He walks me home. He is an artist, he says. He paints some; mostly he does etchings. He knew who I was when he came over with the champagne—apparently someone at the show had pointed me out. He was something of a prodigy himself, he says. Won the top prize in Munich about a hundred years ago. . . . I was sixteen. I give him my most brilliant smile.
Georg is sixty-two. He has curious, black eyes. He listens well. When we reach Lafayette Street, I touch his arm as we say good night. Moleskin. As surprising and inviting as Georg himself. I feel its velvety softness, and the strength of his arm beneath, long after he’s gone.
As I putter around the apartment, too excited—too happy— to go to bed, a strange thought astonishes me. I know that I am going to marry this Georg Hartmann. I am quite sure of it. I can’t say that it’s just the same as it had been with Agnes and Gene, when Gene had walked Agnes home and said, I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. . . . I mean this. Every night of my life. I can’t quite say that. But I’d been comfortable with him from the moment he’d offered me the sparkling golden flute, and somehow I know that it’s not a feeling that will disappear.
We marry within the year. I am a bride at forty-eight.
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I’m astounded by my luck.
Doing nothing much of anything, we are happy together. We sit for hours, wrapped together in a huge old afghan, reading. I read Elizabethan historical novels one after another; Georg reads any book on World War I air battles that he can find.
He rents the studio next to mine. If we want to visit each other we’ve only to climb out of our skylights and scuttle over the rooftop, high above the colonnades, like great dark pigeons.
Now, at long last, I have nothing left to wish for. I am envious of no one. Together, we are part of all that’s bright and real, one among the couples in the Village who walk together entwined and nonchalant and murmuring private things.
I can talk to Georg about anything. Perhaps it is all the years of living alone, of having thoughts pent up inside, but I find myself chattering all the time, telling him everything that comes to mind. I tell him all my secrets, and he tells me his. Somewhere along the way, I mention my old obsession, the series of large canvasses.
“Oh, but that part of me is finished, it was all so long ago,” I tell him.
Georg, however, sees otherwise. He says he can tell my passion is burning still. He will not let it go.
“You must paint again, Pamela. Give it a try, it will be like a rebirth. I’m sure your work will be better than it’s ever been! Besides, I want to see these new paintings, don’t keep them in your head. . . .”
Full of misgivings, I rescue my easel from the cellar. It’s rusty in the joints, all covered with cobwebs. I dust it, wax it. Set it up in the studio. Stare at it. It has been so many years since I’ve held a paintbrush in my hand.
I clean the studio, reorganize it, find any reason not to begin.
At last, one day as snow falls softly on the skylight, I start work on the first canvas. Once the door to my old dreams opens, the pictures spill out. A collection stuffed for years in a far corner of my mind. They are all still there. I’ve held on to everything. The patterns. The settings. The children. The ghosts. I lie awake at night, remembering. The turmoil, all frozen in geometric scenes.
Details. Mam’s beaded purses. The prismed chandelier in the hallway in London. The flocked pomegranate wallpaper from my room in Turin. The French carpet in Gertrude’s grand parlor at the Ritz. I remember how I felt when the world was such a dizzying place. Mazes, and other designs of entrapment, burn in my mind. The beautiful childhood that I couldn’t control. I will paint it all.
Soon I’m working on several canvasses at once. I paint all day, and into the night, just as I did when I was a young girl in Macdougal Alley.
The work is complicated, and progress is slow. I am painting in excruciating detail—hundreds of tiny brushstrokes for a sleeve, a square of garden, a column. It takes me three or four years to finish some of the pieces. Stacks of sketches for future paintings fill the makeshift shelves under the studio eaves.
My dreams acquire names.
The Chandelier. An ornate painting, a crowd of patterns. Vertical. Horizontal. They surround a girl rising from the bottom of the canvas, pinned against the patterns by a dress of jewels, stiff as an altar. She is so tall that if she turned and walked, her head would hit the giant chandelier streaming endless crystal pendants.
In The Appointment, the bust of a girl sits atop a column on the left side of the picture; the bust of a boy on the right. Below them a ruler-straight path of blue-green is bordered by a sunken garden maze of violent green, an endless vista running off the painting—the depths seem unfathomable. A tiny girl in a white dress and red sash is in the path, holding out a silver hoop. If she stepped off the path, she would step into an abyss.
And Pomegranate. An ecstasy of geometry, image upon image. The shattered Christmas ornaments that Shane’s blown off the tree. A kaleidoscope—bits of broken glass reordered, stacked in layers, delicate and precise.
Dream after dream. All the ghosts.
I work patiently, with the infinite care of a restorer. Everything is in place.
By the winter of 1961 I know that I have more than enough paintings for an exhibition. But . . . could I have a show? Do I even really want to?
The truth is: I am afraid.
The New York art world is now a mystery to me. My last exhibition was twenty-five years ago! If I have a show now, how will I be judged? I tell myself over and over that it doesn’t matter. But fear quickly tramples all the joy I’ve felt as I worked on the paintings.
I’ve been painting in a cocoon. I’m crazy to think of an exhibition—it’s far too risky. What if critics—if the public—find these new works wanting? What toll might it take? I try to convince myself not to worry about such things. I’ve painted just what I wanted to paint. I have not painted for an audience.
Still, I am paralyzed. I stop working. I hide in my studio, arranging and rearranging the paintings. Fretting about everything.
I remember my father’s letter. Be not afraid of greatness.
But I am afraid. I’m afraid of just about everything.
I think of the time, so long ago, when Daddy had worried about the critics. And my mother had worried about me. The time Mam and I stood outside the butcher shop, its window displaying the awful row of pink, skinned rabbits.
What’s happening now is not the important thing . . . the important thing is simply that you are an artist no matter what the papers may say, good or bad.
I know my mother was right, that she’s always been right. Still, I can’t seem to make a move.
It’s Georg, of course, who gets things going. He understands my fear.
One evening when I don’t come downstairs at my usual time, Georg comes into my studio and finds me standing by the huge skylight, staring out at the darkening sky. Gently, he lays his hands on my shoulders.
“Call David tomorrow, love. He’s one man, not the whole outside world. See what he says.”
David Herbert is a gallery owner I’ve known for a long time. I respect him. He will tell me the truth.
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