Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  They stood listening to the waves, and she asked, “Boyd, how much do you know about Mark Rutherford?”

  “Mark Rutherford was Ariana’s lover. He abandoned her after her Mexico City Aïda.”

  “Why?”

  “I always suspected Ricarda DiScelta was mixed up in it. She couldn’t stop meddling in Ariana’s life. It wouldn’t have been beyond her to play on Mark’s sense of honor and persuade him to give up Ariana for the sake of her music.”

  Gulls swooped, calling mournfully.

  “Till the moment she died,” Vanessa said, “Ariana never stopped being in love with Mark Rutherford. I was there. I saw it.”

  Boyd’s eyes seemed to change depth of focus. He didn’t speak.

  “Boyd, what if Mark was the same? What if he stayed in love with Ariana all his life, even when he was married to another woman? Don’t you think his son would have picked up on it?”

  “Picked up on it how?”

  “Wouldn’t Ames have sensed something unspoken, something unresolved in his father? What if he sensed it so early in life that it formed his own reactions to love and sex and women?”

  “And to you?”

  Vanessa nodded.

  “It cuts both ways, sweetums. Ames is Mark Rutherford’s son, but—in an artistic sense—you’re Ariana’s daughter. The son falls in love with the daughter of his father’s lost love. And the daughter falls in love with the son of the mother’s lost love. Wouldn’t a psychiatrist call that oedipal rivalry? Succeeding where the parents failed? Well, who knows about you or Ames or psychiatrists? I certainly don’t.”

  “Boyd, be honest with me. What do you make of my husband?”

  “He’s handsome. Nice sense of humor. He obviously adores you.”

  “Thank you. What do you really think of him?”

  “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  “I see him as a figure in a pattern. On the one hand there are Ariana and Mark, on the other you and Ames. It’s almost as though the children were playing out their parents’ story, picking it up at the point where it broke off thirty-four years earlier. As for Ames personally, I doubt he much cares for me.”

  “It’s because you’re a musician. Ames dislikes anything to do with music at all. Once when I was rehearsing Tosca at the Met, he was watching from the balcony. There was a malevolence streaming from him that stopped me cold and wrecked the whole run-through. I had to ask him never to come to a performance of mine again.”

  “Curious,” Boyd said. “It’s like a seesaw balancing itself. Mark gave Ariana to music: Ames is trying to take you back from it.”

  “Sometimes I feel Ames hates music as though it were a rival.”

  “But, sweetums, don’t you see? That’s exactly what it is.”

  It was 6:30 when Ames realized Vanessa was missing, and almost seven when he saw her coming in from the beach on Boyd Kinsolving’s arm. She looked happier than he had seen her in a year and a half, and he didn’t have the heart to take that away from her.

  He waited till the guests had gone home. “Who invited Boyd Kin-solving?”

  “No one. Mandy brought him.”

  “What were you two talking about?”

  “Music.”

  He was silent.

  “Ames, I wasn’t singing. Scout’s honor.”

  It surprised him how hard it was to smile back at her.

  In the weeks after the party Vanessa took down old curtains, put up new curtains, went to a garage sale and found a Mission rocking chair for the living room. She spent three days covering the shelves in the pantry with new Contact paper and putting the glasses where the plates had been and the plates where the glasses had been.

  She didn’t complain, didn’t talk much, just smiled when Ames happened to come into a room where she was pottering around.

  He phoned Dr. Sandersen, who said, “Maybe it’s time to let a little more life trickle in from the outside.”

  A phone call came two days later. A man by the name of James Draper said he’d been Ricarda DiScelta’s assistant for over fifty years; he apologized for calling; Boyd Kinsolving had given him the number, he hoped he wasn’t intruding.

  “I hope you aren’t either,” Ames said coolly.

  There was an instant’s fluttery embarrassment, and then Draper explained that he had a project that might interest Vanessa.

  “My wife isn’t working at present.”

  “I didn’t mean work work. Look, could we meet?”

  “I’ll be in town seeing my agent day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m in Carnegie Hall Studios. Why don’t you stop by for tea?”

  James Draper turned out to be a small elderly man, ruddy and still robust, bald and with a gray mustache. He sat on the sofa in a kind of boyish squat, hugging his knees, petting his Abyssinian cat, his feet tucked under him.

  He explained what he had in mind: a scholarly work, to be printed by the Oxford University Press, setting forth in meticulous detail the interpretation of twelve different roles by twenty divas of the past and present. “I could speculate and theorize all I want, but when you get right down to it, no one but a performer who’s been there can give you the inside view of how it’s done.”

  “What would you expect Vanessa to do?”

  “Listen to tapes. Comment.”

  “No singing?”

  The old man was indignant at the idea. “Naturally not.”

  Ames realized he had been praying for weeks for some little sign from somewhere, from someone. And here it was. This funny little man was offering him salvation.

  “I’ll ask her,” Ames said.

  49

  VANESSA CAME INTO THE room in a billowing skirt of blue brocade.

  A short, bald man with glasses and a polka-dot bow tie rose to take her hand. “I’m so grateful you were able to see me. For many years I was Ricarda DiScelta’s assistant, and of course she taught your teacher. So this is auld lang syne for me.”

  “Yes,” Vanessa said, “Ariana often spoke of DiScelta. She admired her enormously.”

  The cleaning woman had set out tea and two cups. Vanessa served. “Milk or lemon?”

  “Lemon, please. I’ve brought tapes. I thought we could play them, and you could comment, and if you don’t mind, I’ll record what you say. I’ve got the most god-awful memory and we don’t want lawsuits if I misquote you!”

  James Draper had a traveling case on the sofa beside him with a great many wires and microphones spilling out of it.

  “Why don’t we start with a little Turandot? I’ve got some really splendid cuts here.”

  He began with tapes of “In questa reggia”: Tebaldi; then Callas; then Sutherland. “Do you think Sutherland gets to the innerness of the role?” he asked.

  Vanessa thought herself into the role of expert. “It’s a curious role. There’s less innerness there than in Puccini’s other heroines. It would be a mistake to sing it like Tosca. Remember Liú, the rival soprano, calls her ‘tu che di gel sei cinta’—‘you who are girdled in ice.’ Personally, I find Callas’s recording too warm, too emotional. But that’s a subjective opinion. What the role really takes is power—not much else.”

  “Power.” James Draper’s glasses were glinting at her.

  “For example, Nilsson sings it very coldly, but my God how effectively.”

  He nodded and in a moment he was playing more tapes. She commented when he asked for comments. Time floated by. And then a pure soprano voice arched up into the silence.

  She lifted her head, listening. She recognized the music, of course: Violetta’s solo scene from Act One of Traviata.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “You.”

  “Me? My God. I was good.”

  “Oh, you’re excellent. Truly excellent.”

  I’ll get it back, she thought. I’m scarred, but I’ll mend.

  James Draper changed cassettes. And then she was hearing Violetta’s farewell to Alfredo.

 
She felt more than a little uncomfortable at recognizing herself in this singing puppet. The vocal inflections were banal, without any sense of the aching might-have-been. There was no passion in the phrasing, no memory of the long, sweet tenderness the lovers had shared. She felt even more uncomfortable when she heard Ariana singing the same passage. It was almost too much, a fiery outpouring of nightmare and dread and the terror of abandonment.

  James Draper stopped the tape. “This is one of the clearest examples I’ve been able to find of diametrically opposed interpretations—yours and hers.”

  “Yes…they are different.”

  “And the difference is all the more curious in view of the fact that she coached you in that role.”

  At that moment Vanessa felt a whispering trickle of certainty. There was something on those two tapes…something she had to understand.

  “Why did you choose to do such a pastel shading of that scene?” James Draper asked.

  “I didn’t choose anything. It’s just not a very good performance.” She fixed her gaze upon the cassette player. “Could I borrow those tapes? Just the Traviatas. Ariana’s and mine.”

  She awoke in the middle of the night. Ames stirred in his sleep. She crept downstairs. She got James Draper’s tapes out of the piano bench and looked at the neatly lettered labels.

  The date was the same on both: January 12, 1971. The night she’d spent thirteen years trying to forget.

  She got the cassette player from the study. She slid one of the Kavalaris cassettes into the machine. There was a hypnotic moment of dead sound. Strange, she thought, how every opera house had its own special silence: the silence of the Met was huge, cavernous, cool, broken after a moment by applause for the conductor. An instant’s stillness, and then the familiar descending string chords of the Prelude.

  She closed her eyes. She was there, in the Met.

  The cellos sobbed out the haunting, big tune of the Prelude. The violins added their skittering, nervous countermelody. And then the curtain rose on the party at Violetta’s Paris townhouse.

  Ariana Kavalaris was in terrible voice, muffing entrances, dodging high notes, missing lows, swooping into phrases, garbling text. Vanessa slipped her own tape into the machine. The orchestra wasn’t quite as polished as the Met’s, but she was in far better voice than her teacher. Initially. And then came that awful moment in “Ah! fors’è lui,” the B-flat that wasn’t there.

  She forced herself to listen to the whole act; and then Ariana’s second act; and then her own. And then Act Three. An intuition kept teasing her: there was a connection between the two performances, a link so strong it was almost cause and effect.

  But what?

  She spent the morning listening to the tapes and still not knowing what it was she was listening for. After lunch she got paper and pencil, taking careful notes.

  After four hours she looked over her scribblings: Act One: Libiamo. Ariana, lousy. Me: terrific. Sempre Libera. Ariana—lousy lead-in, good cabaletta. Me: good lead-in, good cabaletta. Ah! fors’è lui: Ariana—lousy; me—sensational. And so it went throughout the opera: both sopranos sang erratically; but Ariana improved phenomenally, going from a terrible Act One to a superb Act Three, and Vanessa slid from a sparkling Act One to a dismal last act.

  But she was certain there was something else. She needed to see the music.

  She got the score from the library.

  She replayed the “Libiamo,” marking Ariana’s mistakes on the score in green, her own one slip, a B-flat cut short, in red.

  No pattern there.

  She went through the act, marking. A lot of green, not too much red. A premonition began stirring inside her.

  Act Two: by midpoint the green and red were running equal.

  Act Three: not much green, a sea of red.

  She stared at the two colors. She had the impression a pattern was there, staring right back at her. But she couldn’t see it.

  She looked out the window. The sun was down. How many hours had she spent on this madness?

  She glanced toward the grandfather clock. My God, nine hours.

  She spun the tape backward.

  Where had Ariana’s B-flat been so weak? “Gioir.” Act One. And where had it come out ringingly strong? She changed cassettes. Act Three. That crucial B-flat at the end of the final quintet.

  Now she replayed her own tapes. “Gioir” again. B-flat was damned good. Now the quintet. She winced. The B-flat was like an old lady in a church choir.

  She made notations on her paper: the good B-flats, the bad B-flats, whose was which and where.

  All right, let’s go for the high C’s.

  Two hours later she had an approximate run-down on her and Ariana’s notes from the top of the staff up, F’s through high C’s. There was the glimmering of a sort of pattern: When Ariana finally got her A-flat, Vanessa lost hers; when Ariana finally managed a high C, Vanessa’s cracked.

  But the pattern didn’t quite hold. Ariana managed a decent B-flat in “E Dio cancello,” and ninety-seven bars later Vanessa was still singing good B-flats in “Ah, morir preferirò.”

  Unless…

  She telephoned Boyd Kinsolving, talked her way past a very possessive-sounding male secretary, and finally got the Great Man on the line. “Is there some way I can find out the starting and finishing times of the acts of a performance at the Met and the Philadelphia Opera?”

  “What date?” he said.

  Boyd phoned back the next day. “You sly little devil, you. I conducted that performance at the Met. Ariana was singing. And you were singing in Philly.”

  “Believe me, I know. Do you have those times?”

  He read her the curtain up and curtain down times for each act. “This is all very mysterious, Vanessa. Are you going to let me in on what’s up?”

  “You’ll be the first to know when I know.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  The next step was to make two Xerox copies of the score. That entailed a trip to the public library. She scissored out the vocal lines. She marked one Ariana and the other Me, and using a stopwatch and Boyd’s curtain-up and curtain-down times, marked the minute-by-minute timing of each measure. The results were approximate, but a comparison of the two vocal lines was enough to show the connection.

  Her hands were shaking as she phoned, but she managed to keep her voice steady. “Boyd, can you come down to the house for lunch tomorrow? I need to talk to you.”

  Ariana’s voice came in great waves of sound, traveling out from the stage across the darkness, across the years…

  “Ah! io ritorno a vivere—oh gioia!”—“I live again—oh joy!”

  Verdi’s final, tragic chords thundered out of the tiny speaker. The cassette player snapped off, and Ariana was gone.

  Boyd sat feeling the poignancy of live performance, the loss of the woman who had been his wife. For a long, aching moment his thoughts were in the past.

  “Of course,” he said, “both performances have their rough spots. Yet there are moments on those tapes when I couldn’t say for sure who I was hearing—you or her.”

  Vanessa sat watching him.

  “In some flukey way you caught not just her style but something else too—her timbre, her intonation. Of course, you went on to develop and you became original and marvelous too.”

  “You don’t need to be polite, Boyd.”

  “She was your teacher, and it’s perfectly natural to be influenced. She herself had a great many of DiScelta’s mannerisms.” He was thoughtful a moment. “As do you.”

  “Boyd, there’s one voice on both those tapes.”

  He had to remind himself she was only recently out of her nerve clinic. “That’s an interesting notion, sweetums. You’re saying you and Ariana shared the same tradition?”

  “We shared the same voice, Boyd. It’s not her, it’s not me. But whenever we’re good—and I mean really good—it’s that voice. At moments she has it, at other moments I have it. And we never both have it at the
same time.”

  “Run that past me again, sweetums?”

  “At first I have the voice and she’s got nothing but that squawk, and then bit by bit she gets the voice and I—well, you heard what happened to me.”

  “Anyone can have an off night. You don’t need to get metaphysical to explain it.”

  “It’s not metaphysical. It’s note for note and I’ve documented it.” She opened a notebook and read: “New York, 8:47: Ariana hits her first successful B-flat. Philly, 8:47: Vanessa loses her first B-flat.” She looked at him. “I never have a decent B-flat after that, and hers are all fantastic.”

  “It’s an awfully baroque theory to erect on a B-flat.”

  “It’s not just B-flat. It’s every note above the staff.” She tossed him the notebook.

  He glanced at the neatly penned pages. What they added up to, he couldn’t be quite sure.

  “When James Draper played me those tapes all I heard was me going from wonderful to horrible and Ariana going from horrible to sublime. Then I noticed the dates. They were both the same night. Then I began listening with the score. Ariana started out with no notes. I started out with all the notes. As the evening went on, I lost my B-flat, she got her B-flat. I lost my A, she got her A. It went beyond coincidence. It checked out for every note in the score. And the times checked out too. She got the notes as I lost them. She was taking them from me.”

  Boyd tried to put things together in his mind. The voices on the tape were real. All the notes, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, were really there. Vanessa wasn’t imagining them. She heard what she said she heard, and what she heard disturbed her—as well it might. It disturbed him as well.

  “You’ve made a brilliant case,” he said. “But it’s impossible. Not to be tactless, sweetums, but you were…recovering when these ideas came to you.”

  “Boyd, did you know that common law says the dying don’t lie? Ariana told me about that promise on her deathbed. And she told me the conditions. Once her pupil sang a role onstage, Ariana could never sing that role again. She broke that part of the promise the night we sang those Traviatas.”

  A silence fell on the living room. Boyd lit a cigarette.

  Vanessa paced to the window, turned, faced him. “In the months before she died, Ariana finished teaching me her roles. Boyd, this may sound insane; but at the end she was trying to keep faith with DiScelta—and I intend to keep faith with Ariana. But I can’t do it without your help. Will you find Camilla Seaton for me?”