The Last Collection

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The Last Collection Page 7

by Jeanne Mackin


  “No, thank you. I don’t dance,” I said.

  “May I sit?” He sat without waiting for my response.

  Ania and Charlie were dancing again, but with a good foot of space between them, acting the way men and women act when they are mere acquaintances, not lovers, avoiding looking into each other’s eyes even as they whispered together, studying the room and the other people, all that had not existed for them until a few moments ago. I wondered what she was saying to him, what he was saying to her. There was fear in her face, worry in his.

  “Your brother knows Madame Bouchard?” the aide asked, tapping his fingers on the table.

  “I believe so,” I said, feigning disinterest. “Not certain, though. She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

  “If you like the type.” He drummed his fingertips on the table.

  Let the games begin, and oh, how they did. My first day in Paris, and the stage was already set, the actors in place, and I had only a vague prickling of the scalp to announce it, that excitement you feel at the theater just before the curtain goes up. Of course, it’s the same prickle you feel when you go for a walk down an unknown street and discover yourself in a graveyard.

  Much of that evening is a blur, because the one cocktail I’d allowed myself became two and three and there was a familiar numbness of my mouth and nose that said I’d had too much and should stop. I did, unlike that other night, two years before.

  Django Reinhardt’s music, that blue jazz of the saxophone, the heart-pluck of guitar strings, the demand of drums, made even me get up and dance with the aide, who had stayed at my table. He was surprisingly awkward, so much so that I felt a little pity for him.

  “I have not danced much,” he admitted.

  “Only marches, I guess.” He heard the note of unfriendliness in my voice and reacted with another blush. “Yes, we have war marches. Teufelslieder. But also Mendelssohn, Handel, Schumann.”

  At one point I caught Coco Chanel staring in my direction, her eyes wide with curiosity and more than a little hostility.

  The aide, whose name I still didn’t know, hummed as he danced, a gentle bumblebee of vibration tickling my ear. I managed to keep my eye on Charlie and Ania and von Dincklage, off and on during the evening. Once in a while I would glimpse Ania dancing by with someone, her expression a mask of forced gaiety, with a tight-lipped smile that never reached her eyes.

  Lady Mendl made sure the champagne kept flowing, made sure the wallflowers all had someone to laugh with. This was her party, and she stage-managed it like a professional, steering some people away from each other, leading others together. I sensed a purpose behind the laughter, the meetings, and it felt as if I had walked into a situation already far in progress. The room was alive with secrets and infidelities, with competition and animosity and an overriding need to simply enjoy what there was to enjoy, that “eat, drink, and be merry” desperation of people who sense there is much too much to lose, who fear a war on the horizon.

  At midnight, the witching hour, Coco Chanel came to the table. I stupidly rose to greet her, as if I were going to bow to the queen or something. Coco smiled, delighted by my deference. She studied me the way I’d seen art students trying to find their visual way through a model’s pose, the emotion of the crooked elbow, the significance of one slightly lower eyebrow.

  “So young,” she said under her breath. Coco, that year, was fifty-five years old, still beautiful but with the kind of beauty one begins to describe as “well preserved.” Fifty-five, for a woman, especially for a woman who bases her fame and fortune on appeal, is a dangerous age. And von Dincklage, only at the party for an hour, was already bored.

  “Interesting dress,” she said, her tone making it clear she found it not at all interesting. “One of Elsa Schiaparelli’s? It doesn’t suit you. Wrong color. You should wear ivory, not white, and it doesn’t hang well. Too bad for Lady Mendl her party turned out to be so boring, so silly. It must be all the Schiaparelli gowns. Even Madame Bouchard, who looks so beautiful in my clothes . . . Never a good thing, all these laughable dresses with their feathers and peasant embroideries.”

  She dismissed me with a shrug and said to the aide, “The baron is ready to leave. Come.”

  Across the room, I felt Schiap’s eyes blazing on us. She gave me a thumbs-up, and I knew this night had been her victory. Coco passed Schiap on her way out, and they eyed each other like hungry lionesses looking for prey. The air between them was so bristling they could have impaled themselves on it.

  With von Dincklage gone, the room seemed to relax. Ania and Charlie danced cheek to cheek again, their eyes closed.

  Sometime around two in the morning, Lady Mendl came and sat at my table. “Call me Elsie,” she said, assessing me with a gimlet eye. Elsie was one of the few in the room who was stone sober. “So. You are Charlie’s big sister.”

  “I am,” I admitted.

  With her pointed, ageless face resting in the palm of her hand, she leaned closer. “You know, we all like Charlie very much. He is a fine boy.”

  “I love him like a brother,” I said.

  Elsie laughed. “Talk to him. He is in a dangerous situation, I think.”

  I imitated her posture, leaning an elbow on the table and my face into the palm of my hand. The room whirled a bit around me. “He never listens to me,” I said. “Oh, how I have tried to warn him of the dangers of womanizing. You should have seen him during the New York debutante balls. A string of broken hearts.”

  “This time, it will be his.”

  “I like Ania, and she certainly seems smitten with him.” Husband, a voice in the back of my head reminded me. She has a husband.

  “I like Ania, too. Never said I didn’t. Well.” Elsie sat up straight again. Our little tête-à-tête was over. “Never complain, never explain,” she said, standing. “Are you here for a while? Yes? I hope I see you again. We can talk about New York.”

  “We could, but I haven’t been there in a long while,” I said.

  “And to think being an expat used to be a sign of rebellion. Times have changed.” She gave my hand a gentle shake and moved off into the throng, her red brocade gown disappearing into the melee of colors.

  “Elsie liked you,” Charlie said later, as he put my wrap over my shoulders, sometime around three in the morning. “We’ll be invited to the Durst ball.” His bow tie had come undone, his evening jacket was rumpled, and there was a bit of the lost boy in his eye, an expression I would learn to associate with Ania’s absence. She had left earlier, alone, as if separate exits would erase the open intimacy of their dancing, observed by so many.

  “The Durst ball. It’s just a party,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s going to be the biggest ball of the season, with the best people. And some of the richest. They’ll come in handy someday.” Charlie was ambitious. When he finished his studies he planned to open a clinic, and clinics cost money. A lot of money. Without at least a few wealthy patrons he wouldn’t be able to make it work.

  “Well, even so. I won’t be here for the ball, will I?”

  “You could always come back, you know. For a day or two. I’m sure Gerald and the school wouldn’t mind.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  When Charlie and I left the Ritz, the party was still in progress, though the decorations and guests looked worse for wear. Couples clung wearily together on the dance floor, barely moving. A woman had passed out in a corner, her legs sticking straight out from her sleeping body so that people had to step over her. Men argued drunkenly and waved ash-tipped cigarettes at each other.

  Django was leaning against the doorway at the hotel exit, a cigarette poised between his lips. He was speaking with another man, and I heard the slow burn of disagreement in his tone, saw it in the angle of his heavy black eyebrows.

  “’Night,” I called to him.

  He waved
without looking at me.

  “Did you notice that when von Dincklage left, everyone started talking about the possibility of war? Too many Germans in the city right now. Everyone wonders why.” Charlie kicked at a handkerchief someone had dropped on the street, and the Ritz doorman glowered, then came and picked it up, gingerly, between his thumb and index finger.

  “Roosevelt says we’ll stay out of it, even if there is war,” I said.

  Charlie sucked in his breath, the way he used to do as a little boy, just before he began teasing me. “Roosevelt is an America Firster. A lot of people disagree with him, think that if Europe goes to war, we must as well.”

  “Would you, Charlie?”

  “If it comes to that.”

  “What does Ania say about it? What does her husband think?”

  Charlie grew very still and quiet. When he lit a cigarette, his hands were trembling.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Think nothing of it. You think I’m having the time of my life, being in love with another fellow’s wife, trying to make some sense of all this? I’ve tried to get over her, but she’s . . .” He paused and took a long drag. “She’s the one for me. Can’t help it, Lily. Any more than you could help it with Allen. It kind of takes over, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It takes over so much that nothing else matters.”

  A taxi pulled up, and Charlie opened the door for me. We were too tired to walk any farther.

  “So tell me about the other one. The baron,” I said, leaning into Charlie for warmth.

  “A friend of the family. More like a business associate. And yes, they are, or have been, lovers. From the little that Ania says about it, I suspect the husband actually approves. The baron is very well connected and high up in the German government, which could be useful if there is a war. Don’t make that face, Lily. It’s not such an uncommon arrangement here.”

  Out the cab window, the Seine glowed like tarnished pewter in the predawn light.

  Charlie stared gloomily at the river. Night was lifting, and Paris emerged from grayness into the lavender shades of early morning.

  “She loves me, too. I’m certain of it,” he said.

  “Then why doesn’t Ania just divorce her husband and run off with you? It’s not a great beginning, but at least it is a beginning.”

  “There’s a child. Ania has a young daughter. And her husband won’t let her take the child with us.”

  I sank back into the upholstered cushions, stunned by this revelation.

  “Oh, Charlie,” I sighed. “You are in trouble.”

  • FOUR •

  When I woke up the next day—the same day, actually—the birds in the chestnut trees had already finished their morning songfest and the housewives of the neighborhood were shouting their children in for lunch. As soon as my eyes opened, anxiety and guilt made the room spin even more than the hangover did. I had missed my first class of the day and Gerald would be angry.

  Slowly, my pulse throbbing in my head like a hammer, I sat up and remembered where I was. Paris. No classes. No Gerald. Freedom washed over me. I wouldn’t have to dread the first glance of hate from Gerald or the whispers of the schoolgirls who had turned the story of Allen and Lily into the kind of tragedy they whispered to one another late at night, in the dark.

  There was a note under the door. See you later, Charlie had written. I’ll pick you up at six. I have lectures to attend at the Salpêtrière. The day, what is left of it, is yours.

  A whole day, and no one to account to, no chores, no classes, no boring sherry hour with the school faculty. The day was a blank canvas for me to fill in with color. Trailing immediately behind the pleasure, though, was guilt, like a stray dog that wouldn’t go away. I was alone.

  I dressed in my old frock and walked to the corner, aware of the strange glances I received from the very chic Parisians who knew an out-of-date dress when they saw it. At the café, I had a coffee and a roll with butter. I dawdled at the bookstalls crouching under the plane trees, then stopped at another café opposite the river for another cup of coffee, knowing all along what my destination was but wanting to postpone, to anticipate it the way Christmas gifts are anticipated, and embraces in dark rooms.

  The Seine was a hard, brilliant silver in the strong afternoon light. The gardens of the Esplanade des Tuileries were busy with nannies pushing prams, young lovers walking with their arms around each other’s waists. The garden beds under the canopy of trees were filled with impatiens the exact color of one of the gowns I had seen at Elsa Schiaparelli’s salon. Shocking pink. I didn’t want to see pink, though, but blue: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with multihued sky and river in the background.

  When I had spent that summer in Paris, this had been the painting that most captured my imagination, with its golds and reds and blues, blues made of precious azurite and lapis from the mountains of Afghanistan. On the bench in front of it was where I had fallen in love with Allen, who loved the painting for its mysterious geometry. “There are no straight lines,” he would point out with delight. “No suggestion of beginning or ending, or journey. No strife.”

  I entered the crowded Louvre at the Denon wing, making my way up the grand staircase, loving all over again the mosaic floors, the grand vaulted ceilings, the crowds.

  Mona Lisa’s smile represents Leonardo’s concept for the painting: happiness. Lisa was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and the name itself means smiling, happy, carefree—all those things that are the opposite of unhappy, sad, desperate. When you are first in love, Mona Lisa smiles with you, agrees with your joy. When you are widowed, her smile is a reminder of all you have lost.

  And what many viewers of the Mona Lisa don’t recognize is that the colors, those subdued browns, russets, golds, and blues, have been changed by time. The varnish has added a layer of yellow to the painting. Originally, the sky and the lake behind Lisa would have been the bluest of blues, her sleeves a more definite red. To see the Mona Lisa is to see two paintings: what had been, and what is now. It had become a painting about what is stolen by time.

  I sat on the burnished wooden bench, absorbing those shifting blues, the red of the road behind Lisa, the darkness of her garments that, when da Vinci painted her, would have been very stylish. Even the eternal Mona Lisa wanted to be fashionable.

  It’s just a painting, Gerald would have said. But the calmness of the blue and the muted red besieged me with memories. I was crying, silently, with tears streaming down my cheeks, crying like I hadn’t since the funeral. People tiptoed past me, and I remembered what my father had told me once after a day of ice-skating in Central Park, the year before the Spanish flu invaded the city: that when the toes are frostbitten they are numb, but as the blood begins to flow through them again, as life begins to return to them, there is pain, a terrible burning. I sat in front of Allen’s favorite painting and burned with the loss of him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Charlie and Ania took me out for supper at Café Dome, where we could eat cheaply and sit for as long as we wanted. Ania had purple circles under her eyes and had lost the easy vivacity of the day before. She wore a Chanel suit with a fitted jacket and epaulettes, military style, and a five-strand bracelet of perfectly matched pearls. Charlie had his arms folded over his chest. They seemed to be in the middle of a quarrel, so I talked for all three of us, asking questions and answering them. How was your day? Great. And yours? Get any sleep last night? Not much.

  Gossip, maybe? “Interesting, meeting Coco Chanel last night,” I said. That woke up Ania, at least.

  “Interesting,” Ania said. “Such a mild word for her. She was born poor, you know. Very poor. Somewhere in the south. Her mother died; her father abandoned her and her sisters and her brothers. She learned how to sew in an orphanage, though she tells people she was raised by aunts. Childhood,” Ania sighed. “How many stories we
invent for ourselves.”

  “Charlie and I were raised by our aunt,” I said, remembering how losing our parents had bonded Charlie and me even more fiercely together. Who was Coco Chanel close to?

  “A sister, somewhere,” Ania said. “Gossip says that there might be a child that she calls her nephew, but I don’t think so. She doesn’t have much of the mother about her.” Her voice grew quiet, a sign, I would learn, that she was thinking of her own child.

  “What stories did you invent?” Charlie asked, his hands now spread wide over the tabletop, good strong hands. But perhaps Ania didn’t know this yet, about him, that he stared at his hands like this when he was unhappy.

  “About a Prince Charming who would come for me. He had blond hair and blue eyes. Let me see. He looked like you!”

  “And here I am.” Unable to resist her, unable to continue whatever the quarrel had been, he picked up her hand, the one without the wedding ring, and kissed it.

  “Coco knew how to use her looks,” Ania said. “She knows how to please men. Do I please you, Charlie?”

  “You already know the answer, don’t you?”

  An accordionist took up his place on the corner and began playing the bittersweet musette music of the Parisian streets. There at our little table at Café Dome, as I crumbled pieces of baguette as waiters in black suits and white aprons bustled around us, Ania began to cry, two large crystal tears sliding down her cheeks.

  “Oh God,” said Charlie. “I can’t take this.” He rose, his chair scraping over the floor like a grinding gear in a badly shifted car. He skulked in the direction of the bar. I sat with Ania and put my hand over hers. Her shoulders shook, and she hid her face behind a lace handkerchief. We sat like that for a long while, till the handkerchief fell onto the table. Ania grimaced and sat up straight, pulling at the emerald-green bolero jacket she wore over her dress.

  “Want to talk?” I offered.

  “It is all so bad,” she sighed in her deep, beautiful voice. “So very bad and so difficult. Charlie doesn’t understand.” She would not explain what it was Charlie would not understand, but given that she had a husband and a child and a lover and seemed to be also in love with my brother, I thought the situation was pretty self-explanatory.

 

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