Mademoiselle Chanel (7 page)

“That is wonderful,” she said, unconvincingly, and we cobbled together a cold meal out of three-day-old bread and fatty ham the charcuterie sold us at a reduced price.

Then one day, when I arrived home, nearly at my own wits’ end, I found her waiting in her now-soiled linen travel suit, her suitcase packed and crumpled hat on her head.

“I’m going back to Moulins. I love you like a sister, Gabrielle, but I cannot take this anymore.” Her voice caught. “Maurice hasn’t visited me once, and if I stay away too long—”

“No. Say no more,” I whispered, embracing her.

I accompanied her to the train station, bought her a third-class ticket home, and waved from the platform as the train pulled away in a jangle of gears and a cloud of black fumes.

Only as I trudged back to our grungy room did I realize I’d been abandoned once again.

However, this time I was truly alone.

B
alsan’s absence had first bewildered, then hurt, then outraged me, so that I squashed his memory like the numerous cockroaches infesting my room.

One night, as I performed in the
beuglant
in some awful number, dressed in a humiliating shoulder-baring costume that the proprietor demanded we wear and pay for in installments out of our wages, I saw Balsan enter the cabaret. I recognized him at once, even from across the room, like a kick to my stomach. As the lyrics of the song warbled, bitter in my mouth, he looked around, clearly aghast, at the rowdy stomping of boots and streams of chewing tobacco into spittoons. Then he slowly turned to the stage.

He must have spotted me, the gaunt one, my bodice held up with pins because I had lost so much weight, but I pretended not to see him. I finished the song and fled the lurid catcalls that followed, rushing backstage to tear off my costume, even as the manager barked, “You’re not done! It’s your turn to take around the purse for tips.”

The purse he always dipped into, taking a substantial cut. I just glared at him and stormed out the back door, not caring if I dirtied my sole pair of shoes in the alley where customers relieved themselves.

I felt sick as I raced to my room. Flinging my coat aside, I looked at
myself in the mirror. I had avoided it for weeks, not wanting to see the results of my stubbornness. Now, as I finally let myself take in my reflection, a scream rose in my throat.

I had the face of my childhood again: huge lightless black eyes hovering above pinched cheeks. Whirling away, I reached for my bag and near-empty pack of cigarettes (I smoked incessantly, the cheapest dregs I could buy, because it helped curb hunger).

A knock came at the door.

I froze, not moving, until the match I’d lit singed my fingers. I wouldn’t answer. He could knock until his knuckles bled. He could go to hell, back to his privileged existence, to his damn horses and empty promises.

“Coco,” he said, his voice clear, for the door was almost as thin as me. “I know you’re in there. Open up. I want to see you. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

That did the trick. Lunging at the door, I threw it open and before he could step over the threshold, I yelled, “Everywhere? Where did you look? I’ve been here the entire time, in the very room we rented together. You wanted to see me? Well, here I am.
Look at me!
”

I would have slammed the door on him had he not stuck his foot in the way. As he came inside I backed away, so enraged I could have strangled him with my bare hands.

He said softly, “My God. What have they done to you?”

I crumbled where I stood, covering my face with my hands as sobs overcame me. I had not experienced grief like this since my father left. It came pouring out, all the loss and bewilderment, the disbelief that no matter how much I tried, how strong I thought I was, the world would always be stronger—a tomb of illusions that would bury me under its weight.

“You’re leaving now,” I heard him whisper, his hands about me, catching me by the waist and forcing me to him as I cried and tried to push him away. “You’re coming to live in my new château. Enough of this pride. I want you with me.”

W
hat girl doesn’t want to be taken care of?

That was what I kept telling myself when Balsan took me to Moulins to say my good-byes. After the ordeal in Vichy, even Moulins seemed like heaven, but I was only there to visit my aunts. I wore the new black linen jacket and skirt he had bought me—my other clothes tossed on the rag heap—and sat demurely as he assured Louise that I would want for nothing.

Adrienne clapped in delight, as if Balsan had gotten down on his knee to present me with a ring. In the few months we’d been apart, she had reclaimed her self-possession, aglow because Maurice de Nexon had indeed been pining for her, though she didn’t explain why he had not come to see her in Vichy. Louise had found her a suitable chaperone, renowned for her matchmaking skills, who suggested a trip to Egypt for Adrienne and the baron, along with several other couples, to remove the lovers from their environment and see if marriage was truly something they wished to pursue. Adrienne later confided to me as we walked through the town square that Nexon’s family expected him to wed a girl of rank, but he’d told them he desired only her, so she was prepared to do battle to win his family over.

“I couldn’t be happier for you,” I said, even if I wondered at her willingness to endure the inevitable disrepute of being seen as the baron’s mistress. I also wondered at Louise’s willingness to allow it, chaperone or not, even as I realized I was about to do the same with Balsan, though he’d not said as much. I could hardly judge a situation that I myself was willing to accept. Moreover, Adrienne was in love, while I did not feel anything remotely like that for Balsan. Gratitude, yes, and relief that he had found me, for I’d have perished on my own; but much as I searched my heart, I felt nothing approximating Adrienne’s desire for Nexon. Indeed, I feared further intimacies, though it was inevitable. Once again, as Adrienne regaled me with her hopes, I wondered if I was incapable of the unquenchable ardor she described.

Tante Louise wished me
bonne chance
and averted her eyes, acknowledging with that one gesture that she was relieved to see me go. I had turned out to be my father’s child, intent on forging my own path; it was better for everyone to remove me from Adrienne’s sphere. I was only a niece, while Adrienne was her sister, upon whom Louise must focus all her attention if Adrienne was to win the baron’s hand. I had become a liability, an unwanted reminder of where girls could end up. As in my childhood, I must be shuttled away, out of sight.

This realization hardened my heart. I departed Moulins without a second glance, though my sister Antoinette lived in the convent and Julia an hour away in my grandparents’ house. I wanted to see them but I didn’t care to explain. Tante Louise would inform them soon enough of how I had strayed from any hope for respectability. I knew it was what she thought; I saw it in her eyes. She did not believe Balsan would ever marry me.

Neither did I. But I had made my decision, for better or worse.

THE HOME BALSAN HAD BOUGHT
near Compiègne was a seventeenth-century château with an impressive name—Royallieu—but unimpressive upkeep. A relic with musty furnishings and drapery-shrouded windows and doorways, it had no heating other than massive soot-streaked fireplaces.
Rooms had sat uninhabited for years, occupied by heavy chairs and tables cloaked in sheets. The water ran brown in the tubs and sinks. Rodent droplets soiled the corners.

Balsan seemed strangely unperturbed, given his personal fastidiousness. He remarked that he would refurbish the château in time but for now must direct his efforts to the horses he’d bought, their stables, and clearing the encroaching forest so he would have courses to race on and meadows for polo.

I found him somewhat changed, though I couldn’t tell precisely how. He had rekindled past friendships, admitting that the reason he took so long to come to Vichy was because he’d made an impromptu trip to Paris to conduct “overdue business.” He didn’t explain what his business concerned and I didn’t ask. I sensed that a mistress who asked too many questions was not the arrangement he had in mind.

Whatever arrangement he did have in mind took some time to reveal itself. He let me choose a bedroom for myself with an adjoining bathroom and parlor, where I could read and make my hats. It was a luxury, no matter if the water came in fits and bursts or the pipes moaned like invalids. I basked in the sheer breadth of my suite, the sense that I could come and go as I pleased, carrying armloads of books from the well-stocked library (included in the château’s purchase) and spending hours on end spilled on the carpet with my imagination free to roam.

Balsan gave me money to buy more hats and trimming supplies. A flare of creativity had me working throughout the night, until my finished hats occupied every surface of my parlor and the next room, as well. Balsan took it all in stride, with a smile on his face; he was gone most of the day, occupied with his projects.

We saw each other in the evening for dinners served by unobtrusive servants. I chattered about my latest creations and the novels I’d read in one sitting, devouring the fresh-cooked food. After Vichy, I would indeed never let myself go hungry again.

“Who would think you do all that?” he said, lighting his after-dinner cigarette. “I thought you slept until noon and bathed until three.”

“Well, that, too,” I admitted. “But I’m not entirely idle.” The truth was, I felt a twinge of discomfort about subsiding on his largesse. I’d worked all my life. Sitting around all day wasn’t something I could get used to. I occupied my time with books, for reading was not a passive occupation if one did it properly, and my hats, but already, in just a few weeks, I’d begun to experience an unsettling aimlessness. As I considered what else I might do to earn the privileges Balsan had bestowed, I felt subtle panic. What he must desire I was not yet prepared to give and in a sudden rush I said, “You could teach me to ride.”

He smiled lazily. “That would be fun. You’re not scared of horses?”

“Of course not,” I retorted, though I’d never been on one. “I assume it’s easy enough.”

He chuckled, stubbing out his cigarette. “Then as soon as my horses arrive, I will teach my little Coco how to sit a saddle. It would be good, I think, as I plan to invite some friends here and most of them like to hunt.”

An odd note had crept into his voice. He went off into the library while I returned upstairs to work on my hats. But my usual consuming focus deserted me. I found myself pacing, staring out the window at the impenetrable night, the silhouettes of trees outlined against the indigo sky.

When the door opened behind me, I knew what he had come for. Turning around, I found him on the threshold. He stepped inside, closing the door. As he lifted a hand to remove his shirt collar, I wrenched my eyes up to his face.

“Shall we?” he said.

I stood still, a cigarette smoldering between my fingers.

“Only if you want to,” he added, removing his silver cigarette case from his trousers pocket and setting it by the lamp on my bedside table. “I don’t want to force you.”

“No, of course I do,” I said. My heart started to pound as I fumbled at the fastenings of my dress. He watched me with almost casual disregard as I slipped the dress off and then my chemise. I stood with my arms crossed over my breasts, my undergarments bunched around my thighs. Now that the moment I had dreaded was upon me, I had no idea what he expected.
Images of the choristers at Le Palais Doré swinging their hips and leaning over tables to expose their cleavage raced through my mind. Was he anticipating some kind of brazen floor show?

Instead, he folded back my bedcovers and removed his shirt and trousers. His chest was surprisingly thin, like a boy’s, white skinned and narrow. I didn’t like the sight of his oddly fleshy nipples and dropped my gaze to his hips—wider than I thought men had—and thick hairy legs. It was as though he were a misshapen centaur: scrawny on top but heavy on the bottom. When I caught sight of the small, limp penis hanging from an auburn thicket at his groin that was darker than the hair on his head, I felt revulsion. He looked much better with his clothes on.

Slipping into the sheets, he patted the space beside him. I moved to the bed thinking I must look preposterous, with my underpants crammed around my thighs and my small breasts exposed. I scrambled under the sheet as fast as I could.

He reached over to stroke me, running his hands around my chest, pinching my nipples. I closed my eyes and tried not to think, but I kept seeing the web in the corner of the ceiling with the resting spider I watched every day, catching flies and patiently rolling up their still-thrashing bodies in her deadly cocoons. I’d named her Margot. She was sitting there now, immobile, waiting for her feast, and I felt like her victims as Balsan began kissing my throat.

It was not like what I’d read about in novels. I wasn’t expecting that; I had surmised by now that such fictional ecstasies must be more mundane in reality, for how could an act so common, which everyone called
le petit mort,
be the summit of one’s experiences? Still, I did expect to feel
something.
The fact that I did not disturbed me. When he progressed from my throat to my breasts, lapping at them like a babe at a mother’s teat, I had to stifle a sudden giggle. It seemed so . . . farcical, so unlike us.

“Do you like it?” I heard him murmur, one of my nipples in his mouth, and I supposed I should, so I let out a fake moan. He seemed to like that, for he became excited, nipping and licking, until I felt his hard penis nudge
my thigh and I shifted my legs to evade the sensation. He took my gesture as permission to mount me abruptly, sighing, “Ah, Coco, I’ve waited so long.”

It hurt! I gasped at the unexpected fire of it, as he lowered himself upon me, thrusting, making clenched sounds through his teeth. I thought it would never end, and then it did, suddenly. With a cry, he pulled out and spilled a warm sticky liquid onto my stomach.

I looked down under the sheet at the slime. Then I saw smears of blood on the sheet and the insides of my thighs, and raised my eyes to his.

“You did not tell me,” he said, not accusatorily, but with some surprise. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have been so insistent.”

I made myself shrug. “It had to happen sometime. I’m glad it was you.”

He kissed me and disengaged himself from our position, reaching over the bed to his trousers to fetch his silver cigarette case. He lit two cigarettes, then passed one to me. We lay side by side without touching, smoking, before he sighed. “Well, that was delightful. Good night, Coco. Thank you.”

I managed a weak smile as he dressed and left me. From her corner, Margot slipped down the strands of her web to nibble on her shrouded victims.

It wasn’t something I cared to repeat, but as this was the price required, I could endure it.