by Geoff Ryman
Mr Miazga looked forlornly at Michael. Help me, he seemed to say.
Michael found his return glance said: you help me first.
At eleven o’clock one night about three months after his arrival, Picasso barrelled into the flat with ten boisterous, excited people whom Michael had never met, except for Phil’s friend, Jimmy Banter.
Jimmy’s eyes boggled. ‘My God it’s M’n’M! You did land on your feet with this one, didn’t you? So what’s the story? Is he gay?’
‘No, but he sleeps with me.’
‘I wonder why,’ said Jimmy. ‘I mean, if he isn’t gay. I mean, you were a man the last time I checked. Dear old Philip’s not doing too well.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Lost his way, I would say. Says he’s suffering from a crisis of direction.’
‘Maybe he’s finding a direction,’ said Michael.
‘He’s painting portraits,’ said Jimmy, miming horror.
The guests studiously avoided saying anything about the work on the wall. They stood back, and raised eyebrows, and waited for someone else to say something first. Michael offered them drinks, and learned that some of them were dealers.
Among the influx was the art critic of the Evening News. The critic’s accent was ludicrously posh, a deliberate effort to be noticed and to give affront to an egalitarian world. He fearlessly gave affront to Picasso. ‘Are you unable to experience any anxiety of influence?’ the critic demanded. ‘You do know of course from whose work you are stealing?’
‘No,’ said Picasso, looking smug. ‘Tell me.’
‘Hockney,’ said the critic, as if barely able to bring himself to say the name aloud. ‘In his dreadful Picasso period.’
Michael passed the critic his gin and tonic. The critic turned on him succinctly. ‘You are the maid, are you?’
‘This is my flat,’ said Michael.
‘I see,’ said the critic. Even his smile was designed to annoy. ‘And how long do you think he will be living with you?’ The ‘y’ sounded like he was about to throw up, the ‘ou’ hooted like an owl. Michael’s riposte was succinct. He took back the gin and tonic and began to drink it himself.
Picasso pronounced the critic. ‘Noel Coward,’ Picasso said, pointing. ‘During his precipitous decline.’ It was a miracle Picasso could pronounce the word: prayssheepetooose. It was effective enough. One of the many things Picasso knew is that it is more valuable to make enemies than friends. You can always make up with an enemy, but friends hang around as dead weight.
It was instructive watching Picasso at work. He strode around the flat arm in arm with an apparent favourite, expansively describing the work. The critic laughed at him. ‘He is like a very bad wine, one is amazed he has the effrontery even to wear a label.’
The dealer didn’t care; he was in this for the money, not to defend the sacred flame of art. The dealer began to roll a joint expertly, one-handed, while Picasso talked. Picasso stood in a combative pose, telling a story about a bullfight. Picasso could strut even when he wasn’t moving. Only once did his eyes flicker sideways to another dealer from New York. This dealer was much older and better-dressed than the joint-roller. Though Picasso ignored him, the man’s stone face looked neither annoyed nor forlorn.
Michael had spent years cruising gay bars and he knew: Picasso was making a pass at the older man by playing up to the younger. Did the New York dealer know that? Come on, Michael, this is the air these guys breathe, of course he knew. The younger guy probably knew. What they all actually knew or rather had decided, was that this Luis Ruiz, wherever he was from, was a player. Right at the end of the evening, the New Yorker quietly passed Picasso his card.
‘Boy,’ said Jimmy Banter to Michael as he left, ‘am I going to make Philip jealous.’
‘Why would you want to do that, Jimmy? Just tell him I still love him, will you?’
Jimmy had the grace to look chastened. He gripped Michael’s arm. ‘Just my little joke,’ he said, and left. Camp will always let you down.
When they had all gone, Picasso was slow and well fed, like a bullfrog. He put a hand behind Michael’s neck and said ‘I like being with you. You are useful.’
Tender words. ‘I keep you alive,’ said Michael.
‘You will find when I am being good and you have not made me angry that I am good to you.’
The thought arrived whole and clear and quiet. This is love, and this is adventure. But this is not good for me.
Michael had assumed that love was always in one’s interest. If love was a stone that rolled you naturally home, it must be a good thing. The idea that love could smash as well as build a home or roll you further and further from your self had never occurred to him.
Michael’s entire flat became a workshop: a pottery wheel appeared in the bathroom, with sacks of clay. When he was not painting or computing, Picasso was sawing wood from pallets he had found at Camden market. He would scoop up scraps of fabric, a baby’s shoe, or the skull of some small rodent picked clean. Everything entered the maw of his art and was taken back to the flat to be used.
Adoring women arrived. They no longer wore X-Files T-shirts and Camden nose rings. They were smart, bright young gallery assistants from Notting Hill or Bond Street. They wore slim black slacks, graceful shoes and medium-length, artfully tinted hair which they tossed from time to time to indicate fascination.
‘Hello, Michael,’ the gallery assistants would beam at him when he arrived from work, as if genuinely pleased to see that their fascinating new artist lived with another man. ‘I’d better be going,’ they would offer, standing up after a decent interval.
Picasso kissed their fingers, between the knuckle and first joint. ‘Oh, but you will come back, I hope.’
Amanda, Diana, Jill, Cecilia; apparently they did come back, judging from the state of the bed linen. Michael gave in and began to sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. His headaches started coming regularly. When do you get headaches, Michael?
When you’re angry.
Michael came back from going to see In the Company of Men alone, to find Picasso painting another portrait of him: this time as a weeping clown. Was Michael flattered? He was certainly enveloped, and perhaps being digested.
‘People call idiots the Clowns of God.’ Picasso touched Michael’s nose with the tip of the brush handle. ‘Clown,’ he pronounced him. ‘You are in an unequal contest with God. This is foolish, but inescapable. I learn new things from you, Michael. I did not know that the privilege of saints was to fight with God. Most of us don’t even touch Him.’
Picasso painted either in great easy sweeps, or impatient jabs and lunges that left the canvas or the previous layer of paint showing through in streaks. This was an impatient painting. Picasso had scrawled tears in the jagged, staring diamond eyes.
The next night Michael came home at 6.30 to find Mrs Miazga beside herself in what was now Picasso’s bed. She was red again, but now it was from irritation. Perhaps she had found evidence of others. She looked miffed when Michael stumbled in to fetch shorts and a T-shirt to wear in the house, unconsciously imitating Picasso. They both stared, wishing the other gone, wishing themselves gone, wishing him gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael, coldly. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’ She drew the sheet up higher. She shrugged, but could only just bring herself to say, ‘It’s your house.’
Michael found a private corner in the sitting room in which to undress so he could shower. His towel, he remembered, and his bag of toiletries were still in the bedroom. Damn. He marched back into the bedroom, his trousers wrapped around his midriff.
‘Where is he?’ he asked, rifling amid Picasso’s trash for his own few things.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a pause. ‘He left suddenly. I thought you were him coming back.’
Michael blew out air from tension.
‘I know,’ she said, and sw
ung her feet out from the bed. She fumbled for a cigarette. She sighed. ‘If you let me shower first, I could be gone.’ She looked forlorn.
‘OK,’ he said.
He sat in the front room, and looked at the paintings, the new ceramics, the boxes of wood stuffed with found objects. How on earth, he wondered, do I end this?
He doesn’t allow other people to end things; leaving must be up to him. It would be hard to have him go, because it was a fascinating story to live beside: to see an artist climb. Especially one who climbs quickly, rather than slowly, painfully, humiliatingly as Phil had done.
It would hurt, to tear Picasso out of his life. At first. But to live with someone you love who does not love you is indeed to eat your own heart. You have to live through clichés to realize how powerful and apt an expression they often are. Michael was eating his own heart out. He would have no heart left.
Michael was good at avoiding decisions, at letting life decide. Life decided. ‘Enough,’ Michael said aloud. He had had enough. He looked at the paintings on the wall and had two goals: to get Picasso to go, and to save his art.
So the next day, Michael took another long lunch break, and visited Mr Miazga in the flat that had once been his own. Mr Miazga was working alone at his computer, with the resigned grimness of someone unemployed at fifty.
‘My wife is not here,’ Mr Miazga sighed. ‘Is she perhaps at your house?’
Michael tried to think of what would be polite, and realized that nothing would be. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible. I try not to go there.’
‘I hate that man.’
Michael sighed too. ‘Sometimes I do.’
‘You? You love him.’
‘The two are not mutually exclusive.’ Michael looked at the Zip-drive disk in his hand. ‘Thaddeus,’ he began. ‘I have a lot of respect for you, and so I am going to ask something that I would not ask from just anyone.’
Mr Miazga kept keying in a program. ‘OK. Ask.’
‘I want you to redo all his work.’
Mr Miazga sniffed. ‘He should make backups.’
‘He does. I do. But that won’t work.’ Michael had rehearsed this next part. ‘It would be difficult to explain how I know this, but believe me it is true. Every trace of his work will disappear when he dies.’
‘A fault in how he programs?’
‘Stranger than that. I can promise you that all his paintings and ceramics will disappear as well. That would be a loss. But, consider if his new work in computer art would disappear as well.’
Mr Miazga shrugged. ‘I am not a critic.’
‘No, thank heavens. You are a creative technologist. So, ask yourself this question. Is he not finding out what can really be done artistically with this stuff?’
Mr Miazga went quiet. ‘What are you asking?’
‘I’m asking you to rekey in any code he makes. I’m asking you to redo every gif. I’m asking you to rescan every graphic. That way the work will survive.’
‘Why?’ Mr Miazga turned to him, his bafflement shot through with something genuinely enquiring.
In his shoulder bag Michael had volume two of the John Richardson biography. The books are laced with every existing photograph of Picasso, often in his workshop. Michael opened it at the chapters dealing with the early 1920s. Silently, he kept turning each of the pages.
Michael could see the exact moment when Mr Miazga understood. He jumped as if someone had stabbed him with a pin. ‘It’s him,’ he said and turned to Michael wide-eyed.
‘The rules are simple. Whenever he goes back to wherever it is he comes from, everything he has done in this world will vanish.’
Mr Miazga rifled through the pages. ‘It … really is him.’
He looked at Michael with something like horror. Then he crossed himself. ‘Is this some kind of miracle?’
‘I don’t really know. We could talk about it all afternoon and still not understand it. Can you believe me, Thad?’
Mr Miazga went back to the photographs. He gave a nervous laugh. ‘It is remarkable.’ His eyes said: is it God or the Devil who has done this?
‘If you do this I will tell him what you are doing. If it’s a choice between his work surviving or Marta, I imagine your wife will be safe.’
Mr Miazga chortled, ducked and smoothed down his impeccable hair. ‘A man might prefer to have his wife back for other reasons.’
‘I … imagine she still loves you. I imagine she will be grateful that you are still there to pick up the pieces … And…’
OK, here comes the second impossible thing.
‘Can I promise you something, Thad? When he goes, she will have no memory of him. Neither will you. It will be as if he never existed.’
It was all beginning to be a bit too much for Mr Miazga. He expelled air and pulled his hair back even flatter.
‘I imagine that you are aware of the value of his work. And that, whatever the personal situation, you can see that there is value in making sure the work survives?’ It was a question, left for him to answer.
Mr Miazga covered his face with his hands, and appeared to wash his face with them as though they were flannels.
‘OK, I will do it,’ he said, snatching his hands away. Then he seemed to crumple. ‘Oh, I am a weak man.’
‘You are in control of your emotions, Thad. Whatever the situation with your wife, you are still able to see clearly. And you are a normal man who wants his marriage to survive.’
Mr Miazga looked round at him slowly, his face more creased than usual, in folds. ‘And you do well, too. You get him back.’
‘I don’t have him, Thad. And I’m doing this so that I can send him away.’
Mr Miazga looked at him for a few moments and said, ‘For you I will do this. Not for him.’
Michael returned to work elated. He boomed hello at Shafiq and Tony, and bounced so effectively at Ebru that she had no time to say anything about his absences. He kissed her on the cheek, talked to her about her trip to Turkey, and asked her to run a report on their data using different variables.
Then he slammed into his in tray and got a fair way through it. He saw from the papers that it was too late to agree to speak at the American conference. Well, OK, you can’t do everything. He tore up the correspondence, threw it in the wastebin and e-mailed an apology. At 6.00 PM, he tapped all the remaining, older papers into a neat pile and put them in a folder. He was the last to leave.
Michael wandered in a circuit around Archbishop’s Park. It was the day before the clocks went back and it was nearly dark. There was no one else there, though it was still warm and the trees had all their leaves. Michael’s feet began to drag, as if he had forgotten to drink any water during the whole of the day.
Michael avoided going home. He finally took the tube and ended up in the Camden bar. The red-faced, bearded men ignored him. He watched other laconic, unfearful souls play darts.
It wasn’t enough to have love. You needed to have power. The two were so much alike. Love and power only exist between people. Both come from inner liveliness. Perhaps they were the same thing, since to fail at one seemed in some way to be bound up with failure in the other.
Michael finished a pint of Becks and finally went back to his flat.
‘This flat, it is mine,’ Michael said. ‘I bought it.’
‘Hmph,’ said Picasso from his computer. He turned and glowered a warning.
‘You’re welcome to stay. If you still need to. You can sleep in my bed or on my sofa. But please stop bringing women back.’
Picasso smiled. ‘You are jealous.’
Michael smiled. ‘Not at all. It is inconvenient to come back and find my bed occupied.’
Picasso seemed to swell and darken like clouds. ‘Do not threaten me.’
‘How have I threatened you? I have asked you to keep strangers out of my bed.’
Picasso said, ‘You will make me angry.’
‘Why? Because I ask for good behaviour?’
‘Yes. It is bo
urgeois.’
‘Oh please. It would be bourgeois to sit by helplessly while you turn me out of my own house. If you want to make a mess and fill a flat with whores, go find one of your own.’
Picasso finished keying in with a musical flourish. ‘I will do so.’ He turned and challenged Michael, his jaw thrust out.
‘Good,’ said Michael.
That night Picasso noisily made up a bed downstairs. For the first time in months, Michael slept in his own bed alone. He felt the separation, like scar tissue from his sternum down to the top of his penis. It’s over, he realized. It really is over. There was sadness like a story ending, and another sensation that was like fear.
Trepidation we’ll call it. Unease. Michael knew that it was a necessary unease. It was the unease you feel when you lose a tooth, or change jobs. It was the unease of learning.
I love you, Michael accepted, and it will have to end. He wept one long slow hot unwilling tear, and that was all.
In the morning Michael went downstairs and Picasso was making coffee. He looked smaller. He turned and smiled and said good morning and pushed an empty cup in Michael’s direction.
‘You have set me free, haven’t you?’ Picasso said.
‘Yes.’
‘You will let me live.’
Michael nodded. Picasso chuckled and gave his head a funny shake. ‘You have become tired of me, but you don’t threaten me. That is good,’ he said. ‘It is economical.’ He made a fist to emphasize the last word.
Michael allowed himself to be drawn. ‘Economical how?’
‘Toh!’ said Picasso and spread his hands out over the self-evident, empty table. ‘One should never give everything. It is wasteful. It tries too hard.’
His eyes said: I am going to live. I am going to live without conditions.
Two weeks later Picasso stood at night on the doorstep. He had a new leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a shaved bristly head and a stud earring. He had started to sell pictures; his agent had found him a flat. He was in an expansive mood.
‘I am going to live!’ he said, rocking on his heels.