Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  The young lovers and the Marschallin were now alone on the stage. Their voices rose in a sublime trio, Octavian and Sophie lost in their love for one another, the Marschallin gracefully accepting the inevitable.

  The Marschallin departed with Faninal. A moment later Sophie and Octavian followed. The Marschallin’s page returned to retrieve a handkerchief Sophie had dropped. The curtain fell to a final sparkle of melody.

  Ames wasn’t home when the limousine brought Vanessa back to the house in East Hampton. She found the table set for dinner, candles long gutted onto the mahogany, food ice-cold. She put the veal and vegetables away and made herself some Sanka.

  Ames came through the door at 2:30.

  “Pull up a cup,” she said.

  They sat sipping and chewing and finally she mentioned the obvious. “That was quite some feast somebody made and didn’t eat.”

  “Would’ve been.”

  “You’re home late.”

  “Sorry about that. How was the performance?”

  “So-so.” After a silence, “You took the car?”

  “I went into New York.”

  He was in the opera house tonight, she thought. And then, No, he promised…he wouldn’t have…

  “I went to that old seminary,” he said. “Remember, where we met the day we got married?”

  “Why in the world did you want to go there?”

  “It’s a beautiful old place. It doesn’t seem to be part of New York at all. I just sat there and watched the night get darker.”

  He broke off and she had a sense that he was only halfway to the center of his thought.

  “I don’t care for that seminary,” she said. “It reminds me of a graveyard.” She wanted to say something stupid. She wanted to say that the dead cast longer shadows than the living. She wanted to say, I wish you wouldn’t go there ever again.

  She said it in her own roundabout way. “Next week’s our anniversary—April ninth. If I canceled some performances, we could have the whole week to ourselves.”

  “Come on, you can’t cancel.”

  “Sure I can.” No I can’t, no, I shouldn’t, no, I mustn’t, but I’m going to. “It’s only two Toscas. Camilla can go on for me.”

  “Why, you irresponsible little superstar. Honey, I love you.” He leaned across the table and kissed her and then he grabbed her. “You know why I’ve been acting so rotten lately? I was thinking you’d…I don’t know, forgotten me.”

  “Ames, you beautiful fool.”

  “I don’t know about beautiful, but sometimes I am undeniably a fool.”

  The next morning Vanessa phoned Richard Schiller and told him she was going to be sick for the week of the ninth.

  He was icily silent.

  “Richard, at this point my marriage needs me more than those Toscas do.”

  “Let’s pack a picnic and take a hike,” Ames said. The sky was blue and the weather was freakishly warm for the season—almost summery. It was the first day of their vacation, their hooky, and he felt a crazy, schoolboyish excitement.

  “You’re on,” she said.

  They went barefoot on the shore. The air had the clean salt smell of ocean. They followed the dark line of the outgoing tide, past the beach houses, and then they turned and went up into the dunes and spread their checkered tablecloth on the grass.

  They shared a loaf of French bread and a sixth of a wheel of runny Brie. The weather was warm, the air mild, the wind seemed to have a shine on it. They passed a bottle of vino rosso da tavola back and forth.

  The sound of waves was heavy and muffled. He followed the direction of her eyes. “What are you seeing?”

  “Over the horizon,” she said. “London and Paris and Frankfurt.”

  “Don’t. Pretend the horizon isn’t there.”

  “It came back just then, that feeling. Being penned in. November. Three Lulus and seven Esclarmondes.”

  “A bitch and a witch do not a death sentence make.”

  “Hamburg one day, Milan the next, San Francisco the day after and never a stop. Sometimes it seems like forever.”

  “Forever can be a lot of things. Forever is the next six days, too.”

  He pulled her down beside him and they lay side by side, the sun warm on their backs, the windborne seaspray a faint mist on their skins. They made lingering lazy love in the open air. There were tears in her eyes and he looked down at her and saw a little girl, astonishment floating on her face like a moon in the sky.

  “You know what we’re having?” she said. “Our second affair.”

  “I can’t think of any better way of picking up a marriage, can you?”

  It was perfect till seven o’clock on the fourth day.

  Afternoon had become an evening light saturated with purple. Vanessa and Ames were together on the terrace. In the distance a car hummed past and then stopped and made a backing-up sound. There was a crunch of wheels on gravel.

  “Visitor,” Ames groaned.

  A figure was coming across the lawn. It was Camilla Seaton. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have phoned, but…”

  “This one’s for you,” Ames whispered. He excused himself, saying he had a date with a flounder in the kitchen.

  Camilla sat. There was emptiness in her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” Vanessa said.

  It took Camilla a long moment to begin speaking. She said her Tosca had bombed. There’d been dead silence after her “Vissi d’arte.” She hadn’t been able to find the knife to stab Scarpia and, startled by the snaredrum roll, she had dropped the crucifix instead of placing it on his chest.

  “That’s all?” Vanessa said, though it was plenty.

  “Will you go over the role with me? Tonight?” Suddenly Camilla was sitting forward in her chair. “I brought my score, I have a tape, and if you could just show me where I’m going wrong…”

  Vanessa’s eye went to the kitchen window, to Ames’s shadow cutting back and forth through the light. “Not tonight.” She couldn’t bear to look at the girl. Couldn’t bear to say that for the first time in her life she was happy. “I’m having difficulties of my own.”

  Camilla sat absolutely still, enclosed in a pocket of silence.

  “We’ll work on it later,” Vanessa said. “Next month.”

  “Not till next month?”

  “We’ll go over the score note by note,” Vanessa said, hating herself, hating this life that always demanded you hurt yourself or hurt someone else, and then thinking, No, the whole point is I love my life.

  “What was that all about?” Ames asked over a candlelit dinner of filet of flounder stuffed with crab.

  “Nothing. She was just a little nervous.”

  It was cool and fresh and sunny the next morning, their anniversary. A golden omen. Ames fried eggs for breakfast and managed to break only one of the yolks. They walked barefoot along the shore, saw dew glittering on the beach grass and felt lucky.

  “Hey, honey,” he said, “I have an idea for tonight. Let’s stay home and stuff ourselves silly on all sorts of great food no one in their right minds would eat…”

  “Like lobster thermidor?”

  “And wine and pastry, a lot of pastry. That should keep us busy till eleven or so, and then we can forget about the dishes and sit out on the terrace and look at the moon and…”

  He kissed her, a long teasing kiss.

  “I like that and,” she said.

  “I have to go into town and pick up a few things. You stay right here, okay?”

  “I haven’t got anything else planned.”

  “Promise?”

  She laughed and closed her eyes. “Promise.”

  He drove into East Hampton. As he walked along the main street happiness enveloped him like an invisible coat.

  He had to wait in the fish store for the lobster and in the pastry shop for hazelnut tortes. He thought of a dozen other little surprises like the set of Pierre Deux napkins he knew she wanted and he had to wait in a dozen other sh
ops. He didn’t mind the waiting one bit. He kept seeing her laughing with her eyes shut in the sun.

  Adolf Erdlich phoned. “Vanessa, you’ve got to sing tonight.”

  “No way, Adolf. I’m sick. Officially.”

  “And your understudy is sick, genuinely. Camilla spent the night in emergency at Lenox Hill. Apparently she mistook sleeping pills for vitamin pills.”

  “Oh, my God—no. Will she be all right?”

  “She’ll be all right. Her Tosca is another matter. Over a third of our subscribers have phoned in donating their seats to the musicians’ fund.”

  Light fell through the window lattice of wood and putty. Vanessa’s eye followed the slope of the lawn down to the shore. The sun was at noon in the sky, flinging a brilliant path in the Atlantic between East Hampton and all the opera houses of Europe.

  “There’s no one else who can sing tonight?”

  “You contracted to perform two Toscas this week,” the voice on the phone said. “We’ve let you out of one of them. We need you very, very badly tonight. A car will be at your house to pick you up at three o’clock.”

  Vanessa heard herself say, “I’ll be ready.”

  She wanted to explain. She had to explain.

  But Ames wasn’t there and Adolf Erdlich’s onyx-black limousine was. She made the driver wait fifteen minutes and then another fifteen minutes and Ames’s car still hadn’t turned into the drive.

  At 3:30 she scrawled a note and taped it to the Chemex in the kitchen.

  Ames returned a little after four.

  “Vanessa?”

  His glance moved from room to room, scanning.

  “Honey?”

  His insides went from hope to uncertainty to foreboding. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth when he found the piece of paper taped to the Chemex.

  Darling—I waited till three-thirty. Camilla is badly hurt and can’t go on. They need me. Please forgive. I love you, I’ll make it up to you. Promise. XXXXXX OOOOO Vanessa

  In the ten seconds it took him to read the looping scrawl he aged from a little boy filled with love to an old man with nothing but hate in his heart. He smashed the Chemex against the wall, then stared in disbelief at his bleeding hand.

  What the hell is happening to me?

  An inkling came to him, a tiny last pin-speck of hope. He picked up the phone in his workroom and dialed.

  “Dad, it’s Ames. I’ve got to talk to you. Can you see me right away?”

  46

  “DAD, WHAT I HAVE to ask you may sound strange.”

  “Ask it.”

  “After you left Ariana, what were your feelings toward music?”

  “Music?” The bishop inhaled deeply. “I felt music had taken her from me. For ten horrible years I hated it. Vocal music enraged me. Opera…destroyed me. I wanted to kick down the sets and throttle the singers.”

  For an instant there was not a breath of air in the study, and then a soft wind sighed through the curtains.

  “And now?”

  “Now?” The bishop smiled a smile touched with pain long dead. “Now I’m as musical as the next prelate.”

  “You can go to concerts?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Opera?”

  “I go now and then if I’m invited.”

  “And you’ve stopped hating?”

  “I had no choice. There’s an awful lot of Bach in my business.”

  “How did you manage to change?”

  “I prayed for the strength. I built up a tolerance, listened to records, made myself go to symphonies. One day I went to a vocal recital. It wasn’t easy, but it didn’t kill me. And then I took a real plunge and went to the opera. It hurt, but I survived.”

  Ames couldn’t help but feel admiration for his father, this man who might have been a stockbroker but who had kicked over the traces and put on a clerical collar and cantered so far from Wall Street, who had faced disappointment and broken himself of it as one would a bad habit. “Did you ever go to any of her performances again?”

  The bishop exhaled. “Only…in my mind. But I bought all her recordings. Sometimes…I play them.”

  Late that night, Ames walked around the edge of the woods and down to the water. Cool foam lapped at his bare feet.

  A car engine growled. A moment later, up where the beach threaded into the dunes, Vanessa’s shape was moving toward him. They kissed. He asked about her performance.

  “Ames, I’m sorry—”

  “Hey, don’t be sorry. Work’s work. Did you knock ’em dead?”

  She smiled. “I knocked ’em dead.”

  They strolled a moment. She asked about his day.

  “Know something funny? My day was goddamned wonderful.” For three days longer they were happy.

  And then Camilla phoned Vanessa in tears over pans she’d gotten from the critics for a Pagliacci in Philadelphia.

  Vanessa made reassuring sounds (“No one can sing that role two days out of the hospital”), but the conversation left her feeling it was her fault, that if she would only lead Camilla through the score point by point all would be well.

  For two days guilt obsessed her. Finally she phoned Richard Schiller. “I’ve got to take next week off.”

  “You can’t. You’re singing in San Francisco.”

  “You have to get me out of it.”

  “Why?”

  What could she tell him? That she felt a compulsion to give lessons to her pupil? “I feel queasy. Jinxed.”

  “Let’s have lunch. You can tell me about it.”

  They had lunch at a quiet corner table in the little French place down Fifty-fifth Street from the agency. Richard listened to her.

  “You’re not Camilla’s mother. Her performances are her responsibility, not yours.”

  “She’s my pupil. She helped me.”

  “She helped you? This I’d like to hear.”

  “She let me teach her.”

  Richard’s eyebrows arched. “She let you teach her?”

  “Yes, let me. And then I dropped her.”

  He shook his head. “So? If it’s that important you’ll teach her after San Francisco.” He reached across the tablecloth to squeeze her hand. “Relax, will you? You’re happily married, you’re in perfect health, you’re in the best voice you’ve ever been, you’ll be carried by satellite and two hundred million people will be watching and do you know what that will do to your record sales?”

  “Then why do I feel so rotten?”

  “Artists are supposed to feel rotten. Now eat your vichyssoise. It’s getting warm.”

  Four days later, despite misgivings, Vanessa yielded to her agent’s advice and boarded Eastern Airlines Flight 309 from New York to San Francisco.

  A ghostly voice was talking in the empty office. “Mark Ames Rutherford the Third, trailblazing author of The Fortress, is the first writer to explore the hidden and insidious links behind the vaults of Chase Manhattan and the Trevantine marble walls at Lincoln Center.”

  The sound was coming from the phone-answering machine and it very much resembled Dill Switt in one of his antic moods.

  Ames couldn’t resist lifting the receiver. “Hidden, insidious? I do believe you’re a little bit high, Dill.”

  “Looped is the polite word. I’ve been sitting in the Lion’s Head drinking chilled Beaujolais with a young lady who happens to be an ace reporter for the Wall Street Journal and, here’s the interesting part, an opera buff. Now pay close heed. The price of a glass of chilled Beaujolais just dropped thirty percent. And why did the price just drop? Because the French devalued the franc ten days ago. And why did they do that? Because of the collaboration, witting or un-, of well-intentioned solid citizens like your lovely wife the songbird with international sleaze like Niko the Greeko.”

  “Dill, I’d rather you didn’t make jokes like that.”

  “Who’s joking? You gotta know that Nikos Stratiotis uses his dollar holdings as margin to speculate against European currencies.”

/>   “So does every bank in New York City and Zurich.”

  “But Stratiotis hasn’t paid a cent in American corporate taxes in twenty years. He has charitable foundations to offset income.”

  “That happens to be how the big boys do it.”

  “The other big boys don’t do it with Stratiotis’s flair. To quote from a program of the Chicago Opera: ‘This production of Il Trovatore was made possible by the deeply appreciated generosity of the Stratiotis Foundation for the Fine Arts.’ I translate freely from a recent program of the Paris Opéra: ‘The management wishes to acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the Foundation Stratiotis in the preparation of this production of Romeo et Juliette.’”

  “Okay,” Ames conceded. “Some men back horses. Stratiotis backs opera. What’s your point?”

  “Stratiotis backs your wife’s productions, dumbo. Hers and hers alone.”

  Ames fought to muster disbelief. I’m not hearing this. Dill’s lying. No, not lying. Mistaken. An honest mistake.

  “That’s not true,” he heard himself saying. “Vanessa hasn’t had anything to do with Stratiotis for over a year.”

  “Oh, no? Look at the programs of the Barcelona Lyric, Teatro Colón, La Scala. Look at last week’s program at the New York Metropolitan, for God’s sake. ‘The Metropolitan Opera wishes to acknowledge—’”

  Ames tried to blot out the words, tried to concentrate on the waves breaking softly forty feet from the house. But something twisted in him and then collapsed. “I want to meet your friend from the Wall Street Journal. I want to see these programs.”

  “Lisa and I are having dinner at Carnaby’s at eight-thirty. The table can seat three.”

  Ames met them at the restaurant, the newest, innest dining spot in SoHo. He studied five opera programs while Dill and his date shared a rack of lamb. The programs were all recent, in different languages but with two things in common: Billings singing, Stratiotis funding.

  “I have others at home,” the girl said. “Cartons full. He’s been backing her for years.”

  Ames decided to speak to Stratiotis directly. He phoned the Wall Street office and, using a forgivable bit of subterfuge, identified himself as Stan Billings, Vanessa’s father.

  The secretary’s voice suddenly glowed with pleasantness. “You can reach Mr. Stratiotis in San Francisco, sir. I’ll give you his number.”