Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  “Fine then.”

  “You are a pleasure to work with, Miss O’Keeffe.”

  We both know what he is not saying—that Stieglitz is far from that. I sign and slip the contract across the desk. I am aware I should be apprehensive. The close time frame. The scale of the project. Doing it against Stieglitz’s will. But in my mind’s eye, I can see the powder room already finished—the curved ceiling’s corners, enormous flowers blooming from the walls.

  “Very well, then,” Deskey says, standing, “so it is done!”

  A firm handshake.

  It is done.

  —

  STIEGLITZ IS ENRAGED when I return to the Lake to tell him the contract is signed. Beyond enraged when I acknowledge the terms. It is Rosenfeld—dear Pudge—who talks him down, pointing out in his kind voice that now that the agreement is finalized, there’s no reason to oppose it.

  “Besides,” Rosenfeld says, “I’ve just heard Stuart Davis is doing the murals for the men’s lounge.” This gives Stieglitz pause. Davis is an artist in the Ashcan School. Never one of the circle, but his cubist landscapes are bold. Even if his brash imagery—gas pumps and jazz—aren’t to Stieglitz’s taste, no one can deny his prowess.

  “Let Georgia do this with your blessing,” Rosenfeld says gently. “You’ll find a way to make it right.” And it occurs to me then that Rosenfeld is perhaps the one person in our world who’s always wanted us to succeed. Even now when I am so wrung out with all the machinations and fight over this job, here is Rosenfeld contending in his calm way that there is good that can still come of this. It lifts me.

  Stieglitz clatters around for another few days, still irascible, but the gears of his mind have shifted. I can feel it. He knows Rosenfeld is right. If he wants to continue to manage my career, he might as well get on board. He starts to allude to some of the advantages of taking the commission. Not directly to me. He won’t straight-out admit I was right. But he starts to consider the upsides. Stuart Davis for one. My giant flowers in a place every rich modern woman with her granddaughter will pass through. But he’s still not pleased with the money. “That’s no good as it stands,” I hear him say one day to Rosenfeld. “There has to be a way to redress that to our favor.” Finally, at the end of the month, I agree to let Stieglitz meet with Deskey on my behalf to discuss the terms of the contract.

  “Ask him to shift the date back,” I say.

  “I’m going to discuss the money as well.”

  “Focus on the date, Stieglitz. It’s a huge project, and I want to do it, but November first may not give me as much time as I’d like if the construction continues to drag.”

  “I’ll insist it’s pushed back,” he says. “It’s an impossible date. Several points need to be revised. You’ll do the work for free. They can reimburse us for materials, but if it’s for free, as Pudge suggested so brilliantly, there’s no dollar amount to smear your value.”

  “I don’t care what you do about the money,” I say, “as long as I get to do the work. But focus on the date. I want more time.”

  —

  HE SWEEPS DOWN to New York, meets with Deskey and the architect, and returns to say that all is squared away. They’ve accepted his revisions. Everything is settled, the date has shifted from November 1st to the 15th. I’ll do the work unpaid. And now we can all move forward.

  To my relief, dinner-table conversation shifts to whether Governor Roosevelt will, in fact, win the presidential election. Every time the radio’s turned on, his voice seems to be there, promising that the federal government will regulate industry to create new jobs. Not one of us knows how that will all work. But the newness of it instigates all sorts of vociferous debate that spills from the dining room into the living room and soaks up the long evening hours.

  The Lake feels odd. A kind of weightlessness to things now that the battle about Radio City is over. I’ve won. I know that, but all the fight has worn me down. My mind feels flayed. It’s all been such a struggle and, really, for what? To get my art on some bathroom walls? Sometimes it seems just that inane.

  I think about New Mexico. Sometimes it’s all I think about—leaving here, going back. How long would I stay? Four weeks? Three months? Forever? I miss it. And I hold that sense of missing it close to me at night when I can’t sleep. I remember once, driving out in Taos, I hit a patch of loose gravel. I wasn’t expecting it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see and I was looking at the sky, my eyes following a raven, when the road changed, suddenly uneven under the tires. The car started to slide. I cut the wheel back to straighten it. I remember hearing the sound of low free laughter and realizing that laughter was mine, as I pressed my boot down hard on the pedal and drove it toward the floor, speeding faster, into that endless pellucid distance that flowed into me and around me, as godlike and intimate as breath.

  In the shanty, on a massive canvas, I paint from memory. Jimsonweed—those white trumpet shapes that grow everywhere along the arroyos, opening after dusk, their fragrance strong through the night. Every part of the plant is poisonous. Once cut, the bloom will last only hours. I paint the flower cropped, right to the edge of the canvas, the curls of the blue-green leaves like an echo behind. At one point, I close my eyes and see the shape against my lids—the grace as it falls, more alive than if it were in front of me. I feather thin layers of paint into edges—edge after edge. I want to lift the essence out of every intricate detail, each crease in the leaves, each naked line—so much larger than life, this flower, the eye can’t pull away. I want to lose myself in the pale throat of that flower, its mystery, surfaces softened to such a degree you will not see my hand, the petals so smooth you can almost feel them against your cheek. There is no play here. There is rigor and balance and clarity. This is a story of edges. This is a story of how something as unstable as a petal or a wave can become a definitive edge.

  When the picture is done, I paint another, but the composition is off from the start. My hands, the color, the form, nothing seems to be working. An upper petal distorts, like dolphin lips. Unfixable. I quit and cut it off the frame.

  —

  IN MID-NOVEMBER, FINALLY, Deskey phones to say the powder room is ready. I pack my things and go down. Radio City is a madhouse. Workmen streaming everywhere, plaster, sawdust, half-finished light fixtures, wires popping out, ladders leading sky-high to holes in the wall. A chandelier lies in the center of the dark-red carpet in the lobby, a massive X and circle marked on the ceiling directly above. I step carefully around it, following Deskey and an assistant. We thread our way through the chaos up to the second mezzanine, and walk through a space in the framing. The powder room is pristine. A gleaming whiteness. Everything as we agreed. Canvas, perfectly smooth, wraps the walls, the gentle dome of the ceiling, and each curved corner. The eight mirrors wink back at us. I skim my fingertips over the walls, and feel a quick joy. This is what I wanted. This is what I went to war with Stieglitz over. A vast landscape. A fresh start.

  I turn to Deskey and smile.

  “You are pleased, Miss O’Keeffe.”

  “Yes.”

  He leaves his assistant with me. As I am unpacking my things, I notice the smell—that light sweet stink of wet. Moisture in the air. I can feel it on my face and hands. I hadn’t noticed at first. My heart sinks. This room is not ready. I glance at the assistant, but she has sat down on a box and is busy writing a few things into a stenograph notebook. I scan the walls. My eyes fall on a slight shadow in the corner—a raised point in the surface. I walk over to it and run my hand along the canvas below that corner. It’s dry in spots, but not everywhere; there are distinct places where I can feel the damp of wet plaster underneath. My fingers come to a lump near a seam. With a fingernail, I puncture it. White goo seeps out.

  I turn to the girl. “Get him.”

  “Mr. Deskey’s in a meeting until noon.”

  “Just get him.”

  She hurries off. I continue walking around the room. I can see it now, feel it—this whole
room is a disaster—nothing’s what it seems. There’s nothing pristine about this. Nothing dry or clear or beautiful. Nothing brave or bold or real. I feel a wave of fury. Here I am again. Held down, held back, in a power struggle with some arrogant man, his ego and incompetence that has nothing to do with my art. It’s like they’re all together in some maddening conspiracy to make me good enough but not good enough to topple them. A deranged thought. I know it. And yet. My fists clench. I notice then a light-brown stain on the floor. I bend and sweep my fingers through it. Kerosene.

  What a mess. This room. This project. This decision I made. A ruin.

  I’m putting my things away when Deskey comes in.

  “You put canvas up on wet plaster,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.

  “Miss O’Keeffe, please.”

  I continue packing away sketchbook, charcoals, paints, the few brushes I took out. I replace them now in their long beds, everything neatly arranged. My hands burn—all the shame and frustration and rage has gone to my hands.

  “Miss O’Keeffe?”

  I look at him. “I can’t work on this surface.”

  “We’ll fix it.”

  I want to laugh, or slap him.

  “I give you my word.”

  “Mr. Deskey,” I say coldly. “I told you from the start, I won’t work under these circumstances. You were not honest with me and you know it. When was this room plastered? Two, three days ago? Then canvas slapped up, and a kerosene heater to force it dry? Do you think I’m that stupid?”

  “This can all be redressed. I assure you. We’ll fix it.”

  “You can’t fix this. This whole room will have to be stripped and redone, and even if you do that by the day after tomorrow, it’s still going to take another three weeks to dry in.”

  “We’ll extend the contract.”

  I hear the assistant gasp. A huge piece of canvas has begun to sag from one of the opposite ceiling corners. It goes down in slow motion, a slow loosening wave away from the curve of the wall.

  I turn to Deskey. “I won’t do this work.”

  “We have a contract.”

  “I’m not going to do it.”

  I leave the room and walk out into the street. The blaze of the concrete, the brash black shine of the cars, things seem outrageous, overloud, my mind barely hanging together.

  —

  AT THE SHELTON, I tell Stieglitz the job is over. Done. He’s had his way. This mural business, what a failure it’s turned out to be—just as he so prophetically claimed—the walls literally falling apart.

  “Say it. Say: I told you so.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Georgia. Ever.”

  Lie. I sink into the sofa, head in my hands, nerves shot. So absurd. Imagining I needed to do something like this to make a point, for no other reason than because it was work I thought I wanted.

  “I’ll take care of it tomorrow,” he says. “Tell me what you want. I’ll make it happen.”

  “Just get me out. It’s done. I’m done.”

  I break down into tears. The cushion bends as he sits beside me. The calm pressure of his hand on my back. My chest tightens. I don’t want his hand near me.

  “I’ll fix it tomorrow, Love.” His voice is awful and gentle, sweet of course, because this is how he needs things to be. He can love me this way—when I’m weak and in pieces, when he can play the hero. The whole thing is just so damning. All I wanted was the work.

  X

  I DON’T GO out. I don’t want to see anyone.

  No ambition. No impulse moving in me. Only the deadness of feeling I seem to be trapped under. Scraped up by the failure of everything.

  I think about New Mexico—the hills, the distance, the space, the sky. I need to go there. I need to be in it. I’ve never gone in winter. I don’t know who is out there in winter, though someone must be. I need a plan. I make a mental list. Write Marie Garland. Or Frieda Lawrence. Call Brett. I can’t call Mabel. The whole public debacle of Radio City is just the kind of gossip she delights in. How she’d lord that over me.

  Just go. Pack. Find a train. Go west to Catherine’s. Stay a few weeks. Keep going.

  It hardens into resolve, but then feels like too much, all those machinations, conversations. Too much to explain.

  I sew and fix my canvases. I try to paint. All I want is to work, to get back to what I know. I want the freedom again to be alone in the room. I put the brush to the paper, but it just slips around. No shapes. No burn. Nothing.

  —

  STIEGLITZ CALLS THE Shelton twice a day from the gallery to check on me. Once at ten. Again at two.

  His voice on the phone urges me to paint. “It will make you feel better,” he says.

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “You’re so fragile right now, aren’t you? Oh, my Love.”

  Is that what you’re telling them? I think. That I’m fragile. That Radio City has ground me right down? That I am your Love and it’s all such a shame. Bastard. The word echoes in my head.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, but my voice rings flat and he says so.

  “Georgia, please try to be well.”

  Which feels like somewhat senseless advice given the box of a life I live in.

  —

  A HORSE’S SKULL, I decide, only because my eyes happen to fall on that when I’m hanging up the phone one morning. I make a few sketches, then set a canvas on the easel in my studio. I squeeze out the colors into their discrete piles on the palette, sit there and wait. I don’t seem to know what comes next. Everything is gray compared with the colors on the glass palette. The floor, my dress, my shoes.

  I dip the very tip of my brush into the blue. I want to taste it. I want the thrill of color moving inside me again. The brush floats near the canvas. Where to start? Where to start? A stroke there, but the moment I’ve made it, it’s wrong. Everything I’ve done, what I’ve let happen, all wrong. In that ruined stroke on the canvas, I see: It makes no difference. What I do or don’t do. Where I go. I’m so far from that girl who was once so full of passion it poured out into shapes on paper. Now it seems I have no passion. No clear vision. Now I have nothing. I’m weak in a way I despise. Weak, in a way I never dreamed I could be.

  This isn’t just him, and what he’s done to me. It’s what I’ve let him do.

  I walked in with my eyes wide open. I was the one who reached out on that train platform, drew his face to mine, and kissed him that first time. I knew who he was from the start. I knew what he was capable of, and I knew what I’d become for him—artist, lover, muse. I knew where that sled going downhill was headed, and I knew what I’d get out of it. What I did not know is what I’d give up.

  I run my fingertip from the ferrule down the handle to its end, dig the point into my palm, press deeper until the pain spikes, a funny white burst in my head—an exploding star.

  —

  “YOU’LL BE ALL right,” he says one morning on his way out the door to the Place. Such a ridiculous thing to say, I am going to point out, but then he turns and darts over to the table, looking for something he must have set down, in the wrong place evidently because he can’t find it now, a promise to phone, then gone, the apartment empty. Out the window, a very far distance down, umbrellas knock around like small black flowers on a gray moving stream. I step back, startled.

  Lying in bed, I walk the rooms of the house where I grew up, the kitchen where my mother peels potatoes, past the room where my father’s brother lies dying from TB. I walk back and forth, looking for the door, which is not in its proper place. I slip through the walls, outside. In the distance, I can see my father. His back is always to me, his tall form always moving away. Two of my sisters are in the garden, their heads bent close together; their dresses glimmer in the sun, their hands touch, and they hold a creature between them, an injured bird cupped between their joined fingers. Then one—Claudia?—glances up and sees me. “Georgia, come!” she cries, and I feel a surge of joy. The trees ring with her voice.
The moment shatters, so beautiful and precious, the shed pieces of one moment giving way to the next, and I understand that this is where life dwells—in the unregistered time between moments when you are filled with no thought, no awareness, just a garden, ancient sunlight, your sister’s voice.

  I knew it then. As children, we are oracles. We are flesh, hunger, eyes. As a child, I could hear the stir and groan of clouds. I could feel the shift in the grass, blades parting under the wind, the yawn and stretch of a bud, opening—

  The memory snaps.

  —

  I CRY UNTIL I am an ocean, until the walls slip down. The bed does not feel safe. I get out of it and into a corner, where the walls come together like I could press myself right through that line.

  He finds me in the evening when he arrives home, crying at the teetered edge of everything. Hands over my ears to keep out the sound in my head. My knees shoved in tight, to keep it all held together, to keep some inkling of myself in myself, my body pressed as hard as I can get it into that seam of the wall.

  What have we done? I start to ask him, open my mouth to ask, but the words don’t come. He kneels beside me.

  —

  HE CALLS MY sister Anita, who comes. She helps me pack a few things and brings me to her apartment. I spend Christmas there, in a room that is my own, luxurious and large, but not, in the end, enough to hold the avalanche falling down inside me.

  Noises everywhere. And a stabbing fear of water. I can’t even run a bath. Stieglitz comes to see me nearly every day. There’s nowhere safe. He sits by my bed in a chair. I can’t bear it, and finally I whisper to Anita, Tell him to go. Can’t bear to see him, can’t bear to think, because of all that I remember of what I was and dreamed and wanted.

  XI

  EIGHTY-EIGHTH AND EAST End. Doctors Hospital. In the white room where they’ve placed me for safekeeping, my ears fill with voices. Loud, bright, a million unknown tongues.

  For most of the day, I am alone. The nurses come through with cool efficient hands. They change the bedpan, bring meals I barely touch, and check my pulse. Once a day, the doctor glides in on his rounds. Then they are all gone, the door sealed shut, and I am alone again. My mind drains out. The dead come from far away, looking not as they should. My mother. My father. My dear brother Alexius. And the ceiling is there in the corner, and my soul, if there is a name for that transparent part of me that comes and goes, has gone to do its business elsewhere.