The Last Nude (12 page)

6

“WELL, WHAT IF I DON’T PAINT your hand?”
I repeated, as I walked down rue de Varenne. I was laughing to myself, a tight loud laugh, like a whole balloon of air forced out of a narrow tube one hiccup at a time. With Guillaume and Hervé, my choices had been as clear as they’d been with my mother and stepfather: go along with what they wanted, or just go. With Tamara, however, it occurred to me, maybe I could have something different. Could she teach me, I wondered vertiginously, how to have a lover who was also a friend? My neck felt rubbery and strange, the way it had when Guillaume first had my hair bobbed. I was in no state to get on the Métro and go home to the dress I was making. The day was brilliantly blue: I walked down the Boulevard Saint-Germain until the ringing tightness that I felt loosened. I went to sit in Sylvia’s bookstore again, because it was nearby, and because, as with the prospect of telling Tamara what I wanted and did not want, what I would and would not do, the bookstore made me aware of just how much I didn’t know.

As I approached the shop, I saw Adrienne Monnier walking toward me, dressed once again as if from another age, in a nipped-in black velvet waistcoat over a flowing gray skirt and shirtwaist. The chignon crowning her round face made me think of the distinctive knob on a brioche. She seemed agitated, and as I greeted the overeager shop terrier a moment later, I learned why. Sylvia stood mid-conversation with a harassed-looking French postman holding a large flat package in one hand and mopping his brow with the other. “You’re Anson’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked fondly, and seemed about to tell me something when Adrienne burst in.

“Et voilà,”
huffed Adrienne, counting out money for the postman, at whose departure the two women exchanged smiles—tinged with indulgence on Sylvia’s part and with irritation on Adrienne’s.

“Well, that was a madcap caper,” said Sylvia, as if to me, to which Adrienne replied in French with something quick and pointed, though not, it seemed, aimed at Sylvia.

“What was?” I asked.

Sylvia pointed to the package. “Joyce is in Delft and sent himself a Vermeer print to the store, charging the postage to me, because he’s running out of money again, the poor thing. And just as luck would have it, I didn’t have enough in the till. So I had to send for Adrienne to lend me some.”

Adrienne sighed. I was struck, despite her annoyance, by her high, sweet voice. “He may have no money of his own,” I understood her to say, “but he has no trouble spending yours or mine. Or Bobby’s, for that matter,” she added, pointing out the window. Anson’s friend Bobby Nightinghoul was approaching the store, turquoise earring and all, an arm across the shoulders of a slim young woman in a pale straw cloche
.
Because of the hat, I couldn’t see her eyes at first, but I could tell from the shape of her beautifully made-up mouth that the woman was crying.

At first glance, I took the pair approaching the open door for lovers, unhappy ones, but when the woman’s shipwrecked eyes came into view, it was clear that the cause of her misery lay elsewhere. “Thelma just can’t help catting around, sweet pea,” came Bobby’s flat voice through the open doorway. “You gotta let her go.” They paused briefly outside the store, as if about to enter. The woman saw the three of us watching, and turned away, embarrassed. Bobby gave a tiny, apologetic wave, and followed the woman up the street.

“What a shame,” said Sylvia.

“She did go looking for trouble, but still . . .” Adrienne agreed, wincing on the girl’s behalf.

Wasn’t Bobby married, for money’s sake, to a woman who lived in Switzerland with her girlfriend? Had the two women broken up? “Is she his wife?” I asked.

“June? No, she’s one of his authors,” Sylvia explained, gesturing toward a stack of woodcut prints on the mantel. “In progress, that is. He publishes a lot of our friends,” she said, indicating someone I couldn’t see on the far side of the room. I watched the pair walk up the street. I liked him better when he wasn’t looking at me. “
We
published
him
too,” Sylvia added. “We translated him into French for Adrienne’s magazine.”

“That man’s
language
,” Adrienne said, fanning herself in mock scandalized horror. In English, her voice lilted and fluted just as much as it did in French. “Just think, all the American men who want to learn the French they don’t teach in school have two little women to thank,” she said, with a minxy glance at Sylvia.

“I just about went blind on that translation,” Sylvia said, pleased. “On New Year’s, Joyce and I had matching eye patches!”

A protective look darkened Adrienne’s face. “Bobby gives the man a hundred and fifty pounds a month,” she said. “Why are we paying his postage?”

“And to top it off, Joyce wants us to have this framed for him at Vavin’s,” Sylvia added, brandishing the letter that had come with the package. She laughed. “With a thick black frame, like the ones Vermeer paints into his paintings.”

“Mon Dieu,”
said Adrienne, shaking her head. She leaned in for a quick kiss good-bye.

“What would he do if it weren’t for us?” Sylvia asked as the shop door closed.

“I guess
she
won’t be the one framing that picture,” I joked.

“Oh, she’s publishing the French edition of
Ulysses
,” Sylvia rejoined. “I wouldn’t worry about her.”

I had overstepped myself. “She has a pretty voice,” I said.

Sylvia smiled. “Doesn’t she? Her people come from Savoy,” she explained. “I like to imagine them yodeling to each other over the Alps.”

I laughed. “What’s Vermeer like?” I asked. I had heard Tamara mention his name in such a way I couldn’t tell if he was a friend or an enemy.

Sylvia cocked her head at me quizzically. “You’re younger than you look,” she concluded. “But still, didn’t Anson say you worked for a painter?” She looked across to the far side of the room again, perhaps to check on her other customers, and then pointed out a low half-shelf of art books by the register. “Here it is,” she said, pulling out a tall thin volume. “Whoops, it’s in Dutch, but the words aren’t the point.”

I curled up in a chair and flipped through the pictures. I felt foolish when I discovered that I had completely misunderstood the way Tamara talked about her fellow painter: he predated her by some three hundred years. Her paintings were slicker, bolder, and fleshier than his, but like him, she painted in the same room again and again, using the same furniture, draping her models in the same fabrics, asking them repeatedly to do painful things with their hands. In the cool Northern light of his paintings, a girl sat holding a quill pen, lost in her writing, while another girl, bored, stood looking out the window. A girl played out a spool of thread, bent over a sewing frame. A girl—most painful of all—held a pair of scales. My right hand burned with pins and needles just looking at her.
Well, what if I don’t paint your hand?
I remembered, and smiled. I looked again at the girl at the sewing frame. Working for Tamara had taught me to notice something I wouldn’t have seen before: the objects “closest” to the viewer, which ought to have declared themselves most, were a dark blur, while the more distant female figure sat in sharp focus. Though the painting seemed at first glance to offer a simple window into the sewing girl’s room, it actually paid attention the way a person might, noticing some things, ignoring others.

“The Lacemaker
,” said Sylvia. “You like it?”

“Oh, I thought she was sewing,” I blurted as I looked up, startled. Half an hour had passed in a moment. “Thank you for showing me this.”

“Of course,” she said, still amused by my ignorance. “You know, you
could
go see it in the Louvre sometime.”

“When I went to the Louvre alone, men kept trying to talk to me. And then when I went to the Louvre with my friend Ginny,
she
kept trying to talk to me. I think I’ll see more if I just sit here by myself.”

Sylvia laughed. “Just wait until you’re thirty,” she said. But she looked at me gently and asked my name. “Well, come in anytime. Read anything you want.” Something in her face—her choice not to judge me—reminded me of Anson the night we met. It made sense that they were friends. “And sometime, you should join the library and you can take books home.”

I was carrying a new beaded purse full of modeling money. “I’ll join today,” I said. As I filled out the card she proffered, she gave me a thoughtful look and lent me a book called
A Few Figs from Thistles.
I wasn’t sure I’d like it, considering the woodsy title, but I thanked her.

“ ‘Rue Laffitte,’ ” she said, reading aloud the address on my subscription bunny. “Isn’t that the street full of art galleries leading up toward Montmartre ?”

“You can see the Sacré-Coeur from my front door,” I said. I had wanted to tell Tamara about the optical illusion, particular to rue Laffitte, that fused the Sacré-Coeur with Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, but her contempt for the art dealers on my street had stopped me. I tried explaining it to Sylvia instead.

“Sacré Dame,” she replied playfully. “Or Notre Coeur.”

“Oooh.”

“Or how about Lortre Courette?” she proposed.

“L’Ochre Courette?” I attempted.

“I like that,” she said. “The little yellow-brown courtyard of the heart.”

I grinned.

“I bet you’d like Apollinaire.”

Was he another regular at the store? I could see why so many people came by. “Anson thinks the world of you, you know,” I said.

Sylvia looked across the room once more and offered a wry, apologetic grimace. “Well, you’ll never guess who’s here. I keep hoping he’ll wake up.” She gestured with her chin toward a plush chair in a far corner where I found a man asleep behind an open newspaper. I turned down a corner of his
Herald Tribune
: it was Anson.

My friend smelled of liquor. He seemed at some point to have dipped his cuff into his dinner. I had never seen his face unshaven: his patchy, boyish facial hair reminded me of nothing so much as the thick Italian single brow I’d had as a child. I returned to Sylvia and made a face. “He’s had a rough year,” she said. “But he’s got a heart of gold.”

“Rough how?”

“Sylvia opened her mouth to tell me something, then seemed to rein herself in. He’s more accident-prone than anything else. For example, he boxes, and so does our friend Jean Prévost.
He
works with Adrienne on her magazine. He’s a hardheaded man; that’s his claim to fame. If you ever meet a man in here who asks you to hit him on the head, don’t do it. Anyway, they both box; they both write about sports. I thought they might like each other. I introduced them, and organized a match for them—and Anson broke his thumb on Prévost’s head!”

“No!”

“Prévost didn’t feel a thing, of course,” she said, laughing.

Behind his newspaper, Anson stretched. I approached him again. His eyes, when he opened them, looked eggy and blood-streaked. “What a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

“Literally, hmm?” I pulled out my compact. “Take a look at yourself.”

He melodramatically turned away, hiding behind a raised arm. I laughed. “Any face but mine,” he said.

“You’re a mess.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.”

“What happened?”

“Polly cabled me,” he said.

“Your girl from Missouri?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s not coming?”

Anson flung his head from side to side and slapped his cheeks a few times to wake up. Then he gave me a ghoulish smile. “She asked me to wait a little longer.”

“Oh,” I said. He did not elaborate. “If she really meant just a little longer, you wouldn’t look like this.”

“You are correct,” he said, overenunciating like a wireless announcer.

“She met someone else, then.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“After all this time!”

“I appreciate your sympathy, but I’m already quite aware of this fact.”

I recoiled. “Are you relieved, a little?” I tried again. “I mean, you said you missed your wife. You could get back together now.”

“Oh, that would solve everything.” Anson’s laughter was black and cold, as if he himself were the butt of the joke. What was the joke?

“Well, what are you going to
do
?” I ventured.

“Today?” Anson asked, fixing me with his eggy, bloody mien. “Drink.”

I exchanged a shrug with Sylvia as I left the bookstore: there was nothing I could do for him. I was worried, though. I telephoned him the next day and was relieved to hear his voice back to its unflappable, smug self. “You caught me at a bad moment there. Can I get you dinner sometime, to apologize?”

“You’ve been trying to buy me dinner for months,” I chided, relieved I could tease him again.

7