IT WAS ENOUGH TO ruin Maggie Stratiotis’s breakfast. There was a huge article in the New York Times on Ariana Kavalaris’s favorite way of making fettuccine.
Who chooses these articles? she wondered. Why doesn’t the Times ever ask me how I make blender Vichyssoise?
That same day, at the hairdresser’s, she picked up a magazine and saw a photograph of Ariana at a party in the company of “world-renowned tenor Giorgio Montecavallo.” At the edge of the picture—it was unclear whether he formed part of the group or not—was “playwright Arthur Miller.”
Maggie was suddenly acutely and painfully Ariana-conscious, aware that the woman enjoyed not just fame but a sort of intellectual prestige.
As she sat under the hair dryer she couldn’t help reflecting and assessing. New York had unquestionably become the mecca for world celebrity: it was a city bursting with opportunities for fame. But, staring at the photograph, she had to wonder if she had made the most of those opportunities.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Nikos asked.
Maggie looked up from her Louis Quinze beechwood chair, where she was industriously marking a blue-covered script in red ballpoint. “I’ve been job hunting. And I’ve found something just right. Channel Four. Tony McGraw wants me to host some tours of the great Hudson Valley homes.” She described the project and the go-aheads that the Rockefeller and Roosevelt estates had given.
“I don’t want you getting mixed up with McGraw,” Nikos said.
“Why not? You do business with him.”
“That’s why.”
Their eyes locked.
“What do you expect me to do, phone him and say I’ve decided to drop the whole idea?”
“That’s exactly what I expect you to do.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, Nikos. I have a life too.”
Five thousand miles away, after a night of listening to waves breaking on the rocks, Renata Stratiotis showered and dressed. She tiptoed past her mother’s room. The door was open.
In a stream of pale morning sunlight, Maria-Kristina sat by the window brushing her hair. She turned. “Renata? You’re up early.”
“I’ve got something to do in town today.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed into a quick worried look. “You’re not seeing those dope dealers. Please don’t get into that again.”
“No, Mother, I’m through with them.”
Renata walked slowly across the lawn to the little bay. She got into the blue-and-white speedboat tied to the end of the jetty. It rocked a little under her. The Baltic waters shined up at the sky with the even glow of stainless steel.
With a rip of the starting cord she jerked the motor into life.
The poodle jumped barking into the boat. She lifted it gently and set it down on the dock. “Sorry, Cochon, no passengers.”
At a café on the mainland she met her dealer, a young man with mirrored glasses. She paid him and crammed 800 kroner worth of pills and marijuana into her traveling satchel.
“You’ll like the grass,” he said. “It’s nerve gas.”
She walked in the woods and smoked two joints. From a pay phone by the roadside she placed a call to New York City.
“Collect call for Nikos Stratiotis from Renata Stratiotis,” an operator said.
Maggie glanced irritably from the receiver in her hand to the glowing dial of the bedside clock. “I’ll accept charges.”
“Is my father there?” The voice had that more-than-Oxford accent that Swedish schools teach their nationals.
Oh, God, am I going to have to lie here and listen to a father-daughter reunion? Maggie wondered. I’ve got a ten-hour day lined up tomorrow at the Rockefeller estate. She gloved her voice in kindness. “Renata, this is Maggie. Your father has told me so much about you. Is something the matter?”
“I just need to say hello to him.”
Hello hardly sounded like an emergency. Maggie stubbed out her cigarette. “Darling, it’s three-fifteen in the morning here. Your father will call you in the morning when he wakes up.”
She replaced the receiver. A moment later, when Nikos stepped out of the bathroom, she had rolled onto her side and was pretending to be asleep.
Renata smoked another joint on her way back to the speedboat. She opened the motor full throttle. She stared up at a sky full of mashed-potato clouds. She checked the time by her wristwatch. It was a slender, silver wafer of a watch, sent to her by her father when she’d graduated from grade school university at Göteborg, second highest in her class. He’d been too busy to attend in person.
The island came rushing toward her. The house that Mother and Father had built seemed to be dancing on its foundation. A tall, scholarly woman in a red polka-dot dirndl ran onto the terrace and from her twisted face Renata could see she was screaming.
Mother, I’m sorry, but I didn’t sleep all night and Father wouldn’t take my call.
For one blinding instant time stopped. With a 60-mile-per-hour splintering of wood and chrome, the speedboat slammed into the stone harbor wall. Renata’s skull was split open on impact.
Maria-Kristina’s voice nearly broke across the five-thousand-mile satellite connection. It took Nikos a moment to understand, and then the earth fell away beneath him. “But why?” he said.
“Dr. Aakeborg thinks it was depression.”
“But she had treatment for the depression.”
“We found ninety-two lithium tablets in her medicine cabinet. She’d been lying. She hadn’t been taking them.”
Memories rushed back to him in a tidal wave, unbidden, eerily vivid: Renata’s eighth birthday when he’d given her a white Shetland pony and she’d jumped into his arms and he’d hugged her and said, “Happy birthday, min lilla flicka.”
“And were there any other…drugs?”
“I don’t want to autopsy, Nikos. Unless you insist. I’d like to bury her tomorrow. Here on the island.”
“I’ll be there.” He buzzed his secretary. “Get hold of my wife, please. We have to leave for Sweden in three hours.”
Waiting for Maggie in the private plane gave Nikos a strange sort of nausea. Twilight was turning dusty gray. He watched the sun touch the surface of Jamaica Bay.
They were two hours past their scheduled takeoff when a stewardess approached. “Mr. Stratiotis, your wife is with a camera crew in Pocantico Hills. We’ve been trying since five o’clock, but we can’t get through to her.”
Nikos let himself sink slowly into acceptance. “All right. We’ll leave without Mrs. Stratiotis.”
Nikos stood with his ex-wife and her three servants staring down into a grave that seemed a thousand light-years deep. The Lutheran minister read the service in Swedish.
Nikos tried to follow the words, but his thoughts kept going to the little girl. There had never been time to be with her, never time to tell her how very very much he loved her. His only child and he had never said I love you.
He found himself praying: God, please give her back to me so I can tell her I loved her.
Maria-Kristina threw the first handful of earth, Nikos the second.
Afterward they walked along the beach.
“We haven’t been together here in a long time,” he said.
“Not since we were married.”
“It seems a lifetime ago.”
“It was.”
He looked at the woman who had once been his wife. Her skin had the translucent beauty of middle age but her eyes were the same unfading gray-green he remembered.
“Did you ever think we’d be here again, like this?” he said.
“I try not to think like that. Each day is hard enough without adding others to it.”
“I can still remember her as a girl. Little Renata. With golden pigtails. And now she won’t even live to be a mother.” He suddenly stopped. “How can God let it happen?”
“Maybe someday, with patience, we’ll know the reason.”
He wondered if she really believed those things. “There’s no reason. It’s pointless, all the living and dying and suffering and growing old.”
The hand that took his was soft and strong. “It’s a mystery and we have to endure it. How we endure it makes all the difference.”
“I’m not very good at the ‘how.’”
“Come up to the house. We’ll have coffee. Ilse has baked that raisin cake you love.”
Nikos flew back to New York that night. He arrived at the apartment in the morning and found hundreds of letters waiting. One was from Ariana. He was reading it for the third time when Maggie came breezing through the hallway.
She was obviously on her way to an appointment. Already she was beginning to dress like the highest-paid woman in TV history: diamonds, pearls, a pink Mainbocher suit. She saw him and immediately her manner became subdued.
“Nikos, I’m so terribly, terribly sorry. About your daughter and about the mixup. Nobody knew it was your secretary phoning.” She stopped in front of the mirror. She placed a cartwheel hat on her head and tried it at different angles. It matched her suit and jiggled with dyed egret feathers. “I’d have done anything to be on that plane with you. I could have murdered those fools when I heard they didn’t put the call through.”
“Read this.”
He thrust Ariana’s letter at her. Her eyes glanced over it.
“Very sweet.” She handed it back. “Very considerate.”
“That’s all you can say? Sweet, considerate?”
“What do you expect me to say?”
“There is one living person in the world who cares if I or my family live or die—and it isn’t you.”
“Anyone can write a note.”
“Anyone can get to a plane on time.”
“Nikos, I didn’t know. No one told me.”
“You’re lying. You knew.”
She whirled, eyes mustering denial. “Are you actually accu—”
He seized her head between his hands and bent it back. “She is my family. Not you. From now on, Stratiotis watches over Kavalaris. And you—” He flung her away from him.
She stood massaging her neck, crying softly.
“Don’t cry, little princess. Maybe someday some TV producer will come along and make you the whore you yearn to be.”
That summer—armed with twelve gowns, her briki, two pounds of chamomile tea and three of Vassilaros, the only decent Greek coffee available outside of Greece—Ariana gave eighteen sold-out concerts in the Far East. Audiences applauded wildly when she put on a kimono to sing “Un Bel Di.” Critics never mentioned that she was transposing everything down.
Five weeks later she sat in a New York screening room. Images of her concert at the Pyramids flooded the screen; the sound came through a small speaker that buzzed on every A-flat.
Her gaze sifted through the darkness, catching the puzzled expressions on the faces around her. One of the junior executives rolled a joint.
The reel finished. The lights came up. The president of Channel 4 stood and shook her hand. “That was a most stimulating experience, Miss Kavalaris.”
“When will you air it?”
“It’s not quite our sort of material. Well, we knew it was a gamble, didn’t we?”
“I want to talk to your friend,” Ariana told Monte at dinner that night. “Your friend Mort Degan.”
“What happened, hon?” Richard Schiller stood before Ariana and gazed at her with concern. “You used to have savvy. And now you’re mixed up with this Degan.”
“He’s managing a concert for Monte and me, that’s all.”
“First of all, you shouldn’t be singing with that has-been. Second, you don’t know Degan. I can understand you’re disappointed in last year’s bookings. But he’s a drunk and a cokehead. You don’t need him.”
There was an instant’s silence in the office and then she drew herself up. “I never thought you’d stoop to that.”
“I’m not the one who’s stooping, hon. And I’m not letting you do this concert.”
“I’m doing it.”
“I say no and I’m your agent.”
“Were my agent. Goodbye, Richard.”
She was moving into new terrain; and if that meant burning a few bridges, so what. She sold three sable coats. She had Sotheby’s auction her living room antiques. She took a loss, but since she was backing the concert herself she needed the cash.
Mort Degan handled the production details. Every time she went to his office there was a piece of paper needing her signature.
“Would you just sign this agreement with the stage managers? All three copies. And there’s a rider, be sure to initial. And when you’re through with that would you sign this?”
“What is it?”
“You’re opening a special bank account at Chase.”
“What for?”
“Expenses, ever heard of expenses?” Mort smiled. He was a full-time smiler. “Sign where your name’s typed. All three. And would you sign this—hate to hit you with so much paper.”
“What is it?”
“The bond.”
“Bond?”
“In case we burn the house down, they’ll want to be reimbursed.”
The first ad was a half-page in the New York Times the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
MORTON DEGAN ASSOCIATES PRESENT
IN CONCERT
LIVE
THE DREAM DUET
ARIANA KAVALARIS/GIORGIO MONTECAVALLO
FAVORITE ARIAS FROM OPERA, BROADWAY, AND FOLKLORE
MAIL ORDERS NOW. TICKETS AT BOX OFFICE TOMORROW 10 A.M.
The sun was shining the next morning. Ariana and Monte hailed a taxi and asked the driver to go slowly past Carnegie Hall. At 9:00 A.M. the line stretched around two corners and halfway down the block to Sixth Avenue.
Ariana grabbed Monte’s arm. “All those people. They remember.” Her eyes were beginning to tear.
Monte hugged her to his shoulder. “They never forgot.”
Mort Degan phoned Ariana at three o’clock that afternoon. “It’s a sellout. Scalpers are getting fifty bucks for balcony seats.”
There was too much to do: dresses to be chosen and fitted, a white gown for the first half of the concert, a lower-cut black gown for the second; interviews, press agents who had to be lunched with, columnists who had to be cultivated, parties to go to, parties to give, all the day-and-night labor of promoting a concert that was still two months in the future.
It was hard to judge how the concert was shaping up. Ariana was too close to her fears. The numbers she rehearsed with Monte—candy like “La Ci Darem la Mano” and “The Merry Widow Waltz” and “Tonight, Tonight” from West Side Story—embarrassed her. With Monte bellowing beside her she felt like the sun setting behind a billboard advertising gelati and tortoni.
It was even worse with her solo numbers.
She attempted “Caro Nome” and her voice felt swollen and damp. Every note above the staff seemed to blister her throat. She closed her eyes and plummeted through the empty space where a high B-natural ought to have been.
I was able to sing it once. What happened?
She listened to her records. They made her thoughtful and sad. As she walked back to her bedroom her back ached. For the first time in her life she felt middle-aged. She lay down and wept silently.
Monte sat on the bed and stroked her forehead.
“Nothing lasts,” she said. “Sooner or later everything we have is taken from us.”
“Except our appetites,” he said. “Let’s go out to dinner.”
She took to staying up late. She took to getting up late. She took to Monte’s set because they didn’t know music or, thank God, talk it. Tennessee Williams and Natalie Wood were her friends for an entire week and they didn’t raise eyebrows when she lit a cigarette.
She tried to eat well, and Monte arranged that all important discussions took place over meals at Côte Basque, the Russian Tea Room, “21,” L’Escargot, or—if they didn’t want to be recognized—La Grenouille.
But even nourishing food didn’t put energy into her. She was losing weight and turning edgy, overreacting to things: jumping when a teaspoon clattered in a saucer; brooding when the mailman was late. Dreams took her back to her childhood and she kept seeing her father’s corpse and waking up in a sweat.
As he stepped into the cubicle Dr. Worth Kendall saw a figure in a green smock perched on the edge of the examining table, her head twisted around to look up at him. Her face might have been drawn with gray chalk and if he hadn’t had her chart in his hand he’d never have recognized Ariana Kavalaris.
He was careful to hide his shock. “Hello, Ariana. How are you?”
“I thought I’d come in and find out.”
“Good idea.” He tapped her, probed her, shone a light in her ears and down her throat. He had a sense that something had broken in her. “Look up. Look down. Look at me.”
Dark rings underneath her eyes gave them a ghostly luminosity. “I have pains.” She pointed to her chest.
Dr. Kendall probed lightly where the ribs joined the breast bone. “I see a little swelling and some redness. How does it affect your singing?”
“It’s hell when I have to take a deep breath.”
“Well, relax, it’s not a tumor. It’s called costochondritis and it’s not as bad as the name. It can hurt like hell but it goes away with treatment.”
“What’s the treatment?”
“Mild pain killers, heat, rest.”
“I can’t rest. I have a concert next month.”
“I don’t think you should be giving any concerts.”
“You just said that costo-chondro thing isn’t serious.”
“It’s not only the costochondritis. Your weight’s down. Your blood pressure’s up. Your pulse is irregular, there’s a flutter in your heartbeat, I can hear fluid in your lungs. You had TB as a child?”
“I got over it.”
He looked at her a moment. “Your reflexes are much too slow. And don’t try to blame it on all the coffee you’ve been drinking or all the cigarettes you’ve been sneaking.”
Her eyes slid away from his. “I haven’t been sneaking anything. I make no secret…of my morning cigarette.”
“A for honesty and E minus for conduct. People shouldn’t smoke and singers shouldn’t and above all you shouldn’t. But we’re not here to argue about nicotine. The point is, you’re exhausted and you’re driving yourself to a collapse. You’ve got to postpone that concert.”
“I can’t.”
“Then cancel.”
“Doctor, if I cancel the concert I might as well cancel my life.”
“You have no strength. How the hell do you expect to get up on a stage and sing?”
“You can give me something to get me through the month.”
“Nothing can get you through the month except a complete change of lifestyle.”
She phoned Mort Degan.
“Glad you called,” he said. “I need $850 for lights. Has to be cash. I’d go to the bank myself, but I’m waiting for the features editor from the Times.
She sighed. “All right, I’ll have a messenger send it over. Mort, I need a doctor. Do you know anyone good?”
“I know someone great.”
“What seems to be the problem?” Dr. Ted Gorman had a smile that seemed ready to understand any pain, any confusion in the world. He was a bald, trim man in his late forties, wearing a neatly pressed white linen doctor’s jacket.
“I’m having trouble sleeping at night,” Ariana said, “and trouble staying awake during the day. I’m very nervous about my concert next month. The tension’s affecting my throat muscles.”
Dr. Gorman wrote quickly on a prescription pad. “Are you allergic to cortisone?”
“I’ve never had any reaction to it.”
“Planning to do any driving or operate any heavy machinery?”
“I’m a singer, doctor.”
He glanced up at her. “Sorry. The heavy machinery was a joke. My wife keeps telling me to leave the comedy to the pros. Will you be driving?”
“No.”
“Fine.” He began dealing prescriptions at her like playing cards. “You’ll take these to sleep. These for energy. These for nervousness. These for your throat and these for general muscle tension. Take off that blouse. I’ll give you a shot now and I’d like you to come back twice a week till your concert for more.”