Ariana

by Edward Stewart

At 8:13 Ariana stood at the mirror in her dressing room. A clamminess gripped her ribs every time she tried to draw a breath.

  The stage manager’s assistant had given the warning knocks on her door. There was an instant when she knew she could still send in her understudy. She felt herself suspended between two lives.

  Another knock came. “Miss Kavalaris?”

  “Coming,” she answered.

  And she went on. She willed herself into the role of Violetta Valery, one of the most beautiful courtesans of Paris. She was giving a supper party for three dozen nineteenth-century jet-setters and hangers-on.

  Her first phrase, welcoming her guests, was a disaster. What came out was barely audible, poorly placed, not projected at all. With her second phrase, “Lo voglio,” her voice shook so badly she had to fight an impulse to turn and run from the stage.

  All right, she told herself, so there’s no voice. She would simply have to resort to other tactics.

  Alfredo—a handsome newcomer—toasted her and stayed behind as the others went to dance in the adjoining room. A fit of coughing took her. Alfredo declared his love. She pretended to be amused.

  All through the scene she forced herself to keep moving, keep gesturing, using her own desperation as the character’s. When a B-flat cracked she flung herself onto her tenor as though the cracked note were the point, when she flubbed an entrance she flung herself onto her maid as though the flub were Violetta’s, not Kavalaris’s, when an A just wasn’t there she flung herself onto her couch as though the missed note was an intentional touch.

  After the guests had gone she remained by herself, pondering Alfredo and the love he offered. Mustering all her bravado, she decided to forget him and continue her fast, gay life. Missing most of her high notes, not even projecting the low ones, she forced out a hectic “Sempre Libera.”

  Vanessa took four solo bows after the Act One curtain. The darkness seemed to adore her, like a single worshiping soul. She curtsied deeply, gratefully, confidently.

  Ariana took two curtain calls after Act One. She saw the faces in the front rows and tiers, dangling masks of shock against the unforgiving night, and she refused even to attempt a third bow.

  A blown fuse delayed the Philadelphia curtain, and the New York curtain rose on Act Two three minutes before Philadelphia’s.

  The scene was the country villa where Violetta and Alfredo had been living happily together for several months. Alfredo discovered Annina, the maid, sneaking back from Paris. He learned she had been selling Violetta’s possessions to pay the cost of running the household. Shamed and shocked, he rushed to Paris to raise money.

  His father, Georges Germont, arrived. Accusing Violetta of destroying his son, he beseeched her to break off the affair.

  Ariana began the scene poorly. Her pitch was unsteady. She tried to project calm dignity and, when she learned that Alfredo’s sister could not marry because of her liaison, pity. For a terrifying instant, on the words “Ah, morir preferiró,” there was no sound. Her tone simply stopped.

  No, she told herself, I will not die like this.

  Somehow, by sheer dint of refusal to submit, she forced her voice up into life again. It was not so much a sound as a rattle, and she could feel tiny flapping wings against her throat. There was only a pulsation now, but she was able to build the pulsation into a sliding back and forth between two extremely uncertain pitches, neither of them the high B-flat intended by the composer.

  Her baritone was staring at her in undisguised horror. Boyd’s baton had slowed, and the music hung in suspension. She realized she had reached the turning point, that this note was going to decide not just the rest of her performance, but of her career.

  And of her life.

  Always, before, she had held something back for later. Now she held nothing back. She needed this note, now. With a last effort she narrowed back the airstream, imagined a steel door in her throat closing down against the stream, tightening it into a single strand of air.

  By some miracle, the pitch focused. It was not the pitch she wanted—it was far too low—but at least it was a single, unmistakable note. She was able, by thought, by will, to scoop it up and suddenly, clearly projected like a light through a rift in a storm, was the note Verdi had written: full, warm, unmistakable.

  She agreed to Germont’s entreaties and wrote a hasty farewell note. Alfredo returned. Declaring her undying love for him, she went. He ripped open the note and read the message: he and Violetta must separate.

  His father begged him to return home. Alfredo refused. Seeing an invitation on the table from Violetta’s friend Flora, he resolved to go to Flora’s and force a confrontation.

  Vanessa’s first flub came with no warning. Just after the words “Ah, morir preferirò,” in her duet with Alfredo’s father, she felt a pricking, like a needle in her breast. There was an unbelievable instant when no sound came out of her, a split second of absolute silence, as though all the power in her had shut down.

  An instant later, the voice came back. In all, the slip and the recovery had taken less than a tenth of a second. The audience out there, most of them, probably had no idea.

  But she knew.

  As Ariana’s performance progressed, the notes began coming back, the high B’s and C’s, the daring attacks, the sustained tones swelling like waves. When she appeared with her former lover, Baron Douphol, in Scene Two of the second act, the party at Flora’s, the audience’s approval glowed down upon her, giving her an almost unreal sense of confidence.

  The baron gambled and lost to Alfredo. Taking Violetta aside, Alfredo demanded to know why she had left him. Lying, she claimed no longer to love him. Announcing to the guests that he was paying Violetta in full, he hurled his winnings at her feet. His father entered and, apologizing to Violetta, rebuked his son for such unworthy behavior.

  Vanessa felt it slipping, the mastery that an artist must wield to hold an audience. There was a pressure in her chest. Her voice seemed drawn and shrunken and each note required a throat-filling effort.

  Mistakes began piling up: foolish slips of words, notes, phrasing. She listened in horror to herself bungling more and more of the score. She felt hopeless, as though she were waiting for some final, inevitable catastrophe to burst upon her.

  And it came.

  During the confrontation with Alfredo, two bars before he hurled the money at her feet, she stumbled and fell.

  The whole opera house somersaulted around her. Realization came flooding in on her. This was real now: the cast staring numbly, the cue missed, the music flowing on without her, the white-hot blank in her mind where her next note should have been. The dramatic highpoint of the act was aborted, and with it, the opera.

  Hands helped her to her feet.

  Voices cued her, covered for her. Only the thought that she mustn’t disgrace herself totally kept her stumbling on through the last act.

  Violetta lay in her bedroom dying of tuberculosis. Though her money was practically gone, she told Annina to give half of what little remained to the poor. She reread a letter from Germont saying that Alfredo had been told the truth and would soon return to beg her forgiveness.

  Annina rushed breathlessly in with Alfredo. The lovers embraced and sang of beginning a new life together. The doctor arrived with Germont, who now realized how much and how nobly Violetta had sacrificed. The old man embraced her as a daughter. Violetta felt a last, deceptive flare-up of life and for an ecstatic moment believed she had recovered.

  And then, as those around her despaired, she fell dead.

  At 11:05, to thundering applause, Ariana took twelve curtain calls with a happy, rather shy smile. Her public had forgiven her Act One and Scene One of Act Two. She had recouped. She was their Ariana again, their darling, their invincible.

  There was no way of not taking a curtain call. Vanessa walked toward the gap in the curtain, out into the milky light, and received the monumental contempt pouring from the opera house.

  Ariana hurried to h
er dressing room and closed the door.

  “Ariana.”

  She whipped around. She had not seen the figure in the armchair.

  “I didn’t think you’d do it.” DiScelta’s face loomed out of the shadow at her. “That your honor matters nothing to you, I must accept. I misjudged you. You cannot help how you are made. But that you care nothing for anyone else—”

  Ariana’s hands came up shaped into balled fists. “Do you actually think I did this for myself?”

  “No. You broke your word for that man.”

  “Whatever I do, I do because I love him.”

  “And have you no feeling for your pupil? No responsibility?”

  Ariana thought back, but it seemed so far away, so long ago. She could remember teaching a young woman how to sustain the breath column, where to break the phrase in “Sarò la più bella,” she could remember the voice and the name, but she couldn’t call the face up.

  “I’ve done what I could for her.”

  “You’ve done what you could to destroy her.”

  Anger swelled in Ariana, deep and choking. “I sang, that’s all I did, I didn’t betray anyone, I didn’t murder anyone, I opened my mouth and notes came out!”

  “And whose notes were they? Who put them there?”

  “If I haven’t said thank you, I’m saying it now. Thank you.”

  DiScelta’s gaze touched Ariana fiercely. “Saying thanks is not the same as doing thanks. Every act brings its precise equivalent in return. You have been given a gift and you must give a gift back. Otherwise—”

  “I don’t want to hear this. Not now. Not ever again.”

  DiScelta took Ariana’s hand in an astonishingly tight grip. “If you don’t keep your word, we are all lost—not just you, not just her, but all those who came before, who trusted you to keep the promise.”

  Ariana jerked free. “Will you get it through your head that I am all out of guilt!”

  A corpselike stillness fell on the room.

  “The world is a clock,” DiScelta said. “No wheel moves without moving all the others. When you refuse your destiny, you rob others of theirs. And that is murder.”

  Ariana brought a fist crashing down on the dresser. A mushroom cloud of face powder exploded up into the mirror fringe of makeup lights. “I’m not going to take any more of your nagging! No one gives a damn about me, and I don’t give a damn about anyone—not you, not Vanessa, not your pathetic superstitions! I’m going to sing what I want where I want, when I want; I’m going to show the world I’m not a washed-up old diva like you, you crazy old witch!”

  DiScelta’s eyes heaped disbelief on her pupil. Her words seemed to fight their way through layers of stone. “You’re making the greatest mistake of your life.”

  Ariana’s throat pushed out a harsh, mirthless laugh. “I don’t care! I don’t care!” She tilted back her head, closing her eyes.

  When she opened them again, the old woman was gone, so suddenly and so silently that it seemed she had never been there at all.

  Ariana felt a sudden stinging chill on her bosom, as though a blade were pressing into her skin. She lifted the locket and snapped it open. Was it her imagination, or had the face inside changed its expression, was there a hint of contempt in the eyes, in the set of the mouth?

  That crazy old witch has me imagining things.

  27

  IN FEBRUARY ARIANA SANG three Madama Butterflys in Lisbon. Perhaps superstition had something to do with what happened: Butterfly was one of the roles she had taught Vanessa and which—in theory at least—she had renounced.

  The curtain rose on a set depicting a hill above Nagasaki harbor, a little house bustling with preparations for a Japanese wedding. The groom-to-be, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, took the wedding as a lark, but the American consul warned him that his betrothed, a Japanese geisha, had taken it seriously enough to convert to Christianity. The bride-to-be, Cio-Cio-San, known as “Madame Butterfly,” joyfully arrived with a crowd of friends and relatives.

  There was applause as Ariana, looking surprisingly Oriental and petite, made her entrance in the title role.

  No sooner had the marriage ceremony been performed than Butterfly’s uncle, a Buddhist monk, stormed angrily in and cursed his niece for betraying the religion of her ancestors. Butterfly was reduced to tears. Pinkerton drove the guests from the house. He comforted his sobbing bride and led her to the bridal chamber.

  As the curtain fell to warm applause Ariana felt a soreness just above her collarbone. She had a cup of tea in her dressing room.

  The Second Act curtain rose on Butterfly’s little house. Though Pinkerton had promised to come back “when the robins nest,” three springs had passed, and Butterfly still waited patiently, secure in her faith that one fine day—“Un bel di”—her husband would return to her.

  On the fourth note of the aria, the F-sharp at the top of the staff, Ariana experienced a sudden choking. It was hardly a difficult note to sustain, yet for the rest of the act she had a sensation that it simply was not there.

  The consul entered, trying to break the news to Butterfly that Pinkerton had married an American. But Goro, the marriage broker, interrupted, bringing a rich suitor for Butterfly’s hand. She angrily left the stage and returned a moment later, carrying her child by Pinkerton: a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old. The boy’s name, she told the consul, was Trouble, but when his father returned it would be changed to Joy.

  A cannon shot sounded in the harbor, announcing a ship’s arrival. Excitedly peering through a telescope, Butterfly recognized Pinkerton’s ship, the Abraham Lincoln. In a rapturous duet, Suzuki, her maid, helped her decorate the house with cherry blossoms.

  Ariana’s throat felt as though she were shouting through scabs.

  By now night was falling. As Butterfly, Suzuki, and little Trouble waited for Pinkerton, their crouching figures were silhouetted against the paper wall and off-stage voices could be heard in the haunting melody of the Humming Chorus.

  In the next intermission the house doctor peered down Ariana and said he detected an inflammation. “I wouldn’t continue.”

  “Doctor, I have to complete the performance.”

  He sighed—“I shouldn’t do this”—and gave her cortisone.

  The pain in her throat had abated slightly by the time the curtain rose on the final act. It was after dawn, and Pinkerton still had not appeared. Suzuki persuaded Butterfly to rest in the other room. The consul arrived with Pinkerton and his American wife. Realizing Butterfly had remained faithful, Pinkerton fled, unable to face her.

  Butterfly entered, saw the American lady in the garden, and asked who she was. Finally grasping the truth, she agreed to give up her child, asking that Pinkerton collect his son in half an hour.

  Alone with the infant, Butterfly took her father’s hara-kiri dagger and stabbed herself. With her dying breath she crawled to embrace Trouble. Arriving instants too late, Pinkerton found the boy beside his dead mother, playing with a miniature American flag.

  Oddly enough, Ariana had five curtain calls, and the reviews were respectful. Not her best, said one, but Kavalaris after all is Kavalaris, a claim that can be made by few others.

  A day later, when she vocalized, the F-sharp was still not there. “How could it be?” she demanded at her next coaching session with Austin Waters. “How can an F-sharp simply vanish?”

  “The note is there,” he assured her. “You’re just nervous.”

  But it was something more than nerves. She felt like an organism under attack. A month later in Brussels she was singing Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, another of the roles she had supposedly abdicated to Vanessa. During Act Three, in her scene with Otello, her A below high C suddenly vanished. Again, she was able to force other tones into the gap, but the sound was strained and ugly.

  And again, when she vocalized later, the A was still missing.

  “Now I’ve lost two,” she sobbed to Austin. “The F and the A.”

  “What do you thin
k you just sang?”

  “That wasn’t an A, that was a B-flat bent down and that was why it sounded horrible.”

  He gave her a long look. “Sweetheart, you haven’t lost anything except your marbles.”

  But she was losing something. She could feel it. So could audiences. Her voice began tearing arias into irregular shapes. She had to break the line more and more frequently to sneak a breath, and soon there was nothing sneaky about the breaths; they were outright gulps slicing into the melody.

  Curtain calls became fewer, bravas less spontaneous; and soon critics were commenting that this or that arietta had not been quite up to Kavalaris’s usual standard.

  One day Richard Schiller asked, “Excuse me for prying, but are you on anything?”

  “What do you mean, on anything?” she said.

  He shrugged in a way that seemed embarrassed. “Drugola.”

  “Drugs? Are you crazy?”

  “No, but I sometimes get the impression you are.”

  “I think we’d better continue this discussion another day.”

  “After your vacation. You got three free weeks coming up. Use ’em.”

  Ariana fled back to her work—what remained of it—not simply for distraction, but for solace and sanity. The Chicago Lyric Opera had mentioned needing a Carmen on short notice, and she began studying the role.

  In Carmen Bizet had written the greatest mezzo part ever. The French vowels—usually so hard to project with their closed, nasal quality—were exploited for their sensual effect: an exuberant sexuality sprang from the very sound of the score. Yet there was a classical clarity and perfection that reminded Ariana of Mozart. But how different Bizet was, how modern! Carmen held the listener with its story, which Mozart’s operas did not, and with its unending stream of irresistible tunes, which unlike Mozart’s needed no allowance for style or period.

  And yet she was uncertain whether or not to take the role. She was, after all, a soprano—true, a soprano whose high notes were going. But to accept a mezzo role seemed an admission of defeat.

  March 3, in the first district court of Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, Judge G. de Souza y Saavedra granted Señora Maria-Kristina von Heidenstam Stratiotis of Marjamaa, Sweden, an uncontested divorce from Señor Nikos Lykandreou Stratiotis of Ile St-Louis, Paris. Both parties were in absentia at the proceedings.