Georgia (7 page)

I
N
A
UGUST, HIS
mother summons us to Lake George. She wants to meet the cause of all the upset—the dark-haired creature her favorite son is overturning every applecart for.

“I am not always keen on families,” I tell him on the train.

“They'll love you,” he insists. “And you will love the Lake.”

I smile. “That's not what I said.”

A
T THE STATION,
we're met by Fred Varnum, the man from the house, who loads our things into the carriage and drives us the short distance to Oaklawn. The house is at the edge of the lake—a sprawling Victorian with a hodgepodge of gables, turrets, and porches. The furniture is old, all sorts of somber atrocities jumbled together—hangings, statuary, lamps—gold-framed paintings mask the walls. Every window is bound by heavy draperies as if light is forbidden here. His mother, Hedwig, is warm—plump and apple-cheeked—when we meet, she smiles and presses my hand tightly. My anxiety lifts.

She puts us in separate bedrooms, as he had told me she would. She seats me beside her at every meal—three meals a day, plus tea with cakes every afternoon at four o'clock. Everyone assembles. Nearly the entire clan is there—more names than I can easily remember—siblings and children and spouses and nieces and nephews, cousins and brothers- and sisters-in-law. Stieglitzes coming and going—his sister Agnes; his other sister Selma, overflowing in chiffon—as high-pitched and imperious as he'd warned; his niece Elizabeth, the most grounded and sensible among them. I'm so used to solitude and this is anything but. I've never seen so many people talk and argue, bicker, laugh—their voices rise and fall, and it's like I am witness to some tableau in a dream.

But the lake itself is a thousand shades of molten blue, and there's nothing to do but paint and swim and sneak into his bedroom at the other end of the hallway from mine.

Every morning we tramp together across the road and up the hill, past the old clapboard farmhouse, with its huge veranda. As we walk, he tells me that these upland acres were once a pig farm, but the smell was unbearable, so his father overpaid the farmer and bought the land to get rid of the pigs and their stench.

“Just remember,” I say, “it's a farmer's daughter you're talking to.”

We follow the path past an abandoned stone foundation, through the woods that open into the upper meadow, and he pulls me down into the tall grass, legs, warm wet skin, kissing me everywhere. In the evenings after supper, he rows me out in a little boat onto the lake as the dusk drains out of the sky. We row out into the middle of the lake, then cut back around the island. By then night has fallen, and when I look back to the dock and the house beyond, I can see the small round figure of his mother, waiting on the porch for our return.

In those first few days, it's easy to forget. Then letters arrive from Kitty, first one then another, imploring her father to come to her camp in New Hampshire—to meet with her and her mother—to try to heal the damage he has wrought.

He will go. I know this even before he tells me. I do not bring it up that evening before supper as we lie upstairs kissing in his bedroom.

He shakes his head. “There's no choice.”

“So you will go?”

“I have to. I must make them see. Do you understand? I have to bring peace to it.”

“You think you can do that?”

The room is filled with the reflected light of the sun behind the hills, the bed suffused in that yellow-orange glow—we are like two black-limbed creatures in amber.

I run my finger along his mouth. “You think you can fix it all, don't you? Make it right. Make them see?”

“There was never joy.”

“Not everyone can feel what you feel, or feel to the end of themselves as you do.” I trace my hand along his neck to his shoulder, the strong ropy knob of it. He is propped up on one elbow, looking past me out the window, toward the dusk.

“This morning as I was shaving,” he says, “I looked out to the lake and it lay so still it hardly seemed to exist. Only one bright star, its light fading. It was holy—that moment. I've felt it in me since, everything turning into what it is meant to be.” Such astonishing conviction. It occurs to me now that art is exactly this: making what's unseen but all around us, visible. Having that sort of faith.

“You're like no one else,” I say quietly. “I love that you will try.”

His eyes shift to me. “Why only
try
?”

“Because you'll do what you can, and that's as much as you can do. Don't assume you can bend the world to be what you know it should be. You won't win. Just come home.”

T
HE NEXT DAY,
he is gone, and I am alone in that house with his mother and Elizabeth, the brother-in-law Lou sinking into his cups, and Selma with her ankle-nipping terrier “Prince Rico” that she hand-feeds chocolate creams.

I walk through the dank swells of the house without him. The rooms feel like a heavy trapped pool, bleak and still.

I miss him. And I wait. A large star shines through the trees. The star seems even larger, the light blurred, as if it shines through water. Our star, he called it, when we saw it one night from the boat on the lake.

The day he will return, I almost can't sit still. There's a storm. Leaves torn from the trees, the windows shudder in their guides. The car pulls up. I run to the front door, and he's there, rain sliding off his hat. I throw my arms around his neck.

“It happened!” he says, his eyes alight, triumph spilling off him. “After almost six hours of conversation last night, they finally understood. A miracle. But it happened.”

I hear the others coming down the stairs behind us. I draw his cloak from his shoulders and hang it to dry.

M
IDNIGHT.
M
Y DOOR
creaks open. I sit up in bed, as he puts his finger to his lips, drawing the door shut behind him. Then he is beside me on the bed, his mouth hard on mine.

“Now,” he says, the word mixing with his hot breath.

“I'll bleed.”

He pulls me down onto the floor, our hands on each other, feverish, his knee between my legs spreading them apart, and he is inside me, pushing into me. I feel the sharp pain of something torn deep as his hips dig into my thighs, his breath rough in my hair, quickening, then he pulls out, wetness pools on my belly.

He brings me a towel and a bandage from the bathroom, and I lie on the floor, with the bandage between my legs, the vague tint of blood on my hands.

“Come to bed, Georgia,” he says softly, helping me up.

“Stay with me tonight,” I say.

We slip under the sheets, and hold each other tightly, his legs wrapped through mine.

I
WAKE WITH
a start, my heart hammering. Old dreams of my mother. How sick she grew—blood in a spray of tiny petals every time that cough shook her small frame. A banging on the door—the landlady had come to collect the rent, but there was no food on the shelves, and my mother staggered toward the door to explain, and her lungs blew apart right there in the hallway, sliding down against the wall, she died. The word aloud in the night, so softly.
Died.
The room is strange. All wrong. For a moment, I don't know where I am. Then I see him, Stieglitz, lying there, his lovely face asleep, so peaceful and so near. The storm has passed. The night is clear. Light falls through the window, laddered shapes across the floor. I spoon myself around him, breasts, hips pressing into him, as if my body could fill every negative space his has made.

O
VER THE NEXT
few weeks at the Lake, cousins leave and others arrive—a family chattering, bickering, planning. I quietly nickname Selma's eight-pound terror “Rippy,” a moniker that Stieglitz champions. His niece Elizabeth confides in us. She has fallen in love with the gardener, the long-faced Donald Davidson. Erudite, yet without any notable ambition, he is forty and divorced, but they are in love, she insists, and will marry in the spring. She has yet to announce the earth-shattering news to her parents, Stieglitz's staid brother Lee, the doctor, and Lizzie, his docile wife.

“Uncle Al,” Elizabeth says firmly, “you must keep my secret since I, after all”—she tilts her head toward me—“kept yours.”

“He'll keep your secret, Elizabeth.” I look at him sternly. “Won't you?” It's a mock sternness and he knows it, and the three of us dissolve into laughter as Selma comes around the corner of the porch, her seventeen pounds of chiffon dusting the floor as she goes.

“What's all your ruckus about?” she asks haughtily.

“We were just saying your skirt missed a spot.” Stieglitz points with his pen toward some cobwebs and two dead moths.

“You're as impossible as ever.”

“And you are just as simpering, dear Sel.”

Sel can put him in a rotten mood faster than anyone, and I can understand it. Of all his siblings, she's the one I can't bear—just her presence makes me sharply aware of how different his world is from mine.

When she is gone, Stieglitz says, “That sister is a walking, bleating example of why America's in the hopeless mess it's in—unable to embrace anything new, always clinging to some Kingdom of Before.”

“Sel has about as much weight as milkweed fluff,” Elizabeth retorts. “You give her far too much credit, Uncle Al.”

I
AM PAINTING
well here. I go outside and sit in the grass and make watercolor sketches of the wild roses growing near the trellis. I pare apples and pick grapes. When I have to come in, for the long midday dinner, I skim my spoon over the surface of the soup—too hot for soup, I think. All this food. I am quiet, only half listening—my thoughts drift on the sketches I did that morning.

Toward the end of the third or fourth course, I set my fork down on my plate—a quick ting—it stops Stieglitz in the midst of a heated conversation with his brother Lee. He glances at me. I answer with a faint smile, then look away as they go on talking. Since Lee arrived, the conversation has focused on Oaklawn and the expense to keep it up—taxes, insurance, repairs, all that. The house has been in the family for over forty years, but Lee, who shoulders most of the expense, is commenting that it might be too much house for his wallet to bear. Sel's little dog comes to sniff around my ankles. I give it a brief silent kick. And Lee is asking me now, “How long are you planning to stay in New York, Georgia?”

The table falls still. An awkward silence. Elizabeth clears her throat. I'm careful not to look at Stieglitz. I look at Lee. “I'm due back to teach in Texas in the fall.”

I smile and rise from the table. I bend to plant a light kiss on Hedwig's plump cheek, nod to the others, and head for the stairs, walking slowly until I hear Stieglitz's chair push back against the floor, his footsteps behind me. I glance over my shoulder.
Catch me?
I mouth. He reaches out to grasp my sleeve, but I am quicker and start to run, my feet light, almost noiseless, taking the stairs two at a time, then down the hall to his bedroom. He is right behind me. He catches me at the door, pulls me inside. He pushes me up against it, we are shaking with laughter, digging his hands into the waist of my skirt, pulling my shirt loose, he kisses my neck, my breast. I feel his hardness through his pants against my thigh, and the door quivers, thudding lightly in its frame.

“Shhh,” I say, “they'll hear us.”

“I don't give a damn what they hear.”

And in the free brazen sunlight, we make love, his face above me, I draw the pillow to my mouth when I cry out, and we lie there, afterward, skin damp, sunlight blowing in as the curtains stream and fall.

T
HE DAYS SHORTEN.
The sky turns that lean starched blue that comes toward the end of summer. One morning, he wakes me early, and we go out walking. There's a new cooler twist in the air, the light is different—every shape, every tree, roof, hill, farmhouse, the lake, the road—each levered apart into its own, distinct lines—the colors drenched, intense.

As we walk, I tell him how years ago when I was a student, I underpainted a canvas with a thick layer of white, let it dry, then made a picture over it. Days later, when I caught a glimpse of that painting still propped on the easel, I was struck by the brilliance that shone through. The picture itself was unremarkable, but the luminous depth changed everything.

He listens, unusually quiet, thinking. “You're that kind of whiteness,” he finally says.

I laugh.

“No, I mean it. It's that purity of vision that gives your art its fierceness. Its indescribable sense of life. You have not been overtaught, and most of what you've been taught, you've rejected, and so the essence of what you are and how you feel comes through in your best work.”

A stick cracks under my foot. Those last few words ringing through me, a kind of sinking feeling.
Your best work.
I can feel when it's not there, I can look at a thing I've made and know that I've failed, I can tear it up for being imitative, or imbalanced. But how does one discern what is good and what is best? That's something I want to learn—I want to see it as he does.

Stieglitz seems preoccupied this morning, something weighing on his mind. We walk down to the Lake and lie on the shore, my back propped against a rock.

“Doesn't that hurt?” he asks. I smile. It's one of those odd things about me I can't quite explain—how I like hard surfaces. He looks past me, across the water.

“If you could have a year to do anything, Georgia, what would you choose to do?”

“Paint.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you might be willing to put up with some nonsense for that?”

“Nonsense, for example, in a loden cape?” I push my bare foot lightly between his legs. I can feel him there.

“Don't wake that little man. He'll come find you.”

“Let him.”

“Do you want to stay, Georgia?”

“You mean in New York?”

“Yes, for a year in the studio. Your living expenses would be paid.”

“By who? You?”

“No, but I've made an arrangement.”

“That sounds mysterious.”

“I've secured a patron to pay your room and board. What matters is that you'll be free to paint.”

“And us?” I say.

“That is secondary.”

I laugh. “Is it really?”

“I've given this a great deal of thought,” Stieglitz is saying now. “You need time and space to develop. Your vision is strong, but you need to build your skills in oil. For your work to be taken seriously, you'll have to master oil. You know this.”

One year—a stunning gift, that length of time. I feel it ripple through me. So much I could learn in a year. I could make so much.

“That's what I want,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

The clouds shift, the sun strikes off the water, grazing my eyes.

“Yes.”