Georgia (17 page)

T
HAT FALL,
1925, when we return to New York, we move into the new Shelton Hotel. There's a life-sized wooden Indian in the lobby opposite the registration desk. The hotel has a library, a solarium, and even an Olympic-size swimming pool; it has a cafeteria where we will take our meals, fireplaces in every room, a roof terrace in the spring.

The sales of my paintings have paid for this.

My arm hooked through his, we walk through a suite of rooms on one of the higher floors. Vaulted ceilings, the windows are huge, looking out across the landscape of buildings and streets, the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral. From this height, I can feel the gentle sway of the steel in the wind.

“Perfect all around!” I say.

We will only rent for the months we are in the city. The hotel staff will do the housekeeping, leaving me free to paint.

The bedroom is tiny. We squeeze in the bed, a bureau, his favorite deep armchair. The sitting room is my studio by day. I have the walls painted gray, the furniture slipcovered in white. No decorative chintz, no distraction—only a few shells and rocks scattered in little piles on the mantel and the windowsills. Stieglitz asks for curtains. I refuse.

“I love it here,” I say to him early one morning after we've made love. We lie wrapped together under the coverlet, the wind beats against the windows and the panes sway, all tumult and windshift, distance pouring out in every direction. “It's almost like not being in the city, but we are. You can have your city and I can live here in the sky.”

I help him transform the new space he's rented in the Anderson Galleries. We will call it simply The Room. I tack unbleached muslin over the black velour walls—the natural sunlight reflects off the muslin and the room feels airy, free. Once it is ready, he's there all day, fussing over Marin's installation, which will open the season.

There is a clean lovely peace between us. We take breakfast and supper together in the Shelton cafeteria. I work alone in the apartment. I make pencil sketches of the skyline, then a series of oils of the city. I paint until dusk and, when the phone rings, I pick it up and ask whoever is calling if they could please call back when the light is gone.

B
LANCHE
M
ATTHIAS HAS
offered to write a feature on me for
The Chicago Evening Post.
She comes to our apartment for an interview. Stieglitz has told me the article won't make much difference, since it won't print until early March when my show is on the verge of closing. But I like Blanche. She's sophisticated—wealthy but straight up. She's traveled through the Orient, the Middle East, and Europe, and I've always liked her, not just her person, but her poetry and essays on art, and I see this as an opportunity. When we are alone in the sitting room, her notebook and pen ready on her lap, she asks what I think about women and art.

“There just hasn't been much,” I tell her. “We do things differently from how men do them, and men can't really see or feel what it is we do, because it is so different.” And I explain to her that perhaps that is why I've been written about as I have by men—when all I am really trying to do is say something that I feel in color and form, something that matters, something that has life.

“It's really just that simple, and there's no reason to argue or stew, because the time it takes to complain is time away from work.”

She asks me how I work, and I tell her how I make notes on every color I choose. Each has a certain relationship to life. I paint that.

“That sounds like Kandinsky.”

“He's so theoretical. He links hue with pitch and claims different tones of color cause a particular vibration in the spirit. But art is more about sensation. When someone looks at a painting I've done, I want them to feel what drove me to paint it in the first place. When I make a picture of a flower, I don't paint it as I see it, but as its essence moves me. I eliminate every detail that's extraneous. I paint it as I want it to be
felt.
”

She scribbles a few things on her paper, then turns the page and asks if I am an exponent of expressionism.

I laugh. “I have no use for that term or any other.” I tell her how this all began for me when I was teaching art at a small school down in the Carolinas. “And one October, I took out all the decent pieces I'd ever done. I placed them all around my room, and studied them, and in each picture I could see the influence of some teacher I'd had, or another artist I'd known—and I began to realize that I'd never done anything original. So I packed it all up and put away my color box, and got down on my knees on the floor with some paper and charcoal. For weeks that fall I was dizzy, my head spinning with shapes that meant something to me. When I was finished, I looked at them and I could see that they said something new.”

“A rebellion.”

“It wasn't that grand. And in a sense that was the most wonderful thing about that time in my life. I wasn't doing it for anyone, or in reaction to anyone. I was alone in that room. I was no one. I was those shapes, that paper, that charcoal. And then I rolled the drawings up and sent them to a friend in New York.”

She writes on her pad of paper, her pen flying over it, then she stops, and glances up, waiting. Through the window behind her, dusk has fallen and the sky is that steep violet that I love. The room is spare. We have been here for three months and only a painting of Dove's hangs on the walls. A red flower in a vase, the only spark of color. On cold days he still mutters about the lack of curtains—how those windows let everything in. Should I say that I am a landscape artist who has become famous for someone else's portraits of me? That as my art has hit the world it's been instantaneously recast by those who see what they want, not what is there? The words are on the tip of my tongue. My hands rest on the arm of the sofa. I press my palms down, the muscles tense, gripping slightly, unnoticed.

I explain instead that what has been written about my things says more about those doing the writing than it says about my art.

“You alluded to that earlier,” she says. “Shall I include it?”

“Yes, please.”

She does not write it down. She is still looking at me, a curious look, as if she has unwrapped something and is not at all sure what to make of it.

“What?”

She shakes her head.

“Tell me,” I say.

“You are fearless,” she says.

“Not really.”

“You dare to paint what you feel.” She drops her pen to the page and writes for a moment, then continues. “You know there was one photograph of you—it was an early one, taken up at Lake George, you are standing and the sky is behind you.”

I nod. There were many that were taken that day. Out of so many, though, I already know exactly the one she is referring to.

“There's something remarkable about it,” she says. “A simple ferocity in your expression that reminds me of your art.” I hold up my hand to stop her.

“I have nothing to say about the photographs, Blanche.”

“Excuse me?”

“They're not mine.”

She looks off balance. The sudden hardness in my voice has thrown her.

“One last question then,” she says.

“Yes?”

“Stieglitz?” she says tentatively, unsure perhaps if she should take this route. “I've heard him described in so many ways: philosopher, wizard, master, discoverer of Marin, friend of Einstein.”

I smile at her.

“What would you say about Alfred Stieglitz, Miss O'Keeffe?”

The dusk outside has fallen a step farther, toward near-black indigo. I consider this woman almost a friend, an ally. And in the last hour we have spent together, I can feel the bones of the piece she will write. The things she will say about my work will be things I want people to know. This will be a piece I'll want cited, and so I answer her question this way:

“I would say that Stieglitz is, first and above all, a brilliant artist whose photographs have transformed America's understanding of modern art.” I do not look at her. I want her to absorb only the words and not whatever my eyes might betray. “But Stieglitz has never allowed himself the time to achieve his own greatness. Rather he has dedicated his life to others. He fights for his artists tirelessly, fights so that we might have the time and space to work, and he fights for the integrity and future of art itself against all of the forces and politics that seek to diminish it.”

I look at her then. “Write that,” I say. “Please.”

M
Y EXHIBIT IS
scheduled for the second week in February 1926. Once again, he doesn't want to include my city paintings. He likes them much less than the flowers, he says. At least the flowers have color, but they can be too pretty, too frivolous, and he doesn't like the way people remark on that prettiness when my art is so much more.

“Do you see what I mean about the prettiness?” he says, as if he's entirely forgotten that the argument started on my cityscapes. I tell him I don't care if the flowers are pretty or not. They mean what they mean to me. I make them because that is what I am led to do. And I don't care what anyone else thinks about my city paintings or that the men say I am mad to attempt something so ambitious.

“I don't care, because when I look out from this window all the way across city to the river and past it, right now—exactly now—this is what I want to paint.”

“Which is precisely the point,” he says. “You should care.”

He is hearing only what he wants to hear and stripping out what's useful to his argument: that he should decide what goes in, not me.

“The city paintings are going to be in my show this year,” I say. I remind him then that he was wrong about the flowers when I first started making them. He called them “silliness,” he said no one would buy them, and what a surprise it's been—to both of us—that the flowers are the reason we were able to move into the Shelton.

T
HE WALLS OF
The Room blaze with my things.
New York Street with Moon
sells the first night of the show for twelve hundred dollars. The flower paintings are snatched up as well. Within the first several weeks, sales total nine thousand dollars. Stieglitz is ecstatic and extends the show through March.

I take the train alone to Washington where I am to speak at the National Woman's Party dinner. My friend Anita Pollitzer who arranged it was surprised and thrilled when I agreed to come. There are five hundred women in the audience, a sea of faces, and I tell them that it matters—to earn one's own living, to work hard, and to consider oneself an individual, with rights and privileges and responsibilities—the most vital of which is self-realization.

When I return to New York, he clings to me. He makes love to me in our room, the free night pouring through the windows. He runs his mouth along the inside of my thigh and kisses that spot between my legs until I cry out and stuff my face into the pillow, my mind rinsed, breathless. He lowers his weight onto me. I grip his back and pull him deeper in. Afterward, we lie together, he holds my face in his hands and pushes my hair back with his thumbs from where it has stuck, wet, against my cheeks.

“I walked the streets for hours while you were gone,” he says. “I don't know why it is, but I can't bear it somehow, when you're away. Like everything is missing.”

O
N
M
ARCH
2, Blanche's interview appears in
The Chicago Evening Post.
It is the best thing that's ever been done on me.

“I'm not sure I'd go that far,” Stieglitz says.

“And look what she wrote about you!” I point out the paragraph where she quoted me word for word about his indefatigable work for others, how he once set aside his own career for the sake of his artists, how his new series of photographs—his clouds—secures his place as one of the great visionaries of our time.

“I want to make copies for The Room,” I say, squeezing his hand as he reads the paragraph through again.

“That was generous of you, Georgia, to say those things about me.” There's a tremble in his voice. He is moved.

“So we'll make them copies then.”

He looks at me for a moment. His eyes search my face trying to gauge the slight steely brightness behind my smile.

“Do it,” I say.

“All right. We will.”

I
PAINT THE
black iris over and over, falling more deeply, more irrevocably, into the secret dark of it. At the Lake, I paint cannas but differently, giant canvases. They aren't still lifes. Some are abstracted to the point of being unrecognizable. Their edges explode off the canvas, but they are always nameable. Pansy. Calla. Tulip. Rose.

Stieglitz is not himself. He reads a little, pokes about in the kitchen. One night cleaning up after supper, he washes the dishes, wipes them dry, then sets them back into the rack as if they are still wet. He inadvertently throws leftover scraps of food into the bread box. Finally, he mopes off to bed with an undetermined illness and a smuggled copy of Joyce's banned latest,
Ulysses.

He is bored, and I am busy, and perhaps to get back at me, he invites Eva Herrmann and Ethel Terryll, the daughters of his old friends. He rallies, as he often will for guests. He finds himself exactly where he likes, in a knot of young women, who giggle and adore being photographed. He begins to make nudes of them, the first nudes he's made since Beck. He flirts with the cook that Lee and Lizzie have brought. Her name is Ilse, a young blond thing with a round face, rounder breasts, and a small waist cinched in her red apron. One day I hear him telling her that the rolls she bakes are delicious, the most buttery, sweet biscuits he's ever bitten into. “I could eat the whole tray and still be hungry,” he says. Her girlish laughter drifts through the house. With my city paintings, the money from my sales, and perhaps most essentially Blanche's interview, some balance between us has changed. He'll claim it's innocent—what he's doing—these girls are entertainment for him while I work, but we've been here before, and there is something loud and blatant about the way he is doing it that feels like a punishment.

I
T'S A
T
HURSDAY,
midafternoon, when Eva Herrmann comes to the shanty and knocks politely on the door. I slip back into my shirt. It was hot. I'd taken it off. I go to the door and let her in. Her face is grave as she pulls a stool over and reaches for my hand and tells me that when she walked into the kitchen just now, he was kissing the cook.

I slip my hand from hers—deft and quick—and ask her to leave. I begin to work again, my mind trembling, all seized up like a record caught on a scratch. I lean back against my stool. The door ajar, the sky is starkly blue, the slant of light on the hill so perfect I just want to tear it to pieces.

I leave my things where they are—paint on the palette, the brush on the table. I don't clean up, just that tight stretched feeling in my chest like a drum. I walk toward the house. There's a commotion on the porch—new voices, children, and I suddenly remember that today is the day the little Davidson girls arrive. Elizabeth has stayed at home and sent them on alone.

I cut around toward the back of the house.

“Georgia, there you are!” Lee calls. “Come over here, please, and see the girls. They've prepared something for you.” I turn and walk stiffly over to where the little girls wait just inside the front hall—their matching dresses, sandals, and bonnets.

Little Sue steps toward me and curtsies, holds out her hand, and says shyly, “How do you do,
Aunt
Georgia?”

I slap her light and fast across the face. “Don't ever call me Aunt.”

Like a falling house of cards, the sounds behind me as I move toward the stairs—the child whimpering, a woman's murmur to soothe her, the shocked silence of the rest, and the echo of crisp, determined footsteps, mine.

I spend the rest of that day in my bedroom. Stieglitz comes to find me, and I tell him to leave. It's just too much—the taut weight of anger and shame. The question searing: “Who is this person I've become?”

The sunlight is pale on the walls.

Not one for children.
I remember those words—words from the summer Marie came with her two-year-old Yvonne. We were alone in the kitchen when he said it.
You are not one for children.
A vague, knowing smile on his face. So awful, that smile, it made my throat constrict, like he was seeing into a future I'd not yet arrived at. The future we seem to find ourselves in now.

T
HAT EVENING,
I
tell him I am going to Maine. He denies the business with the cook.

“You think every awful thing you hear about me is true.”

“Why would Eva invent that?”

“You imagine a simple flirtation means something it doesn't.”

I feel a sharp flash of rage. I know what he thinks he's saying. In his mind, the two are separate—love and sex—how he feels about me and what he does with someone else. I think of Beck, how I saw it coming and did nothing to stop it. But this. Somehow it feels worse. A kiss. The word itself is a word I love, and I can't escape the leveling feeling inside that I've brought this on. I've done something to make this happen.

My mind is not working right, torn in too many directions at once. I brush my hand across my face. Tears glisten.

O
N OUR WAY
to the train station: “I didn't make the bed,” I say.

“What?”

“The bed. I didn't make it.”

“That's all right.”

“No, you see, it isn't really.” My voice sounds small, far away, a voice falling through an hourglass, because I thought to myself: I should fix the bed before I go. But as I stepped into the room, I suddenly realized that we would not be in that bed together and he might not be alone.

“I started to make it,” I say, “and then did not.”

“She meant nothing, Georgia. There was nothing.”

“It means something, though, to me.”

W
HEN
I
RETURN
from Maine, they're gone—the nobody cook and the rest. We are careful, he and I. We move around each other gingerly. Not one harsh word exchanged.

I unpack the shells I brought back, and paint them. My palette has shifted—austere, almost alabaster tones—the shells' edges clean, severe. I tell myself it does not matter. What he did or did not do. It should not, cannot matter. Whether it's something or nothing. I should not care. A body, a kiss, or those fugitive clouds he tries to seize rushing over the hill. It does not matter that once I threw myself into him like water into water.

C
ROSSING THE YARD,
I find an old weathered gray shingle on the ground near the barn. It reminds me of a shingle I fashioned with a white sail as a child and set to float in the rain barrel.

I bring that piece of shingle upstairs to the sunny bedroom, and set it with a shell on my table. They seem to say something to each other—the bleached whiteness of the shell and the gray of the shingle—and I paint those shapes and repaint them until the shingle becomes just a darkness, its curved shape like the petal of a very dark flower, the shell a loose dab of whiteness beneath. I look so closely and for so long, my mind begins to soften, my seeing separates. They become fluent, flow together, those non-living things, they shift and continue to shift, losing their hard edges, gradually abstracting from their own forms.