Queen of the Owls Read online

  Because he did. They both understood that.

  She flicked her eyes around the café. Then she was struck with a terrible thought. “You want me to hire you? I really can’t afford—”

  Richard cut her off. “No. It’s not like that.”

  Elizabeth wet her lip. She hadn’t really thought so, but she had to ask. She felt a swell of relief, then panic.

  “Think of it as an experiment,” he said.

  Right. An experiment, a kind of research. “Do I have to answer right now?”

  “Of course not. You can wait till you finish your coffee.” As if to halt her reaction before it began, he raised his palm. Stop. “A joke. It’s up to you.”

  “All right.” Elizabeth lifted her cup. “I’ll let you know next week.”

  “Mr. Wu will be back.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “Not that it matters. We can do the shoot whenever you want. If you decide to.”

  A giddiness welled up in her, saucy and reckless. “Not during class, I assume.”

  Richard gave her a dry look. “Certainly not. Mr. Wu doesn’t want us looking at anyone but him. You’d be far too distracting.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  Her laugh was coy, shrill, excessive. She almost spilled her coffee. He reached out a hand to steady the cup, his fingertips brushing hers.

  Ten

  Elizabeth wrote the words Feminist Art on the blackboard and drew a slash between them. “Let’s look at each word separately,” she said. Above the word Art, she added Modernist. “We can’t really understand the feminist approach to art without understanding the modernist approach.” She turned to the class. “What do you know about modernist art?”

  A girl in the back of the room flung her hand in the air. She had a blonde buzz-cut on one side of her scalp, long pale strands on the other. “It’s over, right? Which seems weird. I mean, I think of modern like meaning contemporary. You know, now. But it’s not.”

  “That’s true,” Elizabeth said. “Modernism began at the end of the nineteenth century and lasted until 1940 or so.” She drew a circle around the phrase Modernist Art. “It wasn’t until—oh, around 1910, and up through the end of World War One—that things really began to heat up. Braque, Gris, Picasso, with their revolutionary cubist ideas, pushing at the borders of what people thought of as art.”

  Then she circled the word Feminist. “Coincidentally, or maybe not, it was also an important time for the feminists. 1913, the March for Women’s Suffrage. 1916, the National Woman’s Party. 1916, the first birth control clinic. Finally, in 1920, the triumph of the first wave of feminism.” She looked at the class, trying to see if they knew what had happened in 1920. “The Nineteenth Amendment,” she said. “Women got the right to vote.”

  She waited for that to register. “Two movements, feminism and modernism, blossoming at the same time. What do you think—any connection?”

  Naomi spoke up, not bothering to raise a hand. The jewel flashed, just above her right nostril. Garnet, Elizabeth realized. That was the name of the stone. “They were both about breaking the rules.”

  “Exactly. They rejected tradition, convention. They wanted something new.” Elizabeth pulled down the screen and reached for the remote. “So here’s my question. What happens when you cross feminism and modernism?” She double-clicked, and two images appeared on the screen. On the left was White Iris No. 7, gentle and receptive, ivory petals surrounding a yellow center. On the right was City Night, geometric, vertical, assertive.

  “What do the paintings say to you about gender?”

  A pencil-thin student in a black tee shirt answered at once. “It’s pretty obvious. The flower was painted by a woman and the skyscraper was painted by a man.” She rolled her eyes, as if Elizabeth had insulted the class by offering such blatant stereotypes.

  “Not so.” Elizabeth let a moment pass. “They were painted by the same person. A woman. A modernist woman.”

  Naomi threw her a smug look. “Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Elizabeth moved to the side so she could see the screen. “O’Keeffe did both paintings. In what order, do you suppose?”

  Naomi frowned as if she sensed a trick. “Well, it wouldn’t make any sense for her to paint a frilly little flower after she had a chance to paint a great big phallic thing like that building—you know, after they let her into the big boy club.”

  The student with the tattoo waved her arm. “I agree with Naomi. Women were only supposed to paint, like, nature and children, not symbols of power and technology. So, wow, no way would she give that up and go back to flowers. Especially, like you said, when women were starting to stand up for their rights.”

  “Actually,” Elizabeth replied, “the flower you’re looking at was painted thirty years after the skyscraper.” She saw the students’ surprise and couldn’t help feeling pleased. “O’Keeffe painted whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Skulls, flowers, rocks. Male themes, female themes—she didn’t care. If feminism’s goal was to remove gender as a limitation, she was already there.”

  Several students looked skeptical. “I don’t get it,” one of them said. “Isn’t feminist art about celebrating the feminine? Not about ignoring it.”

  “O’Keeffe considered herself an artist. Period. Not a female artist.”

  “But she was a female artist,” the student insisted. “She painted stuff no guy would have painted. You know, pubes. Everyone knows that.”

  “It’s not that simple.” Elizabeth looked at the images again. “There’s a story that when Alfred Stieglitz saw her drawings for the first time, in 1916, he said, ‘At last, a woman on paper.’ He’d been looking for a woman artist so he could show the world that their art was different.”

  “He could tell she was a woman by the way she drew?” Naomi made a face. “You just said she didn’t want to be a woman painter.”

  “That’s what I meant by not that simple.”

  The girl was sharp, Elizabeth thought. You had to give her that.

  She gave Naomi an appreciative glance. “Stieglitz helped to make O’Keeffe famous precisely because she was a woman. There weren’t any significant woman painters in the American art world in those days. There weren’t, sorry. So he used that to get her noticed.”

  Elizabeth sensed that Naomi was about to argue, so she continued before the girl could interrupt. “Stieglitz knew how to promote artists; it was what he did. He picked up on America’s infatuation with Freud and wrote this article about how women experienced the world through the womb, not the mind, and how that was the unique genius of O’Keeffe’s art.” She paused to let the class react. “His comments got O’Keeffe a lot of attention, but they made her angry. She wanted to transcend gender. To be thought of as an artist, without qualifiers.”

  “Then she wasn’t a feminist artist.” Naomi crossed her arms, as if declaring and that’s that.

  “She wasn’t,” Elizabeth agreed. “And yet, she lived the feminist vision. She formed her identity through her work, she kept her own name at a time when women simply didn’t, and she was phenomenally successful in a male-dominated field. At the same time, she totally distanced herself from the feminist art movement.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Naomi said. “She could have helped.”

  “She wasn’t interested in helping. She was only interested in pursuing her own vision.” Elizabeth remembered what Georgia had written, early in her career, when she took the first liberating step and threw off everything she had been taught. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.

  And yet, not long after, Georgia had cared very much what Stieglitz thought. She had let him shape her identity, posing for him the very year he wrote that terrible article about how she painted from the womb.

  She opened her robe to his lens. The nude torso, the mound of
pubic hair.

  In one of his letters, when he had just begun to photograph her, Stieglitz wrote: You never were quite as beautiful as you are now. Yes, I’ll make you fall in love with yourself.

  They weren’t lovers yet. Only photographer and model.

  “Why couldn’t she do both?” Naomi demanded. “Be a feminist and paint whatever she wanted.”

  The question jolted Elizabeth back to the classroom. “It was a matter of her independence,” she said. “When the feminists tried to make her their matriarch, O’Keeffe rejected what she considered their attempt to appropriate her work for their own purposes. She didn’t want to be the feminists’ symbol of womanhood in the 1970s any more than she had wanted to be the men’s symbol of womanhood in the 1920s. Wombs, genitals—it made no difference to her. She thought both groups were trying to reduce her, rebrand her, to suit their own needs.”

  Elizabeth waited, letting the students absorb what she had said. Then she added, “When the Women’s Caucus for Art gave O’Keeffe one of its very first awards for lifetime achievement, she was the only one of the honorees who refused to attend the ceremony. It was held at the White House with President Carter, but she didn’t care.”

  “She didn’t want to be a hypocrite,” Naomi said. “White House or no White House.”

  The student with the tattoo looked unhappy. “It would have inspired other women.”

  “Perhaps,” Elizabeth said. “But she wanted to inspire as an artist, not as a woman artist.”

  And yet, surely Georgia’s identity as a woman had mattered when she posed for Stieglitz. Claiming her gender, not discarding it. Revealing the very sexuality she denied in her paintings.

  Georgia, the steel-straight icon of an austere independence, and Georgia, the voluptuous nude in the photos. How was that possible? If Elizabeth couldn’t understand that contradiction, how could she write a dissertation that made sense?

  You have to do what she did.

  Somehow, she kept talking. “It was the second wave of feminism, in the late 1960s, that led to the birth of feminist art.”

  Her voice rattled in the cavern of her body. Words, sentences.

  There was more to being a woman than talking about it.

  You have to do what she did.

  —

  Elizabeth was threading her way through the maze of cars in the campus parking lot, digging in her bag for her keys, when she heard the ping of her cell phone. Oh please, she thought, not Ben with another errand for her to squeeze into an impossible day. But it was a text from an unfamiliar number. She squinted to read it.

  “Hey, this is Phoebe. I got your # from Lucy.”

  Phoebe had inserted a row of emojis. A happy face, a girl waving, and a woman in a graduation cap, presumably meant to be Elizabeth. Then she’d written, “Would you guys like to come by for a drink on Saturday, maybe around 7? You can meet Charlie, and I can meet ur honey.” More emojis. A wine glass, a heart, and a honeybee.

  Her honey. Phoebe’s insipid cheer was starting to grate on her. Phoebe seemed to assume that Elizabeth liked her and that they were going to be friends. But she didn’t, and they weren’t. Besides, the couple Phoebe was inviting for a drink didn’t exist. She and Ben hardly ever went out together without the children. Mostly they exchanged hours so each could do the separate things they needed, or wanted, to do. Squash on Tuesday, Tai Chi on Wednesday. A careful calculus, meticulously fair.

  For yourself. I’d just be the one holding the camera.

  Georgia, her shirt open.

  The sweep of stars as she swung skyward.

  Elizabeth bit her lip. She really needed to stop these daydreams. If she wanted something more—well, she could, and ought to, make that happen with the man she was married to. Put on the negligee again. Try something outrageous. It wasn’t impossible. Relationships changed, like people changed.

  On the other hand, there were things about Ben that she didn’t want to change. They were the very reasons she had chosen him. He was smart, principled, supportive. She could never have embarked on a PhD without his encouragement, especially with two small children. “It’s who you are,” he had told her. “You should go all the way, get your doctorate.”

  He’d always been good like that. Elizabeth listed his virtues in her mind, as if she were an attorney arguing on his behalf.

  And now, especially, she ought to be supportive of him in return. He’d just taken on a bear of a case. Wyckoff versus Solano. An old man had died because the landlord hadn’t fixed a gas leak. It was complicated, Ben explained, because there was no record that the old man had ever called to let the landlord know about the problem. But he was taking the case anyway, with or without a fee, because it could set an important precedent.

  That was one of the things she admired about Ben. He was idealistic, committed to the high road. Once he took on a client—or a wife—he stayed the course.

  Elizabeth chirped open the car door. Then she reread Phoebe’s message and typed, “Great idea. Will confirm w/Ben & let u know.”

  There. Done. She’d go to Phoebe’s house with her husband; it was the kind of thing couples did. She threw her messenger bag onto the passenger seat, slid inside, and pulled the door shut. Then she sank forward, sagging against the steering wheel. Her shoulders twitched, and she began to tremble. Sadness and heat and shame, all scrambled together.

  “We’re so thrilled you guys could make it.” Phoebe gave Elizabeth an effusive hug, then turned to Ben and hugged him too. “And kid-less, what bliss. Ours are passed out in their cave.”

  Elizabeth had found a sitter through the university. She’d half-hoped that it wouldn’t be possible or that she could recycle the sitter-came-down-with-the-flu story, but here they were. Phoebe grabbed the arm of a tall blond man with wire-rimmed glasses and a short beard. “And this is Charlie.”

  Charlie offered his hand to Ben and gave Elizabeth a kiss on the cheek. “Glad you could come.” He ushered them into the living room. Two overstuffed couches faced each other across a low rectangular table. In the center of the table there was a bright blue tray with four glasses and a bottle of wine. Next to the tray, a red-and-blue ceramic dish held crackers and three different cheeses. “Please.” Charlie indicated one of the couches.

  Ben settled into a corner of the couch, his arm stretched across the backrest. Elizabeth took the other corner. She watched as Charlie settled into the middle of the opposite couch, Phoebe next to him with her legs curled. Charlie shifted his body, adapting to hers, and rested his palm on her thigh.

  Ben looked around approvingly. “This is a great space. The bay window, the high ceiling. And those crown moldings are the real thing.”

  “They are?” Phoebe glanced upward. “Well, the truth is we took the place because it’s big and has a long hallway. You know, for running? Once the twins started running around, our old place was impossible. Way too cramped, though I was sad to leave it.”

  Charlie gestured at the wine bottle. “Shall we?” He removed his hand from Phoebe’s leg, uncorked the wine, and filled their glasses. “Phoebe’s being kind. Our old apartment was making her crazy. I was the one who hated to leave.” He grinned. “My former man-cave. The place where she let me seduce her.”

  Elizabeth’s return smile was tight. Phoebe handed her a wine glass. “How’d you two meet?”

  Elizabeth answered before Ben could. “Oh, nothing remarkable. We had a class together in college.” She knew she was supposed to say and what about you? But she didn’t. It was going to be a story she didn’t want to hear.

  Phoebe told her anyway. “Charlie and I met in the funniest way. He crashed into me at the skating rink.”

  Charlie laughed. “Only way I could get your attention.” He picked up two glasses, offering one to Ben and one to Phoebe. “She was wearing this foxy little butt-hugger skating skirt and a tasseled cap, and showing off like mad. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but she wouldn’t slow down. A man does what he has to do.” Phoebe laughed
too. Charlie put his arm around her, pulling her close as he reached for his wine.

  Elizabeth’s cheeks were starting to hurt. She wanted to drop the tight clownish smile that was stretched across her face, but was afraid that its sudden absence would seem even more bizarre. What had she gotten herself into? Was this Andrea and Michael all over again?

  Charlie drained his glass, stood, and gestured at a cabinet. “How about some music? I’ve got some vinyl recordings from the ’50s that’re unbelievable.”

  Ben’s face lit up. “I’ve started collecting vinyl too. There’s no comparison to the sound you can get.”

  Elizabeth was startled by the animation that transformed his features. Did she know he was so excited by vinyl records? She didn’t think so. Yet there it was, right in front of her, the passion and delight she had assumed he lacked.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  “Jazz, rhythm-and-blues? That work for you?”

  “Perfect.”

  Charlie crossed to the cabinet in two quick strides. He took out an album. “One of the greatest ever. You’re going to love this.”

  Ray Charles’s voice filled the room. Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through. Elizabeth placed her glass on the coffee table and stared at Phoebe. Were they making fun of her? But no, she’d never mentioned her dissertation to Phoebe.

  The road leads back to you.

  Ben reached across the couch and tapped her playfully. “Liz’s song.” He looked at Charlie. “She’s studying Georgia O’Keeffe. Ask her anything.”

  Elizabeth wanted to shove his hand away. He had no right to show her off, like some kind of trained monkey.

  She could almost hear her mother’s words. We’re so, so proud of Lizzie. Why? Because she knew a lot of facts? The year something was painted, where and when it was exhibited. No one cared about that. Not even her. What mattered was the way the paintings made her feel.

  The swollen waves of color, peeling open, pushing beyond the border of the canvas. The dark flower with its endless unfurling caverns, mauve and purple and pink. The unbearable intensity of its inner core, the utter revelation.