Georgia (9 page)

“
P
ART THE GOWN
,” he says, “let your hand fall, naturally, across your breast. Higher. There. Tuck your thumb into the fold, near the breast. Yes. Now, don't move that hand, but with the other pull your hair back from your shoulder. Drape it that way.” He disappears again under the dark cloth.

“Don't breathe.” For the slow glass negatives I have to be unthinkably still—I can't blink or twitch or itch that spot behind my ear. If my hand moves, the image will be ruined.

Still,
I think to myself.
Stiilllll,
until my mind drops and my body streams into the word.

When he emerges from behind the camera, I exhale slowly. I arch my spine, stretch my neck, and walk around in the white kimono dressing gown until he is ready. Again he surveys me.

“Hair behind your shoulder. Bring one breast out, touch it, hold it toward me. There.” He disappears under the cloth. The room is quiet. I can hear the muted blurred noise of the city through the window. “Both breasts now,” he says, speaking from under the black cloth, so it is only the eye of the camera I can see, and the very small, distant white floating creature pinched inside the glass that is me. “Let your arms drop to your side. Chin up, throat back. Look At Me. Georgia.”

H
IS WORK HAS
begun to take over the studio. Boxes of printing paper, bottles, trays and pans. He curtains the windows and fills the bathtub with developing solution. It is only temporary, he explains. The fire is in him now—and I find myself transfixed by his obsession with that woman.

Sometimes he will say only that word,
beautiful,
and then he'll cross the room in a few strides, take my chin in his hand, and shift my face a fraction of an inch in one direction, so the light strikes differently and I become, for that moment, someone else entirely.

O
NE AFTERNOON IN
February, he comes home early from his office at the Anderson Galleries.

“Leo Ornstein concert tonight!” he says, waving tickets in the air.

“So wonderful!”

“But first I want to use the window.” He pulls the camera out into the middle of the room.

“But the radiator is in front of the window.”

“You'll stand on it.”

“I don't trust that old rickety thing.” But he is preparing the plates.

“Come on,” he says. He draws a sheet across the window, which is hardly a veil, and I tell him so, but it sheds the light as he wants it to fall. I leave my drawings on the table and climb up. The radiator bars dig into the soles of my feet, warm, but hard to balance on.

“Naked,” he says.

I slip off the dressing gown.

“Straighter.”

“It's freezing!”

“Lift your arms.”

“I'll fall.”

“Never,” he says. He angles the lens upward. The radiator gives a belch, my arms outstretched, fingertips on the wall, winter cold against my backside. I hold my breath, body taut, an electric rush moving through me from the pain of keeping still.

“Perfect,” he says. And it will be. The diffused light sculpts my breasts and hips and thighs, the light ridge of ribs just visible. I am longer, taller in this image, my face cropped. And I realize I prefer it that way—to be curiously absent—the torso of a woman massed out of the air. I've begun to crave the way his eyes rake over me when I am posing for him, so I am only a body. No inhibition, no thought. Pure sensation. There is a strange freedom in that, and it begins to fuel my art.

O
RNSTEIN THAT EVENING
is entirely abstract music—biting dissonance that achieves an odd cogency as the music evolves. Stieglitz's hand slips over my knee as the young man plays, his dark head bent, listening to the sound within the sound, his fingers violent, moving over the keys. The tall windows of the room hold the winter night—the city outside—a world we've already left without knowing, the rapt, marbleized faces of the women, their heads stabbed on their dark dresses—as the music fills the room.

Afterward we spill into the street, a mill of bodies, muffs, coats, hats.

“You're quiet,” he says as we pause at a corner. The moon hangs between buildings ahead. “What are you thinking?”

I take his arm. We cross. The sidewalk underneath us.

“Just feeling that music,” I say. “That range he played. It was almost savage. Like he needed to play every note. Like he was playing on the last night of the world.”

He wraps his arm around me.

I laugh. “It took me right apart, and now you're walking down the street with little pieces of a person, the skin barely holding her in.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
after zwieback toast and coffee, I brush the crumbs from his mustache and send him out the door. I clean up the breakfast things and make our beds, side by side, last night's music still rilling around inside me as I smooth the sheets. The oddest sort of feeling—I'm moving through an ordinary morning and at the same time standing on some brink of free-falling space. The yellow walls seem to waver, shards of colored light.

A bird sails past the window.

I go into the back room and pull out sketches I made last summer of the natural bridge I visited once in Virginia. I remember passing through it, the smell of the greenery, the cool gray of the rock, and how, when I looked back, the orange dusk struck its edges.

I leave the drawings on the table and begin a new sketch. Lines over the paper, shadow by shadow, details stripped—not the bridge as it was but as I felt it blow through me in that moment I turned and looked back, the moss ripped with light.

Over the next few days, I work my sketch of the stone bridge into color.

I try pastel first. That opaque charge, but there's too much contrast in the tones—the orange and blue don't quite meld. Frustrated, I clean up my things and scrub down the table before Stieglitz comes home and asks what I've been working on.

“Not quite ready,” I say.

“Show me what's not ready.”

“No.” I draw him toward the bed. “Let's do something else.”

S
EVERAL DAYS LATER,
I lay out my oils, brushes, and a blank canvas. One looped stroke to begin, bits of pink and blue rimmed into the ivory tones.

How he made me come last night, in the little bed, night pouring through the skylight, his breath on my skin hot and raw. I shiver, remembering. Crimson mixed into red leaving the tip of my brush, just there—a small, unexpected flash of brightness.

I still don't show him.

T
HE NEXT DAY
when I am alone, I put the two pieces side by side. The first, the pastel, has the opacity I want, but the colors fight—that orange and blue like two separate worlds. In the oil, the emphasis is on the form—almost a drawing—the shape is closer to what I want, but the colors feel weak—almost wan.

I set a clean canvas on the easel, and paint it again. Shapes flare, more vivid tones than I've ever used. My chest tightens as I work—the canvas resists, then bends, as I push on, seams of warmth strung through the cool melodic tones of violet, blue. It's as if it already exists in the canvas and I'm carving it out.

Done. I step back and glance at the clock. Later than I could have imagined. I feel a kind of silver zipping around inside me. My body peeled to the root.

H
E COMES HOME
just after dark, and this time I have not moved my easel to the corner but left it there in the center of the room with the painting still on it, wet. I sit on his lap, comb my fingertips through the gray brindle of his hair, and we study it, my music, the thrill of it still in me.

“I see now,” I say, “what I can do with oil. It
is
stubborn and it
is
heavy, not loose and free, but the intensity of color
—that
can say what I want.”

He nods. I wrap my arms around him and draw his face against my breast.

“It's beautiful,” he says.

“It's what you make me feel.”

T
HE STREAM OF
visitors to our makeshift gallery continues, but new names now. Walter Arensberg, Charles Sheeler, Marius de Zayas. Critics, patrons, art dealers. Arthur B. Davies, who organized the Armory Show in 1913, comes, along with Leo Stein, Gertrude's brother. Edward Steichen, also a photographer, brings the art collector Frank Crowninshield, who is the editor of
Vanity Fair.

Crownie shakes my hand. He is as slick and elegant as the magazine he has transformed. A boutonniere bobs from his lapel. Stieglitz is elated. He shows them several of my new oils and charges in about their “savage force,” their “frankness”—the mastery I have already begun to acquire. He tells them the story of how he first discovered my art when my friend Anita Pollitzer brought my charcoal drawings to 291 three years ago on his birthday, New Year's Day, 1916. How the instant he unrolled those drawings, he knew it was a new art. Fearless Self-Expression. An Unaffected Mind. A Woman on Paper.

I will sit at one end of the sofa, sip water, and watch, that black gleam in his eyes as he speaks of me, his hands moving through space. It is the story of my art that he is making. Only a story—I know this—but as I listen, I find it becomes more difficult to imagine another life, a different life when he was not there. My life before him. It seems almost mythic as he describes it: as if I were born out of the wind and the plains and bone-blue sky, out of the long winters spread across the rolling, frozen land.

Invariably, at some point in the evening, he will draw out a few of his new photographs. The shock hits—like a wave through the room. No one overtly acknowledges them as images of me. These fragments—face, breasts, neck, hands. Nude. Sometimes I feel like I should be ashamed, but I find it almost exhilarating to watch how the photographs unnerve them. How they just can't reconcile my straight black dress, prim collar, with the woman in the photographs, her body, hands, hips, thighs, the taut plane of her belly, the gleam of her fingernails, the triangular thatch of black hair. The prints have grown more explicit and unrestrained.

“Astonishing,” someone murmurs, then the invariable stolen glance back toward my end of the sofa as they try to wrap their minds around the austerity of the woman sitting there, and the palladium fragments propped against the wall.

A bold glamour has begun to come into these small rooms. I've been here for less than a year, and already we are seen as an extraordinary couple—the two of us—the old photographer and his daring sibyl, his artist, his young muse. And I begin to see, too—as they can see—how in these deceptively simple images, he comes near to capturing some essence, some manifestation of a universal feminine.

“Revolutionary,” Edward Steichen remarks, glancing at me. “They're really like nothing else in our world.”

“I've told Stieglitz that,” I say. “They're so far beyond just photographs, aren't they?”

Edward smiles. “Done right, a photograph can seize an era in a moment; it can touch, even, what one soul means to another.” He turns away then from the photographs, and nods to my painting
Music
set against the wall across the room. “But when I used the word
revolutionary,
Georgia, I wasn't just talking about Stieglitz's photographs of you. He says this often, but tonight I've seen it for myself: What
you
are doing there.” He points to my oil. “No painter in this country is making abstractions like that.”

“
C
ROWNIE WAS FLOORED
,” Stieglitz exclaims when they are gone. “The photographs just landed him. He loved them.”

“Isn't that what you wanted?”

“Of course, but it was effortless. Like a spell. Did you see how easy?”

I nod. I've begun to clear things away. I wash the dirty drinking glasses, slip into my nightclothes, hang up my dress. I dip my toothbrush into the jar of tooth powder, brush my teeth, spit, and rinse.

“It was good to see Edward,” I say. Do I know this is cruel when I say it?

Stieglitz looks at me, his eyes flat. “I saw you talking with him. What did he have to say?”

“Just that he loved your photographs—and my art.”

“He has more talent in his little finger than I'll have in my lifetime, and it irks me, Georgia, how he's sold out. It's all about money to him now.”

“He said tonight that he wants to go back to his family home in Voulangis.”

Stieglitz snorts. “That's a whore's fuss and fanfare. He wants to be an advertising star.”

I don't agree, but I don't argue. Alfred's fury with Edward Steichen seems to weigh in direct balance with the fiercely close bond they once shared. In the good years of 291, Edward was
the
young protégé—one of the true and adored. When Stieglitz started his magazine
Camera Work,
it was Edward who made the first cover design. They were inseparable. But then Edward grew up: He entered a war Stieglitz did not believe in, directed aerial photography for the Allies, and now there are rumors he's flirting with a position at Condé Nast, which Stieglitz deems rank commercialism. I've always liked Edward—the strength in his face, that slight amused smile. His eyes are penetrating, but kind. He is never thrown by any tirade Stieglitz happens to be on, but is so gentle with him, grateful and indulgent as one might be with an aging father. Edward's own respect for the man who was once his master does not seem to diminish, but he is strong-willed—he does not let anyone pull him off course. Once when I ran into him at a gallery opening, I mentioned it. “Were you always this way, Edward?” I asked. “So sure but so compassionate as well.”

“I saw too much in the war,” he answered simply. “Too much afterward. Burnt villages. Children. Things like that set your course once you have seen them, and no one—not even the inimitable Stieglitz—can steer you from it.” He smiled, his voice sad, but with a clarity I wanted to touch.

That night, as Stieglitz and I lie together on our beds side by side, mine under the skylight, the sound of his breathing deepening toward sleep, I think back over the evening—Edward's remarks about my art, the expression on Crownie's face, how he and the others could not stop staring at the photographs—and lying there, I am aware that we have begun to be swept up in some silent transformation of the world that we belong to.