Mademoiselle Chanel

by C. W. Gortner

  I turned and went into the living room. I was quivering, digging my fingers into my palms as I heard him follow me. “Nothing needs to change,” he said. “It’s not about us. I’ll still be stationed in Paris most of the time as part of my assignment, and we can—”

  “It’s a good thing I rented an apartment, don’t you think?” I spun to him so fast that he took a faltering step back. “I’ll move out as soon as I can.”

  “That’s not necessary. I always intended for this apartment to be yours.”

  “No.” I moved away from him to the sofa, where I fumbled with my cigarette case. “I think it is necessary. Imperative, in fact.” I could hear myself speaking but it sounded like another woman’s voice—an icy woman with acrid smoke in her lungs, who had no stake in this life we had built together. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  His sigh was disconsolate. “You see? This is what I feared. I will lose you.”

  “You should have thought about that before you became engaged to the aristocratic lady with three names,” I retorted. I made myself sit, curling my legs under me and yanking a nearby shawl over them. All of a sudden, I was freezing, as though I would never feel warmth again.

  He returned to the bedroom. A few moments later, he emerged with his leather travel valise, shouldering his coat. I didn’t move a muscle, watching him turn to the door to walk out, for all I knew, forever. Then he paused. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said.

  I remained coiled on the sofa in silence as he pulled open the door and left.

  It took all of my strength to rise, pad into the bedroom on my numb bare feet, and fling open his closet door. As I stared at his racks of trousers, the shirts and folded sweaters he had left, as if he’d departed for one of his extended trips, I thought of fetching my scissors again, only this time I’d savage everything he owned. When he eventually came back—for he would come back, though I didn’t know when—he would find my disdain had shredded his clothes.

  Instead, I found myself reaching for a faded beige pullover almost hidden under the others, the one I’d first tried on when he brought it from England, its soft drape enveloping me with possibilities. I brought it to my face tentatively, with shaking hands. It smelled faintly of him, of his sweat from playing polo and a trace of his lemon-scented aftershave.

  But it smelled more like me.

  Cradling it in my arms, I stumbled to the bed and lay down, closing my eyes. This is the last time I will cry over him, I told myself. The very last time I let him or any other man surprise or confound me. Never again. Never, I swore, as long as I lived.

  I did not sleep. Nor, to my surprise, did I cry.

  There were not enough tears to fill the chasm inside me.

  V

  I moved into my new apartment as German resistance to the Allied juggernaut crumbled and the kaiser sued for a humiliating armistice. All of Paris took to the streets, cracking champagne bottles over the Pont Neuf, dancing on tabletops, and honking horns as they roared ten to a car down the Champs-Élysées. Later, there would be sober reflection, as news of the final death toll reached over two million in France alone, not to mention countless others in the Allied forces. The northeastern part of the country lay ravaged, and Germany left, contained, yet seething.

  I saw and heard it all as if I dwelled under glass. I had brought to the apartment only my clothes, toiletries, and Coromandel screens. Everything else, I left behind. Misia clucked and fussed over me. She wanted me to employ live-in servants to look after me: “I’ll give you my butler, Joseph, and his wife, Marie; they have a lovely little girl, Suzanne. Sert wants to bring a family he’s known since childhood from Catalonia to serve us and we don’t need two butlers and two maids in the house.”

  I declined. I was at the atelier most of the time and all I required was a day maid to keep things in order. I didn’t want potential spies of Misia’s poking around in my affairs. Instead, she brought me two hideous statues of blackamoors on marble plinths to decorate my entryway. I hated them but curbed my tongue, though I longed to ask her what was the point of getting rid of that monstrous Buddha if she was going to clutter up my apartment with objets d’art that resembled something from a rummage sale?

  Frankly, she could have brought me that stuffed rhinoceros I always teased her about and I wouldn’t have cared. It took all the strength I had to set up my bedroom and living space so that I could abide living there, and attend to my work at the atelier, which I was moving to my new building at 31 rue Cambon.

  “In with the new and out with the old,” Misia was fond of declaring as the war ground to a halt. The peace conferences summoned diplomats, generals, and ambassadors to Paris, along with their mistresses, daughters, and wives—all of whom had heard about my shop and crowded there to gossip, flaunt their men’s achievements and insignias, and buy everything I had to sell.

  The glamorous life resumed, though without its prior staid opulence. Those days were gone forever, blown apart with the lives of so many young men. Now, a frenetic gaiety overtook us, a joie de vivre that preceded the scintillating percussion of jazz. Hordes of ambitious writers, artists, and musicians who had survived the war became enraptured with Paris, and sought to make their names in the city that never slept.

  It was a time to prosper, particularly for me. My daring silhouettes matched the times. Women could no longer abide confinement. After tending the putrid wounds of soldiers, serving gruel, driving ambulances and streetcars, they sought freedom in self-expression and attire. I began to present my collections on actual models, the dummies banished to storage. My clothes had never looked right on dummies anyway; they required a woman to embody them. My live models showed clients how my dresses draped from the shoulders, cut with extra length to eliminate folds between the buttocks; how my coats were layered to flow with the stride, and how my hats complemented the new bobbed hairstyle that, like everything else, was a result of the war, long tresses being ill-suited to disinfecting bedpans.

  Everyone wanted a Chanel creation, from my lounge pajamas to my cardigans and twinsets, my coats and blouses with matching linings. My tea gowns of jet-beaded Chantilly lace and black velvet capes trimmed with ostrich were the height of style; I woke up one morning to discover I had become truly famous, the principal couturière for fashion-forward women. That bastion of fashion Paul Poiret had returned to his atelier having spent the war designing soldier uniforms. He reverted to his prodigal style, offering leopard-trimmed coats and gowns with epaulettes, but his fame was fading. He failed to adjust to the fast-paced world around him, bursting with vitality and disregard for everything that carried a hint of the old guard. I had other competitors, too, such as the dressmaker Madeleine Vionnet, whose exquisite bias-cut evening wear modeled on Grecian sheaths were works of art but inordinately expensive, reserved for the highest echelons of society. I respected her craft, and in time would translate it for my own collections, but we kept an implicit distance from each other, not poaching on our respective clientele, two women intent on conquest without stepping on each other’s hem.

  Instead, my clothes bridged the exclusive and the commonplace. I often told my clients that women believed luxury was the opposite of poverty, when in fact it was the opposite of vulgarity. “Simplicity,” I said, “is true elegance. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well dressed. Her clothing should be seen only after she herself is.”

  They flocked to my call, so that it appeared I did not work at all, when in truth I worked harder than ever to maintain the illusion that success was effortless. A woman who toiled was still déclassé. It would take several years of the war’s aftermath to truly challenge the restrictions that prevented us from making a living as anything other than seamstresses, actresses, or whores.

  But I no longer minded the caustic whispers of “She’s a tradeswoman, you know.” The tradeswoman they flattered in my salon and denigrated behind my back now commanded more influence and had more wealth than the majority of those I dressed�
��and we all knew it.

  OLD FRIENDS RETURNED in the wake of my separation from Boy. Among the first was Balsan, who had enlisted and narrowly escaped death. He looked haggard but said he was fine; he brought Émilienne with him. Her era, too, was over, that of the grand courtesans enshrined in Dumas’s popular novel and Verdi’s opera. She’d married and divorced one of Balsan’s jockeys, and engaged in torrid affairs, still a lady about town but florid now, with her forty-nine years showing. She was as affectionate as ever, embracing me in her fleshy arms and whispering, “Mon coeur, how thin you are. He left you a rag, that foolish Englishman.”

  I didn’t like hearing about him. I didn’t want to know. He was in France, attending the peace talks; I heard his name mentioned often, if never by me. I didn’t even heed the news of his wedding. Within the month, Misia took glee in informing me that his wife, Diana, was pregnant.

  Again, I refrained from comment. I behaved before all as if he no longer existed.

  Balsan sensed my resolve and did not say a word, bringing me a bouquet of yellow roses he said he’d cut in the gardens of Royallieu. I introduced him to Misia and Sert, to Cocteau, Picasso, and Diaghilev. They adored his bonhomie, his gargantuan capacity for women and drink, the casual way he carried his stupendous wealth (his textile-driven family, like me, had amassed a fortune from the war). He invested in Diaghilev’s latest ballet and prompted me to do the same. He bought a few of Picasso’s paintings; when he heard that Stravinsky wanted to send for his wife and daughter from the chaos of Russia, he cajoled me into helping him set up a fund.

  I found it painful that the man I had never loved could be so readily accepted into the bohemian world where I moved, while the man I adored was considered an intransigent outsider.

  I consoled myself that it was over. Much as I loved Boy, much as I suffered in the solitude of the night, he was someone I must consign to the past.

  How wrong I was.

  VI

  The end began with the defection of Antoinette.

  It was 1919, the first year when we were no longer at war. The spring and summer had been hectic, as I shuttled between my shops in Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz. I barely had time to see friends, prompting Misia to threaten to disown me. Business came first, and it was all I could do to keep up. I was preparing to launch my first official collection of evening wear. In order to find some measure of peace, away from Misia’s insistent telephone calls and unannounced appearances, I rented a villa in the hills of Saint-Cloud outside Paris, where the fresh air and gardens, and an efficient anonymous staff, could tend to my frayed nerves.

  In truth, I also made the decision to rent the villa in order to escape any chance of running into Boy after we collided unexpectedly in a restaurant. He accosted me as I emerged from the powder room even as his pretty, pregnant wife sat at his table with their English friends. Seizing me by my arm, he yanked me into a corner, his breath rank with liquor as he hissed, “Will you avoid me forever? I thought this was a passing fancy of yours and by now we could go back to being who we were.”

  I took an icy glance at his hand, not speaking until he removed it. He did not look at all well. He had gained more weight than I was used to seeing on his spare frame; his skin was mottled and eyes bloodshot. There was an air of dissipation about him, a loss of that confidence that had attracted me to him, and I said firmly, so he could not fail to understand, “Who we were no longer exists. You are married. You have a child on the way. My passing fancy, as you call it, was that you might come to your senses. You did not.”

  “Coco, please.” His voice ruptured. As he gazed at me in anguish, I thought he might actually start to weep. “Don’t do this. I love you. I will always love you. I had to marry for my family, because it is what’s expected of me. If I had known I would end up losing you, I never would have done it. I swear I would have married you instead.”

  I hadn’t believed it could get any worse. I had taken cold comfort in the fact that as much as it hurt, the sharp hook of it was behind me. I had my work, my friends; I had my life. But as he uttered those words, I remembered him telling me pride would make me suffer and I longed to shriek that had he only bothered to ask, just once, I might have said yes. I might have married him and borne his children.

  Instead, laughter escaped me—a cruel mockery that drained the flush from his skin. “You think I ever cared about being your wife? You think I want to be your property, your possession, beholden to hunting parties and decorating the manor while you gallivant about? It is better this way. This way, we had something beautiful that no one can take from me, not even you. Go back to what is expected. I don’t love you anymore.”

  I pushed past him and stalked away, grabbing my fur wrap off the chair as Misia and Cocteau, with whom I’d been dining, flung money onto the table to cover the check, and hurried after me. As I stormed from the restaurant, I passed his wife at her table. She gave me a pitying look that only enraged me more. She clearly knew who I was.

  “The nerve of the man!” Misia declared while I signaled for my car. “I saw him follow you when you went to the toilet. He wants you back, doesn’t he?”

  Cocteau murmured, “Misia, stop it. Can’t you see she’s upset?”

  “Of course she’s upset! He upset her. Coco, darling, come. Let us—”

  I whirled to her as my chauffeur halted my car at the curb. “Leave me alone,” I said in a dead-calm voice. She blanched. “All of you, just leave me alone, damn you.”

  I rented the villa shortly thereafter. Misia implored my forgiveness—a rarity for her, which only proved how much she loved me, or so Cocteau said when he came to visit. It was that afternoon, as we drank coffee on my veranda, that he told Misia’s secret. “She’s ruthless and treacherous, never more so than when she thinks you’re hers, but I know she’s disconsolate at your estrangement. And she’s not well herself. She hasn’t been for years.”

  “Not well?” I snorted. “I know she has some aches and pains, but it’s entirely her fault. She eats too much. She and Sert both—they live like elephants.”

  Cocteau tittered, always game for a bit of degradation at someone else’s expense. “It’s not the meals that will kill her.” He leaned to me. “She’s a lotus eater, has been ever since her days as Lautrec’s muse. He introduced her to it. He used it to ease the pain in his legs.”

  I had heard the expression before. “She takes laudanum?” I said in disbelief. I’d never seen Misia act intoxicated, though I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t as if I was versed in the signs.

  He nodded, clearly delighted we now shared a secret entre nous. “Laudanum, if that’s all there is, which there always is. Opium or morphine when she can get it. The war has helped. They used barrels of the stuff to ease the pain when they had to amputate. Now, it’s practically free on the black market. She only does it at home or when she has to attend a function she detests; she was on it the night you met her at her house. Couldn’t you tell?” He rolled his eyes, as if I had fallen out of a pear tree in the middle of Paris. “Coco, don’t be so naive. It’s quite common; all the artists and writers use it. How do you think Misia’s beloved Pablo came up with those horrendous sets for Diaghilev?”

  “Have you . . . ?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  “On occasion, yes, when the mood suits. But I’m careful. You have to respect the lotus. She’s not a lady you want to invite too often.” He laughed. “Just like Misia!”

  I didn’t probe further. I had thought he was the only one I could abide, for at least he had shown some sensitivity after my encounter with Boy, but after that afternoon, I didn’t want to see him, Misia, or anyone else if I could avoid it. I was sorry for her. Any addiction except to work terrified me, but I had too much to contend with. Hundreds of people depended on me for their salaries, and so I imposed a punishing schedule, pushing everything and everyone aside, even as I kept hearing over again in my mind, Pride will make you suffer.

  Now I stood in the salon of rue C
ambon after a grueling trip from Biarritz, confronted by forlorn Adrienne and my sister Antoinette, who defiantly informed me she was engaged to marry Oscar Fleming.

  “Who?” I had to search my memory. “Oh, is he that Canadian airman? But you’ve only known each other a few months. Honestly, Antoinette. Do you even know where Canada is?”

  “He loves me.” She squared her jaw in an unsettling reflection of my own. “He wants me to be his wife and move with him to Ontario. He says he comes from an excellent family, and if I want, I can open a salon there to sell your clothes.”

  I threw my coat aside, and searched my crammed travel bag for my cigarettes. Lighting one with my new Cartier gold lighter, an extravagance I’d permitted myself while in Biarritz, I exhaled smoke in her face, making her cough. “You’re insane. How many of these foreign airmen and soldiers have proposed to silly French girls since the war ended? I’ll wager your Mr. Fleming has a dozen like you all over this city, packing up their trousseaus to move to Ontario, wherever that may be.”

  Antoinette took a step back out of the cloud of smoke and derision I blew in her direction. “Well, I’m going to marry him whether you approve or not. Just because you’re miserable because Boy didn’t marry you doesn’t mean the rest of us must be miserable, too.”

  She ran upstairs, leaving me alone with Adrienne. She started to say, “Gabrielle, she’s thirty. This might be her last chance for a husband and children. Don’t you think she deserves—”

  I cut her off with an impatient flick of my hand, stubbing my cigarette out on the sole of my shoe. “Don’t you start. If she wants to go to Ontario to be a stranger’s wife, fine. Let her go.” I glanced at her as she lowered her eyes. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Adrienne, stop looking as if the world were coming to an end. We already had one war and survived it. And put some ashtrays in here.” I tossed the butt onto the pristine counter. “Women can smoke in public now. Where are our clients supposed to extinguish their cigarettes? On my hats?”