by Dawn Tripp
“It’s a Chambers stove,” I say, “very dependable. Older things tend to be that way, though I did finally break down and get a modern dishwasher.”
I lead him through the small hallway, then into the long sitting room, with the three-paneled window at one end and my tamarisk tree. “It’s like having a three-paneled painting that changes through the seasons,” I tell him. “I used to love to watch that tree.”
“Is the Porter rock here?” he asks.
I laugh. “Oh, everyone knows the story of that rock.”
“It was in the New Yorker piece about you.”
“Yes, but the reporter got it wrong.”
“What do you mean he got it wrong?”
As we walk back through the maze of small hallways and across the inner courtyard to my bedroom, I tell him how the part about the rafting trip was true. “I went with Eliot Porter, his wife, and some others, and Eliot found that rock, an astonishing small dark rock that had been rinsed by the creek, worn down to a perfect gleaming shape. You’ll have to see.” We have reached my bedroom. I feel along the shelf until my fingers find it.
“Here.” I hand it to him. “I asked Porter to let me hold it, and it fit so neatly in my hand, I told him he should give it to me so I could add it to my collection. But he refused and took it back.”
“And then gave it to you several months later,” Ray says.
“No.” I laugh. “See that was the not-true part. The Porters invited me for supper, and I stole it.”
“Stole it?”
“It was right there on a coffee table among some other things.” I shake my head. “That rock belonged in my hand, and I knew it.”
I take it back from Ray now and rub my thumb slowly back and forth across the soft curved indentation my thumb has made. It is still my favorite. That rock. It is mine. Certain encounters in a life are meant to happen. As Stieglitz perhaps was mine. Long before we met, the space for him existed in me, unmade, unspoken for.
“Did you make these pots on the shelf here?”
“Yes. It’s not painting, but it’s what I’ve got.”
“And what is this?”
I feel a tiny shudder inside me, because I don’t know what he is looking at. He must realize, because he quickly adds, “This hand, here on the wall.”
The Buddha’s hand. A mudra. The palm is held up, turned outward, the fingers straight—it is a gesture of fearlessness. Also called the gesture of renunciation.
“It was a gift,” I explain to Ray. “But then one of the fingers broke off, and I sent it to be fixed, and it was fixed, perfectly. You couldn’t see the seam where it had broken. But there was nothing left in it afterward. No power. Just those long and graceful fingers on the wall, signifying nothing.”
There is a brief uneasy silence, and I can tell he does not understand. There are no hiding places here.
—
THAT EVENING, WE have roasted leg of lamb with garlic and honey mint sauce, bread and salad. There is salad with every noon meal, and also with supper. Always in the same shallow white bowls, salt cellars in the white footed sake cups with shell spoons. I explain to him that the only way to wash certain greens, spinach for example, is with the leaves down, stems up.
“It makes a difference, you know, in the taste when food is planted and prepared a certain way.”
“The lamb is delicious,” he says.
“It is delicious because it took a ridiculous amount of time to prepare. To make it taste like this, you have to make slits all along the meaty part of the lamb. In each slit, less than half an inch deep, you stuff a garlic slice.”
“Well thank you for taking the time,” he says.
“I did it for myself as well,” I say. “Though I suppose I would not have gone through the trouble if you were not here.”
The fire snaps, the tines of his fork graze his plate. In the silence after, I hear him smile.
After supper, we listen to records. I play a few of the Beethoven sonatas for him, and then one of my favorites, by Monteverdi. When the record stops, I get up and feel my way to the stereo, lift the needle from the groove. I turn the knob until it clicks off, and sit back down. I tell him that I remember when his mother last came to visit, she came with my sisters Claudia and Catherine, we talked late into the evening after supper. “Your mother asked me if they had tired me out.”
“And had they?” he asks.
“Certainly not. I felt like the evening star.”
We talk for a while about his plans for the future, his job, his passion for the environment. We talk about the girl he’s planning to marry.
“The law makes marriage a very long thing,” I tell him, “sometimes it’s best just to be tied to someone in your heart.”
He gently changes the subject, and tells me that when he first came to see me, back in 1960, it was the landscape that impressed him.
“Even more than me?” I ask.
I hear him laugh. “That first visit, yes.”
“Well, thank goodness we are having a second visit.”
At one point, as we are talking, I ask him casually if my sisters have recovered yet from the shock of Stieglitz’s photographs of me that I allowed to be published as a book last year. What a flurry of letters and phone calls—they were so horrified by the scandal of my naked selves gracing coffee tables everywhere.
“Are they over it yet?”
“I suppose,” he says.
I laugh. “And we can’t blame it on their being a different generation and all that, now, can we?”
“You’re different from most women your age,” he says gently. “I’m sure you know that.”
There is a goodness about him—my sister Catherine’s goodness. Sometimes that kind of goodness lends a quality of greatness to a life. I never had that kind of life.
I could tell him this now. I could tell him that the past is so much lighter than we can imagine, flakes of snow falling that melt in an instant and are gone. All that happened then and since. Stieglitz and me. My art. Our letters that I have sealed. That girl in the photographs.
“It’s all so long ago,” I say to Ray now. “I can’t imagine it would matter.”
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY, we drive out to Ghost Ranch and walk from the house to the cliffs. I hear the ravens calling as they soar on the updrafts. I hear the soft whoosh of the wind through the piñon trees. “It reminds me of the sea,” I tell him, “that sound.” I lean a little on his arm as we walk.
Halfway out, we stop at my chair that I have left in the shade of the trees, so I can sit and take a rest. I tell him about the trip I took earlier this year to Costa Rica and Guatemala. Then we continue on. “I know the way,” I say, “and I’ll lead you. But you’ll have to be the one to watch for rattlesnakes.”
—
THAT EVENING WHEN he leaves, I walk with him to the door. I touch his sleeve.
“Let me see your face.” I feel his hesitation, unsure what I am asking.
“Nearer into the light,” I say, “let me see you.”
He takes a small step closer. We are less than an arm’s length away. I can feel how the air shifts as the space between us shrinks, his shadow falls across my sight. I reach up my hands and trace his features. I touch his face the way I will touch a bone and feel the humming of the sky through it. I read my sister in his face, my mother, my father, the fierce dreams they each once held, this torn beauty of a moment we’ve come to.
There are things I wish I could tell him. Things I wish I could somehow leak from my heart into his. It feels so strange that these lives I’ve lived, these things I’ve known and done and seen, the vastness and the beauty, the risk and joy and devastated wonder—all of this will go with me. There’s an odd weight in my chest. So unusual, to feel this kind of sorrow.
“You are very fine, Ray,” I say.
He leaves. I stand at the door and, without seeing, watch him go.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after breakfast,
I walk outside. The garden floats, a blaze of light.
I hear the sound of the hoe against the earth. I call Mino’s name softly. The hoe stops, and he comes. “I want you to help me with something,” I say, taking his arm. We walk together through the house out across the patio and into the studio. I tell him to take down the thick rough wove paper, the watercolor paints, and the brushes, I ask him to tape several sheets of paper to the table, and knob the tape, so I can know where one sheet ends. I run my fingers over each brush until I find the one I am looking for.
“Just one color to start,” I say.
I ask him to lead my left hand onto the first sheet of paper. “The center please.” I move the brush toward it and feel his hand on mine, guiding slightly left. He smells like the garden, like earth.
“Thank you,” I say. He leaves and I am alone. I paint shapes—a wave, a circle—the color slides like grace over the page. I make forms that echo those early abstract forms I made when I was no one, and it occurs to me that art is a separate country, outside the body, outside time, like death or desire, an element beyond our physical selves we are traveling toward.
My hand shakes. Small drops of paint have spilled. So human, so flawed and imprecise, and beautiful for that.
For Kate Medina
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the work of O’Keeffe biographers, curators, and scholars, whose interpretations and writings about O’Keeffe’s life and art provided the building blocks of the structure underlying my novel. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the work of Barbara Rose, Sarah Greenough, Barbara Haskell, Laurie Lisle, Benita Eisler, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Roxana Robinson, and Barbara Buhler Lynes. The scholarship of these women guided my creative journey through O’Keeffe’s life.
For reading earlier drafts and giving invaluable feedback: Barbara Shapiro, Holly LeCraw, Kim Wiley, Caroline Leavitt, Elizabeth Lane. William Callahan’s detailed edits markedly strengthened this book. Gratitude to Millicent Bennett for her friendship; to Sarah Barnum for her perceptive observations about O’Keeffe’s work; to the Madden family and Lucy and Amy White for time at Lake George, which was critical to my understanding of that place. Endless gratitude to my mother and father for instilling in me a faith in the power of art, and to Karen Lustig, who lived with me in the world of this novel.
My agent, Kim Witherspoon, is like no other—passionate, incisive, clear. I am fortunate to have her as a trusted advocate and friend. At Random House, inestimable thanks to Derrill Hagood, Anna Pitoniak, Sally Marvin, Michelle Jasmine, Leigh Marchant, Alaina Waagner, and Avideh Bashirrad for their dedication to Georgia’s story as one that is relevant to women and art today. Thanks also to Sandra Sjursen, Benjamin Dreyer, Joe Perez, Simon Sullivan, Tom McKeveny, and artist Robert Hunt, who created gorgeous artwork for this novel. Special thanks to Carolyn Foley, wise and thoughtful guide, and to my wonderful production editor and friend, Vincent La Scala, who understands how the slightest edits throughout a manuscript can transform the weight and impact of a story.
Georgia would not have been possible without the bold vision of Kate Medina, who worked with me to shape this novel from the start. Her brilliant editorial guidance, warmth, and commitment have been a singular gift—not only to this book but to my life.
Above all and always, gratitude to my husband, Steve, who reads every word of every draft and whose fierce intelligence and insights make the difference. And, finally, to our boys—heart, soul, sky, ground. You are all that.
BY DAWN TRIPP
Moon Tide
The Season of Open Water
Game of Secrets
Georgia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction, DAWN TRIPP is the author of the novels Moon Tide, The Season of Open Water, and Game of Secrets, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, and NPR. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.
dawntripp.com
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