The Last Nude (18 page)

“As long as
this
Rafaela’s not his type,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said protectively. “He may want you, but he cannot have you.”

Tamara’s overblown pronouncement made me giggle, reassured. “So why didn’t you show them
Kizette au Balcon
?”

“Neither of those men want a painting like that. I can tell.”

“Well, it’s a good idea to show them your other work,” I said, setting aside my distaste for Boucard. “They seem rich.”

We laughed. “How long have you been planning this party?” I asked.

“Oh, for about five minutes,” Tamara said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“So,” Tamara said. “We are going to sit down for a few minutes, to give those men time to walk away. And then we are going back for my ten thousand francs.”

Tamara asked me to come home with her after the Salon, to sew up the strap of her slip that I’d pinned. “It
does
hurt. You were right. I was impatient,” she said, contrite. As we climbed the stairs to her apartment, she flipped through her mail, announcing, “My friend Ira is back in Paris. Good.”

“Who?”

“Kizette is at my mother’s. She dropped off a note, see? Jeanne sent to say she is running late. Oh, no, do you hear that?”

“
Oh, no,
what?” I asked.

We had reached the top of the stairs, where we were greeted by a clamor of thuds and claws.

“Oh, no, somebody needs a walk,” Tamara said, opening the door. Seffa whined with relief, setting both front paws on Tamara’s shoulders. “
Bisou bisou,
yes, yes,” Tamara said. “
Does
somebody need a walk?”

“Oh, no,” I repeated, walking in behind them, shocked. The room was clotted with red. Red confetti. Red flecks of paper. Curds of wet red fluff.
What happened?

I saw the overturned zinc
poubelle
poking out from behind the screen where I had changed, and understood. When I changed my sanitary napkin between poses that morning, I put it in a twist of paper in the
poubelle.
In our hurry to go to the Salon, I forgot to dump the garbage downstairs before we left, and Seffa had found it. “Mother of God,” I said, horrified.

“Naughty Seffa!” said Tamara.

“We kept him locked in the bedroom this morning, and then we let him out before we left. I forgot to take down my things. I’m so embarrassed.”

“It is nothing.”

“All your beautiful gray velvet!” I protested, gesturing at the red-petalled walls and rugs.

“You naughty, naughty dog.” Tamara clucked.

“I’m so sorry.”

“It is human. You are a young girl. It is normal.”

“Why don’t you take your walk and I’ll clean this up?”

“No, no, no,” said Tamara. “We need to go. You can use the hall toilet if you need to. Jeanne will take care of this. I can tell her it was mine.”

“But what about your slip?” I asked.

“Some other time,” said Tamara. “I have a friend who just came back to town.”

In the WC, I clipped a fresh napkin into my belt, still rattled. My brothers would have never let me forget this.
But Tamara’s not upset
, I bullied myself.
Don’t be embarrassed.
I washed my hands and then I dried them, and then I washed them again. Then I reapplied my lipstick for good measure.

When we went outside, Tamara walked me partway to the train, gossiping about people we had seen at the Salon. She really wasn’t upset. I breathed deeper as we walked, happy again. “Thank you for coming with me today,
ma Belle Rafaela
,” Tamara said. And then she kissed me on the sidewalk. I hadn’t even realized, until that moment, that I had always harbored the nagging fear that she took Seffa for his daily walks alone because she didn’t want anyone to see us together. “I was so proud to have you next to me,” she said.

I could feel her words buzz inside my chest as she held me, and I curled into them, grateful. “Same here.”

“My good-luck piece,” Tamara said. “I liked watching them fight over
Rafaela
without knowing it was you.”

I giggled. “I felt like a spy.”

“You are our secret,” Tamara whispered, her words hot in my ear.

10

OUR SECRET,
TAMARA HAD CALLED ME. But when I walked into Shakespeare and Company the day after the Salon opened, I learned I was no secret to Anson’s friend Bobby. He had seen Tamara kiss me and had seen
Beautiful Rafaela
on the wall. “That painting of you is gorgeous, Rafaela,” Sylvia said when I walked in.

Anson, looking up from his newspaper, assented with a sigh of regret. “Now I know why you won’t go out with me,” he said.

“But you know that Neoclassical Cubism is a dead end, right?” Bobby piped up, poking through his mail.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying that what your girlfriend does is
odd.
To say nothing,” he added, in an insinuating coo, “about her
private
life.”

Just the day before, Tamara had told me in so many ways that I had nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps that’s what made me speak up. My mind went white. My feet went clammy in my shoes. “Leave me alone, Bobby,” I said.

Bobby stared at me, thrown. My heart was beating hard in my face, but I saw Anson’s eyes widen with respect.

“You heard her,” said Sylvia.

Anson nodded, and though he fluttered them sarcastically, Bobby lifted his hands, as if under arrest. “I hear and obey, Miss Beach.
Pardon.
”

 

 

 

In the weeks at work that followed, I was pleased, but not completely surprised, to see a new canvas emerge: Tamara was painting herself in my one-strapped pink chemise, against the same white dotted swiss she had me wear for
Full Summer.
Her use of white on white made the design on the backdrop look cut out, rather than embroidered. She used straight edges to define the sides of the buckled ribbon strap, as if creating a channel for the softer shading inside the lines to move through. In the painting, and in real life, I saw that the lace I had added to the bodice was beginning to fray. “You’re sure you don’t want me to stitch that up?”

“No. Now it is a painting. I do not want to change a thing.”

“What’s it like to paint yourself as a brunette?” I asked.

“I like it,” she said. “In the painting, I am someone Tadeusz never knew.”

 

 

 

My gift gave Tamara other ideas, too. A week after the Salon opened, once we had finished our sitting, she asked me to wait in her apartment while she stepped out for a moment with Seffa, whom I had already forgiven. He couldn’t help being a dog, any more than my brothers could have helped being children. Tamara returned ten minutes later, accompanied by a beautiful green-eyed woman with dark red hair. She was carrying a baby, and Tamara followed behind her with a bassinette. “This lady wants to commission a dress,” Tamara said.

A commission! I
did
spend all my spare time making dresses, true, but I had never really considered going into business. I’d never even traded anything for my sewing, not since the bet I’d made my mother over my school uniform. But this is how Tamara thinks, I reflected. She sells her work; why shouldn’t I sell mine? I tried to stand a little taller in my lucky dress as Tamara introduced us. “Rafaela Fano, Ira Perrot,” she announced.
Ira
rhymed with
mirror.

“Enchantée,”
I said, unsure whether to shake the woman’s hand or kiss her cheek.

“Ira is English,” Tamara corrected. “She went home to have her baby and she stayed away a
whole year
,” she said accusingly, then turned to Ira. “But now she’s back,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Ira switched to English once Tamara did. “Tamara showed me that pretty chemise you made, and she said you were getting started as a dressmaker.” I was? I realized this must have been how Tamara had gotten her own start as a portrait painter. She must have simply announced that she was one, just like that, before she ever sold a canvas. Could I be a
couturière
before I ever sold a dress? I watched Ira explain herself, gesturing airily toward Lulu, the baby in the bassinette. “I have a closet full of clothes I’m too fat for now, but I can’t wear my maternity clothes anymore either.” Her English was posh and crisp, her face fresh and open. “It
would
cheer me up to have something new.”

“I could copy one of your favorite dresses a little bigger, if you want,” I said, following Tamara’s lead. “In a new fabric?”

“You’re a darling,” Ira said.

While we worked out a price, Tamara produced a roll of dressmaker’s tape. “You left this behind,” she told me. What was she talking about? Before I could contradict her, she held up a finger-and-thumbful of Ira’s bobbed red hair. “What color do you think would flatter this?” she asked me.

“I think we should let the client decide,” I said.

“I haven’t had time to decide a thing, with Lulu,” Ira protested. “But I do love
your
dress, Rafaela.”

“Well . . .” I said, noting her measurements in Tamara’s sketchbook.

“Don’t tell me those numbers, Miss Fano,” warned Ira.

“Do not talk nonsense. You have a newborn,” said Tamara. “If you can trust me with the color, I could choose the fabric,” she proposed.

“That would be the best gift of all,” said Ira. “You choose it, I’ll pay for it.”

 

 

 

Later that month, before finishing our private
Rafaela
, Tamara asked me to try a new pose: seated, half rising, one hand in my lap, one raised to my face. “It surprises you,” Tamara explained.

“What surprises me?”

“A dove.”

“A duff?”

“The messenger of the Holy Spirit. The bird of Aphrodite.”

I giggled. “Do you know, I’m such a city girl, I’ve never actually seen a dove?”

Tamara’s exaggerated sigh betrayed real tenderness. “You are so young,” she said. She dug a small canvas out of a stack of austere little still lifes, from the days, she told me, just before we met. She drove a nail into the wall and hung a painting of two white pigeons and a birdhouse. “I will paint him here,” she said, pointing to a spot on my forearm. “Your eyes will look here,” she said, pointing at the birds. “Doves.”

“They’re cute,” I said.

“This way you will not imagine a chicken or a cow,” she said sternly, her voice freighted with mock disapproval. “It would spoil the painting.”

“Well, we can’t have that.”

“I cannot believe you never saw a dove,” she chided. For a moment, I envied Tamara’s daughter. What wouldn’t she have seen by the time she was my age?

Tamara wanted to try an Annunciation scene, she explained. She touched my face with her fingertips until she coaxed out the expression she was looking for: not startled, or fearful, but meditative. Listening.

“I couldn’t stay this calm if you used a real dove,” I cracked.

“If there were a real dove in this apartment, we would chase it out the window,” Tamara said, with a shudder, to make me laugh. “This is what art is for.”

 

 

 

After a few days of
Nude with Dove,
during which time Tamara’s self-portrait in my chemise took shape as well, she presented me with one of Ira’s old dresses and a length of silk crepe in a brilliant cobalt, a deeper blue than that of my lucky dress, with a finer sheen. “It’s beautiful. Did you find it in the fabric district?”

“I made my housekeeper get it,” she said. “I gave her the color to match.” I was surprised that she deflected my praise, and surprised that a painter—and clotheshorse—as finicky as Tamara wouldn’t do the task herself, but she offered no further explanation.

Once I got over the initial shock of making a dress, not as a gift, but for money, I liked to think this might be the start of something for me. Not life as a party girl, not life at Belle Jardinière. I could model for Tamara by day and make dresses by night. Tamara knew princes and duchesses and wives of rich men. I could make a name for myself, I began to daydream; I could build up a clientele of my own.

 

 

 

I did not see Tadeusz when he returned briefly a week or so later to visit with Kizette and claim Seffa for a few months, but I saw how his appearance—and the dog’s absence—upset Tamara. She continued work on her self-portrait, and even finished it, but pronounced it no good: though it was no less polished than the other recent work, the effect was clownish rather than triumphal. Her breasts, emerging from the lace front of the slip, looked rubbery in their pertness, her short locks fussily twisted, her eyelashes cartoonishly long. She pointed out an anatomically impossible clavicle, and a spot where her mouth looked distorted, as if it were lightly touching a pane of glass. When I looked carefully, I saw the pattern on the lace had started to march up onto the couch: Had she painted it on one of her cocaine-sleepless nights? Or had she just been unhappy? But that wasn’t the worst of it. “You can tell it was flawed from the start. If I hold my neck straight, my head does not fit in the frame.”