The Love Season (4 page)

“Fine,” Marguerite said. It would be way too much, but Marguerite would wrap the leftovers and send them home for the fiancé on Hulbert Avenue.

There was another startling noise. Marguerite, who had been sitting on the bed next to the phone, jumped to her feet. In the last twelve hours, the noises had come like gunshots. What was that high-pitched ringing? The CD player gone awry? Marguerite hurried out to the living room. The CD player waited silently. The noise was coming from the kitchen. Aha! It was the long-forgotten drone of the stove’s timer. The mussels were done.

10:07 A.M.

Renata hadn’t counted on being alone, and yet that was exactly what had happened. Cade and his father were sailing and Suzanne was off for tennis, leaving Renata with two blank hours until she was expected at the yacht club. She wanted to go running; it was the coffee, maybe, combined with the antsy-weird feeling of being alone in the house. As Renata climbed the back stairs—she had never stayed in a house that
had
back stairs—to the guest room to change, she found Mr. Rogers weaving deftly between the spindles of the banister. So she was not alone after all.

She dressed in her exercise clothes and gathered her hair into a ponytail. On a scale of one to ten, her guilt was at a six and a half and climbing. Before she embarked on this weekend trip to Nantucket, she had promised her father only one thing: that she would not, under any circumstances,
contact Marguerite. But how could Renata resist? She had been dreaming about contacting Marguerite since she and Cade boarded the plane yesterday morning; she had been dreaming of it since the day, ten months earlier, when Cade told her his parents had a house on Nantucket.

Nantucket?
she’d said.

You know it?

Know it?
she said.
I was born there. My parents’ life was there. My godmother is there
.

But Renata didn’t really know Nantucket, not the way Cade did, coming every summer of his life.

I’ll take you this summer
, Cade had said.

That was back in October; they had been dating for two weeks. But even then, Renata had thought,
Yes. Marguerite
.

To Renata, Marguerite was like a shipwreck. She had, somewhere within her hull, a treasure trove of information about Candace, information Renata had never been privy to. And now that Renata was an adult, now that she was a
woman
about to be
married
, she wanted to hear stories about her mother, even silly, inconsequential ones, and who better to tell her than her mother’s best friend? The fact that Daniel Knox had forbidden Renata from contacting Marguerite—had, in fact, kept them apart since Candace’s death—only fueled Renata’s desire to see the woman. There was something her father didn’t want her to learn, possibly many somethings.
She’s crazy
, Daniel Knox had said.
She’s been institutionalized
. But Marguerite hadn’t sounded crazy on the phone. She had sounded just the way Renata always imagined—cultivated, elegant, and delighted to hear Renata’s voice. As if she couldn’t believe it, either: They were finally going to be reunited.

Renata jogged down the back stairs (
Service stairs!
Action’s voice cried out), brushing by Mr. Rogers, who was still intent on his acrobatics, and burst out the side door. Beautiful day.

“Hey,” a voice said. Renata whipped around. She had thought that she and the cat were the only ones home, but there, among the hydrangeas, was Miles, holding a hose.

“Oh, hi!” Renata said. She had been awed by Miles’s good looks when he came to fetch her and Cade at the airport, and once she’d acknowledged this attraction to herself, she was doomed to be tongue-tied in his presence.

“Where’re you off to?” he asked.

“Oh…,” Renata said. “I’m going running.”

“Perfect day for it.”

“Yep,” Renata said. She bent down and touched her toes; then she lifted her leg to the railing of the porch and touched her toes, hoping for a ballerina-in-a-Degas-painting effect, but she felt like a complete idiot. “What are you doing?”

“Watering,” he said, and then in a whispered falsetto he added, “the precious hydrangeas.”

“Are you in school?” Renata asked. He looked older than her but younger than Cade. Though maybe not. Cade could already pass for thirty.

“School?” Miles said. “No. I graduated from Colby three years ago.”

“So what do you do now?” Renata asked.

“Work my ass off for these people,” Miles said. “And in the winter I travel.”

“Travel where?”

“You name it.”

“Tell me where,” Renata said.

“I’ve been to South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania. I climbed Kilimanjaro twice in one week.”

“You did?”

Miles laughed.

“You did not.”

“Enjoy your run,” Miles said.

Renata set off down the white shell driveway, hoping and praying that Miles wouldn’t watch her. She turned around to check. He was staring right at her ass. Renata was mortified and thrilled. She waved. Miles waved back. On a scale from one to ten, her guilt was at an eight.

She headed down the street toward the Beach Club, her father’s former business. Daniel Knox had started his career in Manhattan, trading petroleum futures in the 1970s, which, he liked to tell people, was akin to striking oil himself. In five years he had a bleeding ulcer and had made enough money to retire. He took a sabbatical from the business of petroleum futures and moved to Nantucket for the summer to relax. He bought the Beach Club on a whim; he had played tennis with the son of the man who was selling it. At that time, the club was long on history and short on charm. Dan proceeded to renovate, restore, upgrade.

He added a fitness center—the first of its kind on Nantucket—and a hot tub, a sauna, a room for massage. He bought a hundred and twenty beach umbrellas from the company that supplied the most exclusive establishments on the Cap d’Antibes. He built a lunch shack, where families could sign for grilled hamburgers and ice-cream bars. For seventy-five years the members of the Beach Club had packed sandwiches wrapped in plastic; they had suffered with cold-water-only showers; they had lounged on rickety beach chairs and threadbare towels. Many of the members liked things this way; they were reluctant to embrace the improvements and the rate hike that came with them. But Daniel Knox won in the end. Not a single member quit, and, in fact, many had clamored to join. To hear him tell it on a night when he’d had a few scotches (which was what
it took to get him to talk about Nantucket at all), he had single-handedly saved the Beach Club.

These endeavors ate up a good chunk of his capital, but he was happy. His bleeding ulcer healed. He had told Renata of the members’ attempts to marry him off—to their single niece visiting from Omaha, to a career girl they knew from Boston. He’d endured five hundred blind dates in his estimation—dinners at the Club Car, picnics on Dionis Beach, movies at the Dreamland Theater—all a complete waste of time. The members concluded that he was too picky, or gay. And then one summer he noticed a young woman who would jog past the club every morning. He started saying hello; she would only wave. He began to ask around and heard varying reports: Her name was Candace Harris; she worked for the Chamber of Commerce. Her half brother, Porter Harris, was part-owner of the restaurant Les Parapluies. From someone else Dan heard that Porter was not part-owner at all; he was merely involved with the chef, a woman named Marguerite Beale. Candace hung out at the restaurant every night. She was to be seen with older men, drinking champagne. She was to be seen alone, always alone, or palling around with her brother and the chef. She was training for the New York Marathon or no, not the marathon. She ran for fun.
The best way to see her, man
, someone finally said,
is to go to the restaurant. The food’s pretty damn good, too
.

Renata had heard this part of her parents’ history plenty of times. Her father went to the restaurant without a reservation, and after a scotch at the bar he insinuated himself at a table with Candace, Marguerite, and Porter. They, having no idea who he was aside from another man in love with Candace, proceeded to punish him by drinking him under the table. He crawled out of the restaurant and claimed he couldn’t even think the words
Les Parapluies
without vomiting. Ten days passed before he forced himself to return; when he did, Candace agreed to go out with him. The
problem was, the only place she wanted to eat was Les Parapluies.
She
lived
at that restaurant
, Daniel said.
It was her second home
.

As Renata approached the Beach Club, her heart beat wildly. (She was also still thinking of Miles—he
had
been staring at her; she was sure of it.) The club was glorious. The blue, green, and yellow umbrellas were lined up in rows on the beach, and the water glinted in the sun. She spied some children digging with shovels at the shoreline and a solitary figure, swimming. There was a pavilion shading five blue Adirondack chairs and a low shingled building she assumed was the bathhouse.
This could have been mine
, Renata thought, and she pined for it for a minute—a place on Nantucket that would have been hers and not Cade’s. She wished that her father could see the club at that moment, with the sun just so, and the water, and the breeze. He would have been forced to admit that he was shortsighted for selling; he would have wanted it back. Renata had heard the possibility of this in his voice in their final conversation before she left. He had been excited for her to see the club.
My old darling
, he said. There was a tone to his voice that sang out,
Those were the good old days
, and this made Renata think that maybe, after all this time, he was healing. But he’d ended the conversation by making her promise not to contact Marguerite. So no. Not healing. Never.

Renata slowed down, then stopped. Then wished for water, the cooling spray of Miles’s hose. Cade’s parents had been trying to join the Beach Club for years, but they were stuck on the waiting list, a fact that secretly thrilled Renata. She felt a connection to the place, probably more imagined than real. How many years had it been since it was not her but her mother running down this road? Twenty-three years. Renata imagined her father loitering in the parking lot with a clipboard, pretending to check the wind indicator as he waited for Candace to jog by.
Hi
, he
would have said.
How are you this morning?
And the mother Renata could barely remember would smile to herself and give a little wave.

Renata loved her father, and she pitied him. His life since Candace died had been comprised of a safe new career—insurance—and his daughter. The career’s primary purpose was to provide income for Renata’s private high school, her tennis lessons, gymnastics, horses, French, the Broadway shows followed by dinner at One If by Land, Two If by Sea, the vacations to Bermuda and Tahoe and Jackson Hole, with Renata in her own hotel room from the time she was ten because that was, according to her father, the age when she stopped being a little girl and started becoming a young woman. It was around the age of ten, too, when Renata’s view of her father changed. When she was a small child, his love had been a blanket, her security, her warmth. But then one day it became a heavy, itchy wool sweater that she was forced to wear in the heat of the summer; she wanted to shrug it off.
Lighten up, Dad
, she’d say. (He’d become “Dad,” not “Daddy.”)
Back off. Leave me alone
. The light of his interest only intensified; Renata felt like a bug he was torturing under a magnifying glass.

He had taken her to buy her first bra. She was a few months past her eleventh birthday, the other girls in the sixth grade wore bras, and Renata had to have one.
I want a bra
, she said. Her father had looked shocked at this pronouncement, and his eyes flickered over her chest—where, it had to be admitted, not much was happening.

Renata could still remember the trip to Lord & Taylor, the orange carpeting, the fluorescent lights, the soft dinging of the elevators. She and her father walked, not touching, not speaking, to Lingerie.

This is the place?
her father asked incredulously, eyeing the mind-boggling array of bras and panties. The bras on display right in front of them were 36 triple-D—beige, black, lacy, and leopard print. Renata
wasn’t sure this
was
the place; she had never been bra shopping before. She wanted her mother, or any mother at all, and at that moment she hated her father for not remarrying, for not even dating.

They found a saleswoman.
GLENDA
, her name tag said, like the good witch from
The Wizard of Oz
. She took one look at Dan and Renata—embarrassed father and skinny eleven-year-old daughter who bleated like a lamb, “Bra?”—and whisked Renata into the dressing room while she discreetly snuck over to Juniors to fetch an assortment of training bras. Renata emerged, twenty minutes later, with three bras that fit; she wanted to wear one home. Her father, in the meantime, sat slumped in a folding chair until it was time to pay. On the way out, he started to cry. Renata didn’t ask what was wrong; she couldn’t bear to hear the answer. His little girl was growing up, and where was Candace?

Where was Candace?

When Renata and Cade started dating, Renata told him the story of bra shopping.
That
, she said,
sums up the way things are between me and my father. He loves me too much. He feels too responsible. He is weighing me down. I am weighing him down. I have been his daughter and his wife, you know what I mean?

But you don’t mean…?
Cade said.

No
, Renata had said; then she wondered if her relationship with her father was too nuanced to explain to another human being or simply too nuanced to explain to Cade. She was pretty sure that Cade’s relationship with his parents was cut-and-dried; it was normal.
They
took care of
him;
it was a one-way street. Cade didn’t feel the need to escape them. What Cade wanted, more than anything in the world, was to be just like them.