Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  That afternoon, I make up my little cot downstairs by the window, add two more blankets, and crawl under them to read from the new Jung book Stieglitz gave me down in the city. From some far-off corner of the house comes the soft tapping of his typewriter, his fingers on the keys, a pause between thoughts, then the uneven sound taken up again, tap-tap-tapping. A drawer closes above, a door opens, footsteps on the stairs, coming down. He walks into the living room, and stops, surprised to see me there.

  “Could you get me some water?” I ask.

  He goes out and returns with a glass. “So, at last, she has surfaced to the world,” he says.

  “Barely.”

  “Stieglitz wrote a few days ago to say how he worries after you.”

  I nod. “Give it one more day, he’ll catch the cold. My sister Ida puts it in this way: One of us sneezes and we both get sick.”

  Toomer laughs.

  I take a sip of water. “Next life, I think I’ll come back as a blond soprano.”

  “Spare us.”

  “No,” I say. “A blond soprano who can sing very high, clear notes that shatter the glass.”

  “You’d break all the windows.”

  “That’s exactly what I’d do. And I’d be living in a place where there was not this kind of winter, and one could afford to lose a window now and then.”

  “Taos, perhaps?”

  “Taos is awfully incestuous—lots of high drama.”

  “Too much for your taste?”

  “By tenfold.”

  His eyes slide over my face to my throat. It is only a moment. Then he gets up and says he needs to refill the wood box before dark.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING we have frozen pipes. Putnam comes up from Bolton’s Landing.

  “They can be thawed,” I say.

  “Not with this kind of cold, Miss O’Keeffe.”

  “You’re wrong, Putnam.” I give him succinct instructions and pack him off to the cellar and, when his head pokes up, I banish him back down again until he has done what I told him to do and realized I am right.

  It snows and snows. I love winter up here, in this house that was never built for it. I love the hardship, the bitter cold. I love the minor mishaps—frozen pipes, for example, which are, unlike other things, fixable.

  When the snow finally ends, Jean goes out to shovel.

  I wear my slippers to the back door. “See how useful!” I call out to him.

  He quits shoveling and smiles at me. “It’s a hard life I’ve got up here.”

  “Such trouble.”

  “Go back in. You’ll catch cold.”

  “I can’t catch worse than I’ve got.”

  He laughs and shifts his grip on the shovel handle. “Go on, Georgia,” he says. Again, his eyes rest on my face, then he turns away and digs the blade into the next drift. I close the door, a quiet thrill in my chest. The phone starts to ring as I climb the stairs. Stieglitz more than likely. Who else would it be? I should answer. I should let him hear my voice to give him assurance. The steps are cold through my socks, the phone echoing. I let it ring.

  —

  JEAN. I AM beginning to know him. How he sits, speaks, moves, how when he is working at his typewriter, he leans slightly forward, his weight on his elbows. He gives me things to read—sections of the novel-in-progress he is writing, and a copy of his first book, Cane. After supper, we listen to music—Bach, Mozart, the spirituals. We talk late into the night, disconnected abstract conversations about his dead wife, writing, art, politics, the race issue. His father was born into slavery, he tells me, then became a prosperous farmer. His mother was the daughter of a governor. He went to segregated schools—all-white, as well as all-black. He is mixed race—half Negro, the other half Dutch, Welsh, German Jewish.

  “Does it matter, Georgia, really? Negro, white, mulatto, what does it all amount to? I am none of those things and all of those things. I’m no more or less than the man I am.”

  His eyes have a strangely risen quality; they seem to float near the surface of his skin. Inexpressibly beautiful. Light coming through water.

  I tell him about New Mexico, and Abiquiu, that small village that seems cut right out of the hills. “It is such a particular point of earth,” I say. “Light like nowhere else. Even the dust there is different.” Powdered adobe, walls crumbling to mix back into the earth they came from. That dust is different from the dust of any other place.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s only because you’ve not been.”

  “I’ve been to Taos.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  There is a wrinkle then in the silence between us. My voice came out stronger than I intended.

  “You should stay,” I say abruptly.

  “What?”

  “I originally invited you for two weeks.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been nearly two.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to,” I say.

  “I know that.”

  “But you are welcome to. If you want.”

  The edges of his mouth turn up. “Because I am useful?”

  “Exactly. You are useful, and everything is humming along here quite nicely. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” he says slowly. “I do.”

  The cat comes up to me and jumps onto the pillow of the cot. I stroke her head. She tolerates it for a while, then leaps down and circles his chair.

  —

  BY THE TIME Stieglitz comes up for Christmas, the air feels almost warm, and I can get outside again. The grass sheathed in frost glitters in the sunlight.

  When he walks through the door and sees me, his face lights. “Look at you!” he says happily, touching my chin with his hand. “You look so well!”

  I feel something in me twist, and resist the urge to turn my face away.

  —

  THE THREE OF us exchange simple gifts. My gift to Toomer is a bright-red scarf. “It looks dashing on you,” I say.

  “That’s your teasing voice, isn’t it?”

  I laugh. “Stieglitz, tell him how fine that scarf looks.”

  “Indeed,” Stieglitz says. “A glorious red.”

  “There,” I say. “Now, you’ll believe me, won’t you?” Jean shoots me a quick look, then presses the tissue back into the box. Stieglitz is saying how he’s always wanted a Christmas at the Hill, and now it’s here—a few perfect days with snow everywhere—and how heartening it is to see me looking so well, looking almost like I did fifteen years ago. I feel my breath catch. Has it been that long?

  —

  WE HAVE A big dinner. Bellies stuffed, we roll into the kitchen. Stieglitz builds up the fire, then sits down at the table as Toomer and I start on the dishes. We are laughing. So much food, so many plates to wash. My arms are plunged into the warm soapy water, suds on my sleeves, I’ve pushed them back, but they keep sliding down.

  “Give them here, Georgia,” Toomer says.

  I hold my dripping sudsy hands toward him and he folds the cuffs back from the wrist, until they are tight against my elbow.

  “You do that very neatly,” I say. A quick flash of light breaks across his face.

  “Do I?” He picks up a rinsed dish from the rack and runs the drying cloth over the moon-white center.

  When the kitchen is clean, we move into the living room, and Jean reads us his essay on Stieglitz. He has written about the Hill—how it was an old farm, now with a new world set into its borders, how every window is uncurtained, each with a searing capacity to perceive and feel and know. He speaks about my presence here, how I’ve molded the house to my austere vision: the lack of ornaments, the pale-gray walls, the uncovered lights. He continues reading about Stieglitz’s genius, his generosity, his commitment to the livingness of art. He talks about the artists Stieglitz saw before the world did, and his uncanny gift to render in his photographs the treeness of a tree, the stoneness of stone…what a face is…what a han
d, an arm, a limb is…the amazing beauty of a human being…

  Under his hands, the papers shine in the light off the fire, and I know. Even before he has come to the end, before his eyes lift from the last page and meet mine, I feel the rise of desire in his face, how he wants me, and has, I see now, for some time.

  —

  STIEGLITZ STAYS UP late with me. He sits in the chair by my bed. When he starts to fall asleep, I nudge him, but he claims he doesn’t want to go up to his room. I am well again, and he doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow and find anything changed. He clutches my hand, so happy I’ve begun to rouse again as the woman he knew, the woman he loves.

  His pleasure seeing what he calls this sea-change in me is genuine. He sees the light moving through my face. He hears my laughter, the same kind of laughter he and I fell into fifteen years ago, that first summer in our refuge. That time in his life when he discovered me was the time when he was most certain, virile, and alive, and he will always love me for that reason. And when he hears my laughter now, it reminds him of who he was when he heard it then—

  His eyes have closed. I feel a rush of warmth toward him. He looks his age tonight, white hair around the sweet pale of his face. He is almost seventy, and despite whatever foolish mess he gets himself worked up in, despite the fact that he can still make me so angry, in the end he is just a man whose sunlight is behind him.

  I reach for his hand. He stirs, startled for an instant, then he sees me.

  “You are glorious,” he whispers, his eyes sleepy through his glasses.

  I lean over, balancing my weight on the arm of his chair. My lips graze his cheek.

  —

  HE LEAVES TO go back to the city. A letter arrives. One of those letters that spans his day—an entry at 11:27 A.M. from Fort Edward, in his seat on the train, 2:10 P.M. from Albany, passing the stand of birch trees, the same route we’ve taken season after season, year after year. Three more entries—8 P.M. from the Place, then 8:23, then 8:38. Ending with his plan to take a bath.

  It strikes me as the last letter. I know it isn’t. There will be thousands more, exchanged over years, west to east, east to west, his country to mine, and back again. Nowhere near the last and yet, in a way, it is.

  I used to think the letters told the story of our life together, the truth of that strange beautiful love. But the letters were never who we were. They were who we wanted to be.

  —

  JEAN AND I walk out onto the frozen lake over ripples in the surface where the water has rushed over and gotten trapped. Light winks off the snow. We find a smooth spot out toward the center, and skate in our boots. We slide over the ice and laugh, moving more quickly, sliding, running, almost racing. When I slip and almost fall, he catches my arm. I look up and smile. He is looking down at me, not smiling. Then, neither of us laughs, and there is only the ring of the silence and the white frozen world, drops of thaw like crystal on the trees. The scarf I gave him hangs loose on his neck, the dazzling red of that scarf, and his eyes unending, except for a simple hunger I recognize. His grip on my arm tightens, and I feel it move through me like a current.

  We continue walking across the frozen lake back toward the house. We pass children on the road, breaking icicles off the trees, sucking on them, hurling them into the sunlight.

  —

  THAT EVENING, I bump into him as I step from my room into the hall. I close the door, my hand on the knob behind my back.

  “Looking for me?” I say.

  “Always.”

  It’s a narrow space, that upstairs hallway.

  —

  WHEN MARGARET LEAVES after supper, Jean and I go into the living room as usual, but the silence feels new. We are reading, apparently. I have the Jung book open on my lap.

  “What is this?” he asks, looking at me now, and that seems as far as things are able to go. I want to touch him, taste him in my throat. I want his skin on mine, his mouth. I can barely make sense of the wanting.

  Once Stieglitz and I were talking about a painting I had done: one of my flowers he wanted to hang. I wasn’t happy with it, though, and didn’t want it in my show. I explained it to him this way: That painting was done with my head, before my heart and my body were ready, and while it may be beautiful, it does not have the sense of fire or breath that is life.

  I remember this now. I have not answered Jean. He looks back down again at the book—he seems irritated, perhaps because I did not answer.

  —

  I AM WAKENED by a monstrous low growl. The house seems to shake. I slip out of my bed in my socks and pull a heavy cardigan around me. Jean is by the back window.

  “The snowplow,” he says. It’s the strangest-looking thing—half boat, half devil, circling the yard, cutting paths through the moonlight, heaping up layers of snow.

  “It’s cold,” I murmur. He takes my hand, his fingers weave through mine. I glance at him, but he is staring out into the night.

  The plow moves off, its light swinging over the trees, the sound of the engine fades down the road. He pulls me toward him, holding my face, and kisses me. A long kiss.

  “You should go back to bed,” I say.

  “I am going to put you to bed first,” he answers, and we laugh at how teeny it is, the little bed. He tucks me in, then bends to kiss me good night. I grasp his neck and pull him down with me.

  My cheek rests against the pillow facing him, his eyes are dark and still they seem to glow in the strange bluish night of the room. I put my palm on the narrow space between us, that thin strip that separates us. We are apart by the span of my fingers.

  “This space is the bundling board,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will that be adequate?”

  “If it wants to be.”

  “So if I reach across it like this…”

  I strike his arm away. “It can be effective,” I say with a smile.

  “Does it want to be so effective?”

  “Hmm. Not sure.”

  “What does it want?”

  He traces my fingers. I can smell his skin. He reaches across the space I’ve marked out and draws open my sweater, his fingers undo the top button on the V of my nightgown.

  “I’d steal you,” he whispers, his eyes shining. “Beg you to come with me, leave here, go to your Abiquiu. I’ll take you there—”

  “Stop,” I say sharply. And he laughs. Catching my fingers, he brings them to his lips. He draws me to him and kisses me hard on the mouth.

  Later, I will remember a vague light through the window, the moon perhaps, or the blue itself, how it fell across my thigh.

  —

  AFTERWARD HE LIES near me, his face near my face.

  “Why do you hold back,” he says. “It’s like you don’t want anything I could give you because you’d have to give me something in return.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “I think it is.”

  I am silent, remembering what he said earlier. I’ll take you there. How easy it is for a man to say a thing like that. I’ll take you.

  “It won’t work,” I say.

  He looks at me for a moment before he gets up. His hand lingers near my face—again that slight electric tremble in the air between us.

  Then he’s gone, the doorway empty, footsteps fading up the stairs, fainter, fainter. Gone. And the room is not the room it was. The night is brightly framed in the window. Things are in their places: the pictures on the mantel, the lamp, a short pile of books, the kindling and fire tools. It is all familiar, and it is not the same. The room has left as well—part of some distant, slowly disappearing world.

  Years from now, I will understand that this is the moment my life became wholly mine, more mine than it ever was before because I will never again let it be anything less. I will go back to New Mexico. I will walk out into the dry nothingness of the country that I love and paint: sharp-edged flowers, desert abstractions, cow skulls—images of Thanatos. I will title
my work and that is what they will see: the subject that fills space and the words that define it. They will not notice that what I am really after—all I was ever really after—is that raw desire of the sky pouring through the windowed socket of a bone.

  After

  WE STAY MARRIED. I realize it would make no sense to dissolve the business end of things, which works so well. He manages the logistical details I am not interested in. He doesn’t notice the seismic shift that’s taken place. He sees what he wants to believe. And I get what I need.

  I divide the year in two. I spend every summer in New Mexico. Every fall, I return to him in New York. I buy a house at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, and then, in 1943, a second house in the small village of Abiquiu—the ruin of a house with the door I’ve always known was meant to be mine. I build out the Abiquiu house from the inner central courtyard. I make a studio and bedroom out of the old stables and carriage barn, setting plate-glass windows into one wall of the studio and long tables down the length of the room where I paint. I have the walls rebuilt in the traditional way, the adobe smoothed by local women’s hands.

  The house has water rights. Unlike Ghost Ranch, it’s a place I can live year-round. I plant gardens. Vegetables. Fruit trees. Flowers timed to bloom throughout the year. I paint and make tomato jelly and walk the ridge toward the high sheer cliffs where the colors tumble down in waves. It is a gorgeous mad-looking country, more merciless and spare than the land around Taos. The sun hits the earth and burns deep into it, so even at night when I sleep under the stars, I can still feel the warmth of the day stored in the ground.

  Every morning, I drink my coffee in the cold silence of the house. As the light gnaws at the edge of things, I feel a quiet joy. There is nothing in this new day that is not mine.

  —

  WHEN SWEENEY FIRST calls from the Museum of Modern Art to offer me a retrospective, I refuse. Then, because it is Sweeney, I call back to accept. At the opening on May 14, 1946, Stieglitz sits on the stairs with Marin, surveying the crowd. They seem oddly out of place, the two of them, as if the tide has passed them by. I catch Stieglitz’s eye, and he smiles.

  The day before I leave to return to New Mexico, he and I walk together through the exhibition halls. I hold his arm. “This is what we are,” he says quietly, his eyes sweeping over my paintings on the walls. “This is what we made. This is you.” Back at the apartment, while he rests, I sit at the table and write notes to him on small slips of paper. I love you. You are my sweetestheart. A kiss to you. Take care, my love. As always before I leave, I will tuck them through the house, into a drawer, on a shelf in the medicine cabinet, I will fold one and place it into a book he is reading. He likes to find them when I am gone. He has said it makes him feel I am still with him.