The Last Nude (14 page)

After botching several yards of muslin in the weeks that followed, I abandoned my idea of copying Theresa’s dress from memory: it was a knit, not a weave; who was I fooling? I turned instead to a fashion magazine pattern for a similar cut—and soon I had a new dress. Gin was appalled when I returned so much of Hervé’s money, but Hervé was charmed, and demanded we go out dancing the first night he saw me in my lucky dress.

Hervé was an excellent dancer, and thanks to him I became a good one. I did not enjoy the all-too-brief but all-too-frequent bouts of sex he preferred, nor did I enjoy performing the aria of gratitude he liked to hear every single time he got on top of me for a minute and a half. But I did like dancing with him. I liked his escutcheon-shaped face and his minky-thick hair. I liked how devoted he was to his children. I liked that he paid for more French classes, and I was touched by the simple cockiness with which he gave me pretty things. I didn’t find out until I sold them, but the pearls he bought me were real. I wish I’d thanked him more.

I hadn’t simply fallen in with Hervé, nor had I been handed to him like a bribe. It was on this wave of well-being that I labored over a letter in Italian to my Zia Rina, telling her I was alive and safe in Paris, and that I missed her. I was engaged to a nice man who took good care of me, and did she think I should contact my mother?

I guess I didn’t lie so well about being engaged. No sooner had I received a letter from my aunt saying that my mother wanted nothing to do with me than I also received one from my mother herself, saying the same.
You brought shame on our family, you little whore,
my mother’s letter said. The day I got her letter, I took it to Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, lit a candle, and tried to pray. I loved the gloomy skylit domes of that little church, the milky-glass windows bordered in blue, forlorn above the baroque bric-a-brac. But when I looked up at the carved mild face of Mary, I knew she would have stayed on that Alia-bound boat like a good girl.
Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum:
we’d sung that song in school. I knew she would have never run away with my father the way my mother once had. My mother and I were two of a kind, and our bitterness lay beyond the light of Mary’s slim taper. I was too ashamed to write to my friends. I haven’t been inside that church since.

My anger at my mother turned me against Hervé. I began to hate acting like I was having a good time when I wasn’t. He had a wife and two children under the age of three, and he was stinting them for my sake. And for what? That March, when Gin was between boyfriends, I picked a fight with Hervé and she and I got the locks changed. From then until I met Tamara in July, I made do by selling Hervé’s gifts, and each time I had to sell another, I’d delay it by finding a man in a hotel. My mother would have said I’d proved her right, but it felt more honest than pretending I was in love. All I wanted, after eight months of laughing and drinking with strangers whose language I spoke poorly, was to be left to myself for days on end.

Gin and I had eaten extravagantly when we’d had someone else to buy our dinners, and my French classes had made the cold days hurry by. The spring months after I broke with Hervé, however, trying not to leave home or spend money, passed slowly: I’ll never forget shivering in the damp with Gin when the radiators went off. We’d slowly eat the tangerines I got by smiling at the fruit man, Gin peeling hers on the couch in the fur stole Yann had bought her, me eating mine section by section during one of my epic baths: the hot water, at least, was free. When the radiators clanked back on, they steamed us open like letters. We wafted around barefoot in our slips and fixed each other little summer cocktails. I made Gin her rose-colored tunic that season, and a sundress too. I was happier than I’d been since Baxter Street.

Tamara made me happier still, and made me anxious about losing my happiness. The day she told me she wouldn’t need me for a week, I went home shaky. I looked at the book I’d borrowed from Sylvia’s, and I couldn’t concentrate. I had thought
Washington Square
would be about Washington Square, at least a little.

 

 

 

The next morning, Gin found me in the kitchen, bent over
Paris Vogue.
“Rafaela, it’s a fashion magazine; it’s not Greek. What are you doing?”

“There’s this pattern for something I want to make for Tamara. I couldn’t sleep last night.” She leaned in to give me a
bisou
and I tongue-kissed her by mistake. We yelped simultaneously, recoiling. “I’m so sorry.”

“Something on your mind?” she teased.

“I’m just distracted.”

“Obviously. Don’t you have to go to work?”

“She’s away.”

“Wait,” she said, buttoning up her Belle Jardinière uniform. “You want to spend the money
she
gave you to make something for her? Isn’t that like not getting paid?”

“I have enough money,” I protested. I had plenty, in fact. The modeling money was coming in so thick and fast, I had recently bought a Singer Electric with the wheezy old grandfather’s five hundred francs.

“If you say so,” Gin said. She squinted. “Are you in love with her?”

“What? No!” I snorted.

“You said you liked sleeping with her. ‘I like it when she uses her fingers and her mouth at the same time,’” she mimicked.

“Shut up!” I said, mortified.

“And now look at you.” Gin gestured toward the magazine. “How much proof do you need?”

“But I’m not in love with her,” I insisted, crossing my arms. Something in her voice made me want to argue with her. “Because why? What would you say if I were?”

“Well, you’re both girls,” Gin said dubiously.

“So? I wouldn’t be the only one.” I sorted through the examples I had badgered Tamara and Anson to give me until I found the ones that would impress Gin the most. “Georgette Leblanc has a woman lover,” I said, naming one of her favorite French singers. And before Gin could reply, I thought of two nightclubs where she’d been angling for gigs, and named the manager of each. “Suzy Solidor. Bricktop, too.”

“Damn,” said Gin. “So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong.” She looked at me as if thinking something over. “Well, that explains why you haven’t had a boyfriend since Hervé. You like girls. How do you say that in Italian?”

“I don’t like
girls.
I like Tamara.”

“Suit yourself,” Gin said. “I know you wouldn’t try to kiss me on purpose, so I don’t care.” We both suddenly started laughing. “Yann,” Gin burst out. “
Che pazzo.
Well, have fun with your dress, there,” she said. “And try not to get arrested for kissing any lampposts out on the street.”

 

 

 

After Gin left, I walked to Le Sentier and returned to Silovic et Fils, listening with my hands for the texture that seemed most Tamara’s. I found a lustrous charmeuse in a pink so cool it almost shaded into purple: her skin would look all the more golden against it. I couldn’t open a fashion magazine that season without reading about Madeleine Vionnet’s new way of cutting fabric,
en biais
, and more often than not her sleek, clinging gowns were cut from silks like the one I fingered. In order to cut on the diagonal, I read, Vionnet ordered her fabrics two meters wider than all the other couturiers. I had never been tempted to try it myself: so much waste seemed crazy. But the extravagant, ridiculous way I felt about Tamara seemed crazy too. Maybe Gin was right. So, was this what she felt for Daniel? When I palmed the silk my body jumped inside with longing.

I leaned against the display table to right myself, and looked up to see Anya Silovic behind the counter, napping at a sewing machine with a baby tied to her back. She yawned, pawing back her heavy hair: I looked down, embarrassed. Here I was, languishing with desire, and there she was, with so many better reasons to complain. I felt confused, too. Only fourteen months earlier I had beaten at the ship’s door to escape back to my Zia Rina’s on Baxter Street, back to a life very like the one that Anya had, and now here I stood in my fur-collared coat, pitying her. I remembered my mother’s letter. I felt very far from home. I seized on the cool pink silk the way I had seized on Tamara herself. Slippery and fragile, it would require hand-sewing, which was just what I needed to steady me. I knew then that I would survive Tamara’s week in London, that the hours bent over my thimble would become home for me, the way the hours I spent on her gray velvet couch,
seen
, had become home. I knew if I made something ambitious, the time would go by before I even finished sewing. Half a bolt remained of the charmeuse: I bought it all.

When Tamara opened her door a week later, she kissed me on the mouth. I wobbled in her arms, almost falling. “I missed you, darling,” she said. “I brought you toffee. And scotch.” Seffa jumped up to lick my face, and for once I let him. She’d missed me. I inhaled for what felt like the first time in days.

 

 

 

That morning, after we finished flouting her rule about no play before work, I noticed a sheet over the new
Rafaela
, carefully tented so as not to touch the oil colors
.
I asked about it. “I let my friend d’Afflitto stay in the apartment while I was gone,” Tamara explained, pointing to a pair of gentleman’s valises I hadn’t noticed in the hallway. “But I did not want him to see the painting.”

“D’Afflitto?” I asked uneasily.

“The Marquis d’Afflitto. He is from a fine old family in Amalfi, but his boyfriend is here in Paris. They are having a stupid quarrel, so I thought I would do him a favor.”

His
boyfriend
, I thought, relaxing. “He has no place to stay?” It was funny to think of a marquis sleeping in a friend’s apartment, like me sleeping in the coatroom of the Ritz.

“He likes to play the big spender, but the truth is, his father keeps him on a tight leash,” Tamara said. “Not that the old man is any angel himself. I think he just wants to have some money left over for his new wife when he dies. When his first wife passed away, he married her twenty-year-old
nurse
,” she added. Tamara flipped through the paintings that leaned against the wall until she found one to show me. “My friend,” she explained, pointing at a pouting dandy in a rakishly tilted hat, his bow tie coming undone. He leaned against the railing of a staircase, feeling for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. He
did
look like the kind of
vitellone
who would spend his way through Papa’s money unless he were kept in check. Once Tamara and I settled into work, I didn’t give him a second thought, not even when I heard a key in the door: I assumed it was Jeanne, the housekeeper, popping in to drop off the morning’s marketing. Because Jeanne tended to stay out of the salon when I posed, I did not rush to clothe myself, not until a stylish young man walked into the room, hat in hand, his lips as unctuously pink as those in the portrait I’d just seen, his expression as dissolute.
“Mon Dieu!”
he said, mock surprise only half concealing real embarrassment.
“Pardon, Mesdames.”
With that, he took an enormous white peony of a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, lifted it like a sheet, and tossed it over his whole head. As I pulled on the green robe, amused, Tamara crossed the room, teasing her friend in English for my sake. “There is this thing,
chéri,
they call a
doorbell
? You
ring
it?”

“I’m sorry, Tamara,” he said, pulling off his handkerchief, and as they made their
bisous
, I noticed that Tamara had quickly covered the new
Rafaela
back up again. When she introduced us, the marquis made an affected little bow. “I hear Tamara’s pinned her hopes on you for the Salon,” he said in English.

“I have my fingers crossed for her,” I said. I braced myself for him to ask how Tamara and I had met, or what I did for a living.

He didn’t ask. “If the portrait does you justice, her hopes are well founded,” he said instead, kissing his fingertips before turning to Tamara to surrender her keys.

“Did you two patch things up?” she asked him.

“Not well,” he said philosophically. “We’ll see.”

“How is your family? How is the nurse?”

“My brother, Aldo, came through town last week. He’s well,” he said. “But the nurse?” He offered a wicked smile. “Aldo told me Papà got a Steinach operation to please her.”

Tamara giggled. “
La vasectomie
, does it really . . . ?”

“Everyone says so. My father even says so. But my brother heard them in the next room, and the verdict,
Mesdames
?” He made a wilting gesture. “Only in Papà’s mind, poor thing. And the saddest thing is, that surgery was
not
cheap.”

“You scandalize me!”

“I live to scandalize you, Tamara,” he gloated. “Well, I have a friend in a little car outside,” he said. “Jean Cocteau’s invited me to a party tonight, if you’d like to go,
chérie.
There ought to be a whole smorgasbord of pretty young things there.”

I willed Tamara to look up at me briefly, apologetically, as if to say she already had a pretty young thing of her own, thank you, but she did not. Instead she chuckled. “Surely you include yourself, no?”

“Darling, you flatter me. You just aren’t taut and dewy at thirty the way you are at nineteen.”

“At least your Steinach years are still a long way off,” Tamara consoled him. They agreed to meet for dinner, and he vanished with his suitcases.

I liked d’Afflitto’s combination of extravagance and extreme tact, I thought, listening to the car ferry him away. “You really didn’t want him to see the painting,” I noted, surprised. “Isn’t he your friend?”

“You see, with the first
Belle
, I knew it was for all the world to see at the Salon. If, of course, I get in,” she explained. “But this one? It is not a
secret
, exactly
.
Kizette has seen it, and Jeanne, of course. But it seems
private
, no?” she said. “Ours.”