The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Henri had no interest in chatting with customers all day. This was where Delphine thrived. Her father had had to be fluent in English for work, so he could communicate with the drunk American patrons who wanted to chat, leaning on the piano as they asked him about Paris and requested something from West Side Story. He taught her everything he learned, all the phrases she wouldn’t have known otherwise. How to make the tourists feel at ease, when they expected the French to be stuffy, unkind.

  Now she put his teachings to use. She found that she could convince an American couple on vacation to pay eighteen thousand francs for a harp, when neither of them had ever thought of owning a harp in their lives. She could see an instrument and understand the power of its beauty, its capacity to bring someone joy, even when she didn’t know a thing about the maker or the quality of the wood. Dubray, like Henri, had never bothered much with tourists; Delphine made them her focus. When a film director from Los Angeles came in to browse one day with his wife, a long conversation led to a new relationship with movie companies in America who were searching for instruments to use in historical dramas.

  With the pair of them in charge, the shop did a better business than ever before. On the one-year anniversary of their first meeting, they bought it.

  For that first year and half of the next, Delphine referred to Henri as her business partner. He was also a friend, she sometimes thought, but the bulk of their interactions happened at work. Of course, they were always working. She saw more of Henri than anyone. Their business brought mutual acquaintances into their lives, and together they entertained them; most were collectors and experts like Henri, who picked apart the elements of music in a fashion that she found maddening. Delphine enjoyed talk of performances to a point, but she also thought you could talk all the beauty out of it. It irritated her when Henri would ask, “So? What did you think?” immediately after a recital, wanting to examine it before the lights had even gone up.

  When she was a girl, a few times a year her father would take her to hear a concert in the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He would tell her in advance to be quiet and still, to let the music fill her. Afterward, they might have mussels on the square at Café Central or just wander through narrow streets and out to the river, without dissecting what they had seen, without discussing it at all.

  Some nights she made Henri dinner at her apartment after work, just the two of them, and they spoke about their families, their childhoods, their shared love of music. They both worshipped classical musicians like other people worshipped rock stars.

  Henri was a formal man, and scandalizing him brought her a strange pleasure. She loved secretly replacing his Bach CDs with the Beastie Boys in the shop. He was fifteen years older than she, and looked even older than that—Delphine teased him about his age, making him blush. She saw him as a kind uncle, or perhaps a much older brother.

  Once, after too much wine, she told him about how much she missed her father, and confessed that she had never wanted children of her own because of everything that had happened with her mother. She hadn’t told anyone that before. Henri had wanted them once, he said, but now it seemed too late. She couldn’t picture him bouncing a baby on his knee, or tossing a ball with an older child. When she tried, she laughed out loud. But then again, she had once watched him teach a young boy from the neighborhood how to restore a fiddle the child had found in his grandmother’s attic, adding a neck and scroll, and polishing it up until it glowed. “The purfling here is very good. There’s a great difference between spruce and maple,” he told the boy, who nodded quite seriously as if he were an auctioneer at Christie’s.

  Henri first kissed her on a quiet Tuesday when the shop had been empty for hours. She could not have been more shocked if he had walked right up and slapped her in the face. He pulled away, and before she could even speak, he said, “I’ve got a meeting to get to. See you tomorrow.”

  The next day, he asked her out for a proper dinner. They ate entrecôte frites and drank a bottle of wine. Henri’s brow was dewy with sweat. He talked almost exclusively about the store—rambling on about the need to boost sales at Christmastime, and asking whether she thought it was wise to run a few ads in the local papers.

  Delphine felt incredibly uncomfortable, and confused. She had assumed that this was a date, but now she wondered if it was merely an apology for the kiss. Henri paid the check, but he always paid the check when they went out. He walked her home to her apartment, but he always walked her home if it got late.

  Outside her door, she said, “Well, thanks for the meal. I’ll see you tomorrow, yes?”

  At which point he grabbed her around the waist and kissed her urgently. She kissed back; it seemed rude not to. But she kept her eyes open, and could feel them growing wide.

  She did not invite him upstairs.

  The following morning, she entered the store through the back door, knowing he’d be in front. On her desk in the workshop, he had left a vase of roses with a card. Her stomach turned. The card read, As you probably know by now, I’m madly in love with you.

  Delphine nearly jumped. Madly in love? It was hard to imagine Henri worked into a state even vaguely resembling madness. She thought for a moment of running away, but then he stepped into the room, his arms full of papers. When he saw her there, his cheeks went red.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said.

  She could tell he was nervous. She pointed at the flowers. “They’re beautiful.”

  He smiled. “Good, good. I had a wonderful time last night.”

  You did? she thought. But she answered, “Me too.”

  He paused. “I better get back out front.”

  For a moment, she wondered if the florist had simply attached the wrong card. Maybe somewhere in Montmartre, a newly engaged woman had just received a bouquet with a note that said, Good work on setting a record for our most flutes ever sold in a single month.

  That night in bed, Delphine thought it over. Henri loved her. Or at least he thought he did. How had the idea never even occurred to her? She knew he wasn’t going to sweep her off her feet, but that never led anywhere good anyway. Henri was kind and smart, and they had the shop, which was the closest either of them would ever come to having a child.

  They went out for more dinners, which got better over time. They laughed with ease. The sex between them was nice, if not overflowing with passion. She learned more about Henri as they went along—he ate very little of his own accord, as if his brain were far too occupied to think of anything as pedestrian as food. Though he often appeared to be the most confident man in France, he was prone to dark moods, like her father had been; he sometimes took to his bed for a day or two or three.

  And, like her father, Henri became her self-appointed caretaker, constantly worried about her safety, her health, her happiness. When a thief ripped her purse from her shoulder one night as they were locking up the shop, Henri chased him to the top of the hill, and though he never had a chance of catching up with the boy, the attempt had touched her deeply.

  Henri had inherited his massive apartment in the seventh arrondissement, while she just rented her place. For this reason, after five months of dating he suggested that she move in with him, even though it was far from the shop and the neighborhood in which she’d grown up—all the way across the river.

  “I can’t leave Montmartre,” she said. “My apartment. I’ll lose it forever.”

  “It wouldn’t be big enough for both of us anyway,” he said, forgetting momentarily that she had lived there with her father for ten years.

  “How can I go from Montmartre to this wealthy neighborhood that is not at all bohemian? That is entirely bourgeois?”

  “Surely you won’t miss the crowds. The bobos,” he said. When he saw that she wasn’t smiling, he took her chin in his hand and said, “We will still be there all the time for work. Eventually, we can move back if it’s what you really want.”

  She knew it was a lie—he hated Montmartre, would
never choose to live there. But she allowed herself to take some comfort in his words anyway.

  Henri hadn’t changed one piece of furniture after his parents gave him the apartment. The pieces were oppressively vieille France, Louis XVI and Empire style. All straight, harsh lines, with laurel wreaths carved into the oak and gilded fluted columns everywhere, as if they were living in ancient Greece. Heavy velvet drapes blocked out the sun. Delphine insisted on taking them down, but on his parents’ first visit after she did so Henri’s mother yelled, “Ferme les volets!” as soon as she entered the parlor. She ran to the window and grasped the air as if the old curtains might materialize. Seeing that this was hopeless, she settled for pulling the shutters closed.

  In Henri’s world, it seemed, sunlight was the enemy, its only mission to fade centuries-old upholsteries and rugs. Delphine thought of the artists of Montmartre, sweating in their studios five stories up, built in tiny maids’ quarters for the sole purpose of welcoming the northern light.

  In her new life on the rue de Grenelle, she sometimes did not recognize herself. It wasn’t until she arrived in her precious Montmartre each morning that she felt like she could breathe.

  A few months after she moved in, they were engaged. She hadn’t seen a need for marriage. Lots of people went without it these days. They said half the children in France were born to unwed parents now. But it mattered to Henri. As a girl, she had dreamed of a man who would propose to her in some romantic way—going to her father for permission, coming up with an elaborate surprise. But her father was gone, and Henri only asked her over dinner one Friday at Le Florimond.

  At their wedding at his parents’ house in the country, everyone danced until six a.m., and then the guests drank soupe à l’oignon while she and Henri hid in a broom closet, waiting to be found. His mother had insisted that they play the game, in keeping with tradition. Delphine thought it was amusing, especially after several glasses of champagne. She assumed that most couples took the opportunity to be physically close for the first time in their married lives, maybe even sneaking in some illicit act. But Henri was a grump about the whole thing. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I can barely breathe.”

  He wore a stiff black suit and an old-fashioned chapeau haut-de-forme.

  She imagined what her father would say to her if he were there to see it. She somehow couldn’t picture him in the scene. Henri was too brittle a man for his tastes, too serious. But he was also kinder than any man she had ever loved before him.

  Shortly after the wedding, a city magazine that focused on music sent a reporter to cover the story of how François Dubray’s death had led to their meeting. Delphine told her, “I married my best friend.” It sounded so lovely, and it was true, after all. But she knew that other people heard it as I married my soul mate, when what she really meant was I married a kind and stable man who will never treat me poorly, nor set my heart aflame.

  Six years passed. Six years of waking together at seven to the sound of Henri’s alarm clock. He skipped Good morning in favor of asking Quelles nouvelles? as soon as she opened her eyes. As if there could be any news between two people who spent every moment of their day and night together. They ate tartines after rising, and he read the newspaper aloud. Then they drove to work together, discussing the store, spending all day together at work, going home or out to dinner together at day’s end.

  They bought a weekend house in Normandy, in a village called Muids. They hired a woman to mind the shop on Saturdays and went to the country most Fridays on the six o’clock train from Paris Saint-Lazare. The house sat right on the banks of the Seine. She often watched young couples zipping past on bicycles, laughing, a picnic basket draped over someone’s arm. It looked like fun, but Henri would never want to spend a Saturday like that. He preferred to stay on the porch and read, though he would agree to a game of tennis or a walk along the water if she wanted. Sometimes in the evenings they played Vivaldi through the open kitchen window as they sat in the grass, gazing up at the stars.

  It was a fortunate life, a pleasant life, but after six years, Delphine had begun to feel restless. There was a constant buzzing at the base of her skull as she thought about the fact that this was all there was or would ever be. She and Henri were friends, or, more precisely, family. There was such ease between them, but even that disturbed her. When he touched her arm or took her hand, she felt numb.

  She began to wonder if people had children in part to ward off this quiet, uneasy sensation—at least parents had something to look forward to, to worry about, to plan for. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to try to find another job. Perhaps less time together would help. But she couldn’t imagine leaving the shop, and she knew that one of the reasons they did such a good business was because people liked the idea of a husband-and-wife team. In her lowest moments, she wondered if this was why he had wanted to marry her in the first place. Most of the time she thought that Henri had picked her simply because she was the woman right under his nose. Marriage for him was like a Sunday lunch—he would never seek it out or even think of it, until someone presented it to him on a silver tray.

  Her husband could be stuffy, boring, in social situations. She sometimes feared that people saw a married couple as just one person, so that his awkwardness and need to be right at all times reflected poorly on her. But eventually she realized that people saw them as two distinct parts of the whole; she softened their impression of him, and he gave her some heft. What could either of them ever be without the other?

  They were kind to one another. They didn’t ever fight. Delphine sometimes wished he would have an affair, arouse at least her anger and her suspicion if nothing else. Even jealousy had to be better than indifference. But she knew Henri was incapable of such a thing. And for a long time, she believed that she herself was, too.

  2012

  Sometime in winter, Jeff and Toby bought matching diamond rings, handmade by a jeweler in Stockbridge. One of Kate’s many duties was to pick them up a few days before the wedding. All along, as she had helped order the flowers and considered menu options, and taken Ava to two separate dress shops in Manhattan, Kate had tried to pretend that they were planning an elaborate birthday party. But when she went to get the rings, she could not deny that this was, indeed, a wedding. She was surprised that her cousin would ask her to do it, when he knew how disgusted she was by diamonds, but she reminded herself that he was no longer the Jeff she had always known, and he wouldn’t be for at least seventy-two more hours.

  The jeweler had set two velvet boxes side by side on the glass counter, open to reveal identical rings, each with a diamond that lay flush against a thick, flat platinum band.

  “I was sorry to hear that Toby and Jeff weren’t coming themselves, but I know how crazy things get, especially with them living all the way in New York,” he said. “It’s been such an honor this year, getting to make these rings for gay couples like your friends. And I love what we designed together. Aren’t they stunning?”

  It seemed like he expected her to do something, though she wasn’t sure what—applaud perhaps, or faint, or cry.

  “They’re great,” she said, flipping the tops of the boxes closed with two quick snaps. “Do you have a bag?”

  He placed the boxes in a glossy red bag with a gold rope handle, then gave it to her and smiled wide.

  She briefly imagined shaking the bag in front of him and saying, You realize these stupid things have fueled entire brutal regimes in Africa, right? They’re shiny little death pellets, let’s be honest.

  Instead, she just said, “Thanks.”

  Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else’s suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer.

  The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter�
�s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from—their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable.

  Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.

  She had always been this way, and the feeling had only intensified when she went to work at Human Rights Now after college. HRN was a nonprofit organization with field offices in forty-two countries. They compiled reports on atrocities involving war crimes, violence against women and homosexuals, access to water, and other issues. Kate started out as the assistant to the executive director, Ellen Cary, and was promoted four times in ten years. She traveled to Africa and Asia. She got to meet with policy makers, donors, and journalists to reveal findings and suggest strategies. She loved her job, but she found it hard to shut the door on it after hours, something that Ellen often warned her about.