Georgia Read online

  Now, at 291, he strides past me. The gallery walls are no longer empty, as they were when I arrived. The room has sparked to life.

  One piece does not hang straight. He crosses back to it and gently shifts the frame’s edge to be just as he wants it. Then it is done. The room is very still. Light filters through the skylight to the floor.

  He turns to me. “Look,” he says. My eyes flow slowly over the walls, over my art. “You should have been here to see the whole show,” he says. “You would have seen how it stunned them. I can’t tell you how many times I had that thought: If only she were here.” His voice drops. A nameless, burning thing between us. I laugh, an awkward laugh, but it breaks the spell and things are light again. I am light, and he is just a man. I walk with him through the room, looking at my pictures. We pause at a painting of the Palo Duro canyon—the golden sloped walls, rimmed with fleecy clouds, wet blue sky in the upper right corner.

  “That country out there is entirely unlike New York, isn’t it?” he says. “And you love it, don’t you?”

  “The sky is just so big. The distances. It’s hard to describe. It reminds me of Sun Prairie.”

  “In Wisconsin?”

  “Yes. Where I grew up.”

  Farmland rolling away, fields of grain and wheat. But it was the sky I loved most, its gorgeous, blazing moods. When chores on the farm were done, there was nothing to do but wander out into that sky.

  We are still facing the picture of the canyon, standing near enough that I realize I could stretch my fingers and touch the point at his sleeve where the wrist disappears at the cuff.

  “It’s important that you work more in oil,” he says. “You’ll have to—you know.”

  “Oil is stubborn. I don’t always like it.”

  He laughs. “You will learn to.”

  It is the future he is speaking of.

  He quotes from the critics, some of the reviews. I have already seen them. He sent them to me and, though I could not quite bear to read them, I notice the words live on his tongue: exile, privation, flowing, rise, mystical, in a sensitized line.

  I am aware of him standing near me—so near, it feels almost unsafe.

  “I want to photograph you with your pictures,” he suddenly says. “May I?”

  I nod. He goes into the back room and returns with the camera and tripod.

  “Stand there,” he says, pointing to one of my blues. “In front of that. No, not to the side, put it behind you. Make it the background of you.”

  Inch to the left, three inches forward, half an inch back. He knows what he wants. “No, less. Turn your chin. Yes. That’s it.” He disappears behind the camera under the worn black cloth.

  “Look directly here.” His voice snakes into the room like it is not his voice, but another—softer, lower, streaming from the lens.

  I can feel him, watching me, waiting, the other side of the camera, the silence of the room charged now as he waits for the light to shift and fall a certain way, an expression on my face that he is waiting for, he will wait until he has it.

  “There,” he says. “Now. Whatever you are thinking, don’t lose it. Don’t move. Don’t blink. Nothing.”

  The shutter clicks. I am counting. Counting. It takes so long—but there’s a kind of raw pleasure in holding still, like I am stone on the outside, my heart beating through my skin so deep and loud I’m sure he will hear it. I’m aware of his eyes behind the camera, the hot dark work of them, and I feel my body rise.

  “Don’t move,” he whispers. “Georgia.”

  III

  I STAY IN New York for ten days. He invites me to lunch and we walk the streets, laughing, talking. The buildings seem to shimmer, spring sun striking off them. He tells me about Oaklawn, his family’s summer home at Lake George—how he always starts to feel the pull of it this time of year, in spring when the buds swell and the world is busting open.

  “I love the Lake the way you love your plains and sky.”

  I glance at him. A small white dog runs across the path in front of us, a child running after, long spindling legs churning. He talks about his daughter, Kitty, who will enter Smith College in the fall. He calls his wife Mrs. Stieglitz, a strain in the silence that follows.

  He asks about my family. I talk about my four sisters: Catherine and Anita are married, Ida’s a nurse; Claudie, the youngest, still in school, lives out in Texas with me. I don’t talk about our father who turned to drink and disappeared. I don’t mention my mother who died last spring.

  We come to a man selling oranges and stop for one. I peel it as we walk, my fingers tacky with the juice.

  “Do you miss Texas when you’re here?” he asks.

  “Right now?” I say lightly and smile. “No.”

  There is a push in the silence between us. I am keenly aware of the stink of the horses, the blare of the cars, voices passing, trees like green shadows. A carriage passes by.

  “You must continue to send me your things,” he says.

  “Even with no gallery?”

  “I’ll find a way to show them. And you must send them carefully—better packaging, more postage. They must arrive safe.”

  “It’s hard to imagine there will be no 291.”

  I see him frown. “There was no choice anymore. The war. The expense.”

  “It just feels wrong that something with such meaning would not exist.”

  “It will exist somewhere else. Just keep making your pictures and send them to me.” He smiles then. “You, Great Woman Child.”

  He has called me crazy things like this in his letters. “How can I be both?” I say. “Both Great Woman and Child. Tell me. I’ve wondered this.”

  I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t.

  “That’s what gives your art greatness,” he says simply. “You have what a child has—a pure unpolluted instinct. What I call Whiteness. And you are a woman.”

  So casual—how he uses that word, Greatness—as if he’s unfolding something I already know.

  —

  BACK AT 291, he introduces me to a few of his circle—the men. There’s the collector Jacob Dewald, the inventor Henry Gaisman, the painter Arthur Dove. They have already seen my pictures—and are full of compliments and praise. I briefly meet John Marin, the best-known of Stieglitz’s artists. He’ll render smashed sunlight on a coast in forked block lines. When I first saw his work, it reminded me of Kandinsky.

  Stiegtliz’s newest protégé, Paul Strand, is also there. He has a work apron on, a hammer in his hand. He looks like a boy dressed up in someone else’s costume. A solemn round face, blue eyes. He shows me one of his photographs of bowls—four very ordinary kitchen bowls—but cropped close up, disorienting.

  “So beautiful!” I say. And it is—how the curve of one bowl falls into the curve of the next—a definite, near-perfect balance in resolute asymmetry.

  “A similar sense of feeling to your blue spiral, Georgia,” Stieglitz says, coming over.

  “Different, though,” I say.

  “How?”

  “Here, in the bowls, the movement is happening in many directions at once. Not only one. The cropping intensifies that. It magnifies the motion and makes us believe it continues.” I point at a shadow in the shape of a blade, sharply cropped, at the print’s edge.

  “Exactly right,” Stieglitz says, a beat of triumph in his voice, “although I have to admit I myself didn’t see it quite that way before.” He looks at Strand, then at the others. They nod assent, his admiration echoed in their eyes, and in that moment I understand: There are things this man values in me, things he wants. He treats me as an equal, more than equal, and for that reason alone, others will see me that way.

  —

  ON JUNE 1, there is only rain, as if the city itself will pour away. I wake at dawn and watch the world outside slide down the window glass.

  At the train station, Gaisman goes off to check the schedule. Stieglitz and I are alone on the platform. The ache is almost unbearable. A strand of h
air falls across my eyes. He moves it.

  “Lovely, You,” he says.

  I kiss him then, his face in my hands, drawing his mouth onto mine. I press my body into him, my breasts against his chest through my shirt, his hand moves into the small of my back, the touch electric, wild—his breath mixed with mine, skin raw, my mouth opening, hungry, like I could draw every trace of him into me.

  He pulls away, just slightly, still holding me. Shadows pass around us. His hand slips under my coat up my ribs, that fresh strong smell of him so near.

  “Now, it’s everything, isn’t it?” he whispers.

  Later, he will swear he never said it—that it was my imagining.

  —

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER I have left New York, the photographs he took at 291 arrive at the Canyon post office. When I cut the string, slip them out, and see the woman there, the strong-cut angles of her face, for a moment I will not recognize her, but I will fall in love. Not with him. Not yet. But with the woman in the photographs—that quizzical, almost feral expression in her eyes—a restless ambition fused with desire.

  I will never tell him this. Not as sharply as I feel it in that moment. Years from now, I will tell a version of it. I’ll strip out what I need, small glittering pieces that shed light a certain way. It does not matter. A life is built of lies and magic, illusions bedded down with dreams. And in the end what haunts us most is the recollection of what we failed to see.

  IV

  1917, Canyon, Texas

  HIS LETTERS COME—LIKE food, water, breath. The days bleed together until it’s only his letters that mark out time. Five, ten, sometimes fifteen pages. He writes of daily things, some appointment he had, the new office he has rented at the Anderson Galleries, an auction house on Park Avenue. He writes of the war—his sudden despair when he learned that American troops had landed in France. But then I think of you, he writes, and wonder what you are doing out there in your country. It’s nearly real to me—that place I’ve never seen—because of how you describe it. When you’ve painted more, send them to me.

  One evening when my sister Claudia and I are out on the front porch of the boardinghouse, heavy footsteps come down the hall, growing louder. The screen door opens, and our landlord steps outside. He is a big man, hands like slabs of meat, a ruddy face. As he is walking by me, I shift on the step to make room so he can pass.

  “What’s that you got there?” he says.

  “A painting of the canyon.”

  “Don’t much look like the canyon.” He laughs then, hearty and rude. “You must have had a bad stomachache when you painted it.”

  “Maybe next time I’ve got a stomachache, I’ll make a picture of you.”

  This stops him. On the last step, he turns and looks back at me.

  “You do your teaching work, Miss O’Keeffe, and pay your rent.”

  “You have it mixed up,” I say. I point to my painting. “This here is my work. The teaching—that’s just my job.”

  —

  AFTER HE’S GONE, Claudia remarks in a low voice that I shouldn’t talk back like that.

  “It’s a good place where we live, Georgia.”

  “There are plenty of places to live.”

  She frowns. A cheap place is what she means. Before I went to New York, I might have cared a sliver for what people thought. Now not at all.

  I study my watercolor, the canyon with crows, made in a dizzying rush. Orange and green hues intense, the water, how fast it moved and leaked and dried.

  “I almost caught it here, Claudie. Almost.”

  “I completely forgot,” she says. “Ted Reid came by. He was asking for you.”

  “How forgettable.”

  “You seemed to like him well enough before you left for New York.”

  “Ted’s very nice.”

  “What then?”

  “He’s just not what I want.”

  “And what is it that you want?” she says slowly.

  There’s a loose splinter of wood on the step beneath me. I pick it free. “Spit out whatever it is you want to say, Claudie.”

  “Mr. Stieglitz is married.”

  “I’m entirely aware of that. What exists between Mr. Stieglitz and me is what would exist between any two people who share a passion for art. I don’t expect you to completely understand, but don’t judge it as something it’s not.”

  She looks stung. I close the thought of the kiss at the train station out of my mind.

  “He’s held a show for me,” I say. “He’s sold three pieces of my work. Does that matter? Yes. He sees me. He sees what my art can be—risks I haven’t taken yet, things I can still do to improve. He’s different from other people, and sometimes I feel New York’s the only place to be if I want my art to amount to anything.”

  She considers this. “You must compare it constantly, what you felt there and what’s here.”

  “There’s not much here.”

  She laughs.

  “I do love that nothingness here,” I say. “The nowhereness. It makes the sky feel big. Plus, you are here, which makes it so much nicer. But I can’t begin to describe what it felt like seeing my art on those walls. Like my future was right in that room.”

  She comes to sit on the step beside me and reaches for my hand, my lovely youngest sister, Claudie’s sweet open face—eyes still questioning, though. She’s sensed that while everything I am saying is true, something is not quite as it should be.

  A few days later, I choose the best among my paintings of the canyon, along with a series I did—Light Coming on the Plains. Three different pictures of an early-morning sky.

  I am curious to know what Stieglitz thinks of each, which speaks to him and why. They have a certain livingness—these pictures—that feels true. At the post office, though, I almost fail: They aren’t perfect. They could be better. What if he doesn’t like them? What if he feels they don’t have the greatness he saw in my charcoals and numbered blues? What if those days in New York that I’ve not been able to shake out of me since did not mean to him what they meant to me? That kiss.

  Leaving the post office, I bump into Ted Reid.

  “Georgia, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “I’m at school every morning at eight to teach. You know where I live. You couldn’t have been looking too hard.”

  On his face, a pink flush. “I told Claudia to tell you I’d come around.”

  “Yes, she said that.”

  He walks me back to the house, saying funny things and making me laugh. Then he gets a little serious and says there are some other things he wants to talk over with me. He digs the toe of his boot into the road. He is a fine young man, a star athlete, one of the town’s favorites.

  He invites me to go for a walk out to the Palo Duro canyon. I say no at first, but he looks so crestfallen that finally I agree. And that evening as we sit there on the canyon rim, his strong arm comes around my shoulders in the moonlight, and he kisses me, a long slow kiss, and I let him, like I could wash that other kiss out of my mind. Then he asks me to marry him, and I throw my head back and laugh. He gets all befuddled, and asks again. I shrug loose from his hand around my shoulder.

  I know what Ted likes about me. My drive. So different from any other girl he knows. He’s said this before, and I’ve explained to him that living with me for half an instant would shred him to bits.

  “I’m planning to enlist,” he says.

  “You should stick around and graduate first.”

  “I’d stick around for you.”

  Something in me shrinks. “Don’t be stupid,” I say, snipping the last bit of closeness between us.

  I have seen into the future, I could tell him. In that future I am always alone.

  —

  I PAINT AND teach. I poke desert flowers into jars to make still-life models for the older students. I bring small rocks and bones back from my night walks and arrange them on the desk in the classroom. Two young boys draw submarines. One draws a soldier
with big orange clouds. War clouds, he explains. Always war. There is one other little boy, though, who paints a landscape with a purple star, and a house on each side, and trees. It’s a funny picture, not as well done as the rest, but I tell him I love it, because it is free.

  “It isn’t for sale,” he says solemnly.

  I laugh. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Then he tells me he made it for me.

  —

  CLAUDIA BRINGS THE afternoon mail. A letter from Stieglitz. The one I’ve been waiting for. He has received the paintings, the series and the others. He loves them. He loves them.

  Georgia O’Keeffe! I want to crawl inside that world. Lie down under that same sky. Let the same dark night soak into me.

  It seems like ages since I’ve seen your face, heard you laugh—your lips on mine.

  There, I’ve written it. Something happened in that kiss, didn’t it? I think about that when I look at these pictures you send.

  I turn the page and see a few sentences he has written across the top, in small-print letters almost like an afterthought—I wonder what kind of child I would give you. Would you let me?

  I let out a short cry.

  Claudie’s head snaps around. “What’s wrong, Georgia?”

  My hand covers my mouth and I stifle a laugh. “Oh, nothing,” I say. “Nothing.”

  She glances at the letter in my hand. I fold it and go upstairs. I just need to be alone, to read his letter again—what he said about my pictures and his question. Through the wide middle window, the sun has begun to sink, the dark shape of a horse walking across the plains.

  I take out the cardboard box of photographs he took over a month ago, in 291.

  I prefer the one with her hands to those of her face. The gesture of her hands echoes the spiral form of my painting on the wall behind.

  There was a moment that day, in 291, when he set down the camera, came near me, touched my cheek and turned it with his hand. A tremor under his finger. Like a sled going fast downhill.