Georgia (5 page)

H
IS FACE LIGHTS
the next morning when he sees me sitting up in bed. “You look better. Rested.” He's brought fresh eggs from Arthur Dove's farm in Westport. He cooks them on the stovetop, pronounces them “coddled,” and brings them to me.

He has brought me oil paints, smug in their small tubes. They lie at the end of the table, along with a book, some paper, and a brown wrapped package of other supplies.

“I didn't bring these things to suggest you start today. I just don't want you to be bored.”

“I am never bored. I like this space.”

“You seem better today.”

“I feel better.”

“Read, write letters, stay in bed until you are well.”

I nod to the package. “Are there watercolors?” I ask.

He nods. He knows that I love the transient wash of thin colors moving—how quickly you have to work, unlike the sluggish, pretentious oils.

He is studying me.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” he answers.

I smile and point my knife at his plate. “You haven't touched your food.”

W
HEN HE LEAVES,
I am aware of his absence. I can't sit still. I wash the dishes, take other dishes out of the shelf near the sink, and wash those as well. Tiny demons surface in my thoughts: How have you managed to find yourself in these circumstances? It can't go on, you know. Absurd. He is married. A daughter, a wife. Look at you. Practically tied up and owned by a man you can't have. For shame.

I prowl the apartment. The hall bathroom is armed with several bottles of Synol soap. I find his camera things in the back room: funnels, pans, developing trays, a white umbrella, two tripods, boxes of books, negatives, prints, and mounting paper. I feel like an interloper. I sift through the art things he has left on the table for me: a book, watercolor paper with a heavy weave, paints, brushes, primer, boards. A new palette, so smooth and unpolluted.

My head is beginning to ache. I take a pen and paper and crawl into the bed to write to my sisters. I leave the other things on the table, untouched.
Dearest Ida,
I begin. How to explain it? That I am living in a studio apartment that belongs to a man who has committed himself, his passion, finances, and faith to my career. It all sounds like a foolish sham.

I
T'S DUSK WHEN
he returns. He sets his satchel on the chair.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

I don't want to tell him. They hounded me all day—the thoughts, the doubts, the way this must look to anyone else who isn't us. He asks what he can fix me for dinner.

“I'm not hungry.”

“You should eat.”

“I had some crackers.”

He comes over to the bed and sits in the chair. An awkward silence. He goes to touch my chin, I draw back, the slightest movement, his hand falls.

“I am sorry—” he says, glancing away. I touch his hair, gently at first, then push my fingers deeper into it. He raises his eyes. Such sadness in them. Such desire. It takes my breath.

“Will you trust me?” he says. “Will you trust that I'll do nothing to hurt you?”

Something in me softens. “I will.”

H
E COMES EVERY
morning and every evening. He cuts up fruit, slices ham. He makes me oatmeal, toast, and juice. He tells me stories of his day—who he saw, his niece, his mother, some other artist, what thing of mine he showed to someone else and how they loved it, how all of them love me already and cannot wait until I'm well. By early evening I am tired. We have dinner together. Then he leaves and walks the streets, because he can't bear to go home to the Madison Avenue apartment he shares with his wife. He recruits Walkowitz or Zoler to go off and tramp around with him, or he goes alone to an inexpensive restaurant open late and writes letters until midnight when he can slip back to 1111 Madison, sure that the rest of the house is asleep. A vagabond, he describes himself, practically homeless, and I tease him saying he's got no inkling what that word truly means.

During the day, bright light floods the room. I drag the table and stool under the skylight and begin to paint. The paper feels vast and unbound, full of possibility. I begin to clean up an hour before I know he will arrive. I move the table back into its place and climb into the bed as if I have been at nothing all day. If I've done something decent, I show him. More often, though, I tear up what I've made.

In every moment he is there, in every word, every tentative gesture, I feel a thrill. I see how his eyes study my face, the lines of my body, that quiet, particular hunger—then he'll catch himself and look away. We talk for hours. He tells me how they used to call him Hamlet as a child.

“Because you were dramatic?”

“Philosophic.”

I laugh. “Philosophically moody perhaps?”

He tells me how he loved horses, loved the races, loved to bet. He could beat his father at billiards by the time he was nine. One evening, ten days after I've arrived, he tells me how he lived in Berlin when he was around twenty. It was his first taste of freedom, and he was bored with his studies at engineering school. He could afford to be bored with a twelve-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance from his father. Then he met Professor Vogel, who taught photography, and he bought his first view camera that used dry plates. He fell in love with an older woman, a prostitute named Paula, and he lived with her there, in an apartment in Berlin's red-light district.

“There were caged birds hung in every window, their cries pierced the streets. Someday,” he says, “I will show you the photograph I made of Paula. She was my first love. There were many photographs I took, but I kept only one from that time.”

I feel a chill pass through me. When he tells me these things, it strikes me how much life he has already lived. My past feels threadbare in comparison.

“Soon you will come to Lake George,” he says. “You will love the Lake—there's no place I love more.”

“I've been there once,” I say, avoiding the question of how I can go there when he has a wife, named Emmeline, Emmy. She is a brewery heiress. It was her small fortune that bought 1111 Madison. She is the invisible piece of furniture we step around.

“You were at Lake George?” he says.

“I won a scholarship to the art colony there.”

“Amitola?”

“Yes.”

“Which building did you stay in?” It turns out that twenty-eight years apart, we slept in the same room. “A magical coincidence,” he says.

I laugh. “All for my painting of a dead rabbit and a copper pot. That same summer, there was another art contest, do you remember? Your father judged it and the painting he chose was done by a young male student at the League. It was a portrait of a certain dark-haired girl who happened to be me.”

He is elated. “I remember that painting!” he cries. “And it was not my father who chose it. He asked for my opinion, and I told him it could only be that painting. There was no other choice. I have never forgotten that face.” He squeezes my hand. “This was meant to exist. You. Me. Here together in this studio. Down to this unforgivable orange floor.”

W
HEN
I
WAS
twenty years old, in 1907, I had shown enough talent that my mother decided that with a proper education I might be able to make a living as an art teacher, and paint in my spare time. She scrimped and saved enough money to enroll me at the Art Students League in New York. I had short black curls the boys loved. They reached out to pat the bounce of my hair so often that they and everyone else came to call me Patsy. I lived in a boardinghouse on 57th, the room was a few dollars a week, and I took five-month courses, instead of eight, to save an extra thirty dollars. I dressed up as Peter Pan for the League Ball. I took classes with Luis Mora, who always drew his wife's head and hands in the margins of his students' work. The teacher I loved best there was William Merritt Chase—so madly flamboyant, with his ostentatious dress, his monocle, suede spats, and silk top hat. He was the only one of any of them who seemed to be doing something different in art, something of his own. He ordered us to do a painting a day—to work quickly, without thought, using bold, instinctual strokes of loaded color.

One morning in early January, I was on the way up the stairs to my life-drawing class when a shadow fell across the steps ahead of me. I looked up. Eugene Speicher, an older student, tall and handsome, stood several steps above. I went to go around him, but he stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

“I have a request, Patsy.”

“I'm late to class.”

“I want you to sit for me.”

“I won't make a good model.”

“I think you will.”

His eyes were striking, very light. An amused smile played over his mouth.

“Let me pass,” I demanded.

“Say yes.”

I looked up at him, angry now. “I have class.”

“Come on!” He laughed, his eyes teasing. “You know well enough it doesn't matter what you do. I'm going to be a famous artist. You'll wind up teaching in some girls' school. Just sit for me.”

My face burned. Furious, I pushed past him, walked quickly down the hall, and slid into my seat, in the back row of the life-drawing class. It was a class I disliked, second only to anatomy, so tedious. I'd never been good at human forms. Less than a quarter of an hour later, I left and found Speicher in a room upstairs.

“What are you doing here, Patsy?”

“I changed my mind.” I dropped my things and sat down on the stool at the front of the room. I was curious to see how he would paint me. As he began to sketch lines on the canvas, a thought struck me. There was nothing I had to do. No effort or decision to make. I only had to sit there and be still.

When he finished, I looked at what he had done.

“It came out well,” he said.

“Well enough, I guess. I'm not convinced I see
famous artist
in your future, either.” A group of boys burst in just then. Friends of ours, they were on their way down to see the Rodin drawings at 291. They wanted to go and bait the famous Stieglitz. Rumor had it he loved to argue. They wanted to get a rise out of him and see what he would do.

It was winter. Snow covered everything, white and glistening on the trees, as the raucous gang of us flowed down Fifth Avenue to 291. Climbing the steps, I brushed my hand through the snow on the railing. It fell with a thud and made blue shadows. We crunched into the frail cage of the elevator and swayed up to the second floor.

Stieglitz stepped from the back as we came in, surveying us coolly over the pince-nez, a print dripping from his hand. It was the first time I'd laid eyes on him, though his reputation was known by every art student in the city. The boys got into it with him right away over the Rodins
—What makes them art? Some squiggled lines a child could have drawn, how could that be art?
He railed at them for posing such questions, shaking his fist at their ignorance. His nostrils quivered, dark fire snapping from his eyes. Their voices rose, strident, tense. He spat back, “Art is life. Not reiterative. Not imitative, ever. It's always new. Otherwise, it is not Art.”

As they argued, I slipped away into the second room, a quiet alcove, and found myself alone, no chair to sit on, only the lines of Rodin's women on the wall. I didn't think much of them. But as I stayed with them, my eyes passing over them, I could feel something, some suggestion of raw power in the crude lines.
Life,
Stieglitz had called it. The drawings unsettled me, but I could not tear my eyes away—something about the bend of a leg, a back arched, the suggestion of breasts falling back, the smudge of shadow between the legs, not careless at all, but seeming so. Then the boys came and found me, and we tumbled out of the studio. Stieglitz threw us out, really.

Several weeks later, walking one night with some friends down Riverside Drive, I saw the trees, their limbs so deeply black, under the frail sheen of the sky. A shiver ran through me. I stopped and stood there, my booted feet cold in the snow, and felt it—that curious rapture, my body blown open to those shapes.

“Georgia, come on!”

“No, I have to go.” I said.

The light beat like silver dust on those trees—touching them, shaping them—I turned and walked away—I had to keep it—the intensity of that moment—and then I was home and the brush was in my hands, and I let the feeling hone to a sane, cool edge—no time, no thought, only that clear intent, my fingers taut on the brush, the colors like dark water, that mood passing right through my hand into the lean black forms of those trees.

I stepped back. It was good. It was good, the painting. Nothing I had ever been taught. Nothing, either, like the Rodin drawings. And yet.

The next day, I showed it to another student at the League. “Very nice, Georgia!” he said. “But you put no color in those trees. You can't just have black. Think about the impressionists. It won't take much to improve it. Here, let me show you.” He took a brush, dabbed some paint on the end, and made one mark after another, bits of color through my trees. Afterward, I stared and felt a kind of fascinated horror. Not that he had done it. But that I had not stopped him.

I kept that painting for a very long time after, to remind me.

I
ASK
S
TIEGLITZ
now if he remembers how that group of boys came in to challenge him to explain how those raw lines of Rodin were art—and how he tore them up.

“There were so many days like that,” he says. “Many people look at work like Rodin's and don't see it.”

“I'm sure you never noticed me.”

“I did. I barely remember those boys—they were just anyone else. But I remember you, the quiet one, standing alone in the corner.”