The Last Nude (37 page)

33

I LOOK UP AT
RAFAELA.
My daughter blocks her briefly, bustling across the room. The oxygen prongs feed coolly into my nostrils; Kizette must have seen to that. What is she doing with that tray? “Kizette. Stop fussing. Luz can clear that away.”

“It’s just a couple of things.”

“You know I can’t stand it when you talk with your back to me.”

She leaves the room with the tray, and suddenly the air in my tube tastes wrong. It has an odor. The taste of copper and a fresh-tarred road. How I fell in the snow. The two men who took my husband: they’re looking for me.

“Kizette!” I call, afraid.

“Mother?”

“Darling, there’s something wrong with my oxygen.”

Kizette looks from me to the tank. It’s three-quarters full, she reports, but she sets me up with a new tank just in case. Within moments, I’m breathing again.

“I guess Rafaela just took my breath away for a moment there,” I joke.

“You pushed yourself too hard today, finishing that painting,” she says.

“I needed it for Osaka. And now Zurich wants one too.”

“Mother. Stop wearing yourself out. You know we can just send them the other
Rafaela
from ’27. The private copy.”

“No. We can’t.”

Kizette looks away, irritated, and together we look up at my painting. “I wish you’d stop with that story,” she says.

“What story?”

“The whole thing. I Saved Rafaela from the Nazis. Rafaela Saved Me.”

“What about it?”

“What about saving
me
? You made me wait so long, I barely got out.” It’s true. Kizette slipped out of Poland the day before the Germans captured Warsaw. We couldn’t get her out of France until just two days before the border to Spain was sealed.

“Haven’t we been through this before?” If we hadn’t played our cards right, America would have turned us away. Cuba, however, had no quota restrictions against Jews, so the plan was to come in through Havana—with Rollie as an “expert agronomist,” of course, not a refugee. Only then could we get papers for Kizette. She knows this.

“I’m just saying. If it was so easy to get false papers for that tart, why couldn’t you get them for me?”

“Darling, she was a nobody. You were a somebody. Your Papali and I, we had our names in the paper all the time. If she came with me to New York under a false name, so what? But if you’d had bad papers, we all could have gotten in trouble.”

“You go around like you’re a big hero because you saved Rafaela’s life. But you never sound proud you saved mine. You never talk about it at all. I used to think you got her out first because you loved her more,” she says. She looks down at her Bible. Have I driven the little darling to
prayer
?

Fine. You want to see some Christian self-restraint? “Kizette,” I spit. “You’re my
daughter
.”

“But now I think it’s because you couldn’t admit you were afraid for me. You couldn’t admit you were afraid for yourself. You still are. You still can’t admit that I was born in Saint Petersburg. You still can’t admit that
you
were born in Moscow. Gurwik isn’t even a Polish name, it’s—”

“We were never Russian. Those people killed your father, Kizette.”

“He died in
Poland,
Mother. He had
cancer
.”

“So
they
said. Don’t ever let me hear you use my maiden name again, do you understand?”

“Your father—”

“Shut up, Kizette. Would you please shut up?” That’s it. That’s enough. Kizette does not know all my secrets, but she knows enough to hurt me, and now I see how long she has been waiting to do just that. What I took for passivity was patience. It was Kizette who moved my
Saint Anthony.
She left it where I’d be sure to find it, because she knew that’s what would hurt me most. And here I am, helpless, alone in the house with her. If I don’t watch her, she could send anything to Osaka she pleases. She will not care about the promise I made to Rafaela when I called the painting
ours
. Nothing would please her more, in fact, than to break that promise.

“Kizette, call Arlo Mendez.”

“Mother, not again.”

“Call the Wilsons.”

“You do this every other week.”

“I’m an artist. Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.”

“It’s eleven at night. Your lawyer is in bed. The Wilsons are asleep. You can’t keep waking everyone up like this.”

“Call them. I could die before morning.”

“Don’t say that!”

Though I fix Kizette with the look I use to force her hand, I reach for the coffee table surreptitiously, suddenly afraid. They could come tonight, the two men. I pretend to grope for my cigarettes. I touch wood.

Suddenly I miss Hector desperately. I miss his easy kindness, his humor, his radiant face watching me paint. He would come, if it were an emergency, if I were dying. I touch wood again.

“Call Hector, too.”

“
Chérie.
No. He’s probably showing Ana a night on the town.”

“Oh, Ana. She’s in bed with Martin right now.”

“Not everyone’s like you, Mother.”

“You want it on your conscience that you wouldn’t let an old woman change her will?”

Kizette sighs, and turns to the telephone.

34

AROUND THE WHITE MARBLE TABLE AGAIN, without gazpacho, without lobsters, without candles, the Wilsons look older than they did at dinner: Romana without a lick of lipstick, Paul in his fraying robe. They are my neighbors, my witnesses. They’ve come all the nights I’ve been afraid. Arlo Mendez, plugging in his portable typewriter, looks as crisp as he does at the office, and why shouldn’t he, billing by the hour? Cuernavaca is home to many retirees, and he has been summoned late before. The three of them glance warily from Kizette to me and back again. “Well, you haven’t invited us back for a nightcap,” says Paul. Arlo and Romana acknowledge his joke with smiles that are thin—his from professional restraint; hers from fatigue. Kizette doesn’t smile at all. I hope I’m scaring her.

I’m disappointed Hector isn’t here yet, but Kizette did wake his mother for me, asking that he come as soon as he can. He is not a witness, because more than once he has been my sole heir, but he should be here, too. To allow extra time, in case he’s coming late, I ask Kizette to set up another painting next to today’s
Rafaela.
I know she knows exactly where it is.

“Would you like it up on another easel, Tamara?” Romana offers.

Paul gives her a look—
Don’t encourage her—
but I’m grateful. “You’re so thoughtful, Romana. Kizette would never think of a thing like that,” I say. Kizette is returning down the hall, arms spread into wings by the painting. I hope she hears me. “Kizette, hold on to it until Paul comes back with an easel.”

She holds the painting facing her. Are your arms getting tired, darling? Good. If anything, her expression is even duller than it was before she lashed out at me. Is she steeling herself to lose the money again?

“As you know, I’ve gathered you here tonight because my health is not good, and I need to make a change in certain instructions. What are you taking notes on, Arlo? How can I trust you if you insist on using such poor-quality paper?”

“I use a legal pad like this every time I come to your house, Baroness.”

I’m stalling. Paul sets up the second easel, but Hector does not come. Kizette sets the painting on the easel, and Romana gives a quiet whimper of pleasure.

There she is, Rafaela, against gray and green, 1927. The hand that fingers the silk in the Salon
Belle en Rouge
reaches beyond the frame of the private
Belle en Vert
. The undercolor of her flesh—though gold in
Belle en Rouge—
is blue. I’m prouder of the
Belle en Vert
’s left thigh, but I was prouder of the
Rouge
’s right knee. Just as I’m noting how the painting I finished today borrows from the best of each, Paul speaks up: “God, what a knockout.”

“A triumph,” Romana agrees. “I remember the year you painted it; you used to show that girl off at parties. She was beautiful. But this is
more
beautiful.” It is gratifying to show them work twice in one night.

“I don’t understand why we can’t just send this one to Osaka,” says Kizette.

“No,” I agree. “You don’t. But you don’t have to.” So, Hector isn’t coming, then? Fine. I look from face to sleepy face. “I want it added to my will that this painting,
La Belle Rafaela en Vert
, belongs to Rafaela Fano.”

“Do you have an address?” asks Arlo Mendez.

“No,” I say, impatient. If I had her address, why would I have her painting?

My daughter rolls her head back to give her most epic of sighs. “Then how will we find her?” she asks, thirteen again.

I catch Paul and Romana’s eyes:
Aren’t children awful?
“That’s not my problem,” I say. I turn to her. “I know you want to send this to the Japan show the moment my back is turned, and I forbid you. During my lifetime, even if I am unconscious, the painting is not to leave this house for any reason. And after my death, it cannot leave this house except to go to Rafaela. If Rafaela does not claim the painting within ten years of my date of death, it reverts to Hector Oliveras.”

Now Kizette appeals to Paul and Romana with a glance. I smile coldly. Let’s see you hide my new
Rafaela
, the way you hid
Saint Anthony
! As Kizette looks back at me, as if protesting her innocence, the icy rage that has fueled me ever since she began spouting all her nonsense ebbs just long enough for me to ponder, now that I’ve dealt with
Rafaela
, what shall I do with you?

In her sixties, Kizette is even more mine than she was as a child, when she could have grown away from me. She could have become anyone then, but she’s become no one. All these years, she has lived off her husband or me. I married money, a title, and I made my own money, too. She married a little geologist, and she has nothing to show for it but that house in Houston, eating itself up in taxes. She wouldn’t last a year without me. And yet, I thought she was too weak to be disloyal, but I was wrong.

So: I could defer her inheritance for a few years, just to make her pay. Or I could cut her out entirely. Hector slinks into the room, like a student late to a lecture, and it occurs to me that I could make her have to ask
him
for every little check. I haul myself up, looking down at her, bring my cigarette holder to my lips, and smile.

That’s when I look up at
Rafaela in Green
. I gasp. That summer never ended. That summer is now. Rafaela shimmers, alive, as if she were about to open up her eyes, sit up, speak. What would she say? I grip the table, suddenly afraid. Her eyes would be pits of fire. Her voice would be the voice of lions, her breath hot tar and wet copper. She would say,
Yes, Tamara, you can punish her for reminding you how it really ended, between us.
She would say,
But you can’t change what happened.

I sink into my chair, afraid, glancing from face to face to see who heard.

In the silence that follows, Paul and Romana look from me to Kizette, then at each other, baffled. Arlo Mendez looks up from his yellow tablet. “Was there anything else?”

I stare him down. “Why would there be?”

My daughter blinks up at me, gray, surprised.

“We thought you were going to disinherit Kizette again,” Romana says baldly.

I permit myself a smirk. If I
did
scare them all a little, I’m not sad. “I promised Hector I wouldn’t do that anymore,” I say flirtatiously, willing Hector to look up. And he does for a moment, betraying himself with the flicker of a smile. “You were all there, remember?”

“So you got us up in the middle of the night over one painting?”

For a moment I can see what they see: a crazy old woman. But I’m not crazy; I’m desperate. I almost turn earnest on them. I almost say,
If you were haunted like this, you’d wake me up, too.
I almost say,
She was my one chance to do good that mattered.
I inhale again. Command, Tamara. “Come on. Admit it. I’m the most fun you’ve had in years.”