Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “It’s not right, Charley.”

  He was wounded now. “You don’t like them.”

  “Oh, Charley, they’re the nicest presents anyone has ever given me. But we have to give them back.”

  Something honked.

  Ames had been staring at his typewriter for three hours. He swung around in his chair and looked out the window. Through the pines he could see the tiny red flat standing up on the mailbox. The mailman’s station wagon made a faint grunting down the road. He put on his shorts and sprinted, avoiding the puddles from yesterday’s rain. A lumpy, buff-colored envelope was lying in the mailbox on top of the New York Review of Books. Through the heavy paper he could feel ridges.

  It was from the San Francisco Opera, which gave him a jolt, and it was addressed to him, not to her.

  He returned to the house. He found the letter opener and poked the flap loose.

  Inside was a second envelope addressed to Vanessa Billings, care of the San Francisco Opera. The return address indicated it was from a Mrs. Charles Zymanowski on Pine Street, S.F.

  It was too bulky to be a fan letter.

  Ames hesitated. Hell, I have her power of attorney.

  He ripped Mrs. Zymanowski’s letter open.

  Dr. Sandersen stared down at the note. His eyebrows knitted. “‘Forgive me, Ariana.’ Why would she have written that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who’s Ariana?”

  “Vanessa studied with Ariana Kavalaris. Long ago.”

  “But Kavalaris has been dead for years now. Are you telling me your wife wrote this note to a dead woman?”

  “If she wrote it that night…yes, she wrote it to a dead woman.”

  A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles began swaying from the doctor’s fingers.

  “There was something else in the package.” Ames reached a hand into his pocket.

  Dr. Sandersen stared at the ruby and amethyst locket. It was a striking little piece of jewelry.

  “It belonged to Kavalaris,” Ames explained. “Vanessa used to wear it all the time. It was like a good luck charm to her. That night, for some reason, she took it off.”

  The doctor was silent a moment.

  “Doctor, the cassette she was playing in her dressing room—it was Kavalaris’s recording of the Verdi Requiem.”

  Dr. Sandersen’s swinging spectacles came to a dead stop. “May I borrow the note and the locket?”

  Dr. Sandersen stood a moment in the hallway, listening. There was no sound. He pushed the door inward and stepped into the room.

  Vanessa was sitting on the bed.

  “Good evening, Vanessa,” he said pleasantly.

  Her gaze floated toward him.

  He put the cassette player on the table, and then he placed the tape cassette beside it. Taking all the time in the world, letting her see every move and the purpose of it, he loaded the tape into the player. He pushed the start button.

  The machine made a whirring sound. Then the music started.

  She held her face in a calm rigidity. There was no indication of anything living or aware behind it.

  Now came the entry of the first human voices, the chorus.

  Something changed in her. Her gaze seemed suddenly grayer, softer, and then she blinked and he saw it was because her eyes had moistened.

  The voice of Ariana Kavalaris detached itself from the chorus, like a single spark flying upward from a flame.

  For six minutes Vanessa was silent, her face angled downward like a nun’s at prayer. Dr. Sandersen was reminded that hearing is any living animal’s first link with the outer world.

  The music finished. Silence fell. Dr. Sandersen took the locket from his jacket and placed it on the table in front of her.

  Her jaw tightened. Her knuckles were white knots. He could sense some power gathering in her, coming out against him, at long last forcing a crack in that wall of concealment she had faced toward the world.

  “Vanessa.” He whipped her around to face him. “Why did you write ‘Forgive me, Ariana’?”

  Her mouth hid behind pinching fingers. He yanked her hand aside, shook her with all his strength, determined to shatter the answer loose.

  “Why were you wearing her locket? Why did you take it off that night? Why did you need her forgiveness?”

  She looked at him and it was as though her eyes were screaming.

  He heard the shriek, but for an instant he was so surprised he couldn’t tell where it had come from.

  “Because I broke my promise!”

  His heart was thudding, practically breaking through his ribs. “What promise, Vanessa?” Neither his eyes nor his hands nor his will let go of her. “What promise did you break? What promise?”

  48

  “SUBCONSCIOUSLY SHE BELIEVES HERSELF bound by this promise; and because her pupil failed, she believes she broke the promise. It amounts to a delusion that her teacher’s spirit is in control of her.”

  Ames Rutherford was silent. “Doctor, is she insane?”

  “Insane is not a medical term.”

  “But is she?”

  “She’s severely depressed.”

  “How’s that different from insane?”

  “It’s a defense against insanity. The ego can overreact.”

  “To what?”

  “In this case, feelings.”

  “And where do these feelings come from?”

  “From…” Dr. Sandersen hesitated, wondering how best to put it in layman’s terms. “From within.”

  Ames Rutherford shook his head. “Psychiatry giveth, psychiatry taketh away. Every time it answers one question another pops up. Tell me doctor, will she ever get out of here?”

  Dr. Sandersen steepled his fingers together. “Once she recognizes that her ideas are delusions, that she projects them onto the world around her, we might consider a sort of provisional release. With one major caveat. Contact with music is forbidden.”

  “But there’s music everywhere. In elevators, in the supermarket, in the street. She can’t be shielded from all that.”

  “Obviously, casual exposure to music is inevitable. It’s the structured musical situations that concern me: opera houses, concert halls. We have to rule them out.”

  “For how long?”

  “Till we’re sure the projected material has been dealt with.”

  “How can we be sure of that?”

  “If she can get through a year without relapse or depression, that would be a pretty good indication.”

  “Will she be able to perform again after the year?”

  Dr. Sandersen studied Ames Rutherford. “Do you want her to perform again?”

  “Yes. I want that more than anything else in the world.”

  “Then in time—with your help and understanding—she may be able to.”

  Dr. Sandersen’s office was quiet and peaceful. It always seemed peaceful to him when Vanessa was there. The reddish light from the setting sun bathed the bookcases. Her hands rested in her lap among the dark folds of her skirt. The light caught the gold of the wedding ring on her finger.

  “Anything you’d care to talk about?” he asked.

  “My dreams have been pretty dull lately. Let’s see. There’s a little cat wandering the grounds; I think it’s been abandoned.”

  “What about that?”

  “What about what?”

  “Being abandoned.”

  “Oh, doctor, come off it.” She was smiling at him.

  “Why did you mention the cat?”

  “Because I saw it. It was real, doctor, not a fevered projection of my anxious imagination.”

  “Why do you say anxious? Do you think I think you’re anxious?”

  “It’s your business to find anxieties in your patients.”

  He smiled. “Well, have you got any good ones?”

  “What’s there for me to be anxious about? I’ve got no roles to learn. No blocking to unlearn. No tenors to argue with, no conductors to mess up my tempi. No agents, n
o contracts, no autograph hunters. Just blessed rest. It’s a singer’s dream.”

  “I should think most singers would get a little anxious if too much time went by between performances.”

  “You’re trying to get me to say something, aren’t you?”

  “What am I trying to get you to say?”

  “Oh, that I’m scared of sleeping, scared of being awake, scared of swallowing, scared of seeing my husband.”

  “And scared of never performing again?”

  Vanessa gave a tiny shrug. Dr. Sandersen understood the gesture. It signaled capitulation.

  “That most of all,” she sighed.

  “Vanessa, you will perform again. And I hope it will be soon.” Dr. Sandersen clasped his hands behind his neck and explained. What it boiled down to was one year of no music.

  She listened in silence. “And if I agree to all this—what can I expect?”

  “To use the layman’s term—recovery.”

  “What’s recovery? Not being mad?”

  “That’s a fairly good definition.”

  She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at him. “I can bear madness. According to you, I’ve borne it for over a year now. I can live possessed: thousands stronger than me have done it. But I can’t live separated from music. You might as well amputate my hearing, toss away a fifth of my life.”

  “Only for a year.”

  “Don’t you mean maybe another year, doctor? Maybe longer? Maybe for as long as I live?”

  “There’s always a maybe.”

  “And if the sanity you offer me turns out to be—a premature burial?”

  “It’s possible. Not at all probable.”

  “Yet I could bear even that if only I could teach.”

  “Why is teaching so important to you, Vanessa?”

  “I was given gifts. They have to be passed on.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I believe I swore to do it.”

  “And if I told you that you swore nothing of the sort?”

  “Why should I believe anything you tell me? Why should I trust you? You forbid me to perform, you forbid me to teach. You want to kill the only part of me that matters.”

  “No one says you can’t teach. You can teach very soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “As soon as you’re able to recognize the delusory nature of your beliefs. And with rest, and care, and willingness, you’ll learn to. It’s like reeducating the eye after an implant. Vision returns. You begin to see the difference between light and dark.”

  “How will you know that I recognize my delusions as delusions?”

  “Because you’ll say so.”

  She was silent a moment. “You’ll believe me?”

  “We have to trust each other, Vanessa.”

  Three days later Vanessa seemed preoccupied, cautiously distant sitting in the chair. “I’ve been crazy, haven’t I?”

  “Crazy’s a strong word, Vanessa.” Dr. Sandersen crumpled the wrapper of a candy bar into his ashtray and smiled at her pleasantly.

  “But believing those things—” Her shoulders were tensed together and her hands had wrestled one another to a standstill in her lap. “There’s no other word. It’s crazy.”

  He didn’t answer. She was lying, of course. Her body screamed it. Still, the very fact of lying, of telling this lie, showed a willingness to compromise with reality, to meet it halfway.

  It was a start.

  “What do you want to do, Vanessa?”

  “I want to go home.”

  It was a cold day in September, pure and brilliant, when Ames took her back to the house in East Hampton. They put her bags in the front hall and she stood and looked around at the familiar but somehow strange walls and then she crossed the living room and looked out the window at the ocean.

  “Same old Atlantic,” Ames said.

  She turned. “Aren’t you even going to get angry at me?”

  “Why should I get angry at you?”

  “For going crazy.”

  “I’ve been angry enough for a lifetime.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were soft and tentative. “What if I’m not me anymore? What if I’m not the person you married?”

  “But you are.”

  “Ames, they did everything but drill holes in my head. Sometimes I feel so different I wonder if they put someone else inside me.”

  He took her jaw in his hand and stared into her eyes. “Hey. Honey. There’s no one in there but you.”

  “Are you sure you want me here?”

  “I’m very, very sure.”

  That night, he guided her gently through lovemaking that was careful and fragile and their first in over a year and a half.

  Afterward, she swore to him that the affair with Nikos had ended with her marriage.

  “I know,” he said, ashamed he had ever been jealous. He smiled to reassure her, to show her he had recovered just as she had. He kissed her. “Do you know how much I love you?” he said.

  “Do you?” she whispered. She blinked as her eyes teared over.

  He nodded and then very slowly he took her in his arms again.

  “Beautiful,” Ames said.

  And she did look beautiful. In the six weeks that she’d been home she’d shed her hospital pallor and put on just enough weight to lose the haggardness around her eyes and cheekbones. But she kept frowning at her reflection in the hall mirror. “I wonder if they all know. I suppose they do.”

  “Honey, what if they do? It’s no disgrace.”

  “I wish this wasn’t the first party. I wish it was the third or the fourth and I didn’t have to care so much.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to give more parties.”

  “Hold my hand.”

  Three o’clock came, zero hour, and then there was a heart-crunching quarter-hour when nobody showed up and Ames kept resetting his watch by the grandfather clock and resetting the grandfather clock by his watch. Vanessa stood by the pantry window and counted hors d’oeuvres and trays and watched the driveway; and the man they had hired to tend bar, a lean and hungry-looking German named Hansl, arranged olives and ice cubes and polished glasses that didn’t need polishing.

  At twenty after the first car crunched down the drive—a blue Mercedes—and out stepped the Cavanaughs: Morgan and his wife Morgan—they both really had the same name—and then tumbling out of a red Audi were Pia Schrameck and her husband Wystan, who stuttered when he got really excited. And then Frank Bauer, Ames’s real estate broker, who had walked from his house down the road and had brought a striking Eurasian palm reader named Harmony Ching, and then Pablo and Leo—one of them painted and the other…Vanessa forgot.

  “You look wonderful, Vanessa, just wonderful.”

  As though they were all very carefully telling her something. And then Burt and Julia O’Connor and Julia’s cousin Erin, who must have come from another party because they were already a little giddy, and Vanessa found herself thinking that the house was filling up with artists and brokers and writers and lawyers, and not one musician, not so much as a cocktail pianist or a strolling accordionist.

  She made introductions and astonished herself by actually remembering names: “Pablo, Leo, Harmony, Allan, Eleanor, Wystan, Morgan, Morgan—Julia and Burt and Erin.”

  And no musicians.

  And then Mandy van Slyke arrived in a chauffeured Rolls, apologizing for being late and hoping Vanessa wouldn’t mind, but she’d brought an old friend—“Of yours, dear.”

  Vanessa turned. Her heart stopped. “Boyd.”

  “How are you, sweetums.”

  He looked thinner and grayer than she remembered and his face was beginning to show a few too many years’ polite dissipation. But she couldn’t believe the relief she felt at seeing him.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she said.

  It was a half-hour before they could get away and walk along the beach. She asked what was happening at the Met.

  “Strikes,” he said. �
��Clara Rodrigo. A lot of Bohéme. The usual. When are you going to come back and sing for us?”

  “Who knows.”

  “Have you seen our new Don Carlos?”

  “I don’t get out much.”

  He looked at her, surprised. “Sweetums, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “You really don’t know? I went crazy for over a year.”

  “Are you still crazy, sweetums?”

  “We don’t know. We’re waiting to find out.”

  “I don’t see why crazy people can’t go to the opera. They sure as hell sing in it.”

  She laughed and kissed him. “Thank you, Boyd—for being you.”

  He took her hand and they strolled along the shore. He could sense there was something she was trying very hard to say.

  Gradually, it came out.

  “Boyd, during the years you were married to Ariana, did you ever know her to be—a mystic?”

  “A mystic?” He drew his collar up against a gust of ocean wind. “If you mean did she walk on nails and chant—”

  “I mean what sort of things did she believe in?”

  “She believed in giving a good performance, keeping a good tempo, getting good pay.”

  “Those aren’t the sort of things I mean.” Vanessa’s finger went to the gold thread around her neck. “On her deathbed she gave me this locket. She said it was her voice.”

  Boyd shrugged. “Ariana was always an original.”

  “She made me swear to keep the promise she’d left unkept and complete the life she’d left unlived. I gave my word. She seemed delirious. I thought I was humoring her. But now I’m not sure.”

  They walked on.

  “Boyd, do you know about the promise Ariana made her teacher?”

  Boyd stopped a moment. “Ariana mentioned something once about taking a pupil.”

  “She promised DiScelta to take a pupil, teach her, and launch her. What do you know about the life she left unlived?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The sun glinted off the Atlantic like sparks.

  “Could I tell you something spooky?” Vanessa said. “Time and again, ever since I met Ames Rutherford, I’ve felt I’ve been living someone else’s life, not my own.” She turned to face Boyd. “Does that sound as though I should be back in the nuthouse?”

  “Not at all. We’ve all had feelings like that now and then.”