Georgia (19 page)

O
NE EVENING IN
June, he slips and falls, spraining his back. He can barely walk from the cab to the doctor's office. That night, as he fumbles to pull off his underclothes, he tears a tendon in his hand. He is a mass of bandages, tape, and splints. I tell him we should stay in the city until he's better, but he insists he wants to be at the Lake and limps to the train, his weight resting heavily on me.

The space between us is tensile, wrought. Tiny arguments, no more than usual, but harder for me to set aside. Bickerings over the bathroom door, the rain, the pain from the wrench in his back and what he should do for it.

Nothing new is stirring in me. No shapes. I paint what I know—what is safe. Some calla lilies. Roses. A peach on a glass. But the colors feel flat, bodiless. Midway through a second picture of the peach I find myself in a muddled place, oddly dislocated, clinging to the edges, the geometric order of the shape feeling space.

My hand trembles. I close my eyes. That sudden hard fear and nowhere to put it.

You're the strong one, Georgia,
my parents used to say. The survivor.

Tears sting now, squeezing out against my will.

E
ARLY ONE MORNING
at five, what we've always called “our hour,” I crawl from my bed into his, my body pressed against him.

“I miss you,” I whisper.

“I'm right here.”

“But I miss you.”

He sighs. “Oh, Georgia. Why are you unhappy?”

I swallow and avoid his eyes, the sorrow going down somewhere deep. He draws me closer and strokes my back like I am a kitten or a child. Pat, pat. I pull slightly away, he sighs again, and we lie there, separately, as the sun rises through the window. Ten years ago, this month, I came to the Lake for the first time.

At breakfast, he mentions that I've used the wrong cup for his cocoa, so I pull out another, only to have that one rejected as well.

“Please pick out your own,” I say lightly.

I empty the drying rack, put the silverware away, setting forks with forks, knives with knives. I can feel his eyes on my back. Then he gets up and starts rummaging around the shelves for a cup that will satisfy. I go on doing what I am doing.

As I pour his cocoa, he remarks that before we left the city, he was looking for some mounting paper, because he'd given Mrs. Norman one of his cloud pictures, and how aggravating it was not to be able to find the mounting paper he wanted, it didn't seem to be in stock anywhere, and where did I think he should look?

“You gave her an Equivalent?”

He stares at me. I stare back.

“You're missing the point,” he says. “No mounting paper of the old sort. Not in stock, anywhere. We're all at the mercy of commercial manufacturers.”

Something deep in me turns over. He is so protective of those clouds—they are not pictures of the sky, he will say, but of life. And it levels me—not just the gift, but the offhand way he relayed this bit of information, as if not delivered as an attack, but as a minor detail.

I stir the cocoa. As I hand it back to him, my grip on the handle slips and it falls, nubs of cocoa, ceramic. Pieces everywhere.

I
WANT TO
go away. I plan a trip to Wisconsin in July to visit my sister Catherine and her family. I will stop to visit with my brother Alexius and his wife and the new baby in Chicago.

“Come with me, Stieglitz.” It's the first warm day at the Lake and the lilacs are in bloom. Their dusky scent fills the air. We are out on the porch. He is scrapbooking the clippings from the show, as he does for every show.

“Come with me,” I say again.

He shakes his head. “I'm too old to make that kind of trip.”

“Sixty-four is not old.”

He looks at me then, something hard to interpret, then goes back to cutting, pressing, turning the page.

I arrange for a housekeeper, Margaret Prosser from the village, to look after him. He brings me to the station. Bags packed, cash tucked into a money belt around my waist. He kisses me, and I board the train. I find my seat. Through the window, I can see him standing between the station pillars. The black triangle of his cape between the white triangle of the pillars. His eyes find me, that piercing glimmer, and the train gives a shudder and heave as we begin to move. He grows smaller, his eyes fade into his face, and then he is only a speck, vanishing into the black shape of the station door behind him, his hand waving.

Halfway across the country, I cry. My face turned away toward the window until the handkerchief is soaked through.

M
Y BROTHER
A
LEXIUS
meets me in Chicago at Union Station—the war has aged him. He drives me to the Art Institute because I want to see the Bartlett Collection—Monets and a few van Goghs. His swirls of color stun me—how he used such quick strokes of paint, jab after jab to build those larger arcs of moving light and wind and space. At noon, Alexius comes back for me, and we go to the hospital to see the baby, just born, with his wife, Betty. The sweet constellation of the three of them fills my heart with warmth. The baby is in my brother's arms. The small skull rests in the palm of his hand. Alexius's face is worn, his figure sadly drained of its own life, but his eyes shine every time they fall on his child's face.

“She's lovely,” I say. “Such a simple thing—isn't it?—all those toes! You're lucky.” He glances at me. Perhaps he hears the wistful sadness in my voice.

“You always looked after us when we were young,” he says.

I laugh. “I know, imagine that.”

“You were good to us, Georgia.” He drives me back to the station to catch my train, heading west, toward dark country. I order poached eggs in the dining car. Everyone on the train is playing cards.

S
TIEGLITZ'S LETTERS ARE
waiting for me when I reach Catherine's home in Portage. It feels queer to see them there. Catherine and I walk down to the river with her daughter, Little Catherine. We cross over a bridge, and Little Catherine, who's five years old and not shy, weaves her little fingers through mine as we walk the woods on the opposite shore. In the afternoon, I lie down on the daybed on the porch, and when I wake, I find her little body lying near me, asleep, the little features, so like my sister Catherine's, and that echo of our mother's features as well, like this raw bit of creature is the spit of what we were once, and I am the air around her, flowing in and out. I watch the rise of her little chest, slow and even, as she breathes.

He is a thousand miles away. Does the wind stir through the summer green of the lawn on the hill? Does it sweep up to the porch and touch his face, and will he pause and feel my presence in that soft bolt of wind?

My heart feels like stone. Catherine, who has always been sensitive, notices.

“What's troubling you, Georgia?” she asks when we are up late, talking together in the kitchen.

“Things have just been difficult.”

“With Stieglitz?”

“Yes. And
he
can be very difficult!” I laugh.

She looks at me—not laughing—her eyes, dark and gentle, probe. “That's not quite it, though, is it?” she says. “Is it another woman?”

I feel something in me catch. I shake my head. “Sometimes I wish it were that simple.”

“You don't wish that,” she says.

Growing up, I was the one the others looked up to. The one who knew who she was and what she was about. It comes back to me here, as I watch my sister with Little Catherine—that luxuriant joy in her eyes every time they fall on her daughter's pert face. When I think of the five of us, my sisters and me, I can see how our lives have begun to find their track, to become the lives that will be ours. Anita—social, elegant, rich. Her husband, Robert the financier. Just this spring, Anita bought one of my flower paintings, a white lily framed against red that she shows off to her guests when she entertains. Claudia and Ida, both full-time nurses now, have dedicated themselves to that exquisite pleasure that comes with caring for others. And Catherine. Lovely gentle Catherine was always the one with that goodness about her—a woman in the truest, most noble sense of that word. She is the only one of my sisters I occasionally envy. Catherine's life is closest to the life I sometimes feel I could have had. The life I have missed my chance for.

In his letters, he calls me his Dear Runaway, his Faraway One. His Sweetestheart, as always. And as always when I read his letters, I feel something warm rinse through me. He writes of the news at the Lake—new pipes are going in, trenches dug. He has rewaxed some of his prints and respotted them, though I am much better at spotting than he is, he writes. He has been trying to read a bit of Shaw, but it doesn't suit his mood, so he has picked up Lao-tzu's Tao instead.
I am happy for you that you have made the trip out there, to your America, the place of your beginnings, but it makes me sad too. Sometimes I think—a killing thought—that you were lighter when you came to me, that being here has never been quite enough for what you need. I have never been quite enough.

I look up. I'm sitting on the sofa by the window. Catherine is cooking dinner. I can smell roasting potatoes and the lighter scent of cooked ham. The dark is falling outside, and my face has begun to surface in the long window—an older face, only traces of the girl who came to him, dark hair pulled sharply back, as I wore it then.

He used to pull it loose. I remember this. In those first few years when we were together, he loved how it fell when I was above him in the night bed of that small studio with the orange floor, my hair falling like a thin black shelter around us.

I read the letter again like if I keep reading, I will find my way back. Then I fold it and put it away.

I
TELL
C
ATHERINE
I want to drive out to see the farm where we grew up, and I want to paint a barn. We load her car up with canvases and paints, and the three of us set off—my sister, Little Catherine, and I. Things look different, a few landmarks gone, the roads wider than when I was a child. Halfway there, I know where we are. We pass the stretch of marsh with tremendous willow trees on either side. Little Catherine is delighted and claps her hands as she presses her face against the window. The trees are thick and tall and green.

Catherine keeps her eyes level on the road.

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

“Does he make you happy?”

I hesitate before I answer. “Happiness has never been exactly what I'm after.”

“Marriages move through ups and downs. They change. It is hard sometimes, that changing. You will be happy again.”

“It's more than happiness, Catherine. Happiness is only a piece of it.”

We drive past large fields of ripening yellow grain and windrows of cut hay. We pass sunburned men working. We drive until I find the barn that I like. Deep red—that redness like life—with a high-pitched roof and a stone foundation. Bars of white fencing wrap the barnyard. Little Catherine has fallen asleep, curled up with her pink blanket and doll. Catherine goes to speak with the farmer. I get out my oils. When my sister gets back to the car, she takes out her book to read.

“No,” I say. I pass her a board, a brush. “Paint yours.”

She looks at me, surprised. “I don't paint. You and Ida. Not me.”

I don't answer. Finally, she reaches for the board.

At one point as we are working, she says to me, “It's not coming out as I see it.”

“That doesn't matter so much,” I say. “Paint what you feel about the barn.”

Little Catherine wakes up and wanders into the field. She watches a dragonfly.

When we are done, I set our paintings together, hers and mine. It takes my breath—my sister's painting—the small and awkward purity of it, devoid of self-consciousness, like a raw dream.

“That's beautiful,” I say.

“Oh stop, Georgia.”

“No, I mean it. I like yours much more.”

“My first time with a paintbrush in my hand since I was nine. Don't be so kind.”

“Have I ever said a thing just to be kind?”

She looks at me, then back at the paintings. Mine is cleaner, stronger, but there's an untouched life in her small work I recognize, something pulsating I knew once.

“Give me some advice,” she says. “I'll give it another try when you are gone. What would you do to improve it, or if I tried to paint it again?”

“I'll leave you paints and brushes. You can find out for yourself.”

T
HAT WINTER, WE
do not go out nights. We do not have guests. It's just the two of us in our rooms at the Shelton. We've moved to a larger suite on the thirtieth floor. Every day, he goes to The Room to prepare for Marin's show, the first of the season. Mine will open in February 1929. Looking through my paintings, I feel a sense of dread. There's just not much there.

I wear a flaming-red cape to my opening. My lilies, cityscapes, my leaves with torn edges, and an abstraction of Alexius with its wild, cloud-tousled sky, which I made in celebration for my brother when the baby was born.

Dorothy Norman is there. In a slim black dress, she glows, something deep and supple in her young face. I see how her eyes raise to him when he asks her to do something for him, how quickly she responds. I hate the thought. I hate him for having her here, for not knowing, or not caring, what it does to me.

That night, when we are undressing for bed, I confront him. He denies they are lovers. That it's anything other than innocent.

“Are you in love with her?”

“Of course not,” he snaps. I meet his eyes with a calmness that would have been impossible before. “Don't start this up again, Georgia,” he says, angry now.

“Don't turn this onto me.”

“There's no one else. There's never been anyone else.”

I look at him. That's not true. Beck. The cook. Perhaps there were more. Such a manipulation to use those words
never, no one else,
and yet I know, at some level, he's convinced he has not wronged me. I know how he sees it: these other women, these dalliances, he believes they're inconsequential against what I am to him. And sometimes I just want to stand in that clarity, that conviction that allows this to be so clean and upright in his mind.

F
EW PAINTINGS SELL
but, for the most part, the critics continue to rave. They don't seem to have a sense of what I've turned my back on. I'm not happy with the art I am doing. My forms feel too safe. They lack the bold force and freedom of my earlier things, and it strikes me that ever since his photographs of me were shown, my work has a different quality. As if I've been trying to undo the words he and the men trussed me up with. I remember how decisive it was—when I realized the danger of sending a free, abstract shape out into the world. If it had any mystery at all, they would only misinterpret it, sexualize, sensationalize it, reduce it to gendered terms.

And so I made things on the ground. Nameable forms. Leaves. Trees. Flowers. Strident colors yes, but hard-edged lines, a certain polish and restraint. No longer from a fierce driving need but only as an answer to them.

They don't seem to notice, and I find it curious—not heartbreaking as it should be—but like it's happened to someone else.

H
E COMES HOME
late one evening, and I lean in to kiss him good night and smell her. Perfume. The distant, sweet, glassy scent of sex.

I step back.

“What now?” he says.

“Don't lie to me.”

He meets my eyes. “There's nothing to lie about.”

“Don't, Stieglitz. I know what you are doing with her.”

“Stop.”

“This is all wrong. Don't pretend it isn't.”

“I'm tired, Georgia,” he says with a sigh.

“Is it always about you?”

He turns away from me, and sits down to remove his shoes.

W
E ARGUE MORE
and more frequently. A small thing will set it off. He accuses me of never going to The Room.

“Your sitting room?”

It enrages him that I call it that. I tell him I don't want an exhibit for a very long time. He tells me that that's ridiculous, but there is fear in his eyes. “Unthinkable,” he says.

“Because my shows are the mainstay of the season? Is that what concerns you?”

He looks at me for a long moment. “Art is what you're meant to do, Georgia. And your art is meant to be shown because it says something.
That
is what concerns me.”

True and not true—twisting words around again, there's no way to get a foothold.