Georgia (8 page)

T
EN DAYS LATER,
the rest of them are gone, and we are alone. I am full of paint, but he is restless, throwing himself around like he doesn't quite know where to land now that the house is empty and there is no family around to squabble with. He knows I don't like to be bothered while I am working. I don't like to talk.

One afternoon, late September, I come downstairs from painting and cannot find him anywhere. He is not in the house, or on the porch. I catch sight of him at the end of the dock, throwing stones. His body coils, then his arm snaps out in one quick motion. The skips drive over the surface, denting it. He's told me he will count them. His record is over fourteen. It's a practice left over from boyhood, a way of taming his nerves. Such a curious precision in the motion. A thoughtless, brutal force in how he throws those stones.

The days flow by. I paint the change of seasons, burnished reds and yellows, fleeting shades of green, tones so deep I could fall into them. I am happy. Blue edges of sky on Celetex board, gentle white masses of clouds, maple trees pushing up from the bottom edge of the board, only their upper halves visible. Oil has always struck me as so determined—it lacks the spontaneous free life that watercolor by its own unstable nature evokes. But as I play around with those trees, the yellows and reds, I begin to feel a different kind of immediacy that oil can have—that saturation of color, unapologetic, rapturous, intense. I play with the line where the cloud carves the sky. The curving thrust of a tree—that upward push of it into the blue.

I thin the paint, then thin it further until its texture is smooth on my brush. I work the point along the outer edge—a strong-defined line, all the way around. I feel a quick thrill. How intentional it is! Blending edge into edge, simulating that random bleed of watercolor, but with total control and the sheer force of the colors kicking there on the canvas. Lighter shades now with the flat brush, toward the heart of the oval shape—feathered upward—the wavering curve of that tree flowing toward the sky like flame.

While I work, he writes his letters—letters to his family, his other artists and friends in the city; there is business correspondence to keep up with as well. In the afternoon, he comes to find me. He studies what I've done.

“How fierce those colors are,” he says.

“It's starting to work for me.”

“So you're glad I pushed you into oil?”

“You can't push me anywhere I don't want to go.”

H
E BEGINS TO
print the images he has made of me. He sets up the potting shed in the old greenhouse up on the hill, black curtains over the windows. He boards and tapes over the hairline cracks, turning the small musty space down to intimate darkness. He pins the prints to clotheslines strung wall-to-wall, crisscrossing back and forth.

“Look at her,” he says.

In the developing pan, my face ripples just under the surface. He lifts the image dripping from the tray, and pins it next to the others to dry. I look at them, one to the next. The expression of her hands—my hands—her body, her face, all mine—stern, implacable eyes that belie the soft hint of a smile. I cannot stop looking at them.

“You are in love with yourself,” he says, smiling. I study them. Her face does not look like my face.

“You make me different,” I say.

“Different from?”

“How I've always seen myself.”

“There are many of you,” he says, pointing to the prints in turn. “Quizzical, silent, wary, strong.”

“Naked.”

He ignores that. “This one here I love. How soft your eyes are, looking up at the corner, past it. What were you thinking in that moment?”

“I was probably thinking that my ankle itched and you would throw a shoe at my head if I moved to scratch it.”

H
E SHOWS ME
how to retouch the photographs. Those tiny white flaws made by dust are like stars on her body. I touch the photographs with a point-tipped brush. I dilute dried umber with water to match the exact shade of skin. Very carefully, I paint into the tiny white spot, watching it darken as the dye gathers into the gelatin layer.

“You're good at that,” he says, holding up one of the finished prints I've retouched. He peers at it under the magnifying glass. “That is very, very good.”

“I'm not bad with a paintbrush.”

He is still peering at the print. “I almost can't detect where the spot was.”

“Wasn't that the aim?”

“Of course. But even most photographers don't have the eye to do it this well.”

He pulls me to him then, and in the close space of the room, only seams of incidental light, he kisses me. It's like darkness melting, how he kisses me. “I love every minute of you,” he says, “every expression on that face, every mood, shadow, inch.”

“Every half inch?” I tease him.

“And every half of that. I want you here, always.”

“That's a bit longer than a year.”

“I'm only saying what I feel.”

“I'm sure, after a year, you'll be ready to package me up and ship me back to Texas.”

“Never,” he says.

Never, always.
Such big words. It strikes me even then.

“You've given a whole new meaning to my world, Georgia. Everything was ending until you came.”

W
E TAKE A
last swim together naked in the lake. The water is so cold it stings. When my limbs begin to numb, I climb out and wrap a towel around me. He tugs it loose.

“Don't!” I laugh, and tuck the towel back in, and again he pulls it off.

Little Man hangs shrunken with the cold between his legs, the sun is warm on my shoulders, he touches himself, then reaches for my towel. I slap his hand away, laughing. “Someone will see us.”

“There's no someone here.” He takes my hand and pulls me away from the dock to the edge of the trees. He lays out the towel. The ground is hard, sun splashing through the upper leaves, my hands to the wrist in sunlight, as he pushes into me from behind, harder, deeper. Afterward, we lie there naked at the edge of the shade.

“I want a child,” I say to him, running my fingers over his chest. “That child you wrote about in your letters.”

“There is much to do before then.”

“I know, but soon.”

“Yes,” he whispers. “Soon.”

Flocks of geese flood over us. The slow-moving current of their bodies pass like clicks of time.

W
E RETURN TO
New York and the shoe-box room. I'm not going to leave—such a strange delirious feeling—this new life I've slipped into that doesn't yet quite feel like mine.

Twice a week we dine at his mother's apartment on East 60th. She tells me stories of Alfred as a child, how he loved horses and racing; how, at ten, he locked himself into the billiard room on the top floor and practiced billiards hour after hour alone until he could beat his father and his friends. She tells me how when he was very small, not even four, he loved a certain photograph of a favorite cousin, he refused to part with it, so they tied it around his waist with string, and it flew after him as he ran through the house, and bounced along behind him down the stairs.

The dinners at her house are rich and delicious. Candles, a fire, laughter, real joy, an amused glow on the old woman's face, looking on as we tease each other playfully. She beams. It pleases her—to see him happy.

Most nights, we eat out in modest restaurants where we will sit side by side. My favorite is the Automat. I love the beauty and simple anonymity of it—drop a quarter in the slot and pull out a meal.

“This is where our two worlds collide,” I say to him one night.

“Here?”

“Yes—the Automat. Your world of fine marble floors,” I say, “my twenty-five-cent meal.”

He mumbles something, trying to choose between a vanilla crème custard and apple pie. I push the button. The trays revolve around.

“Hey, I was looking at that,” he says.

“But if you look from a different angle, it will be easier to choose. See that sag in the custard—I'd get the pie.”

Stieglitz scoffs, slips the silver coin into the slot. The latch clicks, and he draws open the door for the pie.

O
NCE A WEEK,
we walk to Columbus Circle to meet the Round Table for dinner at the Far East China Gardens, where they serve Pineapple Chow Mein for $1.50. The men discuss life and argue over theories of art. They praise those who have come into their circle, and denigrate those who have defected from the fold. I love these conversations, though I am more curious to observe. Stieglitz's vehemence invigorates the rest—he sweeps them all up into intense arguments about art, culture, politics. I pick gems out of the thoughts that fly back and forth across the table—how Matisse, the most brilliant of colorists, calls black “a force.” How Cézanne contends there is no stillness in a still life—but a continual play between light and shadow.

“The task of art,” Stieglitz says to the critic Paul Rosenfeld, “is not to render things as they visibly are, but to call forth an unseen spirit—to draw what's abstract and timeless out of what is tactile, concrete, personal.” Rosenfeld is listening. He is new to the circle—and seems a little stunned by his luck to find himself in Stieglitz's remarkable world. I find him endearing. Short, roly-poly, with sandy hair and kind droopy brown eyes. He's an incisive writer, though—with an acerbic wit.

“The keynote of experience,” painter Abraham Walkowitz chimes in. “It is not subjective or objective. Think of Isadora Duncan. No laws, no rules.”

“I saw your Duncan drawings when they were shown at 291,” Rosenfeld says.

“There have been others he's made since,” Stieglitz says. “Stronger and more precise, which capture the exact feeling of
why
her dancing moves us.”

Silence then. The table is waiting on that why. Rosenfeld, the unknowing newcomer, asks tentatively, “Why does it move us?”

Stieglitz's voice grows taut as wire. “Because Duncan understands that art
is
the conversion of the body into the luminous fluent spirit, and when she dances, every movement of her body seeks to express that spirit. Therefore, in every movement, she creates, and it is precisely that understanding that Walkowitz is after—not simply the body of the dancer, but its vision and intent.”

I listen as the talk ricochets around the table. The passion moves beyond the argument itself. The heat and the words become tiring to me. Sometimes, on these evenings, Stieglitz feels very far away from the man I know. Sometimes, I just want everything to freeze. I want to reach across the table and touch his cheek, to reach beyond that fierce brilliance to what is private and tender and mine.

The conversation shifts—they are talking now about Germany before the war. In 1913, Marsden Hartley was painting with Kandinsky in Berlin, and his art from that time is a keen synthesis of abstraction and German expressionism—bold color, mystical forms, sometimes so raw you can't bear to be too close.

“It was all so romantic then,” Hartley says, reaching a long arm to a piece of sauce-soaked chicken with his fork. “Those gorgeous German boys in their smart uniforms, their pageantry.”

“Now only hard reality,” Rosenfeld remarks.

“It sickens me.” Stieglitz shakes his head. “Just when Americans were starting to dip their milky white minds into the avant-garde, along comes this war to blow it all down.”

W
HEN DINNER IS
done and paid for, we will stroll together along the edges of the park back to the 59th Street studio. Invariably there will be another artist, or even two, waiting for us on the doorstep, smoking as they wait. Stieglitz will invite them all up the four flights of stairs to an impromptu salon in our two little rooms. He will show them a select few of my pieces—my new oil and some of my earlier things. He will mention the photographs. “I'm working on something new,” he tells them. “A portrait.” And they are eager to hear more, but that's as much as he'll say.

On those evenings the talk will often continue past midnight. Finally, they will be gone, and the studio will be ours alone again, and we will push the beds together and he will kiss me, move against me, into me, pale skin glanced by streetlight, our bodies like wet fire.

I
N
N
OVEMBER, WORD
comes that my father has died. He slipped off the roof of a barracks where he had been carpentering. Fractured skull. Cerebral hemorrhage. There were shards of a bottle on the ground near him.

A scattered flurry of phone calls. My sister Catherine's sweet, calm voice—Claudie's tearful one. Ida has just come to New York to work as a nurse at Mount Sinai. She and I meet with my other sister Anita at her new Fifth Avenue home, but there is little to do, and less to say. The few necessary arrangements are made. It all falls into place, almost too neatly, against the reeling darkness inside me.

The summer I was twenty-three I lived with my father alone in the house in Virginia. When we first drained east from Sun Prairie, he had opened a grocery store, then got into real estate, rented a pier, started a creamery, and failed and failed and failed. By the time I came to live with him that summer, all he owned was a small strip of land with a queer two-story house he'd built out of concrete blocks. He was a ruin of a man, stinking of barrooms. My mother had left him. She'd taken my sisters and younger brother Alexius. She was already very ill by then, her body wasted, dying, blood in her lungs.

That summer, my father and I rarely spoke. I baked biscuits, swept, cleaned, and cooked his meals. We moved around each other through silence full of shame. I had adored him once. When we were children, after supper, he would play the fiddle and dance, heels kicked up, blue eyes sparkling, and when he fell back, laughing, into a chair, I would crawl into his lap. His stubbled cheek bit my skin.

It aches to remember. You will forget, I tell myself, in the long throw of time.

That night in our shoe-box room, I cry. Stieglitz holds me tightly, soft kisses on my damp face. I cling to him. So keenly sharp, so everything—this need of him I feel.

F
OUR DAYS BEFORE
I turn thirty-one, the Armistice is declared. The war is over. The streets erupt in celebration and chaos.

The last of my things arrive from Texas. I spread the artwork on the floor, sorting what to keep. Stieglitz watches me. “How easy it is for you to be ruthless with your things,” he says, “like you feel nothing.”

I want to explain that it is not
nothing—
what I feel. There are pieces that speak to what I have come from and where I am going—but everything else needs to be discarded to keep that arc bone-clean.

“Let me keep that one.” He reaches for a half-finished watercolor at the top of the pile to be thrown away. I beat him to it, and quickly tear an edge to ruin it.

“I don't want it kept,” I say, stuffing it into the wastepaper trash.

That night, when we come home from dinner, we see the paintings blowing all through the street. A huge hollyhock I made over a year ago sticks out of the garbage can in front of our building. Sketches sail around like wild leaves. I feel him flinch, like he'll start toward them. I hold his arm.

“Leave them,” I say. “They belong to someone else back there.”

I turn him to the steps and we go in.