by Dawn Tripp
Stieglitz is out-of-his-mind enraged at how the others are trashed.
“Those critics are one and the same,” he says. “Ignorant traitors.”
I notice that the only writer who remarks that my things this year feel “clinical” is a woman. I feel something tick inside me when I read that. I agree. There’s a restraint to my things now—even in the magnified flowers, a certain pulling back. It would take a woman to see through a woman, wouldn’t it? I shove the thought down.
—
LESS THAN A week after the show opens, Stieglitz falls ill with a violent attack of kidney stones. Too ill to go to the gallery, he fumes.
“I need to be there.”
“You need to get well.”
“I’ve never missed one day of a show.”
“Get yourself well and you won’t miss more.”
He drags himself around the house. He pens a scathing response to McBride whose review in The New York Sun poked fun at the “superpublicity” the Stieglitz group uses to attract attention to itself. By the time I come home from the gallery that night, he’s doubled over in pain. He refuses to go to the doctor. He refuses morphine. I call Ida, who prescribes two quarts of buttermilk.
“I detest milk,” he says when I tell him.
“It’s buttermilk.”
“Any kind of milk.”
I pour half a glass, and he reaches for the bottle and downs it.
“I’ve got too much to do,” he mutters, “to be taken down by a pebble.”
Within a day, he grits through the pain and passes the stone, fishes the odd knuckled thing from the toilet, and hurls it out the window.
IX
AT THE LAKE that summer, I begin to take my meals alone. I pick watercress and lettuce from my garden, tear the washed greens into a bowl with chopped garlic and onions, then walk outside and eat on the porch looking out at the water.
I wake before dawn, when the moon is still up, its light so smooth and still. I row the little boat to the island. There’s an old birch tree I go to visit, several lean trunks twisted together at the base. I paint half a dozen large canvases of that tree, its harmony, the balance of trunk to leaf. I have no intention of showing them—my trees—at my exhibition next winter. I’ve begun to understand that there is work I will do that I will put out to the world and there is work I will keep as my own. That feels important to me. Like it needs to be that way. That slight, but very clear delineation.
—
JUST STIEGLITZ, ROSENFELD, and I are at the house that fall when Jean Toomer arrives with Margaret Naumburg. I am walking up from the shore when I see them above on the hill, Toomer, and Margaret with Stieglitz. They are engaged in a conversation on the lawn, Stieglitz pointing to something farther down the lake, then up the hill—making one broad sweeping gesture with his arm—telling some primeval story of how the lake was formed or how his family discovered it on a chance trip from Saratoga, bought some land, and then more, sold some, endured, and so on. As I come up to them, Jean sees me first, raises a hand, and smiles—a kind of free and happy smile—the others break off. We exchange a few nothings. Then Margaret and Stieglitz take up their conversation again.
I stand near Jean, close enough to imply that that’s what I want, his skin a kind of glow you could put your hand to. I find myself wanting to. His eyes shift and linger for a moment on my face.
Like Rosenfeld, he’s come for a working holiday, to write, but over the next few days Stieglitz takes a dozen photographs of him—sitting on a rock by the white rosebushes, his elbows resting on his knees, his top coat and open-neck shirt. In the evenings, we talk about his writing, about Cane and the new work he is struggling to complete. We talk about the Walden School that Margaret started in 1914. She does not believe in the simple acquisition of knowledge. Too restrictive, she says. Education should be about cultivating a child’s ability to think openly, in creative ways. When “The Marriage” with Frank ended (she calls it that: The Marriage), she resigned from her position as director at the school—one finger twirls through her brown hair as she explains how she suddenly found she needed to cut free of all structure just to keep her mind straight on who she was and what she wanted on any given day. She glances at me as she says this as if I, a woman, might understand. I stare back at her blankly.
When a record comes to an end, I swap it for another on the gramophone, and notice that her head has fallen to rest against his shoulder. She has her hand on his lap, their fingers interwoven. Stieglitz is talking, Rosenfeld and Jean nodding gravely as acolytes do. With the thin hardness of the record in my hand, I stare at her pale fingers. For a moment I can see their bodies together, the first time he kissed her, undressed her in her husband’s house, her whiteness and that luster of his skin. The record ends. He draws her to her feet, his arm circling her waist, and leads her, sleepy, into the hall and toward the stairs. Their tenderness pierces me. The private laughter, the looks exchanged. I find it irresistible. One afternoon, I see them in the hallway when they think they are alone, he runs his finger lightly down her breast, tugging at the fabric of her dress. She catches his hand and knocks it away.
I lead them on a hike up Prospect Mountain. Stieglitz stays behind at the house, concerned that the dry cough in his chest might with exertion turn to something worse. We picnic in a meadow on the ridge, and I send them over to the rim to watch the clouds roll in over the lake while I pack away the plates and forks and napkins. A shadow falls across me. “Almost done?” he says. He holds out his hand to help me up. I feel him pull me through the air to standing. Rosenfeld and Margaret are wading through the wildflowers toward us, talking, laughing. His finger trails down the center of my palm.
“Be careful,” I murmur with a smile, and slip my hand from his.
“Of what?” he says casually. I study his mouth. I want to kiss it. Unforgivable.
I shake my head, and laugh. “You might not want to know.”
That night, I see them from an upstairs window, their shadows are long and rippling on the grass, they are arguing, their voices, low, strained, but the breeze sweeps off the words. At one point, she turns, abruptly, and starts back toward the house, he reaches out to grasp her arm, she wrenches loose and continues walking, I can see her face broken up, unkempt and wet with tears. A door closes below. And he stays there, for a good half hour longer, outside in the dark. He sits in the grass, and looks straight ahead, and the stars rain down—a thousand stars. He does not seem to notice.
When I come back from my walk the next morning, they’re all on the porch, except for Jean. Margaret is there, she looks tired, her eyes puffed. I sit on the steps, and Rosenfeld cheerily asks after my tree.
“I like trees very much because they don’t move or talk back.”
“Or ask questions?” he says.
“Exactly.”
He laughs. “Oh, you are perfect,” he says delightedly.
Jean comes out, and Rosenfeld, in his gentlemanly way, offers his chair.
“No,” says Jean, “the steps are good enough for me.” He sits down on the other end of the step where I am. I look at the grass just past the shade thrown by the roof, the darker line of green dividing the reach of the house from the open sunlight. Something has changed between Jean and Margaret—I notice this—he did not bend to kiss her when he came out as he usually does. He is silent, watching some local children below on the hill. Stieglitz says something that makes Margaret laugh, a kind of tinny laughter.
“I want to see the new croquet court in the greenhouse,” she says.
“A marvelous idea,” Stieglitz answers, and they go off, Rosenfeld after them.
Jean’s leg is stretched out, a quiet smile on his face that has nothing to do with anything—no place or reason at all. I feel my heart skip. I fiddle with a thread at the seam of my shoe, and we sit there, in a sudden awkwardness.
I say something about the fair weather, and he answers some sort of nothing back. I remember when I saw him with Margaret—w
hen he touched her breast, I can almost see it as if it is happening still, his finger moving slowly down, then tugging the neckline as if he would strip her right there.
“You’ll go back tomorrow,” I ask lightly, though it doesn’t come out exactly as I intend. He glances at me, and I see it then, that uncomplicated fire. I feel a stark jolt through my hands. He doesn’t realize this could be a mistake—this thing between us that is nothing but has the weight of something, this wordless, drifting intimacy someone might see.
The clock chimes.
“Shall we go and find the others?” I say.
He does not answer. The wind has faded, the air tenuous and sheer.
—
STRIPPING THEIR ROOM, I find the pen, his, rolled under the bed where they slept. The gold is cool, and I feel my heart rise. I think of him, his face—what it would be like, feel like, to have his face above me, his skin on mine, swirling wild pieces in my body. Later, I take that feeling of him and transpose it into a tree on canvas—that sense of desire in every color, leaf, trunk, limb, fused by an invisible force.
It’s just lines, I tell myself as I squeeze paint onto the palette—clean piles of color, the light slips off the glass. It is only lines—this house of angles where the spirit resides.
When the painting is done, I scrape the color from my palette until the glass is spotless, clean again, and I can cancel the thought of him.
Stieglitz works alone in the Little House through October. He makes 350 prints of the cloud series that he titles Equivalents. “I tore up another three hundred,” he says. “I kept only the ones that expressed that true feeling. The others were beautiful, but that’s all they were.”
He prints several photographs of me. Her face has begun to change. There’s a line between her brows, her lips have tightened, a slight downturn has appeared at the corners of her mouth. She is not the same. Her gaze is fixed, Spartan, that quiet exultant glimmer in her eyes gone, replaced by a stern hardness that could be misread as cruelty.
—
EVEN AT THE time I noticed it. Just a blink, that noticing, then gone. I realize now I should have let it sink in. Let myself really feel what that hardness meant, the story it told.
There are those moments, always, looking back on a life when you can see the points—fully lit in hindsight, real or imagined—where the path split, where you could have made a different choice and the cost of the choice you made.
PART IV
I
THAT FALL, 1925, when we return to New York, we move into the new Shelton Hotel. There’s a life-sized wooden Indian in the lobby opposite the registration desk. The hotel has a library, a solarium, and even an Olympic-size swimming pool; it has a cafeteria where we will take our meals, fireplaces in every room, a roof terrace in the spring.
The sales of my paintings have paid for this.
My arm hooked through his, we walk through a suite of rooms on one of the higher floors. Vaulted ceilings, the windows are huge, looking out across the landscape of buildings and streets, the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. From this height, I can feel the gentle sway of the steel in the wind.
“Perfect all around!” I say.
We will only rent for the months we are in the city. The hotel staff will do the housekeeping, leaving me free to paint.
The bedroom is tiny. We squeeze in the bed, a bureau, his favorite deep armchair. The sitting room is my studio by day. I have the walls painted gray, the furniture slipcovered in white. No decorative chintz, no distraction—only a few shells and rocks scattered in little piles on the mantel and the windowsills. Stieglitz asks for curtains. I refuse.
“I love it here,” I say to him early one morning after we’ve made love. We lie wrapped together under the coverlet, the wind beats against the windows and the panes sway, all tumult and windshift, distance pouring out in every direction. “It’s almost like not being in the city, but we are. You can have your city and I can live here in the sky.”
I help him transform the new space he’s rented in the Anderson Galleries. We will call it simply The Room. I tack unbleached muslin over the black velour walls—the natural sunlight reflects off the muslin and the room feels airy, free. Once it is ready, he’s there all day, fussing over Marin’s installation, which will open the season.
There is a clean lovely peace between us. We take breakfast and supper together in the Shelton cafeteria. I work alone in the apartment. I make pencil sketches of the skyline, then a series of oils of the city. I paint until dusk and, when the phone rings, I pick it up and ask whoever is calling if they could please call back when the light is gone.
II
BLANCHE MATTHIAS HAS offered to write a feature on me for The Chicago Evening Post. She comes to our apartment for an interview. Stieglitz has told me the article won’t make much difference, since it won’t print until early March when my show is on the verge of closing. But I like Blanche. She’s sophisticated—wealthy but straight up. She’s traveled through the Orient, the Middle East, and Europe, and I’ve always liked her, not just her person, but her poetry and essays on art, and I see this as an opportunity. When we are alone in the sitting room, her notebook and pen ready on her lap, she asks what I think about women and art.
“There just hasn’t been much,” I tell her. “We do things differently from how men do them, and men can’t really see or feel what it is we do, because it is so different.” And I explain to her that perhaps that is why I’ve been written about as I have by men—when all I am really trying to do is say something that I feel in color and form, something that matters, something that has life.
“It’s really just that simple, and there’s no reason to argue or stew, because the time it takes to complain is time away from work.”
She asks me how I work, and I tell her how I make notes on every color I choose. Each has a certain relationship to life. I paint that.
“That sounds like Kandinsky.”
“He’s so theoretical. He links hue with pitch and claims different tones of color cause a particular vibration in the spirit. But art is more about sensation. When someone looks at a painting I’ve done, I want them to feel what drove me to paint it in the first place. When I make a picture of a flower, I don’t paint it as I see it, but as its essence moves me. I eliminate every detail that’s extraneous. I paint it as I want it to be felt.”
She scribbles a few things on her paper, then turns the page and asks if I am an exponent of expressionism.
I laugh. “I have no use for that term or any other.” I tell her how this all began for me when I was teaching art at a small school down in the Carolinas. “And one October, I took out all the decent pieces I’d ever done. I placed them all around my room, and studied them, and in each picture I could see the influence of some teacher I’d had, or another artist I’d known—and I began to realize that I’d never done anything original. So I packed it all up and put away my color box, and got down on my knees on the floor with some paper and charcoal. For weeks that fall I was dizzy, my head spinning with shapes that meant something to me. When I was finished, I looked at them and I could see that they said something new.”
“A rebellion.”
“It wasn’t that grand. And in a sense that was the most wonderful thing about that time in my life. I wasn’t doing it for anyone, or in reaction to anyone. I was alone in that room. I was no one. I was those shapes, that paper, that charcoal. And then I rolled the drawings up and sent them to a friend in New York.”
She writes on her pad of paper, her pen flying over it, then she stops, and glances up, waiting. Through the window behind her, dusk has fallen and the sky is that steep violet that I love. The room is spare. We have been here for three months and only a painting of Dove’s hangs on the walls. A red flower in a vase, the only spark of color. On cold days he still mutters about the lack of curtains—how those windows let everything in. Should I say that I am a landscape artist who has become famous for someone else’s portraits of me?
That as my art has hit the world it’s been instantaneously recast by those who see what they want, not what is there? The words are on the tip of my tongue. My hands rest on the arm of the sofa. I press my palms down, the muscles tense, gripping slightly, unnoticed.
I explain instead that what has been written about my things says more about those doing the writing than it says about my art.
“You alluded to that earlier,” she says. “Shall I include it?”
“Yes, please.”
She does not write it down. She is still looking at me, a curious look, as if she has unwrapped something and is not at all sure what to make of it.
“What?”
She shakes her head.
“Tell me,” I say.
“You are fearless,” she says.
“Not really.”
“You dare to paint what you feel.” She drops her pen to the page and writes for a moment, then continues. “You know there was one photograph of you—it was an early one, taken up at Lake George, you are standing and the sky is behind you.”
I nod. There were many that were taken that day. Out of so many, though, I already know exactly the one she is referring to.
“There’s something remarkable about it,” she says. “A simple ferocity in your expression that reminds me of your art.” I hold up my hand to stop her.
“I have nothing to say about the photographs, Blanche.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’re not mine.”
She looks off balance. The sudden hardness in my voice has thrown her.
“One last question then,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Stieglitz?” she says tentatively, unsure perhaps if she should take this route. “I’ve heard him described in so many ways: philosopher, wizard, master, discoverer of Marin, friend of Einstein.”
I smile at her.
“What would you say about Alfred Stieglitz, Miss O’Keeffe?”
The dusk outside has fallen a step farther, toward near-black indigo. I consider this woman almost a friend, an ally. And in the last hour we have spent together, I can feel the bones of the piece she will write. The things she will say about my work will be things I want people to know. This will be a piece I’ll want cited, and so I answer her question this way:
