Free Paint It Black by Janet Fitch Page A

and in the foreground, a little ballerina at a table alone.
    “But where’s her lover?” she asked him. “You can’t let her be there all on her own. Look at her. Look how sad she is.”
    “He’s coming. He’s picking her some violets to pin to her coat.”
    “Well, he better get there, before she leaves with the strong man.”
    He laughed easily, the flash of those big white teeth. He quickly sketched himself in, an artist in a floppy tie, uncombed hair long in the front, a rumpled jacket, a sketchpad before him on the table, a bottle of wine and a squat glass.
    He mixed acrylic paints in Dixie cups, and surprised her by giving her a brush. “Do that with the red,” he said, pointing to the area on which he was sketching paintings in frames. “You’re in this now.”
    So they painted side by side, listening to Louis Armstrong,
Le Jazz Hot.
Django Reinhardt playing his jazzy Gypsy guitar. Piaf and her heartbroken streets. Michael painted the hard parts and she did the easy ones: the wall, the basic shapes, silhouettes, bentwood chairs, the underpainting of the figures in the foreground, while he did the faces and clothing, the little pictures with which the artists had paid for their drinks when they were broke. Just a few strokes, and there was a Picasso—a sad clown and his girlfriend huddled over their drinks. The black candle trees of Van Gogh. The Sacré-Coeur. She had seen these pictures before in the art books where she’d searched out new ideas for poses, but now they were
our Picasso, our Van Gogh.
Every day they got up and painted some more, went for walks, made love. Who knew where Montmartre ended and Echo Park began? Each colored the other, like watercolors, bleeding.
    How could he not remember? It was like not remembering his name, like forgetting the color of the sky. She remembered everything, everything. How they carried the last of the boxes down from the street and collapsed on the enormous couch that someone had managed to haul down there. The way the light streaked the wide planks of the floor and filled the windows with trees. Michael stretching out his lanky shoulders in his peculiar gesture, wedging his wrist behind the joint and pressing the whole arm forward, first one and then the other, as he surveyed the box-filled room, the rough posts that held up the ceiling. Then he slipped his arm around her waist, pressing his head to hers. She loved that best, even more than fucking. She could never have imagined such a little thing could fill her with such indescribable sweetness, she felt too small to contain it all. She could feel it even now, the hardness of his head, the smell of his sweat, like a liquor, the way the view shimmered in the summer light, the long silvery eucalyptus leaves that blew across the window like a girl’s hair. She’d never lived in a place with a view before, like a tree house. She felt like she could finally breathe. As if there had been a big black frog sitting on her chest as long as she could remember, and now it was gone.
    Well, it was back now. Squatting there like a sandbag full of buckshot. Out in the living room, the fucking phone was ringing. “Piss off,” she told it. There was no one here answering to a name. No more names, no more numbers. But on the bedroom walls, Montmartre was still there. Their room over the café, the cobblestone street that sloped down to the warren of artists’ studios at the Bateau-Lavoir. Their greengrocer and the charcuterie man. The shadow theater of M. Rivière. All so clear. And the lovers who lived there, Blaise and little Jeanne, Picasso and Fernande, Toulouse-Lautrec and Suzanne Valadon. How many evenings had they sat up in this bed, drinking wine, her wearing only the black stockings that drove him crazy, as he read poems to her. Valéry in French—
ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes
. . .
    The tombs. Among the tombs, Christ, she’d never thought about