Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (25 page)

Late that afternoon, Igor feeds his parrots. All the birds are kept in an outhouse along with the garden tools and furniture, spades and forks, and bits of netting. A pair of shears hangs on a hook, its blades splayed so wide it seems almost improper. A musty smell rises from the timber of the shed. Inside, the humidity is tropical. Outdoors, for a change, it is quiet. Thanks to Coco, the children have been enrolled in a local school.

Ritually Igor fills the birds' bowls with water. He pours millet and seed into the food troughs and removes the odd torn feather and droppings from the bottom of each cage. Placing his head next to the wire, he scrutinizes their quick, spasmodic movements. The space in the shed is echoey. Collectively they generate quite a din.

Behind him, he hears the door click open. It's Coco.

“They're beautiful, aren't they?”

“They are,” she concedes. She looks at the parrots and lovebirds with renewed attention as they move on their perches like tightly wound toys.

“Look at the engineering that's gone into those wings. There must be a God to have managed that, don't you think?”

“Oh, come on, some birds are just one step up from vermin. They're pests, most of them.”

“Not to me.”

He tickles one bird's underside. With a crooked forefinger he strokes the feathers on its head.

“Watch this,” he says.

He extends his tongue with a few bread crumbs on it through the bars of the cage. The bird looks at him. Its narrow skull twitches in response. Then its beak pecks unerringly at the crumbs on his tongue.

“Ugh!” Coco exclaims. “Don't they nip you?”

Igor sniggers. “No. They're very precise, and their eyes are much sharper than ours. Than mine, anyhow.” Igor caresses the beak of the bird, which purrs in appreciation.

“They must have tiny brains.”

“That doesn't stop them singing.”

“I know. I hear them.”

Igor whistles. He tuts and clicks with his tongue behind his teeth, angling his neck with comical stiffness. The birds shift their feet and tut back, their heads twitching absently. He opens the cage and encourages one of the parrots to perch on his finger.

“Do you want to hold it?”

“Are you sure?”

“Go ahead.”

Cradling it, she feels the bird's heart beat rapidly against her palm.

“They love it here,” he says. “The climate is just right for them.”

“Unlike you?” Coco suggests. She continues to pet it.

“I do find it hot, still.”

He thinks of his argument with Catherine this morning. It depresses him to consider what might happen next. At the moment, he and Coco just steal what time they can alone. They have their afternoons in Paris. But it would be better to spend the nights together, to get used to the sound of one another's breathing, and for each to feel the skin of the other close and touching all night long. At the same time, Igor is determined to keep the relationship discreet. He has no wish to humiliate Catherine or to hurt the children. And since the dreadful scene this morning, the truth is he's not sure what he feels. Numbness, chiefly. And sadness. Looking after the birds, he finds, grants him a kind of monastic calm.

“Well, it's soon going to get much cooler, if that's any consolation. Maybe the birds will have to fly south.”

“The need to migrate can drive some birds mad. They've been known to dash their heads against the bars.”

She hands the parrot back to him. Gently he replaces it inside the cage. Slipping his finger between the wires, he allows another to peck playfully at his nail.

“I hope you don't feel the same way.”

Being with Coco, he reflects, is like being drunk all the time. It's marvelous, but he wonders how long he can sustain it. The sensation is intoxicating. He has never felt so light-headed. It's extraordinary, like the giddy sensation you get with a first cigarette. He finds it impossible to concentrate. Sometimes, he longs just to come up for air. And physically she drains him. A fellatricious little minx, like a snake she seems capable of swallowing someone twice her size.

“Well, do you?”

“What?”

“Feel the same way?”

Turning from the cage to face her, he says, “You know what I miss?”

“Tell me.”

“Snow,” he says. It matches the present blankness of his mind.

“Snow?”

“Yes. Real snow. Not the powdery stuff you get here, but huge piles of it billowing all over the place and falling for days.”

Coco touches Igor's hands and beckons him closer. “Come on.”

“What?”

“It's the heat. It affects me, too, you know.”

“Now?”

“Yes. I want you in my room.”

“But . . .” He remembers the children are at school now. The decision is made for him. He submits. The stronger woman wins, again.

Slinking out of the outhouse, they slip quietly upstairs, Coco leading him insistently by a single finger for the first time to her bed.

An hour later, sitting at her window, she sees Igor in the garden below. On an impulse, she grabs a pillow and begins ripping out feathers by the handful from inside. She walks back to the window and undoes the hasp.

Hearing the window open above him, Igor looks up. He needs to raise a hand to shield his eyes against the sun. Coco smiles broadly, leaning out. He gives her a quizzical look. Her lips lift into the tension of a smile.

Abruptly, “Here's your snow!”

And she lets fall a blizzard of feathers that land in a white cloud on his head and on his jacket. Several more fistfuls are released in a soft white storm, each feather shilly-shallying airily to and fro. They almost blind him as they catch and scatter the sunlight in their spinning, almost dazzle him with their promise of a brightness beyond.

Igor paces the floor of his study in time to the music in his mind. His head is bowed and he hums to himself in a low, barely audible tone. His steps register the rise and fall of a rhythm that haunts his skull. Then he sits down to transcribe this inner music, to seize and hold it fast.

Setting himself limits, restrictions, constraints, he finds, is the best way of achieving imaginative solutions. Total freedom, the absolute permission granted by the blank page, most often proves a freedom merely to jump in the ocean. He needs something to jib against, the equivalent of a net in tennis: something to hit the ball over. With the
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
he has set himself this obstacle of writing simultaneously in different time signatures, of juggling synchronous yet dissonant rhythms. He tries, in writing it, not to control the direction of the piece too much, but rather to pursue lines that suggest themselves and see how they turn out.

He has become interested lately in the tension between chancy, pell-mell elements and more conventionally orchestrated compositions. There seems to him a kind of accidental beauty in the simultaneous sounding of adjacent chords that he wants to explore further. He sees in the pattern of black and white keys potential chords, melodies unplayed, previously unreachable harmonies suddenly heaving into view. He tries to capture and transpose them, trusting his impulse to follow them through.

He likes to start with the bass and build upward. He plays phrases at different speeds regulated by the metronome. He superimposes arpeggios in C major and F sharp. White and black notes. Tonic and dominant chords. Major and minor both in the same register. A hum is set up in his head. A polytonal sympathy. It resonates like a vivid patch of paint upon a wall. He can almost see the shape of it, vibrating like a stain on the retina once his eyes are closed. He strives to align the noise inside his mind with the sounds available on the keyboard. Determined to make it fit, he scribbles notes on the stave. For a few minutes, there seems an absolute correspondence between these inner and outer sounds.

Then a strange thing happens. He feels his existence beginning to take shape according to an unseen pattern of keys. He remembers the celestial insect hum he heard in the garden, and he stops to ponder to what extent his life here is given and preordained—like the scrolls of music for mechanical piano. Abruptly he feels weightless, as if manipulated by the tricky fingering of something outside himself.

He writes furiously. He can't fill in the bars fast enough. The act of composition takes him over. For a man so used to controlling every detail of his life, this is a strange sensation. The impulse overwhelms him, and a buoyancy enters his body at the unstoppable flow of notes. He feels his head grow hot. The thin skin of his ears burns.

Finished, he sits back with exhaustion. But he wants to look over what he has done. Examining it, he's excited. Is he deceived? Is this not brilliant? His instinct is to sound out Catherine. She's usually the first to see his work. She's his best and fiercest critic, his finest copyist. He can always rely on her for an honest opinion. He itches to know what she might think. Would she like it? Would she approve? But he realizes he can't ask her. It would be an insult to give her something so clearly illustrative of his vigor. To offer this up now as an example of how he's thriving would serve only to sharpen her suffering. It would be like presenting the nude portrait of another woman and asking, What do you think?

Igor rolls a cigarette, registering the taste of tobacco on his tongue. Lighting it, his eyes are blinky for an instant from the smoke. He glances at the portraits of his children on the desk and at an oval frame containing an early picture of Catherine. The photographs and their fervid details seem remote studies in happiness, images from a previous life.

Since the revelation of his infidelity, she seems to have withdrawn almost completely into herself. She no longer comes down to lunch or dinner. If she takes turns about the garden, she does so alone. Ceasing to heap insults upon him, she now suffers noiselessly, choosing to turn away when he enters the room. She has stopped crying, too, he has noticed. Emotionally bankrupt, she no longer has the resources even to make a scene. A new mute hardness has entered her features. A look of numbness beyond sorrow. For the moment she has become a ghost.

Down the corridor, the clattering preparations for lunch are under way. It's odd not hearing the children, he thinks, now they are at school. The house is so quiet without them.

Igor thinks back to his own childhood. He recalls long walks in the woods outside St. Petersburg with his brother, the clinging haze of summer mornings, the clouds of midges by the river. Though similarly dimmed, his recollections prompt within him a moment of deep melancholy, a recognition of profound loss. Like a wrong color, there is something about his memories that chafes with the tone of his present locale. The tension generates a noise within his head. And there it is—that burning sensation again. Recognizing the moment, he grabs a pen and begins to scribble, launching himself into a last half hour of work before lunch. His hand can't keep up with his head, and he feels a welt develop on his finger from gripping the pen so tight.

 

 

 

In the afternoon, Coco strolls with Igor about the garden. The children won't return for another couple of hours.

She says, “Doesn't it bother you that we don't hold hands?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“It just occurred to me—we never do.”

“Does it bother
you
?”

“I don't know. I've only just realized.” A scent of cut grass lingers in the air, a polleny burden that scrapes against her sinuses and almost makes her sneeze. “It might.”

He says, “I'm not sure I'd like it much if we did.”

“Why not?”

“We're beyond that stage, now.”

“No one should be beyond that stage.”

“No, I mean, ours isn't a boy-girl kind of love. It's mature. We have an affinity deeper than man and wife. I feel it.”

“Deeper than cousins?”

They come to a curve in the lawn. “All right,” he says.

“I suppose it would be unseemly for your wife to see us holding hands . . .”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Really?”

“Don't be absurd.”

“Why is it absurd? Aren't you worried she'll find out?”

“Find out? What if I tell you she already knows?”

Coco halts. Stunned, she turns to face him. “She knows? How? Did you tell her?”

He does not meet her eye. “In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Why?”

He feels her looking at him. “Why not?”

“I can't believe you told her.”

“Who else would I tell?”

“Well, you didn't tell
me
you'd told her.”

“You didn't consult me before you told Misia.”

“It's not a game, Igor.”

Realizing he has some ground to recover, he blurts, “Look, how can you question the fact that I love you?”

They begin walking again. “I just wish you were more honest with me, that's all.”

“I adore you,” he says. “You know that.”

“Mm.”

As though to prove his point, Igor, in the open, kisses the nape of Coco's neck. Her perfume rises into his nose. He feels the heady familiar ache of longing that has haunted his body all summer.

He has been more attentive of late, she concedes. He's taught her a few things on the piano, written her ardent notes, and given her drawings of the two of them together. But she knows it is also his way of trying to take control. And she must guard against that. She wants to keep the upper hand.