Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  He marshaled a thousand arguments against her going. She granted that they were all wise, all just, all in her best interest.

  Ames watched disbelievingly as she walked out of the house, got into the car, and drove away.

  Nikos came to the door in his dinner jacket. She could hear by the sounds pouring from the apartment that he was giving a party.

  “Vanessa.” It was a soft, pained cry. “What’s the matter?”

  He had aged. His face was longer, the eyes and mouth more lined. His hair was paler; in two years it had shaded to white.

  A word she had never heard before, never spoken before, ripped itself from her throat. “Voïthia!”

  He recoiled from her. “Ariana?”

  “Not Ariana. Vanessa.”

  “But what did you just say? That was…her voice.”

  She felt sudden strength. It was as if Ariana were crying out through her, commanding him to help her. “Voïthia!”

  His face went white. “Pos?”

  She knew he had agreed: he was asking how he could help.

  “Afise mou na kathiso sto spithi sou,” she said, not understanding what she was saying or how she was able to say it, knowing only that he had to take her into his home.

  He stood aside. “Ela,” he said. “Ela.”

  For an instant she didn’t move.

  And then he said it in English. “Come in. Please. Come in.”

  She walked into his apartment with one suitcase. He gave her the guest room.

  He provided everything: the piano, the accompanists, the listening, the advice, the encouragement.

  And he was glad.

  Dr. Sandersen learned at his breakfast table, pouring himself a second cup of coffee. The headlines in the New York Times proclaimed another day of last straws: crime was up, taxes were up, unemployment and prices were up. Everyone was broke and hurting and no one cleaned the streets or cared about the government’s billion-dollar wars.

  He turned for relief to the entertainment page.

  Vanessa Billings’s photograph smiled at him from the third column. He was on the phone thirty seconds later. “You’re playing games with her sanity.”

  “I had no say in it,” Ames Rutherford answered. “She’s left me.”

  “You’re still her husband, aren’t you?”

  “Technically I am.”

  “Then you have the power to stop her. I’ll execute any affidavits you need.”

  “Your husband phoned me,” Nikos told Vanessa. “He says Dr. Sandersen doesn’t want you to sing.”

  “Dr. Sandersen hasn’t seen me in over a year.”

  “All the same, just to be on the safe side, I think we should talk with Holly Chambers.”

  “The fact that we can blow Ames Rutherford off the map doesn’t mean he can’t still make trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble, Holly?” Nikos said.

  “The worst sort. And I doubt Vanessa wants to spend these next weeks agonizing over whether or not she can legally sing Isolde.”

  They were sitting in Chez Claudine, a new little French restaurant on Second Avenue. They’d all ordered the day’s specialty, ragout, and the chilled young Beaujolais. Their corner table was bright with flowers and checkered cloth; the terrine maison and the main course had proved peasant-hearty; and the conversation, for the last five minutes, painful.

  Vanessa raised a gently protesting palm. “Holly, the one thing I’m not agonizing over is whether or not I can sing that role. So long as my lungs don’t desert me, I’ll be on that stage.”

  “Don’t be so sure of it.”

  “I have a contract with the Met.”

  “And you also have a contract with Ames Rutherford that legally takes precedence.”

  She set down her fork firmly against her plate. “I never signed a contract with Ames.”

  “You married him. In court, that’s a contract.”

  “But we’re separated.”

  “Legally?”

  “If you mean have we brought lawyers into it, no.”

  “Then under certain circumstances Ames Rutherford has the right to exercise custody of Vanessa Rutherford.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’m not a child.”

  “Age isn’t the criterion. If a court judges you mentally incompetent, your husband becomes your custodian.”

  “But why would a court—”

  “You were hospitalized.”

  “That was over a year ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter. If your husband can find a doctor willing to swear that you’re still mentally incompetent, the court will grant him custody. He’ll have power of attorney; power to revoke contracts you entered into; power to recommit you to the hospital.”

  Vanessa fought off images of white cells and barred windows. “But Ames wouldn’t—” Her eyes went to Nikos.

  “Holly, show her,” Nikos said.

  Holly moved butter dishes and wineglasses and set the document on the table.

  It was only a Xeroxed copy. Vanessa reached a hand and picked it up by the corner. She read it slowly, incredulity building in her. “They could stop me with this?”

  Holly nodded. “It’s a sad and unjust thing. But that’s the law. He may be a bastard but you’re his spouse and in that situation the bastard has the power.”

  “I never called him a bastard,” Vanessa said softly. “He just doesn’t understand.”

  Holly shrugged.

  “There must be something I can do,” she said.

  “Sure. Shoot him.”

  Nikos spoke. “Not funny, Holly.”

  “Sorry.” Holly sighed. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I can only see one sure way Vanessa can go onstage. Ask the court for a separation. Do it immediately. Once you’re legally separated, Ames Rutherford and all the doctors in the world can’t keep you from singing Isolde.”

  Vanessa glanced up at Nikos. He was faceless against the glare of sunlight in the restaurant window. “Nikos?” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s up to you. You have my full support whatever you decide.”

  “All I want to do is to sing.”

  Vanessa saw Ames the day before her performance.

  He was sitting across the courtroom in a rumpled raincoat and it wasn’t even raining. He was wearing the South American sweater she had given him for his birthday and a necktie that didn’t go with it and she had a feeling he was wearing sneakers too.

  She felt sad. Poor Ames—he’ll always need someone to dress him.

  Holly Chambers was sonorously outlining his client’s petition.

  Vanessa stared at the man she was asking to be separated from.

  It all seemed hopelessly unreal to her, meeting him, loving him so much that the thought of him had obliterated every other thought, living with him, feeling the love change in a way she couldn’t begin to understand or control, and now seeing him across a courtroom while her attorney explained she wasn’t asking for his money or his car or his house, wasn’t asking for anything except never to be approached by him again.

  She had said to Holly, “I only need till after the performance,” and he had said, “But legally you have to ask for never again.”

  Ames sat listening, alone and still in a spill of sunlight from the window. He looked across at Vanessa and she looked across at him.

  She felt they had known each other for centuries, and still she could remember the first time, the little boy in his navy blue private school blazer that she had glimpsed through the crowd at a matinee in the old Metropolitan Opera House, and suddenly she thought, I was never in that old house, and surprise jerked her back to the present.

  “Is Mr. Rutherford’s counsel in the courtroom?” the judge asked.

  Ames rose. His voice was so soft it could hardly be heard. “I have no counsel, Your Honor.”

  “Speak up, please?”

  “I have no counsel, Your Honor.”

  “Are you representing yourself?”

  “I su
ppose so, Your Honor.”

  “Do you oppose Vanessa Rutherford’s motion?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “Motion granted.”

  After the hearing Ames went to the twenty-ninth floor of the World Trade Center. It was 1:15, lunchtime, and several men and women were sitting in a small conference room with a view of the Hudson River.

  The speaker today was an elderly woman, a clerical worker with an architectural firm. Ames slipped into a chair and listened to her gentle voice telling the old familiar story of loss and loneliness and booze…and recovery.

  There were smiles and applause when she finished, and then anyone who had anything to say put his or her hand up in the air.

  She called on Ames.

  “Hi. My name is Ames. I’m an alcoholic.”

  He had been coming to this room, and to rooms like it, for the seven weeks since Vanessa had left him and he had woken up in a wrecked Mercedes with an empty vodka bottle beside him and no memory of how he’d wound up in that potato field.

  “Just an hour ago the court granted my wife a legal separation. I don’t feel like drinking over it, but I feel angry and scared and very much alone. I’ve been holding onto the hope that somehow I’d get her back, but now the prospects don’t look too bright. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her.”

  The woman nodded. “It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be scared. You’ll do the right thing whatever happens. You’re not alone, you’re here. And the court’s not God. You may not lose her.”

  “They changed the New York divorce law. The only grounds used to be adultery. You had to have a guilty party and an innocent party.”

  She wondered why Nikos was mentioning it. “That doesn’t affect me, Nikos. I’m not divorced. I’m only separated.”

  “Once the court grants a separation, if the parties don’t live together or change their minds, they’re automatically divorced in a year.”

  Her mind played with the idea as though it were a strange object, like a chunk of meteor that had landed at her feet. “Holly didn’t mention that.” She walked out of the study onto the terrace and stared down forty stories at Central Park. At first she could only see darkness and then she saw lights lacing the trees beside the paths.

  Footsteps came close and slowed. Nikos’s voice was beside her. “I’ve loved having you here.”

  “Thank you for letting me stay. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “After you married I was dragging myself around like an emotional paraplegic.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Maybe after all the years I’ve ridden roughshod through other people’s lives I needed to learn what it was to need someone else.”

  “You’ve been good to me. I had no right to ask for anything and you’ve been wonderful.”

  “You and Ames are virtually divorced now. Do you understand that?”

  “I can’t think about it now.”

  She said it gently. She was grateful to Nikos. There was caring in him and warmth. She took his hand. His fingers curled around hers.

  “Have you ever been to Georgetown?” he said. “In the Bahamas?”

  “I’ve never been to the Caribbean.”

  “It’s beautiful down there. I have a plane waiting for us at JFK.”

  Sometimes he struck her as a child. He would never understand that people had lives and responsibilities of their own, that they couldn’t just drop everything because he had an impulse to play.

  “It sounds wonderful, but I’m singing tomorrow.”

  “Just for tonight. We can fly back right away.”

  “Why go all that way for a night?”

  “The law’s different down there. We could marry in Georgetown. It wouldn’t carry legal weight in New York, but in a year we could marry here too and then we’d be man and wife in all fifty states.”

  She thought how defenseless he had made himself to her. “That’s the most beautiful thing you could offer me. Thank you, Nikos.”

  “That’s it? Thank you?”

  “Thank you and I love you. You’ve been very good to me.”

  “Will you marry me? At long, long last?”

  She looked at him, his eyes soft and dark and hopeful, his hair curling and thick and white. She thought how easy he would be to wound at this moment and how she must never hurt him again.

  “I can’t decide anything, Nikos. Not till I get through what I have to get through.”

  51

  THEY WERE IN HER dressing room, with barely three minutes before the Prelude. There was a light knock at the door.

  Vanessa frowned into the mirror, trying to adjust her headband. “Would you see who that is?”

  An usher handed Camilla a small gift-wrapped package.

  Vanessa glanced over her shoulder. “Open it, would you?”

  A necklace of cabochon diamonds sparkled in a bed of contoured purple velvet. Vanessa stared. The jewels seemed to have been thrust by accident into the wrong universe. She looked at the card.

  “Nikos.”

  “Don’t you want to try it on—for luck?” Camilla said.

  “No, this is my good luck jewel.” Vanessa lifted the locket from the dressing table. She clicked it open. Her eyes met those of the woman in the portrait. As she put on the locket an easy temporary immortality flowed into her. She smiled at Camilla’s perplexed look.

  “Is my toothbrush around somewhere? I don’t like to pray with dirty teeth.”

  The chandeliers dimmed, rising to the ceiling. Latecomers hurried to their seats. There was applause for Boyd Kinsolving as he entered the pit. He raised his baton.

  The Prelude surged out, faded to two plucked notes of the cellos and basses. The huge golden curtain rose on a ship becalmed on the Irish Sea.

  The knight Tristan was taking Isolde, daughter of the Irish king, to be married to King Mark of Cornwall. She had remained strangely silent and refused food throughout the voyage. Finally—tall, head up, her cape streaming out behind her—she explained her behavior to her bewildered servant, Brangaene.

  Isolde told how her fiancée, Morold, had gone to Cornwall to exact tribute. Tristan had scornfully slain him and sent his head as payment to Ireland. Later a wounded man calling himself Tantris had landed on the Irish coast and sought Isolde’s help, since she was famed for her knowledge of potions and healing. She had noticed a nick in his sword. It matched a piece of steel taken from Morold’s head. She knew he was Tristan. She raised the sword to kill him. His eyes met hers. She could not strike the death blow. Instead she healed him. He promised eternal gratitude. But his uncle, King Mark, impressed by his description of Isolde, decided to marry her and sent Tristan back to Ireland to fetch her.

  Now, her voice cutting through the dense orchestral sound as though there were a light within it, Isolde revealed that she was still in love with Tristan and felt he had betrayed her. Resolving to kill herself and him, she commanded Brangaene to brew a deadly poison. She summoned Tristan and, deceptively, proposed they drink a toast of reconciliation.

  But Brangaene had substituted a love potion for the poison. As Tristan and Isolde drained their cups and looked into each other’s eyes, they fell helplessly in love.

  The audience had listened hushed, unmoving, and at the end of one hour and ten minutes their applause broke like a wave hurling itself against the land.

  “Flowers for Miss Billings.”

  The guard at the artists’ entrance glanced at the man in the raincoat whose eyes seemed so strangely patient and lonely. “Leave them here.”

  “The instructions are to deliver personally.”

  “Sorry, we can’t—”

  The man thrust out the yellow duplicate of the florist’s invoice. The guard’s eyes took in the boldly hand-printed DELIVER IN PERSON FIRST INTERMISSION and the name of the sender—Nikos Stratiotis.

  “Okay. Take a right, another right, and it’s the third dressing room on the left.”


  He knocked. It was the dresser who opened the door. Vanessa turned, saw the florist’s package, saw who was carrying it.

  “Ames.” Her hands tightened.

  He tried to tell her with his eyes all that she would never believe from his lips: that he loved her, had never meant to harm her.

  Nikos burst into the room. “How the hell did you get in here?”

  The two men began shouting. Vanessa screamed.

  A guard knocked at the door. “Miss Billings?”

  “It’s all right,” she called. “I was just—practicing.”

  Nikos dropped shamefaced into a chair, and Ames took up position by the doorway.

  “I’m in the middle of a performance,” she said. “Neither of you is helping.”

  They both looked embarrassed and hurt. It was Nikos who finally spoke. “You’ve got to choose, Vanessa. Take one of us or the other.”

  “No, Nikos. It’s the two of you who have to choose—between me and the woman you really love.” She looked from Nikos to Ames. She could see that neither of them understood. “Leave me alone till midnight. Let me finish my performance, and I’ll belong to whichever one of you chooses me over Ariana Kavalaris.”

  Nikos and Ames watched Act Two from opposite wings of the stage.

  Isolde, married to King Mark, had arranged to meet Tristan while the king was away hunting. Together they prayed to the night to guard their love. Brangaene, keeping watch from the castle turret, warned that day was near. They ignored her. As their song rose ecstatically, Brangaene screamed and Tristan’s groom Kurwenal rushed in to warn that the king’s hunting party was returning.

  With heartbroken dignity, King Mark confronted the lovers. Tristan asked if Isolde was willing to follow him to the land of oblivion. She replied she would happily follow wherever he led. As they kissed, one of King Mark’s knights drew his sword. The guilt-ridden Tristan allowed himself to be mortally wounded.

  Stepping back from her curtain call, Vanessa saw him in the wings, his eyes fixed on her.

  The realization jolted her that she had sung an entire act with Ames Rutherford standing no more than thirty feet away.

  Something has changed, she realized. He didn’t make me freeze up.

  Without a word, she hurried past him, past props and flats of a dozen other operas.