ARIANA WAS ABOUT TO follow the butler and her suitcases into the elevator when she heard footsteps. Nikos came down the marble staircase. He was dressed to go out.
She was on the verge of flinging it out in front of him: I know you’ve been lying, I know everything! But she had not realized the power his face had over her. As she met his gaze, every accusation in her melted. “Hello, Nikos. Are you going somewhere?”
“I have a business date.”
“Now, in the evening?”
“Yes, now in the evening.”
Suddenly she said, “Cancel it. Please.”
“Do you cancel your operas for me?”
“Maybe you don’t know everything I do for you.”
He stared at her, shook his head, and crossed to the front door.
“Are you going to Maggie?” she blurted.
He turned. “Welcome back, Ariana. I’d forgotten what home was like with you.”
Each day of that summer Ariana sensed the gap between her and Nikos grow wider. He spent most of his time out of the country. They did not vacation together. When they dined together, which was rare, it was at private dinners for sixty or more.
Her attitudes began changing. They seemed to belong to someone else. She began not caring.
In September she arrived at the Metropolitan for Pagliacci with barely time to get into costume, let alone warm up. She was able to vocalize a little during the Prologue, while the tenor singing Tonio stepped before the curtain and reminded the audience that though the drama they were about to see would be played by actors, it concerned human beings with real emotions.
The emotions in Pagliacci were jealousy and anger, and for Ariana they were a little too close to home that night. She hurried to her place onstage.
The curtain rose as a troop of actors arrived in a nineteenth-century Calabrian village. Tonio helped Nedda—Ariana’s role—down from the wagon. Her husband, Canio, pushed him jealously away. The company went to the inn, and Nedda was left alone, longing to be as free as the birds flying in the sky. Though Ariana’s voice pinched on the high note of her “Ballatella,” the surging orchestral accompaniment pointed the climax and the audience applauded warmly.
Now Tonio approached and tried to make love to her. She struck him scornfully in the face with a whip.
Ariana was horrified to see blood on the baritone’s cheek.
Tonio skulked away far enough to spy on a conversation between Nedda and Silvio, a villager who wanted her to run away with him. Alerted by Tonio, Canio interrupted the lovers, but Silvio managed to escape unrecognized. Canio began shaking his wife violently, but she refused to reveal her lover’s name.
The other actors separated the quarreling husband and wife. It was time for the clown show.
Canio, enraged and heartbroken, hiding his feelings behind the clown’s face, sang “Vesti la Giubba”—“Put on your costume”—one of the classic tenor showpieces in the repertoire. There were bravos as the curtain fell to mark a brief time lapse. When it rose again the villagers were bustling expectantly to their seats and the clown show began.
Nedda played Columbine, trysting with her lover Harlequin. Her husband Pagliaccio, the clown, played by Canio, burst jealously onto the little traveling stage. Harlequin escaped. Canio, confusing play and real life, cried, “A clown no more—I am a man!”
The audience of villagers stirred in confusion.
Nedda, trying to maintain her character, sang Columbine’s teasing song. Canio, dropping all pretense, flung himself at her, demanding her lover’s name.
Again, she refused to tell him.
He stabbed her. Silvio leapt onto the stage—too late. Canio killed him too. Then, turning to the horrified spectators, he cried, “La cormmedia è finita!”
Ariana couldn’t help wondering, as she took her bows and rode home alone, if the comedy wasn’t finishing for her too. There were days when she couldn’t practice at all, couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. She began canceling dates.
At first she canceled unimportant engagements: a Lakmé in San Diego; a Butterfly in Ghent. But one day the notion of flying seven hours filled her with unbearable queasiness, and she canceled a Pirata in Brussels. Two weeks later she found herself at home listening to a broadcast of a Tannhäuser at the Met that she should have been singing, and she felt a whisper of panic in her blood.
What am I doing to myself?
Finally Richard Schiller summoned her to his office. “Ariana, what the hell’s going on with you? Eight cancellations.”
He stared at her and she felt like a little schoolgirl with shame creeping hotly up her face.
“You’re burning up a hell of a lot of track record awfully fast. The Met says if you cancel the Adriana Lecouvreur gala, that’s it. You’ll no longer be grata, you’ll no longer be hired. And believe me, a thing like that will ripple out. Even Bogotá won’t want you. You’ve got to shape up.”
“I know.”
“Anything you want to talk to me about?”
She looked at this sweet tough man who knew everything about her career and nothing at all about her. She shook her head. “Thanks, Richard. I’m lucky to have you.”
Ariana sang the Adriana Lecouvreur. She couldn’t find her center, musically or dramatically. The Times review was scathing.
DiScelta jabbed her finger at the vocal score. “What in the world do you think you are singing?”
Ariana stopped in midphrase. “Aren’t I singing the notes?”
DiScelta gazed a moment at her pupil with disgust, then slammed the score closed on the music stand. The strings of the piano, shocked into sympathetic vibration, sent out a ghostly chord.
“The notes, yes, but Donizetti wrote melody, damn it, melody!” DiScelta shook her head. “I can’t make sense of all the senseless things you’ve been doing. What’s wrong with you?”
She made two cups of blackcurrant tea with honey and Ariana tried to tell her.
Finally DiScelta set down her cup. “What are you—an artist or a silly courtesan?”
“I don’t know who I am,” Ariana whispered.
“Then make up your mind. The reason you are failing now, as a courtesan, as an artist, is that you’re not paying attention to details.”
Ariana sighed. “How can I bother with details?”
“My child, few things are certain in life except this: if the details are sloppy, the work fails.”
“You don’t understand—I love him.”
“I do understand. You have sunk into love. I cannot help you with love. No one can. Perhaps you cannot even help yourself. But I can help you with music. And for you, music is life.”
“A nightingale doesn’t sing in a storm,” Ariana said softly.
DiScelta slammed down her cup. “Nightingales are not professionals. Look at me, Ariana. If you must face life without this—this man—is it so dreadful?”
“For me it’s dreadful.”
“Then I can only tell you this. Not every problem has a solution, but all have answers.”
“And what’s the answer?”
“Let him go,” DiScelta said, her eyes blazing. “Let him go!”
Ariana tried to keep up her lessons with Vanessa, but she found the endless hours spent rehashing the same old mistakes as difficult and draining as a performance.
“E-flat, Vanessa, it’s written in the score, E-flat.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s take it from ‘beltà funesta.’”
Ariana could see Vanessa was scared, desperate to do everything right. And for some reason that made everything worse, and she wouldn’t let her pupil do anything right.
“Why do you breathe there?”
Vanessa had no answer. She sank to the piano bench next to Austin. His hand closed gently over hers.
Ariana walked slowly to the window. It was raining. The skyscrapers of New York loomed hard and glistening under a leaden heaven. “Vanessa. We’ve got to talk about this.” She pulled a chair over to the bench and sat down.
Vanessa peeped up at her.
“This isn’t working. Our lessons just aren’t getting anywhere.”
Vanessa gave her a look of sheer terror. “Is it my fault? Am I doing something wrong?”
Ariana noticed a small movement from Austin Waters. His eyes snapped around to narrow on her silently.
She shook her head and realized how much she had dwindled. “No, it’s my fault. I’m tired. I need a rest.”
After a moment Vanessa rose and began gathering her scores.
Ariana couldn’t bear the girl’s obvious pain. “Perhaps we can have a lesson next month.”
The girl turned quickly, eagerly. “Next month?”
“Or maybe—” Ariana could not meet the hope in her eyes. “Maybe the month after. I’ll phone.”
And then she was alone with Austin.
“Did you need to do that?” he said.
Ariana stood staring down at the gold chain around her neck, feeling the suddenly insufferable weight of the locket. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please. Just leave me alone.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“I don’t care. Go.”
Three rings, and then the principessa’s answering machine. “Hi. This is Maggie. Beep.”
“Maggie, it’s Ariana—”
There was a click and a buzz and Maggie cut in. “Ariana? Loved your review this morning.”
“Can we meet for a talk?”
The briefest of hesitations; a new wariness in the voice. “How about this morning?”
“Half an hour?”
“Come on over. I’ll give you coffee.”
The walls of Maggie’s penthouse co-op on Beekman Place were light apricot and coffee turned out to be chilled Pouilly Fuissé served by a Norwegian girl. Ariana lifted her wineglass and pretended to smoke a cigarette and made small talk and tried to work up nerve to get to the point.
Maggie said, “Pleasant as this is, Ariana, I do have to think about changing for lunch. Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
Maggie had put on a wrap-around camel’s-hair skirt, a beige and white pin-dot blouse with a brown vest flung over it. She wore a single strand of pearls. Ariana sensed it was Maggie’s idea of a deliberately dull outfit, that Maggie had dressed down for her. Ariana felt inappropriate in her brand-new Givenchy. She realized that she and Principessa Maggie came from totally different solar systems.
“I came to apologize.”
“What in the world for?”
“For resenting you.” Ariana couldn’t help thinking how good Maggie was at seeming amazed. “You must have known it. I’ve resented you from the moment we met.”
Maggie gave her a hard, questioning look. “Why, because I’m younger?”
“Younger and a lot of other things too. Maybe it’s because you’ve never known a moment’s doubt in your life. You’ve always been attractive, always popular, always done well in private schools and on tennis courts and in ballrooms and rich men’s dining rooms.” And bedrooms, she thought. “I grew up in a slum on East 103rd Street and I never got a thing in life I didn’t have to fight for.”
Maggie stared at her with uplifted eyebrow. “You had the rough time and I had the easy time, is that it?”
It flashed through Ariana that this mustn’t turn into an argument. Play it like Verdi, instinct said. Direct, honest supplication. The waitress entreats the princess.
“You know what I’m trying to say,” Ariana said.
“I’m not sure I do.” Maggie pressed her lips together and walked to the mahogany piano and began shuffling sheet music on the rack. It was as though she sensed what was coming and wanted to force Ariana to shout it so that the maid could hear it in the next room.
“Please…” Ariana said. “Please don’t take him from me. Please don’t do it just to prove you can.”
Maggie turned and gazed at her and the look of astonishment that came into her eyes did not seem forced this time. “You’re talking about Nikos?”
Ariana nodded.
“I don’t have to take things,” Maggie said. “I accept them.”
There was another silence and then, in a voice that was suddenly, inexplicably faint, Ariana said, “I love him.”
“Perhaps you should tell Nikos that, not me.”
“I don’t see how you could love him the way I do. You don’t even know him.”
“Did I ever claim to know or love anyone? I’m attracted to a man, he’s attracted to me. We flow with it till one of us gets tired of it and then we go our separate ways and it’s a nice memory. What’s the big fuss?”
“That’s all Nikos means to you?”
“Nikos is a friend.”
Ariana rose and felt herself swaying on unsteady legs. She took a step and looked out the window as though she had never seen a river before. “Are you going to deny you’re sleeping with him?”
“We’re friends and we have a marvelous relationship with trust and understanding.”
“And you’re sleeping with him.”
Maggie drew her teeth across her lower lip, then gave her attention to one of her fingernails. “You have got to be one of the most naïve women I’ve ever met.”
“I don’t care what you think of me.” Ariana knew her eyes must be shining in front of this child like hot spills of candle wax.
Maggie didn’t answer. In the next room the pitch of the maid’s vacuum cleaner had risen to a loud whine.
“I have a right to know the truth,” Ariana said. “Are you sleeping with him?”
“Why don’t you ask Nikos?”
“Would I be here if I had the courage to ask him?”
Maggie drew her head back to look at Ariana with a cool expression. “Let me give you some advice. You know a great deal about Puccini and Verdi, but you don’t know much about men. I’ve had friendships with some of the outstanding men of our time, and the reason is, I never talk about them to other people.”
“Nikos is all I have. You’re young, you’re beautiful, rich. You can have anyone. Please, let me keep him. Let me marry him.”
Maggie shot her a look of almost withering pity. “But my poor little superstar, don’t you realize it’s not up to me?”
“But don’t you realize it is?”
In the silence Maggie lifted her cigarette again. “Ariana, I’m going to tell you something about that privileged childhood of mine. A royal palace is as rough as any street in East Manhattan. Every minute you’re dealing with people at their phoniest, their most manipulative. I had to be tough and show I wouldn’t take bullshit from anyone. And frankly, I won’t take it from you.”
Suddenly Ariana felt strange and weak. “What do you mean?”
“I mean go to hell.”