The Love Season (5 page)

Renata gazed out across Nantucket Sound. Her guilt was eating her for breakfast. She blew the Beach Club a kiss, then turned and ran for home.

10:40 A.M.

She was out again, on foot. It was unheard of: Marguerite Beale out of her house, twice in one day. And that was just a start; later she would have to go to the Herb Farm. She would have to
drive
.

But for now, the meat. Picked up, directly, from the butcher at the A&P. And while Marguerite was in the store, she bought olive oil, Dijon mustard, peppercorns, silver polish, toilet paper. It all fit in one bag, and then it was back out into the August sun. Marguerite was wearing a straw hat with a pink satin ribbon that tied under her chin. She felt like Mother Goose. The liquor store was next.

She went to the liquor store on Main Street, steeling herself for interaction; she had known the couple who owned the store for decades. But when she entered, she found a teenager behind the cash register and the rest of the store was deserted.

Marguerite wandered up and down the aisles of wine, murmuring the names under her breath. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Chassagne-Montrachet, Semillion, Sauvignon, Viognier, Vouvray. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what each wine had tasted like. Wine in the glass, buttery yellow, garnet red, jewel tones. Candace across the table, her shoulders bare, her hair loose from its elastic.

“Can I help you?” the teenager said. He moved right into Marguerite’s personal space. He stood close enough that she could see the white tips of his acne; she could smell his chewing gum. Instinctively she backed away. She was browsing the wine the way she browsed for books; she wanted to be left to do so in peace.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” the teenager asked. “Red or
white? If it’s red, you could go with this one,” He held up a bottle of something called ZD. Marguerite had never heard of it, which meant it was from California—or, worse still, from one of the “new” wine regions: Chile, Australia, Oregon, upstate New York. Even fifteen years ago, she had been accused of being a wine snob because she would only serve and only drink wines from France. Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire Valley, Champagne. Regal grapes. Meanwhile, here was a child trying to peddle a bottle of…merlot.

Marguerite smiled and shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“It’s good,” he said. “I’ve tried it.”

Marguerite raised her eyebrows. The boy might have been seventeen. He sounded quite proud of himself, and he had an eager expression that led Marguerite to believe she would not be able to shake him. Which was too bad. Though maybe, in the interest of time, a good thing.

“I’ve come for champagne,” Marguerite said. “I’d like two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, La grande Dame. I hope you still carry it.”

Her words seemed to frighten the boy. Marguerite found herself wishing for Fergus and Eliza, the proprietors. They used to rub Marguerite the wrong way from time to time—a bit pretentious and very Republican—but they were profoundly competent and knowledgeable wine merchants. And they knew Marguerite—the champagne would have been waiting on the counter before she was fully in the door. But Fergus and Eliza were curiously absent. Marguerite worried for a minute that they had sold the store. It would serve her right to squirrel herself away for so long that when she surfaced there was no longer anyone on Nantucket whom she recognized. It was scary but refreshing, too, to think that she might outlast all the people she was hiding from.

The boy loped over to the wall of champagnes, plucked a bottle from the rack, and squinted at the label. Meanwhile, Marguerite could spy the
bottles she wanted without even putting on her bifocals. She sidled up next to the boy and eased the bottles off the shelf.

“Here it is,” she said, and because she was in a beneficent mood she lifted a bottle to show him the label. “When you’re a bit older and you meet a special someone, you will drive her out to Smith’s Point for the sunset with a bottle of this champagne.”

The tips of his ears reddened; she’d embarrassed him. “I will?”

She handed him the bottles. “That’s all for today.”

He met her at the register and scanned the bottles with his little gun. “That will be two hundred and seventy dollars,” he said. He shifted his weight as Marguerite wrote out the check. “Um, I don’t think I’ll be buying that champagne any time soon. It’s
expensive
.”

Marguerite carefully tore out the check and handed it to him. “Worth every cent, I promise you.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks for coming in.”

“Thank you,” she said. She picked up the brown bag with the bottles in one hand and the groceries in the other. Back out into the sun. The champagne bottles clinked against each other. Should she feel bad that she hadn’t selected a Sancerre to drink with the tart and a lusty red to go with the beef? It was grossly unorthodox to drink champagne all the way through a meal, though Marguerite had done it often enough and she’d noticed any person in the restaurant who was brave enough to do it. But really, what would her readers in Calgary think if they knew? Champagne, she might tell them, was for any night you think you might remember for the rest of your life. It was for nights like tonight.

Her hands were full, true. She had a pile of things to do at home: The aioli, the marinade for the beef, and the entire tart awaited, and Marguerite
held out hope for a few pages of Alice Munro and a nap. (All this exercise—she would pay for it tomorrow with sore muscles and stiff joints.) But even so, even so, Marguerite did not head straight home. She was out and about in town, which happened exactly never and she had done so much thinking about…and if she had really wanted to escape her past, she would have moved away. As it was, she still lived on the same island as her former restaurant, and she wanted to see it.

She lumbered down Main Street and took a left on Water Street, where she walked against the flow of traffic. So many people, tourists with ice-cream cones and baby strollers, shopping bags from Nantucket Looms, the Lion’s Paw, Erica Wilson. Across the street, the Dreamland Theater was showing a movie starring Jennifer Lopez. Marguerite harbored a strange, secret fascination with J.Lo, which she nourished during her daily forays into cyberspace. Marguerite surfed the Internet as a way to keep current with the world and to combat the feeling of being a person born into the wrong century; she needed to stay somewhat relevant to life in the new millennium, if only for her Canadian readers. And cyberspace was alluring, as addictive as everyone had promised. Marguerite limited herself to an hour a day, timing herself by the computer’s clock, and always at the end of the hour she felt bloated, overstimulated, as though she’d eaten too many chocolate truffles. She gobbled up the high-profile murders, the war in Iraq, partisan politics on Capitol Hill, the courses offered at Columbia University, the shoes of the season at Neiman Marcus, the movie stars, the scandals—and for whatever reason, Marguerite considered news about J.Lo to be the jackpot. Marguerite was mesmerized by the woman—her Latin fireworks, the way she shamelessly opened herself up to public adoration and scorn.
Jennifer Lopez
, Marguerite thought,
is the person on this planet who is most unlike me
. Marguerite had never seen J.Lo in a movie or on TV, and she had no
desire to. She was certain she would be disappointed. After a second or two of studying the movie poster (that dazzling smile!) she moved on.

Down the street, still within shouting distance of the movie theater, on the opposite side of Oak Street from the police station, was a shingled building with a charming hand-painted sign of a golden retriever under a big black umbrella.
THE UMBRELLA SHOP
, the sign said.
FINE GIFTS
. Marguerite’s heart faltered. She ascended three brick steps, opened the door, and stepped in.

If what the girl wanted was the
whole
story, the unabridged version of her mother’s adult life and death and how it intersected with Marguerite’s life and how they both ended up on Nantucket—if that was indeed the point of tonight—then Marguerite would have to go all the way back to Paris, 1975. Marguerite was thirty-two years old, and in the nine years since she’d graduated from the Culinary Institute she had been doing what was known in the restaurant business as paying her dues. There had been the special hell of her first two years out when she worked as
garde manger
at Les Trois Canards in northern Virginia. It was French food for American congressmen and lobbyists. The chef, Gerard de Luc, was a classicist in all things, including chauvinism. He hated the mere idea of a woman in his kitchen, but it was the summer of 1967 and he’d lost so many men to Vietnam that, quite frankly, he
had
to hire Marguerite. She had been, if judged by today’s standards, egregiously harassed. The rest of the kitchen staff was male except for Gerard’s mother, known only as
Mère
, an eighty-year-old woman who made desserts in a cool enclave behind the kitchen. Initially, Marguerite had thought that
Mère
’s presence might help ameliorate Gerard’s wrath, his demeaning tirades, and his offensive language. (The worst of it was in French, but there were constant
references to the sexual favors he would force Marguerite to perform if every strand of her hair wasn’t caught up in the hair net, if the salad greens weren’t bone-dry.) But after the second day, Marguerite deduced that
Mère
was deaf. Gerard de Luc was a fascist, an ogre—and a genius. Marguerite hated him, though she had to concede his plates were the most impeccable she had ever seen. He made her instructors at the CIA seem slack. He knew the pedigree of every ingredient that entered his kitchen—which farm the vegetables were grown on, which waters the fish were pulled from.
Fresh!
he would scream.
Clean!
He inspected their knives every morning. Once, when he found Marguerite with a dull blade, he threw her
mise-en-place
into the trash.
Start over
, he said.
With a sharp knife
. Marguerite had been close to tears, but she knew if she cried, she would be fired or ridiculed so horribly that she’d be forced to quit. She imagined the dull blade slicing off Gerard de Luc’s testicles.
Yes, Chef
, she said.

Sometimes, staying in a less-than-optimal—or in this case a savage and unsafe—situation was worth it because of what one could learn on the job. In the case of Les Trois Canards, Marguerite became tough; any other woman, one of the cooks told her, would have left the first time Gerard pinched her ass. Marguerite’s tolerance for pain was high.

She left Les Trois Canards after two years, feeling seasoned and ready for anything, and so she moved to restaurant Mecca: Manhattan. During the summer of 1969, she worked as
poissonier
at a short-lived venture in Greenwich Village called
Vite
, which served French food done as fast food. It folded after three months, but the
sous chef
liked Marguerite and took her with him down a golden path that led into the kitchen at La Grenouille. Marguerite worked all of the stations on the hot line, covering the other cooks’ days off, for three magical years. The job was a dream; again, the staff were mostly Frenchmen, but they were civilized. The kitchen was silent most of the time, and when things were going
smoothly Marguerite felt like a gear inside a Swiss watch. But the lifestyle of a chef started to wear on her. She arrived at work at nine in the morning to check deliveries, and many nights she didn’t leave until one in the morning. The rest of the staff often went out to disco, but it was all Marguerite could do to get uptown to her studio apartment on East End Avenue, where she crashed on a mattress on the floor. In three years she never found time to assemble her bed frame or shop for a box spring. She never ate at home, she had no friends other than the people she worked with at La Grenouille, and she never dated.

Marguerite left Manhattan in 1972 for a
sous chef
position at Le Ferme, a farmhouse restaurant in the Leatherstocking District of New York. The restaurant was owned by two chefs, a married couple; they hired Marguerite when the woman, Annalee, gave birth to a daughter with Down’s syndrome. For the three years that Marguerite worked at Le Ferme, the chefs were largely absent. They gave Marguerite carte blanche with the menu; she did all the ordering, and she ventured out into the community in search of the best local ingredients. It was as ideal a situation as Marguerite could ask for, but Le Ferme was busy only on the weekends; people in that part of New York weren’t ready for a restaurant of Le Ferme’s caliber. Marguerite even did her own PR work, enticing a critic she knew in the city to come up to review the restaurant—which he did, quite favorably—but it didn’t do much to help. The restaurant was sold in 1975, and Marguerite was left to twist in the wind.

She considered returning home to northern Michigan. Marguerite’s father had emphysema and probably lung cancer, and Marguerite’s mother needed help. Marguerite could live in her old room, bide her time, wait to see if any opportunities arose. But when she called her mother to suggest this, her mother said, “Don’t you dare come back here, darling. Don’t. You. Dare.”

Diana Beale wasn’t being cruel; she had just raised Marguerite for something bigger and better than cooking at the country club or the new retirement community. What were the ballet lessons for, the French tutor, the four years of expensive cooking school?

I’m sending you money
, Diana Beale said. She didn’t explain where the money came from, and Marguerite didn’t ask. Marguerite’s father had worked his whole life for the state government, and yet all through Marguerite’s growing up Diana Beale had magically conjured money with which to spoil Marguerite: weekend trips to Montreal (they had bought the grandfather clock on one trip; Diana Beale spotted it in an antique store and paid for it with cash), silk scarves, trips to the beauty parlor to shape Marguerite’s long hair. Diana Beale had wanted Marguerite to feel glamorous even though as a child she’d been plain. She wanted Marguerite to distinguish herself from the girls she grew up with in Cheboygan, who taught school and married men with factory jobs. And so the mystery money. Only then, at the age of thirty-two, did Marguerite suspect her mother had a wealthy lover, had had one for some time.