The Love Season (20 page)

Across the table, Dan was proselytizing to Candace’s brothers about how, if he hadn’t come along to save the Beach Club, that waterfront would be a chain of garish trophy homes by now.

Candace grabbed Marguerite’s hand. “Come with me to the loo,” she said. “I need help with my dress.”

Thus it was in the cramped, slanted-ceilinged women’s bathroom at Les Parapluies, with Marguerite holding seventeen layers of tulle and averting her eyes as Candace peed, that Africa was first mentioned.

“I want to go to Africa.”

Marguerite thought she was talking about her honeymoon. As it was, Candace and Dan had decided to wait until winter to take a trip and Marguerite believed discussion was hovering around Hawaii, Tahiti, Bora-Bora. She’d had too much to drink to make the leap across the globe.

“I’m sorry?”

“Dan asked me what I wanted to do,” Candace said. “With my life. If I could go anywhere or do anything. And I want to go to Africa.”

Marguerite narrowed her eyes. Above the sink, a peach-colored index card was taped to the wall:
Employees must wash hands before returning to work
.

“You mean, like, on safari?” Marguerite said.

“No, no, no. Not on safari.”

Marguerite didn’t get it. She was uncomfortable thinking of Candace starting a new, married life in Africa.

“It’s awfully far away,” Marguerite said. “I’d miss you.”

“You’re coming with me, silly,” Candace said.

In the weeks and months that followed, Candace’s vision of them all in Africa crystallized. She wasn’t thinking of Isak Dinesen in Kenya, or trekking the Ugandan jungles in search of gorillas, or righting the evils of apartheid in South Africa—she was thinking of deserts, siroccos, sandstorms, of souks and mint tea and the casbah. She was thinking of Bedouins on camels, date palms, nomads in tents, thieves in the medinas. She had been reading
The Sheltering Sky
and begged Marguerite to make
tagines
and couscous.

Night after night after night, so many summer nights strung together like Japanese lanterns through the trees, Candace and Dan and Marguerite and Porter sat at the west banquette and talked and talked and talked until they were too drunk or too tired to form coherent sentences. They talked about Carter and Reagan, Iran, Woody Allen and Pink Floyd, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and the new Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Porter talked about a colleague accused of making a pass at a female student, who turned around and
pressed charges
. Marguerite talked about
the bluefin tuna Dusty had caught and how he’d sliced it paper thin and eaten it raw right there on the dock of the Straight Wharf. And always, at the end of the night, like a punch line, like a broken record, Candace talked about Africa. She wanted the four of them to open a French restaurant somewhere in her make-believe North Africa.

“I can see it now,” Porter had said, the first time she mentioned it. “A culinary Peace Corps.”

“A restaurant in the middle of the desert,” Candace said. “I’ve always dreamed of running barefoot through the Sahara. What would the restaurant be like, Daisy, if it were up to you?”

“If it were up to Reagan, it would be a McDonald’s,” Dan said. “Talk about cultural imperialism.”

“I asked Daisy,” Candace said. “So hush. She’s the only one of us who would know what she was doing.”

Marguerite gazed around Les Parapluies. This was how she loved it best—empty except for the four of them, lit only by candles. The staff had cleaned up and gone home for the evening, but there was still the lingering smell of garlic and rosemary and freshly baked bread. There was still plenty of wine.

“Just like this,” Marguerite said. “I would want it to be just like this.”

“Except it wouldn’t be like this at all, would it?” Candace said. “Because it wouldn’t be Nantucket. It wouldn’t be thirty miles out to sea; there wouldn’t be fog. We’d be surrounded by sand instead of water. It wouldn’t be the same at all.”

“Spoken like a true Chamber of Commerce employee,” Porter said, raising his glass.

“I’m serious,” Candace said. She turned to Marguerite with her cheeks flushed and her hair falling into her face. One of her pearl earrings was about to pop out. Marguerite reached for Candace’s ear—all she had
meant was to gently hold the earlobe and secure the earring in place before it fell and got lost in Candace’s blouse or bounced across the wormy chestnut floors and got caught in a crack somewhere—but Candace swatted Marguerite’s hand away. Smacked it in anger. Marguerite recoiled, and the energy at the table changed in an instant.

Candace’s mouth was set in an ugly line; her eyes were glassy and wild. Marguerite was confused, then frightened. Had Candace had too much to drink?

“No one takes me seriously,” Candace said. “Nobody listens when I talk. You treat me like a child. Like a china doll. Like an imbecile!”

Dan and Marguerite reached out for Candace simultaneously, but Candace locked her arms across her chest. Porter chuckled.

“It’s not funny!” Candace said. She glared at them all. “You are all so smart and accomplished and that’s fine, that’s great. I support all of you in your work. But now it’s my turn. I want to go to Africa. I mean it about this restaurant. It’s a dream I have. You may think it’s stupid, but I don’t.” She turned to Marguerite. “Now reimagine. What will the restaurant look like?”

Marguerite was stunned into silence. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine a restaurant different from the one she had, especially one on a continent she had never visited.

“I can’t reimagine,” Marguerite said. “I want to stay here, where I am. I want everything to stay just as it is.”

Yes, it was true: If she could have kept the four of them seated at the west banquette for all eternity—with meals appearing like Sisyphus’s boulder—she would have. But then autumn came and Porter returned to Manhattan—to Corsage Woman, Overbite Woman, the blond, unmarried tennis coach. One unfortunate night that fall, Marguerite found
herself standing in the restaurant’s dark pantry with her lawyer, Damian Vix. Ostensibly, he had been in search of dried porcini for a risotto he wanted to make at home, but they had both had too much to drink and the foray into the dark kitchen and darker pantry was followed by kissing and some lustful groping.
Kid stuff
, Marguerite thought afterward. It gave her none of the satisfaction she’d been hoping for.

In the new year, Nantucket suffered one of the worst winters on record—snowstorms, ice storms, thirty-two hours without power, a record three hundred homes with burst pipes according to the claims man at Congdon & Coleman Insurance. Marguerite tested out new recipes in her kitchen on Quince Street, Candace was still working at the Chamber of Commerce, as assistant director now, and Dan monitored the weather—the wind gusts, the inches of snow—and he checked on things two or three times a day at the shuttered-up Beach Club. The three of them gathered occasionally, but mostly it was Candace and Marguerite meeting for lunch at the Brotherhood, or hunkering down in front of the fire at Marguerite’s house on Quince Street with cheese fondue or pot-au-feu. It was during one of these fireside dinners that Candace proposed the trip: seven nights and eight days in Morocco. They would scout a location for their restaurant.

“Just the two of us,” Candace said. “Me and you.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Marguerite said.

“I already have the tickets,” Candace said. “We’re going.”

“Go with Dan.”

“You’d send me to scout a location for a restaurant with
Dan?
You trust him to find the right place?”

Well, no, Marguerite didn’t trust him. But Marguerite thought she had made her feelings more than clear: The restaurant idea was delusional.

“Anyway, I don’t want to go with Dan,” Candace said. “I want to
go with you. Girl trip. Best friends and all that. We’ve never taken a trip together.”

“I can’t go,” Marguerite said.

“Why not?”

“Porter promised me Paris,” Marguerite said. “After his trip to Japan last year. He swore on a stack of Bibles.”

“A stack of Bibles?” Candace said.

Well, a stack of Marguerite’s bibles:
Larousse Gastronomique
, her first-edition M. F. K. Fisher, her Julia Child. At the end of August, before he returned to the city, Porter had laid his right hand on the cookbooks and said in a solemn voice, “In the spring, Paris.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Candace said. “He’ll back out. He’ll find some reason.”

Marguerite flinched. She stared at the dying embers of the fire and nearly asked Candace to leave. How dare she say such a thing! But perhaps it was tit-for-tat. She thought Marguerite was delusional.

“I’m sorry,” Candace said, though her voice couldn’t have been less apologetic. “I just can’t stand to see you get hurt again. He’s my brother. I know him. He promised you Paris to get himself out of a tight spot. But he won’t follow through. You should just come to Morocco with me.”

“I know him, too,” Marguerite said. “He promised me Paris. There’s no reason to doubt him.”

Candace stared. “No reason to doubt him?”

Marguerite stood up and poked at the fire; it had gone cold.

“Porter is taking me to Paris.”

“Okay,” Candace said kindly. “Okay.” Her tone of voice infuriated Marguerite; it was patronizing. Marguerite had never fought with her friend, though she was ready to now. The only thing that kept her from doing battle was the fear that Candace may be right.

And so, the following week, when Porter phoned, Marguerite pressed him on it.

“Your sister wants me to go with her to Morocco.”

“For her restaurant idea?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“She’s crazy,” Porter said. “God love her. Are you going?”

“No,” Marguerite said. “I told her we were going to Paris.”

Porter laughed.

Marguerite steeled her resolve. She could picture Porter’s face when he laughed—his eyes crunching, his head thrown back—but she couldn’t tell what this laugh meant.

“Have you checked your schedule?” she asked. “Decided on a week? If we want the Plaza Athenee, we have to book soon.”

There was a pause. “Daisy…”

She only half-heard the rest of what he said. Something about a paper he was presenting, a week as a guest curator at the Met, a conference they were hosting at Columbia. Marguerite took the phone from her ear and poised it over the cradle, ready to slam it down. She thought of begging, of laying her heart out on the chopping block. It didn’t have to be Paris. It could be the Radisson on Route 128 for all she cared. She wanted something from him, something that proved she was more than just his summertime. But in the end, all she could bring herself to do was cut him off in midsentence.

“Never mind; never mind,” she said. “Candace will be thrilled. The casbah it is.”

As Marguerite formed the bread dough into loaves, laid them down in her oiled baguette pan, as she snipped the tops of the loaves with kitchen
shears and rinsed the loaves with water so they would have a sheen to them when they came out of the oven, she could say that the eight days in Morocco with Candace had been the best eight days of her life. It was when everything changed.

They had started out in a town on the coast, seven hours by car from Casablanca. The town was called Essaouira. It had a long, wide, magnificent crescent of silver sand beach where men in flowing robes offered camel rides for ten dirhams. Candace, who was in for every “authentic” experience she could find, insisted they try it. Marguerite protested, and yet she ended up eight feet off the ground crushed with Candace against the hump of a dromedary named Charlie. Riding a camel, Marguerite soon realized, was like sitting on a rocking chair without any back. Marguerite held on to Candace for dear life as they ricocheted forward and careened back with each of Charlie’s steps down the coastline. Candace was shaking with laughter; Marguerite felt her gasping for air. The camel smelled bad, and so, for that matter, did the soft mud-sand at the waterline. Marguerite buried her nose in Candace’s hair.

When they dismounted, Candace made the man in the flowing robe take their picture. Marguerite smiled perfunctorily, then said, “I need a drink.”

They sat outside at a little café and drank a bottle of very cold Sancerre. They touched glasses.

“To Morocco,” Candace said. “To the two of us in Morocco.”

Marguerite tried to smile. She tried not to wish she were in Paris.

“Do you wish you were in Paris?” Candace said.

Marguerite looked at her friend. Candace’s blue eyes were round with worry.

“You were right,” Marguerite said. It was a relief to admit it. “About Porter, about Paris. You couldn’t have been more right.”

“I didn’t want to be right,” Candace said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I twisted your arm to come here,” Candace said. “I feel like you’d rather be at home.”

“Home?” Marguerite said. Home on Nantucket, where the beaches were frozen tundra, home where she could wallow in the misery of being disappointed again? “Don’t be silly.”

The heart of Essaouira lay in the souks, a rabbit warren of streets and alleys and passageways within the city’s thick, whitewashed walls. Over the course of four days, Candace and Marguerite wandered every which way, getting lost, getting found. Here was the man selling jewelry boxes, lamps, coat racks, coffee tables, and backgammon boards from precious
thuya
wood, which was native to Essaouira. Here was a shop selling the very same items made from punched tin; here was a place selling Berber carpets, here another place selling carpets. Everyone sold carpets! Marguerite sniffed out the food markets. She discovered a whole square devoted to seafood—squid and sea bass, shrimp, prawns, rock lobsters, octopus, sea cucumbers, and a pallet of unidentifiable slugs and snails, creatures with fluorescent fins and prehistoric shells, things Marguerite was sure Dusty Tyler had never seen in all his life. In Morocco, the women did the shopping, all of them in ivory or black burkhas. Most of them kept their faces covered as well; Candace called these women the “only eyes.” They peered at Marguerite (who wore an Hermés scarf over her hair, a gift from one of her customers) and she shivered. Marguerite’s favorite place of all was the spice market—dozens of tables covered with pyramids of saffron and turmeric, curry powder and cumin, fenugreek, mustard seed, cardamom, paprika, mace, nutmeg.