Starring Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Ernest Hemingway, this is the first story in “Paint it Blue,” a collection of creative stories about artists.

In the Blue House

It can’t be too late. This is a meeting so compelling and mandatory that all rules, technicalities, and encumbrances must be ignored. It doesn’t matter they are dead. It doesn’t matter they never knew each other. It doesn’t matter they were married. It matters only that the proper time be chosen, a common instant that allows both to be decently pubescent and artistically aware. It must as well be long before dissipation and obscene fate ravaged their bodies and eviscerated their souls. The moment, indeed, must be entirely propitious when Papa comes to Frida’s house.

It’s a blue house, and Frida was born there and she will die there. She will always be there. It’s her house and she’s searching for another woman who’s been sleeping with Diego. The intruder’s healthy and hot and new, and Diego’s been pounding her with three hundred passionate pounds, and every thrust fractures Frida’s bones. But Frida can’t find her. The other woman is not in the blue house. She’s must be somewhere with Diego right now, and Frida can hear everything and wants to kill them both. Maybe more she wants Diego to kill her. She wants him to stab her into oblivion. She certainly wants something. She must absolutely have something, but it might not be revenge or the oblivion of alcohol and drugs, which won’t suppress her pain.

No, there must be something else. There must be something better. There must be something to help her forget all this, and it must relieve her right away. She doesn’t know what it could be. She can’t imagine how to escape. She doesn’t know how to get out of the Blue Prison. But today she does not need to. Today Papa is standing at the door, knocking. The servants are not there. Frida is alone, wearing a Tehuana dress long to the floor. She opens the door and looks at Papa. He is strong and brown and his mustache makes him look like Gable. The poet MacLeish has said oxygen is sucked from a room when Papa enters. He’s in the Blue House and Frida sighs.

She knows she can have him. She can have almost any man or woman she wants, for awhile. Language is certainly not a problem. Papa speaks Spanish. Frida speaks English. Papa’s more Latin than Frida feels Anglo. They talk Spanish, and are funny and flirtatious in the relaxed Latin way. Frida is delighted. So is Papa. This is good for him, too. He is tired of his second wife. He doesn’t want her anymore just as he had not wanted his first wife anymore. He has also gotten tired of his first blond girlfriend, a Grace Kelly twenty years before the real one. Actually, Papa is not so much tired of the blonde. He is tired she’s so beautiful and rich he can’t have her. He can have her sometimes, but he can’t really have her. He doesn’t need her. Frida is standing before him in her Tehuana dress.

Papa understands painters. He knows Picasso and Miró, and he knows about Diego. But he doesn’t know Frida. She shows him her work, the self-portraits of a queen, a queen covered with tears and blood and scars, surrounded by fetuses and bones and death, and she has an eye in her forehead, and in the eye there is Diego, and Diego will always be at the center of her, but right now, today, Papa is there, and there are no tears in Frida’s eyes.

She is looking at Papa. She has read his short stories in English and senses he is the best young American writer ever. He is a gringo writer but his canvas is the world. He knows what he is but can’t imagine that is more than he ever again will be. Frida, even after studying her masterpieces, is not sure what she is. Papa tells her. He tells her: “Frida, you are.”

Then he kisses her. He is thankful he’s had some practice with the blonde, his first beautiful woman. That makes this easier and better. He doesn’t have to worry Frida is too good for him. He feels great embracing her. She sticks her tongue in his mouth, and he pushes himself hard against her Tehuana dress and sucks on her hot face and neck. She’s sighing and pulling at the shirt on his big shoulders. He picks her up and asks where. She points, and he carries her into the bedroom and sets her on her feet, reaching for the back of her Tehuana dress.

“Espera,” she says. “My right leg. You should know. I had polio. And the trolley. It hit the bus I was on. I’m not what you think.”

He doesn’t care. Trotsky won’t either. No sane man would. Frida is taking off her Tehuana dress. Papa grabs his belt and she helps him and they embrace again then fall onto the bed and soon Frida’s aroused and saying sweet things and Papa’s sweaty and she’s shouting now and he loves that and at the end exclaims: “Frida.”

“Gracias,” she says.

This is what Papa needs, too. It’s difficult trying to be not only what he is, but what he says he is. He often says he’s brave and tough and graceful, in addition to the real stuff, and all that is hard to maintain. Papa’s father shot himself a decade earlier, and his brother is also going to kill himself and so are a sister and granddaughter, and one of his sons will crave to be a woman. Papa often talks about suicide and knows he’ll someday have to shoot himself unless someone shoots him first. That’s why he loves war. He doesn’t want to be a real soldier and have to be there all the time. He wants to go there when he needs it, and be shot at when he wants it. Papa doesn’t realize Frida knows more about her death than he does his. During the Great War only his wounded leg was at stake. In a smashed bus when she was eighteen, the naked and bloody Frida was considered good as dead.

“Listen,” she says.

“What?”

“At the front door.”

“Who?”

“Diego. You’ve got to get out or he’ll kill you.”

Papa lumbers up and puts on his pants.

“Apúrate. Diego always carries a gun.”

Papa doesn’t have any of his guns so crouches next to the wall on the side the door could swing.

Big footsteps come down the hall.

“Go out the window.”

“Too late.”

“Frida, are you in there?”

“Sí, Diego. Un minutico.”

The door flies open and Diego, grinning in a huge face, storms in to see his wife sitting on the bed, holding a sheet with both hands against her neck.

“Frida,” he shouts, and instinctively wheels around.

Now, the fat man, who as a fat youth fought anyone who challenged him, stands looking at a bare-chested man in his bedroom. Then he charges Papa. Rather than sidestepping and attacking obliquely, as one would a bull, Papa steps fast forward and nails Diego with a right cross to the jaw. Diego staggers but keeps lumbering and grabs him by the throat. Papa thrusts his hands underneath to Diego’s neck but can’t get a good grip. Diego has a very strong grip, and forces Papa back against the wall. He feels his neck burn. Diego snarls and squeezes harder until Papa fires a left hook over Diego’s arms and nails his right jaw, breaking the grip. Then Papa throws a right and a left to the huge stomach of Diego, who gasps but continues to grapple, and both men roll to the floor. Papa is quicker and bounds over on top and shoves his right palm into Diego’s face and begins firing short left hooks, landing most until he shrieks.

“Out,” Frida demands, standing nude above them, holding a pallet knife. “Get out of our house.”

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