Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  The flight across the continent was a dark, dreamlike glide of six hours, and then the buildings and streets of San Francisco were moving past the taxi window like unreal shadows on glass.

  A spring rain was slanting down and it was 7:55 when Ames arrived at the opera house, a small jewel of a building on Van Ness. He threaded his way through streams of opera patrons. An usher handed him his program and showed him his seat. He sat and opened the program. Please, God, let me be wrong. Let it all be my paranoid imagination.

  His eye skimmed quickly down the names of the performers.

  And there it was, the small italicized mention at the bottom of the page. This performance of La Traviata is made possible by a deeply appreciated grant from the Stratiotis Foundation for the Fine Arts.

  In her dressing room, Vanessa felt uneasy, curiously remote, her eyelids shut down over a foreboding she couldn’t quite articulate.

  The makeup woman daubed with a powder puff at her forehead.

  And suddenly Vanessa knew. “He’s here. He’s in the house…”

  The dresser threw her a startled glance before tilting her chin up and correcting the shading of her brow. “Yes indeed, ma’am, Callas used to feel just like that before she sang Violetta.”

  Ames shifted in his seat, glanced at his watch. The second hand seemed to crawl. All right, so Stratiotis happens to be in the same city where she’s singing a performance. What does that prove?

  Finally the houselights dimmed. From the orchestra pit came soft rustlings. An oboe chirped. There was applause as the conductor entered the pit.

  Ames made a deeply concentrated effort to listen.

  So he happens to be in the same city where she’s singing a performance he happened to finance. So maybe he’s been in a few cities where she’s been singing performances he happened to finance. Maybe quite a few cities. What does that prove?

  He was suffocating. He couldn’t endure not moving.

  I don’t want to see this.

  Vanessa’s hands made a protective circle around the locket, drawing strength from it. The premonition lifted, leaving a merciful blank. She couldn’t even remember what had been bothering her—something frightening and fantastic and foolish.

  A knock came at the door and the cry, “Places, Miss Billings!”

  Vanessa rose. With a smile, the dresser pulled the door open.

  Impulsively, Vanessa kissed her.

  Ames drank three double martinis. The bartender had a bushy mustache and the bar had a rich mahogany glow.

  Every now and then a door opened and her voice rocketed through the silence, soaring so lightly, so swiftly that Ames’s ear could hardly follow its flight.

  The performance ended. Applause broke like a storm. Vanessa’s tenor took her hand and led her through the curtain.

  For a moment the whole world blazed up into glory. She stood in the spotlight with the applause and torn programs and tossed flowers raining down. With a smile she acknowledged the deafening acclamation and made a deep curtsy.

  Ames could hear the crowd calling her name like wind in a forest. He stretched a twenty-dollar bill out flat on the bar and snapped a finger to catch the bartender’s attention.

  “How do I get backstage?”

  The air in the corridor pressed down heavy and stagnant. Ames found the door. He raised his hand and gave two knocks, and it was opened by a little gray-haired woman.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Behind her he could see Vanessa relaxing in an armchair, still in costume. And then she saw him.

  For a split second she stared in open horror and then she stretched out a hand and attempted a smile. “Ames.”

  In the instant that she moved toward him he was aware of the other presence in the room, the tall figure in a dark suit waiting near the dimly lit window.

  Nikos Stratiotis turned to face him. Their eyes locked.

  “I understand,” Ames said quietly. “I finally understand.”

  “Ames,” Vanessa whispered, “no!”

  Nikos moved a three-legged stool toward him. “You don’t understand anything. Sit down.”

  Ames swiped the stool aside. It fell with a sideways crash to the floor. “Do you know how lonely and empty I felt when you were with him? I knew there had to be a reason you didn’t want me at your performances, but I never dreamed it was Stratiotis!”

  Terror splashed Vanessa’s face. “Ames, you’re wrong.”

  “And drunk,” Nikos said. “A pity you can’t keep your mouth as closed as your mind for ten seconds and let us explain—”

  Ames whirled on him. “I wanted this woman, I loved her, and unlike you I married her!”

  Vanessa reached out. “Ames, I swear!”

  “You swore to love, honor, and cherish me—me, not him! What the hell did you want me for, a false front?”

  “Ames, you have it all wrong!”

  She tried to explain, but he strode from the dressing room and didn’t even bother slamming the door behind him.

  It seemed an eternity later that the knocking came.

  “Miss Billings.” The assistant stage manager had an apologetic expression. “We’ve raised the houselights, but they’re still applauding. Would you mind one more curtain call?”

  Nikos interposed himself. “Miss Billings is exhausted.”

  “It’s all right, Nikos.” She moved past him. “They’re my friends. I owe them this.”

  He couldn’t read her intention, but he felt something in her, firm and formed and secret.

  “You go on to the party,” she said. “Sally will help me change.”

  The dresser smiled, liking to be needed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Vanessa kissed Nikos lightly. “I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

  The opera house roared. Rising to their feet, the cheering, glittering crowd gave her three more curtain calls.

  It had been the most brilliant performance of a brilliant career: a faultless Traviata. They knew it; she knew it.

  At that instant she was, arguably, what half the critics in the world called her: the greatest soprano of the day.

  Vanessa hurried back to her dressing room. She leaned a moment against the shut door and closed her eyes. Her knees began to buckle. She held the back of a chair an instant before sitting.

  Sally brought a glass of warm milk flavored with molasses. Vanessa sipped. Sally watched with a satisfied look and took the glass.

  “Shall I draw your bath?” Sally offered.

  “No, thanks, I’ll do it. I’d like to be by myself for a while.”

  Alone, Vanessa began undressing. Her movements were automatic, the unthinking reflex of a singer protecting her costume and at the same time divesting herself of what she had been onstage.

  She unhooked the thin gold chain from around her neck and let it slide through her fingers. The locket slipped down onto the dressing table. She lost her eyes a moment in it. The tiny gems gleamed back at her, hard and unyielding as justice without mercy.

  A last sickening conviction settled itself onto her mind. I can never have both. It will always be music or life. Never both.

  She knew what had to be done. There was nothing to be gained by delay.

  With a quick swipe of her arm she swept the locket aside. It thudded lightly against the carpet.

  She ripped a piece of paper from the notepad on the dresser.

  She scrawled three words.

  Forgive me, Ariana.

  She drew a hot bath and sprinkled the tub with a handful of verbena salts. It was like a scene in an opera in which she was performer and audience at the same time. She observed her actions with detachment and a strange sense of completion.

  She took a tape cassette from the dressing table. She did not look at herself in the mirror. She slid the cassette into the player and pressed a button.

  A moment later a pure soprano voice filled the room like a soft fountain of prayer.

  The bathroom was misty, like early morning. A silver haze shimmere
d and trembled over the tub. The air was laden with the fragrance of verbena. The temperature was like a caress.

  She took a razor blade from the cabinet.

  Hesitation suddenly gripped her. She caught the edge of the commode. The smell of bath salts tightened sharp around her, like arms strengthening her.

  She stepped into the tub and lay back. She shut her eyes and pressed close to Verdi’s music.

  Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. …Give them eternal rest, Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.

  She lifted the razor blade.

  It wasn’t hard to do. It was as though life were a fabric and she were slipping through a secret opening in it. She had done the same thing a thousand times when she stepped out onto the stage. This time it was a different stage, that was all.

  A half-hour later, Sally knocked. There was no answer. She tried the door. It was locked. The wood felt hot to her touch. She called for the security guard to bring a passkey.

  The room was filled with steam.

  Vanessa lay in the tub, surrounded by pink foam. She looked waxen, lifeless. Her eyes were closed.

  Sally screamed.

  It was Charley Zymanowski, the security guard, who phoned for the ambulance. He had been with the San Francisco Opera for over twenty years and he had never seen anything like this.

  A team of emergency medics from San Francisco General rushed Vanessa Billings out on a stretcher. Charley stayed behind. He told Sally he’d clean up.

  Ten minutes later he found a scrawled note on the dressing table and a locket on the floor.

  Nikos did not bother to use the house phone. He paid the night manager of the St. Francis $100 to let him into Ames’s room.

  Ames was sitting in his shirt sleeves by the window, staring down at the park.

  “I have one question to ask you,” Nikos said. “Do you want her?”

  Ames turned slowly. “Butt out, Croesus.”

  Nikos felt a hot flash down his back, the same flash he got when it was deciding point in a squash match or when he was closing a long and arduous deal. “You’ll be proud to know she attempted suicide after your little discussion.”

  Ames rose unsteadily from his chair.

  “She’ll recover,” Nikos said. “But she’s going to need care. I’ve made arrangements for her to go to a clinic in New Jersey.”

  “Decent of you.”

  “She flies east tomorrow. One of us is going to be on that plane with her. And that’s the last choice in her life I’ll ever give you.”

  Ames was on the plane with her. He was hungover and shaky and filled with a million stinging repentances, but he was with her, holding her hand for six hours and three thousand miles.

  47

  AMES FOLLOWED DOWN THE long corridor of whitewashed concrete. The orderly knocked on a door and stood aside. Ames went in.

  The room was low-ceilinged. An orange rug and framed watercolors tried to fight the flat white of the walls. Sunlight shone through the open barred window. The air smelled of formaldehyde.

  Vanessa sat stiffly on the quilted bed, holding herself back from the light. Ames approached. She didn’t move.

  He prepared a smile and then he put his arms around her. She turned her head and let him kiss her.

  He sat in the chair facing the bed and held her hand. “Sunny today. Did you go walking this morning?”

  He had never seen such eyes as hers had become. They had the emptiness of wells reflecting the starless night sky. He stared into them and felt the utter absence of her.

  “Everyone asks how you are. Everyone misses you. Especially me. You don’t know how much I miss you.” He squeezed her hand. “Come back to me, Vanessa. Come back soon.”

  She seemed to be looking beyond him, watching the sunlight as it fell slanting on the linoleum tiles. There was only silence. After a long moment he rose and walked to the door.

  “She’s an extraordinary woman and right now she’s in extraordinary pain.”

  Dr. Carl Sandersen’s voice possessed the quiet resonance of power. So did his office, a chilly room of gray carpet and chrome and leather. Ames noticed only one area that had warmth, the bookshelves where several volumes had been put back on their sides. “I wish you’d tell me about the pain,” Ames said. “Two forces are battling for her spirit: the normal human will to survive, and a devastating fear that there’s no longer any reason whatsoever to go on living.”

  “Has she said she’s afraid? Has she actually told you that?”

  The doctor’s brow wrinkled. He was a well-built man, his jet-black hair crew-cut like a soldier on active duty. “Indirectly.”

  “Has she spoken to you? If she has, quite honestly I’m jealous.”

  “There’s no need to be jealous. She doesn’t talk to anyone.”

  “This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so damned self-centered…”

  Dr. Sandersen’s voice became kinder. “Guilt is just a way of pretending we’re in control. It hurts to admit we’re powerless.”

  “But it was because of me that she tried to…”

  “The predisposition was already there. It could have been anything that sent her over. Look, what she’s suffering from is awful, but it’s not rare and it’s no mystery. It’s an epidemic in this country. There are more depressives in hospitals than schizophrenics.”

  “Has she gotten any better in the year she’s been here?”

  Dr. Sandersen wished he could say something encouraging. “All recoveries hit plateaus. It may not look as though she’s moving ahead right now, but she is. And believe me, it’s damned hard work—so give her the benefit of your doubts. She needs them.”

  Dr. Sandersen touched Vanessa’s arm. “I had a chat with your husband yesterday.”

  Her gaze did not move from his face. He went on just as though she had answered.

  “He’s a likable man.”

  She did not agree, did not deny. The sun made dusty yellow patterns on the wall behind her, like thrown pollen.

  “Would you like to tell me about your husband?” He wondered why he could never sustain a doctorly tone with her, never muster the false caring or the cool curiosity he could with the others. With her the caring and curiosity were real.

  She seemed to be staring at the space cutting him off from her.

  Dr. Sandersen had to remind himself that silence is simply a message in a language we do not recognize.

  He thought of what she must have been in the full fury of performance, igniting the hush of the opera house with the flame of her voice. He’d had a glimmer of it. He owned her recordings. He’d seen her on television three times. She had acted out passions that most human beings only dreamt in the secrecy of their hearts. She had loved, sacrificed, betrayed, and murdered. She had done it fortissimo and in front of a million witnesses.

  He couldn’t stand the thought of letting all that wither into silence.

  “I have a confession to make,” he said.

  He had been saving this. He sensed a flicker of interest in his direction. A shyness came into him that was almost like awe.

  “I collect autographs. Perhaps, when you’re better…”

  He’d been hoping the word autograph would summon up some reflex, some neural imprint that bypassed thought. But she sat catatonic and mute like a strip of movie film trapped in a broken projector.

  He had seen it in patients before, the willed renunciation of consciousness, the flight from life into the seamless finality of psychosis.

  Tonight, he thought, I pray for a miracle.

  Sunday the third of August was Wanda Zymanowski’s fifty-sixth birthday, and she and Charley celebrated the event with a little barbecue in the backyard. It was not a large backyard, but this time of year it caught the late afternoon Bay Area sun perfectly.

  “You take it easy, sweetie,” Charley called. “I’ll do the work.”

  Wanda settled into a deck chair and Charley brought out steaks and salt and coarse
pepper. He set the sack of charcoal and can of lighter fluid down beside the grill. He made sure the charcoal was perfectly placed and the fluid perfectly squirted. Then he struck a match, and soon the fire was going.

  He came up to Wanda’s chair, smiling. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”

  He handed her a package. It was a small pyramid of red-and-green striped paper, tied with a blue ribbon. The pyramid turned out to be two smaller packages, a little jeweler’s box on top of a larger wallet-sized box.

  She opened the jeweler’s box first.

  He had given her a locket on a gold chain. She wondered why the dickens he’d thought she’d like it. It was flea market stuff. The amethysts were probably genuine, but she wondered about all the little rubies set in something that was probably meant to look like gold.

  She forced out a gasp of delight. “Oh, Charley, I love it!” She jumped up from the chair to kiss him. “It’ll go so well with—” She had to think. “It’ll be perfect with my red dress.”

  “Open the other box,” Charley said.

  This time Charley’s thinking had her totally buffaloed. He had given her a piece of scratch paper, ripped jagged from a lined notepad. He had had it mounted on velvet and framed under glass in beautiful gold-leafed maplewood.

  There was handwriting on the paper. She had to angle the glass away from the afternoon sun to read the words.

  Forgive me, Ariana.

  “Charley, I don’t get it.”

  Eagerness pulsed from him. “The note’s what they call an autograph letter. Vanessa Billings wrote it herself. They auction stuff like that for hundreds of dollars.”

  Wanda’s heart was pushing uncomfortably at her ribs. “Charley, where did you get these?”

  Charley’s glance wavered. “She left them in the dressing room the night she—you know.”

  “You took these from Vanessa Billings’s dressing room?”

  “You collect opera stuff. Look at that Melba postcard you have framed in the living room.”

  Wanda stared at her husband. “But, Charley, they’re hers.”

  “Come on, she left them behind. No one ever asked for them.”