Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “I’ll be careful.” Ames smiled, kissing her.

  But he wasn’t careful. He had the time of his life. He loved the Old World with its countryside that exuded the smell of time, its ancient buildings that looked like paintings, the unfamiliar music of foreign languages, the taste of the food and the unbelievably clean sunlight.

  He loved the people. He had affairs with girls he hardly knew—French girls, Belgian girls, English girls. He drank too much wine. He ate at some of the best restaurants and some of the worst, slept in good hotels and rotten hotels and five of the most beautiful parks in Europe. He didn’t budget. He loaned a hundred dollars to an Australian painter he met in front of Chartres Cathedral who had the best hard-luck story he’d ever heard. He wasn’t exactly surprised when he ran out of money two weeks ahead of schedule.

  It was at the end of an overactive night at the end of that wonderfully overactive summer that he found himself, broke and contented, stretched on the lawn in the palace gardens of Fontainebleau, an hour’s train ride southeast of Paris. A silvery sound kept butting into his hangover.

  He rolled over and opened his eyes, and saw a girl crouched between the marble paws of a chinoiserie lion, playing a flute. She had long dark hair and she was wearing a long skirt and a Victorian lace blouse. He propped himself up on his elbows and watched and for five minutes she did a good job of not noticing him.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est la musique?” he called, realizing it was not quite the right way of asking, “What’s that music?”

  Her eyes were on him a moment, and in that early morning light they were pure undersea green. She seemed not particularly surprised to see a young man in jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt lolling on the palace grounds at sunrise, and not particularly interested either.

  She lowered the instrument and answered in perfect patrician American English—why did he think it was Delaware?—“Badinerie from Bach’s third French Suite.”

  The flute went back to her lips, and out came another silvery piping note.

  “It’s pretty,” he said.

  She sighed. “You obviously aren’t a musician. The music is beautiful and the performance stinks. My lesson with Mademoiselle Boulanger is in two hours, so would you mind if I practice?”

  “Go right ahead. Would you mind if I listen?”

  He stretched out on the grass. Silvery Bach drifted over him. When he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved up to the jonquil beds and the girl was gone and an old peasant type was steering an electric mower across the lawn.

  He took his queasy headache and fierce stomach to a sidewalk cafe. He was nursing a thick little coffee when two students sat at the next table and ordered omelettes fines herbes. They were chattering in American English.

  Eavesdropping, he gathered there was an American school at the chateau where college graduates studied architecture and music. The café appeared to be their meeting place, and it occurred to him he might see the flute player again if he could just stretch his coffee long enough.

  For four hours he endured the waitress’s stares. It was noon rush hour when he saw the girl standing on the sidewalk waiting for a traffic light. He slapped his last coins down on the table and rushed into the square. She was still carrying that flute case.

  “Say, are you an ambassador’s daughter?”

  She looked at him with undisguised skepticism and he remembered he hadn’t shaved since Torremolinos, where he and three thousand other tipsy young Americans had gone to see if the locals were still running the bulls as they had in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. They were.

  “You’re not from the school,” she said.

  “No, I’m not from any school.”

  “What are you doing here then?”

  “Here Fontainebleau or here France?”

  “Here anywhere.”

  “Chasing you.”

  She gave him that look again, longer and more probing this time. “Would you like to have some coffee?”

  More coffee was the last thing on earth his stomach wanted, but it was a way to be with her. “I’d love to, but I’m broke.”

  “So am I till Friday.”

  That seemed to settle that. They walked past hedges and gardens.

  “We could have coffee in my room,” she said.

  It was a lovable little room, for all the music manuscripts scattered about and the drying undies that she quickly snatched off the backs of chairs. Coffee was American instant, made on a hotplate, served in unmatching tin cups that looked as though they were meant to measure laundry detergent. She assumed a lotus position, told him about the American summer school of music and fine arts, about Nadia Boulanger, who she said was the world’s greatest teacher of music, about her own talent, which Mademoiselle Boulanger had said was decidedly not virtuoso calibre.

  “Mademoiselle says with a lot of hard work I may be good enough to teach children.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “I have a keyboard harmony lesson in ten minutes, and what I want to do is meet you here afterward.”

  He grinned, not believing his luck, and there was a little anticipatory surge of sexuality in his groin. “What do you know. That’s exactly what I want too.”

  That evening he explored her, awakening nerves under her arm, beneath her nipples, finding hidden vibrations that linked breasts to labia. She moaned with happiness, taking his swollen cock as it lay pressed between them and massaging it.

  Then he twisted around to kiss her between the legs and, pressing her more firmly against him, began to penetrate her.

  “That’s nice,” she said. “So nice.”

  Love with her was rich, abandoned, inventive. Almost musical. Themes and variations.

  They got into astonishing positions. She threw her legs up around his neck and he took her on the rug and then he took her on the bed with her head hanging back over the edge, her dark hair brushing the floor.

  And then he took her in the shower.

  That evening he found out everything about her. Her name was Fran, she read Henry James and identified with Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton, and she could cook astonishingly tasty veal cutlets on her little hotplate.

  He spent the weekend with her. He began to notice a look in her eyes. He realized she was falling in love with him. And he realized he hadn’t fallen in love that summer. Not once. Right now, here, in this sweetly messy little room with her, was the closest he’d come.

  He wanted to fall in love. Not falling in love under these circumstances was like driving a car with the handbrake on.

  He asked about spending the week and a light seemed to come on in her face.

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. “Just act like one of the students if Mademoiselle sees you.”

  For two weeks he knew the greatest satisfaction he’d ever known with another human being, and yet there was always that damned handbrake holding him back.

  Why don’t I love her? he wondered. Why can’t I love her?

  And then he looked at his fourteen-day beard in the mirror and realized he had a return ticket to America and seven days to get his ass to Harvard Law School. “I have to go home,” he told her.

  She turned, flute in hand. “When?”

  “This week.” He saw whole cities crashing in her eyes. He crossed the room and threw his arms around her and pulled her bone-crunchingly hard against him.

  I’ll love her, he thought. I will. It’s going to happen.

  “Come with me, Fran.”

  After much juggling of reservations, trading-in of tickets, and excuses to Mademoiselle Boulanger, Fran and Ames tipped the porter 1,200 francs and took occupancy of a cabin in what amounted to steerage on the France. Fran’s eyes took in the walls—white and smooth and shining like the insides of a hospital—and then she peered out of the tiny porthole.

  “Ames, what in the world are we doing here?”

  He put his head next to hers and stared at the bright blue sky and industrial-green
waters of Le Havre. “Fran Winthrop, flautist extraordinaire of Chestnut Hill, Delaware, is having an affair with Ames Rutherford of New York, a promising young student whom she met in Fontainebleau, France. They are moving their headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Mr. Rutherford will pursue his legal studies and Miss Winthrop will be very, very happy and that’s a promise.”

  “Oh, Ames, I am happy, but…”

  He kissed her on the nose. “But what?”

  “This isn’t me. I’m a good Episcopalian girl. I had a scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger.”

  “And I’m a good Episcopalian boy and my father’s a good Episcopalian bishop and that makes it okay.”

  “I’m having a guilt attack.”

  He kissed her on the forehead. “Then let’s go find the dining room and drown our guilt in pâté campagne. The rooms may stink on a French ship, but the cuisine jamais.”

  19

  THE TROUBLE BEGAN AT dinner at Carlotta Busch’s townhouse the Thursday after Labor Day. In a voice strained through Newport and three packs of cigarettes a day, Carlotta brought Ariana up-to-date on her new acquisition: fun couple Principessa Maggie di Montenegro and husband.

  Ariana observed a young woman across the garden, laughing in a circle of men. She had wide, hard eyes, and her long caramel-colored hair swept smooth shoulders left bare by a strapless blue Adolfo evening gown.

  “She was engaged to Prince Olaf of Norway, but she ran away ten days ago with another man and was married by the captain of the France. You’re at her table by the way—I mean, she’s at yours.”

  “Who did she marry?”

  “Him.” Carlotta pointed with her eyes toward a young man with dark brown curly hair. He wore a beautifully tailored navy blue blazer and he was bent over the diamond-bloated hand of one of the Rockefeller wives. “Philippe du Chat, du Chose, du-something. He’s a divine cocktail pianist.”

  “If you’ve seated me with amateur musicians, I swear next time you’re at our place I’ll seat you with a reporter.”

  “I’ve seated you very well, and you’d better be grateful.”

  Dinner was indoors, and Ariana’s companion turned out to be Adolf Erdlich, the gray-haired director of the Metropolitan Opera, who lost no time in describing his upcoming production of Traviata. It was to be a gala, with new sets, new conductor, new tenor.

  Ariana listened, feeling a slight ache. “Adolf, I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  What was she going to say? That she had made a promise to a dotty old strega, that she had already turned the role over to her pupil? “I’ve sung it too often.”

  “Who can sing Violetta too often?”

  Across the table, a shriek of laughter broke from Principessa Maggie. Ariana’s eyes went to the dark-eyed girl with the not-quite convincing hair and the not-quite convincing little upturned nose.

  “Am I the only one out of eighty guests who notices that there’s something very strange about that girl?”

  “More than a few notice. You with your admirable directness are the only one who mentions it.”

  “Is she on drugs?”

  “Cocaine, I’d think,” Adolf said.

  “What have you heard about her?”

  “She’s spoiled. She’s bored. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do to experience a new sensation. Ergo her engagement to the Scandinavian prince. Ergo her elopement and marriage to a café society pianist. Some people want to shock the bourgeoisie; little Principessa Maggie aims higher. She wants to shock the aristocracy—what there is left of it.”

  After dinner there was a five-piece band and dancing in the garden. At the first break in the music Principessa Maggie left her husband and came over to the table where Ariana and Nikos were sitting. Her dress made a rich swishing sound.

  “Hello, Nikos.” Her eyes were half open and very bright.

  “Hello, Maggie. Do you know my friend Ariana?”

  “I’m so pleased to meet you,” the principessa told Ariana with a smile that included a drop of her eyelids. “Ever since I was a tiny little girl I’ve loved your performances.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  Nikos turned to Ariana. “Would you mind if Maggie and I dance?”

  Ariana felt a burn crawling up her face. “Of course not.”

  Riding home in the limousine, Ariana was silent. Nikos tried to hold her hand but she pulled free.

  “You’re angry,” he said.

  “You like her,” Ariana said. “You like that principessa.”

  “Her father’s a friend of mine. I have to be nice to her.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “I’ve known Maggie since she was eleven or so.”

  “I hear she uses drugs.”

  “Naturally. Don’t all the smart young things these days?”

  “I hope you’re not going to be a fool.”

  “I can promise you, my dear, I save all my foolishness for you.”

  Ariana thanked God that she was teaching the next day. For two blessed hours, the lesson got her mind off the principessa.

  Vanessa Billings sang Rosina’s aria from the Barber of Seville, “Una voce poco fa.” Ariana sat in her armchair, still, remote, all her faculties focused into a narrow beam of pure attention. Vanessa negotiated the octave-and-more leaps of the cabaletta with no difficulty whatsoever. Yet Ariana sensed something missing. How am I going to say this? she thought. How did DiScelta say it to me?

  “Not bad,” she said. “But you’re respecting the music too much.”

  It took nerve to say that in front of Austin Waters, but he kept silently to his role of accompanist, face angled toward the keyboard, allowing her to be the expert.

  “I don’t mean you should sing it sloppily,” Ariana said, “but there has to be a freedom and joy within the exactness. With Rossini—and with Bellini and Donizetti for that matter—everything is in the melody.”

  Ariana was surprised at the authority in her own voice. Is this me? she thought. Or is it me parroting DiScelta?

  “Granted, this whole school of opera is terribly artificial—verse, refrain, aria, cabaletta—no one makes love or commits suicide in such strict forms. But it doesn’t matter. The melodies sweep the listener past any possible reservation, not because they’re classics but because they’re wonderful tunes.”

  Vanessa was staring at her. “Of course. I never thought of the aria as a tune.” And she sang it again.

  She understands, Ariana thought, and her blood exulted.

  Three weeks later Nikos took Ariana to a concert at the Grace Rainey Rogers concert hall in the Metropolitan Museum. She was chatting happily when suddenly she realized Nikos’s eyes had become distant, sealed. She followed the direction of his gaze.

  Seven rows back Principessa Maggie was settling into her seat. She was wearing a huge white mink coat with a collar like a wing chair, and the man helping her out of it was not her husband, but a diamond magnate whose very tanned face had been on page one of the New York Post practically all week.

  Ariana tried to remember: When did we decide to come to this concert, who wanted to, Nikos or me, when did we get the tickets, was it before or after we met that girl at Carlotta’s?

  The music started. She didn’t hear a note of it.

  Intermission, at last. They went to the bar.

  As the bell began ringing, summoning the audience back to their seats, Nikos turned apologetically to Ariana. “Please go on without me. I’ll be right back.”

  Ariana went back to her seat.

  The concert resumed. Nikos didn’t return.

  She managed to sit still through half of the first movement. When she could bear it no longer, she looked around to where she had seen Maggie sitting. The diamond man was twisting anxiously to look behind him, and there was nothing in the seat beside him but a giant white mink. She excused herself and wedged past her neighbors’ knees. Outside the concert hall a bored-looking guard was pacing.

&
nbsp; She hurried the length of the corridor and found no one, and then she came to the entrance of an Egyptian tomb. She took another two steps and froze. A woman’s voice was speaking. “You’ll find a way.”

  She found the courage to take one step more, and there were Nikos and Maggie, gazing into a child pharaoh’s crypt. Their hands were touching on the railing.

  Ariana turned and rushed from the museum. It was raining heavily and she stood on the Fifth Avenue steps with drops of rain slapping her in the face.

  Nikos appeared with her coat. “You’re angry.”

  She spun. “Yes, I’m angry! You deserted me!”

  He wrapped the coat around her. “I have tax shelters in Montenegro. The prince is a copartner in eight of my corporations. I have to be diplomatic to his daughter.”

  “And tryst with her in the nearest mausoleum?”

  The limousine pulled up to the curb and they rode home in silence and took the elevator to the apartment. She sat at her mirror and spread cold cream over her face. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “You’re being jealous of a baby,” Nikos said.

  Fear took her. She could see him receding. The cold cream jar came down onto the table with the weight of a cannon ball and she turned, begging. “I’m so frightened. Of you and her and what might happen.”

  He was silent. No denial came from him, no assurance.

  “Nikos, what’s happening to us? We were happy, and now it’s all slipping away. Is it my fault?” She reached for his hand. She attempted a smile and felt it deepening the lines of her face.

  “I’ll let you rest.”

  “Stay with me, please?”

  “Why?” He had someone else’s face. A door slammed and she was alone.

  When he returned two hours later she had slipped into bed with a novel she wasn’t able to concentrate on. He kissed her. “What are you doing for the next two weeks?”

  “You know what I’m doing, three Elisir d’Amores and—”

  “Cancel everything. We’re going to spend two weeks in the Mediterranean. There’ll be no operas, no business, no principessas. Just you and me. That is, if you’re willing?”