The Doctor and the Diva (31 page)

“I
’m worried about Peter,” she said. “Three and a half weeks have come and gone. Don’t you think he should have returned by now?”

Ravell brought out a calendar and counted the days. He, too, felt alarmed. Venezuela was not always safe territory for a traveler, he admitted. It was strange that they’d received no word to explain the delay.

“It’s so unlike him,” Erika said.

Ravell decided to send a message at once to Mr. Hartley, who could go directly to Port of Spain and make inquiries.

Yet less than a day afterward, Peter appeared, as hearty and ebullient as ever. He drove up in a wagon, and when he saw them, he spread his arms and jumped from the height of it, landing on both feet. After his steamer had arrived at Port of Spain, he had gone to the Club and run into Mr. Hartley, who had invited Peter to stay at Eden for a few days and join him for a bit of hunting.

“How did you explain our situation to Mr. and Mrs. Hartley?” Erika asked when they were alone and Peter was unpacking his things.

“What situation?”

“The fact that you’d left me here.”

“I told them that Ravell had you on strict bed rest, fearing a miscarriage.”

“You told them I was pregnant?”

“It isn’t any business of theirs what we do. These are private matters. We’ll be leaving Trinidad soon.”

She sank her hips down on the bed and sat there, dismal at the thought. Peter was bent over a trunk, rifling through clothes. “There it is.” He held up a pistol, relieved. “The authorities confiscated my other revolver when our boat arrived at Port of Spain. They realize everybody coming from Venezuela must be armed.”

“Peter,” she said. “My period is coming back.”

He hesitated, brushing a scuff mark from his shoe. “I see,” he said dully.

She let him think that she was menstruating. She could not bear the lie of it, to sleep with two men at once. During these last days on the island, until the ship took her away, she wanted to open her body to only one man, and that was Ravell.

At Ravell’s house, her husband looked quite tall. His hair grazed the tops of doorways, and his height seemed unfamiliar to her. When Peter’s feet touched hers in bed, there was the sensation of ice. She pulled her legs away from his.

When he perspired into the bedsheets, the air became tainted by a smell she did not recognize. What bitter foods had he eaten in Venezuela? What sour water had he poured from a pitcher and drunk? When Peter unpacked the rum he’d brought back from Bolívar—the one luxury produced there—she took a little on her tongue and tasted, grimacing. She put down the glass and pushed it away.

It isn’t Peter who has changed,
she realized.
It is me. For me, everything is different now.

When Peter left to go swimming at dawn, Ravell came into her room. They stood naked together in the light. She wore nothing except a necklace, a wreath of tiny, tear-shaped garnets. He stood with his shoulders no higher than hers, his eyes level with her eyes.

On the morning of the day they were to leave, she woke up and found the mattress empty beside her. Sunlight warmed the walls, and Peter was suddenly, inexplicably gone.

They were supposed to load their luggage into a wagon and set out by buggy that afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Hartley had invited them to spend Christmas at Eden, and Ravell was included as well.

She sat up in bed and realized what had awakened her. Gunshots rang out on the beach. She shoved her arms through the sleeves of her dressing gown and ran from the house, barefoot, the wind filling her robe like a cape. More shots. Peter was shouting in frustration, and shots came again. With each burst of bullets, her heart split apart. She tripped and fell hard, her whole weight coming down against her outthrust palms. Sand grated her knees and she got up, still running, until she saw Peter and Ravell, both of them alive. Peter was aiming his pistol and shooting at the beach itself. With each bullet, sand spit skyward and sprayed.

He’d been unable to catch the specimens he’d wanted to pack in alcohol and take back to New England. Portuguese men-of-war had washed up in brilliant color across the beach, with their long turquoise and violet streamers, but they were not the quarry Peter was after. It was the strange four-eyed fish that captivated him, the ones with divided eyes. Those fish could see simultaneously above the ocean’s surface and below its depths. Every time Peter felt on the brink of capturing one, the four-eyed fish eluded him, and so he’d decided to stop them with something faster than his hands.

“My goodness,” Erika said. “You have no idea—how much you just frightened me.” She pressed one hand against her stomach; the other hand flew to her forehead as she stood there, recovering.

During their last hour at the Cocal, Erika sat under a grove of palms and listened to the fronds crackle as she watched the surf. She made Ravell bring her a chilled coconut. He’d drilled a little hole into it and put a straw inside. “This is the thing I want to drink,” she said, laughing, “just before I die.” She dug her toes deep under the sand until her feet touched the place where it grew damp and cool, and she sipped the clear juice from the coconut and felt the sweetness flow and spread inside her.
I will never see this place again
, she thought, and sipped slowly, trying to make it last.

When they climbed into the buggy to leave, Munga and the other coolies gathered around to say farewell. Bowing low to Peter and Erika, Munga placed their hands upon his head.

The presence of the Hartley children no longer tormented Erika. The thunder of their small feet on the spiral staircase as they chased one another was part of the surroundings—like hibiscus, or hummingbirds. Even the Hartley baby did not matter. Instead, she thought about Ravell.

While Peter and Erika were guests at Eden, Ravell decided to stay at the Queens Park Hotel, which had recently reopened. He told Mr. and Mrs. Hartley that he had business to take care of in town.

The day before Christmas, Peter and Mr. Hartley took their guns and left the house very early to hunt deer. While Erika still lay under the bedcovers, she heard a horn in the distance, which triggered thrilling barks from the new hounds in Mr. Hartley’s kennel. In the bed she hugged a fat pillow and smiled to herself, knowing that day she would be able to escape to town to see Ravell.

“I have shopping to do,” she told Mrs. Hartley.

Since they’d come to Eden, Peter had asked Erika, rather gently, if her period had finished yet. She told him half-truths. For days, she told Peter, she had feared that her period might be on the verge of beginning, but so far it hadn’t. She hinted that another baby might be struggling to take root; if they made love, they might risk jarring a baby’s tenuous hold.

At this, Peter gave a delicate smile. She felt a pinprick of shame, toying with his hopes. Peter backed away from her. He regarded her from a slight distance, almost reverently.

On Christmas Eve, to her own surprise, she felt shivers of joy as she helped Mr. and Mrs. Hartley sneak into the darkness of the children’s rooms, placing gifts under their beds while they were sleeping. The eldest boy only pretended to have his eyes closed when they crept in. As soon as the grown-ups finished, he woke all the others and the upper floor exploded into happy pranks and havoc.

In the parlor, after a midnight dinner, Peter held forth, telling all the guests about the unusual sights he’d witnessed during his Orinoco trip. He described how women in Venezuela fenced off areas of the river so they could launder things in safety, and not be attacked by alligators or electric eels or other biting fish.

“Things are a bit more civilized here,” Mr. Hartley declared. He sipped the last of his eggnog, and set the goblet down. “In Trinidad and Jamaica, we’ve got laws against shooting birds, for example—whereas in Venezuela you’ve got terrible slaughter going on.”

“For the feathers,” his wife added. “For ladies’ hats.”

Ravell excused himself and went upstairs. From the distant reaches of the second story, the flush of a toilet could be heard.

Erika lingered for a time in the parlor, then slipped away. In the hallway upstairs she caught Ravell by both wrists and pulled him into the darkness of a linen closet.

“Has your period come?” Ravell whispered. “You said you saw signs of it?”

“Not yet,” she told him in delight. “Any hour it might come, but not yet.” The linen closet smelled of mothballs and cedar and woolen blankets and starched sheets on the shelves. She pulled pillows down so they could cushion themselves against the floor, and she unleashed her breasts from her corset. They had to be hasty, just a fast lift of her skirts, the licks of heat continuing until she swallowed her moans, her pompadour loosening, the pins coming unhinged.

No one saw. No one heard. No one who mattered, at least. Ravell emerged from the closet first, and started down the stairs. Erika waited a moment before following, but as she gathered up her skirts and slipped from the closet, a servant was heading down the hallway with folded bedding in her arms. It was the green-eyed servant girl, Uma. She paused and stared strangely at Erika, and pointed, finally, at Erika’s hair. It had fallen to one side. Erika hurried to her room, where she stood before a mirror, straightening herself. With her elbows raised, she smoothed her pompadour, and wondered how long it would take for the flush of high color in her face to subside.