The Doctor and the Diva (3 page)

“You can tell Peter yourself,” Erika told Ravell. Bitterness sharpened her features. “I’m tired of seeing the disappointment in his face.”

She was his last appointment of the day. Ravell asked her to come into his office after she’d finished getting dressed. It always took an excruciatingly long while for a patient to rearrange her undergarments and rows of buttons, he’d found, before she was ready to exit with grace.

In the intervening minutes he slipped into the washroom, lathered his hands, and dried them. The small bathroom felt as private as a prayer cell. He tugged hard at the hot and cold water taps to shut off large drops that fell into the porcelain sink. As he combed his dark moustache with his fingers, he wondered what he would to say to her.

In the mirror he stared at himself—a slender man, shorter than most others he passed in the street. People said that if he weren’t wearing a fine suit, he might be mistaken for an Arab sheik or a Tartar. His eyes dominated his face—dark eyes like his father’s, thoughtful, deep-set. “It’s those eyes,” a lady had once said, “that make people want to tell you things.”

Each woman, each patient, was her own mystery. He tried to listen until he saw distress ease or tears dry on a woman’s face. Much depended on their trust in him. Some told him how they shuddered under the weight of their husbands’ bodies, shunning and avoiding conjugal duties whenever they could.

When a rare husband or two had pleaded for his advice, Ravell had shown them diagrams and spoken with candor about the importance of a woman’s enjoyment. At times he’d needed to be stern with wives, asking:
How do you expect to ever have a child if your husband finds that you keep locking the door to your room?

He heard a hallway door open. When he returned to his office, Erika was already there, walking around. From his desk, she picked up the glass cube with the big blue Morpho butterfly trapped inside, and she held it up to the light before setting it back down. Then she lifted the magnifying glass. Centering it above her upturned palm, she peered at the lines.

“Are you trying to read your palm?” he asked.

Erika gave a rough shake of her head and put the magnifying glass down, as if she did not believe in palmistry. The walls of his office could not contain her restlessness. She gave a noisy sigh.

When Ravell sat down behind his desk, she took the chair opposite him. “May I ask you something personal?” he said. “A woman’s attitude is important. . . . Do you want to become a mother, or is this Peter’s—?”

Closing her eyes for a moment, she then opened them and spoke with sharp resolve. “I used to want a child more than anything,” she said, “but I’ve learned not to want a thing I can’t have.”

She looked sweet and solemn as she said this. Ravell watched her closely. If he did not interrupt and allowed a patient to continue talking, he’d found that she might reveal things she hid from a close friend or sister-in-law. Erika, however, said nothing else.

He leaned toward her, his forearms resting on his desk. “Erika, other people are worried about your state of mind.”

She stared at him, then glanced at the closed door. Obviously there was something she was wary of admitting. “You must have a great many patients waiting,” she said.

He assured her that this was his last appointment of the day—that he had plenty of time just now to counsel her—but she got up and began fastening her long purple cape.

To delay her, Ravell stepped between her and the doorway. “Don’t do anything drastic—will you promise me that?” he said.

She was as tall as he was; her blue-gray eyes looked straight into his, her proud neck growing longer. “My life is my own,” she said. “I can do what I like with it.”

Had she already rehearsed a ghastly act in her mind? In the darkness of the moment he offered blind assurances. “This will all turn out happily, Erika. I’m certain of it.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. When she reached for the doorknob, he moved aside. Just before she turned away, he saw the sharp light of tears in her eyes. Drawing her wool cape tighter, she headed into the corridor, and when the front door opened, cold air blew into Ravell’s face, lifting the hair off his collar. Long after she had gone out into the winter day, his mind held on to her. Long after the strand of bells jingled and the door banged shut, he saw her dark purple cape make a sweeping turn just above her heels.

Would she keep her next appointment? He worried that something awful would happen before then.

By the time his nurse filed some papers and left for the day, the sky had gone dark outside. Ravell extinguished the lights in his office, went down the corridor, and shut himself into a closet-like room. At medical school—at Harvard—he was hardly the most brilliant, but he had asked bolder questions than most. Since then, he had braved more and taken more risks; he had often gotten results where others had missed.

Now he was about to do something unforgivable. Ravell removed a glass dish from a drawer, set it on the counter, and removed the lid. Less than two hours before, Peter Myrick had departed from this room, leaving a sample of his semen; the specimen was still fresh. Ravell had used only a portion of it; on a hunch, he had saved the rest. Now he adjusted knobs on the microscope.

With nervous hands he took a pipette, and let a drop of fluid splash onto the slide. As he slipped the specimen under the lens, he felt moisture break over his face. He thought of Leeuwenhoek, a man from Holland who had first seen sperm through a microscope in the year 1677. A daring act of discovery then. Before gazing into the eyepiece, Ravell bent his head and held his breath, as Leeuwenhoek must have done.

At first nothing darted past his eye, only a blizzard of grayish-whiteness. He pulled away, changed the magnification, adjusted the focus, and peered again. The results made him feel snow-blind. He saw nothing there, no sperm at all.

“Y
our neck smells marvelous,” Ravell said, laughing. His nose nudged the soft place under her earlobe.

Mrs. George Appleton was over forty—a decade older than he. On his bedside table she liked to keep a ring of candles burning while they made love. Wax ran from the tapers. His bedsheets felt moist after their exertions, the air humid with scents from her body and his.

Her hair was half-gray, but her speaking voice was low and deep, with theatre in it. Her laugh had the resonance of an actress’s. Her own husband had not touched her in four years.

“I need to leave now,” she said. She was a tall woman. When she got up from the bed, in search of the clothing she’d cast across a chair, he saw the large-shouldered, great-breasted silhouette of her, the long lean stilts of her legs, the absence of any tapering at her waist. Her backside fell flat like a cliff, like a man’s. (“Where’s my derriere?” she liked to jest, grabbing herself there.)

Ravell knew he was not the first man she had sought out, apart from her husband. He loved her hunger. Since he lived on the floors above his practice, he was careful to draw the shades before she came, and he shut every window. She was noisy while being caressed, and in her cries he heard more animals than he could name. When he told her this, she squatted on all fours and dived at his body, snuffling and rooting. That made him laugh. He had to shush her sometimes, because even three stories up, she might be heard from the street.

Prior to Amanda Appleton, he’d never had an affair with a patient. The idea had appalled him. But from the day she first flung herself across his bed, he’d felt relieved and grateful for all she’d taught him. He’d never had a wife, and when it came to advising married couples, he’d felt secretly embarrassed by the limits of his own experience. He used to worry that he did not know all he felt he should.

She sat at the bed’s edge and squeezed Ravell’s knee. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look troubled.”

He frowned at the ring of candlelight that wavered on the ceiling. “I’ve been thinking about a patient. An infertility case.” Ravell did not describe to her how he had stolen a bit of Peter Myrick’s semen and how, with nervous hands, he had slipped the sample under a microscope. He only said, “It turns out that the husband is azoospermic.”

“What’s that?”

“That means he has absolutely no hope of fathering a child. He has no sperm in his semen, none whatsoever.” Ravell sat up and punched a pillow lightly between his fists. “I don’t know how to tell them.”

“I have no desire to adopt,” Peter Myrick said. “It’s not the same, although I admire people who do it.”

Ravell and Peter had arranged to lunch at the Algonquin Club. They agreed to meet there as late in the day as possible, after most of the tables had been cleared, to ensure more privacy. They sat in a far corner and kept their voices down. Even their waiter sensed that he ought to stand at a distance, a crisp white towel hung over his bent arm.

Ravell wished he could be frank, but how could he simply blurt out what he’d learned? Peter had never given permission for his manhood to be inspected and counted under a microscope. As a physician, Ravell knew he had committed an invasion of an appalling kind: what husband would trust him in the future if it became known that he had violated a patient’s privacy?

“Perhaps it’s time we resorted to the dreaded semen analysis,” Ravell said briskly.

“What good would it do?” Peter said. “Would it mean that we’d do anything differently?”

“It might help you to stop blaming your wife.”

“I’m not finding fault with anybody.”

“Do you ever worry,” Ravell said, “that your wife may be feeling terribly despondent after all this? There are women who lose their will to live—”

“Not Erika,” Peter said. “She has great zest for life. She’s indomitable.”

Was Peter blinded by his own optimism, by his own gusto? Ravell wondered. Did the man know his own wife at all? Ravell gulped from a glass of ice water, then fingered the tines of his fork. Their white plates shone, clean and ready. The rack of lamb they’d ordered seemed a long time in arriving.

“At this stage,” Peter said, “I know some might suggest mixing my seed with another man’s. But I won’t have it. If I were interested in adopting another man’s child, we’d have done that years ago. Besides,” he reasoned, “why fool ourselves? If I’ve fathered a child, I want to know it’s mine. I never want to wonder if it’s somebody else’s.”

Their lunch arrived. The waiter replaced the cold white plates before them with hot plates laden with lamb that sizzled and steamed and ran with rich juices. Peter spooned dollops of mint jelly onto each bite with the delight of a boy who relished huge helpings of sweets. “Erika is giving a private recital at our home for my birthday,” Peter said. “And she has promised to sing my favorite arias. We’d like to invite you.”

Ravell longed to hear her sing again. Peter’s enthusiasm welled up as he described the fine musicians he’d hired to accompany her, the turquoise damask dress he’d bought for Erika to wear at the event. “The dress is from Paris,” he said. “From Worth. I owe it to her, after all she’s endured. Besides, what could give me more pleasure on my birthday than to see my wife looking luscious?” He winked.