The Last Nude (17 page)

“She’s only a puritan when it comes to Bibi,” Romana said. She pantomimed sniffing cocaine, and they both laughed again. “You’re just sore she turned you down.”

“Madame de Lempicka, is that you?” said Anson’s friend Bobby Nightinghoul, emerging from behind two ladies in beaded gowns. Tamara looked up at Bobby, but she did not smile. “Oh, I’ve seen
you
at parties,
ma belle Polonaise
,” he said. “Have I! And isn’t this Anson’s little dish?”

“I’m not Anson’s anything,” I said, standing closer to Tamara.

“Look at that one, Robert,” said his companion, a big American boy with a voice so low I felt instead of heard it. Bless him: he was pointing at a painting instead of a person.

“Oh, Clark. Romaine Brooks is so nineteenth century,” Bobby complained.
“Peter, Une Jeune Fille Anglaise,”
he read aloud. “Whistler’s mama in drag, more like.”

Tamara was buttonholed by a friend, as were Bobby and Clark, leaving me alone for a moment with Romana de la Salle. I wasn’t sure if I’d like her: she seemed soft and pretty and featherbrained. We looked together at
Peter, a Young English Girl.
“That makes me think of Tamara’s portrait of your mother,” I attempted in French.

“I see what you mean,” Romana said in English. “The male dress. The single figure. The pensive stance. But this one has a cooler look, don’t you think? Those grays. And the very thin paint, almost like watercolor. It’s like a painting made of ice.” I gawped at her. I was practically a native English speaker and I had never said the word “pensive” out loud.

“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Do you know her?”

“Not to talk to. I mean, she’s a good twenty-five years older than we are.”

“We?”

“Tamara and I.”

I covered my mouth. “I guess I thought you were younger than Tamara.”

“You dear thing! No, we’re both twenty-nine.”

“But she said she was twenty-seven.
Like the century
.”

“Oh-ho, did she? Well, don’t tell her I spilled the beans.”

We shared a laugh over having caught Tamara out, then turned again to the painting. “Was Romaine Brooks one of Tamara’s teachers, do you know?”

“Not formally. But Tamara learned a lot from her, you can tell. The grays. The portraits. The foregrounded women. You should see Romaine’s portrait of her lover Natalie. Those two have been together almost as long as Maman and Bibi.”

“Natalie’s a tramp,” said Bobby, reëmerging from another conversation.

“Speak for yourself,” said Bobby’s friend Clark. “Romaine isn’t.”

“See the zeppelin and the scarecrow over there?” asked Bobby. “The big one’s one of my authors; she collects Picassos. Your friend Tamara cut Picasso dead in a café once, and now those two don’t speak. Mm-mm. The skinny gal’s her wife. Anson used to run errands for them.”

“Is there a woman left in Paris who sleeps with men?” Romana asked, imitating Bobby’s bloodless Kansas vowels.

“Am I looking at her?” Bobby replied.

Bobby and Romana locked eyes for a moment, until Bobby’s friend Clark interposed himself between them to admire my fur-collared coat. “Nice cut. Shall we go say hello to Gertrude and Alice, Robert?”

“I won’t forget you, my little
tarte aux fraises
,” Bobby told Romana, and the four of us laughed, though Clark’s laughter came a little forced.

“I think I saw those two women on my street once,” I realized aloud, “coming out of Galerie Vollard.” I had noticed them because they were both carrying pastry boxes from Fouquet.

“That’s Picasso’s dealer,” Romana explained quietly. “He handles a lot of Cézannes and Gauguins, too. This is Rue Laffitte?”

I nodded, surprised.

“Well, it’s a shame Tamara turns her nose up at all that, but there are other ways of making a career.
Par exemple
,” she said, gesturing again toward the Romaine Brooks painting. “Brooks painted Cocteau. Now he’s one of Tamara’s best friends. Brooks painted D’Annunzio. Tamara sought out D’Annunzio and he promoted her work. He gave her that topaz ring she wears. But she’s the only woman who never slept with him,” Romana added with a sly laugh. “Though it sounds like he tried.” As Tamara glided toward us, Romana turned to her. “We were just talking about your influences,” she said.

“My influences? The Quattrocento for color. The Dutch masters for light. And for perversity, the men I call the gilded mannerists. Pontormo. Bronzino. Greuze. Ingres.
Le Cinéma
said I reclaimed Ingres for ‘Cubism’.”

“Not a living painter on your list,” teased Romana. “Don’t forget Maurice Denis and André Lhote.”

“Do not speak to me of my
teachers
.” Tamara sniffed. “Those nobodies.”

I looked back at Romana, uncertain. “Don’t listen to her, Rafaela. We were in art school together. She’s insufferable.”

Would I ever speak French as well as these titled Europeans spoke English? Would I ever speak
English
as well? “Are you a painter, too?” I asked.

“It was just for fun.” Romana giggled. “When I saw Tamara’s work, I realized I didn’t have half her talent, and I quit. Have you seen where they hung your painting, Tamara?”

“I was just going to show Rafaela, darling,” Tamara said in French, kissing her friend good-bye when a handsome man approached the redhead. Romana gave Tamara an apologetic look. “You go have a good time,” Tamara said. “Look for
Die Dame
next month if I don’t see you before then.”

When we were alone, Tamara leaned toward me. “I love my new slip,” she whispered, and a single match flared under my ribs. “I have a surprise for you, too.”

“I’m glad we’re here together,” I whispered back, grinning. “But Tamara?” I ventured. “I feel funny. You told your friend I was
La Belle Rafaela soi-même
,” I said.

“Why is that a problem?”

“Now she knows what I look like naked. It’s embarrassing.”

“Beauty, my darling, is never embarrassing,” counseled Tamara. “And do not think about Romana. What does she know?”

Tamara threaded us through the crowded halls. As we approached the main gallery, we passed Bobby and Clark again, standing in an antechamber with a woman in a severely tailored men’s coat. Her eyes were two points of heat at the back of her cavernous hat. “But why do you let her treat you like this?” Bobby was asking.

An American woman’s level voice replied, “I don’t care what she does when we’re apart, because I know I’m the most important person in her life. Not that it’s any of your business,” the woman added, turning her back on him.

“Was that Romaine Brooks?” I whispered to Tamara as we hurried on.

“Was
who
Romaine Brooks?” she hissed. By then we had reached the main exhibition room, and she made me close my eyes. “Time for the surprise. Look where they hung it.”

Floor to ceiling, paintings hung so close together their frames touched, but I found Tamara’s right away: they had placed it at eye level, right in the very center of the wall.

“They gave you the best spot in the house,” I murmured.

“They did,” Tamara said, giving me a quick hard embrace. “Because
my
work,” she explained, as we approached it, “is
finished.
Tight. Not one line out of place. Everything here is chaos and murk compared to my paintings.”

We had reached the painting as she spoke, and when she did, a man turned to us. I noted his tiepin, a single gray pearl. “Is this yours?” he asked.

“It is,” she said, extending her hand, which blazed with its massive topaz. “Tamara de Lempicka.”

“Pierre Boucard,” he replied. “I’ve seen so many paintings tonight, but this one? Perfection.”

With his perfectly trimmed moustache and quietly lush double-breasted suit, Boucard had lively eyes and a smooth face that belied the shallow groove cut into his brow, the silver in his full head of slicked-back hair. More than young or old, however, Boucard himself seemed
finished
—not one line out of place—with a muted sheen as glossy as his gray pearl.

“Are you a painter yourself, sir?” asked Tamara. Boucard was too well dressed to be a painter, I thought, but he seemed like someone who might have been flattered by the question.

“I’m a doctor, Madame
.
A medical researcher. And an art lover. It’s easy to get overwhelmed at these big exhibitions, but your painting—it glows. Is there a secret to your technique?”

Tamara thanked the doctor, pleased. A photographer and a newsman had begun to approach us, drawn by Tamara’s beauty and her startling red hat and coat, and she waited until they were within earshot. “You ask about the unique luminosity of my paintings,” she said for their benefit. She gestured toward
Beautiful Rafaela
for a flash-powder moment, then gave the reporter her card. “I will tell you. I use very thin coats of paint, and I work on several paintings at a time. This way, each coat of paint can dry completely before I lay down the next.” I looked at her, as impressed as the doctor and the newsmen. And I had thought she worked on more than one painting at a time to give me a break between poses!

The doctor nodded appreciatively. “I have never seen a painting so commanding, so brilliantly colored, so polished, so simple, so sensual, so pure.”

Tamara looked down, momentarily dumbfounded, and flashed me a look of childlike joy. Then she straightened, as if to hold the man at arm’s length. “I’m flattered,” she purred coolly. “You’re very kind.”

“I don’t say it to be kind,” he replied. “I say it because I’d like to buy your painting.”

Tamara permitted herself a tiny smile. “Shall we go speak to Monsieur le Directeur, then?” she asked, without missing a beat. As we turned to go to the office, I looked up at her, with
What about your other buyer?
plain on my face. She gave me a warning squint, then took my hand, a gesture clearly chosen to catch the eye of both Boucard and the reporter: I saw the pleasure she took in the glitter of envy and interest she provoked as we left the newsmen behind. When she made to introduce me to Boucard, I gave her a warning of my own: a hard pinch to the palm in mine. “This is Ra—
chela
Dafano,” she said. I turned to her in disbelief. Did I look like that much of a
Rachela
?

Boucard kissed my hand. “I see the blood of Zion here, mingled with the blood of Rome?”

I blinked at him. “Sorry, I don’t speak French,” I snapped in French.

In the office, a desiccated man bent over a ledger with a magnifying glass, searching for
La Belle Rafaela.
“Number 1377, are you sure?” he mumbled.

As the clerk ran his finger down the column of titles, the door jerked open behind us. “Madame de Lempicka?” asked the large man who burst in.

As Tamara responded with a tentative nod and smile, the clerk set down his loupe
.
“Baron Kuffner,” he said.

“Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh,” the red-faced Teuton said with a bow. If Doctor Boucard was as smooth and compact as a pearl, this Baron Kuffner was a barnacle-encrusted shell: bewhiskered, balding, and bespectacled, with a sportsman’s big-boned, stubbly-throated bulk.

“Enchantée,”
Tamara said, languidly extending an arm. In its slow movement I could see physical repulsion struggling with the mild interest stirred up by his title.

“You are the painter of
La Belle Rafaela
?”

“The selfsame.”

“I have ten thousand francs here for your painting,” he said bluntly. “I saw it this morning, I thought about it all day, and I’ve come back for it now.”

“Pierre Boucard,” the doctor said, shaking Kuffner’s hand. “I was just here to purchase Madame de Lempicka’s painting myself, actually.”

“Messieurs,”
the clerk said, and there was something very French about the way he enjoyed his small exercise of power. “As you know, this is an exhibition, not an auction, so the painting does in fact go to the first comer, which would be you, Doctor,” he said, bending down again over his loupe
.

The Baron gave a dignified nod. “Fair enough,” he said, while the doctor, clearly too well bred to gloat, looked smugly pleased with himself for
not
gloating.

The clerk looked up. “Gentlemen, my mistake.” We all turned to him. “Number 1377,
La Belle Rafaela
, was purchased this morning by an Agence Binard. Very impressive for the first day of the Salon, Madame
.
Congratulations.
Messieurs, désolé.
”

The disappointed men turned to each other, then to Tamara. “I’m honored you liked the painting,” she assured each of them. “It means the world to me.
Messieurs
, a month from now, the last night of the Salon, I’m having a studio party. Won’t you both please come?”

“I’d be delighted to see more of your work,” said Boucard. “Do you do portraits?”

“Will there be more paintings of that model, Rafaela?” Kuffner asked. “More nudes?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Tamara said, exchanging cards with the two men. “I’ll send you a
pneu
with details first thing tomorrow.” Tamara’s eyes burned with pleasure as we turned away. She seemed unsteady on her feet, and dropped her Bakelite purse. As the two of us reached, simultaneously, to collect it, I felt the men’s eyes on me and heard Kuffner ask Boucard, “Who’s the girl?”

Of Boucard’s answer, as we walked away, I only heard the word
Juive.

“Why did you call me Rachela?” I asked Tamara. “That ‘blood of Zion’ stuff gave me the heebie-jeebies.”

“I am sorry,
ma belle
. I was already slipping up, and it was the first name that came to mind.”

“I don’t like him,” I said.

“Oh, darling. Some Frenchmen are just like that,” Tamara said, brushing aside my unease. “Both Christians and Jews. They
live
to type each other.” I remembered the wholesaler at M. Léon Tissus and took her point. “I think
Beautiful Rafaela
might just be his type.”