Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  He is a thousand miles away. Does the wind stir through the summer green of the lawn on the hill? Does it sweep up to the porch and touch his face, and will he pause and feel my presence in that soft bolt of wind?

  My heart feels like stone. Catherine, who has always been sensitive, notices.

  “What’s troubling you, Georgia?” she asks when we are up late, talking together in the kitchen.

  “Things have just been difficult.”

  “With Stieglitz?”

  “Yes. And he can be very difficult!” I laugh.

  She looks at me—not laughing—her eyes, dark and gentle, probe. “That’s not quite it, though, is it?” she says. “Is it another woman?”

  I feel something in me catch. I shake my head. “Sometimes I wish it were that simple.”

  “You don’t wish that,” she says.

  Growing up, I was the one the others looked up to. The one who knew who she was and what she was about. It comes back to me here, as I watch my sister with Little Catherine—that luxuriant joy in her eyes every time they fall on her daughter’s pert face. When I think of the five of us, my sisters and me, I can see how our lives have begun to find their track, to become the lives that will be ours. Anita—social, elegant, rich. Her husband, Robert the financier. Just this spring, Anita bought one of my flower paintings, a white lily framed against red that she shows off to her guests when she entertains. Claudia and Ida, both full-time nurses now, have dedicated themselves to that exquisite pleasure that comes with caring for others. And Catherine. Lovely gentle Catherine was always the one with that goodness about her—a woman in the truest, most noble sense of that word. She is the only one of my sisters I occasionally envy. Catherine’s life is closest to the life I sometimes feel I could have had. The life I have missed my chance for.

  In his letters, he calls me his Dear Runaway, his Faraway One. His Sweetestheart, as always. And as always when I read his letters, I feel something warm rinse through me. He writes of the news at the Lake—new pipes are going in, trenches dug. He has rewaxed some of his prints and respotted them, though I am much better at spotting than he is, he writes. He has been trying to read a bit of Shaw, but it doesn’t suit his mood, so he has picked up Lao-tzu’s Tao instead. I am happy for you that you have made the trip out there, to your America, the place of your beginnings, but it makes me sad too. Sometimes I think—a killing thought—that you were lighter when you came to me, that being here has never been quite enough for what you need. I have never been quite enough.

  I look up. I’m sitting on the sofa by the window. Catherine is cooking dinner. I can smell roasting potatoes and the lighter scent of cooked ham. The dark is falling outside, and my face has begun to surface in the long window—an older face, only traces of the girl who came to him, dark hair pulled sharply back, as I wore it then.

  He used to pull it loose. I remember this. In those first few years when we were together, he loved how it fell when I was above him in the night bed of that small studio with the orange floor, my hair falling like a thin black shelter around us.

  I read the letter again like if I keep reading, I will find my way back. Then I fold it and put it away.

  —

  I TELL CATHERINE I want to drive out to see the farm where we grew up, and I want to paint a barn. We load her car up with canvases and paints, and the three of us set off—my sister, Little Catherine, and I. Things look different, a few landmarks gone, the roads wider than when I was a child. Halfway there, I know where we are. We pass the stretch of marsh with tremendous willow trees on either side. Little Catherine is delighted and claps her hands as she presses her face against the window. The trees are thick and tall and green.

  Catherine keeps her eyes level on the road.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  “Does he make you happy?”

  I hesitate before I answer. “Happiness has never been exactly what I’m after.”

  “Marriages move through ups and downs. They change. It is hard sometimes, that changing. You will be happy again.”

  “It’s more than happiness, Catherine. Happiness is only a piece of it.”

  We drive past large fields of ripening yellow grain and windrows of cut hay. We pass sunburned men working. We drive until I find the barn that I like. Deep red—that redness like life—with a high-pitched roof and a stone foundation. Bars of white fencing wrap the barnyard. Little Catherine has fallen asleep, curled up with her pink blanket and doll. Catherine goes to speak with the farmer. I get out my oils. When my sister gets back to the car, she takes out her book to read.

  “No,” I say. I pass her a board, a brush. “Paint yours.”

  She looks at me, surprised. “I don’t paint. You and Ida. Not me.”

  I don’t answer. Finally, she reaches for the board.

  At one point as we are working, she says to me, “It’s not coming out as I see it.”

  “That doesn’t matter so much,” I say. “Paint what you feel about the barn.”

  Little Catherine wakes up and wanders into the field. She watches a dragonfly.

  When we are done, I set our paintings together, hers and mine. It takes my breath—my sister’s painting—the small and awkward purity of it, devoid of self-consciousness, like a raw dream.

  “That’s beautiful,” I say.

  “Oh stop, Georgia.”

  “No, I mean it. I like yours much more.”

  “My first time with a paintbrush in my hand since I was nine. Don’t be so kind.”

  “Have I ever said a thing just to be kind?”

  She looks at me, then back at the paintings. Mine is cleaner, stronger, but there’s an untouched life in her small work I recognize, something pulsating I knew once.

  “Give me some advice,” she says. “I’ll give it another try when you are gone. What would you do to improve it, or if I tried to paint it again?”

  “I’ll leave you paints and brushes. You can find out for yourself.”

  VIII

  THAT WINTER, WE do not go out nights. We do not have guests. It’s just the two of us in our rooms at the Shelton. We’ve moved to a larger suite on the thirtieth floor. Every day, he goes to The Room to prepare for Marin’s show, the first of the season. Mine will open in February 1929. Looking through my paintings, I feel a sense of dread. There’s just not much there.

  I wear a flaming-red cape to my opening. My lilies, cityscapes, my leaves with torn edges, and an abstraction of Alexius with its wild, cloud-tousled sky, which I made in celebration for my brother when the baby was born.

  Dorothy Norman is there. In a slim black dress, she glows, something deep and supple in her young face. I see how her eyes raise to him when he asks her to do something for him, how quickly she responds. I hate the thought. I hate him for having her here, for not knowing, or not caring, what it does to me.

  That night, when we are undressing for bed, I confront him. He denies they are lovers. That it’s anything other than innocent.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Of course not,” he snaps. I meet his eyes with a calmness that would have been impossible before. “Don’t start this up again, Georgia,” he says, angry now.

  “Don’t turn this onto me.”

  “There’s no one else. There’s never been anyone else.”

  I look at him. That’s not true. Beck. The cook. Perhaps there were more. Such a manipulation to use those words never, no one else, and yet I know, at some level, he’s convinced he has not wronged me. I know how he sees it: these other women, these dalliances, he believes they’re inconsequential against what I am to him. And sometimes I just want to stand in that clarity, that conviction that allows this to be so clean and upright in his mind.

  —

  FEW PAINTINGS SELL but, for the most part, the critics continue to rave. They don’t seem to have a sense of what I’ve turned my back on. I’m not happy with the art I am doing. My forms feel too safe. They lack the bold force and freedom
of my earlier things, and it strikes me that ever since his photographs of me were shown, my work has a different quality. As if I’ve been trying to undo the words he and the men trussed me up with. I remember how decisive it was—when I realized the danger of sending a free, abstract shape out into the world. If it had any mystery at all, they would only misinterpret it, sexualize, sensationalize it, reduce it to gendered terms.

  And so I made things on the ground. Nameable forms. Leaves. Trees. Flowers. Strident colors yes, but hard-edged lines, a certain polish and restraint. No longer from a fierce driving need but only as an answer to them.

  They don’t seem to notice, and I find it curious—not heartbreaking as it should be—but like it’s happened to someone else.

  —

  HE COMES HOME late one evening, and I lean in to kiss him good night and smell her. Perfume. The distant, sweet, glassy scent of sex.

  I step back.

  “What now?” he says.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  He meets my eyes. “There’s nothing to lie about.”

  “Don’t, Stieglitz. I know what you are doing with her.”

  “Stop.”

  “This is all wrong. Don’t pretend it isn’t.”

  “I’m tired, Georgia,” he says with a sigh.

  “Is it always about you?”

  He turns away from me, and sits down to remove his shoes.

  —

  WE ARGUE MORE and more frequently. A small thing will set it off. He accuses me of never going to The Room.

  “Your sitting room?”

  It enrages him that I call it that. I tell him I don’t want an exhibit for a very long time. He tells me that that’s ridiculous, but there is fear in his eyes. “Unthinkable,” he says.

  “Because my shows are the mainstay of the season? Is that what concerns you?”

  He looks at me for a long moment. “Art is what you’re meant to do, Georgia. And your art is meant to be shown because it says something. That is what concerns me.”

  True and not true—twisting words around again, there’s no way to get a foothold.

  IX

  LADY DOROTHY EUGENIE BRETT has moved into the Shelton. Quite a grand Englishwoman, she has a tremendous silver ear trumpet nicknamed Toby, and I can’t help but like her. She drags Stieglitz and me down to her room to see her pictures—her Ceremonials. She tries to talk Stieglitz into a showing. “We’ll have to see,” he demurs.

  When I mention I’m thinking of taking a trip to Europe this summer, she immediately jumps in with that haughty Englishwoman clip that instead of Europe, I must go to Taos, to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan at her fiefdom.

  “Everyone seems to say so,” I answer. “Mabel used to invite Alfred once a year.”

  Lady Brett turns Toby in Alfred’s direction, asking, “And how did you find it?”

  “I didn’t go.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  He mumbles something about his heart and the altitude. She asks him to please speak up, and that’s the end of it. But later that month, when I see Strand’s new photographs of Taos on exhibit at The Room, I decide.

  —

  I TELL BECK I want to go.

  “You should,” she says. “You’d love it there.” We’re out for lunch together. She’s got her white shirt casually unbuttoned at the throat, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, that gangster air to her she sometimes adopts. “I’ll have Paul talk to him.”

  “I’ll talk to him myself.”

  “It would be good for you, particularly now—” Her voice breaks off.

  I frown. Mrs. Norman. They all know.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Stupid nonsense,” I say. And it is. This obsession he has with pretty young things. But it’s also distracting, aggravating, humiliating—and I keep thinking to myself I’d rather leave for a while and let it run its course.

  “Men are awful,” Beck says.

  “I just want to get out from under it. I want to do something new for my art.”

  “Let Paul talk to him.” Her cigarette glows as she inhales.

  —

  NO, IS WHAT he says, which shocks me. Absolutely not. Georgia’s too fragile right now to make that sort of trip.

  “That’s what he told Paul,” Beck reports back.

  —

  “FRAGILE?” I SAY when he comes home.

  “This business you keep on about not wanting another show.”

  “Oh, is that the business that’s wrecking things?”

  I’m not proud to admit the deep satisfaction I feel when I see the look on his face.

  “You need to focus on your work,” he says, with less conviction, though.

  “That trip will be good for my work.”

  “I don’t think it’s the right time.”

  “And I don’t think that’s for you to decide—what’s right for me.”

  Silence then. Bleak and steep and strange.

  —

  THEY ALL FALL in to convince him. Dear Pudge, Lady Brett, Paul and Beck, even Hartley.

  Think about Georgia’s art, they say. There’s no place like it in terms of light and views. Think of her early work—what she did with the sky in Texas, those Celestial Solitaire watercolors you’re still always dragging around. There’s so much out there to inspire.

  Slowly, they wear him down. But it is Beck’s offer to accompany me that finally shifts his mind.

  “I told him I’d look after you,” she says to me, a triumphant gleam in her gray eyes—“be a sort of nanny.”

  “The nurse sort, I hope, not the nanny-house sort,” I say.

  “Just a little spy.”

  I scoff. “Wouldn’t that be fantastic if I were up to something worth spying on?”

  She laughs.

  “He knows you’ll keep a tight rein on me,” I say.

  “That’s right. I’ll have you with a cig in your mouth before a week’s out.”

  —

  I TELL HIM we will still have our summer.

  “When?” he says snippily.

  “I’ll be back in July.”

  “July first?”

  “Yes.”

  It’s startling—after all these months of feeling so far away from him—to feel his need of me.

  “Do you know I want you to do this if it will make you happy?” he says.

  “I do know that.”

  “Do you know I love you?”

  I’m silent.

  He sighs. “You’re always going away.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  He paces the bedroom, picks up his tie clip, sets it down, moves to something else.

  “Lie down with me,” I say. He looks up, his face sad. And it’s that pause that shreds my heart. For a second, I almost believe that if I stay, I can hold him close enough and fix it, change it—there would be a place, a way that we could rinse it all from us, and find ourselves again in that small studio on 59th with the cot and the skylight and the orange floor and sunlight streaming through into that time when it was just the two of us, and we were lovely together, bodies of light, that pure uncomplicated desire when I was his only world and he was mine.

  “Lie down with me,” I say again and he does, without a word, and I hold him. I kiss his eyelids, smooth under my lips like shells.

  —

  BECK AND I board the 20th Century Limited on April 27th. I don’t stand up to watch him go.

  The river flows into hills, and the hills fold down into the flatness of nothing. As the train rushes on, Beck falls asleep beside me, her silvering hair, her face with the short deeper lines that have begun to form between her brows.

  Before we left, she and Paul stood a distance apart from us, far enough that we couldn’t hear their voices. They were arguing, some kind of awful row. He was telling her something, and I saw her face wither, and knew, watching them, that their marriage would fail.

  Stieglitz knew as well. “It won’t last, will it?” he said to me.r />
  “No.”

  “It was never quite right, was it?”

  “I don’t know if you can ever really call that until after.”

  He shook his head. “If you look at them clearly, you know. Her lack of direction—his lack of conviction and faith. That’s always been Paul’s failing. For all his talent, and I’d give my teeth for it, he’s never quite had the drive to see his gift through.”

  “Could be,” I murmured.

  “I so love you, Georgia,” he said to me as we stood there on the platform, his arm around my waist, watching them, as if they were strangers, as if they were not us.

  —

  I BREATHE AGAINST the train window now. My face softens under the fog of my breath on the glass. I wipe it away with my hand as we pass peach and plum trees in bloom, and bare trees with nothing on them yet, new green shining everywhere, and mountains in the distance, very gray. The train rocks, and I ache for him. It was vast once, the passion we felt that still hits me at times like a smell, so sharp I feel I’d throw myself down into hurtling darkness if I believed that would keep me with him, would keep us bound together in the way we used to be.

  It comes to me now, our life before, in disparate pieces, like the memory of a country we once sped through.

  PART V

  I

  I FEEL IT the instant the door of the train opens in Santa Fe. The sharp sting of the air on my skin, scents of piñon, sage. The dazzling emptiness seems to extend in every direction.

  We never told Mabel we were coming for sure, and Beck hesitates when I suggest it now.

  “No,” she says, that little-girl pout she gets. “I want you to myself.”

  But for such a vast country, news travels astonishingly fast. Several days later, we take a bus to the corn dance at the San Felipe pueblo. Mabel finds us there. Once the host of infamous soirees in Greenwich Village and a champion of the avant-garde, Mabel threw herself at Taos and fell in love with what she will call her strange and sweet country. On her fourth husband now, an Indian named Tony, Mabel lives in an adobe mansion she built on a vast sprawl of land. In the summers, she imports philosophers, artists, and writers, to spice up the tedium.