Mademoiselle Chanel (18 page)

B
alsan had wanted to take me home. But in the months following Boy’s death, there was no such place. I left the villa in Saint-Cloud; closed up my apartment on avenue de Tokio and sold it, purchasing a slate-roofed house with the fanciful name of Bel Respiro in the western Parisian suburb of Garches—walled and gated, surrounded by gardens. Misia’s former servants came to work for me. Joseph Leclerc, his wife, Marie, and their daughter, Suzanne, had been serving in the home of an avowed eccentric, but they must have found me even more of a challenge.

After ordering my entire bedroom swathed in black, the color that wipes out everything else, I could not spend a single night there and called for Joseph to save me from this tomb and make up a bed for me in another room. I barely ate, though Marie sought to entice me with a variety of native Catalan dishes—hearty meat potages that I pushed away after three bites. In the atelier, my staff whispered that mademoiselle was looking frail, wasting away before their very eyes, while Adrienne tiptoed around me as though I might explode.

She had good reason. I became a tyrant, the first to arrive at work, watching the clock with my foot tapping as everyone else bustled in, reminding them we had set hours of work at Chanel Modes and I’d not tolerate
slacking. I knew how someone’s grief could become another’s profit, for had I not spun gold from the chaff of war? And as I watched them, demanding unswerving fulfillment to the terms of their employment, nitpicking every detail in the workroom, so did I watch my accounts, until Madame Aubert, one of my most trusted and efficient
premières,
informed me that if I suspected thievery, she would hand in her notice. I took her threat under advisement. I could not afford to lose her. My staff at rue Cambon now consisted of over a hundred seamstresses, as well as numerous
habilleuses,
who assisted in the dressing rooms, and
vendeuses,
my sales personnel on the floor. Despite the advice that clients preferred a designer’s service, I would only personally see to an elite few.

And the clients still came—business was as heartless as death. A few ventured to tell me, “You mustn’t let this horrible thing overcome you. You must take care of yourself.”

This horrible thing
.

This was what Boy’s death meant to them: an unfortunate circumstance, like the war or the epidemic of Spanish flu already killing thousands, something to be acknowledged and regretted, but never given proper due. In a flash of rage, as Adrienne tallied the clients’ purchases and I clenched a pen I longed to stick in their eyes, I began to scrawl on a pad of paper:
Capel and Coco, Coco and Capel, Capel and Coco . . .

C and C. In time, I would revert the positions, interlocked but facing outward, independent yet together. Always. It would become my emblem. It was how I would honor him.

Of my private clientele, only Kitty de Rothschild showed true sympathy. Sweeping into the atelier with tears in her eyes, she tossed propriety aside to hug me and say, “Oh, I was beside myself when I heard! My poor Coco, you must be devastated. I remember how he looked at you, as if you were everything he ever wanted to see. He loved you as few do. Remember that later, even if you cannot remember it now. What you had with him, many wished was theirs.”

I never forgot her kindness, which dissolved for a moment our disparate places in society, where even now they did not accept me as an equal.
She also gave me comfort, though I did not say it at the time. For she had spoken a truth no other would dare admit: Boy and I had been envied because we were everything to each other.

Work sustained me, even if I found myself biting back tears as I bent over a swath of fabric or yanked out the cuff on a troublesome sleeve. I still had clothes to design, produce, and sell, even if I decided to set aside for the time my aborted attempt at formal evening wear.

But once my day was done, in my house alone with my servants, I succumbed to despair. Sleep eluded me. I paced all night, the specter of my bed waiting. There were times in those terrible months when I felt I could not endure life without him, everything turning as black as that room I would not enter. I called my decorator, ordered my mourning room turned into a pink satin boudoir. Even then, I drowned awake in carnation sheets.

My beloved Pita and Poppée were the only creatures who kept me sane; they still needed walks, affection, to cuddle at night. They clung to me like mute children who recognize a terrible blow has been sustained, making such a fuss in the morning when I dressed for work that I started taking them with me to the shop. I glared at Madame Aubert when she informed me that she and Adrienne had spent the previous day picking stray fur off the displays.

“You can leave any time you wish. But my dogs stay.”

They were Boy’s final gift to me, the only thing I had left of him that still breathed. I would have fired the entire staff before I relinquished them.

I DID NOT ATTEND HIS FUNERAL,
though many important dignitaries and friends did. Later, I heard his wife had not been there, either, so shocked by his death she almost miscarried his second child. When his will was read in January, I received a terse letter from his London attorney. Boy had bequeathed me the sum of £40,000—the entire price of my Biarritz establishment, which I had reimbursed him for with interest. Accompanying the letter was a small package from Bertha; when I finally forced myself to open it, I found Boy’s wristwatch, still marking perfect time.

That day, I did not get out of bed.

TIME PASSED BUT IT DID NOT HEAL MY WOUNDS,
contrary to the cliché. It excavated and deepened my grief, making hollow niches in my heart where memories perpetually burned.

But it did pass, bringing me some shallow relief. Misia had been pleading with me to go out, see friends, attend the theater and the ballet. She trudged every week to my atelier, hauling me to the Ritz for lunch. On those nights when she telephoned while I was still at work—I began to stay past midnight, avoiding the desolation of my house—to ask me to join her and Sert, I demurred, citing the long drive home. Finally, she suggested I either remodel the vacant apartment above my atelier or rent a suite at the Ritz so we could see each other more.

Both ideas sounded reasonable. Neither appealed, but I did it anyway, bringing in a designer to see to the apartment and taking a two-room suite in the Hôtel Ritz where I could gaze out to the place Vendôme and watch late-night lovers stroll.

“You look like death,” Misia pronounced when she came to fetch me for a gala at the mansion of the Comte de Graumont and his wife, who was a client of mine. We were, in effect, crashing the party, as the American saying went. The only invitation to this notorious spring party, where the Graumonts wore flamboyant costumes and allowed the haut monde and avant-garde to intermingle, was for Sert, who had painted the gala sets. Misia was outraged to learn I’d been excluded. “You dress the countess! How dare they ignore you?” and upon declaring she wouldn’t go if I did not accompany them, she managed to drag me out of my self-imposed exile for a night of revelry I was not looking forward to.

“I’m not sleeping well,” I told her.

“Not well? My darling, you aren’t sleeping at all! You could sell those bags under your eyes in your shop. This cannot go on. I refuse to let you die, too.”

Sert guffawed. I sat sandwiched between them in the car. “Tosh means it,” he said, using his nickname for her. “If she has to, she’ll force-feed you pâté and camp at the foot of your bed.”

I loathed the gala. I was in no mood for blaring saxophones, cheek-to-cheek
dancing, or gossipy innuendo, but Graumont expressed his delight that we’d come uninvited and offered me a commission to design the costumes for his next event. When Sert and Misia saw me back to the Ritz, she opened the beaded bag in which she seemed to carry an endless supply of everything and thrust a small blue bottle at me. “Ten drops before bed. You’ll sleep like a baby. Don’t let me hear you say again that you are not. You will eat, work, and rest. Or I
will
move in with you.”

I didn’t know if it was her alarming threat or the night itself, for I’d felt so alone at the party, stranded among delirium, but as I climbed the stairs to my suite, hearing Pita and Poppée barking behind the door at my arrival, her little bottle weighted my hand.

I left it on my bedside table, took the dogs for a walk, and returned. I had eaten sparingly from the canapés at the party but I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t tired, either. Or rather, I was beyond fatigue. I dwelled in eternal exhaustion, in a haze of the fragmented past and terror of the future.

You have to respect the lotus. She’s not a lady you want to invite too often
. . .

Unscrewing the bottle cap with its glass syringe, I dripped ten drops of the mud-colored, bitter liquid on my tongue. Then, as I faced the dogs already lolling on the bed, asleep in that untroubled manner of animals, I took five drops more.

I did not think. I did not question it.

Misia was right. For the first time since losing Boy, I slept like a baby.

T
hey’re asking if we have any perfume.” Adrienne had come upstairs to the apartment where I was overseeing the recent changes by my decorator. I had to approve new furnishings, search for objets d’art and other items to make it a place where I could stay. It was the first time I’d had a blank canvas, not a fully furnished residence. This would be my special abode, my refuge from the demands of work and life, and I barely paid heed as she repeated, “The Americans, they’re buying up everything we have, but they want to know why we don’t sell perfumes.”

I grimaced, flipping through swatches of wallpaper. “Because we’re not a souvenir kiosk. There are a hundred shops in Paris, selling a thousand horrid scents the Americans will adore. Send them there.” As I heard her turn away, I added, “Don’t give them accounts. They must pay for what they take. Unless they have a permanent address in Paris, no credit. We can’t bill them when they return to wherever they came from. Understood?”

“Yes, Gabrielle.” She left me, down in the mouth as she tended to be these days, no closer to marrying Nexon than she’d ever been and consequently miserable because of it.

I lit a cigarette, paced to the apartment’s newly enlarged windows. It
was cozy in here, not much larger than my suite at the Ritz. Whether or not I could sleep here was another question. As I thought this, I glanced at my purse on one of the gilded Empire-style chairs that the designer had left for me to try.

No. I turned back around. Not during the day and never at work.

Misia’s elixir had become my talisman. I had finally begun to sleep regularly, not as restfully as I had before Boy’s death, but better than I had since. I was also starting to rely on it too much, the first initial fifteen drops becoming twenty, then twenty-five, numbing me until I floated in a dreamless cave. I awoke parched, groggy for hours afterward, so that eventually I’d adjusted my schedule, arriving at the atelier at noon—no doubt, to my staff’s relief.

I chuckled to myself as I thought of the Americans, downstairs in my shop looting the shelves. They had inundated Paris since the war; everywhere I turned, I heard their grating, nasal language or mutilated attempts to speak French. They colonized every district—the Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Saint-Germain—consuming endless plates of steak and
pommes frites,
throwing dollars around as if they grew them in fields. Money, money, money. They had an endless supply, the boom in construction, in automobile industries, in steel and railroads and everything else they could exploit turning their vast country into a bottomless gold mine. Remembering that Boy had often said America was a whore willing to do anything for a buck, I gave a harsh laugh. It suited me like pearls. They were making my already lucrative establishments and reputation impossible to ignore.

They’re asking if we have any perfume . . .

I snorted, stubbed out my cigarette, and called my dogs, who trotted from the other rooms. Perfume. As if they could ever recognize a decent scent. They probably thought the eau de toilette sold in the local pharmacies was perfume!

Nevertheless, as I went downstairs to see how much profit the Americans had made me today, the idea lingered.

A
parfum
by Chanel. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

“I’M THINKING OF DEVELOPING A PERFUME,”
I said a few weeks later at one of Misia and Jojo’s dinners. I’d started visiting again for informal gatherings, where the usual suspects—Cocteau; Picasso; his wife, Olga; and a revolving host of others—sat around drinking and debating art. We had become a close circle, linked by the artery of defiance running through Paris, its blood the color of paint, clay, and ink, or, in my case, blue, cream, and coral. Evenings at the Serts’ were never heavy, never too mysterious; the most immediate concerns after promulgating the value of art and how it would transform the world were how to pay the rent, the latest nightclub to sneak into, who bedded whom, and which new cocktail to imbibe.

I enjoyed the informality of it. I wanted everything light, hedonistic, forgettable. The less I had to dwell on, the less I remembered Boy. He was always there, of course, lurking in the corners of my heart, but I had begun to see him less, to cease turning about with a gasp on a crowded street or in a restaurant, catching a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired figure who stopped my breath. There were days now when I barely cried. I had reached the stage where his memory had been absorbed, soaked inside my skin like indelible dye—a part of me I would never forget. But I was still haunted by his fading smell on the one pullover of his I’d kept and the last set of sheets we’d slept in, which remained unwashed—that subtle aroma of soap and leather, of his musk licked by lemons, now becoming a ghost I tried in vain to summon.

Scent. Here it was again. Why did I suddenly find myself pursuing something so elusive?

“A perfume?” piped up Cocteau. “L’eau de Coco!” Then, when he saw my disgusted moue, he smirked. “No, you’re right. Too tropical. What would you call it?”

He was always interested in what I had to say. He had a magpie mind. He’d begun to explore the radical analytical theories of Freud alongside the melancholic poetry of Rimbaud. Though he sharpened his social teeth at Misia’s knee, I’d grown fond of him, for of all those who attended the Serts’, Cocteau was one of the few who had more than a passing interest in fashion.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “It’s only an idea.”

“Poiret sold perfumes, didn’t he?” said Cocteau. “Nuit de Chine, Lucreze Borgia, and several others. I remember hearing about a grand party he gave to launch the first one. I don’t think he ever made money on his perfumes, but it became de rigueur for his clients to wear them.”

“Yes, they smelled . . .” I shuddered. His perfumes had been ghastly but I didn’t care to say it aloud, not when Poiret faced his final decay, most of his clientele having abandoned his atelier. A few powdered matrons of the gilded past still adhered to his adage that the more luxuriously one dressed, the wealthier one appeared, but the younger generation, the daughters and granddaughters of his matrons, had absconded to me.

“Perfume does have a low margin of profitability,” I said, “and so much competition, too. Maybe it’s not a good idea.”

Whether it was or not was of no concern to Misia, judging by her yawn. “Well, don’t get too involved in a new project, darling, because you must design my dress for my wedding. And you’re coming with us on our honeymoon to Italy, isn’t she, Jojo?”

I started, turned to look at Sert where he reclined on the sofa beside me, puffing on his cigarillo. He was a fat little gnome, furry everywhere, coarse black matting even on the tops of his paint-spattered hands yet as bald as an egg on top. I had come to adore him. He embodied his native soil—earthy and unpretentious, surprisingly erudite but without the compulsion to prove it. And very patient. He had to be, living with Misia.

“So, you finally asked her,” I said. Misia had been after him for months to make their union official—not, I suspected, because she cared about the formality. Rather, Boy’s death had so shaken her that it compelled her to review her own situation and realize that unlike me, who earned my own income, she could be left without an insurance policy, such as a will or an amicable divorce settlement. Sert made money on his commissions and the American millionaire Rockefeller had extended an open invitation for him to come work in New York.

“She wore me down,” Sert replied affably. “My Tosh won’t take no for an answer, never could.” He gave me a sly smile. “You must know that by now. Best start packing for Venice.”

“But when is the wedding? I’ve not heard anything about it until now,” exclaimed Cocteau. No one else in the room was paying the news notice; Picasso was deep in talk with another of the Ballets Russes dancers, his wife, Olga, to my amusement, perched as close to him as she could get without crawling into his lap. Her virile Pablo had a wandering eye.

“I was going to invite you, too,” said Misia. “To the wedding, that is. Not to Italy.”

Cocteau pouted. “I’m small. I can fit in a suitcase,” but Misia had already fixed her stare on me. “We’ll wed in June and leave for Italy soon thereafter. Does that suit, darling?”

The thought of having to fit her for a gown was enough to make me want to plead incompetence. Sert knew it, too. He grinned from ear to ear, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “June would be impossible,” I said, trying to sound apologetic instead of relieved. “I’m scheduled to go to Biarritz. I must attend to my
maison;
it has been too long since I visited and Marthe Davelli wants to meet me there. I’m staying through July.”

Misia scowled. She soured at any mention of my other friends. “You didn’t tell me.”

“It hadn’t come up. I am sorry, Misia. But I can still design your dress.”

“No, no.” She flicked her wrist, jangling her numerous bracelets. “We’ll wait.”

“Wait?” I glanced again at Sert.

“Until you’re ready,” he explained. He leaned over to whisper, “She should marry you instead. I’m not important if you’re not there.” He didn’t say it with rancor. As I laughed and reached for my cigarettes, he arched his brow and sat back in smug contentment.

The next day, I rang up Marthe to confirm that I would be in Biarritz by the end of the month.