The Last Nude (20 page)

I let the two of them force their way through the crowd ahead of me to the bedroom. I recalled from the exhibition that Romana had had a flirty, girlish charm that she could turn on and off at will. She might have claimed at the Salon to be one of the only women left in Paris who slept with men, but that didn’t stop her from sparkling at Tamara’s party as she turned, often, to gaze up at her companion. “How long have you known Tamara?”

“We haven’t met. I came with friends,” the
donna-uomo
said tersely. Though she did not smile, her teeth appeared, sudden and white. When she and Romana stood together in front of Tamara’s portrait of the mannish Duchesse de la Salle, I realized that the only trace I could see of Romana, the art school dropout who had startled me with her eloquence, was the stubborn jaw she shared with her mother. I realized, too, that the woman in the suit pretending not to enjoy Romana’s attention must be the athlete Violette Morris.

Vi Morris, as the newspapers called her (Vi rhyming with
tree,
not
lie),
thrust a hand in a pocket and rested her other arm on the heap of coats on Tamara’s bed, mirroring the Duchesse de la Salle’s pose in the painting. It was only then, by contrasting the two women, that I noticed the feminine details in Tamara’s portrait: the marcelled hair, the rouged lips and cheeks, the white-collared neckline plunging far below that of any man outside of a costume drama involving pirates. When I looked at the duchess’s pointing fingernail, life-size and painted exactly as I would have painted my own, I realized that Tamara had filed it to an oval point and given it a French manicure. In all these little respects, Violette looked much more the man, and yet the arrogance with which each figure claimed space was strikingly similar. From the offhand way Vi leaned against Tamara’s bed, one would have thought she, not I, the little
grisette
despairing of a place to leave her coat, had spent more time in it.
“Mais non,”
she said, angling for a flattering reply.
“
Doesn’t look a thing like me.”

After the two women left the room, Romana with a dainty hand on Vi’s shoulder, I took pleasure in hanging my coat, for the first time, in Tamara’s closet, so that it wouldn’t get lost among the others on the bed. Now I could leave whenever I liked. When I walked out of the bedroom, the first thing I noticed, through the crowded cigarette haze and the sultry gramophone music, was that Tamara, ablaze in beaded fringe, was posing for a photograph between the two rich art collectors from the Salon d’Automne. I recognized them, the suave French Dr. Boucard with the gray pearl tiepin, the shaggy Teutonic Baron Kuffner with his spectacles. Of their conversation, I could hear the titles
Full Summer
and
Nude with Dove.

“Selling the work before it’s even finished? Not bad,” I overheard the Marquis d’Afflitto—elegant even in a purple bow tie—murmur to Romana.

“She’s definitely trying,” Romana agreed, impressed. While Violette signed an autograph, Romana greeted me, remembering our conversation at the Salon. “Romaine Brooks isn’t here tonight, but her girlfriend, Natalie—” she said, gesturing toward a flash of blond hair on the other side of the room before the return of Vi’s attention sidetracked her. “Would you like to meet Tamara?” she asked Violette.

“No rush,” said the athlete, narrowing her eyes at Tamara in a way that suggested she did not like what she saw. “She looks busy.”

While the salon was crowded—in five minutes I spotted Nancy Cunard, bedecked in ivory, Tallulah Bankhead in a hundred ropes of pearls, Filippo Marinetti, and sere, sculptural Jean Cocteau—the dining room was even denser with people. In the arch between two feathered headbands, I saw why.

Everyone wants the naked girl at the party,
Tamara had said. I hadn’t realized she was speaking literally. I saw, draped across the dining room table, a girl my age wearing nothing but oysters. I blinked: no, she was wearing a massive silver tray, on which a dense mosaic of oysters on the half shell shone from a bed of ice. Only a small towel separated the tray from her bare belly. Seaweed lightly downed her hair, thighs, and outspread arms, while a white sheet caught her legs from knee to foot like a mermaid’s tail. The silver tray covered the girl’s midsection, though I could tell a few fellows down around her feet were able to see up her legs quite a bit—while her bare arms and chest rose from above the tray unhindered. Her mother-of-pearl eyelids never opened, her cornsilk-pale hair fanned out a yard around her, and though their oyster-laden hands passed within inches of her beautiful breasts, no guest dared touch her. I wanted the girl. I was afraid of her. I felt upstaged. I was so glad it wasn’t me.

I was glad, too, that Tamara had promised to stay near me when I posed: when I saw her next, she was chatting with the lady editor of
Die Dame
as if the girl on the table were nothing more than a vase of flowers. It was clear from the editor’s gestures that she was talking eagerly about
Full Summer,
and though I couldn’t hear her above the hubbub, I could see her wheedle and plead—until Tamara pulled aside a gray velvet drape to reveal one of the stacks of paintings that leaned against the wall, their faces turned away. She flipped quickly until she came to one of two women in cloche hats, one with her back to the viewer, the other I recognized as Ira Perrot from her long nose and queerly lit eyes. I saw the
éditrice
nod with pleasure, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Kuffner and Boucard hungrily observe the exchange. Then Tamara noticed me and summoned d’Afflitto for help with the lights.

When I went behind the screen to undress, I found the one-sleeved red robe draped across the velvet chaise, just as Tamara would leave it for me when she worked on the first
Beautiful Rafaela.
The sight comforted me, and helped me settle into the routine of posing despite the clamor of the party on the other side of the screen. I let d’Afflitto know when I was ready, and saw him signal to Tamara, who rapped on a glass with an oyster fork.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have brought you here tonight to celebrate a painting,” she said. “In this, my sixth year of showing at the Salon d’Automne, I had two pieces accepted. The first,
Kizette au Balcon
, won a medal in the Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux this past summer, while the second,
La Belle Rafaela
, resulted in my first ever Salon d’Automne sale.”

“Before the Salon even opened!” called d’Afflitto.

“In any case,” Tamara said modestly, “the paintings are enjoying one last night in the Petit Palais, and Kizette is enjoying a night sound asleep at her grandmother’s, so I have for you here tonight a live painting, a live jewel. Ladies and gentlemen, I present
La Belle Rafaela.
”

The wall lights, as planned, went out. I heard d’Afflitto move softly in the dark as he swept away the screen. And then the photographers’ lamps blazed on like lightning,
flash, flash, flash,
just as Tamara had promised, while the gathered company gasped and squealed. My eyes slitted open a hairsbreadth to the sight of the room staring at me—Boucard and Kuffner, d’Afflitto, the
Die Dame éditrice
, Romana de la Salle quite suddenly in Vi Morris’s lap—each mouth slack with wonder. I shut my eyes tight against the awe in their faces and heard the word
belle
whoosh through the crowd, like wind flattening grass.

 

 

 

As the party crowd stared at me, nude and spotlit, I felt gilded, splendid, radiant, afraid: I was a goddess, a statue, a blood sacrifice. The photographers’ lamps went out again, and d’Afflitto—bless him—restored the screen. In the moment I reached for my clothes, Tamara joined me, more a wave of scent and warm satin than anything I could see. She must have abandoned her post by the wall lights. Her ringed hand found me in the dark and she whispered in my ear, “You were just like my dream.” At that moment, as the crowd began to rumble for light, I felt as beautiful as she thought I was. “Your heart,” she said, her hand on my breastbone. “It’s beating so hard.”

“It’s because I’m happy,” I said, kissing her.

Just then a murderous sound cut through the room.
“Sale fils de putain!”
screamed a woman. And that was the nicest thing she said.

The crowd erupted, Tamara with it, and rushed toward the source of the scream. “Someone touched the girl,” I heard a man’s voice explain. A light came on in the kitchen, making the dining room dimly visible, and the salon went from black to gray. “Someone burned her with a cigar,” said another voice. I heard a heavy, metallic cascade of smacks as the silver tray crashed to the floor.

I dressed quickly, rattled at the news, but when I began to circle the screen, I stopped. Tamara was gone. D’Afflitto was gone. Romana and Violette were just leaving, straightening their clothes on the way to the dining room, from which the voice of the oyster girl filled the apartment with blood and shit, with ice and nails, with clouds of rubble.

Two figures, however, remained in the salon, bending toward the paintings that rested on the floor. One, crouching, flipped open a cigarette lighter: I saw the two men were Baron Kuffner and Dr. Boucard. Red-whiskered, heavy on his feet, Baron Kuffner could have been an aging Norse god with a hammer and thunderbolt. The smooth Dr. Boucard, flame in hand, would have been that god’s younger and craftier ally.

Together, they moved quickly but thoroughly through the canvases propped against the wall like dominoes. Suddenly they stopped. “Look at this one,” Baron Kuffner murmured in his accented French. I heard boyish laughter in his voice, as if sneaking around in the dark added to the pleasure he took in the paintings.

“Oh, let’s,” said Dr. Boucard, his voice calmly professional by contrast. Carefully, the two men lifted out a small painting, turned it around, and set it against the wall by itself. In the half-dark, the flaring cigarette lighter revealed the painting one splash at a time:
Rafaela in Green.

“I think you should put that away,” I said.

The two men looked up, alarmed by my voice in the darkness. Another light came on in the dining room, and then they looked from the painting to me and back again. “So
you’re
the model,” said Baron Kuffner, spectacles gleaming.

“Why, it’s Tamara’s little Jewish friend,” oozed Dr. Boucard.

The long raw stare the two men gave me—followed by the short amused glance they gave each other—sent me scuttling into Tamara’s bedroom, where claiming my coat gave me license to sink deep into my hat as well. If I could have exited out Tamara’s window unscathed at that moment, I would have.

When I reëmerged, the two men were deep in conversation with Tamara over the painting. I waved good night, and she waved back, unseeing, as if the kiss behind the screen had never happened. She was doing her job, I consoled myself. I had done mine, after all: I could go. Just before I reached the door, I all but bumped into Anson Hall. I later learned that he and Natalie Barney knew each other from Sylvia’s bookstore, but at the moment, I was simply stunned. “Oh,
you’re
here,” I said.

“Well,
you’re
certainly here.”

“I guess.”

“Why not stay?”

“I’m embarrassed.”

“You weren’t having a good time up there? You looked like you were,” said Anson. “I certainly was.”

This is
exactly
why I want to leave, I thought, impatient. “I wasn’t embarrassed up there, but I’m embarrassed to stay,” I said, with an involuntary glance toward Tamara, Kuffner, and Boucard.

As if feeling my eyes, the three of them looked over at me just at that moment. Anson raised his glass to them in an awkward wave, and the French doctor’s eyes lit in response, as if he were photographing the two of us, while the hulking baron gazed at me alone.

“You were the star of the show until that girl started carrying on,” Anson said.

“You mean until some sick man got it into his head to
burn
her,” I corrected. “That was disgusting.”

Peripherally aware of Baron Kuffner looking up from Tamara to seek me out, I watched something complex and apologetic cross Anson’s face, before Dr. Boucard appeared at his elbow. While the two men made their introductions—and before the Wagnerian Kuffner could thunder over to me—I slipped off, but not before promising to meet Anson for coffee the next day.

 

 

 

When I passed the taxi stand near Tamara’s Métro stop, I was surprised to see someone familiar shimmy into a cab with an overdressed boyfriend. “Maggey?”

My friend from the Bois de Boulogne reached over to close the car door, a long twist of blond hair snaking out from under her hat. “That pervert bitch,” she said in French. I stopped walking, brought short: Maggey had been the girl at Tamara’s party. I hadn’t recognized her naked, nor had I ever heard her scream like that before. She didn’t hear me when I called her name again, but just before she pulled the door shut, I heard a deep, phlegmy cough. She sounded sick.

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