Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “You’ll be recognized.”

  An old woman was scrubbing the stairs. Ariana went to her.

  “Madame, est-ce que je peux acheter votre fichu?”

  The old woman looked up in surprise, saw who wanted to buy her kerchief, and pulled herself awkwardly to her feet. She took the kerchief off and apologized for getting it wet.

  “Thank you. It will bring me luck,” Ariana explained in her operatic French. She insisted on paying with a hundred-franc note, knotted the kerchief around her hair, and put on her dark glasses.

  “Worth every centime,” Austin said. “You look dreadful.”

  The paparazzi at the stage door eyed them and instantly dismissed them. Ariana took Austin’s arm. The afternoon sky was cloudless and pale blue. A soft breeze pulsed down the Avenue de l’Opéra, driving the sounds and smells of Paris before it.

  “Austin—I’m so goddamned afraid.”

  “Don’t be. You have that role in your voice.”

  “I’m afraid of losing Nikos. Really losing him. For good.”

  Austin’s look rebuked her. “The only thing that will lose him is that attitude.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “In that case I want to go to the Tuileries for ice cream.”

  “Your diet.”

  “I can’t diet before I sing Marguerite.”

  They strolled along the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli and the sculpted hedges of the Louvre. Screaming youngsters surged around them, and a flying kickball almost hit them. They came to a children’s carousel. “Where there are wooden horses,” Austin said, “ice cream can’t be far.”

  Ariana went to save a place on one of the benches.

  “Vanilla all right?”

  She accepted a dripping cone from Austin’s hand. “My favorite.” She spread a Paris Herald Tribune on the bench.

  “Where’d you get that paper?”

  “Someone left it.”

  They sat and tasted their cones in silence.

  “I wish I could have been a child here,” Ariana said. “The ice cream’s perfect. Every childhood should have one perfect thing.” She licked slowly, making the vanilla last. Her gaze traveled up the sightlines of the garden and out along the distant sidewalks of the Champs Elysees, where cafes and trees and strollers seemed to exist in perfect natural balance.

  “They say Paris is the capital of happiness. I can believe it. And I can believe it’s the capital of loneliness for people who don’t have anyone.”

  “That’s a very Parisian thing to say.”

  “Thank you for being with me,” Ariana said.

  “It’s my pleasure completely.”

  As they got up to go, Austin folded up the newspaper they’d been sitting on and placed it in a trash basket.

  “You’re awfully neat today, Austin.”

  “We’re guests.”

  His neatness made her suspicious enough to go to the newsstand in the Ritz lobby while he was getting the room keys. She asked for a Paris Herald and hid it in her purse.

  “I think I’ll take a little nap,” she said in the elevator.

  “See you at six then?”

  For all their pastel prettiness and cream trim, the walls of the suite oppressed her. She swung open the windows in the sitting room and pulled a chair into the sun.

  She searched the Herald page by page, column by column.

  In the Social Notes on page seven she read that Princess Maggie of Montenegro was in town, cochairing the International Orphans Ball at the Georges Cinq.

  In the Business Notes on page nine she read that Nikos Stratiotis would be flying to Bucharest to discuss a natural gas pipeline with the Rumanians. His plane would be stopping tomorrow morning at Charles de Gaulle airport for refueling.

  “Shouldn’t have had that ice cream.” Austin wagged his finger at her. “Spoiled your appetite.”

  They were sitting by the open French windows at an early dinner. Day still hovered faintly over the Place Vendôme, and sunset just managed to touch the statue of Napoleon at the top of his column.

  “I think I’m coming down with something,” Ariana said.

  “You don’t have a temperature, do you?” Austin’s hand was cool and firm on her forehead. “You’d better lie down.”

  She couldn’t even doze.

  Nikos is meeting her…Nikos is meeting her….

  She didn’t dare take more than two sleeping pills. Terrors kept tumbling through her.

  What if Nikos should leave me?

  He won’t leave me. Please God. He won’t leave me for her.

  But what if he should decide to leave me?

  He would never leave me for her.

  But what if he should decide to leave me for that child? My God, what if he should decide to leave, what if he should decide, what if he should, what if, what then?

  In the morning she phoned Austin’s room. “My cold is worse. I’m staying in bed.”

  “What about rehearsal?”

  “They’ll have to use the girl who’s covering for me.”

  “But the rehearsal is for you.”

  “I can’t do it!” she screamed, and slammed down the phone.

  She put on a raincoat and her dark glasses and the cleaning woman’s kerchief. She sneaked down the back stairs to the Rue Cambon and slipped into a taxi waiting at the cab rank.

  For the next three hours, while seven soloists and the orchestra and chorus of the National Opera rehearsed without her, she raced through Charles de Gaulle airport. She checked arrival gates of flights from New York and departures of flights to Eastern Europe. Once she was certain she saw Nikos and twice she was sure she recognized Princess Maggie’s back, but when she caught up with them they turned out to be astonished strangers.

  Ariana was in no state of mind or voice to sing Faust that night. From the very first act, she knew she was racing toward disaster.

  The opera opened as Doctor Faust sat in his study, old and disillusioned after a life spent trying to learn the secrets of the universe. He filled a cup with poison and called on the Devil. In a puff of stage smoke Mephistopheles popped through a trapdoor in the floor and proposed a bargain: youth and the joys Faust had missed in exchange for his soul. As an irresistible temptation, the Devil summoned up a vision of the maiden Marguerite.

  At this point Ariana had to stand behind a scrim and be beautiful enough and young enough to induce the greatest intellectual of medieval Germany to give up his soul.

  All she could think was, Nikos doesn’t want me…he doesn’t want me….

  It came almost as a surprise when Faust agreed to the bargain. In a second puff of smoke—long enough to allow Faust’s wig and robe to drop through the trapdoor—Mephistopheles transformed him into a handsome young man.

  Ariana did not sing until Act Two, the village festival, with citizens, soldiers, and students thronging the market square. Marguerite’s brother Valentin, departing to join the army, prayed God to protect his sister. While Mephistopheles baffled the crowd with spectacular feats of magic, Faust offered his arm to Marguerite.

  Ariana had to refuse modestly, but her tone came out dark and chesty, like Delilah vamping Samson, and there were titters in the audience.

  The third act, the garden scene, went without major mishap. Mephistopheles placed a casket of jewels on Marguerite’s doorstep. Musing romantically about Faust, she found the casket, opened it, and was delighted with the sparkling gems. Astonishingly, Ariana negotiated the coloratura of the Jewel Song and thought she even heard some bravas. It seemed to her there would have been more applause if the singer playing Martha, her neighbor, hadn’t rushed into the next recitative, telling Marguerite she’d be a fool not to keep the jewels.

  Mephistopheles and Faust entered. The Devil lured Martha into a corner of the garden. Faust ardently courted Marguerite, and she promised to meet him the next day. But Mephistopheles urged him not to wait.

  Ariana flung open the flimsy stage window and sa
ng of her desire for Faust. He cried, “Marguerite!” and rushed to her. Darkness fell and the Devil laughed.

  Something went very wrong in Act Four, when Marguerite, now pregnant and abandoned, entered church and attempted to pray. Mephistopheles interrupted her and warned she would be eternally damned. It was all too close to what Ariana was feeling and fearing: her voice thinned to a hysterical sob.

  She could feel waves of bafflement and annoyance sweeping the audience. Fortunately there was a distraction—a rousing soldier’s chorus as Valentin returned victorious from war, only to learn of his sister’s disgrace. When Mephistopheles sang a mocking serenade outside her house, Valentin rushed into the street, sword drawn, and was mortally wounded dueling with Faust. Marguerite ran to her brother, but with his dying breath he cursed her.

  When the applause came at the fall of the curtain, sparse and grudging, Ariana felt the curse had been all too effective.

  In the final act, after the witches’ Walpurgis Night revel, Mephistopheles took Faust to the prison where Marguerite, now insane, had been sentenced to death for murdering her child. Faust begged her to escape with him, but she drew back in horror from the Devil.

  Now came the climactic moment of the opera, the Trio, where Marguerite, repudiating Faust and the Devil, saw a shining angel and called upon him to save her.

  Astonishingly, Ariana slipped on the climactic phrase “Portez mon âme au sein des cieux”—“Carry my soul to the bosom of heaven”—and sang “Portez mon homme,” a shift of vowel that laughably changed the line to “Carry my man to heaven.”

  It didn’t matter that her high B rang out secure and pure. There were guffaws and catcalls as Marguerite died. Mephistopheles cried, “Condemned!” and the audience applauded. Offstage angelic voices sang, “Saved!” and the audience hissed.

  As the prison walls parted and Marguerite was carried to heaven on a wheezing hydraulic platform the audience was already hurrying in disgust from the house.

  The reviews were killers. Reading them over café au lait in her bedroom the next morning, Ariana wished she were lying at the bottom of the Seine.

  As she turned a page of Paris-Matin, her eye was caught by a photograph of a woman in dark glasses and babushka skulking beside the Bulgarian Airlines gate in Charles de Gaulle airport.

  Her heart slammed against her ribs. Why was the diva playing hooky from rehearsal? the caption screamed.

  Her eyes winced shut and she crumpled the page into the wastebasket. She lifted the phone receiver. “Give me international information, please—Sweden.”

  Austin answered Ariana’s knock in his bathrobe, holding an electric blow-dryer.

  “I can’t come to dinner,” she said.

  “You’re not going to let those bitchy reviews scare you.”

  “I still have a fever.”

  He returned to the mirror and went on drying his hair. “If you don’t show up, people are going to think that was you in that frumpy photograph.”

  “I can’t be bothered what people think.”

  Slowly his head turned and he looked toward her. “I think as guest of honor maybe you’d better be bothered.”

  “Baron Rothschild would be better off serving his guests rotten meat. You’ll have to apologize for me.”

  He cut the dryer. “I’m an ivory-tinkling nobody. They’ll murder me if I show up without you.”

  “Austin, it was me in the photograph. I was trying to catch Nikos and Maggie.”

  Austin stared at her. He sank back onto the bed. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I’ve been crazy these last few days. I’m still crazy. Please phone the baron’s house. Tell one of the servants. Please, Austin.”

  Austin glared at her, then crossed the room and phoned. He lowered the receiver slowly and met Ariana’s eyes. “I don’t think the House of Rothschild will be inviting you to too many more functions.”

  “It can’t be helped.” She studied herself in the dresser mirror. “I don’t look like that photograph. Tell me I don’t.”

  “You don’t.”

  She kissed him. “Will you take care of Euro-Agency for me?”

  He set the dryer down on the bed. “What’s to take care of?”

  “I can’t sing the other Fausts. Don’t look at me like that. You heard my voice last night.”

  He came barefoot across the rug to her and placed both hands on her shoulders. He spoke very distinctly, very slowly, like a diction coach. “Your voice is fine. It was a memory lapse.”

  She slipped free. “I have to get away from here.”

  “What the hell are you trying to do to your career—hara-kiri?”

  “I have to rest!”

  “And what do you think that $300 a night bed next door is for?”

  “Don’t shout at me, Austin!” She turned away from him, dropping her voice. “I thought you were my friend.”

  “I am your friend—not your manager, not your nursemaid. I’m not changing any more of your diapers. All that shit’s between you and your defective superego.”

  “Why do you always have to get psychoanalytical with me?”

  “It’s time someone did, you crazy old bat.”

  She marched quickly to the door and slammed it behind her.

  As she came back into her suite the phone was ringing. She didn’t answer. A small Vuitton suitcase lay packed on the baggage stand. She opened it, frowned, added a sweater and some overnight items. She looked through her purse and made sure she had her passport and her airline charge card.

  The phone rang again. She hesitated, then picked it up.

  Austin’s voice said, “Love you, honey.”

  “You called me old.”

  “All I meant was old enough to know better. You going to leave me some cash to get home on?”

  Naturally she was going to leave him cash, but naturally she wasn’t going to tell him in the middle of a fight. “No.”

  “You really have messed up my week, baby.”

  “And what about my life?”

  “You call that madness a life?”

  “The only life I have.”

  “I didn’t mess it up, I’m not going to clean it up. That’s your job. See you in Nueva York if you decide to honor your contract and sing there next fall.”

  “I keep my promises,” she said quietly. “It’s other people who don’t keep theirs.”

  22

  FIVE HOURS LATER ARIANA’S SAS jet touched down under the mournful, windy sky of Stockholm. She transferred to a two-propeller plane and after an hour’s flight she was waiting at a small airport near the Baltic.

  She walked out of the shed. Winter lingered in patches of snow alongside the tarmac. A line of telephone poles stretched along the horizon like desolate church steeples.

  “Ti kano edho?” she asked herself. What am I doing here?

  She noticed a figure in the parking lot: a girl was wearing a flannel shirt and a woolen ski hat that made a violent red splash against the bare, white sky.

  A wind blew in from the sea, bending the evergreens beside the runway. Ariana raised the collar of her fur.

  The girl approached shyly. “Mrs. Kinsolving?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Renata Stratiotis. Mother sent me to meet you.” The child had long blond hair and pale, perfect skin and eyes the color of the northern morning sky. “Is that all your luggage?” She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.

  “That’s all,” Ariana said, thinking her mother must be beautiful.

  “You take one and I’ll take the other. It’s only a short walk.”

  They followed a narrow gravel road to the shore. The girl chatted pleasantly about flying and travel. She spoke English with an extraordinarily cultivated accent. They came to a small dock with a speedboat tied to it. “You first, Mrs. Kinsolving.”

  “Please, call me Ariana.”

  The girl placed the bags in the boat, held it steady while Ariana stepped in, and started the motor. She aimed the boat
toward the horizon. The rush of ocean air blasted her hair out behind her.

  “Care for a smoke?” The girl held out a thin, strangely malformed cigarette. “Panama red.”

  Ariana quickly shook her head. “No, thanks. I can’t. My voice.”

  The girl opened the throttle full. The boat gouged into the sea with a sudden forward leap, bouncing and slapping and swerving neatly past shoals. By the time they reached the island and nosed to a stop at a stone jetty it was dark. Night had come quickly and early. The girl placed the bags on the dock. She made the boat fast and led the way up a gentle slope to a frame house.

  “Mother,” she called out.

  A woman rose from a chair on the terrace and came forward. “How do you do? I’m Maria-Kristina.” She had a friendly voice and pale gray-green eyes that looked closely at Ariana from the bright face of a middle-aged child. Ariana was relieved. Her hostess was beautiful, but not nearly as lovely as her daughter.

  Maria-Kristina took Ariana’s hand in a warm, firm grip. “What a great honor it is to meet you. It was very kind of you to come.”

  “I invited myself. You’re kind to have me.”

  “No, no, it’s a pleasure. We collect all your records.”

  A gray-haired woman with a limp appeared, as if by signal, in the doorway of the house.

  “Ilse, Mrs. Kinsolving would like some—” Maria-Kristina glanced at Ariana. “Coffee?”

  “Thank you. Coffee would be wonderful.” Ariana stared up at an astonishingly clear sky. There was something unfamiliar in the way the stars had grouped themselves. They told her she was in a new latitude, a thousand miles from the Paris stage where she was scheduled to perform. She sighed. “I have no business being here.”

  “This is Nikos’s house, and any friend of his is welcome.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “But of course I do.”

  “Has he spoken about me?”

  Maria-Kristina laughed pleasantly. “It’s six years since I’ve heard his voice. But I read the British papers.”

  The servant appeared with a tray of coffee and vanished again.

  Ariana was suddenly aware of the serenity of this moment, this island, this night. “I want to marry Nikos,” she blurted.