Tall glasses of the bar’s trademark cocktail appeared: white peach juice mixed with Prosecco, so light and aromatic, it seemed impossible it was alcoholic.
Maria sat on a banquette next to Tina Onassis, a pretty woman with bleached blond hair and dark eyebrows who on closer scrutiny seemed scarcely out of her teens; there was clearly a substantial age gap in their marriage, as in hers.
“I’m honored you could join us,” she said to Maria. “I’m one of your biggest fans. Did Aristo tell you? I first heard you singing Aida at La Scala back in 1950, and since then I’ve flown to Milan for all your premières.”
“Really?” Maria was touched. “That’s very flattering. Do you live in Athens?”
“We have homes all over the place: Athens, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Montevideo . . .” She gave a quick eye roll, mocking the length of the list. “But Aristo is usually to be found on the Christina. He gets crotchety if he has to spend too long on dry land.”
Battista was telling Aristotle about the funds he was trying to raise to make a film of Maria singing Medea. She hoped their host didn’t feel he was being pressured to contribute.
“How long have you two been married?” she asked Tina, looking from one to the other.
“Forever!” Tina cried. “Eleven years. I was just seventeen at our wedding and Ari was forty, so I’m sure I seemed terribly childish. But then we had children and they make you grow up fast.”
She pulled one of those faces that Maria had often noticed mothers make: it was meant to be long-suffering but was really a look of pride. She would rather have joined Aristotle and Battista’s conversation about the film business but knew Tina was waiting for her to ask about the children, so she did.
“What ages are they now?”
Tina began to describe them, and Maria’s attention wandered. Everyone assumed that she hadn’t wanted children because of her devotion to her career, but it wasn’t true. She yearned for a baby, ached for one, and it simply hadn’t happened. A specialist had told her she had a malformation of the womb that would make it difficult, but not impossible, for her to get pregnant. She was thirty-three years old and all too aware that time was running out.
She blinked, realizing Tina had asked her a question.
“How did you and Battista meet?” she repeated.
Maria smiled. “He saved me from a life typing businessmen’s letters and got me where I am today.” As she told her story, Aristotle and Battista paused to listen.
IT HAD BEEN hard for Maria to get her break in opera, because her voice was too strong, too mature, for the chorus, and it had an unusual timbre. She needed directors who were prepared to risk giving her lead roles, but most were risk averse—unsurprisingly, given the astronomic cost of staging opera. She had trained in Athens, where she spent the war years living with her mother and sister, then moved to New York, where her father’s pharmacy business was based. After more than a year of disheartening auditions, she at last won a lead role, singing La Gioconda in Verona, and sailed to Italy alone at the age of twenty-three.
“It was a difficult time,” she told the Onassises. “There was resentment toward this young interloper who didn’t even speak fluent Italian yet had somehow landed the lead. The cast pushed past me backstage without saying buon giorno, and I went home alone most nights.”
She didn’t add that she was a whale of a girl in those days, over two hundred pounds of blotchy, dimpled flesh, with a nose that was too big for her face, and thick, black-rimmed glasses, without which she was near blind. Her appearance made her shy and awkward, another reason it was hard to make friends.
“I had a guardian angel, though.” She turned to Battista with a smile. “I met this man at a dinner party on my first evening in Verona and he took me under his wing. He was an opera aficionado and we bonded over our shared love of music.”
Battista took up the story: “When Maria’s contract at Verona ended, her father wanted her to return to New York and work as a secretary. To me, that would have been a criminal waste of talent. I offered to subsidize her for another six months while I introduced her to the directors I knew and tried to get her career off the ground.”
“What a clever investment!” Aristotle exclaimed. “You gained a beautiful wife and the world gained a magnificent talent.”
Battista grinned. “We had luck on our side. One evening, when we were strolling after dinner, we bumped into my friend Nino Catozzo, the director at La Fenice. A soprano had let him down at the eleventh hour. His production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had been advertised, tickets sold, and suddenly he had no Isolde—so I suggested Maria for the role.”
She interrupted. “You have no idea how terrifying it was. Battista pretended I already knew the part, which is one of the most difficult in opera. I had to audition a week later, sight-reading for Tullio Serafin, the great guru who had conducted me in La Gioconda. Fortunately he thought I was capable of the role and arranged two months of intensive coaching to get me ready.”
She would never forget the blind panic of that time: the technical difficulties of the part of Isolde, the wild, passionate Irish princess; the immense pressure of stepping out onto the glittering stage where Rossini’s and Bellini’s works had premièred; the grandeur of La Fenice, with its rows of golden boxes, the ceiling mural of flying Graces, the ornate putti, the plush red-velvet seats. All of it combined to make her feel unworthy.
On opening night Tullio had given her a gift of a Madonna icon—a pretty one in jewel tones with a gilt frame. She remembered trembling as she prayed to the compassionate face of the Holy Mother that she would not let everyone down.
The prayer must have worked, because the production was an astounding success. She couldn’t see beyond the proscenium arch without her glasses but could hear that many were getting to their feet, cheering and whistling as well as clapping, and she was called back to the stage a dozen times before she could finally retreat to her dressing room. It felt like a dream.
“You should have seen the reviews.” Battista beamed. “I’ve never read anything like it. The critics were unanimous that a new star had appeared in the firmament. After that, every director in Italy wanted to work with her, and Tullio became her cheerleader.”
They had told this story before, and she smiled at him as she delivered the punch line. “Battista waited till the third night after the opening, when he was sure his investment had paid off, before asking me to marry him.”
They all laughed. In fact, Maria had been stunned by his proposal. She had so little confidence in those years that she couldn’t believe anyone would want her for anything other than her voice. How could he think of making love to a woman so large that no chairs were big enough for her? A woman with thighs the circumference of the average woman’s waist? She had been reluctant to remove her tent of a nightgown on their wedding night, but Battista seduced her slowly, awakening sensations she adored. Right from the start, she loved sex, couldn’t get enough of it. She loved him too; he was the first person ever to make her feel cherished.
Waiters interrupted them with plates of pink carpaccio, the house specialty that Aristotle insisted they try. Maria was glad he had ordered for them. She couldn’t have read the menu without her glasses, and she was too vain to wear them in public. The thinly sliced raw beef was succulent, tender, sublime. When that was gone, he ordered prawns, freshly caught in the Lagoon that morning and grilled with garlic butter. All afternoon, they drank frothy Bellinis and nibbled delicacies, while getting acquainted. Maria felt uncharacteristically light-headed, and more relaxed than she had in many a month.