The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Nor had she gotten used to the portions they served you in the restaurants, enough food to feed a family but meant for a single person. Doggie bags. The way the waiters tried to clear your plate while you still held a fork aloft, or rushed you out as soon as you paid the bill, not caring whether you had finished your coffee.

  Coffee was another thing! The ubiquity of Starbucks. The women in yoga pants ordering their lattes in the morning without a bit of makeup on their faces, their hair up in haphazard buns, as if they had been awakened from a deep sleep and forced to go outside at gunpoint. The men were even worse, with their haircuts like helmets, and their beer bellies, and their shoes. In France, men’s shoes were made of the softest leather, with paper-thin, elegant soles and tapered toes. Here, they resembled boats.

  There were small things and big ones: Water served with ice. Grains in the sugar bowl instead of cubes. The false familiarity of strangers here, the way someone who you might have had a nice chat with at a party would say the two of you must go out sometime, for shopping or dinner, she’d give you a call, and then you’d never hear from her again.

  Of course, New York had its charms, like anyplace. She would not soon forget the beauty of the Chrysler Building. The way the sun gleamed off the glass skyscrapers at midday. How it felt to have your choice of Broadway shows on any given evening. She detested the American tendency to go go go, and yet she admired their idea that anyone could achieve his or her dreams, no matter the childhood they’d had. P.J. was proof of that. No, she mustn’t hate New York.

  But then again, even New Yorkers complained about it. They seemed to take pleasure in detailing all the worst parts of urban life: The stench of the garbage in summer, the impenetrable crowds in Times Square. The expense, the pace, the pressure, the small apartments, the anonymity. In Paris, they were proud of their city. I love Paris every moment, every moment of the year, went her father’s favorite Cole Porter song.

  At the elevators, she pressed the top button and watched it light up. A moment later, the silver doors to her right slid open and she stepped inside, letting them swallow her. The walls were mirrored—she couldn’t look away. People in New York often told her that she resembled Jacqueline Kennedy. The highest compliment you could get in this country, P.J. had once told her proudly, and she had thought of how the French admired Jackie because she seemed like one of them, not like an American at all.

  Now she noticed the dark, puffy circles beneath her eyes, the wrinkles at her lips. She was forty-one, and for the first time in her life she looked her age, perhaps older. Her father had told her when she was a girl that there were many things that made a woman beautiful, but none so much as being in love.

  When she first discovered the truth, Delphine had felt despair that ran through her body like liquid, creeping into every crevice, filling her up, so that all she could do was lie in a hotel room bed with the shades drawn. She wailed pitifully. She did not sleep or eat. Instead, she replayed each moment of their love affair, searching for the instant that it all went wrong. Things had been strained for a few months, she realized that. But she had never expected a betrayal like this. She had almost no money left, no job, and no friends anymore. She saw in an instant that she had turned P.J. into her world.

  After a week and a half at the hotel, Delphine woke one afternoon and went to the window. She pulled the heavy curtains back and looked out on the ugly city below. She was still heartbroken, but she felt stronger somehow, clearheaded, the way you feel on the first morning of recovery after an illness. She knew what she needed to do.

  She would leave New York—she had no reason to be here without him—but she would not just slink off, the pathetic scorned woman. She would make him remember.

  She had ignored P.J.’s calls, which led him to pout—he left voice mail after voice mail demanding that she let him know where she was, in a tone that made him sound like some stubborn brat who refused to eat his vegetables and vowed to hold his breath until his mother took his plate away.

  P.J. was a child. She should have recognized it from the start. Maybe she had recognized it, but then she went mad. Yes, he was young. Only twenty-four years old, and no doubt that was part of it. But he was also an American, and an artist. No one had ever asked him to be a man in the true sense.

  The fastest way to lose one’s enthrallment with an artist was to live with him. Other people saw P.J. as a virtuoso, and treated him as if he were the leading expert on every thread of human existence. The truth was that he had only this one thing—he could play the violin better than almost anyone. But the ability did not hint at some greater genius. His focus had been on his music for so long that other parts of him were dead from disuse, or had simply never developed. He wasn’t particularly bright or cultured, and he wasn’t sensitive.

  Even as she stood before him that night, sobbing, screaming that he had ruined her, he had taken her by the shoulders and said, “I can’t live with you hating me. You have to say you’ll find a way to be my friend.”

  It was these words, and not what he had done, that ran through her mind, keeping her awake.

  He had destroyed their life together and now all he cared about was that she might dislike him. How could she have fallen so deeply in love with such a pathetic coward? How could she have risked so much?

  The elevator deposited Delphine on the sixteenth floor. She took in the familiar scent of cleaning fluid and freshly vacuumed carpets as she made her way to the apartment, inserting her key into the lock. After their final argument, he had not asked her to give it back, and she had not thought to offer. The key and the ring. She had kept them both. But she would leave the key behind when she left today, and mail the ring back to his mother as soon as she reached her destination. She could have just sent it from New York, but she dreaded the American post office, with its surly employees who acted as if she were speaking Latin. “I can’t understand you,” they’d say roughly, and she would feel herself blushing with embarrassment in front of a line full of strangers.

  Inside the apartment, all was still but for the sound of the dog, Charlie, shuffling out from the bathroom. He cocked his head inquisitively, and then went back to the cool tile floor. P.J. was obsessed with that animal. He said the dog reminded him of a simpler time, of running through the backyard of his parents’ home in Ohio.

  He let the dog sleep in the bed. Once, when he had a performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, they had driven there and back, staying in dreary motels along the way, because he refused to put Charlie in an airplane’s cargo hold, and the only person he trusted to dog-sit was out of town. Delphine had never liked dogs, or, for that matter, people who were overly infatuated with them. Dogs were needy, making gods of their masters. Now she saw that P.J. was exactly the sort of person who would crave that kind of arrangement.

  She walked through the foyer, putting her suitcase on the floor before she stepped into the living room. The Stradivarius had a place of honor, upright in its stand in the far corner. This morning he was teaching a master class at Juilliard. For that, he would have taken something less impressive, but still very good: the Guadagnini, perhaps.

  Delphine remembered seeing the class written on the calendar in red ink, in the middle of an otherwise empty block of days. She had reveled in that emptiness, imagining all the things they would do with a rare week off. He was away so often, fifty shows a year. She dreamed of the time when their life would slow down some. In a few years, he might be offered an endowed chair at a prestigious conservatory, and then he would be on the road so much less.

  These were the sorts of thoughts she had had only two weeks earlier. Amazing how quickly life could change, and with no warning. Or perhaps there had been a warning. Yes.

  Delphine went to the violin. The Stradivarius had brought them together. She had known it much longer than she had known him. It was beautiful. The finest she had ever seen, made by the Master himself in 1712. When P.J. played it, a single instrument became a symphony orchestra.


  The critics praised him for the uniqueness of his playing, which they said was technically perfect yet full of imagination. They called him “the Rogue,” because no other living concert violinist was quite like him. He played with his entire body, moving to the rhythm, his hair falling into his eyes with every stroke of the bow. In particularly emotional moments, he had a tendency to press his cheek sideways in the chin rest and close his eyes, like a young boy snuggling into his pillow. He smiled when he played. Privately he might complain—about the travel, the pressures—but onstage, he seemed a world away from any cares. Delphine had once thought that this spoke to his true love of the craft, but now she saw that it had more to do with his powers to deceive.

  She went to the kitchen and placed the brown bag on the counter. The room was tidy and clean, which surprised her. Then came a hard, mean punch in the stomach. Of course. He was keeping it nice for her.

  When Delphine moved in, there were things she couldn’t know about him; they hadn’t spent enough time together yet. P.J. usually had the TV blaring when he was home, and even turned it on for the dog when he went out. He made a mess without noticing, and left the sink full of dishes.

  The first time Delphine saw the apartment, she nearly cried—when he told her he owned a large one-bedroom in a nice Art Deco building on the Upper West Side, he failed to add that it was decorated like a college dorm room. There was a futon positioned a few feet away from the world’s largest television set and flanked by milk crates on either side. In the bedroom, a mattress lay on the floor beside a splintering dresser and bookcase that he had pulled from a stranger’s trash on moving day, and a set of bright orange van seats, which he had actually paid for when a favorite rock band came through town and decided to upgrade to a tour bus.

  “I’m on the road a lot,” he said then, pulling her close. “And it’s just been me here. It needs a woman’s touch.”

  This was not the sort of remark that would normally have moved her to action. But as if under some spell, Delphine had transformed the place. After years of vying with Henri’s mother for the role of design expert, now she had carte blanche to do as she liked.

  She spent the fall in a haze of love, strutting along Madison Avenue and spending untold sums of both their money on Oriental rugs, thousand-thread-count sheets and towels, nice china, a glass-topped dining table with white upholstered chairs, and a king-sized mattress and box spring with a white fabric headboard. The bedding too was all white, topped with a white down comforter, so plush that it felt like you might float away.

  In a gallery downtown, she found blueprints of Lincoln Center, which she had framed and hung over the mantel. She didn’t miss her work back home in Paris, or even wonder how the shop was doing without her. At night she would return home to him with her latest treasures, and he would praise her progress. They usually wound up making love, wrapped naked in one another’s arms until morning.

  Now Delphine reached into the paper bag, pulling out two bottles of cabernet and opening them both. She poured herself a big glass and took a sip, even though it was not yet ten o’clock. She lit a cigarette, taking a long drag before resting it against a tea saucer. He did not allow her to smoke in the apartment. When he was home, she had always dutifully gone downstairs and out to the sidewalk. If he went away, she still feared that he’d pick up the scent, so she smoked with her head sticking out of the open bedroom window like a teenager.

  She would begin there, in the bedroom. She walked in purposefully, a bottle of wine in each hand. Standing over the bed, she held them sideways, and shook them up and down as if dressing a salad. The first splashes of purple on the bedspread made her heart thump. But it got easier as she went along, and soon she was emptying the remains of one bottle onto the pale blue rug, and the other straight into his pillowcase. She stepped back, surveying her work.

  Delphine had wondered if perhaps she would feel sorry, seeing the apartment destroyed. But she felt free, like the only benefit of watching her world come apart was the fact that she had nothing left to fear. She had made this place perfect for the two of them, not for him and someone else.

  She dropped the bottles onto the bed. Next, the shirts.

  Delphine had often urged him to dress better, more like a man. P.J. wore the expected formal wear when he was performing, but the rest of the time he looked like a sloppy adolescent. Outside of work, he insisted on wearing the soft, candy-colored t-shirts he had collected through the years, translucent and tinged gray from overuse. If you saw him in the street, you would never guess who he was. She bought him a refined black suit from Dior and a pair of gorgeous leather shoes, but he never wore them.

  She left the suit alone; he wouldn’t care about that. But she pulled the t-shirts from a drawer one by one, building an efficient pile on her right arm. She brought them back to the counter, and opened the utensil drawer, where she found the kitchen shears she had purchased at Williams-Sonoma for eighty dollars.

  She started with the black shirt that read COLLEGE across the front, and then moved on to the dark orange one with the words TEXAS LAW, and next a green, sweat-stained shirt covered in dollar signs and the peeling statement BANKERS DO IT WITH INTEREST. The sound of the stainless steel blades slicing through cotton was cool and precise. It reminded her of autumn leaves being crunched underfoot. She breathed in, snipping and snipping two dozen or so shirts until there was nothing left but a confetti of fabric at her feet.

  She looked at her watch. She had planned every step of this like a general going into battle. So far she was running a few minutes ahead of schedule. She opened the cupboard and pulled out a jar of peanut butter, unscrewed the lid, and placed the jar on the counter. Then she lifted out a stack of plates. Delphine threw the first one down, but without conviction. It just wobbled on the floor for a moment before landing flat and intact. Something in her held back. She remembered the two of them standing in the china department of Bloomingdale’s, playfully arguing over which pattern they should choose. Afterward, they waited in line at Dean & DeLuca for steaming cups of cappuccino, his arm wrapped tight around her waist.

  Delphine took a deep breath, feeling her rib cage fill up with air. She lifted the next plate from the pile, and this one she threw with great force, watching it break into pieces as it hit the ground. She repeated the motion with each of the plates below, feeling something vaguely sexual with the impact of every smash. At some point, as she knew he would, the dog came in to investigate. She grabbed him by the collar before he could get near the broken pieces, taking the peanut butter in her free hand and guiding him back to the bathroom, where he would spend the next thirty minutes gorging on the stuff straight from the jar with the fan whirring overhead. This was what P.J. had done whenever they had a fight, so that, as he put it, the dog would not be traumatized.

  Back in the kitchen, she peeked into the refrigerator, which contained most of what had been there when she left: Camembert and blue cheese from Zabar’s, and pickles and eggs. On the counter next to the fridge there was one new addition; a green glass bottle of pastis, about a quarter of the way gone.

  Delphine opened the refrigerator door wider now, and left it open. She opened the freezer as well, then unplugged the machine from the wall.

  2012

  Kate woke to the sound of her mother’s alarmed stage whisper in the kitchen. They have nothing but soy milk in the fridge. You’d think when company’s coming—

  Then, her sister May jumping to the rescue: I’ll go find a convenience store and get some regular milk. Wait, do they even have convenience stores out here?

  Because her cousin Jeffrey had decided to get married in the Hudson River Valley in April, Kate had six relatives—including the three kids—staying under her roof for the weekend. Above her head, the bedroom skylight revealed a square of perfect blue, the first sunny Saturday of spring. She could think of so many things she’d love to do today: take her daughter for a hike, dig around in the back garden, spend all afternoon out
on the deck with a book. But none of that would happen.

  “I hate weddings,” she said.

  Dan lay beside her with the comforter pulled up under his chin like every morning. She could tell that he was awake, but instead of opening his eyes he closed them even tighter. “Why do we have to suffer just because they’re in love?”

  Kate groaned. “I know it.”

  She should have gotten up earlier, before everyone else. She should have been showered and dressed by the time they all came downstairs. She should have prepared a delicious breakfast. A strada or frittata or something like that. Usually, Ava was her alarm clock, but today someone must have swooped in and gotten her out of bed. Kate knew she ought to feel grateful, but it meant that now it was after eight, and her mother was already judging the contents of her refrigerator. As Jeffrey’s aunt and godmother, she would give a reading at the ceremony this evening. No doubt, this had her even more on edge than usual.

  May and her husband, Josh, had brought along their three children, ages ten, eight, and five, because, as May had put it over the phone when the save-the-dates arrived, “It doesn’t exactly align with our beliefs, but a gay wedding is a teachable moment. It’s a coup these days to get your kids invited to one.”

  They had driven out from New Jersey the night before, shattering the country quiet as soon as May’s massive SUV pulled into the driveway. Kate went out to meet them, inhaling deeply, asking the God she wasn’t sure she believed in to give her strength.