Read Online The Last Nude by Ellis Avery - Free Book Online

the hall toward Kizette’s room. “Come tomorrow?” she murmured, when I stepped out from behind the screen.
    “If you want,” I said.
    “If?” She laughed. “Do not lower yourself like that. You are too beautiful to fish for compliments.”
    “Then I don’t know what to say.”
    “Come tomorrow,” she repeated.
    I felt so wobbly I reached for the wall, too dizzy to count out the money she handed me. “Yes.”
    The smile she gave me in reply was not a French smile: it was butter-cream frosting, spread with a trowel. “What we did today?” she said. “I cannot do it again.”
    My face fell. Had I completely misread her? “I see.”
    “I have to work. I have to paint. I have to control myself.”
    My jaw dropped in anger. I was the big seductress? Blamed for my looks again, I thought. Jeez.
    “You made me break my rule,” she said.
    “What’s your rule?” I sneered. “You don’t sleep with your models?”
    “Not until the painting day is over.”
    I blinked at her.
    “We work for six hours tomorrow,” she said. “And then we play. No?”
    Oh, I thought, thrown again . Oh, that’s all. “All right,” I said simply, glad I’d kept my mouth shut. And then I gave her half a grin. “We’ll see.”

    I wafted home on a gust of warm July air, into an evening that lasted and lasted. I remembered my first glimpse of Paris by daylight, on a short walk with the ugly man from the ship. We had just eaten lunch in our room in the Grand Hotel, and we were heading out for a matinee: I hadn’t known the opera house would be just across the street, or that the opera boxes were designed to function like private rooms in restaurants. I was just glad to be free of that hotel room for a while. The terrasse of the hotel was itself a miniature opera, with its jewel-colored drinks and its coffees, its wrapped squares of chocolate and cubes of sugar, its speakers of many languages, each one smoking expressively.
    Leaving behind the leafy arch of rue de la Paix, I had never seen anything so magnificent: the great buildings opening onto the wide bright plaza ( place, in French, the ugly man told me) with its spare, elegant Métro entrance, the crowds streaming both across the place and up out of the ground, too. I felt humbled by the massive scale and stirred by the beauty of the architecture, by the white-golden apartment buildings ranged around the traffic star in ordered harmony, rising as solemn as cliffs. “It’s so beautiful,” I murmured.
    “What are you looking at?” the ugly man asked. “The Opéra’s over there.” That’s when I looked left and saw the opera house itself, so grand I’d missed it, shimmering like wet fondant, like a great domed cake.
    I remembered it now, my first sight of Paris: then as now, the city buffeted me with beauty from all sides. Then as now, the warm light beguiled. Then as now, I had just gone to bed with a near-stranger, but this time it hadn’t sickened me. I hadn’t done it to work off a debt; I’d done it for pleasure. I felt as if I were seeing Paris for the first time, a city of bridges and shining water—I detoured south, along the Seine—a city of lindens and sycamores, of cobbled islands, of bird markets and flower markets, of buttresses and gargoyles, a rose-windowed river city wheeling with pigeons. I kept walking. The cathedral bells tumbled and sang.
    I crossed another bridge and bought a purple glace aux myrtilles at an ice cream shop with a magnificent view of the back of Notre-Dame. I ate it slowly on the Pont Saint-Louis. This, I thought to myself, watching the moving water, remembering the sound of Tamara setting her rings on the table. This always. Just this. What would I do with myself until I saw her again?
     
     
     
    I felt like a gardenia blossom as I drifted home, fragrant and bruisable. All the familiar things in my neighborhood seemed new again: the glass-domed arcades. The odor of honey cakes stealing toward me from Pâtisserie Fouquet.