Georgia (21 page)

A
S THE DAYS
pass, the angst in his letters seems to grow. The more joy I pour into mine, the bleaker his become. The building that housed The Room has sold. He'll have to find a new space. He's moved all the art into Lincoln Warehouse for storage. My absence has begun to take root. He's packing for the Lake but afraid to go without me. Restless, too restless. He tries to sleep, but can't. He worries. He can't help it, he writes, he worries about the state of my nerves when I left, the state of things between us. He worries that I don't seem to know—that I've never seemed to truly understand—what I mean to him.

No letter came yesterday. Are you all right, my Sweet Wild Girl? When no letter comes from you, my mind crumbles—a fear that something terrible has happened.

I fold the letters into a neat pile and I write back to him on Mabel's letterhead. There are stacks of it set on every table through the house. A design of Los Gallos takes up nearly half of the page, so you only have half left to fill. I make sure I write him once a day.

“You are an awfully dutiful wife,” Beck says wryly.

“The more he worries, the more work it will be for me,” I say with a smile.

“He'll be fine,” Beck says. “They always are. No matter how much of a fuss they make.”

“When I owe him a letter, the easiest thing is just to write it. Otherwise, it drags on me.”

“Well you shouldn't let it,” she says, apparently more adept with my life than her own. I don't point this out. “I'll write him, Georgia. I'll tell him you've never been better.”

“No, don't say that. That will only make him worry in a different way.”

“I'll tell him you're the picture of serenity, not an ache or pain since we've arrived.”

“Don't tell him about the driving,” I say.

“No. That I'll leave to you.”

W
E TAKE
H
ELLO
out into the desert, then find a spot I like. We walk around, picking up things off the desert floor, bones, rocks, and bits of shell. We are far off, miles from the house, the day I find the first cow skull. The whiteness gleams. I run my hands over it to feel the shape, my fingers through the sockets of the eyes. Beck kneels beside me.

“Touch it,” I say to her. She presses her fingers to it, uncertain. Her hand drops and I laugh.

“Do you ever think our lives stand for nothing?” she says as we walk back to the car. I carry the skull against my chest.

“You mean because of this?”

“Everything seems so old out here, ancient. Like it's always been here. It makes everything I do feel pointless.”

The sage stretches away on either side of us, the silver glint of it like the sea.

“I love that feeling,” I say.

She glances at me, then gives a little sigh and does not speak again until we reach the car. I sort what we've found into piles: the throwaway pile, and what I'll take back to Los Gallos. Then we set up our things and begin to sketch. Beck will last for an hour, sometimes a bit more, but her impulses are unpredictable. She draws in fits and starts, then begins to doubt. She sets down her pencil and lies on the ground near me as I continue to work, her arm over her face to shield the light from her eyes. She is lovely, lying there, with her gray-blond hair sprawled out. I can see the light tug of her blouse where her breasts rise, and the shadow of her nipple through the cotton. I continue working.

“It's hot,” she says. “Don't you want to lie in the sun?”

“I'm not done yet,” I answer.

She makes a little noise, irritated, a few minutes later, then takes off her clothes and lies back down again. After a while, I finish my sketch, order my things, and lie down beside her.

“It's so nice here,” she says, that kittenish smile on her face. She's happier now that I'm not working, either. Her body is beautiful. I remember the photographs he took of her, just under the surface of the lake. Sometimes I think those photographs he made of her body were as beautiful as any he has made. When I see her lying here, next to me in the sun, her scent, her warmth, her long-limbed magic, I see her as he must have. Her body like art.

I
WORK THE
sketches into paint. I am playing with watercolor again and I love it—how the water is free—the color always to an extent at the mercy of what the water is doing. I love its suggestion of that random life present in nature.

My pictures begin to fill the studio. In the corner, a rising pile of bleached bones. From time to time, I'll pick one up. The whiteness gleams, fluent and cool in my hand.

B
ECK AND
I
go out walking behind the
morada
toward the
penitente
cross in the hills. The evening air is so clear it seems to ring. The cross looms large and black ahead of us, implacable against the unruly luminous sky. Once, as a child, at Catholic mass with my father, I saw God in the patterns of stained light on the floor, and while the priest up there droned on and my sisters sat with their backs straight, their prim hands folded in their lap, I shut my ears and dipped my foot into the overlapping pools of that sudden, holy light.

Back in the studio, I paint the cross, the juxtaposition of its black strength against the moving sky. I paint it again and again, its strict form always quartering each canvas in different ways. I paint it as I saw it that first night against the red sunset. Then I paint it again, as I never saw it, with the mass of Taos Mountain right behind it. The arms of the cross cut the sky like the mullion of a windowpane I'm looking through, slim rectangles of dark blue in the two upper quadrants, then lighter below. I don't want it to be quite straightforward, heroic or iconic. I don't want it to be just a cross in a landscape. I want to show how it lives, how the road and the mountain and the backlit evening sky curve around it. I want that frisson, that uncanny, ethereal life this country seems to hold.

I put the stars in last—eight dots of white. The sky is alive with stars, and was, long before the cross was set into this landscape, and will be, long after.

O
THERS ARRIVE.
T
HE
notorious dinners in the Big House grow to be extravagant affairs. Spud Johnson brings a young photographer, Ansel Adams, and his wife. Adams is from California but came to the Southwest to cure a sinus problem. He is in awe when he realizes I am the wife of Stieglitz, whom he calls the greatest photographer of our time. There are local artists: Cady Wells and Russell Vernon Hunter. Charles Collier comes, and Marin arrives in June.

Mabel and Tony fight often—it starts as a squabble, then the argument rises to a high pitch, shooing the rest of us out. “Mabel is so possessive,” I remark to Beck one day as we cross the field back to our cottage, their voices filtering out the windows of the Big House behind us. “If she's not careful, she'll squeeze the life out of him and she won't like what's left
.”

The days here pass so fast, and I am full of paint, in love with this country, the vast desolate yawn of flat land moving away.

Dear Hello is covered with dust. There's been no rain and the car has a thin layer of red earth caked to it. She needs a good wash, I say to Beck, so we slip into our bathing suits and use the hose, but the gush of water is not enough to get it clean, and there are no sponges we can find. Mabel is gone and there's no one to ask where a sponge would happen to be, so we use sanitary napkins to scrub it instead, Beck laughing, giggling, as we go through half a box, stuffing them into a bag that we'll shove to the bottom of the trash. Then we strip down to our skins and turn the hose on each other.

Tony takes us on a trip to Canyon de Chelly to see the ancient cliff dwellings. We get lost in the woods, every road seems to lead nowhere. We have nothing for supper but oranges and whiskey. We go into Santa Fe for the rodeo. Beck picks out matching black sateen shirts for us. I wear a strand of white beads and a silver ring with a large blue stone. I look quite unlike myself. And Beck and I stand together in front of the mirror, studying ourselves and each other, before she slips a cigarette into the side of my mouth and shows me how to get it to dangle just there, without falling.

H
IS LETTERS HAVE
brightened. He has come through something, he writes. And now he has embarked on an adventure of his own. He didn't want to tell me at first, afraid I'd be too concerned, but he went for a fly in an airplane with Donald. Flew higher and higher, then upside down. He has started taking lessons.
I want to take you up, my Love, spin you around up there in the Blue and watch the lake running downhill…
It makes me happy to feel the joy in his letters, like it might be possible: for him to live in his free state, for me to live in mine. I am halfway through the last page:
My Sweetestheart, my only heart, our togetherness can't be touched. I've known that since I met you, from the moment I unrolled those drawings. If there's anything I have faith in, Georgia, it's what you are to me. Not just lips and legs and shoulders and the flare of cheekbone I adore, but the free and nameless part of you—the far side of my soul—that's what you are. We should have had a child. That was a mistake. I see it now.

A thousand kisses, dearest. I send every one to you—

I look up.

Sometimes it seems I know everything about her, that child we might have had. When the thought of her takes me off guard—I sense, I know, it would have been
her
—it hits me: the smell of her skin. Sweet soft soapy, burnt sugar baby smell skin. I know just how the light would strike her hair, how it would fall in a long black wave down her small back. She would have blue eyes and her nose would wrinkle when she didn't get her way. She would be willful. Turning cartwheels on the grass, her legs flashing out from under her skirt, as she turned head over heels, again and again, down the hill.

Once I thought I could be an artist and have a real life, like the life my sister Catherine has. I once thought I could disappear into the world of color and shapes and, when I surfaced from it, satisfied, my family would be there. A child, a husband, their shining faces and open arms. I saw it once so clearly—art and life—and my vision of how those two halves could fit was clear. Perhaps it could have been if I had been willing to put my art second. It would be easy, I realize, to blame Stieglitz and say he took this from me. But that is not entirely true. I've never been willing to put my art second. And the best things I've made—my charcoals, my abstractions, a few of the flowers and trees—have that quality of life ringing through them; they were done out of a kind of ruthless ecstasy when my mind was singularly focused and free, in uninterrupted solitude. I could not live an everyday life of skinned knees, meals to cook, beds to make and also have that kind of solitude, which does not make my longing for the life I did not choose, less.

I get up from the table and walk away from the house, away from the letter and the thought of the child, away from the sharpness of the memory of what I will not have. I walk into the distance and the brightness and the wind-torn skinflint earth that gives nothing back.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
I
find Beck reading on the bed. She sits up when she sees me.

“What is it?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Will you do something for me?” I ask.

“Anything.”

I take out the letter, and she sits on the floor beside me as I read it aloud. I have never done this. Our letters have always been only for us. And it's the oddest feeling hearing his words in my voice fill the room.

I look up when I finish. Her eyes are lowered, she looks down at the Navajo rug underneath us, the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.

“Are they all like that?”

“Each one is different.”

“But he always crams in so much of himself like that?”

“Yes.”

She is silent, then she says, “I don't know what I'd do if someone wrote to me like that. I don't think I'd be able to do much besides wait and tear them open the minute they came.”

I fold the page back together, slip it into its envelope, and put it with the rest. It feels better to me somehow. Like I can leave the thought of that child behind.

“He writes such big sweeping things.” She is looking at me now, her eyes intense on my face. “But they
are
entirely real. More real than ordinary life. And that's Stieglitz, isn't it?”

I nod.

“You know,” she continues, “I remember the first time I met him, the first time he really talked to me. It was like standing in sunlight. I'd never felt anything like that before.”

I could tell her that he is the kind of man who is drawn to things that are free. It's not their beauty he sees, but that other thing, that vital thing past beauty. Life, we could call it, for lack of a better term. He is also the kind of man who can never quite let things exist in the state in which he finds them.

I could tell her, too, that when you are an artist, when you are the kind of person who can vanish for days inside yourself, and you are given this kind of promise:

I will sweep up the details so you can paint.

I will find the words to make you a star. I will make you great. I will frame you, hang you, explain your greatness. I will tell others what to think, what to adore.

As I adore you.

It can be so seductive, the glint of this kind of promise, this kind of man. Particularly when you know it is true when he writes, “I will love you completely, to the end of forever, as no other woman has ever been loved.” No matter how untrue it might sometimes seem, this is what he believes, and it is irrefutable for that reason. Truth more than true.