Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

by Chris Greenhalgh

  “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.”

  He explains that you can code the pianola so it has the equivalent of four hands, eight, or even more.

  “Four hands and no feelings,” Soulima mutters, less impressed than the rest of them. In recent weeks, a saddle of freckles has developed across his nose and cheeks. They seem in their sudden eruption to underscore his disapproval.

  “It’s true you can’t vary the tempo or volume as much as you could if you were playing it yourself. But it’s very useful for working things out without having to rehearse lots of instruments. And it saves having to pay the musicians as well.”

  Milène says, “Well, I think it’s great!”

  “I do, too,” Igor says.

  “Is it expensive?” Theodore is becoming more practical by the day. Physically he has grown fast, too, Igor notices. Though still in shorts and with the thin limbs of an adolescent, he is only an inch or so shorter than his father now. His lankiness serves to exaggerate his height.

  “Yes.”

  Theodore persists. “How can we afford it?”

  “We have Coco to thank for that,” Igor says. The slight delay in his response reveals his discomfort. There is something forced about his smile.

  Of the children, only Theodore seems troubled by this. Perhaps sensing something hostile in his mother’s attitude toward her, he has always been wary of Coco. Being the eldest, he is the most sensitive to the family’s dependency on their host. Instinctively he resents it. He finds it demeaning and undignified, an affront to his imminent manhood. His thick, almost Mongolian features grow tense. His mouth narrows a little. For a moment, the air between father and son seems a fabric that might tear.

  “Did she get the gramophone records, too?” Ludmilla asks innocently.

  Igor’s heart goes hollow. “Yes, she did.”

  “Can we hear them again?”

  “Later, later . . .”

  Igor is determined that the unveiling of the pianola should remain a triumph. He won’t allow Theodore’s bad mood to spoil it. To amuse the children, he presses the palm of his right hand under his left armpit and squeezes in time to the rhythm. The rapid movement of his arm up and down makes a farting sound. They all laugh, except Theodore.

  Igor stops. In an effort to appease his son, soon to be fourteen, he puts an arm around him. He notices for the first time the fuzz on his upper lip. “Just looking at you now, son, you know what I think?”

  Theodore has retreated into his habitual surliness. “What?”

  Igor smiles broadly. He has an idea. “I think it’s ti
me you and I had our first beer together. What do you say?”

  Theodore brightens. Soulima looks on in silent awe. The two girls beam at their big brother, who cannot resist a bashful smile.

  “Come on, let’s share a drink. And for the rest of you, there’s a jug of lemonade.”

  “Hooray!” cries Milène.

  With the pianola still instructing itself blindly in his study, Igor leads his children to the kitchen to enact this new rite.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Coco and Igor sit late on the balcony. Now early September, the weather still holds. An outside light illuminates the two of them as they talk and smoke in the evening air. Mosquitoes swarm in a halo of fluorescence, maddened by the dazzle of the lamp.

  “Damn things!” Igor says, swatting them away.

  Coco pulls a black angora sweater close around her shoulders. Fingering the string of pearls around her neck, she says, “Look at the stars! They’re all shaking.” She plays the pearls to her lips, nibbling them.

  It is true. The more they look, the more the stars seem to jiggle minutely in a kind of dance, like animalcules in a pond. Solemnly the constellations present themselves. Igor watches for several seconds, trying to locate the unseen threads that connect them. He listens to their music: a celestial insect hum.

  “If you look down at the city, you get the same effect.”

  In the distance they see the amber glow of the capital thrown up into the sky. To Igor’s left, Coco’s face makes a heart-shaped shadow.

  “The stars above us and the city below. What more could you want?”

  “I used to dream about coming to Paris when I was a boy.” The city hovers at the edge of his attention like a tint or perfume flavoring the night sky.

  Coco draws on her cigarette. “And now, given the chance, would you return to Russia?”

  Nursing a wineglass in his hand, he says, “There are things I miss.”

  “Such as?”

  “My mother. Friends. My piano. My house. And spring when the ice melts and the earth seems suddenly to crack and creak into being. You feel as if you’re coming alive.”

  A gust of wind blows, rattling the door. The light flickers momentarily. Leaves make a gentle chafing sound. Reaching down, he picks up a half-empty bottle of red wine. He gestures to Coco. She traps her hand over the top of her glass. He shrugs and pours himself another. The wine looks black in the moonlight.

  “You know, you’ve never told me how you met her.”

  Until now they have avoided speaking of his wife. He has made it clear previously that it is not a subject open for discussion. And Coco has indulged him. Indeed, the physical fact of her existence in a bedroom upstairs has been quite enough for her to contend with. It has taken a huge unspoken effort of will on Coco’s part to diminish her presence within the house. Yet it is beginning to seem ridiculous not to acknowledge her. Catherine has become a hole in their talk. An unhealed gap. Now the wine has fortified Coco enough to quiz him. And it is evidence of their growing intimacy that he feels relaxed enough to answer.

  “I was practically brought up with her.” Released from the tension of silence, his words seem weightless.

  “Childhood sweethearts, how romantic.”

  Ignoring her: “But the first time I can remember being drawn to her in any way was when we were about fourteen. We were in a cathedral.”

  “Don’t tell me. She was in the nativity scene, playing the Madonna.”

  “Not quite. She was in the choir.”

  As a formal prelude to his tale, Igor again offers her more wine. She relents this time, permitting him to pour a further inch into her glass, accepting it as a ticket of admission to this episode from his life.

  “It was a crisp spring day. Inside the cathedral, though, it was cold. The choir was singing some hymn, and light streamed in through the stained-glass windows and hit a point near the altar where they stood. The smell of incense was overwhelming, I remember, and the music rose high to the cathedral ceiling. You know what the acoustics of churches are like?”

  “Yes, yes, get on with it.”

  “Anyway, just as the priest intoned, ‘Thou shalt be admitted into the garden of eternal delight,’ it happened. I saw Catherine standing at the end of one row, and . . .”

  “What?”

  “She was wearing a thin white shirt and, with the light hitting her sideways from the window, it became completely transparent.”

  “She must have been wearing something underneath.”

  “I’m sure she was. But in silhouette the effect was devastating to a young boy. She was all . . .”

  “Standing to attention?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was probably the cold inside the church.”

  “Churches are very erotic places.”

  “What?”

  “If you think of the architecture of the cathedral, it’s totally erotic. The spire, the cupola, and the arches with their ribbed insides just waiting to swell and contract . . .”

  “Tender Mary.”

  And then rapidly, burlesquing the catechism: “Exalted Sister of Peace.”

  “Grace of the Redemptrix.”

  “Celestial Queen of Heaven.”

  “Holy Mother of God.”

  They both laugh. Coco’s eyes shine glassily. Filaments of her hair shake loose, catching a glisten of light from the lamp.

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, neither of us had had much contact with the opposite sex. We just became used to each other’s company. And soon we were great friends.”

  Her mouth twists sideways. “Friends.”

  Igor’s tone grows serious. “Yes, actually, friends.”

  “Brother and sister?”

  He shrugs.

  “You didn’t have to marry her, though!”

  “I know all you see is this bedridden invalid, but she’s an intelligent woman. She’s well-read. She has taste and r efinement . . .”

  “It seems to me she’s in danger of refining herself out of existence.” Coco finds it hard to disguise her contempt for Catherine. She didn’t even try to come down once today. Yet she still wants Marie to minister to her all morning and afternoon. Coco can’t stand that kind of weakness in people. There’s no fight in her, she decides.

  Picturing his wife listening to this, Igor winces. He doesn’t like her being so summarily dismissed. He wants her accorded more respect. Their bodies mock her enough as it is. “She’s not well,” he says.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, that’s that.” It is obvious he does not wish to go on.

  Sensing that the conversation needs to change key, she asks brightly, “So what did you think of me when we first met?”

  Igor lifts the wineglass from his knee. He turns the stem slowly, watching the wine lap darkly against the sides.

  “What did I think when I first met you?” He repeats the question aloud to himself and ruminates for a moment. Involuntarily he squeezes one eye shut to look at the glass as he raises it. The surface of the wine seems to form a disc that retains its shape however he tilts it.

  “Come on, tell me the truth.”

  He says, “I thought you were quite aggressive.”

  “Aggressive?”

  “Verbally, I mean.”

  “And what else?” Coco lights a cigarette and blows the smoke out quickly.

  “I thought you were clever and generous . . .”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, I obviously found you attractive if that’s what you mean. Shapely and slim . . .” Igor continues ritually to twist his glass on the point of his knee. “Must I go on?”

  Coco stares out at the garden and the needlepoint of stars. “No. That’s fine.”

  “And me? What did you think when you first met me?”

  Decisively: “You seemed a bit remote and cold.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But vulnerable underneath it all. And passionate.” />
  “Passionate?”

  “I saw that the first night of The Rite.” Her voice lifts. “And I made it my duty to bring it out in you.”

  “Have you succeeded?” He inspects a leaf made glossy by the outside light.

  “I’ve done a pretty good job, I think. Under the circumstances.” She looks at him and they share a smile.

  He touches the back of his hair. “I’ve grown grayer as a result.”

  “But you look”—she hesitates—“more distinguished.”

  Why is it, he thinks, that women find gray hair attractive? Perhaps it reminds them of death, and they find that exciting. Maybe they find it appealing to consider the perishability of their men.

  “I’m starting to dress better, that’s for sure.” He hears a buzzing about his skull.

  “That’s not hard.”

  He falls abruptly to scratching his arms. “I’m being eaten alive out here!”

  “So am I.”

  “It’s your perfume. It’s driving them crazy.”

  Lifting his glass with one hand and grabbing the bottle with the other, Igor is quick to lead the way inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Catherine is sitting up when Igor enters the room. It has become his custom, after working for a couple of hours in the morning, to pay a dutiful visit to his wife. He always comes at the same time. It’s part of the rhythm of his day.

  Catherine has readied herself. Since experiencing the terrifying sight of her own insides, she has become more aware of her appearance, too. In an attempt to spruce herself up and look more attractive, she has combed out her hair and rouged her cheeks. She has even put some lipstick on. She greets Igor smilingly as he walks in the door, continuing to comb her hair.

  His heart sinks. He can see what she’s doing. He responds with a forced smile. “You look very nice,” he says, complimenting her. But she wants more than compliments. He knows that. She needs attention and tenderness. She wants his love. And this he is unable, or at least unwilling, to give. There is a reined-in element to his voice that communicates the glum unenthusiastic truth.

  He finds he needs to remind himself that she is a good person. He loved her once, with youthful ardor and with a passion that seemed reckless. They had braved their parents’ opposition to marry, and risked alienating their good name; such was the strength of their innocent love. He remembers his family’s disapproving glances at the wedding, the sparsely attended ceremony, the shamefaced priest. He can still smell the musk of incense prickling his nostrils, still see the gold ring, and her face trembling beneath a veil as she recited her vows.