The Doctor and the Diva (45 page)

“Don’t you think it’s time we found a proper wife for you?” Stella asked Ravell.

Once at a dinner party at the Eden estate, a married acquaintance of Stella’s had pressed up against Ravell in an unlit hallway, and the lady had hinted that he should meet her at a hotel room in the capital, but he’d declined. Her breath smelled of the lamb they’d just eaten; he knew he did not love her and never would.

“I’m beginning to side with my wife about this,” Hartley said, leaning back deeply in his rocking chair.

“Next month we are going to have another garden party,” Stella said. “Several attractive young ladies are bound to be present.”

They understood his loneliness. Ravell wondered if he had referred too frequently to Erika in their presence. He worried that the memory of Erika was ruining his life. When he wandered through the coolie village at the plantation, he saw laborers surrounded by their little ones, and he yearned in a simple, aching way for children he could call his own. If he could not bring himself to forget about Erika, he would remain alone, living on a plantation in a remote part of the world.

“All right,” he told Stella. They agreed that Ravell would spend several days at Eden, where Stella would oversee his search for a wife.

A couple of weeks before the Hartleys’ garden party, Stella decided to arrange a series of dinner engagements for him, so that he could meet his prospects in a leisurely way, one or two ladies at a time.

On a Wednesday, two very young sisters appeared at the Hartleys’ table. Both were blonde, their twisted curls elaborately pinned and dangling from their temples. They were pretty enough, but as they ate their roast pork, they had little to say until Ravell inquired about their fashionable hairstyles. The sisters glanced at each other, unable to stop giggling and chattering after that. It sounded as though they mainly liked to spend their days arranging each other’s hair.

“Am I expected to marry them together, as an inseparable pair?” Ravell asked after they departed, and Hartley laughed. Ravell did not want to tell Stella how depressed the young sisters had made him feel, how very old and somber.

The following evening Stella invited a pale young widow who had lost her husband so recently that tears welled in her eyes, and she kept reaching for her glass of white wine and taking hard swallows. Ravell felt ashamed sitting across from her, as though he’d rushed in like a grave robber.

“I’m afraid this was all too soon for her,” Stella apologized afterward.

To cheer him up, Hartley went into another room and reappeared with a cue, which he handed to Ravell as he challenged him to a game of billiards.

On Saturday, Ravell’s final night at Eden, a mother and her very tall daughter descended from a motorcar. Both wore feather boas. When the daughter shook his hand, he felt as though ice had been rubbed against his palm.

The daughter, who was in her midtwenties, had a lovely face. He admired the balance of her features, but when he looked closer, he noticed that she had red eyes (an allergy to her feathers?) and a habit of dabbing her thumb under her runny nose.

“I understand you lived in Boston previously,” the mother said.

“I did,” Ravell said.

“Tell me.” The mother leaned toward him and spoke in a quiet tone, clearly hoping to be subtle. “Did you live in a pleasant neighborhood? What sort of house was it? Did you rent or did you own?”

As the evening wore on, the tall daughter kept inquiring about the price of things—the Hartleys’ fringed lampshade, Stella’s high-heeled, buttoned shoes. The conversation bored Ravell so much that he wanted to bolt across the Hartleys’ great lawn and lose himself in the wild forest.

After the tall one rode away with her mother in their motorcar, Stella took a breath and turned toward Ravell expectantly. “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

His gaze flitted away at that moment. Surely Stella guessed that he couldn’t marry that one, either. After each carefully hosted encounter, he felt he was failing her.

“I’m impossible, I know,” he said.

After his return to the Cocal, Ravell went for his usual evening walk along the beach. He found himself talking to the waves, to the night sky, to Erika. Many months had passed since she had left Peter, yet still no word—not even a postcard—had come from her. Ravell felt sure that she must have taken another lover—a leading man, a tenor or a basso profundo, whose vocal cords were long and whose limbs were long, too, because (as Erika had once told him) all men who sang bass were invariably tall.

I have faded into her past like a face in a forgotten audience,
Ravell thought.

He reached for fistfuls of sand and threw them at the white foam spreading along the shore. Instead of Erika’s voice—which he still recalled so keenly—he heard his own wails. Toward the moon he pitched more sand, but drafts of wind blew it backward, blinding him for a moment until he staggered sideways, rubbing his eyelids to wipe away the grit. He told himself he must no longer think about Erika. He decided he ought to attend Stella’s garden party in a few weeks. Until he’d let Stella introduce him to every available woman on the island, he should not resign himself to loneliness.

Walking back to the house, he turned his back on the sea.

Erika threw her brother’s note into a cupboard drawer and slammed it. “
Excessive,”
he had called her expenses. Sunlight streamed through the French doors and reflected so brightly against the red-tiled floor that the color burned painfully in her head. She pulled a hard wooden chair up to the simple table she had bought, took paper and a pen, and wrote back.

She glanced at the sofa, with its carved frame and plush wine-colored upholstery, the fabric soft against her cheek when she napped on it. From the moment she saw the sofa in a dark shop, she’d felt that it belonged in this room, the same red as the tiled floor. She wrote,

To conserve money, she tried to go less often to the Teatro Verdi and other local theatres. Instead, on Saturday evenings she swaddled herself in a white mohair shawl, its lacy crocheted folds slung over her shoulders, and she sat alone on her balcony. A line of electric streetlamps illuminated the Arno’s black channel and the ochre-colored buildings on the opposite bank.

“Allow the vocal cords a rest after a hard week’s practice,” Maestro Valenti had advised, so on Saturday and Sunday nights, Erika did not sing at all.

On Saturday nights in particular, the panorama of lights and the rattle of carriage wheels in the boulevard below reminded her of her own isolation. She imagined that all over Florence, people were rushing to one another’s houses to eat bowls of
ribollita
or veal saltimbocca. She watched couples step into motorcars bound for theatres, gentlemen in tall hats and ladies with long pearls that swung from their necks to their hips.

Where was Christopher on Saturday nights? With his American friends, no doubt. She never knocked on his door on weekends because she did not wish to appear too needy. Instead, she waited for the hastily jotted notes that occasionally came from him. “A stroll in the Boboli today at three?” he would write. Or: “Save next Sunday afternoon. We’ll go to Fiesole by tram.”

Her loneliness was her own fault, she knew. Other lodgers at Donna Anna’s had been friendly, but Erika had gently shut the door on their overtures. She had introduced Christopher as her “brother” as well as her accompanist, to ward off any disapproval about a man occasionally visiting her room. One had to keep a distance from neighbors, especially in a house where so many lives emptied into one stairwell.

On a street corner the roses waited, dark red and long-stemmed. On a Friday evening, she paused and brushed her nose against their velvet petals, inhaling a sweetness that traveled along the arc of her spine and reached her toes. It was the sort of extravagance her brother, Gerald, had warned her against. The vendor came right over, ready to lift them, dripping, from their pail and wrap them in thin paper. She shook her head and backed away.