The Last Nude (5 page)

I pictured the cot that awaited me in the coatroom once the dancing couples claimed their hats and stumbled home. It would be stiflingly hot in that windowless closet. Laure wouldn’t even be able to get me in there for another few hours, and that was assuming the chilly bartender didn’t rat me out. There was no way I was wasting good money on a hotel, so if I had to sit up at an all-night café somewhere, I would.
I wouldn’t mind a nap first.
The Spanish grandfather had two beds, a window, moving air.
If he’s still asleep when I come out, I’m just going to lie down on that other bed for an hour,
I decided as I dressed.
He’ll never know.

When I opened the door, I found him in bed with my new uniform draped across his furred legs. Thick yellow toenails beclawed his veiny feet. Sheets of dead skin seemed to have formed on his real skin, beneath which varicose jellyfish floated, bluish. He was wheezing again. Though his fist worked the wattled misery in his lap, only his face was taut, a mask: when he met my eyes, a smile dribbled out to greet me. “Excuse me? That’s
my
dress,” I said, but it was suddenly too late. The resources available to me in the Ritz powder room wouldn’t make any difference, no matter how hard I worked the polished cotton. I didn’t want to touch it, anyway. I’d just have to buy another one. Angry, I picked up one of his wingtips—I’ve always been a good shot—and thought better of it. I didn’t want to make trouble for myself, or for Laure. “Aw, for crap’s sake,” I said
.
I said some other things, too, and then I stepped into my shoes and left.

In the lift down to the coatroom, I crossed my arms over my handbag, upset. What kind of a person would
do
that? Behind the silent lift-boy’s back, I exchanged a hollow look with myself in the mirror. I was glad for the money, and making so much at one go took the edge off. Hell, it even gave me a kick. I could go back up there and break the guy’s nose, if I wanted to. Rip out what was left of his hair. But really—I gave in, suddenly, to a silent, weepy gust of envy—I just wanted what Anson Hall had: rich parents to send me a little something every month. I could eat in. I could mend my own stockings. Even more than a dress from Chanel, I just wanted enough money to be left alone, to sit and think and study French and watch people and make things. I blotted my eyes as the lift-boy slid open the doors.

The chilly bartender’s back was turned. Good. But there, positioned at the bar where he could watch the lift, sat Anson, drinking alone. I felt him watching me emerge an hour after I’d disappeared—with no makeup and wrinkles in my lucky dress—and I smiled weakly. I walked past the bar without going in, and he followed me.

“Come back and let me get you one more drink, to say good night?” he asked.

I turned. Fine, let the bartender think he’d have to fight this guy if he wanted any of my money, I decided. I steered Anson toward the farthest, darkest booth, and then we looked each other full in the face. I wanted to hurt him for what he knew. I wanted to make him go away. I wanted him to like me anyway. “I’m buying,” I said, putting five hundred francs on the table before Anson could take out his wallet. “Two
marcs
,” I said to the waiter, and then counted out the money from the change. “The movie. Dinner. Taxi. Drinks,” I said nastily, daring Anson to take it, daring him not to.

Anson slowly looked up from the money. I don’t know what the look on my face was, but when he saw it, his own expression melted from affront to apology. “Even Steven, huh?” he said. “Wait.” He passed me back a few francs.

“What?”

“You got the last round, but I’m getting this one.”

I smiled back at him, my eyes suddenly wet again. “Thanks.”

I could tell Anson wanted to ask how I’d spent the evening—and the afternoon, for that matter—and I had some questions for him, too, but we kept our mouths shut, as if to see who would crack first. The next drink made me feel sick and sad, though, and when I started crying in earnest, it was about Gin. “I don’t think that guy’s going to marry her, really. Do you?”

“Unlikely.”

“I wish I could prove it to
her,
though. I wish I could just show her the rest of his life and say, See, you think you have all of Daniel, but you only have half. A third. Ten percent!”

“Well, some people need to get hurt to be happy,” he said.

“I don’t know if she’s one of those,” I said. “I’ve never seen her lose her head like this before.”

“But if you really think she’d drop him if she knew the whole story—”

“Yes?” I prompted.

“Well, I might know somebody who could find out.”

“You do?”

He was drunk, too. As he leaned in to tell me, his eyes were glossy with excitement. “It’s complicated. And it’s kind of a secret.”

“Who?”
I insisted, grinning back at him.

Anson took out a long narrow notepad from his jacket pocket.

“You really are a journalist.”

“Tell me the man’s name and the bank where he works, and I’ll talk to my friend.”

“Well, his name is Daniel Gordin,” I said. “Um.”

“Your roommate never told you where he works? Or”—at this, his voice colored with more judgment than it had when I’d walked out of the lift—“did you never pay attention?”

“Maybe a little of both?”

“C’mon, at least out of self-interest. He might have a coworker, somebody who could set you up sweet. It’s dangerous, running around hotels,” he said.

“Thanks, Mother.”

“I guess I deserved that. How did she meet this banker, anyway?”

“At her job,” I said, and told him their story.

“Belle Jardinière?” he said. “Jeez, that place is notorious.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I used to work in a newspaper office, and let’s just say everybody knew when there was a new girl working there, especially a pretty one. The boys liked to send over this kid named André. He’d snoop around and come back with a full report.”

“Who was André?”

“Just a clerk. But he was good-looking, and he had a special talent for sniffing out the girls who would from the girls who wouldn’t.”

We both looked away, embarrassed. I could see it all over again, my ruined black dress. It occurred to me that Daniel was not at that moment proposing to Gin. Showcased behind her glove counter, Gin may have believed she was getting her pick, but perhaps, forewarned by his own office’s version of André, Daniel thought he was getting his turn.

“Well,” Anson said, breaking the unhappy silence. “All the more reason to do some research. Maybe this Daniel’s a good guy.”

“Maybe he is,” I said. I looked down. Anson’s trousers were an inch or so too short, I noted. He had a foot propped on a neighboring chair, revealing a quarter-moon of badly scarred ankle above his sock. “What happened to you?”

“I got shelled on the Italian front.”

“That sounds awful.”

“I’m luckier than most,” he said mildly. “Listen.” He passed me a business card. “This is an office where I pick up messages most mornings. If you’re serious about this—if you really want me to talk to my friend—call between ten and noon sometime this week, and ask to speak to me. Don’t talk to anyone else.”

“ ‘Yves Boulind et Compagnie,’” I read.

“Oui.
He’s a friend of the family. I call him Monsieur Bland,” he said, barely altering the French name while giving me a look so blank, I laughed.

“You would really do this for me?”

“I don’t know if my friend can help, but I can ask.”

“Thank you,” I said. We were the last two people in the bar, and the restaurant had cleared out as well. “Well, I’ll go find my
copine
,” I said.

“You don’t want to come over for a nightcap?”

“And then where would I go?”

He smiled.

“Aren’t you cute.
Where’s Mrs. Hall? Where’s the Piggott girl?
” I said, mocking Honey’s accent.

“The old man had a ring on.”

“The old man had five hundred francs.”

“Sure, but I’m better looking.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

He gave a good-natured shrug. “Well, I tried.”

What little I knew of Anson’s cluttered love life put me off, and his looks, whatever he thought of them, did little for me. However, the grace with which he gave in made me like him. “You’re all right, Anson,” I said.

 

 

 

The money was still in my bandeau the next morning when I woke up on the coatroom cot. I could buy another uniform, if I wanted it, but my vision of a clean shining glove counter was bleared over with milky spume, with old men and Andrés and
girls who would.
I opened the door a crack for some light to dress by and saw the clock in the lobby: nine-thirty. Late to work, on top of everything else.

 

 

 

I could go to Belle Jardinière, late, and beg Mme. Florin to let me spend another hundred francs, and then I could spend eight hours on my feet, fending off the Andrés of this world. Or I could go home. Five hundred francs was two months’ rent: I could stay home for weeks before I had to look for anyone else. Sixty days to myself. Sixty days of not making nice, not to anybody. Of course, first I’d have to apologize to Gin for not taking her job. If she let me in at all. If she wasn’t too busy with Daniel. Five hundred francs was only one month’s rent if Gin was really leaving. And besides, in the quiet weeks ahead, did I really want that wheezy grandfather to be the last person I’d gone to bed with?

I shook Tamara’s tightly wadded scarf out of my handbag: in the morning light, it was the color of apricots, light as breath. I held it to my face and inhaled tuberose, turpentine, sweat. I remembered that gloved finger under my chin, that velvet couch in the sun.

 

 

 

 

I knew you would come back,” she said when I knocked.

2

WHEN I WENT BEHIND THE SCREEN to change for Tamara, I didn’t put on the sausage-sack dress. I waited until her back was turned and then I draped myself on her couch wearing nothing but her silk chiffon scarf. “You were sitting at the table, remember?” she said in her careful, Slavic English, and then turned to me. She gasped. “You are perfect,” she said.

I looked at her pointedly, and smiled.

“Oh,” she said, her voice wavering, “I need to finish that other painting . . .”

“Finish it later,” I said. “Paint me like this.”

She nodded, her eyes dilating, and took out her charcoals and tablet. Using a timer, she made a series of five-minute sketches of me with and without the scarf: sitting, standing, lounging on her couch, head facing toward her, then away. She looked from sketch to sketch and up to me again, giddy with indecision. “I will just have to paint all of them,” she said. At that, she stood, ran her knuckles lightly over the chiffon that covered me. “Now lie just the way you were when I turned. What is this?” she said, picking up my magazine. She placed it, open, in front of me. “Now, your eyes half open: you are bored and you want to go home.”

But I don’t,
I almost said. But I lay on the couch as she asked, with my
Les Modes
in front of me.

“Do not pretend to read. Really read,” she said. The French words lay on the page, inert: I was so conscious of her eyes on me that I couldn’t make sense of the type. I looked up at her doubtfully. “Do not read, then, if you like.” She moved the magazine just past me, re-draped the silk across my waist, and tied a black velvet ribbon around my wrist. As she came close to tie it, a pale tendril of hair curled up from her bob to brush my face. “Your eyelids are purple, no? Red. As if you never sleep. And your lips are swollen with kisses,” she teased.

“I didn’t kiss anybody,” I said. It was the truth.

Tamara laughed. “Not ever?”

“Not not
ever
,” I protested. “But not last night.”

“If you say so.” Looking at my mouth, Tamara bit the side of her thumb. Drew the wet thumb across my lower lip. “There. Good.”