Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (26 page)

“Anyway,” she says, “there's something I need to tell
you
.”

“What?”

“Something that concerns us both.”

“Well?”

“My period is a week late.”

His heart freezes. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

“Is that unusual?”

“I'm regular as clockwork.”

His next step seems not to land, but to go on falling. His color drains through a hole in the center of himself.

“Does it alarm you?”

“Should it?”

“I don't know.”

He offers, “Catherine is often late.”

A note of protest rises in her throat. “Well, I'm
not
, as a rule.”

“Do you feel any different?” He stays her with his hand. “Catherine always said she felt strange. Something chemical. Her breasts used to be tender and sore. She felt tired. That's how she knew.”

“I don't feel that way.” Come to think of it, though, maybe she does.

“What are we going to do?”

“There's nothing
to
do. Yet.”

A fear is touched off in him. “Have you tried taking hot baths?”

“I always do.”

“I mean scalding.”

“And what if I
want
a baby? Have you considered that?” She thinks of the times she spent trying with Boy, all to no avail. She hasn't so far contemplated it with Igor. Now that it might happen, though, and she hears herself discussing it, she quite likes the idea. She feels a sense of pride in her possible fertility. Her view of the garden, giving on to the plum and cherry trees, seems projected from within. She says, “You're not happy about this, are you?”

The sunlight dyes the insides of his eyelids red—a willed counterpoint to her refusal to bleed.

“Are
you
?”

She withdraws sharply at his question. She's not sure what she thinks. And what's that burny feeling in her abdomen, or is she just imagining it? “No,” she offers solemnly. “But I'd like to be there when you tell Catherine about
this
!”

He can't find the breath to answer. In front of him on the lawn, he sees a green ball covered in dog's slobber and a shuttlecock stripped of all but one feather. The unsayable fills the next few seconds. There's a cacophony from the parrots in the outhouse. Blameless clouds float high above his head.

Walking back into the house, a coolness washes over them. The heat leaks from their skin and clothes.

Of Igor's four children, Coco's favorite is Ludmilla. The twelve-year-old doggedly follows her about the house. She listens to her on the telephone, runs after her into the garden, even pursues her into the bedroom to see her change clothes. And, just when Coco's patience is stretched to breaking point by her clinging attentions, Ludmilla, sensing it somehow, will summon a winning, irresistible smile.

Keenly aware that she has made a favorite, Coco doesn't care. She has no problem showing her affection openly. She's not the girl's mother, after all, she reflects.

Catherine quickly comes to resent the rapport her eldest daughter establishes with her host. She can't help but notice that Ludmilla is more often downstairs playing with Coco than she is upstairs ministering to her. A kind of unannounced competition for the girl's affection begins within the house.

This sense of challenge merely quickens within Coco an already instinctive liking for the girl. The two of them enjoy a developing warmth. She allows Ludmilla to play with her jewelry and encourages her to try on some of her clothes. The girl is excited by the different fabrics. She's intrigued, too, by the way materials can be transformed from their raw state into a skirt or jacket. The whole process fascinates her, and she's keen to know more. So one day Coco takes Ludmilla to the shop. The girl comes back dazzled and impatient to tell her mother about the fabulous things she has seen. She also wants to show off Coco's present of a dress.

“Isn't it marvelous?” Ludmilla gushes to her mother, showing off the mantle of black Chantilly lace. Catherine manages a tight smile. The dress whispers sinisterly to her. In twirling around, the girl displays an instinctive flirtatious-ness, a native sexuality that makes her mother look at her in a different light. She's horrified at the thought that Coco is educating her in the ways of the world. That bitch. Her baby. She feels a hard knot inside herself: something twisted, kinked.

She complains to Igor. She feels Coco is stealing Ludmilla away from her, buying her affection with expensive gifts. It is enough to lose a husband, but a daughter as well! That is too much to endure.

Igor, of course, does nothing. Anyway, what can he say? He can't very well scold Coco for befriending his daughter, for generously spending some time with her. She'd laugh at him. Besides, he wonders how much of this new closeness to Ludmilla is due to her own possibly pregnant state. Each day he waits to hear that it is all a false alarm and that there is nothing to be worried about. But nothing has happened yet, and he's growing ever more anxious and preoccupied. Then, when Catherine complains that if anything the situation has become worse, and that Coco and Ludmilla are spending more time together than ever, he snaps, “I don't see what the problem is. There's no harm in it. It's perfectly natural. And,” he adds with impatience, “it's just as well at her age that the girl gets some attention.”

Catherine feels the jibe keenly. She doesn't deserve this. Energized by fury, she retorts, “Even when I'm sick, I still do more for the children than you.”

It is a sore point all around. Coco is careful not to involve herself in this new row. Ludmilla meanwhile remains oblivious of the crosscurrents of affection that eddy around her. And while her mother and father continue to argue over whom she spends more time with, she grows, to Catherine's chagrin, ever closer to Coco.

One day, the girl remains in her room, crying. She's inconsolable. She fails to respond when Catherine asks her what the matter is. She refuses to speak to her father, too, and seems oddly ashamed. Her sobbing continues all morning. Only to Coco does she reveal, toward lunchtime, the broad red stain, clammy and stickily intimate, that weeps from her knickers, ruining her new dress.

Coco doesn't need to be told. As she walks into the room she can smell it.

It is her first period, and Ludmilla feels afraid and upset. Coco's mouth frames a smile. The ghost of a maternal impulse burrows at her chest. She congratulates the girl at twelve and a half upon her graduation into womanhood, giving her a sisterly squeeze of the hand. Immediately, she sees, Ludmilla feels better about herself.

Coco's period arrived this morning, too. The two of them are in sync. It used to happen when she lived with Adrienne. A blood sisterhood. She feels silly for having said anything to Igor, for frightening him like that. She never
felt
pregnant, though perhaps she imagined a few telltale signs. She told him partly to shock him out of what she saw as his complacency. And partly because by articulating her fears, in a superstitious way, she thought she might even help bring the period on. Besides, apart from Igor, who else could she confide in? If she mentioned it to anybody else, Misia in particular, he'd kill her.

She feels relieved, she thinks, that the scare is over. The fact is she's not pregnant. It was what she wanted. But at the same time her relief is complicated by a remote sense of disappointment. She'd begun, she realizes, to carry herself differently: more stately, more serene. She recognizes now from the responses of her body that she enjoys a secret urge to have a child. And if not now, then when? She knows that time is running out.

Ludmilla has brightened. Flattening a tear at the side of the girl's nose, Coco advises her to tell her mother. “She'll be proud of you.”

Ludmilla twists her lower lip sideways with worry. “She'll think I'm dirty.”

“No.”

“She will.”

“She won't, I promise. She'll think you're growing up.”

“Can't
you
tell her?”

Smiling: “I don't think that would be right.”

“Why not?”

“Why don't you talk to Suzanne about it? She'll explain everything.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The thought provides a ledge to which the girl clings. It seems to reassure her. She looks up. “All right.”

Ludmilla fingers the dark stain on her dress. She laughs nervously. “I feel strange.”

“You
will
to begin with. Everyone does.”

“Does it mean I can have babies?”

“That's right.”

“Are
you
going to have a baby ever?”

“I don't know. Someday, perhaps.” The words scald her throat. Looking at the toilet paper in her hand this morning, darkened with her unpunctual blood, she had felt cheated. In its stain, she had seen the evidence of her failure: the one thing, she recognizes, she cannot do. She thinks now of the two abortions from her early lovers. Cavalrymen, both. What had those operations done to her insides? Reduced her to this empty spot of red; this nameless blank, this absence.

“Mama likes babies.”

“Does she want any more, do you think?” Resentment shades her voice. She wonders how Catherine can be so effortlessly fecund, and she not. Four children. It just doesn't seem right or fair.

“Not since she got sick with Milène.”

Coco says nothing.

After a silence: “So you don't think I'm dirty?”

“It's perfectly natural.”

Then, shyly: “You think I ought to tell Mama?”

Coco smiles. “I think that's right.”

Ludmilla is not quite sure how to hold herself or her dress. She shrugs. Her body seems to have grown heavy. It's as if something inside her drags.

Coco leans toward her, and awkwardly they embrace. She pats her back, then holds her by the shoulders. Ludmilla's eyes grow moist again. Placing both hands on the girl's cheeks, Coco wipes away the tears with a deft, symmetrical motion of her thumbs. “You're a good girl,” Coco says. “And don't worry about the dress. We can soon get you another one of those.”

 

 

 

Yellow-brown leaves fall plenteously. A cold October wind crimps the grass.

A Sunday, Catherine makes an effort to rise early and go to church. She takes the children with her, holding Ludmilla by the hand. Along, too, go Joseph and Marie with Suzanne. Igor has too much work to do, he says. Coco is still in bed.

A little later, Igor dresses for the second time that morning. He's in Coco's bedroom. They have tried and failed to make love. It's the first time since her late period. Igor burns with shame. “I'm sorry. I'm preoccupied at the moment.”

“That's all right.”

Irked by the tolerance in her tone, he protests, “I can't perform to order, you know.”

“I said it's all right. It doesn't matter.” But the warmth in her voice sounds ambiguous.

When she told him she wasn't pregnant, she was shocked to discover how exhilarated he was. He must think he leads a charmed life, she reflects. He'd seemed pleased with himself and said he'd prayed for it to happen. He'd even attended church. She felt annoyed at this. “It doesn't matter,” she repeats.

“You always make me feel as if I have to compete.”

“Compete? With whom?”

“With you.” He can't finish dressing quickly enough and fumbles clumsily with the belt on his trousers.

“With me?” She starts up from her languor. “I see.” For a moment an odd silence organizes itself around the bed. Then she asks, “Are you afraid of me, Igor?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I don't understand what you mean.”

“Don't insult me.”

“I didn't mean to.” She lies back again.

Igor struggles with one of his socks. “You always want to be the one in control.”

“I just try to be happy, that's all.”

“And I do my best to
make
you happy.”

Not wholly convinced: “I know you do.” She sits up in an attempt to appear sincere. He has spoken recently of dedicating his next symphony to her. When it comes to it, though, she doubts he will. It's too reckless a gesture for him, she thinks.

He tightens his laces with a tug. “I'd better go. They'll be back any minute.”

“Yes.”

Fear of discovery has been overtaken by a new fear: that he doesn't measure up to Coco's other lovers. She makes him feel inadequate at times, inexpert, inept. And he still can't shake the feeling that what he's doing is wrong.

His heart lurches between the two women of his life like a pendulum in an unvarying arc. Catherine his wife, and Coco his mistress. Two interlinking letter Cs. Blindly he hopes that through some miracle of merging the two women might become one: with Catherine's delicacy and Coco's ardor, with Catherine's gentle intelligence and Coco's native charm, with Catherine's sensitivity and Coco's taste. Alas, the gap between them seems to widen with each passing hour. And his heart, like an atom trapped, smashes against the cage of his ribs, leaving a burning sensation in the center of his chest.

He starts to leave, then turns to kiss her. A formality. She permits the gesture. But his face lingers next to hers. The moment becomes tender.

She whispers, “Why can't you just relax?”

Breathing in deeply, he smells the musk of her body. For an instant her vulnerability and his lust are renewed.