The Matchmaker (7 page)

“The economist,” Clen said with derision.

“Yes.”

He was studying her. She couldn’t meet his eyes; it was too dangerous. Green glen and weak tea, Scottish hazel, the most mesmerizing eyes she had ever seen. Dabney knew this because they were also Agnes’s eyes.

Oh, God, Agnes.

Dabney said, “I have to go.”

“Come inside,” he said. “See my place.”

“No,” she said.

“Just come look,” he said. “Then you can leave. It’s a step up from the shack behind the Lobster Trap.”

The shack where Clen used to live with his mother, who waited tables at the restaurant. Dabney had lost her virginity in that shack, at Christmastime of her junior year in high school, while Helen Hughes had been off-island, shopping.

She didn’t exactly agree, but she found herself following Clen up the steps to the porch of the cottage.

“What’s with the gun?” she said.

“BB gun,” he said. “I’ve been shooting one-handed at the crows.”

Inside, the cottage was like a very large five-star hotel room, done up in a rustic beach theme. King bed with Frette linens, honey onyx marble in the bathroom. There was a well-appointed galley kitchen and a long pine table where a computer hummed. Legal pads and pens and newspapers were strewn about, anchored down by half-a-dozen dirty coffee cups. There was also a highball glass containing a scant inch of what Dabney knew was bourbon.

He told her that the cottage and the main house belonged to a wealthy Washington family who came to Nantucket only the first three weeks of August, and then again for a week at Thanksgiving, when Joe Biden was a regular guest at dinner. The main house had six bedrooms, Clen said, a gourmet kitchen, and a swimming pool. The family was allowing Clen to live rent-free because he had won a Pulitzer and because he had agreed to do the simple caretaking duties he could physically handle during the eleven months the big house lay fallow. This basically meant that Clen was to make sure the house didn’t burn to the ground or get robbed. He was to make sure the thermostat stayed at sixty-five degrees so that the pipes didn’t freeze.

“I want you to come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll make you lunch.”

She said, “I can’t come back.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’m
married,
Clen.”

“I saw your husband, the professor, on the street in Sconset, you know. He was hurrying after you, I supposed.”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “I fainted.”

“Fainted?” Clen said. “Because of me?”

“Well, seeing you didn’t help.”

“But you came here today, to see me. And if you came today, you can come tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” she said.

“Because why?”

“Will you stop?” she said.

“No. I will not stop. I returned to Nantucket for you. Because I haven’t stopped loving you for one second.”

It was her turn to growl, but her growl sounded like the final bleat of a lamb about to be slaughtered. “I don’t believe you.”

“I dated one other woman,” Clen said. “Her name was Mi Linh, Vietnamese woman, beautiful.”

Dabney flinched.

“Our relationship lasted five years,” he said. “We lived together in Hanoi. At the Chinese New Year, I bought her a strand of pearls. She wore the pearls to dinner at the Hotel Metropole. They looked fine on her, but I asked her to take them off. I asked her never to wear them again.” He coughed, and even his coughing was familiar. He had started smoking the day he got to New Haven. Dabney hated herself for holding on to all these details. “She threw them in Hoan Kiem Lake. An offering for the turtle.”

“Lovely,” Dabney said.

“I was glad to see the pearls disappear,” he said. “Pearls were you. Mi Linh wasn’t you, and never would be. We broke up a few weeks later.”

Dabney let the last words of that story float away on the air.

“Why now?’ she said.

Coughing. Deep breath. “My arm.”

She nodded. “What happened?”

“If you come back tomorrow,” Clen said, “I’ll tell you.”

She opened her mouth to say,
I’m not coming back tomorrow,
but she saw little point in continuing the verbal tug-of-war with him. She turned to go.

“I’m going to make you take your words back,” he said.

“What words?” she said.

A beat of silence. She made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Weak legs. But no.
Forbearance.

“You know what words,” he said.

And then, suddenly, she did know.

“Goodbye, Clen,” she said.

Dabney called Nina at home and asked her to come into the office right away, even though it was barely eight thirty. Across the street, the newspaper van was unloading at the Hub, but aside from that, Main Street was quiet.

Nina climbed the stairs heavily, then perched on the edge of her desk, her expression that of a person about to jump off a building. “Am I being fired?” she asked.

“What?” Dabney said. “No. Gosh, no. Why would you ever think that?”

“In eighteen years, you have never asked me to come in early,” Nina said.

This was true. If there had been a need to come to work early, Dabney had been the one to do it.

“I’m not firing you, Nina,” Dabney said. “I would never fire you.” Nina accepted the cup of coffee that Dabney had gotten her from the pharmacy. She took the white plastic top off the cup and blew. Normally, Dabney brought Nina a cup of ice, too, but today she was so nervous that it had slipped her mind. It hadn’t occurred to Dabney that Nina might be nervous, too.

“What is it, then?” Nina said. She squinted at Dabney as if maybe the answer were written in small print on Dabney’s forehead.

Dabney began to pace the small office. She knew every inch of it by heart: the wall of brochures of each of the Chamber members, the towering stacks of Chamber guides, the photographs of Ram Pasture at sunset and Great Point Lighthouse, taken by Abigail Pease, the frayed oriental rug that Dabney had rescued from her father’s house on Prospect Street, the two desks that had been salvaged from the old police station. She and Nina referred to them as their
Dragnet
desks. Dabney worked at her father’s old desk; she remembered sitting at it as a girl as her father processed paperwork for a DUI, or joked with Shannon, the pretty, blond dispatcher. The Chamber office was her home, but it offered her zero comfort right now.

Dabney said, “We’ve worked together for so long that you probably think you know everything about me.”

“Almost everything,” Nina said.

“Almost everything,” Dabney said. “However, I’m pretty sure what I say next will shock you.” Dabney sipped her coffee. Diana at the pharmacy made Dabney’s coffee perfectly—cream, six sugars, two dashes of cinnamon—every single morning. But today, this also offered zero comfort.

“What?” Nina asked. “What will shock me?”

Was Dabney really going to say it? She had been taught the lyrics to “American Pie” by an Irish chambermaid named May at the Park Plaza Hotel decades earlier. Singing it always calmed Dabney’s nerves.
Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

“Clendenin Hughes has come back to the island,” Dabney said.

Nina spilled coffee down the front of her blouse. This, Dabney had predicted. She handed Nina a wad of napkins.

“It gets worse,” Dabney said. “I went to see him this morning. As in, a little while ago.”

“Oh my gosh golly, golly gosh,” Nina said. There were long seconds of processing this; Dabney watched Nina work through her shock. “Well.” Pause. “Really.” Pause. “Of course you went to see him.” Pause. “How could you not?”

Dabney and Nina had not been friends when Dabney and Clen split, but you didn’t work across from someone for eighteen years and not tell her all the secrets of your heart.

Nina said, “And did you…”

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.
“I kissed him,” Dabney whispered.

“You did?” Nina said. She did some deep Lamaze-type breathing, which she usually saved for phone conversations with her ex-husband, George. “Wow. Wowowowow. This is big. This is huge. Do you remember five or six years ago when I asked you…”

“Of course I remember,” Dabney said.

If Clendenin Hughes ever came back to Nantucket,
Nina had asked,
what would you do?

And Dabney had said,
I will stand on my head and spit in my shoe.

“So now what?” Nina asked.

“He asked me to go over there tomorrow,” Dabney said. “He said he would make me lunch.”

“More likely he wants to eat you for lunch,” Nina said.

“Nina!”

“I think you should go,” Nina said. “It’s not like we’re talking about some cute waiter from the Boarding House. We’re talking about Clendenin Hughes. Your first true love.”

My only true love,
Dabney thought. Then she hated herself.

“I can’t do it,” Dabney said. “I won’t do it.”

“I hate to break this to you, Dabney,” Nina said. “But you’re not the first person in the history of the world to think about having a love affair. I almost did it myself.”

“You did not!” Dabney said.

“With Jack Copper,” Nina said. “I was at the Anglers’ Club one night when George was off-island, gambling, although I didn’t know that at the time. Jack and I were talking and drinking, and drinking and talking—and then I said I had to leave and he said he’d walk me to my car. He kissed me good night in the parking lot and…it could have gone further. He wanted it to, and so did I. But I stopped it.”

Dabney exhaled. “Because you are a good and faithful person.”

“I’ve always regretted it,” Nina said.

“Have you?” Dabney said.

“I have,” Nina said. “Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they’re over and done. Regretting the things you didn’t do is tougher, because they’re still out there…haunting you. The what-ifs.”

Dabney considered this for a second. It was true: Clendenin Hughes had haunted her all these years. Not going to Bangkok haunted her. The what-may-have-been haunted her.

Nina said, “I have to say, I’m relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I really thought you were going to fire me. Or tell me something awful, like you were dying.”

My only true love.
Dabney felt like she was dying. Her insides were in an agonizing knot. She reached for her pearls and started gnawing. Then the office phone rang and Dabney and Nina both sat down at their desks for business as usual.

Before she answered the phone, Dabney said, “You won’t say a word about this, right?”

Nina said, “I’m insulted that you had to ask.”

The following day at eleven thirty, an e-mail popped up in Dabney’s in-box from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line:
Are you coming to lunch?

Dabney clicked on the e-mail, but there was nothing else to read.

She deleted the e-mail, then deleted it from her deleted file.

The following Monday, she saw Clendenin’s bicycle on Main Street. It was leaning up against a tree right in Dabney’s line of vision. If Clen knew how her desk was positioned in the office, he would have realized that she couldn’t look out her window without seeing the bicycle.

Dabney stood up and stretched.

She said to Nina, “Do you mind if I open the window?”

“Be my guest,” Nina said.

Dabney threw up the sash and peered out to get a closer look. Was it Clen’s bicycle? Silver ten-speed with the ratty tape unraveling from the curved handlebars. A relic. Definitely Clen’s bicycle.

“It’s balmy,” Nina said.

“Huh?” Dabney said.

He had left it there on purpose, she decided. To taunt her.

She sat back down at her desk. She had packed herself a lovely BLT on toasted Portuguese bread for lunch, using the first hothouse tomatoes from Bartlett Farm. But she couldn’t eat a thing. She still felt awful. In the morning, she decided, she would start the course of antibiotics that Dr. Field had prescribed.

She said, “I’m going to run some errands.”

“Errands?” Nina said.

“I’m going to light a candle at church,” Dabney said.

Nina squinted at her. “What?”

“For my father’s birthday.”

“Your father’s birthday was last week,” Nina said.

“I know,” Dabney said. “And I forgot to light a candle. And I need some thread from the sewing center.”

“Thread?” Nina said.

“My Bermuda bag is missing a button,” Dabney said.

“You don’t know how to sew a button,” Nina said. “Bring it to me. I’ll do it.”

Dabney signed out on the log, writing “errands.” “I’ll be right back,” she said.

When Dabney got down to the street, she headed straight for Clen’s bicycle. He hadn’t even bothered to lock it up; he was still living in Nantucket 1987. Anyone might steal it. Dabney considered climbing on it herself and pedaling away.

Then she realized how difficult it would be to lock up a bike with only one arm, and she felt awful.

She looked around. Where was he? He had parked in front of the pharmacy. Was he at the lunch counter, having a strawberry frappe? She poked her head in.

Diana, a stunning West Indian with her head wrapped in a hot-pink bandanna, saw Dabney and waved. “Hey, lady!”

The hot pink caught Dabney’s eye. Pink pink pink. But Clen wasn’t at the counter. Dabney felt a stab of disappointment.

Dabney waved and said, “Hello, lovey, goodbye, lovey, I have to dash!”

“Busy lady!” Diana said.

Dabney hurried down the street to the Hub. Clen and his newspapers; of course,
of course
he was at the Hub. Dabney straightened her headband. The day
was
balmy, and she feared she was perspiring. Just the walk down the street had left her winded and a little dizzy. Tomorrow, the antibiotics.

Dabney stepped into the Hub, one of her favorite spots in town, with its smell of newsprint and penny candy. Greeting cards, magazines, fake Nantucket Lightship baskets, buckets of seashells and starfish, Christmas ornaments, saltwater taffy.

No Clen.

She left the Hub and stood on the corner. Where was he? She had been so strong, she had deleted his e-mail, she had not driven back out the Polpis Road, she had not given in to temptation, but it had taken nothing more than seeing the bicycle to start her chasing him.