Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

by Chris Greenhalgh

  He volunteers, “I think you’re making a mistake.” His words contain a hidden plea.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I think we have something together we shouldn’t give up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a feeling. Call it love.”

  “As romantic as ever, I see.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I have to protect myself.” Coco’s voice is planed of tenderness.

  “We work well together. We fit . . .”

  “Igor, tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Would you have left Catherine?”

  “She appears to have left me.”

  “Would you ever divorce her, though?”

  “That’s unfair. She’s extremely ill at the moment, and . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear any more excuses. You’ll never give her up, even though you don’t love her.” Igor begins to protest. She raises her hand to stop him. “Now, I’m prepared to believe you love me. But that simply isn’t enough. I can’t stand having to pussyfoot like a strumpet around my own house. I’m thirty-seven. I’m rich. I deserve better than that.”

  Coco begins to move away. Igor catches her arm. Unyielding, she looks back at the house with her arms stiffly folded, locking him out.

  “I know I’ve been selfish. I’ve been unfair . . . Things will be different.”

  “I’d like to believe you, Igor. And yes, you are selfish.” Then, pulling herself away from his arm: “Well, so am I.” Her words are flung like stones in his face. “The trouble is, you want me to subjugate my life to your work. Well, I just won’t do it. I’m not like Catherine. I have my own work. I’m ambitious, too.”

  “If you’re so ambitious, then why waste time with that imbecile Dmitri?”

  “I’m not going to be drawn into a stupid argument.”

  “He’s eleven years younger than you. He’s just a boy, for God’s sake! I don’t understand how you can be serious about him.”

  “Who said I was serious? Maybe I want some fun.” As an afterthought: “Is that allowed?”

  His voice contracts to a whisper. With his lips barely parted, the words emerge thanks only to the elasticity of his mouth. “Can’t you see he just wants your money?”

  Losing patience: “He’s good to me. He pays me more attention than you ever would—more than you’re probably capable of. And I like that. I want to be cared for. I like someone to be silly over me. Someone for whom I don’t come a poor third after his piano and his wife.” Indignant, Coco stamps her foot. With a sharp movement of her hand, she wipes away the beginnings of a tear. “And you’re wrong about the money.”

  There is a charged silence between them. In the distance, a dog barks. A huntsman’s rifle sounds damply in the air. An ash tree releases in a shiver the bright spear points of purple leaves.

  A new toughness informs Igor’s voice. “Now Catherine has left, the sense of challenge has diminished for you, hasn’t it?”

  Coco makes as if to retaliate. Then in a tone all the more cruel for being neutral, she allows, “Perhaps you’re right. Maybe you are less of a challenge now.”

  He feels as though an opponent in a tug-of-war has just let go, sending him crashing backward to the ground. “You can’t play with people’s lives like this. You’ve torn a family apart . . .”

  “And I suppose you had nothing to do with that, did you?”

  “I’m asking you,” Igor says with renewed urgency, emphasizing each word with a kind of mad clarity, “to reconsider.” His skin tightens visibly; his whole frame braces. His eyes shine with a desperate demand. “Diaghilev says the ballet is off to Spain. Why don’t we go with them?”

  “Dmitri wants to go to Monte Carlo.”

  “With you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Don’t you want to be with me?”

  Almost imperceptibly, she shakes her head. He can’t believe it is ending like this, so casually. Desperate, he seeks for the one thread he might pull to make things whole again. “What do you want? Is it marriage, children?”

  She remembers his shocked response to the news that she might be pregnant. Then, with greater contempt than she intended: “You’re not exactly the father I’d choose for my children.”

  It’s as though a spring within him snaps. “You know the trouble with you?”

  “What? Do tell!”

  “You’re all surface.”

  Coco looks at him, hurt for a moment. Then her features relax into a smile.

  “You’re all surface,” he says again, quieter this time, but with more needling conviction.

  Her smile graduates into a mischievous grin. Adopting a roguish tone, she says, “What else is there?”

  At this instant, Dmitri emerges from the house. He shouts, “Coco, are you coming?”

  Ready for his walk, he has his shotgun with him. He always does when he goes into the woods. The rifle is bent at an angle over his elbow. His presence in the garden communicates power. Remaining at a distance from the two of them, he casually loads the gun.

  “What else is there?” Igor goes on urgently, ignoring him. But the moment is lost. He continues to stare at Coco. An unflattering wildness glimmers in his eyes.

  Suddenly there is a disturbance in the trees. They turn to see the source of the commotion. Following an impulse, Dmitri snaps the rifle straight and levels it. His body moves as one with the gun. Raising it high, he fires into the topmost branches. Two shots go off in quick succession. Each time his arm rears fiercely. Blue puffs of smoke escape from the barrel, and a wood pigeon with a white halter in a band around its neck drops like a stone onto the lawn. Instantly a fan of birds rises darkly, banking steeply across the tops of the trees. Dmitri whistles in triumph. The spent cartridges lie hot on the ground. The flat crack of each shot still rings around the garden.

  Igor looks on in disbelief. The noise reverberates in his ears. As the acrid smell of the bullets hits him, his indignation spills over. His face becomes blurry. He is beside himself with rage.

  “Must you destroy everything you come into contact with?” He starts toward Dmitri, breaking into a run. Arms flailing, he launches himself, fists battering blindly, at the other man’s chest.

  “What are you doing?”

  Dmitri staggers back. The gun is knocked from his hands. More surprised than anything else, he absorbs a flurry of ineffectual blows. Then he turns and, with instinctive efficiency, hits Igor with a single blow smack against the nose.

  Startled, Igor falls to the ground. He is hurt. His glasses have been knocked askew. Tears well in his eyes behind them. A fracture spiders across one of the lenses, splintering his vision. His nose feels out of joint. Gingerly his fingertips seek the point of impact. They come away sticky and darkened with blood. He looks to Coco, his request for love diminished now to a thin need for pity.

  Dmitri watches for her response. He shrugs apologetically. About to say something, he changes his mind.

  “Pick them up!” she barks sharply.

  She directs Dmitri toward the two discharged cartridges lying on the ground. She shakes her head, exasperated by his insensitivity, yet unmoved by Igor’s mute appeal. Then she turns and walks off.

  Dmitri lingers sheepishly for an instant then trails after her. Igor sits alone on the damp grass. He can see his breath in front of him. He can feel the blood thicken under his nose. It is as if all his fears have congealed in the cold.

  He removes his glasses awkwardly and examines the crack.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Catherine and the children have been gone for over a week now. Joseph and Marie are still on holiday, Piotr has been given the day off, and Coco and Dmitri are out riding—again. Igor feels abandoned in this big house.

  He has just heard that his mother has been granted a visa. He ought to be pleased, but the news fills h
im with dread. She says in her telegram that she’s heard from Catherine and needs to know whether to travel to Biarritz or Garches. From her note, he doesn’t think she knows much—just that they’re not together. Catherine would not have said anything about their separation. He knows her well enough to be sure of that. But what is he going to say? How will he explain it? He folds the message into a small square, as if with this action he might shrink his difficulties into a manageable space.

  The silence bristles around him. He smarts as he looks at his mother’s photograph. He can’t escape feeling intensely foolish. And, like a child who has done something naughty, he is fearful of rebuke.

  He knows he has miscalculated, and now ponders the cost. His thoughts wander to Catherine and how she is coping with the children alone. An image comes to him of her laughing, enjoying a joke with some friends at his expense. And it strikes him that maybe she’s relishing her time away from him. Maybe it has liberated her. In thinking this, he realizes how formless for the moment his own existence is.

  Painstakingly he retunes the piano. The tuning fork pings like a dead electric bulb. He adjusts each note minutely: all eighty-eight in turn. Finished, he celebrates by dragging his hands in unhurried runs across the keys. Hard brilliant sonorities flow like water over stone.

  Then he plays.

  He plays with an elegiac tenderness and self-lacerating calm. His fingers touch the keys and lift from them gently. He closes his eyes and reaches deep into himself. The notes rise from beneath his spaced hands. Relaxing, he allows his mind to be drawn by the emotional impulse of the music. Chords mount to an expression of ecstasy, then blend into regret.

  He continues for many hours, his fingers generating their own momentum. In playing, Igor is transfigured, seeming to enter into conversation with the piano.

  At lunch he doesn’t feel hungry but plays straight through. He doesn’t even hear Coco and Dmitri come back, giggling sillily, from their ride.

  He works hard to create tensions and postponements—to slow down the symphony in the final few bars before the passionate climax. He wants the harmonies to thicken and the dissonances at the last to resolve in a perfect concord. At the close, he wants a surprising stillness: the impression of silence stained.

  That night, Igor sits alone in his study and drinks himself into a stupor.

  He drinks two bottles of wine, followed by a half dozen shots of vodka. He drinks quickly until he is almost blind. Beside him, the ashtray brims with cigarette ends. Smoke leaks from between his teeth. He senses an emptiness enlarge within him. He pours in the alcohol to plug a gaping hole.

  When he can no longer see well enough to light another cigarette, and when the vodka bottle shakes in a kind of prism before his eyes, Igor staggers up from his chair. Stumbling across the room, he knocks the metronome clatteringly off the top of the piano. The noise makes the shape of an explosion inside his mind. Clumsily he makes his way to the door. Beneath him the carpet takes on an elastic life of its own. As he leaves, he flicks off all the lights. Noticing a glow still behind him, he realizes he’s forgotten one of them. But he can’t be bothered with that now.

  Slowly, on all fours, he negotiates his way upstairs.

  It is two o’clock in the morning. His face is ash gray and his spectacles askew. The fracture in the lens from his spat with Dmitri merges into the generalized blur of his vision. A fine sweat appears on his forehead and spreads itself across his chest.

  Coco and Dmitri, having retired to their shared bed much earlier, wake as they hear him scrabbling up the stairs. By the time they are conscious, though, he has reached his room and closed the door behind him.

  Violently Igor rips open his shirt, and the buttons fly everywhere. He kicks off his shoes in drunken frustration and falls crosswise upon the bed. He can feel his heart pound loudly. He’s breathing quickly now. From above, the light shoots splinters into his eyes. Then abruptly he feels something rise within him. Possessing just enough presence of mind, he rushes to the bathroom. Some dim civilizing impulse prompts him to place his head over the toilet bowl.

  Unpreventably he feels his stomach churn. A gorge of nausea ripples hotly up his throat. His eyes fill with tears. A burning rush of vomit breaks in straggly beards from his mouth. Bits splash from the toilet bowl back onto his clothes.

  Gasping, he stands to see himself through tear-thickened lashes in the mirror. Though he feels hot, his face looks bluish gray. A numbness spreads to his hands and makes his fingertips tingle. He runs the tap until the water is freezing cold. Taking deep breaths, he cups the water in his hands and splashes his face. For a moment his palms rest like a mask against his skin. Then he drinks, squeezing the water with his cheeks around his rank and stinking palate. His teeth throb, the water is so cold.

  Looking down, he sees a scaly mess move in the shallows of the toilet bowl, rising and falling, rising and falling like the body of a dead fish. The smell appalls him. Ribbons of sick harden around the enamel. A few slivers remain on the wall and on his clothes.

  Aside from flushing, there is little he can do. He makes a mental note to clean up in the morning. The electric light in the bathroom is harsh and hurts his eyes. He feels the vomit still lingering in his throat and in his nose. He returns to the bedroom. Without undressing, he collapses onto the bed.

  In her sleeplessness, Coco hears Igor’s snores erupt unevenly through the night. She rises early and opens wide the windows in his study. It stinks of drink and cigarettes. Lifting the ashtray wincingly with her fingertips, she carries it at arm’s length to the bin.

  Midmorning, she decides to check that Igor is all right.

  He stirs a little, his eyes opening slowly as she enters the room.

  “Come on,” she says.

  She opens the curtains and he shrinks from the light.

  “I feel sick again.” With drunken clumsiness, he scrambles to his feet. Then he runs to the bathroom, where he vomits two or three times. Coco’s reproachful tone is superseded by reassuring noises. She wipes his mouth with a damp washcloth. Soothingly she strokes the top of his head. Then, telling him to undress, she runs a hot bath. He hesitates, but sees she means business. Shyly he removes his clothes. Stepping in, his limbs appear warped in the water. She washes him like a child as he sprawls awkwardly in the tub.

  “I’m sorry,” he manages. “I feel ashamed.” Like an instrument thrown out of tune by humidity, his voice has risen a semitone.

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’ve missed my morning’s work.”

  “I think you have.”

  She bathes his face and squeezes a sponge over his head. The water trickles healingly across his scalp and down his cheeks.

  “You’re very kind,” he says. “Honestly.”

  She smooths the lines of his eyebrows. “How are you feeling now?”

  “A little better.”

  But he feels terrible. He hates her seeing him like this. It’s humiliating. Not for the first time, he feels unworthy. Climbing out, he ties a towel chastely around his waist. Dried, he goes over to Coco. Affectionately they embrace. Surrendering to a childish impulse, their foreheads touch together. Their fingers intertwine. Still damp from the bath, he feels his hands adhere to hers.

  He says, “You have every right to hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  She is glad, she finds, to be with him at this moment. They indulge each other with the tenderness of lovers reconciled to loss.

  “You know something?” he says. “I never told you. You smell marvelous.”

  They squeeze hands, then slowly allow their fingers to slide apart and let go.

  “Don’t think I regret it. Any of it,” he says.

  Gratefully Igor lies back upon the bed. Coco waves good-bye with her fingers. She blows him a kiss before closing the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Baton in hand, Igor rises to the podium to rehearse a revival of The Rite of Spring. A handkerchief billows from
his jacket pocket. A mustache fills his upper lip. His glasses have no arms, but stick fast to his face thanks to the adhesive pressure of nose pads.

  He readies the orchestra. His eyes narrow and his mouth opens slightly. Then, counting with his left hand and beseeching with his right, he calls the music into being. Six desolate notes float from the bassoon. As though haunted, the other woodwinds stir. The first violins scratch in answer; the flutes twitter nervously. There’s a blurt from the second horns, followed by abrupt ejaculations from the brass and strings.

  Igor’s fingers stiffen to signal a quickening rhythm, his hands filleting the air. Then they relax to command more tranquil harmonies. Picking out individual instruments, he achieves an accent here, a softness there. The way he seeks out the musicians with a look, and the way the players meet his eye, generates a sly competition for his attention. He is keen to exploit this rare attentiveness, while all the time seeking to weave the fragments into a whole.

  Suddenly a frown stretches tight across his brow. Something is missing. Lowering his baton, he taps exasperatedly on the lectern and calls the orchestra to a halt. He turns to the timpanist, who smiles benignly from beneath the nest of his fair hair. He thunders, “The passage is supposed to be fortissimo!”

  Solemnly he walks from the podium to the piano. The hall in which they rehearse is underheated and his steps ring loudly in the cold air. Choosing to stand, he plays a few bars in vigorous illustration. “You hear?”

  Mortified, and with the beaters still in his hands, the man blushes.

  Having regained the podium, Igor picks up the music a few bars before the offending passage. He nods with approval as the timpanist responds to the baton’s emphatic strokes.

  Then he closes his eyes and listens. No longer needing to consult the score, he conducts blindly, knowing the music by heart. He feels its stabs and gentlenesses, sees the colors the notes make in his mind. A scent of resin rises sharply from the strings. He hears the familiar E flat and F flat major chords slide against one another.

  As he continues, the music conjures images of its revision. He pictures himself at the piano in Bel Respiro with his ink pens and manuscripts propped above the keys. Summoned, too, are the sunlight and birdsong flooding his study. And then, unbidden, comes the memory of Coco herself, her features tricked into being by the rhythms. Her wide mouth, her short dark hair and thick articulate eyebrows, her hands answering the accents of the piano. Her kisses. The way her eyes would darken when he entered her, and how she moved when they made love.