Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “Mark, why in the world did you run off like that?” This from his own mother, glittering in pale blues and greens, pulling him toward the stairway that led down to the orchestra.

  Just before the girl vanished she turned to look back at him and smile.

  He didn’t see her again for eighteen years.

  By then a depression and a world war had ended. He had graduated from Harvard, done his basic training at army camp in North Carolina, and—thanks to a gift for languages—had served three years on the staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  In 1946 the world had changed but didn’t yet know it. Everyone was trying to get tickets to see Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun; Joe Louis was still heavyweight champion; in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill gave a speech saying that an Iron Curtain had dropped across half of Europe.

  And Mark Rutherford—deciding he not only had a calling to the ministry but a damned good singing voice—went to an open audition of the Domani Opera Company, a semipro, which was to say a totally amateur, totally unpaid opera company of young hopefuls. Affectionately known as the Mañana Met, the Domani was headquartered in a former bar next to a filling station in a run-down neighborhood on lower Third Avenue that looked as bad as anything the Allies had done to Berlin.

  Over a hundred young hopefuls had crowded into the small, makeshift auditorium with its folding wooden chairs and uneven wooden benches and unswept corners. The auditioners sang on a stage that was little more than planks, with a dirty little frill of a drop cloth attempting to disguise the sawhorses beneath.

  As each hopeful auditioned the others waited in silence, sipping coffee in soggy containers from the deli across the street. Between numbers—“Mi chiamano Mimi” and “Pres des remparts de Seville” for sopranos and mezzos, “Celeste Aïda” and “Piangi, Piangi” for tenors and baritones—there was a low buzzing of whispered conversation. Mark realized immediately he was an outsider: there was no one for him to buzz with. Moreover, he was ridiculously overdressed in his Brooks Brothers suit—the other young men were wearing jeans or corduroys.

  Most of the young women were dressed in black skirts and black turtlenecks and wore their hair pulled back in ponytails.

  But there was one young woman sitting up close to the stage who was different. A glow from the light on the rinky-dink piano threw little sparkles into her hair, which hung dark and soft and loose. Dressed in a blouse of sparkling white, she was reading a score. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of her concentration.

  He saw her and right away something about her gave him that once-upon-a-time feeling. It was just a tiny nagging hint of a feeling, except it wasn’t tiny at all. He knew he knew her.

  She saw him watching her and he dropped his eyes in confusion, pretending to be looking at his own score.

  And then it came to him where he had seen her. He rose from his seat and walked up the side aisle.

  “Excuse me.” He leaned toward her with quick eagerness. “This sounds trite, but we’ve met before. A long time ago.”

  She had a fine smile, knowing and warm. At the same time it was girlish and it made him feel protective. “You used to have blond curly hair,” she said. “Now it’s auburn and straight.”

  “It was at the Metropolitan Opera, right? You had long hair?”

  “Down to here.” She touched her shoulder.

  “I kissed you. What a pushy little brat I was.”

  She dropped her eyes.

  There was a silence before he spoke. “Mind if I sit down?”

  She slid over on the bench, making room. She looked over at him.

  “Do you come to auditions often?” he said.

  “As often as I can,” she said. “And you?”

  “I audition now and then when the urge hits. I’m really just a bathtub baritone.”

  He liked her laugh. Something about her fitted something in him. Tumblers moved and it was like a key sliding into a lock.

  He held out his hand. “I’m Mark Rutherford.”

  “Ariana Kavalaris.”

  They shook hands and that hurdle was passed.

  “How about a cup of coffee afterward?” he suggested. “We can catch up on the last two decades.”

  “I’d love it,” she said.

  And then someone was calling her name.

  “Excuse me, Mark.”

  She got up on the stage. Her eyes signaled the accompanist. The piano hit a thunk of a chord. She lifted her head and her throat was a milk-white patch barely hollowed by a shadow.

  She began a tone, and it was like a very tiny hole emitting a point of light that gradually swelled and then went sailing through the silence. What she did wasn’t just an aria: it was a performance; eyes big and wondering and vulnerable, hands clutched around her, she became the tubercular little Mimi.

  The voice soared. The tone was fresh and sweet and pathetic and absolutely appropriate to the role. When she finished applause slammed down in a solid wall.

  It would have been an impossible act to follow. Luckily, there were seven sopranos and three tenors before Mark’s turn came.

  He felt like a fool standing on that wobbly stage in his three-piece suit, felt like a worse fool when he missed his entrance and the accompanist had to start again.

  He got twelve bars into “Piangi, Piangi.”

  The woman running the audition had been standing in the wings listening. Now she stepped out of the darkness into the stage light. “Mr. Rutherford,” she said, cutting into the aria, “thank you.”

  He left the stage guiltily. There was no way he could face Ariana Kavalaris. He sneaked out the fire exit, sneaked across the street, sneaked into a booth in the coffee shop with a view of the Domani entrance.

  Five coffees and a terrible headache later he saw her come out with a group of six other young men and women. They were laughing.

  Ariana stopped a moment, looked around. There was fleeting disappointment on her face and then she was laughing again, linking arms with the others, bounding up the street.

  Ariana Kavalaris, he thought. I’m crazy about you. And I made an idiot of myself.

  She stayed with him, like a lingering image on film: Ariana Kavalaris. The sunny months of June and July and August dissolved into a sea of swimming and sailing and parties and aimless melancholy. There wasn’t a minute in the entire summer when he didn’t feel lonely for her and just plain dying for her.

  He began his studies for the ministry that fall.

  There was nothing else in New York quite like the Episcopal seminary, a peaceful cloister with stepping-stone paths and light-dappled oaks, open to the blue sky. The dark, ivy-twined brick buildings and high Gothic tower of the chapel gave the impression of something ancient and consoling that had survived a century of upheaval.

  For two months he pulled himself through St. John Chrysostom’s sermons and Hebrew waw-consecutives.

  And then one cool day in November his old friend Nita Farnsworth phoned. “How’d you like to go to an opera Friday?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  They agreed to meet in the seminary garden. She arrived wearing blue jeans. She had the understated blond American good looks that come with money moving coolly and uninterruptedly from generation to generation, and she carried herself like an heiress.

  Mark had put on his tux.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she said. “We’re not going to the Met.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Sorry. You look great.”

  They’d grown up together. He had escorted her to her first prom, her second prom, her coming-out at the New York Infirmary Ball. She’d gone to Chapin and Farmington and learned her horses and tennis and French alongside Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and heiresses from Brazil. One night three years ago she had proved astonishingly good at kissing, but he’d decided to leave her a virgin and keep her as a sister and pal. And there matters had rested.

  They took a taxi. He recognized the old brick building that had once been
a bar. He recognized the precarious wooden chairs, the tattered blue curtain, the upright piano jammed against the concrete wall. Nita had brought him back to the Domani Opera.

  “Why are you interested in an amateur outfit like this?” he asked as they found their seats.

  “The girl singing Annina is Mom’s goddaughter.”

  The lights went down. The audience was shushing and rustling expectantly. The piano struck up the Prelude. Traviata, misplayed.

  And then in Act One the young woman playing Flora stepped forward wearing feathers and jewels in her hair.

  It was Ariana.

  Mark sat sweating, breathing too rapidly, hands trembling, heart pounding.

  The performance was a long, agonizing route through a maze of poor singing, tottering sets, bad direction.

  After the curtain calls Nita turned to him apologetically. “I know it’s an awful nuisance, but I promised I’d go backstage. Do you mind?”

  He managed to stammer that no, it wasn’t a nuisance, no, he didn’t mind at all.

  There were a dozen people already in the women’s dressing room. The visitors were standing, the performers sitting, crowding for mirror space to pull off fake eyelashes and to cream off their stage blushes.

  “Shoog, you were fabulous!” Nita hugged the chubby girl who had sung the maid. “Mark—Shoog. Shoog, Mark.”

  Mark met Shoog’s gaze, but he was searching for Ariana. He heard a voice behind him say, “Mark—Mark Rutherford.”

  He turned. Ariana’s glance touched his so gently that the look was a caress in itself.

  Why does it hurt when I look at her? Why is there a tightness in my chest when I see that the skin of her arm is the color of honey?

  “That was a wonderful performance,” he said. He remembered to turn back to include Nita. “Nita, this is Ariana,” and then, with a foolishness that surprised even himself, “Ariana sang tonight.”

  He could feel Nita wondering who, what, how, why, all sorts of things, and he could feel Ariana wondering the same things.

  Nita was making appropriate well-bred sounds, and he stood there wishing he could muster the bad manners to ask Ariana for her phone, her address, do something to let her know that though he was with Nita he wasn’t with her.

  But he was a gentleman. Politeness held him back.

  Then there were goodbyes all around and Ariana gave him that look again, that dark questioning caress of the eyes.

  “Who’s Ariana?” Nita asked in the cab.

  “I can’t say I really know her. We met last spring at an audition.”

  “I didn’t know you still sang.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  They rode eight blocks in silence. Nita said, “She’s pretty.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, I think she’s very pretty.”

  2

  HARRY FORBES STARED AT Mark with eyes of undisguised shock. “You’ve lost weight.”

  Mark and Harry had roomed together sophomore year at Harvard, and tonight they were sitting in Harry’s brownstone floor-through on West Tenth. Harry was working for a brokerage house on Wall Street. He’d had two raises in six months and grown a mustache and gained fifteen pounds.

  He asked about Mark’s studies.

  Mark told him about Ariana. “I can’t get her out of my mind.”

  Harry mixed a second pitcher of stingers and settled back into the armchair and listened to Mark for thirty minutes. Then he reached for the telephone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “I’m about to arrange the rest of your life.” Harry dialed and in his finely chiseled voice inquired, “Operator, do you have a listing for an institution known as the Domani Opera …Thank you.” He dialed again. “Hello, may I speak with Ariana Kavalaris, please?”

  Mark’s eyes came up in a glaze of disbelief.

  “Do you know where I might reach her?…Thank you.” Harry broke the connection. “Operator, there’s an institution known as Fennimore’s luncheonette on Ninety-third Street and Broadway?…Thank you.” He dialed. “Ariana Kavalaris, please? Hi. This is Mark…Mark Rutherford, remember me?”

  Mark jumped out of his chair. Harry waved him back.

  “How’ve you been? Look, I don’t want to keep you from all those starving customers. But I have tickets to the opera next week. Would you be interested?”

  He covered the phone and whispered. “What night?”

  Mark mouthed, “Tuesday.”

  “How would Tuesday be? …Where shall I pick you up? …At work? Fine. Seven-thirty. See you then. Looking forward to it.”

  For a moment Mark was speechless. “You can’t just—”

  Harry twirled the stem of his stinger glass. “Somebody had to before you die of malnutrition. Now hurry up and get yourself a pair of opera tickets for Tuesday night.”

  Mark arrived at Broadway and Ninety-third Street at 7:15. Fennimore’s was all neon lights and Formica and signs announcing specials du jour.

  He watched Ariana through the window. She was wearing a crisp white uniform. She smiled at the customers, she smiled at the cook, and a stab went through him because she wasn’t smiling at him.

  At 7:25 he went in. He sat down at the counter and smiled till the smile ached. She served two red Jell-Os and one malted and refilled three coffees without even a glance at him. Finally with a flip of her pad and a pencil tucked over her ear she came to take his order.

  “We have a special on stuffed pepper.” She stopped. “Mark. Omi-god, Mark!” She had the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. “I just have to take care of two customers. Have a coffee on Fennimore’s. It’s an experience.”

  He sipped. She was right; it was an experience.

  “One of these days,” she said, “I’ll make you some Greek coffee.”

  At her suggestion—“Taxis take hours this time of night”—they took a subway. The Metropolitan was a solid nineteenth-century building completely out of place among the skyscrapers of the garment center. She led him to the stage entrance, where painted flats were propped on the sidewalk four-deep against the ornate stone wall.

  “There’s not enough storage space for them inside. I love trying to guess which opera they came from. That one’s Forza del Destino.” She searched for the grease-pencil scrawl on an arched castle window. “I was right. Act One.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Ariana, we’d better hurry.”

  “Just a minute. Act confident—as though you belong.”

  Smiling a hello at the guard, she pulled Mark through the stage entrance and over to the switchboard. A tiny woman in a huge mink was coming down the curving wooden staircase. “That’s Lily Pons,” she whispered. “The best coloratura ever.”

  He stared, and it really was Lily Pons.

  “Good evening, Miss Pons,” Ariana said cheerfully.

  The little woman smiled back at her. “Good evening, my dear.”

  Back on the sidewalk, Mark shook his head. “You have guts.”

  “Why? I have as much right to walk in there as anyone else—after all, I’m going to sing at the Met one day.”

  They rounded the corner on to Broadway. The huge clock above the large, square canopy said there was one minute to get to their seats. They hurried through the lobby as the last bell was sounding. There was a moment’s blaze of tasseled dark red plush and gold trim, of diamonds and evening gowns and dinner jackets, and then in the dimming lights they dashed down the aisle to their seats.

  “I’m not dressed!” Ariana whispered.

  “They were the only seats I could get,” Mark lied. He’d gotten the orchestra seats to impress her.

  “What am I complaining about. They’re the best seats in the house.” She took off her woolen coat. He led the way past subscribers’ knees into their seats. Jeweled dowagers peered at the young man in the three-piece Brooks Brothers suit and the girl in the Penney frock.

  With an explosion of woodwinds and strings, the opera began. The Metropolitan’s gre
at golden curtain rose on the courtyard of the inn at Amiens. It was the same production Mark had seen years ago. The sets, the melodies, the actions had not changed. He had grown into a man, but Manon Lescaut was not a day older.

  As Mark watched the singers, time seemed to fold back on itself. He sensed that these characters had gone through these motions a thousand times before: Manon had stepped out of the coach bearing her to the convent, glimpsed Chevalier des Grieux, and fallen instantly in love. He knew people never had such emotions, let alone belted them out at the top of their lungs, and yet four thousand people were sitting here in the dark with him believing every note of it.

  He looked at Ariana, saw her face caught in the light from the stage, framed in long dark hair. Her attention had the intensity of prayer and it altered his own perceptions, as though he were seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears. He had sat through dozens of operas, but for the first time in his life the characters and the situations on the stage seemed wonderfully, terrifyingly real.

  He understood that what he was seeing was not life, not even an attempt to mirror life. It was a dream, the dream of the girl beside him and of the other people sitting in that theater. I’ve been listening too long with my head, he realized. This stuff was written for the heart.

  He was especially impressed by Ricarda DiScelta, the soprano singing the lead. Though in her late forties or early fifties, she managed to project all the youth and sensuality and raw innocence of Manon. Any actress her age playing the part would have been ridiculous, but singing it, she was absolutely convincing.

  During the first intermission he took Ariana to Sherry’s on the grand tier. With its old-fashioned paintings and sculpture and red-flocked wallpaper, the restaurant had a fading nineteenth-century elegance. At a little table next to one of the mirrored columns, they lingered over high-priced pastries and thick black coffee.

  “You seem to work awfully hard,” he said. “That job at the luncheonette and then all the roles at Domani …”

  She speared the last of her Napoleon on her fork. “Everyone says I’m working too hard, stretching myself too thin.”