The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  “You like to pretend, don’t you?” he said.

  “Are you kidding? I love it,” Germaine said with a twitch of her nose. She made him promise not to tell anyone, though. “Business is business, after all.”

  “A professional.”

  “Consummate,” Germaine said, her eyes serious again. “But I always imagine I’m somewhere else. It’s all play. Every model likes to pretend. A trade secret, I suppose.”

  “What if I were to paint you dressing up, then? Looking in the mirror, putting on your powders?”

  “It is a sort of pretend, too, isn’t it? Being a lady,” she said. “A parlor game.”

  They moved to the small bedroom, and Pablo began working up a canvas that showed Germaine in the flickering light as she angled her neck before a standing vanity. His brushstrokes were slow, until the bristles barely shivered against the plain weave. He knew then how Carles felt, he who had fallen into the trap of making believe with Germaine ever since they met but couldn’t keep up with a master of the sport. “Pretending is fun,” Pablo said, almost to himself, “until it’s not fun at all.”

  Germaine pulled out the pins holding in place her loose chignon, and a black curtain of hair fell and rushed around her long, golden neck. “What if you painted me, I don’t know, unpretending?”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I’ll remove my rouge, see? And the powder. And . . .” She unfastened her cotton-and-bone camisole from the back.

  “Thought you were cold?”

  “So right,” she said, plunging into the bed in nothing but her laced corset, burying herself beneath the eiderdown.

  “But how will I paint you?”

  “You’ll have to come ’neath, too, I suppose,” she laughed. “Bring your brush!”

  “And Carles?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’ll be home soon.”

  “He’s been gone all day. Probably found some little chippie whom he’d rather make love to.”

  Pablo played dumb, the brush in his hand shaking.

  “It’s not for lack of enthusiasm on my part, either. I’m no dead herring, you know?” Germaine stared right through Pablo. “Come now,” she said, flinging what remained of her garments across the room. “Carles will thank you for saving me from catching a deathly chill.”

  Pablo knew his decision was already made. And he understood what he was doing. But nothing in this moment mattered besides what awaited beneath those covers. He put down the palette and obeyed, diving just as he’d leapt after the school of glimmering fishes when he was a boy in La Coruña, finally catching what had enticed him.

  In the blackness of the bedding’s cave, Pablo grazed his cheek playfully against Germaine’s bare stomach. He sowed a string of kisses from navel to neck within the mystery of the feather-filled duvet. He kneaded the arches of her tightrope-walking feet, then moved up her calves. She hugged the pillow and curled onto her side. He skated behind her knees with his lips all the way up to the cleft of her derriere and felt her body melting as if in a hot iron pan. He reached around her and swept his palm up the length of her thigh, curving it between her legs before dragging it through the valley of her breasts to the mouth that nibbled his fingers.

  Germaine stretched her arm under the blanket and searched blindly, like a hound hunting a burrow. She pawed at a clump of wiry hair, tugged for a second, and then scoured again before discovering a pair of evasive ornaments. She girdled the web of her hand around them and gently squeezed, feeling the dangling skin tighten like a creature in a tide pool as Pablo gasped. She trailed her fingertips along the protrusion guarding these jewels and giggled in her head because his penis was bigger than she expected, silently musing once again how women more than men enjoy surprises. With her thumbnail, Germaine circled the bulbous glans, puffed up like hen wings, and ran the tip of her forefinger down the narrow ridge of flesh. As he rose from the cavern of the blanket, his dark eyes caught the flickering light and then met hers. She guided him inside her.

  Pablo proceeded attentively at first, before adopting an oarsman’s rhythm. He pushed in and out of the inlet and felt himself expanding, as if his blood was increasing in volume.

  Germaine’s hands clung to Pablo’s biceps. Then she lowered her grip to his elbows, feeling the pulsing of his veins inside the soft creases. She clasped her ankles behind his body, absorbing him as he moved. The wind through the crack of a window picked up, and the room quivered and hastened. She swept the back of her forearm against the stubble of Pablo’s cheekbone and held it there. Color was rippling through her, emanating from her sex. With her other hand, she drew him nearer. He was deep, but if only he could reach just a bit more, touch some new part of her, closer to the pith.

  They were fucking so hard, the feather vanes of the quilt began to grow and bud at the seams. Their bodies’ movements slid the two of them to the mattress edge. Pablo saw a drip of sweat roll from his nose onto Germaine’s cheek. The singing of the bedsprings and basso buffo of the floorboards were one song. But just as they were both on the verge of climax, they tumbled onto the ground.

  With the fitness of a show rider, Germaine flipped over from bottom to top, and they pinwheeled across the rug.

  She suddenly was above Pablo, like straddling a motor. It was as if she were piloting some marvelous experimental flying contraption that bests gravity and birds. Pablo pumped harder, and she felt a sensation in her abdomen as they took off into the clouds, leaving France far below, the lighted boulevards of Paris becoming mere yellow lines in the etched face of the distant, gleaming metropolis. At the edge of the stratosphere, there was an explosion that jetted from her center up through his back and down her legs, rolling through their shoulders and shooting through every fingertip, scattering a frond of sparks through the embrace of the sky.

  Floating down into a deep, dreamy opium-like spell, where pink light danced to mélodies saturating the night air, Pablo knew this was the communion he’d always imagined, that he wanted since he was a boy, one for and of the gods.

  Remembering all this months later, before the very canvas that began the episode, that night feels to Pablo like a lifetime ago, Germaine someone from another era, and Carles now cold in the ground.

  Pablo stands in Manyac’s apartment on Boulevard de Clichy, awaiting his patron’s return. He has been hoping to visit Vollard’s gallery to see what promise, what newness, lies ahead. The memory that has been awakened by the painting, he both wants to recapture and bury it. How everything has happened so fast. But he can’t help hearing again the echoes of desire.

  Until, that is, Pablo wonders if it had been Carles who flipped over that canvas from the pile during his brief stay in this apartment before he killed himself.

  A wash of sobering guilt comes, just as it did months ago when he woke right before Carles reached the top of the stairs. Pablo also feels feverish, his limbs suddenly weak. He thinks of that sore he noticed in Madrid. It has gone away now. But when will it return?

  Manyac arrives home, cradling a long paper bag in one arm and a pale cream Pomeranian in the other. “What’s its name?” Pablo asks as Manyac and the powder-puff dog brush past him with a growl.

  “Cat,” Manyac replies, removing a baguette. He slices it in half with a tomato knife and splits it lengthwise, slathering the inside with butter and layering on top a goopy glaze of pure strawberry jam.

  Pablo hasn’t eaten since buying from the news-butchers aboard the train a stale roll that sopped up an oily fried egg. His stomach is acid. He is salivating now at the sight of breakfast and the warm yeasty smell in the air.

  Manyac dries a plate from the zinc-lined wood sink and plunks the baguette on top. He pulls from the daisy-colored icebox a frosty glass carafe, pours into two coffee cups three fingers each of Armagnac from a brown bottle, and adds a splash of grapefruit juice before handing one to Pablo and drinking the other in a gulp. Onto the floor he sets the bread, which, to Pablo’s horror, the toy dog gobbles up.
r />   “Why haven’t you dressed yet?”

  Pablo gazes down at his modest but neither stained nor tattered trousers of thick cotton, collarless shirt, and duster jacket.

  “I am dressed,” he protests, more shrilly than he meant to.

  Manyac’s face blanches as if he’s stepped into excrement in his velvet slippers.

  “I can close the top button,” Pablo says. “You won’t even see the rest.”

  “It’s not the coat! It’s the whole everything! Jesus, you look like a chimney sweep.” Manyac pounds his fist. “And here I am, trying to sell a sophisticated picture-maker whose paintings ought to command top rate from an esteemed gallery owner? He’ll think we trade in rags and pewter. Is that what you want to make? Bric-a-brac?”

  Only half the sum Manyac paid him this month remains, Pablo announces, and he has no other clothes. “Maybe we hold off till I can afford a tailor?”

  “Vollard is not a man you keep waiting,” Manyac retorts. “He makes or breaks a painter’s career. If he excuses himself to the loo, you offer to unzip him and hold his prick to piss!”

  Manyac has no doubts about how suave he appears in his scarlet-red four-in-hand silk tie jauntily tucked into a stiff shirt with a pointy collar, a habit he developed when he was the promising son of a well-heeled manufacturer of lockboxes, safes, and vaults back in Barcelona, studying his father’s trade and making money hand over fist, before it all grew too dull and, well, Spanish.

  Even earlier in life, Manyac had, like Pablo, been an art school dropout and, like Carles, held an avowed affinity for anarchism. Or his own interpretation of it, anyway.

  “Too many laws,” Manyac regularly tells his coterie at Paris’s sidewalk cafés, “serve only to keep riches in the hands of fools instead of visionaries.” He goes on to detail how bygone notions of good and evil prevent a painter from making great art—or, in his case, reselling it for the highest price. “Society, particularly throughout Spain, is full of constraints—manacles for your wrists, a muzzle on your jaw, a Dominican rosary ’round your neck, and an iron-grip codpiece squeezing the gonads like an olive press.” Only in Paris could Manyac have a chance at being a happy libertine, satisfying himself aesthetically, philosophically, and financially.

  As to the latter, Manyac has been a quick study in the cutthroat business of trading pictures. Lately it’s been recompensing handsomely, as he has applied the tried-and-true tricks of the trade.

  Never pay more than one-third of what a painting is worth.

  Always reject the price the painter initially asks, not countering before he appears visibly desperate.

  If you find just one painter who is young, very talented, and too thin, stake your claim with a long-term contract. You’ve uncovered a gold mine.

  The other essential ingredient in this business, Manyac insists, is looking the part—always. “Sheep’s clothing is for lesser wolves,” he’s apt to repeat. “I prefer couture, really.”

  Now, he strokes his beloved mustache as he considers Pablo, then twirls the ends around his forefingers.

  “No, no. This won’t do,” Manyac says, finally. “But I shall not let you let us down,” he adds before hastily repairing behind a Chinese screen. “Get out of those bone-grubber’s clothes—I have just the thing!”

  Manyac returns clutching a pair of hangers, the one on top bearing a straight-cut suit of worsted black-and-blue diagonals. In the other hand, he holds a pair of varnished button-up oxblood boots. “The trousers may be long, but we’ll pin them,” he says. “The jacket ought to fit. Can stuff newspaper in the shoes, need be. Shouldn’t be bad, not at all.”

  Eyeing Pablo’s cotton knickers, Manyac asks if he wants a fresh set.

  Pablo shakes his head.

  “Are you sure? Take those off and have one of mine. It’s just been laundered.”

  “These are fresh,” Pablo responds.

  “Very well,” Manyac says, suspending the suit from the top of the folding screen. He undoes a starchy dress shirt from the other hanger and tosses it to Pablo. “I remember when I was young as you once, a yearling growing into racing shape—fitness up and down.” With a flick of the wrist, Manyac’s plush top hat sails through the air across the room, right into Pablo’s fingers. “What a glorious ride it was.”

  “Stone’s throw from the birthplace of Claude Monet,” Manyac remarks, hustling them to a gallery in the Ninth Arrondissement, just below Boulevard Haussmann. Sixty years on, very many of the first-floor leases within the thick-slabbed, nicotine-colored buildings of Rue Laffitte are held by galleries of all sizes, some smartly curated and others in curious disarray. Manyac ushers Pablo inside the one belonging to Vollard, and it turns out to be a mix of the two styles—a single, methodically packed square room with very finite wall space for mounting frames, which consequently means canvases by Renoir, Gauguin, and Cézanne are leaned on top of one another on the floor. The air is redolent of geranium oil and yellow paper. The owner, Manyac tells Pablo, descends from a long line of aristocrat adventurers and convicts-turned-sugar-planters who colonized the isle of Réunion—a blip off of Madagascar. Vollard is a crafty kestrel, Manyac has warned, his ability to spot value and connive ways to extract it without peer.

  When Pablo catches sight of a large, frumpish figure paging through a stack of canvases in an old-fashioned three-buttoned swallowtail coat, however, his first thought is how Vollard appears extraordinarily uncomfortable in so much heavy-grained wool. His face is glazed with sweat, and his rosy-beige skin seems to be pleading for a bush shirt and drill trousers.

  “What have we here?” says Vollard to Manyac, his eyes roving around Pablo’s own oversize clothes and borrowed top hat. “A dancing chimp? Can he paint? If not, does he play an instrument? An accordion? Jew’s harp?”

  Pablo begins introducing himself, but the man cuts him off in his lilting, tropically tinged French. “Ah, ah—I want to speak to the organ-grinder, not the monkey.”

  “Why, can he paint? Does Rodin sculpt in bronze?” Manyac sallies. “Ahem, this right here is the little genius I’ve mentioned. You’ve already seen a sample of his work, and you liked it very much.”

  “You have? I did?”

  “Yes, twice over.”

  “When?”

  “Just a few weeks ago,” Manyac says. “When that physician was browsing the gallery.”

  “What? Who?”

  “A doctor of venereology, I recall. You know—Cupid’s diseases. Nasty stuff.”

  “Jog my memory with one of the little creep’s arrows, why not?”

  “Well, you were boasting of your acquaintance with van Gogh again, retelling for the umpteenth time the story of his self-portrait with a bandaged head. How he’d read the bible verse that says if an organ causes you to sin you must lop it off before slicing his ear with a razor to give to a prostitute. Or some such—I can’t be bothered trying to follow anymore.”

  “Why’d he nick his ear?”

  “The sound of the prostitute’s voice piqued his immoral curiosities, one suspects. For Christ’s sake, it’s your bloody tale.”

  “I should think it more lasting if he’d scissored off both his balls. Ear’s not really the root of his troubles, is it? Or perhaps he’s mad.”

  “Eek! That’s precisely what the physician said! One look at that other painting of his, that right there,” Manyac says, pointing to a cramped little bedroom done up all in blue that looks like the walls are closing in, “and he cried that this painter must be tortured in the brain by a bacterium.”

  The picture dealer stands, gawking quizzically, as if Manyac were the mental case.

  “This is all an act of yours, Vollard,” harrumphs Manyac, “because you’ve second-guessed whether you ought to give an exhibition to the remarkable young talent I’ve brought you. Really, you should reconsider. The boy’s phenomenal, likely to make you and me heaps of money.”

  “What’s this doctor’s name, the one who treats the privates?”

  “What
does it matter? Enough with your games!”

  “What’s the man’s name, I say!”

  “I don’t recall. Same as some saint.”

  “Patron of what?”

  “Sodomy.”

  “Close! I’m almost inclined to award the question to you,” Vollard cries with maniacal amusement. “His given name is Louis—the guardian saint of France! Now, what’s the surname? Let’s see . . . on the tip of my tongue,” the frisky man says, tapping his balding head with a long fingernail. “Ah, yes! It’s Jullien—Dr. Louis Jullien. That’s it. ‘Have a bout of something ghastly in your pantaloons? Why, make no apologies. The good Dr. Louis Jullien, master of venereology, will see you soon!’”

  The art merchant is busting up laughing at his own joke. Manyac appears unamused. Pablo is confused, though he commits the rhyme to memory.

  Vollard recovers eventually and says, “So it’s very fine to see you again, my Spanish friend, but I must say you’re losing both your touch and humor. Now, you assert you’ve a prodigy with you. But I fear he’ll see me no more commerce than that other painter from the Peninsula you brought. Let’s have the proof!”

  “Go on,” Manyac prods Pablo. “Show the man. He’ll need nothing more. He’s not blind—mostly.”

  Pablo unzips his portfolio on the ground. He carefully removes the unstretched canvases depicting a simmering dwarf dancer three heads in height, cancan girls revealing tantalizing frill and flesh, sultry-eyed Spanish cantantes, and bravura scenes of bullfights done in yellow and red.

  “Not bad—mostly,” Vollard says. “You’ll get you a show after all, Manyac. We’ll bill this one together with that Basque. And I might arrange for several leading—to where, I don’t know—critics to sit for portraits by the lad to drum up press. The works would be offered as gifts, naturally.”