The Last Nude (23 page)

 

 

 

Baron Kuffner waited for me at Bistrot Varenne often, and I firmly but politely rebuffed him. At the same time, his and Dr. Boucard’s calls kept pouring in about the private
Rafaela.
The prices they offered were so high that Tamara hired Anson’s boss Boulind to look into whether either man was as wealthy as he claimed. When a preliminary round of inquiries proved fruitful, Tamara dealt with each man coyly, hinting that if he proved his interest by purchasing one of her other
Rafaela
s, she’d be willing to consider his request. It worked. Baron Kuffner agreed to purchase
Nude with Dove
on its completion: Tamara didn’t mention anything to him about the change in model. Dr. Boucard, for his part, purchased
Full Summer
, agreeing to license it to
Die Dame
for the cover of August 1928, with Tamara to receive a good portion of the fees. Meanwhile, the first of Tamara’s magazine covers appeared:
The Orange Scarf,
featuring Ira, Romana, and the wisp of chiffon Tamara had given me on the day we met
.
On the December day it first appeared, I wore the scarf, simply for the pleasure of grinning when I passed it on a newsstand.

14

WHEN I ARRIVED AT HER APARTMENT in the orange chiffon scarf, an inky-fresh copy of
Die Dame
in hand, Tamara took one look at me and declared a short workday. I was lying asleep in her bed when Dr. Boucard came to claim his painting: I half awoke to Tamara dressing in a scramble, and when I wakened fully, he was standing in her salon. “I’m so sorry,” Tamara said. “I thought you were coming at
deux heures,
not
douze heures.
I was just taking a nap when you rang my bell.”

“Should I come back in at two, then?” he asked.

“No, no, this is fine.” She didn’t say
Come back at two,
and she didn’t say
Don’t mind my model, she’s just leaving.
Boucard’s persistence unsettled Tamara—both men’s did—so I knew she was glad I was there, though I wasn’t sure how useful I could be to her from the next room, naked under her sheets. One of the bedroom’s curtained French doors stood closed, the other only partway open: through it I could see the mirror over the salon mantel. The bedroom looked like a dark fold in its glass, like the lair of an animal, inside of which glittered a single light: my reflected eye.

Below the mirror, a large sheet of brown paper sailed across the room.
“Full Summer,”
Tamara announced, unwrapping a painting. I heard Boucard murmur in admiration.

“Oh, and you had it framed at Vavin’s?”

“Is there anyplace else?”

“Well done.”

“Thank you for sharing your painting with
Die Dame
,” Tamara said, over the rattle of wrapping paper.

“No thanks needed. Seeing thousands of copies on the newsstands next summer and knowing
I
have the original will be rather nice, Madame de Lempicka. This is a delight.”

I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Imagine that, walking up the street with Tamara and passing, not just my orange scarf, but my own face on a magazine!

“I’m very happy with my choice,” Boucard said. “But I was wondering, could I take a last look at
Nude with Dove
?”

“If you understand that it’s still not finished?” Tamara asked.

“Of course, of course.”

Tamara swung suddenly into the bedroom and I pulled the covers over my head. “Sorry,” she whispered. When she returned with the painting to the salon, she left the door half open as before.

“Oh, Kuffner’s going to wish he’d bought mine,” Boucard said, chuckling as Tamara showed him
Nude with Dove.
“This one is larger and a nude, but it could be any woman.
Full Summer
is a real Rafaela. I’m honored to purchase it.”

“I’m glad it’s in the hands of such a discriminating collector.”

“Which brings us to my proposition, Madame.” What proposition? “Have you thought it over?” At this, as quietly as possible, I sat up a little higher in bed.

“Doctor, I’ve read it over, and I’m ready to sign.”

I heard Boucard’s exclamations of pleasure, and then the unfolding of papers; briefly each person appeared in the doorway as they crossed over to Tamara’s desk. “You’re going to find I stand by my word,” Boucard assured her.

I heard a flicker of sexual heat in Boucard’s promise, but none in Tamara’s reply. “You’re going to find that your faith in me is well founded.”

“And now, regarding
Belle Rafaela en Vert
,” he said, calling the private
Rafaela
by its full title. “You don’t want to sell it to me. You don’t want to sell it to Kuffner. Well and good, you’re an artist, and my respect for you is profound. This contract applies only to work you
sell,
after all. However. If you sell any of your work—especially the
Belle en Vert—
to anyone else, I’ll know. I’m not going to get swept up in an auction here, and I’m not getting involved in a battle of wills. But I’ll know. Your French is impeccable, but perhaps you were not brought up with our legal terms—you are familiar with
breach of contract
?” The phrase he used was
“rupture de contrat.”

“You forget my husband practiced law,” Tamara said coolly.

“Then I’m glad we understand each other.”

“Perfectly.”

 

 

 

What was that?” I asked, after Boucard left.

“Now I have a patron,” Tamara announced, unfurling on her chaise in a glittering arc. “I will not have to worry about money at all for the next two years. Watch this,” she said, reaching over to her desk. On it, beside Boucard’s contract, lay Tadeusz’s large white envelope, untouched since July. She slit it open, signed its contents, and sealed them up in an envelope of her own. “Out it goes,” she crowed.
“Et voilà!
I’m a
divorcée.”

“Just what kind of a patron
is
this Doctor Boucard?” I asked, shrinking.

“Oh, no. No no no no no. Some mistakes, a woman needs to make just once in her life, and that one, I have already made.” I heard pride in her voice as she made this pronouncement.

“What happened?”

Tamara lit a cigarette, as if to suck in all the more pleasure from the story she was about to tell. “I once had a friend named Renata Treves, a baroness with a salon. She set me up with the Castelbarco gallery in Milan; they gave me a big show two years ago. So Renata’s husband commissioned a portrait. I painted her portrait. It is a beautiful portrait. But then they introduced me to their friend Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Mon Dieu.
What a favor to me, the chance to paint such a famous man.”

“When was this?”

“Just last winter. So I go to Il Vittoriale—D’Annunzio’s villa—and I try every day to paint him, and all he wants is to sleep with me. He was a compelling man—
not
a beautiful man, but compelling—but he refused to sit for a portrait until he had sex with me. And
I
refused to do a thing with him until he sat for me. Day after day, chasing me around Il Vittoriale like a dog. The man sleeps in a coffin, Rafaela. Ridiculous. So I leave, very disappointed, no portrait, and I go to sleep in a hotel instead. And the next morning there is a man on a horse knocking on my shutters. How does he know which room is mine? And I open my shutters, very nervous, still in my nightgown,” she said, pantomiming. “And there is a messenger from D’Annunzio, on a white horse, handing me a poem through the window. And the poem is rolled up like a scroll, inside”—she lifted one hand—“this ring.”

When Tamara flourished her topaz at the end of this tale, she made me think of Gin posing with the diamond earrings Daniel had given her in Capri. Gin had a pearl collar, too, from Jacques. An ermine stole from Yann. Guillaume and Hervé had given me jewelry, too, but I had sold it all. “You never slept with him, and he gave you a ring anyway?”

“I never went to bed with that man. And everybody knew, because I left Il Vittoriale and I stayed at that hotel. I made him look like a fool. So then D’Annunzio is angry with his friend, Baron Treves, for introducing him to such a disagreeable woman. He tells his friend bad things. And Renata Treves? Never collects her painting. They commissioned the painting, I painted the painting. For one full month I painted that painting. But she never paid.”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did. I agreed to stay at Il Vittoriale in the first place. You know the way married women think.
How dare that slut make a fuss?
”

I nodded, thinking of my mother’s hard face that morning on West Tenth Street.

“So when Boucard talks to me about a contract, about a portrait of his wife, I think, Tamara, this wife? She can kill your contract. You must never be alone in a room with this man. If we had not been asleep when he came by? Rafaela, I would have begged you to stay. I was ready to shout for you if he tried to do anything.”

“So I could rush in and defend your honor? Dressed in a sheet?” I laughed.

“So there would be two stories against one.”

 

 

 

While I bathed, Tamara left to intercept the postman with Tadeusz’s papers, returning with a batch of fresh mail. Setting the rest aside, she opened a thin letter from Anson’s employer. Boulind’s service had informed her by telephone that Dr. Boucard and Baron Kuffner were capable of paying the prices they had offered for her work, but here was the full report. Kuffner and Boucard, Tamara read aloud, shared a love of performers: Boucard maintained a flat in Passy for a young Jewish member of the Comédie-Française; Kuffner did the same on the Place des Vosges (“The Place des Vosges!”) for a Spanish dancer named Nana de Herrera. Boucard, Tamara reported, had retired at forty after making a fortune on a digestive drug—a patent which still earned lavishly each quarter. He bought new cars and furs yearly for his wife, mistress, and nineteen-year-old daughter, and owned homes in Paris, Lausanne, and Biarritz.

“And guess what, Rafaela? He’s the poor one.”

“What about Baron Kuffner?” I asked, drying myself off.

“The man owns half of Central Europe.”

“No!”

“Before the war, Baron Kuffner held
the largest privately owned parcel of land in the Austro-Hungarian empire
,” she read aloud. She looked up at me in my towel. “Boucard has houses? Kuffner has castles. Boucard retired at forty? Kuffner never worked. The man pays for a room at the Ritz year round, and he’s only here three days a week.” Tamara’s face was flushed and glowing from the idea of so much money.

“Not bad.”

“And listen to this. For the past year he has also been paying for his wife to stay in the best cancer hospital in Switzerland.
Sara, age thirty-five
,” she read. “So young. Their poor children.”

“Who’s taking care of them?”

Tamara consulted the letter. “They are both in boarding school.”

“Why is he
here
?” I asked, my lip curling.

“Oh,” Tamara said, shrugging. “To remember the world is bigger than a hospital, I imagine. To visit his Spanish dancer.” Tamara burned the report with a cigarette lighter. “Money well spent,” she mused. She was weighing something in her mind. I watched her read over Boucard’s contract as I dressed; I watched thought spider across her face. What did she want more money for? She had a flat in the Seventh, a motorcar, a housekeeper, and a daughter in private school. She had all the new clothing she wanted. She could afford to pay
me
two thousand francs a month. What else did she need?

15

I HAD BOUGHT
DIE DAME
FOR TAMARA, but not for myself. The morning after
The Orange Scarf
cover came out, Gin gave me a copy of my own, and I found a vase of roses on the kitchen table. “It’s not my birthday or anything,” I said, nibbling at a slice of
gâteau au miel
.

“They’re mine. My lawyer waited for me backstage.”

“Sweet.”