FOR THREE MONTHS CLARA Rodrigo watched the Billings girl mount the climbing wave of fame. Vanessa Billings possesses an unearthly versatility, the New York Times cooed. Her voice can as effortlessly encompass the dark tones of a Tosca as it can the silvery filigree of a Norma. Not since Kavalaris has this listener heard such an astonishing instrument, and Kavalaris, we would do well to remember, excelled in this regard even the magnificent Maria Callas. The magazines, always more sensational, openly predicted a golden future: the next Kavalaris.
As chance would have it, the evening came when Clara and the Billings girl appeared in the same opera at different houses: Clara at the Met in a new gala production, Billings at the City Opera just across Lincoln Plaza in a scaled-down revival. The opera was Turandot, and as Clara was hurrying across the plaza two hours before curtain, a small, dark, bearded man approached her. His jacket was rumpled and stained and he had the aura of a ratty sorcerer.
“Hey, lady.” The voice was secretive. “Got a ticket for Billings? I’ll give you four Rodrigos for a Billings.”
Fury took her breath. She gave him a look of pure hatred, yanked her mink tight around her, strode past him.
“Five Rodrigos! Hey lady! Five Rodrigos and cash!”
Billings’s reviews the next day were better than hers. She was troubled and she decided to go to a fortune teller who had been recommended to her, a woman said to have occult powers who worked near B. Altman’s department store on Thirty-fourth Street.
The sun was going down as Clara climbed the stairs over the Chinese restaurant. She moved aside a beaded curtain and groped her way into the dimness. A transistor radio was blaring salsa and it was very hot inside the room.
At first she could barely make out the huge dark woman wrapped in lace. A surprisingly deep voice commanded, “Siéntese.” Sit.
The woman turned down the radio. Clara could begin to see her: the eyes were milky, practically without irises, and half the teeth were missing from the upper jaw. Behind her was a shelf of carnival dolls: bears and rabbits and babies with blond hair.
The two women spoke in Spanish: not the Castilian of Clara’s conservatory days, but the harsh Santurce dialect of her childhood.
“Who sent you?”
Clara named the Haitian woman who cleaned her apartment.
There was a moment’s silence. “¿Por qué has venido, hijita?”—“Why have you come, little daughter?”
Clara talked for twenty minutes, telling everything.
The old woman instructed her what to do.
Two days later Clara climbed the stairs again. She gave the woman a live chicken tied in a ribbon that she had worn in La Fille du Régiment.
“Come back in one week at the same hour,” the woman said.
“Next week I have to be in Chicago.”
“Come back in one week.”
The next evening at City Opera Vanessa Billings sang another role that Clara regarded as rightfully her own, Magda in La Rondine. To believe the critics, the performance was faultless. After studying the reviews, Clara canceled Chicago.
On the day commanded she again climbed the stairs. The fortune teller held Clara’s hands in a tight grip and passed them over a pot of sickening dark goo.
“There are forces behind her,” the woman said. “They are powerful. More, powerful than you can imagine.”
“Do these forces have a name?”
“They have the name of the unnamable.”
Clara had expected the name of an agency or manager, but she saw she was not going to get it. “How can these forces be defeated?”
“Only love can defeat these forces.”
Clara sprang up from her chair. “Love thine enemy, is that what you’re telling me? I could have gone to a priest for that!” She yanked back her hand and realized the woman had somehow worked the ring off her finger. “Give me back my ring.”
“I have told you the truth,” the woman warned. “If you do not pay me now, you will have to pay much more later.”
“I’ll pay you $25, not a ten-carat diamond ring.”
The woman handed back the ring. “In one year,” she warned, “Billings will be a star and you will have lost your voice.”
That winter Ames Rutherford finally published his second novel. Critics said it more than fulfilled the promise of his first. They called his prose muscular, strong, free-wheeling. People ran a two-page spread. He made TV appearances. He worried about being inadequate on the little screen, having nothing to say, but talk-show hosts liked him and on the TV screen he looked even handsomer than the photo on his book jacket. His eyes televised dark and alert, his mouth full-lipped, his nose narrow and Anglo-Saxon, and his light brown hair darkened to chestnut. His movements, like his answers to interviewers, were minimal and confident, and at six foot one he appeared to be in perfect physical shape.
The book went into a fifth printing.
Now I have everything I ever wanted, he thought.
Yet he felt an unanswerable dissatisfaction, a restlessness that went to the bone. Something was eluding him.
One Friday when the rain was a smear of winter gray over Long Island he lay on the living room rug, his eye absently running down the columns of the New York Times Weekend section. Fran had put a steaming mug of coffee and amaretto by his side and he was turning pages without seeing words.
A photograph of a strangely familiar dark-haired woman suddenly caught his eye. Tuesday night, the caption stated, Vanessa Billings will don a black wig to sing the role of Santuzza, the excommunicated Sicilian beauty, in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.
Tuesday Ames lied to Fran and made an excuse to be out. He wanted to go to the City Opera and he wanted to go alone.
An usher pointed Ames to his seat. Light shone in soft patches across the rows of red velvet seats.
There was an overture and a serenade by the tenor, Turiddu, to his love Lola, before the curtain rose on a Sicilian town square: upstage, the church; stage right, the tavern; stage left, Mama Lucia’s house. Time: an Easter morning in the late nineteenth century.
As the chorus of celebrating peasants cleared the stage, Santuzza crept on. The audience broke into applause. She knocked hesitantly at Mama Lucia’s door and asked for news of Lucia’s son, Turiddu.
Lola’s husband, the cheerful cart-driver Alfio, entered, singing of the joys of work and a faithful wife. He mentioned having seen Turiddu that morning near his home. Santuzza quickly silenced Mama Lucia. It was not until Alfio and the other villagers had gone into the truth that she revealed her shame: Turiddu, returning from the army after his sweetheart Lola had married Alfio, had become Santuzza’s lover. But Lola had succeeded in winning him back.
Disgraced, heartbroken, abandoned, Santuzza now begged Mama Lucia to pray for her in church.
Alone, Santuzza waited in the deserted square till Turiddu arrived. She accused and pleaded with him. Lola appeared, mocking and flirting. Throwing Santuzza aside, Turiddu followed Lola into the church. Prostrate on the steps, Santuzza screamed a curse after him.
Alfio entered. Santuzza revealed his wife’s infidelity. Alfio swore vengeance, fortissimo.
The stage was empty as the Intermezzo—probably the best-loved melody in the score—came soaring out of the orchestra. The villagers spilled onstage from church. Turiddu invited his friends to drink with him. Refusing, Alfio challenged him to a duel. Turiddu gave the Sicilian sign of acceptance—he bit Alfio’s ear.
Turiddu begged his mother to look after Santuzza, kissed the old woman farewell, and left for the dueling ground.
Santuzza entered. As mother and betrayed sweetheart waited in trembling premonition, there was a cry from the wings: “They have murdered Turiddu!” Swooning, Santuzza fell to the stage. The curtain dropped.
Ames was on his feet, applauding and shouting. “Brava!”
“Jean Stern wants us to come to ahousewarming.” Fran handed him a square of Tiffany vellum, engraved, with blanks inked in in Jean Stern’s best Farmington penmanship. You are invited to and then, in red with exclamation points, A BASH!!
“Let’s go,” he said.
Fran was watching him with amazement. “You said you couldn’t stand her or her jet-setting friends.”
“So? Let’s go anyway.”
Years later, he would still be wondering why he made that decision.
Jean Stern greeted them at the door of her new apartment in the Dakota. “Angels, you actually made it!” Her hair was in pigtails and she was wearing a jade-green gown with black peacocks. She sounded happy and high and she looked very happy and very, very high. “Loved your reviews, Ames. Did you write them yourself?”
“Bitch,” he said sweetly, kissing her on the cheek.
She took Ames and Fran in hand and made introductions. Most of the guests were rich or extraordinarily famous—or New Yorker Profile writers who had helped them get that way. The heiress of a perfume fortune, dripping pearls and cigarette ashes, told Ames, “You know, I’ve always wanted to write. I have a wonderful story, but I need a collaborator.”
What the hell am I doing here? he wondered.
“You wanted to come,” Fran said. “Don’t blame me.”
“I’m not complaining, am I?”
“But you’re not mixing either. You’re a celebrity this month. Jean expects her celebrities to mingle. And that way I get to talk to all those old classmates of mine who bore you silly.”
“Okay, I can take a hint. Go talk.”
He explored. Joints were being passed in the library. Cocaine was being snorted in the bath of the master bedroom. From the sound of it, three or more people were having sex in the guest-room john. He didn’t see a thing or person at the party that wouldn’t be improved by being dropped out of a speeding fire truck.
By nine o’clock he was sitting morosely on a sofa, busily not listening to the perfume heiress and her idea for a novel, staring across the flowered Oriental carpet into the far corner of the living room. Through a shifting sea of tailored jackets and shoulders with off-season tans, he saw a small pillared archway.
Suddenly he sat forward. Standing in the archway was a little girl with long black hair and huge dark eyes.
He could see her with almost hallucinatory clarity, as though he were looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. She was as familiar to him as if he had dreamt of her every night of his life. She couldn’t have been more than six. She wore long white socks and a frilled white skirt that spoke of another time. Her smile reached to him like an outstretched hand.
He had the feeling he had had at Kavalaris’s funeral, the sensation of a handbrake coming loose, something inside him racing beyond his control. He heard himself say, “Excuse me.” And then he was rising quickly from the sofa and pushing through the crowd.
“There you are.” Jean Stern took his hand. “Come meet someone.”
“Jean, who’s that little girl?”
“Sorry, darling, no little girls at this party. Vanessa, this is my dear friend Ames Rutherford. Ames, Vanessa Billings.”
“Hello,” he said. “You make quite a Santuzza.”
“In that awful black wig?” she smiled.
At the mention of the wig a jolt went through him. Vanessa Billings was a grown woman, her hair blond and her eyes gray-green, but she was the dark-haired little girl he had just seen.
“Moving right along, Ames,” Jean was saying, “this is Nikos Stratiotis.”
Stratiotis was a solidly built middle-aged man with dark waving hair just beginning to gray. He looked handsomer than his photographs, and healthier, and there was unmistakable murder in his eyes.
“You two were in the New York Times together,” Jean chirped. “Face to face in the Weekend section.” She realized she’d lost two members of her audience. “Hey, Vanessa. Hey, Ames.” She waved a hand. “I’m talking to you both?”
Nikos realized almost immediately that Ames Rutherford was no stranger. An image came back to his mind: a brilliantly blue June day eleven years ago. A crowd milling after commencement in Harvard Yard. Ariana rising on tiptoe to kiss a young man and explaining later that he was no one, “Just the son of an old friend.”
Now that he knew the name, a piece of an old puzzle fell into place. This was the son of the man she had loved. A Greek sense of fatality whispered in Nikos’s blood. He and Ames Rutherford were bound by too much history, too much pain. This crossing of paths was no meaningless coincidence. This curly-headed young man in the Brooks Brothers shirt and old blue jeans and new jogging shoes is my nemesis.
He moved closer to Vanessa. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
She looked at him, startled. “But, Nikos, we just got here.”
“Say goodbye. I’ll get your coat.”
She frowned at him in the elevator. “Don’t you think we were a little bit rude?”
“Do you know that young man from somewhere?”
“No.”
In the limousine he raised the glass partition. “You’re sure you haven’t met him before?”
She stared out the window at the awnings on Seventy-second Street. A secret smile hovered around her lips. “He’s seen me onstage. Some people have, you know.”
“He was looking at you as though you two shared some kind of…I don’t know. Some kind of history.”
She laughed. “You’re very attractive when you’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.” His tan darkened. “It’s just that I have little enough time with you and I don’t intend to share you with every ambitious little writer who pops up at a party.”
She took his hand and leaned across the seat to rest her head on his shoulder. “Stay jealous. It makes me feel safe. I’m going to hire that ambitious little writer to pop up everywhere we go.”
The study on the top floor of the Fifth Avenue triplex was half-firelight, half-dark. Nikos went to the desk and took a long, lined yellow legal pad. He turned on a lamp. In a tight neat hand that he had been taught by Armenian nuns he made notes, listing everything he would need to know about Ames Rutherford and a few things he was simply curious about.
Twenty minutes later Maggie appeared in the open door, peeling diamonds off her neck. “Still working?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He didn’t glance up. “How was the show?”
“You didn’t miss a thing. Are you going to come in tonight?”
“I don’t want you to catch my bug.”
“Okay. Get a good night’s sleep.”
The next morning, in the back seat of a limousine speeding to JFK airport, Nikos handed an assistant three long sheets of lined yellow legal paper that had been covered with meticulous handwriting.
“Get me this information as quietly and as quickly as you can.”
The report was waiting on his desk when he returned from Brussels. He read it slowly.
Ames Rutherford had gotten top grades at the Buckley School in Manhattan; top grades at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire; top grades at Harvard University; top grades at Harvard Law; had served in the army reserve; worked four years with a top New York law firm; published two best-selling novels; lived with the same woman eleven years; never married her (Why not? Nikos wondered); never cheated on her (Why not?); drank heavily but not, for this day and age, abnormally; had friends who took drugs but was not reputed to be a drug user himself.
Nikos stared at the neatly word-processed pages. They filled him with uneasiness. He went to the window and for a long while stood gazing forty stories down at the East River.
The following evening Nikos sat in his study listening to music. The sounds washed like soothing water into the caverns of his mind.
He heard his wife’s voice and opened his eyes.
“We haven’t been spending much time together.” Maggie was dressed in a red Oscar de la Renta as if she were going out.
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me when people notice. Are you having an affair?”
“Please, Maggie. I’m trying to listen to music.”
“Will you at least pay attention to me tonight?”
“Why tonight?”
“Because as you perfectly well know we’re having company.”
“I forgot.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. And disappointed. I’d hoped to listen to Bohème.”
“Hans has laid your clothes out on your bed. The guests will be arriving in forty minutes.”
Nikos couldn’t bear the party. Maggie’s guests made noises about real estate and art as though they were deciding the fate of Western civilization. Finger bowls were passed after the Scotch salmon and the women clunked their rings down by their place settings and it was like being in a washroom.
“I had my sapphires redone,” the woman on Nikos’s left said. She was said to be an up-and-coming anchorperson on NBC news, and she had lectured him for twenty minutes about the situation in Salvador. “I kept the setting but changed the stones. What do you think?”
He excused himself before the dessert soufflés were served. Maggie intercepted him in the hallway. “Where are you going?” she said.
“To the opera. I can still make the last act of Adriana Lecouvreur.”
She stared at him for one instant of hooded fury. “I suppose Vanessa Billings is singing.”
“Yes. And after three hours of your friends I very much need to hear a human voice.”
“Nikos, if you walk out of this party, I warn you—”
He didn’t wait for the warning. He walked out of the party.
The next morning Maggie Stratiotis stopped in at Cartier’s. Her eye fell on a Venetian cross of diamonds and rubies set in gold. “What’s that delicious-looking thing?”
The salesman unlocked the glass display case. “Benvenuto Cellini designed this. It belonged to the Medicis.” He slipped the chain around her neck. “We’ve restored three of the stones.”
She stared at her reflection. “Would you charge it, please, and wrap it?”
The salesman telephoned the Stratiotis office.
“What was that figure again?” Nikos said.
“One million, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, sir.”
“Couldn’t you ship it to New Jersey and save me the sales tax?”
“She took it from the store, sir.”
Nikos sighed. “I see.” He broke the connection, sat a moment, then asked his secretary to phone Richard Schiller’s office. “Richard, what kind of opera could the Metropolitan put on for $1,250,000, plus eight percent?”
“One hell of an opera.”
“Starring Vanessa?”
Adolf Erdlich outlined the proposal. Instead of its scheduled fall production of Manon, Lescaut, the Metropolitan would borrow the San Francisco production, with sets by Chagall; there would be seven stage rehearsals with augmented orchestra; and all costs would be underwritten by Mr. Stratiotis’s foundation.
“For which generosity we are, needless to say, deeply indebted.”
Adolf Erdlich crossed to his desk and took four fine cigars from the humidor. He handed one to Meyer Colby and one to Richard Schiller; one to Boyd Kinsolving and one to Nikos Stratiotis. “Clara, do I dare offer you one?”
Not bothering to smile, Clara Rodrigo shook her head sharply. Adolf Erdlich lit his own cigar, sat down again, and continued. Clara Rodrigo listened, a tiny mountain of diamonds and silence, and when Adolf Erdlich had finished she drew herself up.
“My answer, as you knew it would be, is no. And, Boyd, I am shocked you are a party to this.”
Adolf Erdlich placed an arm around Clara. “Why must we argue? Can’t we be a family, just this once? Don’t we all want what’s best for the Metropolitan?”
“It is my impression that Mr. Stratiotis wants what’s best for his friend.”
“Which in this case is what’s best for all of us.”
Clara turned slowly to look at each of the five men who had betrayed her. “I have a contract to sing that production. Whether the sets come from San Francisco or the moon, whether they are paid for by Mr. Stratiotis or the Abominable Snowman, that production is mine.”
“Clara,” Meyer Colby said, “cooperate just this once. Please.”
Adolf Erdlich spoke softly, with concern. “Clara, we all pray God it’s only a temporary condition, but you do not at the moment have a voice. You’ve had to cancel your last three performances.”
“Is a sore throat such a crime? Anyone can get a sore throat!”
“And anyone who expects to be paid $70,000 a performance can get over a sore throat.”
“By the time the production’s ready, I’ll be well.”
“No, Clara. You’ve canceled three times.”
La Rodrigo rose to her feet, trembling. “Meyer, are you my agent or are you working for these men?”
“There’s nothing I can do, Clara.”
“Then I’ll sue all of you.”
Adolf Erdlich shrugged and turned his dark weary gaze on the woman who had once been his prima donna assoluta. “Sue all you want, Clara. But Vanessa Billings sings this production.”
The Manon Lescaut dress rehearsal that fall went perfectly until the fourth act, when Manon lay dying on what Puccini called “the plains of Louisiana.” Boyd rapped his baton on the music stand, silencing the orchestra. “Vanessa, the tempo changes at ‘sei tu’—the value of the quarter note is 72, not 69. Otherwise you’re dragging.”
She moved toward the apron of the stage. “It feels wrong to speed up there.”
“Sorry, sweetums. If you want to see my score—”
Boyd looked down at his conductor’s score, the score from which he had conducted all of Ariana’s Manon Lescauts. In a red marker, in Ariana’s handwriting, overriding Puccini’s tempo indication, he saw an X slashed through the 72 and the emphatically gashed command: Quarter equals 69 sempre!! Boyd, this is my moment and don’t you dare screw me up!
Vanessa’s eyes met Boyd’s across the footlights and for one heart-stopping instant, seeing her in the powdered wig and torn gray deportee’s uniform, he thought she was his dead wife.
He cleared his throat. “Well, sweetums, we could try 69. Orchestra, make a note.” He raised his baton again. “All set, harp? Take it from where the meter changes to 2/4. Give it guts, gentlemen.”
At 8:26 P.M. on the evening of October 23 on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera, Vanessa Billings, glittering in the traveling clothes of an eighteenth-century schoolgirl, stepped from the carriage that was to carry her to the convent.
The audience stirred like a wind-brushed forest.
From the moment she opened her mouth, they were hers. She knit the arias and recitatives of her role into a character, a fierce amalgam of innocence and willfulness that came hurtling across the footlights like a demonic angel. Her slightest movement, her softest utterance was charged with seduction, as though all the world’s sexual longing had, for that evening, incarnated in her flesh and voice.
Like the four thousand other men and women in the house, Ames Rutherford in his third row seat in the grand tier sat spellbound, fascinated, amazed at how fresh and new the performance made Puccini seem. Each note Billings sang was like a faceted jewel sending out brilliant shafts of melody.
Fran rested against him, her hand touching his for most of the first act. But as Des Grieux proposed to Manon, “Fuggiamo, fuggiamo”—“Let’s flee, let’s flee”—Ames drew away.
Something is about to happen. Watch out.
The feeling of foreboding came out of nowhere. There was no reason for it. He didn’t know the opera, didn’t know the performers, he certainly didn’t know the future; yet he was suddenly certain that everything happening now had happened before—the music, the movement, the bustle and the light on the stage, the rapt silence and the soft floating perfumes in the audience.
An almost claustrophobic panic rose in him and he had no walls to contain it. It was as though he were on the very edge of knowing something he couldn’t bear to know.
He rose, pushed his way past knees and purses, felt Fran reaching out after him, found the aisle and the steps leading up through the darkness to the light-etched outline of the exit door.
He went to the grand tier bar, the only customer. His heart was pounding in his throat. The stillness was dense with muffled Puccini. He took a hard swallow of Stolichnaya on the rocks. Instead of calming him, it hit him like a triphammer, ramming his pulse up through his skull.
The bartender was making a wise face. “They say Billings is going to be the next Kavalaris. Do you agree, sir?”
“Highly probable. Could you pour me another of these, please?”
Fran came hurrying across the red carpeting. “Ames, what happened to you? Are you all right?” She stood looking at him. Something had changed in his eyes. They were like the hollows in Greek statues, with no one behind them.
“Just a moment of claustrophobia,” he said. “It’s pretty stuffy in there.”
At that moment applause broke out in the house. Jeweled dowagers and tuxedoed escorts began streaming toward the bar.
“Would you like to go home?” Fran asked.
Ames downed his second vodka. “Hell no. I’m fine now.”
He had another vodka in the next intermission, another in the third. Fran, watching him with anxious eyes, drank soda with lime.
At 11:20, as the curtain fell on the final act, Ames and Fran hurried out to Broadway to beat the crowd to a taxi, and Billings was called back for twelve curtain calls.
The frantic dresser hurried Dr. Abscheid into the dressing room.
Vanessa was lying full-length on the settee, her face buried in the pillow. The doctor rolled her over. Her skin was deathly white. He loosened the bodice of her costume, felt for the pulse in her neck.
At first he thought she had lapsed into coma but then as her breathing deepened he realized she had simply fallen asleep after an exhausting performance.
She stretched and turned over onto her side. Her eyes opened. There was an instant of dazzling gray-green incomprehension.
“Was I dreaming?” She sat up.
Dr. Abscheid coiled the tube of his stethoscope. “I don’t know. Were you?”
“That was no dream.” Richard Schiller handed her a bouquet of three dozen white roses. “You brought down the house.”
“I was really all right?”
Richard smiled at the others. “You hear the little girl?”
Nikos took her home in his limousine.
“Thank you for the roses,” she said. “They were beautiful. And thank you for this evening.”
“Thank you for this evening. It gave me such joy.” He settled his arm across the top of the seat, spanning the space between them but not touching her. “You know, it’s strange. I used to hate opera. And now I never seem to think of anything else.”
A faint breath of rose scent came up from the air-conditioning duct. She could feel him wanting to draw her closer. After a moment she rested her head against his shoulder.
“Nikos,” she said quietly, “what was Ariana like?”
He sighed. “I’m sure you knew her better than I ever managed to.”
“No. To me she was a teacher—always distant, always unreal. To you she was flesh and blood.”
His gaze came around gravely to her face. “Why do you ask?”
“Isn’t it natural for a woman to be curious about her predecessor?”
He was silent, looking out the limousine window through glass so polished it seemed not to be there at all. The glistening high-rises of Central Park West sparkled in the night.
“I was twenty-five.” His voice was soft with remembering. “I walked into a coffee shop on Broadway. There she was. Dark hair, dark eyes that looked at me like a wounded little girl’s. She wasn’t a star then. But she had spirit… intelligence…independence…”
“And beauty?”
He nodded. “Beauty. Oh, yes, she had beauty. And twenty-one years later, when we finally made love…she was more beautiful still.”
He spoke about their meetings, their courtship, their living together. He spoke of the happiness that had turned to unhappiness and of the gradual coming-apart.
“Why did it go sour?” Vanessa asked. “Because of Maggie?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Because of me. I was never able to…”He fell silent.
“Able to what, Nikos?”
He was staring at his hands, squeezed together in his lap. His voice was tight. “To admit how much I loved her. I’ve never been able to admit how much I loved anyone…until it was too late. I’m good at everything else but that.”
She raised her head and touched her lips to the side of his neck. “There are other ways of saying it than words.”
He turned and held her in his gaze. “I wish tonight could last. The performance. The applause. The way you sounded. The way you look. Riding home, like this, with you. If only it could last.”
“It will last, Nikos. We can make it last.”