The Last Nude (36 page)

THE NIGHT IS A BOSOM OF STARS over the bougainvillea. We’ve left our lobster shells and gazpacho cups inside on the Saarinen table, and now our cigarette smoke climbs up toward the new garden lamp, an intricate Moroccan confection of iron and blue glass. It’s the hour of liqueurs in chocolate thimbles, drunk in quick gusts before the cups melt away.

All evening Paul, as he often does, has been trying to interest the others in a doubles match tomorrow, but for the wrong reasons. Since Kizette came to live with me after her husband’s death in November, she has been most herself at tennis, and she and Paul, despite the difference in age, are perfectly matched: strong players with an easy rapport. This, however, makes Paul feel disloyal to his wife. “You can team up with Martin, Romana. Everyone else will be jealous.”

“Oh, Martin doesn’t want to play with me. I’ll just drag him down,” Romana says, chuckling gently.

“How about Hector, then? He plays just for fun.”

“And that way Martin can play with Ana,” I add. “Don’t you just want to eat her up?”

“But
I
just want to eat up Martin,” Hector protests, camping up the raw truth.

“Oh, Paul,” Romana sighs, a little fiercely. “Just play with Kizette. That’s all you really want to do anyway.”

 

 

 

The spring my husband left me, I tried to win him back with a trip to Lake Como, just the two of us and the child we’d made. Though we were passing her off as eight, she was ten then, and no longer sweet, but she was all we had. On the morning of the night that marked the end for us, we sat together, all three on the terrace, looking at the lake because we could not look at one another. “Aren’t you having a good time, Thade?”

“You’re not making it easy,” he said.

“But isn’t this nice?” I asked brightly. “Isn’t this more fun than running out on your family?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be sharing a hotel room with Ira Perrot?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Or Gabriele D’Annunzio?”

“Darling.”

“Or crashing from cocaine on the bathroom floor? Or sucking off one of the waiters?”

“Oh, look at yourself, Taddi. Passed out drunk every night.” I spoke in a low growl, but then Kizette began to cry.

This was hours before our worst fight, our loudest fight, when we circled each other with stumps of broken wineglass and the hotel men came to the door, hours before Tadeusz left for good to marry his little mouse. This was hours before the sight of his eyes in Kizette’s face—as she crawled out from under the desk where she’d been hiding—made me see black and fall down. This was when hope was still possible, when Kizette’s tears could still move us.

And when we turned, simultaneously, to tell her to behave herself in a restaurant, we froze, because we could both see the swans. They wafted in like gods seated on clouds. They stopped us both mid-breath. “Look, Kizette, darling,” said Tadeusz—it pains me still that he could summon so much tenderness when he wanted to—“swans.” And Kizette stopped crying and looked.

That’s how Rafaela came to me in the Bois later that summer, cutting through the bitterness of Thade’s departure like a swan through water. That’s the way I cut now, through the sudden hard silence of my guests. “I have something to show you,” I offer.

“Ooh, show us something,” says Hector gratefully.

“New work?” Paul and Romana each ask, almost in chorus, and the taut thing between them loosens.

“Hector, darling? Could you bring out the painting that’s on the easel in the studio?”

“Of course,
querida
.”

“Don’t lose it on the way,” I say, watching if he’ll flinch. What a good actor he is.

Overhead, the new Moroccan lamp spits light in jerks until it rights itself. As we watch, Kizette murmurs, “We might need Paco to bring out the ladder again.”

“Is this the Rafaela painting you were working on?” asks Ana. “The girl you saved from the Nazis?”

“You saved a girl from the Nazis?” asks young Martin, turning to look—really look—at me for the first time all night.

“I wish you’d stop with that, Mother,” sighs Kizette. “It’s grandiose.”

“I just arranged some papers for her to get out, that’s all,” I say, giving my daughter a glare. “Really, she saved
me
from the Nazis, in a manner of speaking, so it’s the least I could do.” Kizette may have heard this story before, but she doesn’t have to look so aggrieved about it. Doesn’t age count for something?

“How did she do that?” asks Martin.

“
You
needed saving?” asks Ana.

“My husband was half Jewish,” I explain. “My second husband, the baron. We never discussed it, but there it is.”

“You never discussed it?” Ana repeats, seizing on this fact.

“It was nobody’s business. Until Hitler made it everybody’s business. So one morning in 1935, I was on my way back from visiting family in Poland, and my train home to Paris stopped in Berlin. I have friends staying in Berlin, I thought. I’ll visit with them and go home tonight. So I take a taxi to their hotel, and everywhere in the streets, I see Nazi uniforms. I meet my friends, we have a nice lunch, and then they ask me, Tamara, how did you ever get the papers to come here?
What papers?
I ask. I was sure they were just being dramatic, but they were afraid I wouldn’t be allowed home on the train.

“So we go to get my silly permit, and the police are very rude. They keep my passport for two hours. They make us sit in a hot room. And then they split my friends up and take them in separately for questioning. That’s when I start to get scared. And that’s when they send me in to see the chief of police. His office is large and dark. His desk is a mile of shiny black wood. The only color in the room is the bright red Nazi armband he’s wearing. I haven’t seen my passport in two hours, but now it’s in his hands, and he’s inspecting it
very
carefully.

“ ‘Madame,’ he says, ‘what is your citizenship?’

“ ‘French,’ I say.

“ ‘And where do you reside?’

“ ‘Paris,’ I say.

“ ‘So why do you come to Berlin without a
Reisegenehmigung
?’

“I did not know what this word meant when I came into the station. I thought it was a sneeze. Now I know what it means. And I am not laughing.
I did not know,
I say. I am sweating and I start to shake.

“And then he looks at my papers one more time and he asks, ‘Are you any relation to the Lempicka who painted covers for
Die Dame
?’

“ ‘I am that Lempicka,’ I say.

“ ‘My wife has all those covers,’ he tells me. ‘She saved them. A few years ago, I saw one of your paintings in a magazine, and I cut it out for her. It was called
Rafaela
,’ he says. ‘Very beautiful.’ And he shakes my hand, and I see he is actually quite young, and now I’m not afraid. ‘I wish I had the magazine here so you could sign it.’”

“And he let you go?” asks Martin.

I know Romana has heard all this before. What a good sport. I know she could bore us all now with stories of how her sainted mother and that Bibi woman smuggled Jews into Geneva, but she doesn’t, bless her. Kizette, on the other hand, glowers.

“He says, ‘Madame de Lempicka, I’m only going to fine you this time. But we know about your family, and there is no way you can ever come to Germany again.’”

“So Rafaela
did
save you,” Ana says.

“Now I’m dying to see this painting,” says Martin.

At that moment the garden light crackles out. In no time, Ana is up on the picnic table, her body as supple as her bee-stung face is clogged. “We have the same problem with the light at home,” she explains, stretching toward the bulb. She can’t reach. “You just have to give it a little tap.” Though tall Martin, joining her, could simply adjust the bulb himself, instead he spreads his hands around her waist and, on a count of three, lifts her higher. They both look awfully pleased with themselves when the light blinks on.

“Come on in, everybody,” calls Hector. “I thought I would set the painting up in the living room.”

“Are you sure it’s the right painting?” I ask, as he approaches me. “Are you sure you didn’t replace it with something from the Twenties? Are you sure you didn’t just set it against the wall and forget about it?”

“
Ay, querida.
You know that was the art handlers, the other day. We promise
Saint Anthony
will go into the next shipment.”

“You wanted me to think Kizette did it, don’t you? You could afford to be generous when you thought you had it all coming to you, didn’t you? Now you’re having second thoughts?”

“If I did anything to hurt your feelings, Tamara, I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Hector gently. As I search his flat features for what he’s hiding, the garden light shivers out yet again. His moon face, half lit from the lamps indoors, doesn’t change, but without the blue outdoor light, the blankness of calculation could be the blankness of innocence.

I can’t let him think I’m a fool. “You don’t care if I paint anymore, you just want my house,” I say, trying to make him confess.

“Tamara, I’m sorry about the paint. We just had to take care of Ana’s cheek.”

“What happened?” Martin asks Ana sotto voce.

“I have no idea.”

Kizette sighs. “Just show us the painting, so everyone can go home.”

“I think it’s very beautiful,” says Hector staunchly, but I can tell he’s hurt. If he weren’t being so immature, I would wonder if I’d made a mistake. Maybe he isn’t siding with the mausoleums. Maybe he doesn’t want my money. If he were to turn, I wonder if I would simply see the friend who visits almost every day, the friend who promised to scatter my ashes over the volcano. I wonder if I would see the Mexican boy I met in ’57, over lunch at the Ritz with d’Afflitto. Jean Cocteau was with us, nearly seventy then, but rejuvenated as ever by the presence of a beautiful boy. “Tell her what you told me when we first met,” he begged Hector, his voice breaking.

Hector gave his friend an indulgent smile. He was just an art student in a turtleneck then, not even twenty, with ambition far in excess of his slender portfolio. But he had a face like a Mayan angel, and he kissed my hand like a courtier.
“Encantado,”
he said: he was an enchanted thing. As he leads us from the dark garden into the bright room, I wish he would turn back and look at me. But he does not turn.

32

THE SIX OF THEM STARE at my new
Rafaela
. “I can’t believe I’m seeing new work by a famous painter,” Ana says.

“I know,” Martin agrees. “Pinch me. Am I dreaming?”

“Oh, it takes me back,” sighs Romana in her smoker’s burr. “I wouldn’t have the stamina to keep working the way you do.”

“You just don’t quit, Tamara,” Paul chirps aggressively, the edge in his voice meant for his wife, not for me. Perhaps it is too much to ask of a painting that it mend more than one quarrel at a time. Romana and her husband haven’t spoken to each other since she snapped at him over his tennis plans, and Hector won’t look at me now. As soon as they’ve seen my
Rafaela,
Paul and Hector stand to go claim their cars, and within moments, all my guests fold away into their small machines.

As the two cars lurch their awkward way around each other in the driveway, I stand at the veranda in my Alix Grès gown. I raise my cigarette holder in farewell. I hope Hector remembers this night the next time he tries to manipulate me. I didn’t like calling him out in front of our friends, but he has to know I’m serious. Just two weeks ago I gave in to him and willed the money to Kizette; he can’t keep changing his mind like this. He soured things for all of us tonight.

But I know my painting set a better seal on the evening. Turning back to the lit house, I sit down before my
Rafaela.
(I knew it was Hector when he came back with no paint.
Should
those eyelids be more red than violet?) I’m glad they can leave with an image in their minds, not a fight: Rafaela, floating as fresh as the day I first painted her. No, the eyelids are right. They’re the same violet as the shadowed thigh, a violet absence of color. And they’re true to the girl: the violet hint of weariness that belied her youth. How she stood at my door in yesterday’s tight dress, as if she’d never gone home to bed. How tight she closed her eyes with me inside of her. How violet brown those eyes were when she opened them.

 

 

 

The year my husband left—the year I feared poverty most—was the freest year of my life, and the day I met Rafaela was the freest day. A man could find what he wanted in the Bois as a matter of course, but I was a woman, and I got her into my car anyway. When she agreed to model for me, Rafaela seemed, however lovely, like an ordinary girl hard up for cash, but then she took so much pleasure in my borrowed green car. I felt her eyes on my pale gloves and hood, and when I reapplied my lipstick at a stoplight, I realized I was doing it to make her watch me. And she did. Suddenly I had a girl like plump blackberries, glossy and eager, watching my mouth. She looked out at the trees of the park as we drove, and up at the sun. The top was down: she turned her face from side to side in the wind. “These seats are nice,” she said, looking over at me, the bare sensitive palm of her hand pushing at the gray leather. I watched her stroke it for long seconds, unaware of herself. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth fell open. I looked at her thighs through the tight silk of her dress. She looked up at me then, as if I were a dream she was having, and that’s when I thought it:
I can do whatever I want to her.