The Last Nude (4 page)

I stood quietly at the door, hating her. I picked up the bag I’d set down. And then, in case Gin had heard me at the door, I took the stairs loudly to reassure her I was really leaving. I was so angry it felt good to run, my high heels ringing in the stairwell like shots.

When she asked me to stay at the Ritz in her note, Gin wasn’t proposing that I check in to a room. We had friends among the hatcheck girls, and on a couple of drunken occasions they’d rigged up a pair of cots for us in the deserted coatroom, shooing us out the next day when the lunch shift started. A girl could splash a little water on her face in the powder room, but it wasn’t cozy. To hell with Gin: no one we knew at the Ritz even
started
work until ten at night, and it was only half past six. I had enough money for a coffee and a magazine: I decided to take the Métro to Montparnasse and sit at a café with both.

Was Gin’s banker really about to ASK, as she put it? Nose-to-armpit with a stranger in the Métro sweatbox, I clung to the pole beside me, thinking she
had
seemed awfully eager that morning when she insisted I go interview for her job. “Daniel found a place for us,” she’d said, perching at the foot of my bed in the little nightgown I’d made her. “So I gave notice!”

“You’re leaving?” Gin had been making noises about helping me find another girl to share the flat for weeks, but I hadn’t realized just how serious she—or her banker—was until that morning. Blinking awake, I watched Gin rub a towel over her wet cropped head. “Really?”

“Madame Florin was so disappointed. I had to buck her up
somehow
.” Although she would admit, in confidence, to being from Colma, California, Gin’s let-the-servants-do-it British coo suited her so well, I didn’t even mind the affectation. “So I said you’d go interview today.”

“Me?”

“Rafaela, please. It’s good luck. It’s how I met Daniel.”

I rolled my eyes and put on a Mayfair accent of my own. “Why, you’ve never told me how you met Don Yell.”

“Come
on.
You know Madame Florin loves you.”

I had no great desire to sell gloves to my fellow English speakers, but as I sat facing Gin’s elegant, brown-lipsticked supervisor later that morning, the challenge had piqued me as much as scared me: Could I speak French well enough to get hired?

“You’re aware of our uniform?” asked Mme. Florin.

“Yours looks different from the others,” I noted. Although most women’s clothing in Paris at that time was made-to-order
couture,
a few pieces—coats, uniforms, shirtwaists, some foundation garments—were ready-to-wear
confection.
While the youngest employees’ uniforms were clearly the latter, Mme. Florin’s dress looked like it had been made for her alone: the cotton sateen draped better on her, seemed thicker. Her skirt, fuller than the others’, worked to her advantage. Her collar, whiter, set off her olive skin. If I worked here, I thought, I’d make myself a dress like hers.
En français?
“Nicer,” I explained.

Mme. Florin acknowledged my compliment with a nod. “Some of us do wear our own. You know how much we’ll miss Veer Zhee Nee when she’s married,” she said. Was Gin really getting
married
? “But you’ll catch on quickly here, no? Just make the Americans feel at home,
et voilà
,” she explained. (
Et voilà:
hired!) After the war, Americans had more money to throw around in department stores than locals, and Belle Jardinière welcomed them by hiring girls like Gin. (And me!) Mme. Florin was
désolée
about the hundred francs, but we both knew jobs were scarce, and for non-French, even scarcer.

Where was I going to find a hundred francs? A recently sold strand of pearls—Hervé’s last gift—had paid my rent through the end of the month, and beyond that I had a little money left over: not a hundred francs, but a few days’ grace.
A few days’ grace?
As the escalator eased me down to street level that morning, it struck me: for the wage Mme. Florin offered, I could make the dress back in a handful of days. I could even save up, go back to Chanel, order something
I
chose this time. For some people, time meant money made, not money spent. What if I could be one of them, for as little as a black dress with a white collar?

I was starting to look forward to this job, I reflected, still on the Métro. Tomorrow I’d be fitting gloves onto the slender hands of wives and daughters and mistresses as their wealthy men looked on. I’d have a shining glass case to keep clean, and soon, a perfect black dress like Mme. Florin’s. The part of me that had gotten old and sad at sixteen was girlishly happy that Gin’s supervisor trusted me to handle money and nice things, to speak English and French to the customers, to look good for the shop. I’d go home with my own money at the end of each week whether I met my own Daniel or not. Proud of myself, I tightened my grip on my Belle Jardinière bag. I could feel the ghost weight of the pearls I’d sold lift a little from my neck.

 

 

 

There was the small matter of what to do next; I had planned on a quiet, cheap evening at home. A bath, a
tartine
. I’d been thinking I would hang my new dress up, so the wrinkles wouldn’t hold, maybe let the hips out a little. Gin, however, had spoiled all that. Climbing up from the Métro to Boulevard du Montparnasse, I figured the chance of running into someone from my Alliance Française days—someone who might lend me money for dinner—was highest at La Rotonde: while not the most stylish of the cafés at the intersection of Montparnasse and Raspail, it was the hardest to miss. Le Sélect, La Rotonde, Le Dingo, La Coupole, Café du Dôme: Paris was compact already, but we English speakers made it just two blocks long by always drinking at the same five places near the Luxembourg Gardens. So it was only half a coincidence that the American slickster who had asked if he could paint me that morning walked by, together with his bear cub of a French friend. Painter Slick spotted me at my table and grinned like a kid at the circus. Though stocky, he was not tall: I could hurt him enough to get away, if I needed to, I thought. I might not tell him my real last name, if he asked, but I could give him a crumb of eye contact for now, just enough to let him know I remembered him. And who should reappear ten minutes later, sans friend?

Even if it was all a game, I liked that he took the table next to mine rather than ask if he could sit with me, that he met my eyes with a smile and settled in with his newspaper instead of chatting me up, that when he shook out a cigarette for himself, he offered me one, then returned to his paper. I smoked it and read my magazine, marking the French I didn’t know with my lip pencil: why didn’t I have a stainless-steel pencil like Tamara’s? The man was older than I but not yet thirty, and more down-at-the-heels than he first appeared. His clothes, though clean and sharp, were old; his army-style haircut, though fresh, looked cheap. Sideburns would have given his boyish potato face some cheekbones, but he seemed like—I let his flat midwestern accent color my judgment here—the kind of American who’d beat up any barber who tried to make him look fussy. More’s the pity. But what he lacked in looks he made up for in quiet charm: when the point broke off my lip pencil, he handed me his penknife to sharpen it. “Another cigarette?” he asked later.

“Thanks,” I said. “Sometimes you need it.”

“You need it?”

“My flatmate locked me out, and I have no money until my new job starts tomorrow. I’m killing time until I can stay overnight at a friend’s.”

“That’s a bum deal,” he said. “How about a movie? There’s a German theater playing
Metropolis
.”

I didn’t mean to sigh, but my sigh came out the way my coughs and sneezes did, like a much older woman’s, like my mother’s. “Can I borrow some money?” I said.

“My treat.”

 

 

 

I was ready to bolt, but the American didn’t try anything funny at his boring movie, nor at the quick bistro dinner that followed, nor in the taxi we took to the Ritz. His name was Anson Hall, Anson for a Union army grandfather, recently deceased. He was, in fact, from Chicago: he freelanced for the
Tribune
as a sportswriter.

“You can live on that?” I asked.

“My old man helps me out sometimes,” he said, shrugging.

“Lucky you.”

Anson looked uncomfortable, and when an older couple he knew walked into the Ritz just then, he smiled extra-wide and trotted over to greet them. Either he was richer than he let on, or poorer. Or just ashamed of asking his parents for money. What did
he
know about shame? But even so, something about his discomfort—and about the way he tried to curry favor with the husband and wife who’d walked into the Ritz—made me want to protect him.

The woman glanced at me. “Where’s Mrs. Hall?” she asked.

“Honey,” said the man.

The woman looked at him, confused.

“Mrs. Hall and I have separated,” Anson said stiffly.

The woman’s hand rose to her mouth as Anson turned to order us a round of
marcs
. “He’s the one you told me about,” the woman half whispered to her husband. “With that Piggott girl.”

Anson had heard her. His smile, already strained, popped a stitch.

“Honey,” said the man again.

“Pardon me,” said the woman to Anson, giving me another look.

I had troubles of my own, so I went looking for my friends. I found Laure, a thickset girl who lived with her family in the squalid Nineteenth.
“Pas de problème,”
she assured me. “We just have to wait until all these people clear out.” That wouldn’t be until three or four in the morning, but I knew better than to complain: she
was
doing me a favor.

As I walked back to Anson’s end of the room, the bartender—a chilly young man who affected a monocle—intercepted me. “That gentleman asked me to bring you this.” He pointed to a frail, graying, but very well-dressed specimen alone at a table, and handed me a tightly folded sheet of Ritz hotel stationery.

I did not meet the old man’s eye until after I looked inside—I found a key stamped with a room number, and a note:
50F?
—and that was to give him a look of disgust. Fifty francs wouldn’t even get me a subscription to the magazine I was reading
.
Before Anson could come back, I took out my lip pencil, added a zero to the old man’s figure, and folded the key back into the note for the bartender. In the bar mirror I saw the old man’s eyes widen when he opened the note. I turned to give him a superior look, and he met my eyes. And nodded.

Just at that moment, Anson reappeared, minus Honey and her husband, much drunker than I’d last seen him. “Wanna dance?” he asked.

Now I see that I didn’t need the old man’s five hundred francs. I had a place to sleep. I’d just been hired at Belle Jardinière. But I wasn’t in the habit of making money at a job in those days, and it was so
much
money, it made me laugh out loud. “Wait, Anson, one more sip,” I insisted, pouring some of my drink down the front of my dress. “Oh, heavens, no, darling, I have
got
to go to the powder room right now.” And I did go to the powder room first, but not without a numbing glug of
marc
. I took my Belle Jardinière bag with me.

I arrived at the old man’s floor to find a boy from room service standing at his door with a bottle of champagne, so I could see before I walked in that there wasn’t a gang of thugs waiting to rape and murder me. The awkward way the man tipped the boy made me conclude, in fact, that the thing I had to fear most was my own pity. The old man came from Seville, he told me in labored French. I looked like a girl he’d once known. I looked like his granddaughter, too, he said. I’d really rather not have known that. His odor was a smothering blend of cologne, cognac, and brilliantine, with fainter notes of urine, bleach, and loneliness. When he told me what he wanted, I made him pay me and braced myself against one of the bedsteads. At least I didn’t have to look at him. I was glad it didn’t hurt. I looked around the hotel room I couldn’t afford, and tried to think about nothing, but instead found myself imagining the old man imagining me as his granddaughter. She had the face of the one Spanish girl at my school, sweet Beronica from Balenthia.
Stop thinking,
I thought. I wished I’d drunk more. To distract myself, I worried about the chilly bartender. Would he try to get me thrown out of the Ritz? A girl like me didn’t raise the tone of a place. I worried more that he’d want me to buy his silence. Would he want money, or something else? And how hard would he try to get it? At the end of each of the old man’s labored breaths came a faint whining sound, like the whistle of a radiator. What did they need me for, really? Why not just use some Vaseline? You won’t be any less lonely when this is over,
Señor,
I thought, and then his grip tightened on my waist, and he released a steeper whine. When he finished, I tucked away the money and locked myself in the bathroom, availing myself of a long and thorough scrub.

The worst of my period had ended a couple of days before. Soaking in the bath, I cupped a handful of water containing a last lazy drop of blood and tipped it onto the floor.
Thank God I can’t get pregnant this week,
I thought. Guillaume had taught me to pay strict attention to my period and mid-month cramps, and how to look after him when there was a chance I could get pregnant: if I never take it up the ass again, it’ll be too soon. I had learned, under his tutelage, how to laugh at jokes I didn’t understand. I had learned to drink. I had learned how to move backward on a dance floor without incident: himself a workmanlike dancer, Guillaume enjoyed showing me off at the glittering nightclubs where his coworkers gathered. I had learned that if I acted like I was having fun, he had fun, and sometimes I even did, too. It might be tedious, until the fun caught up, but it wasn’t difficult. Though I felt little for him but revulsion, compared with raising four little brothers, he was a vacation. And yet, though I learned how to make him want me like clockwork, I never stopped wondering why he wanted me in the first place. What did he see when he saw me? It was as if my body were a sign pinned to my own back, a sign I myself couldn’t read.