Georgia (24 page)

H
E GOES BACK
to New York to open the gallery. I stay on at the Lake to prepare for my show.

Everyone else has left. I knock out the wall between my bedroom and the closet to expand the space. I paint the floor a dark pine green and throw down my Navajo rugs. I set my bones around the house. I call them my trash, and I move other things, vases, china knickknacks, to make room for them.

Late September, I give Margaret the day off. There's something I want to do, I tell her, and I need to be alone. I set a pair of brightly colored pajamas on a chair and prop a cow's skull against them, tinkering until the placement is right.

I begin to sketch out the shapes, abstracting the folds of cloth into the vertical plunge of a canyon. This will be my answer to the men who are always setting out to make the Great American Novel or the Great American Photograph. This will be my joke on them. Lines of red, white, and blue, and that mythic, imperfect cow skull—that piece of country—floating there through the center, the stripped cold strength of that bone that lasts and lasts, rising out of the blue like some crazy American dream. It will be unsalable—who would hang a thing like this? I don't care. They may not like it, but they'll notice. Whether they get it or not. They don't make the country like I do. They don't see that what is most magical and lush exists where you would never think to look. The bones are not what you imagine. I told Beck this once. Not death. But the life that is left over.

When I finish the painting, I study it. It isn't pretty, but it's what I want it to be.

I
STRETCH NEW
canvases until my fingers ache. I walk up to Flat Rock almost all the way to the birches and, when I think of Stieglitz, an unexpected warmth surges through me—something I've not felt in a very long time. This is the first fall I've stayed on alone at the Lake without him. I am working, and am pleased with the things I've made. He calls on the phone every evening. He misses me, he says. He's developing the photographs he took, and they are beautiful, extraordinary even, but not exactly what he was after. Only one or two that capture what he feels about me, that true feeling underneath all other temporary things.

I
ASK
M
ARGARET
to drive down with me to the city. There are two sweaters I need to pick up at the Shelton. Then we'll go by the gallery to surprise Stieglitz, and see the new prints he's made.

In the Shelton lobby, I give a brief nod to the ridiculous life-sized wooden Indian and take the lift upstairs. I hear a woman laugh softly as the door swings open. Even before I get my mind around the sound, I tell Margaret, “Go.” She steps back into the hallway with the force of my voice. I shut the door on her. Silence from the bedroom now. Then Stieglitz appears, the camera in his hand.

“What are you doing here?” he says.

I push past him, and she is there, wrapped in the bedsheets, her shoulders bare, hair loose, everything smattered with that telltale sexual disarray. The tripod is set up at the end of the bed with its black cloth, awful and familiar, not her in that bed, but me, in a different wife's room.

I turn and face him. “Get her out.” I walk to the window. Behind me, I hear her scurry off the bed, a fumbling of shoes, the clatter of steps. I look out across the city as he walks her to the front door, exchanging words I can't make out and don't want to. It's ended. It could not have ended any other way. What surprises me is the flood of relief I feel, as if space has opened. At some level, I knew this was coming and I can be done waiting for it. Whatever lie he takes up next—it doesn't matter now. There's nothing here worth being honest for.

He comes back in. I tell him I want separate rooms at the Shelton.

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Separate rooms,” I say.

“Please, don't do this.”

“You're telling me,
Don't do this
?”

He takes a step toward me. The walls tighten. I hold up my hand. “Don't.”

“Georgia.” Another step. “I realize you're upset.”

“You realize nothing.”

He reaches out. I raise my hand to strike his away, then don't. He touches my face. “I love you,” he says, “no matter what you think of me, no matter what you will never believe or understand, that does not change.”

I don't look at him. How small he's grown. His actions so pathetically ordinary. This guttered life. It could be anyone's.

“You are a fool,” I say.

His hand drops. “If I were you, I would act differently.”

“If you were me, Stieglitz, you wouldn't have done what you've done.”

O
N THE RIDE
back to the Lake, Margaret and I don't speak. I miss the exit to Troy, an extra hour out of our way. We get caught in traffic over the bridge in Rensselaer. The fields stare back, blank as we follow the road toward the break in the mountains. Silent, we unpack the car. She fixes supper while I build a fire. We have not spoken more than thirty words.

T
HE FIRST TIME,
I let the phone ring. The second time, after nine rings, I pick up.

“I'm going to bed,” I say into the receiver.

“I don't want a separation.”

“We'll talk about it later.”

“That's not what I want.”

“I just need to get back to work, Stieglitz. My work is what matters right now.”

The neighbors' dogs are fighting—a terrible racket, their barking noises and snarls.

“Georgia.”

“Not tonight,” I say. “I'm not going to do this tonight.”

H
E WRITES THE
following day, then again the day after. He asks when I am coming back to New York. Margaret brings the mail. It stares at me from the table. I wish there were no letters.

I work hard. I paint and lose myself to the smooth flow of color filling the pores of the canvas. I work until my head is light, and the work is good, but I don't sleep well.

I drive at dusk to the garage to get some alcohol in the car radiator so it won't freeze. I take back the pair of Texas steer horns the mechanic lent to me, and he tells me a story of someone getting killed. He is always telling those kinds of stories. The leaves are gone. All is flat and colorless. Cold.

I
ONLY COME
back to the Shelton when he's done what I asked. Our things have been moved into a new, larger suite—three full bedrooms, one for him, one for me. The third I claim for my studio. I'm still not sleeping well—the noise of the city grates on me.

My December show goes up and comes down. My crosses and skulls spark all sorts of conversation and lively conjecture. Words like
mystery, cabalism, surrealism
get flung around. It all just makes me tired—having to explain what I paint or want to paint. I have nothing to say to Stieglitz or anyone else. Mrs. Norman's name does not come up. When I am planning to go by the gallery, I inform him in advance, and when I arrive she is not there. As far as I know, she's still managing things, the rent fund and whatnot. I don't care, and I don't ask. He must sense it, though, because her name has been scrubbed right out of our lives.

The marriage continues. Money, art, logistics, these are the terms that bind us now although he would never admit to seeing it this way. That's what's left.

Silence. More and more silence.

I do my work, he goes to the gallery, and the winter flows quietly by until I refuse to let him hang the nudes he took of me last fall in his February retrospective.

He demands a reason and is annoyed when I won't give one.

“Aren't they beautiful?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Then why not show them?”

“I don't want them linked to my work.”

“This is my work.”

“You know what I mean.”

His face is lit with a sudden rage, but when he sees I'm not saying it to pick a fight, only saying that, for me, something is finished and I won't relent, his eyes cool.

“You can take one of the other portraits,” I say, “the one with my Navajo blanket. That one's good. But not the nudes.”

H
IS SHOW GOES
up on February 15. He's not shown his own work since 1925. There are 127 photographs, spanning forty years. A handwritten announcement boldly stating that the gallery will be open day and night.

In the main room are seventeen images in the series of older New York: early pictures, dreamlike, elegiac, his iconic images of
The Terminal, Winter Fifth Avenue, The Flatiron,
made back near the turn of the century when the city still held that washed romantic air. There's a new series as well shot from the windows of the Shelton that documents the changing Midtown skyline. It's an artful but scathing indictment of what the city has become. The old buildings cower against the graven soulless rise of the new.

In the second gallery are his Equivalents: his clouds pictures, his landscapes of Lake George, and two pictures of Dorothy Norman. In the last room are the rest of the portraits: Marin, Demuth, Anderson, Rosenfeld, me.

One afternoon, late February, when he is going with Rosenfeld to a performance of Wagner's
Tristan and Isolde,
he asks if I would mind the gallery while he is gone.

In the lull between visitors, I walk the length of the rooms and look at each print. The sharp focus of silver tones on the new paper stand in contrast with the graduated shadows of his early pictorial work. Such severe beauty, though. In all of it. Such clarity of feeling, line, and tone. As though a breath were caught. Livingness, we called it once.

The rooms are empty. I am alone in this place that is not my place. The frosted-glass doors are closed, still, and it feels very sad—not the aloneness, but how much I once believed in what a room like this could be.

As a man, he is so impossible. Manipulative, demanding, self-absorbed. But, at the same time, he is also this. Print-to-print, I feel it like a shiver. Curiously transcendent, the incantatory power of his art. How, in a simple image, he can transform grass into water, water into the bark of a tree, the side of a building into sunlight. How he can say something about our flawed, impermanent selves in a raindrop or a cloud. This is what drew me to him. This is what I have always loved—the promise of his vision and his relentless faith in art. And even now, after all that's been undone between us, this remains.

That night after supper, I write Marie Garland to tell her I'm planning to come to New Mexico early this year. I ask if she knows anyone who might have a cottage for rent northwest of Alcalde, closer to Abiquiu.

I seal the envelope and put it with the mail to go out.

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
I am planning to leave for New Mexico, the noted designer Donald Deskey approaches me. He asks if I would consider a commission to create a permanent mural for the powder room on the second mezzanine of the new Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center. He saw my triptych
Manhattan
in the May exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art. He's spoken with the architect. They feel my work would be a perfect fit. They are planning to use the interior spaces and foyers to exhibit contemporary art.

It's an intriguing idea. I've always wanted to make a painting that fills an entire room. I tell Deskey I'd be interested in learning more. He enlists the dealer Edith Halpert to take it further with me. He knows whose toes he's stepping on, and he has conveniently decided to step around Stieglitz and deal directly with me. Over lunch, Edith tells me that Deskey is elated I'm considering the work—and how perfect my large flowers will be for the powder room.

When I mention it to Stieglitz, he's not pleased. He despises murals. He calls them that Mexican Disease and he's not yet forgiven the Modern for holding Diego Rivera's one-man show last fall.

“Besides,” he says, “working for Radio City would be a grave mistake.”

“I've accepted it.”

“Only in words.”

“My word is my word,” I say.

“You don't know what you're agreeing to with a commission like that. When, for example, are you planning to paint this powder room?”

“Over the summer.”

“What about your trip?”

“I'm going to stay and do the work instead; I'll leave when it's done.”

“And if the construction's not finished by summer?”

“Then the fall.”

“During the same weeks you are also painting for your show at the gallery?”

I am silent. He is making this a war.

“Industrial design is not the same as art, Georgia. Their objectives and yours are not the same.”

“It's a project I want to do, Stieglitz.”

“And what have they said they'll pay?”

“That's not quite settled.” The wrong answer, I know, the moment it slips from my mouth.

“What figure was discussed?”

“Every artist hired will be paid the same.”

“What was the figure?”

I meet his eyes. “Fifteen hundred.”

He snorts. “Unthinkable!”

“I want to do this project, Stieglitz.”

“You are an artist. This is not an artistic decision. Your sales control the value of your art.”

I feel the space collapse. His nerve-bending logic.

“I work tirelessly, Georgia, tirelessly, to build the value of your art. I won't sell a painting for less than it's worth. I've finally agreed to let the Whitney buy one of your canvases for almost five thousand dollars, and now you've agreed to paint an entire room for less than a third of that.”

“I told you the figure isn't settled.”

“And you're naïve enough to believe that once they've given you a figure, and you've given them your word, they'll go higher?” The disdain in his voice is palpable.

I meet his eyes. “I'm going to do this work.”

“I do not agree.”

“You don't have to,” I say calmly. “Because I see it now. This isn't about my decision at all, is it, Stieglitz? It's because I made the decision without you.”

He turns and walks out of the room. That's the end of it. The last word. And for the first time, I wonder if I've made a mistake. Not by what I've said or felt or done, but years ago. Where would I be now if I had never stepped foot into the hot fire of the shoe-box room? If I had not come to him, who would I be?

I
N
J
UNE,
I
go up to the Lake to open the house. We do not discuss Radio City. But he has voluble conversations with Elizabeth and Rosenfeld about “the whole mural business.”

One night I dream of my mother—I wake with a start, the sense of her fills me, the craving I once felt for her to break out of the sternness she held herself to, and love me, notice me.
Beautiful.
Just the word shivering in the half-light of the dawn.
You are beautiful.
Words she never said.

I get out of bed and go downstairs. Stieglitz is already awake, fixing his cocoa. We say little. I pour my tea. The liquid steeps, wafts of brown leaking into the clear.

“Milk?” he says, nodding to the bottle.

“No, thank you.”

He places the bottle back into the ice chest and leaves the room.

I walk for hours that morning. Walk straight and fast, thighs burning up the hill through the tall grass into the shade. There's a grief in my chest so deep and sharp. I can't shake the image of my mother's face, the intensity of her dark eyes, her unused life.

I
'M EXHAUSTED, DARK
loopy shadows under my eyes. Still no word about the powder room. Time feels all cut up. Just waiting. What a waste of a summer.

“You've lost weight, Georgia,” Rosenfeld remarks one evening when we're all reading in the front room after supper. “Are you feeling all right?”

I smile at him. “I'll be fine once fall rolls around.”

“It's that Radio City,” Stieglitz cuts in, “doing a job on her nerves.”

“That's not what it is, Alfred.”

“I've known from the start it would.”

“I'm not going to talk about this.”

“You should reconsider.”

“I won't.”

“You don't know what you're getting into.”

I lose it then. It just snaps right out—“You think you know what's right for me, Stieglitz—you've always thought every decision was yours to make about what I could do, should do, and every time I've wanted something else, or struck out on my own, you've found some way to get me back underfoot and stamp me down. Radio City's a job I want to do. And it's a job I can do. Paint on canvas. It's as simple as that. And I need you to stay out of it, or I'll be on that train heading west with no return ticket.”

He says nothing then, after that. Nothing at all. No one does. He only looks down and shakes his head. I glance at Rosenfeld whose face is red, his drooping eyes, sad features sliding away.

“I'm sorry, Pudge,” I say. I go upstairs to my bedroom and close the door.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER,
I
phone Deskey and arrange for a meeting to discuss the contract. I go down to New York. We take a tour of the powder room. Construction is running well behind schedule; there's scaffolding everywhere.

“It's going to be hard for me to paint a room that's not finished,” I say.

“I assure you it will be finished soon, Miss O'Keeffe.”

“When, precisely?”

“By the end of the month.”

“This month?”

“Yes.”

We quibble over canvas. He knows little about art and wants me to paint directly onto the plaster. I refuse and explain I'll need the canvas applied to the walls and the vaulted dome of the ceiling.

“That will be difficult,” he says, “given the curves of the room and the mirrors. There will be eight round mirrors.”

“Mr. Deskey, this is either a commercial project or an artistic one. There are dozens of painters skilled in advertisement boards if that's what you want, but if you want me, it has to be done my way. The surface has to be right. It must be canvas and it must go all the way through the room so the perspective is continuous.”

“You know exactly what you want,” he says. “I'm impressed. Very well, Miss O'Keeffe, we are so looking forward to having your art on these walls. I'll be sure to have the canvas applied to your specifications.”

We walk back to his office to look over the contract.

“My one concern is the time frame,” I say.

“I've heard you paint quickly.”

“But if the room's not ready—”

“It will be.”

“I see.”

“We'd like your work completed by November first.”

“My work will be completed if the room is ready by the end of this month. I'll need four weeks. The plaster must be entirely dry before the canvas is applied, and the canvas itself must be perfectly smooth.”

“I assure you, it will be.”

“Fine then.”

“
You
are a pleasure to work with, Miss O'Keeffe.”

We both know what he is not saying—that Stieglitz is far from that. I sign and slip the contract across the desk. I am aware I should be apprehensive. The close time frame. The scale of the project. Doing it against Stieglitz's will. But in my mind's eye, I can see the powder room already finished—the curved ceiling's corners, enormous flowers blooming from the walls.

“Very well, then,” Deskey says, standing, “so it is done!”

A firm handshake.

It is done.

S
TIEGLITZ IS ENRAGED
when I return to the Lake to tell him the contract is signed. Beyond enraged when I acknowledge the terms. It is Rosenfeld—dear Pudge—who talks him down, pointing out in his kind voice that now that the agreement is finalized, there's no reason to oppose it.

“Besides,” Rosenfeld says, “I've just heard Stuart Davis is doing the murals for the men's lounge.” This gives Stieglitz pause. Davis is an artist in the Ashcan School. Never one of the circle, but his cubist landscapes are bold. Even if his brash imagery—gas pumps and jazz—aren't to Stieglitz's taste, no one can deny his prowess.

“Let Georgia do this with your blessing,” Rosenfeld says gently. “You'll find a way to make it right.” And it occurs to me then that Rosenfeld is perhaps the one person in our world who's always wanted us to succeed. Even now when I am so wrung out with all the machinations and fight over this job, here is Rosenfeld contending in his calm way that there is good that can still come of this. It lifts me.

Stieglitz clatters around for another few days, still irascible, but the gears of his mind have shifted. I can feel it. He knows Rosenfeld is right. If he wants to continue to manage my career, he might as well get on board. He starts to allude to some of the advantages of taking the commission. Not directly to me. He won't straight-out admit I was right. But he starts to consider the upsides. Stuart Davis for one. My giant flowers in a place every rich modern woman with her granddaughter will pass through. But he's still not pleased with the money. “That's no good as it stands,” I hear him say one day to Rosenfeld. “There has to be a way to redress that to our favor.” Finally, at the end of the month, I agree to let Stieglitz meet with Deskey on my behalf to discuss the terms of the contract.

“Ask him to shift the date back,” I say.

“I'm going to discuss the money as well.”

“Focus on the date, Stieglitz. It's a huge project, and I want to do it, but November first may not give me as much time as I'd like if the construction continues to drag.”

“I'll insist it's pushed back,” he says. “It's an impossible date. Several points need to be revised. You'll do the work for free. They can reimburse us for materials, but if it's for free, as Pudge suggested so brilliantly, there's no dollar amount to smear your value.”

“I don't care what you do about the money,” I say, “as long as I get to do the work. But focus on the date. I want more time.”

H
E SWEEPS DOWN
to New York, meets with Deskey and the architect, and returns to say that all is squared away. They've accepted his revisions. Everything is settled, the date has shifted from November 1st to the 15th. I'll do the work unpaid. And now we can all move forward.

To my relief, dinner-table conversation shifts to whether Governor Roosevelt will, in fact, win the presidential election. Every time the radio's turned on, his voice seems to be there, promising that the federal government will regulate industry to create new jobs. Not one of us knows how that will all work. But the newness of it instigates all sorts of vociferous debate that spills from the dining room into the living room and soaks up the long evening hours.

The Lake feels odd. A kind of weightlessness to things now that the battle about Radio City is over. I've won. I know that, but all the fight has worn me down. My mind feels flayed. It's all been such a struggle and, really, for what? To get my art on some bathroom walls? Sometimes it seems just that inane.

I think about New Mexico. Sometimes it's all I think about—leaving here, going back. How long would I stay? Four weeks? Three months? Forever? I miss it. And I hold that sense of missing it close to me at night when I can't sleep. I remember once, driving out in Taos, I hit a patch of loose gravel. I wasn't expecting it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see and I was looking at the sky, my eyes following a raven, when the road changed, suddenly uneven under the tires. The car started to slide. I cut the wheel back to straighten it. I remember hearing the sound of low free laughter and realizing that laughter was mine, as I pressed my boot down hard on the pedal and drove it toward the floor, speeding faster, into that endless pellucid distance that flowed into me and around me, as godlike and intimate as breath.

In the shanty, on a massive canvas, I paint from memory. Jimsonweed—those white trumpet shapes that grow everywhere along the arroyos, opening after dusk, their fragrance strong through the night. Every part of the plant is poisonous. Once cut, the bloom will last only hours. I paint the flower cropped, right to the edge of the canvas, the curls of the blue-green leaves like an echo behind. At one point, I close my eyes and see the shape against my lids—the grace as it falls, more alive than if it were in front of me. I feather thin layers of paint into edges—edge after edge. I want to lift the essence out of every intricate detail, each crease in the leaves, each naked line—so much larger than life, this flower, the eye can't pull away. I want to lose myself in the pale throat of that flower, its mystery, surfaces softened to such a degree you will not see my hand, the petals so smooth you can almost feel them against your cheek. There is no play here. There is rigor and balance and clarity. This is a story of edges. This is a story of how something as unstable as a petal or a wave can become a definitive edge.