The Doctor and the Diva (62 page)

“Your father and I are wonderful friends,” Ravell told Quentin. That evening in the parlor the boy listened with his mouth agape as Ravell described the expedition he and Peter had attempted to the Kaieteur Falls.

“We had no moon the night we made our way back down the Essequibo River,” Ravell was saying. “We grew desperate to reach Rockstone by midnight. The water and the forest around us were so black, we all got a little . . . afraid. Men had to stand at the bow and hold up reflective lights to help the steersman find the way.”

“Did you get there?” Quentin asked.

“We did.” Ravell spoke of an Indian woman they’d seen on the dock the next day. She carried a baby on her back whose forehead had been painted vermilion, and she had a pet monkey coiled around her neck. A black man bought the monkey from her for five shillings, and the poor little monkey wailed as his new owner carried him off. This had greatly upset Peter.

Quentin pressed his mouth against the padded arm of his chair, rapt, still listening.

He lifted his head suddenly. “Why didn’t my father buy it? He’s got a craze for animals.”

“I think he was tempted,” Ravell said, nodding, “but the monkey might have died during the Boston winter.”

Erika observed the two of them. “All right, darling,” she said to Quentin. “Time for sleep. Enough adventures for today.”

After the boy had been put to bed, she and Ravell walked down to the beach, and breezes found their way under her white skirt, rippling the hem like a wave. They sat down on the sand and watched the stars. He wanted to know more about what had happened to her in Italy.

“For about two days after I sang
Carmen
,” she said, “I thought the people who heard me would devour me with love. One man burst into my dressing room and sniffed my bare shoulder! A trio of men sang under my window the next morning, and crowds threw flowers at me.

“And then it all stopped. I auditioned everywhere for six months, and nothing came of it.”

“Perhaps you left too soon,” he said.

“I needed to breathe new air. It’s not as if I’ve quit singing—I could never live without music.”

“Do you plan to go back to Italy?”

She shook loose grains of sand from her hair. To her, the breakers sounded restless. “I haven’t decided. My landlady, Donna Anna, is saving my room until I make up my mind.”

When they got up, she turned to him and lifted her arms. The wind seemed to push them together, the heat of his body against hers while gusts snapped their white clothes. His tongue tasted of the sweet plantains they’d eaten for dinner.

When they returned to the house, it was empty of servants. She paused in her own room before going to Ravell’s bed. Her robe, just laundered, was gone, still drying on the line. In a playful mood, she shed her clothes and pulled a long sheet from her bed, wrapping her body tightly in its pleats. She tiptoed through the dark house, still bound in the sheet.

On his bed the linens were pristine, almost lovingly folded back. Candles glowed and painted the walls with amber light, and orchids—the kind of orchids that spilled in profusion in the forest—floated in a bowl on his night table.

He stepped back when he saw her, watching with amusement as she twirled in a slow circle while unwinding herself slowly from the cloth—shoulders first, then breasts, navel, and hips.

“You shine,” he said softly. “Your skin still shines.”

As they slid against the bed, her hands gripped his haunches, still lean and hard, slippery with sweat. She smelled musk rising from his pores.

When they were done, she rested her palm against his heart. She heard the breakers outside beat and spread; in nine years the sound had never stopped.

When Quentin was missing at lunchtime the next day, Erika went to the workers’ village to look for him. Ravell had gone off earlier with the overseer to attend to a drainage problem. Everywhere Erika heard coolie children calling to their mothers in Hindi (“
Ma! . . . Ma!”
), and it amused her to hear a foreign syllable that she so easily understood.

She happened upon Uma, who sat on the stoop of a hut, balancing a toddler by his underarms to prevent him from tumbling. The tiny boy wore no diaper, only a loose shirt, and was clearly just learning to walk. He went forward a few feet and fell in the dust, picked himself back up, and wobbled a few steps before stumbling again.

“Is that your baby?” Erika asked. The servant girl nodded. It had not occurred to Erika before that Uma was a married woman with a child.

“That’s a beautiful sari,” Erika said. The girl’s sari was the color of saffron, bordered with a brilliant turquoise design. Uma beckoned Erika into the hut and opened a trunk to show her others—an astonishing assortment of saris, fabrics the colors of jewels, lengths of garnet, emerald, and amethyst.

Inside the dim hut with mud floors, Uma showed Erika her other treasures. She drew long, fringed earrings from pouches, and she pushed silver bangles halfway to her elbows. The interior of the hut smelled of incense, cumin, sandalwood.

In Italy Erika had come to adore costumes. How strange it was to stand next to a thin-boned girl who inhabited a hut with dirt floors . . . and to long, suddenly, to drape herself in the scented garments of a Hindu coolie woman.

“Would you show me how to wrap myself in a sari?” she asked Uma.

Erika forgot that she had come to call Quentin to lunch. While Uma’s baby played at their feet, rolling the husk of a coconut back and forth like a ball, Erika let herself become transformed. She selected the most dazzling sari that had been folded into the trunk—the fabric the color of lapis lazuli, with gold threads woven through it—a sari intended, no doubt, for festival days.

Silently, expertly, Uma spun the long banner around Erika, winding it around her hips. Uma formed perfect pleats in front with her nimble fingers, tucking the folds here and there, passing a length of cloth between Erika’s legs. Erika felt shivers of coolness as the coolie girl’s fingers nipped and grazed her form.

Finally Uma held up a mirror to show the banner of deep blue across Erika’s chest. A long glimmering tail fell from Erika’s shoulder to her knee.

The door of the hut opened and light flooded in. Quentin and four-year-old Ajeet halted at the threshold. Ajeet came inside and rubbed his head against Uma’s hip, begging for something to eat.
Ma,
he called her.
“Ma.”

“I didn’t realize that Ajeet was also your son,” Erika said.

She asked if she might borrow the sari, and wore it to dine with Ravell that evening. He was stunned when she appeared.

“Well, look at you,” he said.

Across the table, he could not wrest his gaze from her. They lifted their glasses of green swizzle and laughed at her new persona.

“To the diva in her sari,” he said, toasting her.

At one point during the meal, Uma stationed herself in a corner of the room. She held a serving platter, and studied Ravell with an intensity that seemed strange. When he addressed her, Uma lowered her eyelids, but when he continued to converse with Erika, the servant girl looked at him with a yearning that hinted of pain.

After dinner, he closed the doors to the parlor, so that he and Erika could be alone.

“I was surprised to see how many saris she had to choose from,” Erika said. “Such a feast of luscious colors. And the jewelry—all those little pouches she kept opening, with bracelets and anklets and nose rings.”

“The workers are like that,” Ravell said. “Their women are regarded as princesses. Husbands funnel their wages into their wives’ adornments.”

Erika smoothed the long scarf of the sari draped over her shoulder. On the divan she lounged with bare feet. The doors were shut, but she softened her words nevertheless, so as not to be overheard.

“I see that Uma has a baby. Did you deliver her younger child?”

He nodded. “It was fortunate that I was there.” Uma’s younger son had presented feet first, so Ravell had been forced to reach up and turn the child’s body completely around.

Erika remembered herself in the aftermath of giving birth, the mystical figure Ravell had become for her.

“You know, I think Uma is in love with you.”

Ravell turned his head away in embarrassment. “That sometimes happens with servant girls. They form a fixation on their master.”

Later that evening, Ravell shut the curtains that hung like white veils at his bedroom windows. Erika’s backside fell against the bed as they went down together. As Ravell unwrapped her body from the sari, they smelled spices wound up inside the cloth—ginger, cardamom, and hints of coconut.

“Which of the coolies is her husband?” Erika asked him another night, as they lay in bed.

“She doesn’t have a husband.”

“Who fathered her children?”

“That’s a source of speculation. I never ask about such matters.” Ravell got up to use the outhouse.

The older boy, Ajeet, was light-skinned, the younger one much darker. Erika wondered if Mrs. Hartley had viewed Uma as too much of a temptation to keep at the Eden estate. Perhaps Mr. Hartley had become overly fond of the girl, and that was why Uma had been exiled to the Cocal.

“How long has Uma been here?” she asked when Ravell returned to bed.

“Five years,” he said. He turned on his side, away from her.

She bent an elbow and propped her head against her hand. With one finger she traced the outline of his shoulder, bared above the sheet.

“Have you slept with her?”

A pause. “Why do you ask?”

She did not repeat the question, and he said nothing more at first. Her head slid against the pillow and she watched shapes shift against the ceiling and walls. Wind bent the tall stalks in the garden. The next time she saw Quentin and Ajeet playing together, she would look at them differently. It had not occurred to her before that they might be half-brothers.

Ravell turned, and they lay on their backs in parallel. “You’re angry,” he said, and sighed.