Georgia (11 page)

O
CTOBER.
P
AUL
R
OSENFELD
comes up to the Lake, bringing the artist Charles Duncan with him. Rosenfeld has just been named the music critic for
The Dial.
He adores us, and is becoming one that Stieglitz can count on. He buys art as Stieglitz tells him to—paintings by Marin, Hartley, Dove—and hangs them in his elegant apartment at Irving Place where we met the poet Marianne Moore last year at a winter soiree. She and I laughed at the fact that we were born on the same day, same year. Rosenfeld has asked Stieglitz if he can buy one of my oils.

“I'm afraid her work is not yet for sale,” Stieglitz responds, “but when it is, Pudge, you'll be the first to know.”

Soon after they arrive, Rosenfeld exclaims that all he can amount to in the kitchen is scrambled eggs. And so, the next morning for breakfast, scrambled eggs it is. I take over the rest of the cooking and task the men with cleanup. I garden, can vegetables, and press cider from apples. The sweet scent fills the room with a kind of certainty I crave. I've taught Stieglitz how to stoke the furnace, and he shows off his new skill.

“Georgia's so very capable,” he says. “I like to think some of it will rub off on me.”

“Did you know,” I say, “that when Alfred was a child, he spent whole days reenacting the great horse races of the past on a Parcheesi board. Thus, he never learned much in the way of housekeeping. What chores did you do to receive an allowance?”

“There were no chores.”

I burst into laughter. “So you were being paid to simply exist?”

“Something like that, I'm afraid,” Stieglitz says sheepishly.

O
NE AFTERNOON, HE
photographs Rosenfeld, Duncan, and me at lunch, sitting around the table set with bouillon, olives, asparagus, bacon, eggs.

“To paradise,” Rosenfeld says, raising his glass, then bending back over his food as Stieglitz directs.

Later, I will look at that photograph, and there is something so domestic, so simple—how he caught us, mid-stride—the easy white drape of my shirt, a smile on my face as I spear an olive with my fork, and the fourth place, Stieglitz's, empty at the front of the small table, the loaf of bread on the cutting board beside it, the knife laid perpendicular to a slice just cut. I will look at that photograph—a small print, the size of a playing card—and I will try to remember if it was ever as simple and lovely as he made it appear. This was his gift. This is what we were entranced by. How he could capture the momentary flicker of a soul in the image of raindrops on an apple, or three people gathered around a small table at a meal—such a simple and intimate pleasure—the trees in the background, blurred.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY,
I overhear Rosenfeld expressing concern that his presence at the Lake might be an intrusion on our work, mine in particular.

“I haven't seen her painting since I arrived.”

“No,” Stieglitz says firmly. “Nothing but pleasure to have you here. Georgia feels the same way.”

“Well I can't tell you how grateful I am,” Paul says, his manners as always so beautifully streamlined, “it's such an opportunity to observe the two of you this way at close range.”

“You must see her newest things.”

“I'd love to.”

“It's extraordinary, Pudge—what she's doing right now with color. Her new oils have a daunting power. Almost as bold as those early charcoals.”

It's fascinating—to hear him talk this way about my things—when just a few weeks ago he seemed anxious about them.

“I'm thinking,” he continues now, “at some point, you should write about her painting for
The Dial.
”

“A marvelous idea!”

“Not yet,” Stieglitz says quickly. “But at some point soon. Let's bear it in mind.”

S
EVERAL MORNINGS LATER
we are out on the porch, Alfred in his old gray sweater, the black cape tossed over one shoulder, writing his letters and, beside him on the table, the black portfolio folder that holds a selection of my watercolor paintings and drawings. The men have nicknamed that black folder of my work “Stieglitz's Celestial Solitaire,” because he always seems to have it with him, or near him—and he'll take it out and flip through the pictures, and occasionally show them around. They seem to have a particular meaning to him—my early things. As I sit on the steps jackknifing picture frames, I notice Paul observing us, a wistfulness in his drooping eyes. But then he smiles, a warm smile. I smile back.

Stieglitz looks up from his letter. “Let's do a portrait.”

“Of?” Rosenfeld says.

“You, Pudge.”

“Me?”

Stieglitz stands up. “Yes. You. A portrait of the Writer.”

“I'd be honored.”

In one of the upstairs bedrooms, Stieglitz has Rosenfeld sit at the small, older desk, his arms crossed, and beside him a typewriter, a stack of books, including Carl Sandburg's recent collection of poems, galley proofs, cigarettes.

Charles Duncan and I watch from the doorway as Stieglitz positions the objects exactly where he wants them to be, and it occurs to me that this is what he does. He moves us through space. I see the glow of warmth on Rosenfeld's face, the joy he feels at being the unexpected center of attention. His bow tie is crooked. It hangs skewed to the right, oddly small under the round portly dish of his face. As I move to straighten it, the shutter clicks, I freeze.

W
HEN THEY LEAVE,
the Lake is ours again. Just hours of work and solitude stretching from one day into the next. The air grows cold. I think of the apartment in his brother's brownstone we are moving back to, windows looking out into the dark faces of the buildings behind.

“I don't want to leave,” I say. But Stieglitz needs the city—the bustle and comforts that sometimes seem so strange to me.

I dig out a sketch I made earlier in the year, and work it into oil.
Red and Orange Streak
—a dark expanse of sky cut at the horizon line by a chain of red mountains. A wide-grooved orange arc that drives up from the bottom left and off the edge.

“It's a sound,” I say when Stieglitz comes in to see it, finished. “That loud raw sound of the cattle in Texas.”

It still haunts me—the rhythm of that sound in the desolate emptiness.

He stands before the painting, studying it.

“This is what that country out there means to you,” he says.

“Go with me sometime.”

The sunlight falls on his shoulders—very soft and tender, tame. The sunlight here.

“You've done it, Georgia,” he says. “The union of form and color. This. It's a new American Art.”

O
NE
D
ECEMBER EVENING,
back in New York, Mitchell Kennerley, owner of the Anderson Galleries, comes by and Stieglitz shows him the dozens of prints he made at the Lake this year, many of them of me.

“These don't belong in storage,” Kennerley says. “I think it's time for a retrospective of your work.”

“No,” Stieglitz says quickly, glancing at me.

“When was your last exhibition?”

“Over ten years ago.”

Kennerley nods, then looks back at the raindrops on an apple, and a few images of my body and face.

“These are electrifying, Alfred,” Kennerley says. “High time for the rest of New York to be introduced to your new work.”

A
FTER
K
ENNERLEY LEAVES,
Stieglitz clears his throat and tells me that he would never do this, never think of exhibiting the photographs of me without my consent.

“But you have my consent. This is your art.”

“You don't hear what I'm saying.”

“You held showings in the apartment—I was right there.”

“This will be different,” he says.

“Different people may be looking at the photographs, but other than that, isn't it the same?”

He glances at me, a pause, considering. “It will be an opportunity for your work as well.”

I am sitting in the large chair at the end of the table, my legs tucked up underneath me, black shoes set together on the floor.

“Kennerley said nothing about showing my work.”

“You will be a sensation,” he says.

“My body, you mean. Not my art.”

“No. That's not what I mean. This could work as much for your art as for mine,” he says. “If we do this, your art will be a sensation even before it's seen.”

I stand up and walk over to his prints on the table. Her glistening silver form. They feel very alive to me, the livingness about them—their stunning erotic beauty, their irreverence.

I pull one from the table and look at it more closely. White and black, silver-toned, complete. Her hair pulled back tightly, the cloak around her shoulders, the cords of her neck just visible, a low defiant heat in her eyes that looks directly into the camera, poised, almost insolent. She seems absolute. No past. No future. She belongs strictly to herself, alone.

I remember what Edward Steichen said that night when he came to the shoe-box room and saw the photographs and my oils for the first time:
Nothing like this has come into our world before.

“Do it,” I say now.

“You're like no other woman,” he says, his voice quiet. His eyes so strangely earnest search my face.

I say, “We've had our small studio showings. Kennerley is right. New York should see your art. It will bring attention to the gallery. Maybe buyers, too.”

He catches my face, his palms warm and firm, and draws me to him.

W
HEN HIS FAMILY
learns what we're intending, they descend with a slew of objections. “Alfred, you can't do this! What about Georgia?” I remain silent, through these debates, until he summons my opinion.

“We discussed it, and I agreed,” I say.

Stieglitz goes to pieces over how to choose which photographs best represent the arc of his work over the last thirty years, and I begin to realize how anxious he is. He's spent most of the last decade building up the careers of other artists, letting his own fall by the wayside, and now he seems to be questioning just how good his new work really is.

There's a tacit agreement between us not to discuss the glaring intimacy of some of the prints of me he wants to include. Some are clothed, many not. The ones of the buttocks are in his “to mount” pile. I remove them and put them with the others bound for storage.

I come across an image of my hands. I do not remember exactly when he took it. I recognize the button on the coat—it was the first year I was here—but there were many days when I wore that coat, and I find a quiet fear kick in me that I can't quite place the day he made that image. There is something unsettling in the disembodied hands—the way the fingers of one seem to claw, almost to tear into the palm of the other. It is one he has chosen. I leave it. She will be called simply
A Woman
in the catalog and will remain unnamed. My face is cropped in the nudes. There will be no image where the naked body and face are shown together.

He obsesses over his words for the catalog. He reads it aloud to me as we fix breakfast in the kitchen, and then again at night before we sleep.
I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.
At night, I sneak upstairs into his bedroom to keep up propriety's face for Lee, Lizzie, and the mother-in-law.

“So ridiculous!” I whisper, laughing. “They all must know!”

“But they don't want to know they know.”

“A façade is so much work, Alfred. You must sell twenty photographs from the show, so we can find a place of our own.”

I lie beside him, his hands just touching me, not holding tightly at all. I can feel his anxiety, a tremble in his fingers on my skin. It always surprises me to see him vulnerable this way.

“Why are you so afraid, love?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I just want it to go well.”

W
ARREN
H
ARDING, THE
dark-horse Republican, wins the presidential election, soundly defeating newspaper publisher Cox and his running mate, Franklin Roosevelt, who lives directly across the street from us in 47 East 65th. Stieglitz remarks that Harding's victory marks the country's disgust with any policy that smacks of the progressive. “Four steps forward before the war,” he says, “now twelve steps back.” Instability seems everywhere: large-scale race riots in Chicago, strikes in the meatpacking industry, terrorist attacks on Wall Street. “They don't see how they bring it on themselves,” he says bitterly. “Go crazy with fear over anything new, cling to what they think is safe, and cement themselves right into deadness and doom.”

My sister Claudia writes. She's leaving Texas and coming to New York—my heart soars when I read the news—my sweet youngest sister. She wants to get her degree from Columbia Teachers College. She'll stay with our sister Ida, or perhaps Anita, who's married a wealthy financier—
imagine all those chandeliers and spare bedrooms,
Claudia writes. So much of home—her familiar handwriting, her self-confident humor that matches mine.

I write back to her—
Such glorious news, the thought of you here! And definitely, you should pursue your degree. You must plan to visit the Lake this summer. If money is any object for your schooling, I can help.

Who knows where I'll scrape that money from, but I will.

I
HELP
S
TIEGLITZ
hang the exhibition on the red velvet walls of the Anderson Galleries. It is not me, I tell myself, when I look at the woman set among his other things—visions of old New York, ferry boats, carriage horses, aeroplanes, and city streets—iconic images of his earlier career, before he became more well known for dealing in the work of others. Of the 145 prints he hangs to show, 46 are images of me. In the nudes, my face is cropped out.

Three thousand people attend the exhibition. When the reviews begin to appear, his disciples stress exactly what he wants them to stress: the severity, the revolutionary aspect of his vision and of The Portrait in particular.

But other reviewers do not. One critic writes that his photography is “essentially aristocratic and expensive. He spends an immense amount of time making love to the subject before taking it.” Some reviewers manage to do both, praising Stieglitz's ability to capture the wholeness of a woman in her fragments and, at the same time, describing my body in rudely intimate terms: “the navel, the mons veneris, the armpits, the bones underneath the skin of the neck…the life of the pores, of the hairs along the shin-bone, of the veining of the pulse, and the liquid moisture on the upper lip…lucent unfathomable eyes, the gesture of chaste and impassioned surrender.”

It's the scandal that drew them. They're not after the art. I am his mistress. It's not a stranger's body they're describing, but mine. My mind tumbles through black space. How could I not have seen this coming? I should have known. What have I done?

I
LIE IN
bed for most of the day. The little blue scrap of sky outside feels unthinkably bright. I close the curtains. He finds me there that evening.

“Shall we go to dinner?” he says.

“Not tonight.”

“You are not feeling well.” He stretches out on the bed beside me. “What is it?”

I want to press myself into him, slip under the slight dark curved space his neck makes near the sheet, disappear.

“Have I left you alone too many days?” he says. But he must know. I can't look at his face. I look into that thin dark opening into the pale of the sheet beyond. “I can't bear how they write—it's degrading. This has nothing to do with art,” I say to that shallow dark curve of space.

He strokes my hair. “Dearest Love. One must be talked about and written about, for people to buy. They are talking about the woman in the photographs, yes, but now they want to know more about this mysterious young artist whose work they have not yet been introduced to. They are dying to see it. And they will come to see it, when we let them.”

“The affair is what they're writing about—not the art.”

“You must not care what
anyone
writes,” he says firmly.

“But you care—you care more than anyone.”

“It's gossip. It means nothing.”

I will remember this moment. The space under his neck. I cannot tear my eyes away from it for the whole time we are lying there. Such a narrow space, but wide enough I am sure to flee through.

A
S THE SHOW
comes to a close, he announces a sale price of five thousand dollars for one of his prints—a nude.

“A sordid amount,” I murmur, drinking tea.

“It's unique,” he says. “The plate was destroyed. No other print of that image will ever exist.”

I set down the teacup. A bit of brownish-gray liquid has spilled onto the saucer, making a sludgy mark.

“Sometimes it seems like you enjoy this attention,” I say quietly.

“Would you prefer I fail?” I glance up. His eyes are cool. It feels strange, that coldness. I turn away.

“No.”

“Darling,” he whispers, his hand reaching across the table toward me. “Don't you trust me? This will only help you. Even McBride, whom I can never win over, is already aware of your work.”

“He's never seen my work.”

“That doesn't matter. When it's shown, he'll be looking for it. All of them will.”

I
N
A
PRIL,
S
TIEGLITZ
is invited by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to mount an exhibition. He accepts on the condition that they'll include three works of mine. He takes the art by train to Philadelphia. While he is gone, I prep my canvases, canvas after canvas, running white lead over and over and over until the surface is smooth and shines, until it gleams with that thick whiteness—luminous, opalescent. I get out my paints, squeeze color onto the glass palette, perfectly neat, each remote from the others, an impeccable distance. I sit down at the easel, the whiteness of the canvas glares back at me. I put down my brush and go out for a walk.

R
OSENFELD INVITES US
to a concert of the Detroit Symphony, and after, we go to a restaurant on 59th. As they plow through chocolate éclairs, Rosenfeld is so witty—in his acerbic droll way—poking fun at Paul Strand's new wife, Beck.

“Her father was a vaudeville troubadour,” he says with a flair of his fork, drops of vanilla cream clinging to the prongs. “Made his mark as manager of Buffalo Bill's horrifically successful Wild West Show.”

I stifle a laugh. “I heard she was a basketball star.”

“She's got the legs for it. Apparently, her mother has been trying to matchmake her into a marriage for quite some time.”

“Really?”

“Yes, because the tempers between them are so ferocious, she wants her out of the house.”

“Strand is swept away,” I say.

“She is beautiful,” says Rosenfeld. “And in search of something higher and more profound than secretarial work.”

“That's what she does?”

“And I am afraid it's a perfectly decent match, perhaps the only match, for her abilities.”

Stieglitz shakes his head, cutting off another sizable piece of his pastry. “Strand has introduced her to your work, Georgia.”

“Yes, that's right!” Rosenfeld says. “He brought her by, didn't he? And she was so taken by the O'Keeffes she saw, she has decided to roll up her sleeves and plunge into watercolors herself.” He shakes his head here and glances at Stieglitz who has an inadvertent smear of chocolate on the side of his face. “A little war paint, right there,” Rosenfeld says. “That's the spot. You've caught it. Almost gone.”

“So what's her art like, Pudge?” I ask.

“She is quite lovely, though a bit of a moll.”

“Her art?” I ask.

“Half a gnat of talent, perhaps less.”

I pick triangular pieces out of my grapefruit.

“Strand's been making photographs of her, a serial portrait—sadly imitative of a far greater masterpiece.” Rosenfeld looks at me.

“Well for God's sake warn her not to let Strand mount a show that will make her a public spectacle.”

Stieglitz glares at me.