The Last Nude (21 page)

I WALKED ALL THE WAY HOME from Tamara’s party, and when I got there, I paced my room, swooping between giddiness and nausea. At one extreme, I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror, my familiar, fleshy body made strange and glittering to me, not just by Tamara’s eccentric eye, but by the crowd’s. At the other pole, I smoked half a cigarette and touched it to my skin, then flinched away, sickened, before locking the memory of Maggey’s scream up in a box. Finally, unable to sleep, I worked on Ira’s dress, the sky ebbing white as I tied off the last knot. Gin was out for the night, or I would have woken her. When I finished, I spread the little frock in my arms, alone, eager to show it off.

 

 

 

The next day I brought the dress with me when I went to pose. “It is almost as beautiful as you were last night,” Tamara exclaimed. “I will go tell Ira on your first break. I cannot phone, because look,” she said. The cord dangled from her telephone, unplugged. “Doctor Boucard and Baron Kuffner’s people have called me twice each in the past hour!”

“They want our
Rafaela
?”

“They do, but I will not sell her,” Tamara said.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Well, first, nothing. I will simply let them
want
her for a few days. Then I will decide what to do.”

I knew Tamara had more in mind than she claimed, because she asked me to pose for the almost finished
Full Summer,
even though I didn’t have my period. From my chair, paper flowers in hand, I could see Ira’s blue dress glistening on the satin hanger I’d latched over one of the French doors to the bedroom. I hadn’t liked the way the doctor and the baron looked at me, but the idea of Tamara turning them both down made me feel proud. I sat fizzing quietly over those four phone calls, the way the word
belle
had flattened last night’s crowd, the shining blue lily of a gown I’d made with my own hands.

Tamara left during our first break, returning with chocolates and the news that Ira would come by with money that afternoon. I had promised to meet Anson at four, so when Ira hadn’t appeared by quarter of, I reluctantly left the dress with Tamara and hurried out.

 

 

 

Tamara’s apartment stood two long buildings down from the intersection of her quiet narrow street and the slightly wider rue Vaneau: it was impossible to enter or leave her apartment without being noticed by the patrons of Bistrot Varenne at the corner, or by its mild little waiter, who liked to post himself in the doorway with a cigarette in the afternoons, grunting appreciatively whenever I passed by. Though that afternoon, as always, I walked on the far side of the street to avoid him, I was still close enough to see a flicker of movement through the glass at my left, and catch a gust of warm sausage-laden air before a ruddy hirsute man lumbered out. Just as my eye registered that the big man had left his coat inside, I realized he was crossing the street to reach me. “Rafaela!”

It was Baron Kuffner. His small eyes through his spectacles shone yellow-green, and he was grinning.

I raised a hand to forestall him. “I know you want to talk to Tamara, but I can’t help you,” I said.

“But I want to talk to
you
,” he said, gesturing toward the bistro door. “Won’t you join me for a glass of wine?”

“I’m late to meet my friend,” I said, taking advantage of an ambiguity in French to let him think he had a man to be afraid of.

“Some other time?”

I snorted and kept walking.

 

 

 

The shortcut I attempted to Shakespeare and Company added long minutes to my route. “Has Anson come and gone already?” I asked when I rushed into the bookstore.

When Sylvia looked up, with genuine politeness, from the letter she was reading, I felt like a lout: I hadn’t even said hello. “Sorry, darling. He hasn’t been in since the weekend.”

“Thanks,” I said, apologetic. “I’m sorry about the other day.”

“You mean when you stood up to Bob?”

“I wish I hadn’t lost my temper,” I said.

“You didn’t lose your temper. You were just being clear. Sometimes he needs to be put in his place a little.” I nodded shyly, thankful, and sat down by the warm stove. “To his credit,” she said, “I think he was trying to be protective. It sounds like your painter friend turns up in some pretty louche places. But he can be obnoxious. I told him to mind his own business.”

“That was really decent of you. I know he’s an important customer,” I said, gesturing toward the post-office wall of pigeonholes Bobby’s wife had bought for the store. His name was painted below one of the largest mailboxes.

“I want
all
my subscribers to feel welcome here,” Sylvia said. “Not just a few blowhards. You can get your mail sent here too, if you want.”

“I never get any mail,” I said. “But, thanks. For everything, I mean. Sorry. I interrupted you.”

“Not at all,” she said, shaking out her springy curls as she stretched. My pleasure at having finished Ira’s dress made me notice clothing more than ever: Sylvia’s little tweed jacket fitted her perfectly, but the cuffs were too short. “They’re holding the next issue of
transition
until Joyce finishes ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle,’” she explained with a smile. I had no idea what she was talking about, but that was part of why I liked her. Would an extra strip of brown velvet at those cuffs look elegant or fussy? She held up the letter she was reading, a barely legible list of names. “And then when it comes out, he says here he wants a copy sent to forty different addresses. But the thing is, forty copies plus postage means four hundred francs, and Adrienne put her foot down.” She waved to someone walking by outside, and I saw it was, in fact, Adrienne, once again in her billowy costume and fitted black waistcoat. I remembered the Vermeer book Sylvia had shown me in September, and it occurred to me, first, that Adrienne Monnier was dressed like a Vermeer maid, second, that I had never seen her dressed otherwise, and third, that she had solved the problem of being a fat woman in an age of slim fashions by ignoring fashion altogether. In her chosen uniform, I realized, Adrienne looked iconic rather than dumpy. I waved to her, too, impressed, and she favored me with a dimpled smile. When I looked back at Sylvia again, she was knuckling the bridge of her nose. “So I say we compromise by holding a reading at the store as soon as he’s finisheed,” she decided. “And then what I can do is write all these people and invite them.”

“That’s a lot of letters.”

“I
do
hate to disappoint him, but at least it’s something.”

“He’s lucky to have you.”

I heard no bitterness in Sylvia’s laughter. “The luck is all mine,” she said. “Now I’ve talked your ear off. Do you want to wait and see if Anson shows up?”

I nodded. “Do you have any new art books?”

“Not this week, but I did let someone trade me a big medical textbook full of plates for a copy of
Pomes Penyeach
.”

I laughed. “You did?”

“I can’t say no to a fan. And I have a fatal weakness for
les rossignols
.”

“
Les
what?”

“Nightingales. That’s what French booksellers call the books you can’t
pay
someone to take. But it’s handsome, in its way. Do you want to see?”

“Why not?” I said, and curled up with the book by the stove. At first the squishy viscera repelled me, but when I reached LE SYSTÈME MUSCULAIRE, its intricate web of laces as pink as my long-ago neighbor Theresa’s Chanel dress, I felt a shudder of pleasure I only half understood.
This
was what Tamara saw when she carefully touched my limbs while working, staring with that flat-eyed painter’s look.
This
was the distinct second rounding of thigh in
Beautiful Rafaela
, the subtly separate rise under the arm
.
This new knowledge took hold of me as I looked, but another thing did, too: I wanted to copy even this. My head filled with stacks of interbraided laces. I was seeing a dress in my mind, but what was it made of? Satin? Leather? Tight fat coils of embroidery floss? The thousand separate but parallel fibers split, fanned, re-fused in new combinations, like the waters of a braided stream. A little dress shop, mine, took shape in my mind, a place as warmly inviting as Sylvia’s bookstore. In the window of my shop, I could see a mannequin wearing the entire
système musculaire
itself—beautifully, impossibly—as a dress. I didn’t want to inflict this garment on anyone in particular, I just wanted to see it, to make it, the dress itself, a confection as elaborate as a matador’s jacket, a vision as simple as a human body. I stepped dizzily back from the textbook as if back from a long journey: it was suddenly five o’clock.

 

 

 

Anson clearly wasn’t coming. I wished Sylvia a good night and wandered outside, restless. My friend had stood me up and I would have to wait a whole day to hear if Ira liked her dress. I’d never even gotten to show Gin, I grumped, wondering if she’d spent the night at a hotel. Then it occurred to me: surely Ira had been to Tamara’s by
now.
I could go back and find out right away. Delighted with myself, I sailed down rue Saint-Sulpice back toward Tamara’s flat, refining my shortcut through the Sixth. Ira would look perfect in the dress; she’d love it; she’d tell all her rich friends, and while I waited for the commissions to come rolling in, I’d have something to salt away.
It takes money to open a shop, after all,
I daydreamed, reaching rue de Varenne. No one rushed coatless out of the café to bother me this time, and the mild little waiter was too busy with his early-evening wine drinkers to grunt my way.

When I reached Tamara’s building, I saw her electric lights on and her curtains down. One gray velvet curtain flapped at an open window, sucked in, then out, by alternating blasts of hot air from the radiator and cold air from the night. It was beautiful, the heaving curtain, the streetlight playing over the gray velvet two flights overhead. I stopped to look at it, to try to
see
it the way Tamara did, the way I’d just looked at LE SYSTÈME MUSCULAIRE—and then I heard a sound, two sounds. A baby’s cry. And a woman’s, scissoring its way up a private scale.

Unable to move, I stood gripping the railing in the long silence that followed, my little valise hanging from one arm. Through the gap in the curtains, I saw a shadow approach the window. Then a familiar pair of long-wristed, long-fingered hands reached between the curtains and closed it. I turned around and walked away fast, heels hard on the pavement.

 

 

 

Angry and lonely, I didn’t want to go home. I took the Métro to Le Casino, where Gin danced and sometimes sang, and prevailed on the rat-faced manager to let me look for her backstage. We hadn’t seen much of each other recently, not since she’d come home with that lump over her eye. I felt tentative, leaning into that dim room of mirrors, feathers, and dust: I had sided against Daniel, and she’d frozen me out. But it was empty. She hadn’t arrived for work yet, so I settled onto the dressing-room daybed and fell into a thin black angry sleep. I wouldn’t have even called it sleep, except that when I woke up, Gin was poking me. “Shove over, darling.” Perching beside me in her half-slip and bandeau, she squirmed out of a pair of jeweled butterfly wings and pulled off a Cleopatra wig.

“Hi,” I said, not sure if she was still sore at me.

“You missed my show,” she said, not really angry. I felt relieved.

“Whoops.” My lipstick felt crusty in the corners of my mouth from my nap. I fixed it with my thumb. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. Sorry.”

“Were you up all hours finishing that dress for the painter’s friend?”

I was happy she’d been paying attention, but I winced nonetheless. “A lot of good that did me.”

“Did you get paid, though?”

“Tomorrow, I think. Why?” Did I even need to ask? “I have modeling money if you need some.”

“Nice work,” she said. I was wrong; she’d just been making conversation. “Are you and the painter still together?”

“Well, today I wish we weren’t,” I said glumly, and told her about Tamara and Ira as she rubbed cold cream on her face.

“That’s a rotten way to find out,” she said. “But after everything you dug up about Daniel, surely
you
didn’t think you were
her
only lover?”

Forgiven but not forgotten, I see.
“But she’s
my
only lover,” I protested. “I don’t want anybody else.”

“Do unto others,”
scoffed Gin, balling up her washcloth, and I realized I sounded as young as she had that bad night, with her bowl of hot chocolate and her black eye. “You’ll notice Jesus Christ had no love life. I didn’t want anybody but Daniel, and look where that got me.”

“I guess you two haven’t made up.”

Gin shrugged and began wriggling into a black shift, a real pearl collar, and an opera-length rope of glass beads. “Not yet. I’ve got this lawyer I’m stringing along if things really don’t work out. I’m drinking a lot so the baby will come out small—that way Remy will think it’s his, just early.”

“Is this Remy guy married?”

“Au contraire,”
sighed Gin, pulling on a pair of elbow-length black gloves from her own counter at La Belle Jardinière. “That is, in fact, his greatest charm.”

“Does he look anything like Daniel?”

“Close enough.”

“Nice work, yourself, then.”

“But, Rafaela, he’s
so
boring. Last night I kept thinking, I’m going to
die
of boredom. So, listen. I need to have some fun.
You
need to meet somebody new. I have an invitation to a student ball tonight; do you want to go?”

I was so upset over Tamara and Ira, dancing was the last thing I would have thought to do. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll pay for the taxi.”