Georgia (16 page)

“Will the old order always be the point of reference for what's new?” I ask without thinking. “I'm sorry. I sometimes just want you to love what I'm doing now as much.”

“I just said I did.”

A piece of my hair has fallen loose from the knot I brushed it into. He reaches out and tucks it back behind my ear. His fingers linger. “I love everything you do, Georgia.”

“That's not true, and you know it.”

He pulls me down onto the bed, and kisses me. “It is,” he insists. “Everything.”

He makes love to me. And it is slow and beautiful, the lovemaking—I don't want it to end. We fall asleep there on the bed. I wake after dark, my canvas gleaming, still wet on the easel. I've left the window open, and the room is growing cold, but I don't want to wake him—he looks so sweet and pale and soft. I lie there with my arms around his body while he sleeps, and I listen as the cool night sweeps through the room, touching chairs, desks, surfaces, looking for something it no longer recognizes.

I
DA COMES FOR
a visit. Stieglitz gallivants around, flirting with her, and it is fun and light, the flirting. He photographs her with a rifle and a squirrel she took down with one shot.

Rosenfeld arrives several days later and, over the next week, I notice something slight and lovely developing between them. I mention it to Stieglitz. He grumbles something about how Paul should be focused on his writing.

“You aren't jealous?” I tease him.

“Of course not.”

“Look how happy they are. Can't you feel it? How it's all so new and sweet between them.”

I can see the spark in Rosenfeld's long eyes when he talks to my sister, and I notice a certain self-conscious grace in how she makes the beds, each fold of the sheet so even.

O
NE NIGHT,
I
DA
reads our palms. We're stuffed with dinner, an over-rich meal, and we roll into chairs in the living room. Ida takes Stieglitz's hand, her finger tracing out the lines.

“You lack talent, but you have a great will.”

We all laugh, Rosenfeld harder than the rest of us. Ida glances at him, then back at Stieglitz. She pulls her face into a mock seriousness.

“You see this break in this line here. That says you're an incurable flirt—”

More laughter.

My sister glances at me. “Do you confirm that, Georgia?”

“I can answer that!” Rosenfeld launches in. I feel a quick wave of gratitude. Dear Pudge. Always there to save us.

O
NE NIGHT AFTER
they're gone, I hear him bungling around in the hall, a crash, then a tumbling cry. I leap from the bed, rush out, and find him in a bruised heap at the foot of the stairs. I kneel beside him and take his head in my lap.

“Are you all right? What have you done to yourself?”

“First time in forty-seven years I've fallen down those stairs,” he says wanly. He smiles to see me cry. “You do love me then,” he says. His eyes seem small without the lenses of his glasses magnifying them. “Marry me, Georgia.” My lips graze his forehead. I can smell his age.

“Did you fall down the stairs just to get me to say yes?”

“No, but I would.”

“Come. Let me get you to bed.”

I help him to his feet. He gives a cry when he bears weight on his ankle. “I'm a rickety old carcass,” he says with disgust.

“No, no,” I say softly. I put my arm around him and together we walk up the stairs.

“Marry me,” he says again, when we have almost reached the landing.

“And we'll have our own apartment,” I say.

“That one on Fifty-eighth.”

“Yes, that's the one. Or, if paintings continue to sell, maybe rooms at the new Shelton.”

“Anything you want.”

“Ah, you say that,” I add, not harshly. “But there was something I wanted very much that you refused.” I feel him sink a little into me.

O
N
D
ECEMBER 8
we take the Weehawken Ferry across the Hudson to New Jersey; I've finally agreed, but we can't get a license in the state of New York, because Stieglitz is a divorcé.

“New Jersey's a better state for major life events,” he says.

“Because you were born in Hoboken.”

“If I had to crawl to Canada to marry you, I would.”

I laugh. “Oh stop!”

“You know I mean it.”

It is raining, the sky sliding into the sea, foggy drizzle, an untethered gray.

Marin picks us up at the ferry slip. My hands are soaked. I can feel the cold water leaking into my sleeves. The road is slippery. Marin turns to joke with me, to ask if I am ready to be Mrs. Alfred Stieglitz, and perhaps it's the look on my face that causes his gaze to linger. The car skids into a puddle, veers sideways before he can stop it, toward a grocery wagon. He jerks around and tries to pull the front end back to the road, but turns the wheel too hard, too fast, and it twists in his grasp. He hits the brake, too late, and I can only grip Stieglitz's arm as we spin across the street and sail into a lamppost.

And we are all safe—luckily—essentially uninjured. As we crawl from the wrecked car, I laugh and say that of course this would happen to us. Here we are, trying to do something upright and conventional, and even the heavens toss us an elbow.

After the hubbub of police and witnesses we pick our way across the shattered windshield glass and walk in the rain to the hardware store, where the owner who deals in screwdrivers, sandpaper, and nails is also a justice of the peace.

Three days later, December 11, we return to Cliffside Park. Marin is our witness. There is a bruise on his temple from where he hit the car door, the skin pearly blue, taut. No ritual, we've decided. No reception. No rings.

On our way out on the ferry, I told Stieglitz that I would not say the words
Love, honor, and obey.
He argued with me on that point.

“There's no reason to,” I said simply.

“It's a marriage,” he insisted.

The wind lifted sheaves of spray off the waves, and cut the surface easily.

“You know I can't promise to obey, Alfred. That's what you loved about me to begin with.” I pressed my fingers gently to his lips until he smiled.

M
ARRIAGE CHANGES LITTLE.
Everything continues on course, exactly as I told him it would, except for the fact that I feel a bit boxed up in a formality that has nothing to do with what I am. I am annoyed with him that he pushed me into it, annoyed more with myself that I let him, and maybe it's the tiniest rebellion when I go off and paint a city night scene of 47th Street near the Chatham Hotel. It's large—as large as my flowers—the staircased lines of the buildings angled and clean, a streetlamp with a reddish orbed glow, the moon half hidden in the night clouds.

It rings with life, and I know it. I tell him I'm going to hang it in the
Seven Americans
show.

“That's a bad idea,” he says. “Even the men don't do the city well yet. It will be enough to introduce your flowers.”

We argue over it fiercely—an argument that lingers, flares up over dinner at Joe's Restaurant or on our way home from the new Metropolitan Opera House. It makes him insane that I won't agree. He likes things settled, and I won't let this go—it's my picture, I want to hang it in my part of the show. He reminds me it's not my choice—I am only one of seven artists in this exhibition—we have to do what's best for the whole.

“And who decides that? You, I assume?”

And so it goes on, never quite resolved, the issue still a sticking point when he tells me that Seligmann is bringing Jean Toomer, the celebrated black writer, to the gallery. The plan is to meet them there, then go to dinner, but I've had enough Round Table small talk, and I decide I'll come up with some good excuse—a headache perhaps—to sidestep the rest of the evening. But when I meet Toomer, I change my mind.

He looks like no one else I've ever seen. Fine looking, exceptionally so—his face just irregular enough to be interesting. There's quiet eloquence in how he speaks. His eyes are striking, a unique iridescent tone to his skin. Rumors have been dashing around him all year. He went to visit Waldo Frank, seduced his wife, Margaret, and now she has left Frank and moved with Toomer to New York.

At one point at dinner while the men are talking, I feel a pressure on my face, and it is Jean—looking at me across the table. For a moment I meet his gaze, and he does not look away. He comes back with us to our apartment and stays until after two. I stay up, talking with him. When he finally leaves, my body is tired, but my mind still hums from the conversation.

I go into the bedroom and start to undress. Stieglitz sits on the edge of the bed, taking off his shoes. “A handsome man,” he says, “wouldn't you say?” I don't answer.

He looks at me then, the air momentarily bent.

I
'M FURIOUS WITH
Stieglitz on the opening night of the show, when I walk into the Anderson Galleries and see that the men have, down to the last, sided with him and refused to hang my
New York Street with Moon.
I know it's too late now, but this is the last time, I think to myself, when I'll let him determine what will or won't be hung of mine.

Flanking the entrance hall are Demuth's portraits of us. Marin's skyscrapers and flinty seascapes follow, then my magnified petunias, Strand's close-ups of machine parts, and Dove's collaged assemblages of mirrors, clock springs, sand, and wool, which are baffling, to put it gently.

Within days, the self-indulgent puff of the catalog has ticked off the critics. They go after us. They ransack the work of all the men apart from Stieglitz, whose cloud prints they continue to praise. And they love my flowers—the galvanizing charge of color. I'm particularly pleased to see how Edmund Wilson in
The New Republic
lauds the “razor-like scroll edges” of my leaves.

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.

L
ESS 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.

A
T THE
L
AKE
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.

J
UST
S
TIEGLITZ,
R
OSENFELD,
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—when 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.

S
TRIPPING 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.

E
VEN 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.