The Last Nude (13 page)

WHY WAS TAMARA PAINTING ME in the same pose again? I would have liked to think she did it in order to keep me around longer, but as hot September cooled toward fall, it became clear that she was doing it to calm her anxiety about the Salon jury’s decision, which we would not learn until mid-October. She could have simply photographed her own painting if all she’d wanted was a copy, and the second
Belle Rafaela,
while similar, was in no way a copy of the first. The perspective was more distant, the canvas smaller. My right arm, as she’d promised, lifted out of the frame entirely. The red robe vanished from the couch, and on the floor beside it, Tamara spread a green one. The triangle of green she painted into the floor of the image lit my skin more coolly than the red robe had. It wasn’t the
painting
she was copying, I realized: it was the feeling of painting it.

I understood how work could calm an anxious wait. Mid-September, Tamara went to London for a week to visit friends with a new baby. I missed her, but would she miss me? Would she bring home another model to replace me? The day she left, I decided to make a slip for her to wear against her skin, the way I wore the very thought of her against mine. Sewing for her would crumble the minutes into stitches. I could portion out the hours with the smooth push of my shears.

First I would need fabric from Le Sentier, a district whose narrow streets I had not discovered until after I broke up with Guillaume. My first winter in Paris, when I went back to Chanel to learn that they’d given up on my collecting the red satin dress, I did not bring Hervé with me, so I was alone to face the indignation of the
couturières
who thought I’d stiffed them. “We sold it as a sample,
bien sûr
,” said the
directrice,
a black-clad picket of indignation. I searched the busy room behind her for a glimpse of the elegant seamstress who had fitted me, which only managed to annoy the
directrice
all the more.
“Pourquoi faire autrement?”
she asked, so icily that although I had Hervé’s money in my purse, more than enough to order a new dress, I didn’t even try. I walked down the mirrored staircase, stung. Outside, when I looked back at the Chanel entrance, I noticed the smiling stone girl carved over the door: she seemed to be laughing at me. I trudged away, remembering my neighbor Theresa in her slim rose frock. Why couldn’t
I
have a dress that lovely? I stopped: Why
shouldn’t
I have a dress that lovely? Could I copy it? Or something like it? I looked back at the stone girl, and inhaled. Why not? I would need fabric.

I asked the first person I saw—a man with a sample case, standing at a side entrance to the rue Cambon townhouse—where to find Le Sentier. The concierge in my building had once mentioned the fabric district to me when I had complimented her on her new apron. She had made it herself, she said; it was nothing.

I followed the tradesman’s instructions west in the fading winter light. I crossed the Avenue de l’Opéra and looked away from the glistening sugary dome of the opera house, remembering my arrival in Paris. I lifted my chin as I walked away:
I won’t have traded anything in vain
, I told myself. I walked down rue des Petits-Champs and passed the familiar arcades leading to the Palais Royal, with its aisles of manicured trees. Looking a few blocks to the left, I could see the columns of the Bourse, while before me loomed a statue of one of the Kings Louis on horseback, half naked in sandals, above a plaque showing him in what must have been his normal ruffly attire.

It wouldn’t be my first time making a dress, I reflected. When I was small, my father and his brother, Elio, ran a small piecework shop out of the front of their long dark slit of a flat on Baxter Street. I can still remember the clack and shudder of sewing machines as my Zia Rina shooed me and my cousins out from underfoot, chasing us out to the kitchen where she pressed the finished garments, tying us to our chairs when despair—in the form of Lazzaro overturning a pot of
fagioli
or Beniamino soiling himself again—struck her. On Fridays at sunset when she lit the candles, adults and children faced each other warily, unknown to each other after a whole week spent at opposite ends of the apartment.

My father died when I was three, in one of the waves of tuberculosis that regularly winnowed the tenements where I grew up. I have one memory of him alive—him carrying me up the stairs, his heart under my ear—and one memory of him dead: in bed, on the far side of the flat. I’m peering around what must be my mother’s leg at his gray deflated face, the dark hollows of his closed eyes. I can remember a funeral, my Zio Elio lifting me up to see a coffin that must have been my father’s. I remember, with odd clarity, a phrase in Hebrew from the rabbi’s eulogy, about the well in the desert that the exile found. Was America a desert for my father? I wish I could remember him with his eyes open.

After the funeral, my Catholic mother, living with her Jewish in-laws, continued going with them to Saturday services in the basement flat of New York City’s only Genoese rabbi. On Sundays, however, she took me to church alone. My first clear memory of my mother is of her dressing me for Mass, my black frock belling out over layers of petticoats while the sewing machines storm in the front room.

“Black dresses are ugly!” I complain.

“Don’t disrespect your father like that,” she says, covering my mouth. She takes a handful of straight pins and cinches her own black dress tight across the chest. She is twenty-two; her wavy hair spreads in a thousand colors from dry wheat to wet sand. “If you’re good, and you don’t spoil your dress or cry in church, maybe one day we’ll meet somebody, and he’ll buy you all the dresses you want,” she promises grimly.

When I was six, my mother married Sal Russo. My stepfather had immigrated to the States in 1890, and had spent twenty-odd years building up an import business with his brother back in Sicily: cheese and almonds, olive oil and wine. He was neither young nor handsome when he met my mother, but he was rich, and his wife was sick. When his quick remarriage after her death outraged the immigrant church ladies, he bought my mother the brownstone on West Tenth Street, where she bore him my four brothers in rapid succession. We traded Most Precious Blood for Saint Joseph’s on Sixth Avenue.

I switched schools after the first grade. I liked English, and I was good at school, but although I was glad to get away from the snide girls of Precious Blood, I missed my aunt Rina. As often as not, I forged a note for my teacher and found my way back to Baxter Street, stopping first at my favorite candy shop off Prince Street for a chocolate star for each of us. I liked watching my aunt work. After each garment passed through the jaws of Zio Elio’s loud machine, Zia Rina would take out the pins and hand them to me. Noting the galaxy I’d lovingly arrayed on the pincushion, she warned, “Don’t stick them in all the way, like you’re stuffing a goose. It takes me extra time, see, and it hurts my fingers more. Just the tips of the pins,
ragazza
.”

If I had been a boy, I might have apprenticed with the Fanos; I might still be on Baxter Street today. The day I fixed a sewing machine, my uncle Elio made everyone stop work and applaud. When my Zia Rina told me I had learned enough to make a dress for myself, I felt like I’d won a prize. Puffed up from my visit to the old neighborhood, I went home and proposed to my mother that she give me a month off from making my brothers’ breakfast if I could copy my school uniform so well that none of my teachers would notice. She agreed to my wager, and turned a blind eye when I cut one of my two uniforms apart stitch by stitch to trace it. A week later when I brandished my new navy pinafore for her—the same navy pinafore I was wearing when I met the ugly man on the ship—she stood by her word.

 

 

 

On the cold day when I first looked for Le Sentier, the winter before I met Tamara, I found that the neighborhood started to go downhill once I spoked away from the statue of King Louis on horseback, especially after I crossed rue du Louvre. I passed walled
hôtels
gone to ruin. The streets grayed, then narrowed. The buildings, which up until Place des Victoires had been fronted in
pierre de taille
, were whitewashed with calcimine in this quarter, and not often. With the butter-pale cut limestone, the fruity carved festoons vanished, too. Scruffy Place Caire was full of staring workmen. I knew I had reached the right neighborhood when I spotted a man wheeling a garment rack across the cobblestone street. That’s when I realized the whirring hum that filled the air in bursts was the sound of dozens of sewing machines treadling in upstairs ateliers. I slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon. I passed the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good Welcome—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor, weirdly fitting for the garment district. Mixed in with the armor, I saw a lionskin: representing the fur trade? The arch, one of the old gates to the city, dominated the Grands Boulevards, which had been built on the site of the old city walls. It seemed I had overshot Le Sentier.

One street over, I cut back into the neighborhood I’d left and walked quickly down a block of hard-faced girls wearing little under the coats they opened, cackling at the men who walked by: rue Saint-Denis. “Don’t you like me?” a girl called after the man walking ahead of me. “Well, why not?” she screeched.
“Pédé!
” I pulled my own coat tighter and cut back toward the hum of the sewing machines. On the second pass, I found rue de Cléry.

My concierge had warned me not to bother with any of the wholesale places
,
and although I lingered over many a lavish window display, I passed several shops before I found one that did not declare itself a merchant
en gros.
When I rang the bell of Tissus Léon, I noted the tilted metal case, no bigger than a matchbox, tacked on the doorframe: it was the first mezuzah I had spotted since my Zia Rina’s. I gave the black box a superstitious tap and kissed my gloved fingertips before the shopkeeper could open the door. Blocking my way into the warm, silk-filled room, the big-bellied Parisian took in my good coat, my painted mouth, my kid gloves. “We only sell wholesale, miss,” he concluded: I did not fit the profile of a buyer
en gros
.

“But you have no—” I broke off. At the sound of my accent, he drew back an inch or two. What was the word for “painted notice”?

“Aren’t you Jewish, Mademoiselle?” he asked. Between the prayer box on the door and the little cloth cap he was wearing, I knew not to take offense. I nodded, trying to get on his good side. “Then surely you know no Frenchman in Le Sentier will sell retail,” he sniffed politely.

I half laughed, flabbergasted. Obviously I wasn’t from the neighborhood, let alone French, but were Jews so bound to the garment trade that I should just
know
what he was telling me?

“Go to the Russians, down the street,” he said. “Go to the Poles.” Back in the cold, I walked in the direction indicated by M. Tissus Léon’s dismissive hand, until the quarter took an even shabbier turn. Garment racks crowded
this
part of the street, and the sewing machines jabbered overhead like cicadas, their sound blending with the smell of boiled cabbage and beets. If the Slavic voices jostling past me had been Italian ones, I could have been on Baxter Street. The door of the first fabric store I saw at this end of rue de Cléry featured, along with a black mezuzah of its own, the sign I’d been looking for:
au détail.

A quick look inside the brightly lit Tissus Léon had told me that if I was looking for twenty shades of the same gauge of silk, I had come to the right place. Two minutes in the dim aisles of Silovic et Fils revealed that if I ever wanted to cover damp walls, patch an awning, or make a mailman’s bag, they had the sackcloth, oilcloth, and canvas I was looking for, together with kitchen toweling, cheesecloth, and table linen. I turned to go, disappointed and footsore, but a vastly pregnant girl my age called after me in heavily accented French. “Have you seen our other room, Madame? Ah, Mademoiselle?”

“Anya!” called a man’s voice from the back.

“My husband,” she said apologetically, turning. “I’ll be right back.”

At Anya’s behest, I found an inner room full of wool, cotton, and silk, the quality of which seemed just as good as Léon’s, if the range of colors more scattershot. I chose a white muslin, cheap but serviceable, with which to make my pattern. I found the creamy
peau de soie
—in the same shade of rose as Theresa’s Chanel dress—that would one day become Gin’s tunic. And I discovered a sumptuous roll of silk, a jewel-blue shantung shot through with just enough tussah to break up the sheen into dozens of glittering surfaces. My lucky dress.

Leaving, I realized I wasn’t far from the Boulevard Haussmann at all. I was only a ten-minute walk from the bank where Hervé worked on rue Bergère, only a fifteen-minute walk from home. I paused to memorize the address for Silovic et Fils. When I looked back, I saw Anya Silovic lumbering out the door, a bundle of cut garments slung across her back. I looked at her and thought, I bet
she
would know where I could find a good pair of shears.