The Swan Thieves

I first saw her, the woman, at a highway rest area somewhere in Maryland. But I should tell you before that about when I first saw Robert, too. I met him in New York City in 1984, when I was twenty-four. I'd been working there for about two months, it was summer, and I was homesick for Michigan. I'd expected New York to be exciting, and it was exciting, but it was also tiring. I lived in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. I took three trains to work instead of strolling through Greenwich Village. At the end of the workday, hours as an editorial assistant at a medical journal, I was too tired to stroll anywhere anyway, and too worried about the cost to go to an interesting foreign movie. I was not meeting people quickly either.

The day I met Robert, I went after work to Lord & Taylor, which I knew would be too expensive, to get a birthday present for my mother. As soon as I was inside, away from the summer street, the perfumed air-conditioning hit me hard. Meeting the contemptuous gaze of mannequins in their bathing suits with the new high-cut leg, I wished I'd dressed better for work that morning. I wanted to get my mother a hat, something she would never get for herself, something lovely she might have worn as a young woman meeting my father at the Philadelphia Cricket Club for the first time. She might never wear it in Ann Arbor, but it would remind her of her youth, with its white gloves and feeling of stability, and it would remind her, too, of a daughter's love. I had thought the hat section would be on the first floor, near the silk scarves signed by famous designers I had barely heard of, near the upside-down disembodied legs with their long, smooth stockings. But there was some construction going on there, and a lady in a makeup smock told me to go upstairs to the temporary hat display.

I didn't want to venture farther into the store--my own legs were starting to feel bare and scratched, ugly because I hadn't worn hose to work that morning. But it was for my mother, so I went on up the escalator--always that little catch of breath as I stepped off safely at the top--and when I found the section I was glad to stand alone among the hat trees, each of which blossomed with pale or bright colors. There were sheer hats with silk flowers pinned to a grosgrain band, and navy straw and black straw, and a blue one with cherries and leaves. They were all a little gaudy, especially taken together, and I began to think this hadn't been a good idea for a birthday present after all, and then I saw a beautiful hat, a hat that was out of place there and just right for my mother. It was broad-brimmed, covered with a tight swirl of cream-colored organdy, and over the organdy was fastened a spray of different kinds of blue flowers, almost real flowers--chicory, larkspur, forget-me-nots. It was like a hat decorated in a field.

I took it down and stood holding it in both hands. Then I turned the paper tag over very carefully. The hat cost $59.99, more than I usually spent on groceries in a week. If I saved this amount only three times, I could take the bus home to Ann Arbor to see my mother. But when she opened it she might smile, might hold it very carefully and try it on in the hall mirror at home, smiling and smiling. I held the hat by its delicate edges, beaming with her. I felt sick to my stomach and my eyes were beginning to fill with tears, which was going to ruin the small amount of makeup I wore to work. I hoped no salesclerk would come around the hat tree and accost me. I was afraid that one word from someone else would make me buy it.

After a few minutes I put the hat back on its knob and turned toward the escalator, but I went to the wrong one, the up escalator again, and I had to back away as people came off it. I walked blindly to the down escalator on the other side and rode to the first floor, holding on with both hands. The railing wavered under my grip, and as I neared the bottom I felt very, very sick. I thought I might miss the step off, stumble. I bent over farther so that the surge through my stomach would recede, and then I did stumble. A man passing the bottom of the escalator turned and half caught me, quickly, and I threw up on his shoes.

So the first thing I knew about Robert was his shoes. They were pale-brown leather, heavy and a little clumsy, different from other people's, something an English guy might wear on a farm or for walking across the moors to the pub. I later learned that they actually were English, hand-sewn, very expensive, and they lasted about six years. He had two pairs at a time, changing them irregularly, and they had a broken-in, comfortable look without getting shabby. Apart from this, he paid no attention to his clothes, except that he had an interesting feel for their colors, and they tended to come and go, usually to and from flea markets, thrift shops, friends. "That sweatshirt? It's Jack's," he would say. "He left it in the bar last night. He doesn't care." And the sweatshirt would be with us until it disintegrated and became a rag for cleaning our house in Greenhill, or for wiping paintbrushes--we were married long enough, after all, for clothes to become rags. None of that mattered to Robert, because meanwhile Jack had the gloves or the scarf he'd left on Jack's sofa when they argued about pastels until two in the morning. Most of Robert's clothes had so much paint on them that they weren't likely to appeal to anyone but a fellow artist anyway. He was never careful about that, as some artists are.

But his shoes were his prize. He saved money for them, he saved them, he put mink oil on them even though he wouldn't eat chicken, he was careful not to get paint on them, he lined them up side by side at the foot of our bed next to a pile of his recently shed clothes. The only other expensive item in his life--besides oil paints--was normally his aftershave. But I later learned that, by strange coincidence, he had come into Lord & Taylor to buy a birthday present for his own mother. When I threw up on his shoes, he made an involuntary rude face, a kind of "Oh God, did you have to do that?" I thought at the time that he was merely disgusted by my vomit, not by where it had landed.

He pulled something white out of his pocket and started to wipe his toes, and I assumed he was ignoring my apologies. In the next second, though, he seized me by the shoulders. He was very tall. "Quick," he said, and his voice was quick, too, low and soothing in my ear. He hurried me through the most direct aisles, past a wave of perfume that made me clutch my stomach again, past mannequins holding tennis rackets, their collars turned jauntily toward their ears. I ducked, I tried to get away. Each new sight, all those things to buy, all those things that I couldn't afford and that my mother wouldn't enjoy, sent a new wave of illness through me. But the stranger who had me by one arm and one shoulder was strong. He was wearing a short-sleeved denim shirt and stained gray jeans, and when I tried to turn my bowed head, I got a glimpse of someone rough, of curly hair, unshaven chin. He had a kind of linseed smell that I recognized vaguely even through my nausea and that I might have found pleasant under other circumstances. I wondered if he was using my illness to abduct me, take my wallet, or worse--this was New York in the '80s, after all, and I didn't yet have my requisite mugging story to tell in Michigan.

But I was too utterly sick to ask him his intentions, and after a minute we burst out into the open air, or the relatively open air of the crowded sidewalk, and he seemed to try to steady me. "You're okay," he said. "You're going to be okay." As soon as he said it, I turned and threw up again, this time aiming far away from his shoes and into the corner of the entrance area, away from the shoes of the passing crowd as well. I began to cry. He let go of me while I threw up but kept rubbing my upper back with what felt like a big hand. I was somehow horrified by this, as if a strange man had made a pass at me on a subway car, but I was too feeble to resist. When I was done, he handed me a clean paper napkin from his pocket. "Okay, okay," he murmured. Finally I straightened and leaned against the side of the building. "Are you going to faint?" he said. I could see his face now. There was something sympathetic and matter-of-fact in it, direct, alert. He had large greenish-brown eyes. "Are you pregnant?" he said.

"Pregnant?" I gasped. I had one hand on the outside wall of Lord & Taylor. It felt tremendously solid and strong, a fortress. "What?"

"I'm only asking because my cousin's pregnant and she threw up in a store, too, just last week." He had stuck his hands in his back pockets as if we were chatting in a parking lot after a party.

"What?" I said stupidly. "No, of course I'm not pregnant." Then I began to feel hot and red with embarrassment, because I thought he might think I was revealing something about my sex life, which in truth was nonexistent at that point. I'd had exactly three relationships in college, and a short-lived one in the postcollege gloom of Ann Arbor, but so far New York had been a complete flop in this area--I was too busy, too tired, too shy, to keep an eye out for dates. I said hastily, "I just felt weird all of a sudden." Remembering my first huge retch onto his shoes--I couldn't bring myself to look at them--made me weak again, and I put both hands and my head against the wall.

"Wow, you really are sick," he said. "Do you want me to get you a drink of water? Do you want me to help you sit down somewhere?"

"No, no," I lied, moving my hand toward my mouth in case I had to try to cover it again. Not that covering it was going to help. "I have to get home. I have to get home right now."

"Yeah, you'd better lie down with a bowl," he observed. "Where do you live?"

"I don't tell strangers where I live," I said faintly.

"Oh, come on." He had begun to grin. His teeth were beautiful, his nose ugly, his eyes very warm. He looked just a few years older than I was. His dark hair stood up in crisp locks, like gnarled branches. "Do I look like I'm going to bite you? What's your subway line?"

People were pushing past us in droves, into the store, along the sidewalks, toward home, the end of the workday. "The... there... Brooklyn," I said weakly. "If you can maybe walk me in that direction, I'm fine. I'll be fine in a minute." I took a stumbling step and covered my mouth. I wondered later why I hadn't wanted a taxi. My habit of thrift was very strong, I guess, even in that situation.

"Oh, like hell you will," he said. "Try not to puke on my shoes again, and I'll get you to your station. Then you can let me know if there's someone you want me to call." He put one arm around me, propping me up, and we moved in a clumsy knot toward the subway entrance at the end of the block.

When we got there, I held on to the railing and tried to put out a hand, getting in everyone's way on the steps. "Okay, thanks. I'll just catch my train."

"Come on." He went ahead of me, shielding me from the fray, so that I could see only the back of his denim shirt. "Down the stairs."

I held on to the stranger's shoulder with one hand and the railing with the other.

"You want me to call someone? Your family? Roommates?"

I shook my head. I shook it two or three times, but I couldn't speak. I was about to vomit again, and then my humiliation would be complete. "All right, now." He was smiling again, exasperated, friendly. "Get onto that train."

And we got on together, into the horrible mass of people. We had to stand, and he held me from behind, not pressing himself against me, to my relief, but gripping me firmly with one big hand while he grasped a ceiling loop with the other. He swayed for both of us as the train rounded corners. At the first stop, someone got off and I sank into a seat. I thought that if I vomited again in that closed space, where my excretion would reach at least six other bodies, I would decide to stop living. I would go back to Michigan, because I was not made for the city--I was weaker than the rest of the seven million people there. I was a public vomiter. My biggest pleasure in leaving or dying would be never again seeing this towering young man with his denim shirt and the dark stain on his shoes.