Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  It went without a hitch.

  The hitch came three minutes later, on a Manhattan street with the sun pouring down.

  Nikos helped Vanessa into the limousine and the chauffeur pushed the door shut after them. Vanessa felt the car close in on her: her adopted world.

  The bar was open, the table down. A champagne bottle lay on a bed of shaved ice in a silver bucket. Beside it waited two beautiful pale-green goblets, slender and long-stemmed like roses.

  Nikos lifted the bottle, peeled aside the foil and mesh, and began gently working the cork loose. The pop came, and champagne was foaming down the side of the bottle. He poured quickly, wasting not a drop, and handed Vanessa her glass.

  “To happiness,” he said quietly.

  She felt the thin tap of one crystal membrane against another. Her lips curved to the rim of the goblet. A thousand unbelievably fine bubbles exploded against her tongue. It was like tasting chilled sparks.

  Nikos took a small, flat object from his breast pocket and held it out to her.

  A tiny wave of hesitation pulsed through her. She opened the black velvet jeweler’s box. Light flashed across her hand. She lifted up a necklace of diamonds in three braided strands. It swayed like a pendulum marking the earth’s rotation.

  “It’s lovely,” she whispered.

  “Here. Let me.”

  Nikos fastened the diamonds around her neck. They touched her skin like fingers coolly pressing her throat.

  “I’ve only one thing to ask,” Nikos said. “After we’re married you must never see Ames Rutherford again.”

  She stared at Nikos, her adoring aging Greek god in his beautiful dark business suit, his black curls singed in gray. Then she laid her head against him, very still.

  “Ames Rutherford must never try to see you again, never try to communicate with you in any way, never write anything about you.”

  Never again, she thought dully. “I can’t control another person.”

  “He’s reckless, but he’s still a man of honor. You can get his promise.

  She dialed the East Hampton area code and the number. The ten digits seemed to have been lying in her memory waiting for this moment.

  There were four rings, and then the answering machine came on. Remembrance stirred in her, aching. The beep came and she realized she hadn’t planned what to say.

  “Ames…this is Vanessa…Vanessa Billings…I’m calling to…I’d like to…”

  There was a click, and the rattle of a phone snatched up, and then, “Hello? Hello?” He didn’t sound angry, as she’d thought he might: just shocked—very, very shocked. “Vanessa?”

  She’d never expected to hear his voice saying her name again. Something in her twisted. “I want to see you.”

  Silence slammed down.

  “Do you want to come out here?” he said.

  She wanted to, she realized. She wanted to very much. And that scared her. “No,” she said quickly. “Someplace nearer. Someplace quiet…but public.”

  There was an instant’s hesitation. “Do you know the seminary on Ninth Avenue and Twenty-first Street?”

  She wondered why on earth he’d expect her to know a seminary in Chelsea. She wondered why on earth she had a feeling she had heard of one, or glimpsed one. …

  “I’ll find it,” she said.

  “I’ll meet you there tomorrow morning at ten, okay?”

  The limousine came to a smooth halt before the wrought-iron gates. The chauffeur hopped out and came around to hold the door. A cool draft swept along Vanessa’s legs. She drew her fur around her.

  Nikos remained mountainous, staring, a mask. “I’m not going in.”

  “Nikos—please!”

  He made his hand soft and cupped it to her face. “You’re not a child anymore. Papa can’t do this for you.”

  Vanessa saw finality in Nikos’s eyes and pain for them both. An overwhelming aloneness filled her. She stepped obediently from the car and went slowly to the gates.

  She walked quickly inside.

  44

  A BAFFLING FEELING OF familiarity stained everything: buildings, the paths, the elms and oaks making their strange sighing sounds in the breeze. And then Vanessa saw Ames.

  He was pacing under a tree. She watched him light one cigarette from another, then flip the first one away.

  He turned, saw her. He came quickly toward her. “You sounded awful on the phone. What’s the matter?”

  Suddenly everything was impossible—movement, speech, even breathing. They faced each other, frozen in silence.

  “Vanessa.” He was shaking her and then, without warning, they were pressed together, kissing, whimpering.

  “Don’t ever let me slip away again.” Her hands were pulling at him, holding to him as though if she let go for even an instant he would vanish.

  “My car’s outside,” he said.

  “Not that gate. Is there another?”

  “In back. Behind the chapel.”

  Rain clouds were moving rapidly across the sky and there was a dull rumble of thunder as Ames’s Mercedes shot across the state line into Maryland. They found a jewelry store in a shopping mall and bought a $30 gold ring.

  “I’ll get you a real one later,” Ames said.

  Vanessa kissed him. “This one’s real enough.”

  Ames asked the salesman where you went to get a marriage license in this town. The salesman smiled and drew them a map on the back of the receipt.

  The wood-frame house stood on the corner of High Street and River. An old man dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a workshirt answered the doorbell. He had tiny angel’s wings of white hair at the sides of his head and he walked with a stoop. “Help you?”

  “Marry us,” Ames said, handing him the license.

  The old man put on his spectacles. “Can do. Come on in.”

  The house was tidy, with a faint smell of cat. The justice called his wife in from the kitchen. “Mildred, we need a witness.”

  Mildred nodded hello. She had a thin, masklike face, with large, luminous eyes. As she listened to the ceremony, she dried her hands absentmindedly on her dough-stained apron.

  The justice read from a tattered-looking pamphlet. Every time a car passed the house Vanessa’s eyes crept to the window and she held her breath, listening to hear if it was slowing down.

  “Do you, Ames, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you, Vanessa Billings, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  There was no voice in her. She could only nod her head.

  “Was that a yes, Vanessa?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Ames, you may place the ring on Vanessa’s finger.”

  She felt the warmth of his hand and then a band of coolness sliding onto her finger.

  At last, something in her sighed; at long, long last.

  The justice’s voice seemed to come from a great, echoing distance. “By the powers vested in me by the state of Maryland and Cecil County I pronounce you man and wife.”

  Ames kissed her, and Vanessa saw the reflection of her own eyes shining in his. She had an overpowering, uncanny sense that something had been restored.

  When Vanessa and Ames got back to New York, bullets of rain were spattering the sidewalk. They ran into the building.

  She’d left a standing lamp on, and a comfortable twilight glow filled the apartment. He peeled her out of her coat.

  “There’s just one thing I have to do,” she said.

  “Mmmm, there’s just one thing I have to do.”

  “I mean before that. It’ll only take a second.”

  She went to the phone and dialed her answering service. “Molly, it’s Vanessa—any messages?”

  When she finally replaced the receiver, Ames was smoking a cigarette, watching her.

  “Eighteen calls.” She sighed. “All from Nikos.”

  Silence filled the space between them. Ames blew a smoke ring.
/>   “I have to go to him.”

  Ames didn’t answer.

  “I have to tell him. I owe him at least that much.”

  The maid led Vanessa to the library. Nikos greeted her with fond, mournful eyes. “I was worried,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Nikos, I—” She realized she was going to hurt him and there was no way of softening the pain. “I’ve married Ames.”

  He gazed at her. His chest swelled and a sigh came out of him. “I wanted you free, or not at all. I took a risk and I knew it was a risk. I have no right to complain.”

  “We didn’t plan it. We didn’t intend it.” She tried to explain, but each word seemed to be a stone piled on him.

  “I wish you every happiness,” he said.

  “Are you going to hate me?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m entitled to hate you a little.” He kissed her forehead and turned her face so that the lamplight shone in her eyes. “I want to be part of your life, Vanessa.”

  “You are,” she said softly. “You are.”

  “Will you let me keep helping you? No one need ever know.” He touched a finger to her chin and lifted her face up. “It would help me atone for what I never gave her.”

  A whisper came out of her. It came without her will. It came because she had hurt him and at that moment would have done anything never to hurt him again. “Please never stop helping me, Nikos.”

  Vanessa told her first married lie that night.

  Ames had insisted on taking her to Côte Basque for dinner. They were talking animatedly by the time the waiter brought the bottle of Mumm’s, and they laughed when spray from the popped cork caught Ames in the face.

  “To us,” Ames said. “To Mr. and Mrs. Mark Ames Rutherford the Third.”

  They clinked glasses.

  Ames was watching her. “What did Nikos say when you told him?”

  The smile froze on her face. She could have said, He wants to set up a foundation to fund my performances.

  Instead she said, “He wished us every happiness.”

  “He said that? Every happiness?” Ames smiled. “Here’s to Nikos—for losing like a gentleman. God bless him.”

  That summer, in the Hamptons, they were happy.

  Ames actually got to work on the research for his new novel. Vanessa prepared her fall roles: Lucia for Covent Garden; Marguerite for Brussels; Donna Anna for New York. For three sunny months the house rang with clattering typewriter keys and high C’s.

  “You’re singing a helluva lot of crazy ladies this year,” Ames joked, and she slapped him on the butt with a score of Jenufa. “Another crazy,” he said, then added, “Let’s make love.”

  “Later. I’m working and so should you be.”

  “It’s one-thirty on a sunny afternoon and we’ll never be this young again. Come on. Please? I’ll cook dinner.”

  She hesitated. “Broiled lobster?”

  She awoke in the middle of night. He was not beside her. She got out of bed, curious, and padded barefoot into the corridor.

  The door of his workroom was open. He was bent over the typewriter, gazing at a page curling out of the carriage.

  She could sense he was stuck. She went quietly and sat down on the floor by his chair.

  She’d read his books. They articulated human hope in the face of suffering and she had been moved by them. To her he had the same power as the composers whose melodies she sang. They and Ames brought something beautiful into the world that had never been there before.

  She embraced his leg and laid her head on his thigh.

  After a moment his hand came down and touched the back of her neck. And then his touch vanished, and the typewriter sprang to life, spitting out a furious rhythm of clicks and bells and slamming carriage returns.

  She couldn’t help thinking: I did that for him.

  The next day Ames brought her a tiny bouquet of wild flowers.

  “You’re my center,” he said. “Never leave me.”

  She couldn’t say exactly when she was first aware of changes in her singing, but they began within six months of her marriage.

  Occasionally it was just a note placed carelessly—an uncontrolled high B-natural in her Marguerite that broke into a hard cracking sound when she released it. Occasionally it was an entire aria—a “Mi chiamano Mimi” in Brussels that she sang cheaply, not knowing why, doing it anyway, bringing down the house.

  She mentioned it to Austin Waters the next time she went to his studio.

  He looked over at her and spoke gently. “Audiences like you. And the public is never entirely wrong.”

  “Austin, stop being tolerant. My performances have been getting cheap. I hear myself doing things…”

  Ever the diviner of her unspecified demons, he understood the uncompleted thought and laid a paternal hand on her shoulder. “All you can do is prepare, be ready, go on. A performance isn’t a master class. You can’t be on top of yourself every minute. At some point the performance shapes you, not vice versa.”

  “My performances have been shaping me very strangely lately.”

  “You’ve been through a lot of stress. Your life is changing. You’re developing.”

  She sighed. “I’m so damned tired of developing.”

  “Know what I think you should do?”

  She waited to hear the secret of his centeredness, half expecting the name of a guru or a masseur or miracle herb.

  “You should take a pupil. Believe me, there’s nothing like it for getting your mind off yourself. And you’d be surprised what it can do for your own singing.”

  Vanessa found the phone number of the understudy who’d asked to study with her. “Camilla, would you still like me to coach you?”

  The presence on the other end of the line seemed to die, then revive. “I sure as hell would—I mean, yes—I mean, when?”

  “We’ll have to fit it into my schedule, but for a start, how about tomorrow?”

  Camilla was willing to take the Long Island Railroad out to the house; no small degree of willingness, considering that it was the slowest and filthiest railroad in the East. There were evenings when she missed her early train back and stayed on for dinner (prepared, deliciously and with good grace, by Ames).

  Vanessa loved the lessons, looked forward to them. As a teacher, she was like an accountant with an eye for small change, using a microscope on every detail of the score, seeing things for the first time in the very act of making Camilla see them.

  Nothing got past her. Was it correctly phrased? Was the rhythm exact? Was the length of the rest right? Was the T articulated? A tone poorly placed, an A-flat just a little too flat, a dotted eighth note not dotted quite long enough—all were enough to cause her to wave Camilla silent and face her, hands on hips.

  “Might I ask, Miss Seaton, what the hell was that?”

  As Camilla trained, she began to be able to do a hundred things that had been too hard for her at first. And little by little the uneasiness rolled off Vanessa and she was at ease again in her own performances.

  “Hey, tell me something.” Ames turned to her in the car one Thursday in March after they’d delivered Camilla to the last train. “Did I marry a world-famous star or a teacher?”

  “You married a world-famous star who’s learning to be a terrific teacher.”

  “Sure you’re not spreading yourself a little thin?”

  “If it helps my performing, why not?”

  “But does it help your performing?”

  “Come see my Tosca run-through and judge for yourself.”

  As Ames took his seat in the grand tier of the New York Metropolitan, he was full of expectancy and curiosity. Three sinister chords crashed from the orchestra and the curtain rose swiftly. He sat forward, fixing his attention on the action.

  Angelotti, a political escapee, rushed into the Church of Sant’ Andrea, Rome, where the artist Cavaradossi was painting a portrait of the Madonna. Cavaradossi promised to help Angelotti and hid him in the crypt.

&
nbsp; Vanessa entered as Tosca, a celebrated opera singer and Cavaradossi’s mistress. She had heard whispering and suspected her lover of deceiving her. When she recognized the model in the portrait as the beautiful Marchesa Attavani, Angelotti’s sister, she was convinced of her lover’s infidelity. In a soaring duet he managed to appease her jealousy, saying he loved only her, and promised to meet her that night at his villa.

  Ames found something inexplicable happening to him. He loved Puccini, he loved Tosca, he loved his wife. Yet he couldn’t believe Vanessa’s character for an instant, couldn’t believe she saw value in this—the posturing, the screaming, the exaggeration of emotions that were never credible in the first place. He felt a sort of embarrassment for her.

  The elaborate sets struck him as ridiculous, the expensive costumes as foolish and vulgar. People are starving in the world, he thought, and foundations are spending money on this.

  When Tosca made her exit, he didn’t applaud.

  What the hell’s happening to me? he wondered. Am I turning into an opera-hating curmudgeon?

  Uneasiness whispered through him, and it wasn’t just because a cannon boomed offstage, signaling that Angelotti’s escape had been discovered. It was because he could feel himself turning into someone else, someone he didn’t know.

  Cavaradossi exited, spiriting Angelotti with him to the safety of his villa outside Rome.

  Scarpia, the chief of police, entered in a black cloak. He found the Marchesa Attavani’s fan, bearing the family’s coat of arms. Recognizing her as the model in the portrait and knowing that Cavaradossi was sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, he suspected that the painter might be involved in Angelotti’s escape.

  As Act One wore on Ames broke into a cold sweat. His heart began thudding like an eight-foot bass drum. The music which had once seemed so melodious and sweeping and passionate suddenly sounded thin, with no point except the resounding high notes. Though as operas went the story was not nearly so fraught and phony as most of the standard repertoire, today it struck him as the worst sort of melodrama, with coincidences scattered like raindrops in a storm.