Igor laughs. “And now?”
“After a war and a revolution, they should be ready for anything.”
Igor continues, breathless with excitement, and with a confiding if not quite confessional air, “I’m working well, Serge.”
“You’ve been busy?”
Igor tells him about the five-finger exercises, the concertino and symphony, how he’s experimenting with different tempi, different instruments operating in different time signatures, how he’s working on it in blocks, but that he wants to get on with The Rite now, and is desperate to revise the string parts, and has already amended the second horn group in his head.
A silence follows.
“How’s Catherine?”
Shrinking visibly: “Not too well still, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” After a pause, his voice deepening: “Have you been behaving yourself, Igor?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I’ve heard a couple of whispers, I must say.”
“Who from?”
“Never you mind.”
“It’s Misia, isn’t it?”
“It might be . . .”
“She’s a real snake-in-the-grass, that one!”
“She’s a generous patron.”
“She’s not to be trusted.”
“Never mind her. You just make the most of your time there, old boy.”
“You think it was Coco who donated the money?”
“I doubt it. She has other ways of supporting you.”
“Not you, too!”
“You should be happy. We’ve just received a huge donation.”
“I am happy.”
“Good.”
After setting the phone back on its cradle, Igor curses, “Misia. That bitch!”
Friday, Coco and Igor go to the races. Saturday, they can be seen together at Le Boeuf sur le Toit—a small bar in Montparnasse where a black band plays Mozart and jazz and the regulars dance on the tables. Monday, they rendezvous along with the Serts at the cinema in the center of Paris. They both enjoy watching films. They’ve already seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And tonight they have tickets for The Mark of Zorro.
Inside the cinema it is warm. The chairs are square and uncomfortable. Coco’s legs move away from some ache and come to rest against Igor’s. In the dark they feel an intimacy, a restfulness that contents them both. It’s good to get away from the house in the evenings, and away from their work, too. Here, together, they feel heedless and free.
The movie is exciting with plenty of action. Seeing Douglas Fairbanks perform his acrobatics makes Igor itch to rehearse his own exercises. His legs flex involuntarily with each new stunt.
He is struck, too, by the accompanist. A young man in his early twenties, he sits openmouthed in the pit, staring up at the screen in front of him. He accents the motion he sees, adding chromaticism to the black-and-white images as they drizzle across his face.
There is no question of any connecting music or bridging passages. The jumps are too abrupt. He needs to respond instantly to the visual effects. Igor nods with approval at the young man’s ingenuity, his precise sense of timing, his sensitivity to mood. But he winces at the flatness of the piano, especially in the higher registers. It seems almost to slow the action down. He wonders if the pianist has managed to rehearse, and has seen the film before, or whether the performance is genuinely spontaneous.
At the same time he’s galvanized by a moment on the screen: Zorro roughly embraces his woman, pulling her toward him with an encircling arm. The woman—blowsy, dark-haired, gypsyish—arches submissively as he bends low to deliver a kiss. Witnessing this, Igor feels a sweet ache, a remote throb of semiengorgement tighten inside his pants. He shifts awkwardly in his seat, surprised that the film has stirred him in this way. Coco guesses correctly the source of his unease. And with a note of throat clearing to cover his dismayed excitement, he allows her fingers for a few frank seconds to steal across his thigh.
Seeing this in the corner of her vision, Misia raises an eyebrow. A little later, she whispers to Coco, “I see things are going well.”
“Satisfactorily, thank you.” Coco nods, smiling.
Emerging from the cinema some time later, they are surprised to find it dark outside. The two couples head for a nearby bar. Seated at a table near the window, José and Igor discuss the film. José thinks Zorro improbably athletic. He argues that he couldn’t possibly throw himself about like that and survive. It is all camera trickery, he maintains. But Igor is convinced that the action is authentic. He has read somewhere that Fairbanks is a gymnast and that he performs all of his own stunts. They make a small wager.
Across from them, Coco tells Misia about her jaunt to Grasse to see Ernest Beaux and how she’s been busy this last week dispatching samples to clients. Then in whispering tones she updates her on the latest from Bel Respiro. Igor tries hard to listen. He resents Coco confiding in her and wishes she wouldn’t do this. He is more than a little concerned about the looseness of Misia’s tongue. She’s an incorrigible gossip. He hates the way she twists and distorts things. And if she has blabbed to Diaghilev, then who else has she told? He can’t stand the woman; her flame red hair and her oriental fans. It is all he can do to be civil to her.
They leave the bar around midnight and relish the cool night air. The sky is thick with stars. The couples kiss and part, and the Serts hail a cab.
Coco says to Igor, “We could stay the night above the shop.”
“Shouldn’t we get back to Garches?” He is thinking of Catherine and what she will say, but he is also mindful of his work. If they were to spend the night in Paris then by the time Coco was up and ready, and by the time they returned to Garches, a whole morning would have been lost. And he has so much to be getting on with.
She draws a cardigan jacket around her shoulders. “It’s late. The apartment’s only minutes away.”
“I know, but . . .” Igor shrugs apologetically. “. . . It would only mean trouble.”
“All right, all right.” She’s disappointed. She’s worked hard today. Tired, after a few glasses of wine she is also vaguely amorous. “I just thought you might like to spend the night with me, that’s all.”
“I do . . . It’s just that—”
Frustrated, suddenly: “Save your excuses. I don’t want to hear them.”
But something has been niggling him, too. After a silence, he asks, “What were you saying to Misia?”
“Is that why you won’t come back, because you don’t like me talking to her?”
“Of course not. I’m curious, that’s all.”
“Mm.”
Insistent: “So? What did you say to her?”
“Nothing.”
“You were talking for a long time.”
“We talked business.”
“You weren’t gossiping about us.”
“And what if I were?”
“Is that wise?”
“If you must know, I think she’s jealous.”
“Jealous? Why?”
“Of my helping you out.”
“Oh?”
“She’s rather seen herself as your patron, and I’m not sure she’s keen on me butting in like this.”
“She doesn’t own me.”
“She’s a jealous woman.”
“She’s a gossip.”
With a new firmness in her voice: “She’s a friend.”
“Well, I’m sick of her interfering.”
“Interfering?”
“Yes.”
“You should have said. I thought you liked it when people gave you money.”
Cowed: “You know what I mean.”
“And I’m sure you know what I mean, too.”
“Well, I’m not sure I like her knowing too much . . .”
“No?”
“In fact, I don’t like her knowing anything about us.” His features stiffen; he knows she’s watching him.
“Are you ashamed of people findin
g out?”
He finds her intensity disconcerting. “Ashamed? No.”
“What, then?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“What other reason can you have for not wanting people to know?”
Painted into a corner: “Be reasonable, Coco. I have a family. A wife, children.”
“Well, I don’t.” The gap between her eyes narrows into a frown. “And if I want to confide in my friends, that’s my business, not yours.” Were there a door between them, he knows that it would slam.
They reach the car. The presence of Coco’s chauffeur puts an end to any further discussion. It is their first real fight, and both of them feel agitated and upset. Each feels the other has been unreasonable and stubborn. Driven home, they both surrender to a juvenile impulse to sit apart and say nothing. Their grievances harden in the silence.
Igor can’t understand why Coco entertains a hanger-on like Misia. It’s true, he has accepted her money in the past. But the alternative for him was destitution, poverty. Ordinarily she’d never be a friend of his. And as for staying the night in Paris, perhaps he should have seemed more eager. But can’t she see that it would be terribly insensitive given his position, and that anyway he has work to do in the morning? As it is, the two of them enjoy a nice routine in Bel Respiro. Why spoil it? There’s no need.
At the same time, Coco can’t fathom his unwillingness to spend the night together for once. It seems so little to ask, and this after she has given him so much already. She can’t believe that he’s so selfish. She finds their life back in Bel Respiro sordid, suddenly, mean and cheapening. She’s furious at what she sees as his rejection. For a minute, her mouth is lipless, grim. In the darkness next to him, her profile is a stone.
Staring out, Coco sees the moon appear, now to the left, now to the right of the car. Leaves in the hedges glimmer vividly. Headlights pick up the f licker of insects an instant before they smash against the glass. For a split second she glimpses a fox. Then there’s a sound, a muffled thud. She thinks they hit it. Her fists clench instinctively and she winces, sure of it now. No one says anything, not even the chauffeur, who must sense the tension behind him. A horrible taste enters her mouth.
As they round finally into the drive, the house seems drowned in shadows. A single light burns in Catherine’s room. The car slides to a halt. For a moment Igor thinks he sees a patch of shadow amid the general glow, before—and this time he is certain—he sees the curtains twitch and close.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Click. Catherine stands pale and emaciated, her chest pressed flat against the X-ray machine. Her condition has worsened over the last few weeks. The doctor has advised she visit a hospital in Paris for a scan of her lungs. Stone-faced, she braces herself as though expecting a blow.
The radiologist calls her into his office later to confront her with the spectacle of her own insides. “The good news is, it’s not galloping,” he says.
He slides the X-rays one by one against a luminous screen. She regards the images, this glimpse of the invisible, with an eerie calm. There is her body exposed in all its materiality. Revealed is a secret scaffold of white bones. Blackness fills the vacuum between the ribs, except for these transparent sacs that look like jellyfish, and which she guesses are her heart and lungs. She’s disturbed, though, by the dark, vacant spaces that seem devoid of any soul.
“As you can see, however, the tuberculosis has taken a slow hold.”
The doctor points out the white swirls that cloud her lungs. Numbed, she hardly manages to take in anything he says. Horror mixes uneasily with an impression of magic at what she sees. A chill runs through her, making her shiver.
Moving closer to inspect, she cannot resist touching the X-rays on the screen. What fascinates and shocks her most, though, are not the white shadows on her lungs. Seeing her own slow dissolution frozen in an image is too disembodied a notion really to spook her. No, what strikes her most keenly is the appearance of her left hand, which has also crept into one of the exposures. She places her hand tentatively against its skinless image, finger to sinister finger. And around the thin third digit she registers her wedding ring floating in tender negative—like a halo around the white bone.
The ring hovers, ghostly. It is as if she has penetrated layers of mystery suddenly to discover a truth. But if this is a revelation, then it is without grace. There is no accompanying lift of the spirit, no attendant radiance or bliss. Quite the opposite, she feels tugged down. She becomes conscious of her own mortality as never before. And it fills her with dread.
She tries to think of God inhabiting the calcium of those bones. But the two things—the X-ray in front of her and the existence of God above—seem at this moment wholly incompatible. Instead of God, all that comes into her head is a huge nothing, an appalling sense of cancellation, a final blank that wants to swallow her up.
She has always clung to the belief that there is something out there—something powerful and stubbornly opaque, yet something splendid and ultimately good. It is a crumb to hold on to, a comfort, a reassurance, like the small studded crucifix that hangs around her neck. Until now it has given her hope that the sorry forlorn deplorable business of this life is not all there is. But what, after all, if it is? Thinking about this frightens her. The prospect of oblivion she finds horrific. She feels again the weight of her gold ring like a zero into which everything is pulled.
Even though Igor accompanies her, she has never felt so alone.
“Thank you,” he says, shaking hands with the radiologist.
Fine, she thinks, he doesn’t want to panic her, but must he thank the man quite so heartily? He has just been informed that his wife has consumption. Doesn’t he realize that she has just received her death warrant? Doesn’t he grasp that she might die? Her own handshake, when she offers it, is more grudging, guarded.
Afterward Igor says all the right things, and reassures her in appropriate ways, but as with the X-ray there seems to her to be something missing. She finds it hard to say what it is: a deeper sense of conviction behind the words, perhaps, or a greater sense of consolation in his tone. All she knows is, there’s a gap, a barrier between them, some kind of wall. Maybe, she considers, it’s that he is alive and well and that she is sick. Can it be that simple?
Next morning she wakes up, terrified and sweating, with a feeling of depletion, of lives sloughed off. Turning to see the empty pillow beside her, she experiences a vivid sense of diminishment.
Igor is already at work downstairs, hammering away at the piano. She hears, too, the voices of her children rise from a remote corner of the house. And, leaking also into her consciousness like a detectable stain, she hears distinctly the voice of Coco. She is singing to them.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Igor finishes a morning’s work at the piano with a flourish. The keyboard ripples under the backs of his hands like strips of film being fed into a projector. Leaving his room, he walks along the corridor until he arrives at Coco’s study. She has avoided him these past two days since their argument in Paris.
As he enters, she’s sitting at her desk, working; endlessly pinning and cutting. She has assembled material for a white tunic and sable hat. Watching the film the other night, she had been struck by the contrast of white shirt and dark mask; the chiaroscuro of white horse and black cape. The experience reinforces for her again how black tends to dominate other colors under the lights. She recalls her own years at convent school, forced to wear a black and white uniform like the nuns.
His face cuts into the side of her vision. Seeing him, she leans back into her chair.
He says, “Don’t you ever stop?” He’s not used to seeing women work; not society women, anyway. Like his wife, he’s always thought it somehow improper.
She picks it up, his resistance to her working. Yet, she re flects, it’s what fires her, what has always pushed her on: a determination to prove herself, to reconcile a new sense of feminine elegance with the everyday needs
of her sex. “I never finish.” She wants him to know she’s still cross with him.
Igor hesitates in the doorway. She nods for him to come in. Then she leans across the desk to grab a length of wool. Her hands are quick in manipulating it.
“Here,” she says, improvising an intricate cat’s cradle. Expertly she transfers it onto his fingers. An olive branch. “Go on, then.”
In Igor’s hands, the threads soon tangle and the structure falls apart.
“You’re hopeless,” she says, teasing him. “Watch me again.” Coco again contrives the cradle about his hands. “There. Have another go.”
Once more he tries, and once more the whole thing yields feebly in his fingers.
“All right,” Coco says, with mock exasperation. “Let’s try something different.”
“Something easier,” he protests.
She strings the wool out like a necklace in front of his eyes. “Now, the trick is to pull one of the threads so that it untangles. Watch!” She tugs gently at one of the threads, and the whole net undoes simply. “See?”
Quickly Coco reworks the wool into its web. Then she holds it up for Igor. His tongue touches the top of his lip in concentration. After wavering a moment, his hand suspended in the air, he pulls at one of the depending threads. The wool clots hopelessly.
“It’s no use,” he says. Setting it aside, he reaches toward her. His fingers brush her lips, then trail backward across her cheek. “I’m sorry about the other night.”
“That’s all right,” she says, looking away.
“I was tired.”
Unwilling to forgive him yet, she wants more. “So was I.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Clearly.”
“You know Catherine’s not well.”
At this new mention of his wife’s name, Coco lowers his hand from her face. She finds his apology gauche. “I don’t want to talk about that at the moment, thank you.”
“But you’re the one I want to be with,” he pleads.
Turning on him: “Then do something about it!”
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Page 16
