Free The Last Nude by Ellis Avery Page A

added.
    My curiosity made me feel exposed, and I was aware of trying hard to sound blasé. “I guess there’s a lot of that sort of thing in Paris?”
    “I used to run errands for a woman who called her friend her wife,” he said. “They kept house together on rue de Fleurus. Americans, both. I’ll bet you, ask any pair of American women in the Luxembourg Gardens, and fifty-fifty, they’ll say they’re married.” I didn’t want him to know how much I wanted him to go on. “They’re not a bad lot,” he concluded, “especially when you think about the messes most girls get into. Look at your friend Gin.”
    “True,” I said, but I was only half listening. Right there in the phone booth, in that little trap of stale smoke and old sweat, a wave of desire for Tamara was passing over me so thickly I could barely hear Anson’s voice as it turned serious. “Remember, my friend’s not a miracle worker,” he said. “He can’t access court records, just bank records. But I’ll see what he can do.”

3

    THE MÉTRO FROM NOTRE-DAME-DE-LORETTE to rue du Bac was foul-smelling but direct. On Tamara’s street, I noticed hôtels standing apart from the usual apartment houses . Hôtels , I’d learned, were not hotels: single families, and titled ones at that, lived in them, set back from the street behind low walls, wide gates, and carriage houses. They didn’t come cheap, these runs of sunny sidewalk. I could hear birds. Could Tamara hear them, too? The sole glint of commerce on her street came from Bistrot Varenne, an Alsatian restaurant at the corner where Varenne met Vaneau. Even in the morning, with the restaurant shutters down, I could smell old beer as I crossed onto Tamara’s block. Just two buildings from the corner, outside 63, rue de Varenne, I could smell only the lemon wax on her polished wood door. The soft morning air was lush as cream. My heart in my mouth, I waited a long time after I rang the bell, until the door opened, and it was Tamara. I tipped my face up to greet her with a kiss on the cheek, but her very stillness in the doorway stopped me. “You came back,” she said, and she let me in.
    Because I was eager for Tamara’s workday to end, the long poses she asked of me felt all the longer: sitting at the table in the brown dress, or lying naked on my side with a book. Tamara’s dog, gloomy as an exiled monarch, nosed at me once or twice before settling onto his cushion to doze. Seffa dreamed what looked like complicated dreams, which required the lifting of one eyebrow, then the other. Three times the telephone rang, and three times both painter and dog alike ignored it, so I let the sound pass over me like the birdsong I’d heard in the street. “What is your last name, Rafaela?” Tamara asked during our first break.
    Had she asked me two days before, in the Bois de Boulogne, I would have used a fake name, for the same reasons my friend Maggey did. But I gave her my real name instead. “Fano. Fano,” Tamara mused. “Is that Spanish?”
    No, it’s Italian was the short answer, but I gave her the long one. “It’s the village in Spain that my father’s ancestors left during the Inquisition,” I said. “But we’re Genovese. No one in my family has spoken Spanish for centuries.”
    “You are Jewish, then?” Tamara asked.
    “No. My father was, but he died when I was little. My mother and my stepfather are Catholic, so that’s how I was raised. You’re only Jewish if your mother is, officially,” I added.
    It was a familiar conversation. Because of the scandal my mother and stepfather’s marriage had caused on Baxter Street, the explanation my mother had drilled into me never washed with the other girls at Most Precious Blood. I was the only Jew in a Catholic school, as far as they were concerned: I had no friends there. When I changed schools a year later, my Irish classmates at Saint Joseph’s didn’t know enough to ask about my last name.
    Adult Parisians knew enough.