Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “Not as much as he paid you, but enough.”

  Egidio went to the bureau and collected the grinning snapshots of three children. He folded them one onto the other like a ladder of credit cards and made a cashmere nest for them in the suitcase.

  “Are those nieces and nephews your children then?”

  Egidio nodded. “Gian-Carlo, Maria, and Tonio.”

  A sour taste of losing and hating flooded Boyd’s mouth. “You goddamned parasite!”

  Egidio’s hand paused on the suitcase handle. Steel slid into his eyes. “And you, you’re different? Your penthouse, your clothes, your Renoirs—how did you earn those? Waving a stick?”

  “Chagalls!” Boyd shouted. “They’re Chagalls!”

  “My eight-year-old girl paints better. And my seven-year-old boy waves a stick better. Goodbye, Boyd.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “You’ll find others, more sincere than me. You know now what to be on guard against.”

  “I didn’t mean to shout. Please don’t go.”

  A door slammed and Boyd winced and the future was no longer what it used to be.

  Shaking, he poured himself a vodka and stumbled out onto the terrace to huddle in a canvas chair beside the marble ledge. There was a breeze coming up. In the street far below he saw the doorman helping Egidio with five suitcases and a trunk into a Checker cab.

  He gulped enough vodka to soften the edges of the world. He realized there were decisions to be reached.

  But not now.

  Just for today, just for tonight, he’d push it all back to the horizon.

  In the study, on the shelf behind the Mahler Society editions, was a silver box of cocaine with a tiny jade spoon inside the lid. He pressed a forefinger to his right nostril, lifted a tiny scoop of snow-white powder to the left, inhaled; reversed nostrils, inhaled again.

  Gradually the pain in him dulled, as though a gleaming veil had fallen between him and it.

  He had never before conducted at Avery Fisher Hall while high. He floated and thrashed through Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, lost his place, misturned pages, missed dynamics, stretched the adagio to a crawl and squeezed the finale to a screeching gallop.

  Musicians exchanged glances, but three thousand subscribers jumped to their feet screaming approval, and the next day the critics gave Boyd Kinsolving the best reviews he’d had since the early concerts with Ariana.

  At 10:45 A.M. the following Thursday, a short man wearing a rumpled black robe strode to the bench in the first district civil court in Ciudad Trujillo, Republica Dominicana. He balanced half-moon spectacles on his nose, squinted at his docket, and asked who was representing Señora Kinsolving.

  A lawyer in shirt sleeves rose and identified himself.

  The judge asked who was representing Señor Kinsolving.

  The lawyer in shirt sleeves rose again.

  The judge announced himself ready to hear arguments. He massaged a troublesome nerve at the side of his face. He interrupted the lawyer to ask if Señor Kinsolving opposed his wife’s motion.

  The lawyer shook his head.

  The judge slammed his gavel against the table and pronounced Señora Ariana Kinsolving, under the laws of the Dominican Republic, a divorced woman.

  The newspapers and magazines referred to Ariana and Boyd’s divorce as amicable. One gossip columnist used the word loving.

  Professionally, it was no divorce at all. They kept working together, and their agents kept drawing their contracts years in advance. Though they traveled to engagements separately and stayed in different hotels, photographers often caught them sneaking off to share a rehearsal-break espresso or an after-performance supper.

  They still took bows together, and audiences gave them greater ovations than ever before.

  Time magazine called them a model couple for the ’60s. Their earnings doubled.

  “Are you happy, sweetums?” Boyd asked Ariana.

  They were sitting at a corner table in the Biffi Scala. The first-night audience had just given them twelve curtain calls for their Puritani, and diners at other tables were glancing at them with undisguised curiosity.

  “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she said. “I have my work, I have a wonderful conductor who never hurries me or drowns my voice, and I have Nikos.”

  “I hope he doesn’t hurt you.”

  “Nikos is the kindest man on earth. And you—are you happy?”

  Boyd stared into his glass of Chateau Margaux. “Happy enough. I have a new friend. But sometimes I miss us.”

  She laid her hand across his. “But we still have each other and we always will. Now tell me about your new friend.”

  20

  “WE’RE MEETING HOLLY CHAMBERS,” Nikos said. “I have a surprise.”

  Ariana looked at him, his face as composed and blank as the profile on a Roman coin. A winged telepathy brushed her. The divorce—he’s gotten it!

  The limousine swung to a smooth stop. The driver held the door. Ariana stepped out and stared at the spotless façade of a five-story brownstone. There were thick boxwood hedges and bubble-glass leaded French windows and balconies of curving wrought iron.

  “Has Holly moved his office to an embassy?” she asked.

  “It’s not an embassy,” Nikos said. “And it’s not Holly’s.”

  Holly was waiting for them in the entrance hall. He gestured toward two bronzes set in niches by the front door. “Venus and Adonis, sixteenth century, Renaissance Italy. Attributed by the former owner to Benvenuto Cellini, but who knows?” He nodded toward two six-foot china-blue vases flanking the rose marble staircase. “Lowestoft—authenticated by Parke-Bernet. I got the former owner to throw them in. Why don’t we start the tour downstairs?”

  Ariana could not believe the thirty-two-room townhouse. There were two kitchens, ten bedrooms, eight baths. With each room they entered, she felt a weight of premonition grow heavier.

  She turned to Nikos. “Why are you showing me this place?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I’ve never seen any house so magnificent.”

  “That had better mean you love it, because it’s yours.”

  Holly handed Ariana a key ring and a heavy envelope. “Your front door; your deed.”

  Ariana’s hand shook as she opened the envelope. Nikos had put the house in her name.

  She couldn’t speak. Her mind was racing back through all the tiny rooms she had called home. She stared at the deed a long moment and then she stared at the wall with its carved molding and panels. But she was gazing past it and seeing the future.

  She walked quickly into the next room. It was large enough to be a ballroom. In the mirrored walls she saw a hundred faintly tarnished reflections of herself.

  Nikos came after her. “We can change anything you don’t like.”

  “Do we have to move in before we’re married?”

  “Darling, this is a perfect home for us. You can sing, I can work, we can entertain, we have ten bedrooms to make love in—”

  “Why can’t we marry first?”

  His eyes glowed darkly. “I can’t understand you. You have me already. You think making me a husband will make anything better?”

  Her mind curled around a doubt. “Nikos, are you ever going to marry me?”

  He sighed. “Maria-Kristina will only consent to a divorce if I give up the right to see my daughter.”

  “But surely you can persuade her somehow.”

  He cracked his knuckles and in the empty room they sounded like a rifle shot. “I’ve tried. Believe me. I’ve tried.”

  “Then she’s holding your daughter hostage.”

  He nodded. “Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.”

  “She must love you. She must love you as much as I do.”

  She told herself she needed his warmth to take the chill out of her life. She moved into the house with him and slipped into the wide spaces of his love. For three months she was happy.

  There was
a great deal to be done: servants to be interviewed, decorators hired. A wall had to come out of the morning room, and that meant interviewing architects and it meant saying a last-minute no to the Met, who had scheduled her as Donna Anna in a benefit Don Giovanni in February.

  She had hoped to have Siegliende in Die Walküre ready in time for a May opening, but had to wire La Scala her regrets.

  She tried to see Austin Waters three times a week for coaching, but for two weeks in March she had a cough and had to cancel everything except a few unavoidable parties, which she went to solely to please Nikos.

  One day in April 1970, she thought to check whether the maid had kept the ivories on the Steinway clean. She hit a chord and vocalized on the first phrases of Musetta’s waltz. The high B croaked out of her throat like a frog, ugly, grotesque, foreign.

  She was swept by a wave of disbelief. Two weeks have slipped by, and what have I done? She canceled the decorators and threw herself into work. It took five panicky weeks to get back what she had lost in two.

  That was the month of changes. Nikos turned unpredictable. She sensed an impatience budding within him. Deep creases pulled down the corners of his mouth and the wide rooms of the house seemed too narrow to contain whatever it was he was feeling.

  “Nikos, how was your day?”

  Sullen eyes flicked up at her. “Do we have to talk about it?”

  She retreated to her practice studio on the top floor. It was a bright space, private and quiet. In a way it belonged to the girl she had never been allowed to be. There were colorful French lithographs, shelves of exotic plants and hand-painted porcelain dolls, and most important of all, there was a six-and-a-half-octave Boesendorfer spinet with a specially designed rack to hold vocal scores open.

  She shut Nikos out of her mind, refused to think about his silence. She inhaled, struck a C-major chord, and vocalized.

  The following Thursday, after a long fruitless meeting with the directors of two Manitoba uranium mines, Nikos let himself into the Sutton Place townhouse. A voice floated down from the top story.

  “Pace, pace, mio dio …”

  A surge of impatience flashed through him. He slammed the front door. The house was suddenly still. He jabbed the elevator call button twice, hard. A moment later he could hear the elevator sighing softly down the shaft. The door opened. A handsome young woman stepped out. Nikos moved aside, surprised.

  She smiled at him. Her pale blond hair was cut short and simply combed.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hog the elevator.”

  He stood staring after her, struck by the gentleness of her voice. A moment later she had vanished through the front door.

  Ariana found Nikos standing on the balcony outside the French windows in the living room. A cloud of cigar smoke drifted indoors.

  “Who was that young woman?” he asked, not turning. He was scowling down at the dark green of the Sutton Place private park.

  “You must mean Vanessa, my pupil. She comes every Thursday.”

  His lips narrowed into a thin line.

  “You slammed a door,” she said.

  “Haven’t I a right to slam doors in my own home?”

  She saw in some undefinable way that he was no longer the man she had agreed to live with. “What’s annoying you, Nikos?”

  He sighed. “Why should I be annoyed? Haven’t I got everything? A fine life in a fine house with a fine singer?” He plucked the cigar from his mouth and tossed it angrily to the lawn below.

  “Nikos, we share the park with our neighbors.”

  “We share too much. There’s no privacy.”

  She had an astonished sense that after a mere three months he was turning against the house. “Do you want to sell this place, get another?”

  “What good’s another house? I’ll still hear your voice.”

  She stepped back from him. “You’re angry at—my voice?”

  He put an arm around her. “I love your voice. I worship your voice. But I can’t stand hearing you practice. And in this house, the way we live, there’s no way not to hear you practice.”

  “Even when I close the doors?”

  He nodded. “It’s amazing the neighbors haven’t complained.”

  She felt a sting of embarrassment, as though strangers had been seeing her naked at an unshuttered window. “What should we do, soundproof the room?”

  “I don’t want workmen here again. We’ve had too many of them.”

  “But if you don’t want to hear me …”

  “We’ll get you a place of your own to practice. An apartment in a different building.”

  Through the swell of her own surprise, she could see a sort of justice to the idea. He needed moments to be with himself, just as she needed to be with her music.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll practice in a studio. But it has to be a beautiful studio—as beautiful as my room here.”

  He hugged her and she felt he loved her more at that moment than he had in months. “You’re an angel,” he said. “We’ll make it the most beautiful artist’s studio in all Manhattan.”

  Ten days later Nikos excitedly told her that a real estate agent had found the perfect place. It turned out not to be a studio, but a four-room apartment stuffed with carved seventeenth-century French maple furniture. An utterly out of place Steinway concert grand hulked before the north window, practically blotting out the view of Central Park South.

  “Nikos,” she cried, “who chose these things?”

  He looked hurt. “I thought you’d like them.”

  “They’re lovely. But …”

  When she saw the bedroom, she felt surprise shot through by wariness. The gold silk spread on the four-poster canopy bed matched the draperies and the walls.

  “I didn’t realize I was expected to spend the night.”

  “You might want to nap.”

  In the blue marble bathroom she found a Jacuzzi, a needle-point shower—and a bidet.

  “What is it?” Nikos said. “Something you don’t like?”

  She stared at him and realized he didn’t understand, didn’t even see. “Do you think all you have to do is drown me in mink coats and jewelry and co-op apartments? Is that what you really think?”

  “What have I done wrong?”

  She kicked the bidet. “Why do I need that thing in a practice studio? Why do I need that bed from a French king’s whorehouse? What are you giving me, Nikos—a love nest and carte blanche?”

  Understanding seemed finally to come to him. He covered his eyes. “That stupid agent. He misunderstood my directions. I’ll have this plumbing torn out. I’ll have that bed burned.”

  “The agent doesn’t matter. Don’t you see what matters?”

  He wore a look of utter pathetic bafflement.

  “Won’t you ever think of me the way I think of you? Won’t you ever understand or care?”

  “How can I show you I care?”

  “Maybe you can’t. Maybe you don’t. Oh, Nikos, I didn’t mean that. Just hold me.”

  He held her.

  The agent removed the bidet, but Ariana decided, on second thought, the bed was too pretty to let go.

  “An Escher retrospective!” Carlotta’s cry of disbelief filled the entire front room of “21.”

  “Of all the ways to spend an evening! You might as well wash your hair and watch TV.”

  Ariana’s finger played with the tines of a shrimp fork. “I was between Toscas. Nikos was called away on business. I’m always at loose ends when he vanishes like that.”

  Carlotta’s eyes changed. There was a sudden alertness in them. “What night was this opening?”

  “The tenth. Last Wednesday.”

  “Now that’s funny. Last Wednesday…I’m sure it was last Wednesday…Nikos was at Mimsy Maxwell’s.”

  “That couldn’t be. Nikos flew to Riyadh Wednesday morning and he wasn’t back in New York till Friday.”

&
nbsp; Carlotta sat straight, distancing herself in her chair. “Darling, I saw him at Mimsy’s. I have a feeling I’m putting my foot into something, but three dozen other people saw him too.”

  It struck Ariana that Carlotta had no reason to make up such a story, let alone to tell an outright lie. She very slowly set down her glass of chilled Chablis. “Did I miss a good party? Tell me who else was there.”

  Carlotta began running off a list. Ariana cut her short.

  “What about that sweet girl from that Italian principality? Was she there?”

  It took Carlotta a moment to remember, or to pretend to have to. “You mean Principessa Maggie? Yes, she made quite a sensation. She has lovely taste in colors.”

  Ariana prodded an olive out of her salade Niçoise. “And Principessa Maggie’s husband was there too?”

  “The pianist? No, poor thing, he had to play at another party. I have a feeling that marriage is in trouble.”

  “Then who was Principessa Maggie with?”

  “With?”

  “Someone must have brought her.”

  “That handsome, handsome editor who runs four miles every morning around the Central Park reservoir. You’ve met him—John Thatcher, Thacker, he has adorable brown eyes and a yummy flat turn.”

  Ariana had a dim memory of an editor with one of the men’s magazines who jogged in Central Park and talked about it at dinner parties. “He’s gay, isn’t he?”

  Carlotta adopted a tone of mild reprimand. “Darling, as if it mattered.”

  It did matter, though not in the way Carlotta meant. “Did Principessa Maggie and Nikos talk?”

  Carlotta shrugged. “Now I admit I’m a gossip, but I’m not the CIA—and I didn’t have a microphone planted in their corner.”

  Ariana let two beats go by. “They were in a corner?”

  “That little alcove. Mimsy has hung that dreadful Dubuffet in it. What in the world she sees in a hack like Dubuffet—” Carlotta saw Ariana’s face and stopped short. “Oh, my dear, I’ve upset you. Forgive me.

  “Just tell me how long,” Ariana said softly. “How long were you in the corner with her?”

  Nikos moved to the window. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  She got up from the sofa. Her feet marked out four careful steps on the Aubusson carpet. She whirled. “I can’t help what I am, Nikos. I have feelings. Pain is real to me.”