“THE WHOLE THING WAS pure opera,” Maggie said. “Tears were running down her cheeks, tears, as if she were bidding adieu to life itself. I have to give her one thing: she’s a real performer.”
Nikos dropped into an armchair and closed his eyes. “Yes,” he agreed softly, “a real performer.”
“She actually has the notion that you’re going to marry her.”
He could see Maggie expected confirmation or denial.
“If it’s none of my business,” she said, “just tell me to butt out.”
He stared at Maggie. He shook his head. “I never asked her to marry me.”
Nikos called to Ariana from the living room when the limousine brought her home that night. She saw that the butler had laid a little table of cheese and fruit and French bread.
“Nikos, what a nice idea.” We’re making up, she thought. She spread some ripe Brie on a thick crust and held it out to him.
He didn’t take it. “Are you pleased with your performance?” he asked.
“Trovatore’s never been my favorite,” she said.
“That’s not what I mean. You spoke with Maggie this morning.”
The blood thudded so hard in her veins that his image trembled before her eyes. She was swept by a certainty that in two seconds the world was going to end, that her stupidity had caused it to happen.
“Do I have to remind you we’re not married? I am free to have whomever I want in my life, and I intend to!”
Ariana felt a scream gathering inside her. She seized the knife from the wheel of Brie and thrust the handle at him. “Then why don’t you just kill me and get it over with, for God’s sake!”
Nikos looked at her. A strange trembling filled her. She half believed he might actually cry out, Because I love you.
“You’ve always had a flair for the drab,” he said.
“You never loved me,” she said. “Never. And the worst thing is, you don’t love her either. And if you think she loves you…” She crossed to the window and stared down at the dark garden, wishing he would come up behind her and put his hand on her, knowing he wouldn’t but wishing it anyway.
“I can’t go on like this, Ariana—arguing day in, day out.”
“You’re trying to make it all my fault. But it isn’t.”
“I frankly don’t care whose fault it is. I can’t take another minute of this endless battle that you call living together.”
She turned to face him. “You’ve never cared for me, have you? I was just a possession for you to show off.”
“I thought I loved you. But maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right about everything. Do you want to use my lawyer or do you want to get one of your own?”
At the mention of the word lawyer she felt her world racing toward death. “What do I need a lawyer for? We’re not married.”
“You can have what you want, Ariana. Anything. I don’t want to hurt you anymore than I have.”
“What makes you think you’ve hurt me? I’m not a child.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry that I’m not made for belonging to someone the way you want me to.”
Her eyes drank in the truth in little sips. She finally grasped his utter refusal to compromise. That refusal was his strength. It was him. She had loved a refusal. “You were my life,” she said. “I would have done anything for you.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you know something? Even now I want to plead. I want to say this is all my fault, I’ll do anything to make it right.”
“Don’t—please.”
“Don’t worry. You can’t humiliate me anymore, Nikos. The most you can do is destroy me.”
“I won’t sleep here tonight,” he said. “I won’t sleep here anymore.”
She turned and walked to the elevator and pushed the button. She heard his silence behind her, dark like the onset of night. She realized she was alone now. Not just alone waiting for an elevator to take her to her room, but alone for the rest of her life.
She didn’t know how long she lay on the bed biting her lip and sobbing. At some point during the night she heard the front door closing, and she knew Nikos had gone.
She pulled herself to her feet and crossed to the oak chest of drawers. With a sidewise swipe of her hand she cleared it of perfume bottles, figurines, dolls, lamps. She smashed her fist into the mirror but she was still there, multiplied into a half-dozen silvered fragments, a Picasso with running mascara and a locket flying like a yo-yo at her bosom.
She felt a surge of hate and rage. She yanked the locket loose and hurled it to the floor. She went into the bathroom, leaned over the sink and let herself collapse like a wave.
The mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet swung open and caught her reflection. She stared at herself. Her eyes were pools of fatigue. She saw there was a bottle of Seconal capsules in her hand.
It was not so much making a decision as carrying out one already made. She shook what seemed two dozen pills into her palm, lifted them quickly to her mouth and took ten long gulps from a glass of water.
She heard a crash.
The woman in the mirror was in violent movement, pummeling the drinking glass against the edge of the sink, stabbing at her wrist with a handful of sawtoothed fragments.
She watched blood whirlpooling down the drain. A sort of peace engulfed her. Nothing hurt. Nothing mattered. I should have done this long ago, she thought.
She half closed her eyes. Sounds mingled and faded. And then a figure stepped silently into the bathroom. A man.
For an instant the light enclosed him like the background in a sixteenth-century Flemish painting. He was gazing at her with a kind look, a look she remembered from long ago, a look of caring, of consoling, of being a part of someone.
He was wearing a dark suit, and at his neck was the narrow white strip of an Anglican collar. He took her wrist. “Don’t do that.”
It was Mark’s voice. He looked absurdly young and handsome in his clerical collar and dark jacket.
“Mark?” she said wonderingly.
He pulled in a sigh. “You don’t want to die.”
“I’m going to die anyway, why not now? I’m alone, there’s no one to guide me, no one who even cares, why should I go on?”
“You’re not alone. There is someone to guide you. Someone who cares.”
She raised her eyes. “You, Mark? Do you care?”
“Someday you’ll understand.”
Something like a cold steel pin went through her heart. “I’ll never understand. You left me and the best part of me died.”
“I never left you. I never will.”
“Then where have you been? All this time, all these years that I’ve needed you?”
He kissed her lightly on the cheek. His breath warmed the side of her face. She closed her eyes, remembering. She was a girl again. There was a boy who loved her. The world was full of sun and music and reasons not to die.
He was winding a towel around her wrist. Her blood had made a large rose around the monogram. His hand touching hers felt wonderfully soft, like milk.
Can a touch be imagined, she wondered? Can a touch be remembered as clearly as this?
“Hold the towel now,” he was saying, “hold it as tight as you can.”
“I’m so scared,” she whispered.
“Don’t be. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe.”
“Oh, Mark, you left me too soon, years and years too soon.”
“I never left you,” he said. “Are you strong enough to make it to the other room?”
“I think so.”
“Good. I want you to pick up that phone and call the doctor.” She picked up the phone and called the doctor. When she turned Mark was gone. There was only light where his face had been. An hour later a sleepy butler showed Dr. Worth Kendall, Ariana’s latest private physician, into the bedroom. The doctor unwrapped her wrist from the towel and studied it a moment. He opened his bag and began cleaning the cut carefully.
His eyes met hers. “You weren’t even trying.”
“I feel like an idiot,” she said.
“Anything you care to talk about?”
“Nikos has left me.”
“Then he’s the idiot. Kill him, not yourself.” The doctor bandaged her wrist and then prepared a hypodermic.
“Dr. Kendall, I don’t need any more sedatives. I swallowed two dozen sleeping pills.”
His eyes came up at her. “The Seconals I gave you?”
She nodded.
His only comment was silence. He lifted the sleeve of her dress. She felt the sudden chill of alcohol as though a tiny window had opened on her arm and then the quick sting of the needle.
“Those pills were placebos,” he said. “Just in case you ever tried something like this.”
She didn’t know whether to feel insulted or relieved. “How did you know I’d—?”
A mixture of affection and skepticism played on Dr. Kendall’s wrinkled face. “I’ve been a doctor quite a few years. I know all about human willfullness.”
“I am not willful,” she said.
“On the contrary.” He smoothed a small circular bandage over the puncture. “You performers don’t just have feelings, you insist on having them—no matter what the cost. But now that you’ve decided to live after all, I won’t have to send you to the hospital, will I?”
As he was snapping his bag shut the empty Seconal cylinder rolled to the floor and he bent down to retrieve it.
“Say, what have we here?” He was holding DiScelta’s locket.
Ariana stared. “I must have dropped that.”
He handed it to her. As she took it the lid popped open on an unbroken hinge. The face of Alberta Gesualda smiled out from behind an unshattered crystal.
Dr. Kendall watched Ariana’s hand shake. “Have you considered getting away for a while?”
“I can’t. I have performances till June.”
“Perhaps you should cancel a few of those. You can’t go forever skipping essentials, you know.”
“What sort of essentials am I skipping?”
“Quite a few—air, sun, tranquility.”
She closed the locket and slipped the unbroken chain around her neck. A soothing coolness flowed across her bosom.
“Doctor, is it possible to dream—and be wide awake?”
“For an artistic imagination like yours a great many things are possible. That doesn’t mean they’re advisable. You’d better lie down, Ariana. That injection’s going to hit pretty fast.”