Georgia (6 page)

I laugh. Of course he does not remember. “Actually, I fled to the other room, you were so enraged.”

He shakes his head. “How could anyone not
feel
the life in those drawings?”

“I wasn't sure I liked you that day.” I say this lightly—almost teasing—but his face falls.

“Do you care for me?” he says.

The air sharpens.

“Of course,” I say.

He leans toward me, takes my face between his hands, and kisses me. First once on each eyelid, then on each cheek. It is different now, the kiss—the pressure of his lips, the heat of his breath. My lips part, his tongue moves into my mouth.

I draw him onto the small bed with me, his body on mine, he's hard against my thigh, and I kiss him, I want to pull it all inside me—the lives that he has lived, what he has known and learned and seen and felt and wondered, the places he has traveled, the women he's loved, the art he's seen and worshipped, defended and despised, the genius, the revelation, the full sweeping range of his life.

He draws away, still holding my face in his hands. The room is dark now. He's turned down the lamp. His eyes glow in the lean wicked beautiful night.

“What do you want, Georgia?” he says.

I want what I have no right to want. He knows.

His hand drops, his fingers touch my throat, my neck. A finger moving along the edge of the dressing gown, his eyes following his hand. “Not such a little girl,” he murmurs. He draws the edge of the neckline back. My breast shines, the skin very pale in the dark. He squeezes it, then drops his head, I feel his mouth hot and wet on me. I grip his head and push my fingers through his hair, my body rising to meet him.

It's almost unbearable when it ends. He stops and pulls away. I go to reach for him, but he catches my hand and sets it on the bed.

“No, Love. Not yet.” He draws my dressing gown closed. “What I want of you is much more.”

M
Y BODY GLITTERS
as I walk to meet him for lunch. I pick him up at his office, a few small rooms he has rented at the Anderson Galleries since 291 closed. My watercolor
Blue Lines
hangs on the wall by the office door. Some of the men are there—John Marin, whose puritan features collide so imperfectly with a quiet roguish smile; the painter Arthur Dove, visiting from his farm in Connecticut; the critic Paul Rosenfeld, who writes for
The New Republic
and
Vanity Fair.
They've already accepted me. I am one of the artists, and no one, for instance, takes a second glance at my unconventional clothes: flat simple shoes, straight black skirts.

Stieglitz and I eat together at a simple restaurant, the open secret of us just sitting there at a small table. With silverware and glasses and red napkins, it all feels so ordinary—the patron with his artist.

“When did you first paint something that you loved?” he asks as we wait for our meals. I tell him about the crude pencil drawing I made when I was twelve, of the moonlight, the snow-filled field. I don't know that I loved it, I say. But everything around us was falling apart—the farm, our family, my childhood—everything seemed to be washing right away—and I remember feeling happy as I scratched those funny pencil marks to make a road, because I understood then that there would always be a new blank sheet of paper I could pour myself into. No matter what happened, my art would be the one thing that remained.

The waitress brings our food. He's ordered spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce.

“You like to order spaghetti,” I say.

“I order what's cheap.”

“Not true. That chicken you ordered two days ago was not so cheap.”

“My glasses were not working well that day. I mixed up an 8 with a 3.”

I laugh.

I lean slightly across the table and whisper. “I like it when you do that—when I don't quite know if I can trust what you say.”

“You can always trust what I say,” he insists with an odd solemnity. “I want you to believe that.” It's desperate and intimate, the way he says this, and I feel my breath catch.

H
E BEGINS TO
photograph me in the apartment in the afternoons when the light is full. He mounts his camera on the rickety tripod covered in a worn black cloth, a white umbrella to throw light into the shadows. He brings props—a bowler hat, a thimble, a tailored black jacket with a crisp white collar—he brings my early work, my watercolors and the charcoal drawings. He pins them to the wall and poses me in front of them.

T
HE ROOM IS
tense in the late-June heat. “Not quite right,” he says, lifting his face from the camera.

“Too hot today,” I complain.

“You're not always a cooperative model,” he says, removing the bowler hat. My hair tumbles to my shoulders. “Are you, Georgia?” He touches my throat.

“Do you always get exactly what you want when you want it?” I ask playfully.

In one fierce movement, he pushes me back against the wall, his body pinned on mine, his hand between my legs. I gasp.

“Often.” He kisses me hard. He begins to peel the clothes from my body. Unfurling my black stockings, he leaves them on the floor. He draws me to the bed and spreads my legs apart. His fingers move up into me. It feels like I am turning inside out under the moving pressure of his hand. The room is unthinkably bright. A sheen of heat and sunlight washes through my mind. He lies with me, fully clothed, and his fingers move more quickly now, my hips press up against his hand as he touches me. His teeth graze my breast, the nipple hard in his mouth. I stretch my arm over my head and clutch the edge of the bed. My head explodes with light.

I lie there, breathless, undone.

“You are beautiful,” he says.

“Do everything to me.”

“Soon.” He takes my chin and turns it slightly to the right. “Look there.” He points to the wall across the room. “Eyes a touch lower. There.”

He walks back to the camera. From the corner of my eye, I see him studying me, the composition of the image of my body, the rumpled bed.

“Better?” I say without moving my face.

“Much.” His head disappears under the black cloth. “Don't move,” he says. And I am still. Counting. Counting. My body has begun to cool, my mind softens and drains, a familiar thoughtless pleasure coming over me like sleep.

A
FTER THAT, ON
the afternoons when he photographs me, I tease him, “If you want me to be cooperative today, you must do that thing to me first.” And he does. He explores every inch of me, his lips graze my shoulders, my stomach, my knees.

“Make love to me,” I whisper, more insistently.

“Not until things are settled,” he says, and I feel my face flush, remembering—the wife, the daughter, his other life.

I
N
J
ULY WHEN
Kitty is away at camp, he picks me up one day along with his camera things, and takes me to the apartment at 1111 Madison Avenue. Emmy is out, he explains, on a shopping excursion all day. I am too curious to resist. Tall doors. Gilt mirrors, high ceilings, windows hung with drapes, ornate lamps, heavy dark Victorian furniture. I stay close to him as he leads me through the apartment—everything untouched, like rooms that were left years ago, and have remained uninhabited since. I don't belong here. I feel her presence in the luxury, the crowded perfection of so many things.

“It seems so unlike you,” I say.

“It is.”

His photographs, though, are on the wall, and symbolist prints, one of a naked Eve with a large snake.

“Who made that?” I ask.

“Von Stuck. It's called
Sin.
”

“I wish you hadn't told me that.”

A smile plays around his mouth. “I've not committed the actual act of sin. I am guilty of nothing.”

“I would say you're worse than guilty because you deny it,” I say, laughing. It seems essential to make a joke of it all and pretend it doesn't mean what it does. What he is saying. Doing. That we are not where we are.

“It's just a photograph,” he says, unbuttoning my shirt. He poses me against the wall. He's shot three times when I freeze. Voices outside the front door, then the door opens and a woman is in the apartment, somewhere, calling him—I've never heard her voice.

I am still fumbling with my shirt when she walks into the room. Her eyes flare when she sees me, so wide like they will overspill their edges, understandably so.

“
What
are you doing home?” Stieglitz demands sharply. She turns to him, the room falls silent, a precipice.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“What does it look like I'm doing? Camera. Tripod. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume I'm working?”

She is carrying a shopping bag. It drops to the floor, wavers, then falls over. A piece of ivory silk slips out. She is small, but thickly built. She might have been lovely once, in a distinctly feminine way. Her fingers are shaking—I can see the light tremble of them near the peplum waist of her overskirt.

She waves her hand in my vague direction. “Your model?”

“Miss O'Keeffe has generously agreed to serve that role today.”

“Miss O'Keeffe.”

“If you would rein in your assumptions, I will introduce you.”

She turns and looks at me, as if now, armed with my name in hand, it is possible to do so. I feel the seconds skip—the awful claustrophobic dimness of these rooms, this marriage.

I stand still and stare back at her. No other choice but to stand here and play my crooked part in this exchange. I try to keep the waves of nausea down as outrage washes through her eyes—it's poison, the way she is looking at me. It does not matter that we've never fully made love, I see that now. Why would she care, given what we appear to be? She's a woman of appearances, and the house of appearances is falling now.

But as she stares, I slowly realize that for her, it is not quite so simple; it is not only the sense of being betrayed, but a furious disbelief that he would have let a woman like me—plainly dressed, common—into her space.

“Be civil, Emmeline,” Stieglitz says. It's a shock to both of us—his voice, the evident scorn, and as those words hit the glass silence of the room, her face contorts into something monstrous, and she begins to yell—betray, filth, nothing, whore.

I slip my last shoe on and stride past them, my knee hits the leg of the desk, the pain sudden, intense, but I keep going. I find the front door, and then I am through it. I slam the switch for the lift and wait in the hallway, their voices coming nearer, a sudden pause, a choked sob, then her wail—the sound is horrible, broken and strange—nothing I want to ever hear again.

T
HE STUDIO DOES
not feel like home. I walk in and sit down at the table, then can't sit, the chair feels too hard. I have to leave. It's a horrible thing we've done, and I've allowed it. I must go somewhere. Back to Texas. Or to my sister Anita's house. Crawl in on my knees and beg for one of her spare bedrooms until I get my bearings, find work, figure out where to go.

I pull my things from the closet and the drawers. My dresses, my shoes. I pack the books I brought with me. Letters from my sisters. I hesitate at the art supplies. Are they mine? Not after today. Nothing here apart from what I brought into this room is mine to take from it. Remember that, I tell myself harshly, and feel a slight tearing in my heart. The walls look dirty, grim, the yellow a sad jest of itself—chipped paint on the ridges of the radiator under the window. These flaws. I never noticed them before.

How I've loved it here. In our shoe-box room. Only twelve hours ago, I was lying on the little bed alone, the green night washing over these same walls, the skylight held the stars like a net, and I looked up into the night pouring down, missing him, loving him, and thinking that these four walls made the loveliest room in the world.

I cannot stay. I don't want to go to Anita's—she'll ask too many questions and the thought of explaining makes me cringe. No mother to go home to. And my father working somewhere in Virginia—it's been months since we've spoken. I could find him, though. He would not demand to know the story of how his eldest daughter, the strong one, the proud and capable one, has gone and made such a wreck of things.

The charcoal drawing catches my eye. He left it on the desk beside his black folder holding other works of mine. I touch the edge of the paper—such cheap paper—all I could afford.

I set the drawing with my things and lie down on the bed, my face in my hands, hot tears.

H
E COMES THAT
evening, his face haggard. He carries his satchel and a valise. She gave him an ultimatum: Stop seeing me or stop coming home.

“It took me less than ten minutes to pack,” he says. I stare at him. He seems almost proud. Then his eyes fall on my clothes, still laid out on the bed, the stack of books, the charcoal drawing.

“What's this?” he says.

“I can't stay.”

He looks from the open bag on the floor to me.

“No,” he says. It's a slight word,
no,
it can mean so many things, but in this moment, in this room swept through with blue dusk, I hear the crush of his heart in that tiny nothing. Just that one word.
No.

I go to him, and slip my arms around him. He holds me tightly.

“I don't want to break up your family. I don't want to hurt you,” I say.

“You could never hurt me unless you left.” His voice quiet. “I'll give up anything or anyone that cannot understand that.” I push back from him. I need to see his face. His eyes are tired, forked lines at the edges. In the dim light, they look deeper than they are.

“What of Kitty?” I say.

“I don't know.”

“You've stayed this long for her. You know she'll suffer. This will not be easy for her, and that will make you suffer. I understand that—she's your daughter.”

Still holding my arms, his grip tightens. “But you are my life.”

O
VER THE NEXT
few days, the aftershocks of the drama unfold: the onslaught of recriminations, tearful phone calls, letters from Kitty hand-delivered by messenger. Her grief and fury at her father for what he's done. It feels hollow, almost scripted.

“It's her mother feeding this rot to her,” Stieglitz says.

“We are partly responsible.”

He turns. “You have no idea what you're talking about. This marriage was over long before you came.” I feel myself shrink, something darkly out of place. Then he reaches for me, contrite, tears spring to his eyes, but it takes a moment before I can let him hold me again.

The next day, he phones his sister's husband, George Engelhard, to start divorce proceedings. Boxes and crates of personal items appear at the studio. Books, pictures, dishes, pans, funnels, cameras, prints and printing frames. He moves the rest of his things from 1111 Madison into storage in the basement of the Anderson Galleries. He has another small bed brought in and sets it across the room from mine. He hangs a blanket on a string between them.