Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (9 page)

“Of course.” Igor continues needlessly to stroke his cheek.

“I've prescribed something that should calm her down. It'll allow her to get the rest she needs and make her breathe more easily. It may make her sleepy, though.”

After fizzing inside the lamp shade, the two bluebottles alight on the ceiling. Both men notice the silence.

“I appreciate your coming over at such short notice.”

The children cluster. “Is Mama going to be all right?”

Igor feels love surge within him for these young things. The doctor touches their heads as if healing them. “She'll be just fine,” he says. For the first time, he breaks into a smile. Igor wishes his wife could see this.

Joseph appears out of nowhere. He returns the man's hat and opens the door. A square of light frames them sharply, making them squint for an instant.

“Be sure to give my regards to Mademoiselle Chanel.”

“I will.”

Deferentially, the doctor has parked outside the gates. His feet shuck the small stones in the drive. The sound in Igor's ears is louder than it should be. The sharpness of the light and shadows seems to extend to the air and its ability to carry sound. It extends, too, to his conscience, where it amplifies a pang of guilt.

He experiences mixed feelings at the news of Catherine's illness. Pain at her renewed suffering mingles with excitement at the thought that her convalescence might afford him more time with Coco. Then, remembering his children's instinctive loyalty, he feels wretched entertaining such thoughts. But they ripen within him darkly and will not go away.

He thinks of the six years he has spent looking after his wife; the difficulties he's had squaring the demands of his work with the need, pressingly vivid, to watch over her. The sacrifice has been great. But, he reminds himself, he's not a saint. He loves her, of course, and can't imagine ever being without her. She's the mother of his children. Yet here he is, he reflects, thrust into a world bristling with possibilities, alive with new hopes. Now thirty-eight, and still smarting from the injustice of his exile, he feels the need to be affirmed not only as a musician but as a man.

 

 

 

Coco pushes her sleeves midway up her arms and sits down to dinner. She has on an open-necked blouse with a sailor collar, and a long knitted skirt. A black bandeau echoes the dark arc of her eyebrows.

Shaking out a napkin, she asks, “No Catherine this evening?” She can't conceal the fact that she thinks Catherine a malingerer—the way she carps the whole time, and that insipid way she has of calling downstairs for Marie. Coco can't fathom why Igor puts up with her. She seems to do nothing for him.

“I'm afraid not,” Igor says. He gives a summary of the doctor's visit.

“Well, I'm glad to hear it's not
too
grave.”

Picking up his cutlery, Igor says nothing. He allows her to pour him some wine.

“With Catherine not here, do we still need to say grace?” Coco has been startled recently by the ritual of a prayer before each meal.

Igor becomes complicit. “Fine by me.” But he feels treacherous as he says it, both to Catherine and to his own deep-rooted sense of faith. A primitive loyalty stirs within him, an infant possessiveness. Something wooden in his grin alerts Coco to his discomfort.

She glances at the children. It means little to them. They speak Russian mostly, except when rehearsing their courtesies in a highly trained fashion to Mademoiselle Chanel. Igor chivvies them into delivering their pleases and thank-yous and insists they hold their knives and forks in the proper way. If only it were the same during the day, Coco reflects. Without any discipline from their mother they just run wild, bickering and squabbling and making a racket. Meanwhile Igor seems largely oblivious of their needs. So they constantly come to her, interrupting
her
work. And she's just as busy, if not more so, than him.

Generously, though not without regard for herself, she has engaged a local governess to tutor them for the summer. The truth is, someone has to control and look after them. And it's not going to be her!

She tucks into her starter of chicory and Gruyère. There is a silence before she throws at Igor, “So, you like it here?”

Shuffling off his discomfort: “I do, yes. Very much.”

“But you prefer St. Petersburg.”

There she is, at him again. There's no letup with her. “Not necessarily. I'm fonder of it now, though, than I've ever been.”

“Now that you can't go there?”

The delay occasioned by his sipping the wine adds emphasis to his response. “Exactly.”

“But your wife misses it terribly, doesn't she?”

Setting down his glass, he composes his fingers about the stem. Since arriving at Bel Respiro he realizes how, intimidated by Coco's sociability, Catherine has withdrawn into her own shy world. He can't blame her, though. He feels intimidated himself.

“It must be hard for her here.”

“Yes.” He looks down at his plate.

“And the children?”

“Children adapt. They always do.” His gaze switches to the four of them. Seeking out the innocent spaces behind their eyes, he experiences another reflex of guilt. As he looks, bits of Catherine leap out from their features like strands of color in a rug.

But slowly, like his children, Igor grows more relaxed and animated, more comfortable with himself again. Coco responds. They both talk of their ambitions and warm to their themes. She wants to democratize women's fashion. He wants to redefine musical taste. They speak with vigor and conviction, finding a common loathing of fussiness and luxuriance. She hates frills and furbelows, ruches and puffing. He pours scorn on the empty decorativeness of recent music, its syrupy rhythms and glutinous tunes.

She's determined not to be outdone. Her work is just as much an art form as his, she considers. And if God didn't clothe us the first time around, she thinks, then it takes a second act of creation to put that right.

She tells him how she likes working with jersey. Given the unavailability of most fabrics after the war, the thing about jersey is, it's cheap, stretchy, and practical to wear. You can be simple and chic at the same time, she says. If you can't walk and dance in a dress then what's the point of wearing it? And if the textile seems inferior, then you can always embellish it with embroidery or beads, with films of lace or tassels. All you need do is add a neckerchief to see how the simplest of outfits might be transformed.

Igor recalls what Diaghilev said about her, but she's convincing him. She's making sense. He listens to her intently. It's not only what she's saying, though, it's her manner he finds compelling. That wide mouth, the inflection of her gestures, the dark sweetness of her eyes.

She's looking for a new simplicity in her designs, she says. Unadorned clean lines, a more masculine cut. She wants to know why it is that men get all the comfortable clothes. “Isn't it time that women had clothes designed for them by other women, instead of being packaged like Easter eggs?” Women aren't ornaments, she reasons; they are human beings. “They need to be free to move, and at the moment that means taking away. It's a matter of subtracting and subtracting until you've pared a dress down to the fit of a woman's body. Is that so hard to understand?”

He admires the passion of her arguments. He's never met a woman like her before. There's something absolutely feminine about her, yet with a new confidence, a new sense of independence. He likes that, though it frightens him slightly. It's as if her sexuality surrounds her like a shape he can almost see.

Having stuffed themselves with meat and cheeses, the children are excused. Coco and Igor talk on about their work.

“I rarely begin on paper,” Igor says. “I almost always compose at the piano. I need to touch the music, to feel it rise between my hands.”

“The same with me. I find it hard to work from sketches. I'd far rather start on a model directly. And I always begin with the material handy. I have to shape and feel it first.”

This need for direct contact in their work establishes a braid in their relationship and knits their conversation together. There is a shared commitment and dedication that allows them to connect. To connect, but also to compete.

Igor drinks almost a whole bottle of burgundy, while Coco consumes several glasses herself. They argue about who works hardest. Igor contends that he starts much earlier, while some days she's not even up until noon. She counters that she works until the early evening, whereas he frequently stops in midafternoon. They become eager to outdo one another in the hours that they put in.

As he drinks, he hears her voice bubble up warmly toward him. The overlapping sensation of the wine and her buoyant talk makes him feel heady. A thought strikes him. He hears some inner prompt. The sentence escapes his lips before he's fully conscious of delivering it.

“Misia told me about Arthur Capel.” Immediately he feels he's overreached.

There's a catch in her voice as she answers. “She did?” She seems stunned, disbelieving. “She told you about him, really?” Her face becomes a mask, her voice suddenly small. “Everyone called him
Boy
.”

“You must have loved him.” He surprises himself again.

She gathers herself. “He betrayed me.”

“Oh?”

Shot through with bitterness, her voice nevertheless remains calm. “Without telling me, he married an aristocrat. English. Someone with better credentials,” she adds acidly. “And then he died.” As though reexperiencing the grief in accelerated time, her mood is propelled through desolation, numbness, and anger within a few seconds. A tear starts in the corner of her eye.

“I'm sorry.”

“A car crash.” Her eyes darken as if dipped in shadow. “He was always in too much of a hurry.”

Her heart falls through the silence that follows. She feels the wine go flat inside her. Something drags at the corners of her mouth. As if in a trance, she volunteers, “When he died, I had my bedroom painted all in black, with black sheets and black curtains. I wanted to put the whole world into mourning for him.” She looks up at him stonily. “He was the beat of my heart for nine years, and now he's gone. I can't stand it.”

He reaches across and puts his hand on hers. A gesture of consolation, heartfelt and humane.

Her fingers respond minutely. She feels the hairs on his fingers brush her palm. The metal of his ring surprises her with its coolness. “I was nothing before him. He made me. But you know something? I paid him back, every penny. I built the business by myself.”

There is a softness and depth to their glances that melts the space between them.

Her free hand plays with a napkin ring.

Joseph enters to ask if they want coffee. Shocked to find someone else present in the room, their hands spring apart. Igor rapidly finds his glass. Until this instant, they've been unaware of how well they are getting on. With this recognition, each seems to withdraw a little. The previous uneasiness renews itself. Some dim impulse tells them both, simultaneously, to take out a cigarette. And no, they don't want coffee, thank you.

Joseph retires. Igor snaps a match from a packet given as a souvenir in some Swiss hotel. He has to strike it twice before it lights. Coco moves her head forward. With the cigarette in her mouth, her face presses into his vision. The tobacco flares. She leans back. Smoke rises over the table in simple loops and threads.

She says, “It would just keep me awake all night.”

A rim of lipstick appears like a wound at the end of her cigarette.

Igor says, “Me, too.”

Coco knocks softly on Catherine's bedroom door. After a short pause, a weak “Come in” issues from inside. She enters, wary of transgression, holding the door as she peeps in.

The room is stuffy. The curtains are half closed. The air has an odor of stale sweat and sickness. Prolonged notes from the piano lap about the house from downstairs. “It's only me,” Coco says.

Raising her head from the pillow, Catherine says, “Yes, come in.” Music manuscripts are spread about the bed, filled with her careful annotations.

Coco draws a chair close to the bed. She looks at Catherine. Her face, she notices, is thin and sallow. Her cheeks are wastingly pale and drawn. Her eyes have a swollen look, lending her a permanently startled expression. Shadows of emaciation darken the skin beneath. No sooner has her head sunk back than she needs to sit up again to suppress a fit of coughing. The hard, dry rattling sound makes Coco shiver. It reminds her of the shuttles in a textile mill.

Catherine recovers sufficiently to be dismayed by her appearance. She makes an attempt to straighten her hair, which is wheat-pale and damp on one side where she has been sleeping.

Coco asks, “Can I get you a glass of water?”

“I have one here already.”

Automatically she reaches across the table for her glass. The water is tepid and flat with few bubbles. She takes several ineffectual sips then sets it down.

“I'm sorry you haven't been well recently.”

Catherine detects a laziness, an air of duty about Coco's visit. She says, “I'm sorry, too.”

There is a sharpness to the response that makes Coco sit up and concentrate. She quickly revises an impression of her as pathetic. Catherine doesn't suffer fools gladly, she can see. She's a serious woman, and learned. Books surround her bed: poetry and novels, and volumes of theology. Her French is better than Igor's, too, Coco notices—more fluent and less affected. As a student, she spent three years in Paris. But Coco can't shake the impression that her intellect has been won at the expense of vitality and life. Coco hates sickness in people and is slow to tolerate their ills. If she's honest with herself, it's also got something to do with class. Coco sees in Catherine the anemia of the upper orders, the thinness of blue blood, the weakness of an aristocracy that has had its arrogance exposed.