The Last Nude (34 page)

HECTOR AND ANA HAVE LEFT for town in a flurry of
bisous
; Kizette is reading one of her Bibles (
must
she own three?) in the bedroom that we share. I’m on the chaise in my studio, sipping alternately from my cigarette and my oxygen tube. I can’t see the painting from my couch anymore because last week, after someone tampered with my work, I turned the easel away.

Last weekend, I gathered together a first round of canvases for my Osaka show. They’re borrowing most of the pieces from collectors in Europe, but a few of them I own.
The Dream. Tamara in the Green Bugatti. The Orange Scarf.
A dozen others, including my latest: a new version of my 1936
Saint Anthony.
The owners of the 1936 painting are touchy about showing it, and it’s too good to go unseen: those hands. I’ll send the new
Rafaela,
too, when it’s ready.

So last weekend, I invited Hector over and I put the whole house to work—Kizette, the staff—until all the paintings were leaning against the studio wall, waiting for the art handlers to pack and collect them on Monday. I needed to sleep the whole morning, but Kizette and Hector kept an eye out for me, and the art movers came and went without incident.

Or so I thought. Monday evening in my studio, unable to sleep, I saw something out of place: a small painting, leaning against the wall with its back to me. My new
Saint Anthony
.

I confronted both of them when Hector came for lunch the next day. “How did one piece get left behind?”

I watched them: so surprised, so apologetic. They didn’t know how it possibly could have happened. They counted fourteen paintings against the wall and fourteen paintings in the truck, so the art handlers must have moved it before they started work that morning. Maybe they missed a painting at the end of the row. They’d make sure it went into the second shipment, absolutely.

But when we had set the paintings out over the weekend,
Saint Anthony
hadn’t been off to the side. I remember, it was standing in the middle of the row, with the
Orange Scarf
on the left and my painting of Ira with the mandolin on the right. (I think of Ira, her hair the red-black of cherries, and grimace.) My
Saint Anthony
was right there among its neighbors, and it was left behind. One of them left it behind. One of them, Hector or Kizette, set it aside, thinking I wouldn’t notice. Of course I noticed. Ever since my exhibition in ’72—what Ana blithely called my
rediscovery show—
museums and galleries have been asking for work from the Twenties and Thirties: I send it, they show it, and the world thinks all the more that I stopped painting in ’33. A nobody named Larry Rivers copied that painting of Ira with the mandolin and had the temerity to think I’d be pleased. My friend Romana says it would behoove me to cultivate some young New York painters, but the gall! I stopped doing those portraits fifty years ago! But I never stopped painting. Still lifes. Geometric experiments. Landscapes composed of the tendons of the hand. In the Sixties, I spread loose dreams with palette knives:
Une Semaine de Paris
called them “beautiful frescoes, inspired by Pompeii.” The thing is, I dared to make new work, and this is a world that rewards artists for rolling the same little scarab’s ball of dung up the same little hill all their lives.

They want to dig my grave, those museums, mausoleums. Which one of them left my painting out, Kizette or Hector? Which one of them agrees with the gravediggers? Daughter or friend, which one?

27

NOSY ANA.
WHERE IS SHE NOW?
What kind of a question is that? I was upset that Rafaela left the way she did in ’27, but I had so much to do. I found another girl to pose for
Myrto
and then I didn’t think about Rafaela much, not until a spring day years later. Or rather, I thought about her with an occasional, impersonal pang. Have you ever had a favorite café close? It was like that.

I should have been on top of the world, that spring of ’31. I had finally pried Nana de Herrera off Rollie for good by painting a portrait that showed her in her worst light. His wife, Sara, had entered her final decline. Only then, my title all but assured, had I shucked off Boucard’s contract and secured one commission after another, despite the crash. I had bought a new home in Montparnasse. I was working at the rate of more than one painting a month, thanks to judicious doses of cocaine. It was never a problem for me. I may have painted the occasional six-fingered girl, but my daughter never noticed a thing.

Sweetest of all, my on-again off-again fling with Ira Perrot was on again. The stock market crash meant that she and her husband couldn’t take the trips they’d planned, so I had her to myself to paint: a winter
Die Dame
cover in a red sweater. Larger than life in Rafaela’s blue dress, holding a mandolin. Seated in oyster-white satin with crimson drapery, bearing an armful of arums.

All morning with Ira, painting. All afternoon in bed. It was like having Rafaela back, but better, because Ira never had Rafaela’s American absolutism. When Ira and I first went to Italy, just ourselves, we ate, we made love, we looked at paintings, and then we went home to our husbands, cheerful. When Rafaela and I planned our trip to Italy, I could tell: she wanted to run away with me and never come back.

I could see the difference when I painted them. While Rafaela brought a stupefied Ingres odalisque to every canvas—with her solemn, carnal tenderness, her honest surprise at her own pleasure—there was a coolness to Ira that made her into a grave Fra Angelico figure, a mathematically plotted angel, no matter how we dressed her. Going to bed with Ira was a small decadent miracle, like wearing orange blossoms in the snow. But Rafaela? During those months she modeled for me, I spent my nights in rough bars by the Seine just to keep it from weakening me: her need, her earnest love.

One day in the spring of ’31, after spending the afternoon with Ira, I suddenly remembered that I had an appointment with a collector. I threw on a dress and left Ira, naked, to go home at her leisure. En route to the collector’s, I realized I hadn’t brought his address. I turned around, cursing, and when I pulled up to my studio, there was Ira, just leaving. I was halfway out of my car, smiling and waving, when I saw that she held a canvas in either hand. I stopped. My hand died mid-wave. “Darling!” she exclaimed, her voice high and breathy.

I had one cool thought before the anger hit: I could call the collector and apologize when I got in. I had all the time in the world. I slammed the car door behind me. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh, Tamara, I had no idea you’d come back,” she said, talking too quickly. “You’ve just been so good to me, and I wanted to surprise you.”

I couldn’t speak.

“I was just taking these to the framing store, to surprise you,” she repeated.

“I am surprised,” I said. The fury was cold metal in my veins. “I am very surprised.” Slowly and deliberately as I spoke, I gestured, and Ira surrendered two crudely wrapped paintings.

“I just wanted to surprise you,” she said a third time, her voice weak. I tore open just enough brown wrapping paper to see that she had taken two portraits of herself: the recent one in the brilliant blue dress, and a smaller one, from ’27, in the chemise Rafaela had made for me.

“But Ira,” I said slowly, carefully, the steely wires of anger turning me into a marionette. “I haven’t even varnished this one yet. And that one is already framed.”

I knew Ira’s husband had lost a great deal, including his banking job, in the crash. I knew they had sold their second house. I knew the rents on our street were among the highest in the city, and that they were buying a small building in the Butte aux Cailles where they could take the landlord’s flat and rent out the rest to live on. But it had not occurred to me that the price of a pair of paintings could make a difference to the woman who had once brought me to Italy on her own largesse, let alone warrant the loss of a thirteen-year friendship. “They were of
me
, Tamara. All those years you painted me, and I never asked you for a thing.”

“I thought we were friends,” I said. “I thought painting was the way we spent our time together.”

“You were young and pretty and ambitious, so I let you paint me. But you took advantage,” she said.

I looked at her, this woman whose scent was still on my hands. I opened my mouth to speak, and shut it. I tried again. “If you want a model’s wage for the past ten years, let’s go inside and calculate your hours.”

“You have so many paintings up there. You have stacks and stacks. You’d never even miss these two.”

“Of course I would miss them. I’d never think
you
would be the one to take them.”

“I can’t keep giving and giving to you, Tamara. Let me sell these and we’ll share the profit,” she said, but her voice shook with guilt.

“I’ll mail you a check for your services,” I snapped. I carried in the paintings with my head unbent, knowing she was watching. I burned my way up the stairs, and when I got into my apartment, I wept. It occurred to me that this might be how Rafaela had felt when she saw me give our painting to Rollie. At that, I washed my face. I would never speak to Ira again, I decided. And Rafaela? I would never think about
her.
And I didn’t. Not for three years.

28

YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYONE. One of them is in league with the mausoleums, Kizette or Hector. One of them wants me to stop painting. I defy you, gravedigger. I’ve got a show coming up; what have you got?

Painting
Beautiful Rafaela
, it’s like making love to her was: you just want to do it again. I painted two in ’27, one for the Salon, against red, and one for me, against green. This one, today, is against red. I don’t think of them as copies. I once
copied
a painting,
Kizette en Rose
(was it Kizette?) but that was only because my model had aged, and I missed the little girl. What could be more different than nine and eleven? (Or, as I told the world, than seven and nine? I’d had to shave two years off her age to make her French instead of Russian, but I never lost track.) With the second
Kizette en Rose,
I was painting from a painting. But Rafaela
Red
and
Green
? Neither was a sketch. Neither was a copy. Both were from the girl in the room.

I think it was Kizette who moved my new
Saint Anthony
. When my daughter was nine, I painted
Kizette en Rose.
When she was ten, I painted
Kizette au Balcon.
At ten, she had a trace—as faint as the trace of rose in
Kizette en Rose—
of the sour, sagging woman she is at sixty-three. A hint of thunder at the corners of the mouth and eyes. When she wasn’t simply flouncing on the couch or slamming doors. And just when my husband had left me. And then there was the time I met that Texan. Inviting me to his home for Christmas like that, with no intention of sleeping with me! Did he really think I’d sailed all that way just to meet his wife and children? When I came home to Paris, Kizette had cut my hats to shreds.

I always thought boarding school put an end to all that. When my daughter joined me in California, she was a sunny, placid girl of twenty-three, almost her child self again. My sister was safe, thank God, I told everyone. (How could I have a grown-up daughter, at my age?) I’d fished her up from the war like a bright coin from a dark well. But here she is, with her husband gone, clomping and gloomy, burying me before I’m dead. She
did
move my
Saint Anthony
. But why would she sabotage me now, when I’ve rewritten my will for her? Maybe she wants to punish me for outliving her husband. But she’s timid. She knows I could change it back anytime.

I’m not painting from a painting right now, but from the memory of painting. My eyes and my hand remember that sweating summer. A girl like ripe strawberries, hot with light. A girl like ripe
myrtilles.
A summer girl who never ceased to be summer. Those lips. Those liquid eyes.