Musée Picasso

Pale Sacré-Coeur floats above Montmartre,and I follow its bulbous dome to where Picasso wandered,up one hill, down another, always leading

to the same claustrophobic streets, lines of shopsselling art for tourists. It stays romanticeven as I try to keep it real. I can't help but watch

for his stubby silhouette at the tops of stairwaysor his mad glare as he rushes through Abbesses.In his museum in the Marais, there are so many paintings—

so many ladies. At the beginning,they're recognizable, like Olga with her bobbed hairand no-one-owns-me eyes, who he slowly,

as with them all, carves to pieces—a collection of jagged shapes and ghoul faces.By the time Paulo is born, postrevolutionary Russia

starves and the marriage falls apart. Olgahasn't seen her family in years, and she'll neversee them again. Blocked Pablo seeks

a new darling to muse him. Olga waitswith a pit in her gut for letters from Nizhyn.Her father and brothers are dead; her mother

and sister have fled to Georgia. Picasso, though,son of a bitches his way to masterpieces likeThe Three Dancers, Le Rêve, and Girl before

a Mirror. When Franco's Nazi bombs scorchand mangle Spain, Picasso tumbles from expat to exile.Can't you see him curled up on a bed

in his apartment, the sparkle of the chandeliers,rue la Boétie's ruckus filling his ears.He knows he can be evicted home any moment,

and he'd surely disappear the minute he steppedfrom the train. The French never send him back(he's famous after all). He never divorces Olga, either.

She'd get half of everything if he did,which is French law. She spends her last yearson a beach in Cannes soaking her brokenness

in the surf. Some of the blush returns to her face,and most of her pieces are back in the right place,reassembled into something like the original whole.