Ariana Read online

  “Is it true?”

  “If I expect to get anywhere in this world I have to have a plan and I have to stick to it.”

  He felt that he and this dark-haired girl lived in two different universes. “Your world sounds like a lot tougher place than mine.”

  “Of course it’s tougher. I’m an opera singer.”

  “Don’t you ever get any relaxation?”

  “Relaxation never built a career.”

  “But tonight you’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Tonight I’m learning by listening and watching. Next week I’ll come back and follow the performance with a score.” She described the desks for score reading at the top of the house, placed in such a way that the study lights could not disturb the rest of the audience. “If you lean forward and sideways you can see a little bit of the stage.” She said she saw most productions at the house twice, watching one performance, following the score the next.

  The intermission bell sounded. As they dashed down the grand staircase she gave him her hand and it was marvelously soft.

  He felt the touch of her arm on his shoulder as the tenor was singing “Pazzo son’.” “He’s forcing his high notes,” she whispered. “He won’t last another season.”

  Mark tried to muster a frown of intelligent agreement.

  After the opera they took a cab. There was a giddy feeling of fullness just below his chest. He was thinking, I could kiss her right now. She wants it as much as I do.

  “Right here,” she leaned forward to tell the cabbie. “The house on the corner.”

  They got out and she began looking through her purse for her key.

  He darted a kiss onto her cheek. She gave him a little smile that was almost shy, and then she handed him a piece of paper. “This is my landlady’s phone. If you can’t reach me at work or at Domani you can always leave a message.”

  He folded the paper into his wallet. When he told her his phone number she wrote it in her address book.

  Good, he thought. She’s making me permanent.

  She hesitated. “Goodnight. And thanks. It was wonderful.”

  He watched her unlock the front door. She turned and gave him that same shy little smile again. He smiled back.

  The next day Mark had lunch at Harry’s club. “Why didn’t she ask me in?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to seem forward,” Harry said.

  “Would it have been forward to offer coffee to a guy who’d taken her to the opera? Or a drink? Or at least a glass of water?”

  “Maybe coffee keeps her awake. Maybe she doesn’t have liquor.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t have water?”

  Harry put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Stop it, Mark. You’ve got to be sane about this.”

  “How the hell can I be sane when I’m losing my mind?”

  “By acting sane. Life, in case no one ever told you, is ninety-nine percent acting.”

  Mark phoned Ariana at the landlady’s. At Fennimore’s. At the Domani. At the luncheonette. At the Domani. So much for acting sane.

  And then he settled down to a state of sheer unrequited misery, realizing he was going to spend the rest of his life waiting for a girl with dark eyes who was never going to phone.

  It was 7:30 and he was in his room at the seminary when the phone rang.

  “Mark?” It was Ariana. “You phoned.”

  “Eight times.”

  “Nine.”

  “I guess I lost count. How’ve you been?”

  “Busy. Dead. The usual. And you?”

  “Oh, the usual. Busy. Dead. I enjoyed yesterday.”

  “Me too.”

  “Maybe we can do it again.”

  Two beats of silence. Ominous.

  “I have a friend who ushers at the Met, he could get us in to a performance. It would be family circle.”

  “Sounds great,” he said. “When?”

  “Week after next?”

  Why not the century after next. Stay cool. No gibbering now.

  “Damn,” she said, “there’s my cue.”

  He heard a piano in the background, strident and out of tune.

  “I’ll phone when my friend can get passes,” she said, “okay?”

  He spent the next two weeks not studying, not hearing from her, somehow managing not to go crazy.

  3

  AUGUSTA RUTHERFORD PHONED BREATHLESSLY. “Mark, how quickly can you change into something decent? We’re going to the opera.”

  “Mother, I have a pastoral theology exam tomorrow.”

  “But you already know theology. Be at the Metropolitan in half an hour. Harry Havemeyer has given us his box. DiScelta’s singing.”

  The opera was Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Mark’s mother had invited Nita Farnsworth and he understood that this was part of the Plot to Get Mark Married to the Right Girl.

  “Hello, Mark.” Awkwardness rose from Nita like mist.

  “Hello, Nita.”

  Mercifully, the houselights dimmed and the curtain rose on a set depicting seventeenth-century Seville. Tonight, without Ariana beside him, Mark found Mozart’s graceful score hopelessly at odds with the depressing tale of the sex-obsessed Don Giovanni and his string of female victims.

  In intermission he took Nita strolling on the grand tier promenade. They found embarrassingly little to talk about before the bell called the audience back for Act Two.

  It was close to midnight by the time the stage-flames of Hell swallowed up the unrepentant Don and the curtain fell to tumultuous applause. Augusta Rutherford, gathering up her fur, seemed to be struck by sudden inspiration.

  “Wasn’t that delightful? Mark, why don’t you take Nita home?”

  Mark’s immediate thought was of a two-hour round trip to Lloyd Harbor, Long Island. Nita smiled and took his arm.

  “Don’t worry. I’m at the Barbizon. I can get home by myself.”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Augusta cried. “Mark would love to take you. Mark?”

  In the back seat of the Checker cab Nita kept rearranging the folds of her skirt. Mark fumbled for conversation. “I didn’t realize you were living in town.”

  “I’ve been here for a month. I’m working for Digby Welles. They’re a small advertising agency. I’m really just a trainee. But it’s a good excuse to live in New York. I like being on my own.”

  He wondered how much on her own she really was. The Barbizon had a sign in the lobby:NO GENTLEMEN BEYOND THIS POINT. The woman at the reception desk wore her hair knotted in a tight gray bun, and as she handed Nita the room key she raised a doubtful glance at Mark.

  “Friendly place,” Mark said. “I’m allowed to see you to the elevator, aren’t I?”

  “But not one step beyond.” She kissed him quickly on the cheek. “It was good seeing you, Mark. I go home weekends, but maybe we can get together some week night?”

  “That would be great.”

  Ariana phoned Thursday, ten minutes before their date. “Mark, it’s a real disaster. Laurie was standing by for Sue, but Sue got stranded in Pittsburgh, so Laurie’s going on, and I have to stand by, so I can’t make our date tonight. I’m sorry. They phoned me two minutes ago. Rain-check?”

  “Sure,” Mark said. “Raincheck.”

  He sat on the unmade bed, absolutely still, trying to empty his mind of the hundred thoughts racing in it. His arm stiffened and swiped a book from the bedside table. Seven hundred pages of Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy flew across the room.

  Harry listened, half smiling, half nodding, and then he went calmly back to buffing his patent leather shoes.

  “Mark, did it ever occur to you maybe she’s telling the truth?”

  “Standing by for a standby? Come on. She changed her mind. She got another date.”

  Harry looked at his friend like a doctor gazing at a patient. “Or it could be she’s testing.”

  “Testing what?”

  “Testing you, nitwit. Seeing what you’ll put up with.”

/>   “Girls do that?”

  “Everybody does it.”

  Mark sighed. “I don’t think I can handle it.”

  Harry refilled the wineglasses. It seemed to Mark the wine tasted a little smoother than it had an hour ago.

  “Harry, just tell me what the hell I’m going to do.”

  “You’re going to go after her. It’s obvious she’s not going to join the seminary. So you’ll have to join the opera.”

  “I tried that.”

  “But this time you’re going to succeed.”

  Mark phoned the Domani Opera. The call was answered by a woman with a Park Avenue accent. She said her name was Mabel Dowd and she could see him that afternoon at two. “Be prompt.”

  He was prompt. Nervous and prompt.

  Mabel Dowd’s gray-streaked hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore pearls, a baggy sweater, and blue jeans. “What do you do—or hope to do? Operatically speaking?”

  “Just about anything.”

  They were sitting in her cramped office. She chain-smoked Camels and told Mark what she didn’t need.

  “Baritones, tenors, dancers, pianists who can’t transpose.”

  “I could paint flats,” Mark said.

  Domani performed two operas per month, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. In November they did Il Trovatore on a budget of $82 (Mark painted flats of castle turrets and gypsy tents) and Adriana Lecouvreur on a budget of $120 (he painted flats of boudoirs and drawing rooms).

  He learned how to make doors of canvas and windows of cellophane and trees of cloth. He went for coffee. He swept floors. He turned pages for the pianist. He worked the lights.

  He saw Ariana.

  She was always chatting and laughing and kissing people, and his heart turned into a burning stone in his chest.

  Once he managed to speak to her. The stage was ten feet deep and there was no crossover. The singers had to cross through an alley behind the theater. It was raining and he held the umbrella for her.

  She said, “Hi,” and smiled.

  He said, “Hi,” and smiled back.

  End of conversation.

  But not end of incident. As he returned to his place on the other side of the stage, one of the other sopranos asked him to fasten a hook in the back of her gypsy costume. Her name was Clara Rodrigo and she jiggled against him and her voice was low-pitched and mocking. “I think you have a crush on Ariana, yes?”

  Mark had observed Clara Rodrigo. She was the sort of performer who held notes longer than her tenor and stole extra bows and spent intermissions misplacing rival sopranos’ props. If you had a strong enough voice—and Clara Rodrigo could outshriek a fire siren—that sort of thing was called temperament.

  “I think it’s none of your business.” Mark fastened the hook and gave her a friendly little push away.

  “You’re a nice boy,” Clara said with poisonous sweetness. “Don’t get involved. She’ll hurt you.”

  Mark knew better than to put any faith in the word of a troublemaker like Clara. And besides, Ariana smiled at him during a choral rehearsal of Nabucco and waved during the soloists’ rehearsal of Die Fledermaus.

  But she also smiled and waved at a tenor called Sanche.

  “I hate Sanche,” Mark said.

  It was a chilly day in February 1947 and he and Harry were having port by the fireplace in the Knickerbocker Club.

  “Who the hell is Sanche?”

  “He’s the man Ariana’s flirting with.”

  “Who the hell could flirt with a man called Sanche? Mark, it occurs to me that in certain matters you’re an idiot.”

  Then came Bohème, and Ariana spent rehearsal time next to a balding baritone called Herb.

  “Don’t look surprised,” Clara Rodrigo whispered, brushing past Mark backstage. “I warned you.”

  “She’s interested in a balding baritone called Herb,” Mark told Harry. “She’s always next to him at rehearsals.”

  Harry gazed into his glass of ruby port. The steward had lit a fire and their shadows danced on the wall of bookcases.

  “It could be Domani’s short of scores and they’re just sharing,” Harry said.

  Mark checked with a friendly contralto called Mildred. She said there weren’t enough piano-vocal scores to go around, so the soloists had to double up. Mark was relieved until he saw Ariana standing at the water cooler with Max, the prompter.

  Max was fifty years old and had arms like Popeye, and Ariana was smiling at him.

  Slowly sipping his port, Harry listened to the tale of Ariana and the weight-lifting prompter. Then he cut Mark short. “Friend, I told you to pursue, not sit on your duff sobbing.”

  “How the hell can I pursue when she’s interested in every male in the company but me?”

  “Ask her for coffee.”

  Mark gazed at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Coffee—the stuff you put milk and sugar in.”

  “Milk, no sugar,” Ariana said.

  “Same for me,” Mark told the waitress.

  They let their coffee cool and spent ten minutes discussing Domani politics: who was angling for what role, and whose aunt was putting up the money for the Cavalleria Rusticana costumes.

  “I wanted to ask you for coffee before,” Mark said, “but you always seemed busy.”

  She smiled. “Well, I’ve got voice lessons every Tuesday and Thursday at the Manhattan School of Music; French and German Monday and Wednesday evenings at New School; Wednesday mornings I clean for a little old countess who gives me Russian lessons in exchange.”

  “Russian?”

  “Sure—a lot of opera houses do Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin in the original. I have to be prepared.”

  “So that leaves—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.”

  “Which are the days I tend counter.”

  He persevered. “And Tuesday and Thursday evenings?”

  “Tuesday I study stage movement at Stella Adler. Thursdays I get piano lessons from a teacher at Mannes. We barter. I clean her apartment Monday mornings.”

  “And how do you fill the long hours between?”

  “I study scores, learn roles. There’s always something that needs doing, believe me.”

  Part of him believed her, but part of him thought, She’s giving me excuses. She knows I’m angling for another date and she’s saying no, a nice reasonable no because she’s a nice reasonable girl.

  With unreasonably beautiful dark eyes that kept glancing away from his.

  He lifted his cup. “Even soldiers in the front line get rotated once a month. Sounds as though you’re always on call.”

  “I have to be. Ninety percent of the people who start out in opera never make it. They don’t know a role when the soprano gets strep throat, or their German’s no good. That’s not going to happen to me. There are no excuses in opera.”

  They sat a moment in silence and Mark wondered about her. “Where do you get your determination from?”

  Her eyes met his, dark and speculative, and he realized the thing they were speculating about was Mark Rutherford and his naïve-sounding questions.

  “I suppose I get it from growing up on 103rd Street. Ever been there?”

  He shook his head. Guiltily. He knew nothing about the slums of north Manhattan, nothing about this girl with the dark hair and eyes and the strange-sounding name. All he knew was that he was falling and powerless and he hated it.

  And loved it.

  A beautiful white smile came shining out of her face. “But if I want to sound ritzy, I can claim Fifth Avenue. My mother went into labor on the sidewalk in front of Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. I was born in the emergency room. It’s a great address to be born, don’t you think? Fifth Avenue at 106th Street.”

  For a moment she stared into her coffee, not speaking.

  “One summer we had a sublease on Ninety-sixth. That was elegant, because the railroad tracks were underground. But we moved back to 103rd. My mother still lives there.”


  “Tell me about your parents.”

  “Mom is French. Dad was pure Greek peasant. Most of his family still live in the Peloponnesus. He came to this country when he was sixteen. He was going to strike it rich. He was good with his hands—woodwork, gardening, there wasn’t any kind of machine he couldn’t fix. When I was a child he used to carve me little dolls out of soap. He was a night watchman for the Ruppert brewery for twelve years, and he saved enough to open a little restaurant. The mob told him he had to pay protection. He was Greek. He refused. They blew it up. End of my dad’s career in cordon bleu moussaka.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died later.” Her expression turned serious, and he sensed she was holding something back.

  After a moment he broke the silence. “How’d you get into singing?”

  She brightened. “I always wanted to be a singer. When I was a kid I was lucky enough to have a couple of good teachers. They loved music. They even loved me.”

  She stared out the coffee shop window at Second Avenue with its trucks and taxis speeding past. She seemed to be remembering.

  “They encouraged me. I studied hard. I worked hard. Last year I won a Guggenheim grant to the competition in Toulouse. It wasn’t enough to pay for scores or clothes, so I became a very quick study on how to waitress in fast food joints. I went to Toulouse, I sang my heart out, I didn’t win a damned thing, but I got a chance to hear my competition. And no matter what the judges said, I know I’m as good as anyone else my age singing today. Better.”

  She said it simply and without conceit, as though it were no different from saying the earth was round or two times two was four.

  “I respect you,” Mark said. “I respect you tremendously. And I think it’s damned unfair that it has to be so hard for you.”

  She gazed at him. “Unfair? That’s not the way I see it. I have the advantage over all the others with the rich relatives and patrons and the scholarships and the state grants. I know what I can do, I know what I have to do, and I know how to work for what I want. And I’m going to get it. It’s going to happen because the only person it depends on is me.”

  Mark could feel pride and hope and certainty radiating from her like heat, and in himself he felt a tiny shaming bite of envy. He couldn’t help thinking, I wish I were as certain of my calling as she is of hers.