The Professor and Other Writings (18 page)

We get a brief Mavis-respite the afternoon we drive to see the Taos Pueblo—the “longest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.” The pueblo is a strange and dusty desert encampment by a stream, a massing of ancient-looking adobe huts in varying states of dilapidation. Ratty dogs run free everywhere; they don't seem to belong to anyone. The Pueblo Indian residents have developed a highly efficient tourist-processing operation: parking lots, admission booth, regular “walking tours” with native guides. (
No photos of the Elders without their permission. Please remember you are on the sacred land of our ancestors. Do not throw garbage in the stream. At the end of the tour you will have the opportunity to buy authentic handmade pottery and beautiful silver jewelry from the traditional artisans who still live and work here.
) There's no escaping the whole degrading setup, in which everyone—tourist and “native” alike—is forced to play his or her prescribed role: Put-Upon Noble Savage or Sympathetic But Clueless White Person. Even the babbling brook gets roped into it. The foreign tourists, of whom there are a lot (since the dollar's in the toilet), seem to have an easier time of it than we Yanquis do. They obviously don't think of themselves as the spoiled descendants of murderers and thieves. We know we've got some of General Custer's DNA and feel bad about it.

The respite comes when B. and I find we can't maneuver the wheelchair on the dirt paths well enough to take my mother on the walking tour. After much discussion she tells us just to leave her in the shade somewhere—it's hot and windless—and do it without her. We're hesitant but park her under a tree next to a trio of elderly Pueblo ladies who are selling necklaces and rings laid out on an old folding card table. Mavis insists she will be okay but when I look back
I can't help noticing she looks pink and exhausted and a bit frightened of the ladies.

The tour, led by a somewhat zombie-like young Native American woman, turns out to be perfunctory. She recites a canned history of the place in somnambulist fashion, shows us the Indian cemetery and explains that everyone in it is buried upright. We see adobe huts under repair and hear about the bricks used; she points out the mud ovens that the year-round inhabitants—some of whom are gazing suspiciously out of their dirt windows at us as we go by—use to bake bread. Though the Taos Pueblo is without electricity, gas, or running water, she explains, residents are forbidden to use the nearby stream for bathing or cooking or anything else: it belongs to the spirit-ancestors and cannot be sullied. We, the gaping white tourists, all have the same question:
Then where do people go to the bathroom?
Our guide remains impassive and unsmiling: she's obviously heard the question a zillion times before. Either they go to some communal toilets at the little shopping center outside the Pueblo's main gate, she says, or else they use a utensil. Some of us laugh uneasily at the thought; a rake in the group yells out:
Chamber pots!
More awkward tittering. Still as if in a trance, the Indian maiden announces the end of the tour, drops us in front of the souvenir shops, and coolly collects all the tips that the hard-looking woman back at the ticket booth—a fat and somewhat sinister personage with homemade tattoos, pockmarks, and huge brown bloodshot eyes—has instructed us to pay her.

It is with some relief that I spot my mother still under the tree. Alone in her wheelchair she looks vulnerable and dignified. It's starting to hit me that she really can't walk anymore. That her vision is failing and won't come back. I try to imagine such debility but can't. She seems to be okay, though: she's been chatting with the Indian ladies about jewelry-making and spreading the gospel of the Internet and polymer clay. They all wave goodbye as we wheel her off, back through the ancient sawhorse barriers to the car. The late, lazy
afternoon scene—turquoise sky, lofty ribbons of high cirrus, distant blue-black mountains on all sides—imparts a kind of tristesse. My mother and I are in some baffling place; I'm with her yet I miss her. I get pissy and crabby loading her back into the car. We eat a huge, overpriced meal in Santa Fe—all those zucchini blossoms really add up—and my mother chatters away through most of it.

Yet at some point during our remaining days, a lot of the daughter-angst starts to drop away. Like some frantic, dusty, overturned bug, I finally stop waving my many legs about and lie still. I will simply wait, I decide, for someone either to turn me right side up or squash me underfoot. (Can the latter indeed be much worse than a very intense massage?
Cr-runch! A-h-h…!)
I'm definitely calmer—even starting to enjoy myself. Maybe it's the spirit-ancestors. Or maybe it's Agnes. Because we do catch up with her: we find the small but exquisite room devoted to her at the Harwood Museum in Taos and make a beeline for it.

The space is bijou, only about fifteen feet across: white-walled, octagonal and windowless, with the same low light Tate Britain has in its Blake room. Seven paintings are on display, one on each wall; you go in through the eighth side of the octagon. Though plain and unadorned, the space is the opposite of austere. The pictures seem alive and sentient and even to be regarding one another across the space—enjoying each other's company in a friendly familial way. It's a tiny orgone box of a room, full of faintly pulsing energy currents, but also strangely full of grace, a promise of contact. The prosperous matrons of Santa Fe—major donors—are allowed to hold private yoga sessions in there.

The paintings are from the 1990s, a late period as extraordinary, in its own quiet stone-butch way, as that of Titian, Milton, or Yeats. You'd call it a flowering except there aren't any flowers; just the same old pencil lines and stripes. But the lines and stripes have become positively floral in their glow and poise and breeziness.
Most of the pictures are pink and blue—the same pale hues used to indicate sex in the world of baby clothes and Sippee Cups. The familiar stripes have been laid out precisely and painstakingly, like the military rows of tulips in Uncle Toby's garden in
Tristram Shandy
. Yet far from being insipid—the work of a saccharine or enfeebled talent—these late pastel zips vibrate with joy and renewal and intelligence. Martin never minded repeating titles; she saw nothing wrong with using one she liked over again or giving a new picture a title very similar to that of an earlier one. But in the late work this repetition becomes almost rhapsodic, at times even oddly sexual. Martin's last paintings all have names like
Beautiful Life
,
Lovely Life
,
An Infant's Response to Love
,
A Little Girl's Response to Love
,
I Love Love
,
Loving Love
,
I Love the Whole World
. Though Martin seems to have banished any hint of the erotic from her life—at least in her hermit years—Stein and her work again come to mind: the babyish, burbly and hypnotic love-language, say, of “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story,” dedicated to Alice B. Toklas.

To my surprise—my mother and I have gone into the orgone box and I'm spinning her around—she is an Agnes Martin aficionada. (
Oooh, they are
nice,
aren't they? You know she became a recluse? I think she was strange. I've always liked her, though, more than the other Minimalists…. )
My snob-self is frankly stunned at this unexpected display of maternal hip: it's as if Wally and Charlie, my dachshunds, were suddenly to begin discussing Hans-Georg Gadamer. (
They were even using the word
hermeneutic!) But it is soon matched by other feats of critical discernment. She and I tour the Ernest Blumenschein Home—Blumenschein being one of the major New Mexico painters of the 1920s and '30s—and she finds his sickly greeny-yellowy paintings of adobe churches and Indian squaws as hideous as I do. Those wretched Fauves have a lot to answer for. We are in ecstasy together at the Museum of International Folk Art; neither of us, we realize, has ever seen an Ikat fabric or a nineteenth-century Punch and
Judy puppet we didn't like. My mother even condescends to admire some of the rusty
retablos
(Mexican religious images painted on tin) that I am slavering over; the colorful naïve style, she agrees, makes the fact that they depict Jesus, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis, and various other creepy individuals far more palatable.

By the time we finally roll into the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, late on our last afternoon, we are in a state of bizarre, even uncanny amity. The museum is a set of blocky adobe buildings just off the historic Santa Fe Plaza. Predictably it's packed out, almost entirely with women. (The one or two men standing around in their Teva sandals look sheepish if not a bit anxious, like errant hunters in a Renaissance painting who've blundered into a sacred grove and see a troop of maenads coming to rip their guts out.) I get heavily cruised by the butch German number running the ticket counter—something that happens to me now about as frequently as an asteroid strike—and immediately subside into a warm and jolly mood. One can't help noticing that the gallery is crowded with ladies—
ahem
—of a Certain Persuasion. Everywhere you look: big no-nonsense gals in polo shirts and purple fanny packs, all sporting the same grim gray clippered haircuts, like space shuttle astronauts.

Blakey wheels Mavis off to the main rooms and I lose sight of them in the throng. I'm stuck in a sort of antechamber where a huddle of fans are staring reverently at a series of cheesy photographs by Cartier-Bresson or somebody of the artist in her later years. She's a grisly old thing indeed: picking herbs in her Ghost Ranch garden, making the perfect little salad for one, displaying a cow skull, standing (arm theatrically raised) in front of a canvas. What a ham. She's usually dressed in black, in a sort of Medea outfit typically accented with white scarf or blouse and the signature black hat. Everyone coos and chortles in front of one picture especially: O'Keeffe on the back of a motorcycle driven by a comely young man, the parched New Mexico desert in the background. O'Keeffe wears dust-covered
dungarees and grins at the camera coquettishly. Georgia's a brand, a franchise, a Gap ad, a sitcom star.
You go, girl! No problem if you look like a man!

But something odd is also happening. The paintings, when I get to them, are not, I notice, as huge and blowsy as I was expecting. Several in fact are quite small. Not Vermeer small, but definitely smallish. And one or two, I have to admit, are pleasing, especially the pre–New Mexico ones from the 1910s and '20s.
Hmmm.
Addled connoisseur-brain starts gently powering up again, trying to process the unanticipated subtleties of the situation.
Okay, they're all still
flowers,
but aren't some of them at least as good as ones by those American Modernists you like so much? You know: Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth? If you didn't know they were hers, wouldn't you be impressed? Aren't you being hard on her—as is your perverted wont—because she's a woman?
I keep looking round for more of the expected monstrosities—lewd river basins, vaginal canyons—but have only intermittent success. A few throbbing pink and yellow horrors float in and out of view in the distance, of course, but the worst offenders in the O'Keeffe Anatomical Fixation Department don't seem to be here—that ghastly, fart-in-your-face Jack-in-the-Pulpit picture, for example, in which the gargantuan botanical specimen flaunts what looks like a little purple-black asshole.

Mavis and Blakey roll back into view, then B. slinks off to the museum bookshop to read up on O'Keeffe's financial shenanigans and the punk-gigolo boyfriend. As soon as she's gone, my mother flips into girlish-conspiratorial, faintly passive-aggressive mode.
Blakey is so great. I can see you obviously enjoy each other's company. She's so smart! I am just in awe of her intellect. I guess that's why she's so moody. It's nice how she sometimes wears a
skirt,
isn't it?
Soon unveiled, however, is the fact that B. got bored looking at the pictures and whizzed a certain elderly party round the galleries in careening breakneck fashion.
I couldn't see anything! It was all a terrible
blur!
I know she meant well. I was afraid I would fall out of the chair!
Mavis wants to go back and read all the wall labels, me pushing this time.

But the quaint reversion to maternal archetype seems more for old times' sake than anything else. We have a fine time, it turns out, just trundling along from picture to picture. Indeed, were I wearing white rubber-soled shoes and a little nurse hat we'd look exactly like an ad for a light-filled, nicely decorated assisted-living facility. Except we're also eyeballing the paintings, like a pair of regular Bernice Berensons. And amazingly enough, whether through divine grace or telepathy, the complex verdict I've formulated on O'Keeffe—yes, showy and easy (though the works do look better when you see them in a group); early stuff preferable to later; loathe all the famous pictures but sort-of-like some of the more obscure ones (
My Last Door
, from 1954, could almost be a Malevich)—turns out to be identical to my mother's. We have our different semifavorites, but neither of us feels like enforcing our choices on the other; we have arrived at our views independently and now weigh them dispassionately, like grown-ups at a committee meeting. I lose my surly-insecure edge—feel suddenly less tormented by filial
ressentiment
and incipient acid reflux. Mavis is judicious, even stateswoman-like. Harmony spreads to the blighted corners of the earth. We both agree that, like it or not, O'Keeffe really makes you look. I don't say it aloud, but I rue and dread the day when such looking isn't possible.

Blakey likes to point a moral at times and that evening in the hotel—our last in Santa Fe—she outdoes herself. As I maunder on about the day, my mother, and the odd vagaries of taste, she delivers an irresistible challenge:
Name ten female artists of the twentieth century who are better than O'Keeffe and I will clean up all the dog and cat poo in the backyard forever
. I start off confidently enough: Agnes M. (natch), Popova, Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse,
umm
…Living artists aren't permitted, or photographers, so, gosh, Louise Bourgeois and Imogen Cunningham and Berenice
Abbott and Kiki Smith and Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog and scores of others get knocked out at a stroke. (
Nicole Eisenman: please know I worship you!)
Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I'm afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not exactly a she-titan of the brush. Elaine de Kooning? The canonization of wives has never seemed to me an effective feminist strategy. Dame Laura Knight? I love her, but does anyone else? Joan Mitchell? Marvelous but…
uhhh…
I peter out at Number Seven or Eight in a welter of anguish and indecision. If only Kandinsky or Andy Warhol had been a woman.