Georgia (27 page)

His eyes have closed. I feel a rush of warmth toward him. He looks his age tonight, white hair around the sweet pale of his face. He is almost seventy, and despite whatever foolish mess he gets himself worked up in, despite the fact that he can still make me so angry, in the end he is just a man whose sunlight is behind him.

I reach for his hand. He stirs, startled for an instant, then he sees me.

“You are glorious,” he whispers, his eyes sleepy through his glasses.

I lean over, balancing my weight on the arm of his chair. My lips graze his cheek.

H
E LEAVES TO
go back to the city. A letter arrives. One of those letters that spans his day—an entry at 11:27
A
.
M
. from Fort Edward, in his seat on the train, 2:10
P
.
M
. from Albany, passing the stand of birch trees, the same route we've taken season after season, year after year. Three more entries—8
P
.
M
. from the Place, then 8:23, then 8:38. Ending with his plan to take a bath.

It strikes me as the last letter. I know it isn't. There will be thousands more, exchanged over years, west to east, east to west, his country to mine, and back again. Nowhere near the last and yet, in a way, it is.

I used to think the letters told the story of our life together, the truth of that strange beautiful love. But the letters were never who we were. They were who we wanted to be.

J
EAN AND
I
walk out onto the frozen lake over ripples in the surface where the water has rushed over and gotten trapped. Light winks off the snow. We find a smooth spot out toward the center, and skate in our boots. We slide over the ice and laugh, moving more quickly, sliding, running, almost racing. When I slip and almost fall, he catches my arm. I look up and smile. He is looking down at me, not smiling. Then, neither of us laughs, and there is only the ring of the silence and the white frozen world, drops of thaw like crystal on the trees. The scarf I gave him hangs loose on his neck, the dazzling red of that scarf, and his eyes unending, except for a simple hunger I recognize. His grip on my arm tightens, and I feel it move through me like a current.

We continue walking across the frozen lake back toward the house. We pass children on the road, breaking icicles off the trees, sucking on them, hurling them into the sunlight.

T
HAT EVENING,
I
bump into him as I step from my room into the hall. I close the door, my hand on the knob behind my back.

“Looking for me?” I say.

“Always.”

It's a narrow space, that upstairs hallway.

W
HEN
M
ARGARET LEAVES
after supper, Jean and I go into the living room as usual, but the silence feels new. We are reading, apparently. I have the Jung book open on my lap.

“What
is
this?” he asks, looking at me now, and that seems as far as things are able to go. I want to touch him, taste him in my throat. I want his skin on mine, his mouth. I can barely make sense of the wanting.

Once Stieglitz and I were talking about a painting I had done: one of my flowers he wanted to hang. I wasn't happy with it, though, and didn't want it in my show. I explained it to him this way: That painting was done with my head, before my heart and my body were ready, and while it may be beautiful, it does not have the sense of fire or breath that is life.

I remember this now. I have not answered Jean. He looks back down again at the book—he seems irritated, perhaps because I did not answer.

I
AM WAKENED
by a monstrous low growl. The house seems to shake. I slip out of my bed in my socks and pull a heavy cardigan around me. Jean is by the back window.

“The snowplow,” he says. It's the strangest-looking thing—half boat, half devil, circling the yard, cutting paths through the moonlight, heaping up layers of snow.

“It's cold,” I murmur. He takes my hand, his fingers weave through mine. I glance at him, but he is staring out into the night.

The plow moves off, its light swinging over the trees, the sound of the engine fades down the road. He pulls me toward him, holding my face, and kisses me. A long kiss.

“You should go back to bed,” I say.

“I am going to put you to bed first,” he answers, and we laugh at how teeny it is, the little bed. He tucks me in, then bends to kiss me good night. I grasp his neck and pull him down with me.

My cheek rests against the pillow facing him, his eyes are dark and still they seem to glow in the strange bluish night of the room. I put my palm on the narrow space between us, that thin strip that separates us. We are apart by the span of my fingers.

“This space is the bundling board,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Will that be adequate?”

“If it wants to be.”

“So if I reach across it like this…”

I strike his arm away. “It can be effective,” I say with a smile.

“Does it want to be so effective?”

“Hmm. Not sure.”

“What does it want?”

He traces my fingers. I can smell his skin. He reaches across the space I've marked out and draws open my sweater, his fingers undo the top button on the V of my nightgown.

“I'd steal you,” he whispers, his eyes shining. “Beg you to come with me, leave here, go to your Abiquiu. I'll take you there—”

“Stop,” I say sharply. And he laughs. Catching my fingers, he brings them to his lips. He draws me to him and kisses me hard on the mouth.

Later, I will remember a vague light through the window, the moon perhaps, or the blue itself, how it fell across my thigh.

A
FTERWARD HE LIES
near me, his face near my face.

“Why do you hold back,” he says. “It's like you don't want anything I could give you because you'd have to give me something in return.”

“That's not it.”

“I think it is.”

I am silent, remembering what he said earlier.
I'll take you there.
How easy it is for a man to say a thing like that.
I'll take you.

“It won't work,” I say.

He looks at me for a moment before he gets up. His hand lingers near my face—again that slight electric tremble in the air between us.

Then he's gone, the doorway empty, footsteps fading up the stairs, fainter, fainter. Gone. And the room is not the room it was. The night is brightly framed in the window. Things are in their places: the pictures on the mantel, the lamp, a short pile of books, the kindling and fire tools. It is all familiar, and it is not the same. The room has left as well—part of some distant, slowly disappearing world.

Years from now, I will understand that this is the moment my life became wholly mine, more mine than it ever was before because I will never again let it be anything less. I will go back to New Mexico. I will walk out into the dry nothingness of the country that I love and paint: sharp-edged flowers, desert abstractions, cow skulls—images of Thanatos. I will title my work and that is what they will see: the subject that fills space and the words that define it. They will not notice that what I am really after—all I was ever really after—is that raw desire of the sky pouring through the windowed socket of a bone.

W
E STAY MARRIED.
I realize it would make no sense to dissolve the business end of things, which works so well. He manages the logistical details I am not interested in. He doesn't notice the seismic shift that's taken place. He sees what he wants to believe. And I get what I need.

I divide the year in two. I spend every summer in New Mexico. Every fall, I return to him in New York. I buy a house at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, and then, in 1943, a second house in the small village of Abiquiu—the ruin of a house with the door I've always known was meant to be mine. I build out the Abiquiu house from the inner central courtyard. I make a studio and bedroom out of the old stables and carriage barn, setting plate-glass windows into one wall of the studio and long tables down the length of the room where I paint. I have the walls rebuilt in the traditional way, the adobe smoothed by local women's hands.

The house has water rights. Unlike Ghost Ranch, it's a place I can live year-round. I plant gardens. Vegetables. Fruit trees. Flowers timed to bloom throughout the year. I paint and make tomato jelly and walk the ridge toward the high sheer cliffs where the colors tumble down in waves. It is a gorgeous mad-looking country, more merciless and spare than the land around Taos. The sun hits the earth and burns deep into it, so even at night when I sleep under the stars, I can still feel the warmth of the day stored in the ground.

Every morning, I drink my coffee in the cold silence of the house. As the light gnaws at the edge of things, I feel a quiet joy. There is nothing in this new day that is not mine.

W
HEN
S
WEENEY FIRST
calls from the Museum of Modern Art to offer me a retrospective, I refuse. Then, because it is Sweeney, I call back to accept. At the opening on May 14, 1946, Stieglitz sits on the stairs with Marin, surveying the crowd. They seem oddly out of place, the two of them, as if the tide has passed them by. I catch Stieglitz's eye, and he smiles.

The day before I leave to return to New Mexico, he and I walk together through the exhibition halls. I hold his arm. “This is what we are,” he says quietly, his eyes sweeping over my paintings on the walls. “This is what we made. This is you.” Back at the apartment, while he rests, I sit at the table and write notes to him on small slips of paper.
I love you. You are my sweetestheart. A kiss to you. Take care, my love.
As always before I leave, I will tuck them through the house, into a drawer, on a shelf in the medicine cabinet, I will fold one and place it into a book he is reading. He likes to find them when I am gone. He has said it makes him feel I am still with him.

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.”

H
E 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.”

H
IS 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.

T
HE 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.

I
T 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.

W
HEN
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.