Georgia (14 page)

I
POUR MYSELF
into my work.

I keep my things clear, precise, no question, no inch of room open to interpretation. Everything I paint is a nameable form. I paint the lake and call it
The Lake.
I paint alligator pears in napkins, isolated against the white cloth. I paint still lifes. Grapes. Figs. Things that exist. A calla lily turned away. Strict objective forms.

He's been making prints of the images of Beck he took last summer, tickling up her slim buttocks into variegated tones of light and dark under the rippling water. He is delighted with them, and writes her letters to say so. Once when he catches me reading a few sentences he's left to dry, some outpouring of a lustful adolescent fantasy, he snatches the paper away.

“So ridiculous,” I say to him. “You're lucky I like her.”

“I'm hardly lucky,” he says. “This summer has been miserable.”

“You have yourself to thank for that.”

To prove it makes no difference to me, I tell him to invite Beck for a visit. I am happy to see her—silly Beck—she whirls around the house, a singsongy burst of gorgeous sunshine, and joins me in my hatred toward Marie and the brat. It seems she has forgiven me for that awful evening last fall. We go out for rows on the lake and take turns at the oars.

“I couldn't bear an infant,” she tells me flatly one day. She is helping me stake the tomato plants. “I can't stand how they leak from both ends, and smell of shit and sour milk.” She tells me she is terrified when her curse doesn't come on time if Paul has been careless.

“It's a terrible thing, isn't it?” she goes on. “Not to want one. I should. I know I should.” She sighs. “He is a lot like Stieglitz, you know. Moody and needy and never feeling like what he has done is enough and needing me always to tell him it is, needing and needing. But when he's off on an assignment, I feel so completely shut out.”

“Tear me a strip of that pillowcase please.” Blackflies buzz around our heads. I swat them away. She rips off a thin strip. I pound in the stake with a croquet mallet and tie up the vine.

“Sometimes it's worse, though, when he's there,” she rambles on, “when he's right there, but so absorbed in his work or something very important he's doing, then it's like I take up no more room in his thought than a shower curtain, and that seems almost worse, to be with someone and feel so lonely, that's almost worse than being alone.”

She asks if I know what she means.

I tell her then. I can't bear to stay when the house is like this. It all feels like too much—all the rackety commotion, his angst over Kitty, his obsession with that child, his denial of the little one I want, how he likes to think he knows me better than I know myself.

“It wears me to a thread,” I say.

Beck slips a hand on my arm. “I'm sorry, Georgia.”

I shake my head. It's just too much. Too many in the house. Even her. I do not tell her this.

T
HAT AFTERNOON, WHEN
I hear him and Marie in the next room, I walk in and tell him I need to speak with him alone.

He follows me upstairs and sits on the bed, a dark welling sadness in his eyes as I try to explain in an even voice that if I go to visit our friends the Schaufflers in Maine, it will be more pleasant for everyone. They can get along as they like. He can cavort after the brat, and fawn over his secretary. He can fuss with his prints of Beckalina's breasts and gamy thighs.

“What are you accusing me of?” he interrupts.

“It will be better for everyone if I go. My work this summer has been a failure. You've all but said so yourself.”

“I've not said anything of the sort.”

“You called that landscape
tragic.
”

“That was one picture. Tragic might be right for my clouds, but it's not what your work is intended for.”

I bristle as he tells me—again—who I am.

“It will be best for me to leave for a while.”

He just sits there on the edge of the bed, looking small, forlorn, the weight of some invisible thing perched between his shoulders, hunching them down.

I
FOLD A
shirtwaist neatly and set it in the suitcase, then smooth out the places that are wrinkled. They rise up again, the wrinkles, and I press them out flat, until I can feel the ribs of the suitcase beneath. I want to cry.

“All my love goes with you,” he says. One of those sweeping, lovely things he retreats to when we come to a moment like this.

M
AINE.
T
HE SEA
is vast. The cold sting of salt air strikes my face, and I feel my heart rise. The cottage is small, spare, and plain. After supper that evening with the Schaufflers, Florence and I walk the beach down to a schooner-wreck. I return to my room. The birch logs snap and crack in the fireplace, and I sit in the window and look out into the dark. It reminds me of the sky in Texas—the beautiful forever of that night.

The next morning, I run across the boardwalk in my nightdress over the cranberry bog to the beach. I walk the water's edge, the cold shallows rinse in around my feet. I scavenge odd bits, seaweed, rocks, and shells; a large branch worn and tumbled by the sea into an antler shape, cool and smooth like bone. I bring it back to the cottage and arrange the seaweed and shells into still lifes on the table. That afternoon, I sketch their simple forms. I make quick studies on paper. I stretch canvas I bought in a shop in Ogunquit.

His first letter arrives on the second day.

I know you need this time away,
he writes.
But I love you. It is so clear and deep—the way I love you…
I feel my heart kick over. He writes about how queer he's felt since I've been gone. No interest in photographing. He's just messing around with prints.
I want to Palladio, but the sunlight's not steady enough, clouds keep mucking through, and the air is damp. I suppose I'll Artura instead.

He writes about odds and ends—Dempsey's heavyweight championship victory over Firpo; an evening walk he took along the Bolton Road.
The house has that heartbroken lonely feeling it gets when you're away, when that something that you are is missing from it. No matter who else is here.

They've always been so beautiful—his letters.

I asked him once: “Do you love me, Stieglitz? Or is it an idea of me you love?”

I read his letters in the kitchen, sitting on the little rocking chair with the red cushion, my feet up. There are white oilcloths spread on the table, onions boiling on the stove, the room filled with the heady scent. The ceiling is high and dark, the floor unpainted, the walls unplastered. It's a room made to use, the kind of room I love, and his letter has that beautiful ache his letters have always had. And, for the first time in what seems like months or even longer, I
feel
him, in my body, moving through me, that sense of missing him, wanting him. Sometimes, I think I'd trade every other thing just to have this clear deep sense of him inside me.

A knock on the door. Florence comes into the cottage. She smiles when she sees the letter. “Another arrived in the mail today,” she says, handing it to me.

I
WAKE UP
when I please, go to bed when I please. I meet the Schaufflers for supper, and occasionally lunch. I spend most of my time alone. No one to fuss over or wait on. No one to tell me to shut the window if the night air is too raw. The quiet here is almost complete apart from the rustling of the grasses and the low hollow pound of the waves against the shore. There are live lobsters wandering around in the pantry. I hear them sometimes at night, the scratching scraping sound their claws make as they scramble around.

I tell myself it doesn't matter. What he does with Beck. Flirts or sports with her. She's just a model, posing for the kind of photographs I refuse to pose for anymore. I've encouraged it, haven't I? To keep him busy, out of my hair. I put the thoughts in neat order and make a study of seaweed. One of a shell. Only studies, though. Nothing worth keeping. My work feels strangely uninspired, but the days are beautiful, the sun rising and the green willows through the window, moving sweetly, everything so soft. Funny, how keenly I feel him here, more keenly here than when we are together.

He writes that Strand came for a short visit, then left, and Beck is messy, nothing creative about her. She's always in a rush to speed up, trying to grasp what she can't—her pictures are as scattered as she is. Good with a typewriter, though. Rosenfeld has discovered she's quite useful on that front. He's been writing chapters for his new book. He slips pages under the door, and she Smith-Coronas them for him.

I tell myself it's good for us—this separation. Eighteen days now.

I
FEEL IT
the instant I return to the Lake—the shift, the awkwardness between them, some sexual static gone awry. A line crossed. He is anxious and furtive. Everything about him, his eyes, mouth, hands, lie. He doesn't look at Beck, and when I do her eyes shift away. Her laughter is forced, and I know. Even Rosenfeld's smile is desolate. He's seen the gleam of our ideal union stripped.

Stieglitz takes my arm. “There's something we need to discuss.”

He sits on his bed, and I listen, while he tells me that it was all a mistake, and he is done with these carousel infatuations, this foolishness.

“
What
foolishness?”

“That's how Elizabeth describes it.”

“Elizabeth?”

He hangs his head, and says he needs me to hear him out. It was all a mistake, the flirtation, but how lonely he was without me. He suffered, couldn't sleep, Beck came to him one night and held him, and it became a something it never was. There was no Actual Sex, he says quickly, but she and everyone else have read everything the wrong way. And perhaps it was good for him, he continues, a good lesson, my going away like that. Since now he's realized how much he needs my severity with him all the time, my sense of order.

“Tell me the truth,” I say.

“The truth is you're the only woman in the world who should be close to me,” he says. “My love, my dearest, sweetest love. Poor Pudge,” he adds. “I'm afraid he saw me at my worst.”

I listen and let him go on.

Only after supper that night, in the living room, sorting through the records to choose one for the gramophone, I get into it with Beck and remark how inane it is for a woman to wear trousers. Really.

She tries to buck me off. Stieglitz just sits there, his eyes flick from one of us to the other, as if he had no hand in this.

“What are you trying to be?” I say to her. “Why does a woman get herself up like a man anyway? What is that? Explain it.”

Stieglitz lifts his glasses and brushes something invisible out from the lens.

S
HE LEAVES WITHOUT
a word to me, the pages she was typing up still set in a neat stack beside the Corona. It is only later that night that I let him near me, back into my bed.

“I want only the truth from you, Alfred. Do you understand? From this point on.”

“There's no other woman on earth who can touch what you are to me. That is the truth.”

We lie in silence for a while.

“I needed that time away,” I say. “The sea, that space. I needed it so much I was almost afraid I wouldn't come back.”

“You're home now.”

“Everything was so beautiful there—even us. I wish I could explain.”

“You don't have to.”

“I want you to go with me,” I say. “Stay in a little cottage. Just be alone together.”

He nods, a soft smile. “There's work to be done here. It's our season now.”

“I was afraid—” I say.

“Shhh.”

“I must never leave you—”

“Don't talk now, Sweet.” His voice quiet, gentle, but the more gentle he is, the more the anxiety snaps back inside me, rising.

“I needed it so much, that time away—”

“Shhh—Georgia, dearest. You're home now. It's just us.”

I
T SHOULD FEEL
like any other fall, but it doesn't quite. I do what I've always done. Paint in the shanty until November, then move my work into the house. He shovels coal into the furnace and keeps the fire going. That's his chore, to keep things warm and lit to tend the aloneness I love that so unnerves him.

He turns into his work. Stalking around, vest inside out, shoelaces undone, the cape thrown casually on when he goes out to traffic with the Infinite, just a lone slight figure, wind whipping his cloak around, the handheld Graflex angled straight up. He shoots the clouds until his neck kinks, a crick so severe he can barely move it. I put Sloan's Liniment on it for him, order him to bed, only to find that a few hours later he is gone again, slipped out to his darkroom in the potting shed. I come on him there, the photographs he has made surfacing toward us out of the developing trays, rippling through the water, those long brushed strokes of clouds.

The irony is not lost on me. I remark on it—how I'm choosing things on the ground for my work while he's usurped my sky.

They feel stark to me. My still lifes. The colors intense, even vibrant, yes, simplified forms—my leaves and birch trees, my seaweed studies from York Beach, my picture of two avocados on green drapery. That bit of reflected light on their skins feels almost too meticulous, even forced—unnatural. That's how it seems to me. Unnatural.

The intention of my work has changed. With the exception of the pink moon over the sea I made in Maine, there's no sky in the paintings I made this summer.

A
S WE'RE PACKING
to leave the Hill, the sky begins to gather, darkening—then a blizzard of whiteness.

“Snow on the lake!” he says, staring from the window as it falls. “I've always wanted to see this.”

I hold his arm and we walk out into it, laughing together, falling into each other like children. We roll down the hill, snow in our faces, in our mouths.

By the time we take our boots off inside, my clothes are soaked, my hands red and numb. He builds up the fire. I notice he is silent. I look up. Without a word, he takes my hand and draws me to the mirror in the hall. Reflected in the glass is the window behind us, and through it, the exquisite frozen world. The face is not my face, it's a younger face, smiling, unlined, the cheeks flushed, eyes so bright—

“Look at you,” he says.

We eat in silence. Almost happy. Almost ourselves again. He ministers to the fire, and the night comes down, and we sit in the window together looking out at barns swathed in whiteness, the moonlight brutal, carving channels through the snow.

“Maddeningly beautiful,” he murmurs.