Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (18 page)

 

 

 

A clock ticks audibly on the kitchen wall. Marie is washing up, and Joseph is drying the dishes with a coarse white cloth. The windows are open and the piano sounds distinctly from Igor's study. Voices drift in from the garden. A new swing has been installed in a corner of the lawn. It sways metronomically as the children take their turn.

“I don't know what to make of these goings-on,” Joseph says, wiping a steaming plate with an overlapping motion of the cloth.

“You don't?” Marie asks, sardonically. She plunges her hands into the soapy water and pulls out another dripping dinner plate. A white cup and saucer follow.

Joseph stacks them on the table. “Has she said anything to you?”

Faintly outraged at the suggestion, Marie frowns. “Of course not.”

“Do you think Madame Stravinsky knows?”

“She has eyes and ears like the rest of us. Unless, of course, she's deceiving herself.” Marie sees her fingers have wrinkled finely in the water.

Outdoors the boys are messing around with a hosepipe, spraying each other. Suzanne is pushing Milène vigorously on the swing.

Marie carries on, “Even your own daughter's old enough to understand what's happening.”

“Don't be ridiculous. She's only fourteen.”

“She's not as naïve as you think, Joseph.”

A wineglass gulps as she puts it in the water. The dregs in the bottom make a sharp red stain.

“All right. I suppose she must have an idea. But the worst thing would be for it all to blow up.”

“God! Men are such cowards,” Marie says. And then, with a force that almost pulls her forward: “I've half a mind to tell her myself.”

“Remember, darling, where our loyalties lie.”

“I
would
tell her if she weren't so haughty.”

Joseph wipes away a thumbprint from the side of a glass and puts a stack of plates into the cupboard. Clearing things away, returning each bright pot to its allotted place, is his way of coping with the turmoil that has disturbed the calm of the house. “Like it or not, Mademoiselle Chanel is our employer. Her best interests reflect our own.”

“I think it's perfectly disgraceful the way she carries on.”

“It's not for us to judge, Marie.”

“Somebody has to.”

Through the window, Joseph sees Milène on the swing twisting the ropes around tighter until they begin to kink.

“Well, it's not our place. Remember what happened last time.”

“I don't need reminding.”

“I think you do. Each change of lover brings with it a fresh change of domestics. You know the rule.”

As Milène releases her feet from the ground the ropes of the swing unravel, sending her spinning around and around.

Relenting. “All right, I know.”

“We can't afford that to happen again.”

Marie pulls the plug from the sink. Ringingly she wraps the chain around the tap. She adds, “I don't know what she sees in him anyway.”

“Mm.”

“It's pretty obvious what
he
's after, though.”

“Oh, stop it!”

Just then, the Stravinskys' cat trots into the kitchen and stalks around.

“Nothing left here, I'm afraid, Vassily.”

“Scram!” blurts Marie, less charitably.

The water drains from the basin with a long-drawn gurgle, then a vortical roar. Marie runs cold water around the congealed scum at the bottom of the sink. She swills away the little scraps of food. A few remaining suds crackle softly in the light.

 

 

 

Catherine endures a succession of identical bedridden days.

She awakes each morning feeling the weight of boredom press upon her. She finds it hard to concentrate. Scared of venturing downstairs where she doesn't feel welcome, she's afraid, moreover, of what she might find. Increasingly she feels imprisoned. The bedroom's single window is too high to see anything but birds trace indolent circles. Her horizons have narrowed to this one blank space. And the room is so underfurnished, it still seems to her austere. Hour after hour she lies there motionless, watching the sunlight generate its patterns upon the wall.

She reads a good deal. The poems of Akhmatova, stories by Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. The Bible—Paul's epistles, especially, and the Acts of the Apostles. But not the stories of Colette lent to her by Coco. She reads until her eyes give out. Then in the afternoon she dozes, yielding to the waves of tiredness that lap at her from some far shore.

And when Milène comes to her, pulling at the covers, it all proves just too much. “Get off!” she shouts, pushing her away. Milène, though, continues to hang around the bed, thinking it all part of some game. Again the girl begins tugging at the covers and scratching at her mother's arms. She doesn't realize she is being too rough.

“Get away from me!” Catherine cries, so fiercely that her younger daughter freezes. Poor Milène bursts into tears. She can't understand why her mother, once so affectionate and playful, now appears so wretched and pathetic. Of course Catherine instantly regrets it. But the incident cruelly illuminates her decline. She knows it is wrong, but she can't help herself. She feels too anguished, too harried, too desperate for space and calm. In addition to the physical ailments, she seems to suffer an emotional collapse. Her sobs well in the darkness. Her eyes fill with a liquid thicker than tears. She pushes the children away to keep them at a manageable distance. It is all she can do to survive.

Her nerves are shot to pieces. The dry sound of a petal falling on the sill is enough to startle her. In the room, a faint smell of decay reaches her nostrils, a remote odor of putrefaction. At first she thinks it is the flowers. But the smell is more like meat that has gone off. Then it occurs to her that it must be her insides. It is herself she can smell, her own inner corruption. She feels dead already. Her hair is falling out in handfuls, and now she's beginning to rot. The sensation scares her. She needs to fight to stay alive.

Before Igor retires to their bedroom each night, flush with adultery, Catherine measures out drops of her medicine onto a spoon. The red glob clings to the metal with a tremulous effort of surface tension. Slowly, with the same effort of trembling, she maneuvers the spoon into the dark cave of her mouth.

At last, in mid-August, Coco hears from Ernest Beaux. The perfume samples are ready for inspection. Exchanging childishly solemn promises with Igor, she takes off almost immediately, traveling first class by train down to the south.

There are scores of perfumers in the town of Grasse. The whole region reeks with sweetness, flavoring the landscape for miles around. Just as it attracts many people out of curiosity, though, so many blameless residents have also left the town. Not everyone enjoys the olfactory onslaught that assails the houses night and day. A cloud of cloying odors hangs in a permanent pall over the streets, stretching in an invisible film over the roofscapes. There is little wind to relieve the region. And when a freshening breeze blows in from the coast, it is only so that a new wave of fragrances can waft across the town again.

Coco detects this compound of aromas as she alights from the train. She feels excited that, from this mixture of odors, there might be isolated and distilled a single ribbon of scent that will be bottled and bear her name. She's always dreamed of having her own fragrance, of sending her signature into the world in this way.

But steady. She's getting ahead of herself. There's a lot of hard work ahead of her first.

The next morning, she stands outside Beaux's perfumery with its square window and unfussy façade. Nervously she consults a piece of paper, making sure the address written there corresponds with that of the shop in front of her. It does. The shop bell clangs loudly. The reverberation continues long after its last note leaves the air.

A man emerges from the back and stands behind the counter. “Madame?”

“I'm looking for Monsieur Ernest Beaux.”

“How can I help you?”

“My name is Gabrielle Chanel.”

The man's demeanor changes from that of an obliging shopkeeper to that of a humble subject about to meet his queen. Lifting the hinge of the counter, Beaux walks through to greet her. They shake hands with equal strength and for slightly longer than is necessary.

Like Igor, Beaux is a Russian émigré from St. Petersburg and, Coco notices, he speaks French with the same clipped accent.

“This way, if you please.”

He ushers her behind the counter and steers her into the laboratory at the rear of the shop. He is grayer in appearance than Coco had expected. She'd naïvely imagined her perfumer to be a brilliant young man. A paterfamilias beard luxuriates around his broad jaw. His eyes are bloodshot with overwork. But she notes with pleasure his clean hands. A wedding ring glistens on one of his spatulate fingers.

Beaux notes, conversely, that Coco is younger than he had thought, and much prettier, too. He is struck by her professional air and determined manner, her understated good looks.

Coco is dazzled by the whiteness of the lab. For a moment, she's almost snow-blind. But the sensation does not dominate for long. Immediately she's overcome by the perfumes as they rush at her from all corners. A fabulous amalgam of scents. She feels queasy, experiencing these interwoven aromas for the first time.

She sits down and looks about her. A continuous wooden surface runs seamlessly around the room. On one side lies a set of burners, flasks, and agitating devices. Here, two white-coated assistants bend low over their retorts and swill liquids in glass beakers. On another, measuring glasses rest next to funnels; pestles and mortars share a space with spoons and rods. Coco approves of this careful taxonomy. She likes the fact that he's systematic. She's reassured, too, by the white, germless surfaces.

Opposite, a broad shelf is laden with glass jars. Coco takes a mental inventory. Each container is labeled in black ink: alcohol, volatile oils, and fats in different combinations, plus a liquefied series of natural and artificial odors. A complete lexicon of differentiated scents: ambergris, camphor, frangipani, jasmine, musk, neroli, sandalwood, and violet—scents distilled from southern Europe and the Middle East. The collected sweat of the gods.

Coco asks, “Do you extract the essences yourself?”

“We don't have space. It's an industrial process now. We buy them in already refined. Besides, the way you extract the scents is not so important.” Beaux's voice lowers, hinting at the possession of diabolical knowledge. “It's how you
combine
them that counts.”

He moves around the laboratory like a celebrated chef in his kitchen, assembling all the flacons he has prepared for Chanel. She recognizes his ability to pick out discrete scents, to isolate a happy or recalcitrant strand, either to distill it down or siphon it off. It is, she thinks, the facility Igor has: to pounce on the single instrument in the orchestra that is slightly out of tune.

It is all going bewilderingly quickly. The brightness, the scents, and the movement of white-coated chemists mingle and make Coco dizzy. Then, after a few minutes, the men cease moving and stand ready behind her chair. Beaux squeezes a dribble from a pipette into a petri dish. She thinks of the hundreds of crushed blossoms that have gone into this thin distillate, this elixir, to create a single liquid drop.

He repeats the operation several times. Then he lays out the samples and beckons her to test them. The odors resolve in a precise spot a few inches below her nose. She's conscious of a vaporous welling. Their blended notes rise up.

Now that everything is still, she hears a sound. An insistent hum. The chirr of ceiling fans, she thinks. She looks up, but the fans make too rhythmical and insistent a noise. There is a more frantic and high-pitched buzzing mixed in, coming from somewhere near the window. She looks across. The window is open because of the heat. But behind the frame is a gauze mesh. And beyond the mesh stirs a thick cloud of flies. Fruit flies maddened by the sweetness of the scents. Frantically they dance against the netting, crazed with frustration.

Beaux sees her register their presence. Rubbing his hands together, he says, “That's how people will react to your scent, Mademoiselle.”

Coco manages a sardonic glance that, through an alteration of her features, becomes a shy smile. “I hope!”

In front of her Beaux sets six dishes inundated with perfumes. They are the color of translucent honey, amber, or weak tea. He dips a smelling strip into the first dish, then wafts it below her nose.

As she inhales, each perfume in turn unfurls like a mysterious blossom.

She quickly discounts two of the samples as overripe. Another is a little bitter. This leaves a further three. The smelling sticks swish like wands below her nostrils. She dismisses another one as merely enchanting, which leaves just two more—numbers two and five—still in the running.

After trying another couple of times to discriminate, she says, “I like them both.”

Beaux urges her to try again. She must choose one. She inhales generously above each sample. Each is exquisite, redolent, and evocative in slightly different ways.

“I can smell jasmine.”

“Yes.”

“And tuberose?”

“Yes.”

“And there's an animal note in there, somewhere, too.”

“I'm impressed.”

She sniffs, compares, and reflects once more. And there it is. Slowly it comes to her: subtle but glorious, splendid, and, in its mix of distillates, almost divine. She's never smelled anything like it. A feeling of sickness mixes with desire. And then a strange thing happens. In this state of near reverie, her mind flashes back to the floor of the convent and orphanage in Aubazine where she went to school. Her memory lingers for an instant upon the mosaic tiles in the corridor with their repetition of the Roman numeral V.