The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell

occasions, the death of a bride.
    “I thought you might impose certain limitations,” she declared, “and set forth rules.”
    “If you hope to regulate the frequency of their intimate relations,” Ravell said, “I am afraid that is a matter for a young couple to decide between themselves.”
    The egret feathers drooped. Ravell stood up, a signal that the appointment had drawn to a close. A puddle had collected on the floor below the tip of Mrs. Philbrook’s umbrella, and Ravell thought of Erika outside in the rain, hurrying toward his office at this very moment.
    “Think of all the ladies you know who have survived their honeymoons,” he said.

    All afternoon he’d only half-listened to patients, aware of the fury of rain pelting his office windows, the rain that had surely become part of Erika’s day as well. He pictured her shielding herself with her umbrella, lifting her ankle to step over a puddle before it soaked her feet and discolored her shoes. All afternoon he’d attuned his ears to the jangle of bells hanging from the office’s front door, a signal that one patient had departed or another had arrived. Every shimmering sound of the bells marked the passing of the hours that brought him closer to her, his last appointment of the day.
    He knew, as one who counts the chimes from a church tower, exactly when it must be she who pushed open the front door. He peered down a corridor just as her skirt and the back of her rain-soaked hood were disappearing into the waiting room. This was the final occasion he would see her before Peter returned a week from Thursday. Enough time had elapsed by now for Erika to know the sobering results; what news might she bring him? For a moment he stood in the vacant corridor, half-terrified to face her now that the hour had finally come. Yet he savored the chill air she’d carried into the corridor, the tang of excitement.
    Thirty years he’d been alive. Until now, he’d been prudent, careful to spill his own seed onto sheets or taffeta skirts. He’d wet his own hands with ghosts of children he’d been cautious never to father.
    True, he had placed sparks for a child inside her. . . . But apart from that, he had never touched her or spoken to her with impropriety. He prided himself on this.
    When she swept into his office, her rain hood lowered, drops of water glistened on the ridged folds of her cape. He could tell at once that she had something important to tell him. She paced and moved like a figure onstage.
    “Let’s remove that damp cape, shall we?” he said. He came around from his desk and caught a whiff of lilac from her hair as he slid the cape away from her shoulders. He hung it on a coat rack.
    She did have news to tell him, but it was not the announcement he’d counted on. “I’m completely serious about a singing career,” she said. “And I won’t be coming back.”
    Her pupils were enormous, as large and dark as those of a lady who had ingested belladonna, and he wondered again if there were something unstable about her. She would sail for Italy in four more days, she announced. Her curls and her pearl buttons and the tiny turquoise bracelet at her wrist brightened before him like the markings of a flower. Even her speaking voice sounded like a song.
    Yet something emanated from her—flashes of fire—that scared him and warned him not to come any nearer, not to object to a single phrase she was uttering.
    Within five minutes she had thanked him and was gone.
    Ravell sat for a long while in his oak chair and watched rain glaze the pavement in the alley. He had wondered, of course, if the imaginary child he might have given her would possess her talent for music. He had expected to observe his own child’s upbringing from afar—a truth that could never be told, or it would ruin him. He had expected a connection to her that he had never felt toward any woman—but to her, what had he been? Only a technician.

11

    T he endless preparations depleted