Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “That was naughty,” Monte whispered as they entered La Côte Basque.

  The manager shook hands with Monte and embraced Ariana as though they were his long-lost brother and sister. He led them to a table in the best part of the room. The maître d’ and headwaiters all came crowding up to say hello. Customers’ heads turned, jeweled hands cupped whispers, eyes flashed greetings.

  The manager helped Ariana out of her full-length sable. A pail of ice cradling a bottle of Taittinger brut was by their table almost before they had settled into their places.

  “Kiss me,” Ariana said. “Truman Capote is staring.”

  When the waiter brought the menus Ariana sighed.

  “On the eve of the holocaust,” she said, “happiness must be snatched quickly. I’ll have a dozen escargots, the crème de carottes, the filet mi-gnon bordelaise à point, pommes croquettes, asparagus hollandaise, the endive salade vinaigrette and perhaps we’d better order the dessert soufflés now.”

  The rented limo brought them home a little after two in the morning. They were drunk and happy and New York was sparkling in the misty early morning.

  Ariana dredged her keys out of her handbag and unlocked the front door. Riding up in the elevator she asked Monte to sleep in her room that night.

  “All right, I’ll pull the easy chair over to your bed.”

  When he began moving the chair she caught his hand.

  “Sleep in the bed with me. I want to feel you next to me.”

  He stood there for a second, just looking at her. “You don’t want an old wreck like me.”

  “Old wreck? Monte, you may be a little overweight, but you’re a very attractive man. I love your hair and your skin and your sense of humor and I’d love you to make love to me.”

  He pulled her into a blind, bone-mashing embrace. “I…can’t.”

  She saw a crucifixion in his face.

  “For some time now I haven’t been able to. I thought it might have been because of drink, so I stopped drinking for six months. I went to an analyst, and he couldn’t help. I’ve been to doctors for shots and clinics for rest cures and nothing works. I’m sorry, Ariana. Is that a terrible disappointment?”

  She saw the sadness of it, yet she couldn’t help smiling at the endlessly repeating pattern of her life: new man, same mess.

  “We can still sleep together, can’t we?” she said.

  “If you don’t mind—just sleep.”

  “Oh, Monte. Just sleep sounds like heaven.”

  “Monte, move in with me.”

  “Cara, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But it makes sense. This house is too big for one person.”

  “We’d be cutting each other’s throat in a week.”

  “Nonsense. We’ve been together three weeks without a fight.”

  “And you’ve been in Latin America two of those weeks.”

  “And it made all the difference in the world knowing you’d be here when I opened that front door.”

  They argued for two days. He explained why it couldn’t work: they were both singers, both crazy, there would be no sex. She explained why it couldn’t fail: they were both singers, both crazy, there would be no sex.

  He finally agreed to a one-month trial and moved in with three laundry bags, a carved lamp, and twelve suit bags bearing the name of a good tailor in Venice.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “The rest has to be shipped.”

  She understood. He had nothing else in the world.

  The next day she took one of his suits to Paul Stuart’s. She picked out five pairs of slacks and two lovely Harris tweed sports jackets and asked the fitter to take the size from the suit. While she was in the store she picked out four sweaters and a dozen shirts and three beautifully simple neckties.

  There were tears in Monte’s eyes when the packages came. He kissed her and rushed up to his room to change.

  “You look beautiful,” she said.

  “I’ll take you to lunch,” he said. “You can show me off.”

  They went to La Grenouille; Monte had forgotten his charge card and she paid with hers. He was terribly embarrassed.

  “Be quiet, darling,” she said. “You’re gorgeous and why shouldn’t I use my charge card a little.”

  Over the next weeks, she gave him a nice watch from Tiffany, because all he had was an old one that didn’t keep time; and two pairs of decent shoes, because the half-soles were falling off his; and, thinking ahead, an overcoat for autumn.

  “You can’t keep giving me things. I’m a man and you’re a woman and I should be giving you things.”

  “But, darling, you are giving me something. You give me laughter.”

  And it was perfectly true. He was always saying funny things, pointing out the idiocy of this or that, mimicking people, turning everyday conversations into parodies of operatic scenes.

  Ten days later she found him sitting in the living room looking utterly miserable. He wouldn’t tell her what the matter was, but finally she wormed it out of him that he owed Internal Revenue $12,000 in back taxes and they were dunning him.

  “I’ll loan you the $12,000,” she said.

  “I can’t keep draining you.”

  “It’s not as though I were poor yet.”

  She wrote him a check and he gazed at her.

  “Your beautiful eyes,” he said.

  “What about my beautiful eyes?”

  “They’re just beautiful, that’s all.”

  He said he wanted to make himself useful to her. He took her checkbook from her and looked after money matters. He wrote the checks for everything: food, insurance, taxes on the house. He did the balancing, went over the statements, deposited the drafts from her agent. She signed and that was all there was to it.

  It was a great load off her mind.

  “Cara, you pay Roddy $500 a week?”

  She looked up. Monte was sitting at the desk. She could see him totaling up figures on a pocket calculator.

  “I do half your secretarial work for you,” he said. “I could perfectly easily do the rest.”

  “Monte, I could never ask you to—”

  “Cara, I love you, I understand you, I’m quite content to do everything I can for you.”

  “But Roddy’s been with me so long, I couldn’t bear to tell him I don’t need him anymore.”

  “Don’t worry, cara, I’ll tell him myself.”

  Monte persuaded her to cut back on servants as well: to make do with one maid instead of two; to take a part-time instead of a full-time cook.

  “I love to cook,” he said. “Tuesday and Thursday can be our cook-in nights.”

  The Monday after the butler was let go Ariana answered a ringing at the front door. The caller was a big man, smoking a cigar, and his breath smelled of mouthwash. A temple-to-temple eyebrow arched over his eyes. “Monte around?” he asked gruffly.

  “Monte’s upstairs.”

  “The name’s Degan.” The man held out a hand bristling with black hairs. “Mort Degan.” He wore a polka-dot bow tie and a dark suit that had a glossy look, as though it had been cleaned too often. He tossed a nod over his shoulder. “They’re with me.”

  An orange Toyota was parked at the curb. A woman in a khaki pants suit and a man in a camouflage jacket were hauling camera equipment from the trunk.

  “Monte!” Ariana called.

  He appeared at the top of the stairs, knotting the sash of his bathrobe. He slapped a hand to his forehead. “Cara, forgive me—I forgot the photographers were coming today.” The explanation came tumbling out. Mort was an old friend; the man and woman carrying lights and tripods into the house were from Esquire magazine. “They’re here to interview us, cara. Mort arranged it, wasn’t that nice of him?”

  Ariana sat absolutely still, absolutely smoldering as cameras and lights were set up in the living room.

  Monte asked Mort Degan how life had been treating him.

  “I sold eight million five in film rights
at Cannes.”

  Monte whistled.

  The man in camouflage began darting and crouching about the room, snapping pictures with a little camera that made insectlike buzzes and clicks. The woman in khaki placed a cassette recorder on the coffee table and asked questions about the relationship between opera and fame.

  Ariana let Monte do the answering.

  He went off at tangents, speaking about the techniques of creating a character, the mystery of personality which is at the core of all art, and of course the God-given thing, the human voice. Ariana became aware of a shadowy space between Monte’s words and his actions, of the difference between what he believed himself to be and what she knew he was. She did not like his making a fool of himself. She did not like the look of his friend Mort Degan or of the magazine people. She smiled for Monte’s sake, but inside herself she was not smiling at all.

  “The key,” Monte was saying, “is Ariana’s musical integrity. No matter what she is performing—and she has enormous range—she never debases herself or the music.”

  “Are you really as wonderful as all that, Miss Kavalaris?”

  “Monte’s being charming. The truth is, I’m dreadful. I’m a gossip, I have terrible moods, and I cheat at pinochle.”

  The woman smiled tightly. “Any truth to the rumors about the two of you?”

  Ariana’s glance flicked up at the woman. “Rumors?”

  “A joint concert next January?”

  “I hadn’t heard those rumors,” Ariana said icily.

  “To tell the truth,” Mort Degan said, “I started them.”

  Ariana took a long drag from a filter-tip cigarette. “Why?”

  “Pure self-interest. I want to represent you for the concert.”

  After dinner they were sitting, just the two of them, in the living room. “He’s a peculiar man, your Mr. Degan,” Ariana said.

  Monte glanced at her. “He’s a damned hardworking agent.”

  “But I already have an agent. Richard and I choose my performing dates—not Mr. Degan, however hardworking he may be, not you, however much I may love you. I very rarely do recitals, and I never do them jointly with anyone.”

  Monte looked at her a long, sad, silent moment. “In other words you’re telling me to go to hell.”

  “Monte, what’s wrong with you? I’m telling you I don’t do things Mr. Degan’s way and I don’t want to get mixed up with him or his schemes.”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “Of course I trust you. But my engagement calendar’s full for the next year and a half.”

  “It’s not full on January twenty-fourth.”

  Silence piled upon silence.

  “Monte, this is foolish. Please, let’s not argue.”

  “You’re a great artist, Ariana, but as a woman…” Monte was sitting on the sofa, arms locked around his knees, staring at his Scotch and soda. “You give a man reassurance in one area, you raise doubt in another, you keep his uncertainties alive and stinging. You must be hell to love.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Neither is this hysteria of yours. I was only trying to help.”

  “What kind of joint recital? I sing ‘Sempre Libera’ with piano accompaniment and you sing ‘Granada’ with your guitar? You haven’t even vocalized in a year and a half.”

  Monte drained his Scotch and stood. “Excuse me for trying.”

  “Oh, Monte, for God’s sake—”

  But he was gone, and a moment later the elevator was whirring up the shaft.

  Not wanting to show his anger just yet, Nikos watched Maggie settle down at the dressing table in her lavender evening gown. It was two in the morning. He had been home four hours, but he was still in his dinner jacket. She was babbling about a birthday party she’d been to at the Carlyle.

  “Whose birthday?” he said quietly.

  “The party was given by Adela Schatzberg—you know, the painter—she does those large dolls—they were in New York magazine—and it was in honor of Putney Wilkes, who does something at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Runs it, I believe.” As her arm lifted to unhook her necklace, two rows of zipper teeth in her gown pulled slightly apart.

  “Was it a late birthday party?” Nikos asked.

  “No, we left at about seven and went to the costume gala that Pru Delman was giving for her husband—Senator Bruce Delman, you met him at the Vanderbilts’.”

  “So you went to a birthday party and then to a costume ball.”

  “I suppose the papers will call it a ball. There was a rock band and a big striped tent. I’d never heard of half the movie stars who were there, they were all children on cocaine. Lady Benson says hello, by the way.”

  Nikos stood with his eyes half shut. The rest of my life, he thought. I’ll have to listen to nonsense like this for the rest of my life. He wondered for the ten-thousandth time since his wedding night what the hell he had gotten himself into.

  “Didn’t you forget something?” he said.

  “Forget?” She looked at him with a blankness that seemed almost unfeigned.

  “We were invited this evening to Buzz Dworkin’s reception for his daughter’s wedding.”

  “Buzz Dworkin? I can’t stand that man.”

  “Be that as it may, he’s a force in this city and he sent us an invitation over a month ago. The governor and his wife were there. So were the mayor and his wife. So were a good many other men and their wives.”

  “Poor you. It sounds like cigar smoke and deals and politicians toasting one another.”

  “And we accepted.”

  “No, Nikos, you accepted. You never mentioned it to me.”

  He thrust her Florentine-leather date book under her nose. On that day’s page, in looping green felt-tip, she had scrawled Dworkin recep. In red ink, running over the green, Viv/Shatz party. In pencil, over that, Delmans.

  Her face tightened like a macadamia in a nutcracker. “How dare you search my desk.”

  “How dare you embarrass me in that manner.”

  “How many times have I begged you to come with me to Hobe Sound, or Sag Harbor, or Elaine’s? And how many times have you not shown up at parties we were giving?”

  “Once, only once, and that was because of business.”

  “And how many times have I had to go to art openings alone or fly to Paris by myself?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Just because you’re jealous of Ariana making headlines with that tenor doesn’t mean I have to be at your side every time a sleazy tycoon throws a tax-deductible blast. I don’t mind your being fixated on her, but I will not have you taking your obsession out on me.”

  Silence froze the bedroom. Nikos raised his hand and brought the date book swinging against Maggie’s face like a fly swatter.

  She took a long moment looking at him, and then a sly sort of triumph crept into her narrowed eyes. She turned back to her mirror, finished unhooking her emerald necklace, and laid it neatly to rest in the contoured velvet bed of its enameled box.

  “Putney Wilkes heard her Norma. Apparently it was less than excellent.” Maggie’s gaze attached itself to Nikos and seemed to purr. “Poor Ariana. What’s she going to do now that her voice is gone?”

  “Sweetums…”

  Boyd was staring not at Ariana but beyond her, out the window of their first-class compartment in the Flèche d’Or. They—or rather, he—had decided that taking the train (“And such a comfortable train, sweetums, first class only; the Europeans do these things so well”) was less trouble than flying from Amsterdam to Paris. “Who wants to drag all the way out to airports and back, after all we’re just going from the Doelen to the Ritz.” She had sensed that what he really meant was, We’re just going from bad reviews at the Dutch State Theater to worse reviews at the Paris Opéra, so let’s keep a low profile.

  The manicured Belgian countryside was speeding past. Ariana’s eye followed three farmhouses and two lonely stands of ancient elms.

  “D
on’t you think Puccini’s an awful second-rater?” Boyd’s score of Tosca was open on his lap and now he shut it with a slam. “I don’t care if I ever conduct another Tosca again.”

  Ariana was suddenly alert. For two decades Richard Schiller had arranged her bookings years in advance, and even though her voice was going, she still had future dates to fall back on. Granted, there were fewer and fewer of them, but nonetheless they stretched forward as a dwindling sort of security over the next three years.

  Ariana knew her career was over. She had known it since Milan. She knew Boyd was giving her—and himself—an out.

  And she hated him for it.

  “You mean you don’t want to do another Tosca with me.” Her eyes met his and she watched him muster shock and denial.

  “Nothing to do with you, sweetums. I’d just rather dig into something new. Like late Verdi. Like Falstaff.”

  He knew she didn’t sing any of the women in Falstaff. “You know I won’t cancel my contract, so you’re going to cancel yours, and that way you won’t have to conduct me in Tosca…or anything else. I’m a sinking ship and you’re abandoning me.”

  “I’m not going to talk to you if you’re going to be paranoid.”

  Twelve days later, when she returned to New York, Ariana found a letter waiting from Richard Schiller. Apparently Boyd’s agent had sent word that due to circumstances beyond et cetera et cetera, his client would be forced to cancel next year’s Toscas in Covent Garden, Paris, Vienna, Scala, Chicago, and Melbourne.

  For three days Ariana’s thinking was a fog of self-doubt and terror.

  On the fourth day she went to see Richard Schiller. He was pacing behind his desk, trailing the telephone cord back and forth through his fingers. A low indecipherable voice was screaming from the receiver.

  “Richard. I need to talk to you.” She crossed the room and poised a finger over the cradle, ready to break the connection.

  He apologized to the caller, hung up and stood staring at her.

  “You’re neglecting me,” she said. “Admit it. The only dates I have now were booked long before that Duomo fiasco. You’re letting my career wind down.”