The Last Nude (31 page)

I SAT UP, HUNGRY, MY HEAD POUNDING, and after a moment remembered where I was. The moon through the windows made the whole flat glow silver. I didn’t want to wake up Anson by snooping around for food, so I reached for my little mesh bag. The long chain that had hung across my chest was still wet from the Seine. Maybe, just maybe, my silver cigarette case had proved airtight as well as decorative, and a smoke could stave off hunger. Yes! Sitting up made my head spin, so by touch I found Anson’s lighter on the coffee table, right there by the ashtray. The brief flash lit up the contents of my silver case. Four more cigarettes, a five-franc note. Last night’s train ticket,
ouch
, and the slim stamped book of my passport. Idly, I flicked Anson’s heavy lighter again, opened the passport, and caught a glimpse of my sixteen-year-old face. I was a year and a half older now, I thought. Only that much? My mother’s name, briefly spotted, burned inside my eyelids.
Little whore
was what she’d called me, too.

Could things have happened differently for me in the first place? Could my mother have ignored her husband’s widened eyes when I ran into the kitchen on my sixteenth birthday, my dress soaked through? Could she have trusted me?

For once I could see her as an immigrant girl like me, a girl who had sacrificed everything she’d known—parents, friends, a life in her native language—for a man now dead. A girl who might have liked to go home. If she had returned to her parents, flat-bellied and virginal, without a half-Jewish daughter in her arms, would they have taken her in? Perhaps. Perhaps. But she had stayed, and cared for me. For my sake, she had traded her beauty and youth for the things Sal Russo could buy her, and she’d be damned if I was going to take him away from her. I could picture it. I could understand. I had trusted my future to Tamara the way my mother had trusted hers to my father, and we had both been disappointed. We were both so far from home.

I fumbled with Anson’s lighter again: something had caught my attention, there, below the photograph, my
luogo di nascita
. I had known the name of the ship on which my parents had come to America—the
Maroni
—but my passport also included the name of the shipping company: the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Anson’s Autolex had heated up with repeated use, but I wrapped a bit of quilt around my scorching fingers, thumbed the lighter one last time, and stared at those three French words. I thought about that immigrant ship, looked at my unused train ticket, and grimaced.

 

 

 

I had wanted to have with Tamara what my own parents had with each other. In 1910 they defied both families and eloped together to New York, where my uncle Elio and aunt Rina had immigrated years before. I was born en route. My very first memory is of my father carrying me up a flight of stairs. When he reaches the top, he kisses my mother without setting me down. My first memory is of being held between their two embracing bodies.

My own journey to a new life—with the ugly man from the ship—was nothing like my parents’. We had made a trade, and I paid my end on the night train from Marseille. I paid in his room at the Grand Hotel when we arrived that morning. And I paid at the matinee that afternoon, in the red plush depths of his employer’s opera box, its stage-side partition up, its porthole curtain closed. I had expected it might be painful or frightening, but perhaps because of the crude experiments I’d been conducting on myself alone at night that year, I was more disgusted by his heavy, deliquescing body itself than by what he did with it. I climbed a ladder inside myself and watched, feeling repulsion, curiosity, and a kind of brittle daring. In the black mirror of the night window, I saw the pair struggling on the narrow train bunk and thought,
Don’t you both look shabby.

The morning after the opera, I woke up to the sound of the ugly man on the phone. He was speaking in English. “It’s a shame. I wish I could afford to . . . Really? I
did
hear he’d been an absolute beast since the dancer left. How long has it been? Well, of course I can bring her, but she doesn’t speak a word of French.” At his interlocutor’s reply, he gave a long belt of laughter. “Too true!”

“There’s someone I want you to meet tonight,” he told me later. “You’ll have to thank him for the opera.” That night I joined him and a group of his friends in a private salon in the hotel. Many bottles and cigars later, they left me alone with the fattest one, named Guillaume, who took me up to the ugly man’s room. All my things were there, neatly arranged, but every trace of the ugly man’s presence had vanished. The fat man sat on the bed in his butter-colored suit and watched me scan the room, confused and alarmed, until I figured out for myself what had happened. I was one man’s gift to another, and a thriftily rewrapped gift at that.

I had wanted to go to Paris, but I hadn’t given a thought to what I’d do once I got there. I had no money. I had a small valise full of unstylish dresses, an Italian passport, five words of French, and a sixteen-year-old girl’s body. If I left the room, chances were I would have to do exactly what I’d have to do if I stayed. The fat man sat on the neatly made bed with his hands at his sides, patient and engaged, as if watching a concert staged for his benefit. When he saw me reach the end of my short list of options and turn to him, what he did made me feel all the more trapped. He smiled.

 

 

 

And now the coat he’d given me was in the Seine. I remembered the old man in the opera box, remembered the Spanish grandfather ruining my new uniform. I remembered the day Seffa tore up my sanitary napkin: Tamara’s salon sequined with blood, my own blood staring back at me like the live eyes of birds. And suddenly I remembered that day in the Bois, the dog grinding into the torn-open rabbit, four legs in the air, flanks slick and red, lost in a wriggling orgy of blood and scent, lost as carnally, as impersonally, I realized in that moment, as Tamara liked to lose herself in my body. I understood. Any sailor could have done as much for her.
So this is how you loved me,
I thought. “I loved you—” I said aloud, choking, “differently.”

 

 

 

Without sitting up, I set my little train ticket on fire and held it over Anson’s ashtray, watching its small flare light the room and die. My throat felt sore, and when I coughed, I sounded as bad as Maggey had earlier that month, getting into her taxi after Tamara’s soirée. Of course, I realized. Tamara had picked up Maggey exactly where she’d found me. I pictured Tamara driving through the Bois to find another girl for her party, and I felt sick. And then I imagined Maggey working all winter in the cold, and I felt afraid. There but for the grace of God, and so forth. I began to wonder if I had survived my first year and a half in Paris not due to any cleverness on my part, but just to dumb, dumb luck. I lay for long minutes before I slept again, my closed eyes filling with tears. I had imagined Tamara and I would be together right now, rewriting the story of how I came to Paris, hurtling through the night on a train, this time for love. But Tamara and I hadn’t had what my mother had had with my father. I saw it now. We’d had what I’d had with all the others.

22

“YOUR FLAT IS VERY STRANGE,” I said, late the next morning. My voice was unusually loud and my mouth tasted sour. “Why is it so bright over there?”

Through a glass door, I could see a second room, brilliantly lit by a skylight, under which stood a bare desk and a small bed. “It
is
strange,” Anson agreed. He was already dressed and shaved, and a fresh slab of baguette lay on the table by a pot of jam. “It used to be a plant shop. We’re in the storefront. That’s part of the courtyard they glassed over for a greenhouse. Look, cobblestones.”

I tried to look, but that would have involved raising my head. I was sore all over, and blinking felt difficult. “It must be freezing in there.”

“I’m from the Midwest. I like it.”

“Why are you shouting?” I asked.

“Was that more cognac than you’re used to?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m sorry. There’s coffee when you’re upright.”

“Thanks.”

“After you fell asleep, I went to the de la Salles’ party.”

“Why?” I asked, my brain moving slowly.

“I wanted to talk to Boucard.”

“He was still there?”

“Tight as tight could be. Strutting around like the cock of the walk because Kuffner sent him some sort of apology.”

I sat up slowly and took the cup Anson handed me. “You told Boucard you followed me?”

“He asked if he could talk to you, but I told him I had followed the painting, not you. I said I ran along the quai and followed the painting until I saw it go under, and I told him I didn’t know where you were.”

I blinked at him, surprised: he’d lied for me.

“I mean, I don’t know why you did what you did, but I think it was private,” he said, as if inviting me to say more about Tamara.

I couldn’t. “Thank you,” I choked out.

“After all, it’s
her
painting, not his. No doubt you already have hell to pay.”

I swallowed. I wasn’t ready to tell him where the painting was. Not yet.

“Of course he’s heartbroken that it’s gone, but he’s glad, too, now that Kuffner can’t get at it either.”

“I should go,” I said.

“Are you sure? You don’t want to try standing first, and then decide?”

I stood with extreme care, and then sat down again. “Oh. Do you mind if I stay here a little longer?”

Anson laughed out loud.

“You told me you were a researcher,” I said. “I didn’t know you spied on people, too.”

“I was there to watch the painting,” he insisted. “I wasn’t spying on you. Per se. But still, I’m sorry. I really tried to get out of the job, because you’re a friend.”

“Thanks,” I said, not hiding my distrust.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Bland was doing that thing I hate: once your painter had him research Boucard and Kuffner, Bland went to each of them to drum up business. Boucard had us look up you and Tamara, both, but he really just wanted the painting followed. Kuffner declined his services entirely, but for all I know, that’s where he got the idea to wait around for you all day the way he did. In any case, again, I’m sorry. I felt like a creep watching you come and go like that. But it was my job.”

“You were watching me pose?”

“Your window was higher up than mine, Rafaela. I was watching the front door of the building and dying of boredom. Again, I’m sorry. Believe me, I’d rather read bank statements than sit around smoking for twelve hours a day.”

“What happened the other twelve?”

“One of his other guys.”

“What did you find out about me?”

“That you, my dear, not surprisingly, have no records at all, because you’re a foreigner operating in an all-cash economy. According to our friends in Immigration, you disembarked at Marseille on an Italian passport in 1926, and then you disappeared.”

“Well, I could have told you that. But can I ask you something? I know if you have an Italian father, you’re Italian. That’s how I got my passport. But if you’re born on a French shipping line, are you French?”

Anson looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if consulting something he’d read once long ago, and concluded, “Yes. Technically. You are. Or—that’s it—you qualify for French citizenship, if you haven’t already forsworn it in order to be a citizen of any other country.”

I nodded my thanks, albeit gingerly. “Bravo.”

Anson grinned at his own powers of recall. “Why?”

“I think I could be French,” I said, and explained.

“
You should look into this. We can throw you a party if it all pans out,” he said. “France’s prettiest new
citoyenne.
”

“France’s most hungover new
citoyenne
is more like it,” I said. “What did you find out about Tamara?”

“Well,” he reflected. “Not surprisingly, I found out that she has income from her paintings that she gets in dribs and drabs and quickly spends. One thing
did
surprise me, however. How long has it been since she and her husband divorced?”

“She only signed the papers recently,” I said. “But he left her this past spring.”

“That’s what I thought. From what you said, it was so bitter, I was surprised he still gives her money every month.”

“He does?”

“For the past year at least, every month, there’s a transfer of funds from an account at the Banque de Commerce”—where Tadeusz had worked, I recalled—“to Tamara’s. Ten thousand francs.”

“Oh,” I said. I was sitting upright on Anson’s couch, but at this, I sank down flat on my back again.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

Anson patted his pockets for a handkerchief, and gave me a napkin from the table instead. “Here. Sorry.”

“Thanks. I’m so embarrassed,” I said. I rubbed my salty face with my wrist. “I mean, do
you
have anyone who gives
you
money every month?”