The Last Nude (38 page)

At that, Paul shakes his head at Romana, and even the cool eyes of Arlo Mendez crinkle at the corners.

I look back at
Rafaela in Green.
She is inert, a painting, but the odor that flooded me a moment ago still clings to my mouth: rot and copper, oozing asphalt. I suddenly feel too small to carry it all off. “It won’t happen again,” I say, chastened. “I promise.”

They close on me. I feel their thin-lipped condescension. They’re all thinking,
Until the next time!
They don’t know how well I keep the promises that matter.

“It was important,” I say weakly, as Arlo Mendez begins typing up what I’ve said into legal language. “And I’m grateful.”

When I gesture for the oxygen and Hector goes to bring it, Paul watches, half awestruck, half annoyed. “What a diva. I gotta hand it to you, Tamara.”

Once Hector loops the tube over my ears, Romana gives me an awkward seated hug. I can feel her, loose in her skin but warm, alive. It’s a shame we were never lovers in Paris. “Please don’t wake us up like this again, Tamara,” she says.

“I won’t,” I say. I feel afraid as I hear the words aloud.

The Wilsons sign Arlo Mendez’s paper, and he promises to bring copies around again in the next few days.

“We’re old friends by now, Arlo,” says Paul. “We’d be lonely if you didn’t visit.”

“This really is the last time,” I say. Is it something in my voice that makes Paul exchange a glance with his wife?

The shaken pity in Romana’s face when she turns to me then is what scares me most of all. “No, but really,” she says. “Call anytime.”

35

AT THE DOORWAY, WHEN THE OTHERS LEAVE, I ask Hector in for a drink. “I think we could all use some sleep,” he demurs.

“Please? Just for five minutes? There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Oh, Tamara,” he sighs, and comes in, perching on the very edge of the couch. “Okay, shoot.”

“I’m sorry about those things I said earlier.”

Kizette, pouring Hector’s drink, glances up at us, frankly jealous. Hector looks startled, and worried about me—I suppose I don’t apologize often—but he’s still hurt, too. “Then why did you say them?”

“I thought you moved my
Saint Anthony
, but now I know it was Kizette.”

Hector and Kizette exchange glances. There’s a long silence, until the weariness in Kizette’s face finally congeals into words. “Fine. You win. It wasn’t an accident.”

Before I can even savor the fact that I’ve worn her down, Hector speaks. “Kizette and I decided together not to send the painting.”

The two of them! Kizette looks to Hector for support, and I grip the arms of my chair. “
Chérie,
look at these two paintings,” she says. “One of them, you painted in your twenties. One of them you painted in your eighties.”

“Seventies.”

“You were born in 1898.”

“Don’t tell me when I was born.”

“Mother. Look at them.”

I look at today’s
Rafaela
. The eyelids are different in this light. I wish Hector
had
brought the red so I could try it, to be sure.

Kizette is still speaking. “See? Your hands didn’t shake then the way they do now.”

“My
hands
?”

“When you showed everyone your new painting, they couldn’t think of anything to say. Remember? They all left in a hurry because they were embarrassed for you.”

She’s wrong. “They all left because of what I said to Hector.”

“No,” Hector says gently. “I was the only one who heard you,
querida
.”

“Thank you for coming back,” I say, taking his hand. He squeezes mine. I look up at today’s
Rafaela
again and reach for another packet of Viceroys from the dish on the coffee table. I hate the thin plastic wrappers they’ve all started using on cigarettes. I began opening them by anchoring the plastic tab between my teeth as a joke years ago, but now I wonder, just briefly, if I can still do it with my fingers. I pluck at the tab. I look up. Kizette and Hector are watching my hands. Ashamed, I lift the package to my face and coyly bare my teeth. “You really think that’s why they left so fast?”

“Well, it’s why I didn’t want to send your
Saint Anthony
.”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought it was embarrassing, because of your hands, and then Hector thought we
should
send it for that very reason, but that didn’t seem right to me.”

“I thought it documented your struggle with aging in a very moving way,
querida
, but then Kizette pointed out—”

“My
struggle
? With
aging
?”

“See?” says Kizette. “I thought that was a terrible reason to send it. I thought that would offend you even more.”

“Because Kizette pointed out that your work has always been about total mastery of the surface, so it wouldn’t be right to send anything less.”

“You made magic, time after time, and you never let anyone see you sweat,” Kizette says.

“Not even when the times changed and people paid for sweat. You hated that,” Hector agrees.

“You had Papali, so you didn’t need to please anyone but yourself. It didn’t matter what the galleries wanted,” says Kizette. I can hear what she’s not saying: the galleries stopped wanting my work. It occurs to me that she is better than I deserve, and this is a very hard fact.

I straighten my back. “You don’t have to coddle me,” I tell them. I take a long drag on my Viceroy, caressing the tip of my holder with the scar on the side of my tongue. So there it is: I paid not to care about the world, the same way I paid for all my other pleasures. I could afford to. “Hector’s right. We could all use some sleep. Ana’s probably wondering where you are.”

A wicked smile crosses Hector’s face and I turn to Kizette, vindicated. “See?”

 

 

 

They have walked me to the bedroom that I share with Kizette. They have strapped my tube on for the night, and Hector has returned my paintings to the studio and gone home. Asleep in the other bed, Kizette breathes the long even breaths of her childhood. At first, in my living room chair, I couldn’t even stand up to come to bed. I had to take a long drag of oxygen, then reach for Hector’s two hands. Upright at last, I had to walk the way I do when I’m at my most tired, resting my hands on the shoulders of the person ahead of me. I walked behind Kizette. I leaned on her, one step at a time.

36

I REMEMBER WHEN I FIRST SAW Rollie’s apartment on Mythen-Quai, in early ’34. It reminded me of my aunt and uncle’s vanished flat in Petersburg, all that dark and shining wood. Over coffee and hot rolls on the morning after my second wedding, Rollie told me to go look in the room at the end of the hall. “I have a surprise for you,
chérie
.” The first thing I saw when I opened the door was the large window, the view of his toy city dusted with snow. On the far side of Lake Zurich, I could see the bridges crossing the Limmat. I could make out Saint Peter’s clock and snowy steeple. The Frau-münster spire. Then I saw the easel, the ready-made canvas panels, the fresh new wooden box of paints: the kind of kit a rich man might give his restless daughter. And then I turned and saw her on the wall behind me, beside the mahogany door, bathed in the wintry light of the lake.
La Belle Rafaela en Vert.
My painting, there in the stately flat for which I’d traded it, mine again, just as I’d told Rafaela it would be. I’d never meant for Rollie to keep it. Well played, Tamara, I told myself. But why did I feel so tired?

I could not paint in Switzerland. I could not go back to Paris, at first, because of the riot, so we honeymooned in Egypt. And then I went back to my studio on rue Méchain, and I could not paint there, either. I had not married my husband for his body, so I tried a weekend in Milan with an old flame. I went to the Seine and found a sailor. I went to the Bois and found a girl. I knew Rollie would deny me nothing. I sat alone in my Montparnasse studio, and I could not work.

I did not miss Rafaela. I had heard about her wedding and her dress shop from Adrienne, but after the time Ira betrayed me, I did not even like to think about her. Nevertheless, because my trouble painting dated from the morning I saw my nude of her by that snowy Swiss lake, I dug out my sketchbooks from the months she had modeled for me.

It seemed I had given away, sold, or tossed out all my
Rafaela
s
.
I did discover that I had more than once drawn the hands of her little friend—Boucard’s snoop—during those weeks he smoked at the window across the street from me. I had watched those hands for hours, I remembered. I set the drawings aside.

Suddenly I recalled one
Rafaela
: a nude called
The Dream.
Almost as soon as I had painted it, the piece had gone to an American exhibition, and then I had lost track. After a Byzantine round of telephone calls, I discovered that the painting had never sold, and I had it sent to me at rue Méchain. When I unwrapped
The Dream
, I looked at the clumsy slab of a body I had given Rafaela. Who painted that nightmare? I had made dozens of paintings since then, and so many of them better. But then I looked at Rafaela’s face, and I remembered how it felt when she would come to pose. A gratitude, a joy that translates badly into words.
I know how to mix these colors. I know what to do with these lines.
Had I ever been that happy since? I looked at that painting, and then I locked up my workroom. I telephoned Rollie, barely able to speak. I said,
Get me out of here.

I had been working at the rate of one painting a month up until my second marriage, but then for a year and a half, I did not paint. I traveled. I went to parties. I played house with my ugly husband, and then I moved to Hôtel Baur au Lac. I spent months at a time in bed. Finally, Rollie took me to a sanatorium, and that’s where I met my Saint Anthony, my patron of lost things.

My Zurich psychiatrist is the only person I have ever told what happened when I looked at those two paintings of Rafaela. How the
Belle en Vert
shone like water on the wall of my husband’s house. How she lifted off that wall. I had painted her in a blinding state of hunger to be the woman I had become, Baroness Kuffner on the morning after her wedding. The life I had been forced to leave in Russia lay before me as if it had never been torn away. I had, at last, what I had hungered for. And now I was a husk without that hunger.

My Saint Anthony listened and made notes. I told him about looking at
The Dream
. The points of white in Rafaela’s eyes. Lead white, pure and toxic—resist it—like a young girl’s love. Like the dream I would have been a fool to dream, those years between husbands. That I could live on my art alone, and she could live on hers. That I could paint and she could run her little dress shop; that she could support us both if things went bad, the way Matisse’s wife—Matisse, ptff!—had made hats. That I could live without a baron’s bankroll. That I could do without travel, without parties, without jewels, without cocaine. Oh, Doctor, who would I have been fooling? And why bother? I was not put here on this earth to be simple and earnest and sing Bolshevik songs about tilling the fields of the Motherland. Spare me.

And then I told my Saint Anthony the secret I have never told anyone since.
She was the model for my best painting,
I whispered.
And what if I can’t do better?

 

 

 

To soothe myself, I painted Saint Anthony with my doctor’s face. And to torment myself, I gave him the long smoking hands of the man Rafaela married. At least I was painting again. That was something. How like her, to leave me for that nobody. What could Anson Hall give her, with that errand-boy job of his? Think of that dumpy houseboat!

Last month, painting Saint Anthony again, when I traced the hands of a man now dead forty years, it occurred to me what a shame it was that Rafaela was with him all that time and never had children. She was forbearing, loyal, trusting, good at repetitive tasks, didn’t mind boredom, and had no ambition. What else was she going to do with her life, the poor thing? Work in that little dress shop?