Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  Twenty-eight days later in Vatican City, the papal curia issued a decree per extraordinaria annulling the marriage of Principessa Marghereta di Montenegro and Jean-Baptiste de Grandmont.

  On a beautiful Tuesday in early spring with sunlight splintering off the walls of Olympic Tower and flags snapping on the hoods of diplomatic limousines, 1,500 guests gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to witness the marriage of Principessa Marghereta di Montenegro and Nikos Stratiotis.

  The three television networks stationed cameras on Fifth Avenue, on Forty-ninth Street, and in the nave of the cathedral. Millions of viewers were able to watch as uniformed guards from Cartier’s and Harry Winston’s brought the bride’s jewels to the cathedral in armored trucks; as beautiful, famous women in bright designer dresses and glistening faceted diamonds stepped out of Continentals and Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces on the arms of handsome, suntanned escorts; as Prince Arnoldo of Montenegro, dapper and Old World in spats and cutaway, escorted his daughter Maggie down the aisle. The bride wore a blush French illusion veil, held in place by a wedding tiara of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. Television commentators claimed that the matching lace side panels of her skirt were embroidered in 3,200 seed pearls.

  After the ceremony the wedding cortege of limousines and chartered London buses sped west through Rockefeller Center, where a reception for eight hundred was held in the world-famous Rainbow Room atop the RCA building.

  By nine o’clock that evening two thousand guests were busily enjoying champagne at the bar, cocaine in the bathrooms, and live disco on the dance floor. The celebrating showed no signs of slowing down.

  In Chicago, one time zone to the west, it was eight o’clock, but in the opera house the time was noon and the place was Seville. Soldiers and passers-by thronged the city square as the girls from the nearby cigarette factory returned to work. One of them—Carmen, a hot-blooded, amoral gypsy—flirted with Don José, commander of the troop, and teasingly tossed him a red rose. He feigned indifference, but afterward, unobserved, mused on the flower and hid it in his coat.

  Micaela, a simple peasant girl from Don José’s village, arrived with a letter and a kiss from his mother. She gave him the letter; she gave him the kiss. Alone, he read the letter and discovered, to his pleasure, that his mother wanted him to marry Micaela.

  A commotion broke out in the factory. Girls rushed into the square. Carmen had stabbed a coworker during an argument. The captain of the guards arrested her and handed her over to Don José.

  Carmen now used all her powers of seduction, all the dark lure of her insinuating mezzo voice, to win her freedom. In a lilting seguidilla she offered to meet Don José at a tavern on the outskirts of the city if he would let her go. Fatally snared by her charms, he loosened the rope around her wrists, allowing her to escape.

  Applause was warm. Chicago gave Ariana Kavalaris three bows for this, the first act of her first stab at Carmen. It had cost her a month’s hesitation to accept Chicago’s last-minute offer of the role. She’d had to persuade herself that it was no surrender to go mezzo, simply a proclamation of versatility.

  There was also the consideration that the role, lying mostly in the low range, exposed none of the freak gaps in her high register.

  And so she was Carmen the irresistible temptress, singing and dancing with two gypsy friends for the soldiers at Lillas Pastia’s tavern on the outskirts of Seville. When the bullfighter Escamillo entered to the acclamation of the crowd, she ignored his advances. She was waiting for Don José, due to be released from the jail where he had been imprisoned for letting her escape.

  Finally, after the inn had closed, Don José appeared. Carmen urged him to desert the army and join the gypsies. At first he refused; but the captain of the guard arrived to order him back to the regiment. The two men drew swords. Carmen’s gypsy cronies overpowered the captain, leaving Don José no choice but to escape with them to the mountains.

  Again, three curtain calls.

  Ariana was in her dressing room sipping chamomile tea for her nerves when the phone rang. A voice at the switchboard asked if she would talk to Mrs. Busch—urgent from New York.

  She took the call.

  “Are you near a television set?” Carlotta sounded out of breath.

  “Of course not. You know perfectly well I’m performing.”

  “CBS,” Carlotta said. “The wedding’s coming up right after the commercial.”

  “Panagia mou,” Ariana whispered. “Did you go?”

  “I went to the ceremony and two minutes of the reception. The room was thick with cigar smoke and deals. You know the sort of people.”

  So. It was ended.

  Ariana was no longer thinking clearly as she listened to Carlotta’s voice spilling from the telephone. All she wanted was for Carlotta to have no notion how deeply she was hurt. She had never for an instant believed that Nikos would go through with it. She had seen everything—the publicity, the gossip, even the engagement—as an elaborate game played solely to test her capacity for being hurt; in an obscure way it confirmed that he loved her after all. But now she saw that the only game had been the one she had played on herself; there was a cold hollow in the pit of her stomach and she realized how completely unprepared she was for this disaster.

  “Thank you, Carlotta. Yes, I’ll look at it.”

  A stagehand found a small black-and-white TV. She sat and for the longest three minutes of her life stared at guests streaming into the cathedral. They were the same princes and polo players and playboys who had come to her own wedding; the same women, showing their money, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets in the daytime.

  Could it really be ended? she thought. Does anything in life end like this, between acts of Carmen and commercials on the evening news?

  There was a rap at the door. “Places, Miss Kavalaris.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her thoughts moved amazingly quickly in the next thirty seconds: it was as though she were watching a speeded-up film of her entire life with Nikos. Everything stood out sharply, from the evening so long ago when a young man in an absurd fedora had sauntered into a coffee shop on Broadway to the night twenty-three years later when he had slammed the iron grille door of a townhouse on Sutton Place.

  What struck her now that the story was finished was a sense that it could have ended no other way.

  She hurried onto the stage, into the gypsy smugglers’ camp. She was Carmen again, now tiring of Don José, reading and rereading her fortune in the cards and finding only death.

  Death, she thought. Only death.

  Escamillo, Carmen’s latest conquest, entered. Don José, wildly jealous, attacked him, but Carmen separated the two.

  A frightened Micaela appeared, bringing word that Don José’s dying mother was calling for him. The girl had a lovely voice, all purity and innocence.

  I used to sing Micaela, Ariana thought, when I was a student…when I was a soprano.

  She realized someone was threatening her. It was Don José, warning that, though he was going home with Micaela, he would never let Carmen leave him.

  She sat alone in her dressing room, waiting for the last act.

  At 10:40, on the arm of Escamillo, she entered the square where all Seville waited outside the bullring to hail her new lover. Friends warned her that Don José had been seen lurking about. Unafraid, she waited for him.

  I want to die, she thought.

  Don José appeared, pathetic and beaten, and begged her to return to him. Scornfully she refused, flinging at his feet the ring he had given her. As shouts from the arena acclaimed Escamillo, Don José—blind with jealousy—plunged his dagger into Carmen’s heart.

  She fell to the hard planking of the stage and lay there, hearing the chorus pour from the bullring, hearing the sobbing Don José give himself up, hearing the curtain whoosh down.

  The audience was friendly, polite, only mildly enthusiastic. Ariana took two solo bows. She could tell they were applauding her past, not her
Carmen.

  28

  “REFILL, DARLING?” NIKOS HANDED Maggie the tulip glass. She sipped and smiled at him and sank deeper into the black marble bathtub.

  “Here—lean over,” he said, “I’ll do your back.”

  He scrubbed her gently. Gradually the scrubbing turned into an attempted embrace. She slid free, steadied herself with one hand on the gold-plated faucet and climbed out.

  He held the towel for her and folded it around her. He drew her to him and kissed her. She pulled away and took a robe from the back of the door. The robe was deep purple lace with frilled cuffs.

  “Why are you putting that on?” he asked.

  “Because it’s pretty.”

  “You’re prettier the way you are.”

  “You say the nicest things.” She kept dressing.

  “This is very strange. Do I have to seduce my own bride?”

  “What makes you think I want to be seduced?”

  “The way you’re teasing.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  She looked at herself in the mirror.

  “We were married less than seventy-two hours ago. We’ve spent the last twenty-four hours on trains and planes. Now we’re alone. It’s a beautiful spring night and here we are in the master stateroom with the windows open to the Adriatic. I should be holding you. Kissing you.”

  “Then why aren’t you?”

  “Because you’re there and I’m here,” he said.

  “You can come here.”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Then you just have to try again.”

  He went to her and tried to take her in his arms and again she drew back. He gazed at her a long, curious moment. “Don’t you love me?” he asked quietly.

  “Of course I love you. I’d have to, to marry you, wouldn’t I?”

  “Then what do you expect of me? Am I supposed to wait and let you come around little by little?”

  “If you like waiting, that would be fine. Do you mind if I smoke a joint?”

  He stared at her.

  “My God, Nikos, don’t tell me that shocks you. A lot of people smoke before sex. It makes sex better.”

  “I’ve always found sex pretty good by itself.”

  “Then tonight it’s going to be better than pretty good.”

  He watched her in the mirror. Her negligee had opened. His eye took in the snowy white mound of one breast, the curve of her stomach, the dark glimpse of hair between her legs.

  When he turned around, his penis was standing straight out.

  She was stretched on the bed now, watching with amused fascination as he crossed the stateroom toward her. “You’re not very good at hiding your feelings,” she said.

  “Why should I have to hide them from my own wife?”

  She took another long, relaxed draw on her marijuana. “You’ve got a good body, Nikos.” Her hand reached out and tweaked one of his nipples thoughtfully. She rose up on the bed and pressed her breasts against his chest and made a circular, rubbing motion. The touch of her nipples excited him even further.

  She drew back and pushed the joint into his mouth. “Inhale, Nikos.”

  He inhaled. A lightness gradually filled him. He took her breasts in his hand and began fondling them.

  “Kiss them,” she said.

  He was not used to being told what to do. But she pushed her breasts into his mouth, one after the other, and her smooth firmness filled him, and he liked it.

  She gave him three minutes of her breasts, smiling down at him, taking puffs on her joint and knocking the ash off.

  “Now—I want that.”

  She laid the joint in an ashtray beside the bed and slid gracefully to a sidesaddle position on the carpet before him, her legs pointing out to one side. She swallowed his whole cock.

  When she had made him slick and firm she released him, looking up at him. A tiny smile curved the edge of her lips.

  “I want your cock in me. I want your big cock. Now, Nikos. Now.”

  He hated to hear her talking like that, hated the way it excited him. He pushed her back on the bed and straddled her. She wrapped her legs around him.

  As his movements quickened low wordless sounds began to bubble out of her throat. She dug her fingernails into his nakedness. Little welts of blood rose on the brown of his shoulders. His mouth took starved gulps of her. She raked her nails up and down his back. She bit. She scratched. He lunged and thrashed like a goaded beast, till finally he was at the brink.

  She began to tremble uncontrollably, screaming, and for him that was the signal. He pumped furiously, sweat blinding him, and then he shot into her and heard her crying, “Yes, yes!”

  Afterward she lit another joint. “Wow.” She smiled. “You’re not so bad.”

  Morning dawned cloudy and dark, but the weather cleared in the afternoon and Nikos went swimming off the ship. When he pulled himself back on deck, Maggie was sunning herself without a bra. He decided it was too early in their honeymoon to object to things like that.

  He settled into the chair next to her. She began to run her hand slowly over his chest and belly.

  “You’re in damned good shape for a man your age,” she said.

  In a moment he heard a match strike and smelled the by now very familiar odor of marijuana.

  The galley door opened and an immaculate steward stepped on deck. He was carrying a tray of ice tea and sherbet and meringues. It seemed to Nikos that the man sniffed and smiled before setting the tray on the table in front of them.

  When the steward had gone, Nikos said, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke that stuff in front of the staff.”

  She laughed like a spoiled child. “But they’re only servants. And besides it’s my yacht too now, remember?”

  He pulled himself up from the chair. He crossed the deck and went into the library. He sat by the window, thinking. Then he reached across the table and lifted the telephone receiver. “Can you connect me with the mainland operator please?”

  The Maria-Kristina docked at Dubcek, on the Yugoslav coast, at 8:30 that evening. Maggie came on deck in her white chiffon dress and pendant diamond earrings and cast a glance at the tiny harbor. “Nikos, why in the world are we stopping here?”

  “Company,” he said.

  And they poured on board with their luggage and their laughter: Seymour and C. Z. van Slyke, and the Duke and Duchess of Warwickshire, and Stanley Jannings, the playwright, with his wife and his mistress, a pretty Norwegian model, and his wife’s lover, who happened to be a member of the British cabinet, and Nikos’s old friend Solange, Vicomtesse de Nouilles, who had brought her newest composer, an eighteen-year-old Argentinian.

  He introduced Maggie to the people she didn’t already know. Her expression suggested she had had plenty of experience smiling in all kinds of situations at all kinds of people but was a little surprised at having to take on guests on her own honeymoon.

  The steward showed the new arrivals to their staterooms. Maggie changed into a rainbow-colored Cantonese silk tunic, and just before dinner C. Z. van Slyke came running up to hug her and cried, “You’re so lucky—it’s the greatest yacht I’ve ever seen!”

  “Yes,” Maggie said wistfully, “it’s great for getting away.”

  That night in the stateroom Maggie whipped her hair with the silver-and-ruby brush that had been one of Nikos’s wedding presents. She glared at his reflection in the mirror. “You pick interesting times to give parties.”

  He looked up from the company report he was reading in bed. “I thought you needed cheering up.”

  “Did I say I needed cheering up?”

  He turned a page of the report. “I’m sorry, darling, I misunderstood.”

  Thirty-three hours later, the board of directors of a Sierra Leone zinc mine rebelled against the parent company, a wholly-owned Stratiotis subsidiary. Nikos said goodbye to his guests and to his bride of less than a week and jetted to Geneva.

  It took all of nine days to straighten the matt
er out, too long to be able to resume his honeymoon.

  Ariana flubbed again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  It was the twenty-third take on the silly four measures and she was conscious of the musicians’ gazes fastened resentfully on her face.

  Boyd stood with his head bent. He raised his eyes to look at his former wife and silently lowered his baton.

  “Take five,” he sighed. He signaled Ariana to come into the engineer’s soundproof booth. “What’s the problem?”

  “My throat…won’t do it.”

  “But you’ve sung Lady Macbeth dozens of times.”

  “Not in the last two years.” Not since she’d coached Vanessa Billings in the role.

  “Ariana, what’s happening to you?”

  “I didn’t want to make this recording. It was you who begged me! And now you accuse me of—”

  “Sweetums.” His arm went around her, but his touch was cool and perfunctory. “No one’s accusing. We’d just like to get something on tape we can ship out and market. Now why don’t you go home for the day and get a good rest?”

  “There was another call from Vanessa Billings,” Ariana’s secretary told her.

  “What’s wrong with that girl?”

  Roddy hesitated. Ariana smelled embarrassment.

  “I said you’d talk to her tomorrow morning at ten.”

  She had half a mind to fire him on the spot. “I’ve told you never to make an appointment without consulting me.”

  “She sounded so desperate. And it’s hardly an appointment. Just a simple three-minute phone call.”

  But it wasn’t a simple three-minute phone call. At ten the next day Vanessa appeared at Ariana’s door.

  “I’ve got to see you.”

  “Very well, now that you’re here.”

  Vanessa came into the house. She no longer moved like a young person. “My voice is going,” she said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Voices don’t go at your age.”