Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  A speedboat screamed past.

  “That’s just Renata,” Maria-Kristina said. “She loves to drive her speedboat in the dark.”

  “I want to marry Nikos but he can’t divorce you if you won’t share custody of Renata. Why are you refusing? She’s his daughter too. He loves her as much as you do.”

  Maria-Kristina leaned forward to set her cup down on the table, and the lamplight suddenly glowed in her red-blond hair. “You’ve had a long trip. Why don’t you rest? Tomorrow we can talk.”

  “You’re not going to give me an answer.”

  “It’s too long an answer for tonight. Come. I’ll show you the guest room.”

  Ariana awoke in the middle of the night. Moonlight was spilling across the goose-down quilt. Her mouth was dry and she felt a need for ice-water. She explored her way through dark rooms and found the kitchen.

  Nikos’s daughter was sitting at the table, profiled in moonlight. The air had a sweet, herbal smell. An ember winked in an ashtray on the table.

  “Am I disturbing you?” Ariana said. “I wanted some ice-water.”

  The girl’s head came around. “I’ll get it for you.” She went to the cabinet and the refrigerator and the sink, and a moment later she handed Ariana a tall cool glass.

  “Do you often sit in the dark?” Ariana said.

  “I like the dark. It helps me think.”

  Ariana sipped, interested in this girl who might one day be her stepdaughter. “What do you think about?”

  “To tell the truth, I was thinking about you. I envy you. You’re doing something with your life.”

  “I sing. It’s not very much.”

  “It’s a gift. People admire that.”

  “Do you really think it matters what people admire?”

  “Father thinks so.” The girl sighed. “I wish I had a gift.”

  “Everyone is gifted in one way or another,” Ariana said.

  “How am I gifted?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to say. Do you smoke that marijuana all the time?”

  “Not around Mother. She disapproves. Do you disapprove?”

  “I don’t approve of it for myself. Why do you smoke it?”

  “The same reason I sit in the dark. It helps me think. It helps me not think. It helps.”

  The moonlight caught the girl’s eyes, turning them into fragments of shattered glass. For an instant Ariana had a glimpse into a life as troubled as her own.

  “You seem lonely,” Ariana said.

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “I’d like to be your friend.”

  It was a moment before the girl answered. “I think we both need friends. I’d like to be yours.” She held out her hand.

  Ariana squeezed it.

  In the morning a gray fog had settled over the beach, and Ariana could hear gulls chattering on the shale. It was a sunny day, with a touch of Baltic spring. After breakfast Maria-Kristina took her on a tour of the island.

  They walked through pastures and pine groves. Maria-Kristina pointed out flowers and plants that grew nowhere else in the world. There was a beautiful outgoing warmth in her eyes. She spoke of herself and how she had come to the island and, gradually, Ariana was able to put together part of the story of Nikos Stratiotis’s wife.

  The daughter of a well-to-do Stockholm fruit importer, Maria-Kristina had taken her junior college year abroad in America. There she had fallen in love with the dark brown eyes and the big mustache and the six foot one of Nikos Stratiotis. After a long courtship with, on her side, many hesitations, she had married him. Eight months later—she admitted this with a smile—she had given him a daughter. For the next ten years she had been happy with him.

  “But as you know, happiness with Nikos is strenuous. He demands perfection. You have to dress right, sound right, not complain when he cancels dinner and vanishes for three weeks.”

  Their eyes met and Ariana smiled.

  “Everything changed when I had to go into the hospital. I thought it was cancer. I didn’t tell Nikos.”

  “Why not?” Ariana asked.

  “Because we seemed to have a bargain, and my part was to be perfect. Cancer didn’t fit in.”

  Ariana couldn’t help feeling a desire to be close to this woman; and with it the sadness of knowing that it would never happen.

  “Luckily it turned out to be a small cystoid fibroid. Coming out of anesthesia I realized that I had faced terror and survived—without any help from my husband. That was as terrifying as the possibility of cancer had been. I realized that not only would I never be able to count on him, I would never need to.”

  From the woods came the clear, hollow hammering of a woodpecker.

  “After that the whole importance of my marriage began to shrink. The day came—I wasn’t surprised—when he wanted his freedom. It didn’t matter to me. I think maybe that hurt him, that it didn’t matter. We separated. He was generous. He’s still generous. And for the last six years I’ve been as happy without him as I ever was with him. I love this little island. For me, it’s a little space of order and safety, tucked away from all the noise and heartbreak of the world.”

  “You didn’t fight him on the separation?” Ariana said.

  “Why should I have fought him? What did I need?”

  “Then why won’t you share custody of Renata?”

  Maria-Kristina looked carefully at Ariana. “What has Nikos said about Renata?”

  “He’s said you won’t give him visitation rights if there’s a divorce.”

  Long shadows of pines reverberated like echoes in the landscape. Maria-Kristina’s eyes, gray-green and speculative, met Ariana’s.

  “Nikos has never asked me to divorce him. He’s never asked to visit Renata. If he wants a divorce, if he wants to share custody, I’ll never stand in his way. Renata adores him. I’d be delighted for them to be closer.”

  It was not surprise that took Ariana’s will to speak, but the shock of certainty too long delayed.

  “I’ve made all of that quite clear to Nikos,” Maria-Kristina said. “But perhaps he hasn’t made it clear to you.”

  After a moment Ariana felt Maria-Kristina take her hand.

  “Tell me the truth, Ariana. You know this man, you know what he is capable of, what he is incapable of. Do you really want Nikos Stratiotis?”

  “I want him.”

  “In that case nothing halfway will work. You must fight for him more than you have ever fought for anything in life.”

  That evening, heart beating like a drumroll, Ariana placed two long-distance calls from the island. With the first, she instructed her European agent to cancel all appearances for the next two weeks. He howled in three languages, pleaded, cursed her, predicted ruin. With the second, she reserved plane passage home for the following day.

  23

  ARIANA WAS ABOUT TO follow the butler and her suitcases into the elevator when she heard footsteps. Nikos came down the marble staircase. He was dressed to go out.

  She was on the verge of flinging it out in front of him: I know you’ve been lying, I know everything! But she had not realized the power his face had over her. As she met his gaze, every accusation in her melted. “Hello, Nikos. Are you going somewhere?”

  “I have a business date.”

  “Now, in the evening?”

  “Yes, now in the evening.”

  Suddenly she said, “Cancel it. Please.”

  “Do you cancel your operas for me?”

  “Maybe you don’t know everything I do for you.”

  He stared at her, shook his head, and crossed to the front door.

  “Are you going to Maggie?” she blurted.

  He turned. “Welcome back, Ariana. I’d forgotten what home was like with you.”

  Each day of that summer Ariana sensed the gap between her and Nikos grow wider. He spent most of his time out of the country. They did not vacation together. When they dined together, which was rare, it was at private dinners for sixty or more.


  Her attitudes began changing. They seemed to belong to someone else. She began not caring.

  In September she arrived at the Metropolitan for Pagliacci with barely time to get into costume, let alone warm up. She was able to vocalize a little during the Prologue, while the tenor singing Tonio stepped before the curtain and reminded the audience that though the drama they were about to see would be played by actors, it concerned human beings with real emotions.

  The emotions in Pagliacci were jealousy and anger, and for Ariana they were a little too close to home that night. She hurried to her place onstage.

  The curtain rose as a troop of actors arrived in a nineteenth-century Calabrian village. Tonio helped Nedda—Ariana’s role—down from the wagon. Her husband, Canio, pushed him jealously away. The company went to the inn, and Nedda was left alone, longing to be as free as the birds flying in the sky. Though Ariana’s voice pinched on the high note of her “Ballatella,” the surging orchestral accompaniment pointed the climax and the audience applauded warmly.

  Now Tonio approached and tried to make love to her. She struck him scornfully in the face with a whip.

  Ariana was horrified to see blood on the baritone’s cheek.

  Tonio skulked away far enough to spy on a conversation between Nedda and Silvio, a villager who wanted her to run away with him. Alerted by Tonio, Canio interrupted the lovers, but Silvio managed to escape unrecognized. Canio began shaking his wife violently, but she refused to reveal her lover’s name.

  The other actors separated the quarreling husband and wife. It was time for the clown show.

  Canio, enraged and heartbroken, hiding his feelings behind the clown’s face, sang “Vesti la Giubba”—“Put on your costume”—one of the classic tenor showpieces in the repertoire. There were bravos as the curtain fell to mark a brief time lapse. When it rose again the villagers were bustling expectantly to their seats and the clown show began.

  Nedda played Columbine, trysting with her lover Harlequin. Her husband Pagliaccio, the clown, played by Canio, burst jealously onto the little traveling stage. Harlequin escaped. Canio, confusing play and real life, cried, “A clown no more—I am a man!”

  The audience of villagers stirred in confusion.

  Nedda, trying to maintain her character, sang Columbine’s teasing song. Canio, dropping all pretense, flung himself at her, demanding her lover’s name.

  Again, she refused to tell him.

  He stabbed her. Silvio leapt onto the stage—too late. Canio killed him too. Then, turning to the horrified spectators, he cried, “La cormmedia è finita!”

  Ariana couldn’t help wondering, as she took her bows and rode home alone, if the comedy wasn’t finishing for her too. There were days when she couldn’t practice at all, couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. She began canceling dates.

  At first she canceled unimportant engagements: a Lakmé in San Diego; a Butterfly in Ghent. But one day the notion of flying seven hours filled her with unbearable queasiness, and she canceled a Pirata in Brussels. Two weeks later she found herself at home listening to a broadcast of a Tannhäuser at the Met that she should have been singing, and she felt a whisper of panic in her blood.

  What am I doing to myself?

  Finally Richard Schiller summoned her to his office. “Ariana, what the hell’s going on with you? Eight cancellations.”

  He stared at her and she felt like a little schoolgirl with shame creeping hotly up her face.

  “You’re burning up a hell of a lot of track record awfully fast. The Met says if you cancel the Adriana Lecouvreur gala, that’s it. You’ll no longer be grata, you’ll no longer be hired. And believe me, a thing like that will ripple out. Even Bogotá won’t want you. You’ve got to shape up.”

  “I know.”

  “Anything you want to talk to me about?”

  She looked at this sweet tough man who knew everything about her career and nothing at all about her. She shook her head. “Thanks, Richard. I’m lucky to have you.”

  Ariana sang the Adriana Lecouvreur. She couldn’t find her center, musically or dramatically. The Times review was scathing.

  DiScelta jabbed her finger at the vocal score. “What in the world do you think you are singing?”

  Ariana stopped in midphrase. “Aren’t I singing the notes?”

  DiScelta gazed a moment at her pupil with disgust, then slammed the score closed on the music stand. The strings of the piano, shocked into sympathetic vibration, sent out a ghostly chord.

  “The notes, yes, but Donizetti wrote melody, damn it, melody!” DiScelta shook her head. “I can’t make sense of all the senseless things you’ve been doing. What’s wrong with you?”

  She made two cups of blackcurrant tea with honey and Ariana tried to tell her.

  Finally DiScelta set down her cup. “What are you—an artist or a silly courtesan?”

  “I don’t know who I am,” Ariana whispered.

  “Then make up your mind. The reason you are failing now, as a courtesan, as an artist, is that you’re not paying attention to details.”

  Ariana sighed. “How can I bother with details?”

  “My child, few things are certain in life except this: if the details are sloppy, the work fails.”

  “You don’t understand—I love him.”

  “I do understand. You have sunk into love. I cannot help you with love. No one can. Perhaps you cannot even help yourself. But I can help you with music. And for you, music is life.”

  “A nightingale doesn’t sing in a storm,” Ariana said softly.

  DiScelta slammed down her cup. “Nightingales are not professionals. Look at me, Ariana. If you must face life without this—this man—is it so dreadful?”

  “For me it’s dreadful.”

  “Then I can only tell you this. Not every problem has a solution, but all have answers.”

  “And what’s the answer?”

  “Let him go,” DiScelta said, her eyes blazing. “Let him go!”

  Ariana tried to keep up her lessons with Vanessa, but she found the endless hours spent rehashing the same old mistakes as difficult and draining as a performance.

  “E-flat, Vanessa, it’s written in the score, E-flat.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s take it from ‘beltà funesta.’”

  Ariana could see Vanessa was scared, desperate to do everything right. And for some reason that made everything worse, and she wouldn’t let her pupil do anything right.

  “Why do you breathe there?”

  Vanessa had no answer. She sank to the piano bench next to Austin. His hand closed gently over hers.

  Ariana walked slowly to the window. It was raining. The skyscrapers of New York loomed hard and glistening under a leaden heaven. “Vanessa. We’ve got to talk about this.” She pulled a chair over to the bench and sat down.

  Vanessa peeped up at her.

  “This isn’t working. Our lessons just aren’t getting anywhere.”

  Vanessa gave her a look of sheer terror. “Is it my fault? Am I doing something wrong?”

  Ariana noticed a small movement from Austin Waters. His eyes snapped around to narrow on her silently.

  She shook her head and realized how much she had dwindled. “No, it’s my fault. I’m tired. I need a rest.”

  After a moment Vanessa rose and began gathering her scores.

  Ariana couldn’t bear the girl’s obvious pain. “Perhaps we can have a lesson next month.”

  The girl turned quickly, eagerly. “Next month?”

  “Or maybe—” Ariana could not meet the hope in her eyes. “Maybe the month after. I’ll phone.”

  And then she was alone with Austin.

  “Did you need to do that?” he said.

  Ariana stood staring down at the gold chain around her neck, feeling the suddenly insufferable weight of the locket. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I do
n’t care. Go.”

  Three rings, and then the principessa’s answering machine. “Hi. This is Maggie. Beep.”

  “Maggie, it’s Ariana—”

  There was a click and a buzz and Maggie cut in. “Ariana? Loved your review this morning.”

  “Can we meet for a talk?”

  The briefest of hesitations; a new wariness in the voice. “How about this morning?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Come on over. I’ll give you coffee.”

  The walls of Maggie’s penthouse co-op on Beekman Place were light apricot and coffee turned out to be chilled Pouilly Fuissé served by a Norwegian girl. Ariana lifted her wineglass and pretended to smoke a cigarette and made small talk and tried to work up nerve to get to the point.

  Maggie said, “Pleasant as this is, Ariana, I do have to think about changing for lunch. Was there something you wanted to talk about?”

  Maggie had put on a wrap-around camel’s-hair skirt, a beige and white pin-dot blouse with a brown vest flung over it. She wore a single strand of pearls. Ariana sensed it was Maggie’s idea of a deliberately dull outfit, that Maggie had dressed down for her. Ariana felt inappropriate in her brand-new Givenchy. She realized that she and Principessa Maggie came from totally different solar systems.

  “I came to apologize.”

  “What in the world for?”

  “For resenting you.” Ariana couldn’t help thinking how good Maggie was at seeming amazed. “You must have known it. I’ve resented you from the moment we met.”

  Maggie gave her a hard, questioning look. “Why, because I’m younger?”

  “Younger and a lot of other things too. Maybe it’s because you’ve never known a moment’s doubt in your life. You’ve always been attractive, always popular, always done well in private schools and on tennis courts and in ballrooms and rich men’s dining rooms.” And bedrooms, she thought. “I grew up in a slum on East 103rd Street and I never got a thing in life I didn’t have to fight for.”

  Maggie stared at her with uplifted eyebrow. “You had the rough time and I had the easy time, is that it?”

  It flashed through Ariana that this mustn’t turn into an argument. Play it like Verdi, instinct said. Direct, honest supplication. The waitress entreats the princess.