The Swan Thieves

The ride into New York from that direction was, as always, kind of splendid, the tip of the skyline appearing before the city did, like a row of advancing lances: World Trade Center, Empire State, Chrysler, and a lot of towering nonentities whose names and functions I don't know and never will--banks, I suppose, and megalithic office buildings. It's hard to picture the city without that skyline, as it must have looked even forty years ago, and now it's Increasingly hard to imagine the Twin Towers back into it. But on the train that morning, I felt the buoyancy that comes with plenty of sound sleep and the anticipation of the city's vitality. It was a feeling of being on vacation, too, or at least away from work--twice already in the space of a couple of months. I checked my cell phone for the hundredth time; there were no pages from Goldengrove or from any of my private patients, so I was truly at liberty. It occurred to me that Mary might have called, but she hadn't, and why should she? I would have to wait at least a few weeks longer before I could call her again myself--I wished once more that she'd allowed me to interview her, as Kate had, but there was a particular pleasure in seeing her words on the page, and her story was possibly more candid than it would have been if she'd had to tell me face-to-face.

I didn't realize until I'd left my bags at the Washington Hotel and walked out into the Village why I'd chosen this area, if unconsciously. These were Robert's streets, and Kate's; he'd walked from here to school every day, sat in bars with the friends with whom he swapped opinions and sweatshirts, exhibited his work in little galleries not far away. I wished Kate had told me their address, although I couldn't quite see myself actually looking for the building, craning up at it: Robert Oliver slept here. But, strangely, I did feel his presence; it was easy to imagine him at twenty-nine or so, just as he was now but with no silver in his snaky hair. Kate was more of a puzzle; she'd surely been different then, but I couldn't picture how.

I searched the streets for them, as a game: that young woman with the blond crew cut and long skirts, the student with a portfolio slung by its strap over one shoulder--no, Robert was taller and more powerful-looking than anyone on this crowded sidewalk. He would have loomed here, as he did at Goldengrove, although New York would have better absorbed his vividness. I wondered for the first time if some of his depression had come from simple displacement: a person larger than life, larger than most, needed a setting to match his energy. Had he gradually wilted, away from Manhattan? It had been Kate who wanted the move to a quieter place, a haven for children. Or had his exile from this pulsating city simply increased his determination to pursue his calling-- was that the ferocity Kate had observed when he painted in the attic and slept through his classes at Greenhill? Had he been trying to get himself actually fired from the college so he could justify a return to New York? Why, when he finally fled, had he gone to Washington instead of New York? His having chosen a different city argued for the strength of his bond with Mary, or perhaps it was proof that his dark mistress wasn't in New York anymore, if she ever had been.

I walked past the spot where Dylan Thomas had more or less died in the gutter, or at least been fished out of it for his last ride to the hospital, and the row of houses where Henry James had set Washington Square --my father had reminded me of that one this morning, pulling a copy down from his study shelves and eyeing me over his inadequate glasses-- "You do still find time to read, don't you, Andrew?" The heroine of that book had lived in one of the prim rows facing the square, and when she'd finally rejected her money-grubbing suitor, she'd sat down to her embroidery " 'for life, as it were,'" my father read aloud.

The late nineteenth century again; I thought of Robert and his mysterious lady, with her full skirts and tiny buttons, her dark eyes more alive than paint was supposed to be. This morning Washington Square was tranquil with summer sun, people talking on the benches, as generations had before them, as I once had with a woman I'd thought I might marry, all this time slipping past everyone and disappearing, all of us disappearing with it. There was a comfort in the way the city went on and on without us.

I had a sandwich at a sidewalk cafe, then took the subway from Christopher Street up to West 79th and changed to a crosstown bus. Central Park was overflowing with green, with people Rollerblading and bicycling, joggers narrowly avoiding death by those on wheels--a sublime Saturday, New York exactly as it should be, as I hadn't seen it in years. More than ever, I remembered my world here, its spokes radiating south from Columbia, from my undergraduate classrooms and dormitories. New York meant youth to me, as it had to Robert and Kate. I alighted from the bus and went up a couple of blocks to the Met. The museum steps were covered with visitors, settled there like birds, taking photographs of one another, noisy, fluttering down to buy hot dogs or Cokes from the food carts nearby, waiting for their rides, or their friends, or resting their feet. I threaded a path among them and up to the doors.

I hadn't walked in there in almost a decade, I realized now; how could I have let such acres of time stretch between me and this miraculous entrance, the soaring lobby with its urns of fresh flowers, the hubbub of people flowing through it, the entrance to ancient Egypt yawning at one side? Some years later, my wife went up for a visit to the museum by herself and told me that a new area had been opened just under the main staircase; she had turned in there, tired from wandering, and found an exhibition on Byzantine Egypt. Only two or three people at a time could fit in the space; she'd come around a corner into it and found herself alone with just a few ancient objects, perfectly lit. And she told me afterward that her eyes had filled with tears because the sight had made her feel her connection to other human beings. (But you were by yourself there, I said. She said, Yes, alone with those objects someone had made.)

I knew I'd want to stay all afternoon, even if my visit on Robert's behalf took only five minutes. I was remembering now treasures half forgotten: colonial furniture, Spanish balconies, Baroque cartoons, a big languid Gauguin I'd particularly liked. I shouldn't have come here on a Saturday, when the crowds swelled to their peak; would I be able to see a thing up close? On the other hand, Robert had glimpsed his lady through a crowd, so perhaps it was appropriate that I was here as part of one. With a colored metal museum button folded over the top of my shirt pocket and my jacket over my arm, I went up the great staircase.

I had forgotten to ask if the Degas collection was all in one place, and whether it had been moved since Robert's obsession with it in the '80s. It didn't matter much; I could always go back to the information desk, and perhaps I wasn't looking for information anyway. I found the Impressionist rooms where I'd remembered them, more or less, and was transfixed by their verdant expanse--the crowds were thick here, but I had sudden visions of orchards, garden paths, tranquil water, ships, Monet's regal arched cliffs. A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming. But every time I stepped closer to one of those canvases, the old tune was silenced by a swell of something enormous, color that really was almost melody, thick paint on surfaces that actually conveyed the smells of pasture and ocean. I remembered the stack of books Kate had found next to Robert's attic sofa, books that had inspired his vigorous painting of walls and ceiling. These works had not been dead for him, a contemporary artist, but somehow fresh and refreshing, even in glossy color reproductions from the library. He was a traditionalist himself, of course, but he'd seen through the endless exhibits and posters to something still revolutionary.

The Degas collection was mostly housed in four rooms, with a few other examples of his work--mainly large portraits I didn't remember--spilling into the halls of the nineteenth-century collection. I'd forgotten, too, that the Met's collection of his work must be one of the largest in any museum anywhere, perhaps the largest in the world; I made a mental note to check that. The first room contained a bronze cast of Degas's most famous sculpture, The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, with her skirt of real faded netting and the satin ribbon slipping off the braid down her back. She stood in the path of anyone who entered, her face turned up, blind and submissive but perhaps touched by a dream no non-dancer could understand, her hands clasped behind her, her lower back delicately arched, her right foot forward and impossibly turned out in the beautiful deformity for which she'd been trained.

The walls around her were dominated by Degas, with a few other painters here and there: his portraits of rather ordinary women smelling flowers in their homes, and canvases of dancers. The dancers filled the next two rooms almost completely, young ballerinas with feet on barre or chair, tying their shoes, their skirts upended as they leaned over, like the feathers of swans fishing underwater, the sensuality that made you scan the lines of their bodies just as you might have scanned them at the ballet itself, the heightened intimacy of seeing them in training, offstage, behind the scenes, ordinary, tired, shy, mutilated, ambitious, underage or overripe, exquisite. I made my way from one to another and then stopped in front of a third to look around.

Beyond the dancers was a little room of Degas nudes, women stepping from baths and swathing themselves in huge white towels. The nudes were heavily fleshed, as if the ballerinas had aged and gained weight, or turned out to be curvaceous after all under the discipline of their tight bodices and fluffy skirts. Nothing spoke to me of Robert's presence or the lady he'd once seen in these galleries; although perhaps she'd been here as a Degas fan herself. He'd had permission to sketch in the museum, he'd set up his easel or held his drawing pad before him on some busy morning in the late '80s, he'd seen a woman in the crowd and then lost her. If he'd wanted to sketch, why had he been there in a crowd? I didn't even know if these rooms had been arranged the same way then, and checking it would make me appear fanatical, if only to myself. This was a ridiculous pilgrimage to have made; I was already weary from the jostling of the crowd, all these people out gathering impressions of impressions of Impressionists, collecting firsthand images they already knew thirdhand.

I sent a thought out to Robert and resolved to go downstairs to some quiet room full of furniture or Chinese vases that fewer people cared about. Perhaps it had been like this for him; he'd been tired that day, turned and glanced through the crowd--I tried it myself, and my eyes lit on a gray-haired woman in a red dress holding a little girl by the hand, the child tired already, too, staring vacantly around her at people rather than paintings. But that day Robert had looked straight through the mass to a woman he could never forget, a woman possibly dressed up in nineteenth-century clothing for a rehearsal or a photograph or a prank-- these possibilities hadn't occurred to me before. Maybe he had gone up to her and talked with her, even in a crowd.

"Are there any more paintings by Degas?" I asked the guard in the doorway.

"Degas?" he said, frowning. "Yes, two more in that room." I thanked him and made my way there, to be thorough; perhaps Robert had had his epiphany, or his hallucination, here. There were fewer people in the next room, possibly because there were fewer Monets. I examined a pastel on brown, drawn in pink and white, a dancer stretching long arms down her long leg, and another of three or four ballerinas with their backs to the painter and their arms around one another's waists or their hands adjusting hair ribbons.

I was done. I turned away, searched for an exit at the other end of the gallery, in the opposite direction from the crowds I'd left. Then she was there, across from me, a portrait in oils about two feet square, painted loosely but with absolute precision, the face I knew, the elusive smile, the bonnet tied under her chin. Her eyes were so alive that you couldn't turn around without meeting them. I went numbly across the room, which seemed huge; it took hours for me to reach her. It was indisputably the same woman, depicted from her blue-clad shoulders up. As I drew close, she seemed to smile a little more; her face was wonderfully alive. If I'd had to guess the painter, I would have said Manet, although the portrait didn't have his genius. It must be the same period, however: the careful strokes that made up the shoulders of her dress, the lace at her throat, the dark luxury of her hair, were not quite the domain of Impressionism; her face had some of the realism of earlier work. I scanned the plaque -- "Portrait of Beatrice de Clerval, 1879. Olivier Vignot." Beatrice de Clerval! And painted by Olivier! She was a real woman, all right. But not a living one.

The fellow at the information desk on the first floor helped as much as he could. No, they didn't have any other work by Olivier Vignot, nor any other titles involving Beatrice de Clerval. The piece had been in the collection since 1966, bought from a private collection in Paris. During Robert's tenure in New York City, it had been loaned for a year to a traveling exhibition, one on French portraiture during the rise of Impressionism. He smiled and nodded; that was all he had--did it serve my purposes?

I thanked him, my lips dry. Robert had seen it once or twice before it had been removed to travel with an exhibition. He had not hallucinated, only been struck by a marvelous image. Had he really not asked someone what had happened to the painting? Perhaps he had or perhaps he hadn't; what suited his myth about her was that she had disappeared. And if he had returned to the museum in the years since then, it had not mattered to him whether the painting was actually there or not; by then he'd been producing his own version of her. Even if he'd seen this painting only a few times, he had surely made a sketch of it, a very good one, for his later paintings to resemble her so accurately.

Or had he found the painting again in a book? Obviously, neither artist nor subject was well known, but the quality of Vignot's work had attracted the Met enough to make them purchase the portrait. I tried the gift shop as well, but there was no postcard of it, no book with a reproduction. I climbed the staircase again, went back into the gallery. She was waiting there, glowing, smiling, about to speak. I took out my sketch pad and drew her, the pose of the head--if only I could do it better. Then I stood looking into her eyes. I could hardly bear to leave without taking her with me.