Lust

by Geoff Ryman

  Picasso only sniffed. He moved forwards and backwards through the design. He tried to scamper across the ceiling upside down. He could not. He chuckled. He drove the mouse straight into a wall and through it and he laughed. ‘You are God,’ he said. ‘You can change the rules.’

  ‘It can show what the blueprints will look like,’ corrected Mr Miazga, who detested all overstatement and vulgarity. His black suit and designer shirt would have looked better with a huge gold brooch.

  Picasso ignored him. ‘The artist is the one who makes the space. The audience uses it. It is much more like life. But…’ He slapped his thigh and stood up. ‘The power of the artist has not changed. It is his world the audience enters. Thank you, Mr Miazga. Please, would you be able to show me more about how this works?’

  ‘Certainly, if you wish,’ said Mr Miazga. He was beginning to rise.

  ‘You could do it today?’ Picasso asked.

  Mr Miazga faltered. He batted his eyelids like an embarrassed girl. ‘I … I plainly have nothing else to do.’

  Picasso sat down in his chair. ‘Excellent, excellent. You and your wife must come upstairs and have dinner with us tonight. Is that not so, Michael?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Michael began.

  ‘There will be a lot to celebrate.’

  Mr Miazga could not help but smile. It would indeed be a relief to be able to sell their big flat and move on. He nodded in agreement.

  ‘Michael, you have things to do with banks and lawyers, yes?’

  Michael was beginning to get a bit peeved at being directed all the time. Picasso looked around at him and suddenly he had a face like a bloodhound: doleful eyes and drooping jaws. ‘Don’t you have a lot to do? I’m sorry, is it possible that I can help you in any way? I don’t speak English. I am weak in such situations.’ He was apologetic and undeniable.

  ‘No, it’s for me to do.’ It was just that Michael wished he were doing the driving. It was his money that was buying the flat.

  ‘I will cook!’ Picasso announced, his eyes dancing again.

  Picasso did not cook. He concentrated on a complicated sauce involving cream and tomatoes and basil and berries and apple liqueur and butter and a teaspoon of grated onion. Michael did the shopping. Michael cooked everything else: the boiled potatoes, the salad. The Miazgas rang on the telephone first, to tell them they were on their way: one floor up.

  ‘Remember,’ Michael told him. ‘You cannot be called Pablo Picasso. Everybody in the world knows who Pablo Picasso is.’ Picasso looked like he was picking his teeth after a good meal. ‘You’ll need to be called another name. I suggest Ruiz.’ Michael paused. ‘It will be easy to remember.’

  ‘It is my father’s name.’ Picasso curled his lip.

  ‘That’s why it will be easy to remember,’ said Michael, backing away to the door. And, he thought, it’s your real name.

  The Miazgas came, scrubbed and pressed. Their ageing beauties had been pinned back into place. Mrs Miazga was big and blonde and just the slightest bit blowsy. The academic Laura Ashley dress was so flimsy and pink that it might as well have been Zsa Zsa Gabor chiffon, and strands of her blonde hair kept rising and falling. Mr Miazga looked braced against a further onslaught from Picasso. He had spent the afternoon with this man, and now faced a whole evening of him.

  Picasso bounded up to them and kissed Madame Miazga on both cheeks. His arms enfolded Mr Miazga, and wrenched him down to his height. Picasso kissed him full on the lips.

  ‘This man is a genius!’ Picasso declared of Mr Miazga. Mr Miazga was in the process of recovering from the kiss. ‘He has taught me so much.’

  Mr Miazga pulled himself up to his full height, as if to imply that a kiss on the lips would normally follow a proper introduction. He had not come to live in England to be battered by such behaviour. ‘May I present my wife, Marta.’

  Marta cooed and offered a tiny, polite hand. Mr Miazga continued, ‘Marta this is Mr … Mr…’

  ‘Luis,’ said Picasso. Whose father’s name was that? His eyes were on Michael and the whites looked tobacco-stained with knowing. ‘Luis Ruiz. It rhymes. It is easy to remember, yes?’

  ‘I am sure I will have no difficulty remembering your name at all,’ said Marta Miazga, who had always been more outgoing than her husband. ‘My husband is called Thaddeus, or Thad for short, and so the English call him Tad the Pole.’

  Michael found himself chuckling along with her. Though Picasso could not possibly have understood the joke, he laughed too. Mr Miazga sucked in air thinly between his teeth.

  Over dinner Picasso talked. Michael started to uncork the wine, and Picasso said no, no, no and took the bottle from him. Picasso kept talking as he showed the best way to uncork and pour it. He told Michael where the oven glove was. ‘Yes, yes, I put it on the lower shelf where I can reach it, we keep it there from now on.’

  Picasso talked about computer graphics. ‘They defy gravity. Things are pasted on them, things are stretched, everything blurs into a dream. It is as if you take the human mind and plug it into the electricity grid. The results have ceased to be entirely human. If not used by artists the results are distinctly unpleasant and alienating. These graphics reveal a desire for perfection. Perfection is for people who want to work and who are scared that they will run out of ideas.’

  Mr Miazga coughed.

  Picasso talked about Monet’s water lilies. He enjoyed them in a scanty kind of way, but like all impressionism, its fate was to be used on greetings cards. Its innovations were all technical. Its artistic message was too often merely pretty.

  Marta mentioned the curious art that was now winning awards. A dead sheep in formaldehyde. Picasso laughed, and stomped his foot. ‘That is either very good or very bad. It is reaction against computers. Did he enjoy winning his award?’

  ‘I think so, yes,’ replied Marta. Her sentences seemed to wear glass slippers – they tinkled and you were afraid they would break.

  ‘Ah, then the art will be very bad.’ Picasso munched his lamb heartily. They all waited.

  ‘Why would that be?’ Mr Miazga enquired.

  Picasso swallowed. ‘There are people who Are and there are people who only Have. The people who Have must be good at getting, and they are polite. The people who Are…’ His hand trailed away.

  ‘Don’t need awards,’ said Michael.

  Picasso nodded once, firmly. ‘The awards are there to make the people who Have feel like the people who Are.’

  Mr Miazga enquired, ‘And those who Are, what are they good at?’

  ‘Whatever they like,’ said Picasso with a shrug. ‘Defeating others,’ he added, shamelessly.

  At the end of the evening, the Poles seemed suddenly to remember it was Michael’s flat. They thanked him in English for the meal, for the move. Michael said how that the timing was lucky for all of them. ‘The apartment will be ideal for us,’ enthused Marta.

  ‘You know we have been saying,’ said Mrs Miazga with a confirming glance at her husband as she took Michael’s hand in friendship, ‘we have been friends for so long that we don’t even remember when we first came to this apartment.’

  About three weeks ago, thought Michael. The Miazgas couldn’t remember the Angel monks and the singing at 2:00 AM.

  Michael eased them down his hallway. Marta thanked him for Picasso. ‘It was wonderful meeting your friend! It was just like meeting…’ She sought for someone to measure the impact. ‘Matisse.’

  Picasso’s smile temporarily lost its balance. The dapper Mr Miazga shook Michael’s hand. Marta waved to Pablo. ‘Enchanté,’ Picasso said.

  The door swung shut. Picasso held out both arms, and sighed and spun around. ‘I can eat, I can drink, I can read, I can learn, I can work!’ he said, and did a little dance. He pulled Michael to him, and looked up, his small round face suddenly like a child’s, stretched tight. ‘And all I have to do is love you,’ he said.

  ‘Is that difficult for you?’

  ‘I am a woman’s man,’ said Picasso pro
udly.

  ‘One … one man I brought back, who had been dead. He told me never to do it to anyone else.’

  ‘He turned down life?’ Picasso was incredulous. ‘He was a fool.’

  ‘Mark was no fool. I love your painting because of him.’

  ‘Now I know he was a fool,’ said Picasso. He stood back, to regard Michael as if he were a painting. ‘You are not such a price to pay for life. You have beautiful hair and beautiful eyes. You look like a man, you are big and you are strong, and so don’t cause comment on the street, and you are smart and soft, soft for me and I like that.’

  Michael advanced; Picasso didn’t like being pressed up against him, it revealed too ruthlessly how short he was. Michael dipped down, bending neck and spine, and they kissed. Their tongues seemed to glue to each other. They parted with a smack, and Picasso said what Michael was thinking: ‘Delicious.’ He reached up and rubbed Michael’s neck. ‘You want me to fuck you,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Michael said from a place so deep inside him the words felt as if they came from his stomach.

  Picasso was so short that his arms encircled Michael’s ass. ‘I take you,’ Picasso said, and picked him up from the floor and hugged him into the bedroom. The tips of Michael’s toes dragged across the carpet. Picasso let him fall onto the bed and pulled down Michael’s trousers so hard they tore.

  ‘I fuck you face to face,’ said Picasso.

  ‘Face to face,’ said Michael, and knew that he was in a kind of love. Throughout the act, he looked into Picasso’s eyes.

  The move was upon them before Michael was ready.

  Picasso took charge. The van was to arrive on Thursday. Wednesday evening, they started to pack. Big tea crates arrived: Picasso kept popping out of them like a jack in the box. He thought this was very funny. Michael was not in the mood.

  In fact, Michael was cross. He had wanted to clear things out before he moved; at the same time he also wanted to save everything. There were Phil’s old toiletries, bath foams and aftershaves that Michael had bought for him. Michael sniffed the tops and smelled Phil. He started to chuck them, but at the first clinking of glass in a bin, Picasso, wearing nothing but shorts and sandals, flapped into his bedroom.

  ‘What you throw away?’ he demanded. ‘This is good, no?’ He splashed himself with aftershave: ‘Oh, I smell like Monet’s lily pond now,’ he joked.

  ‘You smell like Phil,’ murmured Michael.

  There were all the old receipts, gas bills addressed to Phil, old photos of trips to Paris. There were books Phil had given him with cards inside showing two cats entwined. There were old socks. There were magazines saved because they recorded the top 100 albums of all time according to New Musical Express in 1990: Pet Sounds at number 1 apparently. There were invitations to Phil’s early exhibitions; old clothes: cowboy shirts, torn PVC, Lycra bicycling shorts. Phil’s unwanted wardrobe was a history of ill-advised eighties and nineties fashion.

  Cups and saucers: things Michael had given Phil that Phil now did not want; beautiful heirloom silver spoons that Phil had given to Michael that he had not wanted. His old life was stripped bare. His old life naked looked like an empty room. He was leaving the carpet and the rosewood fireplace.

  Michael started to cry. Picasso was overcome by kindness. ‘Oh, my love,’ he said, which in French is something you can say more easily between men. ‘Hold, hold.’ He chuckled sympathetically, and held Michael’s shoulders. ‘It is always hard to move. You know, when I was young, we moved here, we moved there. In Spain when you move, everyone speaks a different language. This is just to Camden Town. Eh? Eh?’ Picasso held up Michael’s chin, and made him look into his eyes. It worked. Michael smiled, embarrassed by his own weakness and by love.

  ‘I help you!’ Picasso exclaimed and flung out his arms, to greet the changes.

  So Michael’s old life was packed away into tea chests, except for the four-poster bed from Lancashire. That had been sold to the Poles. Michael slept in that bed for one last night. Picasso did not snore, placated by the reassurance of sex. He slept umbilically attached to Michael, planted deep inside him.

  In the morning, Picasso jumped about the flat as if the floor were a skillet. Michael heard him from the warmth of the duvet clattering away amid the kitchen things. As if Michael were a nervous invalid, Picasso arrived with breakfast on a tray: croissants and coffee. ‘Here, a last breakfast for the condemned man,’ he said, gesturing at the tray. Michael took a tiny sip of coffee to savour it. Picasso gulped down half a cup and one torn strand of croissant before jumping up again. He would have nothing else to eat until supper that night.

  Picasso darted up and down the stairs like a muscular squirrel. The moving men thought he was a porter who was paid to help with the move. Picasso wore overalls from 1916. The legs had a sewn-on lower half of a different colour. He pointed, clicked his fingers, grinned and somehow acted so completely like a mover that the movers began to follow his instructions. Picasso made sure the sofa bed was loaded last, facing out from the back of the lorry. He indicated that he and Michael would travel to Camden Town sitting on it.

  One of the moving men said, ‘Tell him he mustn’t, please, it’s the insurance.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘It won’t do any good telling him anything.’

  The mover was old and reliable, and he looked at Picasso as if accepting some fundamental fact of life. ‘It’s your funeral. I hope not,’ he said.

  Michael and Picasso stayed in the back of the lorry. It jerked and thumped and squealed its way up Tottenham Court Road to Camden Town. Picasso sat on the sofa, looking out the open back. Somehow he had spirited a bottle of champagne from his other world, the eternal past from which Angels seemed to come. The ink on the label was as thick as a rubber skid mark and the font plain, listing the name of a village. Picasso began to sing an old, strange yelping song. Michael was to learn later it was cante hondo, the only music Picasso really loved. He waved a bottle and irresistibly forced Michael to sing along. Canta la rana, y no tiene pelo ni lana! he announced. The frog sings, though she has neither fur nor wool.

  The van took fifteen minutes to coax itself backwards into their narrow side street. Picasso manhandled packing cases with the gusto of a bullfighter. He nipped so quickly up and down stairs that he reminded Michael of a silent flickering film, a two-reel comedy short.

  Picasso was untidy and disordered; everything he did was a kind of unintended blurt. Their new flat rapidly filled with papers, boxes, chairs, CD racks, suits on hangers, lamps and cutlery. They were piled high in unsorted and unnecessarily exciting piles that threatened to spill paint or crystalware onto the floor. Picasso flung himself onto the toilet, fully clothed, in order to sit down, and announced with a sigh, ‘We are done!’

  Michael looked around forlornly. A heap of previously sorted lab reports slithered onto the floor as if depressed and exhausted.

  Picasso gulped water from the tap. ‘We go!’ he announced. ‘We help your friends.’ He took the keys and locked up, and Michael found himself heading back to the apartment that was no longer his.

  The Miazgas had economized. They were carrying their own furniture up the stairs. Picasso hoisted the Poles’ piano on his own back, and twisted it sideways up the circular staircase. He carried Marta’s valuable china in an orange washing-up bowl. The plates and glasses clashed and tinkled as he bounded up the stairs. Picasso pogoed down them again on two feet, like a child splashing in mud puddles. He gave Mr Miazga orders and Madame Miazga compliments. He let Marta mop his brow and he mimed having a fever, panting with the heat she generated.

  Somehow or other, once in the flat, it was Michael and Mr Miazga who did all the less spectacular lifting. Picasso stood back with Marta and conferred and suggested the best places for the furniture to go in their new and cramped surroundings. For this Picasso had absolutely no talent. He suggested their enormous rubber tree stay in the hallway, where it would have no light and block access. With minimum ceremony, he d
umped most of Mr Miazga’s suits on the kitchen table.

  Michael was by now exhausted and dazed. An avalanche of other people’s things poured into what still felt like his home. He kept thinking he would offer people a drink: the tonic water was in Camden Town, the ice was melted. He wanted to comb his hair, but his comb of course would no longer be in its accustomed place on the mantelpiece. Except that it was, poor forlorn, forgotten comb, faithfully waiting his return. See, Michael thought, I haven’t forgotten you. If he felt that about a comb, what did he feel about a man? A whole habit of life?

  Michael combed and recombed his hair and watched Picasso. Picasso had flung himself down on the sandy carpet as if it were a bed. He lounged up a hand to accept a cup of tea that Marta had managed to assemble from the scattering of her kitchen.

  Picasso was vain; he seemed to think the smell of his sweat was manly, virile. He did not bathe every day.

  The smell of Picasso permeated the flat. It was not an unpleasant smell, certainly not to Michael. It was a sexual smell. It was as if the very air were stuffed with Picasso’s penis. All three of them, wife, lover and anxious husband, could not think of anything other than those powerful genitals.

  Mr Miazga was pale and thin-lipped, and sat on edge, hands clasping his knees, his delicate down-turned face looking as if someone had farted. Mrs Miazga’s movements were anxious, faltering. She was disoriented. Her fine blonde hair came increasingly undone. It seemed to be falling out, drifting to the floor.

  Michael took stock. Well, he told himself, you could have had a very clean pub manager instead. Instead you chose Pablo Picasso. It will be exciting, Michael. It will not be easy. And it may not last forever.

  Michael could see the moment when Picasso wanted to get back to painting. In one single rolling motion he was up from the carpet and pounding the palm of his hand with his fist. He looked around the flat as if all of it, the original ownership, the sale, the move, had been his own work. He nodded as if to acknowledge the good job he had done. He said, direct to Michael, ‘Come, we go to our home.’