The Doctor and the Diva (49 page)

Since she’d gone away, he no longer liked to play on the stairs so much because the house seemed too empty and silent there. So Quentin went down to his father’s study. Though his father had been abroad for weeks now, the study still smelled of leather and cigar smoke. On Papa’s desk, a real butterfly lay preserved and embedded inside a magnifying glass.

When Quentin had been much younger—before he’d started school—he’d heard his parents argue many times. The terrible sounds had made him bolt upright in bed. He’d sobbed noisily until they heard him, and that made them stop because Mama had rushed into his room. She wore a hat and long cape and gloves, as if she were going out. Her dress made stiff, crinkly sounds as her weight fell lightly against the bed. She removed her gloves and stroked his face with her fingers, and he kept very still and pretended to be asleep. For a long time she remained with him in the darkness, as if his room were a place to hide. Finally she rustled toward the door and he saw her face by the hall light, her cheeks wet, her eyes squeezed tight.

The housekeeper, Mrs. McMannis, put her hands on her hips and let out a gusty breath when she found Quentin writing a note in the study. “I don’t know why you scribble so many letters,” she said. “A big strapping boy like you ought to be outside enjoying yourself on a bright afternoon.”

He knew a boy from school who lived nearby at the Lenox Hotel. They had planned to play ball together in the Boston Common, but that morning the other boy had felt poorly and could not go out. So Quentin kept on with the note:

When Quentin had told his cousin Susan that he wanted that framed picture, she told him that Uncle Gerald wouldn’t want to let him have the photograph because Papa would probably burn it.

“Why would he burn it?”

His twelve-year-old cousin had made her eyes large with surprise. “Your father is going to
divorce
her, don’t you even know?”

I promise nothing bad will happen to the pikture,
he wrote to his uncle.
Becuz I am going to keep it in a secret place in my room.

When he finished the letter to his mother’s brother, Quentin hunted through his father’s desk drawer for a stamp. At school they put stamps on your letters for you. He found ink bottles, rulers, a compass, and elastic bands in his father’s top drawer, but no stamps, so he opened the next one. A sheaf of pages was stored there, tied with a ribbon, with his handwriting across the papers. These were letters he’d composed at school.
My dear Mamma,
one began. Another said,
Dear Mamma, Did you get my letter I wrote about the skunk?
A third said,
Do you love Italy
?

Every letter he’d written to her was here. No one had mailed them.

 

 

 

 

I
n Cairo, after Peter had finished his business, he hired a guide to take him into the bazaar on Mousky Street. His dragoman Abdou spoke smooth English, but their passage through the bazaar was hardly easy. Twenty thousand people flowed through it. One had to squeeze past other bodies. First came silver merchants, followed by vendors selling amber, then candles, then ostrich feathers, then ivory, then slippers, then scents. Roses and spicy incense tinctured the air.

A caravan of camels moved down the thoroughfare and blocked the road, setting off skirmishes and bursts of complaints. Peter found himself backed up into an open-air shop. It was there that he noticed a young woman who was perhaps seventeen standing in the shade.

The thing that struck Peter first—apart from her delicately shaped face—was the fact that she was not veiled. He’d become used to seeing Egyptian women with nothing more than their eyes showing. The young woman did not appear to be Egyptian, though he could not be certain of her origin.

Peter pretended interest in the atomizers and glass vials arranged on the tables. A fat Arab with steely curls and coarse features rose from a cushion and came to assist. This proprietor, a man in his forties, beckoned the young woman and she came forward like an obedient daughter. She pushed up the sleeve of her loose cloak, dabbed a fragrant oil on the inside of her smooth forearm, and held it up for Peter to sniff.

“Do you like it?” Abdou translated. “Would you like to try the musk?”

The girl upended another vial, moistened her finger, and rubbed the oil against the crook of her opposite arm. Hands behind his back, Peter bent over politely, careful not to touch her, only to sniff. The girl had a silvery scar, the size of a minnow, on the underside of her wrist. He could have stationed himself there all day, if only the young woman had a thousand arms.

Peter handed his guide a number of piastres and let him do the bargaining. “Ask where the young lady comes from,” Peter told Abdou.

After an exchange in Arabic, he learned that the girl was from Tangier, though no explanation was given about how she got here. Like most Moorish women, her eyes and hair were black, yet her skin was as white as a European’s.

That night at his hotel, he could not stop thinking of the Moorish girl, how she’d held her slim arm only inches from his lips. He remembered the silver minnow scar on her wrist.

A strange whim took hold of him. What if he returned to Mousky Street, offered her Arab master a healthy sum, and asked if he might borrow the girl for a day?

The next morning a different guide accompanied him to Mousky Street. The Arab in charge of the girl seemed perfectly willing to pocket a considerable amount of money. What was he—her husband? Uncle? Godfather? Paramour? Peter did not want to think about it.

The dragoman led them to a side street where a coachman and a fine carriage waited. Then the guide departed.

First they stopped at a dress shop for English ladies, where a seamstress agreed to take charge of the Moorish girl. She was escorted to an upper-story room and bathed until the sweat and stale perfumes of Mousky Street evaporated with the steam. The seamstress saw to it that the young woman’s hair was done. Finally the girl was fitted for slippers and a white eyelet dress, and fixed up with a parasol.

Within an hour the girl no longer looked Middle Eastern, but instead like a thoroughbred European. She could have been mistaken for a native of Britain. The dark hair had been drawn off her neck and lifted, fixed by a curved pompadour comb.

Through the streets of Cairo their carriage rolled at brisk speed. Her high-necked gown was white—the color that his wife had usually worn. Like his wife, the young girl had ringlets. Like Erika’s, her throat was long.

As she sat across from him, her pompadour jiggled slightly from the motion of the carriage. What he wouldn’t give to see inside her silent head, to know what sort of life she came from, how she got to be here. Peter had once seen a snake charmer in Tangier, and wished he could ask about her knowledge of such things. A serpent had bitten the man’s tongue; Peter had seen for himself how the blood flowed. Then the snake charmer had stuffed his mouth with hay. Peter had inspected the man’s mouth, tongue, hands, and the straw itself, but saw no gimmick. The performer had pushed more hay into his mouth, and then exhaled fire-works of smoke and flame.

Peter wanted to tell her, “
I have been to your country. I know something of life there—
”

He took her to a fine restaurant known as the English Tea Room, where she ate like a perfect lady. Peter doubted that the other fashionable patrons of the dining room guessed that she was not of their class.

When the last cake was done, she licked whipped cream from the tines of her fork and looked up at him demurely. He gave her his own two finger cakes and she finished them, too. Her hunger touched him.

Outside, the air grew cooler, the afternoon waning. The sun was losing its bright power, and he realized with sadness that in an hour or two, the stalls in Mousky Street would be closing, and he would have to return the girl. But first he wanted to buy her flowers—pink, to match the satin ribbon at her waist. They walked several blocks without any sign of a florist or curbside flower vendor.

In his hotel room he had flowers—irises and delphiniums in a tall vase. Not pink, of course, but for lack of any others, he decided to go back for them. He intended to leave her seated in the hotel lobby while he went upstairs, but when they reached the Hotel d’Angleterre, he did not know how to communicate his plan to her clearly. He was afraid that if left alone, she would vanish before he returned. So he took her upstairs with him.

When they entered his room, the Moorish girl looked flustered. She said something quickly in Arabic, and shook her head.

“Don’t worry,” he said, to reassure her. “We’ve just come to fetch the flowers. I won’t harm you.” He opened the shutters and let sunlight rush into the dim room.

Two chairs faced the long window. Peter settled into one, and motioned for her to be seated in the other. He took the purplish-blue flowers from the vase, shook water from them, and dried each long stem with a towel. Wrapping the flowers in a silk scarf, he placed them in her lap.

The window before them overlooked a bridge that crossed the Nile. On that bridge every motley mode of transportation could be seen: camels, wagons, fellahin on foot, fashionable French motorcars. Sunlight burned red glints into her hair. She looked out the window at a minaret.

“Let me show you a picture of my son,” Peter said. He went to his steamer trunk and fished out a silver frame.

He wished he could tell her how Quentin’s small face would appear at the window, two palms pressed against the glass, waiting for his father’s return. As Peter entered the house, Quentin stood at the top of the staircase. The child hyperventilated and ran toward him in such excitement, Peter was afraid that the little boy might tumble down the steps.

To no other person
, Peter realized at such moments,
does my existence matter so much
.

The girl took the silver frame in her hands and smiled in tender recognition. She pointed to Quentin’s mouth, and then touched Peter’s mouth with her fingertips—to show a similarity. Surprised and confused by this, Peter felt the muscles in his shoulders tense; he was not certain how he ought to respond.

He opened the back of the silver frame and removed another photograph stored behind the one of Quentin—an engagement portrait of Erika. The Moorish girl took the photograph of his wife and walked over to the room’s full-length mirror. The young woman touched her pompadour with one hand, comparing her image to the American lady’s, like a little girl consulting a fashion magazine.

“My wife left me,” Peter said bluntly. He pointed to Erika’s face and kept shaking his head. “My wife did not love me.” His eyes watered as he said it. The room had grown so hot that Peter loosened his tie, and ran his hand inside his stiff collar.