The Swan Thieves

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 class and then come home without painting at school as I usually did, and we would go back to bed for half the afternoon.

On Saturdays 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 wineglasses; 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.

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 classics, 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, Pissarro--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 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 shift 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 Manassas, 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 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 relationship. 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 shore 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?