The Doctor and the Diva Read Online Free PDF Page B

birdcage. Either Peter or one of the servants had draped a cover over the bars to help the creature sleep. Ravell lifted the cloth to peek. A gorgeous parrot balanced on a swing, its feathers saturated with scarlet, yellows, and cobalt blue. Ravell removed the cover completely to have a better look.
    The parrot’s clawed feet shifted on the bar. The cage trembled as the bird awoke.
    “Kiss me!” it squawked. “Kiss me!”
    Ravell threw the cover back over the bars and the bird went silent.
    When Peter appeared, blinking hard against the light, he handed Ravell a small balloon filled with whitish liquid. “Did the parrot wake up?” he asked, incredulous. Ravell quickly turned away and reached into his medical bag, wiping his smile away with his hand.
    Erika lay on the bed, fully draped in her silks. Her skin was moist, her cheeks and forehead flushed. The smell of sex filled the room, though she’d tried to disguise it by spraying herself with an atomizer that rested, half-full, on the night table. Her thighs were damp with the spray she’d flashed across them, preparing herself for the doctor. The fragrance was fruity with cherries.
    Peter held a bright light for the doctor as Ravell prepared his instruments. He took the condom and siphoned its contents between Erika’s open legs. Meticulously he completed his work.
    In his dressing robe and slippers, Peter escorted the doctor through the dark house. At the front door, Peter rose up on the balls of his feet, looking pleased. “Maybe tonight will be the turning point,” he said.
    Ravell had taken care to save the condom that Peter had given him. In the small hours of the night, back in his office, he cut off the end of the rubber he’d tied so precisely, and extracted an unused portion of residue from the condom’s interior. He smeared a few drops across a slide, and peered at this second sample. He squinted, watching for anything to float into view, but saw nothing that swam or wiggled or flitted past. The second sample, too, was as lifeless as water siphoned from the Dead Sea.

5

    “I no longer wish to become a mother,” Erika said. In his medical office she sat dressed in a smart blue-gray suit with velvet lapels, nipped and tailored to display her slim waist. On her head she wore a matching blue toque, pinned at a fashionable angle against her hair.
    She’s in despair again, Ravell thought. She cannot really mean this.
    He listened. Her husband had gone away on business, she said, and when he returned, he would find his life forever changed. “I know I’m about to cause him great sadness,” she added.
    He kept his eyes on her for so long that she finally glanced away from him—out of embarrassment, perhaps. She tilted her chin upward as if to scan the spines of the medical texts on his shelves. Clearly she had made some sort of decision: he sensed an underlying cheerfulness in her, and that worried him. Yet he still could not be certain that she was a person on the brink of extinguishing her own life. Less than a week previously, Ravell had entered her bedroom and smelled her as she lay in her nest of silks. He’d heard her every inhalation of pleasure. She was a woman of emotions and appetites so strong that she forgot—at least for the duration of lovemaking—why her husband had ever irritated her.
    “What are you planning to do that might cause Peter such sadness?”
    She would not answer. There was finality in every sharp turn of her head. If she walked out of his practice today, he knew she would not return. ( “I warned you,” her sister-in-law might rail at him later. “And you did nothing.” ) The prospect that he would disappoint Peter and Erika and all the von Kesslers—that these efforts might provoke a tragedy—sank through him.
    Why had he lied to her brother in such a foolhardy way? Insinuating that he could cure what could not be changed? In the end they would believe the failure was his.
    He had it in his power to save her