9.
It was on the Fourth of July so soon after we met that I was engaged to Simon. That midsummer day of my twentieth birthday, it drizzled an autumn rain. The clouds were swollen white, the sort that might change their minds and drop clumps of snow. On my way up to Simon’s apartment that afternoon, the elevator compartment rattled violently and its little lamp sputtered out. I fell to my knees. For a moment, I hung there, suspended so many stories high in the shaft. Then, using a match, I recovered my body in the dark. The tiny fire must have alerted whoever was my guardian angel, as the elevator soon began to rise again.
Perhaps only the dead can move forward and backward in time, and it was my own future ghost conspiring against me in that elevator, because as soon as the doors opened into that most beautiful apartment in all of New York City, I knew what was to come. It was as if I’d seen it all before, in a dream or another life.
Simon would kneel on the carpet beside the piano, the same one that weeks before had been the backdrop for my monstrous shoes. A ship’s horn would sound; the trains along the Hudson would grumble on toward their next stop, intimating the illusion of escape. And in his hands, Simon would have his birthday present for me. I would look not at his face, but into the eyes of the diamond, a ring that would contain the glory of this world and the impossible next.
And so it was, all of it. I never had to say yes. I just didn’t say no. I let him place the ring on my finger. And it was done.
Mrs. Ranier entered the parlor seconds later, watching the whole engagement transpire from some hidden spy quarters. Simon turned to her for approval, as if it were to his mother he had proposed. “That gem is one of our very best, cut from a stone far superior to anything the competition claims to have,” she exclaimed. “Have you seen their ridiculous recent advertisements?”
I shook my head that I hadn’t, though their name was suddenly everywhere in those days; they had hired every starlet in Hollywood to wear a diamond of theirs the size of a knuckle.
“Well, it’s silly to discuss such things at a thrilling time for us all.” Sincere tears formed in her eyes when she embraced me. “I know you lost your mother very young, Elle, so I hope you’ll consider me as your own.”
I was too humble or too numb to reply appropriately, but I recall managing an awkward curtsy, unconsciously acknowledging for us both the end of a certain stage act between us and the beginning of a new one.
Back below Canal Street, my father was sitting in the living room staring out the window grimly. “How was Mr. Ranier today?” he asked as soon as I entered, his face brightening slightly at the very mention of Simon.
I flashed my newly glittering hand indignantly. But my father still erupted in tears of joy, which soon afterward devolved into a fit of violent coughing. The smell in the apartment had changed with my father unemployed; it was the smell of age taking command of a man. This was the essential cruelty at the heart of life, that even the wildest roses stank of death toward their ends.
“You foolish thing,” my father said when he was thoroughly exhausted from his outburst. His face for an instant resumed the sharpness of youth, the face I’d seen in old photographs of the time just before I was born. He trained his eyes on me with the naïveté of a particularly American conviction. “Don’t you see, this is the happiest day of your life?”
“What’s the difference between this and working in a brothel?” I shouted.
“Elle, I’m living only for you. My days are numbered. How do you expect to go on?” my father asked me. “I’ve fought to protect you from the reality out there, despite my poverty. The entire world is a brothel. Especially for an unmarried woman. Far worse than you can ever imagine. No man will guard you from it like Simon Ranier can.”
That same evening, Gabriel and I had planned to meet in the alleyway beside a nearby bakery, but when I arrived Gabriel was not there. I searched for some time, up and down the dark avenue, trying to appear composed. I was growing ever more conscious of the drunken cries of strangers emanating from every direction, my father’s talk of brothels reverberating inside my head, when at last I heard a burst of laughter ring out from across the street. Gabriel emerged from behind a lamppost.
I screamed at Gabriel that he was truly rotten. Spotting my hand as he crossed the street, he took it when he reached me. “What’s this? Are you marrying the king of England?”
“It was my grandmother’s,” I lied. “Father let me wear it for my birthday.”
“Was your grandmère married to the king of France?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “And I’m engaged to his son.”
“Isn’t that incest?” Gabriel asked, plucking at the gift of Mrs. Ranier’s. “And why don’t you let this fur hibernate? It’s July. Who is it giving you all of these fancy things, Elle? I swear I saw that same ring recently in a gentlemen’s magazine.”
“My father’s boss just leaves these things around the shop. Don’t ask me why, Gabriel. You know how rich people are. They tire of even the nicest things.”
“Even they don’t grow sick of diamond rings, Elle.”
“How would you know anything about it?” I challenged. At this, Gabriel dropped his inquest and pulled my arm into the night. The streets were empty except for a few select drunks leaving the bars with their female companions, stumbling and slurring through one patriotic song after another. It was true that the temperature had risen. July had returned, cloying and warm. We walked toward the water for the breeze, and, upon reaching it, Gabriel ran to the river’s edge and threw the anchor off a rather expensive-looking boat. Furiously he worked at its sail, despite my screams of objection, until it was some ten feet from shore.
Gabriel’s outline had already disappeared into the blackness when the first firework burst into the sky, followed by a stream of brilliant, falling light. One after another he set them off from the boat; his face reappeared with each burst, cast in violet, then blue, then red, mesmerized by his own magic trick. Some of those fireworks died between the shore and the boat, extinguished between our mortal bodies in that river, and some have lasted forever until now.
I ran into the water, toward him, with the blind courage of love. He would steal the boat, I thought; he would sail me all the way to China. Like we could go somewhere.
“Watch out for sharks!” Gabriel shouted.
“There aren’t any sharks in the river!” I cried. The water was up to my knees. I could not get to him without swimming. Suddenly every weed was a vicious fin lashing my calves.
“Then why do you look so scared?” he taunted me, then dove off the boat and disappeared into the water.