Queen of the Owls Read online

  “I’m not a professor,” Elizabeth said. “I just teach this one little class.”

  “One little class? Sounds big to me.” Phoebe put the sunglasses back on and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Well, off I go. Anything to keep the customers happy.”

  Elizabeth watched Phoebe cross the street and get into her car. There was nothing wrong with Phoebe, not really. But just because someone was likeable, it didn’t mean you had to like them.

  She flattened her lips, chiding herself for being so prickly. Phoebe hadn’t done anything—except toss out that breezy hurtful remark about afternoon delight. As if it was unexceptional, the kind of thing everyone did.

  It was the kind of thing O’Keeffe and Stieglitz did—at least in the beginning, before he began to arrange trysts with Dorothy Norman instead. Elizabeth frowned, angry at him for Georgia’s sake. Stieglitz, the hypocrite, had proclaimed his devotion to Georgia again and again, but refused to give up his mistress, insisting that Georgia was strong enough to handle it, telling her that it actually helped their marriage because it made him a more loving person.

  “Mrs. Crawford?” It was Lucy, framed in the doorway. “You okay?”

  Elizabeth wheeled around. “Yes, of course.”

  “You came back,” Lucy said, “and now you’ve been standing there. So I wondered if maybe something was wrong.”

  “No, not at all. Just lost in thought. Sorry.” Elizabeth hurried up the path and handed Lucy the bunny. “Can’t drive away with this in my car.”

  “Ah. Heaven forbid.”

  “I’d better slip away before I’m seen.”

  “A wise idea,” Lucy agreed. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Absolutely.” Elizabeth returned to her car and gave a farewell beep as she pulled away from the curb. Traffic was light, not much to do but steer. She signaled, accelerating into the left lane. The lane for people who didn’t want to wait, who were greedy for more.

  Don’t think, then.

  How do you feel about wildness?

  Richard tugging her toward the swing, leaning his weight into each thrust, giving her no choice but to fly.

  A shiver, then a scrap of memory. Wild red hair, a cracked leather jacket.

  Good Lord. She hadn’t thought about Carter Robinson in years.

  The light turned yellow. Startled out of her daydream, Elizabeth couldn’t decide what to do. Hit the gas? Brake? The driver behind her pressed on his horn. Flustered, she slowed to a halt. After a few moments the light turned red.

  Elizabeth fixed her attention on the windshield. Carter Robinson. How odd to remember him, after all this time.

  She’d been the youngest person in her freshman civics class, starting college when she was barely seventeen. Carter, sprawled in the chair in front of hers, long legs filling the aisle, had taken a year off to travel; that made him two years older and a decade more experienced. An aspiring actor, he had motorcycle boots, a cracked leather jacket, and a killer grin.

  Elizabeth knew she wasn’t his type, yet they’d ended up at the same party and, to her astonishment, he’d pulled her into a corner to talk. She could remember how she’d felt, dazzled by his attention. After a while, they left together. She’d been crazy with lust—really, there was no way to pretend it was anything else. He’d pressed her up against a wall, right there on the street. If he didn’t fuck her, she’d die.

  His room was a few blocks away. They walked through the empty streets, arms around each other, yet with each step Elizabeth had felt her passion fade, her doubt increase. This wasn’t how she’d imagined her first time. She needed to stop, figure out what to do, but she couldn’t find a way to tell him wait, I have to think.

  They climbed the two flights of stairs to Carter’s room. She followed him inside. The place smelled of air freshener and dirty clothes. There was a photo of Laurence Olivier taped above a Murphy bed. Carter saw her looking at the photo. “For luck,” he said. Then he pulled on the strap and jerked the Murphy bed away from the wall.

  The sound of the wood hitting the floor was like a door slamming. She couldn’t do it. She made an excuse and fled, stumbling down the stairs and racing across the street, waving her arm in a frenzy until a cab driver stopped.

  She had cast longing glances at Carter during civics class, but he hadn’t approached her again.

  Elizabeth told herself that he hadn’t really been interested in her. It would have been a one-night screw, nothing more, so it was better that she had spared herself from getting hurt, later, when he stopped calling. She’d been smart to sacrifice—that was the word she used, when she thought about it—the chance for sex with Carter out of loyalty to her vision of what a first time ought to be like.

  Her first time hadn’t, in fact, been all that spectacular. A friend of her roommate’s boyfriend, no one special, except that he had red hair like Carter’s. It was the spring of her freshman year, and she wanted to get it over with. Other partners followed. Then she met Ben and thought yes, this makes much more sense.

  Elizabeth eased her car into the right-turn-only lane and steered onto the cobblestone road that wound through campus. She pulled into a parking spot and turned off the ignition.

  Better to think of it as a noble sacrifice, she had decided, when she ran away from Carter Robinson. Yet there was a question she had never let herself dwell on. Better than what?

  She dropped the car keys into her messenger bag. She regretted running away. There. She’d admitted it, after all these years.

  O’Keeffe’s words flashed in her mind. I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life but I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

  That was the question. Knowing what she wanted to do.

  Elizabeth was supposed to be combing the archives for references to O’Keeffe’s time in Hawaii, yet she couldn’t shake the idea that there was something about the way O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz that she had to understand. Without that understanding, nothing else would make sense.

  She pushed open the library’s big glass door and crossed the anteroom, with its Persian carpet and dark paneled walls, and made her way to the Art History Reading Room on the third floor. She set her bag on one of the mahogany tables and paused, fingertips tapping the edge of the wood. She knew how to research a topic; that was part of being a doctoral student. But what, exactly, was she searching for? Artists who were models? Artists who posed for their lovers?

  Certainly, there were women painters who had been models. Suzanne Valadon, for one, but her story was the reverse of Georgia’s. Valadon had entered the male-dominated art world by posing for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec—naked and clothed—a full decade before she began painting herself. Valadon was a model who longed to paint, and then did. O’Keeffe was a painter who, briefly, modeled.

  Elizabeth looked up Valadon, refreshing her memory. Twenty years younger than Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, the two female painters who had been part of the French Impressionist circle, Valadon had painted what they could not. Middle-class women like Cassatt and Morisot were limited to painting gardens, family portraits, domestic scenes. But Valadon—bohemian, born into poverty, and decidedly not part of the French middle class—could do as she liked. Many of her paintings featured male and female nudes; she even painted nude self-portraits. Her feminist students would have liked Suzanne Valadon, Elizabeth thought, but Valadon wasn’t the example she was looking for.

  All right. What about women who posed for their husbands or lovers? It wasn’t unusual for a painter to use his wife as a model. Picasso, with his portraits of Dora Maar. Renoir and Aline Charigot. Edouard Manet and Suzanne Leenhoff. Then Elizabeth remembered, amused that she did, that Manet had used a different model for his nudes. Not his wife; someone who was a painter herself.

  Maybe that was what she was looking for. Hopeful, she found a computer and looked up Dejeuner sur L’Herbe. Victorine Meurent, that was the model’s name. Meurent was indeed a painter, although not famous
or important like O’Keeffe. Elizabeth was disappointed to learn that only one of her paintings had survived. Meurent had been the model for Manet’s Olympia too. Elizabeth studied the beautiful reclining figure—languid and indifferent, a bow tied around her neck as if she were a present.

  No, it was nothing like what O’Keeffe had done. The model stared blankly from the canvas. An idealized version of something in Manet’s mind, more girl than woman, hairless and coy. Not Meurent herself.

  Elizabeth’s head began to spin. She didn’t even know what she was looking for.

  You do want to understand O’Keeffe, right? Not just write a paper that her dissertation committee would approve.

  Then it struck her: O’Keeffe had been photographed, not painted. It was different, more direct. She tried to think of photographers who had used their wives and lovers as models. Weston, for sure. Richard’s hero.

  She wiped her face, cleared the screen, and typed Edward Weston.

  The similarity hit her at once. Weston was twenty-two years younger than Stieglitz—a different generation—yet both men were photographing the women they loved, clothed and unclothed, whole and in parts, during the same two decades. The images were daring, voluptuous and abstract at the same time.

  It was uncanny, really. Stieglitz mounted his first show of O’Keeffe portraits in 1921, introducing her to the art world as a subject before they knew her as a painter. Weston’s nudes of Tina Modotti, a photographer in her own right, were done only a few years later. Elizabeth clicked through the images. She’d already known about Weston’s close-ups of Modotti’s face but found a series she had never seen before, Modotti posing in an open kimono, in Mexico, in 1924, sultry and exposed. Was this, finally, the parallel she had been looking for?

  Yet in every photo, Modotti’s face was averted, her eyes closed or covered by her hand. It was her body that Weston wanted the viewer to see, like Charis Wilson’s body, a decade later. The Wilson nudes were faceless too—arms wrapped around her legs in a graceful oval, the long elegant body sprawled on the dunes. Only in the clothed photos was her face visible.

  Weston had separated the two. The person, meeting the camera’s gaze, or the body, erotic and impersonal. Never both.

  In Stieglitz’s photos, it was Georgia herself, agent of the gesture, who held her own breasts and offered them to the camera. There was nothing pornographic about the image. It was pure presence. I am here.

  Elizabeth closed the browser with a decisive click. Enough. Not that she had done anything wrong. She’d been exploring, the way you did when you researched a topic, to see if related material could yield fresh insight.

  That only a woman can explore

  She needed to start over, scholarly and purposeful. Focus on her dissertation, O’Keeffe in Hawaii, instead of scrolling through irrelevant websites.

  Abruptly, Elizabeth pushed her chair away from the computer. There was a women’s restroom down the corridor. She needed to stretch her legs, wash her face, and get back to work.

  The hallway was eerily silent, not even the clang of a radiator or the flutter of a candy wrapper on the parquet floor. Elizabeth pulled open the door to the restroom. At first she thought it was deserted too. Then she noticed a woman peering into the horizontal mirror that spanned a row of pedestal sinks. The etiquette of privacy made her avert her eyes until, without meaning to, she caught the woman’s reflection. “Dr. Mackenzie?”

  The woman straightened. She was tall and slender, with silver hair in an elegant twist and flame-blue eyes that matched the scarf twined in a figure-eight around her neck.

  Elizabeth coughed. “I mean, hello. Good morning.”

  It took the woman a moment to register who she was. “Ms. Crawford. Of course.” She dipped her head with a gracious acknowledgement.

  Marion Mackenzie’s presence on the Art History faculty was a coup for the university. Her book on American Modernism was a classic; fifteen years after its publication, she was still the reigning expert, and only the offer of an endowed chair had succeeded in luring her from a sister institution. With her publications, accolades, and impeccable reputation, Marion Mackenzie was everything that Elizabeth dared to aspire to.

  Thanks to Harold Lindstrom, the great Mackenzie had agreed to join her dissertation committee. “She wants to support women scholars,” Harold had explained. “Plus, to be candid, she has to serve on at least one committee, endowed chair or not, so it might as well be yours.” When Elizabeth tried to express her gratitude, Harold had laughed. “Wait before you thank me. Marion’s a tough one. She won’t tolerate an ounce of sloppiness.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Elizabeth told him.

  She had only met Marion twice, once at the introductory meeting Harold had arranged, and once at a full meeting of the committee. Elizabeth was still awed by her good fortune but didn’t want to seem like a star-struck adolescent. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your privacy.”

  Marion waved a hand, dismissing her apology. “It’s a public bathroom.” Then she motioned in the direction of the Art History Reading Room. “You’re doing some research?”

  “I am.” Sort of. Well, she would be, in a minute.

  “Me too. I’m giving a paper on Arthur Dove. I had one of those ideas-in-the-shower this morning and wanted to check a reference in a back issue of a journal that’s not online.”

  Elizabeth twisted the faucet at an adjacent sink. “There’s something about standing under the hot water, isn’t there? Loosens the brain cells. Doesn’t heat make molecules move faster?”

  Marion chuckled, and Elizabeth felt herself relax. Even the great Mackenzie didn’t seem so forbidding in a women’s restroom.

  “You know,” Marion said, reaching for a paper towel. “I’m doing a sort of trial run for some of the senior faculty—you know, to see what their response is, before I present at the conference. It’s a pretty select group but you should come. Dove was a contemporary of O’Keeffe, moved in the same circles. You might find it useful.”

  The water streamed across Elizabeth’s hands. She was being invited to a pretty select group of tenured faculty, guest of Mackenzie herself? Doctoral students would kill for a chance like that. “I’d be honored,” she said. “And yes, I’m sure I’d find it helpful.”

  “Excellent. Just let my secretary know and she’ll put you on the list.” Marion tossed the paper towel in the wastebasket and gave her jacket a quick tug. She fixed her flame-blue eyes on Elizabeth’s. “Next Wednesday. At seven.”

  Elizabeth’s hand froze on the faucet. Wednesday was Tai Chi night.

  Was she out of her mind, hesitating for even an instant?

  Marion must have seen the shadow cross her face. “Is that a problem? I realize it’s short notice.”

  “No, no. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Evenings are always contingent on child care, that’s all.”

  “Oh yes, I remember those days. The good news is they do end. Eventually.” Marion adjusted her scarf. “Well, fingers crossed. I’ll tell Jessie to add you to the list.”

  “I’ll keep mine crossed too.” She cleared her throat. “And Dr. Mackenzie, thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  “My pleasure. It’s a good fit with your research.”

  When Marion left, Elizabeth leaned against the sink, grateful for its support. She didn’t know what she was going to do, and that itself astonished her. Had anyone told her that Marion Mackenzie would invite her to an intimate gathering, she wouldn’t have believed him. And had that same anyone told her that she would consider going somewhere else instead, she would definitely not have believed him.

  All she could think about—and it wasn’t really thinking, more like a crazy swirl of terror and excitement—was that there was another way of understanding O’Keeffe that had nothing to do with Marion Mackenzie or her paper on Arthur Dove.

  She shivered. It was because she’d spent the last hour staring at those beautiful naked forms—forgotten that she was doing research, lost her professional d
istance. She needed to come to her senses and tell Ben that she would be going to a faculty gathering next Wednesday instead of Tai Chi class. Luckily it was a Wednesday, when he was already planning to watch Daniel and Katie. It wouldn’t matter to him where she went.

  Elizabeth felt a slyness slide across her skin. We don’t have to tell Daddy everything.

  With a swift jerk, she turned the faucet full-blast and bent over the sink, splashing big handfuls of water on her forehead and cheeks. Then she snapped a paper towel from the dispenser and dried her face and hands. The restroom door slammed shut behind her.

  She worked for another hour, collecting information about other American Modernists and developments in the art world while Georgia was in Hawaii. When she left the library, she cut across the campus green, toward the Humanities building. A soft breeze wafted through the scarlet and amber leaves. They were starting to turn, late this year, a mass of color that demanded to be noticed.

  “Guess what?” A breathless voice, then a tap on her arm. It was Juniper, the yoga-pants woman from her Tai Chi class.

  “Ah, hello,” Elizabeth said.

  Juniper’s eyes were glowing. “I think our visualizations worked. Mr. Wu is so much better.”

  “He’s coming back?”

  “One more week. Not next Wednesday, the one after. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Elizabeth’s pulse quickened. “So we have one more practice on our own, and then that’s the last one? After that, our regular class?”

  Juniper looked confused. “I guess. But the main thing is, we helped Sifu heal.”

  “Yes, of course.” Elizabeth forced a smile. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “We’re going to practice on the lawn. Want to join us?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.” She pointed across the green. “I have a class to teach.”

  “Well, maybe next time.”

  “Maybe.” Elizabeth gave a farewell wave. A gust of wind, rising up from nowhere, flung a crimson leaf against her shin. She kicked it aside, strangely upset. Mr. Wu’s return, the Wednesday after next, was like the closing of a door. Once he was back, everything would be orderly and predictable. This was the last Wednesday when anything could happen.