“For a hundred francs, I would do it,” I said. “I would do it right now.”
“A hundred francs for five hours, yes?”
I could have Gin’s job and owe her nothing. I looked back again toward Maggey’s tree: still no Maggey. “Let’s go,” I said.
It was a warm day, but between the cool Bois and the open car, my summer dress was what seemed impractical, not Tamara’s thin cape and aviator’s hood, not even her long driving gloves. I felt a little breathless in my gray leather seat: I’d never gone so fast before. At one stoplight, Tamara asked my name and wrote herself a note. “Rafaela,” she repeated, drawing out the middle two syllables. She had a stainless-steel mechanical pencil and a creamy little notebook, exquisitely plain. I wanted both. At another stoplight, she reapplied her lipstick. I had never seen a mouth so red. Her bloodied gloves were the pale yellow of her hair, her cape and hood the gray of her heavy-lidded eyes.
The trees flashed by. As my skin puckered into gooseflesh, I was glad for the heat that seeped into my thighs, glad again when we burst into an open field and, briefly, heat poured into me through the windscreen. I leaned back for a moment, basking in the hot light, the speeding car, Tamara’s beauty: this was why I had come to Paris, I thought. Back home, a year ago, one glimpse of a Chanel dress had made me crave glamour, and now I had found it. Tamara’s eyes flicked toward me, the color of chrome. It was too loud to hear what she said, but I smiled in reply. She reached over and touched me under the chin with a gloved finger, tipping my face toward her. Her eyes moved from my face to the road and back. She gave me a last, approving look and took the wheel in both hands again. I had seen that look before, on Hervé’s face. On Guillaume ’s, too. I would ask for the money first thing.
We burst out of the green silent bubble of the Bois into a hot bright day crowded with scrambling taxis and squawking claxons. People flooded the little streets. Pushcarts crammed with vegetables, flowers, and books inched through the crowds. When we stalled behind an orange-and-brown horse-drawn sewage truck, Tamara grimaced at the smell, then pitched her car into a pedestrian square and passed the horses, frightening two nuns up onto the plinth of a statue. Tamara looked back at them and laughed, and I nervously followed her lead. We sped along the river and crossed the Pont de la Concorde. The Seine glowed like a sheet of lead foil.
Tamara parked in front of an apartment house in the aristocratic Seventh. I followed her—led by Seffa, clawed feet clacking—up two flights of stairs to an apartment much grander than any I’d ever lived in. “My daughter’s room,” she said, pointing to a door off to the side. I caught a glimpse of a kitchen, too, before we reached the apartment proper: three wide handsome rooms, each one leading to the next through French doors, all hung in the same gray velvet as the low couch where Tamara seated me. Both sets of French doors stood open: from the middle room I could see both the dining table at one end of the apartment and the starkly elegant bed by the far wall of the other.
On a low marble table before me sat a glass jar containing the remains of what might have once been a hair ribbon, burned to a stiff charcoal curl. Beside the jar sat a bottle of mineral water and a glass, a bunch of grapes, and the skull of a small animal. When the dog sighted the skull, Tamara moved it to a sideboard behind us and poured me a glass of water. “We can eat this still life. It was no good,” she said, glancing down by way of explanation at the one hint of disorder in her cool, bright flat: a torn sketchbook page on the floor.
As I nibbled at a proffered grape, Tamara moved quickly through the three rooms, wiping down her dog and gloves with a wet cloth, hanging her cape and hood, shaking out her bobbed blond hair. Something about Tamara’s apartment made me think of the street where I lived, which was home to a series of art dealers, but it wasn’t the paintings on the walls: the art dealers, as if trying to outdo each other in drabness, hid away their wares like gold bricks. It was the smell, a resinous vapor that spindled the room. “What ’s that?” I asked, sniffing.
“Huile de lin,”
she said, gesturing toward a table full of brushes and glass jars. “Is that
linen-seed oil
in English? And
térébenthine.
I do not know the word.”
I nodded. “The grapes are delicious,” I said. Even mixed with the sharp oil smell, I liked them: tart skin and sweet pulp, but full of seeds.
“Once, when I was very poor, I brought home some pastries to draw. I set them on the table here, and then I am sitting down with my tablet, here, and I look and I look, and all the time my stomach is saying, ‘Eat them, eat them.’”
“You ate them?”
Tamara pulled off her driving gloves while she spoke, revealing long wrists, long fingers, red-painted nails, and a wealth of rings, one with a square topaz as big as a walnut. It flashed as she nodded, repeating my words, Slavic and vehement. “I ate them.”
“Are you very poor now?” I asked, pretending to joke as Tamara vanished behind her bedroom doors. “Should I worry about the hundred francs?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No!” Tamara called from the next room, as she exchanged her mauve crepe afternoon frock for a black cotton house-dress and a white chef ’s apron. Reëmerging, Tamara looked at me. “You understand the job? You do not move. I will paint you for forty-five minutes. Then you will rest for fifteen. Then forty-five again, and so on for five hours. It is noon now. We will stop at five.” Belle Jardinière would close at six. I needed to show up in uniform at nine the next morning, before the store opened. I nodded.
“The WC is down the hall, or you may go behind the screen,” she said, pointing at the dining room. “You change there.”
I knew I had agreed to model, but here it was: I would have to take off my clothes. “How many people come in and out of this apartment?” I asked warily.
“No one all day,” Tamara said, spreading both hands in a gesture of fiat
.
“And then at five, the housekeeper will come by and make dinner for my mother and daughter.”
“Your mother lives here too?”
“Oh, no. We are just myself and Kizette. My mother lives close by, and she looks after Kizette when I go out at night.”
“And your husband?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“Is in Warsaw,” she replied curtly. And then, as if to forestall further questions, she crossed the room again. “This is for you,” she said, unlocking a drawer. She drew a banknote from a gray satin envelope-style purse and set it on the table by the grapes. One hundred francs: a black dress with a white collar.
“Thank you,” I said. I was relieved to see she was serious about paying me, but even so, I took a long drink of water. I wanted to make it last, the moment she owed me, before I picked up the money and owed her. I proudly set down my glass. “I’ll take it when I go,” I said.
Behind the screen in the dining room, I discovered a bathtub, a chamber pot, and a hook on the wall with a single empty hanger.
I guess that’s for you,
I thought, addressing my lucky blue dress.
Here we go.
Just one look at a dress had been enough to lure me to Paris. The summer before I met Tamara, I was living in the Bronx with my stepfather’s mother, my Nonna Gioia. The farthest she let me out of her flat on Grand Concourse Boulevard—a cell of furniture polish, porcelain figurines, and Italian prayer cards—was onto her tiny balcony, to water the plants. I didn’t miss looking after my brothers, four boys between the ages of nine and three, but I was so bored without them, I watered those plants twice a day. Nonna Gioia disapproved of her next-door neighbor, a pretty, young widow named Theresa, but I liked peeking into Theresa’s apartment from the balcony. She went out often. From five on, Theresa sat near the window with her hat on the table beside her, until a black motorcar pulled up outside. Then she pulled her cloche so low it covered her eyes, tripped outside in her long light coat, and got into the back of the car without talking to the driver. Sometimes she didn’t come home until morning.
Every afternoon, Theresa went out to the balcony to drink a cup of coffee and dry her shining bobbed hair. One day, after sweating at the stove for Nonna Gioia all morning, I stepped out onto the balcony, panting, to find myself face-to-face with my neighbor, dressed radiantly in rose, black hair wet from the bath. “Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know Mrs. Russo lived with anyone.”
“She ’s my grandmother. My stepfather’s mama. I’m just here for the summer.” I looked behind me, into the apartment: Nonna Gioia was at church and could come back any moment.
“You in trouble?”
“Sorry?” Did I look as unhappy as I felt?
“You in trouble?” she repeated.
“Well, my parents are sending me back to Italy to get married,” I said.
“Oh, after the baby comes,” she said. “That’s convenient for everybody, huh?”
I stared at her. What baby?
She reached over the railing and touched my shoulder. “You’ll have another one someday,” she consoled.
“I—”
“And meanwhile”—she shrugged, giving me a smile like a secret handshake—“you only lose your reputation once, right?”
“You think I’m pregnant,” I protested awkwardly. “But I’m not.”
Theresa’s smile, startling in its sudden warmth, vanished. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry, sweetheart. A girl goes away to live with her grandmother for a few months, and . . .” She gestured in a way that made me self-conscious about my all-too-female body. “. . . Sorry.”
“I see,” I said. “I understand. Don’t worry.”
“And I never see you outside,” she added in her defense.
“It ’s really all right,” I assured her. “She keeps me pretty busy in here.”
“Well, come outside sometime. The nice weather won’t last.”
“I like your dress.”
“You do?”
I nodded. Theresa was wearing a solid pink drop-waist sheath with an extra pleat in front, knit out of light wool that clung without bulging and made her long legs look all the stemmier. Four ribs knitted into the fabric gave the dress the sleek, metallic look of a motorcar, while a row of soft loops at the neckline doubled as buttonholes where the vee of the dress closed, showcasing a ridge of pink buttons that plunged almost all the way to Theresa’s navel. I stared at the wink in the fabric: I had never seen a girl’s navel through her clothes before. I had never seen a dress so simple, yet so stylish, so seductive, yet so classy.
“It’s from Paris, sweetheart,” she said, both relieved that the awkward moment had passed and genuinely proud of her dress. “Coco Chanel.”
Theresa and I did not speak again after that fumbling exchange. More than once I’ve thought about that smile she gave me
,
a smile quickly offered and as quickly retracted, a smile that intimated we were two of a kind, that we two alone had somehow bested all the others. When I first met my flatmate in the barroom of the Vaudeville restaurant in December of ’26—the men we were seeing then made us climb up on chairs with them and sing “La Marseillaise”—Gin’s slender, nervy poise had made me think of Theresa in her little ribbed dress. Since then, I’d seen Gin go off in a taxi just as effortlessly as Theresa had. I’d seen her reappear a day later, just as coolly buoyant. Until Gin had met her current banker, Daniel, she and I had often exchanged Theresa’s conspiratorial smile.
My lucky dress, inspired by Theresa’s Chanel confection, was cut from a sky-blue blend of raw silk and linen that caught the light like sequins when I went outside. It fit like a coat of paint. If I wanted a change from baguette and cheese at home, I could wear that dress to a café and, every time, someone—though rarely anyone I liked—would take me to a restaurant. As I stepped out of that dress behind the screen in Tamara’s apartment, the painter’s high heels crossed the room toward me. She passed me a handful of fabric. “Wear this,” she said.
The dress Tamara handed me was a far cry from mine: a dull brown cotton sack-like affair with wide straps for sleeves. Though the garment looked finished enough on the outside, I was surprised when I pulled it over my head to discover raw fabric against my skin. I felt a little superior as I smoothed down the selvage that lumped under the bodice: I knew how to finish a
seam.
Had Tamara made the dress herself? Had she been looking for a girl whom she thought this odd costume would fit? Walking back into the salon, I felt like a sausage in my sack.
“Sit,” she said, pointing to a café-style table and chair. “Good. Lay the right hand here, on the left wrist. Good. Stay there. First I will draw you for ten minutes.”
Sitting opposite me on the gray couch, a tablet braced against her knees, Tamara held a slender twig of charcoal and looked at me. Her eyes were like mercury. They moved over me with a flat, empty look that made me uncomfortable. When her gaze flicked down and her hand moved over the page, I looked away, relieved.
More stylish even than Theresa, more coolly poised even than Gin, Tamara reminded me of a third woman, someone I had met just three months after seeing my neighbor’s pink dress, the day I first entered Chanel myself, on the well-upholstered arm of my boyfriend, Guillaume. After whisking me up a mirrored staircase, he had me fitted for a tight satin ruby-colored cocktail gown by the most sophisticated, the most
competent
woman I had ever encountered. The way Tamara spoke to me, without hesitation, without doubting herself, made me think of that tailor at Chanel, as uncowed by Guillaume ’s age, bulk, and money as she was by the shining, buttery fabric in her hands. As the seamstress draped and pinned the satin on me, I could not speak, awed. When we left, Guillaume took me across rue Cambon into the Ritz, where we cut through the city block using a plush corridor that ushered us into the octagonal, moneyed hush of Place Vendôme.
“C’est belle, n’est-ce pas?”
he said. It
was
beautiful: the silent column, the airy beveled square bounded by arches. I nodded, still dumbfounded.