Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “Do it,” Harry prodded. “Tell her you want to see her and you want to see her tonight.”

  This time Mark dialed seven digits. There was a pause and Harry watched his friend’s face.

  With absolutely no change of expression, mummylike, Mark said, “Hi, it’s me.”

  There was a long silence while Mark sat listening, but his face still didn’t change.

  “I have to see you,” he said.

  “Tonight,” Harry whispered.

  “Tonight. How about O. Henry’s steak house on Sixth Avenue and Fourth?”

  Mark slowly hung up and sat absolutely motionless, staring at bookshelves.

  “What did Ariana say?” Harry asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to Ariana.”

  “Then who were you talking to?”

  “Nita. You’ve met her.”

  “Mark, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Relax, Harry. I’ve worked it all out. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  “Will you marry me?” Mark asked.

  Nita’s eyes fixed Mark’s, trying to see if he was being honest. For she knew questions, like statements, could be lies.

  “Say that again, Mark?”

  They were sitting with two steins of beer. The butcher-block tables at O. Henry’s were crowded, and the waiters in their long white coats and straw hats looked harried and tired.

  For a long moment there was only the murmur of other customers, the faint nattering fingers of rain against the plate-glass window with its ye olde gold lettering in reverse.

  He said it again. She wasn’t imagining.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Surprise caught her and she could feel tears swelling the corners of her eyes. For a moment she writhed with her memories, with all the bright, brave decisions she’d made about putting away childish things, first and foremost among them her crush on Mark Ames Rutherford.

  She couldn’t believe there had been many who had touched the face of the earth quite so gracefully as the man now waiting for her answer. She’d dated a dozen others in the last year and she’d almost been to bed with three and she’d seriously considered marrying one of them.

  But she’d always compared them to Mark. She didn’t know why. Maybe because he’d been the first to kiss her. Maybe because he’d played Schubert duets with her when they were twelve-year-olds. Maybe because even a goodnight brush of his lips made her weak in a way no other man’s kiss did.

  A dark voice warned her that he was only asking because he wanted to heal a wound before it festered, a wound that had nothing to do with her. The voice told her to get up from that table, to get out of Mark’s life and stay out.

  But what did dark voices know?

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, my darling Mark. I’ll marry you.”

  12

  RICARDA DISCELTA KNEW THERE was a solution for Ariana. That the solution was, broadly speaking, work and music and time, she had no doubt. She saw, over the weeks, how the little mercies of routine gradually began to reclaim her student. Yet an element was missing, and the element, she decided, was Boyd Kinsolving.

  DiScelta found Boyd boring but his father was Amory Kinsolving of Kinsolving Steel, and his mother, the former Marjorie Biddle of the Philadelphia Biddles, served on the boards of the New York Metropolitan and the Chicago operas. Connections counted in Ricarda’s world. When you were young they helped you get roles, and later, when you had the roles you wanted, they still helped you get your way.

  She invited Boyd to lunch at the Café Chambord.

  “I’ve a student you ought to meet.”

  Boyd Kinsolving asked who and why.

  “Her name is Ariana Kavalaris. I don’t know whether you read her reviews last month, but she’s considered a very promising voice.”

  “What sort of voice?”

  “Dramatic soprano with a very high, brilliant top.”

  “Does she know the final scene from Salomé?”

  Boyd had contracted to guest-conduct a fund-raising mishmash for the New York Philharmonic in March, and his scheduled soprano—a notoriously unreliable Hungarian prima donna—had canceled. He had had trouble signing a first-rate substitute.

  “If you’re willing to use her, Ariana will learn the scene.”

  “When can I hear her?”

  “Tomorrow at four. You can eavesdrop on her lesson.”

  “I’ll have to reschedule my haircut.”

  “Ariana is worth a haircut.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “And Boyd, if you like her, you’re doing a Rigoletto in Mexico in April? She got a very good press in Mexico.”

  “We’ll see. If I like her, it’s possible.”

  He listened from the study. He liked her.

  “The concert and Rigoletto?” DiScelta whispered.

  He nodded, and his blond bangs fell at an elfish angle across his face. DiScelta swept him into the music room.

  “Ariana, I took the liberty of inviting a friend—Boyd Kinsolving—he loves you.”

  Ariana turned and her mouth fell open just a little. Why not, DiScelta thought, he has blue eyes and pink skin and big shoulders and long straight legs and he’s dressed like a model.

  DiScelta made introductions and told Ariana that Boyd wanted her for his concert.

  Ariana’s face fell. “But I don’t know Salomé,” she said.

  “We’ll learn it,” DiScelta promised.

  Afterward, when they were alone, Ariana wheeled on her teacher. “I can’t learn that music in a month. I’ve never sung Strauss. The tessitura’s wrong for me. That low G-flat is out of the question. I’ll never project with a hundred musicians on the stage behind me.”

  DiScelta smiled, hearing the reasons but not accepting them. “You’ve had too many months of nothingness. You need this.”

  Richard Strauss’s Salomé had been, at the turn of the century, a shocker. The Kaiser had advised Strauss not to let it be performed. The financier J. P. Morgan had once paid the Metropolitan Opera a fortune not to stage it. But the public had always adored this opulent portrait of a murderous Levantine Lolita, and Ariana resolved to give it her best vocal shot.

  “With Strauss,” DiScelta said, “the clarity of the words comes first. You must project over the loudest orchestration in the world—and the vocal line never stops.”

  Though DiScelta obviously had reservations about his music, she regarded Strauss as the operatic giant of the twentieth century.

  “He is the supreme melodist. He is able to stuff his vocal lines to the limit—and they still hold. He is also the greatest writer for the female voice any century has produced. I do not mean the music is always first-rate—far from it—but the effect is always sublime.” She cited the final trio of his Rosenkavalier, where three sopranos (though one was often sung by a mezzo) melted together in a soaring, ten-minute-long melody that crowned not only the opera but nineteenth-century music itself.

  She sighed. “But today we are dealing with less sublime matters.”

  She opened the score of Salomé.

  “Of course, Salomé is really a tone poem with voices, rather than pure opera. Which is why it holds up in the concert hall as well as on the stage. Strauss commands the Wagnerian apparatus of sound and the full range of post-Wagnerian techniques. As a result he is a master at communicating psychological states.”

  She grimaced. “Particularly morbid states. In this work, you and the orchestra are partners in psychoanalysis. The voice expresses the conscious psyche, the orchestra lays bare the unconscious: every impulse, every complex, every mental twitch and fleeting thought is articulated—often simultaneously.”

  She said there had probably never been a richer tapestry of operatic sound than Strauss’s Elektra or Salomé.

  And again she grimaced. “Whether they are pleasant tapestries is another matter. They have power. That is enough.”

  Ariana plunged into a study of the libretto. It was essentially a gory anecdote. Sa
lomé’s stepfather, King Herod, had imprisoned Jokanaan, John the Baptist, in a cistern of his palace on the Sea of Galilee. Fascinated by the prophet’s voice, Salomé had the guards bring him before her. Smitten with desire at the sight of him, she begged to kiss his lips and fondle his hair. He scorned her and returned to the cistern, leaving her stung by rejection.

  King Herod emerged from the palace. Lusting for his stepdaughter, he entreated her to dance for him. At first she refused, but when he promised any reward she wanted, she consented to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils.

  Boyd Kinsolving planned to begin his concert excerpt with the dance, which was masterfully lurid hootchy-kootch and had inspired the scores of hundreds of Hollywood Biblical extravaganzas.

  After shedding her seven veils, Salomé demanded payment: the head of Jokanaan. The horrified king offered her anything else, but she was adamant. Finally Herod gave the signal. The executioner descended into the cistern and a moment later handed up Jokanaan’s head on a silver charger.

  This section would be omitted in the concert performance, and Boyd would cut directly to the final scene, where Salomé—in an erotic ecstasy—gloatingly fondled the head. As she smeared the dead prophet’s lips with kisses, Herod, revolted, called to his guards, “Kill this woman!” They crushed her beneath their shields.

  Herod’s line would be omitted, but the audience would get the point from their programs.

  For four weeks DiScelta drove Ariana twelve hours a day, drumming the tortured vocal line into her memory and into her throat muscles.

  At the first orchestra rehearsal Carnegie Hall echoed with the brilliant chaotic dissonance of instruments tuning. It was a closed rehearsal, but the forward seats of the first and second tiers were filled with women with dazzlingly perfect hair and jewels and rich furs dumped over the backs of their seats. Friends of Boyd’s, Ariana supposed.

  Boyd smiled at her, then raised his baton.

  Ariana stood beside the podium, awaiting her cue.

  The clarinets rippled a shrill, birdlike arpeggio. Horns brayed. Her entrance. She stepped forward, her mouth projecting the opening vowel above the orchestral din.

  “Ah! du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund küssen lassen, Jokanaan!”—“Ah! you would not let me kiss your mouth, Jokanaan!”

  She could feel the orchestral fabric pulling together behind her: the wind prickles really prickled, the brass explosions truly exploded, even the evil little percussion rattles punctuated the texture with just the right snakelike sinuosity.

  After the final catclysmic fanfare of brass and timpani, the tiers of socialites broke into applause. Boyd laid down his baton and mopped his face with a monogrammed handkerchief.

  A woman came running up with an ermine slung over her shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. “I just adored it,” she cooed. Her vowels were rich, confident, depraved. “I’m tingling.”

  “Can you believe it’s Ariana’s first try at the part?” Boyd said. “Ariana, you know Keekee deClairville, one of my great great chums?”

  The woman turned to Ariana. Diamonds shivered at her ears. “My dear, you’re a natural. You bring out the bitchiness in that Jewish princess perfectly.”

  “Thank you,” Ariana said.

  The rehearsal broke up. Boyd reached for Ariana’s hand. “Have you got dinner plans?”

  She had none.

  “Come on. My treat.”

  The morning after the concert Boyd’s houseboy brought him the reviews with his coffee. He glanced over them.

  The Times critic felt that Boyd Kinsolving showed complete mastery of his orchestra, evoking in a thousand sure and telling details the beauty and damnation that inhabit these pages. …

  Boyd blew out a soft, disbelieving whistle.

  The critic was equally kind to the soloist: Ariana Kavalaris—a young woman endowed with great personal as well as vocal beauty—would appear to be well on her way to becoming one of our major dramatic vocalists. She attacked the role with assurance and accuracy, brilliance and fury….

  Boyd knotted the cord of his maroon satin robe and walked to the window. He stared a long, long moment across the peaceful square at Gramercy Park. The winter-stripped trees and iron picket fence stood out with extraordinary distinctness against the snow, like lines in an etching.

  Together, he thought, this little girl and I could conquer the world.

  The limousine cut neatly across the evening-cooled plaza. In the purple mist that had begun enveloping the palm trees and statues, the opera house loomed like the shadow of a gray giant.

  Ariana huddled deeper into the seat. “Panagia mou—ti kano edho?”

  Boyd understood the tone, if not the words. He patted her hand. “Courage, sweetums. You’ll do just fine.”

  The stage entrance smelled of a recent mopping with ammonia. Ariana had come this far with a sort of numb resignation, but as she stepped into the elevator panic gripped her. This is where Mark left me. I’ll never be able to walk onto that stage.

  “Sweetums, you’re perspiring just a tad.” Boyd gave her his handkerchief. “Drink a little tea, vocalize, and lie down. You’ll be fine.”

  They had given her the same dressing room as before.

  Here, she thought. Here is where my life ended.

  The little spinet was tuned flat, and she felt uneasy having to vocalize to it. She drank chamomile tea for her nerves. By the time her dresser arrived cold sweat prickled her forehead and her eyes felt as though they were burning with fever. As the old woman bustled around her, fitting her into the layers of her Renaissance dress, the overture crackled through the loudspeaker on the wall—the ominous motif of the curse, followed by the giddy merrymaking music that set the scene at the Duke of Mantua’s palace.

  Ariana listened with half an ear as the duke, a libertine and tenor, revealed to the hunchback Rigoletto, his jester and confidant—sung by a splendid baritone—that he hoped to seduce a beautiful girl he had seen at church. Rigoletto laughed approvingly. While the courtiers danced a graceful minuet, Count Monterone burst in, enraged and grief-stricken that the duke had seduced his daughter. Rigoletto mocked the count, who hurled a curse at him.

  In the operatic equivalent of whispering—swift, lightly accompanied recitative—Marullo, one of the courtiers, revealed to the others that Rigoletto kept a young woman locked up in his home. Supposing her to be his mistress, they decided to play a joke on the detested hunchback by abducting her.

  The applause that came through the speaker was loud and generous. The audience seemed to be in a good mood.

  There was a knock at the door and a voice called, “Diez minutos.”

  Ariana waited in the wings and watched the beginning of the next scene. In the secluded street in front of his house, Rigoletto crossed paths with Sparafucile, a professional assassin, who offered his services whenever they might be needed.

  Ariana moved quickly from the shadows of the wings onto the glaring light of the stage. Now she was the jester’s daughter Gilda, the joy of his life, and she was running to meet him.

  Beyond the orchestra pit the audience was still and cold as dark water: not a ripple disturbed them.

  Ariana sang her first lines. They had to be projected over a blanket of horns. Rigoletto questioned her about her activities. Her tone felt pinched, her breath short.

  As Rigoletto told the nurse to watch his daughter carefully, the duke slipped unseen into the house, tossing the nurse a purse, and hid.

  After her father left, Gilda told the nurse of the handsome young man who had been following her at church. The duke stepped into the open, motioning the nurse to go. Gilda recognized him. They sang a love duet, and—lying—he told her that he was a student, that his name was Gualtier.

  As Ariana lifted her face to the audience, acknowledging their polite applause, a light seemed to catch her eye. In the third row of the orchestra she saw a man with an empty seat beside him. His eyes were fixed on her in a kindly, encouraging way. He had dark hair, a cleans
haven face, a tiny cleft in his chin. He was wearing a minister’s collar.

  It was Mark. For an instant her heart stopped. He signaled her with his eyes. I am here. You are safe. I’ll protect you. Sing.

  She drew air into her and it was like the first breath she had breathed in months.

  The duke left, and Gilda—rapturously in love—sang “Caro Nome”—“Dear Name.” The music seemed to soar out of her of its own volition: there was no sense of strain or panic.

  The applause was warm, sustained, sincere. There were bravas.

  Ariana felt her heart pumping, tears threatening to run down her face. Mark. Still there, still smiling.

  Now the courtiers gathered outside the house. Rigoletto returned, and Marullo told him they were stealing another man’s wife and needed his help. Pretending to mask him, Marullo blindfolded the jester. Rigoletto held the ladder while the courtiers entered his house and carried Gilda away. Tearing off the blindfold, Rigoletto realized he had been duped. “The curse!” he cried, and the curtain fell.

  Ariana passed the intermission in a state of mixed terror and excitement, almost afraid to step back onto the stage.

  Act Two took place in the palace. The courtiers told the duke they had stolen Rigoletto’s mistress for him. He went to join her. Rigoletto entered, but the laughing courtiers encircled him and blocked his way. Revealing that Gilda was his daughter, he pleaded for their compassion. They mocked him.

  Now. Now was her entrance. Now she was Gilda again. She rushed onstage, sobbing and dishonored, and flung herself into Rigoletto’s arms. Still loving the duke, she begged her father not to swear vengeance.

  From the audience Mark’s gaze came up at her, a warm glow.

  She had no memory of reaching the end of the act. All she knew was that the curtain was falling, and rising, and hands were pushing her to the apron of the stage.

  She heard Mark’s voice above the others, shouting “Brava!” Her eyes met his and thanked him.

  In the next intermission she spoke to an usher. She told him where Mark was sitting. “Would you ask the gentleman to come to my dressing room after the performance?”