Madame Picasso

After she had had gone, Picasso gazed over at the half-finished canvas, much of the paint still wet. He needed solitude—the isolation to make this piece into what it was inside his mind. There was a heaviness within him, and he stood there for a long while, basking in the silence that had been returned to him.

There had been too many voices in his head. Too much of the past.

His heart was not bound up enough by the work on his easel, and he needed it to be. But he was stuck. For Picasso to complete it, he knew he needed inspiration. What he needed was a muse.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_aed462b7-3e97-556f-a3de-cce2260e1154)

Saturday evening at the Moulin Rouge, Eva was busier with mending than she had been the first night. She waited with needle and thread just offstage, behind the edge of the heavy red velvet curtain, with her fingers trembling. She so very much needed to get this right.

“Be quicker about it than you were last night!” Mistinguett growled, thrusting a torn stocking at Eva as a wardrobe assistant approached them bearing a long-handled hairbrush to smooth the star’s hair back into a tight mahogany wave. “What are you staring at, you imbecile? Sew!” she barked when Eva did not move quickly enough.

Shaken from the moment, Eva realized that she had been transfixed by the glamorous star. She hadn’t noticed how openly she was staring until she caught a glimpse of Sylvette standing behind her, wearing a stricken expression. Quickly, Eva cast her own gaze downward and set back to work. It was easy enough to fix the tear, and Eva quickly offered the stocking back up to Mistinguett, who snatched it from her without a backward glance or a thank-you.

After the music began again and the actress burst onstage to thunderous applause, Eva tucked the needle and thread into the pocket of her skirt and peered out past the heavy curtain.

He hadn’t been there during the first act but he was there now. Picasso sat at the front table, along with the same group of boisterous Spaniards. Tonight, however, she saw that Monsieur Oller, the barrel-chested owner of the Moulin Rouge, was seated prominently beside him. He wore a stiff black suit and bow tie, with a heavy gold watch chain over his chest, and he and Picasso were conversing intensely with each other, heads together. Eva was duly impressed, but she knew she shouldn’t be surprised that the two appeared to be well acquainted.

Eva scanned the tables around him looking again for a girl who might be Picasso’s companion. It occurred to her that there just may well be a Madame Picasso, and she cringed at the thought. She realized then that she knew so little about him other than that his strange new style of painting had set the French capital on its ear. He was a bohemian renegade, and he was the talk of the town. Although there were several young women in the row behind him giggling and pointing sheepishly at the handsome young man, there was no woman seated prominently nearby him. Eva shook her head and smiled in self-reproach. Someone like Picasso was so far beyond her reach, even for a fantasy.

Busy with mending, Eva returned to her work, and by the time she managed to steal another glance, Picasso and his band of friends were gone.

Near midnight, after the show was over and they had returned to their room, Sylvette brushed out her long hair and sighed. Eva lay back against the pillow wearing her mother’s bright yellow kimono, the only bit of her mother she had brought away from Vincennes. She was watching the nightly ritual and thinking about the evening.

“She will have me fired, too, won’t she?” Eva asked, speaking of Mistinguett.

The fear and the possibility had been on her mind all day.

Sylvette stopped brushing her hair and glanced at Eva through the mirror’s reflection. “Not if she feels loyalty to you.”

“How on earth am I going to accomplish that?”

“A gift, perhaps?”

“I have nothing someone like her would value.”

“Where did you get that kimono?”

“My mother brought it with her from Poland. Her own mother made it.”

Sylvette turned around on the stool. “It really is lovely. And just the sort of exotic thing Mistinguett likes. Make her a gift of it.”

“It’s the only thing of my mother’s I have with me.” Eva again felt the swell of betrayal toward her parents. The days she had spent with them—the good ones, and far fewer bad—seemed sharper now in her mind since she no longer had them in her life. From her mother, she had taken a kimono, and from her father, a pinch of his pipe tobacco that she had sewn into one of the sleeves so that when she wore it, she would be reminded of them both.

“Well, then that’s a pity,” Sylvette replied. “Because I can think of no other way. I suppose it comes down to whether you want to live in the past, or secure your future. You said being here in Paris meant everything to you.”

“Of course it does.”

“You can always make another kimono. You won’t ever have another chance at a place like the Moulin Rouge.”

It would not be the same, of course, but Sylvette was right. After all, it was really just a robe and Eva could not afford not to make an offering in order to secure her job. She was beginning to understand that maturing really did mean letting go of a great many things from one’s youth, and Paris could not protect her from the reality in that.

The next afternoon, Eva and Sylvette were in the dressing room as the actresses and dancers slowly filed in past the racks of costumes and the littered makeup tables. Their faces were yet to be painted, and they were still wearing their street clothes. The girls who graced the stage at the Moulin Rouge all possessed an air of confidence, and Eva studied them with awe.

She had told Madame Léautaud she had no ambitions for the stage but of course that was not entirely true. What girl would not relish being the center of attention, adored and desired by audiences filled with handsome young men? Eva thought of Picasso and felt her cheeks warm. He fascinated her—for his celebrity, of course, but also for his bravado, and for the sensuality that seemed to pulse through him even when she saw him at a distance. She had never known anyone like him. She couldn’t tell Sylvette they had briefly met. Sylvette wouldn’t believe her, anyway. Besides, a man like Picasso—least of all a famous one—would never have real interest in a girl like Eva. Or so she thought. Steady, predictable Louis was the best she would likely ever have.

Poor, dear Lodwicz. Eva would never love him. Not if he were the last man on earth. If she wanted to settle for that sort of life, she could have stayed in Vincennes and married old Monsieur Fix.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing in here?”

Mistinguett’s harsh tone startled Eva, and the door slammed like an exclamation mark. Mistinguett stormed across the dressing room toward Eva, who had come in early to keep Sylvette company as she prepared for the show. Eva glanced up from Sylvette’s makeup table at the actress who stood with a half-full glass of champagne in one hand and the bottle in the other. Sylvette’s face paled as she shot to her feet.

“And what the deuce are you wearing?” Mistinguett asked, scanning Sylvette from head to toe.

Eva had brought the kimono to the Moulin Rouge that afternoon and, while they waited for the actors to arrive, Sylvette had playfully tried it on.

“It’s a kimono,” Sylvette volunteered sheepishly as Mistinguett poured more champagne from the bottle. “Isn’t it a lovely thing? It’s from the Orient. So exotic, sewn by monks! It has been in Marcelle’s family for years.”

“Is that true?” Mistinguett asked Eva suspiciously as she sipped from her glass.

“Of course it’s true,” Sylvette inserted.

“How did your family come by such exquisite fabric?” she asked as she set the bottle down, then reached out to finger the silk as though it were something precious.

“My grandfather brought it back from a trip to Osaka.”

“I would love to go somewhere so enchanting.” Mistinguett sighed as her lips turned up in a winsome smile—the firm wall of her hauteur slipping just slightly.

“Me, too,” Eva replied, meaning it, since she had never been anywhere but here to Paris.

“May I try it on?” she asked. Her tone was beginning to sound surprisingly friendly.

“Of course!” Sylvette intervened again, slipping off the kimono and handing it to the star.

Mistinguett slipped into the luxurious garment with the grace of a dancer, then sank into her own makeup chair. As she fingered the sleeve, she looked at Eva.

“How much would you take for it?”

“Oh, it’s not for sale but—”

“Everything has a price, chérie. So does everyone.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Eva bravely countered.

“You will one day, after you have been in Paris for a while...Martine, is it?”

“Marcelle. But my real name is Eva. Eva Gouel.”

She was not certain why, but suddenly Eva felt compelled to tell the truth. Perhaps it was because she knew Mistinguett had also created a new persona. It was something they shared.