Delphine felt herself sinking deeper into the chair with each confident word he uttered. She rehearsed what she had planned to say: She had a background in sales after spending the last few years as a realtor, and she had walked by this shop hundreds of times, thousands maybe, in awe of the place. She had wanted to own it for as long as she could remember. This had been her father’s dream, and he had passed it along to her as clearly as he had passed along his long, lean legs and sharp nose. He called her many things: ma tourterelle, mon petit canard, choosing the names of birds to describe her. But in the end, it was he who flew away.
When her turn came, Delphine forgot about whatever meager credentials she might have, and instead told them that she too had lost her father, only a year ago.
“Oh no!” the children cried out, for they could remember the handsome and good Ludovic Moreau, who had lived just around the corner in the ivy-covered house on the rue Cauchois. You could see the house from the front door of the shop if you craned your neck to the right.
“Do you still live there?” the girl asked.
“Oui,” she said. “Your father was such a good man. I know I could love this store every bit as much as he did. It is my favorite place in all of Paris. When I was a child, my father used to bring me here on Saturday mornings. He was a pianist, you know, and this shop was his house of worship. It meant more to him than any cathedral in France. When he died, I came here. I wasn’t expecting to, but I started to cry. Your father was so kind to me. He told me my father was a good man, one of his favorite customers, and that I should come in anytime.”
Afterward, the children went into the workshop. Even they had never been allowed inside when their father was alive, and she wondered what it felt like to them now. They did not say goodbye, nor did they promise to return. Delphine couldn’t be certain if they would come back momentarily and announce their decision, or call her later with the verdict.
“Are we supposed to wait?” she asked Henri, and he shrugged as if he didn’t particularly care, but then he went outside and she watched him pace on the sidewalk in front of the cobbler’s shop for ten minutes. He was a compact man, about her height. Slim, with waves in his silver hair. He looked to be around fifty. He wore sophisticated black-rimmed eyeglasses and a nice suit, but he seemed uncomfortable. She imagined that he was the academic type most of the time, the type who lived in oversized sweaters at home.
Eventually, Dubray’s children returned. The girl waved Henri inside the shop with a smile, and Delphine felt disappointed, but also somewhat relieved. The whole thing might have been a dreadful idea, really. She knew little about historic instruments, and even less about restoration. Perhaps this was just the fates saving her from herself. But then again she needed something new, a challenge that could fill up all the holes in her. She no longer had any interest in romance, not now, although it had been her favorite distraction in the past.
The oldest boy, probably twenty-five or so, said, “Monsieur Petit. Mademoiselle Moreau. Please, sit down.”
They all sat around the desk this time.
“We have talked it over, and we’ve decided that there is a perfect solution,” he said, sounding more like a child than a man. He had his father’s kind eyes, and Delphine smiled at him, knowing how these sorts of decisions could weigh on a person. The children’s mother had been much younger than their father, but she too was gone, having died of cancer a few years back. They were orphans now, like Delphine herself.
The boy went on. “The perfect owner for the shop is—”
“Both of you!” his sister interrupted.
The boy’s entire body drooped. She had robbed him of his moment, and he could not hide his dismay.
“Pardon?” Henri said.
“Monsieur Petit, you know this business well. You studied with our father,” the oldest boy said. “And Mademoiselle Moreau, she is full of light and excitement. She is of the neighborhood. She understands the sentimental value of the place. You will work well together.”
“So you want me to buy the shop and hire her?” Henri asked.
“We want you to buy it together,” the girl said.
“This is not how these things happen,” Henri stammered. “You don’t just buy property with a stranger. It could go so horribly wrong. You must let us each make an offer and accept the best one. Be sensible.”
Delphine bit her lower lip. She could not afford to get into a bidding war with this man. She had only enough to buy the shop for the low listed price, and hardly even that.
The older boy shook his head. “We don’t care so much about the money. We just want to do as Papa would have wished. If we could, we would keep the shop in the family, but it’s not practical.”
Henri scoffed. “Oh, and this idea is practical? You’ll regret this later, I promise you.”
“No,” the girl said. “We will only regret coming back in five years’ time and finding that the store is gone. Our father gave us strictest orders to find the best possible person—or people—to buy it if anything ever happened to him.”
“And Papa was a romantic, so …” the younger boy added, trailing off and nodding in their direction. Delphine had no idea what he meant, not until she thought about it weeks later, at which point she let out a great peal of laughter.
“I cannot accept this,” Henri said.
“Just think it over,” the older boy said, and that was all.
Afterward, she and Henri walked out. Delphine assumed he would turn right, toward the Metro Blanche, and so even though her apartment was in that direction, she went left. But then so did he. She could feel his presence weighing on her back. She stopped abruptly to turn around, and they collided on the sidewalk.
“Do you agree that it’s absurd?” he asked, as if just noticing her for the first time.
Maybe so, but plenty of things were absurd. It was absurd that she had not had a boyfriend to speak of since university, and that boyfriend was now married with two children, and living in a vineyard in Bordeaux, while she still managed to get her heart broken every year or so; a hopeless romantic with a taste for unkind men. It was absurd that she was thirty-three and yet still unsure about what to do with her life. It was absurd that her father, the best and strongest man who had ever lived, was now dead and buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, where cats and American tourists regularly walked over his grave. In a way, Delphine blamed him for her restlessness. He had treated her as if she were the most special girl on earth, and she had assumed that the world would agree. Yet she had lived her life so far with no clear plan, blown about by circumstance.
“It’s a strange proposition, yes,” she said. She wondered how long Henri would fight for the store, and whether he would win.
They turned onto the rue Lepic, where cafés and shops and pâtisseries lined the street. They followed the road up the hill until they got stuck behind a guide, speaking English to her group in chipper tones: “Vincent van Gogh had little professional success in his lifetime. It was here in his brother Theo’s house that he lived in the years before he fatally shot himself. His last words, according to Theo, were La tristesse durera toujours. Does anyone know what that means? No guesses? It means, ‘The sadness will last forever.’ ”
The Americans began snapping pictures of one another in front of the house.
Henri raised an eyebrow. “And what do you suppose they will do with those photos? Turn them into Christmas cards?”
“ ‘Peace and joy to you this holiday season. Here is where van Gogh lived just before his horrific suicide!’ ”
He nodded. “ ‘P.S. The sadness will last forever.’ ”
She smiled.
“I detest Montmartre,” he said. “Nothing but tourists and pretentious artists and bobos. Where do you live?”
“Montmartre,” she said. “I grew up here.”
The fact had already been established at Dubray’s. Was he mocking her?
“Ahh!” he closed his eyes, slapped his forehead.
“I’m an idiot.”
She saw now that he had somehow missed it. He seemed genuinely embarrassed.
“No, no. It’s all right. Montmartre is not for everyone,” she said, although in truth she couldn’t imagine anyone wandering these streets without falling in love.
The area had changed some since she was a child. Back then, there was a boulangerie on every corner, and now most of them were gone. Two of her father’s favorites retained the old signs, but had been converted—one into a preschool, the other a law office. Many of the old tabacs were now late-night grocery stores run by North African immigrants. There was even a frozen-foods shop around the block from her house.
But these changes pleased her. Paris was always evolving—the original and the bold right on top of what had been there for thousands of years, old and new peacefully intertwined. In recent years, she had gone with her father to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop perform at La Cigale in Pigalle, in the same theater where her grandparents had once seen Maurice Chevalier.
In some ways, arriving in Montmartre still felt like entering another time. You could go to Au Lapin Agile for performances and sit in chairs that had once been occupied by Modigliani, Picasso, Renoir. Every October as a child, she stomped grapes like a good country girl at the Clos Montmartre, where nuns and monks had produced three hundred liters of wine each year since the twelfth century. Her father didn’t care for the tourists who flocked to the cathedral and the carousel at the foot of the steps, asking, Where is the Moulin Rouge, the entrance to the funicular, the statue of the bra of Dalida—Dalida, who had brought so much joy through her disco music and her bouncing breasts, only to meet a tragic end. But Delphine felt proud that outsiders wanted to peek at their world. And anyway, she thought the best parts were the ones that the tourists never noticed—the astonishing view of Paris from the outdoor tables at Chez Pommette, toward the top of the hill. The artist studios built high up in the garrets of old houses.
The tourists disappeared at the bottom of the hill, where rent was cheap and, in years past, anyway, bohemians congregated by the dozens. She had lived there, on the fourth floor above a café on the rue des Martyrs, for most of her childhood. She grew up knowing the names of the butcher and the cheese monger, the old woman who ran the pâtisserie and snuck her a moelleux chocolat every day after school, and the couple from Auvergne who ran the tabac, all of them comprising the only big and boisterous family that she, the lone child of a widower, would ever have.
When she was ten, they moved a ways up the hill, into the brick house on rue Cauchois. Delphine had always thought it the most beautiful house in Paris, its walls climbing with ivy, the bright red geraniums in the window boxes set against tall white shutters that her father flung open each morning with a song for the birds. It didn’t look like other houses in the city—it was not Haussmannian or even Art Nouveau—and this made it special. The owner, Madame Delecourt, lived on the first floor. There were two apartments on the second level, and three on the third. Delphine and her father lived in one of these. He stayed there until just a few years ago, when he moved in with his horrible girlfriend, at which point Delphine moved back in on her own. Madame Delecourt had since died. Her nephew now owned the building. Delphine sensed that he was eager for her to go—as soon as she vacated, he could rent the place out for five times what she paid. But she had no intention of leaving.
“Would you like to get a coffee?” Henri asked her now.
She said she would, though in truth she wasn’t sure. They went to the café on the corner. He ordered café au lait, and she had a citron pressé, not wanting the effects of caffeine in her already nervous state. They each lit a cigarette, and talked about music, which seemed likely to be their only common ground. They agreed about the great masters, of course: Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler. He said his favorites were Ravel and Debussy.
Delphine smiled. Her father had preferred the French composers too, taking such pride in them. She could hear him playing “Clair de Lune” at the piano in Madame Delecourt’s parlor when she came home from school for the lunch hour.
“Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Arvo Pärt,” she said. “I just love his music. There’s such soul to it. It’s deceptively simple, I think. But it seems the simplest can sometimes be the hardest to carry off.”
“Ridiculous!” Henri snapped.
She was surprised by his intensity, and she knew her expression made it clear.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. It’s all very odd.” She supposed he meant the arrangement with the store, but now he returned to his point.
“I don’t care for contemporary composers,” he said. “Pärt, when set against Schubert or Brahms or Bruckner, shows himself to be nothing of consequence.”
Her father had always said to beware a Bruckner fan.
Henri went on about how tragic it was that the best of music was long past. He had little respect for anyone presently composing. “The new generation,” he called them dismissively, as if Pärt, Takemitsu, and Philip Glass were a gang of young hoodlums.
“How did you come to know so much about classical music?” he asked. “Dubray’s children mentioned your father. Was he a musician?”
“A pianist,” she said. “He studied at the Paris Conservatory.”
She left out the fact that he made his money playing Gershwin and Cole Porter in a hotel bar, and saved on the rent by giving lessons and impromptu performances for the landlady and her friends. Henri struck her as coincé, uptight, and overly serious. She could only imagine what he’d say about that.
He told her that his own father had studied violin as a child and had pushed him in the same direction.
“I love music more than anything,” he said. “But I have no talent for it.”
She nodded. “I am just the same.”
“My father was a collector, and I followed him in that,” Henri said. “As a boy of seven, eight, nine, I visited flea markets, estate sales, and public auctions all over Europe to assemble the collection I have today. It runs from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.”
“Do you have a favorite piece?” she asked.
“I have a perfect François-Xavier Tourte bow,” he said.
“Ahh.”
Her father had taught her about Tourte, who destroyed any bow that wasn’t flawless, who enhanced the very sound of the violin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and whose bows now sold for roughly the price of a new Ferrari.
“It’s not my favorite, though,” Henri said, bragging a bit, she thought.
“No?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“The year I was born, my father bought a Stradivarius violin for almost nothing. He gave it to me on my tenth birthday. Another made in the same year just sold for two million dollars in America. That one belonged to a general in Napoleon’s army. After the sale, I got many inquiries. I won’t part easily with mine, though.”
She pulled back in surprise.
“Where do you keep it?” she asked.
“At home in my study, in a glass case.”
It seemed tragic that the violin never got a chance to be played. Such a perfect specimen, wasted. A caged bird. And it was bad for the instrument. He was a luthier, he must know that.
“Do you ever loan it out?”
“On occasion.”
Henri took the last sip of coffee in his cup, then nibbled on the piece of chocolate that had come with it.
“Twenty years ago, knowing how much the violin was worth, I might have sold it. And then I surely would have had regrets.”
She nodded. She could tell he was trying to make a point, but she couldn’t say what it was.
“Dubray’s children are being hasty. They see that there is money to be made; they want to make it.”
“Maybe it’s more than that,” she said. “Maybe they love the place, but they just can’t be
ar it.”
She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father’s closets, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet music, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.
“I worry that you may not understand what you’re getting into,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I ran a shop something like Dubray’s once, and these businesses fluctuate. There are years when you’re all right, and then without warning it gets very quiet. Dubray had debts. Whoever buys the store will have to absorb them. Are you aware of that?”
She could sense that he was not a bad man, though he could be slightly arrogant. He just wanted the shop, probably much more than she did. And anyway, he was right. She didn’t know about debts or how to safeguard against a fall. She was outmatched.
Delphine was about to say as much when Henri said, “What if Dubray’s children were to hold on to the store for one year, while the two of us attempt to run it together? A trial period.”
She was surprised, but then the place was sacred to him, just as it was to her. Perhaps he didn’t want the burden of keeping it alive all on his own.
Delphine agreed to try it.
Once they got started, she realized that she could never have done it without him. The children, who had seemed to be acting on a foolish emotional whim, had been right. Henri knew every important dealer and symphony conductor in the world, and he had an understanding of fine instruments that rivaled Dubray’s. He could repair a violin, assess its value, recognize a find when anyone else might have missed it. He was calm, so calm that you might think him dull at first. He lived inside his head.
The Engagements Page 17