“What are you missing most of home?” Marie-Hélène asked. “I like to make a game of it—finding all the French treasures here. Try me on anything.”
Delphine thought it over. There were so many things. “I miss my French fashion magazines, and the tabloids. I miss Elle most of all. I even miss Paris Match.”
“The Universal News at Broadway and Broome will have them,” Marie-Hélène said. “And they’ll let you sit and sip your coffee while you read. What else?”
Delphine felt her cheeks strain from smiling. It was such a small thing, but it felt like a gift.
“I haven’t gotten a haircut in three months. I’m afraid to go anywhere. The one place I did go, I came out looking bizarre.”
“You go to Serge Bertrand down in the meatpacking district,” Marie-Hélène instructed. “But you must see the man himself, and those appointments can book up weeks, sometimes months, in advance. Call them tomorrow. Say you’ll come whenever Serge can take you. It’s not like Paris, where you can just walk in anyplace and expect it to be good.”
“Like the groceries,” Delphine said out loud, before realizing this wouldn’t make any sense.
But to her surprise, Marie-Hélène responded, “Exactly.”
“I’m missing the food,” Delphine went on. “Simple things, like an éclair au chocolat from the pâtisserie on my street, just the texture of the chocolate in France.”
Marie-Hélène shook her head. “I know. You won’t find that here, not even in the specialty shops in Brooklyn, I’m sorry to say. They just don’t do it right. It’s the milk or something. And you won’t find decent cosmetics either, even if it’s the brand you’d get at home. Anything good has to come from a doctor, the pharmacies are shit. La Roche-Posay, or Avène, or Vichy—you’ve got to have someone bring them to you from France. I have a cousin in Paris who comes here on business three times a year. Without his deliveries, I’d die.”
She thought of her one precious bottle of Hydrance Optimale. She had been wise to save it.
They talked for over an hour, the sensation a bit like going on a wonderful first date. Delphine walked home feeling light. She began showing up at the brasserie alone for dinner two or three times a week. She sat at the bar. Marie-Hélène would sit and chat with her, no matter how crowded the place got.
In France, they would probably not have been friends. They were a decade apart in age and had nothing in common, really, besides their country of origin. But here, that was enough to make a friendship. They laughed about American ways, and spoke French while everyone around them tried to guess at what they were saying.
After a month or so, Marie-Hélène invited her shopping. On Lexington Avenue between Eighty-second and Eighty-third, there was a boutique called Ludivine, run by a woman from Provence. She sold labels that Delphine had thought would be impossible to find here—Maison Michel, Denis Colomb. Delphine bought two pairs of cloud-soft jeans for $260 each, a Carven top, and boots.
They took a taxi down to Fifty-seventh Street, to L’Institut Sothys. She had no idea the spa was even there. She had been to the original on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as a gift to herself on her thirtieth birthday. The two of them got hour-long detoxifying salt scrubs and body wraps. Afterward, they went to La Grenouille, which Marie-Hélène considered the most authentically French restaurant in New York. They ordered the blanquette de veau and a Grand Marnier soufflé. The crust was as light as snow. When the waiter cracked the surface and spooned sabayon into the steaming hot opening, Delphine held her breath with delight.
“Thank you so much,” she said to Marie-Hélène, feeling like she could cry. “Thank you for everything.”
Over dessert, Delphine told her the story of how she and P.J. met, and how she had abandoned her husband. Marie-Hélène did not seem the least bit scandalized. She announced that she herself had given up on men, other than for sex. She had experienced enough bad romances to ward her off them for life.
“That’s just how I was before I met Henri,” Delphine said. “And we ended up married.”
“But then not married.”
Delphine laughed. “True.”
She paid the check at the restaurant as she had at the spa, knowing that her new friend was, as they said here, a little cash poor.
Sometimes P.J. joined her at the brasserie. He ordered steak frites or a croque monsieur and a beer. Delphine tried to get him to try the calf liver in red wine sauce or the potatoes cooked in duck fat, but he was like a child about new foods, wanting only the familiar.
Around midnight most nights, Marie-Hélène let the staff go, and they would stay behind, laughing and talking. A cook named Erwan, a boy from Marseille, sometimes stayed too. Erwan was just twenty. It felt like they were forming a family of sorts, a tiny bit of France right here in America. Delphine felt as if her life were finally full. She was in love, and she had made a true friend for the first time in ages.
On a freezing-cold Sunday afternoon in the middle of February, Marie-Hélène’s day off, the two of them sipped wine in a bar downtown.
“Il fait un froid de canard,” Delphine said, shivering every time someone opened the door. What had sufficed as her winter coat in France had not lasted here through November. She had never before owned heavy gloves or a hat, but now she wore both every day.
“Look at this,” Marie-Hélène said, pointing to the TV screen in the corner broadcasting CNN.
Delphine had already seen it on the news.
A day earlier, there were protests all around the world against a possible invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Manhattan, filling twenty city blocks. There were millions more in Rome, and one hundred thousand in Paris. Onscreen, the camera scanned the crowd outside the United Nations—ladies in fur coats and men in suits, crammed in beside college students and young parents and old women leaning on walkers. They held signs that said MAKE LOVE NOT WAR and NOT IN OUR NAME and BUSH IS MORE EVIL THAN BIN LADEN.
“Fuck George Bush,” Marie-Hélène said. “He’ll never get his way.”
The door opened again. Another blast of frozen air.
Marie-Hélène got to her feet. She ran toward the chill, and Delphine swiveled her neck just as her friend grabbed hold of a young, handsome creature in a hooded sweatshirt.
“This is Pete,” she said, pulling him toward the table. “Peter, meet Delphine.”
Delphine had never seen him before, but that was no surprise. Marie-Hélène seemed to find someone new to fall in love with every Friday night. He nodded hello and mumbled something she couldn’t understand.
In March, American troops were sent into Baghdad. Other countries followed. Delphine felt proud when France refused. She felt like telling everyone who had gathered in this city that her country stood with them.
But not long after the war began, she saw a news item online one morning. It said the U.S. House of Representatives had decided to remove the word “French” from their cafeteria menus, replacing it in all cases with the word “Freedom.” No more French toast, or French bread, or French fries.
“What the hell?” she said to P.J., repeating a phrase he used all the time.
P.J. shrugged. “People are pissed. They think you guys are being a bunch of pussies and leaving it to us to fix the whole mess, as usual.”
She could feel her blood rising. “ ‘You guys’?” she repeated, looking behind her as if searching for some group she had not known she was a part of until now. “ ‘As usual’?”
“You know what I mean,” he said quietly. “The French.”
She felt struck, but pointed out a paragraph in the article that discussed how the Americans had done the same to the Germans during World War I.
“Look at this!” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “You crazy people started calling hamburgers ‘Salisbury steaks.’ You changed German measles to liberty measles.”
She laughed, but stopped when she saw the anger on his face.
“You weren’t her
e when the towers fell. You didn’t have to live through it.”
She resisted the urge to say that no, she wasn’t here—she had seen it on television in France, just as he had seen it on television while working out at the New York Sports Club on West Seventy-sixth Street.
“This isn’t about the towers,” she said gently.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Do you know how many of my buddies from home are fighting in Iraq, protecting the free world from terrorists, just like our grandfathers did in World War II? While meanwhile the French prance around and say they won’t take sides.”
She had never heard him mention these buddies before, and suddenly she did not feel like being gentle with him any longer.
“Your friends will die for nothing,” she said.
“Fuck you,” he said, before walking into the bedroom and slamming the door.
And so she had learned that she could not talk to him about the war. He was incapable of thinking sensibly about it. They made up a few hours later, and he gave her an almost apology.
“Look, this patriotic stuff is new to me,” he said. “But ever since 9/11 I just find myself so angry about what happened. I guess I had this idea of America as invincible and now that’s been destroyed.”
“I understand,” she said. “I do. But now more lives will be lost. And for what?”
“Revenge,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. As if he were a brutal killer instead of a sensitive musician.
Things went on as usual after that. She told herself that maybe it was even a good thing that they’d fought. Maybe it was healthy. But for the first time she let herself wonder if she had only come home with P.J. for the dream of it, or if it really was about him.
The one person she could talk about the war with was Marie-Hélène, and the topic filled many of their conversations. On French TV, they were showing dead and captured American soldiers, but not in America. And if you believed the news media, all Americans now hated the French. Marie-Hélène reported that someone had stuck a bumper sticker on a stall in the women’s bathroom at the restaurant that said FIRST IRAQ, THEN CHIRAC. They laughed at that, but not long after, Marie-Hélène arrived at work one evening to find that her business partners had draped an enormous American flag across the front of the building.
“It’s been empty in here lately, but I didn’t realize why,” she said when Delphine stopped by later that night. She was drinking pastis cut with a few ice cubes, which gave Delphine a jolt—she had never seen Marie-Hélène drinking during work hours before.
“It’s a boycott of all things French,” Marie-Hélène said. “Apparently it’s happening all over America.”
“But New York isn’t America!” Delphine said. “You’re the one who told me that. What about those protesters we saw out in the streets?”
“They didn’t want war, but now that they’re at it, they need someone to hate.” Marie-Hélène buried her head in her hands. “First the smoking ban, and now this. The restaurant is doomed. I’ll be lucky to get a job at Au Bon Pain.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Delphine said, but many nights followed when they were the only ones there. She thought of how she and Henri had struggled to keep the shop alive after September 11th, how easily it might have slipped through their hands if not for the Stradivarius.
Delphine and P.J. tried to lift Marie-Hélène’s spirits. They gave her tickets to the Philharmonic, and she brought along a handsome young actor she’d met at a party. When a colleague of P.J.’s had a fiftieth birthday celebration, P.J. convinced him to hold it at the Brasserie Montmartre and the place did a better business in a single night than it had in the previous two weeks.
“You were so sweet to think of it,” Delphine said.
“She’s been a good friend to you,” he said. “She got you out of your winter doldrums.”
Delphine felt touched that he had noticed how she was feeling all those months ago. With Henri, her sadness usually got eclipsed by his own, and she was forced to put on a cheery face. She had felt comfortable with this dynamic somehow; it was so similar to the way she once was with her father. But now at last, she had met a man who truly saw her.
One night, P.J. took Marie-Hélène to a Knicks game, just the two of them. Marie-Hélène loved basketball, and Delphine didn’t want to go. She sat home alone reading, her two regular dates occupied with one another. If the thought of it gave her a moment’s pause, it was only a moment. She felt happy that they liked each other. And when P.J. sent her a text message saying that he missed her, and was dreaming of the new black stockings she had bought, she went straight to the closet and put them on.
Two weeks later, over a hundred people from the restaurant industry gathered at Le Cirque for a press conference, urging New Yorkers to stop the boycott. The Times ran a photograph, and Marie-Hélène stood in the background, her face a knot of frustration.
By the middle of May, the other owners of the Brasserie Montmartre had voted to close and turn it into a Mexican restaurant. They apologized to Marie-Hélène, and said they would be thrilled if she wanted to stay on running the new place. She turned them down. Delphine told P.J. she was worried. She felt like a big sister, wondering what she could do to help.
“I feel for her, but she shouldn’t have quit without having another job lined up,” he said. “She should have done the Mexican place with them. What’s the difference?”
Delphine tried to explain that she couldn’t possibly have stayed on.
“A Mexican restaurant? She’d be humiliated. The brasserie was her dream.”
“The other owners don’t seem to be humiliated,” he said. “Why should she?”
“The other owners aren’t even French,” she said. “They’re coming from New Jersey.”
“Just say they’re from New Jersey,” he said irritably.
She sighed. She couldn’t understand why he was acting this way.
“Fine. They’re from New Jersey. Better?”
“Yes.”
When Delphine and P.J. went to visit his parents in May, they offered to let Marie-Hélène stay at their place, to give her a bit of distance from her roommates. Delphine went to Henri Bendel for lavender soap and Chanel eye cream and Diptyque candles, and set up a spa in the bathroom, in the hopes that it might rejuvenate Marie-Hélène, boost her spirits some. She pulled her one unopened bottle of precious Avène Hydrance Optimale from the linen closet and placed it on the edge of the sink.
The trip to his parents’ house did not go as she had hoped. Delphine overheard P.J. and his mother arguing about her. It was clear that his mother didn’t like her, didn’t approve of their relationship, and Delphine feared that her opinion had taken root in him.
On the way home, as they sat in traffic on the West Side Highway, she said, “I wish you knew someone great who we could set up with Marie-Hélène. She’s so depressed. She needs some distraction.”
But P.J. himself was distracted. “What did you say?”
“Never mind.”
One night soon after, he roused her from a dream and said, “You cried out in English!” She remembered the dream, and he was right—the whole thing had transpired in her second language as if it were her first. P.J. laughed, but when she thought back on it, that was the moment when everything changed.
The next day, he casually said over breakfast, “I hope you didn’t come here just for me.”
Delphine was sure she had misheard him. “Pardon?”
“To America. I hope I’m not the reason you made this drastic change in your life.”
She felt something hard and heavy drop through her body. She saw that part of him was lost to her now. She wondered whether it would come back, and when.
“Of course you are,” she said. “Why else would I be here, if not for you?”
“Because you love New York?”
She scoffed, more at him than at the sentiment. “New York is nothing next to Paris.”
“Oh Paris, Pa
ris, Paris,” he said, in a tone that sounded like one child mocking another on the playground. “Your perfect city only got to stay so perfect because you all surrendered to the Nazis. If it wasn’t for America, who would have liberated you? London is the far more honest city. They wear their principles in the busted-up architecture.”
She was certain he must have heard it someplace. He wasn’t smart enough to come up with something like that on his own.
“And you let your dogs shit everywhere, like you’re too good to pick up after them.”
Now that precious bit of wisdom, she knew, that was all him. He slept on the sofa that night, but by the following morning they were sheepish with one another, polite, like two guests at an otherwise empty hotel who had shared dinner once and felt rather fond of each other. He offered to put her clothes in the wash, and she made him a bowl of Greek yogurt with fresh blueberries and honey.
Still she could tell that things between them had not returned to normal. He seemed closed off, distracted. They usually ate their meals together at the table, but now he took his plate and sat alone in front of the television set. They had always walked the dog together after dinner, at his insistence, but now P.J. went himself. He said he needed to clear his head. Sometimes he’d be gone for an hour or even two, telling her that he was wandering the streets of New York, or the paths in Central Park, where they said no one was safe after dark. She would picture him dead in the road somewhere, and when he returned she would be so grateful that she never mentioned the alcohol in his kiss.
After the restaurant closed, Marie-Hélène came over a few days a week. She usually arrived by noon, and started drinking pastis soon after. Delphine enjoyed the company. It was summer, time to relax and slow down, something that most New Yorkers had no intention of doing. Even the drink itself reminded her of summertime. She had had a glass or two on so many weekends away in the South of France, straight over two ice cubes.
She only wished her friend could stop at one or two glasses. By late afternoon most days, Marie-Hélène was drunk, her eyelids sagging toward her chin, her anger rising high. She was sleeping with three men—a married patron of the Brasserie Montmartre, a bartender she had worked with a decade ago, who wandered in and out of her life with some frequency, and a painter who lived and worked in a one-room studio in Williamsburg. If any of them dared not to call her back fast enough, or refused to show up at her door when summoned, Marie-Hélène would scream at them, and throw things, and threaten to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Delphine hated listening to her cry and shout over the phone. She felt suddenly afraid of this woman she had come to call her friend. Marie-Hélène hardly seemed to like any of the men in her life, preferring the strength of her rage to happiness.
The Engagements Page 37