The Swan Thieves

It actually took Mom several years to decide what to do, then to sell her house and go through all those books. Robert and I stayed in the cottage on campus during that time. Once, I went up to Michigan to help her give away most of my father's possessions, and we both wept. I left Ingrid with Robert, and he seemed to take good care of her, although I worried that he would forget where she was or let her wander around alone outside.

In the fall, Robert went to France for ten days, his turn to get away. He wanted to see the great museums again, he said--he hadn't been there since college. He came back so refreshed and excited that I felt it had been worth the money. He also had a rather grand show in Chicago the following January, an invitation of one of his former instructors--we all flew up there at horrifying cost, and I saw in the course of a day or two that he was becoming something bordering on famous.

In April the flowers Robert and I liked came out on campus again. I went into the woods to find the wild ones, and we walked around the college gardens so Ingrid could see the blooming beds. At the end of the month, I bought a little kit in the supermarket and watched a pink line soak across a white oval. I dreaded telling Robert, although we'd agreed to try for another child. He was so often tired or discouraged, but he seemed pleased with my news, and I felt that Ingrid's life would be complete. What was the point of having only one child? This time we found out it was a boy, and I got a boy doll for Ingrid to hold and to diaper. In December we drove to the birth center again. I had the baby with a kind of fierce, efficient concentration, and we brought him home--Oscar. He was fair-haired and looked like my mother, although Robert insisted he looked more like his own mother. Both mothers came to help for a few weeks--mine was still in Michigan--staying in our neighbors' spare rooms, and they enjoyed debating the question. Now I was pushing the stroller again, and my arms and lap were constantly full.

I have an indelible picture of Robert from the time when our children were small and we were living at the college. I'm not sure why I remember him so well from that period, except that that time was a kind of perfect peak of our lives, although it was also the time when Robert began to really go to pieces inside, I think. Even someone you've inhabited rooms with, and seen naked every day, seen sitting on the toilet through a half-opened door, can fade out after a while and become an outline.

But Robert, from that whole time when the children were toddlers and before Mom came to live with us, is all filled in for me, color and texture. He had a thick brown sweater that he wore almost daily in cool weather, and I can remember the strands of black and chestnut, seen up close, and the other things that got caught in it--lint and sawdust, sticks, all kinds of little bits of roughness that came from his studio at school, from his walks and painting excursions. I bought that sweater for him secondhand soon after we met--it was in great condition, from Ireland, knitted by someone's actual strong hands, and it lasted for years and years--outlasted us, in fact. The sweater filled my arms when he came home. I stroked its sleeves when I stroked his elbows. Under it, he wore an old long-sleeved T-shirt or a stretched cotton turtle-neck, always in a color that vibrated with the sweater--frayed scarlet or deep green, not necessarily matching but compelling somehow. His hair got long or short--it curled over the collar of the sweater or it was shorn in soft bristles across the back of his neck, but the sweater was always the same.

My life was mostly touch in those days--I suppose his was color and line, so that we couldn't see each other's worlds very-well, or he couldn't quite feel my presence. All day long I touched the clean plates and bowls as I put them away, and the children's heads slimy under shampoo in the tub, and the softness of their faces, and the scrape of poop off their goose-pimpling backsides, the hot noodles, the heavy wet laundry as I threw it into the dryer, and the brick front steps as I sat reading to myself for eight minutes while they played just beyond the page in the prickling new grass, and then when one of them fell down I touched the grass and the mud and the scraped knee, and the sticky Band-Aids, and the wet cheek, and my jeans, and the dangling shoelace.

When Robert came home from teaching, I touched his brown sweater and his curling, separating locks of hair, his stubbly chin, his back pockets, his calloused hands. I watched him lift up the children and felt just by seeing it how his rough face brushed their delicate ones and how that pleased them. He seemed completely there with us at those moments, and his touch was the proof of this. If I wasn't exhausted from the day, he touched me to keep me awake a little longer, and then I reached for his smooth, hairless flanks and the soft, crisp hair between his legs, his flat, perfect nipples. He seemed to stop looking at me then and to finally enter my world of touch, in that moving space between us, until we closed the gap with a fiery familiarity, a routine of release. In those days I always felt covered with secretions, the dripping milk, the spray on my neck when I changed Oscar a few minutes too early, the foam on my thighs, the saliva on my cheek.

Maybe this was why I was converted to touch and left the world of vision, why I stopped drawing and painting after all those years of doing it nearly every day. My family, the way they licked and chewed me, kissed me and pulled at me, spilled things on me--juice, urine, semen, muddy water. I washed myself again and again, I washed the mountains of laundry, I changed the beds and the breast pads, I scrubbed and wiped the bodies. I wanted to get clean again, to clean all of them, but in the moment before I had the energy to wash everything, there was always another kind of goodness, an immersion.

Then we were shopping for real estate, like grown-ups, and sending my mother photos of front porches, and finally we moved into our house the summer Ingrid was five and Oscar was one and a half. It was what I had wanted in the first place--two lovely children, a yard with a swing that Robert finally put up after I'd asked him for a couple of months to please do it, a small town whose very name was green, and at least one of us employed at a good job. Should we ever get what we think we want? And I had my mother. In the first years with us, she gardened and vacuumed and read for an hour or two a day in the shade on the terrace, where an elm tree threw the shadows of small leaves over her silvery head and the white pages of her book. From there she could even watch Ingrid and Oscar hunting for caterpillars.

In fact, I think those years were good ones for us because my mother was here. I had company, and Robert was at his best in her presence. Occasionally he stayed up for a couple of nights or slept at school and seemed tired afterward, and now and then he went through a period of irritability and then slept late for a few days. On the whole, things were peaceful. Robert had voluntarily painted over the chaos of his studio attic before we'd left the campus. I didn't know how much of that was due to the orange plastic bottles in our medicine cabinet. Once in a while he mentioned that he'd been to see Dr. Q, and that was enough for me -- Dr. Q couldn't help me, of course, but he was apparently helping my husband.

During our second year in the new house, Robert taught at a painting retreat in Maine. He didn't talk about it much, but I thought it had done him good. We laughed together about the children, and sometimes at night, if I was not too tired, Robert reached for me, and things were the way they had always been. I used some of his shirts, torn into thirds, to dust the furniture--I could have pulled one of them out of any pile of rags and known it was his, known it was him, his lingering smell, his fabric. He seemed happy in his work, and I had started some part-time editing, mostly from home, to help with our part of the mortgage while my mother watched the children.

One morning after she had taken them to the park and I had done the breakfast dishes, I went upstairs to make beds and start work at the desk in the hall, and I saw the door to Robert's studio open. He had left with his coffee mug in one hand as I was getting up--he was in a phase of waking very early and going to school to paint. This morning I noticed he'd dropped something on the floor, a scrap of paper, which lay near the open door. I picked it up without thinking about anything in particular. Robert often scattered paper--notes, reminders, bits of drawings, crumpled napkins.

What I found on the floor was about a quarter of a sheet of writing paper, torn off, as if the writer had gotten frustrated. The writer was Robert--it was his handwriting, but neater than usual. I still have those lines hidden in my desk, not because I kept the original piece of paper--in fact, I eventually wadded it up and threw it at his head, and he caught it and put it in his pocket, and I never saw it again. I have those lines still because some instinct made me sit down at my desk and copy them over for myself and hide them before I confronted Robert. I suppose I was thinking vaguely that I might need them in court someday, or at the very least want to have them for myself later and might begin to forget some of the details. "My dearest one," the note said, but it was not a letter to me, nor had I ever seen any of those words before, lined up in this particular order and flowing from Robert's black pen.

My clearest one:

I am in receipt this very moment of your letter and am moved by it to write you at once. Yes, as you compassionately hint, I have been lonely these years.

And strange as this may seem, I wish you had known my wife, although if that had been possible, then you and I would have come to know each other under proper circumstances and not in this otherworldly love, if you will permit me to call it that.

I hadn't known that Robert could be so flowery in a letter, or anywhere else--his notes to me had always been short and brisk. For a moment I felt more sickened by this surprise than by the fact that it was a love letter. The courtly, almost old-fashioned tone of it was a Robert I could hardly recognize, a gallant Robert who had never wasted his gallantry on his wife, whom he wished the addressee of the letter knew, or had known at some point.

I stood holding his words in the sunny library and wondered what I was reading. He had been lonely. He had fallen in otherworldly love. Of course it had to be "otherworldly," since he was married and had two children and was also possibly crazy. And what about me? Had I not been lonely? But I didn't have anything otherworldly, only all the reality of the world to cope with: the children, the dishes, the bills, Robert's psychiatrist. Did he think I liked the real world any more than he did?

I went slowly into his studio and looked at the easel. The woman was there. I thought I'd gotten used to her, to her presence in our lives. It was a canvas he'd been working on for weeks -- she was alone in it, and her face was not yet fully painted, but I could have filled in that rough pale oval myself with the right features. He had placed her at a window, standing, and she was wearing a revealing, loose robe, pale blue. She held a paintbrush in one hand. Within another day or two she would be smiling at him, or gazing seriously, steadily, her dark eyes full of love. I had come to believe that she was imaginary, a fiction, part of the vision that drove his gifts. That had been trusting, too trusting, because it turned out my first instincts had been correct. She was real, and he wrote to her.

I had a sudden desire to wreck the room, tear up his drawing pads, knock the lady-in-progress to the floor, smear her and stamp on her, rip the posters and chaotic postcards from the wall. The cliche of it stopped me, the humiliation of being like a jealous wife in a movie. And a kind of sneakiness, too, a stealth that crept over my brain like a drug--I could learn more if Robert didn't know I knew. I put the scrap of paper on my desk, already planning to copy the words for myself and put it back on the floor at the open door of his studio in case he missed it. I pictured him stooping for it, thinking, I dropped this? That was a close call. And putting it in his pocket or in the drawer of his table.

Which was my next move--I went delicately through the drawers of his studio table, replacing with the care of an archivist anything I moved: big graphite pencils, gray erasers, receipts for oil paints, a half-eaten chocolate bar. Letters in the back of one drawer, letters in a handwriting I didn't recognize, replies to letters like his. Dear Robert. Darling Robert. My dear Robert. I thought of you today while I worked on my new still life. Do you think still lifes are worth doing? Why paint something that is more dead than alive? I wondered how to put life into something with just your hand, this mysterious force that jumps like electricity between the sight and your eye, and then your eye and your hand, and then your hand and the brush, and so on. And back to your eye; it all comes down to what you can see, doesn't it, because no matter what your hand can do, it can't fix dimness of vision. I have to run to class now, but I think of you constantly. I love you, you know. Mary.

My hands shook. I felt nauseated, felt the room trembling around me. I knew her name, then--and knew she must be a student, or possibly a faculty member, although in that case I would probably have recognized the name. She had to run to class. The campus was full of students I hadn't met and hadn't even seen--I wouldn't have seen all of them even in the time we lived there. Then I remembered the sketch I'd found in his pocket during our move to Greenhill several years earlier. This had been going on a long time; he had surely met her in New York. He had traveled north often since then, including his long semester away--had he gone so he could see her? Had that been the reason for his sudden leave of absence, his reluctance to take us with him? Of course she was another painter, an art student, a working painter, a real painter. He was painting her himself with her brush in hand. Of course she was a painter, as I had once been.

And yet--Mary--such an ordinary name, the name of the person with the little lamb, the name of the mother of Jesus. Or Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, quite contrary, or Mary Magdalene. No, it didn't always guarantee blue-and-white innocence. Her handwriting was large and girlish but not crude, the spelling correct, the turns of phrase intelligent and sometimes even striking, often humorous, sometimes a little cynical. Sometimes she thanked him for a drawing or added a skillful sketch of her own--one took up a whole page and showed people sitting around in a cafe with mugs and teapots on the tables. One of the notes was dated from a few months earlier, but most had no dates and none had envelopes. He had somehow thought to throw those out, or perhaps he'd opened the letters elsewhere and not cared about the envelopes, or carried them around without envelopes -- a few of them were frayed, as if they'd been in a pocket. She didn't mention any meetings or plans to see him, but she wrote once about a time they had kissed each other. There was nothing else really sexual in those letters, in fact, although she said often that she missed him, loved him, daydreamed about him. In one she referred to him as "unattainable," which made me think that maybe nothing more had ever happened between them.

And yet everything had happened, if they loved each other. I put the notes back in the drawer. It was Robert's letter that upset me most--but there were no others from him, only from her. And I found nothing else in the studio, nothing in his office, nothing in his extra jacket, nothing in his car when I searched that, too, that evening, on the pretext of looking for a flashlight in the glove compartment--not that he would have followed me or noticed much. He played with the children, smiled at dinner--he was energetic, but his eyes were distant. That was the difference, the proof.