Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  I know the artist whom she is talking about. Her antics created a sensation but did nothing for feminism. Before I can figure out what to say, O’Keeffe elaborates, “Some have had the nerve to compare the aggressive sexuality of her pose to the photographs that Stieglitz took of me and included in a show of his photography. This is absurd! I was in an intimate relationship with Stieglitz! I don’t want to see that transformed into a cheap template for this young woman’s narcissistic strategy to promote herself. Stieglitz himself insisted, ‘Each time I photograph I make love.’”

  About that I wish that she had said more. I want to ask O’Keeffe about her relationship with Stieglitz. I am curious about how she managed to juggle his roles as the art dealer that he was for her and others, as a photographer, but then as her lover, and then her husband. Better not to go there. After all, Stieglitz, who was more than two decades older than O’Keeffe, has been dead for more than a quarter of a century. Besides, some say that he cheated on her. She is surely not going to want to relive the love affair, the marriage, his flirts with others, betrayals, her abrupt departure alone for New Mexico.

  I’ve read that she puts great value on Stieglitz’s own art—his photography. I’m sure that Stieglitz’s close focus on photographing O’Keeffe—her art, her face, her hands, and her nude body—changed the trajectory of her life and career. I decide to ask her about that instead: “You were the subject of some of his most famous work. Was that difficult?”

  “Stieglitz’s idea of a portrait was not just one picture,” explains O’Keeffe. “His dream was to start with a child at birth . . . As a portrait it would be a photographic diary. It took a lot of patience—posing for him. He would go on shooting me for hours and hours. I had to learn to hold still for what seemed like an eternity.”

  What that makes me wonder, I don’t think I’d better inquire, so I change the subject. “Miss O’Keeffe,” I venture, “you remember being in the Museum of Modern Art’s second show in 1929? They called it ‘Nineteen Living Americans,’ but you were the only woman. How did that feel?”

  “Yes I recall. You might know that Alfred Barr was the curator, but not that he didn’t pick the artists for that show. The museum’s trustees actually voted. You might think that nineteen is an odd number, but that’s all that they could agree upon—not fifteen or even twenty. Some of the trustees, like Duncan Phillips, for example, already collected my work and that of other artists chosen. Each trustee wanted to promote his own artists. Thanks to Stieglitz most of them knew my work well. Some of them collected it.”

  “So the trustees did not know or like work by other women?”

  “Maybe not well enough. Maybe not in the same way.”

  “Miss O’Keeffe,” I ask boldly, about to read her a critic’s comment on her work. “I am sure that you remember Paul Rosenfeld? He once described your work as ‘spiritualizing’ your ‘sex.’ He wrote: ‘Her art is gloriously female. Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us at last to know something the man has always wanted to know . . . [t]he organs that differentiate the sex speak.’”

  “This is false! Paul’s words were often overly reductive. I hear that feminists are now making similar silly claims. One supposedly says that her art—her abstract flowers—represent ‘active vaginal forms,’ while she dismisses my earlier flower forms as ‘passive.’ News of this young woman trying to promote her art by putting mine down irritates me. What irks most is her cheeky attempt to usurp my place in history, all the while making use of what I invented. Why are these youngsters so fixed on fiddling with flowers?”

  “Many of us view your paintings of large flowers as true icons of feminism. We appreciate the flower’s metaphoric identity as a reproductive organ. We champion you as our foremother. There are so many kinds of flowers in your paintings: calla lilies, Oriental poppies, jack-in-the-pulpit, jimsonweed, iris, and red cannas. They have become our positive symbols, our revolutionary images.”

  “Poppycock! This is all too much,” O’Keeffe groans.

  “I must have agency over my body,” I assert, somewhat defensively. “I’m okay with using my existence as a form of resistance. I need an emphatic symbol for that resistance.” What, I wonder, would get her to see her work from our point-of-view? O’Keeffe does not view her flowers with the same gendered gaze as we do. Whatever they once might have seemed to her, by now, after decades of denial, she insists that they are just her close observations of nature, recorded with her particular elan, pizzazz, or whatever you want to call it. She considers herself beyond feminist stereotypes, above the fray.

  “How do you choose your subjects then?” I try once more to tame her. “What is your relationship to nature?”

  “I was taught in school to paint things as I saw them. But that seemed so limiting! If one could only reproduce nature, and get results always less spectacular than the original, why paint at all?” She looks at me as if I had to understand.

  I try again, “But as a woman, how did you see yourself differently than men?”

  “I was constantly experimenting. Eventually, I made up my mind to forget all that men had taught me and to paint exactly as I felt.”

  “Oh, yes!” That’s it, I thought and burst out: “I want to know more about your flowers and female imagery, about their link to female sexuality, to female agency.”

  “You look at my flower and you think you see what I see and you don’t,” she demurs.

  “What,” I ask, “about all those images with central cavities and inner spaces?”

  “Cavities: That sounds like the dentist! I have painted some interior spaces, such as the view from my own home, the East River seen from inside the apartment in the Shelton. All that concrete and those tall buildings—”

  Oh no, I interrupt: “I meant that the flowers seem like metaphors for female anatomical forms, for women’s sexuality.”

  “What metaphors? My work is as objective as I can make it! I suppose that the reason that I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like such interpretations people tried to pin to my images.” She continues, “I just learned about some feminist showing slides of my work along with those of other artists at a women’s arts festival at some Ivy League university. She had the nerve to argue that these women—from myself to Louise Bourgeois to some Miriam Schapiro—all made art with the same kind of repeated patterns! Imagine: circular, organic, so-called ‘biomorphic apertures.’ Those openings are supposed to indicate women’s preoccupation with their own inner spaces! What a ridiculous premise,” O’Keeffe concludes, looking at me with suspicion.

  I desperately try to shift the focus: “Why did you decide to paint your flowers so large?”

  “Everyone has many associations with a flower. You put your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.”

  Finally, I cut to the chase: “I love your flowers and would like your permission to reproduce one in color in my book.”

  “What is your book?”

  “My book surveys important women artists who paint.”

  “What is its exact title?”

  “The title is: Treasury of Great Women Painters from the Renaissance to the Present.”

  I now see that O’Keeffe is visibly annoyed. She does not want me or anyone else to put her in a limiting category. She raises her voice and shouts at me, “I am not a woman painter!”

  I feel devastated as O’Keeffe stands up and indicates that the interview is over. She glares. “Just do your work. Leave mine alone.”

  WARREN MOORE is professor of English at Newberry College, in Newberry, South Carolina. When not discussing Chaucer or Samuel Johnson, he is the author of Broken Glass Waltzes, a novel, and a number of short stories, including “Office at Night” from In Sunlight and Shadow.
He lives in Newberry with his wife and daughter.

  He wishes to thank his parents for introducing him to Dali’s work, and Susan Frommeyer, MD, for technical advice.

  The Pharmacist of Ampurdan Seeking Absolutely Nothing by Salvador Dali

  AMPURDAN

  BY WARREN MOORE

  Alan Bowling was walking again. The golden light of the Colorado autumn played across the rusts and browns of the ground beneath him. Behind him, the city. The air was cool here, away from the shops, the school, the fringes of the city of Ampurdan.

  Alan didn’t know why the city—pfft, city. Don’t put on airs; at most, a town, really—was named Ampurdan. He had read that the word was an old name for a place in Spain, now called Emporda. He himself privately called it “Ampersand,” a place between two other places, connecting them by force of . . . by force of what? How did an ampersand connect things, other than by the will and in the mind of the person connecting them? The and of the ampersand, the conjunction, was between whatever two things the speaker, the thinker, chose to conjoin. And since in Alan’s life, the only conjunctions he saw were the compounding of day upon day, there seemed to be little sense of a period to this place, to this life. Merely a string of days becoming ellipsis, until one day each inhabitant reached an end of words.

  If I keep thinking like this, I’m liable to lapse into a comma, Bowling thought, and smiled at the joke. He knew he wouldn’t tell it to anyone else, not when he was back at work, not at the grocery later. It would have been too hard to explain, for something barely clever.

  A few minutes before, he had seen another walker—perhaps a tourist? Alan laughed, although only the dust could hear him. This was no place for tourists, not because it was rugged, or crime-ridden, or much of anything, really, but because it wasn’t much of anything—only a river and flat ground and the town that grew around the river. There was a mountain, but it was too far away to bring people to the city for the view. There were gullies here and there, but not the canyons people might explore. There were shops, a few restaurants, a couple of doctors, Alan’s pharmacy. There were people, of course, but the same sort of people one might find anywhere, doing the things people had always done—eating, working, mating, growing, or dying.

  And walking. Alan had been walking for a long time. Enough years ago that he didn’t recall exactly why, he had walked away from the pharmacy one afternoon. Afternoons were slow times—his assistant, Marshall, and the technician could handle any customers—and he felt the urge to be somewhere other than behind his counter. So he told Marshall he was going out for a smoke (Why? He didn’t smoke, but that first time, he felt as though he should give a reason.), and he walked away from the shop and into the countryside. It was three hours later when he returned, and if Marshall looked at him oddly, he didn’t say anything about it, nor did he when Alan did the same thing a few days later, and again a few days after that.

  Eventually, it just became a part of the routine. If Marshall speculated about Alan’s peregrinations, he never said anything. Perhaps for a time he thought that Alan had a woman in one of the houses or apartment blocks, but he never asked, and Alan never said.

  There was no woman, of course. Not that Alan was immune—he had dated on occasion, and he had a good job, owning his own store—he could have been a catch. And indeed, once, there was a woman. Her name was Carolyn, and she had dark hair and fair skin, with eyes the color of glass found in the desert. She might have been one he wanted, but she chose another. And a few years later, after her husband Derek had died, and while her name would sing in Alan’s head, but before he could quite reach to her, she chose still another. And with time, she and her new husband left, and Alan no longer knew where they were, only where he was—in Ampurdan, in the city around which he would walk.

  In fact, Alan couldn’t really say why he had begun to walk those years before, and he couldn’t say why he did it now, years later. Sometimes there was a satisfaction in feeling the ground beneath his feet, in knowing he had traveled a certain distance in a certain time. (Had he traveled? He remembered a physics lecture from college: “Work is force over distance. You may apply a great deal of force,” the professor said. “You may grow very tired. You may strain your muscles and tear your ligaments. But no matter how much force you apply, if the recipient of the force ends where it began, you have ultimately done no work.” At the end of each walk, Alan would be back at the drugstore, among the pills from the pharmaceutical companies and the chemicals he had for the rare occasions when he might need to compound a prescription himself. Had he traveled?)

  Other times, people would see him headed to the outskirts of the city, to the federal land where the road ended and there was only land and sky, and they would say to him, “Ah, Dr. Bowling! Walking for your health, I see.” And Alan would smile, glancing down a bit, half raising his hand, and keep walking, and the people he passed would congratulate themselves for their alacrity, but Alan knew that wasn’t why he was walking either. It was good for him, true—certainly that’s what the doctors said, and it kept him trim. But he never thought of that as a reason, never mind the reason, that he did it. He did it, because . . .

  He did it because.

  And that seemed like enough, most days, and when it didn’t, he might not walk that day. And today, as he walked, the air was cool enough on his face that the hair on the back of his neck raised just slightly.

  Carolyn’s lips had felt cool like that, once, before she told Alan that she was going to accept Derek’s proposal. Alan congratulated her automatically, and told her he wished them happiness. Maybe they had happiness, before the cancer took Derek. Maybe she had happiness now, with another man.

  After a time, Alan turned back toward the town, toward his work, the prescriptions that needed filling or refilling, the customers he saw more or less often, depending on their health. As he moved back to the fringe of the town and the road to the shopping district, he saw a little boy. As he walked closer, he recognized the child as Jordan Hopkins; Jordan’s parents ran a teacher’s supply store in what passed for a downtown. He asked Jordan about his recent sore throat, and Jordan said he was fine and had missed only a couple of days of school but had been okay in time for the school carnival. Score one for Zithromax, Bowling thought, and smiled.

  “What are you doing?” the boy asked him.

  “Going back to work,” Alan said. “I’ve been walking.”

  “Were you looking for something?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If I were walking, I think I’d look for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Treasure? Monsters?” Jordan thought for a moment. “Something.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen either of them around here, but if I do, I’ll let you know. But you shouldn’t try looking for the monsters, I think. You could get in trouble.”

  “I won’t get in trouble,” Jordan said. “I’m magic.”

  “All the same, best to avoid the monsters.” The boy shrugged. As he started to walk again, Bowling said, “There’s a good thing about looking for nothing much.”

  “What?”

  “You’re pretty much guaranteed to find it.” But the child was already turning away, and Alan Bowling made his way back to the drugstore.

  That night, after he had washed his dinner dishes and ironed the next day’s clothes, Alan Bowling thought of Carolyn. It was something he did from time to time, almost never on purpose.

  He would lie in bed, listening to the stereo playing Glenn Gould playing Bach, letting his mind wander before he slept, and sometimes he fell asleep right away, and other times he would think of the next day’s tasks at work. But there were times he would think of Carolyn, not quite with regret, but with wonder at the choices he had made, and that she had made, and how their lives intersected and then veered away. He didn’t know what it was about Bach that called her to mind—her tastes ran more to Piazzolla—but it did. Perhaps it was the interthreading of Bach’s lines, e
choing from left to right hand and back, always elegant, wasting nothing.

  He thought of the months after she had chosen Derek. He had forced himself to be gracious—Ampurdan was a small town—and he had never been one for being obviously unhappy. But as day wound into day, songs would play on the radio—not “their song,” they had never really had such a thing, but still a song that would make her reverberate in his mind—or he’d see a picture in a magazine of a woman tilting her head a certain way, or a shard of stained glass that called her eyes to mind, and his breath would catch with sorrow. Anything could remind him of her, and everywhere was her absence.

  But as months faded one into another, Alan learned that even in a small town, it wasn’t so hard to avoid seeing people he didn’t want to see. And with time, he grew used to the way things were, as the tongue grows used to the gap where a tooth used to be. But not always. There were still nights where he wondered if things could have been different, if he had met her sooner, if he had said something or not said something else, how decision had led to decision after decision.

  Years can pass that way, and they had, until one day, Browning received a compounding request from an oral chemotherapy suspension—it was sometimes necessary, when a chemotherapy patient couldn’t take a pill or capsule, but it was uncommon, because the drugs didn’t last as well in that form.

  He looked at the order, and saw the patient’s name: Derek Lipton. He looked at the prescription again: etoposide, and as he read, he saw the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. Browning was surprised; AML generally didn’t hit this early. Still, it was bad news, with a cure rate below 50 percent, and the fact that Lipton was having to take his chemo this way didn’t bode well either. In fact, it might be best for Lipton if he just—

  Got it over with? Browning shook his head and got to work.

  Each week, the scrip would come in; each week, Alan Browning would prepare it. As the weeks went by, Browning wondered if Lipton received his medication at the hospital, or if Carolyn gave the etoposide to Derek herself. He wondered how long Lipton would last, how hard it was for Carolyn, if she still hoped he might get better, or if there had been much hope at all.