The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Things could be especially tense when P.J. was home. It had become clear that he and Marie-Hélène were entirely opposed when it came to politics, which led to more than a few arguments, with Delphine in the middle trying to calm them both down. The warmth between them was gone. He insisted on calling her Mary Helen, which she hated, of course. “You’re in America now,” he said.

  After she went home at night, he’d say things like, “She’s kind of a loose cannon. I think you might want to cut back on how much time you’re spending with her.”

  Delphine thought he might be right, but Marie-Hélène needed her; she couldn’t imagine turning her away. And she was alarmed by P.J.’s pigheaded patriotism. When they first met, she had appreciated the fact that he was somewhat unpolished, certainly not an intellectual. But ever since the war began, the things he said frightened her.

  During the first week of August, Marie-Hélène went out to Montauk with some new man she’d met, and Delphine felt grateful for the break. P.J. was home, but spending his days practicing with the Philharmonic for an upcoming recording. All morning and afternoon, she had peace, time to sit with her thoughts, though she wasn’t sure what to make of everyone’s moods. Perhaps it had to do with the heat, or the fact that so much had happened all at once: Marie-Hélène’s disappointment, the realization that they did not have the blessing of P.J.’s mother, and all this nonsense about Americans and their anger toward the French.

  On Thursday she went to the grocery store to get the ingredients for pasta salad, and there, squeezing avocados in the produce aisle, stood Natasha, the Philharmonic’s flutist, who she had had over to dinner months earlier. Delphine was surprised to see her, and said as much.

  “We’re off right now for a while,” Natasha said. “It’s heavenly. Carl is lobbying for a trip to New England, but I’d rather stay home and read. Not a bad problem to have, is it? Oh, it’s so good to run into you. We’ve got to do dinner soon.”

  Delphine felt her heart seize up. P.J. had already sent her a text message about what was happening at rehearsal. He had typed an entire story: During the slow, soft part of Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto no. 5, when he was playing all by himself, someone’s cell phone started ringing. The conductor flew into a rage, throwing the phone into the wings.

  Maybe she had misunderstood. Perhaps the rehearsals were only for strings.

  She said nothing when he came home late that night, complaining more than usual about the day’s workload. The next morning, she followed him out of the building. He usually walked to Lincoln Center, but today he got on the subway heading downtown. She felt her body begin to shake. Back upstairs she went through his pockets, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Marie-Hélène returned on the Sunday morning train. By noon she was sitting in Delphine’s living room, drinking her pastis straight.

  “They say there are eighty percent fewer Americans traveling to France now as compared to last summer,” Marie-Hélène said. “Here they’re telling everyone that the French are spitting at Americans in the streets, that you’ve got to wear a Canadian flag pin over there or you’ll get murdered. Meanwhile, the French are dying for the business.”

  Delphine thought of Henri, and wondered how the store was faring. Five American tourists spent as much as a hundred Europeans. And he had never been good with the tourists to begin with.

  “C’est stupide,” Marie-Hélène went on. “They say Saint-Tropez isn’t affected, of course. Because the rich ones aren’t such idiots. Meanwhile, they’re all coming around now to what the French were saying six months ago about Iraq.”

  P.J. joined them on the couch and switched on a baseball game on the television. He drank several beers, and Delphine grew wary. She wanted him to go away, give her time to tell her friend about how oddly he’d been behaving, and what Natasha had said. Around four, they ordered some Indian takeout and P.J. went to pick it up. She quickly gave Marie-Hélène the update.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “You probably just misunderstood. Maybe the strings and the horns practice on totally different days?”

  It was unusual for Marie-Hélène to come to P.J.’s defense, and Delphine noted this, thinking that it boded well for her relationship. After they ate, she walked tipsily to the corner store for more wine, telling herself that everything would be all right.

  The shopkeeper had closed early, and seeing the store’s lights turned down, Delphine sighed and returned home. When she entered the apartment, there they were—her best friend and her fiancé—locked in an embrace on the sofa, their lips pressed madly together.

  What followed was a blur to her now, like waking from a nightmare and remembering only the faintest bits: Marie-Hélène jumping up and screaming, as if Delphine were an intruder instead of a woman walking into her own home. P.J. telling Marie-Hélène to go. And then his pathetic apologies, coming in a string of sentences that held no meaning for her. “I got scared,” he said. “I just suddenly realized what I’d done, taking you away from your life,” and “I panicked. I know it was wrong to be with her, but I’m an idiot, Delphine. Please forgive me.”

  She thought momentarily, desperately, that it was just an indiscretion and they could recover. But then he said, “I’m caught between these two worlds. In Paris, even here in New York, this all seemed right. You were the perfect woman for me. But the look on my mother’s face made me realize I’m the same old kid. I know you have to leave me, I totally understand. Just please promise that you won’t hate me.”

  He did not want forgiveness; perhaps that was the reason he had chosen Marie-Hélène in the first place, because he wanted Delphine to be the one to end it. He reminded her of one of those cowards who commit a hideous, violent crime and force the police to shoot him, when he should have just saved everyone the heartache and killed himself at the start.

  “But you despise her,” she said, and then, “Are you in love with her?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m in love with the fact that she doesn’t want to be loved. We’re both empty shells. We deserve each other.”

  She knew this was a lie, at least where he was concerned. He was brimming with romantic feelings and love; he had only decided that she would no longer be its object.

  “How long has it been going on?” she asked. “Since the two of you went to that basketball game in the winter?”

  “No,” he said. “Just since we came back from my parents’ place a few weeks ago.”

  “You slept with her?”

  He closed his eyes tightly as if he too were just receiving the news.

  “And all last week. You were with her?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Delphine began to cry, lightly at first, but soon enough there were heaving sobs that made her entire body quake. She went around the apartment, shoving her belongings into the suitcase she had brought from Paris so many months earlier. As she pulled her dresses down from their hangers, she thought of how he had insisted on walking the dog alone each night. She let out another scream.

  He begged her to stay—not to be with him, but just to remain in the apartment. He could go stay with a friend, he said. A friend. Of course.

  Finally, she paused for a moment and looked him in the eye. “You’ve ruined me.”

  He reached out, as if to embrace her. “I can’t live with you hating me. You have to say you’ll find a way to be my friend.”

  At the height of her obsession with getting the apartment just so, Delphine had allowed herself to be seduced into buying a block of top-of-the-line kitchen knives from a store in Greenwich Village. These knives, the salesman told her, were only for those truly committed to culinary perfection. They were difficult. They needed to be sharpened every three months, and could not be kept in an overly warm room. (“Oh, you mean like a kitchen?” P.J. had said. “That’s fine. We were planning to store them beside our bed.”)

  The biggest, sharpest knife in the block had never been used, to her knowledge. She pulled it
out now and went to the living room, where she plunged it into each of the plush gray couch cushions, pulling the white cotton stuffing out with her free hand, imagining that she was pulling out P.J.’s heart and leaving it on the ground to rot. She began to cry, as if something were coming out of her, too.

  It was noon; time for her to go. He would be home soon.

  She needed to tend to a few small things before she left.

  She stopped up the kitchen sink and the bathtub, turning the taps as high as they would go. With any luck, it would flood the whole place by the time he returned. She went out into the hall and threw his car keys down the garbage chute. His laptop sat open on the coffee table. This she quietly closed and slipped into the tub.

  In the corner of the living room, the Stradivarius stood in its stand, regal, ever more perfect set against the mess she had made. It resembled a tiny body, with all the delicate curves of a woman. She would most likely never hear him play it again.

  Delphine found the case in the hall closet and laid the violin inside. She left the door to the apartment flung open. Violin in one hand, suitcase in the other, she rode the elevator down, walked through the marble lobby for the last time, and stepped out into the humid afternoon air. The doorman never even looked up from his newspaper.

  She had called Helena Kaufman’s office in Brussels two days earlier, pretending to be his manager, Marcy. She said she had some exciting news. P.J. had decided to donate the Salisbury Stradivarius to the International Jewish Congress. They agreed that she would bring the instrument to the organization’s New York office at twelve-thirty. They would make the announcement at four o’clock, issuing a press release and photographs. With any luck, they would get a story on the following weekend’s episode of 60 Minutes.

  P.J.’s quotes in the press release were impassioned, and rather damning of anyone who didn’t happen to agree that the rightful owners of such instruments were the descendants of those who had possessed them to start with.

  By the time he learned what happened, he would never have the guts to say it was anything other than what he had planned. And by then, she would be flying overhead, high in the sky, gone.

  1987

  Maurice didn’t get his cheeseburger until one o’clock. James ordered the roast beef special.

  They had only eaten a few bites when they were called out again, this time to 364 Rindge Tower.

  There was always some kind of chaos in the towers. The two huge, ugly buildings on Rindge Avenue housed over two thousand families, many of them immigrants. If you asked James, it was a stupid policy to have that many poor people crammed together in one place.

  Twice a month, when they got their WIC allotments—butter, flour, milk—it was inevitable that some moron was going to take a bag of flour and drop it down the building’s incinerator shaft, hoping to create an explosion that might blow off an apartment door or two.

  Depending on the day, an EMT might not step inside the building unless accompanied by a police officer holding a gun.

  There were three elevators at 364 Rindge. Today, when they walked in, carrying the stretcher, the elevator furthest to the left was already open. Maurice, in front, walked toward it before quickly pushing back.

  “Fuck!” he yelled.

  Someone had defecated all over the goddamn elevator.

  James shook his head, pressed the up button.

  If one day he just wound up dead in this hellhole, how long would Sheila mourn? Five years? Ten? He could just see Debbie trying to fix her up with divorced men from her church. You’ve gotta get back out there! Jimmy was never good enough for you anyway, honey. See this as a blessing. Parker and Danny would hate the new guy at first, but after a couple years they’d realize he wasn’t all that bad, and sometime after that they’d start calling him Dad.

  When the next elevator arrived, the wall panel was newly melted, the walls themselves charred. The sickening smell of burning plastic hit them as soon as the doors opened; on the floor sat a giant bag of trash that someone had lit on fire, which now smoldered as it melted onto the carpet.

  Two kids came bolting through the fire door to survey their work. They took one look at James and Maurice and hightailed it back to wherever they came from.

  “Aww shit, cops,” James heard one of them say.

  “Man, they’re ambulance drivers, not cops.”

  Ambulance drivers. They hated when people called them that.

  “Let’s just take the stairs,” Maurice said.

  On the seventh floor, strange cooking smells wafted out from under doorways, making James’s stomach turn. In Apartment 7F, a Haitian guy lay unconscious on a couch. His wife didn’t speak English, but she had summoned a cousin over who knew a few words and phrases. From him, James determined that the man had turned in early the night before complaining of a headache, and rolled out of bed sometime around six a.m., never coming to after that.

  “Any health issues?” James said.

  The cousin shook his head and shrugged, unsure of what he was asking.

  “Blood pressure?” James said.

  He nodded, his eyes widening happily, like they had just solved the puzzle and now they could all go home.

  “High blood pressure,” the cousin said.

  “Does he take medicine for it?” James asked. “Medicine?” He tried to mime taking a spoonful of something, swallowing it down. He hoped they understood. “Medicine,” he said again, this time almost screaming it, as if his volume were the problem.

  The guy said something to the wife, and she looked confused. James whistled, trying to disguise his frustration. He felt for the immigrant families they dealt with. Some were afraid to call 911 for fear of deportation. Maybe that’s why these people had waited so long. Others came to the United States but never interacted with anyone outside of their own culture, not trusting or understanding American ways.

  Language was a huge barrier—the city had been recruiting bilingual medics for a couple of years now. But even the immigrants who spoke English were different. The Irish, his own people, never wanted anyone to know their business. To be sick was a sign of weakness, so they kept it to themselves until the last possible second, and by then it was often too late.

  Maurice wrapped the cuff around the patient’s arm.

  “Two-fifty over one-twenty,” he said.

  Probably a bleed in the brain.

  “He will be okay?” the cousin kept asking, again and again. The woman was talking fast, gesturing at him to translate. He sighed. “She says he’s got work at six.”

  They were only a few years older than James himself. He saw kids’ drawings on the fridge, and a tiny plastic Christmas tree on a folding card table.

  Even if they had some common language, he never could have told this woman the truth: if she had called right away, her husband might have made it. But she had waited too long now for there to be any hope. He would leave it to the doctors in the ER to explain. Let them earn their fat paychecks.

  For the wife’s sake, they made a big show of rushing him to Mass General, even though it was too late.

  James realized when they got back in the truck after that he had forgotten to write down the guy’s last name. Now his form sat incomplete on top of the pile as James tried to figure out how he could explain the situation to his boss. It was a stupid mistake, one that he would never have made if he weren’t so exhausted. He needed to get his head on straight. He needed some sleep.

  For the past few hours, his legs shook every time he stood up. Now and then his thoughts started spinning out and pulling him under. Before the Haitians, there had been a twenty-year-old who lost two fingers in a snowblower when he reached in to fix a clog without shutting off the motor first.

  As he drove the kid to the hospital, for some reason James started thinking about the McGuires, who lived next door to him. Their house was a crumbling two-family. They lived in one half and rented the other side to a couple of young guys who were nice enough, though they alway
s seemed high. Why the hell did they have so much stuff piled up on their front porch? Rusty lawn furniture and dirty old stuffed animals, clothes and shoes and soggy newspaper. It was like the freaking Clampetts over there. He should confront Ted McGuire about it, man-to-man. That kind of shit was bad for the neighborhood. A few days earlier, there had been batteries strewn all over their lawn. Batteries!

  The truck shook violently. Somehow he had managed to drive up onto the curb.

  “McKeen, slow down,” came Maurice’s voice from the back.

  James looked at the speedometer. He was going eighty-five.

  “Sorry, man.”

  Batteries. Now suppose one of his kids picked one up and swallowed it. Maybe that particular scenario was unlikely, but who knew.

  Had Sheila gotten batteries for Parker’s robot? Every year they forgot the batteries, and spent half of Christmas morning taking old pairs out of alarm clocks and smoke detectors and the VCR remote. To be a totally together person would require nothing more than having an unopened package of double-As sitting on the coffee table once the presents were unwrapped, and yet somehow they couldn’t seem to manage it.

  In high school, there had been this kid they called Triple-A, because he was skinny, like a triple-A battery. Stupid nickname, come to think of it. Stupid nickname for a not altogether bright kid. One gorgeous summer afternoon, a bunch of them went up to the quarries behind Cunningham Park. They were drinking beers, swimming, having a good time, when Triple-A decided to jump in. Only he did it where everyone knew you weren’t supposed to—at a spot where the ledge below jutted out too far, and the water wasn’t deep enough. They heard him hit the ledge before his body flopped into the water. They all stood there. Connelly, Big Boy, Sean Fallon, Mike Sheehan. If James hadn’t jumped after the kid, the rest of them probably would have left him for dead. That was something to remember.