The Last Nude (3 page)

I never did wear the red satin dress. While we were together, Guillaume kept me in a flat with a doorman, a lift, steam heat. He had a beautician pluck my single brow into two arches and a coiffeur bob my hair. He dressed me in new clothes, from Perugia pumps to a Lanvin cloche
,
from silk stockings to a fox-collared coat. He sent me to the Alliance Française and paid for classes. However, the day I graduated from
Is this a salad?
to
Why do you like me?
he stopped.
“Ça commence à bien faire!”
he said, meaning he was fed up. I stared at him, baffled.
It begins to do well?

Within a week, Guillaume had moved a mutely bewildered Swedish girl into the apartment next door to mine. When I met her, I thought,
You found another duckling to swan, is that it?
I didn’t wait around to see if we’d go back and collect my dress. Instead, I slept with one of his employees, a man too young to have even fought in the war, named Hervé. By the time I made it back to rue Cambon with Hervé’s money, the red dress was gone.

 

 

 

I smiled wryly to myself in Tamara’s apartment: I couldn’t just nod and simper at my rich boyfriend, not even for a gown from Chanel, so now here I was, posing by the hour to pay for a dress off the rack.
A uniform.
“You must not move,” Tamara said.

“Sorry.”

Tamara switched from black charcoal twigs to yellow-brown bars of pigment, using a heel of bread to erase her stray lines. I glanced outside. Tamara’s parlor window cleared a low carriage house across the street, so the wide room shone in the hard north light. The most magnetic thing in the apartment, short of Tamara herself, was her couch. Low and wide and covered, like the walls, in gray velvet, it glowed with a pearly sheen, as sleekly featureless as a doctor’s examination table. I wanted to lie down on that couch like a child and push my cheek against the nap of the velvet. I wanted to fall asleep on that couch for hours. Tamara’s eyes met mine and she smiled. “It ’s pretty,” I said, stupefied, pointing.

“We will talk later,” she said. Embarrassed, I looked away again, this time at the canvases that surrounded me. Tamara’s dining room, lit green by the ivy framing her window, contained no artwork, but her bedroom and parlor shimmered with paintings: they hung on the walls; they perched on easels; they leaned edgewise in stacks in the corners of the rooms. The largest of them hung over Tamara’s bed in the next room: a portrait of a woman dressed as a man.

“You may rest a moment,” Tamara said, massaging her shoulders.

“You painted that?” I asked. Tamara gave me a patient, sarcastic smile. I crossed the room for a closer look. The painting was taller than I was. Its width enclosed my width. The woman in the painting wore a long black coat, a white collared shirt, riding trousers, and tall shiny black boots. She looked like a dandy or a dictator, posed in front of a city as if she owned it, half her body standing and victorious, half slouched against a table hidden in drapery.

“The Duchesse de la Salle,” Tamara said. “The mother of a friend of mine. But I painted her as Violette Morris, the athlete.”

Violette Morris was often in the papers. A professional soccer player, she had also become the French national champion boxer in 1923, after defeating a series of male opponents. Her hobbies, I had read, included motorcycle racing, auto racing, and airplane racing. Her lovers, it was rumored, included women as well as men. I had seen her picture quite a few times. More than any physical or sartorial similarity, Morris and the duchess shared the same smug look, the same arrogant
froideur
.

I stepped back from the painting.
What does Tamara’s husband think of waking up to that every morning?
I thought, looking down at her big gray velvet bed, decked out in pillows of darker gray satin. That’s when I noticed the headboard: carved into the gray lacquered wood was a line drawing of two ladies in a dreamy, stylized landscape, their naked bodies interlaced. And what did he think of
this
? “How long has your husband been in Warsaw?” I asked.

“He is not coming back,” Tamara said coolly.

I should have guessed, but I had never met a woman of her type.
Donna uomo
was how your mother warned you’d turn out if you were too lazy to bleach your moustache. Two women in bed was something your boyfriend wanted to watch. I looked over at Tamara, nervous. Well, I thought, it seemed like she did only mean to paint me. And I could leave anytime, I reminded myself. I felt less afraid than uneasy as I stepped back into the middle room, where Tamara’s most prominently displayed works rested on four wheeled stands. “There he is,” she said, pointing to a line drawing of a man char-coaled onto a panel of canvas. Her husband’s coat was not so different from the Duchesse de la Salle’s. His hard, hollow expression made me turn away.

“Who’s that?” I asked instead, pointing to a second canvas, on which a half-painted young woman sat by a window, wearing a schoolgirl’s shoes and socks and a rather adult expression. Pinned to the stand I saw a photograph of the same girl, age eleven or so, also sitting by a window, looking guardedly up at me.

“My daughter. I use the photograph during the day, and then Kizette sits for me after school.”

“But it’s summer. She’s in school?”

“She has had a difficult year,” Tamara said sharply, her face closing.

Backing off, I turned to the third painting on a stand: two ladies with bobbed hair stood close together, one dreamy, looking upward, one alert, watching for something just past me. “
Die Dame
asked me to do some cover paintings for them,” she said, naming a glossy German fashion magazine. “This is the first. I just varnished it.”

“Beg pardon?” I couldn’t understand her accent for a moment.

“The clear coat on the painting.
Gomme dammar
dissolved in
térébenthine.
” I could see the shiny finish on the painting then. I could even see ripples in the sheen toward the top edge, as if the image lay just below a thin skin of water. I had not seen many paintings, and had never looked at any so carefully. For a moment, I could suddenly see three layers at once: the varnish, the paint, and the weave of the canvas beneath it. And then, just as suddenly, the painting ceased to be a thing and became a picture again. “Who are those people?” I asked.

“My friends Ira and Romana. Romana is the Duchesse de la Salle’s daughter,” she said, gesturing absentmindedly toward the Amazon in the bedroom. “But ptff!
That
one was the real model.” She pointed to a frothy orange scarf around the watchful girl’s neck that took up almost a third of the canvas. “Temperamental,” she said, as if pleased with herself for knowing the English word. “Demanding. Never stayed in one place. Drapery has no memory, so you have to get it all down at once. The
painting
has to remember. Charcoal cloth is fun for practice,” she said, pointing toward the burnt curl of ribbon in the jar. “But you can get spoiled.” Now that I looked at the painted and charcoalized fabric side by side, I could see how she had learned from copying the hard edges of the latter.

“What ’s the scarf made of?” I asked, pointing. “Chiffon?”

“Why chiffon?” Tamara asked eagerly.

I pointed again. “It’s light. It’s soft, but just a little stiff. You can see through it a little, but not loads. And look, rolled hems,” I added.

Tamara’s face lit with pleasure. “Well done,” she declared, and went into her bedroom to dig something out of a drawer: the very same scarf, a thin peach-colored silk that lit the gray room gold. “What a good eye you have,” she said. “Here, take.”

“I couldn’t,” I protested, though I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

“Just wear it someday. For me,” she insisted, pressing the soft film into my hands. Embarrassed, I thanked her, and turned to the painting on the last stand. Only the head was finished: I saw a sad woman with a small, nervous face. Below it, the large seated body was just a few charcoal lines on the canvas : arms, a pair of crossed hands, a crude sleeveless dress—oh!—like mine.

“This is the wife of a Polish friend, an art critic. He has been so good to me in the newspapers,” she explained. “This is a gift for them.” She saw me glance from painting to dress and back again. “The woman goes back to Poland before I finish, and I think, what can I do? But then I meet you and your body is just like hers: beautiful!” The gesture she made in the air was almost obscene. “So now I can finish. Last time you sat five, ten minutes. This time you will sit thirty.”

I took the chair again and crossed my hands like the Polish wife. My eyes climbed the walls. Nude or clothed, everyone Tamara painted looked majestic. Even the mannish duchess seemed princely. The Polish wife, however, looked pinched and squalid. In the mirror behind the screen when I changed, I had seen that the straps didn’t trace my back: they sagged away from it. Whoever made this dress was impatient, I thought. She cut the straps straight across instead of angling them and testing them on the model. Perhaps Tamara would correct the straps in the painting.

As the minutes passed, I realized I no longer felt uneasy. I felt jealous. Why did I get the ugly dress, the ugly painting? And why didn’t Tamara paint my face? The painting next to the mannish woman showed a nude—sleek, modern, Olympian—with her arm across her face. Was this Tamara’s kink? She didn’t paint faces? No, I saw plenty of faces in the room, some, to be honest, not as nice as mine. It was as if, by putting me in the ugly dress, she had made herself blind to me.
Beautiful,
she’d said. Did she really think so? I wanted to take off my dress and lie down on that velvet couch for her: I wanted her to
see
me in the grand way she saw the others.

So this was what artists did: Tamara looked up, looked down, moved her hand, looked up again. Choosing among the many slender, long-handled brushes she kept in a green glass bowl, Tamara dabbed a sheet of white wood with a dozen different shades of an earthy yellow she called ochre. When she hit on a set of shades she liked, she used a different brush for each color, holding as many as four brushes at a time in her free hand, cleaning each frequently with a wet rag. When she swirled a brush in a jar of clear liquid, I realized
térébenthine
was French for “turpentine.” As I watched her move small amounts of paint from palette to canvas, I noticed she didn’t have a single stain on her clothes: not only were her paintings precise, she worked precisely, too.

My attention began to drift. Thinking about the
donna uomo
on the wall and the naked women tangled on Tamara’s headboard, I remembered the one time my flatmate and I ever monkeyed around. It was Yann’s idea: he was Gin’s boyfriend before Daniel. One night he brought over a leather cock, and after we all got high the two of them begged me to give it a whirl. I did my best to look sultry while Gin got it up in me, but really, we both kept laughing. I mean, it was
Gin.
“You know, if you give me a bladder infection, I’ll kill you,” I told her.

“At least you don’t have to wear this thing!”

“Parlez français!”
Yann protested.

“Inky dinky
parlez vous!
”

After Yann left the next morning, I told Gin over breakfast that the only good part had been how much more fun it was to put on a show for her boyfriend than for mine, because the thing wasn’t
his
, you know? “Of course!” She laughed. “He wasn’t attached to it!”

I snorted, spraying a mouthful of coffee on the table. “That was pretty bad,” I said.

“Wasn’t it?”

I was glad we could laugh together about it, but all the same, that night spooked me out of taking any more cocaine. I didn’t mind that we’d fooled around, but I minded how easy the high had made it. If Gin hadn’t had a sense of humor, I could have lost a friend. She broke up with Yann a couple of weeks later, after he took her to an exclusive club that turned out to be a dirt-floored shack by the Seine where half-dressed lowlifes, college students, and society slummers groped each other in the dark. “He wanted us to take turns with some dirty sailor,” she said. “Ew.”

 

 

 

During my fifteen-minute breaks, Tamara and I ate a little: over the course of the day we polished off a baguette and half a cobble of creamy, acrid Maroilles. Twice she took her dog for a walk, and once she brushed a stretched canvas with a mixture of plaster and glue. “This is to give the painting a hard, clear finish,” she explained when I asked why. Time skipped and pooled while I posed. Eventually, I felt neither nervous that she might touch me nor jealous that she hadn’t. Long slow hours passed, and all she did was look, move her hand, look again. I felt like glass: looked at and looked through. My arm ached, then froze. I got so bored I itched all over. At one point I made Tamara stop a dozen times in as many minutes so I could scratch. During one break, I ate all the grapes on the table, and during another, I fell dead asleep. During the last hour, my mind slowed, emptied out. I no longer felt compromised by the money: I felt paid. By quarter of five, when she offered me a glass of wine, I just wanted to go buy my dress.

“You will come tomorrow morning?” Tamara asked, taking my two hands in hers after I had changed back into my own clothes. “Come at ten?”

“I have plans.”

“No. Do not say that.”

“I have a job.”

“Work for me.”

“This isn’t really for me,” I said. “You saw, I got itchy.”

“I do not care.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I said.

Her reply came, formal and dolorous: “I will wait for you at ten, whether you come or not.”

 

 

 

I reached Belle Jardinière just before six and bought my dress. I took it home to find a note tacked to the door. Gin had penciled it on a flattened pâtisserie box: