The Swan Thieves

Chapter 84 1879

She goes to the wardrobe and chooses between two day dresses, blue or soft brown, finally deciding on the brown, with warm stockings and sturdy shoes. She pins up her hair and takes her long cloak, her bonnet lined with crimson silk, and her old gloves. He is waiting for her in the street. She smiles at him without restraint, happy in his pleasure. Perhaps nothing matters but this odd joy they give each other. He carries their two easels, and she insists on taking the bags. His is a battered leather musette de chasse he has had since he was twenty-eight--one of the many things she knows about him now.

When they reach the shore, they put their equipment in a neat pile under the seawall and set off for a short walk without having to discuss it. The wind is strong but warmer today, with a smell of grasses; the poppies and daisies are out in great profusion. She takes his hand whenever she needs help over a rough spot on the path. They climb up the eastern bluffs to a plateau midway above the Channel, where they can look down the beach to the more dramatic arches and pillars at the other end. She is afraid of heights and stays back from the edge, but he peers over and reports the spray splashing high today, dramatic, wetting the cliff below.

They are completely alone, and the setting is so splendid that she feels nothing else matters, certainly nothing as small as the two of them; even her yearning for children, that sore spot under her rib, has no significance for a few moments. She cannot remember the shape of guilt or its purposes. His closeness is her comfort, the small human note in a sublime landscape. When he comes back to her, she leans against him. He keeps her shoulders nestled against the breast of his painting jacket, his arms folded around her as if to hold her back from the cliff's edge. Simple relief floods her, then pleasure, then desire. The wind pulls hard at them. He kisses the side of her neck below her bonnet, the edge of her pinned-up hair; perhaps because she cannot see him, she forgets to measure the years between them.

This is what it might be like with the lights blown out, the two of them together without any barrier, darkness hiding their differences. The thought makes a vein of heat run through her toward the rock under their feet. He must sense it; he holds her against him. She knows the heavy curve of her skirts, the bulk of petticoats, feels what he must feel, and inside of that their strange belonging to each other, sea and horizon, their holding on to each other in the middle of immensity. They stand like this for so long that she loses track of the passing of her life. When the wind begins to chill them, they make their way back down to the beach without speaking and set up their easels.

Chapter 85 Marlow

The streets of Acapulco seemed dreamlike to me; I felt only-disbelief that in my fifty-two years I'd never before made it south of the border. The long, divided highway into town was familiar as a film, with its mixture of concrete and steel under construction, ramshackle two-story houses decorated with bougainvillea and rusting auto parts,, bright-colored little restaurants and huge date palms, also rusty-looking, waving in the wind. The taxi driver spoke broken English to us, pointing out the old city, where we would go tomorrow for my appointment with Caillet.

I had booked us a room in a resort hotel that John Garcia had told me was the world's best place for a honeymoon--he'd been there for his. He'd said this with no ribbing, no humor, no curiosity in his voice when I'd called to ask his advice and told him I'd fallen in love. I didn't tell him who she was, of course; that would have to come later, with explanations. "That's good news, Andrew" was all he said; behind it I heard probable past conversations with his wife: Marlow's not getting any younger--is he ever going to find anyone, poor guy? And behind that the self-congratulation of the long-married, the still-married. But he hadn't said anything more, except to give me the name of the hotel, La Reina. I thanked him silently as I watched Mary walk into the lobby, which was open on all sides to views of palms crowding in, the ocean beyond, warm wind sweeping through it. The wind smelled soft and tropical and impossible for me to identify, like ripe fruit of a sort I hadn't eaten before. She had removed her long nun's sweater and stood there in a thin blouse, her skirt catching the breeze, her head tipped back to see up to the roof of the enormous courtyard, the pyramidal rows of balconies draped with vines.

"It's like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon," she said, glancing sideways. I wanted to come up behind her and put my arms comfortably around her waist and hold her against me, but I felt she wouldn't like this familiarity in a new place, a strange place, where we were alone among strangers. Instead I looked up at the skylight with her. Then we went to the long black marble counter and got two keys to one room--with a moment of hesitation, during which she seemed to comprehend, then accept, my having taken her at her word. We went silently up in the elevator together. It was glass, and the courtyard rushed away at our feet until we were near the top. I thought, not for the last time, how inappropriate it was to stay in this kind of hotel in a country so desperately poor that millions of its people were pounding at our own nation's doors in hope of finding a living wage. But it was not for me, I told myself; this was for Mary, who turned the heat in her apartment down to fifty-five degrees at night in order to lower the heating bill.

Our room was large and simple, full of elegant design: Mary walked around touching the lantern of square translucent marble, the soft stucco of the walls. The bed--I turned away--was broad and made up with a spread of beige linen. Our single large window looked across to other balconies with similar vines and black wooden chairs, down the dizzying well of the central court. I wondered if I should have gotten a room with an ocean view, despite the extra expense--had that been stingy of me, given the cost I'd already incurred? Mary turned to me, smiling, diffident, embarrassed; I guessed that she didn't want to seem to thank me for conjuring all this luxury, and yet wanted to say something. "Do you like it?" I asked, to put myself in the wrong instead.

She laughed. "I do. You are impossible, but I do love it. I feel as if I'm going to have a good rest here."

"I'll make sure of it." I put my arms around her and kissed her forehead, and she kissed me on the mouth, then drew away and busied herself with her luggage. We didn't touch each other again until we'd strolled out together to the beach, where she took my hand, with her shoes in her other hand, and we waded through the incoming tide. The water was astoundingly warm, like tea left in a pot. The beach was edged with towering palms and filled with little thatched huts and people speaking English and Spanish, playing radios and running after their tanned children. The sun splashed over everything, an unquenchable joy. I hadn't waded into an ocean in several years--six or seven, actually, I thought with a sudden shock--and I hadn't seen the Pacific since I was twenty-two. Mary tucked her skirt up a little, so that her thin knees and long shins glistened bare in the water, and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. I felt her trembling next to me in the wind, or perhaps simply vibrating with it. "Do you want to come with me tomorrow?" I called over the huge sound of the waves.

"To see what's his name? Caillet?" She waded into a finger of tide. "Do you want me to?"

"Unless you'd like to stay and paint."

"I can paint the rest of the time," she said reasonably.

As we walked back to the hotel gardens, I saw that the entrance to the beach was patrolled by a guard with an M16 slung over his uniform.

We had our lunch on the veranda outside the lobby. Mary got up once or twice to look at the artificial lagoon and waterfall outside, where a couple of live flamingos waded--owned by the hotel? Wild? We drank tequila in small, thick glasses, raising them in a toast but saying nothing, toasting nothing but our own presences there. We ate seviche, guacamole, tortillas, the taste of lime and cilantro lingering in my mouth like a promise. I wasn't a complete stranger to this feeling creeping over me from the warm wind, the rustling palms, the breath of the Pacific; it was a childhood belief in jungle and ocean, Treasure Island and Peter Pan --yes, that was what these resorts were supposed to evoke -- a magical, safe version of the tropics. And the place evoked in me something else, too, a sense of the long voyage of a book, my favorite, Lord Jim, for example, and the breath of the Far East to the far west of us. Mistah Kurtz--he dead. But wasn't that a different Conrad novel? Heart of Darkness. T. S. Eliot quoting. Gauguin coming out of a hut after sex to get back to his paints. The cycle of the year casual because no one had to wear much clothing. The heat.

"We'll need to leave for Caillet's at about nine," I said to distract myself from the first softening wave of tequila in my head and the edge of Mary's face as she tucked a strand of hair into place behind one ear. "He asked me to come in the morning before it gets hot. He lives in the old part of the city, on the bay. It should be an adventure, just seeing his place, whatever it's like."

"Does he paint?"

"Yes--he's a critic and a collector, but I think he must be above all a painter, from the interview I read."

When we returned to our room, I felt the release of the new place and the fatigue of our early-morning travel taking over. I half hoped Mary would throw herself down on the bed next to me and we would sleep together and gradually reach across the awkwardness between us, but she picked up her easel and bag. "Don't go far," I said in spite of myself, remembering the guard at the gate. Then I regretted speaking; I felt not that she was young and wouldn't understand me but that I was old and might appear to be directing or reprimanding her.

But she didn't bristle. "I know. I'll set up in the garden next to the lobby. On the right side as you're facing the beach, if you need to find me." Her gentleness surprised me, and when I lay down on the bed--I couldn't bring myself even to remove my shirt first, with her there--she bent over and kissed me the way we'd kissed that afternoon on my picnic blanket, with all the longing stored up and dictated against previously. My response was profound, but I lay still, willing myself to let her walk out of the room, since she wanted to. She turned at the door and smiled again--relaxed, affectionate, as if she felt safe with me.

Then she was gone. The sleep I drifted into was a tangle of trees and sunlight, a pulsating surf somewhere beyond my eyelids. The light was fading when my alarm went off; I thought for a moment I'd missed an appointment, probably with Robert Oliver, and sat up in a panic. Fear caught at my chest, but no--Robert was alive and at least partly well, as far as I knew, and Goldengrove had the phone number at the hotel. I went to the window and slid back the heavy drapes, then the sheer ones, and saw people walking far below in the lobby, where a few lamps had been turned on.

Another panic: where was Mary? I'd been asleep only two hours, but it seemed to me too long to have left her anywhere unattended; I found my beach shoes and slid them on. In the gardens the palms were turning noisily inside out, every frond in a stir, the wind up and soaring in from the ocean, too strong now not to be a little menacing, waves breaking wildly in sight of the hotel. Mary was exactly where she'd promised to be, touching the canvas, stepping back to see it, suspending her brush for a moment. She stood with her weight on one hip, then shifted easily, but I could see in her that kind of hurry that comes with losing your light at the end of a landscape session--the race, the way the shadow comes more and more rapidly toward you, the longing to turn back the day or to brush that creeping shadow off your canvas.

A moment later, she noticed me and turned. "No more light."

I stood behind her. "It's wonderful." I meant it. Her scene of soft, rough colors--the blue of the sea with the colorless sheen of evening already on its surface--was really accomplished, but I saw something poignant in it as well. I don't know what gives a landscape pathos sometimes, but those are the canvases you stand in front of longer, whatever their technical skill. She'd caught the last throb of a perfect day, perfect because it was ending. I didn't know how to tell her all this, or whether she'd want more words, so I stayed quiet and watched the edge of her face as she studied her work.

"It's not too bad," she said finally, and began to clean her palette with a knife, scraping the shavings into a little box. I held the wet canvas while she closed up her easel and put everything away.

"Are you hungry? We ought to make it an early night, since we've got a big day tomorrow." I felt at once the awkwardness of this; it might sound like I was hurrying her to bed, and patronizing her at the same time.

To my surprise, she whirled in the dimness, caught me and kissed me hard, avoiding the canvas and laughing. "Would you just stop worrying? Stop worrying."

I laughed, too--relieved, a little shamed. "Do my best."