The Swan Thieves

When lunch was over, Robert left us and strolled off into the woods--to pee, I realized eventually, something I managed myself as soon as the three men were all safely at work again; I had a bit of tissue in my pocket, which I buried under the damp leaves and lichen-covered branches. After lunch we started new canvases to accommodate the change in light, and then painted for hours more. I began to realize that Frank's assessment of Robert's dedication to nature was an accurate one. He didn't come over to look at anyone's work after all, and I was relieved as well as a little disappointed. My legs and back ached, and I began to see plates of dinner in front of me rather than the textures of water and firs.

Finally, just before four o'clock, Robert circulated slowly among us, making suggestions, listening to problems, calling us together once to ask what we thought about the differences between morning and afternoon light in that landscape, commenting that painting a cliff was no different than painting an eyelid--we had to remember that light revealed form no matter what the object. He finally stopped by my easel, and stood examining the canvas with his arms folded. "The trees are very good," he said. "Really very good. Look, if you put a darker shadow on this side of the island--do you mind?" I shook my head, and he borrowed a brush. "Don't be afraid to make a shadow darker if you need contrast," he murmured, and I saw my island swell into geological reality under his hand. And didn't mind his improving my work. "There. I won't mess with it any more--I want to let you get on with it." He touched my arm with his big fingers and left me, and I worked deeply, almost blindly, until the sun began to sink enough to interfere with true visibility.

"I'm hungry," Frank hissed, leaning over into my space. "This guy is a crazy man. Aren't you starving? Cool trees," he added. "You must like trees."

I tried to make some sense of his words but couldn't, couldn't even say, "What?" I was completely stiff, chilled under my sweatshirt and the cotton scarf I'd wrapped around my neck as the ocean breeze grew cooler; I hadn't painted this hard in a long, long time, although I worked almost every day, around the edges of my job. I had one other thing to ask Robert, now that I'd concentrated so deeply on my shadows and needed to add some flecks of white to the whole scene, to brighten it. Should I wait and add the white tomorrow, in something closer to the light with which we'd begun, or do it now--quickly, from memory?

I made my way down the slope to Robert's easel, where he was beginning to clean his brushes and scrape his palette. He stopped every few seconds to look back at his canvas and out at the view. It occurred to me that he'd forgotten for a while to teach us anything, and I felt a pang of sympathy; he, too, had been absorbed, beyond consciousness, in the movement of brush and hand, fingers, wrist. We could learn just from being near that kind of obsession, I thought. I stood in front of his work. He made it seem easy, this viewing of basic forms and blocking them in, adding color, touching them with light--the trees, the water, the rocks, the narrow beach below. The surface wasn't finished; he, like us, would probably be working on this same canvas at least another whole afternoon, if there was time. The forms would expand later to full reality; the details of branch, leaf, and wave would be touched in here and there.

But one section of his canvas was beautifully complete. I wondered why he had finished it ahead of the rest: the rugged beach and pale rocks stretching out into the ocean, the soft colors of stone and reddish seaweed. We were at some height from the edge of the water, and he'd caught that sense of looking down, or aslant, at the two distant figures walking hand in hand along the shore, the smaller bent over as if to pluck something from a tidal pool, the taller upright. They were just clear enough, close enough, so that I could see the woman's long skirts pulled back in the wind, the child's bonnet hanging by its blue ribbons, two people companion-ably alone where there had been no one but a painting class on the hill above all afternoon. I found myself staring at them, then at him; Robert touched the woman's minuscule shoe with a brush, as if polishing its toe, then wiped the sable hairs again. I'd forgotten what my question had been--something about the changing light.

He turned to me with a smile, as if he'd known I was there and had even known who I was. "Have you had a good afternoon?"

"Very good," I said. His relaxed manner made me feel it would be silly to ask him why he'd put two fictional figures into the summer scene before us. He was known for his nineteenth-century references, and he had every right, as Robert Oliver, to stick whatever he wanted into a lesson in landscape. I hoped someone else would ask him instead.

Then I hoped something different: that I would someday know him well enough to ask him anything. He glanced at me, the friendly, distant expression I remembered from college--a puzzle, a cipher of a face. Where his shirt collar parted over his chest, I saw tufts of silvered dark hair. I wanted to reach out and touch that hair, to see if age had softened it or made it wiry--which? He had rolled his sleeves almost to the elbow. Now he stood in his familiar tall-man's pose, his arms crossed, hands holding up his bare elbows, his legs braced against the hill's slant. "It's a hell of a view," he said companionably. "And I guess we should clear out for dinner now." It was a hell of a view, I could have pointed out, but it didn't include any figures in long dresses skirting the tide. No shore could have been more strikingly empty--a landscape without people, which had been the point of the exercise, hadn't it?