The Last Nude (19 page)

“But you liked my chemise,” I countered.

“I did,” she said wryly.

“Well, I like your painting.”

“Do not patronize me,” she protested. “I am weak enough to give in to your flattery.” I wasn’t so sure: the next day she set to work on a second
Chemise Rose.

 

 

 

As I worked on Ira’s dress, Tamara completed our copy of
Beautiful Rafaela.
I finished basting the night she returned to
Nude with Dove.
The next morning, Tamara arranged a fitting: I had done faithful work, but Ira had already deflated a little at the waist in the time since I had first measured her. Lulu was loath to part with her mother, gumming Tamara’s finger suspiciously before giving way to a pure howl. Finally Ira nursed her, and we all breathed easier.

“She’s heavy,” Ira said, breast in one hand, baby in the other.

“Very Quattrocento,” Tamara pronounced. “You make a fine Virgin.”

“Why thank you,” Ira said demurely. The smile she exchanged with Tamara—complicit and charged with history—was anything but demure.

“How long have you known each other?” I asked.

“I moved to Paris just after the Armistice, and I met Tamara my first winter here, so that would be, what? Nine years!”

“Why Paris?”

“My husband’s French. He was working in England during the war. We married when I was eighteen,” she added, answering a question I hadn’t asked, and I realized she was accustomed to being told she looked young.

“A child bride,” said Tamara.

“Speak for yourself.” Ira laughed.

“Your name sounds kind of Russian,” I said. “Yra?”

“My godmother was Irish. My mother’s best friend from school. So my parents gave me the middle name
Eire
to annoy their families. E-I-R-E; it means Ireland. I know, unspellable, unpronounceable. And my Christian name is so dreary: Winifred. Imagine! So Eire it was. But I spell it I-R-A. At least this way you can pronounce it, even if it
is
a Jew’s name, and a man’s name to boot.”

I glanced uncomfortably over at Tamara, but her face was strangely opaque. Then she spoke in a light rush. “Ira took me to Italy not long after we met. I was very poor, but I wanted to paint, and Ira believed I needed to see the museums of Florence, Rome, Venice. And she was right. Botticelli. De Messina. I looked and I said,
They make it all so simple. Radiant. I could paint like that, too, no?
And that is what I have done with you, Rafaela. It took me years, but I did it.”

I felt exposed as Ira turned to look full at me.
Beautiful Rafaela
was Tamara’s triumph after all, but it was me, too.

“Ira paid for everything,” Tamara bragged. “She is my”—here she groped for the English phrase—
“fairy godmother.”

“Don’t make me sound so old,” Ira complained.

Tamara’s second
Chemise Rose
filled the frame less awkwardly than the first. The neck seemed naturally tilted instead of torqued into place; the breasts sat modestly inside the pink satin. As with
Nude with Dove
, at first Tamara only outlined the face, leaving its features for later. “You’re painting another brunette,” I noted during my first break one morning. She had recently redyed herself a blonde.

“I want to compare the two paintings as closely as possible,” she explained. What she loved about both, she told me, was my gift to her: “The lace across the top, it is exciting; it is difficult. I have never painted flesh through lace before. I like the challenge,” she said, and smiled. “Look, you are sweating.”

The radiators ran so hot in Tamara’s apartment that we left the windows open. I was grateful, especially during the poses that made my muscles ache. Hours of arching for both versions of
Beautiful Rafaela
had been hard enough in warmer weather. In a chilly studio, holding the
Rafaela
pose—let alone the half-seated rise Tamara wanted for
Nude with Dove
—would have hurt even after my nightly bath. I looked again at her bare skin in the two self-portraits: I wasn’t the only one who thrived on radiator heat. She had copied my chemise mercilessly in both paintings, down to the frayed lace.

“I
could
try to fix that for you,” I offered again.

“No,” she said, delighting me. “I love it just the way it is.”

11

THE WEEK I FINISHED IRA’S DRESS, a month after meeting the two rich collectors at the Salon d’Automne, Tamara held a soirée to celebrate her Salon triumph, making sure to invite both the behemoth Teutonic baron, Kuffner, and the unctuous French doctor, Boucard. Three days before the party, as I lay in Tamara’s bed at the end of the workday, she woke up, and turned to me. “Darling, I just had a dream. Would you do something for me?”

“Anything.”

“Not so fast,
ma petite.
Listen first. This was my dream. I am at the party and everyone is here, a hundred people: princes and princesses, bank barons and movie stars, press people, everyone. And suddenly the lights go out. And then for one second, a bright light shines on you, Rafaela, like a singer on a stage. You are posing on the couch, just the way you posed for
La Belle
. You are stretching like a cat, but we only see you for one second, and then the lights go out again. Three times this happens, like three lightning flashes, and then the lights come back on, and you have disappeared, but everyone’s eyes are stamped with you. Your image is floating in their eyes forever. They can see only you. They can think only of you. They can speak only about you.”

I stared at Tamara, hypnotized.

“And then they go crazy and buy all my paintings.”

“You want me to take my clothes off at your party?”

“Just for three seconds, Rafaela. One, two, three. We will have photographers, but I promise they will not photograph you.”

“Hmm,” I said, sitting, my arms wrapped around my legs.

“Please? If you do this, no one will ever forget my work. I would pay you anything.”

What Tamara was asking for was less humiliating than some things I’d done for money, and even sounded kind of beautiful. It was nothing my bookstore friends hadn’t already seen at the Salon, thanks to Bobby Nightinghoul’s big mouth. I gathered the sheet to me, thinking. “What would you do for me?”

“Anything,” she said firmly. “What do you want?”

I want you to tell me you love me,
I thought. But I didn’t want to ask. I wanted her to want to say it. “I want—” I said. I let the sheet fall away from me and gave her an eyeful. When she reached for me, I pulled away. “I want you to take me on a trip for Christmas. One week, just us, nobody else.”

Tamara recoiled. “What about my daughter?”

“Her father’s going to be lonely for her this Christmas. He’ll be awfully grateful,” I said, feeling cocky.

“Rafaela, you are a Jew. What do you care about Christmas?”

“I told you, I’m a Catholic,” I said. “Not a religious one, but I care plenty.” I didn’t celebrate Christmas at home until my mother remarried, but ten in a row had left their mark. Gin and I had spent our first Christmas alone together on rue Laffitte while our boyfriends spent it with their wives and children. Homesick, we played records and ate tinned caviar with too much champagne. When Gin asked me to teach her an Italian Christmas song, I got sick to my stomach and went to bed. Of course I cared.

I watched Tamara’s face cloud over. “I’m sure you can pay some other girl to do it,” I said.

“No.”

“No one will miss it if you
don’t
have me at your party. It was just a dream.”

“No.”

I shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t want to go.”

Tamara’s face cleared. “Can we go
anywhere
?”

“Anywhere as long as it’s just us,” I repeated, like a child spinning out a story. “I want to sleep with you every night and wake up with you every morning.”

“All right, then.”

I grinned.

“I am taking you to Italy.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“You
do
know your stepfather’s little town is not even
on
the Italian mainland, darling?”

“I’m not
stupid
,” I said, embarrassed.

“We can go as tourists, Rafaela. No one has to know you are Italian. You can tell them you are Spanish if they ask. We can go to museums and stay in hotels.”

She did have a point. Maybe an Italian Christmas wouldn’t make me feel so sick and sad if I spent it with her. And I
was
getting my way, after all. “Thank you, Tamara.”

“Good girl,” Tamara said. I didn’t pull away this time. “You will be magnificent.”

 

 

 

The morning of Tamara’s party, she had me pose for just an hour, then enlisted my help moving furniture. We pointed three electric photographers’ lamps at the familiar gray chaise, and set up the screen in front of it for me to change behind. “The wall lights go out,” Tamara said, gesturing toward the electric sconces that lined the room. “My friend d’Afflitto moves the screen away. Then
these
lamps flash on, and there you are, just as you are in the painting.
Ravissante.
Flash, flash, flash. Then it is dark, and d’Afflitto returns the screen. When the wall lights come on again, you can dress with no one looking. All right?”

I nodded, remembering the Marquis d’Afflitto with his handkerchief thrown over his face. I liked him. “That’s thoughtful. Thank you.”

“You are comfortable?”

“Just make sure no one touches me.”

“I will be standing right there.”

“I’m not afraid then.”

“Everyone wants the naked girl at the party,” Tamara said, taking one of my earlobes between finger and thumb. I grinned. “But I am going to keep you for myself.”

 

 

 

After the furniture, we moved the paintings.
Nude with Dove
,
Full Summer
, and the second
Chemise Rose
stood displayed on easels
,
while around them hung recent work that hadn’t yet sold: the first
Chemise Rose
, a couple of small abstracts, the spare little still lifes Tamara had been painting just before we met. Two large photographs sat side by side on a table crowded with flowers: one of
La Belle Rafaela
, and one of
Kizette au Balcon.

Even so, Tamara’s portrait of Tadeusz dominated the room, the way Tadeusz, even in his absence, cast so long a shadow on Tamara’s days. Coolly monumental against a pewter cityscape, a handsome man in an overcoat and white muffler leaned into the frame of the painting, or rose out of it, an envelope tucked under his arm, top hat in hand. The largest shape in the painting was that of the man’s lush black coat, a dense, form-fitting wool from the look of it, with wide—were those satin?—lapels. Above the bulwark of that coat, Tadeusz’s eyes, wounded, wounding, met the viewer’s directly, but without trust. His irises held no dot of white.

Also remarkable was that while Tamara’s works-in-progress stood on easels, Tadeusz’s portrait hung on the wall, even though it was not at all
finished
the way Tamara’s other works were. There wasn’t just
one
“line out of place”: the man’s whole left hand—braced on a ledge, holding the top hat—had been left conspicuously
un
finished
.
At first glance, the painting could have been of any good-looking society man out for a jazz night. On second glance, knowing Tamara, it was hard not to see the envelope and remember the divorce papers Tadeusz had brought. It was hard not to see the unpainted hand as Tamara’s little revenge. It was a way to render her choice to render neither his wedding ring nor his bare finger.

 

 

 

I went home to bathe and change, and to avoid the embarrassment of being the first one at the party. By the time I came back, the salon was so crowded I could circle the room unnoticed. Trying to drop my coat off in the bedroom, I found myself caught behind Tamara’s friend Romana de la Salle in a frothy pink dress, talking to a bulky crop-haired brunette in a suit. “You inspired Tamara’s portrait of my mother,” Romana piped in French, fingering the suited woman’s collar. “Come, let me show you.”