The Last Nude by Avery Ellis

Author:Avery, Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2011-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

As the party crowd stared at me, nude and spotlit, I felt gilded, splendid, radiant, afraid: I was a goddess, a statue, a blood sacrifice. The photographers’ lamps went out again, and d’Afflitto—bless him—restored the screen. In the moment I reached for my clothes, Tamara joined me, more a wave of scent and warm satin than anything I could see. She must have abandoned her post by the wall lights. Her ringed hand found me in the dark and she whispered in my ear, “You were just like my dream.” At that moment, as the crowd began to rumble for light, I felt as beautiful as she thought I was. “Your heart,” she said, her hand on my breastbone. “It’s beating so hard.”

“It’s because I’m happy,” I said, kissing her.

Just then a murderous sound cut through the room. “Sale fils de putain!” screamed a woman. And that was the nicest thing she said.

The crowd erupted, Tamara with it, and rushed toward the source of the scream. “Someone touched the girl,” I heard a man’s voice explain. A light came on in the kitchen, making the dining room dimly visible, and the salon went from black to gray. “Someone burned her with a cigar,” said another voice. I heard a heavy, metallic cascade of smacks as the silver tray crashed to the floor.

I dressed quickly, rattled at the news, but when I began to circle the screen, I stopped. Tamara was gone. D’Afflitto was gone. Romana and Violette were just leaving, straightening their clothes on the way to the dining room, from which the voice of the oyster girl filled the apartment with blood and shit, with ice and nails, with clouds of rubble.

Two figures, however, remained in the salon, bending toward the paintings that rested on the floor. One, crouching, flipped open a cigarette lighter: I saw the two men were Baron Kuffner and Dr. Boucard. Red-whiskered, heavy on his feet, Baron Kuffner could have been an aging Norse god with a hammer and thunderbolt. The smooth Dr. Boucard, flame in hand, would have been that god’s younger and craftier ally.

Together, they moved quickly but thoroughly through the canvases propped against the wall like dominoes. Suddenly they stopped. “Look at this one,” Baron Kuffner murmured in his accented French. I heard boyish laughter in his voice, as if sneaking around in the dark added to the pleasure he took in the paintings.

“Oh, let’s,” said Dr. Boucard, his voice calmly professional by contrast. Carefully, the two men lifted out a small painting, turned it around, and set it against the wall by itself. In the half-dark, the flaring cigarette lighter revealed the painting one splash at a time: Rafaela in Green.

“I think you should put that away,” I said.

The two men looked up, alarmed by my voice in the darkness. Another light came on in the dining room, and then they looked from the painting to me and back again. “So you’re the model,” said Baron Kuffner, spectacles gleaming.

“Why, it’s Tamara’s little Jewish friend,” oozed Dr.

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