Ariana Read online

  “And now that we’ve covered me,” she said, “what about you? How do you fit into opera?”

  “I don’t. I just like it.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  You, he thought. “The tunes. The stories.”

  She gazed at him. “What do you do when you’re not painting flats for Domani?”

  “I study.”

  There was a momentary blank in her eyes. “Study what?”

  Instinct warned him not to tell her everything too quickly. To her, the word minister might have implications of priest and abstinence and—who could say?—guilt. Save it for later, he told himself.

  “I study languages.” After all, Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek were languages, weren’t they?

  “Why—to teach?”

  He smiled. “That’s right. Assuming anyone wants a teacher like me.”

  A smile tiptoed across her face and it was as though a light had come on. “They’ll want you,” she said.

  She likes me, he thought.

  She stood and suddenly she was getting into her coat.

  She doesn’t like me. She can’t wait to go.

  “This was fun. Let’s do it again.” She gave him that smile again, and it slid through him like a soft knife.

  “Let’s,” he said.

  The bill at Domani was Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana—Rustic Chivalry—and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci—the Clowns. Opera houses the world over invariably paired these two short masterpieces of blood, thunder, and melody, and singers and fans affectionately referred to them as “Cav and Pag.”

  “Cav” always came first.

  Tonight Clara Rodrigo was singing the heroine, Santuzza. She had a brief moment offstage during the “Intermezzo” when Max, the prompter, knocked on her dressing room door.

  “Did you notice the bald man in the gray suit in the back row? He was taping the performance.”

  “Who is he,” Clara said calmly, “this bald man?”

  “No one knows. He left in a purple limousine.”

  “He left?” There was but one possible interpretation to this information. The stranger with the tape recorder had obviously attended the performance not to hear Pagliacci, but to hear Cavalleria, which was to say to hear Clara Rodrigo.

  “Max, if the limousine is here tomorrow, will you let me know?”

  The next evening, during the “Intermezzo,” Max stopped Clara in the wings. “He’s back.”

  Clara put on a dramatic red shawl to give the man with the tape recorder a new reason to look at her. She sang full-out, holding high notes, interpolating high C’s. After seven curtain calls she changed quickly into street clothes. By the time she reached Second Avenue a faint drizzling haze lay across the city and a purple limousine was pulling away from the curb.

  Luck was with Clara—a Checker cab sailed past, free. “Could you follow that limousine, please?”

  The cabbie gave her a glance in the mirror.

  “I’ll give you five dollars above the meter.”

  The limo stopped on Central Park West at a corner building with chateau turrets. Clara paid the fare and, reluctantly, the tip.

  A bald man stepped out of the limo and hurried into the building. Clara watched him exchange greetings with the elevator operator.

  She darted into the lobby. It was clean, Art Deco, and for the moment deserted. The indicator on the elevator stopped at eighteen. Her eye ran down the line of buzzers. There were two names on the eighteenth floor: H. Ross and R. DiScelta.

  Clara had to rest against the marble wall to catch her breath. Ricarda DiScelta, the leading soprano of the Metropolitan Opera, had sent a man to tape her voice!

  She turned and walked slowly from the building. Her feet seemed scarcely to touch the pavement.

  She wondered what role the Metropolitan would offer her.

  In the music room of her Central Park West penthouse, Ricarda DiScelta sat steely black in the armchair. The voice of Clara Rodrigo singing “Voi lo sapete” poured from the little tape recorder: a surprisingly large sound from such a little machine.

  “Such wonders nowadays,” DiScelta murmured. “Too many wonders.”

  She listened. A wave of fatigue swept her. The voice on the tape was like a blank, unfeeling gaze. It revealed nothing of the soul of the music.

  She rose from her chair and sat at the piano and stared at her hands: young hands once, but now the only young thing about them was an emerald ring that the King of Yugoslavia had given her in 1927.

  She stared at James Draper, bald and gray-suited, serene behind his cloud of freshly exhaled cigar smoke.

  Finally the burden of her thoughts came out in a sigh. “For a quarter-century I have trusted you.”

  “Stop staring as though I betrayed you.”

  “As though after thirty years I even have time to notice your betrayals.”

  “Ricarda, it is the voice you asked me to tape.”

  “It is not. The voice I heard on the tape of the Toulouse competition had fire and a top and a middle and a bottom. This top has no color. The middle has no force below a mezzo forte. The bottom sounds as though it belongs to an entirely different singer.”

  “It’s a young voice.”

  “The problem is not youth. This woman simply is not the singer I heard on that tape.”

  James Draper shrugged and poured himself another port. “I sat through two dreadful performances and I did what you asked.”

  “And you failed. Which means I myself shall have to sit through a third dreadful performance. Will there be a third dreadful performance?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  “Thursday of all nights. I’ll have to cancel dinner at the governor’s.”

  Ricarda DiScelta arrived two minutes before the announced curtain time. There could not have been more than thirty people in the audience. She took her seat in the back row.

  An out-of-tune piano struck Mascagni’s opening chords.

  She watched the performance with a mixture of nostalgia and pity. It reminded her of her own student days. She paid hawklike attention to the Rodrigo girl. She watched the face move across the stage, through the darkness and the light. She was more than ever convinced: This is not the voice I heard on the Toulouse tape.

  She sat through the opening scene and wondered why these youngsters offered themselves so willingly to opera. What power did it possess? It did not go out of its way seeking them, it was not a lover, not a father. In any given year fewer than 150 opera singers would earn a full-time living in the United States, and she doubted that even one of them was singing at the Domani tonight.

  Her mood began lifting when she noticed the second soprano, a dark-haired girl who played the role of Lola. Something in the voice caught DiScelta’s attention. It was not a formed voice. But it was a presence; it had spirit. She angled her program toward the light.

  The girl’s name was Ariana Kavalaris.

  James Draper noted DiScelta’s fretfulness when she returned from the performance. She stared at him balefully, then slipped a tape onto the tape player and pushed a button. The soprano solo from the Verdi Requiem, “Et Lux Perpetua,” poured from the speaker. Finally the voice on the machine ended and became part of the silence in the room.

  DiScelta sighed. “That is the voice. The Toulouse program says it belongs to Clara Rodrigo, yet I have heard her, and it is absolutely not her voice.”

  James Draper rose. “One of the singers scheduled before Rodrigo must have dropped out after the programs were printed. The voice that caught your ear belongs to whoever sang immediately after her.”

  DiScelta crossed to the rolltop desk in the corner of the music room. She rolled back the desk lid and found the Toulouse program.

  She fitted her collapsible spectacles to the bridge of her nose. The print that had looked like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup came into focus. She scanned down the column of names. “The singer after Rodrigo…her name…. her name is…”

  She s
ank into a chair.

  “What a fool I am, James. When I saw her at the Domani I was too stupid to make the connection, but I knew there was something.”

  “What’s the name, Ricarda?”

  “Kavalaris.” Ricarda DiScelta said the name slowly, as though reciting the syllables of a poem. “Ariana Kavalaris.”

  Clara waited six days.

  There was no phone call, no word, no contract, no agent, no dinner invitation, no introduction to the management of the Metropolitan Opera. Nothing.

  But on the seventh day he was there.

  She saw him as she stepped onto the Domani stage as Rosalinda in Fledermaus: the bald man with the suntanned hands and head and the dark stockbroker’s suit. Sitting where he had sat before, in the last dark row of the almost empty theater.

  She sang her greatest Rosalinda. Triumph beat in her. The small audience—it was raining that night—called her back for four bows.

  Afterward she sat in the women’s dressing room, taking a very long time removing her right eyelash, waiting for him.

  A man’s voice said, “Excuse me.”

  She looked up. Her most charming smile flooded her face.

  “Is one of you Ariana Kavalaris?” he asked.

  Clara felt the disbelief that dwells on the edge of murder.

  “I am,” a voice said.

  “Could I speak with you after you’ve changed?”

  Clara’s left eyelash came off much too quickly. The mirror told her that her features had hardened into a stony remoteness.

  Something had changed forever. It wasn’t exactly that the universe had caved in upon her, but she was suddenly aware of a large empty space above her head where two minutes ago the sky had been.

  4

  RICARDA DISCELTA WAVED HER visitor to a high backed chair, keeping the brocade armchair for herself.

  Ariana Kavalaris sat down lightly, smoothed her long dark hair, and arranged her hands neatly in her lap. DiScelta knew the girl at a glance. She was young—what girl wanting to sing wasn’t—but her dreams were old, as old as song itself.

  “Tell me,” DiScelta said, “do you happen to know the ‘Et Lux Per-petua’ from Verdi’s Requiem?”

  Ariana was silent. Her gaze took inventory of the room: the Chinese vase of cut flowers, the marquetry tables, the elaborately framed oil of a cathedral at sunset. So this is what comes with success, she thought. I wonder if I’ll ever have anything like this room.

  After a moment she nodded. “Yes. I know the ‘Et Lux Perpetua.’”

  “Do you need the B-flat chord?” DiScelta gestured toward the Steinway. The keyboard lid was closed like a coffin’s.

  “No, thank you. I know what a B-flat chord is.”

  “You enter, of course, on a G,” DiScelta said.

  “I know what a G sounds like, too.”

  “Do you know by the sound?” DiScelta asked.

  “My throat tells me, by the tension. Each note has its own tension, don’t you find?”

  DiScelta smiled. “Please. ‘Et Lux.’”

  The girl got up from her chair. The strong column of her neck swelled. Her voice rose and began to inscribe in time the spiritual shape of one of Verdi’s most simple, most inspired melodies.

  DiScelta listened, her eyes shut.

  There were a thousand voice students in New York who were the cream of the best voices in America, in the world. And of the thousand there were at most thirty who would break out into international careers, who would shape for themselves recognizable international identities, who would record, perform, whom people would not only want to hear but would be willing to pay and pay exorbitantly to hear; and then, in every generation, there was the voice.

  And Ricarda DiScelta was certain. This was that voice.

  The girl had a slight breathing problem at the “Et Domine,” the descending B-flat minor arpeggio.

  “It doesn’t matter,” DiScelta said. “I can teach you all about that later. Go on, go on. Just keep singing. Don’t break the line.”

  Ariana Kavalaris finished and there was silence.

  DiScelta rose. She wore a knitted lace shawl fastened at the collar and beneath it, on a thin gold chain, an antique gold locket set with amethysts and rubies. Her fingers sought the locket and touched it now.

  She turned to face the girl. “Singing makes uncompromising demands. There are many hardships, few rewards. It requires a leap of blind faith. Are you capable of leaping into the dark?”

  A little drum of nervousness was tapping at the base of Ariana’s throat. “Yes.”

  “Then I shall teach you,” DiScelta said. “Much that I ask may strike you as unreasonable. But I shall ask nothing of you that you cannot do. As for the fee, well—”

  “I’d give anything to study with you.”

  “Anything will not be enough. You must give everything.”

  Their first lesson began with DiScelta asking, “What is opera? In one word?”

  Ariana hesitated. “Music.”

  “No. Opera is theater. Its roots are musical, but its flower is human conflict. And that is why so many great operas are bad music. And why so much good music is dull opera.”

  They were discussing Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Ariana worshiped Mozart. DiScelta obviously had her reservations.

  “In Mozart,” DiScelta said, “we see too many symphonic elements. Well, he came early in the history of opera. He has to be forgiven.” She called his musical, as opposed to dramatic, forms oppressive, his key relationships “useless”—“As though it mattered to an audience whether an act begins and ends in D!”

  With Mozart, she said, the singer was always in danger of putting the audience to sleep. “Arias follow patterned forms, acts are broken into separate numbers, recitatives interrupt the flow and are simply dead. True, there is invention, there is genius, but it is all delicate, tiny, a Dresden figurine. No blood. You have only one ally in Mozart: melody. But it is a treacherous ally.”

  DiScelta explained that Mozart’s vocal melodies were based on instrumental models. “The challenge is to make his melody human. You must get into the characters—otherwise the music is boring.”

  They analyzed the opening scene. DiScelta pronounced it an unbroken music span. “Symphonic, not operatic.” She praised Donna Elvira’s first aria with its crazed leaps and pauses. “Here the music finally gives us character. There is wit. The serious and the comic come together. Audiences like it.”

  She pointed out the amazing ball scene that ended Act One, where three orchestras on stage simultaneously played a peasant dance, a contredanse, and a minuet. “A dramatic idea. Unfortunately, too harmonious. He is writing music, not theater.”

  She praised the supper scene in Act Two where a stage band played numbers by three different composers. “But again, too harmonious.”

  She criticized the finales of both acts. “Long movements held together by tonal relationships. The idea of ending a tragic opera with a cheerful sextet is straight out of the symphony, with its bright rondo finales.”

  She made a face. “Nonetheless, the opera can work—and does—provided the voice supplies the emotions which Mozart, in his perfection, did not. So, let us start with your character, Donna Anna. She is a woman in love with the murderer of her father. A neurotic. A woman torn. Put that into these pretty melodies and you will be giving us opera, not concert music. Which, after all, is the only reason audiences are paying today’s criminally high ticket prices.”

  Ricarda DiScelta made a point of visiting her old teacher, Hilde Ganz-Tucci, once a week. Today her teacher greeted her at the door, frail as old parchment, but neat and clean and tidily dressed.

  “Ricarda, what a pleasant surprise.”

  “It’s not a surprise at all. You know I always come Tuesdays.”

  The table had not yet been cleared.

  “I see you’ve had lunch,” DiScelta said.

  “Alone,” Ganz-Tucci sighed.

  And no wonder, Ricarda thought. Hilde Gan
z-Tucci was a boring old woman. She was always complaining. She was doing it now. Her joints, servants, the Metropolitan Opera, back pains, inflation.

  DiScelta interrupted. “Hilde, I believe I have found the one.”

  Hilde Ganz-Tucci suddenly looked very alert. “You’re sure?”

  “I do have a modicum of judgment. I can recognize talent.”

  “But can she be the voice?”

  “I believe she can be. But time alone will tell.”

  “Sometimes,” Ganz-Tucci grumbled, “you are a paragon of inertia.”

  “And of caution.”

  “Ricarda, we do not have forever. You risk a few hours a week. But I risk eternity.”

  “It’s a risk,” DiScelta remarked coolly—she had, after all, survived decades of her teacher’s manipulations—“that we’ll both have to take.”

  After two months Mark hadn’t phoned Nita.

  After four months she told herself to accept the fact that he was a childhood friend, period; she had plenty of work to keep her busy and she had beaux who were interested in her and it was silly to keep daydreaming of a guy who obviously wasn’t daydreaming about her.

  After six months she picked up the phone in her room in the Barbizon and gave the operator his number.

  “Mark? Nita.”

  “Oh. Hi.” He sounded like a very distant echo of a voice she had once known.

  “Haven’t seen you in a few light-years,” she said. “I’m sorry, Nita. I’ve been swamped with exams.”

  Exams all year, she thought. Why am I phoning him? It’s not as though I were eighteen going on fifty-six. It’s not as though I didn’t have other friends. “Are you busy tonight?” she said.

  “Tonight? I can’t. Not tonight.” And then, “Not for a while.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at herself. I couldn’t take a hint. I had to phone. I wish to hell I didn’t love him. “Well, maybe some other time.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely some other time.”

  “Goodbye, Mark. And good luck with all those exams.”

  She replaced the phone firmly and sat for a moment thinking.

  Say goodbye to him, Nita. It was fun wrestling him when you were six and fun necking with him on sofas when you were sixteen but that was long ago. Now he’s got a friend with dark eyes and dark hair and a beautiful voice and a strange last name and that kind of lets you out.