The Last Nude (7 page)

I even mourned my mother as she’d been when I was small, her magnificent hair spreading across both our backs when she embraced me. And I cried because I felt sorry for myself: I’d really have to live in Alia, a foreigner amid local gossips. I’d really have to speak Sicilian. I could see the future: the children I didn’t want, not now, maybe never. The diapers and dishes and cooking and pressing. The dirt floor. The well. God help me, the outhouse. And before all that, when I got off the boat I’d really have to marry that boy. What was his name?

 

 

 

On the night we docked in Marseille, as she sat gnawing on a chicken wing saved from dinner, Nonna Gioia hacked abruptly and stopped breathing. I slapped her on the back the way my mother did for my brothers. She gave a weak cough, spat blood, then crumpled onto her bunk. I opened her mouth, swabbed around, and found a wet hard morsel. She was breathing again, but didn’t answer when I called her name.

If Nonna Gioia was right—if I was such a danger to myself that I had to be kept hidden away for my own good—then to change my life all I’d have to do was leave the room once. Her breathing was weak but even. I lifted off the ribbon with the room key from around her neck, and I let myself out of the room just as our neighbor—the red-nosed bald old man—was letting himself into his.

“Oh, it’s the American
belle
with the Italian grandmother, I see,” said the ugly man. He had a French accent, which—after eight days with only Nonna Gioia for company—made me almost laugh. “I thought she kept you locked up in your room.”

“She
does
keep me locked up in my room,” I told him. “But she’s choked on a bone. I’m trying to find her a doctor.”

“Please, let me help.”

“I got it out,” I said, brandishing the hard gristly wad in my handkerchief before I put it in my pocket. “But she’s not doing so well.”

“Let me show you the way.” I was wearing my school uniform, the navy blue pinafore I’d made. As we walked down the corridor, the man touched my arm with a wedding-ringed hand. He introduced himself, and the oily pleasure in his voice made me decide not to tell him my real last name when I replied. I had never lied like that before. “They say we won’t sail for days in this rain,” he said, following behind me up the narrow stairway. “I was going to spend a week in Rome with friends, but at this rate, I might just take the train home tonight.”

Even with the funny accent, I was so glad to hear a voice other than Nonna Gioia’s that I didn’t want him to stop. I could feel him watching me climb the stairs. “Where’s home?” I asked.

“Paris.”

At that word, I thought so violently of Theresa and her pink Chanel dress that my stomach lurched. I could hear her voice right there, ringing in the tight stairwell:
It’s from Paris, sweetheart.
I wanted her to offer me that smile again, that quickly extended, quickly retracted smile that had made us, briefly, kin. I wanted to be as beautiful as she was. I wanted to live alone and ride around in a town car. I wanted a different cloche for every day of the week. With both hands clamped on the stair railing, I turned back to get another look at the man, to search his face for some sign that he and Theresa had been stamped by the same city. His yellow teeth smiled up at me, and I turned away: I wanted that dress so much I was afraid I’d reduce him to a cinder if I looked at him too hard. “Lucky you,” I said.

 

 

 

The ugly man stood to the side as the Boston doctor and his aide looked over Nonna Gioia. “She’s a little confused and weak,” the doctor pronounced. “But she should be herself in no time. You did the right thing, to clear the obstruction,” he said, nodding to the packet of bone and handkerchief on the bedside table.

“Brave girl,” agreed the young aide. His sticky grin irked the ugly man, who stepped a little closer to me.

However much I disliked Nonna Gioia, I felt proud of myself: I’d never saved a life before
.
In that moment when I realized I’d saved her, I felt uncannily certain that the person whose eyes I met next would feel bound to me. Nonna Gioia might have won all of Alia over to my side. The doctor might have paid for me to go to nursing school. The doctor’s aide might have married me. I smiled at the ugly man.

As the doctor and his aide took their notes, the ugly man stole even closer and murmured, “Would you like to see Paris?”

I thought of Theresa, and I did not say to him,
I would trade anything to spend one day in Paris, looking at women in Chanel dresses. What can I give you?
No. I turned, as if away, but really so that he and no one else could hear me, and I said, “What would you give me?”

 

 

 

I had traded sex for a train ticket, for an apartment, for a coat and hat and shoes, and most recently—some half-dozen times since my mother’s letter in March—just for money. I’d had sex out of spite, the time I took up with Hervé to get back at Guillaume. I’d had sex because it was easier than explaining myself in French. I’d had sex to get my way, to make peace, to be a good sport. All told, I had never simply gone to bed with anyone just because I wanted to. On Tamara’s couch that morning, I remembered the stairs in my stepfather’s brownstone on Tenth Street again, the glossy banister my mother buffed weekly with olive oil. And suddenly I remembered a day when I was very small, before my brothers came along. When my mother went out for groceries, I slopped more oil on the banister and slid down. I climbed those stairs again and again, to get that feeling: how slick my knickers got, how distinctly I could feel the spreading wings of my little
figa
, how the shock of bliss pleated up through me like lightning. I had forgotten this kind of eagerness until now, as my body sobbed into Tamara’s hand.
Again, again!
I wanted to crow. I was a giddy witch on a broomstick. I was a leaping dog. I was liquor; I was laughter; I was a sliding girl on a shining rail: something I’d forgotten how to be.

 

 

 

Tamara and I woke to a knock at the door and a child’s voice calling,
“Chérie!”

“Kizette,” Tamara whispered. She was across the room in moments, tossing me the red silk robe that hung on the folding screen, stepping into her dress and apron. Mother and daughter embraced in the hallway: the girl looked ten or eleven, in a school uniform and white socks. Her hair, fairer and straighter than Tamara’s, was cropped in the same stylish bob. Tamara’s dog had clattered up the stairs with Kizette—I’d been too distracted to notice his absence before—and now the greyhound circled mother and daughter, shaking with enthusiasm, arching up in the attempt to rest his forepaws on Tamara’s shoulders until a stern word sent him to his cushion. “I kept coughing, so they sent me home,” the girl said in French.

Seeing Tamara test her daughter’s forehead with the back of her hand made something twist inside me. “You’re burning up,” she said. “I want you to stay home the rest of the day, and if you’re still this hot tomorrow, I’m calling the doctor.”

“Can Solange come over when school lets out?”

“They sent you home so you wouldn’t get the other girls sick, Kizette.”

“Can we spend the afternoon on the telephone?”

“You can spend fifteen minutes on the telephone. I don’t want your throat getting worse. I’m going to fix you some hot tea with lemon and jam,” Tamara said.

“I want hot chocolate.”

“Milk coats your throat.” I had never heard the French for
coat
before, but my mother had admonished me in just the same vein years before. “I’ll give you two squares of chocolate with your tea. Why didn’t you have them telephone me to come get you?”

“You were staying in all morning not to miss the new model, remember?”

I saw Tamara, then Kizette, look down the hall toward the salon where I sat in the red robe. “Of course I would come to get you if you were sick, Kizette. Or your grandmother would.”

Kizette shrugged, and unselfconsciously scratched her chin by rubbing it against her shoulder. “Will you stay in my room and read to me?”

“You have to read to yourself today,
chérie.
If you’re quiet, you can come out and draw the model with me.”

Kizette looked down the hall again, this time meeting my gaze. Her eyes were as gray as her mother’s, with a frank, flat regard that seemed to drink me down in moments. She shrugged again and drifted into her room.

Tamara set the kettle on and reëmerged with an apologetic smile. “Well, we have a chaperone.”

“Do you want me to dress for that other painting?”

“Thank you,” she said crisply. “Tea?”

I marveled as I pulled the brown dress over my head. Sleek fashion plate, focused artist, resplendent lover, competent mother: I had seen four Tamaras in two days. She gave me tea in a glass: black and sweet, with a swirl of raspberry seeds at the bottom. “Is this the way the Russians drink it?”

“How would I know?” she asked, her voice hardening. “I am Polish, not Russian.”

I felt uncertain as I sat again in the ugly brown dress, not sure if she was going to pretend the morning had never happened. “Do you ever go to Le Sentier? The Polish neighborhood?” I chattered nervously. “It’s a Russian neighborhood too.”

“No,” she said, before I could put my foot any deeper into my mouth.

At least she’d stopped me before I could tell her about the prissy French wholesaler I’d once met who couldn’t tell the difference between Russians and Poles. “Do you ever go to rue Laffitte? The street with all the art dealers?”

“All the
Impressionist
art dealers?” Tamara corrected, acid with contempt. “No.” As I posed, Tamara’s
no
and
no
sat in my belly, lumpish, making me regret my words. Was she through with me already, just like that? Just when I thought I might pass out from embarrassment, Tamara looked up from her easel and gave me an open, wet smile. “You beauty.”

In near silence, she painted all afternoon. I felt myself dissolving into the table and chair, into the still hours, into my upraised arm. Once Kizette wandered in, stared at me with her silvery flat fish-eyes, drew a few lines, and left. At four, Tamara stretched with her whole long body, like an ermine or a snake. “We need to stop,” she said. As I changed, I saw her standing at her money drawer, glancing down the hall toward Kizette’s room. “Come tomorrow?” she murmured, when I stepped out from behind the screen.

“If you want,” I said.

“If?”
She laughed. “Do not lower yourself like that. You are too beautiful to fish for compliments.”

“Then I don’t know what to say.”

“Come tomorrow,” she repeated.

I felt so wobbly I reached for the wall, too dizzy to count out the money she handed me. “Yes.”

The smile she gave me in reply was not a French smile: it was butter-cream frosting, spread with a trowel. “What we did today?” she said. “I cannot do it again.”

My face fell. Had I completely misread her? “I see.”

“I have to work. I have to paint. I have to control myself.”

My jaw dropped in anger.
I
was the big seductress? Blamed for my looks again, I thought. Jeez.

“You made me break my rule,” she said.

“What’s your rule?” I sneered. “You don’t sleep with your models?”

“Not until the painting day is over.”

I blinked at her.

“We work for six hours tomorrow,” she said. “And then we play. No?”

Oh,
I thought, thrown again
. Oh, that’s all.
“All right,” I said simply, glad I’d kept my mouth shut. And then I gave her half a grin. “We’ll see.”

I wafted home on a gust of warm July air, into an evening that lasted and lasted. I remembered my first glimpse of Paris by daylight, on a short walk with the ugly man from the ship. We had just eaten lunch in our room in the Grand Hotel, and we were heading out for a matinee: I hadn’t known the opera house would be just across the street, or that the opera boxes were designed to function like private rooms in restaurants. I was just glad to be free of that hotel room for a while. The
terrasse
of the hotel was itself a miniature opera, with its jewel-colored drinks and its coffees, its wrapped squares of chocolate and cubes of sugar, its speakers of many languages, each one smoking expressively.

Leaving behind the leafy arch of rue de la Paix, I had never seen anything so magnificent: the great buildings opening onto the wide bright plaza (
place,
in French, the ugly man told me) with its spare, elegant Métro entrance, the crowds streaming both across the
place
and up out of the ground, too. I felt humbled by the massive scale and stirred by the beauty of the architecture, by the white-golden apartment buildings ranged around the traffic star in ordered harmony, rising as solemn as cliffs. “It’s so beautiful,” I murmured.

“What are you looking at?” the ugly man asked. “The Opéra’s over there.” That’s when I looked left and saw the opera house itself, so grand I’d missed it, shimmering like wet fondant, like a great domed cake.