Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  “What exactly do you think you’re going to do with that?”

  I smile at him. “I’m just painting it.”

  “I don’t see where it will take you.”

  “You mean if it will sell?”

  “I just don’t see the point.”

  “I want to paint a flower. That is the point. I want to paint it so big that people will have no choice but to stop and look and really see it—as it is. The way I want it to be seen.”

  He pauses, my words registering in him. “And I love that about you.”

  “What?”

  “That you know what you want. How you are so magnificently lovely when you’re clear. And that is lovely.” He points to the flower. “I may think it’s silliness to paint a flower that way, but it is also lovely, as you are.”

  “Well, I’ll be in soon,” I say.

  He hesitates. It takes him a moment to realize I am asking him to leave.

  —

  I DO NOT stop painting the flowers. He asks me to explain my reasoning. But I don’t want to explain, and I tell him I’d rather just do it.

  I want to show them—my giant flowers—in the group exhibition we’re planning for next winter. Seven Americans, he’s already titled it, the show will feature all of his artists plus himself: Demuth, Strand, Marin, Hartley, Dove, and me. He’s made arrangements with Kennerley. The Strands, his niece Elizabeth, and Rosenfeld have created a collective rent fund that will keep our rooms at the Anderson Galleries open through the year.

  —

  BY THE FIRST of July the heat is stifling—the air filled with a yellow dust that coats the house. When I come out of the shanty one afternoon, I find him on the porch in his wicker chair writing a letter to Strand. His black folder of my work is on the table across from him. I pick it up. He glances at me, wary.

  “Don’t you think I’ll be careful?”

  He gives a little harrumph, then he bends back to the letter he is writing, he dips his pen, his script flows in fluent lines. I turn the pages of the folder slowly, through my watercolors, colors bright and sharp, mounted on black paper, then the charcoals. I keep turning, until I come to his favorite. Special No. 13. A drawing of the Palo Duro Canyon. His pen has stopped, his eyes are on my hands at the corners of the folder.

  “You love this piece,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He does not answer right away. In the distance from the dock, I hear voices, the joyful shrieks of Elizabeth’s daughters, then Elizabeth’s calm voice—the voices changed, caged by water.

  “Because it is you,” he says.

  “Isn’t everything I do, me?”

  “This is how I met you first.”

  “But it wasn’t the first one you saw.”

  “Maybe not. That doesn’t matter.”

  I was teaching in South Carolina when I made that drawing of the canyon. I’d already been out to visit Texas several times by then, seen the country and the vastness of the sky out there, and I missed it. I remember how sharp the feeling was—the ache of wanting to go back.

  He draws the folder away from me now, not harshly, but as if he cannot keep himself from doing it. He runs his fingers just above the paper, not touching.

  “Who else would see a canyon like this? Who else would see a stream like this, or the backs of cattle?” he says, a flinch of sadness in his voice.

  “Why is my early work more real to you than what I am making now?” I ask.

  “I’m not saying it is.”

  “You are.”

  “No,” he says. “But when I look at these drawings, I see that entirely free creature you were before you came to me.”

  I look down at the picture. I remember the night I made it—this Special No. 13. The stub of charcoal and cheap paper laid out on the floor, my knees digging into the wood as I leaned over it, my body tense, elbow held in place until the joint ached, I drove my hand across in long unhindered strokes. There were moments that fall of 1915 when it possessed me so fully I was sure I’d lost my mind, my mind swirling with those shapes—my heart broke for weeks as the charcoal swept across the page, broke through everything I had read or learned in class, everything I had been told that art should be.

  —

  WHEN ELIZABETH COMES up from the dock, she asks me to go for a walk. The grass feels overwhelming—the noon sun beating down.

  “You don’t seem yourself,” she says gently as we head up the hill.

  “Life isn’t quite my strong point these days.”

  She glances at me. She has a light-blue dress on, with a sailor collar. She always wears simple clothes, more practical than any other Stieglitz.

  “Your work is going well, though.”

  I nod. We’ve reached the upper meadow.

  “Hasn’t it been so unthinkably hot this summer?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone gets so crabby when it’s this hot.”

  I laugh.

  “He loves you, Georgia.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s desperate to marry you.”

  “Did he send you to work on me?”

  “No,” she says. “You know I’m neutral. As close to you as I am to him. I know he can be difficult.”

  She watches the ground pass under our feet.

  “He wants to marry as soon as his divorce goes through this fall,” I say.

  “And will you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve stopped thinking about it, really. The divorce has just dragged on so long.”

  “Well, that was Emmy’s doing.”

  “I know.”

  We step into the shade. The long shadows of the trees fall across us as we walk.

  “Let’s look at it from a different angle then,” Elizabeth says. “Why wouldn’t you marry?”

  “I just don’t see the reason to.”

  “I told Donald the other day that I feel like you’re unsure because of that funny business with Beck. You know that meant nothing.”

  I look up.

  “I just don’t see the point, Elizabeth. We’re fine as we are.”

  “He loves you, Georgia. Everything became alive for him when you came.”

  “It just seems easier to keep things as they are,” I say.

  A bird calls in the trees. I stop, she stops, and we listen. It does not call again.

  —

  HIS DIVORCE GOES through. Again he brings up the marriage question. He cites all sorts of reasons—little reasons, bigger reasons, legal, financial, tax penalties, estate planning, the challenge of something as simple as signing a lease. And then there’s poor Kitty. Her doctors have told him that if we marry, it might banish her delusions that her father will return. He is sixty this year. I am thirty-seven.

  “I couldn’t change my name,” I remark to him one morning when he raises it again.

  “What does that mean?”

  I shrug. “After all we’ve done to fashion ‘Georgia O’Keeffe,’ it would lose its value to change it.”

  He looks at me, uncertain. “I never said anything about changing your name.”

  “And love?”

  “What about love?”

  “Is that a reason as well?”

  “You never seem to quite understand what you mean to me,” he says slowly. “Even when you think the worst of me, Georgia, to me, you’ll never be anything less than Absolute.”

  “Are you trying to win me back?” I say.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’ll spend my entire life trying to win you once, all of you, just for an instant.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I say, and laugh.

  “No. It’s true. And I just wish you knew it. I’ve never been more committed to any person or thing as I am to you. I sometimes wonder how you don’t seem to know.”

  —

  MY FLOWERS HAVE gone by. I paint a landscape abstraction instead. Dark red, just a sliver of blue.

  When he comes into the bedroom and sees the abs
traction, he is elated. “Extraordinary!” he exclaims. “On the old order. Do you feel that?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think it will find a buyer, nor am I sure I want to show it.”

  “It’s good enough to keep,” he says. I look at the painting. It could be the hills across the lake, which is how he sees it. It could be the walls of the Palo Duro canyon.

  “Will the old order always be the point of reference for what’s new?” I ask without thinking. “I’m sorry. I sometimes just want you to love what I’m doing now as much.”

  “I just said I did.”

  A piece of my hair has fallen loose from the knot I brushed it into. He reaches out and tucks it back behind my ear. His fingers linger. “I love everything you do, Georgia.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  He pulls me down onto the bed, and kisses me. “It is,” he insists. “Everything.”

  He makes love to me. And it is slow and beautiful, the lovemaking—I don’t want it to end. We fall asleep there on the bed. I wake after dark, my canvas gleaming, still wet on the easel. I’ve left the window open, and the room is growing cold, but I don’t want to wake him—he looks so sweet and pale and soft. I lie there with my arms around his body while he sleeps, and I listen as the cool night sweeps through the room, touching chairs, desks, surfaces, looking for something it no longer recognizes.

  VII

  IDA COMES FOR a visit. Stieglitz gallivants around, flirting with her, and it is fun and light, the flirting. He photographs her with a rifle and a squirrel she took down with one shot.

  Rosenfeld arrives several days later and, over the next week, I notice something slight and lovely developing between them. I mention it to Stieglitz. He grumbles something about how Paul should be focused on his writing.

  “You aren’t jealous?” I tease him.

  “Of course not.”

  “Look how happy they are. Can’t you feel it? How it’s all so new and sweet between them.”

  I can see the spark in Rosenfeld’s long eyes when he talks to my sister, and I notice a certain self-conscious grace in how she makes the beds, each fold of the sheet so even.

  —

  ONE NIGHT, IDA reads our palms. We’re stuffed with dinner, an over-rich meal, and we roll into chairs in the living room. Ida takes Stieglitz’s hand, her finger tracing out the lines.

  “You lack talent, but you have a great will.”

  We all laugh, Rosenfeld harder than the rest of us. Ida glances at him, then back at Stieglitz. She pulls her face into a mock seriousness.

  “You see this break in this line here. That says you’re an incurable flirt—”

  More laughter.

  My sister glances at me. “Do you confirm that, Georgia?”

  “I can answer that!” Rosenfeld launches in. I feel a quick wave of gratitude. Dear Pudge. Always there to save us.

  —

  ONE NIGHT AFTER they’re gone, I hear him bungling around in the hall, a crash, then a tumbling cry. I leap from the bed, rush out, and find him in a bruised heap at the foot of the stairs. I kneel beside him and take his head in my lap.

  “Are you all right? What have you done to yourself?”

  “First time in forty-seven years I’ve fallen down those stairs,” he says wanly. He smiles to see me cry. “You do love me then,” he says. His eyes seem small without the lenses of his glasses magnifying them. “Marry me, Georgia.” My lips graze his forehead. I can smell his age.

  “Did you fall down the stairs just to get me to say yes?”

  “No, but I would.”

  “Come. Let me get you to bed.”

  I help him to his feet. He gives a cry when he bears weight on his ankle. “I’m a rickety old carcass,” he says with disgust.

  “No, no,” I say softly. I put my arm around him and together we walk up the stairs.

  “Marry me,” he says again, when we have almost reached the landing.

  “And we’ll have our own apartment,” I say.

  “That one on Fifty-eighth.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Or, if paintings continue to sell, maybe rooms at the new Shelton.”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Ah, you say that,” I add, not harshly. “But there was something I wanted very much that you refused.” I feel him sink a little into me.

  —

  ON DECEMBER 8 we take the Weehawken Ferry across the Hudson to New Jersey; I’ve finally agreed, but we can’t get a license in the state of New York, because Stieglitz is a divorcé.

  “New Jersey’s a better state for major life events,” he says.

  “Because you were born in Hoboken.”

  “If I had to crawl to Canada to marry you, I would.”

  I laugh. “Oh stop!”

  “You know I mean it.”

  It is raining, the sky sliding into the sea, foggy drizzle, an untethered gray.

  Marin picks us up at the ferry slip. My hands are soaked. I can feel the cold water leaking into my sleeves. The road is slippery. Marin turns to joke with me, to ask if I am ready to be Mrs. Alfred Stieglitz, and perhaps it’s the look on my face that causes his gaze to linger. The car skids into a puddle, veers sideways before he can stop it, toward a grocery wagon. He jerks around and tries to pull the front end back to the road, but turns the wheel too hard, too fast, and it twists in his grasp. He hits the brake, too late, and I can only grip Stieglitz’s arm as we spin across the street and sail into a lamppost.

  And we are all safe—luckily—essentially uninjured. As we crawl from the wrecked car, I laugh and say that of course this would happen to us. Here we are, trying to do something upright and conventional, and even the heavens toss us an elbow.

  After the hubbub of police and witnesses we pick our way across the shattered windshield glass and walk in the rain to the hardware store, where the owner who deals in screwdrivers, sandpaper, and nails is also a justice of the peace.

  Three days later, December 11, we return to Cliffside Park. Marin is our witness. There is a bruise on his temple from where he hit the car door, the skin pearly blue, taut. No ritual, we’ve decided. No reception. No rings.

  On our way out on the ferry, I told Stieglitz that I would not say the words Love, honor, and obey. He argued with me on that point.

  “There’s no reason to,” I said simply.

  “It’s a marriage,” he insisted.

  The wind lifted sheaves of spray off the waves, and cut the surface easily.

  “You know I can’t promise to obey, Alfred. That’s what you loved about me to begin with.” I pressed my fingers gently to his lips until he smiled.

  VIII

  MARRIAGE CHANGES LITTLE. Everything continues on course, exactly as I told him it would, except for the fact that I feel a bit boxed up in a formality that has nothing to do with what I am. I am annoyed with him that he pushed me into it, annoyed more with myself that I let him, and maybe it’s the tiniest rebellion when I go off and paint a city night scene of 47th Street near the Chatham Hotel. It’s large—as large as my flowers—the staircased lines of the buildings angled and clean, a streetlamp with a reddish orbed glow, the moon half hidden in the night clouds.

  It rings with life, and I know it. I tell him I’m going to hang it in the Seven Americans show.

  “That’s a bad idea,” he says. “Even the men don’t do the city well yet. It will be enough to introduce your flowers.”

  We argue over it fiercely—an argument that lingers, flares up over dinner at Joe’s Restaurant or on our way home from the new Metropolitan Opera House. It makes him insane that I won’t agree. He likes things settled, and I won’t let this go—it’s my picture, I want to hang it in my part of the show. He reminds me it’s not my choice—I am only one of seven artists in this exhibition—we have to do what’s best for the whole.

  “And who decides that? You, I assume?”

  And so it goes on, never quite resolved, the issue still a sticking point when he tells me
that Seligmann is bringing Jean Toomer, the celebrated black writer, to the gallery. The plan is to meet them there, then go to dinner, but I’ve had enough Round Table small talk, and I decide I’ll come up with some good excuse—a headache perhaps—to sidestep the rest of the evening. But when I meet Toomer, I change my mind.

  He looks like no one else I’ve ever seen. Fine looking, exceptionally so—his face just irregular enough to be interesting. There’s quiet eloquence in how he speaks. His eyes are striking, a unique iridescent tone to his skin. Rumors have been dashing around him all year. He went to visit Waldo Frank, seduced his wife, Margaret, and now she has left Frank and moved with Toomer to New York.

  At one point at dinner while the men are talking, I feel a pressure on my face, and it is Jean—looking at me across the table. For a moment I meet his gaze, and he does not look away. He comes back with us to our apartment and stays until after two. I stay up, talking with him. When he finally leaves, my body is tired, but my mind still hums from the conversation.

  I go into the bedroom and start to undress. Stieglitz sits on the edge of the bed, taking off his shoes. “A handsome man,” he says, “wouldn’t you say?” I don’t answer.

  He looks at me then, the air momentarily bent.

  —

  I’M FURIOUS WITH Stieglitz on the opening night of the show, when I walk into the Anderson Galleries and see that the men have, down to the last, sided with him and refused to hang my New York Street with Moon. I know it’s too late now, but this is the last time, I think to myself, when I’ll let him determine what will or won’t be hung of mine.

  Flanking the entrance hall are Demuth’s portraits of us. Marin’s skyscrapers and flinty seascapes follow, then my magnified petunias, Strand’s close-ups of machine parts, and Dove’s collaged assemblages of mirrors, clock springs, sand, and wool, which are baffling, to put it gently.

  Within days, the self-indulgent puff of the catalog has ticked off the critics. They go after us. They ransack the work of all the men apart from Stieglitz, whose cloud prints they continue to praise. And they love my flowers—the galvanizing charge of color. I’m particularly pleased to see how Edmund Wilson in The New Republic lauds the “razor-like scroll edges” of my leaves.