Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  He stirred his coffee. “Where are you from?”

  “My part of the world.”

  “I was born in Armenia,” he said, “but my father was Greek.” He told her that he had emigrated to Uruguay at seventeen. She wondered why he thought she’d be interested. “The coffee’s a hell of a lot better down there.”

  “So why are you up here?” she said.

  “New York’s got possibilities. What time do you get off work?”

  “Forget it. I have a friend.”

  He got up from the stool. He slid a $20 bill across the counter. “Take your friend to the movies. On me. Say it’s a present from Nikos.”

  Ariana and Mark went to the movie at the Waverly the next night, Gentlemen’s Agreement. “Put your money back.” She slid a $20 bill through the cashier’s window. “Tonight the show’s on Nikos.”

  “Who’s Nikos?”

  Later, in her room, making coffee with the briki over a Sterno, she told him who Nikos was. “Just about the handsomest Greek-Armenian thug you ever saw.”

  Mark was standing by the window looking up into the cold milky wash of stars. “And you took money from him?”

  “It was a tip.”

  He couldn’t explain what was happening to him. He was two people at once, one of them loving her and the other wanting to twist her head off. “A twenty buck tip for a cup of coffee? That coffee?”

  He turned to stare at her, to try to understand why she was putting him through this terror.

  “Mark, what’s wrong?”

  Rage almost strangled his voice. “Don’t you know I love you?”

  “Panagia mou,” she murmured.

  “Why do you have to bring the Virgin Mary into this?”

  “Panagia mou doesn’t always mean ‘Virgin Mary.’ Sometimes it means—prove it.”

  He proved it; perhaps a little too energetically. Ariana phoned the next day and said the landlady had heard them. “She laid down a new law. No visitors. It’s a renters’ market. Rooms are hard to find.”

  “Don’t lose your room. Pacify the old bag. I’ll think of something.”

  “Why not use my place?” Harry Forbes said. “I go to Vermont weekends. That gives you two nights a week.”

  They were sitting in the Knickerbocker, sipping port by the fire.

  “Harry, I couldn’t ask—”

  Harry scrunched a hand into his pocket and pulled out a key ring. “Relax, I’m taking advantage of you. The deal is, you feed the cat and change the litter, okay?”

  And so Mark and Ariana took up weekend residence in the Tenth Street apartment of Harrison Forbes. The flat had a huge living room with walnut paneling and a beautifully proportioned marble fireplace that actually worked. There were yards of bookshelves loaded with novels and poetry and there was even a little spinet piano tucked into a shadowy corner of the hallway.

  Ariana struck a resounding chord. “Guess what, Mark. You get to hear me rehearse.”

  Those weekends were full of light and lightness. Mark discovered a whole dimension of existence he’d never known before. There was time to thumb through books he never intended to finish, time just to sit in a chair and savor a sensual rush of warmth and well-being and above all time to be with the person he loved.

  For those first seven weekends, Mark Rutherford Junior had never known a deeper feeling of peace and joy. And neither, he had every reason to believe, had Ariana Kavalaris.

  On the eighth weekend, as Mark slipped his borrowed key into the tricky upper lock, he heard voices, and when he opened the door Harry Forbes and Ariana were sitting in the living room, chatting away like old friends.

  There were cocktail glasses, one in Ariana’s hand and another in Harry’s, and ice and a lemon twist were waiting in a third glass on the tray, right next to a half-empty martini pitcher beaded with condensation.

  Ariana rose, uncurling one limb at a time from the sofa. “Hi, hon.” She came unhurriedly across the room and kissed Mark.

  She had a cigarette in her hand. Mark had never seen her smoke before. He supposed Harry had arrived unexpectedly and offered Ariana a cigarette and she’d accepted out of politeness.

  “Hi, Harry,” he said. “Nice to see you.”

  “Allegheny Airlines canceled my flight to Woodstock,” Harry said. “Ergo, I’m staying at the Knickerbocker Club and had to come by for a change of undies. Didn’t mean to barge in.”

  “It’s your home,” Mark said, and he had a sense the words sounded churlish.

  “I invited Harry for dinner,” Ariana said.

  “Correction,” Harry said, “I invited myself.”

  “Great,” Mark said. “That’s great.” He tried to see Harry as Ariana saw him, and he saw a beautifully dressed, beautifully built young fellow who was lazy, good-looking, aristocratic, completely at ease and completely irresistible. “I want to hear all about Vermont.”

  “And I want to hear all about you two.” Harry’s eyes had the glint of empire.

  Despite himself, Mark’s guard went up. He did his best to hold up his part of the chitchat for a few moments and then he went to the bathroom for an aspirin—Harry’s bathroom with all the right male colognes arranged in just the right way on all the right shelves.

  Ariana followed him. “Are you okay?”

  “Just a little headache from squinting at small print.” He gulped two Bufferins and a handful of water from the tap. “Harry likes you.”

  “He has to. I’m your you-know and he adores you.” She kissed him and left him dousing his face in ice-cold water.

  When Mark returned to civilization Ariana was in the kitchen tossing unmeasured herbs and spices into baking pans and salad bowls and Harry was smoking a pipe, propped in the doorway, looking on.

  Dinner was a great success. Ariana somehow threw together a cool green salad of arugula and avocados with lemon and salt and a beautiful leg of lamb au poivre and baked potatoes scooped out and mashed with butter and parsley and bits of bacon and then stuffed back into their crispy skins. There was a bottle of more than decent Burgundy and for dessert fresh pears, unbelievably perfectly ripe, and a block of Stilton cheese that Harry had brought from a specialty shop on Cornelia Street.

  It was a gourmet feast, the sort of evening that years from now they would remember as the good old days.

  But tonight Mark could find nothing good or old about it. His mind was a beehive of uncertainties, stinging and buzzing. He ate little and he never took his eyes from Harry, and Harry never took his eyes from Ariana, who was busy serving and filling glasses and bursting with conversational brilliance.

  Mark got the message. She was the perfect hostess. No need to hide her from anyone.

  Afterward, as Ariana was in the kitchen making espresso, Harry said in a lowered voice to Mark, “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  “Happier than ever in my life.”

  “So’s she,” Harry said. He was silent a moment, his eyes appraising Mark. “Have you asked her to marry you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “I have a feeling if I asked now she’d say no. Or not yet. Or something evasive.”

  “What gives you that feeling?”

  “She has some notion about our backgrounds.”

  “What about your backgrounds?”

  “That they’re different.”

  “That’s not a notion, that’s a fact.”

  “She has some notion that it matters.”

  “Are you sure you’re not the one with that notion?”

  Mark was silent.

  “Mark, that background nonsense was fine in the nineteenth century, but today it’s just plain beside the point. Ariana is head and shoulders above any deb you or I ever waltzed at the Infirmary Ball. If you don’t grab her right now, you’re a fool.”

  After Harry had gone and they were washing up the dishes Mark said, “I adore you, you know that?”

  “Of course I know, what kind of idiot do
you take me for?”

  “No kind. I’m the idiot, not you.”

  Ariana broke into a smile, and her face lit up the kitchen and all of his world. “Come here, idiot.”

  They kissed and a china gravy boat almost broke slipping back into the sudsy sink water.

  “Could you ever fall in love with a bimbo like Harry?” he asked.

  “How do I know? I’ve already fallen in love with a bimbo like you.”

  “Could you ever marry a bimbo like me?”

  “Maybe. If a bimbo like you ever asked me.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Ask me the day after tomorrow.”

  “Know something? You’re a tease.”

  She tossed him a dish towel. “Let’s get these dishes done and then we’ll see who’s a tease.”

  6

  HARRY’S BROKERAGE HOUSE DECIDED to send him on a fact-finding tour that summer. “I’ll be hitting the fact centers of the world—Kenya, Singapore, Paris, Helsinki,” he explained wryly when he came to the apartment to tell Mark and Ariana they could have it for the summer. “All I ask is you mind the cat’s litter.”

  Which solved the problem of summer and how Mark and Ariana were going to manage to spend it together.

  Mark enrolled in a course in clinical pastoral care at St. Clare’s Hospital and Ariana found that DiScelta was willing to come in from the country to coach her twice a week. “You’re making progress,” her teacher said, “and now would be just the wrong time to take a break.”

  For ten weeks Mark and Ariana were utterly hardworking, utterly together, and utterly happy.

  The August heat that summer was the worst on record in over a century. Unlike Mark, Ariana had trouble sleeping. As a result she was underprepared for her second lesson of the month and was still reviewing a tricky cadenza in the score of Lucia di Lammermoor, and she didn’t notice the floor when the elevator stopped.

  Two men got in, talking.

  She glanced at the taller of them: a black-mustached giant in a gray suit and red-and-black-striped tie.

  She felt a needling speculation in his eyes. An instinct she couldn’t quite define told her not to look again at him. She concentrated instead on the dynamic markings of her score.

  The door whooshed shut and the elevator began moving down, not up. With a grimace of irritation she realized she’d missed her floor.

  The tall man noticed her confusion and his dark liquid eyes were looking nowhere but at her. “Enjoy the movie?” he said suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You took your friend to the movies on me, remember? Nikos. Nikos Stratiotis. We met at that diner last spring.”

  He’d changed astonishingly for such a short time: put on better clothes and a lot of money. He seemed to enjoy her surprise, and what had started out as a smile on his face broadened into an uncontrolled grin. He was holding out a hand. It carried too much jewelry too expensive and too obvious for a man.

  “And may I have the pleasure of presenting my good friend Mr. Richard Schiller? Richard’s an agent representing concert artists.” He added, “My young lady friend here sings, Richard. In the opera.”

  The agent’s balding head had a thick, almost unruly fringe of jet-black hair. Ariana sensed interest in his eyes.

  “Very pleased to meet you, miss.”

  “Now if only I could remember this young lady’s name,” Stratiotis said, “we’d be all set—and who knows, you might even have a client, right, Richard?”

  “Ariana. Ariana Kavalaris.”

  “You study with DiScelta?” the agent asked.

  She wondered how he knew. “Yes, for over two months now.”

  “Small world,” Stratiotis said. “Richard and I were just up in DiScelta’s place having a talk with her. Nice apartment.”

  Ariana tried not to show amazement. “You don’t seem the type who’d be interested in classical music.”

  “I like classical everything, right, Richard? I used to read classics when I was a kid—Plato and Shakespeare and Molière in falling-apart paper editions. Now I read them in bound editions. Just between you and me, they lose something in leather.” He laughed.

  “You’re late,” DiScelta said.

  Twilight had come to the apartment, blessedly air-conditioned and cool, but the fading day still sifted dimly through the high windows with their view of the park.

  “I got stuck in the elevator,” Ariana said. “With those two friends of yours.”

  “Ah, did Stratiotis discuss his scholarship?”

  “He didn’t discuss anything. He stared at me.”

  “I’m not surprised. You don’t dress like a lady.”

  For an instant Ariana could not believe her teacher had said such a thing in front of the accompanist. But Austin Waters sat motionless and silent at the keyboard, as though he were no more than part of the furniture.

  “I dress the way I can afford,” Ariana said. “Nikos Stratiotis is rude and I’m surprised you receive him.”

  “My dear,” DiScelta said, “you don’t think Nikos Stratiotis is a friend. He has no value to me except money. And money, as it has been since the time of the Caesars, is a necessity. With what Stratiotis is offering you could dress properly. You wouldn’t have to serve coffee on Broadway. You wouldn’t have to buy used scores. You could take taxis to your lessons and be on time for a change.”

  “Are you suggesting marriage?” Ariana shot back. “Because the only thing he’s proposed to me is prostitution. And frankly with Nikos Stratiotis I wouldn’t consider either.”

  Austin Waters flicked her a glance, and it was as though he had shouted, Attagirl, show her you’re not going to be pushed around.

  A movement of DiScelta’s hand held her mute. “Stratiotis has made an overnight fortune in real estate. At least he says it’s real estate. Now he wants respectability. Someone has put it into his head to establish a scholarship for deserving artists. He contacted an agent, the agent contacted me, and we spoke for half an hour. I said I might possibly be able to think of a deserving student. The offer is, I assure you, quite legitimate.”

  Ariana’s voice felt raw and ugly as she answered, “No.” DiScelta sighed. “Very well. Show me what you’ve done with Lucia.”

  It was their last week in the apartment before Harry returned. Ariana had settled on the sofa with a cup of chamomile tea (“Fresh from the cliffs of Greece and very soothing—sure you don’t want any?”) and a piano-vocal score of La Gioconda. Mark crouched by her legs and laid his head on the cushion beside her.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  She closed the score and pulled away. “Panagia mou. This isn’t the time. There’s too much that still has to be done.”

  “Like what? I get the bishop’s permission, we marry.”

  She sat staring into her tea. “You once said you wanted to give me everything in the world.”

  “I still do.”

  “Then give me time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “I don’t even know where the break in my voice is. I haven’t learned a complete major role. I don’t know what my real top is. What if I’m a mezzo with a freak high?”

  “What does all that mean?”

  “It means not yet!”

  “Not yet is not an answer.”

  She took his hand. “Till I have my own answers, I’m not giving anyone else any. I’m a singer, Mark. I’m a singer who wants to be your wife and one day will be. What I am not, what I will not be, is a wife who wants to sing. There are ten million of those. I want you to be proud of me.”

  “I’m proud of you now.”

  “Then let me be proud of me. Otherwise you’ll have a bitch in bed and you’ll hate me.”

  The situation, he decided, left no choice but to introduce Ariana to his family and show everyone concerned—especially Ariana—that he was Very, Very Serious. He phoned home that afternoon. “Mother, I’d like to bring a friend down for you to meet.”

  �
��Is this friend important?”

  “She’s important to me.”

  “Oh, dear. Then it’s your father’s and my duty to meet her. Does she eat chicken?”

  “Of course she eats chicken.”

  “Then bring her Sunday at one o’clock and she’ll get some.”

  “Why did she invite me?” Ariana moaned.

  “You’re blowing a simple lunch all out of proportion,” Mark said.

  “It doesn’t sound so simple. Your mother thinks I’m trying to marry you.”

  “You don’t have to go if it makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Doesn’t she know I have a career?”

  “I’ll tell her you have a career and can’t come.”

  “No, I’ll tell her I have a career. You tell her I’ll be delighted to eat chicken.”

  Sunday he found her in front of the bathroom mirror. “Does this neckline hang like a noose?”

  “It hangs like a neckline.”

  “If I open my mouth I look like a pushy rabbit. How did I never notice? No wonder I failed the audition at City Center.”

  “You’re not going to an audition, the neckline is great, and you don’t look like a rabbit. And we’re going to be late.”

  “Mark, will you please get out? I have ten minutes to perform a goddamned miracle.”

  Four minutes later she came out of the bathroom. Her face seemed to radiate light.

  “You look great,” he said. “How did you get that glow?”

  “I slapped myself—hard.”

  Harry’s car, for once, didn’t stall. There was no traffic and the weather was perfect and the Hudson north of the George Washington Bridge was a painting of sailboats and mist and bright October light.

  She took his hand and clung to it.

  It wasn’t just a drive forty miles upstate; it was a ride twenty years into the past, into a world where nature was clean and well behaved and the air smelled of apples and burning leaves and freshly tarred back roads. On this particular sunny fall day, the moneyed counties north of New York seemed to Mark to be as close to the Peaceable Kingdom as mankind was ever likely to get.

  Three miles north of Oswick, Mark turned the car off Route 3 onto a curving rhododendron-lined drive.

  “I’ve never seen gravel so white,” Ariana said. “What do they do—wash it every week?”