Georgia (12 page)

“That's not the end of it,” Rosenfeld continues, smoothly. “Beck's begun to take after our exquisite Georgia in other ways as well—wearing her hair combed from her face, no makeup.”

“I've heard she wears trousers!”

“And the cigarettes,” he muses. “Don't forget.”

I shake my head. “A woman is never going to gain anything dressing herself up like a man.”

I
BEGIN TO
resist, quietly, being photographed. I put him off gently. “I have work to do,” I say. “You know this.” He's restless, though. He has been since his show closed and we were deposited back into the humdrum of everyday life. He's begun to plan for the first major exhibition of my things—more than a year from now. He wants it a secret still. It will be his introduction of my work to New York, and only the closest in the circle know.

By the end of June, the Lake is almost full: his mother, ailing, wrapped in shawls; Selma, along with his other sister, Agnes, her husband, and their sixteen-year-old daughter also named Georgia. We call her Georgia Minor or, more simply, The Kid. Stieglitz photographs her by the back door of the farmhouse, then naked in a window, clutching apples to her bare breasts—like some adolescent Eve—until her mother comes around the corner and ends it, urging her brother to find a more suitable subject.

He fumes over this.

“Convention is inane. I hate being boxed in by it.”

I
TELL HIM
I want to have my sister Claudia visit. She's just arrived in New York.

“I know it might seem difficult with your mother unwell—”

“No, no!” he says, suddenly brightening. “Don't give it a second thought. Invite her up. Ida, too. Have them both come. Yes. A little more O'Keeffe is what we need. I'll write to them myself. Seligmann's coming the week after next—I'll have them come then.”

“No,” I say. “Not Seligmann.”

“He's bringing the Hartley proof.”

“The essays?”

“Yes.”

“Then invite my sisters for the weekend before.”

I'm not keen on Seligmann—a writer for
The New Republic
and
The Nation.
I find him a tiresome sycophant, always trying to shoehorn himself into my good graces. But he's editing Marsden Hartley's new collection of essays, and there's a chapter on women artists I'm featured in. I'm curious to see it.

C
LAUDIE AND
I
DA
come up from the city on the train and blow into the Hill—a sudden whirl of fresh air. I throw my arms around my youngest sister, then hold her at arm's length.

“How you've grown up, Claudie! Ida, look at her. Our littlest one. All of twenty-one now.”

“And how lucky you are!” Claudia says. “It's so lovely—the lake, this view.” She bubbles on. Stieglitz walks out to greet them.

“Hello. Hello,” he says smiling. “Welcome! So good of you to come. Wonderful to have you here.” He presses Ida's hand, then takes Claudie by the arm, so charming. I watch how my youngest sister looks at him, shyly—he is
that
man after all, the one she did not trust once. She's fallen under his spell.

“What shall we do first?” Claudia says, later at tea. “We have just these few days, and I want to do everything ten times over, at least. A hike tomorrow morning, do you think? We've brought our boots, right, Ida?” Ida nods and Claudia turns to Stieglitz. “Will you go with us and be our guide, Alfred. No bunk excuses please.”

“I'll think about it,” he says. “There may be things I have to get to tomorrow.”

“Perhaps they can wait until the second half of tomorrow,” Ida says, wiping crumbs off her blouse.

“That's right,” Claudia chimes in. “It's a yes! Alfred will be with us. Now, which mountain—that one there, or that one farther down?” She points. “There must be a lovely sunset from that spot right there.”

W
E SPEND THE
weekend walking, laughing, swimming in the lake.

“He's charming,” Ida says. “Every time I see him again, I remember just how charming.”

“Much less so before you came.”

“Why?”

“All sorts of reasons. His daughter is getting married—there's rumor he won't be invited. And his show is over. Everything got very dull for him after that.”

“But you were relieved.”

“Relieved to know I'd never let that happen again.”

Ida laughs.

“And in the last week or so, he's been moaning on about our ‘poverty.' ”

“Not everyone would consider it that.” I hear the sudden edge in her voice.

“His family may be wealthy, but we're most definitely not.”

She doesn't answer, but I know what she is thinking—we could get real jobs, be like normal people. Go out and work.

Claudie is swimming out toward the center of the lake. Her bathing costume is a size too large and drags around her hips. The sun is warm, the air is still.

I ask Ida if she's heard from our younger brother, Alexius, in Chicago, and our sister Catherine who lives in Madison and just got engaged.

“Can't you stay a little longer?” I say.

She doesn't answer. I glance over my shoulder. She's done a good sketch of the bank and the trees, the outline of a great blue heron. She shades in around the shoulder, and the darker shadows marking the feathers.

“Did you hear me?” I say.

“No,” she answers absently, without looking up, her round face focused on the paper as the pencil tip scratches back and forth. “I have to be back Monday.”

“Such a demanding schedule.”

“I love nursing. I can't imagine doing anything else.”

“And now it's what Claudie will do as well.”

“Seems to be what the O'Keeffe girls are destined for. That is, apart from you.”

“I might like that kind of work,” I say. “Having a structure and schedule I don't have to make for myself.”

Ida's pencil stops then, and she looks at me. Sun on her face, she puts up her hand to shield her eyes. “
That's
not who you are, or have ever been. And you know it.”

T
HE EVENING THEY
leave, Herbert Seligmann arrives. The next morning after breakfast, I ask him if I can see that chapter in the proof of Hartley's book that mentions me.

“It's an extraordinary piece.”

“Yes, Stieglitz told me Hartley based it on my paintings he saw at the apartment.”

“More general really. He recognizes your vision as an abstract artist and he's captured that.”

He hands me the pages. I take them down to the dock with a pencil, my feet dangling into the cold lake, and skim through until I find my name. Hartley writes about the life in my work, my place in modern art. He compares my work to that of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, but there is also this:

Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person. The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are probably as living and shameless private documents as exist….By shamelessness I mean unqualified nakedness of statement.

I look up. The light rings off the water. A mistake. There's been a mistake.

It occurs to me that this is the only copy. It would be easy enough to lose it.

Stieglitz is on the porch, writing correspondence, a forgotten breakfast napkin still tucked into his shirt collar, the black folder of my work in its usual place beside him.

I hand him the chapter, the section marked off in pencil. “There's been a mistake,” I say. “I'd like this to be changed.”

“Did you write on this?”

“I'll erase it.”

“Give me the eraser.”

“I don't have it here.”

“Then get it. This does not belong to us. You had no right to mark it up.”

“Read it, Alfred.” He's trying to distract, to miss the point. He looks at me then, over the steel-rimmed glasses, and it must be something in my face that pulls him from the rut of the debate. His eyes drop to the page, and he reads. His brow furrows.

“I'd like it changed.”

“What?”

“These lines—these words, here, do you see? They are about the photographs, but the article itself is about my painting. ‘Living shameless private documents'—those words are about the photographs. They don't belong in an article about my painting. You see?”

“I do.”

“Then you'll ask him to remove those lines.”

“That's the heart of the piece,” he says.

“It's not the heart of the piece. When he talks about my work itself—how I use color, what I'm doing with abstraction. That's the heart of the piece.”

“It's all excellent exposure,” he continues. “It will be good—”

“It's not the kind of exposure I want.”

He sighs. “We've discussed this, Georgia.”

“We have not. This is
my art
he's written about. We discussed
your
photographs. We never discussed this.”

“It's a strong essay.”

“It's going to be in a book—‘a woman turned inside out and gaping with deep open eyes.'
That
is not my art.
That
is about the photographs.”

He studies me as if I am unwell. “It's praise, Georgia,” he says. “It may not be the words you want, but it's unmitigated praise. The piece
is
controversial. Just as
your art
is controversial. And this piece is, although you may not see it yet, everything your art is and can be: bold, glorious…” His face softens then. He looks at me so intently that the porch is gone, the lake, the house gone, it is only the two of us left in the world.

“Georgia, this is perhaps
the
hardest challenge for every artist. To see their art described in words, because how can words really ever capture the hours and vision that went into the work itself. No words can touch that.”

“But,” I say. “These words are not about my art. They are about your photographs.”

He looks away. He goes on. “Reviews will come. A whole landscape of them, describing the art of O'Keeffe, and at the end of the day, you will have to realize that all that matters, all that really matters, is that there was a feeling you had once, a feeling that burned in you enough that you took a few days or weeks of your life, and turned that feeling into color and form. What matters is that you keep yourself open to
that
—that raw inspiration, that madness, that passion; you must let yourself be driven by that need. You are a true artist. Your abstractions are ahead of our time. Who else is doing what you're doing? No one. And I'm hell-bent the world will see it. And if some article in some book helps make that happen then I'm going to use it.”

I stare at him. There are grains of truth in what he's saying—I know it. But there is something so condescending in how he's telling me who I am, what will unfold, how I must learn. And yet. These things—raw inspiration, the madness, the passion—these things matter to me—he knows this—these are the things I'd trade everything else for.

“And Rosenfeld,” he is saying now, “has agreed to write a piece on American painting for
The Dial.
It will feature you.”

“When?”

“This fall.”

“Who else will it feature?”

“Marin and Dove. I need Dove praised.”

“Dove should be praised.”

“That's what I said.”

“Not exactly. Will there be illustrations?”

“I believe so.”

“Then I want one of my paintings printed alongside whatever Rosenfeld has to say. That way he can say what he wants, and my painting will be in there speaking for itself.”

He studies me for a long moment.

“I don't know that I can make that happen, Georgia.”

I smile at him. “Oh, I'm sure you can.”

H
ARTLEY'S BOOK IS
published. I ignore it. But I look for Rosenfeld's piece in
The Dial
that appears that December. There are moments of wonderfulness in what he's written where he claims that in my work, I am building “a new sort of language” through “the unformed electric nature of things.” But there are moments of awfulness, too: phrases like “gloriously female,” “ecstasy of pain.” He describes my colors in terms of flesh and appetite, and I wince, but keep reading. I reach the end of the page, turn it, then see.

A printed image of my abstraction.
The Black Spot.

One of those pieces I made without knowing where the idea came from or even what it said. But I could feel that thrill in my body as I worked into those shapes, so clear in my mind: dark-blue carving down from one corner, a black edge rising. They burned in me—those contrasting shapes—so much dimension, so many levels of feeling.

I stare at the print for a long time, and a thought strikes me. The thought that I can make my living as a painter.

I
T'S NOT UNTIL
the following August that I meet Beck Strand. Stieglitz invites both Strands to the Lake that fall, but Paul is too busy to make the trip. Beck writes back, asking if perhaps she can come alone.

“Tell her to come now,” I say.

“The house is too full.”

“She can stay in the inn down the road. Nicer that way.” I add, “Then I can see if I like her before she's right underfoot.”

The day after she arrives, we invite her to go swimming in the lake, for a row around the island, then up to the house for tea. She is giddy, bouncy, and constantly looking around, saying how lovely everything is, sighing—she seems slightly in love with the two of us. She tells me that when she and Paul stayed at Rosenfeld's house earlier this summer I was everywhere with her.

“How so?”

“Your paintings. He told me Alfred finally let him buy a few this spring. Considered him worthy, I guess”—she gives a tentative smile—“and he has one room in his house that's all you—your apples, your blue mountain, your canna lily. We were happy on that short trip—my Paul and I—he's my only only, you know, and it was a perfect time for us.” She rambles on. I tear off a piece of biscuit and take a small cut of butter. She is quite beautiful, pale, long-limbed, kittenish. She calls me her Georginkha. Her O'Keefski. She's been here for a day and already assumed a certain intimacy between us. She compliments my espadrilles.

“I bought them shopping with my sister in the city.”

“They're very chic.”

“Good for walking.”

Paul has sent her paper and canvas. “To give the erts a whirl,” she says.

“The arts, you mean?” I ask.

She nods. “Seems I have everything but ideas.” Then she brightens. “Say! I need a tie for my middy blouse—do you think Alfred might have a tie I can borrow?”

T
HAT NIGHT, IN
bed, I tell him we should invite her back for more swimming. “You should take some pictures of her,” I say.

A pause, then, “You don't mind?”

“I have work to do—and she'll be a more compliant model for you.”

So the next afternoon—mid-September already, but the air so warm—Beck returns, and the two of us go into the lake with nothing on.

“Frigid!” she shrieks plunging in. “Come on, O'Keefski!”

The water is clear, and cold, I feel it flowing into me, around me, as I float on my back near the end of the dock, my hair trailing on the surface. She is near me, floating too, her hand brushes mine. My eyes are closed when the shadow falls across my face, and when I open them, he is standing on the dock against the sun. He has the camera out, and I suddenly find I don't want to be there anymore.

She's caught sight of him, and is laughing now. His gaze shifts to her. I climb out and dry myself off with a towel.

“You're going up?” he says, looking back at me.

“I've got to work.” I smile. It's a consent—the smile.

I
T GOES ON
for days—them gamboling about, him photographing her by the edge of the woods, or in the lake. “All in the nudelet,” she laughs delightedly when I meet up with them in the later afternoon. “He must have taken a quintillion pictures of me today.”

Thank God he's occupied, I think. I leave them at it, and vanish into my work. I make abstractions of the lake—sensual folds of hills, reflection, sky. I paint the shanty for fun in dark muted colors. To play a little joke on the men, just to prove I'm not all vivid red, pinks, and blues. I can do a drab thing every bit as well as they can.

Once, through the open door of the shanty, I hear her shriek, “Al-fred!” Her voice with that coy bubbly giggle, just a short distance away. They must be in the meadow. I know it's what he needs to wrench himself out of his doldrum-ruminations—someone or something to entertain him. Better her than me. I've got work to do.

H
E SHOWS ME
a few prints of his photographs of Beck.

“They are lovely!” I say, sorting through them, and I mean it—they are lovely.

“Exactly as you said she would be,” he says.

“How's that?”

“A very pliant model.”

“I said
compliant.
”

“I am sure the distinction escapes her.”

There is one here—an astonishing image—her head is cropped, just the edge of her throat visible, her breasts fill half of the frame. She is lying in the shallows, just under the water, her wet body shining in the sunlight. She has a hand clutched under one breast, the nipple taut. I feel a quick chill run through me—so exquisite, that image of her body, so frank, his desire. Looking at the photograph, I can almost feel the way it happened. How he waded in, his pants rolled up, standing over her, instructing her to lie down in the shallows, to move her hand under her breast, nudging her gently at first, then more sternly, even as her skin shrank against the icy water, holding her breast toward him, her breast ripe, perfect, the camera and his eyes moving over her.

“You like that,” he says, and I feel him behind me then, his hardness pushing into me, he lifts my skirt and I want him to. He slips his hand between my legs. I feel his fingers moving there, peeling into the layers of me. My body opens to him. “You want that,” he says, his mouth near my ear, his breath hot, “to be in that water with her, imagine what we could do with her, what would you want to do with her?” The thought makes me shiver, and he can feel it. He laughs softly—a dark laugh that thrills me.

“You are so wet,” he says, “I would like to have seen you there, in that cold water with her. You would like that. You would like to put your mouth on that.” I push him away, but he draws me back, his voice a dark whisper, disembodied in the black of the potting shed. He unbuttons my shirt and takes my breast out and puts my hand under it, as hers was. I can feel the tug of his teeth, sucking lightly, the nipples sharpen in his mouth, his hand still moving between my legs. I grip the edges of the table behind me.

“Don't tip me into the acid,” I say, laughing quietly. A stray light nicks the rim of his glasses as he takes them off.

“Shhhh,” he says. Through the door, I hear children's laughter coming nearer, the babble of the baby, and Elizabeth's voice. “Shhh,” he says as they pass by. The voices fade, his hand still moving between my legs, moving faster, his fingers creeping into me.

“You're going to make me scream,” I say. His hand doesn't stop.

“You'll have to learn to scream without making a sound.” He tucks the hem of my skirt into the waist, and then he kneels between my knees, turns me, and pushes me back against the sink. I set one foot on the stool and he buries his face between my legs, and I can feel his mouth on me, harder, sharper, everything in me rising, taut. I grip his hair pushing his face deeper into me, something knocks over behind on the table, I barely notice, don't even care, and in the small cramped blackness of that room I feel his hand grip my buttocks, his mouth moving over me, his fingers moving into me. And the light is a scream—exquisite, cutting—washing through my skull, and I make no sound, and when I open my eyes the room is blacker than darkness, my body limp, spent, I cannot see a thing.

B
ECK IS AT
the house every day, for lunch and dinner, modeling, sewing, reading, lying around, writing letters to her Paul, bang-banging away on the old Corona, typing up articles for Stieglitz. She repairs his undershirt. She knits me a pair of heavy bed slippers.

“They'll keep your feet warm,” she says—so obvious it seems almost ludicrous.

“And thick enough to keep my toenails from scratching up Stieglitz's legs in bed at night.”

She looks slightly askance at this.

“I'm surprised he hasn't showed you yet,” I say lightly, a hint of power in my voice. She's begun to sew a nightdress, a sheer thing.

That afternoon, she gathers a bouquet of dahlias she found on a walk, sets them into a vase, and gives them to me. “For you to paint,” she says shyly.

B
Y THE TIME
Paul comes to join us in late September, the family has gone back to the city and we're alone. “There's plenty of spare room now,” I say to Stieglitz. “Invite them to move from the Pines and stay with us.”

Paul has changed, no longer the soft-faced boy who came to fetch me from Texas. I've seen him since, but it hits me now—how somber he is, oddly anxious in his tweed jacket, knit tie, with a cigarette he's constantly smoking. Paul and Alfred take turns photographing Beck in the bed on the sleeping porch. But then Stieglitz complains to me that Strand is shooting everything that's his—everything in sight, right, left, forward, backward, the lake, the trees, even the old buggy.

“You've had quite a run with his wife,” I remark. “Consider it a fair swap.”

He shoots me a look, about to respond, then doesn't. But I can feel it smolder, his envy of Strand's youth, energy, his devouring talent. “Strand's gift is pure,” he said to me just a few months ago. “He doesn't lose that edge. It's my intellect that gets in the way.” I remember this now, feeling the tension in the house rise.

After supper one night, as the four of us sit around the fire, Stieglitz says: “Say, Georgia, why don't you read that piece aloud—the one you wrote for
Manuscripts.
”

I glance at him, and know exactly what he's planning.

I shake my head. “It's not quite finished yet.”

“Close enough, though!” he says brightly. “Please go get it.”

“Yes, do!” Beck says, clapping her hands. So naïve not to smell his design. I glance at Paul. He nods at me, smiling, blind too, so stupidly blind—I would have expected more from him. He knows Stieglitz well. He should be able to read the tone.

“I'd like to hear it, Georgia,” Strand says sincerely.

Actually you wouldn't, I think. But then it occurs to me that perhaps it is what they need, to be cut down a bit. She is not me—though she might play at it, modeling for him, and imagining we are all the best of friends. And Paul
is
wildly talented, but his photographs of Beck are derivative at best, queerly resonant of Stieglitz's serial portrait of me.

They are both just sitting here waiting, their eyes blankly full of worship for us.
We
are what they want to believe in. We are the paragon couple they imagine they want to be.

“Very well, then,” I say, and leave the room to fetch it. The piece has only a cursory mention of Strand. I know it doesn't do his work justice, barely two sentences sandwiched between my praise of Stieglitz as the singular force driving modern American photography, and the focus of the piece—a tribute to Charles Sheeler, whom Strand actively dislikes.

I can feel the air in the room change as I read, the tension rippling. By the time I'm done, Paul's face is oddly red, flushed with anger and shame.

“Well,” says Stieglitz disingenuously. “What do you think?” He is mocking them, and Strand at least has woken up and seen it. Beck still seems a little muddled and looks from one of us to the other, her mind not quite able to compute what it all adds up to.

“That paragraph felt out of style with the rest,” Strand says carefully, addressing me.

“Really?” Stieglitz asks. “Tell us then, what would you suggest as an improvement?”

Strand starts to talk, but every argument he raises, Stieglitz refutes. Paul's face burns. Finally Beck grasps what has transpired, and erupts in a burst of childish outrage in defense of her husband's genius—“How could you be so dismissive? So careless? Or was it intentional? How could you?”

Strand turns on her. “Please be quiet,” he says, because she is making quite a nut of herself.

She snaps back at him then, “Don't tell me to be quiet!”

Stieglitz has a faint and awful smile on his lips, watching them. I feel strangely heartless. I should feel compassion, remorse, or some trace of disgust for Stieglitz and the games he plays. That's not what I feel. They gave away too much. They gave him too much power and put us both up too high. They have left us no choice really but to stay there.

Later, I will look back on this and it will pick at me. It was wrong—what Stieglitz did that evening, what I did, dismantling Paul, his trust in us, and dismantling something young and tender between Paul and Beck as well. I played along, let it happen, felt nothing. In some clear resolute way, I knew how wrong it was, but it was easier to turn on them than look too closely at what I did not want to see.