by Dawn Tripp
He calls me into the bedroom. I draw a chair over and sit by his side.
He has his glasses off, and his eyes look small. “I would like you to stay please, Georgia.”
I press his hand, his palm is cool and slack. “I know.”
“Just awhile longer, please?” he says.
I shake my head. “Maybe next time.”
—
HE PHONES TO tell me that a brilliant review of my retrospective has appeared written by James Thrall Soby, a modernist critic who has never especially liked my work. Stieglitz is elated. He reads passages aloud to me over the phone: “ ‘She is the greatest of living women painters…Hers is a world of bones and flowers, hills and the city…She created this world; it was not there before and there is nothing like it anywhere.’ ”
Silence hangs between us on the line.
“I’ll send it to you,” he says.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “Just send me McBride’s piece. I always look forward to reading what witty things he’s got to say.”
“No,” he insists. “You must read this one as well. It is true, my darling. There is nothing like your world anywhere. This is what I’ve wanted for you, always.”
He is tired—his voice dwindles, fading in and out, as he tells me that yesterday, he had the pains in his chest again and had to lie down on the cot in the back room of the Place, and he was resting there when our friends the Newhalls stopped in. They had brought him an ice cream cone, chocolate, because they knew that was his favorite.
“It was already dripping everywhere, I couldn’t lick it fast enough. It made quite a stain on my shirt, I’m afraid.”
I tell him about a new painting I am doing: another sky through the hole in a pelvis bone—the same blue oval of the other pelvis paintings, edged by whiteness, completely abstract but, in this one, I am making a fold of reddish-orange dusk along the top.
“I suppose that’s just how it goes,” I say to him now on the phone, “when one has more sky than earth around.”
—
HIS DOCTOR TELEPHONES a few days later and suggests I fly back to New York. His heart is not behaving well. But there have been many other calls like this, and I put it off. By early July, he’s faring better. Soon I’ll be as good as new, he writes. Nothing for you to worry about. Today I found another of your notes. I remind myself that in only a few months, you’ll be home again.
On July 10, his assistant finds him unconscious, lying on the floor halfway between his bedroom and mine. His pen near his hand. A letter to me unfinished on the writing desk.
I am shopping in Española when I receive the telegram. I go straight to the airport. I can feel the heat working through my red cotton dress, and as we rise through the clouds, and the earth below us falls away to simple shapes, I think of how he did not want me to go this time. He never does. Not really, but maybe this time I could have noticed it was different: the sadness in his eyes, the way he held my hand, the last touch between us before my fingers, cold, left his.
My ears pop as the altitude changes. I close my eyes. Under the hum of the engines, the echo of his voice. Just a little longer, Georgia, please this time. Stay.
—
A SIMPLE UNLINED coffin. No eulogy. No music. Only a few flowers. Time passes as though underwater.
—
THE DAY AFTER the funeral, I phone Dorothy Norman and explain that I will assume control of the gallery, including the rent fund. She must remove her things. When she begins to cry, I tell her that she was one of those people Stieglitz was quite foolish about. The affair between them was disgusting, and I will have no more to do with it. I hang up. I clasp my fingers together, holding them tightly in my lap, until I can feel every bone.
I throw out his medicines, his clothes, his shirts. Some in perfectly good condition, almost new. I should give them to someone, I think, but that thought lasts only an instant. There’s one with a dark stain, the chocolate ice cream, ruined. I rip it before it goes to the trash. I rip it slowly, that horrible sound of a thing torn apart from itself all the way through.
I drive to Lake George and bury his ashes deep near the root of a tree and cover the spot with leaves. For years, the rest of his family will push me to reveal the spot.
“I put him where he can hear the water” is as much as I will say.
—
IT WILL TAKE me three years to go through his things. Sorting archives, art, letters, personal items, photographs, books. Relatively speaking, I save little, but that is only because he kept so much. Handwritten copies of every letter he wrote, the letters he received. I winnow it down to fifty thousand pages or so. There is the art, of course, works of Dove, Marin, Picasso, Cézanne, and others. I leave the bulk of his collection—around six hundred pieces—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nancy Newhall tells me that Stieglitz told her once I would probably destroy the nude portraits he made of me. She says this casually one night when we are at a party. She’s holding a glass, a stain of lipstick already on the rim, and I watch the glass tilt thoughtlessly in her hand, wine sloshing gently back and forth.
Is that what you really thought? That I would destroy them? Damn you, Stieglitz.
—
I KEEP ONLY the finest ones. I go through thousands of his prints, and distill them to a master set of sixteen hundred. I want to give them to the Metropolitan, but the rather snitty head of the print department informs me that the mats are too large.
“They’ll have to be cut down,” he says.
“No, I won’t do that. He sized his mats very specifically to fit each print.”
“As they are, they will not fit in the museum’s solander boxes. They’ll have to be trimmed. This is what we do to store the Rembrandts.”
“Well, Mrs. Rembrandt isn’t exactly around to contest it, is she?”
In the end, all sixteen hundred photographs go to the National Gallery in Washington. I include multiple prints of the same image that he’d printed in silver, platinum, and copper tones. How many times he touched her face, her body, reworking shadow and light so it clung, each time slightly different, print after print. I look through them until it breaks my heart.
Then it is done. Everything is done. Leaving New York, I determine that when anyone asks, I will say I took nothing. I purged it all. A woman who keeps nothing. A woman who has stripped her world down to tomorrow. It’s only up to me now: what I give them to construct their understanding of who I am.
—
WHEN I COME back to New Mexico, it is fall. The earth seems barely tethered to the sky. I wake in the morning and the floor seems unstable, as if the edges of the world are crinkling.
I paint my mountain and the river valley. I paint snow. Red hills cloaked in whiteness. As I put in a blue wash of sky, crows rise past my window. My brush pauses midair. I follow them with my eyes until they disappear. I draw in a single crow above my hills, long wings outstretched. A black bird flying—always there, always going away.
I loved you once. How I loved you.
A wrenching thought when I let it in.
Now
LOOKING BACK, IT often seems it happened overnight. I became the old woman I was meant to be. Fiercely alone.
On the long tables in my studio, we are looking over my paintings. Years of work spread out, all the way back to the charcoals. It is 1970. There will be a show at the Whitney. It will be the first major showing of my art in New York since he died. I am eighty-three years old. I have traveled all over the world, to Peru, Egypt, Austria, Greece, the Near East. Two years ago, I was featured on the cover of Life magazine. They call me the Pioneer Painter. They are enthralled by the woman artist who has chosen to live in the desert, who wakes in the dark before dawn, drinks her coffee, and walks out with her chows toward the horizon. I have become that horizon, unreachable and absolute. They call me mysterious, because I turn strangers, especially famous ones, away. I allow only certain photographers to take certain kinds of picture
s of me: in my black and white clothes, my kimonos, my shawls, poised with my cow skulls, my wizened face and wrinkled hands. A symbol of the American West, reclusive, self-reliant, I can no longer quite see the mountains in the distance, but I still love them beyond reason.
We do not talk about my eyes. I have worked hard to do this right. To give the world just enough so they will still want more. In every interview, I play up very precise details of my artistic career. When I am asked about Stieglitz and his influence, I find ways to sidestep the question. New York was a different life. The woman I was, a different person. It isn’t always easy—looking back across the vast distances of time. I see it clearly. Sometimes more clearly than I could see it when my sight was still unchanged. My life with him. My life before. I have begun to buy back some of my paintings at auction to drive their values higher. One must protect oneself. I’ve gone through my artwork from time to time, culled out a few pieces, ripped them up, then walked outside to burn them in the can. I’ve marked the best works with a star on the back and my initials in a circle. Over the years, I have often chosen not to exhibit my abstractions. I have continued to paint them, and I keep them, along with my early works, in my own collection. I am no longer known as an abstract artist. I am known for my New Mexico landscapes, my bones, my sharp-edged flowers, my sky holes, and my clouds. This is, after all, what I learned from him: to keep what I want to myself. To reveal only what I want to be seen.
I have worked hard to build a legend to replace the one he fashioned for me.
I am not expecting to feel what I do that day in the studio when I am sitting there with my manager and my assistant reviewing my early work spread out on the long tables—the charcoal drawings, the abstract watercolors from 1915, and 1916, those pieces I did before I came to him—Blue No. 1, Blue No. 5, the spiral, the canyon, two lines. I feel my heart turn over. They are so fresh, even now more than half a century later.
“Well,” I say flatly. “We don’t really need to have this show after all. I never did better.”
They miss my point—they often do—and Doris, the manager, says firmly, “We will arrange the paintings thematically. That way they will see how those early forms are reflected in your later works.”
I look at her. “You’re trying to bolster the credibility of my later work.”
“No,” she says, in that glorious no-nonsense way she has. “This is just the alphabet you’ve used throughout your career.”
I am not so easily fooled. She doesn’t want me to stumble into the thought that I might have abandoned my best work, my vision, for him. I can’t say I haven’t asked myself that question. What would I have done with those early abstract forms if I had just continued working on my own? What kind of artist would I have become if I had not gone to him that day in 1917 and the obsession between us began?
He once called our relationship a mixing of souls. But then again, he called it a love story. And it was far more—and less—than that.
I sigh. They are like ashes—thoughts like this.
The Whitney show is a tremendous success. It travels to Chicago and San Francisco. By the time I come back home, piles of letters and invitations have already streamed in. Letters from museums all over the country, phone calls from magazines and newspapers. Letters from women who see me as a symbol for the feminist movement, which I want nothing to do with. Letters from young artists seeking guidance. I read through a number of them, then lose interest. There is only one piece of advice to give: “You want to be an artist? Go home and work.”
—
I CONTINUE TO paint, and my eyes continue to fail. My central vision slowly clouds, until only tiny holes remain at the edges of my seeing. There is no cure, they tell me, and at a certain point I will also lose my peripheral sight.
I refuse to authorize a biography of my life. I write two memoirs instead. My form of memoir. The first a series of drawings with small paragraphs of text to accompany them. The second is more complete, told exactly as I want it told, at arm’s length—moments of a life strung together, each like an arrow in flight hurtling toward some center. I mention Stieglitz three times, and even that seems a little excessive.
Every day, Candelaria comes in to do the housekeeping and Estiben builds my fires. He has a zen for building fires. He shaves out kindling with his knife, and arranges the wood in three or four graduated vertical layers, the smaller pieces toward the front. You can light his fires with one match. A girl comes every day to help me with my paperwork. We dry apricots off the fruit trees in the garden. We make Irish soda bread and grind homemade flour in my small mill. We organize the shelves in the book room, and she rubs oil into my back and legs to soothe the ache. She drives me in my white Lincoln Continental between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu and to my weekly appointments with the eye doctor in town. She looks away discreetly when I drop my head into my hands to hide the tears. And then there is Juan, who has become my primary companion. He showed up one day at my back door, a tall long-haired artist looking for work. He has been with me since. It was hardly altruistic, my taking him on. I loved his lanky handsomeness from the get-go. I love the way he laughs. He is good with me. He knows when to nudge and when to leave me alone. He knows how to talk back to me, how to flirt like a younger lover, and how to let me fuss over him as a mother would over her beloved son. He takes me to the opera in Santa Fe, and he knows just how to hold my arm as we walk the sidewalk to keep me from the low edge of the curb I can no longer distinguish.
After supper in the evenings, I listen for the village children playing outside in the street in front of the cantina, their laughter clatters with the fading sunlight off the walls, their voices sparkling like music. From time to time, I call them in. Through the housekeeper, I learn which child belongs to which family. I send them to the movies sometimes in Española. The ones who are too poor, I pay for them to go to school.
After dark, when the children are gone back to their own lives, I ask the girl to read to me from Blyth’s books of haiku. As she reads, I run my fingers over the pot on the bench shelf. The clay is smooth and cool under my hand, raised flecks of dirt strung through it. Mino, the gardener, helps me with my pots. We work on them together. When a pot is done, I feel it with my hands. If it’s not what I want, we rework it. If the clay is too dry, we smash it with a certain glee, and start again.
—
MY SISTER CATHERINE’S grandson, Ray, is coming to visit. He came here once when he was thirteen. He has not been here since. His sister was named Georgia after me. I paid her way through college and offered to pay his as well if he went to Harvard, but he preferred to pay his own way and chose a different school. He’s a lawyer now, in his early thirties, about to be married. He has a legal case down here, and will come to visit for the weekend.
The morning he is to arrive, I rise early. The girl comes into my bedroom, lets out the chows, and lights the fire in the small kiva in the corner, then she goes to make my coffee. When she comes back, she helps me dress and we go out to walk. I make my laps around the courtyard, setting a small rock down for every lap to keep track. I feel the blood pulse in my neck, the slight push of life under my fingers when I press them there. Afterward, I rest in the sun by the old well. The door is across the patio. I can only see the darker uneven stain of where I know it is on the wall. The light hits that one spot differently. Sometimes in the dry air and the smell of sage, I swear I sense him in that door.
I have my coffee and yogurt with a handful of raspberries from the garden. I tie up my hair in a scarf. I smooth cream into my hands, working around each knob of my gnarled fingers. My skin is cracked, like the desert floor.
The morning is very white today. I can feel it on my face. It will be a hot day.
When Ray arrives, I take his hand and show him through the house. I tell him that since he was here last, there have been many changes—white carpet now in the studio and in the bedroom.
“The chows were black, you see, and when I could no longer t
ell dog from floor, those black tiles had to go.” In the studio, I point out two paintings. I cannot see them, of course. “That one by the little sitting area is Above the Clouds, and this one here on the long wall is A Day with Juan.” I point to the small stovetop next to the sink. “That little thing clicks on from time to time without anyone hitting the switch. It has a mind of its own.”
“Like other denizens here?” he asks lightly.
I laugh. “Oh, maybe. Speaking of which, where is Juan? I want you to meet him.” But he is nowhere to be found. Candelaria knows nothing. Neither does Mino. Juan does this sometimes: disappears when a member of my family comes or an old friend who belongs to a life I lived before. Perhaps he is afraid someone will judge him. Or perhaps he just needs a few hours on his own to be free. “He’ll be back,” I say to Ray now. “Come let me show you the rest of the house.” We cross the inner courtyard and walk through the short passageway. I show him the dining room with dark floors and bright-white walls, daffodils I placed this morning on the table surrounded by wooden captain’s chairs, Mexican weavings draped over their backs. I show him the pantry, where I keep my kettles, my spice jars, my refrigerator, pots and pans hung on nails against the wall. I tell him that the other girl I used to have would argue with me all the time about the proper way to preserve ginger. He asks me who was right. I shrug. “Well, she’s no longer here.” I take his hand, young and soft, not an artist’s hand—the skin is smooth, and reminds me of my sister Catherine’s hands. We walk through the kitchen. I feel along the worktable with its red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth set near the sink and the stove.