The Doctor and the Diva (24 page)

“Yes,” he replied. “I’ve lived on several.” He crossed his legs and turned sideways in his chair. “And what about you? Have you always lived in Boston?”

“Always,” she responded, telling him briefly of her childhood and her mother’s long illness.

“Did your mother ever recover?”

“No,” Erika said. “When I was seven, my mother died.”

The look in Ravell’s eyes deepened. He appeared on the verge of asking something else when Peter interrupted.

“Would you care to stroll down to the beach?” her husband proposed suddenly. “Mr. Hartley says the nights here are very beautiful.”

Not far from the shoreline, the men wandered slightly ahead of Erika. The night was so warm that both men had removed their jackets, and they strolled with shirtsleeves rolled to midarm. Their suspenders resembled dark harnesses against their white shirts.

Following the water’s line for a distance, the three of them listened to the long-backed breakers. The black sky looked sharper here, awash with stars. Across the sand, crabs were moving in exodus from the lagoon down to the ocean. “They only travel at the new moon,” Ravell pointed out. “In October and November—around this time of year—their migrations are heaviest. On some nights it’s impossible to ride or step across this beach without crushing them.”

This intrigued Peter, although when he crept toward crabs, they ducked into holes. Soon he cried out with a discovery: by rolling palm seeds between his hands, he managed to lure the crabs to poke out of their holes for a curious peek.

“My husband is as irrepressible as a boy,” Erika remarked to Ravell as Peter wandered farther away, playing hide-and-seek with the crustaceans.

She turned to face the sea. It amazed her how the ocean’s waves always stayed in motion, always alive, spilling against the shore and retracting, even when no one stood there to observe the show. It would go on, undiminished, even while they slept.

“Did the ship that brought your furniture anchor here?” Erika asked.

“No,” Ravell said. “There are quicksands here. It wouldn’t be safe. The last time a schooner stopped here, its bow soon tipped into the water. The anchor disappeared until finally they had to sever the cable.”

He took a Havana from his pocket and asked if she minded if he lit it. She shook her head. The fine cigar fragrance mixed with sea air and entered her senses in a pleasant way. He seemed more relaxed in her presence now.

“Did your father ever remarry?” Ravell asked.

“No,” she said.

“You grew up essentially motherless, then?”

“Not entirely. There was an older woman—my voice teacher Magdalena—with whom I was very close. In fact, I still depend on her.”

Receding waves made sizzling sounds and left residual foam in the sand. Crouching low, Erika touched the froth with two fingertips, and as she extended her hand she recalled her mother’s long fingers.

Soon Peter walked briskly toward them, his arms outstretched in the darkness, the sleeves of his white shirt filling with wind. “I could live here,” he cried out to Ravell. “I could join you here, old friend!”

He looked ready to embrace the night sky, the beach with its army of crabs. Erika knew her husband meant those words. Surrounded by this wild place, Peter could be quite happy.

Ravell laughed and turned to Erika. “What about you?” he asked. “You’d miss the city, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t live without an opera house nearby,” she said.

“Yes,” Peter said. “That’s the thing. Erika could never stay here very long.” With his hands plunged into the pockets of his loose white trousers, he did not seem displeased by her remark. He turned and started back toward the house, with Erika and Ravell following.

From the rear she watched her husband. As always, he strode with vigor, and he walked like a man who had a plan.

When they returned to the bungalow, Ravell clearly hoped to prolong the evening. He invited them into the parlor for a drink.

“It’s late,” Erika observed. “We should let you get some sleep.”

“It’s early yet,” he said. “Besides, you haven’t sung for me.”

“Tomorrow I’ll sing,” she said. “I’m a bit tired now.”

He unscrewed the glass knob from a decanter and poured Cognac for them. “Tonight when you go to bed, you must leave a light burning. We have vampires here.”

“You actually have bats?” Peter put aside a book he’d been browsing.

“I’m afraid so. Last summer a man named Jotham was a guest here, and he neglected to leave a light burning. Needless to say, when he awoke, he found himself and the sheets all splattered with blood. During the night, a vampire bat had gotten hold of one of his toes. The bedroom looked like a murder scene.”

“How wide is the wingspan?” Peter wanted to know.

“Some have a span nearly a yard wide.”

“I imagine that would keep the victim rather quiet,” Peter said, and laughed.

The Cognac swirled through her, and after a few quick sips, Erika found herself giddy. She laughed and spoke in rushes—louder than usual, knowing that before they all closed their eyes and ended the day, Peter would make love to her, and Ravell would slip into the room bearing his medical bag and his syringe. (“No point in wasting a single day,” Peter had warned her.)

Ravell settled into an overstuffed chair that was upholstered in red horsehair, while she and Peter took the couch. At one point she crossed the room to admire a Congolese wall mask. When she turned, she caught Ravell taking a furtive glance at her midriff.

Peter noticed the piano. Impulsively he leaped up, flipped open the lid, and struck one chord, followed by another. The sounds were so horrid that Erika cringed and slapped her hands over her ears.

“Stop!” Ravell begged, and laughed.

“Pianos in the tropics always sound execrable,” Peter declared. “I was wondering how you could manage to keep it in tune.”

“I tried tuning it myself,” Ravell said, “but it’s hopeless. It’s the moisture, you know, which swells the wood.” Opera scores lay in piles on top of the piano:
Rigoletto, La sonnambula, La traviata, Don Giovanni.

Before midnight Ravell brought a lamp and guided them through the shadowy corridor to their room. He left the light burning beside their bed and departed.

“It’s hard to believe that we’re here at last,” Peter said. He removed a shoe and threw it noisily onto the floor.

Erika pulled the thin drapes shut and changed into a lilac dressing gown. As she lay on the bed, she worried that it might be strange to make love in a room where lamplight bleached the walls, where she half-expected bats to swoop down upon her from the four corners of the ceiling. Outside the house, the forest breathed its eerie noises. Wind riffled the palm leaves and red howler monkeys roared, sounding strangely like lions.

“Rather terrifying,” Peter said, “if you didn’t know they’re just monkeys.”

After the howls died away in the distance, she murmured, “I wonder how Ravell stands it here. He must live the existence of a monk.”

Peter said, “Oh, there are women enough here to suit Ravell’s purposes.”

“What do you mean by that?” Erika asked, fascinated.

With his head nestled on the pillow, Peter shut his eyes and smiled with closed lips. His hand sought her knee, then her breasts.

While they pleasured themselves, Ravell waited elsewhere in the house. Green parrots lived in the forest at the back of the lagoon, and Erika heard their sounds. She kicked off the sheets and twisted in silence on the mattress and let the birds of the night cry out for her.

When they were done, Peter left the bed and called Ravell into the room. She had wondered if she would be nervous, or shudder, or weep when the doctor touched her again, but it all seemed natural.

“My hands may feel a little cold,” he warned, and touched her thigh.

His hands felt as mild as the night, not cold at all. She glanced at his features—impassive—as he aimed the syringe. Peter held the lamp for him, and the men’s faces glowed with light before they retreated into shadows.

After the doctor left the room, she lay with pillows stacked under her knees. For a long time she remained on her back and did not stir while Peter slept beside her, breathing rhythmically. The air in the room smelled the same as the garden, a mingling of jasmine and honeyed scents of blossoms she could not name. Why did flowers seem to release their fragrances more vividly at night? At night, in one’s bed, the world became slower, and one noticed things more. Her nostrils drew in the essences of the garden, and as she inhaled more deeply, the scents felt almost piercing.

Erika found herself wondering why Ravell had not married. He must be in his early thirties. In a remote environment like this, how likely was it that he would meet women of his own class? With a pang she supposed that Mrs. Hartley or her friends would try to find a wife for him.

She thought of her piano far away in Boston, the keys left silent in her absence while snow fell like feathers past a nearby window. Already she missed her music. Given the chance, she’d still sacrifice everything—her life with Peter—to stand on worldly stages and sing as radiantly as she could. But first, she had something else to finish. For now, she was not unlike the animals hidden in the forest that surrounded Ravell’s bungalow. Only by luring a man into her body, only by wrestling and grappling, could her need be relieved.

After the required half hour had passed, she left the bed. She took a chance that no bats would fill the room for a moment or two while she dimmed the lamp and went to the window, drawing the white curtain aside. On the opposite side of the courtyard, Ravell’s bedroom was illuminated. Behind the sheer drapery in his room, she saw his silhouette. She watched him pace and move.

She could have opened the French doors and passed through the garden and slipped into his arms within seconds. But now that a ship had carried her across the equator and finally brought her this close to him, Ravell still seemed out of reach. He moved away from the window and she saw only the whiteness of draperies. She could no longer see him.

In his room Ravell removed his fob watch and set it on a table. He sat on his bed, elbows on his knees, and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. They had voyaged to another hemisphere to see him, and he wanted to please them. “These are the only weeks we have,” Peter had taken him aside to say, with a beseeching look one man rarely shows another, so Ravell agreed to do whatever he could. But he had promised himself not to delude them this time, not to spite God or interfere with the natural course of things. He would use only Peter’s semen.

The procedures would be worthless, of course. He could not stop their sorrow, the sadness he had only opened wider and made wilder. He could not bear to demolish Peter’s hopes—and why shouldn’t this husband be optimistic? Peter believed in the possibility of another child the way all human beings believed in the sun or the moon (the man had seen the thing with his own eyes!—hadn’t he already succeeded in fathering an infant?). After yet another fertility specialist in New England had failed to help—why wouldn’t they have crossed the equator to find him?

Why shouldn’t Peter believe him brilliant?

Now, more than ever, Ravell could not bear to speak the truth to Peter—if you place your semen under a microscope, you will see there is nothing; no more hope for you to impregnate your wife than if I load a syringe and fill her womb with pure air.