Madame Picasso

Eva noticed that their brightly colored costumes were surprisingly garish. They were certainly cheaply made and sewn. Her mother long ago had taught her to know the difference. Close up, she could see the patches, the repairs, the soiled collars and dirty stockings. It was a disappointment, but she did not let it detract from the absolute thrill she felt at merely being here. It was all so exciting, this vibrant, secret world of performers!

Eva tried to be inconspicuous as she waited for her moment to be called upon. She clasped her hands to keep them from trembling, and her heart was pounding. She recognized all of the performers. Mado Minty breezed past her first, in an emerald taffeta costume with flared hips, cinched waist and a tight bodice. Across the way, near a rack of hats and headdresses, stood the celebrated comedienne Louise Balthy, with her distinctively long face and dark eyes. She was eating a pastry.

As Madame Léautaud had predicted, Eva was called upon several times during the performance to dash in with needle and thread.

Suddenly, she felt someone stumble over her foot.

“Hey, watch what you’re doing! Do you not know who I am?”

Eva jolted at the sharp voice when she realized that it was directed at her. She glanced up from her sewing basket and saw a beautiful woman wearing an elegant costume, rich in detail. She looked just like her posters and Eva would have known her anywhere. This was Mistinguett. She was the current star of the Moulin Rouge.

“I—I’m sorry,” Eva stuttered as the tall, shapely performer glowered down at her.

“Where do they find these people?” The young woman sniffed as she straightened herself and brushed imaginary lint from the velvet bodice of her costume.

“Two minutes, Mistinguett! Two minutes till your next act!” someone called out.

“Sylvette! Where the deuce are you?”

Her harsh tone turned heads and, an instant later, Eva’s roommate dashed forward, clearly mid costume change herself, but bearing a full glass of ruby wine.

“I’m sorry, mademoiselle, I was just in the middle—”

“Sylvette, I don’t give a rat’s tail what you were in the middle of.”

Eva did not move or speak as she watched her roommate reduced to blanch-faced subservience. When the moment passed, she lowered her eyes and, feeling a bit shaken, went back to her needle and thread.

The performance went on, and Eva continued to make costume repairs. A torn sleeve, a popped button. But in the end it was Mistinguett, not Louise Balthy, who split her drawers in a high kick. She stormed off the stage and cast an angry glare at Eva.

“And what are you staring at?”

The sudden question hung accusingly between them. Oh, dear. She hadn’t been staring, had she? Eva could not be certain. Mistinguett glowered at her as a young wardrobe assistant held her hand so she could slip the torn drawers down over her lace-up black shoes.

“Forgive me. I was only waiting,” Eva replied meekly.

“Waiting for what?”

“For your drawers, mademoiselle. So that I can mend them.”

“You? I’ve never seen you here before!”

“I may be new here, mademoiselle, but I am experienced with a needle and thread.”

Mistinguett’s fox-colored eyes widened. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, certainly not, Mademoiselle Mistinguett.”

Eva could feel the heavy weight of stares from some of the other performers, in their many varied costumes and headpieces, as they passed by her. They knew better than to stop, however, when the temperamental star was angry.

“Well, see that you don’t!”

Mistinguett pivoted away sharply. “Do be quick about it. I have my big number in the second half.”

Eva thought, for just a moment, that she should sew the drawers loosely so that Mistinguett would split them a second time in the same evening. But she quickly decided against the clever tactic. She needed this chance too desperately. For now, a reprisal would have to wait.

Once the crisis had been averted, Mistinguett went off with a tall young man with thick, thick blond hair that was slicked back from his face in a wave. “Who is that?” Eva asked Sylvette as she waited to go on for her second number.

“His name is Maurice Chevalier. He dances the tango with her late in the second half. But talent certainly isn’t how he got the job.” She winked and Eva bit back a smile.

There was so much happening in this glorious place. So many acts, so many personalities and so many names to memorize. For the moment, Eva was holding her own. All of the sewing mishaps had been seen to for the moment.

As the performers filed backstage to relax during intermission, Eva dared to steal a peek around the heavy velvet stage curtain.

Her heart quickened to see such a huge audience crowded into the theater. She looked over a sea of silk top hats, stiff bowlers and fedoras. There wasn’t an empty seat in the place.

As Eva scanned the well-dressed crowd, her gaze was drawn to a group of dark-haired young men, exotic looking and dressed in varying shades of black and gray. They were seated prominently at the table nearest the stage. The tabletop was littered with wine and whiskey bottles and a collection of glasses, and she could hear from their animated conversation that the group was Spanish. They slouched in their chairs, periodically whispering, drinking heavily and trying, like errant boys, to behave themselves until the show resumed. There was a heated air of something tempestuous about them.

But one stood out boldly from the others. He was a powerful presence, with his long, messy crow-black hair hanging into large eyes that were black and piercing. He was tightly built with broad shoulders, and he wore wrinkled beige trousers and a rumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled past his elbows, revealing his tan, muscular arms. His jacket was slung over the back of his chair. He was incredibly attractive.

Surely the man was someone important since he was sitting at the front of the dance hall. As she turned away from the curtain, Eva thought how interesting it was that there was no beautiful woman beside him. A man who possessed such a powerfully sensual aura, and such penetrating eyes, must have a wife. A mistress, at least.

She almost asked Sylvette if she knew his name, but then suddenly the orchestra music flared for the second half of the show, and she heard Madame Léautaud shouting for her. Fanciful thoughts would have to wait since there was work to do, and Eva was determined to make a success of this job.

Chapter 2

He stood barefoot and shirtless before the easel wearing only beige, paint-splashed trousers rolled up over his ankles and holding a paintbrush in one hand. Morning light streamed into the soaring artist’s studio in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir. There was an easel planted in front of a window that overlooked a sloping vineyard where sheep grazed. Beyond it lay a sweeping vista dotted with the slate-gray rooftops and chimneys of the city.

In the humble space, the cold tile floors were littered with rags and jars of paint and brushes. The plaster walls were papered with art. Here, Pablo Picasso was free to be much more than a painter. Here he was like a great Spanish matador, the wet canvas like a bull to be finessed into submission.

The act of painting was all about seduction and submission.

Finally now when the private thoughts were put aside, the canvas yielded at last. Once he knew he had won control, Picasso was humbled before his opponent. It opened to him like a lover, took hold of him—possessed him as a sensual woman would. The comparisons always mixed freely in his mind. The work after the surrender, once his challenger, became his most exotic mistress.

Paint stained his fingers, his trousers, the inky dark coils of chest hair, his hands and his feet. There was a streak of crimson slashed across his cheek, and another across a swath of his long black hair.

It was quiet in his studio at this early hour and there was a hazy stillness around him. Picasso savored moments like these. He gazed at the wet canvas, the cubes and lines speaking to him like poetry. And yet the quiet brought thoughts of other things, too.

Fernande had drunk too much again last night after their quarrel, so he had gone off to the Moulin Rouge, taking solace in the predictable company of his Spanish friends. Feeling increasingly celebrated here in Paris eased a little of his disquiet. But he knew that when the night was over, Fernande would be at home in their new apartment, and last night he was still too angry to return to her. So he had come to his studio.

He loved Fernande. He did not doubt that. She’d had a difficult life before him, married to an abusive husband from whom she had escaped, and who she was still too afraid, even now, to divorce, and Picasso always had an overwhelming need to protect her because of it. They had been together through the hungry years, living the life of an unknown and struggling artist in Paris, which had strengthened their bond in spite of their ongoing inability to marry.

Yet lately he had begun to question whether that was enough; and his ambivalence about their relationship was extending to other things in his life. In the increasingly looming shadow of his thirtieth birthday, he felt deeply that something was missing. Perhaps it was only that he felt this concerned him.

Picasso picked up a smaller paintbrush and plunged it into a pot of yellow paint. Beyond the smudged windows, the sun was shining. He focused for a moment on the grazing sheep that made the little corner of Montmartre seem like countryside. He thought suddenly of Barcelona, where his mother remained, worrying about him every day.

Thoughts of family, and the simplicity of childhood wound themselves like thread in his mind. He thought of his little sister Conchita, with her wide blue eyes and precious innocence. Even after all these years, Picasso missed her so dearly, but forcefully he pressed the memory away and urged himself to think of something else. He could not change what had happened. All it ever did was bring him pain laced heavily with guilt.

The sound of someone knocking sent the memories skittering into the back of his mind. The door opened and two young men staggered inside. They were his good friends Guillaume Apollinare and Max Jacob. They were laughing, their arms draped fraternally around each other, and they carried the strong scent of alcohol.

“So much for Pablo’s promises,” Apollinaire slurred, and his flamboyant gesture filled the room. “You said you would meet us at Au Lapin Agile last night right after the Moulin Rouge show.”

“I say a lot of things, amigos,” he grumbled, and returned to his painting. But as annoyed as he was by the interruption, he was relieved that it was his friends who had come and not Fernande.

Picasso loved these two misfit poets as if they were his own brothers. They stimulated his interest in ideas, in poetry, in thought—and that encouraged him always with his art. They talked together, drank, argued wildly and had built a deep trust that Picasso greatly valued now that he was beginning to find the first hint of real fame. He was not always certain any longer who he could depend upon to like him for himself. But Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire were beyond reproach.

Max, the smaller of the two men, was the trim, well-read and exceedingly witty son of a Quimper tailor. He had been Picasso’s first friend in Paris. That winter, ten years ago, Picasso was so destitute that he had been reduced to burning his own paintings as firewood just to keep warm. Max had given him a place to sleep, the two of them taking turns in a single bed in eight-hour shifts. Max slept at night while Picasso worked, and Picasso slept during the day. Max had little but he always shared with Picasso what he had.

It was generally assumed that Max led Apollinaire in their flights of fancy, but that was no longer true. Max’s addictions to opium and ether set him at a disadvantage to the charming and clever Guillaume Apollinaire, who now ruled their social engagements.

“Where’s your whiskey?” Max slurred.

“Haven’t got any,” Picasso grunted in reply.

“Fernande drank it all?” Apollinaire asked.

“As a matter of fact, she did.”

“Oh, bollocks, that’s a lie. She rarely comes slumming up here anymore now that you’ve gotten her that elegant place on the boulevard de Clichy, and we know it,” Max countered.

“Well, she came yesterday. We fought, so she drank the whiskey because I had no wine,” Picasso replied in French, but with a voice thickly laced with the melody of his Andalusian roots. Everyone always told him that his French was a dreadful mess of improper verbs and tenses and he knew it, but so early in the morning like this, he didn’t care.

“Ah,” Apollinaire said blandly, dabbing a single long finger at the canvas to check for wet paint. He did not always believe Picasso’s stories. “That does explain a multitude of things.”

“Well, whatever she’s done, you will forgive her. You always do,” Max said.

Pablo felt the squeeze of anxiety make a hard knot in his chest. It was all starting to feel like an inescapable cycle. Best just to work and not to think. Of her, of the futility, of the wild restlessness that was invading his heart more strongly every day. He must bury it just as he did his thoughts of his sister, and how she’d died.

Max looked around the studio, taking stock of the new canvases. Then he paused at the two rough-hewn Iberian stone heads sitting just behind the little drapery that hid his single bed. “You still have these?”

“Why wouldn’t I have them? They were a gift,” Picasso snapped of the antiquarian busts he used in the studies for several pieces of his work.

“A peculiar gift, I always thought. They always looked to me like something from a museum,” Max dryly observed. He ran a finger over the throat of one bust and touched the head of the other. “Where on earth does one find something like these? Legally, that is,” he asked.

Apollinaire replied. “How would I know? I got them from my secretary who was trying to bribe me to introduce him around Paris. Apparently, he thought they would impress me. I gave two of them to Pablo. Simple as that. It has never been my habit to question where gifts come from.”

“Or where the women come from,” Max quipped with a smirk and a clever flourish. “And yet, they do come to our dear Picasso—and both rather generously.”

“Are the two of you quite finished?” Picasso growled as a stubborn black lock of hair fell into his eyes.

“What, pray tell, is this meant to be?” Apollinaire asked, changing the subject. He was looking at the wet canvas on Picasso’s easel.

Picasso rolled his eyes. “Why must art always be something?” he snapped.

“That circle there reminds me of a cello,” Max said playfully. He was rubbing his neatly bearded chin between his thumb and forefinger as he and Apollinaire looked at the painting and then exchanged a glance.

“It reminds me more aptly of a lady’s derrière,” Apollinaire offered with a devilish little smirk.

“Not that you have actually ever seen one, Apo, my good man,” Max quipped, using the endearing nickname they all had adopted for him.

“Well, you most certainly haven’t.”

“Do you not feel things when you look at the painting, or do you only see with your eyes?” Picasso asked, annoyed that they had disturbed him at this sacred hour, and irritated that now they were poking fun at his work. “Dios mío, sometimes I feel as if I am surrounded by a gang of idiots!”

“What I feel is confused.” Apollinaire chuckled, pretending to further inspect the canvas. “Pablo, your mind is a mystery.”

“I feel thirsty just talking about it. Shall we all go find a drink?” Max asked.

“It’s not even noon,” Picasso snapped.

“Morning is always a fine time for a beer. It will set your day to rights,” Apollinaire answered as he loomed over the two of them like a lovable, slump-shouldered giant.

“You two go ahead. I’m going to work a while longer, then I am going to take a nap.” Picasso nodded toward the little iron-frame bed in the corner of the studio. It was covered with a fringed apple-green quilt embroidered with red roses that has mother had sent from Spain. He pressed his hair back from his eyes.

“Sleep here?” Max asked with a note of surprise, since Picasso was well beyond his hungry years in Montmartre. There was no reason for him to spend more time up here in this frigid tumbledown place than was absolutely necessary. “Will that not make things worse at home with La Belle Fernande?”

“Fernande and I will be fine. We always are,” Picasso assured his friends as he picked up a paintbrush and turned away from them. “Go on ahead. I will see you both Saturday evening at Gertrude’s, as usual,” he assured them as he began to stir a pot of paint.

He looked forward to Gertrude Stein’s Saturday evening salon. He craved the young minds there, and his intellectual arguments with Gertrude herself, who was always up for a debate. She challenged him. She made him think, and she questioned every single societal rule there was to question. That woman was a force of nature! If only he was attracted to her physically.

“Now let me get back to work.”

“Aren’t you forgetting? You promised to go to Apo’s reading at the Salon des Indépendants tomorrow,” Max reminded Picasso in a whisper as they arrived at the door.

“I haven’t fogotten,” Picasso said.

But he had forgotten entirely.

* * *

For a moment, with her eyes still closed, and the fog of sleep just beginning to leave her, Fernande had a vision of her husband, the man who had beaten her. She opened her eyes in a panic, but all she saw was a little toffee-colored capuchin monkey dressed in a smart red jacket with a necktie sewn to the lapel. The creature was peering at her with beady black eyes as Pablo stood behind him, smiling.

“The monkey from the café?” Fernande asked, trying to make sense of the little thing perched on her chest, busily cleaning himself. The moment seemed absurd, especially with the fringes of such an awful dream still playing at the edges of her mind.

“I bought him on the way home from the studio this morning. Granted, he is unique but he is better here with us and our little menagerie than how he was being treated.”

Fernande glanced around at their shaggy dog, Frika, a huge shepherd mix, Bijou the Siamese and a white mouse they kept in a wooden cage near the window. Yes, it was becoming a menagerie indeed.

She sat up and the bedcovers fell away from her bare chest. Her long auburn hair tumbled down over her shoulders highlighting her green eyes. The animal leaped from her lap and up onto the dresser, then onto the floor, in skittish bursts of movement. “But a monkey, Pablo?”

He sank onto the edge of the bed beside her. “He was being abused and neglected. You know me, I could not resist rescuing him. I didn’t have enough money with me so I made a sketch for the organ grinder. He seemed quite happy to make the trade.”

The apartment was now flooded with bright morning sunlight and Fernande looked around at all the rescue animals Picasso had always insisted on taking in. “Besides, it is an investment,” he continued. “I can use him in some of my new studies. Monkeys have been symbolic in art back to the Middle Ages, so he might actually prove useful.”

“When he is not soiling our floors or our furniture.”

Fernande sighed as she watched the little creature leave a puddle on the carpet, then scramble across a bureau. Picasso pulled a piece of a croissant from his jacket pocket to give to it. Bijou and Frika lay together on the rug, watching the encounter with bland acceptance.

Fernande sighed and finally got out of bed to dress. She loved Pablo’s tender nature most of all. Perhaps one day, if she loved him enough, God would bless them with a real child. She knew he wanted a family most of all, just like the one he had as a boy in Barcelona.

As she drew on her chemise and buttoned her blouse over it, she saw his eyes narrow. Peeking out from behind her pillow, he had found the pencil sketch she had posed for yesterday while he was in Montmartre. She knew how Picasso felt about her modeling for other artists but she had done it, anyway. The days were long here in this lovely apartment, and he was not the only one who deserved fame. His success kept getting the better of her.

“What is this?”

“You know what it is.”

She knew he immediately recognized the style. “You posed for van Dongen?”

“Pablo, be reasonable. You are gone for hours at a time most days, and Kees is one of our friends from the old days. We know his wife and little daughter, for God’s sake.”

“He’s still a man and you posed for him with your clothes off.” He stalked across the room toward her as she buttoned up her long black skirt. Picasso took her wrists and pulled her forcefully against his chest, stopping her. There was desperation in the movement. “Have I not given you everything you have ever asked for? This apartment, elegant clothes, a wardrobe full of hats, gloves and shoes, and an entrée into any restaurant in Paris you like so that you don’t have to do that demeaning work any longer?”

“It’s not work to me, it’s freedom.”

A silence fell between them, and Fernande turned her lower lip out in a little mock pout and her green eyes grew wide. “Does this mean we are fighting again today, too?” she asked.

“It’s a disagreement. Only that.”

“We quarrel too much, I fear.”

He pressed a kiss onto her cheek and released her wrists. His hands snaked around her then and moved down to the small of her back, drawing her close against him. He was so good at seduction, Fernande thought, and she tried not to think again of the blinding number of women on whom he had honed his skills. She was good at manipulation, but they both knew he was better.

He tipped her chin up with his thumb so that she could not look away from his eyes. “Yet, we always reconcile, which is the enjoyable part,” he said.

It was difficult to feel angry about how forceful Picasso could be when her desire for him had already claimed her. She wanted to be right back in that big warm bed with him, even if there was an element of predictability to their relationship now. After all, they loved each other, and at the end of the day that was enough for her. It had always been enough for him, too.

“I want you to tell van Dongen you can’t pose for the painting.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“It is not a question of trust.”

Fernande could hear the sudden edge in his voice, and she wondered how much he knew of what she did during the long hours when he was up in Montmartre working. “Of course it is.”

“I will not say I am sorry for trying to protect you all of these years, after what your husband did to you. You deserved much better than that.”

She thought of saying that she did not deserve to be so high on the pedestal upon which he had placed her five years ago. But she could not bring herself to because some part of her still craved his adoration. Instead, she pressed a hand to his chest, knowing the curves of him so well, knowing what would make his body respond. It surprised her when he gently brushed her hand aside and turned to look at the little monkey, who had perched on top of the dog’s large, shaggy back. Watching Picasso, Fernande’s heart felt heavy all of a sudden. She was not certain why.

“Let’s go across the street to L’Ermitage for lunch. Just the two of us, hmm?” she asked, trying to sound kittenish. She felt a strange new barrier between them and she did not like it.

“All right. But don’t give me a hard time when I want to bring the leftovers back for Frika.”

“Sometimes I think you love that dog more than you love me.”

“Dios mío, Fernande, I am still here, aren’t I?”

Chapter 3

“I can’t do it! I won’t!”

She heard her own voice first, when she remembered what had happened the last time before she left home, and the memory of the scene was quickly vivid again in her mind.