The Blue Bistro (51 page)

“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 fiancé.”

“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. Fiancé 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 class, Madame Verge asking her students to pretend there was a wire that ran from the top 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 bumped into people she knew, though they were never the people she wished to see, and thus she stuck to a smile, a hello.
Let them think what they want
. And Marguerite, both amused and alarmed by her own indifference, 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 glass, 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 glass, 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 glass 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 sex 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. Sex 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 glass of Chartreuse aside, and passed 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 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 God-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, passed 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 pâté and cocktail 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-shell crabs and swordfish chunks (
“great for kebabs”
); there was unshelled lobster meat selling for $35.99 a pound; there were large shrimp, extra-large shrimp, and jumbo shrimp available with shell or without, cooked or uncooked. But then there were the Dusty staples—the plump, white, day-boat scallops, the filets of red-purple tuna cut as thick as a paperback novel, the Arctic char and halibut and a whole striped bass 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 apron 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 gratitude. 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 damn 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 shells 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 only cost 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 Cohasset, 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.