Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (33 page)

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 Coco's reproachful tone is superseded by reassuring noises.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.

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.

The vision pierces him.

He's shocked to discover how much the music moves him. Until now he's always seen music as an absolute, pure and authentic: an essence that represents nothing but itself. Having resisted the expressive quality of his work for so long, he finds himself overwhelmed with the images and the memories it evokes. The back of his throat aches. His legs are trembling. Hearing it now, he's puzzled by the impact the music has on him. And yet there's nothing sentimental about the experience, nothing fuzzy or obscure. The recollections are sharp and exact, and the sense of loss all the more poignant for it. He feels the sadness hang upon his heart like a weight.

The principal violinist is alone in witnessing it. Closest to Igor and keenest to catch his look, he sees a tear well in the conductor's eye.

Igor feels it brimming, forming a lens that focuses all the aches and longings, all the tendernesses and caresses of his time with Coco, distilling for an instant the months he spent in Garches. Then the tear, already distended, its droplet tensely stretched, breaks—and with it the memory of their relationship shatters into a thousand fragments. Unmendable. Abruptly the music bursts upon his consciousness. The percussion thuds, the strings tighten, and the brass arrives in orgiastic crashes. Great swerves of sound.

And as it breaks, the tear slips from his eye, quickening down the plane of his cheek, slowing in the channel at the side of his broad nose. It warps finally around his mouth where, drawn into its dark space, it melts upon his tongue.

On the last day of her life, a Sunday, Coco returned from a drive.

Dismissing her chauffeur, she pushed her way through the revolving doors of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Still disturbed by what she had seen, she felt exhausted. Her body felt so heavy, every step she took seemed about to pull her down.

That morning, as announced in the newspapers, a cull of pigeons had taken place. Everywhere she looked, the boulevards were strewn with their bodies, the streets were thick with the litter of dead birds.

Shocked by the sight of this slaughter, Coco had been startled, too, by the sudden silence that obtained. Aside from the occasional hum of morning traffic there was, she noticed, no undersong to the city anymore. Its melody, a kind of liquefied cooing furnished by the birds, had disappeared. Now everything suddenly seemed so still. Mist clung to the trees, making ghosts of them. The city seemed bleached of color. An odor of decay rose to Coco's nostrils and almost made her faint.

Back inside her permanent suite at the Ritz, she rested in her single bed. She did not have to go to work again until the following morning. Around her, the walls were white, the vases dense with flowers, and the shelves filled with leather-bound books. But inside her a sense of emptiness swelled.

Lying there, she heard the church bells chime. The sound transported her for a moment back to her schooldays at the convent in Aubazine. She remembered prayers being whispered in the church by the altar, and candles glimmering over rows of dried flowers. And through the intervening years arose a penetrating whiff of incense lifting in clouds above the Madonna.

Next to her, she saw the triple icon Igor had given her as a gift after leaving Garches some fifty years before. She wondered, Was it really so long ago?

She smiled, reflecting how, out of the dense weave of the century, they had managed to snag in the developing threads of each other's lives. In her memory, their love affair made a vivid pattern, a small but perfect dance. They were each in their late thirties then. In retrospect, it occurred to her how young they both had seemed. Now she felt so decrepit, so old and alone. She pondered what might have been had they stayed together; how differently for each of them things might have turned out. She still had, in storage somewhere, his mechanical piano. He had never returned to pick it up.

Memories of the last half century mixed with the impression of the room's whiteness, making the space within her seem infinitely wide. Slowly, as the sound of the bells faded, and the sense of her own tiredness grew, she drifted off to sleep.

An hour later, she awoke abruptly. A bubble entered her stomach. Pain crowded her chest.

She screamed to her maid, Céline: “Open the window! I can't breathe! I can't breathe!” The noise seemed torn from her.

Seeing the icon on her bedside table, an impulse seized her. She crossed herself. A series of images flashed across her eye: that first night at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; the bunch of jonquils he brought her at the zoo; the nacreous button she sewed back on his shirt; the night of the storm when she fell into his arms; her hands trailing noiselessly across the keys of the piano; the sunlit walks they both took in the woods; the dancing on the tables at Le Boeuf sur le Toit; and the pistachio-colored parrot that drove them crazy squawking her name.

The images condensed with hallucinatory clarity. She thought she heard a distant music: the spasms of a piano, a shadowy harmony. She caught and followed the song along the communicating rooms of her senses. And in the phantasmagoria of sudden memory she recalled how he looked as he leaned to kiss her, remembered sharply his dark eyes.

The pain spread in bands across her chest, arrowing down her arms.

She heard Céline utter something reassuring and saw her reach for a syringe. Her head lifted effortfully from the pillow. Her body arched upward, then fell back heavily. She felt something tighten around her. The scent of lilies touched her nose. A single tear filled her eye, tense with iridescence.

Then everything went blank.

An ocean away, Igor was getting out of bed in New York. He experienced a pain, as if a rib of his had cried out. A dull throb lingered as he rose to his feet. He stretched his arms to take away the ache. Then, dressing, he unwrapped a new shirt from a crinkly cellophane packet. He felt a tiny thrill of static exercise the hairs on the back of his hands. Teasing out layers of tissue paper, he detached a blanched cardboard support and a clear plastic halter from inside the collar. He released pins from the shoulders and the back. The sleeves were pleached like a cinema curtain. One square pocket framed the left breast. Then, undoing two or three buttons at the throat, he pulled the shirt on over his head. After a moment of half panic in which he felt he was being smothered, his head emerged through the neck of the shirt. Whitely he raised his arms as though about to fly.