Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  I stare at him. There are grains of truth in what he’s saying—I know it. But there is something so condescending in how he’s telling me who I am, what will unfold, how I must learn. And yet. These things—raw inspiration, the madness, the passion—these things matter to me—he knows this—these are the things I’d trade everything else for.

  “And Rosenfeld,” he is saying now, “has agreed to write a piece on American painting for The Dial. It will feature you.”

  “When?”

  “This fall.”

  “Who else will it feature?”

  “Marin and Dove. I need Dove praised.”

  “Dove should be praised.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Not exactly. Will there be illustrations?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then I want one of my paintings printed alongside whatever Rosenfeld has to say. That way he can say what he wants, and my painting will be in there speaking for itself.”

  He studies me for a long moment.

  “I don’t know that I can make that happen, Georgia.”

  I smile at him. “Oh, I’m sure you can.”

  —

  HARTLEY’S BOOK IS published. I ignore it. But I look for Rosenfeld’s piece in The Dial that appears that December. There are moments of wonderfulness in what he’s written where he claims that in my work, I am building “a new sort of language” through “the unformed electric nature of things.” But there are moments of awfulness, too: phrases like “gloriously female,” “ecstasy of pain.” He describes my colors in terms of flesh and appetite, and I wince, but keep reading. I reach the end of the page, turn it, then see.

  A printed image of my abstraction. The Black Spot.

  One of those pieces I made without knowing where the idea came from or even what it said. But I could feel that thrill in my body as I worked into those shapes, so clear in my mind: dark-blue carving down from one corner, a black edge rising. They burned in me—those contrasting shapes—so much dimension, so many levels of feeling.

  I stare at the print for a long time, and a thought strikes me. The thought that I can make my living as a painter.

  IX

  IT’S NOT UNTIL the following August that I meet Beck Strand. Stieglitz invites both Strands to the Lake that fall, but Paul is too busy to make the trip. Beck writes back, asking if perhaps she can come alone.

  “Tell her to come now,” I say.

  “The house is too full.”

  “She can stay in the inn down the road. Nicer that way.” I add, “Then I can see if I like her before she’s right underfoot.”

  The day after she arrives, we invite her to go swimming in the lake, for a row around the island, then up to the house for tea. She is giddy, bouncy, and constantly looking around, saying how lovely everything is, sighing—she seems slightly in love with the two of us. She tells me that when she and Paul stayed at Rosenfeld’s house earlier this summer I was everywhere with her.

  “How so?”

  “Your paintings. He told me Alfred finally let him buy a few this spring. Considered him worthy, I guess”—she gives a tentative smile—“and he has one room in his house that’s all you—your apples, your blue mountain, your canna lily. We were happy on that short trip—my Paul and I—he’s my only only, you know, and it was a perfect time for us.” She rambles on. I tear off a piece of biscuit and take a small cut of butter. She is quite beautiful, pale, long-limbed, kittenish. She calls me her Georginkha. Her O’Keefski. She’s been here for a day and already assumed a certain intimacy between us. She compliments my espadrilles.

  “I bought them shopping with my sister in the city.”

  “They’re very chic.”

  “Good for walking.”

  Paul has sent her paper and canvas. “To give the erts a whirl,” she says.

  “The arts, you mean?” I ask.

  She nods. “Seems I have everything but ideas.” Then she brightens. “Say! I need a tie for my middy blouse—do you think Alfred might have a tie I can borrow?”

  —

  THAT NIGHT, IN bed, I tell him we should invite her back for more swimming. “You should take some pictures of her,” I say.

  A pause, then, “You don’t mind?”

  “I have work to do—and she’ll be a more compliant model for you.”

  So the next afternoon—mid-September already, but the air so warm—Beck returns, and the two of us go into the lake with nothing on.

  “Frigid!” she shrieks plunging in. “Come on, O’Keefski!”

  The water is clear, and cold, I feel it flowing into me, around me, as I float on my back near the end of the dock, my hair trailing on the surface. She is near me, floating too, her hand brushes mine. My eyes are closed when the shadow falls across my face, and when I open them, he is standing on the dock against the sun. He has the camera out, and I suddenly find I don’t want to be there anymore.

  She’s caught sight of him, and is laughing now. His gaze shifts to her. I climb out and dry myself off with a towel.

  “You’re going up?” he says, looking back at me.

  “I’ve got to work.” I smile. It’s a consent—the smile.

  —

  IT GOES ON for days—them gamboling about, him photographing her by the edge of the woods, or in the lake. “All in the nudelet,” she laughs delightedly when I meet up with them in the later afternoon. “He must have taken a quintillion pictures of me today.”

  Thank God he’s occupied, I think. I leave them at it, and vanish into my work. I make abstractions of the lake—sensual folds of hills, reflection, sky. I paint the shanty for fun in dark muted colors. To play a little joke on the men, just to prove I’m not all vivid red, pinks, and blues. I can do a drab thing every bit as well as they can.

  Once, through the open door of the shanty, I hear her shriek, “Al-fred!” Her voice with that coy bubbly giggle, just a short distance away. They must be in the meadow. I know it’s what he needs to wrench himself out of his doldrum-ruminations—someone or something to entertain him. Better her than me. I’ve got work to do.

  —

  HE SHOWS ME a few prints of his photographs of Beck.

  “They are lovely!” I say, sorting through them, and I mean it—they are lovely.

  “Exactly as you said she would be,” he says.

  “How’s that?”

  “A very pliant model.”

  “I said compliant.”

  “I am sure the distinction escapes her.”

  There is one here—an astonishing image—her head is cropped, just the edge of her throat visible, her breasts fill half of the frame. She is lying in the shallows, just under the water, her wet body shining in the sunlight. She has a hand clutched under one breast, the nipple taut. I feel a quick chill run through me—so exquisite, that image of her body, so frank, his desire. Looking at the photograph, I can almost feel the way it happened. How he waded in, his pants rolled up, standing over her, instructing her to lie down in the shallows, to move her hand under her breast, nudging her gently at first, then more sternly, even as her skin shrank against the icy water, holding her breast toward him, her breast ripe, perfect, the camera and his eyes moving over her.

  “You like that,” he says, and I feel him behind me then, his hardness pushing into me, he lifts my skirt and I want him to. He slips his hand between my legs. I feel his fingers moving there, peeling into the layers of me. My body opens to him. “You want that,” he says, his mouth near my ear, his breath hot, “to be in that water with her, imagine what we could do with her, what would you want to do with her?” The thought makes me shiver, and he can feel it. He laughs softly—a dark laugh that thrills me.

  “You are so wet,” he says, “I would like to have seen you there, in that cold water with her. You would like that. You would like to put your mouth on that.” I push him away, but he draws me back, his voice a dark whisper, disembodied in the black of the potting shed. He unbuttons my shirt and takes my bre
ast out and puts my hand under it, as hers was. I can feel the tug of his teeth, sucking lightly, the nipples sharpen in his mouth, his hand still moving between my legs. I grip the edges of the table behind me.

  “Don’t tip me into the acid,” I say, laughing quietly. A stray light nicks the rim of his glasses as he takes them off.

  “Shhhh,” he says. Through the door, I hear children’s laughter coming nearer, the babble of the baby, and Elizabeth’s voice. “Shhh,” he says as they pass by. The voices fade, his hand still moving between my legs, moving faster, his fingers creeping into me.

  “You’re going to make me scream,” I say. His hand doesn’t stop.

  “You’ll have to learn to scream without making a sound.” He tucks the hem of my skirt into the waist, and then he kneels between my knees, turns me, and pushes me back against the sink. I set one foot on the stool and he buries his face between my legs, and I can feel his mouth on me, harder, sharper, everything in me rising, taut. I grip his hair pushing his face deeper into me, something knocks over behind on the table, I barely notice, don’t even care, and in the small cramped blackness of that room I feel his hand grip my buttocks, his mouth moving over me, his fingers moving into me. And the light is a scream—exquisite, cutting—washing through my skull, and I make no sound, and when I open my eyes the room is blacker than darkness, my body limp, spent, I cannot see a thing.

  —

  BECK IS AT the house every day, for lunch and dinner, modeling, sewing, reading, lying around, writing letters to her Paul, bang-banging away on the old Corona, typing up articles for Stieglitz. She repairs his undershirt. She knits me a pair of heavy bed slippers.

  “They’ll keep your feet warm,” she says—so obvious it seems almost ludicrous.

  “And thick enough to keep my toenails from scratching up Stieglitz’s legs in bed at night.”

  She looks slightly askance at this.

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t showed you yet,” I say lightly, a hint of power in my voice. She’s begun to sew a nightdress, a sheer thing.

  That afternoon, she gathers a bouquet of dahlias she found on a walk, sets them into a vase, and gives them to me. “For you to paint,” she says shyly.

  —

  BY THE TIME Paul comes to join us in late September, the family has gone back to the city and we’re alone. “There’s plenty of spare room now,” I say to Stieglitz. “Invite them to move from the Pines and stay with us.”

  Paul has changed, no longer the soft-faced boy who came to fetch me from Texas. I’ve seen him since, but it hits me now—how somber he is, oddly anxious in his tweed jacket, knit tie, with a cigarette he’s constantly smoking. Paul and Alfred take turns photographing Beck in the bed on the sleeping porch. But then Stieglitz complains to me that Strand is shooting everything that’s his—everything in sight, right, left, forward, backward, the lake, the trees, even the old buggy.

  “You’ve had quite a run with his wife,” I remark. “Consider it a fair swap.”

  He shoots me a look, about to respond, then doesn’t. But I can feel it smolder, his envy of Strand’s youth, energy, his devouring talent. “Strand’s gift is pure,” he said to me just a few months ago. “He doesn’t lose that edge. It’s my intellect that gets in the way.” I remember this now, feeling the tension in the house rise.

  After supper one night, as the four of us sit around the fire, Stieglitz says: “Say, Georgia, why don’t you read that piece aloud—the one you wrote for Manuscripts.”

  I glance at him, and know exactly what he’s planning.

  I shake my head. “It’s not quite finished yet.”

  “Close enough, though!” he says brightly. “Please go get it.”

  “Yes, do!” Beck says, clapping her hands. So naïve not to smell his design. I glance at Paul. He nods at me, smiling, blind too, so stupidly blind—I would have expected more from him. He knows Stieglitz well. He should be able to read the tone.

  “I’d like to hear it, Georgia,” Strand says sincerely.

  Actually you wouldn’t, I think. But then it occurs to me that perhaps it is what they need, to be cut down a bit. She is not me—though she might play at it, modeling for him, and imagining we are all the best of friends. And Paul is wildly talented, but his photographs of Beck are derivative at best, queerly resonant of Stieglitz’s serial portrait of me.

  They are both just sitting here waiting, their eyes blankly full of worship for us. We are what they want to believe in. We are the paragon couple they imagine they want to be.

  “Very well, then,” I say, and leave the room to fetch it. The piece has only a cursory mention of Strand. I know it doesn’t do his work justice, barely two sentences sandwiched between my praise of Stieglitz as the singular force driving modern American photography, and the focus of the piece—a tribute to Charles Sheeler, whom Strand actively dislikes.

  I can feel the air in the room change as I read, the tension rippling. By the time I’m done, Paul’s face is oddly red, flushed with anger and shame.

  “Well,” says Stieglitz disingenuously. “What do you think?” He is mocking them, and Strand at least has woken up and seen it. Beck still seems a little muddled and looks from one of us to the other, her mind not quite able to compute what it all adds up to.

  “That paragraph felt out of style with the rest,” Strand says carefully, addressing me.

  “Really?” Stieglitz asks. “Tell us then, what would you suggest as an improvement?”

  Strand starts to talk, but every argument he raises, Stieglitz refutes. Paul’s face burns. Finally Beck grasps what has transpired, and erupts in a burst of childish outrage in defense of her husband’s genius—“How could you be so dismissive? So careless? Or was it intentional? How could you?”

  Strand turns on her. “Please be quiet,” he says, because she is making quite a nut of herself.

  She snaps back at him then, “Don’t tell me to be quiet!”

  Stieglitz has a faint and awful smile on his lips, watching them. I feel strangely heartless. I should feel compassion, remorse, or some trace of disgust for Stieglitz and the games he plays. That’s not what I feel. They gave away too much. They gave him too much power and put us both up too high. They have left us no choice really but to stay there.

  Later, I will look back on this and it will pick at me. It was wrong—what Stieglitz did that evening, what I did, dismantling Paul, his trust in us, and dismantling something young and tender between Paul and Beck as well. I played along, let it happen, felt nothing. In some clear resolute way, I knew how wrong it was, but it was easier to turn on them than look too closely at what I did not want to see.

  X

  A FEW WEEKS later, Stieglitz writes a gracious letter to Strand and shows it to me. I regret that last night you were here. I should have known better, he’s written. It may take a few months, but he will woo them back. This is what he does. A disciple gets a little brash or, in Strand’s case, competitive. Stieglitz will set them down a notch, then reel them back in.

  He tells me that along with the letter he’s going to send as a gift a print he made of Beck on the sleeping porch.

  “Is that really the right thing to send?”

  He snickers. “It’s a fine print.”

  “You’re a rat.”

  “I prefer rapscallion.”

  “That too.”

  “Don’t you see,” he says, “it will be a nice little weapon for her to have, in case he gets so swept up in his work and forgets his little Beckalina.”

  “Come with me,” I say, pulling at the waist of his trousers.

  He sets the print down with the letter, and gives me that look—delirious—it rakes my body. I have less than an instant to run. He takes off after me, sprinting through the house. I start up the stairs, but we don’t make it. He pulls me down on the worn scarlet Oriental and makes love to me in the hallway.

  Afterward, our bodies are warm and damp, next to each other on the carpet. I touch drops of wetness on my bel
ly where he came—smooth, glimmery.

  “Do you think we’ll ever tire of this?” I say.

  “I don’t know why we would.”

  “Sometimes I feel that every woman should have the chance to have you for a lover.”

  “Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

  I roll over and prop myself up on one hand. “I have some bold thought like that, then I change my mind.” I reach to touch his cheek. How sweet he seems to me even when he’s been so bad. He catches my hand. His face sobers.

  “Is there another man you want, Georgia?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You know I’d always give you the freedom to have what you need as long as in the end you were still mine.”

  “I don’t want that kind of freedom,” I say.

  “What do you want, my love?”

  “A child.”

  “Yes.” Glancing away. “Soon.”

  “When is soon?”

  “After your show.”

  “You promise?”

  “It’s a tremendous decision, Georgia, not as easy as you think.”

  “Why not easy?”

  “When you’re painting, Georgia, when you’re really in your art, that’s where you are. You disappear from the world, from me. And I understand that. I want that for you, because I know that in order to make the art you need to make, you need to give yourself completely to it.”

  I nod.

  “A child would dismantle that.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Your vision right now is so clear.”

  “My vision will always be what it is.”

  —

  IT IS BLISS for a while. I’ve done so much this year ahead of the January show. I set up all the paintings downstairs in the front room. An avalanche of abstract oils and pastels—my landscapes of the lake, the pond in the woods—they seem to have the same fierce strength as the Evening Star watercolors I did in Texas.

  I feel a cogency in these pieces—a common language that binds the body of my work.