Georgia (28 page)

L
OOKING BACK, IT
often seems it happened overnight. I became the old woman I was meant to be. Fiercely alone.

On the long tables in my studio, we are looking over my paintings. Years of work spread out, all the way back to the charcoals. It is 1970. There will be a show at the Whitney. It will be the first major showing of my art in New York since he died. I am eighty-three years old. I have traveled all over the world, to Peru, Egypt, Austria, Greece, the Near East. Two years ago, I was featured on the cover of
Life
magazine. They call me the Pioneer Painter. They are enthralled by the woman artist who has chosen to live in the desert, who wakes in the dark before dawn, drinks her coffee, and walks out with her chows toward the horizon. I have become that horizon, unreachable and absolute. They call me mysterious, because I turn strangers, especially famous ones, away. I allow only certain photographers to take certain kinds of pictures of me: in my black and white clothes, my kimonos, my shawls, poised with my cow skulls, my wizened face and wrinkled hands. A symbol of the American West, reclusive, self-reliant, I can no longer quite see the mountains in the distance, but I still love them beyond reason.

We do not talk about my eyes. I have worked hard to do this right. To give the world just enough so they will still want more. In every interview, I play up very precise details of my artistic career. When I am asked about Stieglitz and his influence, I find ways to sidestep the question. New York was a different life. The woman I was, a different person. It isn't always easy—looking back across the vast distances of time. I see it clearly. Sometimes more clearly than I could see it when my sight was still unchanged. My life with him. My life before. I have begun to buy back some of my paintings at auction to drive their values higher. One must protect oneself. I've gone through my artwork from time to time, culled out a few pieces, ripped them up, then walked outside to burn them in the can. I've marked the best works with a star on the back and my initials in a circle. Over the years, I have often chosen not to exhibit my abstractions. I have continued to paint them, and I keep them, along with my early works, in my own collection. I am no longer known as an abstract artist. I am known for my New Mexico landscapes, my bones, my sharp-edged flowers, my sky holes, and my clouds. This is, after all, what I learned from him: to keep what I want to myself. To reveal only what I want to be seen.

I have worked hard to build a legend to replace the one he fashioned for me.

I am not expecting to feel what I do that day in the studio when I am sitting there with my manager and my assistant reviewing my early work spread out on the long tables—the charcoal drawings, the abstract watercolors from 1915, and 1916, those pieces I did before I came to him—
Blue No. 1, Blue No. 5,
the spiral, the canyon, two lines. I feel my heart turn over. They are so fresh, even now more than half a century later.

“Well,” I say flatly. “We don't really need to have this show after all. I never did better.”

They miss my point—they often do—and Doris, the manager, says firmly, “We will arrange the paintings thematically. That way they will see how those early forms are reflected in your later works.”

I look at her. “You're trying to bolster the credibility of my later work.”

“No,” she says, in that glorious no-nonsense way she has. “This is just the alphabet you've used throughout your career.”

I am not so easily fooled. She doesn't want me to stumble into the thought that I might have abandoned my best work, my vision, for him. I can't say I haven't asked myself that question. What would I have done with those early abstract forms if I had just continued working on my own? What kind of artist would I have become if I had not gone to him that day in 1917 and the obsession between us began?

He once called our relationship a mixing of souls. But then again, he called it a love story. And it was far more—and less—than that.

I sigh. They are like ashes—thoughts like this.

The Whitney show is a tremendous success. It travels to Chicago and San Francisco. By the time I come back home, piles of letters and invitations have already streamed in. Letters from museums all over the country, phone calls from magazines and newspapers. Letters from women who see me as a symbol for the feminist movement, which I want nothing to do with. Letters from young artists seeking guidance. I read through a number of them, then lose interest. There is only one piece of advice to give: “You want to be an artist? Go home and work.”

I
CONTINUE TO
paint, and my eyes continue to fail. My central vision slowly clouds, until only tiny holes remain at the edges of my seeing. There is no cure, they tell me, and at a certain point I will also lose my peripheral sight.

I refuse to authorize a biography of my life. I write two memoirs instead. My form of memoir. The first a series of drawings with small paragraphs of text to accompany them. The second is more complete, told exactly as I want it told, at arm's length—moments of a life strung together, each like an arrow in flight hurtling toward some center. I mention Stieglitz three times, and even that seems a little excessive.

Every day, Candelaria comes in to do the housekeeping and Estiben builds my fires. He has a zen for building fires. He shaves out kindling with his knife, and arranges the wood in three or four graduated vertical layers, the smaller pieces toward the front. You can light his fires with one match. A girl comes every day to help me with my paperwork. We dry apricots off the fruit trees in the garden. We make Irish soda bread and grind homemade flour in my small mill. We organize the shelves in the book room, and she rubs oil into my back and legs to soothe the ache. She drives me in my white Lincoln Continental between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu and to my weekly appointments with the eye doctor in town. She looks away discreetly when I drop my head into my hands to hide the tears. And then there is Juan, who has become my primary companion. He showed up one day at my back door, a tall long-haired artist looking for work. He has been with me since. It was hardly altruistic, my taking him on. I loved his lanky handsomeness from the get-go. I love the way he laughs. He is good with me. He knows when to nudge and when to leave me alone. He knows how to talk back to me, how to flirt like a younger lover, and how to let me fuss over him as a mother would over her beloved son. He takes me to the opera in Santa Fe, and he knows just how to hold my arm as we walk the sidewalk to keep me from the low edge of the curb I can no longer distinguish.

After supper in the evenings, I listen for the village children playing outside in the street in front of the cantina, their laughter clatters with the fading sunlight off the walls, their voices sparkling like music. From time to time, I call them in. Through the housekeeper, I learn which child belongs to which family. I send them to the movies sometimes in Española. The ones who are too poor, I pay for them to go to school.

After dark, when the children are gone back to their own lives, I ask the girl to read to me from Blyth's books of haiku. As she reads, I run my fingers over the pot on the bench shelf. The clay is smooth and cool under my hand, raised flecks of dirt strung through it. Mino, the gardener, helps me with my pots. We work on them together. When a pot is done, I feel it with my hands. If it's not what I want, we rework it. If the clay is too dry, we smash it with a certain glee, and start again.

M
Y SISTER
C
ATHERINE'S
grandson, Ray, is coming to visit. He came here once when he was thirteen. He has not been here since. His sister was named Georgia after me. I paid her way through college and offered to pay his as well if he went to Harvard, but he preferred to pay his own way and chose a different school. He's a lawyer now, in his early thirties, about to be married. He has a legal case down here, and will come to visit for the weekend.

The morning he is to arrive, I rise early. The girl comes into my bedroom, lets out the chows, and lights the fire in the small kiva in the corner, then she goes to make my coffee. When she comes back, she helps me dress and we go out to walk. I make my laps around the courtyard, setting a small rock down for every lap to keep track. I feel the blood pulse in my neck, the slight push of life under my fingers when I press them there. Afterward, I rest in the sun by the old well. The door is across the patio. I can only see the darker uneven stain of where I know it is on the wall. The light hits that one spot differently. Sometimes in the dry air and the smell of sage, I swear I sense him in that door.

I have my coffee and yogurt with a handful of raspberries from the garden. I tie up my hair in a scarf. I smooth cream into my hands, working around each knob of my gnarled fingers. My skin is cracked, like the desert floor.

The morning is very white today. I can feel it on my face. It will be a hot day.

When Ray arrives, I take his hand and show him through the house. I tell him that since he was here last, there have been many changes—white carpet now in the studio and in the bedroom.

“The chows were black, you see, and when I could no longer tell dog from floor, those black tiles had to go.” In the studio, I point out two paintings. I cannot see them, of course. “That one by the little sitting area is
Above the Clouds,
and this one here on the long wall is
A Day with Juan.
” I point to the small stovetop next to the sink. “That little thing clicks on from time to time without anyone hitting the switch. It has a mind of its own.”

“Like other denizens here?” he asks lightly.

I laugh. “Oh, maybe. Speaking of which, where is Juan? I want you to meet him.” But he is nowhere to be found. Candelaria knows nothing. Neither does Mino. Juan does this sometimes: disappears when a member of my family comes or an old friend who belongs to a life I lived before. Perhaps he is afraid someone will judge him. Or perhaps he just needs a few hours on his own to be free. “He'll be back,” I say to Ray now. “Come let me show you the rest of the house.” We cross the inner courtyard and walk through the short passageway. I show him the dining room with dark floors and bright-white walls, daffodils I placed this morning on the table surrounded by wooden captain's chairs, Mexican weavings draped over their backs. I show him the pantry, where I keep my kettles, my spice jars, my refrigerator, pots and pans hung on nails against the wall. I tell him that the other girl I used to have would argue with me all the time about the proper way to preserve ginger. He asks me who was right. I shrug. “Well, she's no longer here.” I take his hand, young and soft, not an artist's hand—the skin is smooth, and reminds me of my sister Catherine's hands. We walk through the kitchen. I feel along the worktable with its red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth set near the sink and the stove.

“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.

T
HAT 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.