As the four of us sipped martinis and chatted languidly, another dancer joined us. Then a rather pretty shop girl came to join us. Before I knew it, I was the sole male in a rotating group of women, like some sort of mini Hugh Hefner. What really made me sit up and reflect on the moment, however, was when Jurita joined us.
Jurita of Lithuania staggeringly beautiful—truly world-class—with naturally red hair and emerald eyes and a smoking hot body. Jurita was so sexy, in fact, that once, when she sunbathed on the open deck below the bridge in her booty shorts, the navigator almost rammed another ship. Literally. Klaxons went off and everything. Maybe it was just coincidental timing, but I doubt it. Though we were off the coast of Mexico, I remember people shrieking in panic that we’d hit an iceberg.
And now Jurita was talking to me. This was new. Since I’d arrived she had never deigned to speak to me. Why now? I was in such shock that her voice sounded like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. “Wah wah WAH?” she asked with a Baltic accent.
She was so damn gorgeous that she made even that sound sexy! Yet for some inexplicable reason I ignored her query and said something really, really dumb.
“I’m a tadpole,” I said.
Jurita’s almond-shaped eyes glittered as she pondered my arcane response for a moment, then she turned back to her other friends. Before I could feel too much the loser, however, Petra gave my arm an understanding squeeze. She knew what I meant, having been my confidant all contract. Sarah cocked her head to the side and asked, “What does that mean?”
Tiredly I replied, “It means that I have earned the right to be with my Bianca.”
“You’re so sweet,” Sarah commented, accompanied by a few romantic sighs from the ladies.
That’s when it occurred to me why I was surrounded by all the babes, including the super-sexy Jurita. Unlike my waiter days, these women didn’t want a Green Card. Jurita, in particular, was the chief officer’s squeeze and Tina was already American. No, they hung out with me because they all knew I wouldn’t hit on them. Flirtations don’t count, of course.
The reality was that being lonely for affection on a ship is most trying. I was hip deep in hotness, and their comfort level and advances grew daily. I never kidded myself about why they made moves on me. Sometimes it was a game, such as Tina’s advances. Sometimes it was merely flirtation, such as Petra’s. But was I kidding myself about why I didn’t make any moves on them? Was my fidelity after almost a year of separation truly that powerful? If so, why had I kissed Tina? Was there something else, something less noble, going on?
Alas, one real reason for my past refusal of cheating became clear. Despite being an uncontrollable flirt, or rather because of it, I was really just trying to mask my lack of self confidence to act. But was I really just all talk? Should I really think so poorly of myself? After all, actions speak louder than words, and I never once cheated on Bianca. The irony was that these women were attracted to the happiness I exuded at the mere thought of Bianca.
I gave Jurita another glance, then shook my head. Who was I kidding? They all thought I was gay. They all thought I made up the whole Bianca thing to hide it. Sigh.
“Well,” I finally said with a last puff of smoke. “There’s one more sea day this cruise, and there is one thing I have left to do.”
2
Lucifer had issued the challenge of selling a Picasso, and I accepted. Well, in my heart I had, so this was my ‘sell a Picasso or go home’ cruise. That was what I thought on day four when he threw the gauntlet, anyway. After a few days it became ‘sell a Picasso or go home’ week. Now, the next-to-last day of the cruise with a full port day tomorrow, was officially ‘sell a Picasso or go home’ day. I really really really hoped it wouldn’t get to ‘sell a Picasso or go home’ port, or, worse, ‘sell a Picasso or go home’ night.
I awoke with high expectations. Mr. Payne and his delectable Russian wife had been all but drooling over Picasso’s Minotaur Seduces the Sleeping Girl etching all cruise. They already owned a fine international collection, mementos from his many summers abroad. After a summer in Spain he brought home a Picasso linocut. A later summer in Russia brought home an insanely sexy wife. Most recently they stayed in Japan, where he brought home several historical Japanese woodblocks. His questions about the few we had to offer were extremely astute. He utterly exhausted all my knowledge gleaned from a semester on Japanese Art at the University of Iowa oh so long ago. In the end he was not as interested in the woodblocks as he was the Picasso, but the entire process served to reinforce my credibility.
Aside from woodblock talk, three separate times Mr. Payne and I had delved into the market for Picassos. Today I was going to sell one. He was already hot and bothered by the Picasso etching, but with my mini lecture this morning, I was going to give him a Picasso orgasm. The cruise was all but finished, so it was time to put out or get out. Whenever Mrs. Payne was around, my metaphors turned naughty. I couldn’t help it.
Every couple of mornings this cruise I had arranged for an informal art lecture in the Rolls Royce Café, called Coffee With the Masters. Ecstasy’s regular weekend cruises were too short for such things, but a two-week repositioning provided plenty of relaxed mornings. So the night before I would fill the café walls with as many good works as I could from my chosen artist, say Marcel Mouly or Salvador Dalí, then in the morning give a relaxed, fifteen-minute lecture. Today’s featured artist was, of course, Picasso.
True, we had only two works of his on board, but there was more to talk about with him than anyone else. I had placed teasers all over the ship asking, “Why is Picasso so famous?” I expected a dozen or so folks to show up, but this lecture was really directed at the Paynes. For this lecture I waited until morning to set up the two Picassos on some easels. I wasn’t particularly worried about their theft, but certainly I was about controlling exposure of the pornography. I covered it with a cloth.
I had a few minutes before the lecture, so I ran to check my email. I wish I hadn’t. Some asshole auctioneer on another ship had sold my Minotaur Seduces the Sleeping Girl for $120,000, using nothing more than a picture on a laptop.
I shuffled back to the Rolls Royce in a haze of demoralization. Mr. Payne had, of course, scrutinized both Picasso etchings we had on board. Not surprisingly, he preferred Picasso’s iconic minotaur over his admittedly also-iconic pornography. But, really, you’d have to be one hell of a hardcore art lover to hang a graphic depiction of cunnilingus above the living room couch.
When I returned to the café, there were about twenty people waiting patiently as they sipped their coffee. I waved to Greg and Shirley Gregg in the back row, then my eyes locked on Mrs. Payne. I mean, the Paynes. Man, I truly was obsessed with the babes lately! I really, really needed to see my Bianca again.
“Good morning everyone,” I greeted. “Welcome to Coffee With the Masters. Today we are featuring Pablo Picasso.”
People shuffled themselves into attention. I reached for the cloth covering Woman With Bracelet Receives Dandy and a Cat, but paused before presenting it. I scanned the crowd for children, but there were none. When I revealed the artwork, a middle-aged lady at the nearby table gasped.
“Oh, my word!” she exclaimed. She rose to her feet and looked down upon her husband, who was trying to hide his fascination of the image.
“Come, Ralph,” she ordered. “I will not sit here and be subjected to this filth! Why does art always have to be lewd, crude, and inappropriate? Wouldn’t it be so much better if they just painted something wholesome and inspiring, like angels? Don’t you agree, Ralph?”
She glared down at her husband, who was completely ignoring her in favor of the intricately intimate cross-hatchings of the Picasso.
“Ralph!” she snapped. He jumped as if yanked from a trance.
“Yes, yes, dear, of course we’re leaving,” he muttered as he meekly followed her. She marched out with her head held high, and he trailed along behind with a few quick, regretful glances back.
&nbs
p; This was going to be a rough lecture, I realized. I sipped from my latte, but Lucifer’s mocking laughter echoed in my head. I set the coffee aside and began.
“Why is Picasso so famous, you ask? He is undeniably the most famous artist ever. People use his name mindlessly because it has become part of our language, a noun synonymous with over-the-top artistic excellence. But why?
“If pressed, most people would say that Picasso is famous for creating Cubism. We’ve all seen the funky angle-twisting portraits he made. Technically, he was a Modernist, which is a larger, umbrella-term that covers all those isms of art, such as Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, etc. He did them all, actually, not just Cubism. He mastered one art form and moved onto others continuously, even into his nineties. But he did more than merely drop one movement to master another, he was a pioneer who blazed a trail into the wilds of unknown art. Picasso was the greatest artistic inventor who ever lived.”
I paused for a moment to let my audience shake their heads in doubt.
“Most people revolt at that statement,” I acknowledged. “Wasn’t Da Vinci the greatest artist/inventor? After all, he made the most famous painting in the world, Mona Lisa, and invented tanks and stuff. All true, but did he change the world for all time? Did any of the greats that come to mind?
“I’ll start with Da Vinci. His big contribution was bringing new perspectives to classic themes, such as The Last Supper. For the first time, someone painted Jesus at the center of the table with the room’s architectural vanishing-point right on his halo. All objects and even the people’s postures reference this vanishing point. Genius? Yes. World-changing? Not even close.
“Who else? Michelangelo comes to mind, of course. His Sistine Ceiling is a masterwork of grand vision and revered by two billion Christians around the world today. All that and he wasn’t even a painter, but already the world’s greatest sculptor! His statue of David is truly awe-inspiring. Yet he was also an engineer, who had to design the scaffolding that allowed him to paint that big ol’ ceiling while church services continued below. Genius: absolutely. World-inspiring? Yes. But world changing? Nope.
“If those giants didn’t change the world as we know it, who else could have? Monet? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. He was the start of something new. He pioneered Impressionism, which was a whole new way of looking at and presenting a scene. But remember that in his day photography was fast replacing the need for portrait and landscape painters. Art had to adapt to survive, and it began to show us that simply being more accurate was not enough. Monet was on to some change, but his genius petered out and he retired to painting billions and billions of lily pads, as Carl Sagan might say. The door of change was ajar, though, and Matisse tried to toe it open further by using colors in non-realistic ways. He would paint a room with red walls, red ceiling, red floor, and red furniture just to shock you. But that was it. So he mastered color. Big whoop.
“All of these guys, from Da Vinci to Michelangelo to Rembrandt to Monet, have in common one simple thing that keeps them below Picasso on the genius scale. I’ll get back to that thing in a moment. This is where we introduce Picasso and his origin.
“Picasso, born in Spain in 1873, was a child prodigy. By age 8 he was already painting bull fights. I was watching Smurfs, and he was composing the chaos of bullfights! By his teen years he already mastered all aspects of late 19th century Realism and had qualified for the most prestigious art school in all of Spain. The entry exam was a solid month of grueling testing. Picasso passed it in one day.
“But none of that matters. What matters is what he did in 1907, when he painted The Ladies of Avignon. This is a huge painting of five crazy-ass, nude women and a bowl of fruit. Some women are painted kinda-sorta normally, but others appear with wildly distorted faces. It begins on the left with his earlier Rose Period style, but as the eye moves across the scene, the styles morph and, suddenly, so do the perspectives. There was actually progression within a single painting. In short, this was the first Cubist painting. The door of change had not only been kicked open, but blasted off its hinges.
“Cubism, you might say. So what? Remember, until this moment, the only type of painting ever done were either obvious images, such as landscapes and portraits, or an allegory. He did many allegorical paintings of his sexual fears, be it scary prostitutes, performance anxiety, venereal disease, or pregnancy. Typical young man fears, more or less. But with this painting he embodied his fears, and the fear of sexuality was transformed into fear of the painting itself. It’s huge, raw, filled with sharp angles where there should be feminine curves, horrid masks where there should be smiling faces. Even the surface of the painting is spiky and dangerous. This canvas was not a neutral space for presenting an image. It was downright dangerous to behold. This painting wants to eat you alive!
“This one painting, The Ladies of Avignon, is why Picasso is the greatest artistic inventor who ever lived. It’s not because Cubism is so awesome, but something else. These are not nudes with African tribal masks on their heads: the masks are their heads. Within a single image these five women transform from simple nudes, past the beauty, past the sexual, to the primal. Yet in the end they are just women. A person is far more than just the body you see before you. You see, he painted the abstract of a woman. The abstract.
“The Ladies of Avignon broke away from all art of the past, ever. For all time henceforth, everywhere on Earth, there will always be at least two types of art: Realism and Abstract. And that, my friends, is what Picasso did that was beyond the wildest aspirations of Da Vinci or Michelangelo. Those other guys mastered better ways of depicting images, but they were grounded in the image. Picasso made art about the idea, not merely the means of presenting it. Forever.”
I paused to let it all sink in.
I gave a mischievous smile and added, “By the way, Avignon is not a reference to the city in France, as most people assume. It was the name of a brothel in Barcelona. See? I just knew that being a lustful young man in a brothel could bring about good things. Unfortunately I just didn’t know I was supposed to first master 500 years of artistic method. Damn it.”
The artist brief was over, and as guests filed out I tried to hide how anxious I was to talk to Mr. Payne. After most people filtered out of the café, I wandered over to him and his wife. We made small talk for a few minutes, but soon enough I cut to the chase.
“So what do you think?” I asked him. “I understand if the graphic Woman with Bracelet is not suited to your tastes, but if we find the right Picasso on our electronic gallery, would you be interested in having it in your home?”
“What, me? Oh, no, I could never afford a Picasso,” Mr. Payne admitted. “I’m just a High School art teacher. How else do you think I would get every summer off from work? School is out.”
As smoothly as possible, I scrambled to salvage my dashed hopes and dreams of ascending beyond tadpole status. “You do already have a Picasso, do you not?”
“Well, true,” he admitted. “But I had just inherited some money. That was a long, long time ago. I was just hoping to get an idea from you of what it would be worth nowadays. I can’t afford to have it appraised. Aren’t those several hundred dollars?”
I answered mechanically, trying to hide my disappointment. “Yes, they can be. But you really should get one to have it properly insured. There could be some sort of tragic accident when a blimp crashed into your house or something. You never know. Thank you, Mr. Payne, for your time and interest.”
I wandered away, disappointed but not really surprised. How could I complain? I had far surpassed G2 and proven to Sundance that I was a fully capable auctioneer. So what if I didn’t sell a Picasso this cruise? Who did I think I was, anyway?
I sat at the table and silently sipped my lukewarm latte. After a while I noticed Greg Gregg stealthily approaching me. Well, with as much stealth as possible from a man the size of a Kodiak bear.
“Tell me something,” Greg asked. “Do you think a Picasso
is a good investment?”
“I don’t really look at it that way,” I answered, gesturing for him to sit with me. “Most of the big name art we sell will likely raise in value, yes, but that should never be the reason to buy it. I hear stories all the time from collectors who bought a so-and-so twenty years ago and are shocked to hear what it’s worth today. But that was never why they bought it. They just liked it.”
“I’m curious,” Greg said as he stroked his beard in thought. “If you had, for example, $50,000 to buy a new oil painting by Peter Max, or a thirty-year old Picasso etching, which is one of a hundred, which would you buy?”
“That’s easy,” I replied. “I would buy the Picasso. I don’t happen to like Peter Max’s style so much, but I love Picasso. The only reason to buy art is because you like it. Be an art lover, not a gambler.”
Greg chuckled to himself as he openly and appreciatively regarded the pornographic Picasso. Suddenly he asked, “How about an upgrade?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you drop everything that my wife bought this cruise, barring her favorite Peter Max 9/11, I’ll buy this Picasso. You know, Nasty Woman Eaten Out by Gay Boy.”
My jaw wanted to drop, but I managed to keep cool by correcting, “With a Cat.”
“With a Cat,” Greg agreed.
“I think that is a brilliant idea,” I agreed. “I think I can arrange that.”
Ship for Brains (Cruise Confidential 2) Page 32
