WEDNESDAY EVENING AMES RUTHERFORD watched two acts of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut from a seat in the Metropolitan grand tier. This time he suffered no premonitions, no claustrophobia. In a simpleminded way he even enjoyed the opera—more for its sumptuously spun-out melody than for its moral, which seemed to be that passion never pays.
At 9:55 he threaded his way backstage through a mob of cheering Manhattan nabobs, gave his name to a guard, and was ushered into Vanessa Billings’s dressing room to wait for his quarry.
After three minutes the most famous American soprano in the world walked in and glanced at him. “Hello,” she said. “Haven’t we met?”
The earth didn’t shake, there was no bolt of lightning. Yet that one glance told him his whole life had just changed direction.
“We met at Jean Stern’s,” he said.
She was wearing a powdered wig and a hooped, low-bosomed dress of satin the color of sun on snow. She had a beauty mark on her cheek.
Why do I feel like an eight-year-old with a crush? he wondered.
She lifted her wig. With a smile and a thank-you she handed it to a young man who went to work combing it and readjusting curls. “We can take our time,” she told Ames. “I wear the same costume to jail in Act Three. Would you like something to drink?”
He felt excited and anxious out of all proportion to anything that was happening. He didn’t need to pour fuel on top of that. “Thanks, I’m not drinking.”
“I didn’t mean a drink drink. But I’ve got some apple juice.”
“Apple juice sounds great.”
She poured two glasses from a pitcher on the dresser top and handed him one. “It’s room temperature. Pretty icky, but singers have to be careful what they drink between acts. A burp onstage could be disastrous.”
“May I quote you?”
She laughed, and instantly there was warmth in the room. Stranger still, there was warmth in a space inside him where he had never felt warmth before, where he had never even known there was a space.
“What sort of people do you usually interview?” she asked brightly. “Do they walk right up to the guillotine and lie down?”
“Some do. It’s up to them.”
Her wide mouth curved wryly. “Thanks for the warning. You’re not going to ask embarrassing questions, are you?”
“That depends what sort of things embarrass you.”
“That depends what sort of things you want to know.”
“What do you want to tell me?”
“There’s not much to tell. I’m just an amateur from Hempstead, Long Island, who turned pro.” The remark sounded like outrageously phony modesty until she burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, that was too dumb, wasn’t it? I’m trying to be interview material and I haven’t the faintest idea what that is.”
He tried to analyze the attraction he felt for her. It wasn’t just the beauty, the suggestion of intelligence, the slightly aloof informality. It was something far less tangible. He wasn’t looking at a simple middle-class girl from Hempstead or a French coquette or one of the world’s greatest artists. He was seeing someone else, someone she was creating especially for this moment. For him.
“May I ask a corny question?” he said.
“Why not? After all, we’re in an opera house.”
“Are you one of the greats?”
“Ask them, not me.” She pointed to the walls, where she had hung up pictures of divas of the past and present. “As far as I’m concerned, all I am is one tiny link in a long, long chain.”
“But you broke into the chain. A lot of people don’t. What made the difference? Or was it a who that made it happen?”
“You mean, was it my mother, or my teacher, or some secret backer…?”
Their eyes met.
“Please,” she said, “let’s not discuss those rumors.”
“Was it Kavalaris?” he asked.
“Ariana played a very great role in my life. She taught me.”
“Some people say she formed you in her image.”
“Some people are fools. I don’t even come within envying distance of her. But I’m trying my damnedest.”
From then on it went smoothly. He sat there trying not to gaze too openly at her, asking questions, pulling answers out of her. In a quarter-hour he had enough for a decent five-page article: the hopes, the breaks, the disappointments, all the colorful superficial stuff. And then there was a knock on the door and a voice called, “Ten minutes, Miss Billings.”
She rose from her chair and went to the wig stand. “Funny. I was dreading this, but you turned out to be nothing like what I expected. In fact I had a good time.”
“Thanks…I enjoyed it too.”
He was at the door, one hand reaching for the knob, when she said, “I’m on TV a week from Friday—Channel Thirteen. Doesn’t that impress the hell out of you?”
He smiled. “I’ll watch.”
“Look, I didn’t give you much. I’m not very good at talking. But if you’d like to—I don’t know—follow me around one day and see how a prima donna buys chuck in the supermarket…”
“I’d like to,” he said. He knew he’d like to very much.
“I don’t know my schedule right now. I’ll phone you as soon as I have a day free.”
He gave her his number.
The night Vanessa Billings was on television, it turned out, Fran had invited Ellen Stern and friend for dinner. Ames pushed lobster around his plate and tried to be fascinated by Ellen and her blond beau, a drawling stockbroker by the name of Chasen Montgrade.
“Art is the creation of its outlaws,” Chasen said.
Ames bit back a reply, excused himself and went into the library. Five minutes later Fran came after him and found him in front of the television set.
“Ames Rutherford, what’s the matter with you? We’ve got guests. If you’re watching something important, tape it and look at it later.”
The rest of the evening felt like a slow trudge through snow. Ellen and Chasen didn’t leave till 1:30. Fran followed Ames into the library, talking about Ellen and the old days at Vassar.
He rewound the Betamax tape and pushed the play button. The black-and-white image of a woman’s face composed itself on the screen. It wasn’t Vanessa’s face. He realized they were filling in background on her teacher. He pushed the fast-forward button.
Fran yawned. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’ll come in a little while,” he said.
But it wasn’t a little while. He sat playing and replaying Vanessa’s interview till four in the morning.
He spent Saturday waiting for Vanessa’s call. She didn’t phone. He tried to work. The pieces of the article wouldn’t come together and he couldn’t concentrate for more than a half-hour at a time.
She didn’t phone Sunday.
He played and replayed her tape. He watched her tell the interviewer why she had chosen opera. “I believed in the feeling of wonder and the sense of romance I’d known as a kid. I wanted the world to be that way. And in opera, it is.”
She didn’t phone Monday, and he began to be frightened at the importance she had in his life.
“Is something wrong?” Fran had a mystified, concerned look.
His mind came back from the other end of the solar system. “I can’t seem to get a handle on that damned article.”
“Don’t think too hard.”
He kissed her guiltily and hoped the guilt didn’t show. Then he shut himself in his workroom with the phone and a notepad. He got nothing written, and there was no call.
That night he drank.
The next morning Fran brought him a cup of coffee in bed. She was silent, watching him with the patient eyes of a woman waiting for someone who was never going to be there.
“There’s a message on the phone for you,” she said.
He tried to show no excitement, tried to take a very long time getting to the answering machine and pressing the playback button.
“I’m calling for Vanessa Billings. Could Ames Rutherford meet her at noon today at 89 Perry Street, apartment 2A?”
It was a woman’s voice, but it wasn’t Vanessa’s. It was dark and urgent, unfamiliar in an oddly familiar way. He played the message again and wrote down the address.
Fran was standing there in her pink jogging shorts, watching him. “You have a lunch date with your agent,” she reminded him.
“Damn it. Forgot about that.” He phoned Horatio Charles and asked if they could move lunch back an hour.
He shaved and showered and threw appropriate notebooks and his cassette player into his briefcase. Fran bade him an oddly subdued goodbye.
The house at 89 Perry Street was a four-story stucco walkup, painted pink and covered in ancient wisteria vines. There was no answer when Ames buzzed apartment 2A, so he buzzed the super.
The slight humpbacked woman who unlatched the wrought-iron gate must have been in her eighties, but she had thick white hair and lively eyes that observed him closely.
“Miss Billings asked me to meet her in apartment 2A.”
Limping slowly, the old woman led him through a narrow passageway. They crossed a noon-bright courtyard. Birds were chirping with energy that was almost crazy. There were trees of paradise and beds of blue and pink petunias and a splashing marble fountain with an ivy-covered Pan tilting nonchalantly far from the vertical.
She took him up a flight of stairs and stopped at a wooden door with the Gothic brass A.
He experienced a dreamlike certainty that he had walked through this courtyard, up these stairs, to this very door before.
The old woman gave the door a push, and as it swung inward the un-oiled hinges sang two notes. He could have sworn he remembered those notes from a long time ago: the first two notes of “Amazing Grace.”
The apartment was dusty and dim and furnished like a motel room. Bafflement swept him. “She’s not here?”
“You’re the first,” the old woman said. “Take your time. I’ll be downstairs if you want the place.”
With a shuffling step she was gone, and it came to Ames that he was standing in a furnished apartment for rent.
Why did Vanessa ask me to meet her here?
He walked to the next room. There was a wooden-frame bed with a cotton spread printed in imitation of a quilt. The closet door was open. He had a surprisingly definite feeling there should have been a piano, a carved upright, against the wall by the window.
He sat on the bed. The quarter-hour chimed from a nearby church, and in a while another quarter-hour chimed. He heard the gate in the courtyard swing open and a dog barked and he thought, It’s her. But he ran to the window and it was a fat woman in pink curlers.
The church chimes rang again, and he knew she wasn’t going to come. He went down the staircase and gave the old woman his best smile. “If my friend comes, will you tell her she can catch me at Gino’s restaurant down on Bleecker?”
The meal was very quiet except for the sound of knives and forks scraping plates. Horatio Charles had on a perfectly tailored, very light gray suit, and he talked in his very soft Princeton voice about a French deal on the novel.
Ames kept looking at the door, but Vanessa Billings didn’t walk in, breathless with apology and explanation. His heart felt like a burning stone in his chest.
He drank deeply from his glass of beer. Talk drifted along, but in his mind he kept seeing the apartment on Perry Street, and the wall where a piano should have been, and the gate that she should have walked through at noon.
Horatio Charles paid for the meal. “Shall I send the papers out to East Hampton or do you want to stop by and sign?”
“Send them out,” Ames said, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what he’d agreed to.
He tried calling Vanessa from a phone booth. He reached her answering machine, and he was too hurt to speak to it and admit he was hurt. He drove home much too fast and replayed the day’s messages. There were the usual hangups and wrong numbers, one partial erasure that made him wonder if something was wrong with the machine, and a man saying, “Please call Timothy.”
That was it. One Timothy, whoever he was, and no Vanessa.
When Fran got home from tennis Ames asked if she’d erased any of his messages. She looked at him and in that one moment of explosive silence he realized, She knows. She knows the thing that never happened between us has happened between me and someone else.
“I don’t erase other people’s messages,” she said.
That was all there was to it: a question, an answer, and they both knew they had crossed to the downhill side.
Just before noon, he heard the front door slam as Fran went out. He phoned Vanessa again and again her machine answered. This time he left a message. “It’s Ames Rutherford. Please phone me.”
From that moment on his office was no longer the room where he worked: it was the room where she didn’t phone.
After two hours he called her agent. Richard Schiller said it was a very difficult period for Miss Billings. She had commitments in Europe and South America as well as a Kundry this June in Bayreuth, and quite frankly interviews were not a first priority; in fact, she didn’t give them.
“She gave me one last week,” Ames said.
“In that case, could I ask why you need to see her again?”
“I need some personal background.”
“Miss Billings is a very private person.”
“She promised.”
There was a pause, and Ames waited for a drop dead or a disconnect. What came instead was almost ingratiating.
“Well, if it’s background you want, her parents are real characters. They live out on Long Island. Hold on, I’ll get you the phone number.”
The little white frame house stood on a corner lot. There were trellised morning glories and a flagstone path leading to an immaculate birdbath, and a gray-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt stopped pushing his lawnmower and jogged over to the curb.
“Hi, I’m Stan Billings.” A red, friendly hand came through the open Mercedes window and Ames shook it. “Put your car in the drive and come on in and meet Ella-Viola.”
Ella-Viola had pink hair and glitter-framed bifocals and a chubby face that seemed made for smiling. She offered iced tea. “Unless you’d like something stronger?”
Ames noticed a Bless-This-House sampler above the stairway. “Iced tea will be fine, thanks.”
Ella-Viola sat in a rocker and plunked a half-finished needlepoint rose onto her lap. “It wasn’t overnight success for Vanessa, the way the magazines tell it. She’s been working since she was a child, and it was always two steps forward and three backward, and after she sang that horrible Traviata in Philly, she was ready to give up.”
“Now, Ella,” Stan said, “let Mr. Rutherford ask questions.”
Ella-Viola took the advice with admirable serenity. “What would you like to know, Mr. Rutherford?”
Ames looked around the living room full of stuffed dolls and bowling trophies and shelves of Tony Bennett records, and he couldn’t help wondering, A world-class operatic soprano came out of this? It seemed as likely as an orchid growing in a clover patch.
“Please, call me Ames.” He knew from interviewing dozens of parents that childhood was the can opener. “Tell me about Vanessa as a little girl.”
And for the next two hours Stan and Ella-Viola were talking about a living person and not a national shrine.
One point more than any other caught his interest, because it was a mystery that the parents made no attempt to explain away. Vanessa had failed in Traviata, failed in the role that was ten years later to become her greatest triumph, failed so completely that she had disappeared, severing all contact with opera, with friends, with family, until her astonishing comeback at her teacher’s funeral.
“What was she doing during those years?” Ames asked.
“She never talks about it,” Ella-Viola said. “We thought she was dead.”
The sun’s last rays were pouring across the wall-to-wall carpet when Ames finally said thank you to Stan and Ella-Viola, packed up his notebooks and cassette recorder, and got back into the Mercedes.
He drove three blocks. At the intersection of Albemarle and Kingston a black stretch limousine cut him off. A tall man in chauffeur’s livery stepped out and motioned Ames to pull over to the curb.
“Mr. Rutherford?” His voice was low and without expression. He opened Ames’s door. “Mr. Stratiotis would appreciate your company for a moment.”
Ames saw no way of refusing. He didn’t want a fistfight, and the reporter in him said, go ahead. The chauffeur escorted him to the limousine and he stepped from the sweltering afternoon into the creamy air conditioning of the black Lincoln Continental.
Ames and Nikos Stratiotis stared at each other from opposite ends of the back seat. An antique tabletop hinged to the partition held a silver tray of bottles and glasses and ice. Stratiotis leaned forward and poured a Chivas on the rocks.
“This is what you drink, right?”
Ames accepted the glass. “Thanks. Why not.”
Stratiotis lifted his own glass in an unspoken toast. Ames suspected from the look of the bubbles that it held Perrier and lime.
“You’ve been phoning Vanessa Billings,” Stratiotis said.
“I’ve been phoning her answering machine.”
“Why?”
“I’m writing an article on her.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”
“It’s my job.”
“Who’s paying you?”
Sorry.
“I can find out.”
“But not through me.”
“Mr. Rutherford, you seem to have enough to keep you busy already.” Stratiotis’s black-with-iron-gray hair lay in a beautifully cut wave across his forehead. “You have a woman you’re busy breaking up with, you have dope-smoking literary friends, and people say you have an impressive drinking problem. You don’t need to add Vanessa Billings to all that.”
Ames glanced toward the chauffeur on the other side of the raised glass panel. “I don’t know who gives you your information, but they’re full of crap.”
“My sources are reliable. Please drop the article.”
The please did not impress Ames. Stratiotis was ordering, not requesting. In a way it was touching. The man was obviously in love and was simply trying to protect his property; only he made the mistake of doing it, as he did everything in his life, with a bulldozer.
Ames had to wonder: What is it about Vanessa that makes this man love her; is it the same thing that fascinates me? Why does she have me swimming against the stream like a salmon?
There was no question of dropping the article, but he knew better than to give a man of Stratiotis’s power an outright no.
“I’ll drop it when my employer asks for his advance back.” Which, if he knew Greg Hatoff, would be never.
“In that case,” Stratiotis said, “your employer will be in touch with you.”
But Greg Hatoff did not get in touch, and the Stratiotis encounter turned out to be the prod Ames needed.
He burrowed into the local library for all the pop journalism he could find on Vanessa from the last eleven months. He spent three days in New York Xeroxing articles from the Times and the Post morgues. He had four boozy lunches with an opera maven and took down all the Billings scuttlebutt on his cassette recorder.
Then he hung the GENIUS AT WORKsign on his office and began putting it all together.
All the while, he was aware of Fran watching silently, uneasily.
He was into his second week of binge-writing when the phone, with exquisitely wrong timing, rang and derailed a very intricate train of thought. He was sick of his own voice on the answering tape and snatched up the receiver before the machine could cut in.
“Ames?”
It was Vanessa. He knew her voice right away. He could feel the room brighten as though the sun had flown in through the window.
“How have you been?” she asked.
How’ve I been? I’ve been going crazy waiting for you to phone and now that you’re on the line I feel eight times crazier. Not the time to go into all that. Don’t want you to see what an idiot I am. Time to be strong, attractive, successful. “Oh, I’ve been fine. And you?”
“I’ve been away—Chicago needed me for three Trovatores; it’s not my favorite role. The part lies just wrong for my voice, but don’t tell anyone.”
“I guess that’s why you forgot our date?”
“Date? We had a date? Ames, I’m sorry. My secretary must have forgotten to tell me. We’ve all been going crazy around here, my coach has had the flu and I’m working with a real madman, and I’m looking for a new apartment, and nothing’s been sane. Do you still want to meet or am I on your enemies list now?”
“I don’t keep an enemies list and if I did you’d never be on it.”
“I wish critics were as nice as you. Would you like to meet tomorrow? Noonish?” Sure.
“Where?”
“Well, why not 89 Perry Street?”
“I’ll be there.”
Vanessa hung up and then remembered something astonishing: she had a rehearsal of Salomé tomorrow at the Met at 10:00 A.M. How in the world could I have forgotten that?
A strange weight fell on her at the thought of calling Ames Rutherford back and canceling.
She asked herself why she felt so attracted to him. It had something to do with his easy, relaxed laugh; and with his eyes. She remembered intelligence in his gaze, and mystery. She remembered feeling that this stranger saw deeper into her than she saw into herself, that he knew everything about her past, her thoughts, her hopes.
She went to the window and opened it wide enough to lean out. It was a dazzlingly clear afternoon. From the street came a confused but unchanging noise, like a soft chord held on an organ.
She phoned her agent.
“Richard, I can’t rehearse tomorrow. I have some kind of intestinal bug.” It was an outright lie, yet she felt wistful and happy and truthful. Tomorrow Ames Rutherford, not Salomé, would be her reality. “Can you cancel for me?”
A very practiced sigh of a very practiced agent came across the line. “You know they’re going to have to pay the chorus.”
“There’s no chorus in Salomé, and it’s only a piano rehearsal. Please, Richard? Just this once?”
“One thing I’ve learned in my long tragic career is that in opera there’s no such thing as just this once. But just this once, okay.”