The Doctor and the Diva (43 page)

Christopher was not at home. When he did not respond to her knock, Erika scribbled a note and slid it under his door. “
Un colpo di fortuna, a stroke of luck!
The great Valenti has agreed to take me on.”

To celebrate this success, she went to a restaurant and ordered her favorite dessert,
millefoglie alla crema.
She bit into the flaky layers of pastry and licked the whipped cream from her lips. She felt an inward sweetness, thinking that while her time of greatest striving was only beginning, her future would unfold as planned.

It was a day to rejoice—or so she’d thought. But when she returned to her room near the Ponte Vecchio, a bleak note from her father awaited her.

After reading the letter, she was too upset to stay in her room. She put on her wraps, and for the rest of the afternoon she strode through the streets, wandering everywhere and nowhere. From the Lungarno Acciaiuoli she crossed to the Oltrarno again, and drifted through unfamiliar neighborhoods.

In an alley she passed a small child, a pathetic thing with knees and shins so filthy, they looked charred. He was crying.

In that little boy’s cries, she heard the misery she must have caused everybody, especially Quentin. In the bloody scabs on the boy’s face, she saw neglect. Where was his mother? Had she left him and gone away? Or had she sent him into the streets to beg, with orders not to come back without money?

A smear of fresh blood glistened on his elbow. Dust from the paving stones darkened his feet. She had an urge to scoop him up and take him home for a bath.

Instead, Erika opened her purse and gave him a coin. The boy sucked in his breath, and the sobs stopped for a moment as his dirty fingers opened and closed over the money. He broke into a stumbling run and made off with the coin, but as he disappeared around a bend, he was still crying.

Returning to her room, she closed the shutters and lay down on the bed, fully dressed. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Leaving Quentin was the most grievous thing she had ever done. She loosened her shirtwaist and rested her hands against the smooth skin of her abdomen, just as she’d done during pregnancy, her fingers just above her navel. Here, she used to feel her son’s movements under her skin. One night when she was six months along, she’d felt the same tiny twitch of movement repeated more than ninety times before she stopped counting. The baby must be hiccuping, she had thought. Now it was as though she could still feel him inside her—except that now she was feeling only her own bright pulse.

Behind the shutters, the day dimmed. Night came. Hunger made her roll from the bed. The room was so black that she crawled to the table and struck a match, lighting a candle. The glow washed the walls with warm ochre hues. From inside the cupboard, she took a piece of focaccia and paper-thin slices of prosciutto, and she set these on the table.

With its sparse furnishings, the room felt empty. Bits of song, a little humming—that was what she needed to lift herself from the gloom. But she couldn’t sing, or stop remembering the small boy she’d met in the alley. She wondered if the sound of his crying would ever leave her. In her heart, he went on weeping.

Erika was not certain why her father’s letter offered such information. Perhaps a warning lay beneath it. Peter was more determined and persistent than any person she had ever known. Did he plan to take a train north from Naples to Florence? Would he stand before the door to her building, grasp the brass ring that fitted through the lion’s nose, and knock?

As the time neared, she expected him to come. In seven months, Peter had sent her no sort of personal message, communicating with her only through her father, requesting her signature on various documents. By now, his flaring pride must have receded a little. It would be quite like him to appear. He’d ask if he might come up to her room to speak with her. After she led him up several flights, he’d admire her view of the Arno. Quite self-righteously, he’d try to persuade her that she was making no visible progress toward anything here in Florence. He’d speak of Quentin and spark guilty tears in her. When he walked toward the door, preparing to depart, he’d spin around suddenly and try to engulf her in his arms.

By May, she was ready for him to appear. And then one afternoon, as she walked through the Piazza della Signoria, near the place where the monk Savonarola had been burned centuries before—an area where tourists frequently passed—Erika saw him.

She saw him from afar. Peter wore a brown herringbone suit, and looked thoroughly British. From the instant she noticed him, fear jumped inside her chest; sounds of surprise threatened to leap from her mouth.

She glimpsed his profile just as he was turning a corner. Briefly she followed him, just to be certain. His long, trim back spoke to her with frightening familiarity. Though her father had hinted about Peter’s possible arrival, the sight of her husband in Florence shocked her nonetheless.

In less than a minute, she headed back to her room. After closing the shutters, she lay down on her bed, shoes still on, hiding herself. She regretted sending him her address. If the bell rang and the maid brought word of a gentleman caller, Erika wondered what she ought to say. What did she want to have happen?

If he stepped into her room, she worried that loneliness would pull her backward like the tides. His presence might wash away everything she’d worked for.

While she waited on the bed, her blood coursed faster, and the heat of worrying left her skin moist. Did she want to see him, or not? Finally she got up and removed her blouse; patches of the fabric were soaked through by then. Draping the garment across the back of a wooden chair, she poured water from a pitcher into a bowl, and washed her underarms.

If he comes here,
she thought,
I will pull him straight onto my bed, and afterward, I will insist that he leave. His body, a man’s body. That is what I miss most.

Half-dressed, she went to the window, cracked open the shutters, and looked out, expecting to see Peter in the street below. He did not materialize that day.

But during those moments while she waited, as it dawned on her that he would not be coming, she found herself mourning the past. She saw before her a thousand mornings when his foot had touched hers in bed, and she had woken beside him, happy. She no longer loved him or wanted to be with him, but it was unbearable to think that those times were lost and would never come again. Only he remembered the day they’d ridden by camel into an Egyptian desert on their honeymoon. Only he could recall with her the terror of that storm at sea, and laugh about Mrs. Bickford with her pickles.

It felt strange to deny his prominence in her memory, but now that he was no longer her husband, she must do just that, in order to forge on.

Later that summer her father wrote:

So the person she’d seen that day at the Piazza della Signoria had not been Peter after all. After one glimpse of a man in a herringbone suit, she’d gasped at his nearness and fled, but it had only been her mind conjuring him up.

But it was not Peter, really, who walked beside her, as close as a shadow, through Florence. It was Ravell. At night, through open windows, he flowed into the room on a river of air.

When she slid from bed on a dim morning and lifted her shoes from a cold floor, she felt the chill of the leather, and sensed his presence. When she bathed, Ravell sank alongside her into the water’s heat.

Her father sent her a small drawing of a horse that Quentin had sketched. No note had come from her son since she’d moved to Italy, only this, but the words “For Mama” moved her to tears. Under the pressure of Quentin’s small hand, the paper had curled as he filled in the mane and the tail.
Look what he drew,
she wanted to murmur to Ravell.
Look what our son drew.

She tried to envision herself on Ravell’s island, but she did not see how she could make a life with him. Her voice would be lost in the canopy of tropical foliage, her arias blending with the cries of macaws and scarlet ibises.

If Boston had felt limiting . . . how long could she be happy there, in that wild place?

Now her days had become more regimented than any she had ever lived. At nine every morning, she had a lesson with Maestro Valenti. Between ten-thirty and noon, she worked with Christopher to learn the notes of new operas. Lunch followed—the one frivolous hour of the day, during which they would go to a
caffè
on the Via Tornabuoni, or to a restaurant where Erika would order her favorite dish,
coscia di vitello con maccheroni
, and Christopher his
petto di pollo
or his fish.

By one o’clock he hastened away, because Christopher had other aspiring opera singers whom he had to accompany.

During the afternoons she was invariably alone. The one glass of Chianti or
vino bianco asciutto
she had drunk at lunch would make her drowsy, and she would lie on her dark red sofa and doze while studying Italian grammar in her room. When the book slid to the floor, the thump woke her. Determined to be more diligent, she shuttered her room against the afternoon sun that always deepened her lethargy. She made herself sit upright at a table while translating whatever libretto she was learning line by line. Valenti had encouraged her to do this. “Don’t let the meaning of a single word mystify you,” he said. “You should know this opera’s story like the story of your own life.”

After taking a long, exploratory walk around Florence, she often returned at dusk and caught succulent whiffs circulating through the house’s stairwell: the aroma of sautéed onions steeped in red wine sauce being cooked by the landlady’s servant. From five to seven in the evening, Erika stayed in her room and sang. When the weather was mild, she opened the windows, as her blind landlady had requested.