Free Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Chris Greenhalgh Page A

the thread with the tip of her tongue and pokes it through the needle’s eye.
    Obediently he turns to the window. The light crowds his white shirt, making it transparent. Igor stands, shyly immobile as she attends to the button at his waist. With his arms lifted and his head raised high, he feels the ceiling close above him.
    Coco senses the squat musculature stiffen beneath his shirt. For a small man, he is impressively athletic. It is her turn to hesitate. She plies her needle with quick hands, drawing the thread out tightly and working the point in briskly through the seam. A little too briskly, for she pricks her finger. Pain blooms inside her. She curses as the room turns red beneath her lids.
    Igor recoils, dropping his arms and looking down. “What’s wrong?”
    She shoots her finger between her lips. Flared, her eyes reflect the whiteness of his shirt.
    A sudden tenderness wells within him. He has to suppress an impulse to take that vulnerable finger and heal it inside his mouth. Then, with a spasm of courtesy, he remembers himself. He says, “Here, take this handkerchief.”
    â€œIt’s nothing.” A bubble of blood oozes up. Further proof for him, if proof were needed, of how full of life she is. She tamps it with the handkerchief, covered now with a pattern of small red stars. “I’m sorry. That was careless of me.”
    â€œAre you all right?”
    An attraction flashes between them. Unspoken and remote, perhaps, but as real and clear as the button she sews back on to his shirt. Igor feels an obscure queasiness in his belly, as though he has just eaten seafood. An undertow of longing pulls at him. The sting of the needle in her finger has quickened the heat in his blood.
    â€œOf course. Let me finish off.”
    Before he can protest, she’s back at work. The button hangs limply by its crimped string from the hole. Raising his arms again, he looks down. Her hair is tied in a bun above a white turndown collar. He can smell the lye soap, ubiquitous in the bathrooms, rise from the back of her neck. He can feel the pressure of her hand against his chest.
    She says, “Here, hold this.”
    He puts his finger against the button as she ties a knot around it.
    â€œNow let go.”
    He releases his finger and the button is secured. Unthinkingly she snaps the thread with her teeth. She leans back, inspecting the finished article.
    â€œThere!” Coco’s mouth broadens into a smile, forcing a dimple into her left cheek, a puckered shape almost like the beginnings of a second mouth. She gathers up her needle and thread and makes to leave then turns around, recalling why she came in the first place. “So he’ll be here around three. I’ll be out having my hair cut. Joseph will show him in.”
    Conscious of having thanked her enough already, he merely nods. He remains standing, listening to her steps grow fainter down the hall. Cut again! Her hair is boyishly short as it is, he thinks.
    Then he sits down. He places his glasses back on his forehead, picks up his pencil, and returns to work. His hands, widely spaced, make different shapes on the piano. There’s a sudden roundness to the sounds, a richness to the tones, a fatness to the harmonies. Reaching up to the board above the keys, he changes a minim into a crotchet by filling it in.
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    With his thick index finger and thumb, the doctor draws the skin of Catherine’s eyelids up. Her corneas roll, revealing a filigree of broken blood vessels across the whites of her eyes.
    As she breathes deeply in and out, he listens with a stethoscope to her chest. Then she sits up from her bank of pillows while he taps and listens from the back. She submits in silence to his repertory of tests, conscious of the labored operation of her lungs. She feels them wheeze like a squeeze box as the air snags before being expelled and wonders for a moment what he must hear. She watches for his