Georgia (25 page)

When the picture is done, I paint another, but the composition is off from the start. My hands, the color, the form, nothing seems to be working. An upper petal distorts, like dolphin lips. Unfixable. I quit and cut it off the frame.

I
N MID-
N
OVEMBER, FINALLY,
Deskey phones to say the powder room is ready. I pack my things and go down. Radio City is a madhouse. Workmen streaming everywhere, plaster, sawdust, half-finished light fixtures, wires popping out, ladders leading sky-high to holes in the wall. A chandelier lies in the center of the dark-red carpet in the lobby, a massive X and circle marked on the ceiling directly above. I step carefully around it, following Deskey and an assistant. We thread our way through the chaos up to the second mezzanine, and walk through a space in the framing. The powder room is pristine. A gleaming whiteness. Everything as we agreed. Canvas, perfectly smooth, wraps the walls, the gentle dome of the ceiling, and each curved corner. The eight mirrors wink back at us. I skim my fingertips over the walls, and feel a quick joy. This is what I wanted. This is what I went to war with Stieglitz over. A vast landscape. A fresh start.

I turn to Deskey and smile.

“You are pleased, Miss O'Keeffe.”

“Yes.”

He leaves his assistant with me. As I am unpacking my things, I notice the smell—that light sweet stink of wet. Moisture in the air. I can feel it on my face and hands. I hadn't noticed at first. My heart sinks. This room is not ready. I glance at the assistant, but she has sat down on a box and is busy writing a few things into a stenograph notebook. I scan the walls. My eyes fall on a slight shadow in the corner—a raised point in the surface. I walk over to it and run my hand along the canvas below that corner. It's dry in spots, but not everywhere; there are distinct places where I can feel the damp of wet plaster underneath. My fingers come to a lump near a seam. With a fingernail, I puncture it. White goo seeps out.

I turn to the girl. “Get him.”

“Mr. Deskey's in a meeting until noon.”

“Just get him.”

She hurries off. I continue walking around the room. I can see it now, feel it—this whole room is a disaster—nothing's what it seems. There's nothing pristine about this. Nothing dry or clear or beautiful. Nothing brave or bold or real. I feel a wave of fury. Here I am again. Held down, held back, in a power struggle with some arrogant man, his ego and incompetence that has nothing to do with my art. It's like they're all together in some maddening conspiracy to make me good enough but not good enough to topple them. A deranged thought. I know it. And yet. My fists clench. I notice then a light-brown stain on the floor. I bend and sweep my fingers through it. Kerosene.

What a mess. This room. This project. This decision I made. A ruin.

I'm putting my things away when Deskey comes in.

“You put canvas up on wet plaster,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.

“Miss O'Keeffe, please.”

I continue packing away sketchbook, charcoals, paints, the few brushes I took out. I replace them now in their long beds, everything neatly arranged. My hands burn—all the shame and frustration and rage has gone to my hands.

“Miss O'Keeffe?”

I look at him. “I can't work on this surface.”

“We'll fix it.”

I want to laugh, or slap him.

“I give you my word.”

“Mr. Deskey,” I say coldly. “I told you from the start, I won't work under these circumstances. You were not honest with me and you know it. When was this room plastered? Two, three days ago? Then canvas slapped up, and a kerosene heater to force it dry? Do you think I'm that stupid?”

“This can all be redressed. I assure you. We'll fix it.”

“You can't fix this. This whole room will have to be stripped and redone, and even if you do that by the day after tomorrow, it's still going to take another three weeks to dry in.”

“We'll extend the contract.”

I hear the assistant gasp. A huge piece of canvas has begun to sag from one of the opposite ceiling corners. It goes down in slow motion, a slow loosening wave away from the curve of the wall.

I turn to Deskey. “I won't do this work.”

“We have a contract.”

“I'm not going to do it.”

I leave the room and walk out into the street. The blaze of the concrete, the brash black shine of the cars, things seem outrageous, overloud, my mind barely hanging together.

A
T THE
S
HELTON,
I tell Stieglitz the job is over. Done. He's had his way. This mural business, what a failure it's turned out to be—just as he so prophetically claimed—the walls literally falling apart.

“Say it. Say:
I told you so.
”

“I wouldn't say that, Georgia. Ever.”

Lie. I sink into the sofa, head in my hands, nerves shot. So absurd. Imagining I needed to do something like this to make a point, for no other reason than because it was work I thought I wanted.

“I'll take care of it tomorrow,” he says. “Tell me what you want. I'll make it happen.”

“Just get me out. It's done. I'm done.”

I break down into tears. The cushion bends as he sits beside me. The calm pressure of his hand on my back. My chest tightens. I don't want his hand near me.

“I'll fix it tomorrow, Love.” His voice is awful and gentle, sweet of course, because this is how he needs things to be. He can love me this way—when I'm weak and in pieces, when he can play the hero. The whole thing is just so damning. All I wanted was the work.

I
DON'T GO
out. I don't want to see anyone.

No ambition. No impulse moving in me. Only the deadness of feeling I seem to be trapped under. Scraped up by the failure of everything.

I think about New Mexico—the hills, the distance, the space, the sky. I need to go there. I need to be in it. I've never gone in winter. I don't know who is out there in winter, though someone must be. I need a plan. I make a mental list. Write Marie Garland. Or Frieda Lawrence. Call Brett. I can't call Mabel. The whole public debacle of Radio City is just the kind of gossip she delights in. How she'd lord that over me.

Just go. Pack. Find a train. Go west to Catherine's. Stay a few weeks. Keep going.

It hardens into resolve, but then feels like too much, all those machinations, conversations. Too much to explain.

I sew and fix my canvases. I try to paint. All I want is to work, to get back to what I know. I want the freedom again to be alone in the room. I put the brush to the paper, but it just slips around. No shapes. No burn. Nothing.

S
TIEGLITZ CALLS THE
Shelton twice a day from the gallery to check on me. Once at ten. Again at two.

His voice on the phone urges me to paint. “It will make you feel better,” he says.

“I don't feel anything.”

“You're so fragile right now, aren't you? Oh, my Love.”

Is that what you're telling them? I think. That I'm
fragile.
That Radio City has ground me right down? That I am
your Love
and it's all such a shame. Bastard. The word echoes in my head.

“I'll be fine,” I say, but my voice rings flat and he says so.

“Georgia, please try to be well.”

Which feels like somewhat senseless advice given the box of a life I live in.

A
HORSE'S SKULL,
I decide, only because my eyes happen to fall on that when I'm hanging up the phone one morning. I make a few sketches, then set a canvas on the easel in my studio. I squeeze out the colors into their discrete piles on the palette, sit there and wait. I don't seem to know what comes next. Everything is gray compared with the colors on the glass palette. The floor, my dress, my shoes.

I dip the very tip of my brush into the blue. I want to taste it. I want the thrill of color moving inside me again. The brush floats near the canvas. Where to start? Where to start? A stroke there, but the moment I've made it, it's wrong. Everything I've done, what I've let happen, all wrong. In that ruined stroke on the canvas, I see: It makes no difference. What I do or don't do. Where I go. I'm so far from that girl who was once so full of passion it poured out into shapes on paper. Now it seems I have no passion. No clear vision. Now I have nothing. I'm weak in a way I despise. Weak, in a way I never dreamed I could be.

This isn't just him, and what he's done to me. It's what I've let him do.

I walked in with my eyes wide open. I was the one who reached out on that train platform, drew his face to mine, and kissed him that first time. I knew who he was from the start. I knew what he was capable of, and I knew what I'd become for him—artist, lover, muse. I knew where that sled going downhill was headed, and I knew what I'd get out of it. What I did not know is what I'd give up.

I run my fingertip from the ferrule down the handle to its end, dig the point into my palm, press deeper until the pain spikes, a funny white burst in my head—an exploding star.

“
Y
OU'LL BE ALL
right,” he says one morning on his way out the door to the Place. Such a ridiculous thing to say, I am going to point out, but then he turns and darts over to the table, looking for something he must have set down, in the wrong place evidently because he can't find it now, a promise to phone, then gone, the apartment empty. Out the window, a very far distance down, umbrellas knock around like small black flowers on a gray moving stream. I step back, startled.

Lying in bed, I walk the rooms of the house where I grew up, the kitchen where my mother peels potatoes, past the room where my father's brother lies dying from TB. I walk back and forth, looking for the door, which is not in its proper place. I slip through the walls, outside. In the distance, I can see my father. His back is always to me, his tall form always moving away. Two of my sisters are in the garden, their heads bent close together; their dresses glimmer in the sun, their hands touch, and they hold a creature between them, an injured bird cupped between their joined fingers. Then one—Claudia?—glances up and sees me. “Georgia, come!” she cries, and I feel a surge of joy. The trees ring with her voice. The moment shatters, so beautiful and precious, the shed pieces of one moment giving way to the next, and I understand that this is where life dwells—in the unregistered time between moments when you are filled with no thought, no awareness, just a garden, ancient sunlight, your sister's voice.

I knew it then. As children, we are oracles. We are flesh, hunger, eyes. As a child, I could hear the stir and groan of clouds. I could feel the shift in the grass, blades parting under the wind, the yawn and stretch of a bud, opening—

The memory snaps.

I
CRY UNTIL
I am an ocean, until the walls slip down. The bed does not feel safe. I get out of it and into a corner, where the walls come together like I could press myself right through that line.

He finds me in the evening when he arrives home, crying at the teetered edge of everything. Hands over my ears to keep out the sound in my head. My knees shoved in tight, to keep it all held together, to keep some inkling of myself in myself, my body pressed as hard as I can get it into that seam of the wall.

What have we done? I start to ask him, open my mouth to ask, but the words don't come. He kneels beside me.

H
E CALLS MY
sister Anita, who comes. She helps me pack a few things and brings me to her apartment. I spend Christmas there, in a room that is my own, luxurious and large, but not, in the end, enough to hold the avalanche falling down inside me.

Noises everywhere. And a stabbing fear of water. I can't even run a bath. Stieglitz comes to see me nearly every day. There's nowhere safe. He sits by my bed in a chair. I can't bear it, and finally I whisper to Anita,
Tell him to go.
Can't bear to see him, can't bear to think, because of all that I remember of what I was and dreamed and wanted.

E
IGHTY-EIGHTH AND
E
AST
End. Doctors Hospital. In the white room where they've placed me for safekeeping, my ears fill with voices. Loud, bright, a million unknown tongues.

For most of the day, I am alone. The nurses come through with cool efficient hands. They change the bedpan, bring meals I barely touch, and check my pulse. Once a day, the doctor glides in on his rounds. Then they are all gone, the door sealed shut, and I am alone again. My mind drains out. The dead come from far away, looking not as they should. My mother. My father. My dear brother Alexius. And the ceiling is there in the corner, and my soul, if there is a name for that transparent part of me that comes and goes, has gone to do its business elsewhere.

I hear the sound of water—the roar of the sea at night in Maine, the black underwater sound of the Lake that night in the storm, so many years ago, when the boy tipped over out of his canoe, the beautiful youth of that boy a casualty, perhaps the first casualty, of our petty arguing, our discontent.

I can feel the weight of a body in the bed. Head. Buttocks. Legs. Arms. A strange body in a stranger's bed.

And I ask Stieglitz, who is not here: “Is this my comeuppance? You always said it was the blazing hunger in me that you loved, but is this what I get? For being a woman who wanted too much—too much feeling, too much freedom, too much sky?”

How guilty I have been of that wanting.

I am not the woman you mistook me for. I was never whiteness. I was never pure. I was never the woman with the unpocked skin and the beautiful hands in the photographs.

I am thinking these things when the wall opens, and his head comes through—then the whole of him appears in the sliding wall that I suddenly realize is the door. Dressed in black, a stricken concern on his face—a grief so torqued, fraudulent, with that treacherous loden cape.

He takes a step toward the bed, and there is screaming. A woman screaming in my head, and I see in his face he hears her, too.

Nurses appear, clothed in their whites, scrubbed hands take him by the arm and draw him quickly, firmly, back through the hall.

The door shuts. The screaming stops. I can still hear, faintly, the grain of his voice in the hallway.
She is my wife.

H
IS LETTERS COME
to me in the white room. The everyday details and abstract wonderings it's his luxury to have. I do not answer. I have nothing to say. They have given me paper, and it sits in a neat short stack, eyeing me blankly on the table by the bed, a pen beside it. Anita comes with Ida. They bring me books and magazines to read. My mind spools back somewhat while they are there, then weakens when they leave. I take short walks in the hallway. I write to Beck, but the handwriting is someone else's handwriting—crumpled, frail.

After four weeks, I am well enough that the doctors permit him to visit for ten minutes. We meet each other like strangers.

“Won't you sit down?” I point to the visitor's chair. The air in the room is polite.

“How are you?” he asks.

That
is a rotten question. He should know by now.

“What have you brought?” I point to the slim packet under his arm.

Photographs, it turns out, of my exhibition titled
Paintings—New & Some Old.
There is my trumpet flower; a slim cross; barns and shells.

Art on the little hospital table between us. After all, this is what we know how to do—this calm, almost habitual practice we are proficient at—studying a few pieces of art no matter how roiling the world around us is. It is after all what first bound us together, then saved us—if one would call it that—again and again.

“Tasty food here,” I say. “Eggs this morning.”

“I've wanted you to see your show.”

I touch the edge of a print.

“I think it would be good for you to see it, Georgia.”

“Yes, I do see. Thank you for thinking of me and bringing these.”

“No, I mean I think you should see them on the walls of the Place.”

His voice has that urgency—that dark push in it I once loved. It fritters me now.

“I don't believe they'll let me out,” I say carefully. “I'll discuss it, though, with the doctor when he comes.”

“I've already asked,” he says.

“Of course you have,” I murmur.

“He said if you are willing…” Again the pleading look. I feel my heart sink. Walls everywhere. “Please, Georgia.” I notice an uneven patch of white scruff at his chin where the razor skipped a spot. “Please,” he says, again.

Of course I will go. I should want to. To see my things, my show that he's put up for me. This is what a good wife would do, I think to myself. Which is not the reason I will go. Just to be clear. But right now it's too much work to argue.

A
NITA BRINGS ME
to the Place. Stieglitz is in the back room, reading the paper, a letter drying on the desk. He leaps to his feet as we come in, so youthful, bounding across the room toward me. I try not to shrink.

“I wanted sunlight for you,” he says, a sweeping gesture toward the window and the scud of clouds through it. “It was here an hour ago, I begged it to stay. Alas.” He smiles.

Alas.

The floor spins. I feel a little sick to my stomach. He has taken my hand, a firm pressure. It should be comforting, his hand. I can only manage to stay for twenty minutes. Even that feels too long. The Place, I notice, is empty apart from us.

“Just last week, Elizabeth Arden bought one of the earlier flower paintings,” he reports.

“And from this show—has anything sold?”

He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

Because the new work's no good, I think. The lines are very nicely done—all that—but you can't put the bold back in when it's gone.

He glances away. He clears his throat. He seems to be waiting.

Let him wait.

A
T THE END
of the month, when I am released from the white room, I can't bear to go back to the Shelton. That vertiginous view, too intense.

We pack our things and speed north. The countryside is familiar—like a ride I took once. I do not tell him this is how it feels to me. Then I would have to explain it.

After two days, he leaves me in Margaret's charge. For weeks, I am boneless, drifting. I do nothing but sleep until late morning, lie in the sun, and eat until my underwear no longer fits, and I have to wear Stieglitz's undershorts. I can't get back into myself. My insides are a scrap bag, full of limp mismatched things. I take the new roadster convertible up to flat ground so I can walk. The hills feel like too much effort. I keep the top down and drive very slowly, not quite trusting myself.

A stray cat has begun to come around the house. I name her Long Tail and watch her little pink tongue lap cream off the inside surface of the bowl. She is one long feathery gesture, like a stroke in charcoal I might have made once in another life when every day was a different color.

When Stieglitz arrives for the summer, he banishes the cat. He's always despised them. I dissolve into tears, and she stays.

I
T'S ODD HAVING
him around, going through the motions of a husband and wife, as if that still had relevance. It does seem to, though, to him. He is attentive, aware of me moment-to-moment, where I am in the house, what I might need, my happiness, my mood. Almost as if he believes this will be our life again, reconstituted. As if I've only temporarily stepped away.

At one point when things feel nice between us, I try to explain that something in me is broken, more than broken, and that thing is the very part of me that drew him in the first place. He looks at me sadly. The sunlight through the trellis tattoos one side of his face.

“You'll get well,” he insists. “You must rest. You
will
get well.”

I wonder who he is trying to convince.

H
E WRITES LETTERS
to those who cannot come to visit because of my “illness.” He knows they cannot come without my having to say anything. All I have to do is turn into myself and go silent when he brings up the possibility of inviting so-and-so. The silence frightens him, although at times I sense a trace of irritation, perhaps because he is helpless to fix it and he knows the last thing he can do is get angry.

He works on drafts of the essays for the new book.
America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait.
Waldo Frank is editing it. My art will be featured, though I am not submitting a written piece. Everyone else is: Marin, Strand, Dove, Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein—all have written some glowing laudatory piece about Stieglitz.

The Hill is quiet. My heart has begun to settle. Some days, it seems so still I wonder if it's stopped.

Beck writes from Taos. She and Paul have separated. She has gone back out west to be with a man who runs a trading post there. Stieglitz and I don't discuss it, like we've tacitly agreed it's better that way.
You'll manage, dear Beck,
I write to her.
Someday, this will seem a small thing.

I haven't painted since last fall. One day I am surprised to see the goldenrod in bloom. A year since I saw it last. Is that possible? I walk out to the shanty, sit in the meadow, and wait for myself to come back.

S
TIEGLITZ STARTS TO
go back and forth to New York to prepare for the Marin exhibit.

One weekend when he comes up to visit we lie in bed together before breakfast. He kisses me gently, peels the clothes from my body, and makes love to me. It is slow and sad, like a leave-taking. He holds me afterward—how tender it feels, lying together like this.

“It should have always been like this,” I say.

“I know,” he answers, but I can see he really doesn't, he only says it to please me. My eyes fill—such a rotten betrayal, those hot tears I crumple into. He whispers my name and pulls me closer, and I let him, a part of me wishing I could lose myself there all over again.

Later that morning, we take a walk up Hubble Lane. He tells me the news from the city. How Rosenfeld stopped by the gallery with the artist Cady Wells who asserted that my
Black Iris
is arguably the greatest painting in the world. And the young poet Cary Ross lost a drinking contest against Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife, Zelda, does watercolors and drawings. Apparently, about a year ago, she raved to Cary about some things of mine she saw—but now she's locked up in her own white room. We talk about this, and other things that have to do more with other people, and only obliquely with us. So many names to keep track of. All these names prop something up in him. Funny, how clearly I see it all now.

As we come back around to the house, we linger under the old chestnut trees. The leaves a swath of purple, yellow, scarlet at our feet.

“There was an owl in these trees just three days ago,” I say. “Such a great big thing, that bird.”

He tells me how last week, back in the city, he was going through some things in storage, and found a batch of photographs he had taken so many years ago when I first came to him. Platinum prints and early Palladios.

I don't want to hear about this.

“Look at the yellow leaves,” I say, reaching to one still on a branch. Unthinkably bright. I touch it—that's all it takes—it falls.

“Those photographs of you were so beautiful,” he continues.

“Why did you come this weekend, Alfred?”

“To see you.”

“Sometimes it feels you come to see me, call and write and all the rest, because you feel you ought to.”

“I come because I want to.”

“It doesn't quite seem so.” I don't mean to be unkind when I say it. It's just a fact. But he is hurt.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I wonder if I'd not run across you, if you would have been better off.”

A pointless question, now, for either of us.

I change the subject. “How is Dove? I keep meaning to ask you.”

Over the past few months, I have begun to see all too clearly what is true: what we did and failed to do, what we believed and wanted and destroyed.

I don't say this. There's a split now between what I will tell him, and this other stirring thing in me—a tiny, keen life that moves like a little plant in its own black soil with its separate thinkings.

I
PACK HIM
a sandwich for the train, cut celery and cake.

“Don't forget to have your buttonholes fixed.” I point to where they have loosened, threads spitting out. It kicks in me—a funny sadness—that his coat doesn't fasten properly because he doesn't have the time, or take the time, to have something so everyday and essential mended.

“I could fix them for you,” I say.

“No, no, Love,” he says absently. “I'll have it done.”

I
STRIP THE
sheets from his bed to wash. I fold the blankets and place them in the closet. Leaving the room, I pause by the window. Grass strung through with wet dusk, the poplar like some unearthly sentinel against the sky. He claimed this bedroom, years ago, for the view. Every time he arrives at the Lake, the first thing he'll do is come upstairs to see it. This matters to him, so deeply, to know that everything is as it has been and as he expects it to be.

The kitchen is empty, a bowl of eggs on the counter Margaret must have brought. Her coat gone from the peg. She must be outside somewhere. I fix my tea and write to him. How hard a letter is now. I force myself to fill a page. I write about the cat, about the house. I inquire about his day. So much work, it seems, to come up with this litany of news that sounds like something but amounts to nothing. I put the pen down. I remember when he first wrote to me about the Lake, he and his life only the gauze of a dream. I was still in Texas, my body already filling with his faith: in my talent, my art, in what I wanted, the risks I'd only just begun to take. I poured my entire self into my letters to him.