The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Sheila had looked up through tears. “Oh, what’s the point of saying any of that shit? You weren’t there.”

  Ever since, he hadn’t been able to sleep. He wasn’t a good sleeper to begin with, and now, even though he was usually bone tired when he got into bed, as soon as his head hit the pillow his heart began to pound, and he was suddenly wide awake. James would force himself to close his eyes. For the next few hours, he’d lie there, thrashing around, trying to get comfortable. By morning, it was impossible to know if he had slept at all. He never felt rested. All day, he dreamed of sleep. He was dizzy, unfocused. But then he’d finally reach his bed, and the cycle would begin again.

  Sheila had been having nightmares. She insisted that he check the locks two or three times every night. She wanted them to move. She was worried about the kids, and about James’s mother living on her own in what Sheila had now decided was a bad neighborhood. He felt defensive of the street he’d grown up on, even as he knew his wife was coming from a good place. His mother had moved in with them for a while after her stroke two years back. Sheila had a newborn to care for, but she nursed his mother back to life like it was nothing; she did reading exercises and physical therapy with her, practicing the right way to hold a hairbrush and walk down the stairs. She gave his mother sponge baths and painted her toenails, without so much as a single complaint.

  James wished there were some way to start over. The mugging had broken something in him, some part that was already dangling, not firmly in place to begin with. Everything he had suspected about himself had proven true. He had failed to protect his own family. And now that it was clear, there was still nothing he could do. He couldn’t afford to move them someplace safer, with a big backyard and a pool. He was stuck, and they were stuck with him.

  In high school, people thought of him as one of the best-looking guys in their class, even though he was never tall like his brother. Sheila told him all the time how lucky she felt that someone as handsome as him had chosen her. He remembered this electricity in the way they’d move together at CYO dances, the nuns putting a ruler between them and commanding that they leave some room for the Holy Ghost or else their mothers would be notified. James felt now like he had tricked her. Her friends, who she had felt so superior to back then, had seen their average-looking husbands grow into men with money and power, the sort of guys who took them to the Bahamas for an anniversary, or out to dinner in town every Friday night. And what did Sheila have? The formerly handsome teenager who had failed to live up to his potential.

  A few months ago, they had gone to Papa Gino’s for pizza one night, a rare dinner out. As the boys fiddled with the tabletop jukebox, James saw her slide a coupon across the counter to the girl at the register—two medium pies for the price of one. When the girl turned to answer the phone, Sheila quickly snatched the coupon back and put it in her purse. She glanced over at him and winked, as if they had just pulled off a bank heist. His wife was proud of herself, and it made him feel like the biggest asshole to ever walk the earth.

  A blind man could see what a failure he was, but rather than try to make up for it by acting like a prince, sometimes he just lashed out at her. His Irish temper, his mother called it. He would never hurt Sheila or the kids, but out of frustration he had broken things—a cracked lamp, a shattered glass, a hole in the wall. He once punched himself in the face during a fight with Sheila, gave himself a black eye. She had mocked him for that one for ages. The simple truth was that she was everything to him. If he lost her, that would be it.

  Inside the house, he unhooked the dog’s leash and started the coffee. He went to the cabinet to the left of the sink and pulled out the big bottle of ibuprofen. He took three, and swallowed them down without water. As he leaned his head up to do this, he could see where the paint was cracking. The spot had started out the size of a pancake but was now as big as a hula hoop. Inside the dark brown ring the ceiling had started to sag, threatening him. James looked away. He vowed not to look again until after Christmas.

  He felt dead tired, staring down the prospect of his third twenty-four-hour shift this week. He would give anything to go back to bed—just crawl in beside Sheila and wrap himself around her and sleep all day. They hadn’t done that in ages, not since before the kids. Sheila worked in the OR at the Brigham, three eighteens every week, on his off days. They had set it up this way for the boys, but they hardly saw each other anymore, other than Sundays.

  He had never wanted her to have to work after they had children. Her mother hadn’t, and her sister Debbie didn’t now. Sheila never mentioned this, but he could feel the weight of it every time her sister went on about spending a Tuesday at the Y with her kids, or the fact that Sheila really ought to get more involved in the PTA.

  Debbie was the bane of his existence. She had married a sleazebag named Drew who went to college at UMass Amherst and now she lived the life of Riley in a nice house in Milton. In the seventies, Drew and Debbie were disco freaks. It was one thing for a woman to get into that shit, but what self-respecting man would? To this day, James referred to Drew almost exclusively as John Travolta. He was one of those shady lawyers who advertised on TV: Your husband died of asbestos? Call now! Your kid ate lead paint? Call now! A pit bull chewed up your grandma? …

  James probably hated Drew most of all because of the way he and Debbie had met: right after high school, when James and Sheila split up for close to a year, Sheila had dated some jackass who was in law school. Drew was the jackass’s best friend.

  Every time they went to Debbie and Drew’s for supper, James could feel them holding it all over his head: they were doing better by a landslide, they might buy a summer place soon. Sheila and Debbie were close, so they unfortunately saw a lot of each other. In his opinion, Debbie took every chance she could to rank on Sheila, though his wife said that’s just how sisters were.

  Sheila had gained some weight with the boys, mainly right around her stomach, and she was self-conscious about it, even though she was still as beautiful as the day he first saw her. She bought exercise videos and made fun of herself, telling the kids, “Look at Mommy—I’ve got an extra butt in the front.” Debbie, on the other hand, worked like a maniac to stay thin. It was a job to her—aerobics class every morning, a jog in the afternoon, something called Jazzercise twice a week, to which she wore hot pink leg warmers and a black leotard, and after which she lay in a tanning booth for half an hour. Yet she complained to Sheila about her weight, which only made Sheila feel worse. Last summer, Debbie had returned from a trip to Hyannis with a gift for Sheila: a wooden wall hanging printed with a picture of a hippo in a bathing suit, teetering above the words I Don’t Skinny Dip, I Chunky Dunk.

  “Isn’t it funny?” Debbie said. “I got one for me, too!”

  Seeing the injured look on his wife’s face, he had wanted to smack her sister, or—since he’d never hit a woman—maybe John Travolta instead.

  James waited for the water to boil, then poured himself a cup of black coffee. He pulled a clean towel from a stack on the dining room table and glanced into the living room, where the Christmas tree stood, slightly tilted, in the corner. Sheila was crazy about Christmas. She had been hanging garlands everywhere and singing carols for the past month. James went out and got the tree the first morning the local nursery had them in. It was small, and they had suffocated it with gold tinsel, strands of which he kept finding in the boys’ hair, in his pockets, stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Last year, they had waited until Christmas Eve to buy one, when all the trees were half off, but this year he was determined to make things special for her, whatever the cost.

  He made his way up the staircase toward the shower, stopping at the door to the boys’ bedroom. He peeked in at them. Their chests rose and fell rhythmically with each breath; the smell of their sleep hung in the air. Parker had four Ninja Turtles arranged in a straight line beside his head. He always instructed James to wish each turtle good night.

  “Sweet dreams, Raphael,” Ja
mes would say, holding the plastic figurine up to the lamp before tucking it beneath the sheet and picking up another.

  “Michelangelo, I know you’re a party dude, but it’s time for bed.”

  Parker laughed hysterically every time. It was so easy to make him laugh.

  On his nights home alone, James fed the boys frozen fish sticks or microwaved chicken nuggets with ketchup and put them to bed around seven. He read them stories and sang to them—“Blackbird,” “Norwegian Wood,” all sorts of sad, dark songs that were inappropriate for kids if you really thought about it, but they didn’t seem to notice the words. Afterward, he’d watch them sleep, sometimes for half an hour.

  Now, through the open door across the hall, he could see Sheila turning under the covers. He took a step and the floorboards creaked beneath his feet.

  Sheila’s head shot up.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Hi, hon. I didn’t hear you come up.”

  He went to her, sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t scare me. What time is it?”

  “Almost five-thirty.”

  “The pants from your uniform are in the dryer,” she said. “And your shirt is hanging up down the basement.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Weather report says a foot of snow today.”

  She sighed. “Jesus.”

  “I know.”

  Parker padded across the hall and into their room, blinking several times, struggling to open his eyes.

  “Only one more day until Christmas, Mom!” he said. “How many hours?”

  “Twenty-four. Go back to bed, honey,” Sheila said. “It’s too early.”

  “It’s not too early for me,” Parker said, his voice booming.

  “Well, it’s too early for me,” she said. “Inside voices, okay? You’ll wake the baby.”

  “It’s not too early for Dad. Will you read me the funnies before you leave, Dad? I know you’ve got to go, but just a couple?” Parker’s tone was impossibly hopeful, as if he’d asked for the moon.

  “You’ll be late,” Sheila warned. “Parker, back to bed.”

  She always said James turned her into the bad cop by putting himself in the role of the fun one. But how could you deny the kid a request so sweet and small?

  “Just one?” Parker pleaded. “Family Circus? Or Garfield?”

  “Just one,” James said, though they both knew he’d read them all. He walked to his son and took him by the hand, leading him out into the hall and back toward the stairs.

  “Are you gonna do the voices, Dad?”

  “I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet.”

  Parker beamed. “Mom isn’t good at getting the voices right.”

  Sheila’s words sailed out from the bedroom: “I heard that!”

  He could almost hear her smile.

  “Of course she did,” James whispered.

  Parker stood up tall, like he did around his older cousins. He shook his head, and said knowingly, “Of course.”

  Then he asked, “Dad, do you think Santa’s gonna bring me the Rolly Robot?”

  The Rolly Robot was the hardest toy on earth to find. Every toy store in Massachusetts said they’d be getting in a new shipment on January third. A lot of good it was going to do parents then. James and Sheila had gotten obsessed somewhere around the middle of the month. Together and separately, they had driven as far as Worcester and stopped at every store along the way, even the hardware stores, which made no sense. He finally found one wedged behind a display of back massagers at the Radio Shack in the South Shore Plaza. Maybe somebody had hidden it there, or maybe God had finally decided to cut him a break. Whatever the case, he couldn’t explain the sheer joy that came over him then. He felt like he was unstoppable. Like he had just invented penicillin or something.

  Parker was in the room when he got home that night and told Sheila the news. “The thing came through,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I got the thing.” Had he said this twenty years earlier, she would have assumed he was referring to beer or maybe a joint, but she realized what he meant, and said, “Oh wow. You’re my hero.”

  Now he turned to Parker and said, “It probably depends on whether or not you give your mom a hard time today while I’m at work.”

  “I won’t,” Parker said earnestly.

  “Then I’m thinking it’s a strong possibility.”

  “Woohoo!” Parker shouted, as loud as his lungs could manage.

  Right on cue, Danny’s wail broke out through the house. Rocky slumped up the stairs and began to howl in solidarity.

  “And we’re off!” Sheila said. She appeared in the hall a moment later, looking like an angel, pulling on her robe.

  2003

  The dress was an old shirtwaist of her mother’s: dark blue, with tiny light blue flowers swirling across the skirt and bodice. It had a thin leather belt, the color of a cloudless sky. Delphine thought she could remember her mother wearing it, though as with all memories of her mother, this may just have been her imagination.

  Earlier that morning, she folded the dress carefully and wrapped it in tissue paper before placing it in the suitcase with the rest of her things. But then she decided to slip it on. She had lost weight these past two weeks. Even when she pulled the belt to its tightest, it fell slack across her waist.

  She added the vintage Chanel heels, which she had purchased in a boutique on the rue de Passy when she was at university twenty years earlier. She had had them resoled half a dozen times since.

  She wore this exact ensemble on the night they first flew from Paris to New York, her hand squeezing P.J.’s from takeoff until landing. She remembered looking down at the buildings below, which twinkled like toys and seemed flimsy compared to the man by her side. The diamond ring he had given her glowed on her finger. It fit perfectly, as if it were made for her, even though it was probably a hundred years old.

  When they stood up to leave the plane that night, the stewardess touched her shoulder, holding up a sweater and asking, “Does this belong to your husband?” Delphine had not corrected her to say that they were only engaged. She loved the sound of it. Your husband. Their lives were all before them. P.J. was helping an elderly woman pull an overstuffed shopping bag down from the compartment above—he was six foot one, with broad shoulders and a wide, muscular back. His dark hair did not yet contain a single strand of gray. The sight of him, every time, made her breath catch in her chest.

  Delphine had never felt anything like it. For him, she had gladly left her life behind—her business, her home, her marriage to Henri.

  Only a year had passed since that night. There was something about this fact that made the situation all the more painful; it was no time at all. She had followed her desire down a path that history had proven would lead to disaster. Yet she had been selfish enough to believe that in her case, things would be different.

  On West Seventy-fourth Street, she stepped out of a taxicab and into the late August sun. She held her suitcase in one hand and balanced a brown paper grocery bag on the opposite hip. His apartment building loomed above her, casting a shadow over the sidewalk. The building had a name, the Wilfred, which put her in mind of an elderly man with thinning hair and a cigar. New York struck her as a masculine city, full of tall buildings and sharp edges, lacking any softness.

  “Morning,” the Russian doorman said as he opened the glass door. “Do you need help with the bundles?”

  She eyed his white-gloved fingers on the brass handle.

  “No thank you.”

  “P.J.’s already gone to work,” he said.

  The doormen all called him by his first name. P.J. insisted on it. The sound surprised her every time. It was too intimate; it seemed forced.

  “I know.” She smiled. “I have my key.”

  He gave her a suspicious look. She wondered if P.J. had told him everything. She could just picture him swaggering home drunk f
rom some bar, draping an arm around this man’s shoulders. Hey buddy, have I got a story for you.

  Or perhaps the doorman had only noticed her absence. He hadn’t been on duty the night she left, two weeks earlier. It was the older fellow, the Irishman, who bowed his head as she made her way out in tears, lugging her things behind her. Then again, the doormen probably all talked and knew the business of every tenant. When she lived here, they had seen her fiancé come in and out with another woman—how many times?—yet they always smiled at Delphine, keeping his secret.

  For the past few months, even before everything went wrong, she had missed her home in Paris, on the fourth floor of a typical Haussmannian apartment building in the seventh arrondissement. The building, which dated to 1894, sat on the rue de Grenelle, just off the rue Cler, a neighborhood she had always thought of as terribly bourgeois. Her husband had inherited the apartment when his parents retired to the country. It was large—four chambres, a parlor, a dining room, living room, and study. Delphine had never loved it. Even after she replaced much of his mother’s Louis XVI furniture with clean, modern pieces in white and gray, and crammed her books onto the shelf alongside Henri’s, part of her felt like a guest. But now she had the strangest desire to be back there. To slip into the claw-foot tub once again, to stand in the elevator, with its black metal grating that had to be forcibly pulled aside before you could get in.

  It was odd how you could long for a place that you had never much cared about. She sometimes missed an intersection or a perfume shop, the old men playing afternoon boules on the esplanade des Invalides. At a random moment, she might crave the feeling of standing at the comptoir of a certain café, where she drank coffee some mornings in her twenties, or the sight of children eating ice cream cones carved into the shape of flowers, which had become popular just before she left.

  Now she entered the Wilfred’s marble lobby, which was too cold, as usual. After all this time, she still had not grown accustomed to the American obsession with air-conditioning. Every store and subway car had it—an ecological disaster, but an apparent necessity for American comfort. In apartments, people perched giant, unsightly metal cubes on the window-sills, which used up an incredible amount of electricity to force cold air into the room. The backs of these cubes hung out of thousands of windows around the city; all summer long, condensation dripped off them and straight onto your forehead as you made your way along the sidewalk below. She hadn’t grown accustomed to that, either.