She hesitated. “Timothy, I’ll meet you at the house.” She got into Ames’s car.
They drove in silence. It was not that large a front seat, and yet there was a great deal of space between them. He took the curves carefully. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m tired of your being sorry and my being sorry. I’ve sunk twelve years into you and me, and what do I have—a dumb degree in music, no kids, no husband, a couple of months in Al-Anon—it’s not enough!”
“I guess the world’s tough for all of us.”
“The world’s tough, but it doesn’t have to be absurd. I can’t live in Kafka-land anymore, wondering if you’ll be cold or if you’ll be warm, wondering if you’ve stopped off in a bar and forgotten we had a dinner, praying you’re alive and wishing you were dead.”
“I never knew you wished I was dead.”
“I don’t wish anything. I don’t even care if you touch me or give me the silent treatment or fall in love with someone else. You can keep tearing little shreds off yourself and throwing them away and it will never hurt me again. I prayed to be able to detach from you and now thank God I can.”
“Have I been that awful?”
“You’ve gotten pretty awful over the years.”
“Then why did you want me?”
“Because you make love beautifully. Or used to. And for some reason you seemed to need me.” She sighed. “Why did you need me, Ames? Why did you hold on to me for twelve years?”
“I loved you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“All right—I didn’t.”
“Do you know what I think, Ames? You’re afraid of love. It’s something you picked up from your father. Love is dangerous, don’t do it. I was your defense against falling in love. Well, the defense has failed. You’ve met your opera singer.”
When they got back to the house, night was closing in. He made himself a drink and watched as she piled the last clothes into the last bags and made everything fit. Finally a few toiletries went into the little overnight Gucci he had given her for the second anniversary of the night they’d decided to live together. It was battered and a little ragged now, but she’d kept it.
He followed her to the front door.
“Goodbye, Ames.” She went up on tiptoe and kissed him. “I’ll send my address when I have one.”
“Fran, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault, it’s not mine. We tried to prove we could have a life; we can’t.”
She turned and ran quickly outside to the station wagon where Timothy was warming the motor. Ames stood motionless in the hallway, waiting, and then he heard the car door slam on twelve years that were suddenly no longer there.
With the help of a quart of vodka Ames fell into a restless sleep. No one said “Good morning” when he awoke and rolled over in bed. There was no coffee on the bedside table, sending up its friendly cloud of steam.
He staggered into the kitchen. The day was already a bright square of light on the counter. The wall seemed naked in new places.
He squinted at the crumbs from last night, the half-eaten peanut butter sandwich that he didn’t remember slapping together, the beer cans and the crazily stacked dishes in the sink.
He’d left tens of thousands of dirty plates in that sink, and they’d always wound up magically in the dishwasher or back on the shelves. These plates hadn’t budged all night. They were serving him notice: the universe has changed.
He made himself a cup of instant coffee with hot water from the tap. He picked up the telephone and dialed the New York City area code and the seven digits of Vanessa’s number.
For a moment there was no ring.
It’s too early. I’ll wake her.
He hung up and made an agreement with himself not to phone her before ten.
But what if she’s out by ten?
Okay, nine-thirty. But not a minute earlier.
At 9:29 he dialed Vanessa’s number again.
It makes no sense for me to love her. Every sign is against it. I should at least wait a decent interval after Fran.
He hung up and then he thought, What kind of bullshit am I giving myself? Fran is over. I don’t need to wait for anyone or anything.
He dialed a third time. There was an instant of absolute stillness. His stomach had the sensation of free fall. On the fifth ring a voice answered. “May I help you?”
Not Vanessa; a man.
“Miss Billings, please.”
“Miss Billings is away, may I take a message?”
Away—where’s away? “Could you tell me where I can reach her?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Ames Rutherford. I’m interviewing her.”
“Yes, Mr. Rutherford. Miss Billings is very sorry. She won’t be giving interviews this summer. She’s with friends in Monte Carlo and will be touring till September.”
What’s happened? She never said anything about Monte Carlo.
“She’s written you a note. I mailed it this morning. You should have it tomorrow.”
But the note didn’t come the next day or the day after or even the day after that. Four days went by, days of listening to waves and going crazy and running out to the mailbox in sun and downpour every time a passing car slowed down. There were fliers and bills and ads for Fran, but for four days there was nothing from Vanessa Billings.
On the fifth day he found a letter lying alone in the mailbox. The paper was thick and soft with the comfortable skinlike feel of vellum. It was Vanessa’s handwriting on the envelope, a rectangle of soft gray that reminded him of dawn. He brought the letter up to his face and inhaled and smelled her perfume.
Suddenly he was as weak as a dog panting beside a stream. He felt he’d run four hundred miles for that letter. He took it and collapsed in the easy chair by the fireplace. His hand was shaking. His insides were shaking. He opened the envelope neatly along the flap.
My dearest Ames,
These are the hardest words I think I’ve ever had to write in my life. I feel more strongly for you than I’ve ever felt for anyone or anything, including music. And that is the problem.
Music is not just my career—music is my life, the best part of me. It is everything that is good and strong and honest in me.
The rest is fear and dishonesty and shame, things I cannot bear even to look at.
Music brought me back from the dead to the living. I owe music my life and soul. I made a promise, Ames, a promise that leaves no room in my life for more than a halfway love.
Till I met you I was never tempted to betray that promise. And since meeting you I’ve wanted to betray it a thousand times over. But betrayal would be the death of all that I have become, of everything that you love in me.
I cannot love you halfway. Any other man I could, but not you.
And so there is no choice. I can never see you again.
I shall never forget you. You have made me happier than I ever deserved. Please forgive me, Ames. I will always love you.
Vanessa
Part Five
RETURN: 1981–1985
42
AMES READ THE LETTER a hundred times that day, but each time it said the same unbelievable thing.
Why? Why?
He put Vanessa’s tape on the Betamax and sat staring at her, hearing her, looking for an answer in that image.
Suddenly a strange voice filled the living room. “Of course I shall sing again. I must—I will—I can.”
There was something arresting in the face that stared out of the screen at him. It was part of the black-and-white introductory segment on Vanessa’s tape that he had always skipped. Someone was asking Vanessa’s teacher about her proposed comeback.
His heart thumped in his chest and his breath caught. He knew that voice.
He jabbed the stop button and ran the film back to replay her. The face hung motionless on the screen. There was an instant of explosive silence and then, again, the voice th
at he somehow knew.
“I must—I will—I can.”
Dill Switt got Ames Rutherford’s phone call at four in the afternoon and, breaking his ass, he was able to make the five o’clock train.
Potbellied, unshaved, squint-eyed, nursing a three-day hangover, Dill knew that his grooming and dress were pretty casual, but he was nonetheless shocked by what greeted him when his oldest and best drinking buddy opened the front door.
Ames Rutherford had shed ten pounds and the lines in his face had gained at least as many years. Beard stubble flecked his chin and the hand he clapped on Dill’s shoulder trembled badly. “Dill, babe.”
“Ames, babe.”
The two Harvard men fell into each other’s arms.
“Hungry after that lousy train ride?” Ames slurred.
The kitchen looked like the site of a terrorist bombing. The sink was piled with unwashed dishes and punctured beer cans.
“I’ve missed you, old pal.” With a sweep of the arm Ames cleared a space on the counter. He wrenched a couple of two-inch steaks from the freezer and slapped them unthawed into a skillet.
“Get yourself a drink. Glasses in the cupboard.”
Dill drank and watched. For twelve minutes Ames lurched around the kitchen, slopping a coffee cup of vodka down his front and, now and then, down his throat. He adjusted flames and threw ingredients into a blender and never measured or timed a thing.
Drink was funny, Dill reflected. It hurt a lot of men’s writing, but rarely a man’s cooking.
They ate their salad and steaks on the terrace under the stars, passing the wine and the coarse black pepper back and forth. Dill brought Ames up-to-date on all the gossip, who had sold a new book, who hadn’t, who was breaking up and who was making out.
He sensed he was boring his host.
“You said you wanted to talk about something, Ames?”
Ames brought a six-pack of Bud from the kitchen and snapped the tops off two of the cans. He angled two deck chairs toward the Atlantic and gestured Dill to one of them. Feet propped on the little stone wall, Ames began quietly speaking about Vanessa.
A six-pack and a half later, Dill wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “You’re not the first man who’s been in love.”
Ames’s gaze nailed him. “It’s not the first time I’ve been in love with Vanessa Billings.”
The moon was reflecting off the high tide. The waves were breaking close to shore with long spaces between the splashes.
“When was the first time?”
“Dill, I’ve never not been in love with this woman. The minute I saw her, I knew this was the one.”
Dill thumped his feet on the flagstone. “Sweetheart, I know the tune. You’re not the first who’s sung it.”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean I knew this woman. Knew what made her laugh, made her cry, what her favorite flower was, what it would be like to make love to her.”
“Okay, this Vanessa gives you a strong case of déjà vu.”
“I’m not buying that reductionist shit, Dill.”
“You’re in love with someone you don’t know. You’re filling in the blanks. Ames, I could fill in the blanks. This woman has been on eight magazine covers in the last year and the Times has run umpteen profiles on her, and you’ve been saving her clippings. No wonder you know her favorite flower—you know her favorite recipe, for God’s sake.”
“How did I know about making love to her?”
“There are two kinds of sex. Good sex, bad sex. Good sex is always the same. Déjà screw. Don’t you see, you’re making her up. The word for it is projection. Ask Freud. Ask Jung. Ask anyone.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“We’re all crazy. We’re writers, we have to be. What we don’t have to be is dumb. You threw away a woman you’d lived with for twelve years, for fantasy; and you lost the fantasy to boot. Now that’s dumb, and if you want my opinion, that’s what’s hurting. Pick up the phone and get Fran back.”
“Fran and I have been over for years.”
“Which you didn’t know until Vanessa made it all very clear.”
“It would have happened with or without Vanessa.”
“Sure—you would have met someone else—and you would have known all about her, what perfume, what flower, what the hell. Ames, you were ready. You made it happen. You can make it un-happen, and if you want my advice, that’s exactly what you’ll do.”
“It’s too late. I love Vanessa. I always have, I always will. And she loves me. Her letter says she loves me.”
“Sure she loves you. That’s why dishes are piling up in your sink and she’s off with her billionaire on the French Riviera.”
“She wants me. That letter is a cry for help.”
“That letter is a cry to leave her the hell alone.”
Ames sighed. Far away two waves broke in quick succession, like a gunshot and its echo. “Come inside.”
He led the way into the house, past the living room liquor cabinet where he picked up a bottle of Stolichnaya, into a room that reeked of sweat and pot and spilled beer.
“Take a seat,” Ames said. “I want you to see something.”
The something was a grainy black-and-white tape of Ariana Kavalaris’s last, pathetic TV interview, the famous one where she’d said, I’ll sing again. I must—I will—7 can.
Ames was pushing the buttons on a phone-answering machine. “Now listen to this.”
Dill listened to a man selling magazine subscriptions for the Police Athletic League.
“Crap, not that one.” Ames jabbed another button. Up came a wrong number in Spanish. Then Fran said she’d be home at 6:30. And then a woman’s voice.
“I’m calling for Vanessa Billings. Could Ames Rutherford meet her at noon today at 89 Perry Street?”
That was all.
“So?” Dill said.
“You don’t hear it?” Ames reran the television tape and then the woman on the answering machine.
Dill didn’t react. He wasn’t exactly refusing comment, but he wasn’t rushing in with a verdict either.
“They’re the same voice,” Ames said.
“Wait a minute. Ariana Kavalaris is not phoning people to make appointments for Miss Billings. That is not her line of work. For another thing, she had to be dead when you got that message.”
“That’s Ariana Kavalaris on my answering machine.”
“How the hell can it be her?”
“How the hell can it not be?” Ames shouted. Now he was pushing buttons crazily, running the tapes simultaneously.
Dill raised his hands in surrender. “All right—all right. There’s a resemblance. Maybe Billings hired this secretary because the voice reminded her of Kavalaris.”
“Vanessa’s secretary never phoned me. We checked.”
“You’re telling me Ariana Kavalaris phoned you all the way from the grave with that dinky message?”
“Not Ariana Kavalaris. Her voice.”
“Listen to me, Ames. They’ve tested astrology. They’ve tested Tarot and I Ching.”
“I’m not talking about extrasensory crap. I’m talking about …” Ames fell into a chair. “Hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He began crying softly.
Dill’s heart went out to his old, suffering friend. The guy’s life was a mess. It seemed a very good moment to switch to a less painful subject. “So tell me, old buddy, how’s your writing?”
Ames shrugged.
“Maybe you should get back to that article. All the stewing you’ve been doing about Vanessa Billings, it’d be a shame to waste it. Put it down on paper.”
Ames drained his glass and then his eyes came up at Dill with sudden hopefulness. “If I write this article, she’ll see it, won’t she.”
In the morning Ames drove Dill to the 10:30 train, waved goodbye, and came home and placed his hands on the typewriter. He felt its gunmetal stillness creep up into him. He took a drink—just one—for luck, for lubricant, for the road.
He could feel his brain loosen up, words ready to trickle.
He lifted his hands over the keyboard—and dove.
He knew what he wanted the article to say. He wanted to underscore the parallels between Ariana Kavalaris and her pupil, to make them if anything eerier and more uncanny than in life. He wanted to present Vanessa as the supreme artist, caught in the clutches of commercial mediocrities, repeating all her teacher’s mistakes. He didn’t fool himself about his own role. He was a self-appointed Galahad, rescuing the fair damsel by publishing the piece.
For the next three days he slept four hours a night, downed twenty cups of coffee and a fifth of vodka a day, and ignored the phone. He lived on canned tuna and hard-boiled eggs.
On the morning of the fourth day he carried 143 pages out into the sunshine and sat under a great burst of summer leaves and tried to focus his eyes on what he had somehow done. That afternoon he drove into East Hampton and mailed the article overnight express.
Seventy-two hours later the phone pulled Ames out of a three-day sleep. Greg Hatoff was screaming. “I love it! I love you! You even made me love that screwed-up little diva!”
Painfully, Ames opened the other eye. “Hope all that loving means you like it.”
“Wise-ass. We’re having the lawyers check it for libel, and if all’s well we’ll run it in the July Fourth issue.”
Ames dug into isolation and waited. His proofs came June 21, and the July Fourth issue of Knickerbocker hit the stands June 28.
On June 29 Greg phoned. “The newsstands sold out in twenty-four hours. We had to run off another hundred thousand.”
Tear sheets from clipping services started showing up in the mailbox: a columnist in Chicago said Ames knew all about ambition and the heartbreak behind it. The Washington Post said no one had raunchier wit than Ames Rutherford or a keener feel for the extravagant vulgarities of our time.
Ames filed the clippings, but only one thing interested him: Vanessa Billings’s reaction. It didn’t come. He wondered how long it took Knickerbocker to reach Monaco.
He spent the Fourth of July alone, waiting by the phone. He actually hoped she’d phone to say Happy Fourth—oh, and I saw our article.
She didn’t phone. By 10:00 P.M. that night he figured everyone was asleep in Monaco anyway, and he went down the beach to George Plimpton’s fireworks party to see if there was any gossip about her.
Ariana Page 49