The Doctor and the Diva (5 page)

He’d never seen her hair fully unleashed from its pompadour before; it rippled and streamed across the back of the chaise, the strands reaching her elbows. Contrary to what she’d told her brother, she didn’t appear fatigued after her performance. With her body outlined under silk, she looked ready to leap, quite impetuously, from her long chair.

A chambermaid had already turned down the fine linens of their great bamboo bed. The pillows lay smooth, the sheets folded back in parallel triangles, his and hers. The bed had been a wedding gift, built in Japan, they told Ravell.

“This isn’t the sort of house call I usually make,” Ravell said lightly. He thought of the great Doctor Sims. Back in the 1840s and 1850s, Doctor Sims had not hesitated to bring his newfangled instruments into a married couple’s home and stand at the ready, behind a wall, to assist conception—an arrangement that shocked any number of people.

“I suppose we ought to begin,” Peter said, his hands hidden in the pockets of his long robe.

The three of them looked at one another. Ravell brought his heels together and stood straighter. He reached into his black bag and gave Peter a special condom, telling him that he should use it with care so that not a drop of his precious seed would be lost. Ravell explained that he would reappear afterward to aim the syringe directly into the opening of the womb. The quick injection might prevent the sperm from tiring on their journey, and from going astray. The syringe might carry the seed more effectively—even faster into a wife’s depths—than nature could.

Erika and Peter knew such things by now, of course. “Have you any other advice for us?” Peter joked.

“Enjoy yourselves,” Ravell said. “And let me know when you’ve finished.” He took his black leather medical bag and found his own way through the adjoining room, which happened to be a bathroom. From there he wandered into what appeared to be Peter’s private study and latched the door.

To distract himself, Ravell picked up a stereoscope. He inserted photographs Peter kept of bazaars in Cairo, and of serpentine streets and arches that might be located, Ravell guessed, in Morocco. Held up to the light, viewed through the stereoscope, the scenes shifted in the brain and became three-dimensional, so that he felt himself step inside dusty North African towns where he had never been.

When he heard the quickening of her breaths in the other room, he put down the slides and the stereoscope and shut his eyes. The door was closed, but he heard them nonetheless. He could not focus on anything else. Not a sound came from Peter, only from her. Her gasps heated up in a mounting crescendo. Something thudded. (A foot or leg against the bamboo bed?)

Ravell walked the circuit of Peter’s study, trying to mask the echoes of lovemaking with his own footsteps. He leaned closer to inspect a dozen framed images on the walls—a series of butterflies Peter had painted (Morphos,
Caligos,
extraordinary specimens)—all exquisite miniatures, absolutely true to nature, the colors applied with a hair-thin brush. Normally such paintings would have ensnared Ravell’s complete attention.

But not tonight.

Peter’s instincts had been good. He had predicted that after a performance, his wife’s every pore would open in a kind of radiance. Privately Ravell had to agree: if there was ever a time to impregnate her, tonight was surely it. Was this the same woman who had complained to him—to the point of weeping—about her husband’s obsessive tracking of her periods, his habit of picking up undergarments she’d dropped to the floor and turning them inside out, checking for blood?

How relaxed she had seemed tonight when he, her doctor, had entered the bedroom. He’d worried that she might resent his presence, but clearly she wasn’t minding the intrusion at all. In the adjacent room, the bamboo wedding bed squeaked like an object vibrating on a factory chassis. Ravell envisioned it shuttling back and forth at a rate faster than the human eye could measure. His chest hurt from the effort of trying not to make a sound, as though something sacred were occurring behind that closed door.

She began to use her voice, issuing more than pants of pleasure. He heard hints of the music they’d all reveled in earlier, her back probably curved, her mouth open as notes leaped from her.

He couldn’t recall ever having been in such a position before. In hotels, yes. But not as a physician. No other couple had ever suggested that he embroil himself like this.

Why had he come? He didn’t really believe he could help Peter impregnate her, did he?

So why had he come—to torment himself? He rubbed his palm across his face as roughly as if he were washing it. It was unbearable to think, just now, of ruining their hopes. And the elation in Erika that he’d seen tonight—he wanted to keep sparks of that alive. Yet the fact was that Peter’s sterility could not be changed. Ravell shut his eyes at the thought.
I will deal with the consequences of that later,
he decided.

In the corner of the study Peter kept a huge birdcage. Either Peter or one of the servants had draped a cover over the bars to help the creature sleep. Ravell lifted the cloth to peek. A gorgeous parrot balanced on a swing, its feathers saturated with scarlet, yellows, and cobalt blue. Ravell removed the cover completely to have a better look.

The parrot’s clawed feet shifted on the bar. The cage trembled as the bird awoke.

“Kiss me!” it squawked. “Kiss me!”

Ravell threw the cover back over the bars and the bird went silent.

When Peter appeared, blinking hard against the light, he handed Ravell a small balloon filled with whitish liquid. “Did the parrot wake up?” he asked, incredulous. Ravell quickly turned away and reached into his medical bag, wiping his smile away with his hand.

Erika lay on the bed, fully draped in her silks. Her skin was moist, her cheeks and forehead flushed. The smell of sex filled the room, though she’d tried to disguise it by spraying herself with an atomizer that rested, half-f, on the night table. Her thighs were damp with the spray she’d flashed across them, preparing herself for the doctor. The fragrance was fruity with cherries.

Peter held a bright light for the doctor as Ravell prepared his instruments. He took the condom and siphoned its contents between Erika’s open legs. Meticulously he completed his work.

In his dressing robe and slippers, Peter escorted the doctor through the dark house. At the front door, Peter rose up on the balls of his feet, looking pleased. “Maybe tonight will be the turning point,” he said.

Ravell had taken care to save the condom that Peter had given him. In the small hours of the night, back in his office, he cut off the end of the rubber he’d tied so precisely, and extracted an unused portion of residue from the condom’s interior. He smeared a few drops across a slide, and peered at this second sample. He squinted, watching for anything to float into view, but saw nothing that swam or wiggled or flitted past. The second sample, too, was as lifeless as water siphoned from the Dead Sea.

“I
no longer wish to become a mother,” Erika said. In his medical office she sat dressed in a smart blue-gray suit with velvet lapels, nipped and tailored to display her slim waist. On her head she wore a matching blue toque, pinned at a fashionable angle against her hair.

She’s in despair again,
Ravell thought.
She cannot really mean this.

He listened. Her husband had gone away on business, she said, and when he returned, he would find his life forever changed. “I know I’m about to cause him great sadness,” she added.

He kept his eyes on her for so long that she finally glanced away from him—out of embarrassment, perhaps. She tilted her chin upward as if to scan the spines of the medical texts on his shelves. Clearly she had made some sort of decision: he sensed an underlying cheerfulness in her, and that worried him. Yet he still could not be certain that she was a person on the brink of extinguishing her own life. Less than a week previously, Ravell had entered her bedroom and smelled her as she lay in her nest of silks. He’d heard her every inhalation of pleasure. She was a woman of emotions and appetites so strong that she forgot—at least for the duration of lovemaking—why her husband had ever irritated her.

“What are you planning to do that might cause Peter such sadness?”

She would not answer. There was finality in every sharp turn of her head. If she walked out of his practice today, he knew she would not return. (
“I warned you,”
her sister-in-law might rail at him later.
“And you did nothing.”
) The prospect that he would disappoint Peter and Erika and all the von Kesslers—that these efforts might provoke a tragedy—sank through him.

Why had he lied to her brother in such a foolhardy way? Insinuating that he could cure what could not be changed? In the end they would believe the failure was his.

He had it in his power to save her life, if that was really what was at stake here. He could satisfy them all. It would be easy enough.

But I cannot do it,
he thought.
I would never do such a thing.

“So—” he said. “You are refusing to seek my help in trying to conceive? Is that what you mean?”

“I’ve come to say good-bye to you,” Erika said.

He felt alarm pulse in his wrists.
I am at my best in times of trouble,
he thought.
At moments of greatest emergency
. Others depended on his ability to rush into a dark room where a dire scene was unfolding and react as if by instinct. It was a gift he had: he could decide a thing quickly, in a flash of light from an opening door. In this way he had pulled forth babies from wombs that might soon have become graves; he had revived half-conscious mothers and staved off more deaths than he could remember.

A doctor is supposed to save lives,
he thought,
by any possible means. Erika has been tortured by this situation long enough,
he decided. His leg muscles flexed; he prepared to rise from his chair. Above all, he must keep her from walking through the door and disappearing.

“Erika,” he said, and leaned across the desk. “Are you depressed?”

She stared at him. “Of course,” she said. “About all this? What else am I supposed to feel?”

“Peter has left frozen samples of his semen,” he reminded her. “We’ve all agreed to work on this in his absence.”

She twisted her neck to one side, as if to relieve a crick.

“This is hardly fair to Peter,” Ravell argued. “I made a promise to him, and I feel a certain loyalty to the agreement, not only as a physician but as a friend. When Peter returns—if we haven’t had any good fortune by then—maybe we can discuss the situation and reconsider matters then.

“I’ve already thawed the sample for today,” Ravell added. “It wouldn’t be right to waste it.”

At first Erika appeared unmoved, and then a quake of exasperation went through her. “All right,” she said, sighing. “But it’s futile. And this is going to be the last time.”

A radiance carried him then, and his heart beat hard, knowing that he was about to take a terrible chance.
Whatever happens,
he decided,
I’ll cope with any unpleasantness that arises.
He ushered her to the examination room where she began, with a few resentful mutters, to undress. Her chest thrust forward as she arched her back and shrugged off her jacket with its velvet lapels.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Ravell said. He hurried to the closet-like chamber where he kept his microscope and locked the door. The dish containing Peter’s specimen waited on the counter. Ravell turned on the tap and carefully washed away every trace of Peter’s semen. Then Ravell shut off the light and loosened his suspenders, unfastened his trousers and underwear, and let everything drop to the floor. He took himself in his own hand. Madness! He would never have condoned such a thing before, but now he had no time for self-doubt. He had to hurry. When Peter stood in this space, he’d been given a book illustrated with Parisian prostitutes, but he, the doctor, had no such luxury. He kept the chamber dark, and remembered how her breasts had moved, loose, unleashed under peach silk.

The nurse rapped sharply on every closed door in the corridor, searching, calling his name in a bewildered tone. “Doctor Ravell?”

“Yes!” he managed to answer.

“We’re ready for you.”

He groped in the darkness and found a dish he knew would be lying on the counter, and replaced Peter’s seed with his own. He flicked on a light and buttoned his trousers. His tongue felt swollen in his mouth.

Dutifully the nurse remained in the exam room, a reassuring, motherly presence. Ravell took the dish and suctioned the pale substance into a long instrument. He lifted the drape covering Erika’s lower body.

The nurse stood by, a sentry in a corner. She was supposed to serve as a guard of sorts—but what, she and Erika might have wondered, did they need to guard against? Doctor Ravell was a reputable man; he had never done such a thing before, and surely never would. Part of the drape had slid from Erika’s thigh, exposing her there, but she did not bother to cover herself.