Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “I’m calling for Vanessa Billings. Could Ames Rutherford meet her at noon today at 89 Perry Street, apartment 2A?”

  It was a woman’s voice, but it wasn’t Vanessa’s. It was dark and urgent, unfamiliar in an oddly familiar way. He played the message again and wrote down the address.

  Fran was standing there in her pink jogging shorts, watching him. “You have a lunch date with your agent,” she reminded him.

  “Damn it. Forgot about that.” He phoned Horatio Charles and asked if they could move lunch back an hour.

  He shaved and showered and threw appropriate notebooks and his cassette player into his briefcase. Fran bade him an oddly subdued goodbye.

  The house at 89 Perry Street was a four-story stucco walkup, painted pink and covered in ancient wisteria vines. There was no answer when Ames buzzed apartment 2A, so he buzzed the super.

  The slight humpbacked woman who unlatched the wrought-iron gate must have been in her eighties, but she had thick white hair and lively eyes that observed him closely.

  “Miss Billings asked me to meet her in apartment 2A.”

  Limping slowly, the old woman led him through a narrow passageway. They crossed a noon-bright courtyard. Birds were chirping with energy that was almost crazy. There were trees of paradise and beds of blue and pink petunias and a splashing marble fountain with an ivy-covered Pan tilting nonchalantly far from the vertical.

  She took him up a flight of stairs and stopped at a wooden door with the Gothic brass A.

  He experienced a dreamlike certainty that he had walked through this courtyard, up these stairs, to this very door before.

  The old woman gave the door a push, and as it swung inward the un-oiled hinges sang two notes. He could have sworn he remembered those notes from a long time ago: the first two notes of “Amazing Grace.”

  The apartment was dusty and dim and furnished like a motel room. Bafflement swept him. “She’s not here?”

  “You’re the first,” the old woman said. “Take your time. I’ll be downstairs if you want the place.”

  With a shuffling step she was gone, and it came to Ames that he was standing in a furnished apartment for rent.

  Why did Vanessa ask me to meet her here?

  He walked to the next room. There was a wooden-frame bed with a cotton spread printed in imitation of a quilt. The closet door was open. He had a surprisingly definite feeling there should have been a piano, a carved upright, against the wall by the window.

  He sat on the bed. The quarter-hour chimed from a nearby church, and in a while another quarter-hour chimed. He heard the gate in the courtyard swing open and a dog barked and he thought, It’s her. But he ran to the window and it was a fat woman in pink curlers.

  The church chimes rang again, and he knew she wasn’t going to come. He went down the staircase and gave the old woman his best smile. “If my friend comes, will you tell her she can catch me at Gino’s restaurant down on Bleecker?”

  The meal was very quiet except for the sound of knives and forks scraping plates. Horatio Charles had on a perfectly tailored, very light gray suit, and he talked in his very soft Princeton voice about a French deal on the novel.

  Ames kept looking at the door, but Vanessa Billings didn’t walk in, breathless with apology and explanation. His heart felt like a burning stone in his chest.

  He drank deeply from his glass of beer. Talk drifted along, but in his mind he kept seeing the apartment on Perry Street, and the wall where a piano should have been, and the gate that she should have walked through at noon.

  Horatio Charles paid for the meal. “Shall I send the papers out to East Hampton or do you want to stop by and sign?”

  “Send them out,” Ames said, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what he’d agreed to.

  He tried calling Vanessa from a phone booth. He reached her answering machine, and he was too hurt to speak to it and admit he was hurt. He drove home much too fast and replayed the day’s messages. There were the usual hangups and wrong numbers, one partial erasure that made him wonder if something was wrong with the machine, and a man saying, “Please call Timothy.”

  That was it. One Timothy, whoever he was, and no Vanessa.

  When Fran got home from tennis Ames asked if she’d erased any of his messages. She looked at him and in that one moment of explosive silence he realized, She knows. She knows the thing that never happened between us has happened between me and someone else.

  “I don’t erase other people’s messages,” she said.

  That was all there was to it: a question, an answer, and they both knew they had crossed to the downhill side.

  Just before noon, he heard the front door slam as Fran went out. He phoned Vanessa again and again her machine answered. This time he left a message. “It’s Ames Rutherford. Please phone me.”

  From that moment on his office was no longer the room where he worked: it was the room where she didn’t phone.

  After two hours he called her agent. Richard Schiller said it was a very difficult period for Miss Billings. She had commitments in Europe and South America as well as a Kundry this June in Bayreuth, and quite frankly interviews were not a first priority; in fact, she didn’t give them.

  “She gave me one last week,” Ames said.

  “In that case, could I ask why you need to see her again?”

  “I need some personal background.”

  “Miss Billings is a very private person.”

  “She promised.”

  There was a pause, and Ames waited for a drop dead or a disconnect. What came instead was almost ingratiating.

  “Well, if it’s background you want, her parents are real characters. They live out on Long Island. Hold on, I’ll get you the phone number.”

  The little white frame house stood on a corner lot. There were trellised morning glories and a flagstone path leading to an immaculate birdbath, and a gray-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt stopped pushing his lawnmower and jogged over to the curb.

  “Hi, I’m Stan Billings.” A red, friendly hand came through the open Mercedes window and Ames shook it. “Put your car in the drive and come on in and meet Ella-Viola.”

  Ella-Viola had pink hair and glitter-framed bifocals and a chubby face that seemed made for smiling. She offered iced tea. “Unless you’d like something stronger?”

  Ames noticed a Bless-This-House sampler above the stairway. “Iced tea will be fine, thanks.”

  Ella-Viola sat in a rocker and plunked a half-finished needlepoint rose onto her lap. “It wasn’t overnight success for Vanessa, the way the magazines tell it. She’s been working since she was a child, and it was always two steps forward and three backward, and after she sang that horrible Traviata in Philly, she was ready to give up.”

  “Now, Ella,” Stan said, “let Mr. Rutherford ask questions.”

  Ella-Viola took the advice with admirable serenity. “What would you like to know, Mr. Rutherford?”

  Ames looked around the living room full of stuffed dolls and bowling trophies and shelves of Tony Bennett records, and he couldn’t help wondering, A world-class operatic soprano came out of this? It seemed as likely as an orchid growing in a clover patch.

  “Please, call me Ames.” He knew from interviewing dozens of parents that childhood was the can opener. “Tell me about Vanessa as a little girl.”

  And for the next two hours Stan and Ella-Viola were talking about a living person and not a national shrine.

  One point more than any other caught his interest, because it was a mystery that the parents made no attempt to explain away. Vanessa had failed in Traviata, failed in the role that was ten years later to become her greatest triumph, failed so completely that she had disappeared, severing all contact with opera, with friends, with family, until her astonishing comeback at her teacher’s funeral.

  “What was she doing during those years?” Ames asked.

  “She never talks about it,” Ella-Viola said. “We thought she was dead.”

  The su
n’s last rays were pouring across the wall-to-wall carpet when Ames finally said thank you to Stan and Ella-Viola, packed up his notebooks and cassette recorder, and got back into the Mercedes.

  He drove three blocks. At the intersection of Albemarle and Kingston a black stretch limousine cut him off. A tall man in chauffeur’s livery stepped out and motioned Ames to pull over to the curb.

  “Mr. Rutherford?” His voice was low and without expression. He opened Ames’s door. “Mr. Stratiotis would appreciate your company for a moment.”

  Ames saw no way of refusing. He didn’t want a fistfight, and the reporter in him said, go ahead. The chauffeur escorted him to the limousine and he stepped from the sweltering afternoon into the creamy air conditioning of the black Lincoln Continental.

  Ames and Nikos Stratiotis stared at each other from opposite ends of the back seat. An antique tabletop hinged to the partition held a silver tray of bottles and glasses and ice. Stratiotis leaned forward and poured a Chivas on the rocks.

  “This is what you drink, right?”

  Ames accepted the glass. “Thanks. Why not.”

  Stratiotis lifted his own glass in an unspoken toast. Ames suspected from the look of the bubbles that it held Perrier and lime.

  “You’ve been phoning Vanessa Billings,” Stratiotis said.

  “I’ve been phoning her answering machine.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m writing an article on her.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Who’s paying you?”

  Sorry.

  “I can find out.”

  “But not through me.”

  “Mr. Rutherford, you seem to have enough to keep you busy already.” Stratiotis’s black-with-iron-gray hair lay in a beautifully cut wave across his forehead. “You have a woman you’re busy breaking up with, you have dope-smoking literary friends, and people say you have an impressive drinking problem. You don’t need to add Vanessa Billings to all that.”

  Ames glanced toward the chauffeur on the other side of the raised glass panel. “I don’t know who gives you your information, but they’re full of crap.”

  “My sources are reliable. Please drop the article.”

  The please did not impress Ames. Stratiotis was ordering, not requesting. In a way it was touching. The man was obviously in love and was simply trying to protect his property; only he made the mistake of doing it, as he did everything in his life, with a bulldozer.

  Ames had to wonder: What is it about Vanessa that makes this man love her; is it the same thing that fascinates me? Why does she have me swimming against the stream like a salmon?

  There was no question of dropping the article, but he knew better than to give a man of Stratiotis’s power an outright no.

  “I’ll drop it when my employer asks for his advance back.” Which, if he knew Greg Hatoff, would be never.

  “In that case,” Stratiotis said, “your employer will be in touch with you.”

  But Greg Hatoff did not get in touch, and the Stratiotis encounter turned out to be the prod Ames needed.

  He burrowed into the local library for all the pop journalism he could find on Vanessa from the last eleven months. He spent three days in New York Xeroxing articles from the Times and the Post morgues. He had four boozy lunches with an opera maven and took down all the Billings scuttlebutt on his cassette recorder.

  Then he hung the GENIUS AT WORKsign on his office and began putting it all together.

  All the while, he was aware of Fran watching silently, uneasily.

  He was into his second week of binge-writing when the phone, with exquisitely wrong timing, rang and derailed a very intricate train of thought. He was sick of his own voice on the answering tape and snatched up the receiver before the machine could cut in.

  “Ames?”

  It was Vanessa. He knew her voice right away. He could feel the room brighten as though the sun had flown in through the window.

  “How have you been?” she asked.

  How’ve I been? I’ve been going crazy waiting for you to phone and now that you’re on the line I feel eight times crazier. Not the time to go into all that. Don’t want you to see what an idiot I am. Time to be strong, attractive, successful. “Oh, I’ve been fine. And you?”

  “I’ve been away—Chicago needed me for three Trovatores; it’s not my favorite role. The part lies just wrong for my voice, but don’t tell anyone.”

  “I guess that’s why you forgot our date?”

  “Date? We had a date? Ames, I’m sorry. My secretary must have forgotten to tell me. We’ve all been going crazy around here, my coach has had the flu and I’m working with a real madman, and I’m looking for a new apartment, and nothing’s been sane. Do you still want to meet or am I on your enemies list now?”

  “I don’t keep an enemies list and if I did you’d never be on it.”

  “I wish critics were as nice as you. Would you like to meet tomorrow? Noonish?” Sure.

  “Where?”

  “Well, why not 89 Perry Street?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Vanessa hung up and then remembered something astonishing: she had a rehearsal of Salomé tomorrow at the Met at 10:00 A.M. How in the world could I have forgotten that?

  A strange weight fell on her at the thought of calling Ames Rutherford back and canceling.

  She asked herself why she felt so attracted to him. It had something to do with his easy, relaxed laugh; and with his eyes. She remembered intelligence in his gaze, and mystery. She remembered feeling that this stranger saw deeper into her than she saw into herself, that he knew everything about her past, her thoughts, her hopes.

  She went to the window and opened it wide enough to lean out. It was a dazzlingly clear afternoon. From the street came a confused but unchanging noise, like a soft chord held on an organ.

  She phoned her agent.

  “Richard, I can’t rehearse tomorrow. I have some kind of intestinal bug.” It was an outright lie, yet she felt wistful and happy and truthful. Tomorrow Ames Rutherford, not Salomé, would be her reality. “Can you cancel for me?”

  A very practiced sigh of a very practiced agent came across the line. “You know they’re going to have to pay the chorus.”

  “There’s no chorus in Salomé, and it’s only a piano rehearsal. Please, Richard? Just this once?”

  “One thing I’ve learned in my long tragic career is that in opera there’s no such thing as just this once. But just this once, okay.”

  40

  AMES AND HIS NOTEBOOKS and his cassette recorder arrived at the pink house on Perry Street at quarter of twelve. By five of twelve she still hadn’t shown up.

  She’s not going to come.

  At noon a Checker cab pulled up and she stepped out. She was dressed completely in pale raspberry and she glowed and he felt his eyes sticking to her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  They approached each other a little too rapidly for a simple, friendly glad-to-see-you. He realized they were about to hug, and he felt her realize it too. Then each pulled back a half-step and she held out her hand.

  “What a great day not to be singing Salomé,” she said.

  “And a great day not to be sitting at a typewriter.”

  Ames buzzed the super and the old woman appeared and opened the gate. “We’d like to see that apartment again,” he said.

  The old woman led them into the little garden. She stared at Vanessa, her eyes squinting against the sun. “You know where it is,” she said.

  Ames took Vanessa up the stairs. He sensed her hanging back. He pushed the door with the Gothic brass A. It swung in, and the hinges sang two notes of “Amazing Grace.”

  She walked into the room slowly. As her eyes scanned the walls, Ames noticed things about her: the smoothness of her slightly suntanned skin, the deep gray-green of her eyes, the way she carried her head high, as though four thousand people
were watching. She seemed to shine against the walls.

  “What’s the verdict?” Ames said. “Will the apartment do?”

  She looked at him, confused. “Do for what?”

  “You’re looking for a new place, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am, but…not a furnished walkup in the Village.”

  He frowned. Something wasn’t making sense. “Then why did you ask me to meet you here?”

  She stared at him. “But you asked me to meet you.”

  “Last time your secretary told me to come at noon. I came and you never showed.”

  “But my secretary said she never phoned you.”

  “Come on, someone phoned.”

  “Ames, it wasn’t Cynthia. Besides, if I were meeting someone, why in the world would it be here?”

  “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m innocent.”

  But she kept staring at him, and it occurred to him she had the same odd sensation he’d had the first time he walked into the place.

  “Without all the tacky furniture it could be a homy old apartment, couldn’t it,” he said.

  “I don’t know. A place never feels like home to me without a piano.”

  He had no idea why he said what he did next. In some unfathomable way he wanted to test her. “There’s a piano.”

  She threw him a look, then went to the closed door and opened it. She turned toward the empty wall. “Where?”

  “Why did you go straight to that corner?”

  “Because it seemed a logical place for a little…”

  Say it, he thought: a carved little upright.

  But she drew herself together and stood absolutely motionless and stared at him. “Are you playing games?”

  “Of course. Don’t all interviewers?”

  “You’re interviewing me here?”

  “Why not? It’s more private than any restaurant.”

  She smiled, and it was as though a storm cloud had passed. They sat and he put his cassette recorder on the glass-top table.

  “You’re probably more interested in Billings than in me.”

  “Is there a difference?” he said.

  “Billings sings. I eat fudge and watch soap operas.”