Georgia (3 page)

1917, Canyon, Texas

H
IS LETTERS COME—LIKE
food, water, breath. The days bleed together until it's only his letters that mark out time. Five, ten, sometimes fifteen pages. He writes of daily things, some appointment he had, the new office he has rented at the Anderson Galleries, an auction house on Park Avenue. He writes of the war—his sudden despair when he learned that American troops had landed in France.
But then I think of you,
he writes,
and wonder what you are doing out there in your country. It's nearly real to me—that place I've never seen—because of how you describe it. When you've painted more, send them to me.

One evening when my sister Claudia and I are out on the front porch of the boardinghouse, heavy footsteps come down the hall, growing louder. The screen door opens, and our landlord steps outside. He is a big man, hands like slabs of meat, a ruddy face. As he is walking by me, I shift on the step to make room so he can pass.

“What's that you got there?” he says.

“A painting of the canyon.”

“Don't much look like the canyon.” He laughs then, hearty and rude. “You must have had a bad stomachache when you painted it.”

“Maybe next time I've got a stomachache, I'll make a picture of you.”

This stops him. On the last step, he turns and looks back at me.

“You do your teaching work, Miss O'Keeffe, and pay your rent.”

“You have it mixed up,” I say. I point to my painting. “This here is my work. The teaching—that's just my job.”

A
FTER HE'S GONE,
Claudia remarks in a low voice that I shouldn't talk back like that.

“It's a good place where we live, Georgia.”

“There are plenty of places to live.”

She frowns. A cheap place is what she means. Before I went to New York, I might have cared a sliver for what people thought. Now not at all.

I study my watercolor, the canyon with crows, made in a dizzying rush. Orange and green hues intense, the water, how fast it moved and leaked and dried.

“I almost caught it here, Claudie. Almost.”

“I completely forgot,” she says. “Ted Reid came by. He was asking for you.”

“How forgettable.”

“You seemed to like him well enough before you left for New York.”

“Ted's very nice.”

“What then?”

“He's just not what I want.”

“And what is it that you want?” she says slowly.

There's a loose splinter of wood on the step beneath me. I pick it free. “Spit out whatever it is you want to say, Claudie.”

“Mr. Stieglitz is married.”

“I'm entirely aware of that. What exists between Mr. Stieglitz and me is what would exist between any two people who share a passion for art. I don't expect you to completely understand, but don't judge it as something it's not.”

She looks stung. I close the thought of the kiss at the train station out of my mind.

“He's held a show for me,” I say. “He's sold three pieces of my work. Does that matter? Yes. He sees me. He sees what my art can be—risks I haven't taken yet, things I can still do to improve. He's different from other people, and sometimes I feel New York's the only place to be if I want my art to amount to anything.”

She considers this. “You must compare it constantly, what you felt there and what's here.”

“There's not much here.”

She laughs.

“I do love that nothingness here,” I say. “The nowhereness. It makes the sky feel big. Plus, you are here, which makes it so much nicer. But I can't begin to describe what it felt like seeing my art on those walls. Like my future was right in that room.”

She comes to sit on the step beside me and reaches for my hand, my lovely youngest sister, Claudie's sweet open face—eyes still questioning, though. She's sensed that while everything I am saying is true, something is not quite as it should be.

A few days later, I choose the best among my paintings of the canyon, along with a series I did—Light Coming on the Plains. Three different pictures of an early-morning sky.

I am curious to know what Stieglitz thinks of each, which speaks to him and why. They have a certain livingness—these pictures—that feels true. At the post office, though, I almost fail: They aren't perfect. They could be better. What if he doesn't like them? What if he feels they don't have the greatness he saw in my charcoals and numbered blues? What if those days in New York that I've not been able to shake out of me since did not mean to him what they meant to me? That kiss.

Leaving the post office, I bump into Ted Reid.

“Georgia, I've been looking for you everywhere.”

“I'm at school every morning at eight to teach. You know where I live. You couldn't have been looking too hard.”

On his face, a pink flush. “I told Claudia to tell you I'd come around.”

“Yes, she said that.”

He walks me back to the house, saying funny things and making me laugh. Then he gets a little serious and says there are some other things he wants to talk over with me. He digs the toe of his boot into the road. He is a fine young man, a star athlete, one of the town's favorites.

He invites me to go for a walk out to the Palo Duro canyon. I say no at first, but he looks so crestfallen that finally I agree. And that evening as we sit there on the canyon rim, his strong arm comes around my shoulders in the moonlight, and he kisses me, a long slow kiss, and I let him, like I could wash that other kiss out of my mind. Then he asks me to marry him, and I throw my head back and laugh. He gets all befuddled, and asks again. I shrug loose from his hand around my shoulder.

I know what Ted likes about me. My drive. So different from any other girl he knows. He's said this before, and I've explained to him that living with me for half an instant would shred him to bits.

“I'm planning to enlist,” he says.

“You should stick around and graduate first.”

“I'd stick around for you.”

Something in me shrinks. “Don't be stupid,” I say, snipping the last bit of closeness between us.

I have seen into the future, I could tell him. In that future I am always alone.

I
PAINT AND
teach. I poke desert flowers into jars to make still-life models for the older students. I bring small rocks and bones back from my night walks and arrange them on the desk in the classroom. Two young boys draw submarines. One draws a soldier with big orange clouds. War clouds, he explains. Always war. There is one other little boy, though, who paints a landscape with a purple star, and a house on each side, and trees. It's a funny picture, not as well done as the rest, but I tell him I love it, because it is free.

“It isn't for sale,” he says solemnly.

I laugh. “That's not what I meant.”

Then he tells me he made it for me.

C
LAUDIA BRINGS THE
afternoon mail. A letter from Stieglitz. The one I've been waiting for. He has received the paintings, the series and the others. He loves them. He loves them.

Georgia O'Keeffe! I want to crawl inside that world. Lie down under that same sky. Let the same dark night soak into me.

It seems like ages since I've seen your face, heard you laugh—your lips on mine.

There, I've written it. Something happened in that kiss, didn't it? I think about that when I look at these pictures you send.

I turn the page and see a few sentences he has written across the top, in small-print letters almost like an afterthought—
I wonder what kind of child I would give you. Would you let me?

I let out a short cry.

Claudie's head snaps around. “What's wrong, Georgia?”

My hand covers my mouth and I stifle a laugh. “Oh, nothing,” I say. “Nothing.”

She glances at the letter in my hand. I fold it and go upstairs. I just need to be alone, to read his letter again—what he said about my pictures and his question. Through the wide middle window, the sun has begun to sink, the dark shape of a horse walking across the plains.

I take out the cardboard box of photographs he took over a month ago, in 291.

I prefer the one with her hands to those of her face. The gesture of her hands echoes the spiral form of my painting on the wall behind.

There was a moment that day, in 291, when he set down the camera, came near me, touched my cheek and turned it with his hand. A tremor under his finger. Like a sled going fast downhill.

She has a certain poise, that woman in the photographs. She is me and, at the same time, not. I've always thought of my face as round, but in the prints there are angles—cheekbones, jaw. Beautiful. She knows exactly who she is, and there is something so breathtaking in it all, not just in her, but in the inviolate space of this exchange. In my letters, I've begun to write to him things I can't say to anyone else: my ideas about art—how sometimes I'm so full of shapes and colors, my mind can't hold it all in. It's become clear to me, though, that if anyone were to understand the particular language of my pictures of light on the plains or the flow of an abstract shape, it would be him.

I look up. It is dusk. The evening star hangs just there through the window above the stick limbs of a windmill. Far off, cows move like tiny black chains, slowly at the sky's hem. The wind blows the sound of their lowing around so it seems to come from everywhere.

I walk out into the falling daylight across the plains, past the ugly white houses, black windows, his letter folded in the pocket of my skirt. I can feel its edges against my thigh. When the town is a pebble far behind, I lie down on the hard dry earth and let my head fall back. The evening star, unearthly, and the feeling, to be enthralled by nothingness. The sky, so wonderful and big, I breathe it in so deeply. I lie there in the cold quiet, a small thought moving at the edges of my mind—the possibility that he is like that open space, vast like these plains, this night, vast enough it seems sometimes to hold me.

T
HE NEXT DAY
after I teach my class, I close the door, pull out a sheet of paper, and lay it on the table with my paints. Water on my brush. A pale wash of sky, orange-yellow. A slight resistance in the woven surface of the paper. I add a line of deeper red, blazing into the light, more energy, more life, quickening—a faint electric thrill in my fingertips as the brush sweeps back and forth, the loss of time, of self, as the feeling of that shape in my mind drives through my hand. The colors seep, sky almost to the edges, just a scrap of whiteness toward the top—my star.

I finish the painting and leave it, rinse my brush, lay it down. I change the water in the bowl. The air in the room is stifling. I crack the window open.

I take a clean sheet and start again, leaving a spot of white for the star in the same place, high up, off center to the left. A yellow glow around it, then rings of darker yellow-orange, red—the colors bolder now, a braver slope in the line, less control. One dark thick stroke below—the weight of land to balance the pure driving radiance of the star.

The pictures, startling. A humming in my body.

I make it again, letting go of the edges even more this time, past where I think they should be, I push them farther, letting that burning light become the night sky, the colors strike into one another, bleed. Each different evocation of that star—luminous, abstract—an answer to the dark hot work of his eyes moving over me that day in 291. As perhaps almost every picture I've made since has been.

A
S THE SUMMER
passes, I spend more and more time alone. On an evening when Claudia goes out, I sit on the steps with one of his letters. He writes of the July offensive in Ypres, stunning casualties, so tragic and unnecessary—he writes how the war has completely dismantled America's young fascination with modern art.
They distrust everything foreign now, Europeans in particular. And The Marriage, I'm sad to admit, is a shambles. Mrs. Stieglitz has never understood me. There's nothing between us except for Kitty, and I would not break my daughter's heart. I took her to college last week, now she's gone. So much, it seems, is gone. Prewar hopes,
Camera Work,
291, gone. But you are the lamp. The spirit of 291 continues in your art—

Against the vastness of his letters, the town has begun to feel so small. I am some snapping lunatic fire stuck in this wound of a town. The women laugh behind my back because I wear men's shoes and long straight black dresses, because I am almost thirty, unmarried and not looking to be, and because I do not believe in the warmongering posters slapped up on the walls of the general store, charging us to slaughter every German. Such ignorance. I call it that. And they shun me for it—for how I speak my mind and for how I go tramping about in the dusk like a crazy person shooting at small game and tin cans.

A
RAW SCRATCHING
in my throat and a cough I can't seem to shake. I've not been feeling well. I've blamed it—jokingly to Claudia—on the town, how I am choked by its backwater stupidity, the hostile looks. But the cough grows worse. There are days where I have trouble speaking.

Claudia is preparing to leave for a job student-teaching in Spur. It's good work, but I can't quite make sense of a life in Canyon without her. She's been my charge since our mother died. Two days before she is to go, I sit on the bed as she packs her things.

“You need to see the doctor for that cough,” she says, tucking a ball of stockings into a pair of shoes.

“It's getting better,” I say.

“It doesn't seem to be. What if it gets into your chest?”

“It won't.” But my breath catches, and I cough, hard, my body doubled over.

“I'm not going to leave you like this,” she says.

“You will go, Claudie. I'll be all right.” My voice calm again, controlled, the oldest sister's voice she knows—the levelheaded strong one, the one who is in charge, who will not be argued with, the one who does not break.

T
HE AIR GROWS
cold. Brutal November winds tear through what's left of the leaves on the locust trees. I have to stuff paper down the front of my dress to block the winds as I walk back and forth to class. I go to the doctor and he mops out my throat with long metal instruments, and tells me I must be more careful. He's heard I take long walks at night on the plains. I must stay inside. Stay quiet. Keep the cold air out of my throat. He asks about my family history. “Consumption?” I shake my head no. Silent. Lie.

He sticks a needle into my arm, it goes in deep.

A
BATCH OF
my things arrived in New York crushed. Stieglitz has salvaged them but is angry with me.
Such rare & glorious things, these works of yours, packed in nothing but a flimsy cheap tube and sent unregistered mail,
he scolds. He proceeds to lay out explicit instructions on how to package in the future what I send.

Tears spring to my eyes, a sting of shame for what he does not understand and what I am too proud to explain—how careful I have to be with money. I haven't much. Nothing left over to save. My throat hurts, the pain growing sharper, more intense.

A savage and futile desire. I miss him. I wish he were here with me. I can't paint. I seem to have nothing to say.

I
N
N
OVEMBER, THE
school invites me to speak at a faculty meeting about theories of modern art. When the invitation comes, at first I think it's a joke—they despise me—but I accept, what choice do I have? I pore over my books—arguments about art and the human body. Arthur Jerome Eddy's theory that, in painting, one should strive for a higher abstract language—spiritual, pristine. These are theories that meant something to me once. I find myself tearing holes in them now.

When someone looks at something I have painted, I want them to feel what moved me to paint it in the first place. I paint as I feel it. Light, sky, air. As I want it to be felt.

In my speech, I stand up and talk about how when you make a picture—whether that picture is of a chair or a bird or a canyon—you have the chance to say something about what life is, and what it means to you. A picture might be beautiful but if there's no life in it, it's no good at all. Then I take them all apart, the entire faculty, and how they teach, the men most of all, because they are the ones who are always so convinced they have a corner on what's right. I tell them that their program is essentially useless, crammed too full of rattly ideas that have no basis in human emotion, sensation, or need.

I am quite convinced they'll stone me but they don't. Afterward, some of the women come up and seem almost pleased, giddy that I could have gone on like that—out loud. I shake their hands and leave and go to bed.

S
TIEGLITZ WRITES,
I
am worried about you, the cough, the illness.
He seems so far away.
I'm afraid it's worse than you're letting on. Your handwriting has changed. The letters are very small. You must get well.

I
FALL TOO
ill to teach. The cough has moved into my lungs, and the doctor tells me I'm as close to having TB without actually having it as anyone he has ever seen. He says the word so evenly it almost slips past me. My head spins. “You'll need to go south,” he says gravely, “to a warmer climate. Or else.” He rubs those last two words in hard, like salt in a cut—but his eyes are gentle and sincere. He is someone I can trust. I feel a sudden bolt of fear. This cough—this stupid, nagging cough—it is not nothing.
If you are not careful. Take care. Go south. Or else.
My mind a thousand glittery pieces. Everything I want—the vast hope and the magic—his letters, my art, that kiss—lost.

The doctor is looking at me still. “Do you understand?” he says.

I tell him then.