“Then don’t kiss me.”
“But I want to.”
And she did. Lightly, on the lips.
And he returned the kiss, lightly, on the crown of her wig.
He watched the opera from the wings. The first act went well for Verdi, well for the Mexicans who had paid a hundred pesos a seat, well for Ariana Kavalaris.
But terribly for Mark Rutherford.
The setting was the palace at Memphis in ancient Egypt. The high priest told the warrior Radames that the goddess Isis had decreed him leader of the Egyptian army against the Ethiopians. Radames loved the beautiful slave girl Aïda and sang of her in one of the world’s best-loved tenor arias, “Celeste Aïda”—“Heavenly Aida.”
Amneris, the pharaoh’s daughter, entered. She loved Radames, but sensed he did not return her affection. Aïda appeared. Ariana looked magnificent. Jealously watching Radames and the beautiful slave, Amneris began to suspect that Aïda was her rival for Radames’ love.
The pharaoh entered with his court and appointed Radames commander against the Ethiopians. The crowd rejoiced, wishing him a victorious return.
Aïda remained behind, torn by the knowledge that her beloved must meet her father, the Ethiopian king, on the battlefield, and that one of them must die. Ariana wrung every drop of pathos from the scene. The audience loved her “Ritorna Vincitor,” they loved her “Numi, Pietà,” in which she implored the mercy of the Ethiopian god. They loved every note she sang.
And so, in a terrible way, did Mark. He had never heard tones purer, more sustained, more effortlessly floated. The rapturous Mexicans called her back for four bows after her first curtain.
In Act Two, word reached the court that Radames had won the battle. Amneris lied to Aïda, saying that Radames had been killed. Aïda’s grief-stricken reaction told Amneris all she needed to know. In cold fury, she revealed the truth and warned that she would be a pitiless rival.
The scene shifted to the gate at Thebes, where Radames led his army into the city to the strains of the Triumphal March. Amneris placed the crown of victory on his head. The pharaoh bade him name his reward. He asked that the lives of the prisoners be spared. Among them Aïda recognized her father, the Ethiopian king, disguised as an officer, but he begged her not to betray his identity.
Over the priests’ objections, the pharaoh granted Radames his wish—and gave him Amneris’s hand in marriage, proclaiming him heir to the throne.
Watching the spectacle swirling on the stage was like looking down from a bridge into swift water. Mark felt as though his hands were bound with a cord behind his back, as though Ariana’s voice were a noose encircling his neck.
She sang even more beautifully in the next act, where Aïda met Radames at the temple of Isis and begged him to flee with her to Ethiopia. He said they could escape through the Napata Pass, which was unguarded. Aïda’s father stepped out of the shadows, revealing his identity, and announced he would lead his army across the pass. He offered Aïda’s hand if Radames would side with Ethiopia.
Amneris entered with the high priest. Confessing that he had betrayed Egypt’s plans to the Ethiopian king, Radames gave himself up to the priest.
As Mark applauded tears blurred his vision. He had the sensation of both his life and Ariana’s bounded in time, his moving toward a strange sort of death, hers toward something he would never know, let alone be part of.
There was one more act.
Amneris begged Radames to renounce Aïda, promising he would be pardoned. But he insisted on being punished for his treason. The priests condemned him to burial alive.
In the final scene Radames was sealed into the crypt in the Temple of Vulcan. As the stone closed over him forever, he discovered Aïda waiting for him in the dark. While Amneris stood weeping in the temple above him, the lovers embraced and sang farewell to the earth.
There were fourteen curtain calls, followed by a celebration party. The noise in the restaurant was a constant, deafening scream, and perfect strangers came up to Mark to tell him that his wife would be one of the true greats of her age. Every time he looked at her she was radiating joy and he knew it was true.
How many times during the night can you get out of bed without waking the woman sleeping next to you?
“Hey.” And she was standing beside him, lit by a wave of light rippling in from the balcony. “Since when did you start smoking?”
“It’s something I do now and then.”
She took the cigarette from him and held on to his hand. They stood there silently, side by side, gazing out over Mexico City.
“When your hand is in mine,” she said, “I feel nothing can ever hurt me.”
That week of three performances brought rave reviews in all the local papers, even a glowing mention in Milan’s Corriere della Sera that arrived by airplane, and a deepening certainty in Mark.
There was an empty sensation high up in the middle of his chest. For the first time in his life he craved unconsciousness. He began hanging out in the hotel bar, and it was there that he became drinking buddies with Ariana’s tenor.
It was hard not to love Giorgio Montecavallo. Short, muscular, with a sheet of corpulence over the muscularity, his thick black hair beginning to gray handsomely, and he flowed into the bar as regular and as imperial as the Nile, at eleven o’clock every morning.
“Buenos días, my friend.” He clapped a hand on Mark’s shoulder, then gave a fingersnap and a smile to the bartender. “Two double tequilas, por favor.”
Giorgio Montecavallo might not have been the world’s greatest tenor (even Mark recognized that some of those high B-flats in “Celeste Aïda” were hefted, like a Soviet athlete on steroids jerking six hundred kilos at an Olympic competition) but he was certainly a nonstop talker, just the man when you didn’t want to hear yourself think; and he also turned out to be one of the world’s most charming, most willing tour guides.
“You haven’t seen the pyramids at Cuernavaca?” His eyebrows rippled in disbelief when Mark and Ariana informed him of this astonishing fact. A glance at his $2,000 Omega wristwatch—“We’re in luck, there’s time before rehearsal”; a snap of his fingers summoning the waiter to summon the concierge; and within minutes a car and private guide had been hired, and two hours later the three of them were clawing their way up steeply stepped Aztec burial mounds, sweating and gasping beneath a burning Mexican sky, pausing at the top to take snapshots of one another.
“You have to admit it’s extraordinary,” Monte said. (That was what he’d asked them to call him: “No one calls me Giorgio.”) “Here we are on top of a crypt in Central America that was built two thousand years before Mozart, and in a week I’ll be four thousand miles away in Scala singing Verdi, and Ariana will be—where will you be, Ariana?”
“Back in New York singing scales.”
“Nonsense, you’ll be in Vienna singing Queen of the Night. One more, keep smiling, there we are. Now, Mark, could I ask you to do me the honor of taking one of me and my delicious Aïda?”
Mark managed to hold together till two minutes before the final performance. He was in Ariana’s dressing room when his whole body began to shudder. He bent his head and kissed her on her wig.
“Knock ’em dead,” he said.
There were eighteen curtain calls after the final performance, three thousand men and women leaping to their feet to scream and clap and cheer. Ariana felt she was living a scene from someone else’s life. Nothing seemed real, not the dressing room, not the voices rippling outside the door, not the dresser’s hands helping her out of her costume. And not the envelope that her dresser held out to her.
“Señor Rutherford left this for you.”
She had a sudden, overwhelming fear that something dreadful had happened to Mark. Opening the envelope, she sank into a chair.
My dearest Ariana,
These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write in my life. I feel more strongly for you than I’ve ever felt for anyone or anything, including th
e church. And that is the problem.
I realize now that the church is not just my career—it is my life, the best part of me. It is everything that is good and strong and honest in me.
I made a promise, Ariana. In my heart I betrayed that promise. My very act of loving you betrayed it—and betrayed you as well. That betrayal would sooner or later kill everything we love in one another. I could not bear that.
I am returning to the church. I can never see you again.
You have made me happier than I ever deserved. Please forgive me, Ariana. I shall never forget you.
Mark
She couldn’t believe he had written it.
The handwriting was his, but the words were someone else’s.
Suddenly she understood. It was a joke. It had to be a joke. Some sort of Mexican tradition of scaring the prima donna to death.
“Where is Señor Rutherford?” she asked.
“He went to the airport.”
“The airport…” Could the letter be real? she wondered. Could this really be happening?
She read it again, and once again, and each word struck her like an earthquake burying a little bit more of the past, a little bit more of the future. She saw herself in the makeup mirror, a thing still living that had just been dealt a killing blow. She could see belief seeping, like death, into her face.
She tried to stand. She had to think each movement, execute it one minuscule exertion at a time.
In the distance a bell was ringing.
She screamed. The world had just ended.
“Señora! Señora!” The dresser was holding her down in a chair.
A grave-faced man with a black bag was hastily assembling a hypodermic. Ariana felt the cold kiss of alcohol on her arm, the quick sting of a needle, the slow inflooding of false relief.
After that time passed with a strange, unnatural flow. She felt hands undressing her, washing her, dressing her, transforming Aïda back into Ariana.
And then a voice came through a fog: “The best investment I ever made.”
It took Ariana a moment to recognize the dark eyes and drooping mustache and suntanned skin of the man standing in the doorway. “Nikos,” she said.
He embraced her lightly. “Music makes me hungry,” he said, “doesn’t it you? Let’s go someplace wonderful and eat.”
Her mouth began to shake and then her face and then she could feel herself going entirely to pieces.
He sat down beside her. He took her hand, so lightly she didn’t even notice that he was holding a part of her.
He let her talk. “I’m taking you home,” he said gently.
He took charge. With two phone calls he had a limousine waiting at the opera house and a private plane waiting at the airport. It was peaceful and quiet in the ten-seater plane. They were the only passengers. He sat beside her all the way to New York, holding her hand, listening when she spoke, listening when she didn’t.
Another limousine was waiting when they landed at Idlewild. A chauffeur drove them to Perry Street.
Nikos hugged her. “Your bags will be here tomorrow. Try to get some sleep. You’ll feel better. Here. Don’t forget your passport.”
She kissed him, a kiss of thank-you, nothing more.
She unlocked the front door.
Mark will be here, she told herself. It was all a misunderstanding. In two minutes we’ll be laughing about it.
Her feet took her through the squeaky gate into the little courtyard with the lonely little Pan in the fountain.
He’s home. I know he’s home waiting for me.
She hurried up the flight of steps to apartment 2-A.
He’s just on the other side of this door. He’s embarrassed and he’s sorry and he’s afraid I’m going to be angry and maybe I will be, just for a moment.
The door hinges sang out the two notes of “Amazing Grace” and she looked around the darkness. She turned on the light.
He wasn’t in his chair in the corner, lifting his eyes from a page of New Testament Greek, rising to kiss her.
She crossed the room and turned on the bedroom light.
He wasn’t in the bed, holding out his arms to her.
She went into the bathroom to find an aspirin. The odor of his aftershave lotion came floating out of the bathroom cabinet, and for a brief, stabbing instant she stood recalling that eternity ago when there had been love and tomorrow had really existed.
She phoned his parents. Augusta Rutherford answered sleepily. “Yes, Ariana.”
“May I speak with Mark?”
“Mark’s not here. He said he was going to Mexico with you. Ariana, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry to wake you up. Goodbye.”
She dialed Harry’s number. He didn’t know where Mark was. She felt her life slipping away. “If you hear from him, would you ask him to phone me?”
“Of course,” Harry said gently.
Her mind clenched and unclenched like an empty fist and a spiraling emptiness pushed through her. She knew her life had changed forever, and the only question was how long forever would be.
She stared at the phone. It didn’t ring. It didn’t ring. Didn’t ring.
And then she was hurling pans at the piano, kicking over lamps, screaming, and five minutes later Magda, the concierge with dyed red hair, was pounding on the door and angry neighbors were peering onto the landing, and a policeman was saying, “Isn’t there anyone who can take care of her?”
DiScelta arrived forty minutes later.
She looked at the mess. She looked at the girl.
“I’ll handle this.”
Ariana showed her Mark’s letter.
“Sad,” DiScelta said. “Very sad. He’s through with you.”
“But why?”
“Who knows why? Sometimes I think even God doesn’t know why.”
Ariana cried convulsively for almost two hours.
DiScelta spoke gently, patiently, like a mother. “Face it. Accept it. Mark is gone. The person you loved is no longer part of your life. Don’t think about him. Don’t think about the past and don’t worry about the future. Though you don’t believe it now, there will be a future.” Her touch was soft on Ariana’s face. “And don’t try to contact him. It will only prolong the pain.”
But Ariana did try. She phoned Harry the next day, whispering so DiScelta couldn’t hear in the next room.
“Have you heard from Mark?”
“I’m sorry, Ariana. I’ll be in touch the minute I do.”
“Harry, can I see you? You’re his friend and I need to talk. Please.”
“I’m leaving for London this very minute, but maybe when I get back…”“When will you be back?”“I don’t know exactly. A few weeks …”
Ariana phoned Harry’s number the next day.
When Harry answered she hung up without speaking.
DiScelta canceled pupils, canceled parties, even canceled performances to stay with Ariana—cooking, cleaning, and always, always listening and soothing.
When Ariana began crying because the apartment reminded her of Mark, DiScelta answered, “You’ll stay here till you can stand it, because if you don’t, the street outside will remind you of him, and the city will remind you of him, and the world will remind you of him. Once you start hiding no place in the universe is safe.”
So they stayed in the apartment, teacher and pupil, and for almost a week Ariana was a hopeless mess: crying, sleeping, crying, not sleeping, crying, remembering, crying, not eating, crying. For those first seven days there was nothing in her life except DiScelta, nursing, listening, helping her through her angers and fears and loneliness.
Gradually the first sorrow, the first unlivable-with grinding ache faded, and a mechanical sort of life began to flow back into her again.
“It’s time to work,” DiScelta said. She struck a chord on the piano, turned her commanding gaze on Ariana. “Don’t just stand there. Vocalize.”
Ariana flew into a disbelieving rage. “What
am I supposed to do? Go perch on a bough and sing for an emperor?”
DiScelta looked at her from a great center of calmness. “It will come, my child, it will come.”
At first it was difficult. There was a tightening in her throat. DiScelta was patient with her.
“The voice wants to rise under stress, but you must resist, my child. Hold the note.”
Ariana obeyed. There was no choice. The only barrier between her and insanity was do-re-mi and la-la-la.
Gradually, music took her back. It challenged her, dared her, absorbed her, stimulated something in her will to live.
After two weeks DiScelta moved out, and Ariana felt a bone-soaking loneliness. She kept at her music. Three times a week she went to her teacher’s apartment for her lesson. Twice a day, at DiScelta’s insistence, she chatted with her teacher on the phone. “Never isolate, my child, never isolate. Only contact with the world can heal.”
It was a month since she’d last seen Mark when she swallowed her pride and phoned Harry Forbes again.
“Harry, it’s Ariana. How was London?”
“Wonderful, as always.”
An awkward silence.
“Have you heard from Mark?”
A pause. “I’m sorry, Ariana. Truly sorry.”
Harry hung up the phone and turned to gaze at the figure slumped in the easy chair.
“It can’t go on like this, Mark.”
For weeks Mark had holed up in Harry Forbes’s apartment, drinking, smoking, smoking, drinking, never changing the sheets on the sofa, never washing a plate, never taking a shirt to the laundry, never leaving the apartment except to go to work and never returning except to drink and smoke and stare at bookshelves.
“I’m not complaining,” Harry said. “I don’t mind helping a friend. I don’t mind listening and cleaning and cooking. But I do mind lying to that poor girl.”
“Sorry,” Mark said in a dead voice.
“You’ve been sorry a hell of a long time. Why don’t you stop being a fool and pick up that phone and call her?”
Mark sighed.
Harry crossed the room and handed him the phone.
In very slow motion Mark began dialing: three digits, a fourth, two more…and stopped, like a mechanical toy needing winding up.
Ariana Page 13