Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “What do you want, Ariana? Just what is it you expect an agent to do for you?”

  “I want to be on television.”

  “Why? Because your ex-boy friend got married on TV and you have to compete?”

  “Leave Nikos out of this.”

  “I suggest you leave Nikos out of this, because in my frank opinion, that is all this tzimmis is about.”

  “That is one hell of way to talk to one of your top clients.”

  “And that is one hell of way to talk to your top agent.”

  “Then maybe you don’t want to represent me anymore.”

  He waved his hands across his face. “Go home. Just fucking go home.”

  Without thinking, she was out of her chair, leaning over his desk, pounding her fist on the blotter.

  “What is it about you agents? You get a performer helpless and tied up with contracts and completely at your mercy and then you torture them for the sheer fun of it. You’ve already decided to junk my career but you’re taking your own sweet time watching me die, and all the while you could be helping, you’re lecturing and ladling advice and sneering. You’re a bullying, sadistic psychopath!”

  He looked at her a long moment and a genuine sadness seemed to come into his eyes.

  “Ariana—honey—it’s not me that’s killing you, it’s this attitude you’ve gotten into. It’s showing in your work and it’s showing in the way you’re behaving. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but it’s showing badly. You’ve got to pull out of this.”

  “Get me a job and just watch me pull out of it.”

  “You’ve got plenty of jobs—San Francisco next month, Hamburg, Milan, Dusseldorf—”

  “Those aren’t the kind of jobs I want. Richard, I need promotion. What the rock stars get. Ads on busses. Record jackets in windows. Television spots. I could advertise quality products—American Express Cards, Lincoln Continentals…”

  He sighed heavily. “Hon, you stick to the singing, I’ll handle the rest.”

  “You’re not handling it right. People are forgetting my name.”

  “If you’d show up for a performance once in a while maybe they’d remember it.”

  “I haven’t missed a performance in two months.”

  “Sutherland hasn’t missed one in her whole career.”

  “I’m not Sutherland.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” His teeth bit down on his lower lip. He came around the desk to hug her. “Hon, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bark—only it’s a hell of a time to barge in without an appointment. It’s the craziest time of the day. You know we do all our calls to the Coast between two and four.”

  “What’s so important about calls to the Coast that you can’t take two minutes to talk to an old client and friend?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s so important—I’m trying to save your tush from a couple of goniffs.”

  She raised her eyebrows and instantly felt him retreating.

  “Don’t ask for details, please. You don’t want to hear, you don’t want to know.”

  “Richard, I want to hear, I want to know.”

  “Those clowns I was talking to, they want to do a miked concert at the Pyramids, televised, $1,000 a seat, some lousy pop program.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  Richard hesitated, his glance darting around the room as though to make sure that all the ashtrays were nailed down. “They want you.”

  “Will there be publicity?”

  “Sure—an abortion like that is nothing but publicity.”

  “Articles in the papers? Interviews? TV guest shots?”

  Richard nodded.

  Ariana strode to the window. “How many people see an opera? Four thousand in a big house? And how many see a television show? Eighty million, two hundred million? Richard, I’ll do it.”

  His face blanked out. “You don’t want to work with these people. Everything they touch turns to crapola. Believe me, they’ll make the Pyramids a garbage dump.”

  “So, what’s ten minutes in a garbage dump?”

  For a long moment he didn’t answer. “It’s scheduled for August. It’ll mean canceling Rio del Mar.”

  “To hell with Rio del Mar.”

  Still he hesitated.

  “Richard, I’m not leaving this office till you call and accept that offer.”

  30

  IT WAS ENOUGH TO ruin Maggie Stratiotis’s breakfast. There was a huge article in the New York Times on Ariana Kavalaris’s favorite way of making fettuccine.

  Who chooses these articles? she wondered. Why doesn’t the Times ever ask me how I make blender Vichyssoise?

  That same day, at the hairdresser’s, she picked up a magazine and saw a photograph of Ariana at a party in the company of “world-renowned tenor Giorgio Montecavallo.” At the edge of the picture—it was unclear whether he formed part of the group or not—was “playwright Arthur Miller.”

  Maggie was suddenly acutely and painfully Ariana-conscious, aware that the woman enjoyed not just fame but a sort of intellectual prestige.

  As she sat under the hair dryer she couldn’t help reflecting and assessing. New York had unquestionably become the mecca for world celebrity: it was a city bursting with opportunities for fame. But, staring at the photograph, she had to wonder if she had made the most of those opportunities.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” Nikos asked.

  Maggie looked up from her Louis Quinze beechwood chair, where she was industriously marking a blue-covered script in red ballpoint. “I’ve been job hunting. And I’ve found something just right. Channel Four. Tony McGraw wants me to host some tours of the great Hudson Valley homes.” She described the project and the go-aheads that the Rockefeller and Roosevelt estates had given.

  “I don’t want you getting mixed up with McGraw,” Nikos said.

  “Why not? You do business with him.”

  “That’s why.”

  Their eyes locked.

  “What do you expect me to do, phone him and say I’ve decided to drop the whole idea?”

  “That’s exactly what I expect you to do.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry, Nikos. I have a life too.”

  Five thousand miles away, after a night of listening to waves breaking on the rocks, Renata Stratiotis showered and dressed. She tiptoed past her mother’s room. The door was open.

  In a stream of pale morning sunlight, Maria-Kristina sat by the window brushing her hair. She turned. “Renata? You’re up early.”

  “I’ve got something to do in town today.”

  Her mother’s eyes narrowed into a quick worried look. “You’re not seeing those dope dealers. Please don’t get into that again.”

  “No, Mother, I’m through with them.”

  Renata walked slowly across the lawn to the little bay. She got into the blue-and-white speedboat tied to the end of the jetty. It rocked a little under her. The Baltic waters shined up at the sky with the even glow of stainless steel.

  With a rip of the starting cord she jerked the motor into life.

  The poodle jumped barking into the boat. She lifted it gently and set it down on the dock. “Sorry, Cochon, no passengers.”

  At a café on the mainland she met her dealer, a young man with mirrored glasses. She paid him and crammed 800 kroner worth of pills and marijuana into her traveling satchel.

  “You’ll like the grass,” he said. “It’s nerve gas.”

  She walked in the woods and smoked two joints. From a pay phone by the roadside she placed a call to New York City.

  “Collect call for Nikos Stratiotis from Renata Stratiotis,” an operator said.

  Maggie glanced irritably from the receiver in her hand to the glowing dial of the bedside clock. “I’ll accept charges.”

  “Is my father there?” The voice had that more-than-Oxford accent that Swedish schools teach their nationals.

  Oh, God, am I going to have to lie here and listen to a father-daughter re
union? Maggie wondered. I’ve got a ten-hour day lined up tomorrow at the Rockefeller estate. She gloved her voice in kindness. “Renata, this is Maggie. Your father has told me so much about you. Is something the matter?”

  “I just need to say hello to him.”

  Hello hardly sounded like an emergency. Maggie stubbed out her cigarette. “Darling, it’s three-fifteen in the morning here. Your father will call you in the morning when he wakes up.”

  She replaced the receiver. A moment later, when Nikos stepped out of the bathroom, she had rolled onto her side and was pretending to be asleep.

  Renata smoked another joint on her way back to the speedboat. She opened the motor full throttle. She stared up at a sky full of mashed-potato clouds. She checked the time by her wristwatch. It was a slender, silver wafer of a watch, sent to her by her father when she’d graduated from grade school university at Göteborg, second highest in her class. He’d been too busy to attend in person.

  The island came rushing toward her. The house that Mother and Father had built seemed to be dancing on its foundation. A tall, scholarly woman in a red polka-dot dirndl ran onto the terrace and from her twisted face Renata could see she was screaming.

  Mother, I’m sorry, but I didn’t sleep all night and Father wouldn’t take my call.

  For one blinding instant time stopped. With a 60-mile-per-hour splintering of wood and chrome, the speedboat slammed into the stone harbor wall. Renata’s skull was split open on impact.

  Maria-Kristina’s voice nearly broke across the five-thousand-mile satellite connection. It took Nikos a moment to understand, and then the earth fell away beneath him. “But why?” he said.

  “Dr. Aakeborg thinks it was depression.”

  “But she had treatment for the depression.”

  “We found ninety-two lithium tablets in her medicine cabinet. She’d been lying. She hadn’t been taking them.”

  Memories rushed back to him in a tidal wave, unbidden, eerily vivid: Renata’s eighth birthday when he’d given her a white Shetland pony and she’d jumped into his arms and he’d hugged her and said, “Happy birthday, min lilla flicka.”

  “And were there any other…drugs?”

  “I don’t want to autopsy, Nikos. Unless you insist. I’d like to bury her tomorrow. Here on the island.”

  “I’ll be there.” He buzzed his secretary. “Get hold of my wife, please. We have to leave for Sweden in three hours.”

  Waiting for Maggie in the private plane gave Nikos a strange sort of nausea. Twilight was turning dusty gray. He watched the sun touch the surface of Jamaica Bay.

  They were two hours past their scheduled takeoff when a stewardess approached. “Mr. Stratiotis, your wife is with a camera crew in Pocantico Hills. We’ve been trying since five o’clock, but we can’t get through to her.”

  Nikos let himself sink slowly into acceptance. “All right. We’ll leave without Mrs. Stratiotis.”

  Nikos stood with his ex-wife and her three servants staring down into a grave that seemed a thousand light-years deep. The Lutheran minister read the service in Swedish.

  Nikos tried to follow the words, but his thoughts kept going to the little girl. There had never been time to be with her, never time to tell her how very very much he loved her. His only child and he had never said I love you.

  He found himself praying: God, please give her back to me so I can tell her I loved her.

  Maria-Kristina threw the first handful of earth, Nikos the second.

  Afterward they walked along the beach.

  “We haven’t been together here in a long time,” he said.

  “Not since we were married.”

  “It seems a lifetime ago.”

  “It was.”

  He looked at the woman who had once been his wife. Her skin had the translucent beauty of middle age but her eyes were the same unfading gray-green he remembered.

  “Did you ever think we’d be here again, like this?” he said.

  “I try not to think like that. Each day is hard enough without adding others to it.”

  “I can still remember her as a girl. Little Renata. With golden pigtails. And now she won’t even live to be a mother.” He suddenly stopped. “How can God let it happen?”

  “Maybe someday, with patience, we’ll know the reason.”

  He wondered if she really believed those things. “There’s no reason. It’s pointless, all the living and dying and suffering and growing old.”

  The hand that took his was soft and strong. “It’s a mystery and we have to endure it. How we endure it makes all the difference.”

  “I’m not very good at the ‘how.’”

  “Come up to the house. We’ll have coffee. Ilse has baked that raisin cake you love.”

  Nikos flew back to New York that night. He arrived at the apartment in the morning and found hundreds of letters waiting. One was from Ariana. He was reading it for the third time when Maggie came breezing through the hallway.

  She was obviously on her way to an appointment. Already she was beginning to dress like the highest-paid woman in TV history: diamonds, pearls, a pink Mainbocher suit. She saw him and immediately her manner became subdued.

  “Nikos, I’m so terribly, terribly sorry. About your daughter and about the mixup. Nobody knew it was your secretary phoning.” She stopped in front of the mirror. She placed a cartwheel hat on her head and tried it at different angles. It matched her suit and jiggled with dyed egret feathers. “I’d have done anything to be on that plane with you. I could have murdered those fools when I heard they didn’t put the call through.”

  “Read this.”

  He thrust Ariana’s letter at her. Her eyes glanced over it.

  “Very sweet.” She handed it back. “Very considerate.”

  “That’s all you can say? Sweet, considerate?”

  “What do you expect me to say?”

  “There is one living person in the world who cares if I or my family live or die—and it isn’t you.”

  “Anyone can write a note.”

  “Anyone can get to a plane on time.”

  “Nikos, I didn’t know. No one told me.”

  “You’re lying. You knew.”

  She whirled, eyes mustering denial. “Are you actually accu—”

  He seized her head between his hands and bent it back. “She is my family. Not you. From now on, Stratiotis watches over Kavalaris. And you—” He flung her away from him.

  She stood massaging her neck, crying softly.

  “Don’t cry, little princess. Maybe someday some TV producer will come along and make you the whore you yearn to be.”

  That summer—armed with twelve gowns, her briki, two pounds of chamomile tea and three of Vassilaros, the only decent Greek coffee available outside of Greece—Ariana gave eighteen sold-out concerts in the Far East. Audiences applauded wildly when she put on a kimono to sing “Un Bel Di.” Critics never mentioned that she was transposing everything down.

  Five weeks later she sat in a New York screening room. Images of her concert at the Pyramids flooded the screen; the sound came through a small speaker that buzzed on every A-flat.

  Her gaze sifted through the darkness, catching the puzzled expressions on the faces around her. One of the junior executives rolled a joint.

  The reel finished. The lights came up. The president of Channel 4 stood and shook her hand. “That was a most stimulating experience, Miss Kavalaris.”

  “When will you air it?”

  “It’s not quite our sort of material. Well, we knew it was a gamble, didn’t we?”

  “I want to talk to your friend,” Ariana told Monte at dinner that night. “Your friend Mort Degan.”

  “What happened, hon?” Richard Schiller stood before Ariana and gazed at her with concern. “You used to have savvy. And now you’re mixed up with this Degan.”

  “He’s managing a concert for Monte and me, that’s all.”

  “First of all, you shouldn’t be singing with that ha
s-been. Second, you don’t know Degan. I can understand you’re disappointed in last year’s bookings. But he’s a drunk and a cokehead. You don’t need him.”

  There was an instant’s silence in the office and then she drew herself up. “I never thought you’d stoop to that.”

  “I’m not the one who’s stooping, hon. And I’m not letting you do this concert.”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “I say no and I’m your agent.”

  “Were my agent. Goodbye, Richard.”

  She was moving into new terrain; and if that meant burning a few bridges, so what. She sold three sable coats. She had Sotheby’s auction her living room antiques. She took a loss, but since she was backing the concert herself she needed the cash.

  Mort Degan handled the production details. Every time she went to his office there was a piece of paper needing her signature.

  “Would you just sign this agreement with the stage managers? All three copies. And there’s a rider, be sure to initial. And when you’re through with that would you sign this?”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re opening a special bank account at Chase.”

  “What for?”

  “Expenses, ever heard of expenses?” Mort smiled. He was a full-time smiler. “Sign where your name’s typed. All three. And would you sign this—hate to hit you with so much paper.”

  “What is it?”

  “The bond.”

  “Bond?”

  “In case we burn the house down, they’ll want to be reimbursed.”

  The first ad was a half-page in the New York Times the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

  MORTON DEGAN ASSOCIATES PRESENT

  IN CONCERT

  LIVE

  THE DREAM DUET

  ARIANA KAVALARIS/GIORGIO MONTECAVALLO

  FAVORITE ARIAS FROM OPERA, BROADWAY, AND FOLKLORE

  MAIL ORDERS NOW. TICKETS AT BOX OFFICE TOMORROW 10 A.M.

  The sun was shining the next morning. Ariana and Monte hailed a taxi and asked the driver to go slowly past Carnegie Hall. At 9:00 A.M. the line stretched around two corners and halfway down the block to Sixth Avenue.

  Ariana grabbed Monte’s arm. “All those people. They remember.” Her eyes were beginning to tear.