The Love Season (2 page)

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 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 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 fillets 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 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 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.

“Wonderful,” Marguerite said, taking the mussels.

“Who is it, Margo?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Not the professor?”

“No. God, no.”

“Good. I never liked that guy. He treated you like shit.”

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.

Marguerite had been in the fish store all of ten minutes, but those ten minutes were the difference between a sleepy summer morning and a fullblown August day on Nantucket. One of the ferries had arrived, disgorging two hundred day-trippers onto the Straight Wharf; families who were renting houses in town flooded the street in search of coffee and breakfast; couples staying at B and Bs had finished breakfast and wanted to rent bikes to go to the beach. Was this the real Nantucket now? People everywhere, spending money? Maybe it was, and who was Marguerite to judge? She felt privileged to be out on the street with the masses; it was her own private holiday, the day of her dinner party.

There was a twinge in Marguerite’s heart, like someone tugging on the corner of a blanket, threatening to throw back the covers and expose it all.

Dusty had let her off easy, she thought. But the girl might not. She would want to hear the story. And Marguerite would tell her. The girl deserved more than five thousand dollars. She deserved to hear the truth.

8:37 A.M.

The sheets were white and crisp, and the pillows were so soft it was like sinking her head into whipped cream. The guest room had its own deck with views of Nantucket Sound. Last night, she and Cade had stood on the deck kissing, fondling, and finally making love—standing up, and very quietly, so that his parents, who were having after-dinner drinks in the living room with their absurdly wealthy friends, wouldn’t hear.

Once you marry me
, Cade had whispered when they were finished,
all this will be yours
.

Renata had eased her skirt and her underwear back into place and waited for the blinking red beacon of Brant Point Lighthouse to appear. She would have laughed or rolled her eyes, but he was serious. Cade Driscoll wanted to marry her. He had presented her with a diamond ring last week at Lespinasse. (The maître d’ was in on the plan in advance: drop the ring in a glass of vintage Dom Pérignon—he didn’t realize Renata wasn’t old enough to drink.) They set out, cautiously, to inform their families. This meant Cade’s parents first—and then, at some point later, Renata’s father.

The announcement to the Driscolls had taken place the previous morning, shortly after Cade and Renata arrived on the island. Miles, a drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a man who was spending his summer as the Driscolls’ houseboy, had picked up Cade and Renata at the airport, then delivered them to the house on Hulbert Avenue, where the cook, Nicole, a light-skinned black girl with a mole on her neck, had prepared a breakfast buffet on the deck: mimosas, a towering pyramid of fresh fruit, smoked salmon, muffins, and scones (which Mrs. Driscoll wouldn’t even look at, being on Atkins), eggs, sausage, grilled tomatoes, coffee with hot frothy milk.

“Welcome to Nantucket!” Suzanne Driscoll said, opening her arms to Renata.

Renata had bristled. She was nervous about announcing the engagement; she was afraid that the Driscolls, Suzanne and Joe (who had early-stage Parkinson’s), would notice the ring before Cade was able to tap his silver spoon against his juice glass, and she had to abide another display of the Driscolls’ wealth in the form of the house, Vitamin Sea.

Renata tried to view the circumstances through the eyes of her best friend, Action Colpeter, who was cynical about the things that other people found impressive.
Houseboy? Cook?
Action would say.
The Driscolls
have servants!
Action had traced her ancestors back to slaves in Manassas, Virginia; she was touchy about hired help, including her own retarded brother’s personal aide and her parents’ cleaning lady. She was touchy about a lot of other things, too. She would be horrified to learn of Renata’s engagement; she would pretend to vomit or, because she tended to get carried away with her little dramatizations, she would vomit for real. Faint for real. Die for real. Renata was spared her dearest friend’s reaction for three more weeks—Action was working for the summer as a camp counselor in the mountains of West Virginia, where there were no cell phones, no fax, no computers. More crucially for the inner-city kids who attended the camp, there were no TVs, no video games, no Game Boys. In her most recent letter, Action had written:
We are completely cut off from the trappings of modern culture. We might as well be in the Congo jungle. Or on the moon
. She had signed this letter, and every other letter she sent Renata,
Love you like rocks
, which Renata understood to mean a great and rarefied love. Ah, Action. Good thing she wasn’t here to see.

Miles had whisked Renata’s luggage to her guest quarters; she was presented with a mimosa and encouraged to eat, eat, eat! If either of the Driscolls noticed the whopper of a diamond on Renata’s left hand, it was not mentioned until Cade pulled Renata into the sun, placed his arm tightly around her shoulders, and said in his resonant lacrosse-team-captain voice,
I have an announcement to make
.

Suzanne Driscoll had shrieked with delight; Mr. Driscoll, his left hand trembling, made his way over to clap Cade on the back. It was for Mr. Driscoll’s sake that Cade had proposed to Renata after only ten months of dating. No one knew how quickly the Parkinson’s would progress. Cade was an only child; he was older than Renata, a senior to her freshman when they’d met, and now, with his degree from Columbia in hand, he would start a job with J. P. Morgan the Tuesday after Labor
Day. His parents had bought him an apartment on East Seventy-third Street; “a little place,” they called it, though compared to Renata’s dorm room on West 121st, it was a castle.