The Swan Thieves
Chapter 6 Marlow

It had been more than a year, I was sorry to realize, since I'd actually entered the National Gallery of Art. The steps outside were overrun with schoolchildren; they swarmed around me in their drab uniforms, a Catholic school, or perhaps one of those public schools that require pleated navy and dull plaids in an effort to restore some long-lost order. Their faces were bright-- the boys with mostly very short hair; some of the little girls with plastic bubbles on their braids--and their skin was a spectrum of lovely colors, from pale and pinkly freckled to ebony. For a moment I thought, Democracy. It was that old idealistic feeling I got from social studies class in my Connecticut grade school, from reading about George Washington Carver and Lincoln, an America with the dream of belonging to all Americans. We were moving together up the grand staircase toward a museum free of charge and, in theory, open to everyone, everyone and anyone, where these children could mingle with one another and me and the paintings without restraint.
Then the mirage cleared: the children were shoving each other and sticking gum in one another's hair, and their teachers were trying to keep the peace with only the resources of diplomacy. More important, I knew that most of DCs population would never make it into this museum, nor feel welcome here. I hung back and waited for the kids to go in ahead of me, since it was too late for me to thread my way through and beat them to the doors. That also gave me time to turn my face to the afternoon sun, which was warm, in the full flush of spring, and enjoy the green of the Mall.
My three o'clock appointment (borderline personality disorder, a long struggle) had canceled, and for once I didn't have an appointment after that, so I'd left my office for the museum, free, released; I wouldn't have to go back to work at all that day.
Two women presided over the information desk; one was young, with a cap of dark, straight hair, and the other a retiree-- a volunteer, I guessed, frail-looking under her frothy white curls. I chose the older for my question. "Good afternoon. I was wondering if you could help me locate a painting called Leda."
The woman glanced up and smiled; she might have been the younger docent's grandmother, and her eyes were a faded, nearly transparent blue. Her badge read miriam.
"Certainly," she said.
The younger woman edged toward her and watched her find something on a computer screen. "Hit 'Title,'" she urged.
"Oh, I almost had it." Miriam sighed deeply, as if she'd known all along that her efforts were useless.
"Yeah, you've got it," the girl insisted, but she had to press a key or two herself before Miriam smiled.
"Ah, Leda. That's by Gilbert Thomas, French. It's in the nineteenth-century galleries, just before the Impressionists."
The girl looked at me for the first time. "That's the one that guy attacked last month. A lot of people have been asking about it. I mean--" She paused and tucked an obsidian strand back in place; I realized then that her hair was dyed black, so that it appeared carved, Asian, around her pale face and greenish eyes. "Well, not a lot, I guess, but several people have asked to see it."
I found myself staring at her, unexpectedly stirred. Her gaze was knowing as she stood there behind the counter, her body lean and flexible under a tight-zipped jacket, the smallest curve of hip showing between that and the top of a black skirt--that would be the maximum glimpse of abdominal skin permitted in this gallery full of nudes, I speculated. She might be an art student, working here in her spare time to get through school, a gifted printmaker or fashioner of jewelry, with those long, pale hands. I pictured her up against the counter, after hours, no underwear under that too-short skirt. She was just a kid; I looked away. She was a kid, and I was no catch, I knew--no aging Casanova.
"I was shocked to hear about that." Miriam shook her head. "I didn't know it was that painting, though."
"Well," I said, "I read about the incident, too--strange that someone would attack a painting, isn't it?"
"I don't know." The girl rubbed one hand along the edge of the information counter. She had a broad silver ring on her thumb. "We get all kinds of crazies in here."
"Sally," murmured her elder.
"Well, we do," said the girl defiantly. She looked me full in the face, as if daring me to be one of the lunatics to whom she'd just referred. I imagined discovering some sign that she found me attractive, inviting her for a cup of coffee, a preliminary flirtation, over which she would say things like We get all kinds of crazies in here. The image of the woman in Robert Oliver's drawings came into my mind--she was young, too, but also ageless, her face full of subtle knowledge and life. "The man who attacked that painting seems to have cooperated with the police, once he was arrested," I observed gently. "Maybe he wasn't that crazy."
The girl's eyes were hard, matter-of-fact. "Who would want to hurt a work of art? The guard told me afterward that it was a very close call for Leda."
"Thank you," I said, now an elderly and correct man with a gallery map in his hand.
Miriam took the map back for a moment and circled with a blue pen the room I wanted. Sally had drifted away already; the frisson had been only on my side.
But I had the whole afternoon to myself; with a feeling of lightness, I climbed the stairs to the tremendous marble rotunda at their summit and wandered among its gleaming, variegated pillars for a few minutes, stood in the middle, taking a deep breath.
Then a strange thing happened--the first of many times. I wondered if Robert had paused here, and I felt his presence, or perhaps simply tried to guess what his experience must have been--here, where he had preceded me. Had he known he was going to stab a painting, and known which painting? That might have sent him past the rotunda's glories in a rush, his hand already in his pocket. But if he hadn't known ahead of time, if something had incited him to it once he was in front of the painting, he might well have lingered in that forest of marble trunks, too, as would anyone with a sense of surroundings and a love of traditional forms.
In fact--I put my hands in my own pockets--even if his attack had been premeditated and he had felt confident in it, or savored the thought of the moment when he would draw out his knife and open it in his palm, he might still have stopped here for the pleasure of postponement. It was difficult, of course, for me to imagine wanting to damage a painting, but I was imagining Robert's urges, not my own. After another moment, I walked on, glad to leave that celestial, dim place and to be among paintings again, the long first galleries of the nineteenth-century collection.
To my relief, I found the area free of visitors, although there was not one but two guards there, as if the museum administration expected a second attack on the same painting at any moment. Leda drew me across the room at once. I'd resisted the temptation to check for it in books or on the Internet before visiting today, and now I was glad--I could always read its history later, but the image was fresh for me, startling and real.
It was a large canvas, frankly Impressionist, although the details were somewhat more in evidence than they might have been in a Monet or a Pissarro or a Sisley, and it was about five by eight feet, dominated by two figures. The central figure was a mainly nude female form, lying on beautifully real grass. She was supine, in a classical attitude of despair and abandonment--or abandon?--her head with its burden of golden hair thrown back on the earth, a wisp of drapery caught over her middle and slipping off one leg, her shallow breasts bare, arms outspread. Her skin was numinously painted against the reality of that grass; it was too pale, translucent, like the sprout of a plant that has grown under a log. I thought at once of Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, although the figure of Leda was full of struggle, startled and epic--not calmly naked like Manet's prostitute, the skin cooler in tone, the brushwork looser.
The other figure in the painting was not human, although it was certainly a dominant character--a huge swan, hovering over her as if about to land on water, its wings beating backward to slow the speed of its assault. The swan's long wing feathers curved inward like talons, its gray-webbed feet almost touched the delicate skin of her belly, and its black-circled eye was as fierce as the gaze of a stallion. The sheer force of its flight toward her, caught on canvas, was astonishing, and this explained visually and psychologically the panic of the woman in the grass. The swan's tail curled under it, a pelvic thrust, as if to further aid its impulsive slowing. You could feel that the bird had burst over those vague thickets only a moment before, that it had come upon the sleeping form suddenly, and just as suddenly had veered to land on it in a paroxysm of desire.
Or had the swan been searching for her? I tried to remember the details of the story. The momentum of the great creature could have knocked her down, knocked her onto her back, perhaps, as she was rising from a nap en plein air. The swan needed no genitalia to make it masculine--that shadowed area under the tail was more than enough, as were the powerful head and beak as it bent its long neck toward her.
I wanted to touch her myself, to find her sleeping there, to push the creature forcefully away. When I stepped back to see the canvas as a whole, I felt Leda's fear, the way she had started up and fallen backward, the terror in her very hands as they dug into the earth--none of this had the voluptuous victimhood of the classical paintings that lined other galleries in this museum, the soft-porn Sabine women and Saint Catherines. I thought of the poem by Yeats I'd read several times over the years, but his Leda was a willing victim, too--"loosening thighs"--without many reactions of her own; I would have to find it again to be certain. Gilbert Thomas's Leda was a real woman, and she was really frightened. If I desired her, I thought, it was because she was real, and not because she had already been overpowered.
The plaque for the painting was all too succinct: "Leda [Leda vain?ue par le Cygne], 1879, purchased 1967. Gilbert Thomas, 1840-1890." Monsieur Thomas must have been a highly perceptive man, I thought, as well as an extraordinary painter, to put this sort of authentic emotion into the portrayal of a single moment. The rapidly worked feathers and the blurring of Leda's draperies recorded the advent of Impressionism, although it wasn't quite an Impressionist painting: the subject matter, to begin with, was the kind that the Impressionists had disdained--academic, a classical myth. What had made Robert Oliver draw a knife with the idea of plunging it into this scene? Was he, I wondered again, suffering from an antisexual derangement, or a condemnation of his own sexuality? Or had this act of his, which could have damaged these painted figures beyond repair if he hadn't been caught in time, been some strange defense of the girl flung helplessly back under the swan? Had it been gallantry of a twisted, delusional sort? He might simply have disliked the eroticism of the work. But was it an erotic painting, exactly?
The longer I stood in front of it, the more it seemed to me to be a painting about power and violence. Staring at Leda, I didn't want so much to touch or defile her as to push away the huge feathered chest of the swan before it flew into her again. Was that what Robert Oliver had felt, pulling the knife out of his pocket? Or had he simply wanted to liberate her from the frame? I stood pondering this for some time, looking at Leda's hand digging into the grass, and then turned to the next work, also by Gilbert Thomas. Here, maybe, was an answer to my growing question, curiosity beyond any thought of Robert Oliver and his knife: What sort of person had Thomas been? I read the title-- "Self-portrait with Coins, 1884"--and had just gotten an impression of firmly stroked-in black coat, black beard, smooth white shirt, when I felt a hand on my elbow.
I turned, not wholly surprised--I've lived in Washington for more than twenty years now, and it is rightly called a small town-- but saw that I'd been mistaken. There was no one I recognized; someone had simply brushed against me by accident. In fact, there were now more than a few other people present: an elderly couple pointing out a painting to each other in low voices, a dark-suited man with a shiny forehead and long hair, some tourists speaking what was probably Italian.
The person nearest me, whom I'd thought I felt at my elbow, was a young woman--youngish, in any case. She was looking at Leda and had stationed herself directly in front of the painting as if she intended to stay there for a few minutes. She was tall and lean, almost my own height, standing with her arms crossed in front of her, dressed in blue jeans and a white cotton blouse, brown boots. Her hair was artificially dark red and quite long, hanging straight down her back; her profile--cheek, three-quarters--pure and smooth, with a light-brown eyebrow and long lashes, no makeup. When she bent her head, I saw that her hair had blond roots; she had reversed the usual procedure.
After a moment she stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans like a boy and leaned closer to the painting, studying something. I knew from the way she craned at the brushwork--can I be making this up, in retrospect?--that she was a painter herself. Only a painter would examine the surface from that angle, I thought, watching her turn and bend to take in the texture of the paint aslant, where the lighting hit it. I was struck by her concentration and stood there observing her as discreetly as I could. She stepped back, studying the whole again.
I felt that she stayed in front of Leda a moment too long, then another, and for some reason that was not a question of craft. She apparently sensed my gaze but didn't care about it much. Then, in fact, she walked away--no glance for me, no curiosity. She shrugged it off: a handsome tall girl used to being stared at. Perhaps, I thought, she wasn't a painter but a performer, or a teacher, hardened to the gaze of others, even enjoying it. I waited for a glimpse of her hands, hanging now at her sides as she turned to the Manet still life on the far wall; she seemed to peer with less concentration at his luminous wineglasses, his plums and grapes. My eyesight, although still keen, is not exactly what it once was; I couldn't see whether or not she had paint under her nails. And didn't care to step closer to her shrug to find out.
Suddenly she surprised me by turning all the way around and smiling in my direction, a bemused, noncommittal smile, but a smile nonetheless and one that even contained some conspiracy for a fellow close-to-the-picture gazer, a fellow lingerer in front of the view. Her face was an open one, made more alert by the absence of makeup, her lips pale, her eyes a color I couldn't figure out, her skin fair but also rosy next to the auburn hair; on her collarbone she wore a necklace of knotted leather strung with long ceramic beads that looked as if they could have had prayer parchments rolled up inside them. Her white cotton blouse showed possibly full breasts on an angular body. She held herself erect but not delicately, not so much like a dancer as like someone on a horse, exercising a grace that was partly caution. The old people were closing in on her, so that she had to edge away: Thomas, Manet, strange middle-aged man, farewell.