Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “You were saying, someone who…”

  “I was being a teenager.”

  He gave the attendant the ticket for the car, and they drove back to the ship. Their hands almost touched on the front seat. Almost.

  “I enjoyed our talk,” he said outside her stateroom.

  “So did I.”

  It was 2:00 A.M., and she felt pleasantly exhausted. He seemed to understand that.

  “Goodnight,” he said. There was not even an attempt to kiss her.

  “Goodnight.”

  She bathed, slipped into her new nightgown, and fell asleep without a glance at the empty space beside her in the bed.

  Nikos and Ariana were together after that.

  He took her shopping in Nice; shopping in Juan-les-Pins; showed her how to scuba dive off Portofino; sat with her in the corner of the ship’s bar and sipped fruity drinks and asked her questions about opera and answered her questions about finance.

  The crew and staff treated her with new deference. They rushed to open doors for her, fought with one another to carry her little packages, were constantly asking if there was anything she needed and looking so crestfallen if there was nothing that she began making up needs just to avoid hurting their feelings.

  The guests treated her differently too. She was sunning alone on A deck when a woman pulled up a deck chair beside her. “Darling, are you going to tell me?”

  Ariana took off her sun-goggles and looked at the woman, who was wearing a pale blue Galanos and had beautifully maintained ash-blond hair and smooth skin without a hint of sunburn. She sounded like New York, the exactly right sort of New York.

  “You and Nikos look as though you have a secret.”

  “Maybe we do,” Ariana said.

  “I detest maybe’s.”

  “I don’t. I think maybe’s are beautiful.”

  “Darling, I really haven’t time. I’m dummy this hand and the baroness has bid five no trump. Are you sleeping with him?”

  “You’re a gossip.”

  “And a damned effective one. If I were to say the right word about you and Nikos, these people would respect you.”

  “Are you offering that as a favor?”

  “I collect people and you’d be my first decent operatic soprano. You’d be envied. Invited. Imitated.”

  “You make your friends sound like monkeys.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I can’t give you an answer.”

  “Can’t or won’t? Everyone’s seen the way he watches you. Everyone’s talking and everyone’s wondering.”

  “You’re the only one who’s wondered about it to me.”

  “I’m the only one with the sense to be direct. By the way, we haven’t been seated together at dinner yet. My name’s Carlotta Busch.” She looked Ariana straight in the eye as she shook her hand. “I hope you’ll come to dinner when we get back to New York. I’ll invite Nikos too. Must run. I hear the baroness growling.”

  That evening at dinner the other guests were extraordinarily courteous to Ariana. She was keenly aware of secret, envying glances from women at neighboring tables. The glances warmed her.

  Two days later the maid was making the bed as Ariana came into the stateroom.

  “You needn’t bother,” Ariana said. “My husband and I will be leaving the ship in an hour.” She opened her suitcase on the bed. She began bringing dresses from the closet. The maid helped her. “Mr. Stratiotis will be very sad,” the girl said. Ariana’s hand paused on the zipper. “Will he?” The maid lowered her voice. “Madama is his favorite.” Ariana tried to maintain her composure. Suddenly this little servant was the most important critic in her career. He told her to tell me, she realized. She crushed 10,000 lire into the maid’s hand. “Please finish the packing and ring for the porters.”

  She hurried out onto the deck. Nikos and Boyd were waiting. Nikos came forward to place his hands on her shoulders. He kissed her cheek, lightly but warmly.

  They stretched their goodbye to ten minutes, eyes meeting, probing, lingering. She was aware that halfway down the deck the Baroness de Chesney had straightened in her chair and was craning her neck.

  “Keep in touch, both of you.” Nikos’s arm went around Boyd’s shoulder, and his hand closed around Ariana’s, tight and secret and for a moment almost causing pain, and then she and Boyd and five uniformed porters and eight pieces of Vuitton luggage were moving down the gangway and into the waiting launch.

  Ariana and Boyd picked up their tour with four Aïdas in Copenhagen and two Semiramides in Athens. They gave themselves two days to shop and unwind in Paris. She did no shopping and no unwinding at all but sat in the Ritz wanting to phone Nikos’s number.

  And then they flew back to New York, back to the co-op on East Seventy-eighth Street with its marble entrance hall and phones ringing and doorbells buzzing and secretaries and agents and managers and housemaids all demanding, all needing, all talking at once.

  Ariana tried to study scores but kept staring into space, kept seeing Nikos’s large brown eyes. She kept thinking, Maybe he’ll phone, maybe he’ll write. She found the transition back to routine unbelievably painful. She worked on her cadenzas in Lucia.

  He didn’t phone, didn’t write.

  That winter Boyd began going on weekend retreats in the country with his Mahler scores and the weekends would run as long as Tuesday.

  One morning at two, when he still wasn’t home from a Philharmonic concert that should have ended at 9:30, she went into the living room to find a magazine. She heard something and realized it was Boyd, slipping through the front door like a thief. He tiptoed into his study, and then he was on the phone, whispers muted. When she heard the receiver go down she knocked.

  “Boyd, is something the matter?”

  He was sitting staring into space. There was distance in his eyes. She searched his face.

  He took a sip from his pony of brandy. “I’ve got a hell of a load with the Philharmonic and the Chicago guest series and I still haven’t heard from Amsterdam about the Concertgebouw.”

  “You’ve had heavy work loads before. You’ve never reacted this way.”

  “I’m being piggy, aren’t I. And I’m taking it all out on you.” He rose from the chair. He was wearing the patent leather slippers that had been her gift on Father’s Day and they made a soft squeaking sound on the carpet. Suddenly he drew himself up short. “I’ll rent a studio. A little place where I can take my sulks out on the four walls and not on my adorable wife.”

  “Boyd, I didn’t mean—”

  He cut her short with a wave of his cigarette. “It’s settled. Tomorrow I start searching the real estate ads for a little padded cell large enough for me and a Steinway and a few thousand scores.”

  Thursday afternoon six weeks later the doorman handed Ariana an envelope. It was a cable for Boyd and she could see through the cellophane window that it came from Amsterdam. She opened it. The Con-certgebouw orchestra wanted Boyd for three Mahler concerts.

  She quickly let herself into the apartment, ran to the phone and began dialing. Her finger stopped at the seventh digit.

  He’d been waiting and hoping months for the Amsterdam contract. The news was too good for the phone. She’d surprise him and take the cable to his studio.

  The blue sky was darkening and the air held a hint of snow as she stepped out of the cab in front of the converted brownstone on Greenwich Street. There was no answer when she buzzed. She let herself in.

  Boyd’s little apartment had only two rooms but they were jewels, and there was a little garden in back with big old elms that you could see from the window. She had helped him choose a pale green for the walls, and the effect was delicious, like the inside of a grape.

  “Boyd?” she called.

  There was no answer, which surprised her, since he had said he would be working late. Her eye scanned the empty room. It was medium-sized, with just enough space for the Steinway, the shelves of musical scores and the stereo equipm
ent, the two comfortable chairs.

  The door to the next room was open. She walked to it. The windows were shuttered. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she saw two bodies intertwined on the couch that had been opened into a bed.

  She turned back to the living room. Two pairs of galoshes sat side by side on the stone hearth. A man’s jacket lay carelessly tossed on one of the chairs. She could see at a glance that it was not the work of Boyd’s Savile Row tailor.

  Through a half-open closet door she could see two overcoats hanging. She recognized only the camel’s-hair that she had given Boyd. The other, a broad-belted Aquascutum, she had never seen before. Half the clothing in the closet was new to her. There were three suits in broad checks, not Boyd’s style at all; cashmere scarves and sweaters she had never seen him wear.

  As she swung the closet door shut she heard a voice behind her.

  “Oh, it’s you, sweetums. Sorry the place is such a mess.” Boyd stood in the bedroom door knotting his bathrobe.

  “I should have phoned, but I wanted to surprise you.” She handed him the cablegram.

  Boyd kissed her quickly on the cheek. He opened his cable. A catlike look of hunger satisfied came into his eyes.

  “You have someone living with you,” Ariana said.

  Boyd glanced back at her and nodded.

  “Why did you keep it secret from me?”

  “Now, sweetums, please don’t be hurt. I wanted to tell you, but…”

  “You deceived me, Boyd. And you didn’t need to. You said your work was upsetting you. You said you needed room to be alone when you really needed room to be with your lover. I felt I was letting you down and now that I know the truth I feel humiliated.”

  “I was rotten to you, sweetums. But I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Tell me what? I know you meet men. I know you need things I can’t give you. We’ve lived together eighteen years—credit me with a little understanding!”

  “But I love Egidio. And it’s not just an affair.”

  “Egidio?” She frowned. In her memory, the name stirred distrust.

  Another man stood in the bedroom doorway, groggily slipping into a maroon silk bathrobe. “Ariana. It’s so good to see you.”

  “You remember Egidio DiBuono,” Boyd said. “From the cruise.”

  The man came forward into the room, hand extended.

  For Boyd’s sake she took the DiBuono man’s hand but the handshake was a lie. She wanted it to end.

  “We were talking about you all afternoon,” the DiBuono man said. “Wondering how to tell you. And now”—he gestured—“there is nothing to tell. You have made it all so easy.”

  He bent forward to kiss her on the cheek.

  Ariana studied the face, the carefully styled hair, the mannerisms of movement and speech. The man struck her as utterly false.

  Through the window she could see night beginning to seep through the garden. “Boyd, can you and I go outside for a moment?”

  “Will you excuse us, Egidio?”

  They stood in the little garden, husband and wife, and stared up at the smoky purple evening sky.

  “Well, Boyd, what do you want to do?”

  “I want to live with Egidio.”

  There it was. The truth. “Then you want to leave me.”

  He nodded. There was sadness in the nod, but firmness too. He told her his reasons. He censored nothing.

  As she listened she felt his need in all its sad and awful nakedness, a need she would never be able to satisfy. But she felt something else as well; a mysterious illogic in Boyd’s decision, a sort of fatalism coming off him like a mist. And in herself she sensed a fear that she wouldn’t know what to do without him.

  She pleaded with him. She reminded him that they had agreed to face the world together, as a couple, each lending the other what little strength or hope or experience he or she possessed.

  He agreed with every word she said. But…there was always a but. Always a glance thrown back toward the half-open window. “Everything you’re saying is right and wise. But I love him. I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it.”

  “You don’t even know this man. And he doesn’t know you.”

  A laugh came out of Boyd that was oddly jaunty. “He’ll just have to take his chances. And I’m not such a bad bet, am I?”

  She saw discussion was pointless. After a moment she sighed. “How do you want to arrange the divorce?”

  His head snapped around. “Who’s talking divorce?”

  “You and I are—aren’t we?”

  Something wounded came into his eyes and he took her hands. “Good God, sweetums, no. We’re a great husband-wife team and I want to keep it that way. Of course, if you want a divorce, I’ll understand. But it seems a shame to break up our…”

  “Our façade?”

  “Call it what you will, it’s worked for eighteen years.”

  “Till you met Egidio six months ago.”

  “It can still work. We can make it work.”

  “What’s the point, Boyd?”

  “Career.”

  “And with all our careers, do we ever get a life?”

  “We have more than most people.”

  “At this point I somehow can’t give much of a damn about most people. I hurt, Boyd. This hurts. You’re throwing away eighteen years. Maybe you’re right to. I don’t know. But you have him, and I have…nothing but hurt.”

  It was drizzling and dark by the time Ariana came home. Tonight was the maid’s night off, but she called anyway, making sure.

  “Sonya?”

  No answer.

  She sat in a living room chair and tried to cry, telling herself tears were therapy, telling herself if she let go of her feelings she’d be free of them.

  She let go and she wasn’t free.

  She wandered through the apartment, the showplace that it had taken her and Boyd twelve years and three and a half-million dollars to put together. She remembered the parties, the arguments with decorators, the prices. The place seemed cluttered and pointless. All the expensive furniture struck her as stage trappings, shapes without use or meaning. Nothing interested her, not the piano, not the paintings, not television, not books, not records.

  She took two Seconals with a glass of water.

  DiScelta refilled teacups and brought endless slices of hazelnut cheesecake to the table. For three-quarters of an hour she listened and did not interrupt once, not even with her eyes.

  Finally there was nothing left for Ariana to pour out. Silence flowed through the kitchen.

  DiScelta steepled her fingers together and gazed at her pupil. “You will die if you sit still with all your remembering and regretting and looking back. It would be better to water plants and scrub the kitchen floor. Do anything. But keep moving. Movement is the basis of all life.”

  “Tuesday I’ll be in Hamburg, Sunday in Zurich, Thursday in Paris—you call that sitting still?”

  “I call that sitting still on an airplane. You must have movement.”

  “Aïda isn’t movement?”

  “For you, Aïda is repetition. You must learn new movements.”

  Ariana raised a wary eyebrow. “There’s some strange new Czech opera you want me to learn.”

  DiScelta waved the idea aside as though it were a fly trying to get at her cheesecake. “I’m thinking of a new role off the stage. Now is the time for you to reach out to another person.”

  Ariana sighed. “I’ve spent all my life trying to reach out to other people.”

  “You reached from your weakness, not your strength. Which is why you failed. This time you will reach from your strength.”

  Ariana slammed her teacup into its saucer. “Haven’t you understood a thing I’ve been telling you? I’m scooped out. Hollow.”

  DiScelta shrugged as though nothing on earth had the power to impress her, not pupils, not hysterics, not even a cracked Wedgwood saucer. “Music is your strength. You will reach out from your music.”

&n
bsp; She lifted a hand to touch the gold and amethyst locket that hung around Ariana’s neck.

  “Over eighteen years ago you promised to take a pupil. You must delay no longer. For your own sake, find her. Teach her. You’ll see. It will make all the difference.”

  17

  ARIANA PUT OUT WORD, discreetly, to the music schools: Juilliard, Mannes, Manhattan. For over two months, two days a week, she auditioned a flood of applicants. She listened, she said “thank you,” “very nice,” “good luck.” And after each one had gone she exchanged sad shrugs with Austin Waters, planted on the piano bench.

  But in the second month a slim young girl called Vanessa Billings entered Ariana’s music room.

  “What are you going to sing for me?” Ariana asked pleasantly.

  “I’d like to sing ‘Et Lux Perpetua’ from the Verdi Requiem.”

  Ariana knew it wasn’t an accident. She knew it had to mean something that the girl had chosen that piece.

  She looked at the girl as she would have a photograph. The face was unlined. From beneath the blond, neatly arranged hair arced a broad, intelligent brow with penetrating gray-green eyes.

  The girl handed her music to Austin Waters. As he played the unaccompanied choral parts on the piano, her unfaltering voice shaped the line of the glorious, soaring soprano solo: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis”—“Give them eternal rest, Lord: and may perpetual light shine upon them.”

  She has the gift, Ariana thought. It was all there: the timbre, the projection, the thousand instinctive touches of musicianship that could never be taught, but only given by the Creator.

  “I want to teach you,” Ariana said. “When can you start?”

  The girl smiled. “Right now.”

  Though she had taken hundreds, Ariana had never given a lesson before. From time to time, in that first lesson, when she felt a moment’s uncertainty, her finger touched the locket, and somehow the right question, the right instruction, came to her lips. Within forty minutes, she began to understand what DiScelta had meant. When she taught, she forgot herself.