THEY WERE IN HER dressing room, with barely three minutes before the Prelude. There was a light knock at the door.
Vanessa frowned into the mirror, trying to adjust her headband. “Would you see who that is?”
An usher handed Camilla a small gift-wrapped package.
Vanessa glanced over her shoulder. “Open it, would you?”
A necklace of cabochon diamonds sparkled in a bed of contoured purple velvet. Vanessa stared. The jewels seemed to have been thrust by accident into the wrong universe. She looked at the card.
“Nikos.”
“Don’t you want to try it on—for luck?” Camilla said.
“No, this is my good luck jewel.” Vanessa lifted the locket from the dressing table. She clicked it open. Her eyes met those of the woman in the portrait. As she put on the locket an easy temporary immortality flowed into her. She smiled at Camilla’s perplexed look.
“Is my toothbrush around somewhere? I don’t like to pray with dirty teeth.”
The chandeliers dimmed, rising to the ceiling. Latecomers hurried to their seats. There was applause for Boyd Kinsolving as he entered the pit. He raised his baton.
The Prelude surged out, faded to two plucked notes of the cellos and basses. The huge golden curtain rose on a ship becalmed on the Irish Sea.
The knight Tristan was taking Isolde, daughter of the Irish king, to be married to King Mark of Cornwall. She had remained strangely silent and refused food throughout the voyage. Finally—tall, head up, her cape streaming out behind her—she explained her behavior to her bewildered servant, Brangaene.
Isolde told how her fiancée, Morold, had gone to Cornwall to exact tribute. Tristan had scornfully slain him and sent his head as payment to Ireland. Later a wounded man calling himself Tantris had landed on the Irish coast and sought Isolde’s help, since she was famed for her knowledge of potions and healing. She had noticed a nick in his sword. It matched a piece of steel taken from Morold’s head. She knew he was Tristan. She raised the sword to kill him. His eyes met hers. She could not strike the death blow. Instead she healed him. He promised eternal gratitude. But his uncle, King Mark, impressed by his description of Isolde, decided to marry her and sent Tristan back to Ireland to fetch her.
Now, her voice cutting through the dense orchestral sound as though there were a light within it, Isolde revealed that she was still in love with Tristan and felt he had betrayed her. Resolving to kill herself and him, she commanded Brangaene to brew a deadly poison. She summoned Tristan and, deceptively, proposed they drink a toast of reconciliation.
But Brangaene had substituted a love potion for the poison. As Tristan and Isolde drained their cups and looked into each other’s eyes, they fell helplessly in love.
The audience had listened hushed, unmoving, and at the end of one hour and ten minutes their applause broke like a wave hurling itself against the land.
“Flowers for Miss Billings.”
The guard at the artists’ entrance glanced at the man in the raincoat whose eyes seemed so strangely patient and lonely. “Leave them here.”
“The instructions are to deliver personally.”
“Sorry, we can’t—”
The man thrust out the yellow duplicate of the florist’s invoice. The guard’s eyes took in the boldly hand-printed DELIVER IN PERSON FIRST INTERMISSION and the name of the sender—Nikos Stratiotis.
“Okay. Take a right, another right, and it’s the third dressing room on the left.”
He knocked. It was the dresser who opened the door. Vanessa turned, saw the florist’s package, saw who was carrying it.
“Ames.” Her hands tightened.
He tried to tell her with his eyes all that she would never believe from his lips: that he loved her, had never meant to harm her.
Nikos burst into the room. “How the hell did you get in here?”
The two men began shouting. Vanessa screamed.
A guard knocked at the door. “Miss Billings?”
“It’s all right,” she called. “I was just—practicing.”
Nikos dropped shamefaced into a chair, and Ames took up position by the doorway.
“I’m in the middle of a performance,” she said. “Neither of you is helping.”
They both looked embarrassed and hurt. It was Nikos who finally spoke. “You’ve got to choose, Vanessa. Take one of us or the other.”
“No, Nikos. It’s the two of you who have to choose—between me and the woman you really love.” She looked from Nikos to Ames. She could see that neither of them understood. “Leave me alone till midnight. Let me finish my performance, and I’ll belong to whichever one of you chooses me over Ariana Kavalaris.”
Nikos and Ames watched Act Two from opposite wings of the stage.
Isolde, married to King Mark, had arranged to meet Tristan while the king was away hunting. Together they prayed to the night to guard their love. Brangaene, keeping watch from the castle turret, warned that day was near. They ignored her. As their song rose ecstatically, Brangaene screamed and Tristan’s groom Kurwenal rushed in to warn that the king’s hunting party was returning.
With heartbroken dignity, King Mark confronted the lovers. Tristan asked if Isolde was willing to follow him to the land of oblivion. She replied she would happily follow wherever he led. As they kissed, one of King Mark’s knights drew his sword. The guilt-ridden Tristan allowed himself to be mortally wounded.
Stepping back from her curtain call, Vanessa saw him in the wings, his eyes fixed on her.
The realization jolted her that she had sung an entire act with Ames Rutherford standing no more than thirty feet away.
Something has changed, she realized. He didn’t make me freeze up.
Without a word, she hurried past him, past props and flats of a dozen other operas.
“So you see,” Vanessa said, “the story of this locket is quite special. It’s the story of a life that never reached its goal and had to be lived again.” The dressing room had the silence of a vacuum pressing in. “Are you frightened?”
“No,” Camilla answered. “Just scared to death.”
From far away came the lonely, unsupported notes of the violins, ascending as though into endless space. Act Three was beginning.
“Do you accept?” Vanessa asked.
She could feel the smallest seed of hesitation drop before Camilla silently bowed her head in acquiescence.
Vanessa handed the locket over, ensuring that there would be no turning back for her as there had been for Ariana. She fastened the thin gold chain around her pupil’s neck. “Now it’s yours, Camilla—the gift, the promise—and the duty.”
Vanessa turned now to Richard Schiller.
“Did you bring the contracts?”
He nodded and placed them on the dressing table.
Vanessa’s eyes skimmed, running down the list of roles and operas. Isolde came first. Then came the heroines in Tales of Hoffmann; then Nedda in Pagliacci and Marguerite in Faust; and on and on, four pages listing every role she had ever learned.
After each came a date and the identical stipulation: from the day specified onward, Vanessa Billings would never again sing the role; thenceforth Americana Artists Agency would use its best efforts to promote Camilla Seaton in said role.
Vanessa signed, then handed the pen to Camilla.
Camilla signed quickly and handed the pen to Richard. He shook his head. “Twenty years. No one ever signs a twenty-year contract.” But he signed.
At a desolate castle on the rock-strewn Brittany coast, Kurwenal kept watch over the dying Tristan while the two waited for Isolde’s ship. She had promised to come heal her lover. Tristan was on the verge of despair when a shepherd’s pipe signaled that a ship had finally been sighted.
Delirious, Tristan ripped off his bandages. With his last strength he staggered to his feet to meet Isolde. They embraced. He died in her arms.
King Mark arrived. He had learned of Brangaene’s potion and had come to forgive the lovers. But it was too late.
Across the stage, in the opposite wing, Nikos could see Ames Rutherford pacing.
In the distance, from the direction of the dressing rooms, a solitary woman approached. She walked along slowly, very small in a hooded black woolen cloak. She passed within a foot of Nikos.
He hardly glanced at her.
The grief-stricken white-garbed Isolde bent over the body of her dead knight. Her eyes closed. She began the “Liebestod”—the “Love-death.”
The shining line of her voice detached itself from the waves of orchestral sound and arched in a forever of longing. Note by note, then in a steady stream, the music entered the senses and nerves of the audience. It was as if they could hear time itself welling up. For a soaring quarter-hour, eternity was a place—that stage.
Wombed in mystery, rising into the sun’s glory, the voice threw itself outward toward the universe.
There was a war of climaxes, music and voice rising to separate peaks, finally peaking together, then falling back.
The voice faded and was still. Isolde sank to the floor and—following Tristan to the land of oblivion—fell across her lover’s body, dead.
The orchestra subsided. The strings sighed out a high, aching melody. There were two stinging woodwind chords, the longing motif, resolving into the final transcendant B-major chord. For a moment a single oboe held a lonely D-sharp. The chord returned and then all was stillness, peace, fulfillment.
The curtain fell in silence. Applause ripped loose.
The musicians filed out of the pit, the houselights were raised, it was five after midnight, then ten after, and still the curtain calls went on and torn programs and flowers rained down on the stage.
In the wings, Nikos and Ames waited to see which way she would turn. The curtain fell back for the last time. The applause died. She hesitated, then came quickly toward Ames.
He rushed forward, arms open. Then stopped. The woman in Isolde’s costume, the woman beneath Isolde’s makeup, was not Vanessa.
Camilla Seaton looked at Ames Rutherford curiously, then smiled. “Excuse me.” And stepped around him.
From deep in the shadow of the wings, the figure in the cloak watched the well-wishers flocking to Camilla Seaton. She couldn’t help feeling a surge of pride.
I taught her. I passed that on to her.
Then her eyes went to Nikos and Ames, still disbelieving, still lost on the outskirts of the confusion. Though she openly met both their gazes, neither seemed to recognize her. It was as though they were looking too far beyond her to see her.
And no wonder. Now she was only Vanessa Billings, the girl from a little town called Hempstead; she was Ariana no longer.
Ariana was there in the wings where she belonged, glowing from the face of Camilla Seaton.
Vanessa’s eyes misted. Goodbye, Nikos and Ames, you who thought you loved me; it was Ariana you really loved.
And she wondered, What about me? Did I ever love them? Or was that Ariana too?
Vanessa adjusted her hood and passed quietly through the stage door, raising scarcely a nod from the guard on duty.
She turned for one moment and whispered her goodbye.
On the underground sidewalk a mob of newsmen had collected. A man with a minicam shoved her aside in his rush to line up a better shot of the artists’ entrance.
She went slowly out to the street.
It was a clear early spring night. She raised her arm and hailed a taxi. She got in.
As the cab pulled into the Broadway traffic she turned to stare back at the opera house, at the arched glass façade with the bright red and yellow splashes of the Chagall murals on the grand tier.
I’m free now.
An emptiness ached in her.
Twenty feet down Broadway, a figure darted crazily into the traffic. The driver slammed on his brakes. Car horns blared angrily behind them.
A man was rapping at the passenger window, pulling at the door handle. Through the shield of glass, Vanessa’s eyes met Ames Rutherford’s.
In her memory a young man, flushed and eager, bolted up the steps of a choir loft; a little boy in a school blazer stared at her across the crowded promenade of an old opera house.
She unlocked the door.
Ames slid into the back seat beside her, out of breath. “Why did you run off like that? I panicked when I realized Camilla wasn’t you.”
“When did you realize?”
“During the curtain calls. You were standing by the artists’ entrance. You stopped and said goodbye.”
“You heard me?”
“I felt it. Don’t say goodbye, Vanessa. Please don’t ever say goodbye again.”
For a moment nothing moved in her face. Then she smiled and it was as though a rose were slowly opening its petals. There was memory and sadness in that smile but there was hope too.
“I was only saying goodbye to Isolde. She’s been good to me; and I’ll never sing her again.” Sadness brushed her. “One by one, I’ll have to say goodbye to all my roles. In twenty years…they’ll be gone.”
She was silent. He took her hand.
“Twenty years can be a lifetime,” he said.
She stared at him, sensing he was beginning to understand as she understood; to believe as she believed.
“Where are you going now?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“We can catch the last train to the Hamptons.”
She hesitated.
“Vanessa, I’m not the person I was.”
It was as though for the first time she was hearing the voice that was truly his. And then there came a sound almost as surprising, the voice that was truly hers. “I’m not the person I was either.”
Her fingers closed tight around his. A strange wondering peace began slowly to fill them both—a peace of reconciliation that had been over a half-century in coming.
Somewhere far away a little boy in a school blazer kissed a little girl in a white skirt. A young seminarian held a dark-eyed voice student in his arms, at last, forever.
Ames leaned forward to the partition. “Driver, we’ve changed our minds. Take us to Penn Station, please.”