The Swan Thieves

That was not the last time I was alone with Robert Oliver before he left Barnett; we had one more encounter, but first I have to tell you about a few other things. Our class was finished; we had painted, mostly badly, three still lifes, one doll, and one model-- discreetly robed, not nude, a muscular male chemistry student. I couldn't help wishing Robert would paint and draw more along with us, so that we could watch how it was really done. Some of his work was included in the faculty spring show, and I went to see it. He had contributed four new canvases, all painted--where? at home? at night?--during the term he'd been with us. I tried to see in them the lessons he taught in class: form, composition, color choices, mixing the paint. Had he turned them upside down while he was working on them? I tried to find triangles in them, verticals, horizontals. But they were so strong in their subject matter, their living, breathing brushwork, that it was hard to look behind the scenes.

One of Robert's paintings in the show was a self-portrait (I saw this again years later, before he destroyed it) full of detached intensity, and two others were almost Impressionist and showed mountain meadows and trees, with two men in modern clothes walking off the edge of the canvas. I liked the contrast between the nineteenth-century brushwork and the contemporary figures. I was learning that Robert did not care whether or not people thought he had a style; he considered his work one long experiment and rarely used a single look or technique for more than a few months.

Then there was the fourth painting. I stood in front of that one for a long time because I couldn't help it--you see, I encountered her long before Robert and I were lovers ourselves; she was already there, always there. It was the portrait of a woman in a low-cut, old-fashioned dress, a sort of ball gown, holding a closed fan in one hand and a closed book in the other, as if she couldn't decide whether to go out to a party or stay home and read. Her hair was thick and dark, piled in soft curls and ornamented with flowers. I thought her expression was musing and deeply intelligent, a little wary. She'd been pondering something and then had suddenly become aware that she was being watched. I remember wondering how he could have caught such a fleeting expression.

She must be his wife, I thought, posing in costume--the portrait had that kind of intimacy. I didn't like meeting her that way, for some reason, especially since I'd already imagined her as dull and hardworking, with her toddler, her practical job. I found it a vaguely unpleasant surprise to think she might be this vital and lovely to Robert. She was young, but not too young to belong to Robert, and so full of subtle suspended movement that you felt in another moment she would smile -- but only once she'd recognized you. It was eerie.

The other thing that was remarkable about the painting was the setting. The lady sat on a great black sofa, leaning back a little, with a mirror on the wall behind and above her. The mirror was so skillfully rendered that I expected to catch myself reflected there. Instead, at a distance, I saw Robert Oliver with his easel, in his rumpled modern clothes, painting himself painting her, and at the center of the mirror was the back of her softly coiffed hair and slender neck. His face was serious and preoccupied as he glanced up at her--she was model as well as wife.

So he was the one at whom she would smile in a moment. I felt a stab of actual jealousy, although I couldn't have said whether it was because I'd expected her to smile at me instead or didn't want Robert to smile back at her. The mirror showed him and his easel further framed by a window that was the source of light behind him as he painted, a latticed window bordered by stonework. Barnett had some Gothic Revival buildings from the 1920s and '30s; he might have gone to a dining hall or one of the old classroom buildings to find those details. Through the window reflected in the mirror, you could see what looked like a beach, cliffs off to one side, blue sky coming down to the horizon of water.

Portrait and self-portrait, subject and viewer, mirror and window, landscape and architecture: it was an extraordinary painting, one that messed with your mind, to use the lingo of our dorms and dining halls. I wanted to stand in front of it forever, trying to decipher the story. He had called it Oil on Canvas, although the other three canvases had real titles. I wished Robert would stroll into the gallery so that I could ask him what it meant, tell him how chokingly lovely and puzzling it was. I felt a kind of anguish at walking out and leaving it--I checked the catalog in my hand, but the college gallery had chosen to reproduce one of his other paintings and discuss it in detail, while this work was simply listed and dated. Once I left, I might never see it again, might never see this woman whose gaze met mine with such longing--that was probably why I went back to it a couple of times before the show was taken down.