by Dawn Tripp
I hear the sound of water—the roar of the sea at night in Maine, the black underwater sound of the Lake that night in the storm, so many years ago, when the boy tipped over out of his canoe, the beautiful youth of that boy a casualty, perhaps the first casualty, of our petty arguing, our discontent.
I can feel the weight of a body in the bed. Head. Buttocks. Legs. Arms. A strange body in a stranger’s bed.
And I ask Stieglitz, who is not here: “Is this my comeuppance? You always said it was the blazing hunger in me that you loved, but is this what I get? For being a woman who wanted too much—too much feeling, too much freedom, too much sky?”
How guilty I have been of that wanting.
I am not the woman you mistook me for. I was never whiteness. I was never pure. I was never the woman with the unpocked skin and the beautiful hands in the photographs.
I am thinking these things when the wall opens, and his head comes through—then the whole of him appears in the sliding wall that I suddenly realize is the door. Dressed in black, a stricken concern on his face—a grief so torqued, fraudulent, with that treacherous loden cape.
He takes a step toward the bed, and there is screaming. A woman screaming in my head, and I see in his face he hears her, too.
Nurses appear, clothed in their whites, scrubbed hands take him by the arm and draw him quickly, firmly, back through the hall.
The door shuts. The screaming stops. I can still hear, faintly, the grain of his voice in the hallway. She is my wife.
—
HIS LETTERS COME to me in the white room. The everyday details and abstract wonderings it’s his luxury to have. I do not answer. I have nothing to say. They have given me paper, and it sits in a neat short stack, eyeing me blankly on the table by the bed, a pen beside it. Anita comes with Ida. They bring me books and magazines to read. My mind spools back somewhat while they are there, then weakens when they leave. I take short walks in the hallway. I write to Beck, but the handwriting is someone else’s handwriting—crumpled, frail.
After four weeks, I am well enough that the doctors permit him to visit for ten minutes. We meet each other like strangers.
“Won’t you sit down?” I point to the visitor’s chair. The air in the room is polite.
“How are you?” he asks.
That is a rotten question. He should know by now.
“What have you brought?” I point to the slim packet under his arm.
Photographs, it turns out, of my exhibition titled Paintings—New & Some Old. There is my trumpet flower; a slim cross; barns and shells.
Art on the little hospital table between us. After all, this is what we know how to do—this calm, almost habitual practice we are proficient at—studying a few pieces of art no matter how roiling the world around us is. It is after all what first bound us together, then saved us—if one would call it that—again and again.
“Tasty food here,” I say. “Eggs this morning.”
“I’ve wanted you to see your show.”
I touch the edge of a print.
“I think it would be good for you to see it, Georgia.”
“Yes, I do see. Thank you for thinking of me and bringing these.”
“No, I mean I think you should see them on the walls of the Place.”
His voice has that urgency—that dark push in it I once loved. It fritters me now.
“I don’t believe they’ll let me out,” I say carefully. “I’ll discuss it, though, with the doctor when he comes.”
“I’ve already asked,” he says.
“Of course you have,” I murmur.
“He said if you are willing…” Again the pleading look. I feel my heart sink. Walls everywhere. “Please, Georgia.” I notice an uneven patch of white scruff at his chin where the razor skipped a spot. “Please,” he says, again.
Of course I will go. I should want to. To see my things, my show that he’s put up for me. This is what a good wife would do, I think to myself. Which is not the reason I will go. Just to be clear. But right now it’s too much work to argue.
—
ANITA BRINGS ME to the Place. Stieglitz is in the back room, reading the paper, a letter drying on the desk. He leaps to his feet as we come in, so youthful, bounding across the room toward me. I try not to shrink.
“I wanted sunlight for you,” he says, a sweeping gesture toward the window and the scud of clouds through it. “It was here an hour ago, I begged it to stay. Alas.” He smiles.
Alas.
The floor spins. I feel a little sick to my stomach. He has taken my hand, a firm pressure. It should be comforting, his hand. I can only manage to stay for twenty minutes. Even that feels too long. The Place, I notice, is empty apart from us.
“Just last week, Elizabeth Arden bought one of the earlier flower paintings,” he reports.
“And from this show—has anything sold?”
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
Because the new work’s no good, I think. The lines are very nicely done—all that—but you can’t put the bold back in when it’s gone.
He glances away. He clears his throat. He seems to be waiting.
Let him wait.
—
AT THE END of the month, when I am released from the white room, I can’t bear to go back to the Shelton. That vertiginous view, too intense.
We pack our things and speed north. The countryside is familiar—like a ride I took once. I do not tell him this is how it feels to me. Then I would have to explain it.
After two days, he leaves me in Margaret’s charge. For weeks, I am boneless, drifting. I do nothing but sleep until late morning, lie in the sun, and eat until my underwear no longer fits, and I have to wear Stieglitz’s undershorts. I can’t get back into myself. My insides are a scrap bag, full of limp mismatched things. I take the new roadster convertible up to flat ground so I can walk. The hills feel like too much effort. I keep the top down and drive very slowly, not quite trusting myself.
A stray cat has begun to come around the house. I name her Long Tail and watch her little pink tongue lap cream off the inside surface of the bowl. She is one long feathery gesture, like a stroke in charcoal I might have made once in another life when every day was a different color.
When Stieglitz arrives for the summer, he banishes the cat. He’s always despised them. I dissolve into tears, and she stays.
—
IT’S ODD HAVING him around, going through the motions of a husband and wife, as if that still had relevance. It does seem to, though, to him. He is attentive, aware of me moment-to-moment, where I am in the house, what I might need, my happiness, my mood. Almost as if he believes this will be our life again, reconstituted. As if I’ve only temporarily stepped away.
At one point when things feel nice between us, I try to explain that something in me is broken, more than broken, and that thing is the very part of me that drew him in the first place. He looks at me sadly. The sunlight through the trellis tattoos one side of his face.
“You’ll get well,” he insists. “You must rest. You will get well.”
I wonder who he is trying to convince.
—
HE WRITES LETTERS to those who cannot come to visit because of my “illness.” He knows they cannot come without my having to say anything. All I have to do is turn into myself and go silent when he brings up the possibility of inviting so-and-so. The silence frightens him, although at times I sense a trace of irritation, perhaps because he is helpless to fix it and he knows the last thing he can do is get angry.
He works on drafts of the essays for the new book. America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. Waldo Frank is editing it. My art will be featured, though I am not submitting a written piece. Everyone else is: Marin, Strand, Dove, Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein—all have written some glowing laudatory piece about Stieglitz.
The Hill is quiet. My heart has begun to settle. Some days, it seems so still I wonder if it’s stopped.
> Beck writes from Taos. She and Paul have separated. She has gone back out west to be with a man who runs a trading post there. Stieglitz and I don’t discuss it, like we’ve tacitly agreed it’s better that way. You’ll manage, dear Beck, I write to her. Someday, this will seem a small thing.
I haven’t painted since last fall. One day I am surprised to see the goldenrod in bloom. A year since I saw it last. Is that possible? I walk out to the shanty, sit in the meadow, and wait for myself to come back.
—
STIEGLITZ STARTS TO go back and forth to New York to prepare for the Marin exhibit.
One weekend when he comes up to visit we lie in bed together before breakfast. He kisses me gently, peels the clothes from my body, and makes love to me. It is slow and sad, like a leave-taking. He holds me afterward—how tender it feels, lying together like this.
“It should have always been like this,” I say.
“I know,” he answers, but I can see he really doesn’t, he only says it to please me. My eyes fill—such a rotten betrayal, those hot tears I crumple into. He whispers my name and pulls me closer, and I let him, a part of me wishing I could lose myself there all over again.
Later that morning, we take a walk up Hubble Lane. He tells me the news from the city. How Rosenfeld stopped by the gallery with the artist Cady Wells who asserted that my Black Iris is arguably the greatest painting in the world. And the young poet Cary Ross lost a drinking contest against Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife, Zelda, does watercolors and drawings. Apparently, about a year ago, she raved to Cary about some things of mine she saw—but now she’s locked up in her own white room. We talk about this, and other things that have to do more with other people, and only obliquely with us. So many names to keep track of. All these names prop something up in him. Funny, how clearly I see it all now.
As we come back around to the house, we linger under the old chestnut trees. The leaves a swath of purple, yellow, scarlet at our feet.
“There was an owl in these trees just three days ago,” I say. “Such a great big thing, that bird.”
He tells me how last week, back in the city, he was going through some things in storage, and found a batch of photographs he had taken so many years ago when I first came to him. Platinum prints and early Palladios.
I don’t want to hear about this.
“Look at the yellow leaves,” I say, reaching to one still on a branch. Unthinkably bright. I touch it—that’s all it takes—it falls.
“Those photographs of you were so beautiful,” he continues.
“Why did you come this weekend, Alfred?”
“To see you.”
“Sometimes it feels you come to see me, call and write and all the rest, because you feel you ought to.”
“I come because I want to.”
“It doesn’t quite seem so.” I don’t mean to be unkind when I say it. It’s just a fact. But he is hurt.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I wonder if I’d not run across you, if you would have been better off.”
A pointless question, now, for either of us.
I change the subject. “How is Dove? I keep meaning to ask you.”
Over the past few months, I have begun to see all too clearly what is true: what we did and failed to do, what we believed and wanted and destroyed.
I don’t say this. There’s a split now between what I will tell him, and this other stirring thing in me—a tiny, keen life that moves like a little plant in its own black soil with its separate thinkings.
—
I PACK HIM a sandwich for the train, cut celery and cake.
“Don’t forget to have your buttonholes fixed.” I point to where they have loosened, threads spitting out. It kicks in me—a funny sadness—that his coat doesn’t fasten properly because he doesn’t have the time, or take the time, to have something so everyday and essential mended.
“I could fix them for you,” I say.
“No, no, Love,” he says absently. “I’ll have it done.”
—
I STRIP THE sheets from his bed to wash. I fold the blankets and place them in the closet. Leaving the room, I pause by the window. Grass strung through with wet dusk, the poplar like some unearthly sentinel against the sky. He claimed this bedroom, years ago, for the view. Every time he arrives at the Lake, the first thing he’ll do is come upstairs to see it. This matters to him, so deeply, to know that everything is as it has been and as he expects it to be.
The kitchen is empty, a bowl of eggs on the counter Margaret must have brought. Her coat gone from the peg. She must be outside somewhere. I fix my tea and write to him. How hard a letter is now. I force myself to fill a page. I write about the cat, about the house. I inquire about his day. So much work, it seems, to come up with this litany of news that sounds like something but amounts to nothing. I put the pen down. I remember when he first wrote to me about the Lake, he and his life only the gauze of a dream. I was still in Texas, my body already filling with his faith: in my talent, my art, in what I wanted, the risks I’d only just begun to take. I poured my entire self into my letters to him.
Through the kitchen window, the shapes of the sky—a zigzag of spindly treetops. Light echoes in the glass. Just a small quiver. But something moves in me, watching it.
XII
SNOW BEGINS TO fall. A light dusting of white on the ground, the last burnished leaves. I move a cot into the front room downstairs. Everything sits, my rocks and bones on the shelves. Easel, paints, brushes, still waiting for me.
Jean Toomer writes from Chicago, looking to see if I’ve kept any letters I might have received from his dead wife, Margery Latimer. Margery died in childbirth—she began to hemorrhage, but she was a Christian Scientist, and so no doctor was called. She delivered the baby and, several moments later, lapsed into a coma and died.
In his letter, Toomer says he’s coming east to gather Margery’s correspondence for a memorial collection. I write back. Yes, I believe I do have one she sent to me, a lovely letter—she was a beautiful soul, your wife. I’ll be in the city later this month. I’ll find that letter for you then.
I had not in fact planned a trip down to New York, but now there it is. So funny—that little intent inside me working away on its own, leaving aside my daylight mind.
—
“I DON’T SEE why you won’t stay at the Shelton,” Stieglitz says when I tell him I’m coming to the city.
“I’m going to stay at Anita’s.”
I can feel his uncomprehending sadness, a crinkle in the silence on the phone line.
—
IN NEW YORK, I go to the Brancusi exhibit, and visit with my sisters. I ask Claudia to stop by the Shelton with me so I can hunt up that letter for Toomer. I keep my arm tucked through hers as we make our way down Fifth. “It’s somewhat thrilling,” I say, “that I can walk in the streets again without losing my mind.”
After lunch with Rosenfeld on Thursday, I stop in at the Place to see Marin’s new landscapes. As I’m studying one, the slightly cubist thing he has begun to do with planes of space and color, I sense a presence behind me, and turn. For a moment, I don’t recognize him. Then I realize that it’s Jean.
“So good to see you!” I say.
“And you as well.” He presses my hand, his fingers warm.
“I couldn’t find that letter,” I say. “I’m sorry. It seems I’ve misplaced it. It was an extraordinary piece of writing, and I’ll keep looking.”
“How long are you in the city?” he says.
“Too long already.”
He tells me he’s working on his essay for the Stieglitz portrait. He needs a quiet place to finish it and is going to talk with a friend who has a house on Long Island.
“Come to the Hill,” I say. “If you’re writing about Stieglitz, isn’t that where you should be?”
“I never thought of it.”
“Nothing but quiet this time of year. The house is drafty, but if you don’t mind a few sweaters along with some mic
e to share the kitchen with, consider it.”
“I think I could brave it.” A pause. “All right,” he says. “I’ll come.”
—
AFTERWARD, I WILL see my invitation as strange, as it must have seemed to him. Stieglitz, however, is ecstatic that I’m feeling well enough to suggest a visitor.
“You’ll be yourself again,” he says. I almost smile. He has a new Picasso drawing in the office—a standing nude. I want it for the upstairs hall at the Lake. He gives it to me happily, and I leave the Place.
I think of Jean again on the train back up to Lake George, the drained fields rushing by. Through the window, a light snow has begun to fall. The sky breaks up into soft flakes floating down.
—
THE FIRST WEEK he is there, I spend the better part of every day closed up in my bedroom with a miserable cold. I hear him moving through the house, talking to Margaret. He makes her laugh, and laughs with her. A good strong sound, the way he laughs. Then long hours of silence, only the tap-tapping of his fingers on the typewriter keys. He works all day, then goes out and does our errands. He gets the mail no matter the weather. He starts my car to make sure the engine doesn’t freeze.
“It’s quite nice,” I remark to him one evening at supper, “to have you around. Very useful.”
He looks at me across the roast beef in the center of the table, unsure of the tone in my voice—if I am teasing.
“You’ve been quite taken by that head cold of yours since I arrived.”
“That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been nice.”
And it has been. Unexpectedly nice. Having someone here preoccupied with his own thoughts, work, and silence.
—
THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE plunges to eight below. The lake skims over with a layer of ice.
