The Love Season Part 1

The Love Season.

Hilderbrand, Elin.

For Margie Holahan-.

a friend for all seasons.

XO.

Part One.

Provisions.

August 19, 2006 * 6:30 A.M.

Marguerite didn't know where to start.

Each and every summer evening for nearly twenty years, she had cooked for a restaurant full of people, yet here she was in her own kitchen on a crystalline morning with a seemingly simple mission-dinner for two that evening at seven thirty-and she didn't know where to start. Her mind spun like the pedals of a bicycle without any brakes. Candace coming here, after all these years. Immediately Marguerite corrected herself. Not Candace. Candace was dead. Renata was coming tonight. The baby.

Marguerite's hands quivered as she brought her coffee mug to her lips. The grandfather clock chimed just as it had every fifteen minutes of its distinguished life-but this time, the sound startled Marguerite. She pictured a monkey inside, with two small cymbals and a voice screeching, Marguerite! Earth to Marguerite!

Marguerite chuckled. I am an old bat, she thought. I'll start by writing a list.

The phone call had come at eleven o'clock the night before. Marguerite was in bed, reading Hemingway. Whereas once Marguerite had been obsessed with food-with heirloom tomatoes and lamb shanks and farmhouse cheeses, and fish still flopping on the counter, and eggs and chocolate and black truffles and foie gras and rare white nectarines-now the only thing that gave her genuine pleasure was reading. The people of Nantucket wondered-oh yes, she knew they wondered-what Marguerite did all day, hermited in her house on Quince Street, secreted away from the eyes of the curious. Although there was always something-the laundry, the garden, the articles for the newspaper in Calgary (deadline every other Friday)-the answer was: reading. Marguerite had three books going at any one time. That was the chef in her, the proverbial more-than-one-pot-on-the-stove. She read contemporary fiction in the mornings, though she was very picky. She liked Philip Roth, Penelope Lively, as a rule no one under the age of fifty, for what could they possibly have to say about the world that Marguerite hadn't already learned? In the afternoons, she enriched herself with biographies or books of European history, if they weren't too dense. Her evenings were reserved for the cla.s.sics, and when the phone rang the night before Marguerite had been reading Hemingway. Hemingway was the perfect choice for late at night because his sentences were clear and easy to understand, though Marguerite stopped every few pages and asked herself, Is that all he means? Might he mean something else? This insecurity was a result of attending the Culinary Inst.i.tute instead of a proper university-and all those years with Porter didn't help. An education makes you good company for yourself, Porter had liked to tell his students, and Marguerite, when he was trying to convince her to read something other than Larousse Gastronomique. Wouldn't he be proud of her now.

The phone, much like the muted toll of the clock a few seconds ago, had scared Marguerite out of her wits. She gasped, and her book slid off her lap to the floor, where it lay with its pages folded unnaturally under, like a person with a broken limb. The phone, a rotary, continued its cranky, mechanical whine while Marguerite groped her nightstand for her watch. Eleven o'clock. Marguerite could name on one hand the phone calls she'd received in the past twelve months: There was a call or two from the editorial a.s.sistant at the Calgary paper; there was a call from the Culinary Inst.i.tute each spring asking for a donation; there was always a call from Porter on November 3, her birthday. None of these people would ever think to call her at eleven o'clock at night-not even Porter, drunk (not even if he'd split from the nubile young graduate a.s.sistant who had become his late-in-life wife), would dare call Marguerite at this hour. So it was a wrong number. Marguerite decided to let it ring. She had no answering machine to put the phone out of its misery; it just rang and rang, as pleading and insistent as a crying baby. Marguerite picked it up, clearing her throat first. She occasionally went a week without speaking.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Aunt Daisy?" The voice had been light and cheerful; there was background noise-people talking, jazz music, the familiar clink and clatter of gla.s.ses and plates-was it restaurant noise? It threw Marguerite off. And then there was the nickname: Daisy. Only three people had ever used it.

"Yes?"

"It's Renata." There was an expectant pause. "Renata Knox."

Marguerite's eyes landed across the room, on her desk. Taped to her computer was Renata Knox's e-mail address; Marguerite beheld it every day as she binged guiltily on the Internet for an hour, but she had never sent a single message. Because what could she possibly say? A casual h.e.l.lo would be pointless and anything more, dangerous. Marguerite's eyes skittered from her desk to her dresser. On top of her dresser were two precious framed photographs. She dusted them carefully each week, though she rarely lingered over them anymore. Years ago she had scrutinized them so intensely that they imprinted themselves on her brain. She knew them by heart, the way she knew the streets in the sixth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, the way she knew the temperament of a souffle. One picture was of Marguerite and Candace taken at Les Parapluies on the occasion of Renata's christening. In it, Marguerite was holding Renata, her G.o.ddaughter. How well she remembered that moment. It had taken a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and several gla.s.ses of thirty-year port to get Dan to relinquish his grip on his newborn daughter, and when he did, it was only to Candace so that the baby could nurse. Marguerite sat with Candace on the west banquette as the party thundered around them. Marguerite knew little of babies, or lactation; she fed people every day, but nothing was as captivating as watching Candace feed her daughter. When Candace finished, she eased the baby up over her shoulder until the baby burped. Then Candace pa.s.sed her over to Marguerite casually, like she was a loaf of bread.

Go see your G.o.dmother, Candace said to the baby.

G.o.dmother, Marguerite had thought. The last time she had been inside a church before that very morning was for Candace and Dan's wedding, and before that the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris the year she met Porter, and so her notion of G.o.dmother came mostly from fairy tales. Marguerite had gazed down at the baby's tiny pink mouth, which still made the motion of sucking even though the breast was gone, and thought, I will feed you your first escargot. I will pour your first gla.s.s of champagne.

"Aunt Daisy?" Renata said.

"Yes, dear," Marguerite said. The poor girl probably thought Marguerite was as crazy as the islanders said she was-self-mutilation, months in a psychiatric hospital, gave up her restaurant-or worse, she thought Marguerite didn't know who she was. How surprised the child would be to find out that Marguerite thought of her, and of Candace, every day. The memories ran through her veins. But enough of that! Marguerite thought. I have the girl on the phone! "I'm sorry, darling. You caught me by surprise."

"Were you sleeping?" Renata asked. "It's awfully late."

"No," Marguerite said. "Not sleeping. In bed, reading. Where are you, darling? Are you at school?"

"I don't start back for three more weeks," Renata said.

"Oh, right," Marguerite said. "Silly of me." Already she felt like the conversation was a dog she'd agreed to take for a walk, one that yanked on its chain, urging Marguerite to catch up. It was August now; when Renata went back to college she'd be a... soph.o.m.ore? Marguerite had sent Renata five thousand dollars for her high school graduation the spring before last-an outrageous sum, though who else did Marguerite have to give her money to? Renata had graduated first in her cla.s.s, and although she'd been accepted at Yale and Stanford, she'd decided on Columbia, where Porter was still chairman of the art history department. Renata had sent Marguerite a sweet little thank-you note for the money in loopy script with a lot of exclamation points-and Dan had dashed off a note as well on his office stationery. Once again, Margo, you've done too much. Hope you are well. Marguerite noticed he had not actually said thank you, but that would have been hoping for too much. After all these years, Dan still hadn't forgiven her. He thought she sent the money out of guilt when really she had sent it out of love.

"Where are you then?" Marguerite asked. In his annual Christmas letter, Dan had written about Renata's infatuation with her literature cla.s.ses, her work-study job in the admissions office, and her roommate, but he had hinted nothing about her summer plans.

"I'm here on Nantucket," Renata said. "I'm at 21 Federal."

Marguerite suddenly felt very warm; sweat broke out on her forehead and under her arms. And menopause for her had ended sometime during the first Clinton administration.

"You're here?" Marguerite said.

"For the weekend. Until Sunday. I'm here with my fiance."

"Your what?"

"His name is Cade," Renata said. "His family has a house on Hulbert Avenue."

Marguerite stroked the fraying satin edge of her summer blanket. Fiance at age nineteen? And Dan had allowed it? The boy must be rich, Marguerite thought sardonically. Hulbert Avenue. But even she had a hard time believing that Dan would give Renata away while she was still a teenager. People didn't change that fundamentally. Daniel Knox would always be the father holding possessively on to his little girl. He had never liked to share her.

Marguerite realized Renata was waiting for an answer. "I see."

"His parents know all about you," Renata said. "They used to eat at the restaurant. They said it was the best place. They said they miss it."

"That's very nice," Marguerite said. She wondered who Cade's parents were. Had they been regulars or once-a-summer people? Would Marguerite recognize their names, their faces? Had they said anything else to Renata about what they knew, or thought they knew?

"I'm dying to come see you," Renata said. "Cade wants to meet you, too, but I told him I want to come by myself."

"Of course, dear," Marguerite said. She straightened in bed so that her posture was as perfect as it had been nearly sixty years ago, ballet cla.s.s, Madame Verge asking her students to pretend there was a wire that ran from the tops of their heads to the ceiling. Chins up, mes choux! Marguerite was so happy she thought she might levitate. Her heart was buoyant. Renata was here on Nantucket; she wanted to see Marguerite. "Come tomorrow night. For dinner. Can you?"

"Of course!" Renata said. "What time would you like me?"

"Seven thirty," Marguerite said. At Les Parapluies, the bar had opened each night at six thirty and dinner was served at seven thirty. Marguerite had run the restaurant on that strict timetable for years without many exceptions, or much of an eye toward profitability.

"I'll be there," Renata said.

"Five Quince Street," Marguerite said. "You'll be able to find it?"

"Yes," said Renata. In the background there was a burst of laughter. "So I'll see you tomorrow night, Aunt Daisy, okay?"

"Okay," Marguerite said. "Good night, dear."

With that, Marguerite had replaced the heavy black receiver in its cradle and thought, Only for her.

Marguerite had not cooked a meal in fourteen years.

8:00 A.M.

Marguerite left her house infrequently. Once every two weeks to the A&P for groceries, once a month to the bank and to the post office for stamps. Once each season to stock up at both bookstores. Once a year to the doctor for a checkup and to Don Allen Ford to get her Jeep inspected. When she was out, she always b.u.mped into people she knew, though they were never the people she wished to see, and thus she stuck to a smile, a h.e.l.lo. Let them think what they want. And Marguerite, both amused and alarmed by her own indifferences, cackled under her breath like a crazy witch.

But when Marguerite stepped out of her house this morning-she had been ready for over an hour, pacing near the door like a thoroughbred bucking at the gate, waiting for the little monkey inside her clock to announce that it was a suitable hour to venture forth-everything seemed transformed. The morning sparkled. Renata was coming. They were to have dinner. A dinner party.

Armed with her list and her pocketbook, Marguerite strolled down Quince Street, inhaling its beauty. The houses were all antiques, with friendship stairs and transom windows, pocket gardens and picket fences. It was, in Marguerite's mind, the loveliest street on the island, although she didn't allow herself to enjoy it often, rarely in summer and certainly never at this hour. She sometimes strolled it on a winter night; she sometimes peered in the windows of the homes that had been deserted for fairer climates. The police once stopped her; a lone policeman, not much more than a teenager himself, started spinning his lights and came poking through the dark with his flashlight just as Marguerite was gazing in the front window of a house down the street. It was a house Marguerite had always loved from the outside; it was very old, with white clapboard and wavy leaded gla.s.s, and the people who owned it, Marguerite learned from nosing around, had fine taste in French antiques. The policeman thought she was trying to rob it maybe, though he had seemed nervous to confront her. He'd asked her what she was doing, and she had said, Just looking. This answer hadn't satisfied the officer much. Do you have a home? he'd asked. And Marguerite had laughed and pointed. Number Five, she'd said. I live at Number Five. He'd suggested she "get on home," because it was cold; it was, in fact, Christmas. Christmas night, and Marguerite had been wandering her own street, like a transient, like a ghost looking for a place to haunt.

Marguerite reached Centre Street, took a left, then a quick right, and headed down Broad Street, past the bookstore, past the French bistro that had absorbed all of Marguerite's old customers. She was aimed for Dusty Tyler's fish shop. Marguerite's former restaurant, Les Parapluies, had been open for dinner seven nights a week from May through October, and every night but Monday Marguerite had served seafood from Dusty Tyler's shop. Dusty was Marguerite's age, which was to say, not so young anymore. They'd had a close professional relationship, and on top of it they had been friends. Dusty came into the bar nearly every night the year his wife left him, and sometimes he brought his ten-year-old son in for dinner. Dusty had gotten very drunk one night, starting at six thirty with vodka gimlets served up by Lance, Marguerite's moody bartender. He then ordered two bottles of Mersault and drank all but one gla.s.s, which he sent to Marguerite back in the kitchen. By the time dinner service was over, the waitresses were complaining about Dusty-he was out-of-bounds, obnoxious, bordering on criminal. Get him out of here, Margo, the headwaiter, Francesca, had said. It was a Sunday night, and the fish shop was closed on Mondays. Marguerite overruled the pleas of her staff, which was rare, and allowed Dusty to stay. He stayed long after everyone else went home, sitting at the zinc bar with Marguerite, sipping daintily from a gla.s.s of Chartreuse, which he had insisted he wanted. He was so drunk that he'd stopped making any kind of sense. He was babbling, then crying. There had been spittle in his beard, but he'd smelled salty and sweet, like an oyster. Marguerite had thought they would sleep together. She was more than ten years into her relationship with Porter at that point, though Porter spent nine months of the year in Manhattan and-it was well known to everyone-dated other women. It wasn't frustration with Porter, however, that led Marguerite to think of s.e.x with Dusty. Rather, it was a sense of inevitability. They worked together every day; she was his first client every morning; they stood side by side, many times their hips touching as they lifted a bluefin tuna out of crushed ice, as they pried open sea scallops and cherrystones, as they chopped the heads off shrimp. Dusty was destroyed by the departure of his wife, and Marguerite, with Porter off living his own life in the city, was lonely. It was late on a Sunday night; they were alone in the restaurant; Dusty was drunk. s.e.x was like a blinking neon sign hanging over the bar.

But for whatever reason, it hadn't happened. Dusty had rested his head on the bar, nudged the gla.s.s of Chartreuse aside, and pa.s.sed out. Marguerite called a taxi from a company where she didn't know anyone, and a young guy wearing an Izod shirt, jeans, and penny loafers had dragged Dusty out to a Cadillac Fleetwood and driven him home. Marguerite felt-well, at first she felt childishly rejected. She wasn't a beauty, more handsome than pretty, her face was wide, her bottom heavier than she wished, though certain men-Porter among them-appreciated her independence, her G.o.d-given abilities in the kitchen, and the healthy brown hair that, when it was loose, hung to the small of her back. Dusty had sent sunflowers the next day with just the word Sorry scribbled on the card, and on Tuesday, when Marguerite and Dusty returned to their usual song and dance in the back room of the fish shop, she felt an overwhelming relief that nothing had happened between the two of them. They had been friends; they would remain so.

Marguerite felt this relief anew as she turned the corner of North Beach Street, pa.s.sed the yacht club, where the tennis courts were already in use and the flag was snapping, and spied the door to Dusty's shop with the OPEN sign hanging on a nail.

A bell tinkled as she walked in. The shop was empty. It had been years and years since Marguerite had set foot inside, and there had been changes. He sold smoked bluefish pate and c.o.c.ktail sauce, lemons, asparagus, corn on the cob, sun-dried tomato pesto, and fresh pasta. He sold Ben & Jerry's, Nantucket Nectars, frozen loaves of French bread. It was a veritable grocery store; before, it had just been fish. Marguerite inspected the specimens in the refrigerated display case; even the fish had changed. There were soft-sh.e.l.l crabs and swordfish chunks ("great for kebabs"); there was unsh.e.l.led lobster meat selling for $35.99 a pound; there were large shrimp, extra-large shrimp, and jumbo shrimp available with sh.e.l.l or without, cooked or uncooked. But then there were the Dusty staples-the plump, white, day-boat scallops, the fillets of red-purple tuna cut as thick as a paperback novel, the Arctic char and halibut and a whole striped ba.s.s that, if Marguerite had to guess, Dusty had caught himself off of Great Point that very morning.

Suddenly Dusty appeared out of the back. He wore a white ap.r.o.n over a blue T-shirt. His hair was silver and his beard was cut close. Marguerite nearly cried out. She would never have imagined that she had missed people or that she missed this man in particular. She was shocked at her own joy. However, her elation and her surprise were nothing compared to Dusty's. At first, she could tell he thought he was hallucinating. For as much of an old salt as Dusty believed himself to be, he had the kind of face that gave everything away.

"Margo?" he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

She smiled and felt a funny kind of grat.i.tude. There were people you knew in your life who would always be the same at base, hence they would always be familiar. Marguerite hadn't seen Dusty Tyler in years, but it might have been yesterday. He looked so much like himself that she could almost taste the ancient desire on her scarred tongue. His blue eyes, his bushy eyebrows, white now.

"Hi," she said. She tried to sound calm, serene, as if all these years she'd been away at some Buddhist retreat, centering herself. Ha! Hardly.

" 'Hi'?" Dusty said. "You disappear for d.a.m.n near fifteen years and that's all you have to say?"

"I'm sorry." It was silly, but she feared she might cry. She didn't know what to say. Did she have to go all the way back and explain everything? Did she have to tell him what she'd done to herself and why? She had been out of the public eye for so long, she didn't remember how to relate to people. Dusty must have sensed this, because he backed off.

"I won't ask you anything, Margo; I promise," he said. He paused, shaking his head, taking her in. "Except what you'd like."

"Mussels," she said. She stared at the word on her list, to avoid his eyes. "I came for mussels. Enough to get two people off to a good start."

"Two people?" he said.

She blinked.

"You're in luck," he said. "I got some in from Point Judith this morning." He filled a bag with green-black sh.e.l.ls the shape of teardrops. "How are you going to prepare these, Margo?"

Marguerite poised her pen above her checkbook and looked at Dusty over the top of her bifocals. "I thought you weren't going to ask me any questions."

"I said that, didn't I?"

"You promised."

He twisted the bag and tied it. Waved away the checkbook. He wasn't going to let her pay. Even with real estate prices where they were, two pounds of mussels cost only about seven dollars. Still, she didn't want to feel like she owed him anything-but the way he was looking at her now, she could tell he wanted an explanation. He expected her to wave away his offer of no questions the way he waved away her checkbook. Tell me what really happened. You clearly didn't cut your tongue out, like some people were saying. And you don't look crazy, you don't sound crazy, so why have you kept yourself away from us for so long? A week or two after Marguerite was sprung from the psychiatric hospital, Dusty had stopped by her house with daffodils. He'd knocked. She'd watched him from the upstairs window, but her wounds-the physical and the emotional wounds-were too new. She didn't want him to see.

"I could ask you a few questions, too," Marguerite said, figuring her best defense was an offense. "How's your son?"

"Married. Living in Coha.s.set, working in the city. He has a little girl of his own."

"You have a granddaughter?"

Dusty handed a snapshot over the refrigerator case. A little girl with brown corkscrew curls sitting on Dusty's lap eating corn on the cob. "Violet, her name is. Violet Augusta Tyler."

"Adorable," Marguerite said, handing the picture back. "You're lucky."

Dusty looked at the picture and grinned before sliding it back into his wallet. "Lucky to have her, I guess. Everything else is much as it's always been."

He said this as if Marguerite was supposed to understand, and she did. He ran his shop; he stopped at Le Languedoc or the Angler's Club for a drink or two or three on the way home; he took his boat to Tuckernuck on the weekends. He was as alone as Marguerite, but it was worse for him because he wanted company. The granddaughter, though. Wonderful.

"Wonderful," Marguerite said, taking the mussels.

"Who is it, Margo?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Not the professor?"

"No. G.o.d, no."

"Good. I never liked that guy. He treated you like s.h.i.t."

Even after all that had happened, Marguerite didn't care to hear Porter spoken about this way. "He did the best he could. We both did."

"What was his name? Parker?"

"Porter."

Dusty shook his head. "I would have treated you better."

Marguerite flashed back to that night, years earlier. Dusty with his head on the bar, drooling. "Ah, yes," she said.

They stood in silence for a moment, then two; then it became awkward. After fourteen years there were a hundred things they could talk about, a hundred people, but she knew he only wanted to talk about her, which she wasn't willing to do. It was unfair of her to come here, maybe; it was teasing. She shifted the mussels to her other hand and double-checked that her pocketbook was zipped. "Oh, Dusty," she said, in a voice full of regret and apology that she hoped would stand in for the things she couldn't say.

"Oh, Margo," he mimicked, and he grinned. "I want you to know I'm happy you came in. I'm honored."

Marguerite blushed and made a playful attempt at a curtsy. Dusty watched her, she knew, even as she turned and walked out of his shop, setting the little bell tinkling.

"Have a nice dinner!" he called out.

Thank you, she thought.