Die for Her A Die for Me Novella

thinking about the linear quality of one of his early self-portraits lately—which has suspicious similarities to one of my own works from that year. And truth be told, I wouldn’t mind inspecting it up close.
    Within minutes we are inside the museum, standing in front of one of Pablo’s Analytical Cubist café-table-with-newspaper-and-bottle still lifes.
    “It just looks like one big mess to me,” says Ambrose.
    “No, see, he takes each individual item—the newspaper, the bottle, the glass”—I point each one out—“flattens them, and then rearranges those two-dimensional forms on the canvas. It’s genius, really, but the point is it wasn’t his idea. It was Braque’s. And the two of them got into this how-Cubist-can-we-get? competition until you’ve got canvases full of barely recognizable splinters of objects. But did Pablo give Georges credit for coming up with the idea in the first place? Of course not. Because he was a narcissistic megalomaniac.”
    “Don’t look,” says Vincent.
    “What do you mean, don’t look? The more you look the more you’ll see how I’m totally right and . . .”
    “No, don’t look behind us,” he says.
    So of course I do. And there she is: Not-Quite-As-Sad Girl, sitting there spaced out in front of one of Pablo’s abstracts. I can’t believe it.
    No, actually, I can. “What an incredible coincidence, Ambrose,” I murmur, “that at the same moment you propose a lesson in Cubism, Vincent’s obsession is sitting right here in the Picasso Museum. Nice one.”
    I hear Ambrose chuckle, and know he set the whole thing up. “This is not being helpful , Ambrose,” I growl. “It’s being hurtful .”
    Vincent doesn’t seem to think so , he replies.
    I turn to Vincent. “Don’t go talk to her. I’m warning you. This is the last thing you need. You’re too into her to make it a one-night stand, and having a mortal girlfriend is the worst thing that you could do. Just pretend you didn’t see her, and let’s walk. Look, she’s looking down. She won’t even see you.”
    Vincent just stands there like he’s hypnotized or something.
    “I am leaving in five seconds, Vince, and you are coming with me. Four. Three. Two. You’re on your own, dude.” I book it out of there. I don’t want to stay to watch this train wreck happen.
    I feel Ambrose’s presence nearby, keeping up with me. “Just a warning,” I tell him. “I’ll get you back for this next time you ask me to come with you volant to the racetrack. It’ll be the biggest losing streak of your life, man.”
    Vincent could use a little distraction , Ambrose says. He hasn’t gone out with a girl for years.
    “I think you will agree that there’s a difference between a girl and that girl . As in Vincent’s so obsessed with her already that he’s going to fall. Hard. And then we have Charles Mach Two on our hands. Resentful for what he is, and making all the rest of us suffer for it with his raging attitude.”
    But Geneviève . . . Ambrose begins.
    “Geneviève was already married to a human when she died and animated. That’s a totally different case. Speaking of, are you still pining away for her, waiting for Philippe to die?”
    Hey, I like Philippe , Ambrose rebuts. He’s good to Geneviève.
    “But you still want him to die.”
    It’s not that I want him to die this very instant. It’s just that he’s got to pass away sometime soon. The guy is ancient. I just need to be ready when it happens.
    “That’s twisted,” I say. A security guard watches me cautiously as I “talk to myself” while exiting the museum. Probably thinks I’m some kind of nutcase, come to splash paint all over Pablo’s canvases. Not that it wouldn’t be an improvement for some of them.

FIVE
    I SCRAPE THE OILS ONTO MY PALETTE: A MIX OF Zinc Buff and Montserrat Orange for her slightly tanned skin, Vandyke Brown for her long, thick hair, Venetian Red for her succulent lips, and Perylene Black for eyes like oceans.
    Valérie lies on my antique green couch, wearing nothing but what she was born in. I stand ten feet away, near the window of my studio, letting the natural light illuminate my canvas.
    I’m painting Valérie as a reclining nude, Modigliani-style. I miss the guy, even though he was obnoxious. Always drunk or high and picking fights. Doing outrageous things so that no one would notice the fact that he was dying of tuberculosis and avoid him like . . . well, like the plague.
    There was that time