Drowning Lessons (8 page)

“Tell me,” said Andrew, “just what do respectable lawyers living in London like?”

Karina frowned.

“How about one of these charming paintings?” suggested Andrew, in front of a stall with watercolors for sale at embarrassingly low prices.

“Peter doesn't like paintings.”

“No?”

“His tastes are peculiar.”

“I'll say. He doesn't eat anchovies, doesn't like olives; he doesn't look at paintings. Has it occurred to you that you may be in love with a dead man?”

“That is not funny.”

“He must eat something.”

“Steak.”

“Perhaps a bottle of Worcestershire sauce?”

“I am not amused.”

“I know — how about some roses? A full dozen!”

She turned on him. “I do not like you. Why are you doing this?”

“What? What am I doing?”

“You have been so nice until now. I have so much enjoyed being with you. And now …” Tears welled in her eyes.

“I'm sorry.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “I must be jealous.”

“I think so,” she said, wiping her eye.

“Can you blame me? Three days in Greece with a beautiful, charming woman, and now I've got to hand you over to that steak-eating rose-giver.”

“I am not yours to hand over,” she said.

“I know,” said Andrew. “Still, I have to confess, all this time I've been pretending you were mine. I enjoyed our little games.”

She nodded. He held her. In the end, she settled for a set of earthenware raki cups. As the proprietor wrapped them in red paper, Andrew stood outside, buffeted by sunlight and shoppers, dragging on a cigarette, wondering about gestures, why he was so bad at them. Flowers, gifts, the appropriate kiss planted at the
opportune moment, opening doors, sending cards, saying thank you. Was it laziness, selfishness? Or was he just a regular asshole? He felt a fresh tide of loneliness rising, and there was nowhere for him to turn. It was now or never, he thought, his chance to prevent his loss from being total, to break with the past and make at least a gesture that might change his life. How? Karina, package in hand, skipped out of the store.

“There,” she said. “I am sure he will like them. And now you will walk me back to the car, yes?”

As the silence between them thickened, Andrew realized it was too late; he had missed his chance; he had failed. She would forget him soon, but he wouldn't forget her. In his own idiotic way he had loved her. He had to say something. He had to
do
something. But what? They reached the car.

“Are you sure you'll be all right?” he asked. “Driving, I mean?”

“Of course,” she said, getting in.

“Wait,” he said. “I have something for you.” He reached inside his backpack, took out his sketchbook, and riffled the pages, stopping between an olive grove and an old farmer.

“What's your preference? Olive trees or old men?”

“You know how I feel about old men.”

He tore out the olive-tree sketch, folded it twice, and handed it to her through the driver's window. She thanked him.

“Wait,” he said, tearing out the old man, too, and pressing it into her hands, then a café scene, and a church, and a group of children by a fountain. “What are you
doing
? Don't be
stupid
!” And the fat man snoring on the ferry, and a lifeboat against the black sky. He gave them all to her. He tore out Mount Etna from a distance, and the balcony covered with bougainvillea.

“Stop!” she protested. “You are ruining your notebook!”

“I don't care,” he said. And then he bent forward and kissed her on the lips and tossed what was left of the sketchbook into the car. She kissed back, sniffling. It was the first time they'd kissed, yet still she'd managed to catch his cold. Or had she? She pulled away, gathered the sketches off her lap, and put them on the passenger seat, then drove off without looking back.

Andrew watched the green frog stop at a crossing, then continue down the road. She had no trouble with the transmission, none at all. When she'd disappeared around the bend, he turned and started walking. Already the sun was low in the sky. He'd have to seek lodgings. But first he would walk to the harborside to smoke a cigarette and look at the sea.

PICASSO CANNOT DRIVE
. He finds cars too amusing. I chauffeur him in a lagoon blue open-roofed '37 Fiat Topolino “transformabile” (two passenger, four-cylinder, top speed fifty-five miles per hour). From the sinkholes and mudslides of an unusually wet Hollywood, we make our way south, more or less, toward the Colombian Andes with their terrifying switchbacks (which my boss won't find terrifying; switchbacks amuse him, too).

The year is 1952. I am thirty-two years old and already convinced that I have botched my life. The ad in
Variety
said, “Artist seeks driver for journey of unspecified duration. Should be fresh faced and impressionable. Draftsmanship a plus but not required. Driver's license indispensable. Will provide means.” I responded immediately as I'd lost my shoe store to the bank and creditors and groaned at the prospect of going back to work for Morton Cheswick at his Little Red Shoe House. I groaned for the following reasons:

1. I'd worked for Cheswick for eight years, starting in high school at sixteen.

2. The Little Red Shoe House is built to look like a giant saddle shoe, and its clerks wear conical green hats.

3. My father and I lived there, in a small apartment on the upper floor, and I hated the thought of working a flight beneath my home.

4. Cheswick is a cigar-chewing money-grubber who fancies himself royalty because he once sold a pair of white buck oxfords to Jimmy Stewart.

It takes us forever to leave L.A. Every twelve yards we stop and sniff at something. Following six days of rain my hometown is as lush as Rousseau's jungle. Rain drips from palm trees lining the boulevards; the sky is a fuzzy gray blanket. Under my 280-plus pounds the Topolino sags perilously to port.

Under a cloud-stuffed sky Picasso and I set up our easels and paint. One doesn't think of Picasso as a plein air artist. Picasso eats preconceptions for breakfast, and paint outdoors he does, with an amateur's brio and inconspicuous talent, the sort of canvases you'd put your foot through at a flea market. Does it shock me to see the creator of
The Frugal Repast
give rise to Sunday paintings as bad as Winston Churchill's? But I've been with Picasso for three days — long enough not to be too shocked by anything he does.

“Sincerity is not a moral issue but an aesthetic one,” he says, putting finishing touches on a view of Hollywood from Griffith Observatory. Having detached the painting from its stretcher, he rolls it still wet (nothing dries in this damp) into a tight tube and
shoves it into the Topolino trunk among a dozen other rolls, some mine. Picasso insists that we paint together, though I'd rather just watch. I especially like watching him mix colors. No one mixes colors like Picasso. Excluding my failed-animator father, I haven't known many painters; I grew up in Hollywood. But it's a sure bet most don't mix colors the way Picasso does, the brush a blur as it gathers pigments from light to dark, blending them with a deft twist of his wrist, but never thoroughly.

“The real mixing,” Picasso says, tapping his temple, “occurs here. But you know that, don't you, Maestro?”

Picasso calls me “Maestro.” At first I assumed that he was calling me Monstro, after the whale in Pinocchio — a crude joke, given my weight. But the real joke is that I am the farthest thing from an artist. I sell shoes for a living, or used to. I had my own store on Gower Street:
Cancellation Shoes, Brands You Can Trust at Prices You Can Afford
. Except for measuring feet, I have no talent (as it is I relied heavily on the Brannock device).

Picasso disagrees. He's seen my napkin sketches and says I have potential. “You have a gift for caricature, Maestro,” he told me over a Howard Johnson's breakfast yesterday. “The great ones were all caricaturists. Van Gogh, Daumier, Rembrandt, Da Vinci … A good line should carry not only the form but an opinion about the form.”

We tear ourselves from the latest swatch of scenery and drive off, my boss singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” at the top of his considerable lungs, getting the lyrics all wrong. As a countermeasure I belt Maurice Chevalier songs in my abysmal French, memorized from scratchy albums my dad would play on the Victrola in his bedroom studio while trying mightily to trace Donald Duck's contours to Mr. Disney's specifications.

The sun breaks through clouds. I have only a vague notion where we're going, gained at the top of our journey as we pulled out of the used-car lot on La Brea, where, after days of searching, we discovered our less-than-ideal method of transport under a butter-colored tarp. The Topolino needed only a fresh battery and lubrication. With the top down (it leaks anyway) and the painter of
The Family of Saltimbanques
holding an umbrella over our heads in heavy traffic, I was supplied with the rudiments of our mission, something about an expatriate saint living in a monastery above the equator and below the third parallel, a Sister Maria del Something-or-Other, who once performed on Broadway in her own musical review. This, of course, was before she renounced showbiz, joined the Order of Our Lady of the Andes (a Carmelite order), conceived immaculately, and lost one or both of her legs to a mountain lion — or was it a
Puma concolor
?

Picasso couldn't be sure.

Since then I've been wary of asking questions. Know your place, Son, my father — who could not color or trace within the lines — told me, his only child, always. And I took his advice, genuflecting before my store patrons day by day, applying their knobby, stinking, swollen feet to Mr. Brannock's gauge, squeezing the places where toes should and shouldn't be.

Between song numbers Picasso urges us onward, saying, “Forward, forward! Más allá! Andale!” We leave San Gabriel's mountains behind and make for Joshua Tree National Monument — fine with me, a sucker for deserts, especially one with trees out of the funny pages. Sometimes I think my dad went into animation just to please me, his cartoon-loving son. If not for my love of
Popeye
and the
Toonerville Trolley,
he might have made
a fine carpenter or dentist, or unleashed himself completely and gone abstract, or expressionist — or both. But he wished to please me, his fat boy, to make me happy. Is it any wonder I blame myself for his literal downfall, tumbling back-first down the stairs to my storage room under an armload of shoes?

“You should paint a picture,” says Picasso. “You could call it ‘Father Descending a Staircase.'”

For Picasso the desert is a toy store, burlesque show, and threering circus, all in one. He can't get over God's whimsy, his variations on a theme of roots and water. I try to fill him in on some of the cacti's more salient scientific features; how they are capable of holding more than eighty times their weight in water; how, like starfish and octopuses, their limbs not only regenerate when shed, they form whole new root systems where they fall. When threatened, they spew their needles, sometimes at speeds exceeding those of the fastest major-league pitchers, including Satchel Paige, whose fastballs are said to reach ninety miles per hour.

Picasso's interest in science is null. He grasps only form.

“God — the caricaturist!” he muses.

When not sketching with pen in notebook or with fingers in the air (conducting a symphony of line), he uses his body as implement. As we soar past barrel cacti, he hunkers in his seat, arms tucked to his chest, compacting himself into a prickly ball. When the saguaros appear, he stands, throwing his limbs this way and that, seizing their forms. Even rocks and sand aren't exempt. Tumbleweed, jackrabbit, boulder, he apes them all. To ride with Picasso is to ride with all creation in the passenger seat.

From clouds of desert dust the Joshuas leap out at us, puffy branches raised like banditos' arms as Picasso waves pretend six-shooters at them. We park the goat (
Topolino
means “little
mouse” in Italian, but Picasso calls it the “goat”) and walk, carrying easels, a blanket, and a picnic basket into the park. As deserts are meant to be, it's hot. At 260-plus pounds, even in mild weather I sweat like a sausage. We take off our shirts (Picasso wears his trademark blue-and-white-striped
chemise marinier
; I wear a white button-down, tie dispensed hours ago) and tie them around our waists. We come upon a field of purple sage puddled with yellow flowers.

“Ça va,” says Picasso.

We lunch on jug burgundy and spongy slices of Wonder Bread spread to pieces with Skippy. Picasso loves peanut butter, can't get enough of the stuff. “Es un milagro,” he says, prying some from his teeth. Though he spices his speech with foreignisms, his English is good — too good, I'd say, having bargained for more idiomatic improvisation, that reckless freedom of syntax only strangers can bring to our tongue.

“The problem with life,” he says, his tongue thick with peanut butter, “is that it must be lived in chronological order. That is God's great blunder, one of his great blunders. Imagine if time weren't tunnel visioned, if we could approach our lives from more than one direction, if there might be a flashback here, a flashforward there, as in a good novel. But no: instead we get this oneway journey — as plodding and monotonous as the stretch of road we were just on. To make matters worse, we have to view the road in hideous three-point perspective — as if driving into a tunnel isn't bad enough! It's not even a tunnel; it's a funnel, narrowing as it goes, squeezing us until we turn into a point and die. To hell with perspective, I say! To hell with chronological time! Let us drive backward and sideways; let's go through life inside out and upside down, with our colors reversed, too, while we're at it.
I'm sick of that blue sky; aren't you sick of that blue sky, Maestro? Let's turn it chrome yellow, or purple, or a combination! Stripes! Polka dots! Why not a paisley sky? Or a tartan plaid? As for this gravity business …
merde,
don't get me started on gravity!”