The Last Nude (35 page)

 

 

Let ochre-gray and blue be plush. Let gray-ochre and pink be flesh. How close can they get and still differ? Let a greenish halo lead the way from lit to shadowed flesh. I never liked painting skinny women. This knee radiates two bones like spokes: shin and thigh. Hard of bone makes flesh look full. Hang of flesh makes bone look hard. Shadow under bone. Darker darker darker darker. Brighter brighter brighter brighter. Fine defined foreground shadow: calf. Spongy darker background shadow, so softly applied, so edgeless: thigh. Short thigh. Not if you’re face to knee. Make a sharper knee. I can feel my heart beat in my wrists.

The knee is a globe. The knee is a world. The knee has mass. The knee is any joint of meat. The knee is a moon. The knee is a round wheel of cheese. No. The knee is a knee. The knee is paint. The knee is rimmed in light below—slim crescent—and shadow above—slim eclipse. Three bright lobes form hills of bone, split and joined by a vee of tendon. The lobes of the knee blush the faintest red. Same red as the lifted fold of cloth but light, light, as pale a red as Kizette’s
Rose
was rose.

That lifted fold of cloth. The thin distinct line of the drapery’s crest, and the fat curve of its deep trough. China red. Vermillion. Cinnabar. So was it Hector? Was it because of the will? Red, red. Paste. Pulp. Make it like the lip. But he begged me. He insisted. Blood is thicker than water, he said. Red. He said, you already gave me your house. Sold, not gave, I said. For nothing, Tamara! Do right by your daughter, he said. But now he’s angry, is that it? He moved my saint out of spite. He changed his mind. He wants the money after all. He wants me to think Kizette did it, so I’ll change the will back for him.

I stop. I need another cigarette, and then more oxygen. I should only take it when I smoke. Sometimes I want it more, but I hate to give in like that. I’d hate to be an old lady strapped to a tank. I let Kizette and Hector fit the prongs of the tube in my nose at night, to humor them, but some nights I take it out after Hector goes home (was it Hector?), after Kizette falls asleep in the other bed (was it Kizette?), just to prove I can.

But once or twice a day, when I’m painting, I feel tight behind the eyes. A door in my throat begins to close. There it is. My cigarette burns down to an ash worm, unsmoked, gone. I’ll light another; let me just breathe with the tube a bit first. Oh. But this hasn’t happened before. This odor, like tar and pennies. Is this a new tank? Did they send me a bad one? No. That smell. It’s the same tank, new yesterday. And it’s the same smell, with or without my tube in. Tight eyes and closing throat. Tar and pennies, and something else. Is it the smell of the hospital when I swam up from the ether? They were cutting out the side of my tongue—cancer, smoking—a small price to pay for all those years of pleasure; I can still talk, still eat. So is it that, a surgery smell?

No. I know it now. I’m lighting another cigarette. My long holder keeps it that much farther from the flammable tank. I’ll want it as soon as my throat opens up a little. The tobacco will burn that smell away in one blue breath. But there it is again, a gust of it. I know I know it.

Oh.

It’s the dead horse.

I shut off the oxygen and smoke. When I’m done, I soak a cotton rag in linseed oil: pale amber, sharp and clean. I breathe until my throat loosens, until the smell drifts away. Tobacco and linseed are incense, a prayer. They disperse rot.

I’ve painted the white skin and black leather a hundred times, but I’ve never painted the horse.

 

 

 

I’m almost finished, but I’m often almost finished. I’m often almost finished for a long time. And then finishing comes to me all at once, and leaves me feeling empty, shaken, private. At first I don’t want anyone to know. I clean my brushes like it’s any other day.

I just need to clarify the knee. I just need that hint of red—my last gasp of red before Hector comes back—to marry knee to lip, marry both to that red drapery. There. Is it finished? This empty sudden rush. This stillness in the room. Rafaela has been floating in my mouth like a spoonful of
myrtille
jam, and now she’s ebbing away. She’s been splayed at my feet, all summer sweat and poppies, and now she dresses, stands in the doorway with her back to me. Is it finished?

I’m happy with the eyelids, closed in erotic concentration. Two soft sand dunes. Two shadows for lashes. Two rounded, fleshy triangles, plastic rhyme to breasts and nostrils. Gold, like her skin, but violet, shadowed, all those fine capillaries. Bruise-colored: a girl who stays out late. But should they be a tint of red instead? What red I have is no good. By this point it’s almost white. I could poach a little from the painting, but I’ve worked that surface so fine, I could lose hours to fixing what’s already good. I can take my knee-blush red, my almost red, and dull it down, but then I’ll have more gray than red. I could do knee-red with skin-gold, but no. Too muddled. Leave it. Wait for Hector. The eyelids are right the way they are. I am finished. I feel so alone.

29

THE ONLY SMELL NOW IS THE JASMINE in the garden. The windows are open to the softening air. Late afternoon. There’s the judder of a car pulling up; Hector’s back. “Kizette!” I call, and she emerges from the bedroom, sleepy-eyed, to walk me down the hall, unsteady on my pins. We pass Luz, bound for the living room with a platter of little pancakes—my mother’s recipe, adapted for the tortilla griddle—and a tray of ice that floats dishes of minced onion,
crema fresca,
and flying-fish caviar: tiny crunching grits of orange light. By the time I reach the foyer, my chauffeur is parking Hector’s car and Hector himself is tripping up the three steps to greet me. Ana is trailing behind, one cheek lumped and red. “Look who got stung by a bee!” Hector announces.

“Are you allergic?” asks Kizette.

“No, just embarrassed,” murmurs Ana. I hate to see anything spoil that face, ripe as
myrtilles,
round and taut as a brown pear. My throat closes at the sight of her marred, and I catch just a breath of it again, the odor of tar and pennies. “Too sweet to resist,” I joke, gesturing with my cigarette holder.

“Let me see,” says Kizette, clearly grateful for something to fix, some simpler foe than what age has made me. “Let me make you a baking soda poultice.”

The crisp, capable Kizette—the one who rowed crew at Oxford and raised two daughters—always surprises me when she appears, as she does, for strangers and stray cats. Why can’t I have her instead of the moody, bovine one, the Bible-cud ruminant? As Kizette inspects Ana’s cheek for the stinger and Luz wheels out the champagne bucket, my old friend Romana and her new husband, Paul, pull up with the young nephew—handsome as promised—and emerge with a slapping flutter of car doors, Romana in lemon silk, Paul gauntly elegant in gray linen. Cuernavaca is too small a town to fool with a friend’s husband, but there’s no harm in looking. Hector leans in, his hand in mine, to kiss each cheek in turn. “I’m sorry,
querida
, I couldn’t get the paint today. We were getting ice for Ana’s face, and it was later than we thought. I promise I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”

So that’s how it is, I think, and the wire door of a trap clips shut inside me. “Don’t worry, darling,” I purr, cigarette holder to lips. “You’re a dear boy to even think of it.”

Unfair!
say Kizette’s eyes beside me, as she watches me laugh off Hector’s slight apology.

But she doesn’t understand: I don’t want him to know I know. Hector is the one who moved my painting. Now I know.

30

SUDDENLY, I CAN HEAR, but I can’t move. My eyes are closed. Then the scent of jasmine cuts through to me and I’m home on the living room couch, buoyed up by bubbles of warm chatter which suddenly pop, flat. Paul Wilson’s U.S. Open story breaks off mid-McEnroe. My nostrils, propped open with plastic tubing, are damp with cool oxygen. So they have me in my Space Age necklace, do they? My cannula. “Should we leave her alone?” Ana’s voice whispers.

“No,” Kizette says. “As long as she has the oxygen, she’s fine; she just falls asleep like this sometimes. It would hurt her feelings if we left her.”

“Tamara loves a party more than anything,” Hector agrees.

“In that hat, she looks like a sunflower drooping on its stem,” a young man’s voice says softly. Whose? Oh, yes, I forgot about the Wilsons’ fine-looking nephew. Martin, yes. I can’t open my eyes.

“Are you sure you’re not a poet?” asks Hector, and I know he’s leaning in with his shy-boy smile.

My eyes fly open:
Traitor!
“Me? Drooping?” I interrupt, to spite him, to break the hold of his gaze on that dark-eyed, thoroughbred boy.

“I was just wishing I could catnap as gracefully as you, Tamara,” says Romana. I don’t like to date myself, but suffice to say I met Romana de la Salle just after I arrived in Paris, when we were little art students at the Académie Ransom. She was prettier than any of the models, with her strong jaw and her red-blond hair, and one day when I sketched her instead, she caught me looking. She smiled: she was drawing me, too. It was the third or fourth time we had been subjected to Maurice Denis’s sycophantic tale of the time he presented his
Hommage à Cézanne
to the master
soi-même
—that cluttered, muddy excuse for a painting! At the end of that class, I dropped out to find a new teacher, and Romana dropped out, too, never to paint again. But we traded sketches that day, and here we are together, decades later. “Dear Romana Wilson,” I reply. “You’re so cunningly made. Don’t you just want to pick her up like a lizard and walk around with her on your shoulder?”

Romana smiles her cool dry lizard smile, basking, and Paul laughs. “No, I can’t say that I ever have. We were just raving about these blinis,” he says.

I wave my cigarette holder at him. “They’re not blinis, darling. They’re Polish. Look how they’re so thin you can see through them.”

“We hate the Russians for how they treated Poland,” Kizette explains to Ana and Martin.

“No politics, no politics, please,” I insist.

“Crêpes it is,” Ana assents, her syllables glopping their way around her swollen cheek. “No Russian tonight. We promise.”

I wonder if she has the presence of mind to be happy that beautiful Martin is sitting on her good side.
“Nyet!”
He laughs, catching her eye.

Laugh at me if you must, children, but those men killed my husband in the end. Thade enjoyed himself too much, living it up as a diplomat in Toulouse when everyone back home in Poland was a good self-sacrificing Communist. In 1950, Stalin’s puppets summoned him to Warsaw for a short trip, and when he arrived, they hospitalized him. Within days he was dead. He was only sixty-two.

Only Kizette and I know this story. I haven’t even told it to Hector, so I’m not surprised he joins the young people in their nonsense.
“Nyet-nyet!”
he choruses, smiling at Martin. Usually I would pity him for throwing himself at yet another unattainable boy, but tonight, knowing that he moved my painting, I’m glad to see him look the fool.

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