The Last Nude (24 page)

“Boring.” I glanced at her still-flat belly. I wouldn’t broach the subject until I had the money in hand. Ugh, I’d just have to ask Tamara for a loan. “Look what came back
Retour à l’Expéditeur
.” Gin pouted, holding up a letter she’d written to Daniel.

“I’m sorry.” I told her about lying in Tamara’s bed as she’d signed Boucard’s contract the day before, and about her burning the report from Anson’s boss.

“She should go after Kuffner,” Gin said. “Think of all that money.”

“But she’s already rich. And he’s so repulsive. He sits there waiting for me all day in that restaurant on the corner. Watching. I feel like ants are crawling all over me when I walk by.”

“Wait, what?”

I told her about the day Kuffner ran outside to talk to me, and she rolled her eyes. “Rafaela, what’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

Feeling superior made Gin lay her British accent on extra-thick. “The man who owns Central Europe wants to have a drink with
you.
Why are you turning your nose up at him?”

“Oh,” I said.

“There’s no future in modeling, unless you meet somebody who takes care of you.”

Silly me. I’d been putting off the loan idea for days now, and here was another option staring me in the face. I watched Ginny fix herself a breakfast scotch and water. I could brave the mild little waiter at Bistrot Varenne, I thought, and I could walk by. And if Kuffner were waiting for me there, I could just go in. “I feel stupid,” I said.

“Good. Now, get wise. If you don’t have the brains to go after him for your own sake, just think about how sore I’ll be at you if you let him go.”

“Sì, sì. Grazie, Mamma,”
I said, indulging her Italian fetish to get her off my back.

“
Capisci?
Think about it: maybe the sick young wife will die and
you’ll
be the next Baroness Kuffner.”

I recoiled. “That’s not. Necessary,” I spluttered.

Gin shrugged. “You can bring a horse to water,” she said.

 

 

 

Kuffner was not at Bistrot Varenne that day, nor did he appear over the next two weeks. I did, however, notice a pattern to his persistent calls about our
Rafaela
: three days in a row, then nothing. Three days in a row, then nothing. If Boulind’s report was right, it seemed he called during the part of each week he spent in Paris. Tamara spoke with Kuffner for a few minutes every time he called, promising, without committing to a thing, that she would keep in mind his interest in the artist’s copy of
La Belle Rafaela
, and assuring him that his
Nude with Dove
would be ready by Christmas.

Tamara may have worked on
Nude with Dove,
but she also spent hours painting the two of us together. She would call the piece
Myrto
, she decided, for the
myrtille
ices I loved. From my vantage—lying on my side, facing the easel—I could see across the street to the lace curtains of the discreet rooming house that Tamara’s neighbor Mme. Grissard, unbeknownst to her aristocratic employers, ran out of the carriage house of the Hôtel des Castries. Each day a cigarette, attached to a man’s gloveless hand, extended its slim length out a second-story window, disappeared briefly, and reappeared with an exhaled cloud of smoke, as if its chilly owner couldn’t bear to raise the window another inch. I watched dozens of cigarettes appear and burn down each time I posed, so many that I began to feel sorry for the smoker, sitting in that room all day. The cigarette—or cigarettes—became for me a permanently steaming vent between the indifferent sky of the outside world and that stranger’s private, smoldering hell.

 

 

 

Halfway through December, Tamara began making me a peacock-feather dress. “You never told me you sewed,” I said.

“I don’t,” she said. “So, listen. Romana de la Salle and her mother are having a party the same night we go to Italy and they’ve asked me to do a five-minute live drawing as part of the festivities.”

“Why?”

“Because I am quick, and I am good, and I can draw in an evening gown.”

“I meant, why a drawing at a party?”

“Because photographs are so tired?” Tamara shrugged. “Anything is interesting when you are drunk. The point is, Rafaela: Will you let me draw you in this?” Tamara was building the dress tier by tier out of dozens of rounds of feather trim, the glittering peacock eyes overlapping like scales. I found it rather camp, and yet—even in progress—astonishing, a blinding glove of color and light. “Our train does not leave until nearly midnight,” she said, when I did not reply. “If I draw you at eight or nine, we will have plenty of time.”

“You haven’t told me where we’re staying in Italy or
anything.
It’s like we’re not really going,” I complained. But I was smiling in spite of myself, staring at that dress.

“I thought you would not mind.”

 

 

 

That weekend, at the Clignancourt flea market, I began to get an idea of my own for a dress. I had seen my first zipper in ’23, on my stepfather’s new galoshes, but by ’27, I saw them regularly on boots, tobacco pouches, and suitcases, such as the much-abused one the flea-market dealer tried to sell me that Sunday. Because he had sold me the steamer trunk I used as an armoire, I returned to him for a smaller suitcase, as a way to daydream about my trip with Tamara. I laughed at the slashed and battered piece he tried to unload on me. “But she zips,” he insisted, demonstrating. It
was
impressive, I conceded, that you could make a kind of fabric out of metal. As I looked more closely, the zipper became beautiful to me, its tab hanging like a pendant necklace from the Fritz Lang future, its steely teeth fusing like ribs do at the sternum, or like vertebrae locking together. Staring at it took me back to the afternoon at Shakespeare and Company that I’d spent poring over the French medical textbook. Sylvia would have called the wretched suitcase a nightingale, but what if there were a dress that zipped? I grinned to myself, imagining it as clean and startling as one of Tamara’s paintings, as simple and memorable as Adrienne’s Vermeer uniform: a conservative, charcoal-gray wool gabardine dress, lined in black satin, its only ornament a slender column of metal, itself a delicate tissue of interlocking steel bones, the zipper tab hanging like a jewel from the vee of its neckline. Maybe a paler gray rib of piping on either side of the zipper, where the zipper tape met the wool. I don’t know if Elsa Schiaparelli later copied my zipper dress design, but I do know I never copied hers. I had never seen a zipper for sale on its own, or I would have walked away from that bashed-in suitcase, but I bargained the dealer down that day instead. I could carry my little old valise to Italy, after all. Wouldn’t Tamara be impressed when I unpacked my new dress?

 

 

 

A week before the Duchesse de la Salle’s party, on the way to buy shoes for my peacock-feather confection, Tamara took Kuffner’s
Nude with Dove
to be framed at Vavin’s, off the Boulevard Raspail. When we arrived, I wasn’t surprised that she demanded to speak to the owner, a thick-faced older man, or by the care with which she chose the color and shape of the frame—a streamlined ebony—but I was astonished by how many other details she demanded M. Vavin adhere to. To make the picture jump out at the viewer, she wanted the canvas to extend out from the wall so far that you could have fit a medicine cabinet inside the box of the frame. She had brought an extra stretcher bar with her to demonstrate the thickness of the lip she wanted in back. The third time she showed Vavin exactly what she wanted, I asked, “Does it really matter?”

“Of course it matters,” she declared, gesturing dramatically in her red wool coat. “The front of the painting is the painting, yes, but the back of the painting is the painting, too.”

“Why, the frame of the painting is the painting!” M. Vavin concluded, before he could stop himself. Thinning hair fell across his scalp in a limp white flap, and when he tossed it out of his eyes, the whole flap moved. “Of course, when I frame a Matisse, it’s not at all the same as when I frame a Pas-cin, or again when I frame a Picasso.”

What a name-dropper, I thought, watching Tamara’s face cool in irritation. Wasn’t it in poor taste for him to mention one living painter to another? Yet he had plenty of clients: Why did they flock to him when he made them feel bad? Pondering this question as we finally left, I almost walked right into someone—Anson Hall!—on my way out. “Rafaela!”

“Are you following me?” I teased.

“I’m just—” he said, abashed, “picking something up for a friend.” We were only minutes from rue de Fleurus, so it wasn’t hard for me to guess who.

“How’s your little boyfriend?” Tamara asked as we walked away from the frame shop.

I stuck out my tongue sourly at the epithet, then confided in her. “I’m wondering if he lost his job. I get the feeling he might be so hard up for money he’s letting Gertrude Stein pay him to run errands again. I mean, didn’t Vavin mention Picasso?”

“Who did he not mention?”

“I bet you anything Gertrude Stein gets her Picassos framed there.”

“Oh, Picasso. Oh, Gertrude Stein,” Tamara said. “She just wants to be a man, and Anson just wants to be a woman.”

“Why say that?” I asked.

“Have you gone to bed with him?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go.”

“What?”

“He obviously likes you. So why not sleep with you? It is unnatural.”

“Because,” I said, indignant.

“Because why?”

“If you don’t know, it’s humiliating for me to tell you,” I said.

“Why?”

“That, or you’re just jealous, which is unfair, considering.”

“What is it?” Tamara asked, impatient.

I stopped walking, but couldn’t face her. “Because I only want you, all right? I only want you.”

“Oh.” Tamara stopped walking, too. A hand flew to her neck in an unconscious, wounded gesture. “I
was
jealous. How tiresome of me.”

 

 

 

I saw Anson a couple more times in the neighborhood that week, once on Boulevard Raspail and once on rue du Bac, both of them streets that ran between Tamara’s neighborhood and Stein’s. Both times he was carrying groceries, and though we chatted for long minutes on the sidewalk, his mesh bags and his evasiveness about his work—and the fact that for once he didn’t badger me to go have a meal with him—reinforced my suspicion that things were not going his way.

 

 

 

The day M. Vavin telephoned to say that
Nude with Dove
was ready—after yet another call from Kuffner—Boucard dropped by again. This time, I had enough warning to put on my robe and go dress in Tamara’s bedroom, and when I emerged, she and Boucard were talking in relaxed fashion about the American show—the painting was for exhibition only, she assured him, not for sale—that
The Dream
was bound for. Knowing Tamara would want me to, I stayed as they chatted on, over scotch, about Americans and Poles, about the second car Boucard wanted to buy for his daughter. I was impressed that he managed not to say anything offensive to me this time, though once or twice I caught him staring at my features the way most men stared at the rest of me. After an hour, just as he left, Boucard gave Tamara a sudden, careful look. “I just want to let you know,” Boucard said, “that when I found out you took a painting to be framed without showing me, at first I was disappointed in you. But when I learned that it was
Nude with Dove—
I know your sale agreement with Kuffner predates our contract—I was ashamed of myself for ever doubting you.” His voice was jovial, and he changed the subject before Tamara could reply.

Tamara chatted and laughed as gaily as before, but the moment Boucard left, she clouded over. “That whore Vavin. Boucard has him in his pocket. He came
specifically
to tell me that he knows I framed a painting.”

“Why does it matter if you framed a painting?”

“Because I am selling it, and not to him. I am completely within my rights to make good on my commitment to Kuffner without notifying him. A contract is a contract, but who does Monsieur le Médecin think he is? My father?”

“You know this is about just one thing.”

Tamara turned to me, puffed up with anger, then deflated as the thought occurred to her, too. “Of course. Our
Rafaela
.”

“He just wants to make sure Kuffner doesn’t get it.”

“And he wants me to know he is watching. What am I supposed to do, find a new framer?”

“Do you
want
to sell our painting to anybody?”

“No!” Tamara’s eyes went wide.

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about. You found yourself a patron. Let him feel like a patron.”

“I am very angry,” Tamara said. “I am very upset.”

“Do you want me to stay? Do you want to keep working on
Myrto
?”

“No,” she said, exhaling grandly. “I think I—well—I promised the man who bought the Salon
Belle
that I would go to his warehouse and varnish the painting soon. I can do that today. So please come tomorrow,” she concluded. “I will work better then.”

“I should go? Are you sure?”

“Unless
you
can think of some way I can have Boucard’s money without Boucard.”

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