Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  The Manon Lescaut dress rehearsal that fall went perfectly until the fourth act, when Manon lay dying on what Puccini called “the plains of Louisiana.” Boyd rapped his baton on the music stand, silencing the orchestra. “Vanessa, the tempo changes at ‘sei tu’—the value of the quarter note is 72, not 69. Otherwise you’re dragging.”

  She moved toward the apron of the stage. “It feels wrong to speed up there.”

  “Sorry, sweetums. If you want to see my score—”

  Boyd looked down at his conductor’s score, the score from which he had conducted all of Ariana’s Manon Lescauts. In a red marker, in Ariana’s handwriting, overriding Puccini’s tempo indication, he saw an X slashed through the 72 and the emphatically gashed command: Quarter equals 69 sempre!! Boyd, this is my moment and don’t you dare screw me up!

  Vanessa’s eyes met Boyd’s across the footlights and for one heart-stopping instant, seeing her in the powdered wig and torn gray deportee’s uniform, he thought she was his dead wife.

  He cleared his throat. “Well, sweetums, we could try 69. Orchestra, make a note.” He raised his baton again. “All set, harp? Take it from where the meter changes to 2/4. Give it guts, gentlemen.”

  At 8:26 P.M. on the evening of October 23 on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera, Vanessa Billings, glittering in the traveling clothes of an eighteenth-century schoolgirl, stepped from the carriage that was to carry her to the convent.

  The audience stirred like a wind-brushed forest.

  From the moment she opened her mouth, they were hers. She knit the arias and recitatives of her role into a character, a fierce amalgam of innocence and willfulness that came hurtling across the footlights like a demonic angel. Her slightest movement, her softest utterance was charged with seduction, as though all the world’s sexual longing had, for that evening, incarnated in her flesh and voice.

  Like the four thousand other men and women in the house, Ames Rutherford in his third row seat in the grand tier sat spellbound, fascinated, amazed at how fresh and new the performance made Puccini seem. Each note Billings sang was like a faceted jewel sending out brilliant shafts of melody.

  Fran rested against him, her hand touching his for most of the first act. But as Des Grieux proposed to Manon, “Fuggiamo, fuggiamo”—“Let’s flee, let’s flee”—Ames drew away.

  Something is about to happen. Watch out.

  The feeling of foreboding came out of nowhere. There was no reason for it. He didn’t know the opera, didn’t know the performers, he certainly didn’t know the future; yet he was suddenly certain that everything happening now had happened before—the music, the movement, the bustle and the light on the stage, the rapt silence and the soft floating perfumes in the audience.

  An almost claustrophobic panic rose in him and he had no walls to contain it. It was as though he were on the very edge of knowing something he couldn’t bear to know.

  He rose, pushed his way past knees and purses, felt Fran reaching out after him, found the aisle and the steps leading up through the darkness to the light-etched outline of the exit door.

  He went to the grand tier bar, the only customer. His heart was pounding in his throat. The stillness was dense with muffled Puccini. He took a hard swallow of Stolichnaya on the rocks. Instead of calming him, it hit him like a triphammer, ramming his pulse up through his skull.

  The bartender was making a wise face. “They say Billings is going to be the next Kavalaris. Do you agree, sir?”

  “Highly probable. Could you pour me another of these, please?”

  Fran came hurrying across the red carpeting. “Ames, what happened to you? Are you all right?” She stood looking at him. Something had changed in his eyes. They were like the hollows in Greek statues, with no one behind them.

  “Just a moment of claustrophobia,” he said. “It’s pretty stuffy in there.”

  At that moment applause broke out in the house. Jeweled dowagers and tuxedoed escorts began streaming toward the bar.

  “Would you like to go home?” Fran asked.

  Ames downed his second vodka. “Hell no. I’m fine now.”

  He had another vodka in the next intermission, another in the third. Fran, watching him with anxious eyes, drank soda with lime.

  At 11:20, as the curtain fell on the final act, Ames and Fran hurried out to Broadway to beat the crowd to a taxi, and Billings was called back for twelve curtain calls.

  The frantic dresser hurried Dr. Abscheid into the dressing room.

  Vanessa was lying full-length on the settee, her face buried in the pillow. The doctor rolled her over. Her skin was deathly white. He loosened the bodice of her costume, felt for the pulse in her neck.

  At first he thought she had lapsed into coma but then as her breathing deepened he realized she had simply fallen asleep after an exhausting performance.

  She stretched and turned over onto her side. Her eyes opened. There was an instant of dazzling gray-green incomprehension.

  “Was I dreaming?” She sat up.

  Dr. Abscheid coiled the tube of his stethoscope. “I don’t know. Were you?”

  “That was no dream.” Richard Schiller handed her a bouquet of three dozen white roses. “You brought down the house.”

  “I was really all right?”

  Richard smiled at the others. “You hear the little girl?”

  Nikos took her home in his limousine.

  “Thank you for the roses,” she said. “They were beautiful. And thank you for this evening.”

  “Thank you for this evening. It gave me such joy.” He settled his arm across the top of the seat, spanning the space between them but not touching her. “You know, it’s strange. I used to hate opera. And now I never seem to think of anything else.”

  A faint breath of rose scent came up from the air-conditioning duct. She could feel him wanting to draw her closer. After a moment she rested her head against his shoulder.

  “Nikos,” she said quietly, “what was Ariana like?”

  He sighed. “I’m sure you knew her better than I ever managed to.”

  “No. To me she was a teacher—always distant, always unreal. To you she was flesh and blood.”

  His gaze came around gravely to her face. “Why do you ask?”

  “Isn’t it natural for a woman to be curious about her predecessor?”

  He was silent, looking out the limousine window through glass so polished it seemed not to be there at all. The glistening high-rises of Central Park West sparkled in the night.

  “I was twenty-five.” His voice was soft with remembering. “I walked into a coffee shop on Broadway. There she was. Dark hair, dark eyes that looked at me like a wounded little girl’s. She wasn’t a star then. But she had spirit… intelligence…independence…”

  “And beauty?”

  He nodded. “Beauty. Oh, yes, she had beauty. And twenty-one years later, when we finally made love…she was more beautiful still.”

  He spoke about their meetings, their courtship, their living together. He spoke of the happiness that had turned to unhappiness and of the gradual coming-apart.

  “Why did it go sour?” Vanessa asked. “Because of Maggie?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Because of me. I was never able to…”He fell silent.

  “Able to what, Nikos?”

  He was staring at his hands, squeezed together in his lap. His voice was tight. “To admit how much I loved her. I’ve never been able to admit how much I loved anyone…until it was too late. I’m good at everything else but that.”

  She raised her head and touched her lips to the side of his neck. “There are other ways of saying it than words.”

  He turned and held her in his gaze. “I wish tonight could last. The performance. The applause. The way you sounded. The way you look. Riding home, like this, with you. If only it could last.”

  “It will last, Nikos. We can make it last.”

  38

  “YOU’RE MAKING TOO MUCH scandal," Holly Chamers said
in April. He was sitting with Nikos in the New York office, drinking espresso and reviewing strategy on next week’s stock offering.

  “I can afford scandal,” Nikos said quietly.

  “We’ve persuaded a very conservative brokerage house to underwrite us. They don’t appreciate their client showing up in tabloids between the disco gossip and the cocaine busts.”

  “It’s a changed world, Holly. Fame is an asset nowadays. Any kind of fame. A mass murderer could franchise hamburgers. A dictator’s mistress could put her name on a line of blue jeans. And a hundred banks would be waiting in line to back them.”

  Holly shook his head dubiously. “I still wish you’d slow down a little with the singer.”

  Nikos paced to the window and turned. “She’s an oasis for me. She gets my mind off work. She gets my mind off all the nonsense, all the parties and cruises and people I can’t stand. Most of all she gets my mind off my ridiculous marriage. I’m crazy without her and with her I’m sane. I don’t understand it and I don’t want to understand it. All I know is, I need her.”

  The phone rang. Nikos snatched up the receiver, listened an instant, shot off commands. “She’ll be singing at the Paris Opera Wednesday. It’s a late curtain. Have the limousine waiting at the stage door. And make sure the plane’s waiting at the airport.”

  Nikos hung up and his counsel’s blue eyes pierced him. “And you’ll be waiting on your yacht in Cannes, I suppose?”

  Nikos didn’t deny it.

  Holly smiled a cynical, accepting smile. “Face it. You’ve never had sense where women are concerned, you never will.”

  “What’s the point to women if I have to have sense? I have sense in business. I’ve earned a little madness.”

  “And if the principessa’s on that yacht, a little madness is exactly what you’re going to get.”

  Nikos had done all the inviting himself. He had persuaded the Marquis and Marchioness of Ava to come on board for three days. Sir Herbert Parry, who painted the royal family and did society portraits, was staying at the Angleterre in Nice and Nikos had gotten him to join the party for Thursday and Friday and bring Lady Parry, Britain’s first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer. He felt reasonably sure that with a British cabinet minister on board Maggie would behave herself and not slip into one of her famous public pouts.

  Vanessa arrived by seaplane from the airport Thursday night. She seemed to shine in her plain white dress, and even at night her wide-brimmed red straw hat threw a warm glow on her face.

  Nikos made introductions.

  Maggie hid her shock well. “You could have warned me,” she hissed later, as they were going to their stateroom.

  “And spoil the surprise?”

  “Don’t you dare humiliate me, Nikos. Not in front of these people.”

  He made no attempt to seek Vanessa out. But the next day he saw her on the deck just after sunset. She was standing at the railing some distance from the others, staring out at the sea, her face sweet and serious. He joined her.

  The sky was hushed and the lights and sounds of Nice seemed to come across an enormous gulf of space and time.

  “I’d like to stand here beside you forever,” he said.

  She smiled. “You’d get bored with that.”

  “I’d never be bored with you.”

  He ached to press her close to him and cover her face and throat with kisses. But he sensed that was not the way.

  “Oh, Nikos, I’m so insignificant compared to your friends. They run empires and I…warble.”

  “You’re more significant than any of them, and you know it.”

  She squeezed his hand for just a moment, gratefully. “Why are you so good for my ego?”

  “Why are you so good for mine?”

  After dinner Maggie rose and clapped her hands for silence. “Vanessa, could I possibly persuade you to sing a few songs in the ship’s lounge? I’m sure our guests would love it as much as I would.”

  The guests applauded, and Vanessa felt a burn of anger creeping up her neck and face. She was tempted to say she never sang except onstage; but she realized that this was exactly the reply her hostess hoped to force out of her.

  Vanessa gathered all her graciousness into a smile. “I’d be delighted to sing.”

  Instinct told Nikos not to applaud too loudly, not to court Vanessa Billings too openly. He excused himself and went to his stateroom after her third selection.

  Through the open porthole he heard a soprano voice floating effortlessly through “Regnava nel Silenzio,” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The sound came to him above the waves, like a memory. His book fell to his lap and he dozed off smiling.

  Maggie came into the stateroom a little after two in the morning. She was stripping off jewels, talking irritably as Nikos woke up. “I don’t care for the way your Miss Billings carries on. She treated our guests as if they were a backers’ audition.”

  “How so?”

  “Monopolizing things, singing all those dull songs.”

  “Be fair, Maggie. It was you who asked her to sing.”

  “But not all those arias.”

  “What did you expect? ‘Melancholy Baby’?”

  “At least that would have been short. I thought she’d never shut up. Did you invite her to annoy me? Are you having an affair with her?”

  “Do you see me in her bed?”

  “Not yet.”

  Nikos opened a book. “Then why don’t you just relax about Vanessa and enjoy her?”

  “Why on earth should I enjoy that woman?”

  “A lot of hostesses would kill to have her for five days.”

  “You invited her for five days?”

  Nikos nodded and turned a page of his book.

  Maggie thumped a gold bracelet down onto the bureau. “Then I’m getting off this ship and you can entertain La Billings and all your old bores yourself.”

  The Maria-Kristina docked at Corfu three days later. Principessa Maggie disembarked, carrying her overnight case, and dropped into the back seat of the only taxi at the dock.

  Rage beat in her heart. “Take me into town.”

  The taxi honked its way through twisting cobbled streets. Maggie gazed at perfume shops, liquor shops, souvenir shops. She gazed at an art shop with a window full of local-looking paintings and sculptures and handicrafts.

  She realized she was staring at the solution.

  “Driver—stop here, please.”

  The air over New York City’s Jamaica Bay had turned misty and smoggy as Air France Flight 546 from Paris touched safely down. The terminal swarmed with travelers. Press and TV reporters added to the congestion, clustering like bees in the exit corridor.

  A figure in black mink raised a hand to her face as she passed through customs, placing dark glasses over her eyes. Too late. A woman from Newsweek recognized her, and then CBS and the Washington Post took up the shout: “Miss Billings!”

  They rushed with her in a wave, leaving no lane of clearance.

  “Are you having an affair with Nikos Stratiotis?”

  She removed the glasses and faced them. “I’ll tell you if you tell me who wrote La Traviata.”

  “Richard Wagner.”

  “There will be no June wedding.”

  Ames had been sitting at his typewriter for three hours and nothing had flowed but crumpled sheets into the wastebasket. He snapped the power switch off and went to get a beer.

  Fran was in bed with a book and she called out as he passed the open door. “Coming to bed soon?”

  “Depends if I get lucky at the typewriter.”

  He pulled a beer from the fridge and went to the study and dropped down in front of the TV. He played with the remote control, channel-hopping to see what they had on this late at night.

  He was slumped in the Barcalounger, peering at commercials and late movies, when a woman’s mocking voice drew him up with a start. “There will be no June wedding.”

  As he stared at Vanessa Billings’s face he
r lips parted in a luminous smile. He realized he had been daydreaming about that smile, following it in his half-conscious thoughts for days now. He leapt up from the chair, pressed the “record” button on the VCR, was able to get just a snippet of her before a commercial cut her short.

  He ran the tape back, stopped the frame on her, stared. He sat half an hour gazing at her face.

  “This is crazy.”

  He gulped the last of the now-warm beer and went and took a long hot stinging shower. When he came into the bedroom the light was out and he could hear Fran’s breathing, regular and untroubled in sleep.

  He got another beer, dropped down again in front of the TV, lit a cigarette and began staring again at the face.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr. Stratiotis, but the shipping agent won’t release the statues unless he’s paid cash.”

  Nikos glanced up from his desk. “What statues?”

  “The Cupids Mrs. Stratiotis ordered in Corfu.” His secretary handed him the duplicate invoice.

  His eyes quickly scanned the column of figures—$132,000 to ship stones first-class letter rate. He felt the unreality of it and a dull fatigue cut into him. “From now on, Mrs. Stratiotis’s expenses are her own affair—not mine, not this company’s. And Miss Owens—I mean all her expenses. Please see to it.”

  In absolute rigidity Principessa Maggie listened as the shipping agent explained why the Cupids could not be sent by limousine to the apartment. She pressed another button on the phone.

  “Tell the chauffeur I need him to take me shopping.”

  Maggie was looking at rings when a cabochon sapphire engraved with a tiny figure caught her eye.

  The salesman showed it to her under a magnifying glass. “Diana, goddess of the hunt.”

  Maggie pulled off two rings, making room, and slipped Diana onto her finger. “It’s loose.”

  “We can tighten the band.”

  She sighed. “How long will that take?”

  “Would tomorrow noon be convenient?”

  “No, I need it for a party tonight.” She handed back the ring and stalked around the display counters like a starved lioness. And then she saw a display case full of necklaces. “How very pretty,” she said. “How very, very pretty.”