“Oh, come now, Mademoiselle Humbert. There is nothing like the present! In Paris, one must seize opportunity. Pablo is a master at that. Tell them, Pablo. Tell them about being a master!”
“Stop it, Fernande,” he groaned in response.
“Con calma, mi amigo,” said Germaine’s husband. Eva knew even without understanding Spanish that Picasso’s friend was urging him not to make a scene, which the group had clearly been privy to more than once before.
“Spoilsport,” Fernande muttered beneath her breath.
“You mustn’t always bait him like that,” Germaine urged her friend, and suddenly Eva wished to be anywhere but here.
It all felt so exceedingly awkward. Louis tightened his fingers around Eva’s arm. Both of them could feel a battle brewing.
“Shall we not talk of how he baits me?” Fernande whispered back urgently.
“Bait you? I have given you everything you have ever asked for!” Picasso shouted, seemingly unleashed as he sped up to walk beside her.
“Let’s calm down, everyone, before this gets out of hand,” Ramón suggested, trying to ease the tension between them. “I think we are all in need of a drink.”
“Brilliant idea,” said Apollinaire.
“I’d prefer opium,” Fernande said in a kittenish mewl.
“You know perfectly well that is not going to happen again.”
“Don’t be too sure what is going to happen with me, Pablo,” Fernande said.
“I could say the same to you, mi corazón,” he shot back.
Instead of their apartment, they settled for la Closerie des Lilas on the boulevard du Montparnasse, a stylish café crowded most nights with young intellectuals. They collected at the long mahogany bar, where a group of men in white tie and tails, and women in elegant gowns, were enjoying a drink. They were likely going to or coming from the Opéra de Paris.
Picasso leaned in toward Eva. “I began the painting of you after you left,” he said in a low tone, breaking the din of animated conversation and the clatter of dishes around them.
“You are wasting your time,” Eva replied, refusing to look at him.
“Oh, I never do that,” he countered, biting back a smile as he glanced around. “Did you like the book?”
Fernande was openly flirting with Louis now, and she seemed to Eva to be rather drunk already. “Sylvette is using it as a doorstop.”
“Ah, Sylvette.”
“Have you seduced her, as well?” Eva asked baitingly just as Apollinaire approach them.
“I’m told you like my work,” he said affably as he barged between them as everyone was doing with one another in the crowd.
“I do.”
“Any poem in particular?”
“‘We knew very well that we were damned, / But hope of love along the way / Made both of us think / Of what the Gypsy did prophesy.’ That one has always spoken to me the most.”
Eva saw a spark of jealousy flare in Picasso’s eyes and she reveled in it.
“You memorized it?”
“Several of them, actually. ‘I have picked this sprig of heather. / Autumn has ended, you do remember. / Never on this earth shall we meet again. / Scent of time, sprig of heather / Remember always, I wait for you forever.’”
“I’m duly impressed, mademoiselle.”
“Apo, go see if our table is ready yet,” Picasso grumbled with an authoritative air. He seemed to be completely ignoring Fernande, and what was happening between her and Louis, half a bar’s length away.
“I must see you again. You must allow me to paint you.”
“Sit for you, like last time? Oh, I think not.”
“Was it really so bad between us, Mademoiselle Gouel?” Picasso pressed as he leaned in close enough that she could feel the warm, primal attraction between them, and his breath near her throat.
Eva drew up her wineglass and took a sip. When she realized her hand was shaking, she slowly set the glass back down on the bar, hoping he had not seen it.
“I certainly didn’t know you were living with someone,” she said.
“And I didn’t know you were such an innocent to the ways of the world. So we each have had the other at a disadvantage.”
She never expected him to be so clever, or so disarming—particularly now in a crowd of people in which his lover was mere steps away. Eva might be out of her league with him but she was just angry enough not to submit to his artful ploys again.
“Forgive me, I don’t mean to toy with you,” Picasso said as he trapped her fingers in his own beneath the bar. “Only say you’ll allow me to see you again.”
“And Madame Picasso?”
“Fernande has a new lover, as it turns out, a strapping young German boy. My friends think I don’t know. They are trying to protect me so that I will keep painting. Anything to keep the peace, and keep the money rolling in. But I know.”
“It is all just too dangerous for me,” Eva shook her head. “I really cannot get caught up into this.”
“Alas, it seems to me, mi belleza, that you already are.”
When their table was finally ready, Apollinaire insisted that Eva sit beside him so that they might speak further of poetry and the poets she liked. Then, in turn, he would reveal how he had come to write some of his own intentionally cryptic, often gritty, verses. It was such a joy, he said, to speak to anyone who respected the art. Picasso sat across from her at the table between Germaine and Ramón. Throughout dinner, in spite of their distance, Picasso’s gaze never strayed far from Eva. She could feel it even as Apollinaire chattered on about poetry and drugs.
“Do you not ever write about love?” she asked as they were served a course of terrine.
“I’ve never been in love. Only lust.” He sighed. “And I make a point only to write what I know.”
“Seems prudent. I don’t think I have been, either.” Eva chuckled, knowing she hadn’t.
“So Fernande tells me you, too, are from Poland, Mademoiselle Humbert?”
“My parents met there. My father is French, my mother Polish. We lived there only when I was a small child, until my father brought us all back to live in France.”
He really was surprisingly easy to talk with for someone whose work she had so long admired. “My real name is Eva Gouel, but I’m putting it aside for now to see what else is out there for a Parisian girl who goes by the name Marcelle Humbert.”
“Ah, yes. That is much more Parisian. Not clearly quite so authentic, though, for your lovely Polish smile. I’m really the very unpoetic Wilhelm Kostrowicki, but, as a fellow Pole, I will trust you not to spread that around.” He chuckled.
“Fernande told me she, too, has called herself many different things here in the city.”
“Including Madame Picasso.”
“You don’t approve of her calling herself that?” Eva asked.
“I wouldn’t dare say so if I didn’t. Fernande Olivier is a force with which to be reckoned. Certainly not one to be crossed.”
And into the mix suddenly came Fernande’s lovely voice from across the table. She was telling Louis that she had come up with a name for him and that after tonight he must be known in Paris as Marcoussis. That, she decreed, was a wonderfully