Free How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo Page B

herself.
    Then, “like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky,” ††† Macmahon wrote and invited himself to visit her in Columbia for Thanksgiving. She was elated. He showed up a day late, but she put that behind her. They talked. They walked in the piney woods. She dared to take her shoes off and dabble her feet in a stream, while still wearing her stockings. Then, probably, they had sex.
    I wish it all didn’t come down to nookie. Who Georgia slept with is none of our business. We’re not the village elders in one of those barbaric cultures who insist on waving bloodied sheets out the window the morning after the wedding night. Still, after this weekend, when Macmahon returned to New York and resumed his maddening passive-aggressive Stop It Some More ways, Georgia, delirious with the memory of their presumably hot time together, frustrated by his mixed messages, started in on the group of charcoal drawings that would capture the eye of Stieglitz and change her life.
    If Georgia had lived, say, now, she would not have poured her raging heart into her work. She would have rolled up her sleeves, Googled “How to get and keep your man,” sprung for a weekend workshop on applying the principles of The Secret to her situation, moved to New York, waxed the proper body hair, found out which Power Yoga class Arthur frequented, and arranged to accidentally bump into him. In short, she would have found a way to make him hers!
    Georgia was not the only one to sublimate her roiling unhappiness and frustration into her work. Sublimation is not just a woman thing. Stieglitz’s entire early career was also one long adventure in sublimation.
    Without putting too fine a point on it, Stieglitz had married his wife, Emmeline “Emmy” Obermeyer, for money. She was the heiress to a brewing fortune, and by 1893, the year they were married in a restaurant on Fifth Avenue, it had become clear to Stieglitz’s father, Edward, that his eldest son was going to need a sugar mama if he was to survive. A deal was struck: Her trust fund would pay for their bourgeois upper-middle-class lifestyle, and Edward would settle enough money on him so that he could pursue his photography.
    Since Stieglitz was adamant in his refusal to sell his photographs, or work for magazines, or take commissions for fear his art would be compromised by the quest for filthy lucre, and since every enthusiasm that entered his head demanded its own little avant-garde magazine, and since he could barely get out of bed in the morning if he didn’t have a gallery to go to, where he could hector people, Emmy’s money wound up paying for more or less everything.
    Moreover, Stieglitz wasn’t really interested in being a husband, in the traditional sense of the word. On their honeymoon, he left his wife in various hotel rooms around Europe to visit galleries or take photographs. Emmy retaliated in the time-honored tradition: She withheld sex. She was really good at it. After a coitus-free year, Stieglitz came down with a bad case of pneumonia, which prompted Emmy to promise that if he recovered, he’d get some.
    Alfred and Emmy managed to produce one child, a daughter named Katherine. After her birth they moved to a big apartment on Madison Avenue where Emmy hired a cook, a maid, and a nanny. Meanwhile, Alfred busied himself photographing skyscrapers at all hours of the day and night, in every sort of weather, after which he camped out in his darkroom, producing one turn-of-the-last-century masterpiece after another.
    Sublimation is a powerful thing.
    Best of all, it’ll never let you down. Are most of us not, at least some of the time, frustrated by our jobs, disappointed by our mates, envious of the slim-ass receptionist at the gym? The good news is, we needn’t fix anything. We need not get another job, a divorce, or strangle the receptionist while she’s restocking the towels. We need only start a blog.
    Say yes