The Love Season (9 page)

The phone in the house rang. Cade? She couldn’t bear to talk to him.
She picked up her monogrammed canvas beach bag—a welcome-to-Nantucket present that Suzanne Driscoll gave to all of her overnight guests—and stuffed it with a striped beach towel, her sunglasses, her book—and, as an afterthought, Suzanne’s list. Then she raced downstairs. She had to get out of the house.

When she walked into the kitchen, she found Miles at the counter making a ham sandwich.

“Hey,” he said. His favorite syllable. Employable in any situation, Renata now understood.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m on my way out.”

“Where to?” he said.

“Beach.”

“Here?”

“I have no wheels,” she said. “So, yes.”

“That little beach is crap,” he said. “And the water isn’t clean. You notice Mr. D. keeps his Contender anchored offshore.”

“It’s not clean?” Renata said. “Are you sure?” More than anything, she wanted to swim.

“You should come with me,” Miles said. “I’m just about to head out. I have the afternoon off.”

“Well, I don’t,” Renata said. “I’m supposed to meet the family at the yacht club in an hour.”

Miles rolled his eyes, and even then he was dazzling. Tall, broad shouldered, tan, with brown hair lightened by the sun, blue eyes, and a smile that made you think he was born both happy and lucky. “Blow off lunch,” he said. “Cade and Mr. D. won’t be there.”

“You don’t think?”

“Day like this?” Miles said. “Mr. D. will sail all afternoon. He won’t have many more days on the water if he gets any worse.”

Renata checked the horizon. She wished she was sailing herself, but she hadn’t been invited. Cade had hung her out to dry this morning—but would he really stick her at lunch with only his mother? Renata could imagine nothing worse, today of all days, than lunch alone with Suzanne Driscoll.

“Where are you going?” Renata asked.

“The south shore,” he said. “Madequecham.”

“Made—” Renata tripped over the word; she had never actually spoken it out loud. Madequecham was the Native American name for a valley along the south shore, but to Renata the word meant her mother, dead. She nearly said this to Miles.
My mother was killed in Madequecham. So no thanks, I think I’ll pass
. Except it was turning out to be a strange day, unpredictable, and Renata found that a trip to Madequecham satisfied many, if not all, of her immediate needs. She wanted out of this house. She wanted to bask in the friendly attention of Miles, however perfunctory, and on a more serious and substantial note, she wanted to see for herself the place where her mother had been killed. Was that morbid? Maybe. It was a secret desire, part and parcel of a larger belief: that somehow once Renata understood her mother’s life and death, a fog would lift. Things that had been obscured from her would become clear.

“Come on,” Miles said. He dangled a piece of sliced ham over the bread in a dainty way, like the queen with her handkerchief. He was trying to be funny. “I’ll have you back here before Cade even gets home. Say, three o’clock.”

“I’d like to go,” Renata said apologetically. Strangely, what was holding her back was a factor she would have claimed in public not to care about: Suzanne Driscoll’s disapproval.

“Whatever,” Miles said. “Suit yourself.”

Renata was getting a headache. Only eleven o’clock and already so
much pressing down on her. Suzanne and her list, her father and his bizarre endorsement. They thought they could manipulate her. Well, guess what? They could not. And Cade, perhaps, was the worst perpetrator of all. He had told her they would be going to the beach together today, and yet he’d deserted her. Resolution must have fixed itself on her face, because Miles said, “Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”

“Yes,” Renata said. “I’m coming.”

11:45 A.M.

Almost noon and still so much to do! And Marguerite was exhausted. She put away the groceries and the champagne. She tucked her new, ridiculous umbrella into the dark recesses of her front closet. She checked on her bread dough—it was puffed and foamy, risen so high that it strained against the plastic wrap. Marguerite floured her hands and punched it down, enjoying the hiss, the release of yeasty stink. She had several things to do before she headed out to the Herb Farm. She would delay that trip for as long as possible, because she was afraid to see Ethan. He fell into the category of people she loved, but the connection between them was too painful. Maybe, like Fergus and Eliza at the liquor store, he would be out, leaving a teenager, a college student, someone Marguerite didn’t know, in his place. She could always hope.

But for now, the aioli. Garlic, egg yolks, a wee bit of Dijon mustard. In her Cuisinart she whipped these up to a brilliant, pungent yellow; then she added olive oil in a steady stream. Here was the magic of cooking—an emulsion formed, a rich, garlicky mayonnaise. Salt, pepper, the juice of
half a lemon. Marguerite scooped the aioli into a bowl and covered it with plastic.

She barely made it through the marinade for the beef. Her forehead was burning; she felt hot and achy, dried up. She whisked together olive oil, red wine vinegar, sugar, horseradish, Dijon, salt, and pepper and poured it over the tenderloin in a shallow dish. Marguerite’s vision started to blotch; amorphous yellow and silver blobs invaded the kitchen.

I can’t see
, she thought.
Why can’t I see?
The grandfather clock struck noon, the little monkey inside having a field day with his cymbals. As the twelve hours crashed around Marguerite like Ming vases hitting the tile floor, she realized what her problem was. She hadn’t eaten a thing all day. All that walking on only two cups of coffee. So her symptoms weren’t due to brain cancer or Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease, three things Marguerite feared only remotely, since there was very little to keep her clinging to life—though somehow, the event of tonight’s dinner had sparked promise and hope in Marguerite in a way that made her relieved that she wasn’t sick, only hungry. She pulled a box of shredded wheat from the pantry and doused it with milk. It was cool and crunchy, pleasing. The clock stopped its racket; Marguerite tried to coerce her vision clear by blinking. She might have sunstroke, despite the valiant efforts of her wide-brimmed hat. She drank a glass of water, slowly made inroads on her cereal. The journey out to the Herb Farm intimidated her; she could sacrifice quality, maybe, and simply return to the A&P for the herbs and goat cheese, the eggs, the asparagus, the
fleurs
. Then she laughed, derisively, at the mere thought.

Forget everything else for now
, she thought.
I need to lie down
.

She was so warm that she stripped to her bra and underpants, double-triple-checking the shutters to make certain absolutely no one could see in. (It was the mailman she was worried about, with his irregular hours.)
And even then she felt too odd lying on top of her bed like a laid-out corpse, and so she covered herself with her summer blanket.

Too much walking around in the August sun. That and not enough food, not enough water. And then, too, there was all the thinking she had done about the past. It wasn’t healthy, maybe, to go back and float around in those days. In fourteen years she hadn’t indulged in the past as much as she had in the last twelve hours. It hadn’t seemed productive or wise, because Marguerite had assumed that thinking about the things she had lost would make her unbearably sad. But for some reason today the rules were suspended, the logic reversed. Today she thought about the past—the whole big, honest past—and how she might, tonight, explain it to Renata, and it made her proud in a strange way. Proud to be lying here. Proud that she had survived.

The restaurant had been open for four summers before Marguerite felt the floor stabilize under her feet. She meant this both figuratively and literally. She had spent thousands of dollars getting the restaurant to look the way she wanted it to—which was to say, cozy, tasteful, erudite. She wanted the atmosphere to reflect a cross between Nantucket, whose aesthetics were new to her—the whaling-rich history of the town, the wild, pristine beauty of the moors, the beaches, the sea—and Paris with its sleek sophistication. Marguerite had decided to keep the exposed brick wall at Porter’s insistence (this very feature was a major selling point for Manhattan apartments), and she refurbished the fireplace in the bar, installing as a mantelpiece a tremendous piece of driftwood that Porter had found years earlier up at Great Point. (He’d kept it in the backyard of his rental house, much to the chagrin of the house’s owners, as he waited for a purpose to reveal itself.) To balance the rustic nature of the driftwood,
Marguerite insisted on a zinc bar, the only one on the island. But threatening to throw the whole enterprise off were the floors. They slanted; they sloped; they were tilted, uneven. She had to fix the floors. She couldn’t have waitstaff carrying six entrée plates on a tray over their heads walking across this tipsy terrain, and she didn’t want people eating their meals in a room that felt like a boat lurched to one side. The floors were made of a rare and expensive wormy chestnut; she was afraid she would damage them if she pulled them up and tried to level the underflooring, and so Marguerite opted for the longer, more arduous process of lifting the building and squaring the foundation.

Marguerite’s efforts paid off. The space evolved; it became unique and inviting. She loved the bar; she loved the fireplace and the two armchairs where very lucky (and prompt) customers could hunker down with a cocktail and one of the art history books or Colette novels that Marguerite kept on a set of built-in shelves. She loved the dining room, which she’d painted a deep, rich Chinese red, and she hoped that customers would fight over the three most desirable tables—the two deuces in front of the windows that faced Water Street and, for bigger parties, the west banquette.

However, even with all this in place and precisely to Marguerite’s specifications, it took a while for the people of Nantucket to
get it
. At first, Marguerite was viewed as a wash-ashore—some fancy woman chef with a checkered background. Was she French? No, but she peppered her conversation with pretentious little French phrases, and she spoke with some kind of affected accent. Was she from New York? She had worked in the city at La Grenouille—some people pretended to remember her from there, though she had never once set foot in the dining room during service—and she had been educated at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, but somehow she didn’t quite qualify as a New Yorker. Her
only saving grace seemed to be her connection to Porter. Porter Harris was a much-appreciated fixture on the Nantucket social scene; he had rented the same house on Polpis Road since graduating from college in the early sixties. When Porter spoke, people listened because he was charming and convivial, he could single-handedly save a cocktail party, and he was famous for his extravagant taste in art, in food, in women. He liked to tell people that he could look at Botticelli and Rubens all day and move on to Fragonard and the French Rococo all evening. Nothing was too rich or too fine for him. He claimed to have “unearthed a jewel” on a trip to Paris, and that “jewel” was Marguerite. The restaurant Les Parapluies was named after a Renoir painting. (For the first two summers, a good-quality reproduction hung over the bar, but then it came to seem obvious and Marguerite replaced it with a more intriguing piece, also of umbrellas, by local artist Kerry Hallam.) The restaurant served only one fixed menu per day at a price of thirty-two dollars not including wine, and this confounded people. How could one meal possibly be worth it? Porter was instrumental in those early years in filling the room. He lured in other Manhattanites, other academics, intellectuals, theater people on break from Broadway, artists from Sconset with sizable trust funds, and the wealthy people who looked to the aforementioned to set the trends. These people realized after one summer, then two, then three of unforgettable meals that anyone who worried they wouldn’t like the food was worrying for no reason. This woman whom no one could figure out wasn’t much to look at (or so said the women; the men were more complimentary, seeing in Marguerite’s solid frame and long, long hair an earth mother)—but
boy, could she cook!

It hadn’t been easy to win Nantucket over, but at some point during that fourth summer it all came together. The restaurant was full every weekend, Marguerite had a loyal group of regulars who could be counted
on at least twice during the week, and the bar was busy from six thirty when it opened (and sometimes a line formed outside, people who wanted to vie for the armchairs) until after midnight. Marguerite’s questionable pedigree flipped itself into a mystique; the local press came sniffing, asking for interviews, which she declined, enhancing her mystique. People started recognizing Marguerite on the street; they claimed her as a friend; they announced Les Parapluies as the finest restaurant on the island.

People grew accustomed to her unusual accent (it was a combination of her childhood in Cheboygan and the lilting French-accented English she mimicked from her ballet teacher, Madame Verge, which was later reinforced by so much time in French-speaking kitchens)—but increasing speculation surrounded her relationship with Porter. As the rumors went, he had lured her to Nantucket from Paris and he had bought her the restaurant. (On this last point, Marguerite liked to set the record straight: She bought the restaurant alone; hers was the only name on the deed.) People knew that Porter and Marguerite lived together in the cottage on Polpis Road, and yet summers passed and no ring appeared; no announcement was made. The inquiries and critical glances of the clientele made Marguerite uneasy. The relationship between her and Porter was nobody’s business but hers and Porter’s.

The summers in the cottage on Polpis Road were good and simple. Marguerite and Porter slept in a rope bed; they used only the outdoor shower, whose nozzle was positioned under a trellis of climbing roses. They ate cold plums and rice pudding for breakfast, and then Marguerite left for work. Porter went to the beach, played tennis at the yacht club, read his impenetrable art history journals in the hammock on the front porch. He stopped in at the restaurant frequently. How many times had Marguerite been working at the stove when he came up behind her and kissed her neck? She had the burns to prove it. When Porter couldn’t
stop by, he called her—sometimes to tell her who he’d seen in town, what he’d heard, what he’d read in
The Inquirer and Mirror
. Sometimes he used a funny voice or falsetto and tried to make a reservation. They spent an hour or two together at home between prep and service—they tended a small vegetable garden and a plot of daylilies; they listened to French conversation tapes; they made love. They showered together under the roses; Porter washed her hair. They had a glass of wine; they touched glasses. “Cheers,” they said. “I love you.”