The Last Nude (10 page)

With sudden violence, Tadeusz tossed the envelope onto the desk. “Let’s hope you can keep
this
promise,” he said. As he turned to go, the dog shot down the hall in pursuit, his eager gait mocking the man’s slow one.

Tadeusz caught the dog by the collar as he opened the door, but Tamara stopped him. “You have abandoned your daughter,” she threw at him. “Don’t take her dog away, too.” Tadeusz did not reply, but neither did he take the dog.

 

 

 

When the door slammed, Tamara left the room and collapsed onto her bed. Seffa retreated to his cushion, whining. I went to Tamara, uncertainly, and found her curled up on her side, staring straight ahead. Her pupils were dilated, her face expressionless. “I still love that man,” she said.

I felt uncomfortable, standing beside her bed. It was such a private thing to witness. I raised my hand and realized I had never touched her to give comfort before. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how. “I should go,” I said. She said nothing.

I changed quickly, feeling ashamed of myself for not staying, yet at a loss. When I emerged from behind the screen, however, she was standing in her bedroom doorway, her dress pooled on the floor behind her. “You should stay,” she said.

“It seemed like you just—needed to—
rest
, I guess, after seeing—”

“—My husband?” she asked. “No.”

She walked toward me, fresh and crisp in her slip, as if the exchange with Tadeusz had never happened. “I know you want to try out my bed.”

 

 

 

I was surprised, given how rattled she’d seemed just moments before, by the ferocity with which Tamara demanded I touch her, by the blinding vigor with which she came. I had never met anyone like her before: heartbreak made her want sex as much as pleasure did. We fell asleep, and when I woke up she offered me her compact mirror.
“De la poudre?”

“No, thanks.” After my night with Gin and Yann, I had promised myself I’d never take cocaine again, but I didn’t want Tamara to think I was no fun, so I gave her my second-best reason. “I’m a cheapskate. I can’t afford to want it,” I said.

“I know what you mean, that’s why I only use it on my gums,” she said, thumbing her teeth.

“You scared me a little there,” I said.

“What?”

“Oh, come on.”

I don’t know what possessed me to imitate Tamara at that moment, instead of just tell her. But I did: I tensed my prone body like a cat, like a flamenco dancer, head thrown back, one hand behind my neck, the other reaching to caress my own breast. The moment I did it, Tamara’s behavior made sense to me: demanding sex felt so much better than feeling sorry for myself. “You should
stay
, Rafaela,” I vamped. Tamara was silent.

I opened my eyes. Had I gone too far, making fun of her accent? “Sorry, it wasn’t funny. Sorry.”

“No, very funny,” Tamara said. Seeing her smile, I realized I had never made fun of a boyfriend like this before, nor had any man ever pretended to be me. I liked it. “Do it again,” she said.

It felt good, to fling myself back into bed, to be the Tamara who had stood before me: an extravagant monster, a gilded grotesque, a creature who lived for lust alone. “Come to bed viss me.”

“Rafaela,” Tamara said. I sat up, surprised by the reverence in her face. I saw there, too, the mixture of triumph and delight that comes with solving a problem. She kissed me. “How long do you think you can hold that pose?”

4

ONE WEEK TO THE DAY after I first encountered Tamara in the Bois, Anson met me in front of his friend Sylvia’s bookshop, ushering me back to a nook in its depths to tell me what he’d learned about Gin’s boyfriend. As I listened, dismayed for my flatmate’s sake but grimly pleased I’d been right, I began to take in my surroundings a little. The shelves crammed with gilt and leather—and the walls crowded with portrait photographs—lent Anson’s potato face a distinguished look. The air smelt pleasantly of pulp and acid, apples and mold. An earnest little wirehaired terrier announced each new customer. A black cat slept on a stack of books, beneath a framed drawing of the same black cat: a caption warned female customers that Lucky was an eater of gloves. On the mantel sat a bust of Shakespeare, and on the front counter stood fat copies of
Ulysses
, bound in blue: you could read the title from across the room. The room hummed with the leafy stir of patrons reading or scratching in notebooks, talking quietly, the occasional rattle of an open newspaper, the burr—only once since our arrival—of the cash till.

Presiding over this many-celled hive was the curlytopped American girl who had greeted Anson with
bisous
when we walked in. Anson had told her my name, but another favorite customer had popped in before I could catch hers. I could see her bustling on the other side of the room, constantly in motion but not nervous, now standing with one customer, recommending Joyce’s
Pomes Penyeach
, “just published by yours truly,” now telling another, “I’ll set you up with a bunny,” punning on
abonné
, a library subscription.

I turned to Anson. “That’s Sylvia?”

Who else would it be?
his expression said. “This is her store,” he explained.

“But she’s so young.”

“She’s forty,” he whispered.

“No!”

“And you’re actually seeing her at half-mast. Her mother just died in June.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to concentrate on what Anson was saying: her mother had died. She was sad. But I found myself distracted by the physical fact of her crossing the room. Sylvia Beach had a woman lover. Anson had said so. And not just Anson: when I had mentioned my afternoon plans to Tamara, she’d told me that she often shopped at the French bookshop across the street owned by Sylvia’s friend. Not
a friend of Sylvia’s.
Sylvia’s
friend.
The whole world knew. Sylvia Beach was evidence to me that Tamara and I weren’t the only two women in history to go to bed together just because they wanted to. Dazzled, I watched her chatting with a customer, pert features scrunching with merriment. She wore a boyish jacket over a slim dress. I had to stop staring; it was rude. “Who are all these photographs?” I asked, to calm myself down.

“Authors,” Anson said, as if showing off his own living room. He reeled off a few names, some of which I’d heard in school. “And what’s that?” I pointed at the list of names and signatures that hung beside us. Spread over several framed sheets of typescript, the whole display extended almost from floor to ceiling.

“An American publisher pirated
Ulysses
and Sylvia organized a protest. Look, that’s Albert Einstein’s signature.”

“Nifty,” I said. “Look, W. B. Yeats. Somerset Maugham.”

“That’s Yates and Mom, darling, not Yeets and Moggum.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. I glanced around, hoping Sylvia hadn’t heard me, but then something caught my eye. “Wait, look, that’s
your
name. Are you an author?”

“Lord, I should’ve blocked it with my hat. Sylvia just had me sign this because I was in the store.”

“But why don’t sportswriters count? Einstein should be proud to be on a list with you.”

Anson rolled his eyes at my flattery. “I did write a book, once,” he said. “But it wasn’t very good.”

“Really? I never met anyone who wrote a book before.”

“Just some poems and stories. You don’t have to look at me like that. My friend Bobby paid a printer to run off a few copies, that’s all.”

“Is it here? Can I see it?”

“Not anymore; this was years ago. And the poems were so bad.” He lowered his voice and glanced significantly from the photograph of Joyce on the wall to the slim green volumes of
Pomes Penyeach
displayed beside
Ulysses. “
Almost as bad as that fella’s.”

I had never read anything by James Joyce, but making fun of him made Sylvia seem a little more human to me. “That’s blasphemy in here, isn’t it?” I whispered back.

“Heresy,” he said.

We shared a muffled laugh as a narrow-faced, fair-haired man let himself into the bookstore with a kiss on the cheek for Sylvia and a sausage-end for the terrier. “Any mail?”

“Speak of the devil,” said Anson, as the taller man reached into the wall of pigeonholes behind the cash till. “Well, if it isn’t Bobby Nightinghoul.”

“Anson, you bum. Whatcha up to?” Bobby asked, knifing across the room to our back corner. He had thinly blue eyes and a turquoise earring in one ear. Looking me up and down, he gave Anson a punch in the ribs. “You lucky son of a gun.”

“Show some respect, Bobby,” Anson said, punching back.

“This place is a post office, too?” I asked, to get Bobby’s eyes off my chest.

“Annie bought the pigeonholes for Sylvia. Aren’t they handsome?” asked Bobby.

“Annie?” I asked.

“My loving wife.”

“Marriage of convenience,” Anson explained. “Annie lives in Switzerland with her girlfriend.”

“Rich English parents. Nobility.
Very
conservative,” said Bobby. “You would set off a fire alarm in their house, honey.” The combination of his sissified gestures and his needling sexual attention confused me.

“Annie writes letters to her parents and sends them here,” Anson explained. “And then Sylvia puts French postage on them so the parents don’t know she’s in Switzerland.”

“They think we’re two lovebirds,” said Bobby, laughing. “Whatever keeps the money coming in.” Hearing about yet another female couple, my breathing felt a little shallow. Anson was right; Paris was full of them. “Come on down to the Sélect, Handsome Hall, and bring your little
panna cotta
with you. Janet and Solita will be there. Let’s all have some drinks on my in-laws.”

“In an hour, Bobby.”

“Don’t you fail me, boy.”

“Will you really go join him?” I asked, after Bobby chatted his way out of the bookshop.

“Not right away,” said Anson, amused. “He’s a drunk and a letch, but he’s not a bad guy. He buys drinks for everybody. He publishes his friends
.
” Anson gestured back at the framed list of names, which made me think of a question: I held on to it as he continued. “He even typed part of
Ulysses
for Joyce
and
lent him money. Adieu to
that
,” he said, waving good-bye to Bobby’s said money. “But the thing about Bobby is, he’s a stranger to the concept of paid work. So you can’t just drop by for a drink unless you’re ready to knock off for the night.”

I laughed, and asked my question. “Are you writing another book now?”

“You don’t give up, do you? But no. Really, it’s for the best. I used to think I was going to be the next Gabriele D’Annunzio. You didn’t know how to pronounce that name either, did you?”

“What do you take me for?”

“Sorry. Well, to make a long story short, I lost all my work, and that’s what brought me back to my senses.”

“Oh, Lord. Was there a fire?”

“It was stolen. No, it’s not like that,” he said.

“What happened?”

“You really want to know?” Anson’s expression was equal parts embarrassment and gratitude. He idly picked up a copy of
This Side of Paradise
and reshelved it backward, spine facing in. “Well, my first winter here, I went to cover a story in Switzerland.” Switzerland, I thought, getting distracted, where Bobby’s wife lives with her girlfriend, writing deceptive letters to her rich parents. Imagine! “While I was in Lausanne, I met a man from a publishing company who said he wanted to read some of my work. Of course I was over the moon. So I told my wife in a letter, and she packed up all my stories into a suitcase and brought them to me on the train. Except the stories never made it to Switzerland. They never even left Paris. She loaded the suitcase on the train; she stepped out to buy a Perrier for the trip, and when she got back on the train, the suitcase was gone.” I gasped. He laughed. “It was a cheap suitcase, too. The poor thief couldn’t have gotten more than a few centimes for it.”

“I think I’d be heartbroken,” I said.

He forestalled my pity with more laughter. “It did put me off writing stories,” he said.

“It put you off your wife a bit, too, I imagine?” I asked lightly, trying to match his tone.

Anson recoiled. “It’s not like that,” he said. Suddenly he wasn’t laughing. I didn’t understand. What I’d said
was
callous, but hadn’t he started it? He was looking down, as if suddenly fascinated by the copies of
The Little Review
shelved at my feet. “I met somebody else,” he said stiffly.

I chose my words with care, trying not to offend him again. “Is this the person your friend’s wife mentioned? The night we met?”

“I should’ve known you’d weasel it out of me,” he said, his momentary touchiness gone. “It’s not a very original story. My wife and I were young; we were in love; we had a son. And then I met another girl. Polly and I fell in love, but I still loved my wife.”