The Last Nude (32 page)

“Uh, Monsieur Bland?”

“No, I meant—”

“My imaginary rich parents? I know, that’s what I told you when we first met. I wish.”

“Really?”

“Rafaela,” he said gently. “When I saw you coming out of the lift that night we first met, you looked so sad and angry that I felt for you. I really did. But at the same time, I got a little sore at you, too. I thought, oh, so
you
think
you’re
so special because
you
hate
your
job? Bland owns me as much as Boucard owns your painter.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said, smarting at the memory of that night in the Ritz, but even more so at the memory of Tamara’s grand speeches about supporting her daughter on her own.

“My wife had some money from her family,” he said. “But
that’s
over. Maybe that’s why those bank transfers from de Lempicka’s husband struck me. Now that it’s over, I can’t imagine taking money from my wife every month.”

“Maybe it’s for his child,” I said, my mouth like cotton. “Well, now she wants to marry Kuffner for
his
money.”

“Rafaela, I saw Bland’s report. If I could, I’d try to marry Kuffner, too.”

I realized, just then as I groaned in reply, that I had completely forgotten the suitcases. The little valise I had packed for Italy was still sitting in Tamara’s apartment. And my coat was lost in the Seine. I stumbled as I stood. “I’ll just take this behind the screen,” I said, reaching for my bedraggled dress.

“It’s
December.
You’re not going out in wet feathers. Can’t I lend you something to wear?”

“You’re a pal, Anson.”

“And then I should probably drift into work sometime. Tie up some loose ends before the holiday.”

“I’m sorry to hold you up. If I can borrow this,” I said, gesturing toward the gray union suit I was wearing, “and you lend me the biggest coat you can spare, I can scuttle home and change.”

“I have just the thing for you,” he said, digging into his wardrobe.
“Voilà!”
He produced a thick Italian military cape. “But someone will check you into the Salpêtrière if you go around with those woolly underwear legs poking out. Let me at least give you
something
. All the girls are in trousers these days.”

“All the rich American girls who think it’s fun to break the law,” I said, but I accepted what he gave me and changed behind the screen, pausing to note a medal tacked to the wall beside a clipping in a frame.
Al Valore Militare,
the medal said. The
Sun
article, yellowing under glass, ran under a photograph of Anson: it said that he had been distributing cigarettes for the Red Cross
in the Piave district in the front line trenches when a shell from a trench mortar burst over his head. The surgical chart of his battered person,
it also said,
shows 227 marks, indicating where bits of a peculiar kind of Austrian shrapnel, about as thick as a .22 caliber bullet and an inch long, like small cuts from a length of wire, smote him.

Anson had cut his own name out of the article. Why? Had he since changed his name? Or was it out of shame at what the war had done to him? I would ask him one day, I decided. It was weird that Anson kept so many relics of a war that had cheated him so badly. It was weird not to see his book anywhere in his flat, or even a clipping from his sportswriting days. He had excised his life as a writer as much as he had enshrined his life at war. I saw a photograph of him on the wall, holding the hand of a stocky little boy outside the Jardin des Plantes zoo. Through a gap in the screen, I saw him opening the passport I’d left on the coffee table: the happy, potato-faced boy looked exactly like him. But how could that be, given what Anson had told me the night before? The war had ended eight years back, and Anson’s son was only four. Had he made up that story about what they said in the Italian hospital? Why would you lie about a thing like
that
? I looked from son to father again, and my fogged but clearing brain suddenly climbed a dense braid of intuition and logic. Perhaps it was the loss of his writing, and not the war, that had crippled Anson. I would ask him that someday, too. Who might he have become if he hadn’t lost his work, I wondered, or if losing it hadn’t broken him? What might he have written? What might he still write yet? Just as I opened my mouth to ask about his book, Anson coughed in horror. “Rafaela,” he spluttered. “You’re seventeen years old.”

“So?”

“I have a sixteen-year-old sister in the tenth grade. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Oh, for crying out loud. I think it’s a little late for that,” I said, my voice dropping uncontrollably.
Not again with the tears,
I thought, glad he couldn’t see me.

“It’s not too late,” he countered. “I mean, isn’t there anything you want to learn?”

Just then, a metallic whine sheared the air: we both jumped. “What’s that?”

“Don’t worry, it’s only the sawmill,” he said, as the groan of wood, motor, and steel rattled the glass in the windows.

“Ohhh,” I said, gently pressing my skull into my hands. “The sawmill?”

“Ten to five except on Sundays.”

“Oh, that’s very bad.”

“It’s not so bad when you haven’t drunk too much.”

“God help you.”

“It keeps my rent down,” he said, as I emerged to face him. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“It’s a good thing all you have is that shaving mirror,” I said, looking down at my ensemble: a pair of putty-colored trousers from a sacque suit that had seen better days, held up with braces over a union suit, mercifully hidden from sight by Anson’s military cape.

He didn’t try very hard not to laugh. “You really make quite the officer.”

“Spare me the hat that goes with this,” I said, laughing at myself. “No, I want it, in case
les flics
are awake at this hour.”

“As you wish, Mademoiselle. I do have the boots, unless you want to wear my shoes from last night again.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“And the pistol, too. Want it? I’m still going to teach you how to shoot one day.”

“Well. I have to think about today.”

“Let me send you home in a taxi.”

“I—appreciate it,” I said, brought short by how much I meant it. “And then I can go
pay hell
in my own clothes.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“Thank you—” I said, “for all of this.”

“Thank
you
,” he said, with a smile so sudden it embarrassed us both. “You know you’re welcome here anytime.”

 

 

 

Tamara did not say a word to me until she closed and locked the door. I was wearing a too-tight coat I had borrowed from Gin’s closet: I did not take it off, nor my hat. “You are not in Italy,” Tamara said.

“Neither are you.”

“I am sorry about last night. I tried to find you, at the party, to say we could not go, but you left early. Why?”

I didn’t answer her question. “You spent the night with Kuffner.”

“Well, he invited me,” she said huffily.

I blinked.

“I have to invest in my future, Rafaela.”

In the furnace of her enormous betrayal, the only sentences I could form felt like tiny flakes of snow. “But I thought you didn’t want him.”

“I would be a fool not to take him,” she said. “You would do the same, surely?”

My throat began to close. “No,” I choked. “No. I wouldn’t.” I handed her a paper sack. “Sorry your dress got rained on,” I sneered.

Tamara opened the sack. “Completely ruined, I see,” she said lightly. “It is a good thing we took those photographs, no?” I looked away. “But where is the rest of it? Where is your peacock tail?”

“It’s in the Seine,” I snapped. “Along with the
painting
you gave me.”

Tamara started, then gave me a calculating look. “Did Boucard’s man see you?”

“Yes,” I said savagely.

“You know who I am talking about? The man at the window with the cigarettes?”

“Yes, I know who you’re talking about. What do you think Anson was doing in the neighborhood all this time?”

Tamara gasped. “Was Boucard paying
you
, too?” At the look on my face, she laughed. “No, I see. Your friend was just spying on you and you were too dumb to know. Some friend. Maybe you should choose better ones.”

“Maybe I should,” I said. “Look at yourself.”

She was not looking at me. She was stroking her collarbone, thinking. “If Boucard thinks you threw the painting in the Seine, we can never display it now,” she murmured.

“You lied to me,” I said. “You used me.” Tamara continued to look away. I took the gold ring from my coat pocket and flung it at her. “You
gave
our painting to Kuffner!”

A chilly sound hung in the air after the ring snapped to the floor. Tamara did not look down for it. “Rafaela,” she said patiently. “When I marry him the painting will be mine again.”

“But I thought—”

“What?” Tamara laughed.

I didn’t know what I’d thought until I’d begun to say it, but I swallowed it fast.

“You thought I would marry
you
? Rafaela, can you make me a baroness? Can you make me a rich woman? Can you give me a
child
?”

Despite everything I had learned about Tamara in the past fourteen hours, I began to shake. I thought my face would crack open. I turned my back to her and faced the bed carved with those nymphs in each other’s arms, the portrait of Romana’s mother in her suit. I was crying as hard as I had on Anson’s couch that morning.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Tamara’s voice was solid honey: golden, gritty, particulate. “Rafaela, come here, you beautiful thing,” she said. My whole body blushed. I shrugged the hand away.

23

“YOU POOR THING,” said Sylvia an hour later, passing me a handkerchief. I had sought her out in the bookstore, where she and Adrienne were sharing a late breakfast alone in the fat morning light. I hadn’t thought I’d wanted to
marry
Tamara, not in so many words, but now that she’d mocked me for it, I felt humiliated, exposed: she was right. And was it so strange, to want what I’d wanted? What Sylvia and Adrienne had, was it so impossible as all that? I was crying all over again as Sylvia said, “But just think, most people get their hearts broken and have nothing to show for it. At least you can point to those gorgeous paintings out in the world. She’s kind of a genius, no?”

At Sylvia’s soothing words, I began to suck in little gusts of air that threatened to burst into sobs at any second. Adrienne looked impatient. “Ah, genius,” she said wryly. I looked up at her and held my breath. “There’s no excuse for treating your friends badly,” she said in French, more to Sylvia than to me, and glanced toward the copies of
Ulysses
by the till. She patted my back and pointed at a basket of croissants atop a neat stack of books. “You should sit down and eat something.”

As I reached, gratefully, to take off my borrowed coat, my eyes fell on the little suitcase I’d lugged all the way from Tamara’s. “I even made a dress to wear on our trip, and she’ll never see it,” I said, sniffling.

Sylvia looked over at Adrienne, half pitying, half amused. I would become better friends with them in time, so close that I would one day vacation with them to Adrienne’s family cabin in the Savoy Alps, which is where I’m perching now. But I
was
imposing on them that morning, on their goodwill and on their breakfast, too. I wiped my eyes again and tried to look a little less morose. I realized the basket of croissants was sitting on Sylvia’s unsold medical text, and remembered, dimly, the pleasure I’d felt when I first looked at LE SYSTÈME MUSCULAIRE. “You inspired me, Adrienne,” I said, opening my valise to show them my zipper dress.

“Well, will you look at that,” said Sylvia, almost touching, unawares, Kuffner’s money still sewn into the hem.
Enough money to change my life
, I realized.
But how?

Adrienne was looking from the dress to me, puzzled.

“I mean, you inspired the feeling of it,” I explained. “You don’t dress like anybody else, but you dress so much like
yourself.
”

“You
do,
” Sylvia told her. “Look at this. It’s beautiful.”

“I’ve never inspired a dress before,” Adrienne said, pleased in spite of herself. “You should keep at it, Rafaela. You have a gift.”

24