The Swan Thieves

The next morning I woke early, as if someone had whispered to me--fully awake, knowing exactly where I was--and my first thought was of the ocean. It took me only a few minutes to put on clean khakis and a sweatshirt and to brush my hair and teeth in the chilly dorm bathroom with spiders on the ceiling. Then I crept out of the barn, wetting my tennis shoes in the dew; I would regret that later, I knew, since I didn't have another pair with me. The morning was gray with mist, clearing in uneven patches overhead to show pellucid sky, the evergreens full of crows and cobwebs, the birches already turning over a few yellow leaves.

A track led out of the camp just beyond the ash-heaped fire ring, as I'd hoped. I was going in the right direction, toward the ocean, and after a few minutes of listening to my shoes tap the path and to the sounds of the woods, I came out onto a stony beach, the slop of water and sea wrack, the bubbling tide among gray fingers of land. Fog hung right over the water, struggling to clear, so that I got glimpses of pale sky above but could see just a yard or two of waves. There was no view out to sea, only that fog and the edges of the continent lined with dark upright firs, a few cottages breaking their ranks. I took off my shoes and rolled my khakis to the knee. The water was cool, then cold, then very cold, penetrating the bones of my feet and making my calves pimple with chill. The seaweed reached over my ankles.

I felt suddenly afraid, alone with the woods, the smell of pine, the invisible Atlantic. Everything was still, apart from the surge of water. I couldn't bring myself to wade in deeper than my ankles--I had that sudden childhood fear of sharks and entangling weeds, the sense I might be pulled under and lost at sea. There was nothing to gaze out at; the fog returned my stare like a kind of blindness. I wondered about how to paint fog and tried to remember if I'd ever seen a painting that was mostly fog. Maybe something by Turner, or a Japanese print. Snow, yes, and rain, and clouds hovering on mountains, but I couldn't think of any paintings of this kind of fog. At last I backed out of the tide and found a rock to sit on, a high enough, dry enough, smooth enough rock to save the backside of my khakis, with a higher rock to lean against. There was an equally childish pleasure in that, finding one's own throne, and I fell into a dream. I was still sitting there when Robert Oliver came out of the woods.

He was alone and he seemed lost in thought, as I'd just been; he walked slowly, gazing down at his feet on the path and occasionally around him at the trees or out to the foggy water. He was barefoot, in old corduroy pants, and he wore a crumpled yellow cotton shirt hanging open over a T-shirt with some letters on it that didn't quite form words, from where I sat. Now I would have to introduce myself whether I wanted to or not. I thought of standing up and greeting him and immediately missed the moment--I started to get up and then realized I was still out of his line of vision. I sat down again behind my boulders in an agony of embarrassment. If things went well, he would put his feet in the ocean for a moment, check the temperature, and turn around to go back to the camp; I would wait twenty minutes, let my face cool off, and sneak back alone. I huddled against the cold rock. I couldn't take my eyes off him; for one thing, if he saw me, I wanted to see him recognize me. Which he probably wouldn't.

Then he did what I'd most feared and longed for, without knowing it: he took off his clothes. He didn't turn away toward the ocean or hide in the edge of the forest; he simply reached down and unbuttoned his trousers, pulled them off--he wasn't wearing underwear--and then pulled off his shirts, dropping everything in a pile above the tide line and walking toward the water. I was paralyzed. He stood only a few yards away from me, his long, muscled back and legs bare, rubbing his head as if to subdue his hair or rouse his mind from sleep, then rested his hands loosely on his hips. He could have been a studio model, stretching stiff limbs while the class took a break. He stood looking out to sea, relaxed, completely alone (as far as he knew). He turned his head a little, away from where I sat. He twisted his body, gently, warming up, so that in spite of myself I got a glimpse of wiry dark hair, of dangling cock. Then he waded swiftly out into the water and--while I sat shivering, watching, wondering what to do--dove in, a long, shallow dive away from the last rocks, and swam a few strokes. I knew already how cold the water covering him must be, but he didn't turn back until he'd swum out twenty yards.

Finally he wheeled around in the water, came back more swiftly, and found his feet, stumbling a little, wading in. He dripped and gasped; he wiped his face. Drops glittered from the hair on his body and the heavy wet curls on his head. At the shore he finally saw me. You can't look away at such a moment, even if you want to, and pretense is impossible: how could you miss Poseidon stalking out of the ocean; how could you pretend to be checking your nails or scraping snails from the rock? I just sat there, mute, miserable but also transfixed. I even thought at that moment that I wished I could paint the scene--a cliche kind of thought, something I rarely consider in the midst of experience. He stopped and studied me for a moment, a little startled, but didn't make any move to cover himself. "Hello," he said, attentive, wary, possibly amused.

"Hello," I answered as firmly as I could. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, no--no worries." He reached for his clothes on the pebbly beach and, using the T-shirt, dried himself modestly but without hurry, then dressed himself in his pants and yellow oxford. He came a little closer. "Sorry if I was the one who startled you," he said. He stood there studying me, and I saw the dreaded expression of half recognition come into his eyes; saw, miserably, that he couldn't quite place me.

"To make it worse, we used to know each other." It came out sounding flatter, harsher, than I'd intended.

He put his head to one side, as if the ground could tell him my name and what he should remember about me. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I'm terrible about this, but remind me."

"Oh, it's no big deal." I punished him by staring him down anyway. "I'm sure you teach a million students. I was in one of your classes at Barnett a long time ago, just for a term. Visual Understanding. But you really started me toward art, so I've always wanted to thank you for that."

He was looking hard at me now, not bothering to hide his search for my younger presence, as a more polite person might have done. "Wait." I waited. "We had lunch one time, didn't we? I remember something about that. But your hair--"

"Fair enough. It was a different color, blond. I dyed it because I was tired of having people see only that."

"Yes, I'm sorry. I do remember now. Your name--"

"Mary Bertison," I said, and now that he was dressed I put out my hand.

"Good to see you again. Robert Oliver."

I was no longer his student, or wouldn't be again until ten o'clock this morning. "I know you're Robert Oliver," I said as sardonically as I could.

He laughed. "What are you doing here?"

"Taking your landscape class," I said, "except that I didn't know it was going to be you."

"Yes, it was an emergency." He was rubbing his hair now with both hands, as if he wished he had a towel. "But what a nice coincidence. Now I can see how you're coming along."

"Except that you won't remember what I was doing before," I pointed out, and he laughed again, that lovely release of all troubles, with nothing wry or knowing in it--Robert laughed like a child. I remembered now those gestures of hand and arm, and the curling edges of his mouth, the oddly sculpted face, the charm that was charming because there was no awareness behind it, as if he were simply renting his body and it had turned out to be a good one, although he treated it with a renter's lack of caring. We walked slowly back together, and where the path allowed only single file, he went ahead, not a gentleman, and I was relieved because I didn't have to feel his eyes on my back and wonder what their expression might be. When we reached the edge of the lawns, with the mansion in full view and dew glittering across the grass, I could see people hurrying in to breakfast and realized that we had to join them. "I don't know anyone here except you," I confessed on impulse, and we both paused at the edge of the woods.

"I don't either," he said, turning his uncomplicated smile on me. "Except the director, and he's an incredible bore."

I needed to flee, to be alone for a few minutes, not to have to walk into a public meal beside a man I'd just seen coming out of the ocean naked--he seemed already to have forgotten this incident, as if it had happened as long ago as our Visual Understanding class. "I've got to grab some things from my room," I told him.

"See you in class." He seemed about to pat me on the shoulder or to slap me on the back, man-to-man, then apparently thought better of it and let me go. I walked slowly to the stables and shut myself in my whitewashed stall for a few minutes. I sat still, feeling the blessing of the locked door. Huddled there, I remembered how, on a hard-earned trip to Florence three years before, my first and only time in Italy, I'd gone to the monastery of San Francesco and seen the Fra Angelico murals in the former cells of the monks, now empty. There were tourists in the halls, and modern monks on guard here and there, but I had waited until no one was looking, gone into a small white cell, and illegally closed the door. I'd stood there, finally alone, guilty but determined. The tiny room was bare except for a Fra Angelico angel, radiant gold and pink and green on one wall, its wings folded behind it, and sunlight coming in through the grated window. I had understood even then that the monk who had once lived alone in that space, which was otherwise like a prison, had wanted nothing else, nothing but to be there -- nothing, not even his God.