Georgia (18 page)

“
I
WANT TO
evoke something different in The Room this season,” he remarks one evening. We're back at the Shelton, and I'm sorting through things for my upcoming show.

“Different how?” I say.

He sits on the sofa near me. “I want people to understand that when they enter The Room, this is True Art, what they're seeing.” He glances at me then, a playful smile on his lips. “I want solemn reverence.”

“And you think you can institute that?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Oh, you make me laugh, Stieglitz.”

“Hours of silence. That's what I'm thinking. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”

“All day? No one will come!”

“No. Only certain hours. In the morning. Ten to noon.”

“Does that mean
you
will have to keep silent as well?” It gives me a kind of pleasure, this sweet, gentle teasing, it's like the way things used to be.

“And a crystal ball,” he says.

“No!” I laugh.

“I'm serious,” he says. “I want people to understand that The Room holds the spirit of 291. It's not like any other gallery in the city, and it's not some stuffy museum. I want people to walk in and feel something different, something in the space itself. That will help them
feel
the impact of the art.”

“I don't know that you can make people feel that way.”

“Of course you can,” he says.

T
HE TONE IN
the reviews of my work has begun to change. I don't remark on it to Stieglitz—it's all still praise and, for him, that's enough—but it pleases me to see that the emotional faucet has been cinched. I'm convinced it's because of the Blanche Matthias piece and the copies I made that we still keep to hand out at the gallery. The critics have begun to incorporate some of the terms and perspective I used in my interview with her to describe my intent and vision. McBride praises the intellectual palette of my paintings. Helen Read lauds my giant close-ups of flowers, fruits, and shells. Mumford compares my work to Matisse, although he still, aggravatingly, continues to spell my name with only one
f.

Six paintings sell for a total of seventeen thousand dollars. I collect these details in my mind—noting that things are finally becoming what I want them to be: The critics are taking my work on its own terms; money is coming in; everything is as it should be.

So why can't I feel the fineness? It all feels a little mechanical, some tiny something in me broken, or between us, removed.

Perhaps it's the work itself that feels wan to me. When I look at my things, I don't entirely like what I see. The shells, white flowers, even the cityscapes, they are almost too controlled. I ask him if he sees it. He disagrees. He loves the elegance of the neutrals. Though color is my strength, he's never quite trusted my passion for it, and seems a bit relieved that it has fallen from me.

O
NE MORNING, THAT
fall, lying alone in bed, I find a small round thing in my nightgown like a marble for a doll's game. A balled-up thread. Then I realize it's not in the cotton but under the skin of my breast, a small hard sphere rolling around under my fingers. It doesn't hurt.

I show Stieglitz, his face is stricken when he feels it, and I have to pack away every ounce of my own fear just to calm him.

“It's not a lump,” I say.

“That's exactly what it is.”

“It's too small. Just some funny blister under the skin.”

He doesn't let his fingers off it.

H
E SITS WITH
me in the doctor's waiting room, completely undone. He picks at his fingernails. I've never seen him do this.

“Don't be so anxious,” I say. “How sweet you are. You love me.”

His eyes shift to my face, strangely dark. “Love you?” he says. “You're my
life.
”

“Alfred. I'll be fine.”

But the words glance off him, and his fear starts to kick up a wild flailing in me. I look away. “Stop this,” I say. “Please. I need to know I'll be fine.”

We're called in. During the exam, he sits in the visitor's chair, his shoe tapping the floor, as the doctor's cool, expert fingers probe. I feel like a yard of cloth stretched out on the table—inanimate, taut.

“It just seems to be that one,” the doctor finally says. He has stern blue eyes. My palms sweat, a jittery feeling that must be my heart as he tells us they'll have to cut in and take that thing out.

S
TIEGLITZ SETS A
light kiss on my eyelids before I'm wheeled through the sterile scrubbed hallway of Mount Sinai—the antiseptic reek, brutally polished linoleum floors, nurses in their hospital whites moving crisply about.

I close my eyes to feel it again, that dry brush of his lips grazing my eyelids as the ether pulls me down, the room funneling to a tiny circle of light, my mind unpeels.

T
HE CYST IS
benign. But it takes time to recover; the pain in my side so intense, I can't raise my arm. I can barely sit up.

“They went deep with the knife,” I joke when he comes to see me in the hospital. “Did you tell them to go after a good chunk of my stony heart?”

He doesn't like that kind of black humor.

The pain is searing, even after I'm moved back home. The shape of my breast is altered, puckered skin around the stitches, the cut long and bruised.

He does not leave my side. He insists on changing my bandages.

“You don't know how to do that,” I tease him and twist to peel the gauze away myself. The pain rips through me. So sharp—that pain—like a nail through my ribs. I gasp.

“Darling,” he says, easing me back onto the pillow. He gently removes the bandage, adds fresh ointment to the wound, and covers it again. He taps a small white pill out of the bottle on the night table and gets me a glass of water.

“What do you need? Books? Paper? Do you want to sketch? How is the pain? You need to tell me
before
it becomes too much.”

I laugh. “For which one of us?”

“It's true,” he says. “I hate seeing you in pain.”

He spends one entire afternoon sitting in the chair by the bed, reading aloud to me from Sherwood Anderson's
Tar.
He flows in and out, bearing plates of orange slices, crackers, hot soup, and tea. It feels lovely—the intimacy between us, like soft fire moving again sweetly, quietly, as it was once.

Even after he returns to the gallery, he calls once an hour to check on me.

I
MISS MY
opening that January. There's still too much pain, I can barely stand. He sends Rosenfeld to the apartment with flowers.

Rosenfeld has just returned from the Southwest, and as we sit together in the living room he waxes on about the untamed beauty of Taos.

“So many artists out there now, writers as well. It's becoming a cultural mecca.”

“I've heard Mabel Dodge orchestrates all that.”

“You've met her?”

“Once.”

I don't add that she struck me at the time as a larger, female counterpoint to Stieglitz—moving people around through space, importing the important ones, all that.

“I'd love to see what art you would make out there,” Rosenfeld says. “The colors and the light are so intense.”

“As magnificent as Marin claims?”

“Every bit. You'd love it, Georgia. Of anyone, you.”

“Sadly right now, I can barely visit the kitchen.”

He looks at me, with those wise drooping eyes. “That place reminded me of you, that something about you no one can touch.”

I brush some bits of nothing off my skirt and tell him that's very nice of him to say, and perhaps I'll go sometime when I'm well enough to travel. I do love to travel, and only wish I could get Alfred out of the Manhattan, Lake George rut.

He smiles at this. A good friend, Pudge. He loves us both and knows Stieglitz well—flaws and all—better than anyone apart from me.

I
THINK ABOUT
it more after he leaves. I used to tell Stieglitz I missed that sort of country—wide-open plains, real spaces—but his face would cave in the strangest way and so I stopped telling him.

John Marin has been going to Taos for years, and the Strands were lured out last summer by the plump and lavish force of nature, Mabel Dodge Luhan, an heiress once married to a Bolshevik who's spent most of her life trying to outrun her bourgeois childhood. Beck, whom I've slowly begun to forgive, has told me it's like no other place, and while she was there, she felt so serene, cut loose from everything.

I know that western sky. Sometimes when I'm alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I'd lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me.

It was all I wanted then—to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable—that hunger I felt once—like the edges of my skin could not contain it.

I miss that.

H
E'S DISTRACTED,
I
notice, which I chalk up to the fact that I am ill in bed until he remarks, in passing, that Dorothy Norman—the young wife of that Sears, Roebuck heir—has returned to The Room.

“You might remember,” he says, “she was the one banished so summarily, I'd say rudely, by that disparaging remark Louis Kalonyme made when she came by one day.”

“No, I don't remember your telling me that.”

“She delivered her baby in November,” he continues, “and she dropped in last week on her way to a luncheon. She wants to be engaged in the work. She said she'd be happy to do anything for us that we need: manage the goings-on, open the mail, answer the phone, and so forth.”

“For
us
?” I say.

“You must meet her. You'll see what I mean. Her innocence is unusual. She's not at all jaded as the rich can sometimes be. She's having dinner with the Strands next week.”

“What about the baby?”

“What about it?”

“She'll just leave the baby at home all day?”

He shrugs. “That's hardly my affair.”

E
ARLY
F
EBRUARY, SIX
weeks after my surgery, I'm well enough to slip into a plain black coat. On his arm I walk in to see my show. I meet Dorothy Norman then for the first time. She is younger than his daughter but reminds me of his wife, Emmy, whom I may always perhaps think of as his wife. That same coy gentility. She has girlish cheeks and a doe-eyed look. Stieglitz, in his favorite tweed suit, makes the introduction and, among other things he's already told me, explains that Mrs. Norman is involved in the Civil Liberties Union.

“Why not quit that nonsense and just support the Woman's Party?” I say.

“Other causes interest me more.” A sweet smile as she answers, but her lips are tense, a coldness in that lipstick line I was not expecting. A funny shiver in my chest, a quick pain in my wound when the muscle tightens.

T
HAT SPRING, WHENEVER
I come by The Room, it seems she's there, answering the phone, reading old issues of
Camera Work,
or taking notes as Stieglitz answers questions, her head bowed, on the verge of kneeling at his feet. She wants to write a book on him, he says. She's begged to be allowed to be there, and he's told her she is welcome as often as she likes.

She begins to root herself into the circle—Dove, Hartley, the Strands. Only Rosenfeld apparently will have little to do with her. But I see the looks exchanged when her name comes up, how they all avoid my eyes. Trouble stirring. When I mention it, Stieglitz reminds me that the week after she met me, she graciously made a one-hundred-dollar donation to the rent fund, and even went as far as to ask if she could borrow his camera to do the installation photos of my show.

“Under your guidance.”

“What are you implying? She's married, with an infant.”

“That she leaves at home with a nurse.”

“You treat her coldly,” he says, almost accusingly.

“No differently than any other bootlicker.”

He glares at me.

We're at breakfast in the Shelton cafeteria. A boiled egg and toast on the plate before me, an orange.

“The Room gives her a sense of purpose.”

“That's of no consequence to me.”

“She is nervous around you. She told me you look at her queerly.”

I don't answer.

“You could be kinder. She's just young and old-fashioned. She wishes you would call yourself Mrs. Stieglitz.”

“Since she is Mrs. Norman, it would seem that's not her decision to make.”

We don't talk as he spreads a thin sleeve of butter across his toast. I slice my egg into halves, then quarters, then I slice those quarters once more. I eat them slowly, watching my fingers on the fork and knife. I could ask him if it's her money he is after, but in my heart I know him well enough to know that's not it.

It's true I dislike her. That flushed juvenile brightness. There were girls I knew at boarding school in Virginia who had that same quality—cinched waists, wide shining eyes, flounced and ruffled dresses—they huddled in cliques and giggled. One night after curfew, I stole onions from the kitchen, then caught and killed a chicken from the coop, and cooked it up in the wood-burning stove in the dormitory. They were in awe of me from then on. I was the one they could never quite make sense of, but I taught them all poker and my daring enthralled them. Toward graduation, as I illustrated the yearbook with ink drawings and irreverent cartoons, all they talked about were the boys they would marry.

“What about you, O?” my friend Susan asked.

I laughed. “I won't have the kind of life you're signing up for. I'm going to give up everything for my art.”

I
EAT THE
last piece of my egg.

“Listen to this, Georgia,” Stieglitz says now. He reads aloud an announcement in the
Times
that the painter John Sloan sold thirty-two pictures to an unnamed collector for forty-one thousand dollars. “Unnamed collector,” he says. “Unnamed. If that's not a bucket of nonsense—who would
pay
for thirty-two Sloans?”

I push my plate of egg and toast away, and begin to cut an orange. It's her softness he's so taken with, that breathy, ingenuous tone in her voice. I don't realize I've cut my hand until the blood comes in a veiny trickle. A small cut, but deep. I drop the knife and feel the acid sting of the juice.

Stieglitz looks up. “Heavens!” he says rushing to my side. “What have you done to yourself?”

A
FEW WEEKS
later, he announces to the press that six of my calla lily panels have been acquired by an anonymous collector from France for twenty-five thousand dollars.
The New York Times
prints a story on the sale. The news sparks a frenzy when it hits the other papers: “Prim ex-country schoolmistress who actually does her hair up in a knot is the art sensation of 1928!” Stieglitz feigns a stunned disbelief when we are asked about the sale.

“It is extraordinary,” he says over the phone to a reporter calling to request an interview. “Yes, of course, I am thrilled, of course, but at the same time, not entirely surprised. That amount is after all what her art is worth. Europe knows that. O'Keeffe
is
modern American art. This only proves what many of us have always known.”

He is in his element. He is also, I know, constructing a truth out of smoke. I watch him as he nods, listening, the phone tucked against his ear, not a touch of uncertainty in his face—he knows exactly what he's done.

“Yes, absolutely,” he says. “Four-thirty, Wednesday. Miss O'Keeffe would be happy to meet with you. Here, at our rooms at the Shelton. I'll leave your name with reception.”

I
ALMOST CAN'T
bear the landslide of publicity. But the announcement of the sale has done just what he planned: catapulted me to new heights and confirmed him as a visionary. He knew what I was worth before the world did.

As he arranges interviews, I make a list of errands that need to be done. Such a charade, this scheme he's concocted. I drop our shoes off at Slater and his cape at Barrett & Nephews to be cleaned; I look for the blue cups I like at Macy's, but it seems they are sold out; I order frames at Of's.

When the reporter from the
Sunday Magazine
arrives at the Shelton, I find that my face has stiffened to a mask. I can barely smile. I sit and answer questions and try to play down the exorbitant price.

“But is it true?” the man says, snakelike, leaning forward. “Twenty-five thousand dollars!”

“Yes it's true,” I say brusquely. “But the idea that you can make an artist overnight is not. There have been many paintings, many years of hard work and hard experience.”

I am in my bedroom, writing to my sister Catherine, when he comes home that night. I start to get up to go and meet him, but I hesitate.

“Hello,” I hear him call. He appears in the doorway. “How was the interview?”

I set down the pen. “Someone will find out,” I say.

“Find out what?” he says.

“That it's a hoax.”

“It's a perfectly legitimate sale.”

I think of Mitchell Kennerley with his pipe, his Englishman accent, his thinning hair, swimming in debt. He was forced to sell the Anderson Galleries back in January, and the only plan he has is to buy it all back after his marriage to his wealthy European lover.

“Kennerley does not have twenty-five thousand dollars,” I say.

“His fiancée wants them.”

“She's never seen them.”

“He signed the contract. You signed the contract. Quarterly installments.”

He has not yet taken off his cloak. One of the buttons, I notice, is loose, a big round shiny button, hanging by a thread. And I think about how I had to walk twenty blocks the other day to find the shirt and tie he wanted. Exactly the same as the old shirt and tie. When I pointed out the fray at the collar, the stain on the tie, and suggested new ones, he was nearly sick. He can't bear to let go of old things. It would have been funny if I hadn't had to go in such a mad search to replace them.

There was a painting I did once when I was very young. A picture of a man, but my hand was a child's hand, and I could not get him right, he seemed to bend where I wanted him straight, and was straight where I wanted him bent. What he became on paper was not at all what I intended, and finally there was nothing to do but turn the page a different way.