While the piano sounds in one room, the snip of scissors undoes the stitching of a dress in the other. While a pencil dangles sideways from Igor’s lips, Coco toils away down the corridor with pins between her teeth. While Igor presses the pedals of the piano, Coco works the treadle of her sewing machine. Both mutter to themselves inaudibly as they go on.
The third night of their stay in Bel Respiro, Igor and Catherine sit with Coco in the living room drinking tea. Outdoors, cicadas charge the darkness. An owl floats its long mournful notes across the woods.
Igor is particular about his tea. He likes it very weak and very hot. An antidote to his usual vodka. He is explaining to Coco the battles fought with successive neighbors over his playing the piano.
“One man used to beat the ceiling with a stick until the landlord complained about his damaging the plaster. Another threw pinecones at my windows, and even smashed one of them.”
“It can be unsociable, dear,” Catherine says. The couple exchange a look, hinting at the tolerance that obtains in their relationship.
Coco says, “Well, here you can play as loudly as you want!”
Suddenly the door swings open and in walks Milène. She has awoken in a strange room, terrified, not remembering where she is. Worse, in her fright, the bedroom furniture has taken on a nightmarish presence: a chair in silhouette has swollen into an ogre; a lamp shade has become a giant spider; and a nightgown on the back of the door has assumed the proportions of a headless ghost. Bravely she has made her way along the unfamiliar corridor, heard the voices of her mother and father downstairs, and come into the room. As she enters and sees her parents, she flashes them a look full of hurt, mixed with relief at having found them.
“Oh, darling!” Catherine stands up, opening her arms wide for Milène to run into. “What’s wrong?”
Coco says, “The poor thing! She’s obviously disoriented.”
Milène says nothing. She’s too frightened even to cry. Her face is frozen in a mute appeal for love and reassurance.
Igor walks over to his daughter. He bends down to address her at her own eye level. Stroking her hair gently, he says,
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. Mama and Papa are here. And Coco, too.”
“There’s no need to be afraid,” offers Coco. “This is your home now for a while.”
The little girl’s expression softens. Her eyes glimmer with light from a nearby lamp. Leaning toward her, Igor says, “Everything will be all right.”
Catherine whispers, “I’ll put her back to bed now.”
“No,” the child says.
“Come on, we’ll read a book.”
Milène pleads, “Can’t I stay down here for a while?”
With gentle firmness: “No. It’s very late now. It’s time for bed.”
“Yes, and you’ll need your sleep because tomorrow is going to be very exciting. We’re going to play lots of new games in the garden, and you’ll need plenty of energy if you want to keep up.” Coco pumps her arms up and down athletically to illustrate.
Milène recognizes this for the sop that it is, but seems happy to go along with it.
“Now kiss Papa good night.”
Milène hugs her father. Squeezing her tight, Igor administers a tender kiss on her forehead. “Good night,” he says. “And give Coco a kiss, too, and say thank you for letting us stay here.”
“Thank you, Coco,” chants the child.
“That’s quite all right.”
“Now, young lady, up to bed. Come on.” As Milène opens the door to leave, Catherine pauses at the doorway. “I’ll retire now, too, if you don’t mind,” she says. “I’m very tired. Good night.”
She hasn’t felt well the last couple of days. She trusts her husband will follow. Though she’s not jealous by nature, she doesn’t like leaving the two of them alone.
Igor says, “I’ll be up soon.”
“Good night,” echoes Coco musically.
Catherine leaves the room, clutching her reluctant daughter’s hand. She still has her doubts about the situation here. There’s something not quite right about the place. She feels it instinctively. All the carpets are new, the furniture is modern, and everything is spotless. The smell of fresh paint is everywhere; even the grass looks immaculate. Yet it doesn’t feel real somehow. It seems to her as if she’s living in a stage set, and she half expects at any moment the audience to reveal itself. Still, it has always been her habit to reserve judgment, so she agrees with herself to give it time.
Igor and Coco remain, listening to the pattering footsteps of the child and the more solemn steps of her mother as they drift up the stairs. Between them, the cat stretches its rough tongue in a yawn.
“She’s a lovely girl.”
He looks up. “She is.”
“You must be very proud.”
In the silence that follows, the note of the cicadas seems to rise a semitone. Having returned to his chair, Igor adjusts the newspaper’s slippery leaves across his lap. The print in front of him starts to swim. He is conscious of Coco’s presence like a massy object on the other side of the room. She seems closer than she was before, as though his chair has been tugged toward her. He feels suddenly uncomfortable and is aware of his wife now waiting upstairs. He sets the newspaper down and folds it with unnecessary neatness. Then with equal formality he finishes his tea and announces that he, too, is going to bed.
“Good night,” he says. A sense of challenge informs his voice. A muscle twitches on the right side of his face.
Her eyes tilt up toward him, catching the lamplight shallowly. She leans her head sideways, shifting her weight in the chair. Something about her look unnerves him. Boldly he meets her gaze.
“Good night,” she says.
Her voice is husky, rough-textured, like velvet brushed the wrong way. The pitch of it sticks with him as he goes on up to bed; as his head hits the pillow; as his mind begins to generate the nonsense of his dreams.
CHAPTER SIX
Igor sits at the piano, penciling in corrections. Sheets of music are propped high on a board above the keys. With head held intently and glasses pushed up onto his brow, he resembles a cardsharp or racing driver: a man who might take risks.
Constantly he juggles combinations of notes and plays with their durations. He’s after that arresting coincidence of sounds, that correspondence of tones that’s so thrilling it’s like someone piercing you with a needle between the ribs. He tries out different chord sequences, adjusting the position of his fingers until there’s a density of texture that seems sweet and difficult all at the same time. He finds the answers lie rarely in straightforward harmonies. The solutions are more slanted. They come at an angle and surprise you, so that what can sound at first discordant turns out to be penetratingly complex and superb.
There is a knock on the door of his study. He presumes it is Marie come to tidy. But no, it is Coco. Hurriedly he stands up. His glasses slip down his face, almost falling off his nose.
“Coco,” he says, resettling his spectacles.
“Just to let you know, I’ve arranged for a doctor to call upon your wife.”
“You’re very kind.” A respiratory ailment has laid her low in recent days. She wasn’t even well enough to go to church on Sunday.
“And don’t worry about the expense. I’ll attend to it.”
“No. You mustn’t.”
“Don’t be silly. You are my guests here. I can’t stand to see people ill under my roof.”
“It’s my responsibility. I’d feel insulted if you were to pay.”
“Nonsense. Consider the matter closed. He’ll be here this afternoon around three o’clock.” Igor makes to remonstrate, but Coco insists.
They both laugh uneasily. She’s aware that her tone is a bit schoolmistressy. At the same time, he knows how expensive doctors can be. He knows, too, that he could never afford to pay for any lengthy course of treatment. He feels the weight of Coco’s money tilt the balance of authority between them. Humbl
ed, he looks down. As he does so, he notices a hole in his shirt gape open, exposing the skin of his stomach beneath. A few dark hairs crinkle finely in the light.
She follows his gaze. “You’ve lost a button.”
He colors slightly and closes over his shirt.
“There it is!” Her eyes seem to bend around the piano in seeking it out. Reaching low, she picks up the button. “I’ll sew it back on for you.”
He can’t bring himself to argue again. “Thank you. I’ll leave it with Marie this afternoon.”
“I’m going out this afternoon. It’ll only take an instant. Come on, I’ll do it now.”
Slightly thrown by her urge to do things promptly, he blurts, “Well, give me a minute and I’ll go up and change.”
Startled by his formality, Coco is even more abrupt. “No need.” That toughness in her voice again. “You don’t even have to take off your shirt. Sit still, I’ll be back in a second.” Her dress whispers deliciously to him as she leaves the room.
Discomposed, Igor feels the need to assert himself more. But each time he speaks to her, his resolution melts. He finds himself constantly disarmed by her frankness. He removes his glasses and wipes them clean with the tail of his shirt. It is then he realizes his hands are trembling.
Coco returns, bearing a small tan packet of needles and some thread. “Face the light,” she says. She wets the thread with the tip of her tongue and pokes it through the needle’s eye.
Obediently he turns to the window. The light crowds his white shirt, making it transparent. Igor stands, shyly immobile as she attends to the button at his waist. With his arms lifted and his head raised high, he feels the ceiling close above him.
Coco senses the squat musculature stiffen beneath his shirt. For a small man, he is impressively athletic. It is her turn to hesitate. She plies her needle with quick hands, drawing the thread out tightly and working the point in briskly through the seam. A little too briskly, for she pricks her finger. Pain blooms inside her. She curses as the room turns red beneath her lids.
Igor recoils, dropping his arms and looking down. “What’s wrong?”
She shoots her finger between her lips. Flared, her eyes reflect the whiteness of his shirt.
A sudden tenderness wells within him. He has to suppress an impulse to take that vulnerable finger and heal it inside his mouth. Then, with a spasm of courtesy, he remembers himself. He says, “Here, take this handkerchief.”
“It’s nothing.” A bubble of blood oozes up. Further proof for him, if proof were needed, of how full of life she is. She tamps it with the handkerchief, covered now with a pattern of small red stars. “I’m sorry. That was careless of me.”
“Are you all right?”
An attraction flashes between them. Unspoken and remote, perhaps, but as real and clear as the button she sews back on to his shirt. Igor feels an obscure queasiness in his belly, as though he has just eaten seafood. An undertow of longing pulls at him. The sting of the needle in her finger has quickened the heat in his blood.
“Of course. Let me finish off.”
Before he can protest, she’s back at work. The button hangs limply by its crimped string from the hole. Raising his arms again, he looks down. Her hair is tied in a bun above a white turndown collar. He can smell the lye soap, ubiquitous in the bathrooms, rise from the back of her neck. He can feel the pressure of her hand against his chest.
She says, “Here, hold this.”
He puts his finger against the button as she ties a knot around it.
“Now let go.”
He releases his finger and the button is secured. Unthinkingly she snaps the thread with her teeth. She leans back, inspecting the finished article.
“There!” Coco’s mouth broadens into a smile, forcing a dimple into her left cheek, a puckered shape almost like the beginnings of a second mouth. She gathers up her needle and thread and makes to leave then turns around, recalling why she came in the first place. “So he’ll be here around three. I’ll be out having my hair cut. Joseph will show him in.”
Conscious of having thanked her enough already, he merely nods. He remains standing, listening to her steps grow fainter down the hall. Cut again! Her hair is boyishly short as it is, he thinks.
Then he sits down. He places his glasses back on his forehead, picks up his pencil, and returns to work. His hands, widely spaced, make different shapes on the piano. There’s a sudden roundness to the sounds, a richness to the tones, a fatness to the harmonies. Reaching up to the board above the keys, he changes a minim into a crotchet by filling it in.
With his thick index finger and thumb, the doctor draws the skin of Catherine’s eyelids up. Her corneas roll, revealing a filigree of broken blood vessels across the whites of her eyes.
As she breathes deeply in and out, he listens with a stethoscope to her chest. Then she sits up from her bank of pillows while he taps and listens from the back. She submits in silence to his repertory of tests, conscious of the labored operation of her lungs. She feels them wheeze like a squeeze box as the air snags before being expelled and wonders for a moment what he must hear. She watches for his reaction, but he gives little away. In fact, he barely looks at her. He removes the stethoscope from around his neck and winds the tube around his hand. Stout, with an olive complexion and an abundance of dark hair, he is himself radiantly healthy. Who’d trust a doctor that was anything but?
No deep furrows mark his forehead, Catherine notices. Nothing has worked to disturb the smoothness of his brow. He has never suffered any life-unsettling wrench, she thinks. Indeed, he has shrewdly restricted his constituency to that rim of the city where only the wealthy can afford to live. His practice has fattened happily with clients such as Chanel entrusting their medical welfare and expenses to him. Catherine’s own father was a country doctor. She knows the strains he had to endure in serving the poor of the town.
“Well?” Igor says. He moves toward a corner of the room to confer. Impatience colors his voice.
The doctor presses the stethoscope into his case. His look promises nothing. “The right lung is very weak,” he says, with an effort at frankness and loud enough for Catherine to hear. Her face falls exhaustedly back against the pillows. She resents these two dark-suited men talking about her health, as though she is not a real person with feelings and a certain purchase on her own life.
She is more alarmed than she cares to admit at the move to Bel Respiro. True, the fresh air and sunlight are undoubtedly good for her health, as Igor—and Coco—persuasively maintain. But what is she to make of the captivating Mademoiselle Chanel? Does she not have other, darker motives for inviting them here?
The exile from Russia has affected her more than it has Igor. He, at least, has his work to go on with. She has abandoned everything: her friends, her property, her sense of belonging. And the constant traveling has eroded her health. All that sustains her is a deep religious faith. That, and the love of her husband.
Turned to one side her eyes hold a reflection of the window and the sill tricked out with lilies. They seem suddenly malignant to her, these flowers: snake-tongued and venomous. And they stink. She doesn’t quite know why, but she feels contaminated in this room, in this godforsaken house. A sympathetic taste of acid coats her tongue. Watching a wedge of shadow darken the bed, she feels she wants to vomit.
Sensing his wife’s resentment, but fearful of what the doctor might have to say, Igor ushers him from the room. The two men descend the staircase and pause in the corridor at the bottom. Two bluebottles orbit a light fixture, buzzing dementedly in repeated squares.
The doctor’s tone is solemn. “Has she coughed up any blood?”
“Not recently.”
“Any history of that happening before?”
“She was mildly tubercular in her youth,” Igor concedes. “It came back after our youngest was born.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago . . .”
This seems to confirm a suspicion.
The doctor nods while biting his lip. “Well, she might be showing signs of that again.”
The angle of Igor’s shoulders communicates distress. “Is it serious?”
“She needs to be looked after.”
“Is there anything she should be doing?” He lifts a hand to his cheek, where his fingers begin stroking.
“Getting plenty of bed rest and fresh air. A little walking might be a good idea. Nothing too strenuous, you understand. Gentle but regular exercise. Also, she’s a bit on the thin side. She should eat a little more. She needs to build up her strength.”
“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.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Page 6
