Georgia

by Dawn Tripp

  In those first few days, it’s easy to forget. Then letters arrive from Kitty, first one then another, imploring her father to come to her camp in New Hampshire—to meet with her and her mother—to try to heal the damage he has wrought.

  He will go. I know this even before he tells me. I do not bring it up that evening before supper as we lie upstairs kissing in his bedroom.

  He shakes his head. “There’s no choice.”

  “So you will go?”

  “I have to. I must make them see. Do you understand? I have to bring peace to it.”

  “You think you can do that?”

  The room is filled with the reflected light of the sun behind the hills, the bed suffused in that yellow-orange glow—we are like two black-limbed creatures in amber.

  I run my finger along his mouth. “You think you can fix it all, don’t you? Make it right. Make them see?”

  “There was never joy.”

  “Not everyone can feel what you feel, or feel to the end of themselves as you do.” I trace my hand along his neck to his shoulder, the strong ropy knob of it. He is propped up on one elbow, looking past me out the window, toward the dusk.

  “This morning as I was shaving,” he says, “I looked out to the lake and it lay so still it hardly seemed to exist. Only one bright star, its light fading. It was holy—that moment. I’ve felt it in me since, everything turning into what it is meant to be.” Such astonishing conviction. It occurs to me now that art is exactly this: making what’s unseen but all around us, visible. Having that sort of faith.

  “You’re like no one else,” I say quietly. “I love that you will try.”

  His eyes shift to me. “Why only try?”

  “Because you’ll do what you can, and that’s as much as you can do. Don’t assume you can bend the world to be what you know it should be. You won’t win. Just come home.”

  XIII

  THE NEXT DAY, he is gone, and I am alone in that house with his mother and Elizabeth, the brother-in-law Lou sinking into his cups, and Selma with her ankle-nipping terrier “Prince Rico” that she hand-feeds chocolate creams.

  I walk through the dank swells of the house without him. The rooms feel like a heavy trapped pool, bleak and still.

  I miss him. And I wait. A large star shines through the trees. The star seems even larger, the light blurred, as if it shines through water. Our star, he called it, when we saw it one night from the boat on the lake.

  The day he will return, I almost can’t sit still. There’s a storm. Leaves torn from the trees, the windows shudder in their guides. The car pulls up. I run to the front door, and he’s there, rain sliding off his hat. I throw my arms around his neck.

  “It happened!” he says, his eyes alight, triumph spilling off him. “After almost six hours of conversation last night, they finally understood. A miracle. But it happened.”

  I hear the others coming down the stairs behind us. I draw his cloak from his shoulders and hang it to dry.

  —

  MIDNIGHT. MY DOOR creaks open. I sit up in bed, as he puts his finger to his lips, drawing the door shut behind him. Then he is beside me on the bed, his mouth hard on mine.

  “Now,” he says, the word mixing with his hot breath.

  “I’ll bleed.”

  He pulls me down onto the floor, our hands on each other, feverish, his knee between my legs spreading them apart, and he is inside me, pushing into me. I feel the sharp pain of something torn deep as his hips dig into my thighs, his breath rough in my hair, quickening, then he pulls out, wetness pools on my belly.

  He brings me a towel and a bandage from the bathroom, and I lie on the floor, with the bandage between my legs, the vague tint of blood on my hands.

  “Come to bed, Georgia,” he says softly, helping me up.

  “Stay with me tonight,” I say.

  We slip under the sheets, and hold each other tightly, his legs wrapped through mine.

  —

  I WAKE WITH a start, my heart hammering. Old dreams of my mother. How sick she grew—blood in a spray of tiny petals every time that cough shook her small frame. A banging on the door—the landlady had come to collect the rent, but there was no food on the shelves, and my mother staggered toward the door to explain, and her lungs blew apart right there in the hallway, sliding down against the wall, she died. The word aloud in the night, so softly. Died. The room is strange. All wrong. For a moment, I don’t know where I am. Then I see him, Stieglitz, lying there, his lovely face asleep, so peaceful and so near. The storm has passed. The night is clear. Light falls through the window, laddered shapes across the floor. I spoon myself around him, breasts, hips pressing into him, as if my body could fill every negative space his has made.

  XIV

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks at the Lake, cousins leave and others arrive—a family chattering, bickering, planning. I quietly nickname Selma’s eight-pound terror “Rippy,” a moniker that Stieglitz champions. His niece Elizabeth confides in us. She has fallen in love with the gardener, the long-faced Donald Davidson. Erudite, yet without any notable ambition, he is forty and divorced, but they are in love, she insists, and will marry in the spring. She has yet to announce the earth-shattering news to her parents, Stieglitz’s staid brother Lee, the doctor, and Lizzie, his docile wife.

  “Uncle Al,” Elizabeth says firmly, “you must keep my secret since I, after all”—she tilts her head toward me—“kept yours.”

  “He’ll keep your secret, Elizabeth.” I look at him sternly. “Won’t you?” It’s a mock sternness and he knows it, and the three of us dissolve into laughter as Selma comes around the corner of the porch, her seventeen pounds of chiffon dusting the floor as she goes.

  “What’s all your ruckus about?” she asks haughtily.

  “We were just saying your skirt missed a spot.” Stieglitz points with his pen toward some cobwebs and two dead moths.

  “You’re as impossible as ever.”

  “And you are just as simpering, dear Sel.”

  Sel can put him in a rotten mood faster than anyone, and I can understand it. Of all his siblings, she’s the one I can’t bear—just her presence makes me sharply aware of how different his world is from mine.

  When she is gone, Stieglitz says, “That sister is a walking, bleating example of why America’s in the hopeless mess it’s in—unable to embrace anything new, always clinging to some Kingdom of Before.”

  “Sel has about as much weight as milkweed fluff,” Elizabeth retorts. “You give her far too much credit, Uncle Al.”

  —

  I AM PAINTING well here. I go outside and sit in the grass and make watercolor sketches of the wild roses growing near the trellis. I pare apples and pick grapes. When I have to come in, for the long midday dinner, I skim my spoon over the surface of the soup—too hot for soup, I think. All this food. I am quiet, only half listening—my thoughts drift on the sketches I did that morning.

  Toward the end of the third or fourth course, I set my fork down on my plate—a quick ting—it stops Stieglitz in the midst of a heated conversation with his brother Lee. He glances at me. I answer with a faint smile, then look away as they go on talking. Since Lee arrived, the conversation has focused on Oaklawn and the expense to keep it up—taxes, insurance, repairs, all that. The house has been in the family for over forty years, but Lee, who shoulders most of the expense, is commenting that it might be too much house for his wallet to bear. Sel’s little dog comes to sniff around my ankles. I give it a brief silent kick. And Lee is asking me now, “How long are you planning to stay in New York, Georgia?”

  The table falls still. An awkward silence. Elizabeth clears her throat. I’m careful not to look at Stieglitz. I look at Lee. “I’m due back to teach in Texas in the fall.”

  I smile and rise from the table. I bend to plant a light kiss on Hedwig’s plump cheek, nod to the others, and head for the stairs, walking slowly until I hear Stieglitz’s chair push back against the floor, his footsteps behind me. I glance over
my shoulder. Catch me? I mouth. He reaches out to grasp my sleeve, but I am quicker and start to run, my feet light, almost noiseless, taking the stairs two at a time, then down the hall to his bedroom. He is right behind me. He catches me at the door, pulls me inside. He pushes me up against it, we are shaking with laughter, digging his hands into the waist of my skirt, pulling my shirt loose, he kisses my neck, my breast. I feel his hardness through his pants against my thigh, and the door quivers, thudding lightly in its frame.

  “Shhh,” I say, “they’ll hear us.”

  “I don’t give a damn what they hear.”

  And in the free brazen sunlight, we make love, his face above me, I draw the pillow to my mouth when I cry out, and we lie there, afterward, skin damp, sunlight blowing in as the curtains stream and fall.

  —

  THE DAYS SHORTEN. The sky turns that lean starched blue that comes toward the end of summer. One morning, he wakes me early, and we go out walking. There’s a new cooler twist in the air, the light is different—every shape, every tree, roof, hill, farmhouse, the lake, the road—each levered apart into its own, distinct lines—the colors drenched, intense.

  As we walk, I tell him how years ago when I was a student, I underpainted a canvas with a thick layer of white, let it dry, then made a picture over it. Days later, when I caught a glimpse of that painting still propped on the easel, I was struck by the brilliance that shone through. The picture itself was unremarkable, but the luminous depth changed everything.

  He listens, unusually quiet, thinking. “You’re that kind of whiteness,” he finally says.

  I laugh.

  “No, I mean it. It’s that purity of vision that gives your art its fierceness. Its indescribable sense of life. You have not been overtaught, and most of what you’ve been taught, you’ve rejected, and so the essence of what you are and how you feel comes through in your best work.”

  A stick cracks under my foot. Those last few words ringing through me, a kind of sinking feeling. Your best work. I can feel when it’s not there, I can look at a thing I’ve made and know that I’ve failed, I can tear it up for being imitative, or imbalanced. But how does one discern what is good and what is best? That’s something I want to learn—I want to see it as he does.

  Stieglitz seems preoccupied this morning, something weighing on his mind. We walk down to the Lake and lie on the shore, my back propped against a rock.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” he asks. I smile. It’s one of those odd things about me I can’t quite explain—how I like hard surfaces. He looks past me, across the water.

  “If you could have a year to do anything, Georgia, what would you choose to do?”

  “Paint.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you might be willing to put up with some nonsense for that?”

  “Nonsense, for example, in a loden cape?” I push my bare foot lightly between his legs. I can feel him there.

  “Don’t wake that little man. He’ll come find you.”

  “Let him.”

  “Do you want to stay, Georgia?”

  “You mean in New York?”

  “Yes, for a year in the studio. Your living expenses would be paid.”

  “By who? You?”

  “No, but I’ve made an arrangement.”

  “That sounds mysterious.”

  “I’ve secured a patron to pay your room and board. What matters is that you’ll be free to paint.”

  “And us?” I say.

  “That is secondary.”

  I laugh. “Is it really?”

  “I’ve given this a great deal of thought,” Stieglitz is saying now. “You need time and space to develop. Your vision is strong, but you need to build your skills in oil. For your work to be taken seriously, you’ll have to master oil. You know this.”

  One year—a stunning gift, that length of time. I feel it ripple through me. So much I could learn in a year. I could make so much.

  “That’s what I want,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  The clouds shift, the sun strikes off the water, grazing my eyes.

  “Yes.”

  XV

  TEN 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.”

  —

  HE 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.”

  —

  HE 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.”

  —

  WE 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.”