Georgia (20 page)

L
ADY
D
OROTHY
E
UGENIE
B
RETT
has moved into the Shelton. Quite a grand Englishwoman, she has a tremendous silver ear trumpet nicknamed Toby, and I can't help but like her. She drags Stieglitz and me down to her room to see her pictures—her Ceremonials. She tries to talk Stieglitz into a showing. “We'll have to see,” he demurs.

When I mention I'm thinking of taking a trip to Europe this summer, she immediately jumps in with that haughty Englishwoman clip that instead of Europe, I
must
go to Taos, to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan at her fiefdom.

“Everyone seems to say so,” I answer. “Mabel used to invite Alfred once a year.”

Lady Brett turns Toby in Alfred's direction, asking, “And how did you find it?”

“I didn't go.”

“Why on earth not?”

He mumbles something about his heart and the altitude. She asks him to please speak up, and that's the end of it. But later that month, when I see Strand's new photographs of Taos on exhibit at The Room, I decide.

I
TELL
B
ECK
I want to go.

“You should,” she says. “You'd love it there.” We're out for lunch together. She's got her white shirt casually unbuttoned at the throat, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, that gangster air to her she sometimes adopts. “I'll have Paul talk to him.”

“I'll talk to him myself.”

“It would be good for you, particularly now—” Her voice breaks off.

I frown. Mrs. Norman. They all know.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“Stupid nonsense,” I say. And it is. This obsession he has with pretty young things. But it's also distracting, aggravating, humiliating—and I keep thinking to myself I'd rather leave for a while and let it run its course.

“Men are awful,” Beck says.

“I just want to get out from under it. I want to do something new for my art.”

“Let Paul talk to him.” Her cigarette glows as she inhales.

N
O, IS WHAT
he says, which shocks me. Absolutely not. Georgia's too fragile right now to make that sort of trip.

“That's what he told Paul,” Beck reports back.

“
F
RAGILE
?”
I
SAY
when he comes home.

“This business you keep on about not wanting another show.”

“Oh, is
that
the business that's wrecking things?”

I'm not proud to admit the deep satisfaction I feel when I see the look on his face.

“You need to focus on your work,” he says, with less conviction, though.

“That trip will be good for my work.”

“I don't think it's the right time.”

“And I don't think that's for you to decide—what's right for me.”

Silence then. Bleak and steep and strange.

T
HEY ALL FALL
in to convince him. Dear Pudge, Lady Brett, Paul and Beck, even Hartley.

Think about Georgia's art, they say. There's no place like it in terms of light and views. Think of her early work—what she did with the sky in Texas, those Celestial Solitaire watercolors you're still always dragging around. There's so much out there to inspire.

Slowly, they wear him down. But it is Beck's offer to accompany me that finally shifts his mind.

“I told him I'd look after you,” she says to me, a triumphant gleam in her gray eyes—“be a sort of nanny.”

“The nurse sort, I hope, not the nanny-house sort,” I say.

“Just a little spy.”

I scoff. “Wouldn't that be fantastic if I were up to something worth spying on?”

She laughs.

“He knows you'll keep a tight rein on me,” I say.

“That's right. I'll have you with a cig in your mouth before a week's out.”

I
TELL HIM
we will still have our summer.

“When?” he says snippily.

“I'll be back in July.”

“July first?”

“Yes.”

It's startling—after all these months of feeling so far away from him—to feel his need of me.

“Do you know I want you to do this if it will make you happy?” he says.

“I do know that.”

“Do you know I love you?”

I'm silent.

He sighs. “You're always going away.”

“I'll be back soon.”

He paces the bedroom, picks up his tie clip, sets it down, moves to something else.

“Lie down with me,” I say. He looks up, his face sad. And it's that pause that shreds my heart. For a second, I almost believe that if I stay, I can hold him close enough and fix it, change it—there would be a place, a way that we could rinse it all from us, and find ourselves again in that small studio on 59th with the cot and the skylight and the orange floor and sunlight streaming through into that time when it was just the two of us, and we were lovely together, bodies of light, that pure uncomplicated desire when I was his only world and he was mine.

“Lie down with me,” I say again and he does, without a word, and I hold him. I kiss his eyelids, smooth under my lips like shells.

B
ECK AND
I
board the
20th Century Limited
on April 27th. I don't stand up to watch him go.

The river flows into hills, and the hills fold down into the flatness of nothing. As the train rushes on, Beck falls asleep beside me, her silvering hair, her face with the short deeper lines that have begun to form between her brows.

Before we left, she and Paul stood a distance apart from us, far enough that we couldn't hear their voices. They were arguing, some kind of awful row. He was telling her something, and I saw her face wither, and knew, watching them, that their marriage would fail.

Stieglitz knew as well. “It won't last, will it?” he said to me.

“No.”

“It was never quite right, was it?”

“I don't know if you can ever really call that until after.”

He shook his head. “If you look at them clearly, you know. Her lack of direction—his lack of conviction and faith. That's always been Paul's failing. For all his talent, and I'd give my teeth for it, he's never quite had the drive to see his gift through.”

“Could be,” I murmured.

“I so love you, Georgia,” he said to me as we stood there on the platform, his arm around my waist, watching them, as if they were strangers, as if they were not us.

I
BREATHE AGAINST
the train window now. My face softens under the fog of my breath on the glass. I wipe it away with my hand as we pass peach and plum trees in bloom, and bare trees with nothing on them yet, new green shining everywhere, and mountains in the distance, very gray. The train rocks, and I ache for him. It was vast once, the passion we felt that still hits me at times like a smell, so sharp I feel I'd throw myself down into hurtling darkness if I believed that would keep me with him, would keep us bound together in the way we used to be.

It comes to me now, our life before, in disparate pieces, like the memory of a country we once sped through.

I
FEEL IT
the instant the door of the train opens in Santa Fe. The sharp sting of the air on my skin, scents of piñon, sage. The dazzling emptiness seems to extend in every direction.

We never told Mabel we were coming for sure, and Beck hesitates when I suggest it now.

“No,” she says, that little-girl pout she gets. “I want you to myself.”

But for such a vast country, news travels astonishingly fast. Several days later, we take a bus to the corn dance at the San Felipe pueblo. Mabel finds us there. Once the host of infamous soirees in Greenwich Village and a champion of the avant-garde, Mabel threw herself at Taos and fell in love with what she will call her strange and sweet country. On her fourth husband now, an Indian named Tony, Mabel lives in an adobe mansion she built on a vast sprawl of land. In the summers, she imports philosophers, artists, and writers, to spice up the tedium.

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.

H
ER HUSBAND,
T
ONY,
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.”

L
OS
G
ALLOS 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.”

T
HE 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.

A
S PROMISED,
B
ECK
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.

E
VERY 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.