Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  She is stocky—slightly bull-like, but irresistible, with her intense eyes and cropped black hair. She is shocked we came to Taos without telling her, and overturned when she realizes we are not intending to stay with her. Because she’s the kind of woman who loves the challenge of going after what’s out of reach, she sets out to convince us that her home, Los Gallos—as we must have heard—is like no other place. A compound on twelve acres, it overlooks the mesa. A stunning view. She looks meaningfully at me when she says this. There’s a studio where you could paint that looks all the way to the mountains.

  She is formidable, and to Beck’s chagrin and my delight, it seems we have no choice but to follow her.

  —

  HER HUSBAND, TONY, comes for us the next morning, with another Indian, to drive us the seventy-five miles from Santa Fe to Taos. I sit in the passenger seat beside him. He barely speaks. He is a landscape-made human, a barrel-chested man with a long nose. Mabel told us he prefers buckskins to what he’s wearing now: a blue sweater, tan-colored breeches, and black boots. He doesn’t read or write and refuses to learn. When they married, Mabel changed his name from Lujan to Luhan in some vague attempt to tame him. “They fight like cats,” Lady Brett had told me once. “They’ll have a wild brawl and he’ll up and leave Los Gallos and go to the pueblo, and Mabel will lose her mind with jealousy and a fear that he won’t return.”

  The car slides around the narrow turns along the riverbank. In the woods off the road, patches of snow are slung through the trees. We emerge onto the high mesa, the roar of mountains all around, bruised purple shapes under the heady blue of the sky.

  “My watch has slowed,” Beck says from the backseat.

  “Those don’t work good here.” Tony’s voice is low, sharpened to a point from being seldom used.

  “You’re wearing one.” I point to his watch.

  His dark eyes are solemn. “I set it to the sun,” he says. His finger taps the wheel. “You drive next time?”

  “I will!” Beck pipes up from the backseat. “Georgia doesn’t drive.”

  “Why not drive?” Tony asks me.

  I shake my head. “I never learned.”

  A smile touches his mouth, his eyes fixed back on the road. “Then we’ll teach you.”

  —

  LOS GALLOS IS astonishing. We pass under a bell, through carved wooden entrance gates that swing into a flagstone courtyard. A sprawling masterpiece all built by this inimitable woman. She left a big life in the East, snipped it with one cut and tossed the whole of the page behind her. The Big House is a three-story adobe, ladders leading from one level up to the next. It’s a flamboyant mix of New York artwork and Navajo hangings, ornamental tiles, caged parrots, and antique French chairs. We will stay in Casa Rosita, the trim little guest cottage at the edge of the desert, where Beck stayed before when she came out with Paul.

  As promised, Mabel gives me a studio to work in. She leads me into a round high-ceilinged room with a kiva fireplace, white walls, and windows looking out across the plains toward the mountains.

  Walking back to the main house, she warns us to mind the sun. “Don’t let it do its work on your face,” she says. “It’s deceptive. The air is so dry, you don’t feel the heat as you do back east. The sun is much stronger than you realize. Have you brought dark glasses?”

  “No,” I say.

  “You will have to buy some.” She draws out her own pair and hands them to me.

  I put them on and look out across the sage to the horizon. The dark lenses mute everything—color, scale, even shape. I take them off and hand them back to her. She looks at me, a superior glint in those eyes.

  “You’ll regret it,” she says.

  I nod. “Yes, I understand what you’re saying.”

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING I walk out alone into the cold dawn. I feel a quiet exhilaration rill through my body watching the sky go to flames. Piercingly beautiful—this country—so much space between the ground and sky. I walk over to the Big House and go into the large sitting room where there’s a grand piano, a daybed, and a Max Weber painting. Tony comes in and sits on a chair near me. Without speaking, he and I become friends.

  He takes us to the footraces at the pueblo, where the boys strip to nothing but a loincloth and race in pairs of two. They wear moccasins, feathers, beads, bells, paint. The old ones, wrapped in their black shawls and blankets, call from the edges, urging them on, and the sky rings with the sound of shouts and the beating flush of feet against the earth. I look out past the pueblo toward the desert. Curious, how something as inarguable and simple as wide-open space can rearrange me back into myself.

  I think of Stieglitz and feel a sudden stab of fear, like if I really let myself fall into it, I’d keep falling. Leave my life behind and never go back.

  —

  AS PROMISED, BECK and Tony teach me to drive. “I’m no good at it,” I say when I inadvertently hit the shift and we jerk into reverse. Beck has told him that Stieglitz is nicknamed Old Crow Feather, and now Tony calls me Mrs. Crowfeather. He tries to be patient. His low voice rises only when I bear down too fast and hard on the gas so we lurch forward. He shows me how to work the clutch and use the brake but, on our fourth run when I hit a gatepost, he shakes his head and directs us back to where Beck is waiting. He gets out there, and says he won’t drive with me again.

  So it falls to Beck, and we go out together hurtling into the roadless distance. The cool rushing air makes my head light. I catch a glimpse of a dead tree far off.

  “Let’s go there!” I say, and swing the wheel hard in my hand. The car whips around, the front end aimed toward that withered tree. I press the gas to the floor without restraint and speed across the plain.

  “Slow down, Georgia!” Beck cries, but I laugh at her fear and drive faster—it’s impossible how at home I feel right now. The world is flooding through me, the wild gorgeous recklessness of it, the sky rushing by. I am flying, free.

  I notice Beck’s hand white-knuckling the door handle.

  We stop.

  “Get out of the car,” I say. She looks at me, confused. “I need to drive the way I want to.”

  “You don’t know how to drive.”

  She doesn’t understand I know exactly where I am and what I’m doing and there’s no way I’m going to give this up.

  “Get out, Beck,” I say again, and it might be the way I say her name, that lingering kick on the k. I see her face fall as she reluctantly climbs out of the car, closing the door behind her. I don’t look back to see her standing, watching as I go. I drive faster, the speed catching up to the wind, becoming wind, faster, and everywhere around me, the sky.

  —

  I BUY A car. A black Ford sedan with steel-blue interior for $678. Beck is all in at first, until the very last minute when she falters.

  “You’ll go out and kill yourself and I’ll be the one who has to tell him.”

  “If I’m dead, it’ll hardly matter,” I say.

  “What will you do with it after the summer?”

  “Bring it back across the country with me. What else? We need a car out here, Beck. We can’t always be asking Tony or someone else to take us out looking for good things to paint.” I see her waver. She pays for half the license and the insurance. We name the car Hello.

  —

  EVERY MORNING, I scramble onto the roof of the cottage to watch the sun rise.

  My mind begins to loosen. There’s a sharpness to the colors here, and the world back there, his world, seems so far away, like a page I’ve turned.

  Beck and I go out on long walks, looking for things to paint. Or we take Hello and drive out into the desert until we find a place where we feel like stopping. We bathe in the irrigation ditches and lie naked in the sun, the desert ground hard and dry underneath us. My hands darken. My nose peels with sunburn.

  In the evenings after supper in the Big House, we play cards, drink liquor, then Beck and I walk across the field to our little cottage.
Sometimes when she has drunk too much, she talks about her troubles with Paul, how she doesn’t think they’ll be able to make it work. She talks until she has talked herself into tears, and I sit down with her on the floor, my arm around her shoulder.

  Over time, I tell her, the weight of what you’re feeling now will seem so slight. Like a flower that opened once, long ago, so long ago you won’t recall the scent.

  I hold her tightly until her breathing grows quiet and her head falls against me, her face lovely and tentative, like a child’s.

  I lie awake as she sleeps. The cottage feels empty, and the emptiness rings. Like a tingle under the skin. And for the first time in a dozen years, it occurs to me that perhaps Stieglitz is not my life, but a detour from it.

  II

  AS THE DAYS pass, the angst in his letters seems to grow. The more joy I pour into mine, the bleaker his become. The building that housed The Room has sold. He’ll have to find a new space. He’s moved all the art into Lincoln Warehouse for storage. My absence has begun to take root. He’s packing for the Lake but afraid to go without me. Restless, too restless. He tries to sleep, but can’t. He worries. He can’t help it, he writes, he worries about the state of my nerves when I left, the state of things between us. He worries that I don’t seem to know—that I’ve never seemed to truly understand—what I mean to him.

  No letter came yesterday. Are you all right, my Sweet Wild Girl? When no letter comes from you, my mind crumbles—a fear that something terrible has happened.

  I fold the letters into a neat pile and I write back to him on Mabel’s letterhead. There are stacks of it set on every table through the house. A design of Los Gallos takes up nearly half of the page, so you only have half left to fill. I make sure I write him once a day.

  “You are an awfully dutiful wife,” Beck says wryly.

  “The more he worries, the more work it will be for me,” I say with a smile.

  “He’ll be fine,” Beck says. “They always are. No matter how much of a fuss they make.”

  “When I owe him a letter, the easiest thing is just to write it. Otherwise, it drags on me.”

  “Well you shouldn’t let it,” she says, apparently more adept with my life than her own. I don’t point this out. “I’ll write him, Georgia. I’ll tell him you’ve never been better.”

  “No, don’t say that. That will only make him worry in a different way.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re the picture of serenity, not an ache or pain since we’ve arrived.”

  “Don’t tell him about the driving,” I say.

  “No. That I’ll leave to you.”

  —

  WE TAKE HELLO out into the desert, then find a spot I like. We walk around, picking up things off the desert floor, bones, rocks, and bits of shell. We are far off, miles from the house, the day I find the first cow skull. The whiteness gleams. I run my hands over it to feel the shape, my fingers through the sockets of the eyes. Beck kneels beside me.

  “Touch it,” I say to her. She presses her fingers to it, uncertain. Her hand drops and I laugh.

  “Do you ever think our lives stand for nothing?” she says as we walk back to the car. I carry the skull against my chest.

  “You mean because of this?”

  “Everything seems so old out here, ancient. Like it’s always been here. It makes everything I do feel pointless.”

  The sage stretches away on either side of us, the silver glint of it like the sea.

  “I love that feeling,” I say.

  She glances at me, then gives a little sigh and does not speak again until we reach the car. I sort what we’ve found into piles: the throwaway pile, and what I’ll take back to Los Gallos. Then we set up our things and begin to sketch. Beck will last for an hour, sometimes a bit more, but her impulses are unpredictable. She draws in fits and starts, then begins to doubt. She sets down her pencil and lies on the ground near me as I continue to work, her arm over her face to shield the light from her eyes. She is lovely, lying there, with her gray-blond hair sprawled out. I can see the light tug of her blouse where her breasts rise, and the shadow of her nipple through the cotton. I continue working.

  “It’s hot,” she says. “Don’t you want to lie in the sun?”

  “I’m not done yet,” I answer.

  She makes a little noise, irritated, a few minutes later, then takes off her clothes and lies back down again. After a while, I finish my sketch, order my things, and lie down beside her.

  “It’s so nice here,” she says, that kittenish smile on her face. She’s happier now that I’m not working, either. Her body is beautiful. I remember the photographs he took of her, just under the surface of the lake. Sometimes I think those photographs he made of her body were as beautiful as any he has made. When I see her lying here, next to me in the sun, her scent, her warmth, her long-limbed magic, I see her as he must have. Her body like art.

  —

  I WORK THE sketches into paint. I am playing with watercolor again and I love it—how the water is free—the color always to an extent at the mercy of what the water is doing. I love its suggestion of that random life present in nature.

  My pictures begin to fill the studio. In the corner, a rising pile of bleached bones. From time to time, I’ll pick one up. The whiteness gleams, fluent and cool in my hand.

  —

  BECK AND I go out walking behind the morada toward the penitente cross in the hills. The evening air is so clear it seems to ring. The cross looms large and black ahead of us, implacable against the unruly luminous sky. Once, as a child, at Catholic mass with my father, I saw God in the patterns of stained light on the floor, and while the priest up there droned on and my sisters sat with their backs straight, their prim hands folded in their lap, I shut my ears and dipped my foot into the overlapping pools of that sudden, holy light.

  Back in the studio, I paint the cross, the juxtaposition of its black strength against the moving sky. I paint it again and again, its strict form always quartering each canvas in different ways. I paint it as I saw it that first night against the red sunset. Then I paint it again, as I never saw it, with the mass of Taos Mountain right behind it. The arms of the cross cut the sky like the mullion of a windowpane I’m looking through, slim rectangles of dark blue in the two upper quadrants, then lighter below. I don’t want it to be quite straightforward, heroic or iconic. I don’t want it to be just a cross in a landscape. I want to show how it lives, how the road and the mountain and the backlit evening sky curve around it. I want that frisson, that uncanny, ethereal life this country seems to hold.

  I put the stars in last—eight dots of white. The sky is alive with stars, and was, long before the cross was set into this landscape, and will be, long after.

  —

  OTHERS ARRIVE. THE notorious dinners in the Big House grow to be extravagant affairs. Spud Johnson brings a young photographer, Ansel Adams, and his wife. Adams is from California but came to the Southwest to cure a sinus problem. He is in awe when he realizes I am the wife of Stieglitz, whom he calls the greatest photographer of our time. There are local artists: Cady Wells and Russell Vernon Hunter. Charles Collier comes, and Marin arrives in June.

  Mabel and Tony fight often—it starts as a squabble, then the argument rises to a high pitch, shooing the rest of us out. “Mabel is so possessive,” I remark to Beck one day as we cross the field back to our cottage, their voices filtering out the windows of the Big House behind us. “If she’s not careful, she’ll squeeze the life out of him and she won’t like what’s left.”

  The days here pass so fast, and I am full of paint, in love with this country, the vast desolate yawn of flat land moving away.

  Dear Hello is covered with dust. There’s been no rain and the car has a thin layer of red earth caked to it. She needs a good wash, I say to Beck, so we slip into our bathing suits and use the hose, but the gush of water is not enough to get it clean, and there are no sponges we can find. Mabel is gone and there’s no one to ask where a
sponge would happen to be, so we use sanitary napkins to scrub it instead, Beck laughing, giggling, as we go through half a box, stuffing them into a bag that we’ll shove to the bottom of the trash. Then we strip down to our skins and turn the hose on each other.

  Tony takes us on a trip to Canyon de Chelly to see the ancient cliff dwellings. We get lost in the woods, every road seems to lead nowhere. We have nothing for supper but oranges and whiskey. We go into Santa Fe for the rodeo. Beck picks out matching black sateen shirts for us. I wear a strand of white beads and a silver ring with a large blue stone. I look quite unlike myself. And Beck and I stand together in front of the mirror, studying ourselves and each other, before she slips a cigarette into the side of my mouth and shows me how to get it to dangle just there, without falling.

  —

  HIS LETTERS HAVE brightened. He has come through something, he writes. And now he has embarked on an adventure of his own. He didn’t want to tell me at first, afraid I’d be too concerned, but he went for a fly in an airplane with Donald. Flew higher and higher, then upside down. He has started taking lessons. I want to take you up, my Love, spin you around up there in the Blue and watch the lake running downhill…It makes me happy to feel the joy in his letters, like it might be possible: for him to live in his free state, for me to live in mine. I am halfway through the last page: My Sweetestheart, my only heart, our togetherness can’t be touched. I’ve known that since I met you, from the moment I unrolled those drawings. If there’s anything I have faith in, Georgia, it’s what you are to me. Not just lips and legs and shoulders and the flare of cheekbone I adore, but the free and nameless part of you—the far side of my soul—that’s what you are. We should have had a child. That was a mistake. I see it now.