Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  Tosca returned. Scarpia showed her the fan as proof that her lover was deceiving her. Convinced, she set off in a rage to find Cavaradossi. Scarpia dispatched an agent to follow her. To the counterpoint of a church choir, Scarpia blasphemously plotted with a crony to execute Cavaradossi and make Tosca his own mistress. “Tosca, you make me forget my God!” Then, in an access of sexual fervor, he joined in the Te Deum.

  The curtain fell.

  Ames stayed in his seat through the first intermission. A hatred filled him stronger than any he had ever known in his life. It was a slashing, annihilating hatred that wanted to rip apart curtains, knock over sets, tear pages from scores, burn down opera houses.

  After a stomach-churning eternity the houselights dimmed to the halfway mark, warning the audience back to their seats. The theater went dark and the curtain rose on Scarpia’s office in the Farnese Palace.

  As Scarpia dined, his agents dragged in Cavaradossi. Scarpia interrogated him, but the painter refused to reveal Angelotti’s whereabouts.

  Tosca entered, and Scarpia ordered Cavaradossi into the next room to be tortured. Unable to bear the sounds of her lover’s screams, Tosca revealed that Angelotti was hiding in the well at her lover’s villa. As the guard led him through the room, Cavaradossi turned on her furiously, accusing her of betrayal.

  Alone with Tosca now, Scarpia stated his bargain: her lover would be executed unless she consented to become his mistress.

  Like a trapped animal, Tosca fled to the window that only moments before she had threatened to throw herself from. Across the room, the gloating Scarpia reminded her that her lover had only one hour to live.

  In the distance a military drum rapped out the cadence of a death march. Tosca raised her head and listened.

  There is a silent beat to music that underlies the heard beat. It is not the inanimate ticktock of a metronome or the movement of a conductor’s baton marking off measures, but the pumping of a living heart. All musicians hear it and follow it. Thanks to this silent beat an entire orchestra can rise out of dead silence and attack a note together, slow down or hasten a phrase together, or meet the soprano just as she brings her trill to a safe finish. Thanks to this beat vocalists can hold together during the wildest stretches of the wildest duets.

  Vanessa listened now for this beat.

  The near-emptiness of the house answered her.

  For an instant she saw the dim glitter of the tiered balconies, and perhaps it was only her imagination, but she had a flash of Ames with his elbows propped on one of the railings. It seemed to her he had a disgusted look on his face.

  What must he think of all this hollering? she wondered.

  Her lungs expanded, drawing in air, but for a moment only. She felt a ripple of disorientation. In one glance she saw the baritone, oozing operatic menace in his eighteenth-century costume, and just beyond him in the wings, scratching his ear and radiating boredom, a stagehand in overalls.

  What nonsense this is. What am I standing here for?

  She was ludicrously aware that she was moving across a false set in the false glow of electric lights surrounded by false shadows.

  She missed her entrance.

  Boyd Kinsolving rapped his baton on the music stand, silencing the orchestra. “Can we take it again from number 34?” He gazed questioningly at Vanessa. “Sweetums, are you all right?”

  Even with the house dark and still, Ames could feel her not sleeping, could feel the racing of her thoughts on the pillow beside him. Finally he flicked the light on.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s both stop pretending. I know you’re not asleep, you know I’m not asleep. We’d better talk about it.”

  She sat up, stared at him. “I felt something happen in the opera house today. Just before I missed my cue.”

  He nodded. “I felt it too.”

  “What was it, Ames?”

  He shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  “It was as though something were pouring out of you—something terrible and almost…hating.”

  He sighed. “Sometimes I wish you weren’t so damned intuitive.”

  “What were you hating, Ames?”

  “It just came over me that I was going to lose you.”

  She stared in drop-jawed amazement. “Lose me how?”

  “I don’t know. But I could feel the music taking you from me, swallowing you up like quicksand.”

  “Come on, I know Puccini can be soupy, but quicksand…” She was silent a moment. “Ames, how many of my performances have you been to?”

  “I don’t know. Dozens, I suppose.”

  “Have you ever felt this hatred before?”

  “Never.”

  She gazed at him a long, searching moment. “Today was the first time you’ve heard me perform since we were married.”

  “How could that have anything to do with—”

  “I’m not certain, but when we married, something changed in my voice. I know it sounds superstitious, but damn it, Ames, singers are superstitious. At least this singer is.”

  He was silent.

  “I love you, Ames. I’ve loved you from the very first moment we met. Sometimes I feel I’ve loved from long before that first moment. I’d do anything in the world for you.”

  He caught something held back in her. “But?” he said.

  “But today I was terrified.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t want you to come to any of my performances ever again.”

  The surprising thing to Ames was that he wasn’t surprised.

  He felt darkness encroaching, he felt Vanessa drifting away from him, but he felt no surprise at all.

  He reached to the bedside table, lit a cigarette, blew out smoke. “So it would appear I’m a big bad magician and I put curses on pretty little singers.”

  “Do you think I’m just being neurotic?”

  He shook his head. “If anyone should be seeing a shrink it’s me. Something crazy came over me today and you felt it.”

  “And everything in me stopped and the sound wouldn’t come. Ames, I’ve failed so often, I can’t afford another failure.”

  He kissed her as though it were all very understandable. “Look, you’re not going to fail. And I won’t come to any more of your performances, okay?”

  “Are you angry?”

  “I love you.”

  “But are you angry?”

  “Not angry—a little mystified, that’s all.”

  The baritone reminded her, chillingly, that her lover had only an hour to live.

  Vanessa stood at the window staring out for three bars.

  When she turned back toward the audience she was different. Everything about her had somehow altered during those few seconds.

  It was difficult to describe what the difference was, but going to the window she had been Vanessa Billings playing a better-than-decent Tosca, and when she turned around again a totally changed person presented herself to the audience.

  She crossed to the sofa, sank slowly down onto it.

  Scarpia, cold and cynical, poured his coffee and sipped.

  The orchestra subsided.

  The audience sat forward in their seats, hushed.

  There was an instant’s total silence.

  She raised her head. A sound came out of her, startling in its purity.

  “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore…”—“I have lived for art, I have lived for love…”

  What happened in the opera house was something beyond the words, beyond the musical notes. The aria seemed to lose its identity feature by feature, to dissolve into a sort of limitless music that in turn dissolved into pure supplication.

  Listening, the audience changed. It was as though every man and woman in that dark house were recalling the time when as children they had begged most hopelessly for the life of a pet or for a wish, or as adults for the life of another person, or for a dream, or perhaps for love itself.

  And when God had, inexplicably, refused.


  “Perchè, Signor, ah perchè me ne rimuneri cosi?”—“Why, ah why, Lord, do you repay me thus?”

  The question hung in the air, unanswered.

  Applause did not come immediately. Too many of the audience were holding back sniffles. There was a moment of handkerchiefs slipping back into pockets and purses before the bravas and screams ripped through the dark.

  And then a police agent entered with word that Angelotti had committed suicide. Scarpia asked Tosca her decision: Would she become his mistress or would she let her lover die?

  Grimly, she nodded. She would become his mistress.

  Scarpia instructed the agent to arrange a mock execution, with blanks instead of bullets. The agent went, and Tosca demanded a safe-conduct for herself and Cavaradossi. Scarpia quickly wrote it out. Tosca took a knife from the dining table and hid it behind her. As Scarpia came to embrace her, she plunged the blade into his stomach. He crumpled. She searched frantically for the safe-conduct, found it. Suddenly she thought to set two candles beside the dead body and a crucifix on the breast.

  And then she fled.

  In her dressing room Vanessa settled down uneasily into a chair and looked across at her understudy. “How am I doing?”

  Camilla stared at her unbelievingly. “You have to ask?”

  “It’s such a can’t-miss act they applaud even when I’m lousy.”

  “You’re never lousy.”

  “My rehearsal was lousy and I feel I’m lousy tonight.”

  “You’re terrific tonight.”

  “Am I? I don’t seem to be there for the big moments. I remember going to the window. I remember stabbing Scarpia—but in between’s a blank. I don’t remember singing ‘Vissi d’arte.’”

  Camilla looked at her teacher in amazement. “You’re kidding. That was the best ‘Vissi d’arte’ I’ve ever heard.”

  Vanessa felt herself floating through the last act.

  The curtain rose on the battlements of Castle Sant’ Angelo, where the guards were preparing Cavaradossi for execution. Tosca entered with her safe-conduct and told him the execution would be a hoax. The lovers sang rapturously of their future happiness.

  The firing squad arrived. Tosca instructed Cavaradossi how to die realistically. The soldiers fired. Cavaradossi fell to the ground.

  “Ecco un artista!”—“That is an artist!” Tosca exclaimed.

  But when she rushed to Cavaradossi’s side he didn’t move. She realized Scarpia had tricked her: the bullets had been real. Her lover was dead.

  Guards rushed in to arrest her. She ran to the parapet, pausing only to cry: “Scarpia, avanti a Dio!”—“Scarpia, we will meet before God!”

  And then she jumped to her death.

  The audience called her back for eight solo bows. The next day the Times called Vanessa’s the most sensational Tosca since Callas. This was opera at its most unabashedly grand. Brava, Billings!

  45

  WHEN VANESSA SANG IN New York Ames could survive the seven-hour stretches without her. But when she sang in Europe there were twelve-day stretches without her, chunks of blank time when he wandered the house listening to waves, trying to write, not writing, trying to eat and not eating, looking at the level in the vodka bottle going down and not knowing how it was going down so fast.

  And then one morning he lifted his head from the typewriter and found her bending over him.

  “Please be happy, Ames. You’ve got the best of me. What’s onstage isn’t me. It’s just something I have to do. Come to bed.”

  “I’m sorry,” he slurred, thinking, What in God’s name am I turning into?

  When he woke up, hangover and guilt pressed on him like a metal sky. She had errands that kept her out of the house, and he was glad of it. He prepared dinner: rolled veal stuffed with sage and sausage and grated lemon peel, zucchini with lemon butter, potato croquettes handmade from first peel to final sizzle; hot sourdough rolls; a nice chilled jug of German Riesling.

  He set sandalwood-scented candles on the table and lit them and had just one glass of wine and waited and wondered what was keeping her.

  What was keeping her was her seventeen-year-old lover.

  One hundred and eighty miles away, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Vanessa was singing the Marschallin in Act One of Der Rosen-kavalier—the Knight of the Rose—a bitter-sweet comedy set in eighteenth-century Vienna.

  The curtain had risen on a sumptuous bedroom. Just as the Marschallin and her cousin Octavian were awakening from a night of rapturous lovemaking, a man could be heard pushing his way past the servants into her chamber. Octavian slipped into one of the Marschallin’s dresses, disguising himself as a chambermaid, “Mariandel.”

  The intruder turned out to be another cousin of the Marschallin, the pompous and oafish Baron Ochs, requesting a favor. Always short of cash, he had become engaged to the daughter of a newly ennobled merchant. He needed a young nobleman to present the traditional silver rose to his fiancée. The Marschallin suggested he use Octavian.

  Throughout the discussion Ochs flirted outrageously with “Mariandel.” Since the role of Octavian was sung by a mezzo, the baritone playing Ochs was in fact ogling a woman playing a man pretending to be a woman.

  The Marschallin’s morning reception began. A horde of petitioners and shopkeepers surged in. Among them were Valzacchi and Annina, two professional intriguers offering to sell the Marschallin a scandal sheet. Ochs hired them to investigate his bride-to-be.

  The crowd finally departed, leaving the Marschallin in a sad mood. She reflected that Octavian would soon tire of her and fall in love with a younger woman. Octavian tried to reassure her, but after he left she realized they had forgotten to kiss goodbye. She sent her page after him with the box containing Ochs’s silver rose.

  Ames went into the kitchen and checked the calendar on the side of the refrigerator where Vanessa wrote her engagements. He wondered how he could have missed it. The date was clearly marked. She was singing that night at the Metropolitan.

  He went to the garage and got into the car and backed into the driveway and drove. Just drove.

  Vanessa, like most sopranos able to sing her, loved the Marschallin. The character had beauty, intelligence, humor, and generosity—not to mention some of the loveliest pages Richard Strauss had ever composed and—a big plus—though she opened and closed the opera, she didn’t appear in the middle act.

  Which gave Vanessa time to rest, time to sip fruit juice, time to write letters.

  Two stories above her the opera continued. In her father’s palace, young Sophie van Faninal eagerly awaited her first meeting with her fiancée. Octavian entered and ceremoniously presented her with the silver rose. The two instantly fell in love.

  Ochs arrived, oozing crudeness and shocking his fiancée. While he discussed the terms of the marriage contract with Faninal, Sophie—repelled—begged Octavian to save her from the baron. The young nobleman swore to stand by her.

  Valzacchi and Annina alerted Ochs. The baron tried to pull Sophie from the room, but Octavian drew his sword, challenged the old lecher, and nicked him in the arm. Crying “Murder!” the baron called for a doctor.

  Defying her father, Sophie flatly refused to marry Ochs. Faninal threatened to send her to a convent.

  Octavian hit upon a plan.

  Annina entered and handed the baron a note from “Mariandel,” the Marschallin’s supposed chambermaid, requesting a tryst. The baron, delighted, promised to reply.

  Ames checked his Mercedes into the parking lot under Lincoln Center. Up on the plaza, an old woman with a mink as frizzy as her hair was hawking a balcony seat for the last act of Der Rosenkavalier.

  The seat was practically at the top of the house. Ames sat tapping his fingers together, staring at the stage.

  Why am I doing this? he suddenly thought. Why am I here?

  The curtain rose on a private room in a rather shady tavern where Valzacchi and Annina were arranging the final details of Ochs’s rendezvous. Octav
ian, dressed as “Mariandel,” tossed them a purse. He returned on the arm of Baron Ochs, who—to save money—dismissed the waiters.

  “Mariandel” and Ochs settled down to dinner and seduction, but “she” refused to drink and resisted Ochs’s advances, pointing out that he was, after all, engaged.

  On prearranged signals, Octavian’s accomplices popped out of chests and openings in walls. The baron was convinced he was hallucinating. Annina burst in, insisting that Ochs was her husband and had abandoned her. Four children rushed in, loudly claiming Ochs as their father.

  Outraged, the baron called for the police.

  The knock came on the door and the call, “Three minutes, Miss Billings.”

  Vanessa moved toward the mirror, glancing one last time at her costume. A sudden nausea gripped her. She began to sway. Her dresser caught her and helped her back into the chair.

  She knew what the matter was. Ames is here—in the house. She could barely force sound out of her throat. “Call my understudy,” she told the dresser. “I can’t go on.”

  It was like coming out of a blackout.

  “Excuse me.” Ames rose and, ignoring his neighbors’ annoyance, squeezed his way into the aisle. It was a long dark walk down to the exit.

  As abruptly as the spell had come, it passed. Vanessa drew in a breath, drinking up air. He’s gone.

  Another knock at the door. “Places.”

  She was able to rise, to walk, to cross to the door and turn the handle. She saw relief on her dresser’s face.

  “Tell Camilla it was a false alarm. I’m going on.”

  Faninal and Sophie, summoned by Valzacchi, arrived at the tavern, followed by the Marschallin. Immediately grasping the situation, the Marschallin assured the police commissar that the whole affair was only a farce. Then, with kind firmness, she advised Ochs that he had lost Sophie and had better accept the fact.

  Ames walked through traffic and fumes, passed signs and shops that were strange to him. He came to a stone wall between two ivied brick buildings. There was an iron gate and it seemed to him this was his destination. He opened the gate and went through.