The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  “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.

  When Erika
left the window and returned to bed, she realized that her throat and mouth were parched. She had no water by her bedside to sip. She had meant to ask Munga to leave a glass of water next to the bed every night, because she could not sleep when she felt thirsty.

  From the bedside table she took a lamp and wandered into the corridor. Her feet were bare against the floorboards, but no matter how silently she tried to move, the old wood creaked underfoot. Her fingertips touched the dark wall with uncertainty as she made her way into the kitchen, closed up now, servants gone, kettles and skillets put away. A pitcher stood on a table. She filled a tin cup and tossed her head back, drinking, gulping, wetting her fingers with the glory of the water, wiping the spillage from her silk dressing gown. The tin cup made the water taste of metal.

  A light moved closer and wavered against the doorway, brightening. Someone was coming. Ravell appeared, still fully dressed in the white clothes he’d worn earlier in the evening, when they’d strolled along the beach. He was still harnessed into his suspenders.

  “Erika?” he asked. “Are you not feeling well?”

  “I was thirsty,” she said. “I came for a glass of water to keep by the bedside.”

  “Rainwater,” he said. “That’s what we have to drink here.”

  He found a proper carafe and filled it, and gave her a clean glass. When he turned to leave, she stunned herself with what she did next. She lifted an arm and said, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done,” and—as simply and easily as if he were Peter—she flew against him and embraced him just as she had that day in the music room.

  How natural it seemed to hug the doctor. . . . She pushed her nose against his cheek and gave his sideburn a kiss and sniffed musk on his damp and faintly perspiring face. His fingers—fleshier than Peter’s, and more fatherly—were suddenly entwined in her own. This man had endured the most awful sorrows with her, and they had hugged with wild sadness before.

  In the doorway Ravell winced. He pulled back, and in that one grimace she saw a man struggling with himself. Violently he jerked away and hurried off.

  Returning to her room, Erika closed the door. She set the lamp and the glass of water down on the night table. Revolted and confused by what she had done, she clutched her head.

  Peter slept on, oblivious.

  When Ravell took the two of them for a tour of the plantation the next morning, his manner was brisk and businesslike. He addressed his comments more to her husband than to her.

  Ravell showed them the drying sheds along the beach where coconuts were cut open and their kernels dried in the sun. This was called copra, he explained, and the oil pressed from it was shipped to Denmark and sold as a replacement for butter.

  Several times she asked for the buggy to stop so that they could step down. There were so many things she wanted to see. Coolie men wielding machetes climbed to the feathery tops of coconut palms. She watched in fascination as a man hooked a vine hoop around his waist and a tree. He proceeded to walk straight up the trunk, moving the hoop upward as he climbed. With a swipe of his machete, nuts rained down.

  In the forest coolie men were cutting trees, clearing new lands for cultivation. Monkeys pestered them, and they had to pause in their work and throw stones to scare the monkeys away. In the buggy Erika’s shoulder jostled against her husband’s, and they laughed at the sight.

  Giant balata trees grew in the forest, their dimensions unbelievably huge. Ravell said that balata wood never decayed. Their felled trunks would lie in the jungle for centuries, never rotting. The coolies, he said, believed it easier to remove a balata tree if they crept out with their saws and took it down by the light of a full moon.

  The carriage drove on. Toward the southern areas of the plantation, Ravell showed them the new drainage system and an expanse of newly planted trees. When the buggy could venture no farther, the three of them hopped down and walked. Normally Ravell arose at four in the morning to supervise the work. He seemed quite proud of the improvements.

  “If you come back in three years,” he said, “these trees will be bearing coconuts by then.”

  Together she and Ravell walked ahead to view the saplings while Peter lagged behind, on the lookout for birds and butterflies.

  “It’s a wonder Mr. Hartley does not live here himself,” Erika remarked. “He seems to regard the Cocal as the most beautiful land he owns.”

  “He would live here, I expect,” Ravell said, “except for the distance from town and the Club, where he conducts his business affairs. Besides, his wife very much enjoys society. I imagine Mrs. Hartley would find herself isolated here.”

  “And you don’t?” Erika asked.

  “No,” he said. “The solitude pleases me.”

  The sky changed from a pearly gray to a charcoal hue. When Erika raised her face, wet drops hit her cheekbones. The rain quickened and Ravell’s wire-rimmed spectacles became splattered with water. As they hurried back to the carriage, Erika picked up her skirts. By the time they reached the buggy, Ravell’s glasses were steamed and her white shirtwaist was streaked with rain, her shoulders quite wet.

  “The marvel to me,” Ravell said, “is that the delicate orchids and plants of the forest aren’t crushed by the violent downpours here.”

  She drew her shoes farther under the seat, away from the brow of the carriage roof, which was dripping. Ravell rubbed at his oval spectacles with a handkerchief, then tucked the glasses inside his shirt pocket. From the sides of his dark eyes he looked at her.

  Crackling sounds came from behind the buggy. “Is that Peter?” she asked. “Where has he taken refuge, I wonder—under a tree?”

  Ravell made no pretense of being concerned about her husband. He continued to study her. “Peter tells me that you’ve stopped singing.”

  “I’ve taken time off from performing so we could come here. I haven’t stopped singing.”

  He had a face out of the Old Testament, she thought, and wondered if he knew how foreign and mysterious his eyes seemed. Most likely he did, and perhaps that was why he did not pull his spectacles from his pocket. He seldom wore them in her presence.

  “Do you regret—” he began. “Do you ever wonder what might have happened if you had gone—”

  He was referring to Italy and her dashed plans, she was nearly certain, but he did not know how to phrase it. If he hadn’t entered their lives with his instruments, with his face like a holy man’s, she’d be in a room overlooking the Arno by now. She’d be standing on a balcony, and arias would flow from her.

  “I continue to train and sing,” she answered. “Back in Boston, with my piano in the music room.”

  “What is the point of having such a voice,” he asked, “if you stay limited to one city . . . if that keeps your gift from—?”

  “I’ll live in Italy someday,” she said. “After I’ve had another baby. After I’ve conquered this.”

  A pause. He picked up a glove that had fallen. “I hope I’ll have the pleasure of hearing you sing,” he said. “You can’t imagine how lonesome I get for a fine voice sometimes, living here.”

  A muffled yell came from the woods, whoops of greeting as the cries moved closer. The buggy bent to one side as the weight of a foot pressed down upon it. Peter climbed into the turnout, his clothes sodden, thin ribbons of hair wet against his forehead and scalp.

  “One of the coolies was showing me a cabbage palm they just felled,” Peter explained, hard out of breath. “The top had decayed and they found a macaw’s nest in the trunk with a bunch of young ones about to fly. They offered me one.”

  “And you didn’t take it?” Ravell hiked up an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t dare, old friend. That bird could die during our winter voyage back to New England.” In the buggy Peter looked as if he were perspiring raindrops.

  On the way back, the rain lifted, and they stopped at the plantation’s little village because Erika was curious to see how the coolie workers lived. Hanging hibiscus baskets festooned the outside of the huts. Ra
vell ducked his head and led them inside a cottage where two young sisters lived with their elderly grandmother. Erika recognized the young women as servants she’d seen in Ravell’s kitchen.

  The grandmother had black hair with a streak of bright white running up the center of her head, like a rare pelt. The older woman slapped disks of white dough between her hands and fried the circles of bread for Ravell and his guests. Na’an, she called the bread, and when a piece grew puffy, she fished it from the pan and offered them delicious bites.

  The hut was a humble place with a dirt floor, but it was extremely tidy. It pleased Erika to linger inside its walls, the air thick with spices she had never smelled before. When Ravell eased toward the door, nodding his thanks at the coolie women, she felt reluctant to leave. She would have preferred to remain there, listening to the clink of the women’s bracelets on their delicate wrists.

  When Ravell took Peter and Erika to another building that served as the plantation’s hospital, she hesitated at the doorway, afraid to enter. “Isn’t there a risk of contagion?” she asked.

  “You have more to fear from mosquitoes than from these men,” Ravell answered.

  Inside two feverish men lay on cots. When Ravell appeared, relief washed over their faces. He set a cool palm on one man’s forehead; he took each man’s pulse. For one he prescribed quinine; for the other, Epsom salts. The wormlike lines of worry in the coolie men’s foreheads eased as he ministered to them.

  As they exited the village infirmary, an elderly woman approached. She took both of Ravell’s hands and placed them on top of her head. “Sahib,” she said, calling him her master and bowing low.

  The aged woman’s daughter had nearly been lost in childbirth, Ravell explained after they’d walked away. “For some reason, she credits me with saving her,” he said, and shrugged, his hands joined behind his back.

  “Well, old friend,” Peter remarked, “I see that you’re held in rather high esteem around here.”