Drowning Lessons (9 page)

Lunch over, the colors of the sky deepening overhead, we stab the sunset with our brushes. But we've had too much wine. “To paint a drunken sky one must be sober,” Picasso says, putting away his brushes.

Back at the goat my boss takes out one of his “road maps.” These are not maps, really, but drawings he has made in advance of our excursion, bright squiggles, loops, curlicues, and swirls of primary crayon color — red, yellow, blue — on Manila construction paper, the kind used in kindergarten. His “schematics,” Picasso calls them. He consults them, brow furrowed, tracing a stubby finger along a rosy contour, nodding, saying, “Comme ça.” Meanwhile genuine road maps, courtesy of various trusted oil companies, gather darkness in the Topolino glove compartment, appreciated only as visual poetry.

“So, where to next?” I ask, donning my chauffeur cap — a 1948 Sinclair Championship Baseball Team cap — jamming the car into gear.

“Suivez le piste rouge!”

I lift my snakeskin-topped stubby (I've always favored cowboy boots, since seeing Gary Cooper in
High Noon
) off the clutch, floor the throttle. We spin away in an amber cloud. My boss prefers that we drive through the nights and sleep by day, in the mornings with the air still cool. The Topolino's headlights barely dent the night. No matter, with only desert passing and no cars to either side of us. We drive through outer space. My cargo fires up
a Gauloise, thrusts it high into the air, and points to the rearview mirror, where a comet's tail of golden sparks flickers away into darkness.

“You'll set the desert on fire,” I warn.

He nods up at the star-dazzle. “Let God play with his own cigarettes!”

We're still headed south: this much I know from the shapes of the constellations overhead. To keep from falling asleep we play Twenty Questions. It's the boss's favorite game, one of his favorites.
Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Does it come in different colors? Can you roll it? Does it have a handle? Is it bigger than a bread box?
Mostly, Picasso dispenses with questions, blurts his guesses into the wind.
Periscope! Aubergine! Platypus!
“Admit it, you
were
thinking of a platypus just now! Don't deny it — I see it in your eyes!”

At dawn's break we search for lodgings. Picasso has a thing for motor inns, the kind with a dozen or so discrete units or “cottages” arranged in a crescent around the parking lot, or a kidneyshaped pool, in which case we avail ourselves of its overly chlorinated waters as both prelude and epilogue to sleep. My employer doesn't say “sleep.” He says, “Let's fire up the dream furnaces, eh?” — though I gather this is only a crude approximation of the Andalusian original.

While carrying luggage into Cottage no. 12 of the Yucca Valley Motor Court, I notice something in the car parked in front of the cottage next door. The big, smooth brown car — a Melmoth, a make unknown to me — looks familiar, and I remember it overtaking us on the highway earlier. Its engine purrs; its headlights are on. A radio plays inside. A shadow moves within, and I peer to see a girl in the backseat, her face tinged yellow from the porch
light (all the cottages have identical yellow porch lights). She sheds golden tears. As she wipes them with a wrist, she catches me watching her; her face freezes into a wet blur. I consider tapping on the glass, asking, is everything okay? when Picasso nudges me with his suitcase, and we press on to our cabin.

Contrary to folklore, Picasso isn't much of a swimmer. When he does the crawl, his arms flail wildly, slapping the water like beaver tails. His kick is counterproductive. If there are born backstrokers in this world, he's one of them, spewing tall jets at morning clouds. Despite my weight, or thanks to it, I'm good in water — better than on dry land, my body its own raft. Doing a dead man's float, I can read the newspaper without getting it wet. While Picasso spews, I do my twenty lengths, trying to swim a straight line — no mean feat in a pool shaped like an internal organ. Finished, I barely breathe hard. This annoys Picasso.

“How can someone so fat swim so well?” he asks, indignant. I think of all the answers I might give, such as that whales swim very beautifully. But I know my place.

That's when I see her, the girl, the one who'd been crying in the car. Wearing cutoffs and carrying her sneakers, she walks over and sits by the pool's edge, dipping a scarlet toe in the water, watching the ripples flow. There is that pleading, desultory look again on her face. Seeing me look at her, Picasso winks over his newspaper. His hand says, “Go on and talk to her, coward!” My frown answers, “She's scarcely sixteen, pervert!” Our mute argument is cut short by the man who stands in the doorway to cabin no. 13, wearing a suit, calling to the girl, his voice hypercultivated and vaguely European. With the air of a prisoner off to the gallows, the girl picks up her sneakers and joins him.

With a soft click the cabin door closes. The yellow light goes out.

“Mariquita,” says Picasso. Translation: “ladybug.”

Despite it being daylight outside, Picasso sleeps with the light on and the curtains drawn. He wears silk pajamas, green and gray stripes. Item: Picasso snores. The other night I heard him talking in his sleep. He said, “Proximidad.” He gets up five, six times a night. I hear him emptying his bladder and gargling. Newsflash: the inventor of synthetic cubism has an enlarged prostate.

I know all this because my father had an enlarged prostate and because I'm an insomniac, descended from a long line of sleepdeprived antecedents, including my dad. One night, when I was six years old and both of us couldn't sleep, my father whispered in the dark from his bed (his wife, my mother, died in childbirth). He told me the story of a noble Austrian family related somehow or other to the Hapsburgs, whose members one by one contracted and died of familial fatal insomnia, an extremely rare disease resulting from — depending on which authority one appeals to — either exposure to cannibals or to ergot poisoning (ostensibly from a contaminated loaf or loaves of rye). The disease, my father said (his whispers slipping and sliding through the darkness into my ear), took between three and twelve months to claim its victims, during which time they suffered spectacularly: precipitous weight loss, loss of concentration and coordination, nervous twitching, deficits of both short- and long-term memory, difficulty distinguishing between reality and dreams, copious tears, murderous rages, despair, depression, delusions, dementia, and — finally, mercifully — death. In the case of the Austrian
Hapsburgs, the victims all hallucinated that they were being eaten alive by white tigers.

No one could convince them otherwise.

They died of horror and exhaustion.

This was my father's way of comforting me in my sleeplessness.

We lived alone in our cramped cold-water studio above The Little Red Shoe House. The smell of shoe leather, with that of Cheswick's cigars, wafted up through warped floorboards. We were as poor as we were not because my father had too little talent but because he had too much. He could not color between the lines or trace them faithfully. With a bulging portfolio and hat in hand, he went from Disney (whom Dad dubbed the Antichrist) to Warner Brothers to Max Fleischer Studios and back. But every time they gave him a chance, my father blew it by “improving” on the characters he was asked to color or sketch, making them in some little way his own despite his best efforts to honor their originators. He did not know his place, my poor father. Others his age would soon march off to the war and would gladly have taken
his
place (like me, Dad had flat feet, though he was not fat); they would have happily marched in step with Disney or anyone else — provided they didn't have to do so through a field pocked with land mines.

One day I stood by the drafting table watching my father draw a whale. Taped to his light board was the model he was to have followed slavishly, but being my father he enhanced the prototype, transforming Monstro from a sober, lumpy sperm whale to a grinning, jovial baleen. When they saw the result, naturally the people at Disney fired him. But when the movie debuted a year later, in 1940 (I was eleven years old), there was my father's
whale brought to Technicolor life on a wide screen: the grinning Monstro children of all ages have come to love.

He could have sued but didn't. He made no effort to claim credit. In the dark, through smells of shoe leather and Cheswick's cigar smoke, my father's whispers found me:
Know your place, Son, know your place …

Eating any meal with Picasso is a tricky business, with some foods to be avoided at all costs. Breakfast, served twenty-four hours a day at most roadside inns, presents particular challenges. Two eggs fried sunny-side up and served with a crisp strip of bacon will send him into paroxysms of laughter, especially should the bacon be placed in a horizontal line at the plate's leading edge to form a straight face. Cornflakes are okay, but never,
ever
with sliced bananas or fat strawberries (Rice Krispies, it goes without saying, are out of the question). I'm also careful to order foods that won't tempt the sculptor in him — ruling out oatmeal and hominy grits. (At first, silver-dollar pancakes were permissible, until my boss discovered he could make mobiles out of them.)

I've nothing against watching the master work; on the contrary, I wish my dad, who kept a print of
Night Fishing at Antibes
above his drafting table, were here to see it. But Picasso goes too far; he can't leave anything alone; he's an engine in need of a governor. He reminds me of my father, though in my father's case not sketching within the lines did him in, while it has made Picasso a legend. This angers me.

For myself I order the Hungry Man Breakfast Special. I know I'm a glutton; I can't help it; I feel safe within my layers of fat. For Picasso I order an English muffin, resigned to his doing something
outlandish to it. Sure enough, with the grape jelly he paints an equestrian Don Quixote into the nooks and crannies.

“Stop playing with your food!” I say.

“Pourquoi pas?”

“Because — restaurants are for eating,” I say with a mouthful of pancake.

A smirk breaks over Picasso's bad-boy face, lights up his binocular eyes. He likes getting me angry. Thanks to him, I've broken my code; I have forgotten my place.

“Eating is your métier, Maestro, and one at which, may I say, you are clearly as prolific as you are accomplished!”

Just this side of the border we encounter the Melmoth again, this time at a Texaco service station. Have they been following us, or are we following them? As I pull alongside it the girl plunges a finger deep into her mouth and with its glistening tip writes, “Help!” on the window, the
e
and
p
both backward. I'm now convinced that she is in serious trouble, and just as convinced that I am the one to do something about it. But I am a fat former shoe salesman and know my place. With its tank full and the girl's pleading face pressed to the glass, the Melmoth mumbles off down the highway.

Attracted by colorful serapes flapping in the breeze, Picasso has me pull into one of the countless Mexican tourist shops. He buys us both ponchos and sombreros, the latter doomed to blow off our heads on the highway. From tavern doors music blares into the zocalo, to mix with the dust and wind dancing there. My employer insists that we dance in our ponchos, taking my arm and salsaing me as tourists gather to watch, along with a group of tawny teenaged boys, barefooted and twirling strands of straw
in their mouths. The crowd thickens. Choosing a woman from among the spectators, Picasso makes me dance with her. I don't like dancing; I've never liked it. I sweat too much, for one, and even squeezed into pointy, high-arched cowboy boots, my feet are too big and flat. My partner is likewise obese, which I'm sure was planned. She's also drunk and wears great gobs of perfume and jewelry, so many bracelets she rattles. She leads, probably because I can't, making it no less humiliating. She sweats more than I; her breath stinks of garlic and alcohol and something bacterial. Picasso watches, clapping his hands and shouting, “Olé!” like he's at a bullfight, with me the toreador. Why doesn't the
SOB
dance himself? I wonder, grown dizzy. Must I do this for him, too? Why? So he can laugh at me? So he can find
me
amusing? Dust clouds eddy and swirl, rising to mix with the sweat on my limbs. Every time I step on her toes, my partner cries, “Aeyaaa!” provoking peals of laughter from the crowd and especially from my boss, who throws back his cannonball head and laughs louder than anyone.

As I collapse into the sidelines, Picasso grabs a girl from the crowd, sweet faced in rolled, tight pink pants, brown hair avalanching to an impossibly slim waist. In my dizzy state it takes a moment to realize it's the girl from the Melmoth. For once she's not crying; she's laughing, thrilled to tango with Picasso — though for sure she has no idea who Picasso is. With a metal-bending glare in his eyes the father of
Demoiselles D'Avignon
toggles her back and forth across the dusty square. He's showing me up, proving he's got bigger
sopladores
than I, swinging his bull balls in my sweaty face. When the hypercultivated European reclaims his quarry — thundering across the impromptu ballroom and, with a perfunctory curtsy, snatching her off — I expect the adamantine
Spaniard to put up a fight. But no, he goes on tangoing himself, the stubby prick.

Disgusted, I buy oranges at a stand and head back to the Topolino, where, a few minutes later, Picasso finds me peeling one and offers his assistance.

“Thanks, I can manage.”

With a shrug he takes another orange and peels it, all of a piece, the rind spinning away in a bright, leathery zigzag. He spreads the segments like petals, turning his orange into a juicy sunflower. In his hands nothing maintains its integrity. Will I maintain mine? Have I got any to maintain?