Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (10 page)

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.

Catherine says, “I haven't seen it for years.”

Coco is stunned into wordlessness by the sight of the dress. It is as if some fugitive outfit has been conjured from the cupboard, something that doesn't belong.

Levelly, Catherine asks, “You never married?”

A vision of bridal whiteness knits itself in front of Coco, white like a scream. The power she feels she has established evaporates in an instant. Thirty-seven, unmarried, and with no children to her name, she realizes she must appear a failure. She fights an impulse to justify, to explain. Then, in reaction, she feels a sudden hardness. The truth is that, since Boy, men have been dispensable to her. Looking at Catherine now, she recognizes the softness of her loyalty, the weakness of a wife.

“No,” she says, more contemptuously than she intended.

She rearranges the paper hastily over the dress, replacing it deep within the cupboard. Then, drawing the hanger back evenly across the rail, she closes over the walnut-colored doors. One of the jackets snags. She has to tuck it back in and reclose the cupboard. The delay frustrates her.

“If you ever want to borrow the skirt, just say so,” reiterates Catherine. She is dimly aware of Coco's discomfort and keen for them to end on a positive note. Charitably, for the moment, she assumes that Coco has balked at her own brashness in fingering the wedding dress.

“What?” Coco asks, preoccupied. The words filter slowly into her consciousness. “No. No. Thank you.” Perplexed by the strength of her reaction, she sits down, subdued, then abruptly stands again. She becomes hard-eyed. “What time is it?”

Catherine glances at a timepiece on the bedside table and starts to answer. But before the information can be conveyed, Coco decides she must leave. She has urgent business that must be attended to. Right away, she says.

“Well, thanks for coming to see me,” Catherine says. Her tone is polite, but also detectable is a fear, which leaks through into her voice, a growing fear that, with her bedridden, Coco and Igor might become more closely involved. She feels threatened by this woman's vitality, her determined energy and strength.

The presence of both her and Coco under one roof inevitably begs comparison. It is a comparison that Catherine does not enjoy making, even to herself. In addition, she feels compromised as Coco insists on paying her medical bills. At once indebted and resentful, her sympathies oscillate between two opposing poles.

“Sorry?” Coco is already on her way out.

“Thank you for coming to see me.” Her tone is sincere. She understands she can't afford to make an enemy of this woman.

“Oh, yes. Not at all. 'Bye,” Coco manages, with candid disregard. She halts, then quickens, leaving the room filled with light and air.

Catherine begins coughing hard again. Coco hears her muffled convulsions as she steps unsteadily down the stairs.

Clouds gather tumultuously throughout the afternoon. Plum-colored, the thunderheads churn into a premature dusk. The elms sway, and shutters flap in a rattling staccato. Fat spasms of rain begin to fall.

At the first pulse of lightning, the children move inside. The dogs bark fiercely, sensing a chemical event. In a superstitious reflex, Marie hides away the silver. Coco watches as rain spatters the windows. One flash fills the glass like the filament in an electric bulb.

The storm continues after dinner when Igor hears his study door click open. It is Coco. He sees her reflection in the window. Oily shadows course down her face. He turns. She seems exhilarated.

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

Storms always thrill her—the more spectacular the better. She loves their power, their ability to pulverize the earth. She feels animated suddenly and experiences an urgent need to participate, to draw like a galvanic battery on the fury of the storm. Yet having entered Igor's study, she feels unusually tentative. She's there for no other reason than she wants to see him. It seems odd that within her home there are areas that feel out-of-bounds. But with a stern sense of privacy, Igor has already made this space his own. Her energy converts into an itch to quit the room. But she can't just leave. Her visit would appear purposeless. Another vivid flash outside is enough to spark a decision. “Let's
do
something,” she blurts.

“What?” Magnified by his glasses, his eyes hold a reflection of the last lightning flash.

On previous evenings, Igor has played chess with his children. Tonight, however, Coco decides it is too sedate an occupation for the whole entourage. Instead, she proposes the children have some fun performing songs and dances.

As he looks at her, her weight shifts one way and her head tilts the other. An angle is established between her upper and lower body, as though on the keyboard he had struck adjacent chords.

She walks over and takes his hand. “Come on.”

He enjoys this sudden contact of her palm, relishing the pressure of her skin against his. His fingers tingle, remembering the shared electricity of their first meeting. Standing up, he seems to float toward the door.

The piano is moved into the living room to accompany the songs. Catherine, though too ill to participate, is persuaded to come downstairs to watch. Installed in a chair with blankets around her, she readies herself to be entertained.

They begin with Russian folk songs. Coco joins in as best she can, humming along once she gets the melody. Then the children sing some songs in French that Coco taught them earlier in the day. They are joined by Joseph and Marie's daughter, the fourteen-year-old Suzanne. She helps lead the singing, filling in the lyrics when the children are uncertain. Igor strikes up jauntily on the piano. Then, together with Coco and Suzanne, the children start to dance.

The music hits the walls and bounces back. Coco pushes her hair up with both hands. Then, while the children dance with one another, she peels off, describing a wider circle around them. She responds to the accents of the music, feeling them chime with her insides. The high notes seem to express a sharp passion. The low notes set off a deeper sympathy. It's as if a dialogue is being articulated between his music and her movements. In the lightning that irradiates the room, for a moment she looks goatish.

Catherine registers with increasing alarm the intimacy that has grown between Coco and her husband. It is obvious they share an unspoken rapport. Shocked that this has happened so fast, she feels hurt and excluded. The two women have hardened against each other since their encounter the other day. She wishes now she had not been inveigled down. She feels the music and the thunder combine to drum inside her skull.

One of the dances ends. The children rush to their mother, expecting encouragement. Instead, she tuts and turns her head. But, as she does so, the children leave her side again. They run to Coco, who beckons them back onto the floor.

At the children's insistence, the music begins to quicken. Suzanne and Ludmilla whirl ever more swiftly around the room. Seen from above, they form a wobbly revolving wheel. Coco holds herself very straight, maintaining an erect posture—the result of years of ballet lessons from her friend Caryathis. Her figure is given an eerie symmetry in the long French windows at the end of the room.

The chords build; the music bubbles up. Lightning flashes thrillingly in glittering ribbons, shocking the trees into relief. Shapeless rumbles of thunder follow. Torn pieces of sky hurry overhead. Igor begins to play louder and more urgently. Coco feels an ache in her neck. And there's the sensation in her head of something spilling over. The feeling takes seed and widens within her circle by circle until the chairs, tables, lamps, and piano begin to blur together in a vertiginous wheel. The ceiling spins around. The chandelier at its center flakes light. Rising in redoubled fortes, the music and the dance accelerate until Coco collapses in a climax of calculated abandon, and Igor jumps from the piano to catch her in his arms.

Catherine can scarcely believe her eyes. A flush of anger spreads across her face. Her mouth twitches nervously. This is too much.

Igor looks bewildered. Coco still plays faint. Coming in with some tea, Marie is shocked by the scene that now confronts her. An impulse of sympathy toward Catherine contends with another that prompts her to check that Coco is all right. These feelings war within her. Before she can decide, she is summoned to bring a washcloth and some water.