Queen of the Owls Read online

  When she arrived at Lucy’s house, Katie was sound asleep, just as she’d expected. Daniel and the twins were in the sandbox. Seeing her approach, Daniel glowered and turned his back. If you’re not really here, I don’t have to stop playing. A woman in a bright red sweater and big sunglasses strode into the yard behind Elizabeth. She had tousled light-brown hair, one side longer than the other. Elizabeth didn’t know if the uneven look meant a chic expensive haircut or a working mother, like herself, who didn’t have time to get it properly trimmed. Andrea, the expert on hair, would have been able to tell.

  The little girl grabbed a plastic brontosaurus from her brother, checking to see if her mother was going to yell. Her brother howled, grabbing it back. The woman in the red sweater laughed. “I’m sure you two were getting along just fine until I got here. Pretend I’m still driving.” Then she turned to Elizabeth, pushing the sunglasses to the top of her head. “I try to think of them as unevolved little gnomes instead of miniature humans who ought to know better. It helps me get through the day.” Her smile was wide, generous. “Phoebe,” she said. “Humble servant of Ruthie and Rex.”

  “I’m Elizabeth. And that’s Daniel. Katie’s zonked out somewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t I love to join her. It’s been a long day.”

  “Tell me about it.” Elizabeth motioned to the bench, and the two women sat, a silent agreement passing between them to take a minute before collecting their children. Elizabeth felt something relax deep in her body as she settled next to Phoebe, this person who was like her. There was a comforting familiarity in the wrinkled clothes and messy hair, the dry comments and exhausted affection. Her questions about nude models seemed contrived and far-away.

  She sat with Phoebe in companionable silence until one of the twins, the girl, ran across the yard demanding a tissue. “A tissue instead of your sleeve?” Phoebe declared. “What’s the world coming to?” She opened her purse, her forehead creasing. “No tissues? I can’t believe it. What a bad mother.”

  “Here,” Elizabeth said. She held out a travel packet. “Would you like to pull one out yourself?” The girl nodded and plucked a tissue from the pack.

  “Say thank you,” Phoebe prompted.

  “Thank you,” the girl shouted, running back to the sandbox, waving the tissue like a victory flag.

  Her brother jumped up. “I want one too.”

  Phoebe sighed as Elizabeth handed him a tissue of his own. Lucy opened the back door. “Want me to rouse Katie for you?”

  Elizabeth glanced at Phoebe. “In a minute. It’s nice to sit here.”

  “Sit, then.” Lucy paused. “Do you need me or—?”

  Phoebe waved her away. “We’re good.”

  Elizabeth settled against the bench, oddly at peace. It was a beautiful afternoon. The birds were darts of blue overhead; sunlight glittered on the maple leaves. She could hear Daniel making happy growling noises as he banged two dinosaurs together. She smiled at Phoebe. “Do you bring Rex and Ruthie here every day?”

  “Mostly when I have a big freelance job. I’m a web designer. I do the tech part.”

  “That sounds interesting.” It didn’t really—mathematics and formulas and all those strange symbols—but Elizabeth tried to sound friendly.

  “Hey, it’s a living.”

  “Well, it’s good to have work that stimulates you.”

  “More like, work that pays the bills. If I want to be stimulated, that’s what Charlie’s for.” Phoebe gave Elizabeth a merry sideways look. “Charlie’s my husband. Sometimes we drop the kids with Lucy so we can sneak in a little afternoon delight. Of course, Lucy always thinks I have a last-minute rush job.” She lowered her voice, even though Lucy couldn’t possibly hear. “Makes Charlie and me feel like we’re stealing a screw behind our parents’ backs. All part of the thrill.”

  Elizabeth could tell that Phoebe was expecting her to smile in return, but her body had turned to stone.

  Was everyone’s marriage sizzling but hers? It was one thing to tell herself oh, that’s just Andrea, showing off. But Phoebe too? It meant that she, Elizabeth, was the exception. Someone whose stimulation came from looking up obscure articles on Academic Search Premier and not from an hour of afternoon delight.

  Mercifully, Daniel and Rex rose in unison and ran to the bench. “We can’t go home yet,” Daniel announced. “We’re not finished.”

  “Guess what?” Phoebe said. “Neither are we.” He looked confused, so she added, “The mommies.” She gave Rex a playful poke, shooing them back to the sandbox. Then she grinned at Elizabeth, the grin shorthand for so many things. How predictably unpredictable the children were. How endearing and maddening, the little tyrants.

  The secret wordless language of mothers. That much, they shared. But there was something else they didn’t share. The thing Elizabeth couldn’t say aloud.

  The lovely relaxation was gone. Phoebe wasn’t like her after all.

  Her cell phone dinged inside her bag. She reached down and pulled out the phone. A text from Ben. “Can u swing by cleaners to pick up my shirts? They close at 6.”

  A chill spread across her body. Not even middle-of-the-night delight. Only shirts and chores and polite turn-taking, even in bed. She crammed the phone back in her bag.

  “Anything important?” Phoebe asked.

  Elizabeth looked into Phoebe’s bright innocent eyes. Then she bolted upright, as if an unseen hand had grabbed her collar and yanked her off the bench. Anger and envy and shame surged through her veins—at Phoebe’s red sweater and tousled hair and the happy marriage she couldn’t possibly deserve. At O’Keeffe, the way she and Stieglitz used to run up the stairs to their bedroom at Lake George, laughing and unbuttoning their clothes as they took the steps two at a time. At the way everyone knew that her favorite body part was her brain.

  “I need to get going. Sorry.”

  “Really?” Phoebe looked disappointed. “Well, maybe another time.”

  Elizabeth twisted her neck in the direction of the sandbox. “Daniel,” she yelled. “Get your shoes. We need to go.”

  “You just said.”

  “Well, now I’m saying something else.”

  “Why? Why do we have to go?”

  Elizabeth crossed to the sandbox and grabbed his shoes and socks. “Because we do,” she snapped. “Up.”

  “But why?”

  Because. Because I’m married to someone who would never dream of sharing afternoon delight, and I hate this woman whose husband dreams of it, and does it, and I cannot stay here one more instant.

  “But I’m not finished. It’s not fair.”

  No, it wasn’t. Nothing was fair. Or maybe it was. Maybe you got exactly what you chose, back when it seemed like the right thing to want.

  “Please don’t be difficult. I have to get Katie.”

  From a thousand miles away, Phoebe asked, “You sure everything’s okay?”

  Elizabeth couldn’t look at her. “It’s later than I realized, that’s all.” She raised her voice. “Lucy, we’re leaving.” She hurried inside and scooped up the sleeping Katie. Katie fluttered her eyelashes and settled onto Elizabeth’s hip. Daniel, still complaining, trailed after her.

  Elizabeth pulled open the car door but Daniel, taking a belated stand, refused to get in. “You can’t make me. We’re not finished.”

  She wanted to smack him. Instead, she gritted her teeth and tried her best mommy psychology. “I understand. You weren’t finished.”

  Daniel wouldn’t budge. Elizabeth shifted Katie onto the other hip. Time for more serious measures. “I know what let’s do. Let’s stop on the way home and get chicken nuggets.”

  “Chicken nuggets?” His face lit up, and he scrambled into the car. Elizabeth placed Katie in the car seat next to his. Daniel watched her arrange the harness, then wrinkled his brow. “Daddy said we shouldn’t eat chicken nuggets.”

  Elizabeth clicked his seatbelt. She wanted to say, “We don’t have to tell Daddy.” But that would guarantee that
Mommy got us chicken nuggets would be the first thing Daniel announced when he saw his father. “He meant not every single day.”

  Daniel seemed to accept her answer. He settled into the car seat, dropping a plastic T-Rex onto his lap. He must have taken it from Lucy’s house but Elizabeth was too tired to scold him.

  We don’t have to tell Daddy everything.

  She started the car and veered right at the stop sign, toward the fast food restaurant, not the cleaners.

  Six

  It was one of Ben’s squash nights, which meant he wouldn’t be home for dinner. They’d agreed that it was easier for Elizabeth to cook for Daniel, Katie, and herself while Ben went out for a late supper with his gym partners. She didn’t mind the separate dinners, especially tonight. The day had exhausted her—dealing with that aggressive student, Naomi, and then rushing to Lucy’s house and getting blindsided by Phoebe Morgenstern’s offensive happiness. Chicken nuggets in the car was the perfect meal after a day like that.

  When they got back to the apartment, she let Daniel and Katie watch The Lion King while she folded laundry, emptied the dishwasher, and—in a burst of guilt—ironed one of Ben’s almost-clean shirts. Then she gave them a quick bath and tucked them into bed with her best rendition of Where the Wild Things Are.

  “Daddy reads it better,” Daniel told her.

  “I’m sure he does,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe he can read it to you the next time he puts you to bed.”

  Tomorrow, in fact. When she went to Tai Chi. Stayed afterward for another Americano.

  You can buy next time.

  Once she had kissed the children goodnight and closed the door, Elizabeth went to her makeshift desk in the corner of the dining room. She had an hour, maybe longer if Ben was enjoying his after-squash dinner. Not the two hours she had hoped for at the library, but every hour counted when you had a dissertation to write. She opened the drawer and pulled out the folder where she kept her reproductions of the Hawaii paintings.

  I decided that if I could paint that flower on a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

  That was what O’Keeffe said, when people asked her about the flower paintings. An audacious declaration, believing that you could force people, or trick them, into seeing what you saw and loving what you loved. O’Keeffe had done that with the pelvis paintings too— made people look through the opening she had placed in the very center of the canvas, into the emptiness beyond. There was no way to look at one of her pelvis paintings without doing what she wanted and being drawn into that void.

  There had to be something like that in the Hawaii paintings, Elizabeth decided. Something intentional, a secret idea that bridged flowers and bones—that connected the beauty O’Keeffe wouldn’t let people ignore and the void she found later, in the desert.

  Elizabeth opened the folder. She wanted to look at all the pictures at the same time—for clues, shapes, hieroglyphs that O’Keeffe began to use, specifically, in Hawaii. Delicately, she removed her copies of the two hibiscus paintings and placed them side by side. Hibiscus with Plumeria, elegant and stylized, with its clean sure lines. When the New York Botanical Garden mounted its landmark exhibit, bringing the Hawaii paintings together for the first time in almost eighty years, Hibiscus with Plumeria was the image they chose for the catalogue and posters. But there was another hibiscus painting that no one ever mentioned—missing from the show, missing from all the books about O’Keeffe in Hawaii, because no one had been able to track it down, not even the exhibit’s conscientious and determined curator.

  Then, three days after the exhibit opened in New York, the missing painting surfaced. Titled simply Hibiscus, it was the lead work at a Christie’s auction, sold by one private collector to another. Too late to be included in the exhibit, even if the owner had agreed, and shown only twice in eighty years—once by Stieglitz in 1940 and once at a Memphis gallery in 1998—the painting flashed across the art world like a comet.

  The other hibiscus, Elizabeth thought. This one was entirely different. Soft and dreamlike, the gentle rippling edges of the flowers flowing into each other like clouds against a glint of turquoise sky. The same yellow and pink in the two paintings, the same subject, yet utterly unalike. The carefully defined shapes in the first painting, the sunlit blur of the second.

  Elizabeth grew still, noticing something else. In the second painting, Hibiscus, the reproductive center was there, where it belonged. Smaller than in the real flowers she had seen in the greenhouse—a gentle curve, while the stigma in the real hibiscus shot up bold and straight from a blood-red center—but there nonetheless.

  Georgia had portrayed the flower both ways. Hibiscus with Plumeria was a painting to admire, from the outside. Hibiscus drew you close, asked you to soften.

  Slowly, Elizabeth pulled the ’Iao Valley paintings from the stack and laid them in a neat row along the desk. The plush descending contours, folding into the center. Georgia had plunged the viewer right inside the valley itself. There were no edges, no perch where you could stand and observe the scenery. You had to enter, participate.

  Elizabeth put a hand on the desk to steady herself. She was dizzy, hot, confused, as if Georgia had tricked her into an experience she hadn’t agreed to. Then she shook the rest of the papers out of the folder. What was O’Keeffe’s approach to Hawaii? That was the point. She was a scholar. You couldn’t write a dissertation about sensations.

  She studied the paintings, the ginger and lotus and papaya. There was no clear chronology, but the assumption was that O’Keeffe had started with familiar subjects, anchoring herself in what she knew— particular flowers, none of which, ironically, were native to Hawaii— before opening to a larger vista. No palm trees or hula dancers. She’d plunged right into the Hawaii she could touch and feel.

  Georgia hadn’t been seduced by a fake paradise. Richard had been wrong, or maybe just teasing her.

  Elizabeth pushed the pictures aside and opened one of her reference books. She wanted to look at some of O’Keeffe’s later work. The Black Place, painted four years after her return from Hawaii. It was the same composition as the ’Iao Valley paintings—a jagged streak that bisected the landscape into dark rounded hills, pulling everything into its vortex—only this time the terrain was dark and desolate, unearthly.

  What had happened to Georgia between 1939 and 1943?

  Harold Lindstrom told her to look at what came before Hawaii and what came after. Before were ripe and feminine flowers, warm red hills. After were arid canyons, bones and skulls. The flowers in O’Keeffe’s paintings, after the ones she did in Hawaii, were tiny hollyhocks. Nothing immense. Nothing that made sure you could not ignore its beauty.

  As if, Elizabeth thought, Georgia had shifted from lushness to dryness—from female images, bursting with possibility, to dry sexless skeletons. But why?

  She thought of O’Keeffe’s early work, the irises and poppies. What could be more sensuous and alive? That was how the art world got to know her.

  No, she corrected herself. They learned about O’Keeffe through Stieglitz’s eyes, his lens, his photos of her—exposed, robust, grave, unafraid—and carried that image back to her paintings. When they looked at her paintings, they saw the woman in Stieglitz’s photos. The art she modeled for had already defined her.

  It was the opposite of what that student, Naomi, was talking about. Instead of embodying her own work, O’Keeffe became the embodiment of someone else’s.

  Elizabeth frowned, confused. That didn’t sound like Georgia, so fierce and self-sufficient. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe she really had been the co-creator of Stieglitz’s photos, collaborating on a vision that needed both of them.

  Then again, she might have simply offered herself. Not passively, but consciously. That too seemed an extraordinary thing. To let oneself be seen. Not filtered through an idea or description. Here I am. My breasts, my hands.

  They had just become lovers. She’d been a virgin until she met him.

  It was clear from Stiegl
itz’s letters that he had been obsessed with O’Keeffe. His portraits grew more and more intimate, as if his camera was learning, or evoking, the astonishing richness of her sexuality. The letters weren’t published until 2011, twenty-five years after O’Keeffe’s death. Elizabeth had read them, avidly at first, then with a growing discomfort. Really, they were over the top. It seemed girlish and histrionic—unbecoming, for a man of Stieglitz’s distinction—to be besotted like that. Yet the letters had verified what some of the art critics had already intuited. Elizabeth remembered what Lewis Mumford had written about Stieglitz’s 1921 show—forty-five photos of a single subject, O’Keeffe, an audacious and revolutionary challenge to the conventions of the art world. Mumford had called the photographs “the exact visual equivalent of the report of the hand as it travels over the body of the beloved.”

  Elizabeth pushed away from the desk and strode down the hall to the master bedroom. She flung open the door. On the back was a full-length mirror.

  When you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.

  That was Georgia’s reply to a world that believed it had the right to interpret her paintings, to reduce what she was exploring—about form and contour and the way nature revealed itself—to a metaphor for something they had selected. It had filled her with rage.

  Georgia didn’t need to use flowers as a stand-in for her sexuality. She expressed her sexuality directly, when she posed for Stieglitz.

  Elizabeth unbuttoned her blouse and let it drop from her shoulders. In her mind, she saw the photo Stieglitz had taken of O’Keeffe with her hair loose, shirt open to reveal her breasts. O’Keeffe was languid, unsentimental, utterly present. Here I am.

  A longing rose up in her, huge and terrible. To be the woman in that photo. To be known, wholly, without words.

  “Mama?”

  She wheeled around. It was Katie, clutching her bunny. “Mama.” Katie stumbled forward and hurled herself around Elizabeth’s legs.