“Do you know who she is?” Balsan yelled. I finally let myself graze his sleeve. “It’s fine, I’ll sleep anywhere, on the floor in the lobby if need be. Don’t shout.”
After the manager rang her suite, Bertha came downstairs. Her resemblance to Boy in the green of her eyes and her dark hair choked me. I had met her before, briefly, when I lived with her brother and she visited Paris. She had married into the aristocracy, her father-in-law an infirm lord who died a week after her wedding. Her marriage to his heir guaranteed her a fortune. As she made to embrace me, her eyes bruised from crying, I wanted to push her away, thinking the death of her father-in-law had been a harbinger of doom for Boy.
Bertha wept into my shoulder, disconsolate. When she finally managed to gain control of herself, I said, “I want to see him,” and she brought a trembling hand to her chest.
“You can’t. He . . . the coffin, it’s already been sealed at the morgue.”
I gazed at her as if she had uttered an obscenity. “Sealed?”
“Yes.” She shuddered, fighting back tears. “Gabrielle, he was burned beyond recognition. You wouldn’t have wanted to see him, not like that. He wouldn’t have wanted it. When he left us the day before, he was so eager to return to Paris, to be with you. He . . . he loved you so.”
He had been driving home. To Paris. To me.
I began to scream. I could hear it, startling the desk clerks and manager, the passing curious guests. But when I focused on Bertha, I saw the scream was only in my head. I felt Balsan cup my elbow. “Coco, you must rest. You can’t do anything more,” and I found myself allowing him and Bertha to accompany me to her suite.
THE NEXT MORNING, CHRISTMAS DAY, I told Bertha I wanted to go to the site of the accident. Her mother-in-law, Lady Michelham—one of those very proper ladies with three or four very proper names—made a moue of distaste; she was already dressed from head to foot in black.
“How morbid. There is nothing to see except the car. We’ve made arrangements to have it hauled away, as it’s unsightly for travelers to encounter. The funeral is to be held in Paris,” she went on. “According to his testament, which Bertha witnessed, he wanted to be buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, a request we assume can be honored, as he was titled a knight of your Légion d’honneur for his contributions during the war.”
She imparted this news as if it were an item in a society column, in the voice of someone chastising an interloper for spilling wine on her tablecloth. No, not just any interloper: me. She did not welcome my unexpected intrusion in her family’s time of grief, my spending the night awake on a chaise lounge in her suite, smoking incessantly, without saying a word. I must have seemed unnatural, as baseborn as she supposed—the quintessential mistress, unable to recognize her proper place, which was nowhere near here. I could count myself fortunate that Boy had not yet gone to fetch his wife and daughter from London. Had they been here, I had no doubt his mother-in-law would have refused to grant me entry.
Ignoring her, I said to Bertha, “Balsan is exhausted. Can you lend me your car?”
She nodded, but when I went to the lobby, clad in my dark navy blue coat and hat, I found Balsan waiting. I knew it was futile to convince him otherwise. The firm set of his jaw assured me he would walk to the site if necessary.
Boy had not made it far, only an hour or so from Cannes. The road veered around a sharp curve; a kilometer stone near the site bore an angry smear of bright blue paint.
His beautiful automobile, the splendid Bugatti we’d sped around Paris in, was tilted on its side, a carbonized ruin, tires melted into the underside, its spokes twisted and blackened, sticking outward like imploring fingers.
Bertha’s chauffeur halted a short distance away. Balsan waited with the driver as I walked alone to the wreckage. My heels crunched over the charred ground. With the trembling grope of the newly blind, I reached out to touch the ruptured opening near the crushed side door, where they must have broken through to retrieve his body.
It was so quiet. So still. Not a single bird chirped in the nearby poplars; not a sough of wind rustled my skirt. It was as though the entire world held its breath, to allow me this moment as I stood before the unexpected annihilation of my existence and the loss of the only man I’d ever known whose life had been too magnificent, too intense, to be constrained by banal time.
He had been thirty-eight, just two years older than me.
I wished I had died with him.
Turning from the car, I staggered to the kilometer stone, gouged by the violence. I sat, buried my face in my hands, and let the frozen pit inside me melt, turn molten, submerging me in a wail of fury as hot and pitiless as the fire that had consumed him.
I sat there for an eternity. I might never have left had Balsan not finally moved to me, gathered me in his arms, and whispered, “Come, Coco. Let me take you home.”
ACT FOUR
NO. 5
1920–1929
“EITHER I DIE, AS WELL, OR I FINISH WHAT WE STARTED.”
I
Balsan had wanted to take me home. But in the months following Boy’s death, there was no such place. I left the villa in Saint-Cloud; closed up my apartment on avenue de Tokio and sold it, purchasing a slate-roofed house with the fanciful name of Bel Respiro in the western Parisian suburb of Garches—walled and gated, surrounded by gardens. Misia’s former servants came to work for me. Joseph Leclerc, his wife, Marie, and their daughter, Suzanne, had been serving in the home of an avowed eccentric, but they must have found me even more of a challenge.
After ordering my entire bedroom swathed in black, the color that wipes out everything else, I could not spend a single night there and called for Joseph to save me from this tomb and make up a bed for me in another room. I barely ate, though Marie sought to entice me with a variety of native Catalan dishes—hearty meat potages that I pushed away after three bites. In the atelier, my staff whispered that mademoiselle was looking frail, wasting away before their very eyes, while Adrienne tiptoed around me as though I might explode.
She had good reason. I became a tyrant, the first to arrive at work, watching the clock with my foot tapping as everyone else bustled in, reminding them we had set hours of work at Chanel Modes and I’d not tolerate slacking. I knew how someone’s grief could become another’s profit, for had I not spun gold from the chaff of war? And as I watched them, demanding unswerving fulfillment to the terms of their employment, nitpicking every detail in the workroom, so did I watch my accounts, until Madame Aubert, one of my most trusted and efficient premières, informed me that if I suspected thievery, she would hand in her notice. I took her threat under advisement. I could not afford to lose her. My staff at rue Cambon now consisted of over a hundred seamstresses, as well as numerous habilleuses, who assisted in the dressing rooms, and vendeuses, my sales personnel on the floor. Despite the advice that clients preferred a designer’s service, I would only personally see to an elite few.
And the clients still came—business was as heartless as death. A few ventured to tell me, “You mustn’t let this horrible thing overcome you. You must take care of yourself.”
This horrible thing.
This was what Boy’s death meant to them: an unfortunate circumstance, like the war or the epidemic of Spanish flu already killing thousands, something to be acknowledged and regretted, but never given proper due. In a flash of rage, as Adrienne tallied the clients’ purchases and I clenched a pen I longed to stick in their eyes, I began to scrawl on a pad of paper: Capel and Coco, Coco and Capel, Capel and Coco . . .
C and C. In time, I would revert the positions, interlocked but facing outward, independent yet together. Always. It would become my emblem. It was how I would honor him.
Of my private clientele, only Kitty de Rothschild showed true sympathy. Sweeping into the atelier with tears in her eyes, she tossed propriety aside to hug me and say, “Oh, I was beside myself when I heard! My poor Coco, you must be devastated. I remember how he looked at you, as if you w
ere everything he ever wanted to see. He loved you as few do. Remember that later, even if you cannot remember it now. What you had with him, many wished was theirs.”
I never forgot her kindness, which dissolved for a moment our disparate places in society, where even now they did not accept me as an equal. She also gave me comfort, though I did not say it at the time. For she had spoken a truth no other would dare admit: Boy and I had been envied because we were everything to each other.
Work sustained me, even if I found myself biting back tears as I bent over a swath of fabric or yanked out the cuff on a troublesome sleeve. I still had clothes to design, produce, and sell, even if I decided to set aside for the time my aborted attempt at formal evening wear.
But once my day was done, in my house alone with my servants, I succumbed to despair. Sleep eluded me. I paced all night, the specter of my bed waiting. There were times in those terrible months when I felt I could not endure life without him, everything turning as black as that room I would not enter. I called my decorator, ordered my mourning room turned into a pink satin boudoir. Even then, I drowned awake in carnation sheets.
My beloved Pita and Poppée were the only creatures who kept me sane; they still needed walks, affection, to cuddle at night. They clung to me like mute children who recognize a terrible blow has been sustained, making such a fuss in the morning when I dressed for work that I started taking them with me to the shop. I glared at Madame Aubert when she informed me that she and Adrienne had spent the previous day picking stray fur off the displays.
“You can leave any time you wish. But my dogs stay.”
They were Boy’s final gift to me, the only thing I had left of him that still breathed. I would have fired the entire staff before I relinquished them.
I DID NOT ATTEND HIS FUNERAL, though many important dignitaries and friends did. Later, I heard his wife had not been there, either, so shocked by his death she almost miscarried his second child. When his will was read in January, I received a terse letter from his London attorney. Boy had bequeathed me the sum of £40,000—the entire price of my Biarritz establishment, which I had reimbursed him for with interest. Accompanying the letter was a small package from Bertha; when I finally forced myself to open it, I found Boy’s wristwatch, still marking perfect time.
That day, I did not get out of bed.
TIME PASSED BUT IT DID NOT HEAL MY WOUNDS, contrary to the cliché. It excavated and deepened my grief, making hollow niches in my heart where memories perpetually burned.
But it did pass, bringing me some shallow relief. Misia had been pleading with me to go out, see friends, attend the theater and the ballet. She trudged every week to my atelier, hauling me to the Ritz for lunch. On those nights when she telephoned while I was still at work—I began to stay past midnight, avoiding the desolation of my house—to ask me to join her and Sert, I demurred, citing the long drive home. Finally, she suggested I either remodel the vacant apartment above my atelier or rent a suite at the Ritz so we could see each other more.
Both ideas sounded reasonable. Neither appealed, but I did it anyway, bringing in a designer to see to the apartment and taking a two-room suite in the Hôtel Ritz where I could gaze out to the place Vendôme and watch late-night lovers stroll.
“You look like death,” Misia pronounced when she came to fetch me for a gala at the mansion of the Comte de Graumont and his wife, who was a client of mine. We were, in effect, crashing the party, as the American saying went. The only invitation to this notorious spring party, where the Graumonts wore flamboyant costumes and allowed the haut monde and avant-garde to intermingle, was for Sert, who had painted the gala sets. Misia was outraged to learn I’d been excluded. “You dress the countess! How dare they ignore you?” and upon declaring she wouldn’t go if I did not accompany them, she managed to drag me out of my self-imposed exile for a night of revelry I was not looking forward to.
“I’m not sleeping well,” I told her.
“Not well? My darling, you aren’t sleeping at all! You could sell those bags under your eyes in your shop. This cannot go on. I refuse to let you die, too.”
Sert guffawed. I sat sandwiched between them in the car. “Tosh means it,” he said, using his nickname for her. “If she has to, she’ll force-feed you pâté and camp at the foot of your bed.”
I loathed the gala. I was in no mood for blaring saxophones, cheek-to-cheek dancing, or gossipy innuendo, but Graumont expressed his delight that we’d come uninvited and offered me a commission to design the costumes for his next event. When Sert and Misia saw me back to the Ritz, she opened the beaded bag in which she seemed to carry an endless supply of everything and thrust a small blue bottle at me. “Ten drops before bed. You’ll sleep like a baby. Don’t let me hear you say again that you are not. You will eat, work, and rest. Or I will move in with you.”
I didn’t know if it was her alarming threat or the night itself, for I’d felt so alone at the party, stranded among delirium, but as I climbed the stairs to my suite, hearing Pita and Poppée barking behind the door at my arrival, her little bottle weighted my hand.
I left it on my bedside table, took the dogs for a walk, and returned. I had eaten sparingly from the canapés at the party but I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t tired, either. Or rather, I was beyond fatigue. I dwelled in eternal exhaustion, in a haze of the fragmented past and terror of the future.
You have to respect the lotus. She’s not a lady you want to invite too often . . .
Unscrewing the bottle cap with its glass syringe, I dripped ten drops of the mud-colored, bitter liquid on my tongue. Then, as I faced the dogs already lolling on the bed, asleep in that untroubled manner of animals, I took five drops more.
I did not think. I did not question it.
Misia was right. For the first time since losing Boy, I slept like a baby.
II
They’re asking if we have any perfume.” Adrienne had come upstairs to the apartment where I was overseeing the recent changes by my decorator. I had to approve new furnishings, search for objets d’art and other items to make it a place where I could stay. It was the first time I’d had a blank canvas, not a fully furnished residence. This would be my special abode, my refuge from the demands of work and life, and I barely paid heed as she repeated, “The Americans, they’re buying up everything we have, but they want to know why we don’t sell perfumes.”
I grimaced, flipping through swatches of wallpaper. “Because we’re not a souvenir kiosk. There are a hundred shops in Paris, selling a thousand horrid scents the Americans will adore. Send them there.” As I heard her turn away, I added, “Don’t give them accounts. They must pay for what they take. Unless they have a permanent address in Paris, no credit. We can’t bill them when they return to wherever they came from. Understood?”
“Yes, Gabrielle.” She left me, down in the mouth as she tended to be these days, no closer to marrying Nexon than she’d ever been and consequently miserable because of it.
I lit a cigarette, paced to the apartment’s newly enlarged windows. It was cozy in here, not much larger than my suite at the Ritz. Whether or not I could sleep here was another question. As I thought this, I glanced at my purse on one of the gilded Empire-style chairs that the designer had left for me to try.
No. I turned back around. Not during the day and never at work.
Misia’s elixir had become my talisman. I had finally begun to sleep regularly, not as restfully as I had before Boy’s death, but better than I had since. I was also starting to rely on it too much, the first initial fifteen drops becoming twenty, then twenty-five, numbing me until I floated in a dreamless cave. I awoke parched, groggy for hours afterward, so that eventually I’d adjusted my schedule, arriving at the atelier at noon—no doubt, to my staff’s relief.
I chuckled to myself as I thought of the Americans, downstairs in my shop looting the shelves. They had inundated Paris since the war; everywhere I turned, I heard their grating, nasal language or mutilated attempts to sp
eak French. They colonized every district—the Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Saint-Germain—consuming endless plates of steak and pommes frites, throwing dollars around as if they grew them in fields. Money, money, money. They had an endless supply, the boom in construction, in automobile industries, in steel and railroads and everything else they could exploit turning their vast country into a bottomless gold mine. Remembering that Boy had often said America was a whore willing to do anything for a buck, I gave a harsh laugh. It suited me like pearls. They were making my already lucrative establishments and reputation impossible to ignore.
They’re asking if we have any perfume . . .
I snorted, stubbed out my cigarette, and called my dogs, who trotted from the other rooms. Perfume. As if they could ever recognize a decent scent. They probably thought the eau de toilette sold in the local pharmacies was perfume!
Nevertheless, as I went downstairs to see how much profit the Americans had made me today, the idea lingered.
A parfum by Chanel. Now, wouldn’t that be something?
“I’M THINKING OF DEVELOPING A PERFUME,” I said a few weeks later at one of Misia and Jojo’s dinners. I’d started visiting again for informal gatherings, where the usual suspects—Cocteau; Picasso; his wife, Olga; and a revolving host of others—sat around drinking and debating art. We had become a close circle, linked by the artery of defiance running through Paris, its blood the color of paint, clay, and ink, or, in my case, blue, cream, and coral. Evenings at the Serts’ were never heavy, never too mysterious; the most immediate concerns after promulgating the value of art and how it would transform the world were how to pay the rent, the latest nightclub to sneak into, who bedded whom, and which new cocktail to imbibe.
I enjoyed the informality of it. I wanted everything light, hedonistic, forgettable. The less I had to dwell on, the less I remembered Boy. He was always there, of course, lurking in the corners of my heart, but I had begun to see him less, to cease turning about with a gasp on a crowded street or in a restaurant, catching a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired figure who stopped my breath. There were days now when I barely cried. I had reached the stage where his memory had been absorbed, soaked inside my skin like indelible dye—a part of me I would never forget. But I was still haunted by his fading smell on the one pullover of his I’d kept and the last set of sheets we’d slept in, which remained unwashed—that subtle aroma of soap and leather, of his musk licked by lemons, now becoming a ghost I tried in vain to summon.
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