Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  There was a teacher I had once, Arthur Wesley Dow, who talked about composition not as an arrangement of pretty things, but as space filled in a meaningful way. I have done this, not only by filling the space of a canvas, but by selection, elimination, emphasis. In the abstractions, the forms are so simplified, they become something greater than themselves—not realistic, but real. Even in my leaves and flowers—the object for its own sake is pushed away. Never rejected altogether, but stripped to its essence, its intrinsic, hidden life.

  Stieglitz has been in a frenzy himself, photographing clouds. When the light slants and the breeze is cool, clouds rage over the lake. They seem to rise out of nowhere—so fast, their massive shapes on the tear.

  “So difficult to get the rightness of everything,” he says. “When the clouds are right, the sky is wrong, and when the leaves are still, the clouds have lost their shape, and there’s nothing for it.”

  But I lose my mind when I see the pictures he’s made. A low horizon of tree or hills and then the sky above, clouds rushing, those fugitive evanescent forms he’s somehow managed to grasp.

  He lifts the hair from my neck. I feel his mouth there, warm, the light graze of his teeth.

  “You’re not paying attention to me,” he says into my neck.

  I smile. “It’s not always about you.”

  I cannot stop looking at them—his clouds—his argument against our mundane, ordinary lives. I remember watching him out there, wrestling with his camera up the hill. He has done it—how has he done it? Seized something so ephemeral—an accident of sky and sun and clouds—and fixed it to paper in such a way that all I want to do is fall into the mystical sheen of the world he has rendered.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER I turn thirty-five, the news comes about his mother: another stroke. We rush to the city, but she’s gone within days.

  I have never seen him as silent as he is on the train back up to Lake George, where we will pack up the rest of our things.

  “Time’s an awful thief,” he murmurs, and I remember what she said once just this past summer, looking at him, “If only I was twenty again, my sweet boy, and you were still a baby.” For those few last days at the Hill, he does not sleep well. I can see his fitful grief, like a demon clutching tightly, deep inside. I wake to find the bed empty beside me. I go to the window and see him outside, wrapped in blankets, sitting on a chair he has pulled out into the grass, his soft white head, silvery, very gentle in the moonlight. And I know that there is nothing I can give him, nothing I can say, no wise or gentle thing to undo what he feels.

  —

  HE TURNS FIFTY-NINE on New Year’s Day, 1923. He writes a note to Mitchell Kennerley thanking him for his gift of the space at the Anderson Galleries for my exhibition that will open at the end of the month.

  Art is laid out everywhere. There will be one hundred pieces in the show—pastels, charcoals, watercolors, oils—it will be the first time the full range of my work is shown. I have written my short essay for the announcement, to define who I am, how I think, and to debunk what Rosenfeld, Hartley, and the rest have been writing about me. I am not some wickedly female dust storm blown in from the Midwest. I am educated. I am an artist. I paint because color is a significant language for me. I paint to fill space in a meaningful way. My head swirls. I set down the pen and cross out a section. So exasperating, really, that I have to explain myself at all. And knowing at the same time this is my chance to do it.

  XI

  THE DAY MY show opens, we take the elevator to the top floor of the Anderson Galleries. I pick up a catalog, and leave Stieglitz to settle some business with the dapper-dressed Kennerley. Walking through the rooms, the one hundred pieces of my things lining the red plush walls, I feel something in me settle.

  There are the abstract charcoals made before I met him, the watercolor landscapes of the canyon and the sky, my music pieces, my oils from New York. The room is oddly quiet. Stieglitz and Kennerley are at the far end toward the entrance, several of the other Men have come in, their voices muted, and again, I can’t escape the sense of how cogent the work feels—the framed pictures not distinct or separate from one another, but living parts of a unique and integrated whole.

  The announcement in my hand—“Not a catalog” Stieglitz had insisted, the word calling up the stodgy elitism he so detests about museums.

  ALFRED STIEGLITZ

  PRESENTS

  ONE HUNDRED PICTURES

  OILS, WATER-COLORS

  PASTELS, DRAWINGS

  BY

  GEORGIA O’KEEFFE,

  AMERICAN.

  —

  THE PICTURES ARE listed only by number and date. No titles. I begin to feel the weight of their impact like a wave—what I have done, what I have worked for. From the other end of the gallery, Stieglitz’s voice rises. I feel a quick shiver of joy. Perhaps this is what he was trying to tell me—that it wouldn’t matter what anyone wrote beforehand, because no one could look at my things now and not see them as they are.

  I look across the room again and find him. He is not talking anymore, only looking at me steadily, looking nowhere else.

  —

  FIVE HUNDRED PEOPLE a day crush into the elevator and pour out into the Anderson Galleries. By the end of the second day, I am nauseous, my head aches, and a chill takes root in my limbs. I beg him not to make me go, to let me stay home, and finally I fall ill enough to warrant it. “The grippe,” he says solemnly, “that’s what the excitement of a show will do.” I stay alone in the apartment, work, read, and try not to think about the reviews that have begun to appear.

  He comes home one afternoon with three that have come out in a day. He is ecstatic, I can feel the crackling hum off him the moment he steps through the door, and something in me shrinks away from the paper he holds toward me. It’s too penetrating, too intense, his excitement.

  “You must read these, Georgia. Don’t even stop to breathe!”

  “I think it will be better for me not to mix my mind up with reviews.”

  “You must. I’ll read from this one to you.” He snaps it out and begins. “ ‘Georgia O’Keeffe is what they probably will be calling—’ ”

  “No,” I interrupt. I hold out my hand, and he passes it to me, and then gives me another, a triumphant look in his eyes. His finger lingers on the start of the paragraph, and I follow the tip of his finger into the words. It is praise—yes—stirring praise. But one by one, they echo the Hartley essay.

  Little phrases and words: naked, cleaving, sensuous, the eternal feminine.

  I feel heat rising into my face, burning. They are writing me down, this thrall of bow-tied men, straining me into awful, frivolous terms. Every observation they make about my art is linked back to the body of the woman in the photographs.

  I want it not to matter—desperately. I want to let it flow through, sweep over me like dust. Let it be nothing. I push the papers back to him.

  He stares, dumbfounded. “How can you not be happy?”

  “Can you imagine I would be?”

  “These are rave reviews for your art, Georgia,” he says. “What more do you want?”

  My silence only tips his anger. He slams the jar of paper clips down on the table, gets up and leaves the room, and I sit very still—and I wonder why the jar of paper clips was left on the table. Who would be so forgetful not to put it back on the desk where it belongs? I sit and stare at those thin elegant loops of steel, all jumbled together in that jar. My gut tight.

  He comes back into the room. “What would make you happy, Georgia?” he says, more gently.

  “Talk to them,” I say.

  “To who?”

  “They’ll do anything for you.”

  “Critics have their own minds.”

  “Not always.”

  “And what exactly would you want me to say?”

  There’s a clip on the table, I notice now. It must have leapt out when he slammed down the jar. I pick it up, take one loop and untwis
t it so it is straight. “Tell them not to write such stupid things. Everything they say goes back to her—to that creature in your photographs—as if my pictures are hers—you must see this.”

  “Your nerves are frayed.”

  “Don’t be dismissive of me.”

  He stares at me.

  “I’m an artist, Stieglitz. All this nonsense about the eternal feminine and essential woman and cleaving and unbosoming. This bosh they smear on my work. It rips away the value of what I’ve tried to do. You tell me not to let talk like this interfere with my work. Well, it does interfere. It will. How could it not? You have to set them straight.”

  He examines me coolly. So unlike me, to say so much at once, but everything’s all tipped over, inside out and upside down between us now—and it is so unlike him to be calm and still, not saying anything, his gaze on my face like stone.

  “No man has ever been written down the way they think they have license to write me down. You are asking me to submit? To this? And then on top of it, you are trying to say it’s my fault—that I feel this way?”

  “That’s not what I am saying.”

  It is what he is saying. The look on his face rips something in me—as if I am distasteful, someone he does not entirely recognize. I’ve stretched every twist in the paper clip out. One thin straight piece.

  —

  FINALLY THE SHOW is over, considered a success in every respect. Twenty works sold for three thousand dollars, which will see us through the year. Eight weeks later, 116 of his prints go up at the Anderson. His cloud music; apples in the rain, the poplars, and the old barn at the Hill; his portraits of Rosenfeld, Marin, me; six nudes of Beck Strand.

  PART III

  I

  AT THE END of May, Kitty delivers her first child and falls into a deep depression. She can’t leave the hospital. Strange outbursts of rage. Uncontrollable. She sobs for her father, he goes to visit her, but she throws things at him and cries more.

  “Everything I touch is wrecked,” he says on the train to Lake George. “Kitty is an innocent. I look at her. I look at you, and I feel like a criminal.”

  “Why me?”

  His eyes are flat. “I’m an old man. I’ll never be able to be what you want.”

  I stare at him, and I know what he is saying without saying—the baby—the little one I want that he keeps putting off.

  “Don’t lump everything together,” I say. “Kitty has good care. She’ll be all right.”

  He turns away. The train rocks. We continue silently. Our life on that clockwork tick.

  —

  HE TEARS OPEN letters from Elizabeth that arrive with updated reports about Kitty.

  “Not improving,” he says, guilt strung through his face. He seems angry I don’t share it.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I say, which irritates him, that I can be so fatalistic, so heartless, since I was after all—though he won’t go so far to say it—the hoo-hah who turned his family inside out.

  He tells me he’s invited his former secretary Marie Rapp to the Hill. For ten weeks.

  “Guests never stay that long,” I say.

  “They’ve got no money. Since her husband was gassed in the war, he’s had no work.”

  “They’re both coming?”

  “Only Marie.”

  “What about the two-year-old?”

  “She’s coming as well.” He glances at me. “It will be good for you, Georgia, to get a little dose of living with a child.” He’s trying to get back at me, the thought crossing my mind before I can stop it. I feel a stab of anger.

  —

  WITHIN A WEEK, they arrive. Marie was his assistant at 291. Over the years, he’s made a dozen portraits of her—none very clerical—and I’ve never quite trusted the curious intimacy I’ve observed between them. She will occasionally say something to remind me she was in his life long before I walked into it. I dislike the child the moment I lay eyes on her. A terrible blond little sprite—a first-class whiner with a bone-scratching cry. Stieglitz fusses over her. The second morning they are there, she sits on his lap at breakfast, and he chuckles with delight as she puts her little hands around his toast and squeezes until the butter slips out the cracks between her fingers, then crams it all into her mouth. He wipes her chin, and she rests back in his arms—a kitchen, a little family, sweet breakfast smells still lingering over the stove. This was my dream. So wrong of him. So underhanded to play at it this way. As if I am another disciple, another Strand, to be cut down when I want too much.

  Stieglitz gives a quick laugh as she reaches up to twist his mustache, then her leg strikes out, nearly toppling the orange juice. She wriggles free and runs from the room. A door slams in the hallway, Marie’s voice soft, “Yvonne, you must behave.” The child answers with a shriek.

  “Delightful,” Stieglitz says to me, “isn’t she? Who would’ve thought someone so little could make such a racket. Twenty-one cats on a back fence. Just marvelous.”

  “She’s a brat.”

  He looks at me. “Well that’s a child for you.”

  “No it isn’t. A child doesn’t have to be that.” I stand up and leave the room.

  —

  I WILL HAVE little or nothing to do with them. I explain this to him in neat, clear terms. I will set the meals. Marie can be in charge of cleanup. And if she decides to engage our housekeeper to oversee her child’s evening bath (as she’s done for the last two nights), then she can wash all the dishes herself. She will not be invited to talk art or politics in the front room after dinner. She is his guest. Strictly. Not mine.

  I make this clear and, as I do, I see the funny flinch around his eyes that I have seen when I am too hard for him to counter or manage, when he knows better than to try to say one thing to change my mind.

  One evening when he is in the middle of a dinner-table argument with Rosenfeld who has just arrived, contending that the life we live every day is not Life, I wonder what would happen to him if he rose in the morning and met only the unfilled hours, if he did not cram it all up with plans or menus or scheming or busyness, letter writing, conversations, other people’s awful children. If he just sat with the silence.

  An angry thought—I realize. Directed as much toward the habitual circumstance our summer lives have become—with an open door to whoever wants to breeze in.

  He’s talking about an idea he’s had for a cloud sequence—

  “Clouds are, just by their nature, an expression of what is at once transient and incontrovertible. But it’s the accidental collision of clouds and light and sky that evokes the feeling—there should be a single word for it, don’t you think? That certain feeling of what is both temporal and eternal that only Art can express.”

  Marie listens attentively—quiet sounds of dishes and pots in the kitchen, the housekeeper starting to wash up. Ordinary sounds. Nothing out of place. Quiet.

  Too quiet.

  I jump up, my chair crashing to the floor behind me, out through the hall and up the stairs. Stieglitz calls after me. I take the steps two at a time, then run down the short hall to the bathroom.

  Bursting through the door, I see her there, facedown, her fair hair blousy underwater. I grab her by the arm and pull her up so hard she startles, water spurting from her mouth. She gags and coughs, bathwater sprays into my face, down my shirt, onto the walls, the floor, and her eyes snap open, suddenly wide. She chokes and struggles, gasping for breath, her little fists flailing out, and I hold her arms and strike her lightly on her back, until no more water gushes.

  I hear them coming, Marie crying her daughter’s name, as she comes up the stairs. The little girl is crying, sobbing, and I hug her to me for a moment, that beautiful child I saved, holding her close, her chubby, waterlogged self—that warm fierce life. “You nearly drowned, you terrible thing,” I say tenderly, pushing the hair from her face.

  She stares at me—her little eyes tremble, drawing me all the way in. I let her go.

  There will be no
child. Not because I could not do it, but because he will not. Not next summer. Not ever.

  I sop the excess water from the floor, and let the bath drain.

  II

  I POUR MYSELF into my work.

  I keep my things clear, precise, no question, no inch of room open to interpretation. Everything I paint is a nameable form. I paint the lake and call it The Lake. I paint alligator pears in napkins, isolated against the white cloth. I paint still lifes. Grapes. Figs. Things that exist. A calla lily turned away. Strict objective forms.

  He’s been making prints of the images of Beck he took last summer, tickling up her slim buttocks into variegated tones of light and dark under the rippling water. He is delighted with them, and writes her letters to say so. Once when he catches me reading a few sentences he’s left to dry, some outpouring of a lustful adolescent fantasy, he snatches the paper away.

  “So ridiculous,” I say to him. “You’re lucky I like her.”

  “I’m hardly lucky,” he says. “This summer has been miserable.”

  “You have yourself to thank for that.”

  To prove it makes no difference to me, I tell him to invite Beck for a visit. I am happy to see her—silly Beck—she whirls around the house, a singsongy burst of gorgeous sunshine, and joins me in my hatred toward Marie and the brat. It seems she has forgiven me for that awful evening last fall. We go out for rows on the lake and take turns at the oars.

  “I couldn’t bear an infant,” she tells me flatly one day. She is helping me stake the tomato plants. “I can’t stand how they leak from both ends, and smell of shit and sour milk.” She tells me she is terrified when her curse doesn’t come on time if Paul has been careless.

  “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?” she goes on. “Not to want one. I should. I know I should.” She sighs. “He is a lot like Stieglitz, you know. Moody and needy and never feeling like what he has done is enough and needing me always to tell him it is, needing and needing. But when he’s off on an assignment, I feel so completely shut out.”