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 secon
ds. 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.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
Her attitude is complicated, too, by the fact that, when she was eleven, she watched her own mother succumb agonizingly to consumption. Now part of her feels resentful that Catherine is so pampered, while her mother died with a quickness reserved for the lonely and impoverished.
An uneasiness exists between the two women, punctuated by the piano’s experimental chords down below. This uneasiness is quickened by the friendship Coco so obviously enjoys with Igor. Catherine doesn’t believe in friendships between members of the opposite sex. In the end, they’re either fraudulent or erotic, she thinks. Aside from Igor, whom she likes to think of as her best friend, she’s never enjoyed a meaningful friendship with another man. She likes Diaghilev, of course, but that’s different. He prefers men, anyway.
The two women’s eyes slide over one another. Oil on water.
“The doctor did say, remember, that you must get some fresh air.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to open the window?”
Catherine hesitates. This is the first time they have been alone together. And there is something about the act, she feels, that grants Coco a kind of power. Instinctively she distrusts her, finding her sly. Yet, despite herself, she wants to like her—and be liked. There’s a charisma about the woman that’s undeniable. She recognizes that. Again, she tries to fluff out her thin hair.
“Yes,” she says.
Coco rises from her chair. She pulls back the curtains fully and pushes at the window. It is sticky with humidity. Catherine was unable to open it earlier. But with a firm shove it gives, and the window opens wide. A warm breath of air enters and diffuses through the room. The curtains flutter gauzily, the manuscripts stir on the bed, and the edge of Catherine’s hair lifts. She winces at the light.
Coco declares, “That’s better.”
“Yes,” Catherine says, intimidated all the more by the note of decision in Coco’s voice.
“The sun gives you energy.”
But the sun mocks Catherine in the goodness and health it administers. Coco sits down, uncrosses then recrosses her legs. During an awkward silence, the piano repeats a difficult phrase.
Catherine stares at the bedclothes. Her throat is dry, but she resists reaching for her water again. She knows it will communicate weakness.
She is aware of Coco’s origins—her illegitimacy, her orphan status—and admires the ferocious energy she must have drawn upon to claw her way up. But she also fears that energy and how it might be used against her. She feels, in her presence, as though she’s in the path of a tornado.
On an impulse, Coco rises again and moves toward the wardrobe. “Do you mind if I look at some of your clothes?”
The request surprises Catherine. It seems presumptuous. But Coco moves with such fleetness, she feels overwhelmed. It comes as another reminder that they are living here thanks to her charity. This is her house. It is she who pays the doctor, she who pays the bills. What can she, Catherine, do? Refuse? A sense of obligation weighs upon her chest and constricts her airways even more. Her voice is thin as she says, “Of course.”
Coco tugs open the wardrobe doors. A sweet, musty smell escapes. For Catherine any sense of privacy melts away. Revealed are all her things. She feels almost violated, so intimate is the act.
Most of her clothes are fussy formal gowns and dresses: heavy, old-fashioned things. Mostly winter wear, and not too much that is appropriate for summer. There are a few gypsy-type shirts with flounces; a series of fur outfits, including shirts with fur collars; and a large number of skirts.
“Most of them are too big for me now.”
“I like this,” Coco says, pulling out one of the simpler
skirts with a bell-trumpet design. She inspects the embroidery around the hem.
“Oh,” is all Catherine can manage. “It’s just some peasant thing.” She thinks for a moment that Coco is teasing, but her interest seems sincere. “I got it in St. Petersburg before we left.”
“I like it,” Coco repeats, removing it from the hanger and holding it against herself.
Catherine watches as she flourishes the skirt around the waist of her blue dress. “I’m glad,” she says.
Coco, though, doesn’t seem to listen. Deaf to any condescension, she picks out something else. “And this is wonderful, too,” she says, holding up a long belted blouse in wool with embroidered bands on collar and cuffs.
“That’s a roubachka,” Catherine says.
“A roubachka,” echoes Coco, determined to pronounce it right.
Catherine understands now Coco’s championing of inferior materials like jersey: in effect she’s promoting herself. “You can borrow it if you like,” she says.
This shocks Coco back into the present. “No, no. I didn’t mean . . .” Hastily she replaces the blouse, but continues to rummage undeterred. She takes out a few more things and holds them up. Each time, she elicits comments about their purchase and when and where Catherine has worn them.
Eventually Coco’s fingers, reaching deep, feel a quantity of tissue paper. She tugs the hanger along the rail until it is possible to squeeze it out. Catherine says nothing. Disturbed, a cream-colored moth staggers tipsily from the cupboard. Its lightness seems to infect Coco’s mood. She lifts out the hanger. The shape of a gown is concealed beneath opaque layers of paper.
Intrigued, she asks, “What have we here?” She peels off the tissue until the last couple of sere sheets reveal the crisp white silk of a wedding dress. Coco lifts it up for a moment. She sees what it is and stops. Of course, a wedding dress. She blanches.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Page 7
