Madame Picasso

“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.