The Engagements Read online

  He smelled like booze and piss and rotting flesh. It didn’t take much persuading to get him into the ambulance and onto the stretcher. Maurice climbed in back and James returned to the driver’s seat.

  The stench of the guy was so foul that he had to breathe into his sleeve.

  James rolled down the windows and kept it in park for now. He radioed to the doctor on call to request permission for an IV, just in case Maurice wanted to use one. You always had to ask the doctor’s permission, every time, even though they never said no.

  Afterward, he picked up the binder off the passenger seat and started in on the reports. But he was listening with one ear, making sure Maurice was safe.

  “Do you drink regularly?” Maurice asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you had a drink?” He paused, and then answered his own question. “Today, obviously. Do you do drugs? Pills? Cocaine?”

  “No, none of that stuff. I’m through with that shit.”

  “Uhh-huh. When was the last time you did it?”

  “I’m trying to think of it.”

  “All right.”

  “There’s something different going on today,” the guy said. “Like an itching inside my head.”

  “Okay. We’re going to try to figure that out.” Maurice’s voice was calm and soothing, as if he were talking to one of his own children. “So. What have you been in the hospital for?”

  Silence.

  “I need to know when the last time you did drugs was.” Maurice’s tone grew a little more forceful now, a dad scolding a first-time offender for coming home after curfew.

  The guy’s tone was defiant. “I never did drugs. Actually.”

  Maurice nodded. “Did you ever do Valium? Did you ever do rock cocaine?”

  “Sure.”

  Maurice started to unbutton the guy’s shirt, talking all the while. He pulled a stethoscope from his pants pocket, checked the heartbeat, and, as if he were just making friendly conversation, asked, “When was the last time? Did you take any drugs today?”

  “No.” The guy raised his voice, and James turned his head to look. “I fucking hate drugs. And I hate fucking Ronald Reagan.”

  He gripped Maurice’s wrist, but Maurice shook out of the hold. “Try not to grab me.”

  His partner was as calm as ever, but James felt full of anger.

  “You were just about to hit me, weren’t you?” the guy accused.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah you were, dude. You were gonna hit me. It’s okay.”

  “I wasn’t going to hit you,” Maurice said.

  The guy’s words took on a mocking rhythm. “How does it feel being the Afro-American All-American?”

  Maurice had grown up down south. His wife was a Yankee, as he put it, a black girl from Roxbury. He liked to say that Boston was far more racist than Georgia had ever been.

  “Fantastic,” he said now, not letting his emotions show. “When were you in the hospital?”

  The patient raised his voice, threatening: “How does it feel being the Afro-American All-American?”

  “It feels great. Now you answer my question. Do you have any psychological problems?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sometimes,” Maurice said. “What do you have, man? Do you have schizophrenia, depression, anxiety?”

  “Everything, Georgetown.”

  “Looks like you had an IV in your hand.”

  “You ever been to Georgetown University?”

  Maurice sighed. “No, I haven’t.”

  “I went there. I want to go to the Cambridge Hospital psych ward.”

  “All right, but we’re gonna stop off at the emergency room first,”

  Maurice said. “Now, this cuff is just going to take your blood pressure.”

  “You know what the truth is, dude, I love you, buddy.”

  “I know you do.”

  The guy lifted his head. “How’s your penis?”

  “It’s fantastic.”

  “See? I know you. That’s the motherfucking truth. You’re Rick.”

  “I’m Rick. Are you gonna let me do this IV? Do you shoot up?”

  “No, I never shot up.”

  “You’ve got a bunch of scars all over your veins. New ones? Don’t move, okay?”

  Maurice gently inserted the IV. It couldn’t have hurt, especially for a junkie who was probably used to needles, but the guy shouted, violent, “If you bend my motherfucking hand, I’ll bend your motherfucking hand!”

  James took a deep breath, feeling his own hands curl into fists. He could tell now that the idiot was probably going to try to throw a punch. He pictured having to jump over the seat, pummeling him. He was afraid that once he started, he wouldn’t stop.

  “You’re okay, nothing’s going on. I’m just lifting your hand,” Maurice said softly. “I’m just putting your seat belt on, so relax.”

  The guy allowed this, and Maurice gave James the nod to get going. James put the truck in drive, with the siren in phaser mode.

  “What’s your name again?” Maurice asked. He was just trying to keep things light.

  “What’s your name, Rick?” the guy said.

  “Rick. What’s yours?”

  Now he went back to screaming. “If you fucking ask me one more time, I’m gonna punch you.”

  “Take it easy. What’s your name?”

  “Give me a handshake.”

  James eyed them in the rearview mirror. For some reason, Maurice was dumb or kind enough to extend his hand. James could see the guy reach out, take hold, and start to squeeze down, lifting his other fist to try and deck him.

  “McKeen, pull over,” Maurice shouted, ducking out of the way.

  “Yeah, pull over, McKeen,” the guy said snidely, but he dropped his fist.

  James pulled over, took a sip of coffee.

  Maurice regarded the guy. “Are we okay? Do I need to restrain you?”

  “We’re okay, Africa. Give me a handshake.”

  There were medics who would have pulled the truck down a dark alley and beaten the shit out of this asshole. But Maurice wasn’t like that. A few months ago, a guy in the middle of a fit spat blood in his face and said, “There. Now you’ve got AIDS too.” Maurice just wiped the blood away with his sleeve and kept going, like nothing had happened.

  Now he said, “We’re through shaking hands. Am I gonna have to call the police?”

  “All right, Rick, you’re a tough guy, you win. The doctors don’t help me. I’ve had all these seizures and they won’t help me.”

  “Well, we’re gonna take you in and try to get that taken care of.”

  “Yeah, but they probably won’t.”

  Maurice nodded at James again, and he signaled back out into traffic. He radioed ahead to let the ER know that the patient was combative. A small part of him felt bad for the guy. He was clearly nuts, and he was alone at Christmas. James knew they would joke about it later. They made dark jokes all the time, especially when they saw the worst—murders, or anything to do with kids. At least once a month, they’d pick up a child who’d been running with some object in his mouth that went straight through the back of his throat when he tripped—a knitting needle, a Cross pen, they had seen it all. Last month, there was a six-year-old boy who choked on a hot dog and was now in a coma. They even joked about that: How do you turn an all-beef frank into a vegetable?

  As a kid, he had never worried about danger. How many afternoons had he spent out back, chucking beer bottles at the shed for no reason, and later pulling tiny slivers of glass from his arms and legs? How many times had he and his buddies hitchhiked for a ride into Boston, or jumped off the roof of Big Boy’s garage, cannonballing into the aboveground pool? Now he thought of all the things that could have gone wrong. His own kids wouldn’t be like that, so unsupervised, so careless.

  From the back of the truck, he heard the homeless guy starting up again.

  “Where in Africa you from, buddy?�
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  “Atlanta.”

  Five minutes later, they arrived at the hospital. James was all too happy to drop this particular piece of shit off to the nurses. He could tell Maurice was wound up.

  Once they got back in, he asked, “Do you want to hang out here, or—”

  “Nah man, I want that burger.”

  James nodded, and started to drive toward Elsie’s.

  “Racist motherfucker, huh?” Maurice said.

  James shrugged. “We’ve seen worse.”

  Big Boy and O’Neil liked to bust his chops about Cambridge turning him into some touchy-feely type, hanging out with a bunch of homos and black guys, his patients. James would just tell them, “Homophobic hard-line redneck Irishmen like you people couldn’t handle what I do for a day. You guys are a walking hate crime.”

  His boss called it cultural competency. Basically that meant that you had to know every patient’s way of being—one minute you’d be asking some street addict, “What did you do, an eight ball?” The next, you were at some rich guy’s mansion and he was complaining of stomach pain, and you were all, “Have you experienced any flatulence today, sir?” Like you were in some goddamn Grey Poupon commercial. You had to be comfortable with rich, poor, gay, straight, white, black, whatever.

  It was a black kid who had mugged his wife. James tried not to mention it around Maurice, for fear that he might say something he’d regret.

  He was grateful at least that she just let the scumbag have what he wanted. Sheila said if the baby hadn’t been there, she would have fought back, and James didn’t doubt it. He remembered a night in high school at a dive bar in Charlestown. They were there with one of his older cousins, and didn’t even need to use their fake IDs. Three members of the Honey Bees had come in, and the place emptied right out. Even guys were scared shitless of the Honey Bees, because those girls were crazy. They had once stabbed a frat boy to death for a case of beer. But Sheila insisted on staying put and finishing her drink.

  She hadn’t made much of the fact that the mugger was black, but her parents kept saying that on their side of town you just didn’t run into that kind of element. It would probably sound racist as all hell if he were to say something to Maurice, but James sometimes wondered if Maurice didn’t quite get it.

  He had been in his twenties, still a fireman, when the forced busing started in South Boston. All you heard of when people talked about it now was that the white-trash Irish in Southie were racist, that they threw rocks at the black kids. But a cousin of his, a Boston cop, was called to the scene when an innocent white guy was pulled from his car and beaten into an irreversible coma, with a bunch of black people standing around, yelling, “Let him die.”

  It wasn’t something James liked to think about much, but given the right set of circumstances absolutely anyone could become a savage.

  “Did I ever tell you about my anniversary dinner at Jimmy’s Harborside?” Maurice said now.

  He had told James the story a hundred times, but once he started in, there was no use trying to shut him up. And anyway, it was a good one.

  After dinner, Maurice’s wife had gotten the car from the valet while he was in the john. As he walked out of the restaurant and saw her idling at the curb twenty feet away, a white guy in a suit approached him.

  “He didn’t even make eye contact,” Maurice said now. “He just shoved his keys at me and said, ‘Blue BMW.’ Assumed since I was black, I had to be the valet.”

  “What did you say?” James asked, happy enough to set him up for the punch line.

  “I said, ‘Just a moment, sir.’ Then I walked a block and threw his keys into the harbor.”

  They laughed as James stopped at a red light.

  His eyelids felt heavy; keeping them up required actual effort. James knew from experience that the light would take forever to change, so he let his eyes close, just for a minute, relief setting in.

  Next thing he knew, Maurice was shaking him by the shoulder. “McKeen, you okay? Did you fall asleep?”

  “What? Nah.”

  “You want me to drive?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  They arrived back at Elsie’s, and he pulled over to let Maurice out.

  “You want a sub?” Maurice asked.

  James looked at the clock. “It’s still not even nine, man. I’ll have a Diet Pepsi.”

  He drank a crazy amount of the stuff, maybe eight or nine cans a day. He let Parker have some with his pizza on Friday nights, which Sheila hated.

  James had taught him to say, “But Mom, it’s the choice of a new generation.”

  She always replied, “It’s poison.”

  Eventually, James would probably give in and stop drinking it. Over the years, Sheila had changed so many of his habits. She had gotten him to quit smoking pot before Parker was born, and cigarettes when she was pregnant with Danny. And every time he drank more than a couple beers in front of her, she liked to remind him about his father.

  2003

  Delphine lit a fire in the gas fireplace.

  It was as simple as flipping a switch, an act that seemed unnatural. To make a fire ought to be a challenge, involving sticky sap-covered wood and balls of newspaper that left black stains all over the palms of your hands. In their weekend house in the backcountry, she had often watched her husband, Henri, struggling with lighter fluid and logs that were too damp to be of use. When a flame finally appeared, they would both cheer and shout, Hourra!

  A gas fire seemed like cheating, though P.J. had once said that he bought the apartment in part because of this feature. He had warned her not to put anything in it. “Even just a sheet of paper could mess up the system, make it overheat and break the glass,” he said.

  All around her, the place was in a state of disarray: His t-shirts in shreds on the kitchen floor, alongside broken chunks of china. The paintings pulled from the walls. The rugs sliced into strips of fabric, and the dog in the bathroom, stuffing himself full of peanut butter.

  She held a stack of important papers, the type that everyone keeps in a safe or file cabinet somewhere, the story of a life told in signatures and numbers. In P.J.’s case, the crucial folder lived in a plastic storage bin under the bed, crammed in with old phone bills and love letters and programs from concerts he had played with the English Chamber Orchestra, the Pasadena Symphony, the Warsaw Philharmonic.

  Into the fire she tossed his birth certificate, his bank documents, and a blue sheet of notebook paper covered in letters and numbers. He never memorized any of his account numbers or passwords, choosing instead to just consult this list whenever he needed to.

  The ring on her finger glistened in the firelight: two large round diamonds that formed a tilted figure eight, with diamond accents all around. The ring had such a unique look, almost like a flower. People were forever asking her about it—when it was made and where. But Delphine had no idea about its provenance. She always meant to take it to a jeweler who might know more. There was a word etched into the metal band. EVIE. She had asked P.J. what it meant once, but he said he didn’t know.

  Delphine let her imagination roam. Was it someone’s name, or did it stand for some secret message between two lovers? What had happened to make them sell it? Or had they simply lost the ring, or given it away? Whatever the case, it was no longer theirs. After today, she too would be just a former owner.

  She closed the glass door, watching the flames lick up gently over the paper.

  The process took longer than she had imagined. A gas fire could only ever grow so big. It was meant to represent something wild and untamable, but was in fact only a meek, pale imitation of the real thing.

  “Hourra,” she said, and thought of home.

  Delphine Moreau met Henri Petit one week after her thirty-third birthday, at a small shop on the rue Constance in Montmartre. The shop sold rare and antique musical instruments, some dating back to the fifteenth century. It had stood there on the ground floor of a four-story apartment building for fo
rty-one years, right in the middle of a narrow, sleepy block paved with cobblestones, a hidden gem, beloved by collectors all over Europe for its unique inventory, as well as for its lively owner, François Dubray. He was a portly yet handsome man, with a full, dark beard and a laugh that could make a statue turn and smile. Dubray had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of music, and he was a renowned luthier. In his workshop in the back of the store, which hardly anyone was allowed to enter, he had repaired and tuned violins for the world’s most celebrated performers. They came to him once a year, and he slipped a tool into the f-hole, moving it just a hair to the left or right, altering the sound according to the specific way in which each violinist played.

  Two months earlier, Dubray had died of a heart attack while taking out the trash, and now his three children were looking for someone to buy the shop, someone who would vow to preserve it for its original purpose.

  As a girl, Delphine had spent countless hours with her father, gazing at the collage of instruments displayed behind Monsieur Dubray’s dusty window. At the center, an array of violins hung from the thinnest of floss over a piano, seeming to float like magic. These were flanked by dozens of flutes and clarinets, and a harp that was taller than she was. There were instruments that the average person would never recognize, and her father knew the names for all of them: the virginal, which resembled a shrunken harpsichord; an African lamellophone, its sound box made of an intact tortoise shell.

  Dubray’s children, all in their early twenties, were building their lives elsewhere, the oldest two in London and the youngest at a university in Montreal. They had returned to Paris for the funeral, and to hold an open house from two o’clock until five that Saturday, at which they intended to thoroughly vet each and every prospective buyer for the shop.

  Only Delphine and Henri showed up.

  She sat in a chair by the door as the children questioned Henri at a desk a few feet away. Delphine could remember them running around the neighborhood when she was a teenager and they were just babies. It was clear that none of them had inherited their father’s passion for music. Their questions were simplistic, having more to do with feelings than facts—What sorts of songs are your favorites? they asked, and Why would owning this store make you a happier man? It was clear too that Henri was immensely qualified for the job. He had learned restoration from Dubray himself, and as such believed he was the rightful heir to the place. He seemed almost offended that Dubray had chosen to will the shop to his own children rather than to him. Henri told them that he worked as a consultant at the Musée de la Musique, one of the largest instrument collections in the world. When he was a much younger man, just out of university, he had managed a small shop off the Place des Vosges that specialized in seventeenth-century stringed instruments.