by Dawn Tripp
“I would say that Stieglitz is, first and above all, a brilliant artist whose photographs have transformed America’s understanding of modern art.” I do not look at her. I want her to absorb only the words and not whatever my eyes might betray. “But Stieglitz has never allowed himself the time to achieve his own greatness. Rather he has dedicated his life to others. He fights for his artists tirelessly, fights so that we might have the time and space to work, and he fights for the integrity and future of art itself against all of the forces and politics that seek to diminish it.”
I look at her then. “Write that,” I say. “Please.”
—
MY EXHIBIT IS scheduled for the second week in February 1926. Once again, he doesn’t want to include my city paintings. He likes them much less than the flowers, he says. At least the flowers have color, but they can be too pretty, too frivolous, and he doesn’t like the way people remark on that prettiness when my art is so much more.
“Do you see what I mean about the prettiness?” he says, as if he’s entirely forgotten that the argument started on my cityscapes. I tell him I don’t care if the flowers are pretty or not. They mean what they mean to me. I make them because that is what I am led to do. And I don’t care what anyone else thinks about my city paintings or that the men say I am mad to attempt something so ambitious.
“I don’t care, because when I look out from this window all the way across city to the river and past it, right now—exactly now—this is what I want to paint.”
“Which is precisely the point,” he says. “You should care.”
He is hearing only what he wants to hear and stripping out what’s useful to his argument: that he should decide what goes in, not me.
“The city paintings are going to be in my show this year,” I say. I remind him then that he was wrong about the flowers when I first started making them. He called them “silliness,” he said no one would buy them, and what a surprise it’s been—to both of us—that the flowers are the reason we were able to move into the Shelton.
—
THE WALLS OF The Room blaze with my things. New York Street with Moon sells the first night of the show for twelve hundred dollars. The flower paintings are snatched up as well. Within the first several weeks, sales total nine thousand dollars. Stieglitz is ecstatic and extends the show through March.
I take the train alone to Washington where I am to speak at the National Woman’s Party dinner. My friend Anita Pollitzer who arranged it was surprised and thrilled when I agreed to come. There are five hundred women in the audience, a sea of faces, and I tell them that it matters—to earn one’s own living, to work hard, and to consider oneself an individual, with rights and privileges and responsibilities—the most vital of which is self-realization.
When I return to New York, he clings to me. He makes love to me in our room, the free night pouring through the windows. He runs his mouth along the inside of my thigh and kisses that spot between my legs until I cry out and stuff my face into the pillow, my mind rinsed, breathless. He lowers his weight onto me. I grip his back and pull him deeper in. Afterward, we lie together, he holds my face in his hands and pushes my hair back with his thumbs from where it has stuck, wet, against my cheeks.
“I walked the streets for hours while you were gone,” he says. “I don’t know why it is, but I can’t bear it somehow, when you’re away. Like everything is missing.”
—
ON MARCH 2, Blanche’s interview appears in The Chicago Evening Post. It is the best thing that’s ever been done on me.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Stieglitz says.
“And look what she wrote about you!” I point out the paragraph where she quoted me word for word about his indefatigable work for others, how he once set aside his own career for the sake of his artists, how his new series of photographs—his clouds—secures his place as one of the great visionaries of our time.
“I want to make copies for The Room,” I say, squeezing his hand as he reads the paragraph through again.
“That was generous of you, Georgia, to say those things about me.” There’s a tremble in his voice. He is moved.
“So we’ll make them copies then.”
He looks at me for a moment. His eyes search my face trying to gauge the slight steely brightness behind my smile.
“Do it,” I say.
“All right. We will.”
III
I PAINT THE black iris over and over, falling more deeply, more irrevocably, into the secret dark of it. At the Lake, I paint cannas but differently, giant canvases. They aren’t still lifes. Some are abstracted to the point of being unrecognizable. Their edges explode off the canvas, but they are always nameable. Pansy. Calla. Tulip. Rose.
Stieglitz is not himself. He reads a little, pokes about in the kitchen. One night cleaning up after supper, he washes the dishes, wipes them dry, then sets them back into the rack as if they are still wet. He inadvertently throws leftover scraps of food into the bread box. Finally, he mopes off to bed with an undetermined illness and a smuggled copy of Joyce’s banned latest, Ulysses.
He is bored, and I am busy, and perhaps to get back at me, he invites Eva Herrmann and Ethel Terryll, the daughters of his old friends. He rallies, as he often will for guests. He finds himself exactly where he likes, in a knot of young women, who giggle and adore being photographed. He begins to make nudes of them, the first nudes he’s made since Beck. He flirts with the cook that Lee and Lizzie have brought. Her name is Ilse, a young blond thing with a round face, rounder breasts, and a small waist cinched in her red apron. One day I hear him telling her that the rolls she bakes are delicious, the most buttery, sweet biscuits he’s ever bitten into. “I could eat the whole tray and still be hungry,” he says. Her girlish laughter drifts through the house. With my city paintings, the money from my sales, and perhaps most essentially Blanche’s interview, some balance between us has changed. He’ll claim it’s innocent—what he’s doing—these girls are entertainment for him while I work, but we’ve been here before, and there is something loud and blatant about the way he is doing it that feels like a punishment.
—
IT’S A THURSDAY, midafternoon, when Eva Herrmann comes to the shanty and knocks politely on the door. I slip back into my shirt. It was hot. I’d taken it off. I go to the door and let her in. Her face is grave as she pulls a stool over and reaches for my hand and tells me that when she walked into the kitchen just now, he was kissing the cook.
I slip my hand from hers—deft and quick—and ask her to leave. I begin to work again, my mind trembling, all seized up like a record caught on a scratch. I lean back against my stool. The door ajar, the sky is starkly blue, the slant of light on the hill so perfect I just want to tear it to pieces.
I leave my things where they are—paint on the palette, the brush on the table. I don’t clean up, just that tight stretched feeling in my chest like a drum. I walk toward the house. There’s a commotion on the porch—new voices, children, and I suddenly remember that today is the day the little Davidson girls arrive. Elizabeth has stayed at home and sent them on alone.
I cut around toward the back of the house.
“Georgia, there you are!” Lee calls. “Come over here, please, and see the girls. They’ve prepared something for you.” I turn and walk stiffly over to where the little girls wait just inside the front hall—their matching dresses, sandals, and bonnets.
Little Sue steps toward me and curtsies, holds out her hand, and says shyly, “How do you do, Aunt Georgia?”
I slap her light and fast across the face. “Don’t ever call me Aunt.”
Like a falling house of cards, the sounds behind me as I move toward the stairs—the child whimpering, a woman’s murmur to soothe her, the shocked silence of the rest, and the echo of crisp, determined footsteps, mine.
I spend the rest of that day in my bedroom. Stieglitz comes to find me, and I tell him to leave. It’s just too much—the taut weight of anger
and shame. The question searing: “Who is this person I’ve become?”
The sunlight is pale on the walls.
Not one for children. I remember those words—words from the summer Marie came with her two-year-old Yvonne. We were alone in the kitchen when he said it. You are not one for children. A vague, knowing smile on his face. So awful, that smile, it made my throat constrict, like he was seeing into a future I’d not yet arrived at. The future we seem to find ourselves in now.
—
THAT EVENING, I tell him I am going to Maine. He denies the business with the cook.
“You think every awful thing you hear about me is true.”
“Why would Eva invent that?”
“You imagine a simple flirtation means something it doesn’t.”
I feel a sharp flash of rage. I know what he thinks he’s saying. In his mind, the two are separate—love and sex—how he feels about me and what he does with someone else. I think of Beck, how I saw it coming and did nothing to stop it. But this. Somehow it feels worse. A kiss. The word itself is a word I love, and I can’t escape the leveling feeling inside that I’ve brought this on. I’ve done something to make this happen.
My mind is not working right, torn in too many directions at once. I brush my hand across my face. Tears glisten.
—
ON OUR WAY to the train station: “I didn’t make the bed,” I say.
“What?”
“The bed. I didn’t make it.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, you see, it isn’t really.” My voice sounds small, far away, a voice falling through an hourglass, because I thought to myself: I should fix the bed before I go. But as I stepped into the room, I suddenly realized that we would not be in that bed together and he might not be alone.
“I started to make it,” I say, “and then did not.”
“She meant nothing, Georgia. There was nothing.”
“It means something, though, to me.”
—
WHEN I RETURN from Maine, they’re gone—the nobody cook and the rest. We are careful, he and I. We move around each other gingerly. Not one harsh word exchanged.
I unpack the shells I brought back, and paint them. My palette has shifted—austere, almost alabaster tones—the shells’ edges clean, severe. I tell myself it does not matter. What he did or did not do. It should not, cannot matter. Whether it’s something or nothing. I should not care. A body, a kiss, or those fugitive clouds he tries to seize rushing over the hill. It does not matter that once I threw myself into him like water into water.
—
CROSSING THE YARD, I find an old weathered gray shingle on the ground near the barn. It reminds me of a shingle I fashioned with a white sail as a child and set to float in the rain barrel.
I bring that piece of shingle upstairs to the sunny bedroom, and set it with a shell on my table. They seem to say something to each other—the bleached whiteness of the shell and the gray of the shingle—and I paint those shapes and repaint them until the shingle becomes just a darkness, its curved shape like the petal of a very dark flower, the shell a loose dab of whiteness beneath. I look so closely and for so long, my mind begins to soften, my seeing separates. They become fluent, flow together, those non-living things, they shift and continue to shift, losing their hard edges, gradually abstracting from their own forms.
IV
“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.
—
THE 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.
—
ONE 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.
—
HE 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.
—
STIEGLITZ 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.
—
THE 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.
