The Last Nude (6 page)

She took her drawing board and charcoal and moved her chair closer to the couch where I lay. My lower lip pulsed as she drew. I watched her glance from her page to my mouth and back. And then I felt the room change as she disappeared into drawing: it became fuller, because all her attention was in one place, and emptier, too, because
she
wasn’t there for a little while. Only drawing was there. I felt that way, sometimes, when I was making things. Could I feel that way without making anything? I looked at her clothes, the white canvas chef ’s apron over her simple black dress. Could an apron be a dress? For Tamara—a woman flatter-chested than I—why not? I’d want the bib a little wider, with darts, small ones, tucked into the sides to make it cling to her, and to play up what little she had. The trick, like wrapping an orange in a sheet of paper, would be getting the rectangular fabric to follow both the small of her back and the swell of her ass. (It would be the palest, palest gold, like her hair, my lower lip told me. Like the pale gold inner flesh of a brioche.) But if I used the idea I had yesterday to alter Gin’s dress with gores, and I could cut up a second apron—

My lower lip, throbbing as it dried in the warm air, was having none of it. Tamara was sitting so close I could almost feel the vibration of the charcoal on her tablet jarring me in soft waves. Unconsciously, I closed my mouth and let it fall open again, just to repeat the pleasure of Tamara’s finger—my own tongue—across my lip. Suddenly I felt the air thicken. “What did you do?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Do it again.”

“What?”

Tamara set down her drawing board, and leaned forward. When I felt her hair wisping against my face again, I inhaled sharply. When she kissed me, I sighed. Her tongue across my lip made me clench at the fold of silk between my thighs. “I can tell you are going to be a difficult model,” she said, coming up briefly for air before dipping back into my mouth. I had never kissed lips so soft. She stood and lifted the scarf off me. Her eyes were like silver. “Oh?” she said, holding the scarf in the air, the pale chiffon with its darker wet bull’s-eye. I closed my eyes, abashed. I couldn’t open them. I heard Tamara set her rings deliberately on the table before she said, “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, stalling. It was hard to speak with her thumbs on my knees. The world fell apart behind my eyelids in sheets of apricot light and pale gold hair. My knees slid away from each other. I shook: her breath brushed against the coiled hairs between my thighs the way her finger had brushed against my lip.

“You do not know?”

I shrugged.

“That is not good enough,” she said, straightening.

Oh, no, I thought. Please don’t make me look like a fool. Please don’t bring me this far just to drop me. “Please,” I breathed.

“Good girl,” she said, and I felt her tongue flick hot across me. My body clenched again and I knew she saw. “Very good,” she said. And then I watched her slide two fingers into her mouth slowly, saw how slick they got in the light. I felt them wet between my legs where she held me: the very pressure spread my lips. The nails on those two fingers are so much shorter than the others, I remember thinking, before they curved inside me, reaching what must have been the back, the spongy rootbed, of my
grilletto,
once, again, again. It had a back? I’d never known. Nobody had ever touched me there, not even me, I thought—
oh, God, I’m flying
—and then I couldn’t think at all.

For a while I lay stunned on Tamara’s couch, and when the little dots behind my eyelids turned into a world again, I saw that she had taken off her clothes. She lay beside me on the couch, just as golden as I’d imagined her, her pubic hair a leonine brown. “Do you know what to do with me?” she asked.

I had never put my fingers inside a woman before. “Is there a trick to it?” I asked.

“No.”

I tried one finger and it sank in all the way. I tried another—nervous about hurting her with my nails—and she felt like hot liquid inside. I tried a third and she grabbed me with muscles I hadn’t even known were there. She slammed against me in a hard tattoo that slowed to an easy canter, and when she came with a fast harsh sigh, her eyes rolled back in her head. When she woke, I was startled by the contrast between her body—queenly, lavish, spent—and her gaze, shiny and vulnerable. As she looked up at me, a sense of accomplishment snapped through me so triumphantly, so violently, something happened I had never experienced with anyone: I needed her all over again. “How can I ever thank you?” she whispered.

“Like this,” I said. That was the moment I crossed over from letting things happen to making them happen: I took her hand and pushed her fingers back inside my body.

 

 

 

On my sixteenth birthday, sixteen months before that day in Paris, I had walked out of my room in the brownstone on West Tenth Street my stepfather had bought for my mother, and into a practical joke staged by the eldest of their sons: a pail of water perched atop a half-open door. “Carlo!” I screamed, drenched. If I had known the future, I might have stood at the top of those stairs a moment longer, dressed in my best for church. I might have fingered the oiled banister, savoring my last moment as a child. I did not: I stomped down to breakfast. “Where is he?”

My stepfather had always treated me like a bill it was rather good of him to pay on time, but that morning he looked at me. He set down his
Progresso.
“Sal,” my mother said.

Time slowed when my stepfather set down his newspaper, his eyes widening. I think anyone eye to chest with a nippling girl in a wet dress would have stared, but that was no consolation: I watched my mother’s face harden against us, and I felt afraid. I think my stepfather did too, because his voice turned forced and jolly, and what he said was more effective than any protestation of innocence. “I think it’s time we found that daughter of yours a husband, don’t you?”

My mother’s face relaxed. “You think?” she said. I ran out of the room.

Although Cat O’Reilly, Maura Kelly, and I had plotted every detail of our wedding nights (with Fairbanks, Barrymore, and Valentino) in pornographic detail, I had given no thought to my actual future. As I changed my dress, appalled, I wondered, were they serious? When I finally slapped my little brother, my heart wasn’t in it.

They
were
serious. My stepfather found a husband for me as far away as possible: his brother back in Alia had a twenty-year-old son who liked my photograph. Done.

“But I—” I mustered at dinner when they told me, “I don’t speak so much Italian.”

“You should,” my stepfather said. My mother, buttering a roll for my youngest brother, did not look up. As with many New York immigrants, the two of them spoke to their children in Italian, and we answered them in English.

“What about school?” I tried again.

“Haven’t some girls in your class already left school to get married?”

“Sure,” I said. “But—” But not girls I ever talked to. Those girls—the ones Cat and Maura and I whispered about between classes—got bad grades, or got pregnant, or both.

“See?” he said. “The pretty ones always do.”

My mother stopped moving the knife in her hand.
“
Sal.”

 

 

 

Arranging my passport took a good deal of letter-writing to Italy, because, born at sea, I had never become an American citizen. In the meantime, my mother and stepfather sent me to live with Nonna Gioia on Grand Concourse Boulevard.

What wouldn’t my stepfather do for my mother? He had moved his own mother to the Bronx for the same reason he had bought the brownstone on West Tenth Street. After his wife’s death, Sal Russo’s remarriage to my beautiful young mother (
that stuck-up Genovese, that slut, that Jew’s widow
) had angered the women at the Church of the Most Precious Blood as much as it had stirred the men. “How do you expect me to live with all this talk?” Sal’s mother would ask him. His import business had done so well he could afford to take a step back from his insular neighborhood: in response to his mother’s complaints, he had set her up in a spacious flat in a brand-new building, far from the crowded tenements she’d always hated. It was only after she’d lorded her marble foyer and indoor plumbing over all the villagers she’d immigrated with that Nonna Gioia realized her son had moved her away both from the people she’d known all her life and from her burgeoning new crop of grandchildren.

I’m sure if she could have had my mother under her roof, Nonna Gioia would have exacted her lonely revenge drop by drop. But she didn’t have my mother. Instead, she had a younger, darker copy of the hotsy-totsy who had stolen away her son and ruined her life: me.

Nonna Gioia kept the key to her flat on a ribbon around her neck and glared at me each time she came home and locked us in together. To prepare me for life in Alia with Sal’s nephew, she taught me not only Sicilian dialect, but Sicilian cooking, and in doing so instilled in me a hatred of the kitchen that persists to this day. I can still hear her now: “That blonde
battona
never taught you how to pluck a chicken?” In the evenings, she’d look up from her
caffè corretto
and tug at her moustached top lip with two fingers, eyeing me with the same distaste she reserved for Theresa, the neighbor with the Chanel dress. Although I never learned the reason my stepfather handed her for why I needed to marry her grandson so fast, it was clear that Nonna Gioia, like my mother, thought I should be kept as far away from Sal as possible. “Just look at you,” she’d say, shaking her head.

I had a plan. Once my passport was straightened out, Nonna Gioia would chaperone me to Naples, and thence to Alia. So if I could contrive to leave her behind just before the ship left New York Harbor, she would be stuck on board, unable to get a message to anyone for weeks. I could go live on the Lower East Side with the Fanos, my real father’s family, and no one would be the wiser.

When we found our room on the boat, I looked desperately up and down the hall. How would I find my way out? “I don’t want you opening the door to anyone this trip, do you understand?” said Nonna Gioia.

“I
understand
,” I replied in English, impatient.

At that, Nonna Gioia tried to exchange a weary, eye-rolling glance with our next-door neighbor, a balding, red-nosed man. Too polite to reply, he gave a small bow and entered his own room.

“
Out
of the doorway, Rafaela,” said Nonna Gioia, giving my arm a yank. I leaned out again, into the empty corridor, trying to get my bearings. “Stop displaying yourself like a
battona
.”

I sat down with my unopened valise in the small, windowless room, and I stared at the door. “I’m going to go watch us pull off,” Nonna Gioia said. I grinned as she shut the door behind her. And then, as my hand closed around the grip of my valise, I heard her lock me in.

I ran silently to the door: I silently turned the knob back and forth. That was when I found out I couldn’t unlock the door from the inside, not without the key that hung—on a ribbon, of course—around Nonna Gioia’s neck. “Wait! Wait!” I called through the keyhole. I heard her pause in the hall.

“Nonna Gioia!” I cried aloud, banging on the door. I tried calling to her in Italian, with even some Sicilian thrown in. “Come back! You forgot something! Come back! Please? Please!” I listened to her walk away. Can a tread gloat? I think it can.

I knocked on the door, hoping someone from the crew would hear me. I knocked louder when the engines began to fire. “Help!” I called, making a chant of it. When the ship began to pull away, I screamed it, weeping. I pounded and pounded on the locked door.

I spent a week in the ship’s small cabin. Nonna Gioia brought me meals, which I would not touch in her presence, as well as tracts from the ship’s Catholic chaplain. I did not speak to her. I lay in bed, barely moving. Whenever she left the room, I ate and cried. I hoped, bitterly, that my mother and stepfather had been forced to hire a girl to cook and clean in my stead, and I hoped my brothers hated her. Why had I ever washed a single dish for those people? I mourned my last two years of high school, my friends Maura and Cat. I mourned my uncle, Elio Fano, and the terrible puns with which he teased out my shy Italian. I mourned his wife, my Zia Rina, and her almond cookie balls—buttery, evanescent, dredged in powdered sugar—that imploded in my mouth. I mourned my Fano cousins. I mourned the arch and fountain of Washington Square, the pear trees that snowed white over the Manhattan streets in spring, the weedy trees of heaven that yellowed every fall. Though in the weeks at Nonna Gioia’s I hadn’t missed cleaning up after them one bit, I mourned my little brothers, too.