The Matchmaker (6 page)
“Or it might be a wheat allergy. Perhaps you should stop eating bread?”
“Box,” Dabney said. “I feel much better.”
He had been married to the woman for twenty-four years; he realized that no one told her what to do—but he did not like being dismissed.
“You’ll never guess who I saw at the Daffodil Parade when I was headed to find you. Can you guess?”
“Who?” Dabney said.
“I saw Clendenin Hughes!” The mock joy in his voice was grating even to his ears. “He was riding a bicycle!”
Dabney laughed without sounding at all amused. Maybe she thought he was kidding around, or maybe she thought he was being cruel.
“I have to go, darling,” she said. “I have work to do.”
Box had spent a year courting Dabney before they slept together. She had been keen about giving him the tour of the island and making the picnic—but as soon as he’d kissed her, after taking his first bite of her strawberry pie, she’d inched backward.
He’d said, “I’m sorry, is this not what you want?”
She had welled up with tears and that had made her even more fetching—her big brown eyes shining. “I want to want it,” she said.
At the time, he had not understood what that meant. He was an economist: he dealt in absolutes. But her inscrutable answer doubled his ardor. He decided he would do whatever it took to capture Dabney Kimball’s heart.
What he eventually learned was that Dabney Kimball’s heart was missing. It had been pillaged by Clendenin Hughes, a boy she had loved since she was a teenager. Hughes was Agnes’s father, although by the time Hughes found out that a child existed, he had already embarked on a new life overseas. Hughes had wanted Dabney to move to Thailand, but she couldn’t, because of the confines of her psyche. Instead, she decided to raise Agnes without one word or dollar from Hughes. Dabney convinced herself that she would be better off if she never heard from Clendenin Hughes again. And she hadn’t. But the fact of the matter was that Hughes had taken the tender, beating center of Dabney with him.
For most of that year, Box spent his weekends on Nantucket at the Brass Lantern Inn. He paid a month at a time for a room with a queen canopied bed and a chintz armchair, where he graded student papers. He grew accustomed to the smells of cinnamon-scented candles and the cheddar scones served at breakfast. The proprietor of the inn, Mrs. Annapale, discovered that Box was on the island in pursuit of Dabney Kimball. Mrs. Annapale had known Dabney since she was born and believed her to be a lost cause—not because of Clendenin Hughes but because the girl’s mother had abandoned her in a fancy hotel room when she was only eight years old.
“And you know,” Mrs. Annapale said, “people are never quite right after something like that happens.”
Box had triumphed solely because of his persistence. He showed up in the bitter cold of January and in the windy gray of March. He brought peonies and potted orchids for Dabney and stuffed animals and storybooks for Agnes. He read to Agnes, despite having no experience with children. He brought bottles of single-malt scotch for Officer Kimball and cannoli from the North End of Boston for Dabney’s grandmother, who soon allowed him to call her Grammie instead of “Mrs. Kimball.” He had won over the daughter, the father, and the grandmother, but Dabney remained just out of reach.
Then, in June, Box left to teach for the first time at the London School of Economics, and he missed three consecutive weekends on Nantucket. When he finally returned to the Brass Lantern, he found Dabney waiting for him in his room, sitting on his queen canopied bed.
She said, “I was afraid you’d never come back.”
They made love for the first time that night. Box knew it had been a long while since Dabney had been with a man, and he knew the only man she had ever been with was Clendenin Hughes. Clendenin Hughes
was
sex to Dabney, and as much as Box wanted to set out to change her mind in a swift, masterful conquering, he proceeded slowly and gently. And she didn’t shy away. She cried out in pleasure, and then she asked him to do it all again the next morning.
He proposed over cheddar scones.
That had been twenty-five years earlier. John Boxmiller Beech was an economist, his area of expertise was guns and butter, supply and demand. He was the first to admit, he knew nothing about the mysteries of the human heart.
I am negative proof. I am the one Dabney tried to warn. But did I listen?
I had been working at the Chamber of Commerce as Dabney’s assistant for two years when I started dating George Mobley. I had lived on Nantucket my entire life and I had known George forever. He was five years ahead of me in school, but his sister was only a year ahead of me, and his father was a scalloper who also ran the island’s most popular fish market, where my mother was a faithful patron. (Like all good, old-school Catholics, we ate baked scrod every Friday.) I knew the Mobleys, everyone knew the Mobleys, but I never gave George a thought. I knew he had gone to Plymouth State, and studied statistics, but then he headed down to Islamorada to work on a fishing charter. He had ended up a fisherman like his father, but a far more glamorous kind—sailfish, marlin, fish you hang on the wall.
Then George’s father died in spectacularly tragic fashion—he was thrown off the bow of his boat during a storm, his leg caught in the ropes, and he drowned. George came back to the island for the funeral, which I attended with my mother, and at the reception afterward I started talking to George. It was the deep freeze of January, but George was a golden tan color from his year of fishing on blue water. He had a kind of celebrity, being the bereaved. I was honored that George would talk to me.
I never asked for Dabney’s opinion of George Mobley, and she didn’t offer it. George would stop by the office on Friday afternoons to take me to the Anglers’ Club for appetizers. He had moved back to Nantucket to take care of his mother and sister. Dabney was always her friendly self, saying, “Don’t you two look cute! Have fun now!”
But when George proposed, Dabney chewed on her pearls for a long time, instead of jumping up to congratulate me. And I thought,
Oh boy, I know what that means.
Dabney spent the next six months hinting that I should cancel the wedding. But I was in love. I told Dabney that I didn’t care about the green fog. I would not be talked out of marrying George.
At the Methodist church, as Dabney, who was serving as my maid of honor, arranged the hem of my dress, she said, “Nina, my darling, I’m going to tell you this now while I still can. I don’t think George is the man for you. I think you should run out the back door. In fact, I’ll go with you. We can go to Murray’s for a bottle of rum and get drunk instead. We can go dancing at the Chicken Box.”
I looked down at Dabney and laughed nervously. I knew Dabney was right—and not because Dabney had been blessed with a sixth sense, but because I felt it inside myself.
“Well,” I said. “It’s too late now.”
George and I bought a house on Hooper Farm Road. In a span of seven years, I had five children: two sons, then a daughter, then twin sons. George’s mother and unmarried sister lived down the street, so I was able to continue working at the Chamber. I had to work—we needed the money and I needed the time out of the house for my sanity. Things were crazy but I was happy enough, and I was tickled to prove Dabney wrong. The green haze had been an illusion, caused by Dabney’s own prejudice.
But then things went south with our finances. After doing a little digging, I discovered that George was a regular at Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, he had a bookie in Vegas, he had gambled away all our savings, and the kids’ college funds. He had taken out a line of credit on our house and after three missed payments, the bank repossessed it. George and I and the kids were forced to move in with George’s mother and sister. I lasted for fourteen months, then I found a year-round rental and left George.
“You were right,” I said to Dabney. “I never should have married him.”
“You have the kids,” Dabney said.
I hid my face in my hands.
It was amazing to me that I could know someone my whole life, I could live with him for nine years, sleep next to him in bed every night, give birth to five of his progeny, hold his hand during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass, high-five him when our eldest son got his first base hit, believe every word that came out of his mouth—including the made-up reasons for his trips off-island every Sunday—and still not know him at all. The only thing being married to George Mobley had taught me was that other people are a mystery. And the people who lie and keep secrets are always the people you’d least expect.
S
he lasted three days without giving in.
Box returned to Harvard for the end of his semester: he had exams, graduation, then the class reunions, including his own fortieth.
Dabney lied to Ted Field, and to Box, and to Nina, telling them she felt better. She did not feel better. She felt worse. She was exhausted, she had no appetite, and she had pains all through her middle—shooting pains as well as a general ache. But this wasn’t something antibiotics could cure. She had been infected by Clen’s return.
Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about him: Clen wearing Chuck Taylors like a teenager, Clen riding his bike like a teenager, Clen with one arm.
I have suffered a pretty serious loss…
Dabney had loved Clendenin Hughes since she was fourteen years old, when he told their English teacher, Mr. Kane, that Flannery O’Connor wrote like an angry, lonely woman. Dabney could picture Clen in his jeans and his flannel shirt and his ratty Chuck Taylors, his hair too long, the inflamed pimples on his temple, his knee constantly jogging up and down because his body held energy that could not be contained. He had been on the island for only a couple of weeks at the time of his parry with Mr. Kane. Mr. Kane had said to Clen,
And how do you know what an angry, lonely woman sounds like?
And Clen had said,
I live with one.
The rest of the class laughed, but his answer had struck Dabney as painfully honest. Then and there, she decided she was his.
Dabney had been matchmaking since the ninth grade, but what nobody knew was that the first couple she had set up was herself, with Clen. On the day he spoke out in Mr. Kane’s English class, Dabney’s field of vision had turned pink. She had thought there was something wrong with her, possibly a migraine, but as days passed, she realized that the pink appeared only when she was in Clen’s presence—and so it became clear that the pink meant she had fallen madly and forever in love. The second time she saw this pink it was surrounding Ginger O’Brien as Ginger watched Phil Bruschelli play basketball in the high school gym. Ginger and Phil had been married for twenty-nine years. All the couples Dabney had set up had been bathed in luscious pink and all were still together—perfect matches, forty-two of them.
How
had she been wrong about Clen?
Did the magic of it not apply to her own self, perhaps?
It had started out well. Dabney had pursued Clen’s friendship; she initiated conversations, first about books and then later about more personal things. In December of that year, a surprise early snowfall came to Nantucket, and Dabney invited Clen to go tobogganing. He had kissed her at the top of the hill at Dead Horse Valley, and that was that. They had been together for nine years before Clen left for Thailand—all through high school, through four years of long-distance while Dabney was at Harvard and Clen at Yale, and then back together on Nantucket for a year, both of them living with their respective parents, Dabney managing a T-shirt shop in town, Clen writing for the
Nantucket Standard
.
That final year had been difficult. Dabney finally felt safe and content, home and at peace on her island, but Clen had been restless and angry, still the boy whose energy could not be contained.
Had Dabney thought their relationship would last? She hadn’t been able to imagine the alternative.
But it had not lasted, no, not at all. Clen had left for Thailand, and there had followed twenty-seven years of silence. And yet something
had
lasted because Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about the man. It was absurd! Dabney was furious with herself. No one else could control her. She would not go to Clen today, or tomorrow. She would not go to him, ever. But certainly he knew where she lived? Everyone on Nantucket knew that Dabney Kimball Beech lived in the fish lots, on Charter Street. He could look her up in the phone book; she was plainly listed. Furthermore, he could come walking into the Chamber whenever he pleased.
It was for this reason, or so she told herself, that Dabney left work on the third afternoon and drove out the Polpis Road. She would see Clen, say hello and goodbye, and leave. If she bumped into him on the street, it would be awkward, but at least the initial contact would be out of the way.
However, as she approached the mailbox marked 432, she hit the gas rather than the brake, and sped right past. She kept going—past Sesachacha Pond, past Sankaty Head Golf Course, through the village of Sconset, until she was back on the Milestone Road heading west. The top was down on the Impala and she howled into the open sky. She felt like she had won some kind of game or contest. Clendenin Hughes wanted to see her! But she would not go!
She tossed and turned that night with the knowledge that Clendenin Hughes was on the island, in his bed. She knew he was thinking of her.
She got up several times to peer out the window to see if he was standing in the street in front of her house. He had never seen her Impala. When he’d left, three cars ago, she was still driving the Nova.
So many years had passed. She knew from reading about him when he won the Pulitzer that he had never married or had other children.
She thought about taking a sleeping pill. Box had some in the medicine cabinet left over from his knee replacement, but instead Dabney lay wide-eyed in bed. She was too antsy to read—even Jane Austen wouldn’t soothe her—and she had no appetite. She felt the velvet dark of four o’clock change into the birdsong hour of five o’clock, which slid into the first pearly light of six o’clock. She went downstairs and made coffee. She put on clothes for her power walk—her gray yoga pants and a crimson T-shirt emblazoned with a white
H.
(Box kept her outfitted like a faculty wife, though she had been to campus only twice since she’d graduated.) She slipped on her headband, drank her coffee standing up, and tied her sneakers. She set out onto the streets of Nantucket an hour earlier than normal, which wasn’t like her, but that stood to reason as she was not feeling at all herself.
She arrived back at the house at quarter past seven, energized. She ate a piece of whole grain toast with blueberry jam and half a banana. Tomorrow, she would eat the other half of the banana over her shredded wheat. Everything was fine, normal.
It was only in the shower that she started to cry. The weight of the sleepless night and the enormous burden of the situation poured over her. She got out of the shower, threw on her yoga pants and a T-shirt, and, with her hair still wet, she climbed into her car.
He was sitting on the porch of the cottage in a granny rocker, smoking a cigarette, with a gun across his lap like a character in a John Wayne Western. His beard made him look like a hermit, or a serial killer.
When Dabney stepped out of the car, he didn’t seem at all surprised. He dropped the cigarette into a jar of water at his feet and it hissed upon extinguishing.
“Hey, Cupe,” he said.
Hey, Cupe.
His voice. She had not accounted for how hearing his voice would affect her. She feared she might cry, then she realized that crying was far too mild a reaction. She would do something else. She would melt, or turn into a pillar of salt, or spontaneously combust. What happened to a person placed in a situation like this? Box might try to turn this into a formula: if one started with the amount Dabney had loved Clen, then took its derivative and divided it by twenty-seven years, one would certainly end with only a small decimal of 1 percent. Dabney should feel nothing, or practically nothing. She should be able to say,
Hey, Beast
—because in their long-ago life, that had been their private nomenclature, Cupe and Beast—and shake Clen’s hand or give him a gentle hug because of his arm, and say,
So, how have you
been?
Dabney briefly closed her eyes: pink. Pink was normally a cause for celebration. But not today.
Clen descended the porch steps and stood before her, and she was funneled into the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes. He was older, and bigger, and lopsided, but the sound of his voice and the beauty of his eyes threatened to bring Dabney to her knees. Their love had been a castle, the castle had been reduced to rubble, and Dabney had cleared the rubble away teaspoon by teaspoon for more than a quarter century until she was sure there was nothing left but a barren clearing inside her.
Why then this rush of feeling, a molten stream of pure silver desire, and a golden glinting of what she feared was love. It had been so many years since she’d felt love like this—love she had known only with Clendenin, love she had forsaken but that she had secretly hoped and prayed would return—that she barely recognized it.
Love.
She couldn’t speak. It was just as it had been when she saw him in Sconset on his bicycle. She could not get air. Was she going to faint again? She did
not
feel well. The return of Clendenin Hughes was killing her.
“You came,” he said.
His voice.
She broke. Sobbing, tears, she felt raw, exposed, and human. Before the e-mail had arrived in her in-box (subject line:
Hello
), it had been months since Dabney had cried. The death of their dog, Henry. And before that it had been years—tears of joy, Agnes’s graduation from high school, again from college.
“You are still so beautiful,” Clen said. “Exactly as I pictured you. You look just as you did when you stood on the wharf as my ferry pulled away.”
“Stop it!” Dabney screamed. She was shocked at the volume and pitch of her voice, shocked that her voice worked at all. But really, how
dare
he start out by conjuring the worst day of her life! He had been standing at the railing of the Steamship on a blindingly blue September day. He had waved at Dabney, shouting out,
I love you, Cupe! I love you!
Dabney had been unable to shout or wave back. She had stood still as a post, mute with sorrow and fear and regret—and anger at herself for the weakness and failings of her psyche.
She could not go with him.
She felt as perhaps the first Dabney—Dabney Margaret Wright—had felt when she stood in nearly the same spot and watched her husband, Warren, set sail on the whaling ship
Lexington
.
Dabney Margaret Wright would never see her husband again.
Dabney Kimball had seen pink with Clendenin for so many years that she had been convinced they would end up together. But watching him disappear toward the horizon shook her confidence. She thought,
I will never see Clendenin Hughes again.
Yet, here he was.
He moved to embrace her. She batted at him, pummeled his chest—still being careful of his missing arm; weird how Dabney could be afraid of something that wasn’t there—but Clen pulled her in with his one strong arm, brought her close. She could smell him, he smelled the same, and he was still the same relentless bastard. He
would not quit
until the world saw things his way.
“Let go of me!” Dabney said.
“No,” he said. “I will not let go. I waited far too long for this moment. I have wanted nothing more in this life than to hold you again.”
“Stop!” Dabney said.
“Just relax,” Clen said. “You can walk away and never come back, but please just give me a moment to hold you and give you one kiss.”
Dabney succumbed. She hugged him fiercely around the middle and inhaled his scent and felt a rush of desire so strong it made her dizzy, and she wobbled. She felt Clen’s mouth in the part of her hair, and the warmth of this was unbearable. She raised her face to him and then they were kissing. It was insane, reckless kissing, kissing like Dabney had never known—but that wasn’t quite true. It was kissing like Dabney had known only with Clendenin when they were teenagers, when the wonder of kissing had first entered their lives. Their mouths, lips, tongues were searching, hungry, aching. It was that kind of kissing, so old it was new again, and with the kissing came desire so intense it hurt. He was instantly hard against her leg. She remembered sex with him, how desperate and mind-altering it had been, how it had felt like the earth was tilting, how she had howled with the first shuddering orgasms of her young body, and how he had placed the side of his hand into her mouth for her to bite so that her cries would be stifled. He would later show her the teeth marks and they would climb onto their bikes and ride to the pharmacy for strawberry frappes, Clen grinning like a fool, Dabney sweetly sore and tender against her bicycle seat.
So many things she had not allowed herself to remember.
She pulled away and there was a sucking sound, like a vacuum seal being broken. The sun went behind the clouds.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can,” he said. He was short of breath. “You just did.”
“That was…I don’t know what that was.”
He growled a laugh.
Beast.
She had called him Beast because of his size, and his unruly dark hair, and his noises, and the ferocity that surfaced in him when he got riled. When she was first getting to know him, he reminded her of a character from a fairy tale—not an animal per se, but not quite human, either. He had arrived on Nantucket wounded from his life before, in Attleboro. His alcoholic father had drunk himself to death at the kitchen table. Clen had been wild and strange, and the smartest person Dabney had ever known.
“I’m married,” she said.
“I don’t care,” he said.
No, of course he wouldn’t care. He had bucked against convention and authority and
the rules
the entire time Dabney had known him. She assumed this was still true. He had graduated as valedictorian of their high school class, but had barely escaped being expelled for losing his temper with their history teacher, Mr. Druby, over the philosophical stands of Malcolm X. Clen had used profanity in his outrage, and he had called Mr. Druby an ignoramus (which Dabney had thought sounded like some kind of dinosaur), and it was only the ensuing wrath of Clen’s mother, Helen Hughes (for everyone, including the principal, was afraid of Helen Hughes), that had saved Clen.
“I don’t care if you don’t care,” Dabney said. “I care. Box is a good man.”
