The Last Nude (30 page)

 

 

 

We eased through the blue winter night and the empty streets. I saw another taxicab not far behind, and knew Boucard’s man had seen me, was watching me, would see me enter the station, find the platform, mount the train. I had a ticket and he didn’t, which meant if my timing was right, he would see me and not reach me; he would see the painting leave Paris without being able to stop it. Boucard would think the painting was out of both his reach and Kuffner’s. And Tamara would think I was a fool. At first. Then she would discover Kuffner’s wedding ring was missing, and that’s when she would know I knew. That’s when she would know—here we sat waiting for the light on the Boulevard Saint-Germain—that someone in this world had loved her better than she could love anyone.

The other, sadder reason I took that taxi to the station was this: she had told me to. We had a plan. How could she meet me on the train if I wasn’t there? How could I disappoint her? How could I fail to bring the—here, as we pulled away from the light, the painting swung back, striking my head—
Wait,
I gasped—
what painting?
The streetlight flashed on the split my forehead had dented into the brown paper that covered—
what?
I fingered open the split paper and pulled, looked at the back of the canvas, kept tearing paper until I reached the front, looked again. We swung past another light overhead, a still-lit room on a second story.

Tamara had packed up a blank canvas for me to bring to Italy.

That was when I began to cry again, when I looked up at that empty, electric-lit room, those diamond-paned windows. My head was full of tears, and had been waiting for this movement: chin up, eyes down, bare mute throat. Lifting my face to look up tipped it back like a glass and everything in me spilled out: I loved her.

Tamara was not at the party. Tamara was not drinking one last champagne, was not touching a beautiful boy or girl under the chin with a long gloved finger, was not calling
goodbye-my-love
to the hostess or descending the stairs in furs. She was not telling any other departing guest that her car was in the shop, so she was taking a taxi. Tamara was not looking at the black lit waters of the Seine and thinking of me right now, nor was she paying the driver, nor finding her platform or train car or seat. She was not waiting for me on that train. She was not waiting on that car nor would she burst in late, breathless and golden, tipping the porter and chiding the conductor for his impatience.

We were crossing the Pont Sully. Suddenly I didn’t care about doing what Tamara wanted. I looked across the inky water at which she was not looking while thinking of me, and I said, “Stop.”

“Eh?”

“I’ll get out here.”

When I paid the driver, he got out of the cab, tugged the canvas free, and set it in my hands before I could stop him. His expression when he handed it to me was so polite, so offhandedly kind, that I started crying again. I turned my back to avoid his pity, to let him drive away.

I was standing at the center of the bridge facing the river with a broken heart wrapped in paper and twine. I chucked it into the river. And then, before the canvas could hit the Seine, before my brain could even form the word
drown,
I clambered up the railing and pitched myself over, too.

20

THE MOMENT THE COLD OF THE WATER shocked through me, my body took over: it did not want to die. My heavy coat filled with water and my body, wrestling free, refused to sink with it. The river sucked the train right off my dress.

Half naked, I reached for the nearest floating thing to hand. The canvas had landed facedown: I clung to it like a lifebuoy. As the muscled current pulled us downstream, I tucked the frame under my body, inch by inch, until, briefly, I could crouch on the canvas that was filling with black water; I could let go and use both arms to reach for the stone wall that bounded the river, to scrabble for purchase as the icy maw of the river sucked the canvas out from under me. There were iron rungs driven into the river wall; I seized hold of one just as I spotted the edge of the canvas nosing out from the water. It was caught on the stone foot of the next bridge: a stretcher bar strained against the current, then cracked. The canvas racked, collapsing like a kite in a storm, and vanished silently underwater.

I clung to the iron rungs in the stone wall, and then I scaled them. My shoes had gone the way of the canvas; the narrow bars stabbed into my feet as I hauled myself up, up, and onto the quai. I was dressed in nothing but wet feathers and gooseflesh. My heart was broken and I couldn’t even drown myself. I threw up once, then huddled, frozen, on the paving-stones and began to rock so slowly, so numbly, so
comfortably,
even, that I think to this day my blue body might have been beginning to close up shop. I meant to get up, but I couldn’t. I would get up soon. I heard footsteps rushing down stairs and heavy breath huff toward me: I didn’t even care. My eyes were iced shut and I could only concentrate on not biting my numb tongue. I was shivering so violently that at first I didn’t feel the thick coat thrown over me, didn’t hear the voice shouting my name.

It was Anson. Of course. I had known it without knowing it: Anson was Boucard’s smoking man. The slight heat that clung to his coat made me shake all the more as I staggered up against him. I dug my lowered head into his ribs. “Doesn’t he want you to rescue the
painting,
not me?” I asked numbly.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “I mean, sure
.
But are you
crazy
?”

In the streetlight I could see the dark weal on his white cotton shirt where it was soaking up the water from my hair. “Take back your coat,” I mumbled. “You’ll freeze, too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” His heart was loud in his chest and his breath steamed into the dark. “God, you’re barefoot. And it’s starting to rain. Come on, get up on my back. Let’s find you a cab.”

 

 

 

I saved myself from drowning that night, but Anson saved me, I think, from dying of cold. In the taxi, I curled up in a ball inside his coat. “She told me she loved me,” I said, looking up at him briefly.

Anson didn’t know what had happened between me and Tamara, but he gave me the kind smile of a doctor on a lunatic ward. “Sorry.”

“I know I sound as dumb as Gin,” I said. “I guess I just thought, because we were both girls—”

“That you’d be like Sylvia and Adrienne?” His pity made me dig my face back into my knees. We took a hard right and my balled-up body swung toward the window. “Rafaela, some of these women are like Gertrude and Alice, and some of them sleep around with other girls, like Natalie Barney. Some of them sleep around with men, too, like Djuna Barnes’s girlfriend. And I hate to say it, but according to Bobby, there are some who like to get coked up and fool around with two sailors at a time.”

I was almost sick again, remembering the dirt-floored shack by the Seine that Gin had once told me about. It was uncannily easy to picture Tamara in that crowd, especially when I recalled those summer mornings when she told me she hadn’t slept the night before. “Oh, God,” I said.

“I think you maybe drew the short straw, there.”

The cab turned even more steeply, and my cold forehead touched the colder window glass: I shrank away from it. I had once wondered, when I told Gin what I knew about Daniel, why, though she couldn’t bear to hear me, she wouldn’t contradict me, either. Now I understood: she knew it was true the moment she heard it. I kept my eyes shut as my question lifted into the quiet car: “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because you didn’t want to know,” he said softly. “Sylvia told me she tried.” I remembered, suddenly, the “louche places” that Sylvia had mentioned. I remembered, too, that beautiful woman in the pale straw cloche outside the bookstore
,
June—no, Djuna—weeping in the street. I remembered Bobby asking Romaine Brooks why she put up with Natalie’s lovers. There were a lot of things I had chosen not to notice. “I really would have told you sooner,” Anson said, “if I’d thought that you could take it in.”

By the time we reached the Place de la Contrescarpe, the rain was coming down hard. Anson insisted I wear his shoes and crossed the wet cobbles in his sockfeet. Inside, he turned on the gas lights, lit a fire in the Prussian stove, and ran a tub behind a screen for me, drying his shirt on a chair. He didn’t say much as I shivered and wept in the bath, even when I vomited, again, over the side of the tub. He just pattered through his small neat flat, passing over tea and cognac, a wet washcloth for the floor, and, later, as I huddled under a quilt in the union suit he’d lent me, a reefer. I felt warm and safe and grateful on the couch beside him, listening to the rain, gazing at his bare scarred feet. I wanted to float in his world of liquor and smoke forever. “Can I stay here tonight?”

“Of course. You’d die of cold out there.”

I knew what I was setting myself up for by asking to stay, but I didn’t want to be alone. Gin was out for the night with her lawyer, no doubt cutting the same stunted deal. Anson won’t care how unhappy I am, I thought. Either he’ll ask for it or he’ll just take it. Either way I’ll like him less. It was a shame. I could think of only one way to weather the next few minutes with my good opinion of him intact. Oh, well. I
did
like him: it might even distract me. “I’m about to fall asleep, but—” I offered.

He pushed my hand away. “Don’t.”

“Oh, sorry—”

“It’s me,” he said. “The war.”

“Oh.”

He looked away from me.

“That’s a raw deal,” I said.

“At the Italian hospital, they said,
You have given more than your life, Americano.
”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t say you’re sorry.”

“I’m—” I stopped myself. “All right, I won’t.”

“Why did you try that?” he asked.

“I
said
I was sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he insisted. “I just want to know.”

“I guess I should go.”

“Oh, Rafaela,” he said, his voice thick with loss. “But it would have been a bad idea. You’re a mess tonight.”

I
was
a mess. I shrugged. “It’s fine. I was only—”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. I felt terrible. “Oh.” He looked at me again and said quietly, “You don’t have to pay me to stay here.”

I hadn’t known that’s what I was waiting for. “Thank you,” I said, and I let go, leaned into him, my cheek finding his shoulder. I felt him sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time. He took my arm and lay it across his waist. I could feel the pulse in his throat through my forehead.

I remembered something. “But. You have a son.”

His breathing changed. “He’s not mine.”

“Oh.”

“I never begrudged her. I couldn’t.”

“But still.”

“No, it’s not like that. And now they have each other.”

“That’s true,” I agreed.

Poor guy, I thought. What had he hoped to accomplish by chasing me all those months? Funny, I’d heard him use the courtyard WC and hadn’t noticed anything remarkable. Maybe he was better off than he made it sound: before modeling for Tamara, I had once encountered, in addition to the wheezy grandfather, another old man in a hotel—drained, gasping, briefly beatific—who actually came without ever getting it up. But then again, he’d never been
shot.
He’d tasted like bleach, I recalled. I had hated him for that, and for his self-pity, but I had not been in a position to like any of them. It must be lonesome, I thought, my grip tightening around Anson. “Well, that’s not the only game in town,” I said aloud.

I felt his jaw harden, his pulse go fast. I said nothing, suddenly careful. He inhaled, thinking. I burrowed my cheek deeper into his shoulder and his pulse slowed.

“You would know about that,” he said, finally.

“I would.”

The outstretched arm resting on the back of the couch settled then, across my back, like snow.

21