Drowning Lessons by Peter Selgin Page B

the stars that begin to appear just thenin the sky. We drive through the night with no words from her. In our cut-rate motel room the next morning we force her to sit for us next to a bowl of bananas: the least she can do, the gumpopping twit. Picasso titles his portrait
Still Life with Virgin
. Though I daresay mine is the better likeness, our subject is equally untaken with both our efforts. “They don’t look a thing like me!” she squawks.
    â€œDon’t worry,” Picasso and I chime. “They will.”
    Touched with an artist’s brute fearlessness, I guide our considerably more powerful vehicle to Bogotá, where we drop Dolores off with the proper authorities, who assure us that they know just what to do with her.
    From there all roads lead to glory, or close enough. We are a brush loaded with pigment, sweeping across a primed, gessoed landscape, the world our blank canvas. All boundaries have been erased, all outlines eradicated. Wherever we go we spill color; we spew, splatter, and scumble it, improvising subject and form as we please — improvising but also obscuring, demolishing them. Is there a Virgin of the Andes? Who
cares
. If we put her on paper, there she is. If not, not.
    From here on, what we say — or paint — goes.
    Plaza des Armas, Cuzco, Peru. The fountain sprays as high as the budding trees. We arrived in time for the annual art fair, with Pablo in sunglasses and sombrero, me in a green-visored boating cap. We’ve nabbed an excellent spot, in the shade of the triumphal arch. Thus we intend to raise gasoline money for our journey back north.
    So far, the painter of
Three Musicians, The Weeping Woman,
and a thousand etchings of bulls hasn’t sold one of what he callshis “Topolino Landscapes.” I, on the other hand, former shoe salesman and child of a failed, insomniac cartoonist, have sold twelve.
    Picasso’s pissed.
    â€œBeginner’s luck,” he says.

SAWDUST
    MR. BULFAMANTE SMELLED like oil of wintergreen. I swear he greased back his gray curls with the stuff. He had a chunky head and cauliflower ears and carried a ball-peen hammer everywhere, as if it were the key to unlock his days. That hammer: a dainty object of brass, so small it disappeared inside his fist. He’d been a boxer in the French navy, he said, and carried his shoulders scrunched high, as if warding off imaginary blows to his ears.
    On weekends starting the summer before my junior year of high school and continuing through winter break, I worked for Mr. Bulfamante sanding floors: worst job in the world. Most of the floors we sanded were in new houses, their Sheetrocked walls unpainted, no electricity, no water. We drank and washed our hands from a two-gallon water keg Mr. Bulfamante kept in the back of the van, next to the drums of varnish and sealer.
    Mr. Bulfamante liked me to call him Sugar, as in Sugar Ray Leonard or Sugar Ray Robinson, one of those sweetly named boxers. At dawn he would pick me up in his white Ford Econolinevan. The van was covered with varnish: dripping down door panels and across windows, staining upholstery, stamping blurry brown thumbprints on the hood, streaking like comets across the windshield. The radio dials were all yellow and sticky. Seeing me standing at the end of the driveway holding my lunch bag, Sugar would flash a gap-toothed smile, nod his big, square head, and mouth the words,
Ya bum!
through the windshield, which had a big crack in it. Sugar called everyone a bum.
    Before he’d let me into his van, Sugar would make sure that I’d brought my thermos full of bouillon. Sugar insisted on hot bouillon as the only suitable beverage for floor sanders and boxers, summer and winter. Not lemonade or iced tea or coffee or hot chocolate. Bouillon. And not chicken bouillon, either. Beef. Chicken was for fruitcakes. Also the bouillon couldn’t be made from those little cubes, none of that Herb-Ox or Knorr Swiss crap. It had to