Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “What in the world are you talking about, sweetums?”

  “Three Santuzzas and six Neddas. Opening and closing night on the Washington tour—as the Marschallin!”

  “She’s only understudying the Marschallin,” Boyd said.

  “That makes no difference.” Clara’s head snapped back into a stare that bored into his skull. “Maybe her future is great. But she cannot leap into it. She must crawl like anyone else!”

  “Now, Clara, you hardly had to crawl into the Metropolitan.”

  She was jabbing diamond-crusted fingers dangerously near his eyes. “Three years in Palermo, four years with Barcelona Lyric, never a Marschallin in New York—and this Billings, with one arioso at a funeral—you give her everything!”

  “Why does she frighten you?”

  “I am not frightened,” she screamed, “I am disgusted!”

  A strange excitement exploded in Boyd Kinsolving’s chest. It began to dawn on him just how good the Billings girl really was.

  “I will not sing at this house if she does. You hear me, Boyd?”

  “Yes, sweetums. You’ve made everything quite plain.”

  It took Boyd Kinsolving till three that afternoon to break through Richard Schiller’s phone defenses. “I can’t hire the Billings girl. If she sets foot on this stage, Clara walks.”

  Richard muttered, “That piggy little bitch.”

  “But there’s another possibility. Can you bring Billings to Côte Basque for lunch tomorrow?”

  Richard asked Vanessa to meet him in the restaurant at one. His heart broke when he saw her sitting there in a pretty white dress, bursting with anticipation.

  He talked slowly, explaining. He reached across the table and took her hand. She sat silent, motionless.

  Boyd Kinsolving sauntered in twenty minutes late, wearing a red ski jacket. “Miss Billings?” He took her hand. “You’ve got a terrific agent and I love your work and I’m sick about the mixup.” He sat and opened the menu. “Excuse me if I seem a little high, but I’ve just been rehearsing Strauss with the Philharmonic. God, that man is the sun.”

  “The sun?” Vanessa said pleasantly. “I’ve always thought he was a satellite of Wagner.”

  “Satellite?” Boyd Kinsolving laid down his half-moon glasses and peered at this young lady who not only sang but talked back.

  She said that Wagner captured the psychology of the human race, but Strauss never got further than the individual. “Take the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’—it’s a universal cataclysm. Compared to those pages, Elektra’s dance of triumph and Salomè’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ are strictly local events.”

  Boyd Kinsolving placed his glasses back onto his nose. “I’m scheduled to record in London next month. But my soprano has decided to have a baby. Can you sing Manon for me?”

  “Puccini’s or Massenet’s?” she asked.

  Both composers had written operas—Manon Lescaut and Manon, respectively—based on Abbè Prevost’s novel. It wasn’t unusual for two composers to take the same subject. What was unusual was for both operas to achieve lasting popularity. Usually one ousted the other: Verdi’s Otello had wiped out Rossini’s; Puccini’s Bohème had kept Leoncavallo’s in permanent shade. But the two Manons—one raw Italian passion, the other pure French elegance—had thrived.

  “Massenet’s,” Boyd said.

  “I don’t know the role,” she said quietly.

  “Of course, you won’t have to memorize,” Boyd said, “and it’s all going to be short takes anyway. You’ll be singing with the London Philharmonic. To my mind, they’re the most sensitive opera orchestra in the world bar none. Your tenor will be Lucco Patemio. He’s still good in the recording studio. Richard, tell her to do it.”

  Richard nodded. “Do it.”

  “May I think about it? Overnight at least?”

  Boyd Kinsolving smiled a charming smile that said no. “Don’t worry about learning anything. We’ll get Austin Waters to coach you. He taught that role to Callas in—was it three weeks, Richard?”

  “Two.”

  “Then it’s settled? Good. Let’s celebrate. Champagne with our oysters?”

  For the first time in his career as a working writer, Ames Rutherford dead-ended.

  He sat at his desk and nothing came. He walked two thousand miles around his desk and nothing came.

  Something was gone: the will, the trick, the ability. He couldn’t call it back. When he shut his eyes and tried to summon up words, all that came was the image of that face in the choir loft.

  After twelve days dribbled away like cat piss in a litterbox, he knew he would never write this article, and after thirteen he began to wonder if he would ever write anything again. He went to the man at Knickerbocker magazine who thought he had the makings of a features writer. “Greg, I just can’t lick this one.”

  Rising from his desk, Greg Hatoff pulled the after-lunch cigar out of his mouth. He was a large man, his face tanned even in winter, his brown eyes nested in a web of smile lines. “Maybe you don’t want to dish the dirt on your dad. I can understand that. Hell, I can even admire it.”

  Ames had come prepared for an argument and instead the manipulative bastard gave him understanding.

  “I’ll have my agent return the advance.”

  Greg threw an arm around Ames’s shoulder. “Hey, keep the money. It’ll be a retainer for your next.”

  For ten days Vanessa Billings studied Jules Massenet’s Manon, and Boyd Kinsolving assumed the score was causing his new star no insurmountable difficulties. A week before the recording date he invited Vanessa’s coach to dinner just to make sure.

  Austin Waters sat at the long dining table and seemed to be trying to bring himself to say something very difficult. “How well do you know this Billings?”

  “Oh, Christ.” Boyd set down his fork and reached for his wineglass. “She can’t read music. She has no memory. She has no top. No bottom. Will you please get that spooked look off your face and tell me the bad news?”

  “Why’d you hire her?”

  “Instinct. Plus she sounded good at the funeral. Plus—I don’t know. There’s something about her…”

  Austin Waters was silent in the flickering candlelight. He had gray hair and penetrating eyes and something was definitely troubling him. “I worked with her when she was Ariana’s pupil. She’s changed. There’s no way I can coach her in this role.”

  Boyd stared in shocked silence and felt the earth give way beneath him. Austin was one of the best coaches in opera. He’d taught beginners, he’d restored old-timers, he was known to work magic. And here he was admitting defeat. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Did she tell you she’d sung Manon before?”

  “No. She was honest. She admitted she’d never sung it.”

  “Then she’s lying.” Austin leaned forward. He spoke almost in a whisper. “Boyd, she’s not learning the score. She knows it. Every note, every intonation—from day one, she had it down pat. Not to mention that her French is beautiful. But this is the bizarre part. It’s Ariana’s performance.”

  Boyd stared at him, not understanding. “But Ariana never sang Massenet’s Manon.”

  “Believe me, if she had, it would have sounded like this.”

  Boyd sank back into his chair. A tightness lifted from his chest. “Then you’re telling me she’s good.”

  “She’s not just good. She’s the best.”

  Boyd Kinsolving flew to London eight days later.

  Vanessa Billings astonished him.

  She wore a light dress to the recording studio and her blond hair was pulled back with a blue ribbon like a little girl’s. She was completely at ease in front of one hundred of the most experienced, critical musicians in the world.

  She didn’t strive, she glided into the role. She had scrupulous phrasing, clean attack; she refused to swoop into notes; she projected not just the melodic quality, but the drama of each tone. Everything—timbre, shading, phrasing—was there.

  H
er work was perfect on the first take. In three eight-hour work days they taped the major arias of Acts One and Two.

  On the fourth day Boyd took Vanessa to a light lunch at Claridge’s. They chatted about opera, or, rather, she chatted and he tried to listen without showing amazement.

  She told him that she didn’t think of opera as music. “Its roots are musical, but it’s really theater and emotion and sensation. Don’t you think that’s why so many musicians mistrust it?”

  Boyd asked what she thought melody was if not music.

  “Operatic melody began as music,” she said. “But compare a melody of Strauss and a melody of Mozart, or of Puccini and Donizetti. Look how the later composers have broken free of musical logic and substituted emotional impact. Look how they rely on harmony and orchestration to buttress their melodic line. You can transcribe the arias of early opera or even sing them without accompaniment. Melodies of later opera exist only in the environment their composers have set them in.”

  Boyd tried to look wise and suitably unimpressed. “You have a point,” he conceded, and he caught the waiter’s eye to signal for more wine.

  By 3:00 P.M. on the fifth day of recording they had reached Manon’s gavotte, “Profitons de la jeunesse”—“Let’s enjoy youth while we have it.” Vanessa took all the optional high runs, including a spectacular rippling scale from low E to D above high C. At another point she attacked a climactic note mezzo forte, then without warning she made a diminuendo, bringing the sound down almost to a whisper. The effect was hypnotic, like a bright blaze of light suddenly narrowing to a burning infinitesimal pinpoint.

  And then she brought the tone up and out, steady and strong and absolutely even, building it to a mass of sound that pulsed through the entire space of the studio, a physical presence so huge, so solid, so tangible that every musician in the room could feel its shimmering weight pressing down on him.

  And then—where any other soprano would be stretching the effect, slugging it home—silence. No sound.

  Boyd wondered why she had cut the note short, but so far the take was perfect, and he was willing to go with her. He gave the downbeat for the next measure. On the second beat Vanessa glanced at him and he knew immediately that something was wrong.

  He signaled the orchestra to cut.

  “Vanessa, that was beautiful, just ravishing. What went wrong? You can hold that note as long as you like—I’ll follow you.”

  She shook her head. “It can’t be held. The oboe enters there and the voice will drown it.”

  He looked down at his score. She was right. The oboe entered on the fourth beat, a three-note phrase that the composer had marked avec douleur—“with sadness.” He had never noticed the entrance before, and he was certain he had never heard it in any performance or recording. “Oboe, three bars after H, fourth beat, what do you have?”

  The player bent toward his music stand and squinted. “A rest.”

  Boyd frowned. Apparently there was a mistake in the publisher’s orchestral parts. “There should be an E-flat tied across the bar line.”

  The oboist bent forward again and jotted the note on his part.

  “Can we take that again, just the orchestra?” Boyd raised his baton and gave the downbeat.

  The music surged, and at the climactic dissonance, the oboe added a sting of regret. Suddenly, a musical passage that had been simple melodrama was pure emotion.

  “Perfect.” Boyd lowered his baton. “Absolutely perfect.”

  He wondered how Billings could have known. She couldn’t have memorized the orchestral score. It was enough work just learning her own part. He had never in all his years of conducting opera known a singer who bothered to learn the orchestral part.

  Except Ariana.

  Afterward he asked Vanessa, “How did you know about that oboe?”

  “It’s my business to know. The orchestra is one of the most important characters in opera—don’t you agree?”

  He mused a moment. “I’d never thought of it that way.”

  “The orchestra is like the narrator in a novel. It knows the past, the present, the future—the causes, the outcomes, the reasons. And it always tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  He stared at her and had the impression he was seeing someone else.

  “You amaze me,” he said.

  35

  IN HER CENTRAL PARK West co-op, Clara Rodrigo was running out of breath. Her voice clawed its way up toward the A-flat, got as far as G, and—with a grotesque squawk—cracked.

  Her accompanist, who made house calls twice weekly, looked at her with an odd arch to his eyebrow. “Excuse me, madame, it’s difficult to sustain the line unless you breathe before the E-flat. In fact, Bellini inserts the rest for that reason.”

  Clara squinted at the score and wondered why she had never noticed that rest before. “Kavalaris never breathed before the E-flat and my breath control is far better than hers.”

  The accompanist drew himself absolutely straight on the piano bench and was silent.

  “You’re useless,” Clara said. “You’re all useless. None of you understands what I’m trying to achieve. Well, there’s always Austin Waters. I don’t like him, but he at least understands the voice.”

  She phoned Austin Waters. She got his answering service, who said he was in London and would not be back for ten days. She slammed down the phone. How dare he go off without telling her? Didn’t he know she might need him?

  She made another phone call, this time to one of Austin’s students. She chatted. She offered passes for her performance of Cavalleria Thursday. Finally, “And what do you hear of dear Austin?”

  She listened, and her mind became like a magnifying glass. She began to perceive the tiny links in the plot against her. “Thank you, my dear. Do enjoy the tickets.”

  She hung up. A scream ripped out of her.

  Clara hired a limousine and got to JFK airport barely in time for the 8:30 evening flight to London. She stopped at Claridge’s and freshened up, and at 10:00 A.M. she strode into the HMV Kingsway studio as though she owned controlling interest in the company. She waved a jeweled hand at the guard. He let her pass. She went directly to the control room and stood listening.

  The Billings girl was floating a long arc of sound over a murmuring string accompaniment. The ache that went through Clara was part admiration, part envy, but mostly despair. She knew she would never again sing those notes as this girl did, in one unbroken breath.

  She touched the engineer’s shoulder. “Stop the recording.”

  A goateed face lifted two eyes of shock at her.

  “She should have sung A-flat on douce,” Clara said.

  The engineer hesitated, then leaned toward the mike and raised his voice over the torrent of sound. “Mr. Kinsolving, sorry to interrupt. We seem to have a problem.”

  Clara refused the chair to which Boyd gestured her. “Boyd, you’re a rascal. Didn’t we agree she wouldn’t sing with you?”

  “We agreed she wouldn’t sing at the Met.”

  Steel edged into her voice. “But, dear Boyd, you are the Met.”

  He looked into her eyes and saw the madness of Lady Macbeth, of Medea and Lucia. “Now Clara, we’re in London. Our orchestra is British.”

  “You gave me your word. Either you keep your word, or I break my contract.” She opened her purse, took out a document, and began ripping.

  Boyd went through a rapid calculation. For six years now Clara had been abusing her voice, jetting across continents and oceans to five engagements a week, taking on roles she couldn’t handle. Her pitch was insecure on the top notes and she had the beginnings of a wobble. On the other hand, she still had a following, and she could still count on reviews. Vanessa Billings had as yet no following, no friends among the critics.

  For the moment, Boyd needed Clara more than he needed Vanessa.

  He reached out and stayed her hand. “Clara, you’ve made your point. Stop ripping.”

 
; They were sitting at a table in the Waldorf bar. Boyd was drinking his gin and tonic, Vanessa was stirring hers.

  “I believed in this project,” she said. “I believed in you and for the first time in ten years I believed in myself. I learned the role and I really thought we were going to do something wonderful.”

  “And we did do something wonderful.” He put his hand over hers. He could feel her pulling her strength back into herself.

  “Have you had dinner?” he offered.

  “No, thanks. I’ll eat on the plane tonight.”

  Richard Schiller listened and nodded with carefully measured sympathy. He didn’t need her feeling sorry for herself. “Boyd Kinsolving made a mistake,” he said. “That’s his problem.”

  Vanessa huddled in the chair. “Sometimes I feel so powerless.”

  “Then sometimes you’re an idiot. You’re going to give a recital. We’ll book Alice Tully Hall. We’ll buy ads on the classical stations—and we’ll use your Manon tapes. You’ll sing some lieder, some folksongs, and since you went to all the trouble of learning them, you’ll sing Manon’s three big arias.”

  For a moment she didn’t react. “I’m not sure I can face…”

  “To hell with you. You’re going to do this for Ariana.”

  “Hey, honey,” Ames called.

  Fran raised a questioning smile. “Mmm-hmm?”

  He was stretched in his bathrobe, leafing through the entertainment section of the Sunday Times. They were on the glassed-in sun terrace, and a pot of coffee was steaming on the table.

  “How’d you like to go to a concert on the twenty-third?”

  “We can’t. Cathy and Sid Guberman invited us for dinner.”

  He groaned. “Dinner and slides of their trip to Egypt? Say your mother’s in town. Say mine just died. Say anything.”

  “What’s so great about this concert?”

  “It’s that woman I heard at Kavalaris’s funeral.”

  “Since when are you such an enthusiast for song recitals?”

  “I’m not going to miss this one, Fran. If you want to watch slides at Cathy’s, watch slides. But I’m going.”Alice Tully Hall was sold out the evening of the concert, and Fran and Ames squeezed into their seats just as a rising wave of applause welcomed the singer on stage.