Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “Let’s start with Billings.”

  It was as if she were making affectionate fun of a person who wasn’t there. She told him of the years of unrelenting discipline, of the obsessive will that enabled Billings to condition the muscles of the body and voice. “Billings never finishes learning anything—not technique, not a role. And when she’s in shape she can never hold it long: maybe four hours; for Götterdämmerung, six. Then she has to start from the beginning with the same dumb do-re-mi’s. Behind every hour when she’s in form on that stage are thirty when she’s killing herself.”

  She refused to discuss her own period of eclipse after the disastrous Traviata in Philadelphia. On the other hand, she told him stories that no journalist had ever written about her.

  “Billings is a real bitch about her hot milk and blackstrap molasses after every performance. It does absolutely no good, of course; in fact milk causes mucus. But her granny gave it to her as a child and no diva likes to give up her bad habits.”

  She told him of songs that had stayed in her memory since childhood, the popular songs, the folksongs, the easy classics everyone starts with, music that even today could pull her up from depression and restore her faith in life.

  “I can’t believe you’ve ever been depressed or lost your faith in anything,” Ames said.

  She gave him a long look. For a moment they held each other in the cool trembling of their gazes.

  And suddenly he wasn’t thinking of any interview. He felt all the emptiness in himself, all the space, all the hungering past, waiting to be filled.

  And now, suddenly, he was very sexually aware of her. Not yet. I could kiss her now, but I’m not going to.

  But that wasn’t what happened. To his surprise he found himself getting up from his chair. The act involved no will, no choosing. It was as though someone else were walking over to her.

  She reached out a hand. As it grazed his cheek, he felt a pinpricking of excitement run along his skin. Neither of them moved, and he knew with absolute sureness that she felt the same desire as he did.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and studied her troubled face for a long moment, then bent forward and lightly touched her lips with his. For a moment she did not respond, then with a tiny moan she locked her arms around him, pressing their bodies together as her lips parted hungrily.

  He tasted the cool tip of her tongue. The kiss did not stop. It was a kiss with no turning back after it. He went and locked the door.

  “In here,” he said, leading her into the bedroom.

  Again, it was not he whose heart was pounding, he who lifted her blouse and kissed her breasts. It was not he who unhooked her skirt and gave her his hand as she stepped out of it.

  And yet, a moment later, it was he who became her lover.

  Vanessa rushed into her apartment, confused, worn out, and exhilarated all at the same time. Her eye fell on a bowl of roses like none she had ever seen before. They were shell pink, with a birthmark of fiery red at the base of each petal. As she bent down to smell them she saw a note. The handwriting was Nikos’s. Sorry you aren’t feeling well. N.

  A phone was ringing in the other room. Cynthia, her secretary, came into the hallway, her bun of gray hair trembling. “He’s been calling every hour since eleven this morning.”

  Vanessa took the call.

  “You’re not feeling well?” Nikos said.

  “I’m all right. Just a little exhausted.”

  “It’s not like you to cancel a rehearsal.”

  She felt a great sadness. He had moved from the center of her life to the margin. “Nikos, I’m dead tired. Can we talk tomorrow?”

  “Of course. I love you.”

  She was silent just a moment too long. Then, “I love you too.”

  The next day Ames shut himself in his study. He knew what he wanted: not the usual celebrity guff about mansion and jewels and limousines but Vanessa herself, an image caught in the blink of a camera’s lens.

  He reviewed his notes. Whole stretches came back to him with astonishing clarity.

  Not just the conversation. How she’d smiled. The moment they had touched. The way her eyes had met his. But he couldn’t get anything down. It was like trying to nail clouds to a board.

  Fran took to appearing at the door. Sometimes she brought coffee or a sandwich and sometimes she was just there, and he had a disturbing sense that she was checking up on him.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Want to walk?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Come on. It feels like you’ve been away a month. I miss you.”

  “Why do you have to start missing me just when I’m trying to write?”

  She stared at him and her voice took on the tautness of a stretched cord. “I’ve lived with you twelve years and do you know something ridiculous? Sometimes I still haven’t the foggiest idea who you are or what you want me to be.”

  He sighed, gathering his patience. “I’m Ames Rutherford, I’m trying to be a writer, and you can be anything you want so long as you let me get this article done.”

  Silence dropped, and he realized he’d raised his voice at her.

  Her color deepened and suddenly she was out the door and a slam followed her, and then she was back looking at Ames with a prayer in her eyes. “Oh, Jesus. Hold me. Please.”

  He got up and held her.

  “I’m so scared,” she said. “I never see you and we haven’t made love in eighteen days. I hate this article and I hate the way it involves you and I’m scared I’m going to lose you.”

  “Lose me to an article?” To her.

  “Who the hell are you talking about?”

  He knew who the hell and he could see she knew he knew but her eyes thanked him for the lie.

  He atoned the only way he knew how: he made dinner. Lobster tails with thick daubs of mustard and Parmesan broiled under a high flame. They ate on the terrace with cool breezes fanning them.

  “Do I dare ask how the article’s coming?” she said.

  “Better,” he lied. “Much better.”

  After dinner he went back to work. He said it would only be for an hour or so, but it was 4:00 A.M. before he came to the bedroom.

  There was a crack of light underneath the bathroom door. He could see Fran’s face against the pillow. She was on her side, breathing deeply.

  “Fran?”

  No answer.

  He undressed and showered, then switched off the light and groped his way carefully through, the dark. He got into bed very quietly so as not to disturb her. But she moved and he felt her breasts pressing against his back, and he realized she had been waiting for him.

  He turned and shut his eyes, praying to be able to love her.

  His arms went around her. His lips passed over her mouth, touching, not kissing. He could feel her beginning to respond and he could feel himself withdrawing, his thoughts fleeing to Vanessa.

  He passed his lips over Fran’s cheeks, then very slowly in a circling movement down to her breasts. Usually it worked for him, but it didn’t work tonight.

  His fingertips moved up to her face. Her eyes were closed and he could feel dampness. She had begun to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She rolled away, pushing out silence like a wall. He felt an ocean of misunderstanding wash between them.

  “Go to sleep,” she said. “Please go to sleep. I love you and it doesn’t matter.”

  But it did matter. It mattered very much.

  She had seen too many changes in him happening too quickly, and they had begun with his work on the opera article.

  She waited till he drove into town for his monthly haircut, then—swallowing her self-reproach—threw herself headlong into a search of his study. She played a quick sampling of his tape cassettes. They appeared to be four stultifyingly ordinary hours of where-did-you-study and what-do-you-eat.

  She leafed rapidly through his notebooks, the “in” and “out” mail trays on his desk where he
kept manuscripts in progress. She combed the desk drawers, the closets, the shelves. She searched the wastebasket. She even looked under cushions and behind pictures.

  In an hour and a half she turned up nothing.

  Nothing typed, nothing handwritten, nothing jotted or scrawled or even doodled. He had been locked in the room, shutting her out for three days, and there was nothing on paper.

  Just as she heard his car coming back, the wheels crunching on the gravel drive, her eye went one last time to his desk. She noticed his address book. A sudden instinct told her to open it.

  A piece of typing paper, neatly folded, fell out.

  She bent and picked it up.

  She had expected an explosion, and instead there was only a whisper. On the paper, in printing that was not Ames’s, was a New York City telephone number. Below that, in loops that danced and leapt across the page, the name Vanessa was written, how many times? She counted.

  Twenty-seven times.

  The handwriting was Ames’s.

  41

  DINNER WAS FRESH SHAD roe with bacon and perfectly steamed string beans and silence. Ames answered Fran’s attempts at conversation in civilized monosyllables. She knew it was the wrong moment to talk and she knew when she was angry she was not her own pilot. But she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

  “Don’t you have any stake at all in us? Am I the only one who’s trying to save this love affair or whatever it is we have?”

  “Fran, please, I know I’ve been lousy company, but as soon as I’ve finished my article—”

  She knew she had to fight and she had no weapons: no guile, no celebrity, no mystery. She had nothing but the truth. “Come off it, Ames. You’ve been working in there three days and nights and your pages are blank.”

  He stared at her as though she had kicked the breath out of him.

  “Except for this one.” She held out the page.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I searched your room.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you having an affair with her?” she asked.

  He rose. “I don’t think this is the time to—”

  “Because if you are, I want to know. I’m not going to take another twelve years of feeling guilty and responsible every time you pull away from me when you’re the one who should be guilty and responsible!”

  “You’re accusing me? You with your Timothy?”

  Her jaw dropped. “Timothy?”

  “He phones and you erase his messages so I won’t suspect.”

  “Oh, my God, you think Timothy—is an affair?”

  “Call me back when you can talk…When can we meet. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

  “Timothy is a sweet, white-haired seventy-year-old married man and he’s my Al-Anon sponsor.”

  “Run that past me again? Your Al-what?”

  “I’ve been going to Al-Anon meetings. It’s a self-help group for families and friends of alcoholics.”

  For an instant Ames had the eyes of a trapped animal. “You’re telling people I’m an alcoholic?”

  “You drink, Ames. Look at yourself now. You can’t even get up from the table without a glass in your hand.”

  He looked at the glass. “That doesn’t make me an alcoholic.”

  “You drink and you’re killing yourself and I’m not going to let you kill me too. Yes, I go to meetings. Twice a week. And yes I tell Timothy everything—and he helps me get through this mess of a life we’re living.”

  Rage blinded him. The last thing he remembered about that night was barricading himself in his study with a bottle of vodka.

  In the morning when he staggered into the kitchen for coffee, his head felt like a drum and Fran’s silence beat a funeral march on it. “I think I owe someone an apology,” he said.

  “You don’t remember the things you said, do you.” From the way she was looking at him he knew whatever he wasn’t remembering must have been pretty dreadful.

  The phone rang. “Ames, it’s Vanessa. Is our interview still on?”

  Fran was pouring herself another cup of coffee, carefully measuring a teaspoon of organic honey into it and stirring.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Same place?” the voice asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Twelve-thirty?” Sure.

  Fran turned her head and watched him. For an instant there was remarkable beauty in her pain and suddenly he was torn.

  He hung up the phone and began moving with energy and speed. He put on a clean Brooks Brothers shirt and clean jeans. He put the right papers into his briefcase. He went for the car keys.

  Fran was looking at her coffee with a sad sort of acceptance. “Remember we’re having dinner with the Currys tonight. Six-thirty. We were two hours late last time. They won’t be giving us another chance.”

  It took him a moment to get back into the world of dinner and tonight. “I’ll be on time.”

  Vanessa was in the Perry Street apartment before him, standing by the window looking down at the garden. She turned when he came in. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

  “The traffic held me up.”

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.”

  It was a strange moment, awkward and beautiful.

  He started his cassette recorder, fingers fumbling, and asked some dumb question or other about critics.

  “Ames, would you turn that machine off?”

  He turned the machine off.

  “I wish you’d come over here next to me.”

  He closed his notebook and crossed the room. “A minute ago I was sitting over there thinking I’d sell my soul just to hold your hand again, and now I’m holding your hand.”

  “Stand close to me,” she said. “Hold all of me.”

  He stood close to her, held her. “Do you know I haven’t thought about anything but you for the last week?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “When I close my eyes I see you, when there’s no sound in the middle of the night I hear you. Oh God, if you knew how much I want to make love to you…”

  “Ames—that’s what I want too.”

  He kissed her. First on the forehead, lightly, and over the eyes, gently, one at a time, and then on her cheeks, less gently, and finally on the mouth, full and deep and not gently at all.

  She pulled back and led him through the doorway to the bedroom.

  He was hard before they even reached the bed. They undressed quickly, and then she opened her embrace to him.

  “Oh, yes, Ames, oh, yes.”

  Without pulling away from each other they made love three times, each act flowing without boundary into the next.

  Afterward, they lay on the bed. “I guess it’s happened,” he said. “We’re having an affair. Meeting secretly, making love. Isn’t that what an affair’s supposed to be?”

  “I wanted it to happen,” she said.

  “So did I.”

  Her arm tightened around him. “When did you first want it?”

  “When I first saw you.”

  “Me too.” And then she was silent. “But you have a friend.”

  “You do too.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Not anymore. Not for a long time. Do you love him?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It would kill me if I thought you loved him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve fallen in love with you.” He knew what he wanted to hear from her, and he didn’t hear it. “What about you?”

  “All I know, Ames, is that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and if I don’t…I’ll die.”

  He was still lying beside her on the bed when he saw that the light in the courtyard had darkened to evening.

  “Oh, God.” He reached to the pile of clothes on the floor where he had laid his watch. “I’m in trouble. Where’s a phone?”

  “Call me later this week?”

 
“Tomorrow, okay?” He kissed her and she held out his cassette recorder. He looked at her and his heart missed a beat. “You’re goddamned wonderful, you know that?”

  “What are you, some kind of critic?”

  “Just someone who’s been waiting a long, long time for someone exactly like you.” He made a move to kiss her again but she held him away with surprising firmness.

  “Corner of Bleecker. Phone booth.” She pushed him out the door.

  The booth was right where she said it would be. He dropped the coins in, dialed. After a moment the line buzzed.

  “Hello?”

  “Fran, I’m sorry, I got held—”

  She cut him short. “I was raised with the old-fashioned notion that when we promise something it matters.”

  “I’m on my way now. You go to the party. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Take your time. I told them we wouldn’t be coming. I’m going to my Al-Anon meeting instead.”

  “Come on, Fran, it was an accident, you don’t need to punish me.”

  “I love you, Ames. And you don’t love me. You don’t love anyone. I shouldn’t say that. Maybe you love your opera singer. But you’ve never loved me. No one’s to blame and the punishment’s over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about us. We’re through, Ames. I’m moving out.”

  “Because I was late for a dinner date?”

  “Because you were late for a dinner date. And ten million other reasons.”

  The line went dead. He dialed information. “Operator, is there a listing for Al-Anon in East Hampton?”

  He found Fran’s Al-Anon meeting just as it was breaking up. A dozen or so people, mostly women, were hanging around chatting on the lawn in front of a Methodist Church.

  Fran was wearing dinner clothes and her favorite little Tiffany star-burst and he felt a pang of guilt.

  “Ames, this is Timothy. I’ve told you about him.”

  A short and solid white-haired man with rimless glasses was holding out his hand. “Hi,” he said in a friendly voice.

  “Hi,” Ames said. He didn’t trust Timothy. He sensed masks beneath masks.

  “Timothy is coming home with me,” Fran said. “He’s going to help me pack a few things.”

  Ames nailed a smile to his face. “Can’t we talk?” he said.