Free The Last Nude by Ellis Avery Page B

Usually, they listened to my explanation and gave my face a measuring look. It was I, however, who measured them, based on what they said next. Responses varied from the benign ( Interesting, or Ah, so you’re Catholic, then? ) to the slightly annoying ( You don’t look Jewish, or Italians and Jews look similar, don’t they? ) with a few distasteful ones here and there. One man had said to me, “Once a daughter of Israel, always a daughter of Israel, n’est-ce pas ?” Another had asked, “Is it true what they say about les Juives ?” Was what true? I didn’t wait around to find out.
    So I watched Tamara carefully when I explained. “I see,” she said, nodding. As she ran her fingers through her hair, her topaz darted a fleck of light across the walls. “Your grandparents were ahead of their time, no? To let your parents marry?”
    I relaxed. “They eloped,” I said.
    “They must have loved each other very much.”
    I smiled. No one had ever said that to me. “They did.”
    “It shows,” she said. “Look at how beautiful you are. And how old are you?”
    “Seventeen,” I said, trying not to grin like a fool.
    She watched me shake out my stiff limbs, and sighed. “You can hold any pose at seventeen.”
    “How old are you ?”
    “Twenty-seven. Just like the century.”
    “Not so old as all that, then.”
    “Not so old as I feel.”
    I laughed wryly: I knew what she meant. “Your English is so much better than my French,” I said apologetically.
    “I learned it as a child,” she said, shrugging.
    “You lived in England?”
    “I had a British nanny,” she explained, using an extra-British accent. “But you? How old were you when you came to Paris?”
    “Sixteen. I’ve just been here a year. How old were you?”
    “I came here in ’18. Kizette was born just after we arrived.” Kizette was younger than she looked, I realized: eight or nine, not ten or eleven.
    “Why did you move when you were pregnant?” I asked. “That sounds hard.”
    “The decision was not up to me.”
    “Your husband’s job?”
    “Ah, to be an American. Nineteen seventeen is just a number to you?”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened in Poland in 1917.”
    “We lived in Saint Petersburg.”
    Oh, the Russian Revolution, I thought, feeling stupid. “Were the Poles on the White Russians’ side?”
    Tamara’s expression—the same icy look she gave me when I asked about the jam in my tea—made me feel no less stupid. “We are always on our own side,” she said. “The point is, I am a Pole, but I am also a countess. So you can understand why we had to leave Russia.”
    “Because of the Communists?”
    “Rafaela,” she said wearily. “ Belle, belle Rafaela.”
    “I’m sorry,” I insisted. “In 1917, I was seven.”
    “I will show you one thing, because it is absurd how little you Americans know, and then, no more politics. All right?”
    I nodded. She turned and flipped quickly through the paintings propped against the wall. She moved a stack aside to reveal a portrait, clearly hers, of a man in an elaborate military uniform. “Prince Gabriel. Cousin to the Czar. People say he is one of the men who killed Rasputin.”
    I nodded, knowing better than to let on that while Rasputin’s name gave me a shudder, I wasn’t quite sure what he had done to earn it.
    “And now he is nothing, here in Paris. He lives off his wife in a wretched little flat. He had to borrow this uniform for his portrait.”
    So the uniform was a costume, as much as my brown sack was. Over the prince’s shoulder I saw a familiar gray velvet drape: though at first glance, the background had a majestic vigor, Tamara hadn’t actually painted the man in a palace. “Did you paint him here, in this apartment?” I asked. Tamara nodded. I could see the weariness in his hollowed-out handsome face, together with a puzzled, paralyzed expression. “It’s as if he can’t believe he isn’t still royalty,” I said.
    “That is the