“So playful!” she said. “From Coco I get the beautiful suits and dresses, but I think she maybe lacks humor? So serious, her clothes.”
I looked at Charlie, who was beginning to fidget like a child being held after school. His girl was rich. Or at least her husband was. I felt that thud in the bottom of my stomach that was foreboding.
Ania was just rising to go into the fitting room when the atmosphere in the room charged with electricity.
“She’s here,” someone murmured, and even the straw and wire forms the clothes hung on seemed to stand straighter.
Elsa Schiaparelli, small and slender, and her face, with its olive complexion and heavy-lidded eyes, was striking rather than pretty, exactly as I had remembered her. With that solemn, Roman face she could have been a saint preparing for martyrdom, so stern was her expression. She wore a simple black suit, belted at the waist, and a huge bangle on her wrist, a golden snake entwining it three times, and a little cap with a curling black feather that almost encircled one eye.
She strode into the room and gave the lingering salesgirls an evil glance. They scattered in different directions, back to their counter stations and fitting rooms. Then she headed straight for us, her hand extended, all smiles. Rather, she was heading for Ania.
“Madame Bouchard? Yes, I think it is. How marvelous to finally have you in my salon. Have you been treated well? Have they shown you anything you liked?”
“I’ve been meaning to come so many times,” Ania lied. “Yes, the most marvelous dress and jacket and a suit. The beachwear . . .”
“I will supervise the fitting myself,” Madame Schiaparelli announced.
“My friend has found a dress as well. But . . .” Ania, eight inches taller than Schiap, leaned over and whispered something into the designer’s ear. Schiaparelli frowned, then whispered something back. This went on, back and forth, for several minutes.
“Lily Sutter,” I said, interrupting them, extending my hand. I waited to see if she would remember our lunch together in London with Allen and her daughter, how Allen had amused her by trying to explain Zeno’s arrow paradox about change and time. “Then they can’t exist?” she had shouted at Allen. “Nothing ever changes? That’s very bad for fashion.”
But she didn’t remember, and it would have been rude to mention it, to make a claim of acquaintance with her daughter when we were haggling over the price of a dress.
Schiaparelli and Ania continued their whispering for a few minutes, and then Ania smiled at me. “You can have the frock at half price. It is from an order that was not picked up. Will that do?”
“Yes!” I lifted the dress from the chair it had been draped over and walked to the mirror, holding it against my shoulders. Behind me, Madame Schiaparelli was also reflected in the mirrors. Her businesslike expression changed to one of curiosity.
“I know you,” she said. “Gogo’s art teacher at that awful school! They made her so fat!”
“Yes,” I said, relieved that she had brought it up, not me. “You took me out to lunch once. Roast beef and salad, no bread or pudding.”
“And your husband, who told me change is impossible, that nonsense about Zeno. How is he?”
I put down the dress and felt the brightness of the day grow dim. Charlie put his arm across my shoulders and hugged me closely.
“He died,” Charlie said softly. “Two years ago.”
“Oh, my dear. I’m so sorry. You two, so in love. I saw it.” She turned in a little circle, thinking, then went to a glass case. She took out a hat of blue satin formed like a sailor’s cap. “You should have this, to go with the dress. A gift.” She gave my battered straw hat, resting on the table next to Ania’s coffee cup, a malignant glare.
“I couldn’t . . .” I protested, no longer interested in dresses or hats.
“It is nothing,” she insisted. “Once, when I was a child in Rome, I gave away all of my mother’s fur coats and evening gowns. Threw them out the window to the people in the street, just like Catherine of Siena did. No sweets for a week after, but it was worth it. It’s good to sometimes let things go. And people, too,” she added.
I threw my arms around her, and it was like hugging a child, she was so tiny. A very well-dressed child, of course. “How can I thank you, Madame Schiaparelli!”
“I’ll think of a way,” she said. “But you must call me Schiap. All my friends do, and we will be friends.” She looked at Ania. “We will all be friends, yes? Try on the dress, and if little needs to be altered, I’ll send it to your hotel later today. You are going to Elsie’s soirée tonight? You will wear this.”
“Make the alterations this afternoon? You are crazy!” a salesgirl complained.
Schiap clapped her hands. A fitter came running through the arched doorway, the rose pincushion on her wrist bobbing, several tape measures around her neck swaying. With astoundingly swift and precise movements, she measured me from shoulders to waist, from waist to knee, around the bust, around the shoulders, her hands moving in gestures as precise and ritualized as a Java dancer.
Ania pushed me into a dressing room and had me out of my faded cotton dress and into the Schiaparelli gown before I could say a word. The fitter came in, and I was measured a second time with the dress on me. The fabric was so light it billowed and swirled with the slightest movement.
“Good shoulders,” Schiap declared. “Small waist. You measured accurately?” she asked the fitter, who was still on her knees, her mouth porcupined with pins. “Good. It must fit perfectly.”
Then, Ania’s turn. The green sequined dress was lifted over her and smoothed down over bust, hips, thighs. It already fit perfectly, even the length. Ania was a perfect model’s size.
“I would love to wear this tonight,” Ania said.
“Then you will. This very dress.” There was a glint in Schiap’s eye, a giveaway of victory to come that I wouldn’t understand until later.
When we were leaving the shop, Schiap gave me another hug. She turned away and stared out the window at the column where Napoleon posed on top, presiding over the Place Vendôme.
“You are maybe four years older than Gogo? You remind me of when my daughter was a schoolgirl and needed her Mummy. They grow up so quickly,” she said. “And then, they are gone. All his little soldiers,” she murmured. “It’s something between Gogo and me. She says, ‘Napoleon,’ and I say, ‘And all his little soldiers.’ It is how we tell each other ‘I love you.’”
Just as we were going out, another group was coming in, speaking in Italian, and Charlie and I both had enough school Latin to understand them. They were talking about the parades in Rome a few weeks before, when Hitler had visited, the jubilant glory with which Mussolini had shown off his city.
“Not all of the city,” Elsa Schiaparelli said in a low voice. “The pope locked the doors of the Vatican Museums and turned off the lights.”
The Italians hadn’t heard her, and weren’t meant to. They were customers, after all. The comment was for Charlie and me.
“From what I’ve heard of Herr Hitler’s artistic ambitions, it was a wise move,” Charlie said.
When I stumbled a little going out the door, Schiap said, “Quick. Touch iron, for luck.” She guided my hand to a metal hat form on a table.
• TWO •
COCO
Coco Chanel sat at her desk, fuming. Her black-rimmed spectacles had fallen down her nose, giving her an owlish look, and her left hand twirled a strand of huge, obviously fake pearls. Underneath the layers of fake pearls were the real ones, the ones that Duke Dmitri had given her. She liked to do that, mix real with the fake. Just like life, she told herself. Just like men.
There was a knock on the closed door. “Yes?” Coco quickly removed her glasses. She avoided, as much as possible, being seen in them. The very thick lenses magnified the lines under her eyes. She sat up straighter, stiffening her spi
ne. Like all children who had grown up cowed by too much adult authority, who had spent as much time as possible huddled over a book to escape into other worlds, her spine rounded when she was relaxed. “Come in.”
The salon manager, a tall, stern woman not easily frightened, hence her ability to work with the famously difficult Coco Chanel, came in.
“Telephone call in the other office,” she said. “Lady Mendl wants to make sure you received your invitation.”
“Elsie knows I did. She’s just nagging. Let her worry a bit. It’s good for business. Tell her I can’t come to the phone, I’m in a fitting with . . .” Coco paused. Better make this one good. “Just say ‘the princess.’ Make her guess.”
“Very well, Mademoiselle.” The door closed again.
In fact, the princess she had in mind, but hadn’t named, hadn’t been in this week, or even this month. She’d been to that Italian woman’s salon, though. She’d defected, just like some of the other customers. Business was still excellent. Mademoiselle was one of the richest women in the world, a household name, a purveyor not just of clothes but of lifestyles, of dreams, the modern woman, slender, free, athletic, independent. Coco Chanel had brought women into the twentieth century, liberating them from corsets and double standards. Me, she thought. I did that. And more.
But now that Italian arrivista was turning women into clowns. Dresses with silly buttons as big as tennis balls, flopping feathers all over the place, trains three yards long, animal embroideries and sequins like circus performer costumes. A coat made of braided copper. Must weigh a hundred pounds. Who could wear it? A hat shaped like a shoe . . . just a joke, of course. But that other hat, that frightful thing she called the madcap that sold in the thousands . . . a knit tube pulled over the head with the points sticking up. Even the heiress Daisy Fellowes had the nerve to wear one into the Chanel salon!
It will not do, Coco told herself. Not at all. Lately, she had just begun to recover her equilibrium, had managed to convince herself that Schiaparelli was a fad good only for a few seasons, and then Ania had pulled that stunt.
“Must go,” she had said, standing so quickly she had dropped the note that had been brought to her a moment before, the message from a telephone call placed through to the boutique downstairs. Ania had raced out without looking at a single dress, without placing a single order. When no one was looking, Coco had bent to retrieve the note. Meeting at Schiaparelli, not Chanel, it had said.
The Italian woman, again.
One or two dresses didn’t matter. Coco could have retired and still earned more money from her perfume, Chanel No. 5, than most people earned in several lifetimes. But Ania mattered. She was a certain type of customer, one of those beauties who turned heads everywhere she went, and she went everywhere. All men wanted her. All women wished they could look like her. If she began wearing Schiaparelli, then others would as well. It was a question of reputation, of fame. And this would not do.
The knock on the door, again. This time Coco did not bother to remove her glasses. It wasn’t as if her assistant hadn’t seen her in them thousands of times. “Yes? Now what?”
“Lady Mendl insists on speaking with you.”
“Tell her I’ll ring her later. I’m busy.”
Alone again, Coco fidgeted with the statuette on her desk, a little male figure by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. The figure was Apollonian in its neoclassical homage to the male form. Her friend Salvador Dalí, when he had seen it, had fallen to the floor in a faked fit. He had wanted to paint it lime green and pound nails into it, not because he had strong opinions about German politics but because he hated, absolutely hated, neoclassicism.
Dalí was good-looking in that darkly Spanish way but too strange to be considered as a bedfellow. Besides, did he even bed women? He was married, but that meant little.
Coco’s heavy, straight eyebrows moved closer together in a frown. How long since she’d been in love, really in love? Yes, there were lovers. Playthings, really. And former lovers, now old friends, who still shared her bed occasionally.
The day felt sad, and when she thought of her bedroom, all those nights alone, it felt sadder yet. None of her lovers had measured up to Boy Capel, the first of the great ones. He’d been the most handsome, most generous, most understanding. He’d gotten her started in business, and his beautiful English blazers had helped her create the Chanel Look. How she’d loved rummaging through his wardrobe, the crisp shirts and pleated trousers, silk ties by the dozen, the riding coats and boots, all bespoke, all perfect down to the last detail.
She’d never really recovered from his death, twenty years ago. Two decades? Not possible. It felt like yesterday; there was still that knife twisting in her gut whenever she thought of it. He’d died in a motorcycle accident, on his way to rendezvous with her for a Christmas holiday.
And then Paul Iribe, the artist who had used her face for so many beautiful illustrations, the second of her great loves, had died three years ago. Again, suddenly, playing tennis at her house in the south, La Pausa. She loved exercise, riding and swimming and tennis, but every time she held a tennis racket she saw him again, crumpling to the ground. So much death. It stalked her, had done since she was eleven and her mother had died, poor and abandoned by her husband. One night, in the tiny rented attic room where she had slept with her mother and sister, Coco—she was still Gabrielle then—had listened to her mother’s rasping, asthmatic breath grow slower, lighter, then cease completely.
Too long ago, Coco told herself now, going to her mirror to apply fresh lipstick. Why think about that now? She saw herself looking back at her, lips red and glistening, eyes large, dark.
She hadn’t been in love since Iribe’s death. Plenty of sex, plenty of parties. But she’d always felt alone, not just after but during, as well, when the silk sheets were still being tousled and twisted, when the champagne corks were still popping, she’d been alone. And it made her feel old.
No, this will not do. She stood and straightened her skirt, pulled back her shoulders, and went to the door.
“Charlotte!” she shouted for one of her assistants. “Get Lady Mendl on the phone. Tell her I’m free to speak now. I want to ask her something.”
Would Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage be there tonight? They’d met at several dinner parties but talked only briefly. Like Boy Capel, he was a man of extraordinary male beauty and culture. At the races at Longchamp she’d felt his eyes on her and grown warm, sensing his desire. She hadn’t encouraged him. Hadn’t let their eyes meet and linger, hadn’t touched his hand when accepting a cigarette from him, hadn’t stood a fraction of an inch closer to him than other people at the cocktail party.
She knew instinctively he was not a man to toy with, not a lover who’d expect only a weekend with her. If she took him on, it would mean something. If he took her on. What if . . . She could still have her choice of lovers, boys and men, and women as well, when the mood struck. But she had arrived at an age when she no longer took her power to attract, to hold, for granted.
He was younger. He was powerful and important in the Abwehr, German intelligence. Could she still hold a man like that, a man who could have his pick of the beauties of Paris?
She’d find out. She felt the old energy flowing through her, the electricity of desire for both the trophy and the fight leading to it. Today, she’d leave her office a little earlier than usual, go to her Hotel Ritz suite and take a long bath, dress carefully, make sure her maquillage was perfect.
Tonight.
* * *
• • •
“No dinners out for me next semester,” Charlie pretended to grumble when we were back on the street. “Though I admit the dress suits you. Schiaparelli, hey? A good designer, I think.”
“And what do you know about designers and clothes?” Ania teased.
“Only how you look in them.” His eyes devoured her. “I l
ike those new things.”
“And you don’t like my old things?” Ania pretended to pout, forcing her mouth into a sulk, but her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“I think I like these better. You look happier in them.”
“Then tonight I will wear the new sequined satin. For you. I will buy all Elsa Schiaparelli.”
“How did an Italian woman come to be named Elsa?” I asked, reminding them I was there.
“Her parents wanted a son so much that when she was born they let the nurse name her.” Ania stared into Charlie’s baby blues and leaned toward him. “Or that’s the story she tells. Who knows?”
Her uniformed chauffeur appeared from around the corner, checking his watch and throwing a half-smoked cigarette to the curb. He walked with authority, not subservience. He works for the husband, not the wife, I thought. Charlie and Ania jumped a guilty arm’s length away from each other. The chauffeur opened the passenger door of the roadster. “See you tonight?” Ania asked Charlie, her voice light, almost cold.
“Why not.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and I understood that this aloofness, this public nonchalance, was a performance. After Ania had gotten into the automobile and the chauffeur had pulled away from the curb and into traffic, Charlie took my arm and we went to the corner to hail a cab.
“Where did you meet her?” I asked.
“Here, in Paris. After your accident, when you were in the hospital . . .”
“And Allen was dead,” I said.
“. . . and Allen was dead, when you didn’t want to see anybody, I thought I’d spend some time here, closer to you than if I’d been in New York. Just in case. I spent the summer studying at the Sorbonne Medical College. Brushing up on my French and anatomy at the same time. And one day I saw Ania in the park, this beautiful woman who just took my breath away. We talked. One thing led to another. And when I went back to New York, she just stayed on my mind. So I came back this summer, looking for her. And I found her. Same park.”
The Last Collection Page 4