Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

Every night she cooked for him in the borrowed apartment on the boulevard St.-Germain and he stood behind her, actively watching, drinking a glass of wine, asking her questions, praising her knife skills, fetching ingredients, filling her glass. While the chicken roasted or the sauce simmered, he would waltz her around the kitchen to French music on the radio. Marguerite, at the advanced age of thirty-two, had fallen in love, and even better, she liked the man she was in love with.

He made her feel beautiful for the first time ever in her life; he made her feel feminine, sexy. He would tangle his hands in her long hair, nuzzle his face against her stomach. They played a game called One Word. He asked her to describe her mother, her father, her ballet teacher, Madame Verge, in one word. Marguerite wished she had spent more time reading; she wanted to impress him with her choices. (Porter himself used words like uxorious and matutinal with a wide-eyed innocence. When they visited Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookstore opposite to Notre-Dame on the Ile de la Cité, Marguerite raced to the First Oxford Collegiate to look these words up.) In the end, she said savior (mother), diligent (father), elegant and uncompromising (Madame Verge).

“That’s cheating,” he said. Then he said, “And how would you describe yourself? One word.”

She took a long time with that one; she sensed it was some kind of test. Charming , she thought. Witty, talented, lonely, lost, independent, enthralled, enamored, ambitious, strong . Which word would this man want to hear? Then, suddenly, she thought she knew.

“Free,” she said.

Even as she looked back from this great distance, it was nothing short of miraculous-the way that meeting Porter Harris had changed the course of Marguerite’s life. But then, as suddenly as it began, it ended: He flew back to New York. Marguerite traveled all the way out to Orly, hoping he would ask her to come back to the States with him, but he didn’t, which crushed her. She had his telephone number at home and at his office. He had no way to reach her. She stayed in Paris.

But Paris, in the course of ten days, had changed. The place that had been so mysterious and full of possibility when she arrived was unbearable without Porter. She wondered how long she had to wait before she called him and what she would say if she did. She had given him the word “free,” but she wasn’t free at all, not anymore. Love held her hostage; it made her a prisoner. She returned to her bed at the hostel; she went back to eating bread, cheese, figs. April turned into May; Paris was warm. Before he left, Porter had given her a copy of The Sun Also Rises . She hung out in the Tuileries and read and slept in the afternoon sun.

And then, after two excruciating weeks, the owner of the hostel knocked on the door of her room. A telegram. DAISY: MEET ME IN NANTUCKET, MEMORIAL DAY.-PH

Marguerite moved through the shop into the back room, the saleswoman on her trail. This had been the dining room. Eighteen tables: On a crowded night, a Saturday in August when every seat was taken, that meant eighty-four covers. Marguerite closed her eyes. There was Muzak playing, a rendition of “Hooked on a Feeling” on the marimba. But in Marguerite’s mind it was laughter, chatter, gossip, whispers, stories told and told again. In Marguerite’s mind the room smelled like garlic and rosemary. A spinning card rack stood where the west banquette used to be, next to a display of scented candles, embroidered baby items, wrapping paper.

Porter had found the space; he’d been looking around the island for a place to put an art gallery. He brought Marguerite to the building as soon as he picked her up from the ferry dock. He kept saying, I want to show you something. You’re really going to love it. Really, really, really. I can’t wait to show you . Marguerite was a bundle of nerves. Did Porter know what she would like or not like after only ten days together in what now seemed like a fairy-tale city on the other side of the Atlantic? She was so ecstatic to be back in Porter’s presence that she didn’t care. On her first ride through town she didn’t notice a single detail about Nantucket other than the weather: It was gray and drizzling. Porter pulled his Ford Torino up onto the curb and ran around to open Marguerite’s door.

You’re going to love this, Daisy , he said. And up the three brick steps they went, hand in hand. Porter pulled out keys and swung the door open.

A narrow room, empty. A bigger room behind it, empty. A lovely exposed brick wall, two big windows.

What is it? Marguerite said.

Your restaurant , he said.

In that moment, Marguerite had many times mused, lay the conundrum of Porter Harris. They had been in each other’s presence for less than two weeks and he was making the gesture of a lifetime, offering that space to her. And yet Porter’s commitment to her began and ended with the space. The restaurant had, in many ways, taken the place of a marriage, taken the place of children. The space was what Porter had to offer (and, little did she know then, all he had to offer). At the time it had seemed a miraculous thing. Marguerite had dreamed of her own restaurant, she was ready, certainly, and she would ask her mother for the down payment. (It was unfathomable, but the building had cost only thirty thousand dollars.) Her life was starting over. That was how Marguerite felt when she’d stood in this room for the first time: She felt like she was being born.

Marguerite returned to the front room. Time to go. She was being self-indulgent; she had to get home. But her conscience prickled; she didn’t feel she could leave without purchasing something. A refrigerator magnet quipped, HOW TO LIVE ON AN ISLAND: EXPECT COMPANY . No, no. But then Marguerite saw them by the door, in a brass stand. Umbrellas. She wished they were classic black with wooden handles, like the umbrellas in Renoir’s painting. Instead, they were blue and white quarter panels, and on the white it said, NANTUCKET ISLAND , in blue block letters. Marguerite shifted her parcels and plucked one from the stand.

“I’ll take it.”

The saleswoman beamed. Marguerite pulled out her checkbook. She had no use for an umbrella, as she never left her house in the rain, and she had a visceral aversion to any piece of merchandise that shouted the name of the island. She had lived here for more than thirty years. Why would she need to announce the name of her home on her umbrella? Still, she wrote a check out to the tune of…seventeen dollars.

“The Umbrella Shop,” Marguerite said. “A curious name. Do you know where it came from?”

The saleswoman folded down the top of the shopping bag and stapled Marguerite’s receipt to it. “Quite frankly,” she said, “I have no idea.”

10:53 A.M.

It was the powers-that-be in the student life office of Columbia University that had brought Renata Knox and Action Colpeter together in Finnerty 205, although Renata suspected another force had been at work: Fate, or the hand of God. The name on the letter Renata received two weeks before she left for Columbia was Shawna Colpeter . “Freshman,” it said, and it gave a home address of Bleecker Street, New York, New York. Renata pictured Shawna Colpeter as a girl raised one of two ways in Greenwich Village. She was either a child of traditional hippies or a child of extraordinarily wealthy hippies. Any which way, Renata was intimidated. The people she knew who grew up in Manhattan went to private school (Trinity, Dalton, Chapin) and they prided themselves on attending fashion shows, rave clubs, charity benefits of which their parents were cochairs. They were grown-ups in teenage bodies; they were cynical, world-weary, impossible to impress. They looked down on suburbia, the Home Depots and Pizza Huts, cheerleaders, beer parties in the woods, driver’s licenses. With ten thousand cabs at one’s disposal, who needed a driver’s license?