TWO WEEKS BEFORE THANKSGIVING Ames and Vanessa were having breakfast in the kitchen when she suddenly said, “I want to join Women for Recovery. It’s a self-help group of ex-mental patients. Mandy van Slyke told me about it.”
“Do you think you need it?”
“Can’t hurt, can it?”
“Why don’t you phone and check with Dr. Sandersen?”
The next day she said Dr. Sandersen had assured her it was all right to go to the group. “We meet in New York. Twice a week.”
He gave her a look.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I can survive the Long Island Railroad.”
On March 5 Clara Rodrigo returned to New York from a series of European performances. She found the Metropolitan Opera revised rehearsal schedule in her mail, forwarded by her accompanist.
“Puta!” she screamed. “Coño!”
The next morning she entered Adolf Erdlich’s office with the brisk air of a ruling queen. “Adolf, we agreed last May. The closing performance of the season is mine.”
He stared at her. “Our contract hasn’t been signed.”
“Because you haven’t fixed the air conditioning in my dressing room.”
“Nevertheless, it hasn’t been signed.”
“I have told managers I am singing that Isolde. I have told magazines. I have told friends. I must sing it. I will sing it!”
Adolf Erdlich gave her a motionless look that held the shadow of a pitying smile. “There is no contract.”
Clara’s black leather telephone book had three numbers listed for Billings: the first two were crossed out and the third appeared to be Long Island, with a 516 area code.
A machine answered. She waited for the beep. “I’m going to fight you, Vanessa. You will not sing my Isolde.”
Ames played the message.
You will not sing my Isolde.
He erased it before Vanessa could hear it.
Once again, Clara made her way up the dimly lit stairs over the Chinese restaurant near B. Altman’s department store. She pushed through the beaded curtain into the hot, suffocating space.
The huge dark woman reached to turn down the radio. Her milky eyes fixed unseeingly on her visitor. “Siéntese,” she commanded.
Clara sat. “Soy yo—Clara,”—“It’s me—Clara.”
“Te recuerdo.”—“I remember you.”
Clara slipped the diamond ring off her finger and pressed it into the woman’s hand. “Now Billings wants to sing my Isolde.”
“I warned you. It is too late. No power on earth can help you now.”
“What shall I do? At least tell me that!”
The old woman sighed and pocketed the ring. “All you can do is to accept what must be.” And, in terrifying detail, she went on to describe what resistance to the inevitable would entail.
“Clara—cara!”
She had summoned Giorgio Montecavallo to a 10:00 A.M. conference on her terrace. As he bent to kiss her, sunlight struck the tiny hairline scars of his recent face lift.
“Two hundred thousand dollars, Monte?” She held the letter that had arrived three months ago outlining the request.
“An investment, cara—not a loan.”
“Tell me about this restaurant you want to open.”
Monte described it. He had an option on a prime lot in Bergen County. The restaurant would serve the best fettuccine and saltimbocca in all New Jersey. And twice nightly Giorgio Montecavallo would sing favorite arias from grand opera.
Clara was thoughtful. “This comes at a good moment. I’m thinking of semiretirement.”
Monte’s face was very good at showing shock. “You, cara?”
“It’s best to leave the stage while one is still at the height of one’s fame and power.” She poured coffee, thick rich-smelling espresso with three spoons of sugar in each cup. “The restaurant will be called Clara and Monte’s. We will sing arias and duets.”
He nodded. “Yes, duets are popular.”
“And I think—for publicity purposes—we should be married.”
Ames could not get the phone message out of his mind.
That Thursday, while Vanessa was with her group, he phoned the subscription department of the Metropolitan and asked if there had been any cast changes in upcoming productions of Tristan and Isolde. He was told Rodrigo would not be singing, but that a replacement had not yet been announced.
Tuesday he followed Vanessa into New York.
She went to an old Victorian apartment building on West Fifty-fifth Street. A younger woman was waiting for her. Ames recognized Camilla Seaton. The doorman let them go up.
Ames went into the building and asked for Dr. Harry Woolrich.
“No Dr. Harry Woolrich here, sir.”
“Are you sure? This was the address my dentist gave me.”
The doorman stepped aside to let him look down the row of buzzers. Ames caught the name that resonated: A. Waters. Vanessa’s old voice coach.
He went to a pay phone and rang Austin Waters on Fifty-fifth Street. A man answered. In the background Ames heard Vanessa, unmistakably Vanessa with her high vocal filigree.
He apologized. “I must have the wrong number.”
He saw the women come out of the building together, talking with the animation of old friends catching up on years’ absence. They said goodbye on the sidewalk and Vanessa went to a garage on Fifty-eighth Street. A small chauffeured sedan was waiting for her.
The sedan dropped her at the train station at East Hampton, and from there she drove back to the house.
When Ames came through the door and Vanessa gave him a warm kiss and asked how his day had been, he said, “So-so. And yours?”
She began describing how tiresome it was rapping for three hours with a bunch of crazy ladies.
He cut her short. “I followed you.”
Vanessa met his gaze. “Then you know Austin’s coaching me.”
“I figured that out.”
“You know I’m singing Isolde?”
At that moment he felt the ground giving way beneath him, he felt her slipping back into that world of high C’s and mad Lucias. “I think you ought to talk to Dr. Sandersen about that.”
“Ames, I’m through being a patient.”
He could hear tidal waves roaring out of the orchestra pit and the whole Social Register in gowns and cutaways springing to their feet screaming bravas. He could feel her wanting that world more than she wanted recovery, more than she wanted Ames Rutherford, more than she wanted anything else on this earth.
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you what we have,” he said, “what we’ve built in these last six months?”
“What have we built?”
He couldn’t believe she’d said it like that, so calmly and matter-of-factly. “We’ve built a recovery,” he said.
“Ames, I’m not what you think. Maybe I’m not even the woman you married. I know I’m not the case of delusional psychosis Dr. Sandersen’s got you believing I am.”
“Dr. Sandersen never said that about you.”
“Of course not. He didn’t need to. It’s self-evident that I’m a poor overworked madwoman with some crazy idea that she made a deathbed promise to her teacher. Well, let me ask you one thing. If I’m deluded, what was that phone call on your machine?”
“Hey, will you calm down?”
“No, I will not calm down. You played me the tape the week we moved out here. That voice on the phone telling you to meet me at Perry Street—it was her, Ames. It was Ariana using me just the way she used me onstage. Don’t you see? I wasn’t imagining!”
His mind was spinning wheels. He remembered the phone message, remembered matching the voice to Ariana Kavalaris’s. But he’d been on a bender when he did that, he’d been drunk, crazy.
Dear God, he prayed, don’t let Vanessa be mad, don’t let Vanessa be mad.
“I only want you to be well,” he said.
She looked at his entreating eyes, his sun-streaked hair, his trembling mouth, and something in her cried out to bridge the emptiness between them. She felt his aching fear.
Yet she knew she had to stand her ground. If she yielded now she would be yielding forever.
She went into the bedroom and began packing.
Ames stood watching her from the doorway. “I’m not threatening, but you’d better face realities. You have no money, no property. Everything’s in my name.”
She closed the one suitcase.
“Where are you going?”
“Ames, I made a promise. I have to keep it. Under the circumstances that obviously means I can’t stay with you. I’m sorry. I love you, but as you just got through saying, I have to face reality—only I’m facing my reality, not yours.”
He marshaled a thousand arguments against her going. She granted that they were all wise, all just, all in her best interest.
Ames watched disbelievingly as she walked out of the house, got into the car, and drove away.
Nikos came to the door in his dinner jacket. She could hear by the sounds pouring from the apartment that he was giving a party.
“Vanessa.” It was a soft, pained cry. “What’s the matter?”
He had aged. His face was longer, the eyes and mouth more lined. His hair was paler; in two years it had shaded to white.
A word she had never heard before, never spoken before, ripped itself from her throat. “Voïthia!”
He recoiled from her. “Ariana?”
“Not Ariana. Vanessa.”
“But what did you just say? That was…her voice.”
She felt sudden strength. It was as if Ariana were crying out through her, commanding him to help her. “Voïthia!”
His face went white. “Pos?”
She knew he had agreed: he was asking how he could help.
“Afise mou na kathiso sto spithi sou,” she said, not understanding what she was saying or how she was able to say it, knowing only that he had to take her into his home.
He stood aside. “Ela,” he said. “Ela.”
For an instant she didn’t move.
And then he said it in English. “Come in. Please. Come in.”
She walked into his apartment with one suitcase. He gave her the guest room.
He provided everything: the piano, the accompanists, the listening, the advice, the encouragement.
And he was glad.
Dr. Sandersen learned at his breakfast table, pouring himself a second cup of coffee. The headlines in the New York Times proclaimed another day of last straws: crime was up, taxes were up, unemployment and prices were up. Everyone was broke and hurting and no one cleaned the streets or cared about the government’s billion-dollar wars.
He turned for relief to the entertainment page.
Vanessa Billings’s photograph smiled at him from the third column. He was on the phone thirty seconds later. “You’re playing games with her sanity.”
“I had no say in it,” Ames Rutherford answered. “She’s left me.”
“You’re still her husband, aren’t you?”
“Technically I am.”
“Then you have the power to stop her. I’ll execute any affidavits you need.”
“Your husband phoned me,” Nikos told Vanessa. “He says Dr. Sandersen doesn’t want you to sing.”
“Dr. Sandersen hasn’t seen me in over a year.”
“All the same, just to be on the safe side, I think we should talk with Holly Chambers.”
“The fact that we can blow Ames Rutherford off the map doesn’t mean he can’t still make trouble.”
“What sort of trouble, Holly?” Nikos said.
“The worst sort. And I doubt Vanessa wants to spend these next weeks agonizing over whether or not she can legally sing Isolde.”
They were sitting in Chez Claudine, a new little French restaurant on Second Avenue. They’d all ordered the day’s specialty, ragout, and the chilled young Beaujolais. Their corner table was bright with flowers and checkered cloth; the terrine maison and the main course had proved peasant-hearty; and the conversation, for the last five minutes, painful.
Vanessa raised a gently protesting palm. “Holly, the one thing I’m not agonizing over is whether or not I can sing that role. So long as my lungs don’t desert me, I’ll be on that stage.”
“Don’t be so sure of it.”
“I have a contract with the Met.”
“And you also have a contract with Ames Rutherford that legally takes precedence.”
She set down her fork firmly against her plate. “I never signed a contract with Ames.”
“You married him. In court, that’s a contract.”
“But we’re separated.”
“Legally?”
“If you mean have we brought lawyers into it, no.”
“Then under certain circumstances Ames Rutherford has the right to exercise custody of Vanessa Rutherford.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not a child.”
“Age isn’t the criterion. If a court judges you mentally incompetent, your husband becomes your custodian.”
“But why would a court—”
“You were hospitalized.”
“That was over a year ago.”
“Doesn’t matter. If your husband can find a doctor willing to swear that you’re still mentally incompetent, the court will grant him custody. He’ll have power of attorney; power to revoke contracts you entered into; power to recommit you to the hospital.”
Vanessa fought off images of white cells and barred windows. “But Ames wouldn’t—” Her eyes went to Nikos.
“Holly, show her,” Nikos said.
Holly moved butter dishes and wineglasses and set the document on the table.
It was only a Xeroxed copy. Vanessa reached a hand and picked it up by the corner. She read it slowly, incredulity building in her. “They could stop me with this?”
Holly nodded. “It’s a sad and unjust thing. But that’s the law. He may be a bastard but you’re his spouse and in that situation the bastard has the power.”
“I never called him a bastard,” Vanessa said softly. “He just doesn’t understand.”
Holly shrugged.
“There must be something I can do,” she said.
“Sure. Shoot him.”
Nikos spoke. “Not funny, Holly.”
“Sorry.” Holly sighed. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I can only see one sure way Vanessa can go onstage. Ask the court for a separation. Do it immediately. Once you’re legally separated, Ames Rutherford and all the doctors in the world can’t keep you from singing Isolde.”
Vanessa glanced up at Nikos. He was faceless against the glare of sunlight in the restaurant window. “Nikos?” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s up to you. You have my full support whatever you decide.”
“All I want to do is to sing.”
Vanessa saw Ames the day before her performance.
He was sitting across the courtroom in a rumpled raincoat and it wasn’t even raining. He was wearing the South American sweater she had given him for his birthday and a necktie that didn’t go with it and she had a feeling he was wearing sneakers too.
She felt sad. Poor Ames—he’ll always need someone to dress him.
Holly Chambers was sonorously outlining his client’s petition.
Vanessa stared at the man she was asking to be separated from.
It all seemed hopelessly unreal to her, meeting him, loving him so much that the thought of him had obliterated every other thought, living with him, feeling the love change in a way she couldn’t begin to understand or control, and now seeing him across a courtroom while her attorney explained she wasn’t asking for his money or his car or his house, wasn’t asking for anything except never to be approached by him again.
She had said to Holly, “I only need till after the performance,” and he had said, “But legally you have to ask for never again.”
Ames sat listening, alone and still in a spill of sunlight from the window. He looked across at Vanessa and she looked across at him.
She felt they had known each other for centuries, and still she could remember the first time, the little boy in his navy blue private school blazer that she had glimpsed through the crowd at a matinee in the old Metropolitan Opera House, and suddenly she thought, I was never in that old house, and surprise jerked her back to the present.
“Is Mr. Rutherford’s counsel in the courtroom?” the judge asked.
Ames rose. His voice was so soft it could hardly be heard. “I have no counsel, Your Honor.”
“Speak up, please?”
“I have no counsel, Your Honor.”
“Are you representing yourself?”
“I suppose so, Your Honor.”
“Do you oppose Vanessa Rutherford’s motion?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Motion granted.”
After the hearing Ames went to the twenty-ninth floor of the World Trade Center. It was 1:15, lunchtime, and several men and women were sitting in a small conference room with a view of the Hudson River.
The speaker today was an elderly woman, a clerical worker with an architectural firm. Ames slipped into a chair and listened to her gentle voice telling the old familiar story of loss and loneliness and booze…and recovery.
There were smiles and applause when she finished, and then anyone who had anything to say put his or her hand up in the air.
She called on Ames.
“Hi. My name is Ames. I’m an alcoholic.”
He had been coming to this room, and to rooms like it, for the seven weeks since Vanessa had left him and he had woken up in a wrecked Mercedes with an empty vodka bottle beside him and no memory of how he’d wound up in that potato field.
“Just an hour ago the court granted my wife a legal separation. I don’t feel like drinking over it, but I feel angry and scared and very much alone. I’ve been holding onto the hope that somehow I’d get her back, but now the prospects don’t look too bright. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her.”
The woman nodded. “It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be scared. You’ll do the right thing whatever happens. You’re not alone, you’re here. And the court’s not God. You may not lose her.”
“They changed the New York divorce law. The only grounds used to be adultery. You had to have a guilty party and an innocent party.”
She wondered why Nikos was mentioning it. “That doesn’t affect me, Nikos. I’m not divorced. I’m only separated.”
“Once the court grants a separation, if the parties don’t live together or change their minds, they’re automatically divorced in a year.”
Her mind played with the idea as though it were a strange object, like a chunk of meteor that had landed at her feet. “Holly didn’t mention that.” She walked out of the study onto the terrace and stared down forty stories at Central Park. At first she could only see darkness and then she saw lights lacing the trees beside the paths.
Footsteps came close and slowed. Nikos’s voice was beside her. “I’ve loved having you here.”
“Thank you for letting me stay. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“After you married I was dragging myself around like an emotional paraplegic.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Maybe after all the years I’ve ridden roughshod through other people’s lives I needed to learn what it was to need someone else.”
“You’ve been good to me. I had no right to ask for anything and you’ve been wonderful.”
“You and Ames are virtually divorced now. Do you understand that?”
“I can’t think about it now.”
She said it gently. She was grateful to Nikos. There was caring in him and warmth. She took his hand. His fingers curled around hers.
“Have you ever been to Georgetown?” he said. “In the Bahamas?”
“I’ve never been to the Caribbean.”
“It’s beautiful down there. I have a plane waiting for us at JFK.”
Sometimes he struck her as a child. He would never understand that people had lives and responsibilities of their own, that they couldn’t just drop everything because he had an impulse to play.
“It sounds wonderful, but I’m singing tomorrow.”
“Just for tonight. We can fly back right away.”
“Why go all that way for a night?”
“The law’s different down there. We could marry in Georgetown. It wouldn’t carry legal weight in New York, but in a year we could marry here too and then we’d be man and wife in all fifty states.”
She thought how defenseless he had made himself to her. “That’s the most beautiful thing you could offer me. Thank you, Nikos.”
“That’s it? Thank you?”
“Thank you and I love you. You’ve been very good to me.”
“Will you marry me? At long, long last?”
She looked at him, his eyes soft and dark and hopeful, his hair curling and thick and white. She thought how easy he would be to wound at this moment and how she must never hurt him again.
“I can’t decide anything, Nikos. Not till I get through what I have to get through.”