The Last Nude (9 page)

“True,” I said, but I was only half listening. Right there in the phone booth, in that little trap of stale smoke and old sweat, a wave of desire for Tamara was passing over me so thickly I could barely hear Anson’s voice as it turned serious. “Remember, my friend’s not a miracle worker,” he said. “He can’t access court records, just bank records. But I’ll see what he can do.”

3

THE MÉTRO FROM NOTRE-DAME-DE-LORETTE to rue du Bac was foul-smelling but direct. On Tamara’s street, I noticed
hôtels
standing apart from the usual apartment houses
. Hôtels
, I’d learned, were not hotels: single families, and titled ones at that, lived in them, set back from the street behind low walls, wide gates, and carriage houses. They didn’t come cheap, these runs of sunny sidewalk. I could hear birds. Could Tamara hear them, too? The sole glint of commerce on her street came from Bistrot Varenne, an Alsatian restaurant at the corner where Varenne met Vaneau. Even in the morning, with the restaurant shutters down, I could smell old beer as I crossed onto Tamara’s block. Just two buildings from the corner, outside 63, rue de Varenne, I could smell only the lemon wax on her polished wood door. The soft morning air was lush as cream. My heart in my mouth, I waited a long time after I rang the bell, until the door opened, and it was Tamara. I tipped my face up to greet her with a kiss on the cheek, but her very stillness in the doorway stopped me. “You came back,” she said, and she let me in.

Because I was eager for Tamara’s workday to end, the long poses she asked of me felt all the longer: sitting at the table in the brown dress, or lying naked on my side with a book. Tamara’s dog, gloomy as an exiled monarch, nosed at me once or twice before settling onto his cushion to doze. Seffa dreamed what looked like complicated dreams, which required the lifting of one eyebrow, then the other. Three times the telephone rang, and three times both painter and dog alike ignored it, so I let the sound pass over me like the birdsong I’d heard in the street. “What is your last name, Rafaela?” Tamara asked during our first break.

Had she asked me two days before, in the Bois de Boulogne, I would have used a fake name, for the same reasons my friend Maggey did. But I gave her my real name instead. “Fano. Fano,” Tamara mused. “Is that Spanish?”

No, it’s Italian
was the short answer, but I gave her the long one. “It’s the village in Spain that my father’s ancestors left during the Inquisition,” I said. “But we’re Genovese. No one in my family has spoken Spanish for centuries.”

“You are Jewish, then?” Tamara asked.

“No. My father was, but he died when I was little. My mother and my stepfather are Catholic, so that’s how I was raised. You’re only Jewish if your mother is, officially,” I added.

It was a familiar conversation. Because of the scandal my mother and stepfather’s marriage had caused on Baxter Street, the explanation my mother had drilled into me never washed with the other girls at Most Precious Blood. I was the only Jew in a Catholic school, as far as they were concerned: I had no friends there. When I changed schools a year later, my Irish classmates at Saint Joseph’s didn’t know enough to ask about my last name.

Adult Parisians knew enough. Usually, they listened to my explanation and gave my face a measuring look. It was I, however, who measured them, based on what they said next. Responses varied from the benign (
Interesting,
or
Ah, so you’re Catholic, then?
) to the slightly annoying (
You don’t look Jewish,
or
Italians and Jews look similar, don’t they?
) with a few distasteful ones here and there. One man had said to me, “Once a daughter of Israel, always a daughter of Israel,
n’est-ce pas
?” Another had asked, “Is it true what they say about
les Juives
?” Was what true? I didn’t wait around to find out.

So I watched Tamara carefully when I explained. “I see,” she said, nodding. As she ran her fingers through her hair, her topaz darted a fleck of light across the walls. “Your grandparents were ahead of their time, no? To let your parents marry?”

I relaxed. “They eloped,” I said.

“They must have loved each other very much.”

I smiled. No one had ever said that to me. “They did.”

“It shows,” she said. “Look at how beautiful you are. And how old are you?”

“Seventeen,” I said, trying not to grin like a fool.

She watched me shake out my stiff limbs, and sighed. “You can hold any pose at seventeen.”

“How old are
you
?”

“Twenty-seven. Just like the century.”

“Not so old as all that, then.”

“Not so old as I feel.”

I laughed wryly: I knew what she meant. “Your English is so much better than my French,” I said apologetically.

“I learned it as a child,” she said, shrugging.

“You lived in England?”

“I had a British nanny,” she explained, using an extra-British accent. “But you? How old were you when you came to Paris?”

“Sixteen. I’ve just been here a year. How old were you?”

“I came here in ’18. Kizette was born just after we arrived.” Kizette was younger than she looked, I realized: eight or nine, not ten or eleven.

“Why did you move when you were pregnant?” I asked. “That sounds hard.”

“The decision was not up to me.”

“Your husband’s job?”

“Ah, to be an American. Nineteen seventeen is just a number to you?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened in Poland in 1917.”

“We lived in Saint Petersburg.”

Oh, the Russian Revolution, I thought, feeling stupid. “Were the Poles on the White Russians’ side?”

Tamara’s expression—the same icy look she gave me when I asked about the jam in my tea—made me feel no less stupid. “We are always on our own side,” she said. “The point is, I am a Pole, but I am also a countess. So you can understand why we had to leave Russia.”

“Because of the Communists?”

“Rafaela,” she said wearily. “
Belle, belle
Rafaela.”

“I’m sorry,” I insisted. “In 1917, I was seven.”

“I will show you one thing, because it is absurd how little you Americans know, and then, no more politics. All right?”

I nodded. She turned and flipped quickly through the paintings propped against the wall. She moved a stack aside to reveal a portrait, clearly hers, of a man in an elaborate military uniform. “Prince Gabriel. Cousin to the Czar. People say he is one of the men who killed Rasputin.”

I nodded, knowing better than to let on that while Rasputin’s name gave me a shudder, I wasn’t quite sure what he had done to earn it.

“And now he is nothing, here in Paris. He lives off his wife in a wretched little flat. He had to borrow this uniform for his portrait.”

So the uniform was a costume, as much as my brown sack was. Over the prince’s shoulder I saw a familiar gray velvet drape: though at first glance, the background had a majestic vigor, Tamara hadn’t actually painted the man in a palace. “Did you paint him here, in this apartment?” I asked. Tamara nodded. I could see the weariness in his hollowed-out handsome face, together with a puzzled, paralyzed expression. “It’s as if he can’t believe he isn’t still royalty,” I said.

“That is the face of dispossession,” Tamara said. The look of injured dignity that I found endearingly grave on her dog struck me as repellent on a person. But before I could say I was sure the serfs hadn’t had a rum time of it either, she added, “My husband still has that look to him.” I had no idea what she had endured, I realized. I bit my tongue.

 

 

 

Not being able to touch Tamara until the end of the day made me want to know every little thing about her. I knew we had run over our first break already, so I waited until the next one to ask more. “Why did you move to Saint Petersburg in the first place?”

“I went to live there with a rich aunt and uncle when I was fifteen,” she said. “They invited me. Petersburg was like a fairyland compared to Warsaw, and I knew they would spoil me rotten.”

“And did they?”

“Oh, they did. What a life. We lived at one of the best addresses in town. A three-story flat full of servants and champagne. We had a box at the ballet. My aunt Stefa lent me her diamonds so I could wear them to the theater when I invited Thade Lempicki to tea. He had all these beautiful women with him that night. But he said yes.”

“Lempitzky?”

“I use the French version of my name,” she explained. “Lempicka.”

“But Todd—?”

“Thade,”
she repeated. “Tadeusz. Kizette’s father.” She looked like she might cry.

“Could you go back to Warsaw now?” I asked, treading carefully.

“He is there and I am here,” she snapped. Then her face softened. “And my mother is here. I can make a life here, as a painter. Support my daughter.”

“Are you in love with someone else here?”

“I am in love with
la vie parisienne
,” Tamara replied. She followed my involuntary glance over to the next room, where it fell upon her bed. I looked away, but not fast enough. “No no,” she said, with a stern wag of the finger. “We paint first.”

“I know. I wasn’t trying—” I spluttered. “I just—I mean, did you buy that carved headboard with someone special in mind?”

“I did not ‘buy’ it. I had it made. I designed it myself.
For
myself,” Tamara said, flourishing her cigarette holder.

Embarrassed, I changed tack. “So, do you think in French now, or in Polish? Or Russian?”

“French,” she said. “I was raised to speak French to my parents and Polish to the servants.”

“Your parents were French?” I asked, confused.

“No,” she said impatiently. “It is what one did then.”

 

 

 

Although Tamara claimed it was politics she shunned, it seemed she might be averse to personal questions entirely. I could understand. When I was taking classes at the Alliance Française, I heard
So, Rafaela, are you a student? Are you an artist?
a few too many times myself. During the next breaks, I discovered the less I asked, the more she spoke, though much of it was about me. “How can something as delicious as you even exist? Look at this curve,” she said, tracing my hip with a clean brush. “Just decadent.” During our last hour of work, she did another series of five-minute sketches, murmuring between poses, “Which one? Which one?”

“Which one what?”

“Which one to paint first? Rafaela,
you
are going to get me into the Salon exhibition this fall. I know it. But which pose?”

Was she really asking me? “I don’t know.”

“Do not worry.” She chuckled. Oh, I realized, she hadn’t really been asking. “This is just the kind of problem an artist dreams of.”

Moments later, the doorbell rang. Before, I had only heard it from the outside, dull and distant. From the inside, however, it came as a hard clang. Seffa stirred in his sleep. Tamara, working, did not look up.

Then a man’s voice called up from the sidewalk, using the same Slavic French. “I know you’re up there.”

Seffa woke, ears perked. Tamara’s eyes met mine. After long seconds, the man in the street broke the silence a third time. “I’ll just let myself in with my key, then.”

Tamara’s hands tightened around her charcoal and tablet. Seffa ran to the front hall. I heard the building door open, a tread on the stairs. Tamara did not look at me as I sat up and pulled on the red silk robe. The apartment door opened and Seffa leapt up to lick the face of the man who burst in: I recognized him from Tamara’s portrait of her husband.

Tadeusz Lempicki wore his clothes with an air of being too good for them. “I telephoned—” he said, entering the salon. He broke off to take me in with a look at once appraising, predatory, and dismissive. “But I see you were busy.”

Tamara stood, set down her board, and crossed her arms. “I
was
busy, thank you.”

“I brought the papers we discussed.”

“I’m sure Irene’s happy you did.”

Tadeusz saw me listening and switched to a swishing, liquid language that could only have been Polish:
Swish wish lish wish. Wish lishya. Swish lish.
He extended a large white envelope which Tamara made no motion to accept.

Neither the man nor the woman looked down at the dog that circled them hopefully. They faced each other without a word. I could see why Kizette was so discomfitingly pretty: they must have once made a striking couple, so contemporary they could have graced an advertisement for soap or motorcars, so timeless they could have ruled a long-ago tribe on horseback. His taut, beautifully regular features threw her extravagant ones into monstrous relief; his lifting, alert look of canine sensitivity made her seem all the more like a beaky, fleshy-lidded bird of prey. I could see, too, that they brought out the worst in each other: I saw a flash of cruelty in her hooded, down-tipped eyes, while his looked like two holes punched out of tin. “Is that all?” she said in French.