back to the gravel drive. I touched my breast pocket as I got into the car, checking the crinkling sheet there.

I hadn't felt so sad in a long time, somehow. My patients, when they saw me or when I saw them, were surrounded by the uniform setting of my office or the doggedly cheerful rooms at Goldengrove. Now I had talked with a woman who was alone, alone and maybe depressed enough so that she could reasonably have come to my practice herself as a patient, but instead I'd seen her surrounded by her own life, the enormous holly near the front door, the garden beds with her tulips blooming in them, the furniture her grandmother had left her, the smell of salmon and dill in her kitchen, the ruins of her husband's life in evidence behind her. She had still been able to smile in my direction.

I drove back on the springtime roads of her neighborhood, the woods and glimpses of interesting houses, feeling my way along the route I'd come. I pictured Kate putting on a canvas jacket and getting her car keys off a hook, locking the door behind her. I 113.

thought about how she must look bending to kiss her children in their beds at night, her small waist flexible under her blue clothes. The children would both be blond, like her, or one would be pale-haired and the other crowned with Robert's heavy dark locks--but here my mind drew back. She would kiss them every time she saw them again, even after a short absence. That I was sure of. I wondered how Robert could bear to be away from these three exquisite people he had made his own. But what did I know? Maybe he couldn't bear it, actually. Or maybe he had forgotten how exquisite they were. I had never had a wife or a child, or two children, or a large old house with a living room full of sunlight. I saw my own hand taking the plates from Kate's -- she wore no rings, just a thin gold chain on one wrist. What did I know?

At the Hadleys', I again opened all the windows, then put the sc.r.a.p of letter from Robert's office on the bureau, lay down on the ugly twin bed, and fell into a doze. At one point, I actually slept for a few minutes. Deep down in my dream was Robert Oliver, telling me about his life with his wife, but I couldn't hear a word and I kept asking him to speak more clearly. There was something else buried in that dream, a memory: etretat, the name of a coastal town in France--where, exactly?--the scene of Monet's famous cliff paintings, those iconic arches, blue-and-green water, green-and-purple rock.

Finally I got up, unrested, and put on an old s.h.i.+rt. I took my current reading, a biography of Newton, and drove down to the town to hunt for dinner. I found several good restaurants; in one of them, which had tiny white lights in all the windows as if it were Christmas, I had a plate of potato pancakes with various garnishes. The woman sitting at the bar smiled at me and recrossed lovely legs, and the man who joined her a few minutes later looked like a New York businessman. A strange little town, I thought, liking it even more as my Pinot Noir took effect.

Walking around the streets after dinner, I wondered if I might encounter Kate, and if so what I would say to her, how she would 114.

react if we ran into each other after this morning's conversation, then remembered that she would surely be at home with her children. I pictured myself driving back into her neighborhood to peer through those huge windows. They would be softly lit, the bushes around them already dark, the roof floating above. Inside, a box of gems: Kate playing with two beautiful children, her hair s.h.i.+ning under the lamp. Or I would see her at the kitchen window where she'd made me salmon; she would be was.h.i.+ng dishes after the children were in bed, reveling in the silence. I imagined in a rush her hearing me among the bushes, calling the local police, the handcuffs, the fruitless explanations, her anger, my disgrace.

I stopped to compose myself for a moment in front of a boutique window full of baskets and what appeared to be handwoven shawls. As I stood there, I began to long for home. What on earth, after all, was I doing here? It was lonely in this pretty town; at home, I was used to being alone. I kept seeing the words in pencil on Robert's wall. Why had he filled his library with the Impressionists? I made myself walk a little farther, pretending that I hadn't given up on the evening already. Soon I would go home--to the Hadleys', in other words -- and lie in bed reading about Newton, who was comfortably from another world, an era without modern psychiatry. Tragically without it, of course. Before Monet, before Pica.s.so, before antibiotics, before my own life. Comfortably dead Newton would keep me better company than these twilit streets, with their restored buildings, cafe tables, young couples draped in scarves and earrings who went by holding hands in a cloud of musky scent. It was already a long time since I'd been young, and I didn't know how the distance had crept over me, or when.

At the end of the block, the boutiques gave way to a parking lot and then, rather surprisingly, to a festive-looking club that turned out to be a topless bar. Despite the presence of a bouncer at the door, the place had none of the sordid appearance of such operations in Was.h.i.+ngton. Not that I had been in one in many decades, and then only once, in college, but I had driven past them 115.

here and there and noted, at least, their existence. I hesitated for a moment. The man at the door was neatly dressed, gentlemanly, as if even the strip shows in this town had been gentrified. He turned toward me with a friendly, expectant, understanding smile, like a financial consultant at a bank. Was he inviting me in? Did I want to apply for a mortgage?

I stood there wondering if I should indeed go in, because I couldn't think why I shouldn't. I remembered, too, the one really beautiful model from my cla.s.ses at the Art League School at home--remote, balanced nude before the group, her mind far away and probably going over her college homework or her next dental appointment, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s lifted delicately in front of her, her professionalism, the slight quiver that was the only betrayal of her need to move at all during the long, long pose.

"No, thank you," I said to the fellow at the door, but my voice seemed m.u.f.fled by age and embarra.s.sment. He hadn't invited me in, he hadn't handed me any kind of flyer, so why was I speaking to him? I tucked the biography firmly under my arm and walked on, then turned the next corner so that I wouldn't have to pa.s.s him again--him and his festive doorway. Had he long ago grown used to the sights and sounds within, so that it was no ch.o.r.e to him to have to sit outside in the gathering dark, no hards.h.i.+p to miss it all? Did his mind wander away at last, bored even by what was supposed to excite?

At the Hadleys' quiet house, I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron sc.r.a.ping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded?

Standing on Kate's porch the next morning, I felt not increased embarra.s.sment but a kind of familiarity, an actual ease, as if I'd 116.

arrived to see an old friend or as if I were an old friend myself, stepping up to ring the bell. She answered promptly, and again it was like walking onto the set of a play, except that I'd seen the show once now and knew where all the props would be. Today the sun was fully out, streaming through the room. There were only two other changes: one, a great bowl of floating blooms, pink and white, arranged with care on the table by the windows; and Kate herself, who wore a blouse of saffron cotton over her jeans, with the same tourmaline jewelry. Yesterday I had thought her eyes were blue; now they were turquoise, wide and clear. She smiled, but it was a reserved, polite smile, the acknowledgment of a problem, and the problem was me, my renewed presence in her house, my need to ask her more questions about the husband who no longer lived here.

When she'd finished serving our coffee, she sat down on the opposite sofa. "I think we should plan to kind of wrap this up today," she said mildly, as if she'd studied how to say it without hurting my feelings or revealing her own.

"Yes, of course," I said, to show I could take a hint with alacrity. "Of course. You've been very hospitable already. Besides, I should get back to Was.h.i.+ngton tomorrow night, if possible."

"Then you won't be going out to the college?" She balanced her cup on her neat, small knee, as if to show me how it could be done. Her tone was courteous, conversational. I wondered if I would get less from her today, not more.

"Do you think I should? What would I find there?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I'm sure there are still plenty of people there who knew him, but I wouldn't feel comfortable putting you in touch with them myself. And I doubt he showed his moods much at school. But his greatest painting is there. It should be in a first-cla.s.s museum--he should have sold it well. I'm not the only one who considers it his greatest, although I've never really liked it."

"Why not?"

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"Go see it for yourself."

I sat considering her elegant, small presence across the room. I felt that I needed to know how Robert's illness had first manifested itself, and we were running out of time. And I needed, or at least wanted, to know who his dark-haired muse was. "Would you like to go on with your story from yesterday?" I asked her as gently as I could. If it didn't lead soon enough to information about the onset of his problems and his subsequent treatment, I could steer her carefully to those more important matters when she was warmed up. I nodded without speaking, although she hadn't said anything more yet. Outside a cardinal landed in the sunlight; a branch swayed.

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CHAPTER 19 Kate.

Our lives in New York went on and on, or went by in a flash. We lived three different places in five years--first at my apartment in Brooklyn for a while, and after that in an unbelievably small room on West 72nd near Broadway, a closet with a kitchen counter that folded down out of a smaller closet, and finally on the stifling top floor of a building in the Village. I loved all those places, their Laundromats and grocery stores and even their local homeless people--everything, everything that became familiar about them.

And then one day I woke up and thought, I want to get married. I want to have a baby. It was really almost as simple as that--one evening I went to bed young and free, carefree, disdainful of other people's conventional lives, and the next morning by six o'clock, when I got up to take my shower and dress for my editing job of those years, I had become a different person. Or maybe the thought came to me between drying my hair and pulling on my skirt-- I want to get married to Robert and have a ring on my finger and a baby, and the baby will have Robert's curly hair and my small hands and feet, and life will be better than it's ever been before. It was as if that vision was suddenly so real to me that all I had to do was cover the last bit of ground and make it reality itself and then I would be completely happy. It didn't occur to me just to get pregnant and have a little free-love baby--as my mother might have half humorously said--in Manhattan. I a.s.sociated babies with marriage, marriage with the long-term, children growing up on 119.

tricycles and green lawns--after all, that's what I'd known in my own childhood. I wanted to be like my mother, bending over to put our socks on and tie our little dark-red oxfords. I even wanted to wear the dresses of her youth, which required squatting down with your legs folded neatly together to one side. I wanted a tree with a swing in the backyard.

And just as it wouldn't have occurred to me to produce babies without wearing a wedding ring first, it never occurred to me that I could raise a child in the overwhelming city I had come to love. It's hard to explain these things, because I'd been so sure I wanted nothing but this life of Manhattan and painting and meeting our friends after work at cafes and talking about painting and watching Robert paint in his blue oxford-cloth boxers at a friend's studio late at night while I drew on my lapboard, and then getting up in the morning, yawning before work, waking up as I walked under the stunted trees to the subway. That was my reality, and these curly-haired small people who didn't even exist yet, didn't even have the right to my daydreams, told me to leave it all. And, years later, they are the one thing--our bringing them into existence, despite all the grief, the fear, despite losing Robert, despite the overpopulation of this poor planet and the guilt I feel about having added to it--my children are the one thing I have never regretted.

Robert didn't want to give up any of that life we had in New York. I think it was the persuasion of the body that made him undo it, ostensibly for my sake. Men love to make babies, too, although they will tell you they don't feel the way women do. I think he was drawn in by my pa.s.sion about the whole thing. He didn't really want the green small town or the job at a little college, but I suppose he knew, too, that sooner or later the postgraduate life we'd pieced together would give way to something else. He'd done well already, had a show with a faculty member from his department, sold a bunch of paintings in the Village. His mother, 120.

a widow living in New Jersey who still knitted him sweaters and vests and called him Bob -bee in her French accent, had decided he was going to be a great artist after all--she'd actually started sending him some of his inheritance from his father so he could use it to paint.

I think Robert felt invincible, with that much beginner's luck. It was beginner's talent, as well. Everyone who saw his work seemed to recognize the gift, whether or not they liked his traditionalism. He taught an entry-level cla.s.s at the school he'd graduated from, and day after day he turned out those early paintings that are now in quite a few collections--they are wonderful, you know. I still think so.

Just about the time I proposed babies, Robert was working on what he rather seriously called his Degas series--the young girls warming up at the barre at the School of American Ballet, graceful and s.e.xual but not really s.e.xual, stretching their thin legs and arms. He spent hours at the Metropolitan Museum that winter, studying Degas's little ballerinas, because he wanted his to be the same and at the same time different. Each of Robert's canvases contained an anomaly or two -- a huge bird trying to get in at the ballet-studio window behind them, or a gingko tree growing up the wall and reflecting in the endless mirrors. A gallery in Soho sold two of them and asked for more. I was painting, too, three times a week after work, rain or s.h.i.+ne--I remember the discipline I had then, the feeling that I might not be as good as Robert but that my work was getting stronger every week. Sometimes on Sat.u.r.day afternoons we took our easels to Central Park and painted together. We were in love--we made love twice a day on the weekends, so why not make babies? He was caught up by the new way I made love to him, too, I'm sure, since that part of our lives was always extremely important to him, and he was intrigued by the feeling of a seed pa.s.sing between us, the imminent flowering of our connection.

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We got married in a chapel on 20th Street. I wanted to go to a justice of the peace, but instead we had a modest Catholic wedding to please Robert's mother. My own mother came from Michigan with my two best friends from high school, and she and Robert's mother liked each other and sat close together during the alien ma.s.s, two widows, Robert's mother adding a second child to the "only." My mother-in-law made a sweater for me as a wedding present, which sounds kind of awful, but it was one of my treasures for years--off-white, with a collar like dandelion down. I had loved her from our first meeting. She was a tall, gaunt, cheerful woman who approved of me for no reason I could discern and was convinced that my ten or twelve words of her native language could be transformed into fluency if I worked hard enough. Robert's father, a program officer of the Marshall Plan, had removed her from a postwar Paris she didn't appear sorry to have left. She had never been back, and her entire life revolved around the nursing job for which she'd trained in the United States, and around her prodigy son.

Robert seemed to me unchanged by and during the ceremony, the act of marriage, uncomplicatedly happy to be there with me, oblivious to wearing a suit, the one tie he owned crooked on his s.h.i.+rt front, paint under his nails. He had forgotten to get a haircut, which I'd particularly wanted him to do before we stood up in front of a Catholic priest and my mother, but at least he didn't lose the ring. Watching him as we said the unfamiliar vows, I felt he was as he'd always been--himself, eternally himself, that he could just as well have been standing with me and our friends at our favorite bar, having another beer and debating problems of perspective. And I was disappointed. I had wanted him to stand up next to me changed--transformed, even, by the opening note of this new era of our lives.

After the ceremony, we went to a restaurant in the heart of the Village and met our circle there--they looked unusually cleaned 122.

up, and some of the women were wearing high heels. My brother and sister were there, too, from out West. Everyone acted a little formal, and our friends shook hands with our mothers or even kissed them. Once some wine had gone around, Robert's cla.s.smates started making bawdy toasts, which worried me. But rather than being shocked, our mothers sat side by side, their cheeks flushed, laughing like teenage girls. I hadn't seen my mother so happy in a long time. I felt a little better then.

Robert did not trouble himself to apply for jobs elsewhere until I'd asked him for several months to do so--now I wanted us to find that cozy town with the houses we might someday be able to afford. In fact, he didn't really apply at all. A job at Greenhill came to him through one of his instructors because he happened to drop by that instructor's office to ask him to go out for an impromptu lunch, and at lunch the instructor happened to think about a job he'd just heard of, for which he could recommend Robert--he, the instructor, had an old friend, a sculptor and ceramist, who taught at Greenhill. It was a great place for an artist, he told Robert at their lunch: North Carolina was full of artists living the real, pure life, just doing their art, and this Greenhill College had ties to the old Black Mountain College because a few of Josef Albers's students had left Black Mountain when the place dissolved and founded an art department at Greenhill--it would be just right, and Robert could paint. Maybe I could, too, come to think of it, and the climate was good, and--well, he would send a letter on Robert's behalf.

In fact, Robert gets most of the good things in his life this way, by luck, and his luck is usually good. The police officer forgives his speeding and reduces the fine to $25 from $120. He's late turning in a grant proposal and he gets the grant, plus an extra grant for equipment. People love to do things for him because he seems so happy even without their help, so oblivious to his own needs and to their wish to help him. I've never understood this. I used to 123.

think he was kind of cheating, tricking people without meaning to, but now I sometimes think that life is simply compensating for what's missing in him.

I was pregnant by the time we moved to Greenhill. I pointed out to Robert that all the great loves of my life began with vomiting. In fact, I could hardly think about anything else. I packed everything in our Village apartment and gave away a lot of stuff to the friends who were staying (staying behind, I thought pityingly) in our old life there. Robert had said he would organize a bunch of them to help us load up the truck we'd rented, but he forgot, or they forgot, and in the end we hired a couple of teenagers right off the street to carry everything down from our walk-up. I'd done the packing myself, because he'd had a lot of last-minute something or other to do at school, in his studio. When the apartment was bare and we'd cleaned it so that the landlord wouldn't keep our deposit, Robert drove the truck over to his studio and dragged down boxes of painting supplies and armloads of canvases. He hadn't packed a single piece of his own clothing, a single pot or pan, I realized later--only those essential items from his studio. I went along to sit in the truck and move it if the police or the meter maid showed up.

As I sat there, with the August sun beating down on the steering wheel, I stroked my belly, which was swollen already, not with the peanut-sized baby in the clinic's wall charts but with my eating and throwing up, my new slackness and softness, my not caring to hold it all in. When I slid my hand over the spot, I felt a melting desire for the person growing inside, for the life ahead of us. It was not a feeling I'd ever had before--it was secret even from Robert, mainly because I wouldn't have been able to explain it even to him. When he came down with the last load of shabby boxes, the last easel, I glanced out the truck window at him and 124.

saw that he was cheerful and full of energy and selfhood that had nothing to do with me. He wasn't thinking about anything except getting those parts of his old life to fit into a pile with our hopeless furniture in the back. At that moment, more than at any other, I felt the beginning of a mistake, and it was as if my child had been whispering it to me: Will he take care of us?

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Mon cher oncle: Please do not take amiss my not answering you sooner; your brother, your nephew, and two of the servants have had bad colds--most of the household, in short -- and I have been very much occupied as a result. There is nothing serious to worry about, really, or I should have written you much sooner. Everyone is on the mend, and your brother has begun to take his const.i.tutional in the Bois again with his manservant. I am sure Yves will go with him today; he, like you, always has Papa's health at heart. We have long since finished the new book you sent, and I am reading Thackeray to myself and also aloud to Papa. I cannot send much news now, as I am very busy, but I think of you fondly-- Beatrice de Clerval 126.

CHAPTER 20 Kate.

We stopped for lunch a few miles north of DC, pulling off at a rest area and stretching our legs. I was starting to get foot cramps just from thinking about them. The rest area had picnic tables and a grove of oaks--Robert checked the ground for dog piles and then lay down and went to sleep. He'd been out late, packing his studio, and then up late, apparently drawing something and drinking cognac, which I'd smelled on him when he'd tumbled into the not-yet-packed sheets of our bed. I should be driving, I thought, in case he was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel.

I felt actively annoyed--I was pregnant, after all, and had he helped with any of the preparations, even the modest one of getting enough sleep before a long, tough trip? I stretched out next to him in the gra.s.s without touching him. I'd be too tired to drive at the end of the day, but if he slept now he might be able to take over again for me when I faded. He wore an old yellow s.h.i.+rt with the b.u.t.ton-down collar unb.u.t.toned and curling up unevenly on the right side--probably one of his thrift-store purchases, something that had once been fine fabric and was now worn to a pleasant softness. There was a piece of paper tucked in his s.h.i.+rt pocket, and lying there with nothing else to do, yet not wanting to wake him, I carefully reached over and pulled it out. It would be a drawing, of course, and it was. I unfolded it--skillful, heavy pencil, a sketch of a woman's face.

I knew immediately that I'd never seen her before. I knew the friends he'd used as models in the Village, and the baby ballerinas 127.

whose parents had signed forms saying that Robert could draw or paint them, and I knew the improvisations of his brain. This woman was a stranger to me, but Robert understood her well--that thought leapt at me from the page. She glanced up at me as she would have at Robert, under his hand--with recognition, her eyes luminous, her look serious and loving. I could feel his artist's gaze on her. His talent and her face were indistinguishable from each other, and yet she was a real woman, someone with delicately shaped nose and cheeks, the chin a little too square, the hair dark, rumpled and curly like Robert's own, the mouth about to smile but the eyes intense. Those eyes burned from the page--they were large and s.h.i.+ning and without any attempt at self-disguise. It was the face of a woman in love. I felt myself falling for her. She was a person as likely to reach out and touch your cheek without warning as to speak.

I had always been certain of Robert's devotion to me, as much because of his obliviousness to his surroundings as because of any sort of innate responsibility on his part. Studying this face, sketched with love, I felt myself jealous, huge with jealousy and yet small, demeaned by my own insistence that Robert was mine. He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude, the person for whom I'd given up my old self. Who was she, this n.o.body? Had he met her at school? Was she one of his students, or a young colleague? Or had he simply been copying some other drawing, someone else's work? The face was not youthful, actually--it said instead that age was not a question once the question of beauty had been answered so fully. Was she actually older than Robert, who was older than I was, perhaps a model about whom he'd had some special feeling of kins.h.i.+p but whom he'd never touched, so that if I accused him of doing that I would only be belittling myself? Or had he touched her as well as sketched her and thought I wouldn't understand, because I was less of an artist?

128.

Then I realized with a pang of anger that I hadn't picked up a brush or pencil in the three months since I'd become pregnant and since I'd starting packing and cleaning up our physical, practical lives. I hadn't missed it, which was worse. The last months of my job had been frantic, and my home life filled to exhaustion with planning and doing. Had Robert been out drawing this beauty while I was busy arranging everything? When and where had he met her? I sat in the neatly mown rest-area gra.s.s, feeling sticks and ants through my thin dress, the soothing shade from the oaks over my head and shoulders, and I asked myself over and over what I should do.

Finally the answer came to me. I didn't want to do anything. If I thought hard enough, I might be able to convince myself that she was a being from his imagination, since he occasionally drew from that as well. If I asked Robert leading questions, I would make myself less desirable in his eyes. It would make me the pregnant, pestering, paranoid wife, especially if the woman meant nothing, or maybe I would find out something I didn't want to know about, just didn't want to know, didn't want wrecking our new lives.

If she was in New York, we were leaving her already, and if Robert went back there for any reason, I would go with him. I folded the lovely face again and tucked her back into Robert's pocket. He slept so deeply that you could shake him or speak to him for long minutes with no result, so I wasn't afraid of waking him.

The drive into North Carolina the next day was spectacular--I was at the wheel and I shouted with happiness, then leaned over and woke Robert. We came in on the north side of Greenhill, over a long pa.s.s in the Blue Ridge, and headed east on a smaller highway toward Greenhill College. The college is actually in the town of Shady Creek, in a range called the Craggies. Robert had 129.

pa.s.sed through the region on vacation with his parents long ago but remembered very little, and I had never been this far south. He said he wanted to drive the rest of the way, and we traded places. It was early afternoon, and the countryside seemed asleep in the sun, with its big, old farmhouses and river-valley fields and spreading trees, the haze of ridges in every distance, the sudden roar of a streambed under rhododendron as we climbed onto a back road. The air that came into the sweltering cab was cool, cooled as if from a cave or a refrigerator--it trembled on our faces and caressed our hands.

Robert slowed at a turn, leaned out his window, and pointed to a carved sign: greenhill college, founded as craggy farm school in 1889. I snapped a picture with the camera my mother had given me before I moved to New York. The sign was framed with gray fieldstones, and it sat in a meadow of gra.s.ses and ferns with dark bushes just beyond, a trail leading into woods. It was, I thought, as if we'd been invited into a rustic paradise--I expected to see Daniel Boone or someone like that walk out of the woods with his gun and his dog. It was hard for me to believe that we'd been in New York City the day before, or even that New York existed. I tried to picture our friends walking home from work or waiting in the overheated subway, the constant screech of traffic, the voices in the air. That was all gone. Robert pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the truck, and we got out without speaking. He walked over to the hand-carved sign with its carefully painted letters--made by art students? I took a picture of him leaning against it with his arms crossed in triumph, a hillbilly already. The truck ticked and steamed in the dust. "We can still turn around and go back," I said mischievously, to make him laugh.