Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (22 page)

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.

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!”

“What do you suggest?”

Exasperated: “You don't make things easy for me, Igor.”

“Easy things are not worth having.”

“And difficult things aren't always worth pursuing.”

“But sometimes they are,” he insists. Reaching toward her this time, he's more resolute. “And I
am
!”

He recognizes the need for a gesture, something brave but self-abasing. Abruptly he gets down on the floor and lies flat on his back. He lifts up his shirt to his chest. Then, tensing his muscles, he invites her to stand on his stomach. “Come on.”

“Don't be silly.”

“It's not silly. Come on.”

It's his way of making up, she recognizes, his way of regaining her trust. But in seeming to belittle himself, she sees, he is actually showing off.

“All right,” she says, making it clear she's humoring him.

Slipping off her shoes, she plants her stockinged feet squarely on his midriff, wobbling for a moment. He supports her weight for several seconds without flinching. His face goes taut with concentration. She can't resist a smile. She steps off; but before he has a chance to roll down his shirt, she reaches for a knitting needle lanced in a ball of wool. He looks up, alarmed.

“You don't get off that lightly,” she says.

“What are you going to do?”

“Give you the mark of Coco!”

In imitation of Douglas Fairbanks, she grazes his stomach below his shirt, incising nimbly a monogram of her initials: two big interlinking letter Cs.

“You're mine,” she says, dragging the knitting needle upward and following the seam of his shirt until the point is at his throat. “Do you understand? All mine!” she continues in a singsong tone, but with a serious undercurrent to her words. “And I don't want to share you with a-ny-bo-dy else.” Suddenly pulling the needle down, she ends with a remonstrative jab in Igor's groin.

“Understood?”

He's conscious that he's under her control and feels a kind of panic at the fact. Yet it's a panic that possesses a sweetness, too. In yielding to the regime she imposes, he feels the challenge of a slave to please a master; the thrill of willing submission; the humility of having to lick a woman's shoes only to discover suddenly that they are smothered in honey.

“Understood.” He gulps.

The next few days, he accompanies Coco into Paris in the afternoons. While she goes to the shop, he walks around the capital. He enjoys the city's trembling energy, its radial symmetries, its broad avenues, and its bridges spanning the river like the frets on a melting guitar. He loves the birch trees that are everywhere, with their blistered trunks and their leaves that catch the sunlight spottily. There's a grandeur to the parks, too, that he likes, and a shameless love of spectacle. France may be a republic in name, he thinks, but everything about the capital seems to scream out royalty: its arches and spires, its monuments and tombs, its gardens and palaces. It reminds him of St. Petersburg.

Regularly he visits the Pleyel office, where he submits his transcriptions for mechanical piano and picks up orders for further work. It's lucrative, he finds. And while not particularly stimulating, it's easy enough to do. More importantly, it gives him an excuse to be there, in Paris with Coco, and for this he is grateful.

While she finishes work, he strolls in the Tuileries and takes coffee in one of the nearby cafés. Afterward he invariably retires to Coco's apartment above the shop, where they make love.

One afternoon she surprises him with a present.

 

 

 

“Well—what do you think?” Igor allows the children into his study to show them his new toy.

“What is it?” Milène asks. Tilting her head, her ponytails dangle sideways, unevenly exposing two pink bows.

Soulima answers, “A pianola.”

“Watch!” Igor says. His eyes flash like a conjurer's with the promise of spiriting music from the air. He winds the instrument up. Then as he releases the handle, the music starts. A little flat, perhaps, and the rhythm seems to drag at the end of one revolution then quicken at the beginning of another, but jaunty nonetheless. He recalls Coco's remark that it sounds like something you might find in a brothel.

The pressure of invisible fingers depresses the keys. A perforated scroll revolves on a cylinder in the central panel of the piano. The children are thrilled. As if witnessing a miracle, they move closer, openmouthed.

“Careful—don't touch!”

“How does it work?” Theodore asks, stirred out of his moroseness by the apparent magic of the machine.

“You see the scroll?” The children watch the perforated paper turn thickly at the front. “Well, the little holes give information to the keys about what notes need to be played. It's clever stuff.”

Igor is delighted to see his children interested. He's been stung by Catherine's criticism that he doesn't spend enough time with them. She says that Theodore isn't sleeping, and this upsets him, and she tells him that the others are feeling insecure. He realizes he's become distant recently, as a consequence probably of his wish to protect them from his secret life. This afternoon is an attempt to reestablish good relations, to reinforce the fact that he cares.

“So what do you think?” he repeats.

“I like it!” Milène says.

Ludmilla complains, “But there are too many keys going down at once.”

“That's the beauty of it.”