Paris
Summer 1970
Maria’s apartment was like a botanic garden, full of lavish bouquets and exotic plants. Every surface had a vase perched on it, and the air was filled with fragrance.
Her friends rallied around her so that in the weeks following her release from the hospital she was never alone. They alternately comforted and chivvied her, urging her to get back to singing, to make more movies, to fill her life with fresh challenges, and to never, ever, see Ari again. He sent flowers and cards, but her entourage wouldn’t let her take his calls. She didn’t fight them; she knew she couldn’t have coped with hearing his voice.
In the newspapers, she read that he and Mrs. Kennedy had spent the summer on Skorpios, and that Lee had joined them. Didn’t Jackie mind that her sister had slept with Ari first? Wasn’t that awkward? Lee had been trying to launch herself as an actress, but the drama critics who attended her theatrical debut in Chicago were scathing. Maria smiled when she read the dire reviews: “A star is not born,” one said.
One afternoon in late September the telephone rang. She picked it up without thinking and was startled to hear Ari’s voice.
“How are you?” he asked, his tone gentle.
“I’m well.” She felt unsteady on her feet and sat down on the chair in the hall. “Very busy. I’m giving a series of master classes next year for students at the Juilliard School in New York.” She was proud to have been invited. It would be fun to work with a new generation of opera singers, and she told Ari about her preparations, chattering to hide her nervousness.
“They are very lucky students!” he said. “And are you performing any concerts?”
“I don’t know. There seems to be enthusiasm for the idea of me singing onstage again. I guess people want to come along and be reminded of how great I used to be.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” he said.
She chuckled before she replied. “Even your metaphors involve money.”
He paused. “That’s the Maria I miss; the one who is straight with me, who tells it like it is.”
She didn’t answer, scared of where this conversation was heading. She was still too fragile to deal with him, like a smashed porcelain vase that had been hastily glued back together.
“Can I see you, Maria? Please?”
She shook her head firmly. “No.”
“What, never?”
“I can’t be your lover anymore. It harms me too much. And I don’t think I could see you without wanting to be your lover.”
She heard him sniff. Was he upset? She listened hard.
“Not even if I come to you waving the decree nisi and an engagement ring?” His voice was emotional.
“I can’t wait for that to happen. I need to protect myself, Ari.” There was no artifice now; only the truth.
“I understand,” he said at last. “But can I telephone sometimes? I can’t bear not being a part of your life. There’s no one else I trust the way I trust you. We have so much shared history. We can’t throw it all away.”
Maria considered. Her friends’ voices rang in her ears like a Greek chorus: “Have nothing to do with him.” “He’s arrogant and thinks only of himself.” “He manipulates you and poisons any chance of happiness.”
And then she thought about the closeness they had once shared. Could they be friends who spoke on the telephone? Or would it be a slippery slope that would lead to becoming lovers again?
“We can try,” she said. “But if you upset me, I will stop taking your calls. And I never want to hear you mention Mrs. Kennedy. Is that clear?”
“Of course. As you wish.” He paused, then spoke so tenderly it brought tears to her eyes: “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
IT WASN’T LONG before Maria and Ari fell back into their old habit of chatting on the phone most days. She looked forward to their conversations, enjoyed being part of his life again. He called for advice when his daughter, Christina, married a real-estate agent twenty-seven years her senior, who had four children from a previous marriage. He called with mounting alarm as Project Omega began to slip inexorably from his grasp. He called in fury and disbelief when Tina, his first wife, married his archrival Niarchos. To him it was the ultimate stab in the back, and Maria had to work hard to dissuade him when he threatened to send a hit man to murder Niarchos. But she would not, could not, see him.
“Why has my luck run out?” he asked in exasperation. “It’s as if the gods have turned against me.”
Maria thought to herself that the gods had turned against him when he entered into matrimony for vanity rather than love, but out loud she said, “Since when have you believed in luck? You and I make our own luck. It’s one of the things we have in common.”
She had begun touring with a tenor named Giuseppe di Stefano, singing medleys of arias and duets to sellout crowds across Europe. That was gratifying, even if she knew her audiences were not hearing the vocals that La Callas had once been capable of. “Watch out for di Stefano,” Ari warned her gruffly. “I hear he has a reputation as a ladies’ man.”
“He’s married!” Maria exclaimed, well aware of the irony. In fact, she had begun to sleep with her costar occasionally while on tour. It satisfied her physical needs, but her heart was not in it, and she was anxious that word did not reach the press and, in particular, Ari.
When asked in interviews about her relationship with him now, she told the truth: “He is my best friend. He is, was, and always will be.”