by Dawn Tripp
“There’s no someone here.” He takes my hand and pulls me away from the dock to the edge of the trees. He lays out the towel. The ground is hard, sun splashing through the upper leaves, my hands to the wrist in sunlight, as he pushes into me from behind, harder, deeper. Afterward, we lie there naked at the edge of the shade.
“I want a child,” I say to him, running my fingers over his chest. “That child you wrote about in your letters.”
“There is much to do before then.”
“I know, but soon.”
“Yes,” he whispers. “Soon.”
Flocks of geese flood over us. The slow-moving current of their bodies pass like clicks of time.
XVI
WE RETURN TO New York and the shoe-box room. I’m not going to leave—such a strange delirious feeling—this new life I’ve slipped into that doesn’t yet quite feel like mine.
Twice a week we dine at his mother’s apartment on East 60th. She tells me stories of Alfred as a child, how he loved horses and racing; how, at ten, he locked himself into the billiard room on the top floor and practiced billiards hour after hour alone until he could beat his father and his friends. She tells me how when he was very small, not even four, he loved a certain photograph of a favorite cousin, he refused to part with it, so they tied it around his waist with string, and it flew after him as he ran through the house, and bounced along behind him down the stairs.
The dinners at her house are rich and delicious. Candles, a fire, laughter, real joy, an amused glow on the old woman’s face, looking on as we tease each other playfully. She beams. It pleases her—to see him happy.
Most nights, we eat out in modest restaurants where we will sit side by side. My favorite is the Automat. I love the beauty and simple anonymity of it—drop a quarter in the slot and pull out a meal.
“This is where our two worlds collide,” I say to him one night.
“Here?”
“Yes—the Automat. Your world of fine marble floors,” I say, “my twenty-five-cent meal.”
He mumbles something, trying to choose between a vanilla crème custard and apple pie. I push the button. The trays revolve around.
“Hey, I was looking at that,” he says.
“But if you look from a different angle, it will be easier to choose. See that sag in the custard—I’d get the pie.”
Stieglitz scoffs, slips the silver coin into the slot. The latch clicks, and he draws open the door for the pie.
—
ONCE A WEEK, we walk to Columbus Circle to meet the Round Table for dinner at the Far East China Gardens, where they serve Pineapple Chow Mein for $1.50. The men discuss life and argue over theories of art. They praise those who have come into their circle, and denigrate those who have defected from the fold. I love these conversations, though I am more curious to observe. Stieglitz’s vehemence invigorates the rest—he sweeps them all up into intense arguments about art, culture, politics. I pick gems out of the thoughts that fly back and forth across the table—how Matisse, the most brilliant of colorists, calls black “a force.” How Cézanne contends there is no stillness in a still life—but a continual play between light and shadow.
“The task of art,” Stieglitz says to the critic Paul Rosenfeld, “is not to render things as they visibly are, but to call forth an unseen spirit—to draw what’s abstract and timeless out of what is tactile, concrete, personal.” Rosenfeld is listening. He is new to the circle—and seems a little stunned by his luck to find himself in Stieglitz’s remarkable world. I find him endearing. Short, roly-poly, with sandy hair and kind droopy brown eyes. He’s an incisive writer, though—with an acerbic wit.
“The keynote of experience,” painter Abraham Walkowitz chimes in. “It is not subjective or objective. Think of Isadora Duncan. No laws, no rules.”
“I saw your Duncan drawings when they were shown at 291,” Rosenfeld says.
“There have been others he’s made since,” Stieglitz says. “Stronger and more precise, which capture the exact feeling of why her dancing moves us.”
Silence then. The table is waiting on that why. Rosenfeld, the unknowing newcomer, asks tentatively, “Why does it move us?”
Stieglitz’s voice grows taut as wire. “Because Duncan understands that art is the conversion of the body into the luminous fluent spirit, and when she dances, every movement of her body seeks to express that spirit. Therefore, in every movement, she creates, and it is precisely that understanding that Walkowitz is after—not simply the body of the dancer, but its vision and intent.”
I listen as the talk ricochets around the table. The passion moves beyond the argument itself. The heat and the words become tiring to me. Sometimes, on these evenings, Stieglitz feels very far away from the man I know. Sometimes, I just want everything to freeze. I want to reach across the table and touch his cheek, to reach beyond that fierce brilliance to what is private and tender and mine.
The conversation shifts—they are talking now about Germany before the war. In 1913, Marsden Hartley was painting with Kandinsky in Berlin, and his art from that time is a keen synthesis of abstraction and German expressionism—bold color, mystical forms, sometimes so raw you can’t bear to be too close.
“It was all so romantic then,” Hartley says, reaching a long arm to a piece of sauce-soaked chicken with his fork. “Those gorgeous German boys in their smart uniforms, their pageantry.”
“Now only hard reality,” Rosenfeld remarks.
“It sickens me.” Stieglitz shakes his head. “Just when Americans were starting to dip their milky white minds into the avant-garde, along comes this war to blow it all down.”
—
WHEN DINNER IS done and paid for, we will stroll together along the edges of the park back to the 59th Street studio. Invariably there will be another artist, or even two, waiting for us on the doorstep, smoking as they wait. Stieglitz will invite them all up the four flights of stairs to an impromptu salon in our two little rooms. He will show them a select few of my pieces—my new oil and some of my earlier things. He will mention the photographs. “I’m working on something new,” he tells them. “A portrait.” And they are eager to hear more, but that’s as much as he’ll say.
On those evenings the talk will often continue past midnight. Finally, they will be gone, and the studio will be ours alone again, and we will push the beds together and he will kiss me, move against me, into me, pale skin glanced by streetlight, our bodies like wet fire.
—
IN NOVEMBER, WORD comes that my father has died. He slipped off the roof of a barracks where he had been carpentering. Fractured skull. Cerebral hemorrhage. There were shards of a bottle on the ground near him.
A scattered flurry of phone calls. My sister Catherine’s sweet, calm voice—Claudie’s tearful one. Ida has just come to New York to work as a nurse at Mount Sinai. She and I meet with my other sister Anita at her new Fifth Avenue home, but there is little to do, and less to say. The few necessary arrangements are made. It all falls into place, almost too neatly, against the reeling darkness inside me.
The summer I was twenty-three I lived with my father alone in the house in Virginia. When we first drained east from Sun Prairie, he had opened a grocery store, then got into real estate, rented a pier, started a creamery, and failed and failed and failed. By the time I came to live with him that summer, all he owned was a small strip of land with a queer two-story house he’d built out of concrete blocks. He was a ruin of a man, stinking of barrooms. My mother had left him. She’d taken my sisters and younger brother Alexius. She was already very ill by then, her body wasted, dying, blood in her lungs.
That summer, my father and I rarely spoke. I baked biscuits, swept, cleaned, and cooked his meals. We moved around each other through silence full of shame. I had adored him once. When we were children, after supper, he would play the fiddle and dance, heels kicked up, blue eyes sparkling, and when he fell back, laughing, into a chair, I would crawl into his lap. His stubbled cheek bit my skin.
It aches to remember. You will forget, I tell myself, in the long throw of time.
That night in our shoe-box room, I cry. Stieglitz holds me tightly, soft kisses on my damp face. I cling to him. So keenly sharp, so everything—this need of him I feel.
—
FOUR DAYS BEFORE I turn thirty-one, the Armistice is declared. The war is over. The streets erupt in celebration and chaos.
The last of my things arrive from Texas. I spread the artwork on the floor, sorting what to keep. Stieglitz watches me. “How easy it is for you to be ruthless with your things,” he says, “like you feel nothing.”
I want to explain that it is not nothing—what I feel. There are pieces that speak to what I have come from and where I am going—but everything else needs to be discarded to keep that arc bone-clean.
“Let me keep that one.” He reaches for a half-finished watercolor at the top of the pile to be thrown away. I beat him to it, and quickly tear an edge to ruin it.
“I don’t want it kept,” I say, stuffing it into the wastepaper trash.
That night, when we come home from dinner, we see the paintings blowing all through the street. A huge hollyhock I made over a year ago sticks out of the garbage can in front of our building. Sketches sail around like wild leaves. I feel him flinch, like he’ll start toward them. I hold his arm.
“Leave them,” I say. “They belong to someone else back there.”
I turn him to the steps and we go in.
PART II
I
“PART THE GOWN,” he says, “let your hand fall, naturally, across your breast. Higher. There. Tuck your thumb into the fold, near the breast. Yes. Now, don’t move that hand, but with the other pull your hair back from your shoulder. Drape it that way.” He disappears again under the dark cloth.
“Don’t breathe.” For the slow glass negatives I have to be unthinkably still—I can’t blink or twitch or itch that spot behind my ear. If my hand moves, the image will be ruined.
Still, I think to myself. Stiilllll, until my mind drops and my body streams into the word.
When he emerges from behind the camera, I exhale slowly. I arch my spine, stretch my neck, and walk around in the white kimono dressing gown until he is ready. Again he surveys me.
“Hair behind your shoulder. Bring one breast out, touch it, hold it toward me. There.” He disappears under the cloth. The room is quiet. I can hear the muted blurred noise of the city through the window. “Both breasts now,” he says, speaking from under the black cloth, so it is only the eye of the camera I can see, and the very small, distant white floating creature pinched inside the glass that is me. “Let your arms drop to your side. Chin up, throat back. Look At Me. Georgia.”
—
HIS WORK HAS begun to take over the studio. Boxes of printing paper, bottles, trays and pans. He curtains the windows and fills the bathtub with developing solution. It is only temporary, he explains. The fire is in him now—and I find myself transfixed by his obsession with that woman.
Sometimes he will say only that word, beautiful, and then he’ll cross the room in a few strides, take my chin in his hand, and shift my face a fraction of an inch in one direction, so the light strikes differently and I become, for that moment, someone else entirely.
—
ONE AFTERNOON IN February, he comes home early from his office at the Anderson Galleries.
“Leo Ornstein concert tonight!” he says, waving tickets in the air.
“So wonderful!”
“But first I want to use the window.” He pulls the camera out into the middle of the room.
“But the radiator is in front of the window.”
“You’ll stand on it.”
“I don’t trust that old rickety thing.” But he is preparing the plates.
“Come on,” he says. He draws a sheet across the window, which is hardly a veil, and I tell him so, but it sheds the light as he wants it to fall. I leave my drawings on the table and climb up. The radiator bars dig into the soles of my feet, warm, but hard to balance on.
“Naked,” he says.
I slip off the dressing gown.
“Straighter.”
“It’s freezing!”
“Lift your arms.”
“I’ll fall.”
“Never,” he says. He angles the lens upward. The radiator gives a belch, my arms outstretched, fingertips on the wall, winter cold against my backside. I hold my breath, body taut, an electric rush moving through me from the pain of keeping still.
“Perfect,” he says. And it will be. The diffused light sculpts my breasts and hips and thighs, the light ridge of ribs just visible. I am longer, taller in this image, my face cropped. And I realize I prefer it that way—to be curiously absent—the torso of a woman massed out of the air. I’ve begun to crave the way his eyes rake over me when I am posing for him, so I am only a body. No inhibition, no thought. Pure sensation. There is a strange freedom in that, and it begins to fuel my art.
—
ORNSTEIN THAT EVENING is entirely abstract music—biting dissonance that achieves an odd cogency as the music evolves. Stieglitz’s hand slips over my knee as the young man plays, his dark head bent, listening to the sound within the sound, his fingers violent, moving over the keys. The tall windows of the room hold the winter night—the city outside—a world we’ve already left without knowing, the rapt, marbleized faces of the women, their heads stabbed on their dark dresses—as the music fills the room.
Afterward we spill into the street, a mill of bodies, muffs, coats, hats.
“You’re quiet,” he says as we pause at a corner. The moon hangs between buildings ahead. “What are you thinking?”
I take his arm. We cross. The sidewalk underneath us.
“Just feeling that music,” I say. “That range he played. It was almost savage. Like he needed to play every note. Like he was playing on the last night of the world.”
He wraps his arm around me.
I laugh. “It took me right apart, and now you’re walking down the street with little pieces of a person, the skin barely holding her in.”
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after zwieback toast and coffee, I brush the crumbs from his mustache and send him out the door. I clean up the breakfast things and make our beds, side by side, last night’s music still rilling around inside me as I smooth the sheets. The oddest sort of feeling—I’m moving through an ordinary morning and at the same time standing on some brink of free-falling space. The yellow walls seem to waver, shards of colored light.
A bird sails past the window.
I go into the back room and pull out sketches I made last summer of the natural bridge I visited once in Virginia. I remember passing through it, the smell of the greenery, the cool gray of the rock, and how, when I looked back, the orange dusk struck its edges.
I leave the drawings on the table and begin a new sketch. Lines over the paper, shadow by shadow, details stripped—not the bridge as it was but as I felt it blow through me in that moment I turned and looked back, the moss ripped with light.
Over the next few days, I work my sketch of the stone bridge into color.
I try pastel first. That opaque charge, but there’s too much contrast in the tones—the orange and blue don’t quite meld. Frustrated, I clean up my things and scrub down the table before Stieglitz comes home and asks what I’ve been working on.
“Not quite ready,” I say.
“Show me what’s not ready.”
“No.” I draw him toward the bed. “Let’s do something else.”
—
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, I lay out my oils, brushes, and a blank canvas. One looped stroke to begin, bits of pink and blue rimmed into the ivory tones.
How he made me come last night, in the little bed, night pouring through the skylight, his breath on my skin hot and raw. I shiver, remembering. Crimson mixed into red leaving the tip of my brush, just there—a small, unexpected flash of brightness.
; I still don’t show him.
—
THE NEXT DAY when I am alone, I put the two pieces side by side. The first, the pastel, has the opacity I want, but the colors fight—that orange and blue like two separate worlds. In the oil, the emphasis is on the form—almost a drawing—the shape is closer to what I want, but the colors feel weak—almost wan.
I set a clean canvas on the easel, and paint it again. Shapes flare, more vivid tones than I’ve ever used. My chest tightens as I work—the canvas resists, then bends, as I push on, seams of warmth strung through the cool melodic tones of violet, blue. It’s as if it already exists in the canvas and I’m carving it out.
Done. I step back and glance at the clock. Later than I could have imagined. I feel a kind of silver zipping around inside me. My body peeled to the root.
—
HE COMES HOME just after dark, and this time I have not moved my easel to the corner but left it there in the center of the room with the painting still on it, wet. I sit on his lap, comb my fingertips through the gray brindle of his hair, and we study it, my music, the thrill of it still in me.
“I see now,” I say, “what I can do with oil. It is stubborn and it is heavy, not loose and free, but the intensity of color—that can say what I want.”
He nods. I wrap my arms around him and draw his face against my breast.
“It’s beautiful,” he says.
“It’s what you make me feel.”
II
THE STREAM OF visitors to our makeshift gallery continues, but new names now. Walter Arensberg, Charles Sheeler, Marius de Zayas. Critics, patrons, art dealers. Arthur B. Davies, who organized the Armory Show in 1913, comes, along with Leo Stein, Gertrude’s brother. Edward Steichen, also a photographer, brings the art collector Frank Crowninshield, who is the editor of Vanity Fair.
Crownie shakes my hand. He is as slick and elegant as the magazine he has transformed. A boutonniere bobs from his lapel. Stieglitz is elated. He shows them several of my new oils and charges in about their “savage force,” their “frankness”—the mastery I have already begun to acquire. He tells them the story of how he first discovered my art when my friend Anita Pollitzer brought my charcoal drawings to 291 three years ago on his birthday, New Year’s Day, 1916. How the instant he unrolled those drawings, he knew it was a new art. Fearless Self-Expression. An Unaffected Mind. A Woman on Paper.