Ariana

by Edward Stewart

For three hours a week after that, the pain and the emptiness were gone. But except for those three weekly hours, spring was a season of Norma and Traviata and feeling like dry leaves waiting for rain.

  And then one morning in late May Ariana caught her new secretary, Roddy, a thin gangling blond boy, throwing an envelope into the discard tray.

  “A Greek-American fund-raiser,” he said. “You’re in London that night. It’s your second Covent Garden Manon Lescaut.”

  “I still like to know what I’m refusing.” She opened the invitation and read down the list of patrons. “Wire them and cancel the second performance. I’m flying back.”

  Roddy squinted as though he were seeing a crazy lady. “But—”

  “No but’s. I’m singing at the Waldorf for the benefit.”

  Because it was her duty as a Greek-American. Because the air was heady with the fragrance of gardenias from the bowl on the desk. Because the chairman of the fund-raiser was Nikos Stratiotis.

  Covent Garden screamed, her agent screamed, and DiScelta was on the phone to her the very next day, demanding, “Why?”

  “For God’s sake, Moffo cancels. Callas cancels. Why can’t I?”

  “The real reason is Stratiotis. Admit it.”

  “What of it? I’m tired of being lonely.”

  “You’re lonely because you know too many people. And you’ll be even lonelier if you start moving your life around to suit this pirate. I forbid you to fall in love. He’s in too many headlines.”

  “I shall not fall in love. But I shall sing the benefit.”

  Ariana kept only half her promise.

  At 10:30 she made her entrance at the Waldorf down a red-carpeted staircase and was greeted by a standing ovation. She began with the Greek national anthem and then sang two folksongs: “The Olive Tree,” and “When the Dolphin Returns.” The Waldorf dance band accompanied. For an encore she did Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro,” transposing it up a third to show off her high C.

  The applause went on for twelve minutes.

  Afterward she glimpsed Nikos moving gracefully through the crowd. He nodded at her twice. He didn’t smile. Didn’t approach. Didn’t congratulate her or thank her. What she felt was worse than disappointment: it was physical shock, as if he had driven a knife through her chest.

  She tried to listen to a movie tycoon and a senator arguing whether Israel could beat the Arabs in under a week. She made polite murmurs, sipped retsina and nibbled lamb and watched Nikos across the room whispering to a woman in blue and vowed I’ll never do a thing for him again.

  After the program he came over to her table. He greeted the others and then he greeted her. “Hello, Ariana.” He bent down and his lips brushed her cheek.

  She was too startled to organize her resistance. He took her hand. “Can I give you a lift home?” he asked.

  “Thanks, but I have a car waiting.”

  “I took the liberty of sending your car away.”

  She sat looking up at him, wanting more than anything else in the world to be furious at him, but suddenly there was no anger in her. Suddenly the only thing that mattered was that Nikos Stratiotis was offering her a ride home.

  She gathered up her purse. “There’s no sense calling another car. We might as well take yours.”

  It was a magnificent custom-built gray Mercedes limousine. It had a bar, a tape player, color television, two phones. He pushed buttons, pulled down panels. “This turns into a writing desk.”

  She asked what he was writing.

  “My memoirs.”

  “Am I in them?”

  “I hope you will be.”

  He gave the driver her address. It pleased her that he knew it without asking. She felt herself sinking into a warm sea of safety. She wanted to lay her head in Nikos’s lap.

  “Thank you for performing,” Nikos said. “You canceled Covent Garden.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re living alone now.”

  “Yes.”

  He pressed a button and raised the partition between them and the driver. His fingers went grazingly over her forehead. He slid an arm around her waist. His lips touched her mouth, her face, her throat.

  The car coasted to a stop. “I’d like to come up,” he said.

  She wrapped her hand around his.

  They went upstairs. He closed the apartment door behind them.

  “A drink?” she offered.

  “I didn’t invite myself here for a drink.” He stood smiling down at her, his burning brown eyes at once devouring and tender.

  Suddenly aware how long she had been imagining this moment, she led him into the bedroom. She pressed her mouth against his, her tongue hungry and impatient. She was astonished to sense a holding back in his kiss. Even his embrace was light.

  She met his eyes and could not read them. He seemed preoccupied.

  “Wait,” he whispered. “Just a minute.” He went into the bathroom. To her surprise she heard water running in the tub. He came back to her, a slight smile on his face.

  “Let’s undress,” he said. He began to open her gown.

  Her hands reached and grappled blindly with his collar button, his diamond shirt studs and cuff links. Each newly bared inch of his skin received a touch of her lips—not a kiss but an acknowledgment.

  She came to his cummerbund and her fingers trembled. Her hand explored the inside of his leg, brushed against his thigh. She felt a swelling in response.

  Can he tell that I’ve never unzipped a man’s trousers before?

  She tugged his Jockey shorts down. Every muscle of his corded belly was clearly defined. Her hand enclosed his testicles. She gazed at his penis, watching it contract and expand as blood pumped through its blue veins.

  All her reserve, all her timidity, burned away. She knelt before him on the carpet. She gripped his thighs. She had never known herself to be so open, so heedless of all but the need to give and receive love. She kissed the tip of his penis and probed the sensitive slit with her tongue. She pressed her nose into the thick, clean-smelling mass of his pubic hair.

  Nikos gave a tiny gasp and pulled back. “No—not yet.”

  He held her a little away from him. She could hardly bear the momentary separation of their bodies. He dealt smoothly with her bra and then surprisingly gently with her hose, as if he knew how easily they could be snagged.

  When they were both finally naked he took her into the bathroom. He bent to test the water. When its warmth suited him, he pulled her toward the tub, still smiling his slight smile. “Come.”

  She stepped into the tub and slid down to her knees, letting him treat her like a little girl. He sponged warm water over her shoulders and breasts, slowly, ritualistically, as if he were subjecting her to a delicious sort of punishment.

  He got into the tub beside her and straightened her legs so that she was stretched almost full length. The water came to her shoulders. He caressed her with the soap from hip to ankle—first the outside of her legs, then the inside. Each stroke brought his hand closer to the waiting, pulsing place between her thighs.

  She lay back and closed her eyes. His fingers slipped into her and something like light went through her legs.

  Now she felt his mouth on her lips—more insistent, a little less gentle than before. He raised her to her feet and helped her from the tub. He took a huge, soft towel and knelt, drying her legs and feet with long strokes. He pulled her toward him. He buried his face between her legs. Gradually, millimeter by millimeter, his tongue entered her.

  Electricity shot through her. She had to grip his warm, hard shoulders to steady herself. With one movement, he rose and swept her up, carrying her to the bed.

  As his lips and tongue moved down her rib cage another spasm thrilled through her. She felt his knee separating her thighs and a gentle pressure as he lowered himself on top of her. She yielded like melting wax to his stocky, graceful strength, his weight, his smiling confidence. Her body glowed with total happiness as it savored the wonder of
this moment, this man.

  Nikos’s plunging pace gradually quickened. “Are you comfortable?” His words came through the darkness.

  “Yes, oh, yes. Yes, my darling.”

  She looked up into his face. The long-lashed dark eyes were watching her. The same odd little smile played on his lips.

  “Nikos,” she murmured.

  His hand reached for her breast and in that instant she came, gloriously, knowing a fulfillment she had never imagined possible.

  And then amazement. God, she realized, he’s not stopping.

  She could feel him still inside her, firm as ever, going on. Continuing. Entering and withdrawing with a zest and eagerness that made her whole body quake. He was better than she had ever imagined any man could be.

  “You like it?”

  She heard herself give a long, low moan. “Oh, yes, Nikos, yes.”

  He slammed violently into her. She gave a strangled, exalted shriek. He brought her to a climax again, and then again, with his hand, and again, with his mouth, and then he entered her again…

  His last words before he left in the morning were, “I’ll phone.”

  She found excuses to stay home, canceled her lunch date, canceled Austin Waters. (She had taken to working more with him and less with DiScelta, who found fault not only with her singing but with every other aspect of her life as well.)

  She sat at the piano and stared down at her hands. She didn’t vocalize, didn’t play. She wanted to hear the phone when it rang.

  It rang, but it was never Nikos.

  She sat on the terrace in a spill of evening light. Without turning her head, she could see the phone in the study. In less than twenty-four hours her entire world had shrunk to the hope of hearing his voice.

  He didn’t phone. Not that day, not the next.

  Tuesday she flew back to London for her final Manon Lescaut. Somehow she had expected he would call or send a cable or note or bouquet. But there was no message, no cable, no bouquet.

  The London audience was polite. The reviews were not.

  The next week she sang a dreadful Isolde in Berlin; the week after she pulled herself together and managed three decent Hoffmanns in Zurich. But she kept remembering his eyes.

  She was in Hamburg to sing three Lulus when the phone in her hotel suite rang. “Ariana?”

  There was a strange suicidal thrill in her stomach, as though she had stepped into an elevator shaft with no elevator.

  “I’ve missed you terribly. Tell me you’ve missed me too.”

  Instinct warned her that this was the wrong time to let Nikos know the power he had over her. “I enjoyed our evening,” she said.

  “Can you meet me in Paris next Tuesday? I’ve booked a suite at the Georges Cinq.”

  It astonished her that he never even considered the possibility of her having her own life and her own commitments. She let him bubble on about theaters and nightclubs and a country week at Baron Rothschild’s, and then she said in what she hoped was exactly the right tone of not giving a damn, “Nikos, I can’t. I have to be in New York. We’re blocking the new Pelléas at the Metropolitan.”

  An instant’s disbelieving silence came across the line. “It’s that important?”

  “Yes, Nikos. It’s my career and it’s that important. When I make promises I keep them.”

  “You’re angry with me. Won’t you please let me explain?”

  “I have a performance in three hours and I’ve got to get ready. Goodbye, Nikos.”

  She broke the connection quickly, before her resolve could falter. There was a click and then the lonely hum of a dial tone and suddenly she was very much alone in a strange hotel room in a strange city on a strange continent. She seized up the receiver again.

  “Operator, we were cut off, can you reconnect me?”

  “It’s difficult, madame, the call was coming from Moscow.”

  Control returned. “In that case never mind.”

  The Pelléas and Mélisande dress rehearsal went disastrously.

  Ariana was trying for a special vocal quality, soft and supple enough for Debussy’s elusive heroine, yet full and powerful enough to fill the four-thousand-seat Metropolitan. But the director, Gian-Sebastiano Ferelli, an elegant composer and fashion designer (and current darling of the Texas millionairess bankrolling the production) was taking his virgin plunge into opera staging. He nagged about senseless details and kept pulling Ariana off her characterization.

  “Ariana, you have to be on the yellow mark at ‘Votre chair me dégoûte!’ And when Golaud seizes you by the hair, let yourself go—don’t fight it.”

  “It’s my scalp he’s pulling, not the wig.”

  “There should be a wig strap.”

  “There’s not.”

  Gray hair fluttering, Gian-Sebastiano whirled on his heel and screamed, “Props!”

  Three voices relayed the scream backstage and eventually two prop men, a seamstress, and two electricians arrived. What with union regulations and imbecilic stagehands, it took half an hour to straighten out the wig strap and the tiny piece of yellow cloth taped to the stage.

  Finally Boyd rapped his baton and gave the upbeat.

  A characteristic Debussian effect—two clarinets playing a dissonant major second—rose from the orchestra pit. The sound hovered in the air like a single note that had split into two warring halves and could not pull itself back together. Ariana found the sound agitating, stirring, troubling, like a premonition that could not quite be articulated. It seemed to her that with those two clarinets Debussy had caught all that was wordless and subliminal and troubled in the twentieth-century psyche.

  The clarinets died and a menacing silence filled the hall.

  “Gentlemen, please.” Boyd rapped the music stand again.

  There was a sudden sound of joking and laughing, a scraping of chairs, a shuffling of feet and squeaking of stands. The musicians rose, instruments under their arms, and crowded in a disorderly mass toward the two exits.

  “Gentlemen,” Boyd cried, “what the hell is going on?”

  It was the bass-clarinetist, union spokesman, who answered. “We’re taking a coffee break.”

  “I haven’t given you a coffee break. If you leave now, you’re walking out.”

  They walked out.

  “Panagia mou! Ti kano edho?” Ariana strode to the footlights and stared at the empty desks shining in light-framed quadrangles. “For God’s sake, Boyd, I flew three thousand miles to be here today. Can’t you control your musicians any better than that?”

  “They’re not my musicians, sweetums.”

  Blind rage flooded her. She ran to her dressing room, slammed the door, stood shaking, wanting to scream. With an unthinking sweep of her hand she took vengeance on the dressing table, sending brushes and hairpins flying to the floor.

  A movement in the mirror caught her eye. The reflection of a man in a dark suit was rising from the reflection of a chair. She spun.

  “I brought you a present.” It was Nikos, holding out a package.

  They were alone: no dresser, no seamstress. Electricity began to rise up the back of her neck.

  His eyes were on her, hungry and steady and pleading. All thought, all anger flew from her head. Silently, she took the package. She removed the expensive Madison Avenue wrapping.

  It was a small oak clock veneered with ebony and Boulle marquetry of brass on tortoiseshell. A museum piece.

  “It works,” Nikos said. “I had the parts replaced.”

  “It’s lovely. Thank you.”

  Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders. His mouth clamped onto hers. A roaring of waves filled her ears. All strength drained from her legs. They began buckling under her.

  She tried to push him away. But he shoved her down onto the daybed, began pulling her costume off. She dug her teeth into his shirt. A muffled groan came out of him. She raked her nails down his face, but they were too short, powerless to draw blood. He wrestled her to the corner of the bed, held her
pinned.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  He held her till she stopped resisting, then sank gently into her. The sensation that filled her was so strong and so sweet, it carried her so far outside of herself, so far from musicians and walkouts and telephones and pain, that ten seconds of it would have been worth ten years of her life.

  Afterward they lay side by side, quiet, floating.

  Gradually, the walls of the dressing room returned and beyond them the sounds of workmen shouting and scenery moving.

  “You paid the musicians to walk out,” she said.

  He didn’t deny it.

  She sprang up from the bed. “You’re intolerable! You think money can get you anything you want!”

  “And you’re an idiot if you think it can’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you that hundreds of people worked thousands of hours to prepare a performance. All that matters is your whim, your desire.”

  “And yours. You enjoyed making love as much as I did. Perhaps even more.”

  “How dare you!”

  “What do you expect me to say? I’m perfect for you and we both know it.”

  She stared at the brutish cunning in his face. A heart-thumping fury came over her. She seized the little oak clock from the table and hurled it at him.

  It struck the side of his head.

  He stood a moment feeling his face. When his hand came away she saw that his cheek was torn open under the eye.

  She seized a makeup towel and pressed it to the wound.

  “You’ve destroyed a very rare clock,” he said.

  “I’m sorry—about the clock.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Nothing matters to you, does it?”

  “You matter. I love you.”

  “Get out. And tell the musicians to get back to work. I have an opera to rehearse.”

  At the performance the next night Ariana’s voice moved through Debussy’s shifting harmonies like sunlight pouring through the rose window of a cathedral. She communicated something extraordinary to the audience, something that went far beyond the notes in the score and the words in the text. It was a blend of effortless musicianship and uncanny acting. One critic said you could hear her shadow moving across the stage.