The Last Nude (11 page)

“Despite the suitcase.”

“Of course despite the suitcase,” he said, snappish. I couldn’t read his face. “So I asked her for a divorce. She said if I could stay away from Polly for a year and a day and I still wanted that divorce, I could have it.”

“A year and a day. Like in a fairy tale.”

“And what a fairy tale it is, my friend. I’m here, and Polly’s waiting out the year with her family in Missouri.”

“Why did you agree to this?”

“That’s personal.”

“Sorry,” I said, and this time I knew better than to push. “How long has it been?”

“Ten months.”

“You’re nearly there.”

“Maybe so,” he said, gazing at the titles behind me:
Canzoni
,
Personae
,
Umbra.
“But after ten months you start getting a little funny.”

“You’re still sure of you and Polly, though?”

He nodded.

“And you’ve never wanted to just go back to your wife?”

“ ’Course I have. But I never—” he began. “I just didn’t want to confuse either of us.”

“And there’s been nobody else this whole time?”

“Well, there
have
been little things here and there,” he said. He sounded
so
casual about it, I wondered if he was exaggerating. “But nothing serious. I’m full up with serious.”

“Evidently.”

He laughed.

“Do you ever get to see your son?”

“Now and then,” he said. “We go to the zoo. He’s four.”

“Sweet.”

“Well, now you know my whole sad story.”

“You already know mine,” I said.

“You do what you have to do,” he said. I heard no judgment in his voice, only a benign, tacit complicity: there were things he wasn’t telling me, and there was plenty I wasn’t telling him.

“Well, what I have to do
now
is figure out how to tell Ginny what you just told me. Or not.”

“I can’t help you there, sweetheart.”

Just then, the bookstore terrier burst into an ecstasy of barking: a moonfaced Frenchwoman entered the store. Sylvia clasped her briefly, without stooping, even though the woman was half a head shorter. “That’s Adrienne Monnier,” Anson explained, following my eyes. Adrienne wore a black waistcoat over a flowing shirtwaist and a billowy full-length skirt. Unlike her bobbed companion, the dumpling-shaped Frenchwoman wore her long hair in a chignon; she was fanning herself with her hat as she and Sylvia talked, their faces close.

“How long have they been together, then?”

“Ten years, I think,” he said. “Love
does
work out for some of us mortals.”

I knew I was staring again, and that I should stop. But it was a lot to take in, all at once.

 

 

 

The next morning, after Daniel left the flat, I bathed and dressed quickly, then brought a flask over to Café Lorette. “Oh, Rafaela, you shouldn’t have,” Gin said when I returned with coffee for her.

“Gin,” I said seriously. As I opened my mouth to deliver my preamble—
You know I’d never say anything to hurt you—
I looked at her: she really
had
been transformed by love. There was a soulful, meditative look to her sharp features I’d never seen before. Her eyes shone so wetly, I lost my nerve, and said instead, “We’ve had so much fun in this flat.”

“Oh please, don’t use that tone of voice, Rafaela.”

“What tone of voice?”

“Like I’m dead and buried in Meaux already. Please, please, please, please, please don’t tell me you’ve found another girl for the flat?”

Gin’s eyes weren’t shining with love; she was just upset. “What is it?” I asked.

“He said September first!”

“You mean, instead of August first?”

Gin nodded. “So I went to Madame Florin and got my job back,” she gulped, and then began crying in earnest. I was surprised such great honking gasps could come out of such a tiny person.

“Oh, Ginny. Oh, Gin.”

When Tamara had cried over her husband a few days before, I hadn’t known how to comfort her. A year of hangovers, achy shoes, and high-rolling men had eroded that sort of physical shyness between me and Gin. We had cried in front of each other before. Not only had we fooled around the one time, we had mopped up each other’s vomit on more than one occasion. When I threw out my homemade granny rags, Gin was the one who took me to buy my first box of sanitary napkins. Now I drew circles on her back with the flat of my hand, like a mother with a sick child. Telling her at this point just seemed cruel. But what if not telling her made her suffer longer? “I have to ask you something.”

“What?” she sniffled.

“What if you found out he wasn’t divorcing his wife at all?”

Gin wiped her eyes. “Rafaela, I ask myself that all the time. Of course I want to believe him, that he’ll leave her. But you know what I decided? These things happen. I wouldn’t be the first married man’s girlfriend in the world.”

“So you’d still go to Meaux?”

“Whenever he wants,” Gin said. Then she looked up hopelessly, speaking more to herself than to me. “But why did he say August first and then September first? It’s not fair.”

I didn’t feel cruel when I said the next thing I knew: I felt mythic, implacable, possessed by something larger than myself. “What if you found out he had a mistress in Meaux as well as his wife, and that’s why he didn’t want you to come?”

“Oh, Rafaela, why are you so awful?”

“Well? What would you do, if you
knew
it was true? If you had proof?”

I had seen Gin onstage a few times at Le Casino, and had been arrested by the purity with which she could express emotions, even those she herself had never experienced. I was stunned all the more so now as she considered my question. She looked crushed. Then angry. And then I saw her dainty face transformed by a kind of savage possessiveness. It jarred me. I recognized the ferocity I had recently seen in Tamara’s body, that I had echoed in my own when I had made fun of her. Gin’s face shut down and a voice I had never heard her use tore its way out of her: “I would still go to him.”

5

GIN AND I DRIFTED APART a little after that morning, perhaps because it pained me so much to see her suffer Daniel’s lies, perhaps because I began spending so much time on rue de Varenne. Tamara called the monstrously sexual pose I’d struck to tease her
La Belle Rafaela,
or
Beautiful Rafaela
: I lay supine, torqued, with one hand behind my head, the other, it seemed, fingering my own breast. Looking longer, as Tamara planned it, the viewer would discover that my hand was actually lifting the barest scrap of red silk robe toward that breast, as if to mock the very idea of modesty. She cut a sleeve off the robe so that she could place it on the floor beside the couch—a zone of red—and she taught me how to drape the rest of the robe across my lower legs the exact same way each time I posed. It would not simply be a robe; it would govern the colors of the painting: red robe, ochre flesh, gray couch, black background wall. She bought me a lipstick the same red.

Tamara painted me in the
Belle Rafaela
pose daily, driven. September first became for me not Gin’s moving day (especially since, soon enough, she announced it was October first instead), nor the day that Anson’s girl was to set sail for France, but the date by which Tamara would have to submit two paintings to the jury of the Salon d’Automne, which would open November fourth. One of them, she decided, would be the painting of her daughter on the balcony, which had just won a medal in an exhibition in Bordeaux. The other would be me.

I could not hold the pose for long. It hurt. Tamara handled this by working on at least two paintings at a time, one with a difficult pose, the other with an easy one: half asleep beside a book, nude, or on my side, wearing the silk slip I’d reclaimed from Gin
.
When I had my period, which animated Seffa so much Tamara had to lock him in her bedroom, she posed me clothed—wearing a white shawl flocked with dots, holding flowers—for a painting she called
Full Summer.

Every day I posed for
Beautiful Rafaela
, I experienced the same thing. First, the simple strangeness of being naked in a place not designed for nudity. Being naked in a room whose other inhabitant was clothed. Being naked in a room with windows, even if no one could see into the room from the outside. A separate shock: being naked in a room with windows open to every stir of summer air.

Then, as I moved into the pose, I felt two separate waves of lust: one as myself, just wanting the workday to be over so I could drag Tamara off to bed; the second, oddly, as the woman in the painting. The glow from the window fell plumb down my body from sternum to navel until the front slab of my ribcage became a hot slam of light to the eye. The more I arched my ass, the deeper that light fell across me, and the louder the voice of the painting purred in my throat:
Aren’t I beautiful?

Every time I took the pose that summer, it took
me
, the way an actress’s role might dictate her feelings to her, the way Gin’s songs made her their own
.
For a few seconds out of every day that I posed, the pose rode my body; she haunted me.
Have you ever seen anything like me?
she said.
I was made for this, for you to want.
They say,
Kneel, pray, and you will believe in God.
Arrange your limbs the way I did, and you will believe you
are
a god, a goddess made to subjugate the earth with a glimpse of your flesh alone.

Until your back begins to hurt. A few seconds in, the ecstasy would pass, and within five minutes, I would experience four separate unpleasant sensations, like four telephones ringing in the same room. Sweat that filled the instep of my right foot where I braced it on my left. A throb at exactly the spot that the trick of the painting, Tamara had told me, would announce as “closest” to the viewer: my right kneecap. A stabbing cramp exactly where Australia would fall on the right globe of my ass. And halfway between the wrist and elbow of the hand that tugged the red robe, a tendon pain like nothing I’d ever known, a pain remarkable for its precision and inevitability. Having the spot drilled with a dull pencil and electrocuted at the same time might have felt similar. After one especially long day when I collapsed out of the pose, Tamara groaned with disappointment and impatience. “
You
try doing this,” I snapped.

“You try doing
this
!”

But there was nothing else I wanted that August, as my body burned like the linden leaves scorching in the sun outside, than to be looked at by Tamara. The only minutes that went slower than the ones I spent posing for
Beautiful Rafaela
, watching Tamara sink into the marks she made, were the ones I spent without her: during two of my hourly breaks each day, Tamara took Seffa on a short walk, alone, she said, so as not to waste time on my dressing and undressing. I waited all day for Tamara to come back from those walks, for her to climb up out of her work and touch me. We wracked the poor bed those summer afternoons. Sometimes Tamara would rub cocaine into her gums before we made love, and even after she came and came, she still glittered with hunger. The next morning she would have shadows under her eyes. “I could not sleep. The state you had me in.” And we would wait all day again.

The last week she worked on
Beautiful Rafaela
, Tamara painted less and less, looked at me more and more. On the last day of August, after a week of applying tinier and tinier strokes of paint, Tamara stepped back, midday, and took off her apron. “Not bad.”

“That so?”

“I am going to miss this painting so much. Look at it.”

I felt a jab in my wrist—the one cramped from reaching for the red robe for six weeks—as I finally
did
tug the one-sleeved robe across my chest to go stand before the painting. “It’s me.” But it was me as I had never seen myself: lit from the inside, magnificent. I could not see a single brushstroke until I put my face up close to the painting, and then they appeared, like single strands on a head of hair, like the single interlocking fronds that compose a feather. Even half a step back, they disappeared, and I emerged again, radiant. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

“I know.”

We stared at it quietly for a moment.

“Rafaela, there is only one way I can let this painting go, even for just a couple of months to the Salon.”

“If you know you have a buyer?”

“No. If you let me paint it again.”

“I have never copied one of my own paintings before. I have never liked anything I did enough. Please, Rafaela—”

“You are. Never. Painting. My hand like that again.”

Tamara blinked at me. “Well, what if I don’t paint your hand?”

My mother and stepfather had sent me away to get married without asking me. My first boyfriend in Paris was a man I’d been passed to like a secondhand toy. I had made a grand stand just then, but I hadn’t expected to be taken seriously. I stared at her. “Well,” I said. “In that case.”