‘Your mom says you’re a little out to lunch,’ Fleur said, sniffing.
‘Out to lunch? Gee, that’s the nicest thing I think she’s ever said about me,’ I kidded but anxiety quickly sucked the laughter out of me. ‘I can’t remember the right things,’ I blurted out. ‘And the things I can remember aren’t true. It’s awful, Fleur, I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happened. Real life is all jumbled up with dream life in my head and it’s horrible.’
Fleur wriggled up the bed until she was lying next to me and hugged me close. She had lost weight in the missing years or rather changed shape — that sexy butt of hers was smaller but her boobs were bigger, her waist thicker and that fabulous hair was even curlier and more lustrous than before.
‘Is it true you’ve lost your memory?’ she asked.
I nodded miserably. ‘Some of it. So they tell me. I mean it’s not like the guy in The Bourne Identity or anything, I know who I am, sort of. Or who I used to be. But the past few years are gone. I mean I didn’t know at first, I thought it was still back then. I thought I was okay, that everything was okay, that I was lucky to be alive but I just couldn’t figure out the date. It’s so weird, Fleur. I can remember going to Venice, so freakin’ clearly, like it was yesterday, but Mom says I didn’t go. You and I went out the night before I was supposed to fly out, remember?’ I thought back to the table at the Gotham Bar and Grill where Fleur and I had split a bottle of South Australian chardonnay and a plate of Alfred Portale’s Maine lobster tails with roasted fingerling potatoes while we discussed marriage-renewal tactics.
‘I remember the restaurant,’ I told her, ‘but not much afterwards.’
‘Oh, Connie,’ Fleur sounded as heartbroken as I was. ‘So much has happened since then. Jesus, you couldn’t just break your leg like a normal person?’
‘But look, I’m thin,’ I said, throwing back the bedclothes and showing her my bony body.
‘It’s disgusting,’ she agreed.
‘I know, and it’s not even the weirdest thing that’s happened. Did you know about it?’
‘The thin thing? Oh, gee, um …’ she hesitated. ‘There’s a lot of catching up to do, Connie …’
‘So, catch me up then.’
I detected a certain reluctance.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said.
‘Well, do you know about my accident?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Start there.’
She seemed slightly relieved and shifted in the bed to get comfortable, hoisting herself up on one elbow. ‘Well, the story was that you were running by the Boat House in Central Park when you saw Woody Allen and you slipped on something, fell over and hit your head on a rock.’ She stopped to have a good look at my scar, her face scrunched up in sympathy. ‘He had a bagel or something, Woody Allen did. They think that’s what distracted you. No, it was a pretzel, a soft pretzel. Anyway you must have been real hungry because despite being unconscious you apparently wrangled it off of him somehow. You had it in the ambulance. In fact, they had to prise it off you in the hospital.’
We were both silent for a moment. She waiting for my reaction, me hoping I had mis-heard what she said. My near-death sounded like a bad joke.
‘I stole Woody Allen’s pretzel?’ I asked her. ‘Why would I do that? Did he take it from me in the first place?’ I wanted to say that I didn’t even like pretzels but I was pretty sure there were photos to the contrary. Pushcart pretzels, in my opinion, while not truly a New York invention were definitely one of the reasons to live there. And I bet I knew where Woody Allen got his too because there was a grouchy woman sold them at 72nd Street and Central Park West … Hers were much better than the ones you could buy from the franchised carts in the park itself: hotter and she used a finer salt. I would dearly love to believe there was no truth in such a ridiculous explanation of how I jumbled my brain but sadly there was nothing unlikely about me nearly killing myself lusting after somebody else’s pretzel at all. It was exactly the sort of thing that would happen.
‘How do you know this stuff anyway?’ I wanted to know.
‘There were witnesses,’ Fleur admitted. ‘The guy who rows that skinny boat around the lake in the stripy shirt, he saw the whole thing.’
‘The Central Park gondolier?’ I asked in horror.
‘Yeah, the Central Park gondolier. He was right there. He saw the whole thing with the pretzel apparently and then you fell and hit your head and he was right there talking to you when the paramedics arrived. I think maybe it was him stole Woody’s pretzel and gave it to you to make a better story, but that’s not what it said in the paper.’
‘It was in the paper?’ I was in danger of going into shock. This just kept getting more and more unbelievable.
‘Well, yeah, of course it was. Front page. You’re a —’
‘Stop,’ I whispered. ‘Stop.’ My head needed time to catch up with what she was telling me. I had been running in Central Park; had fallen trying to steal a famous film director’s snack; then been tended to by the Central Park gondolier. Well, I didn’t need to know anything about how the brain worked to figure out how Marco got into my coma as a Venetian boatman, for crissakes. The Grand Canal felt like a long, long way away then and while I felt less lonely with Fleur snuggled next to me on the bed, I still wanted Tom. He was the rock to whom I wanted to cling.
‘Why isn’t Tom here, Fleur? What happened?’
Fleur tensed up, I felt her body stiffen next to me. ‘The thing is, Connie,’ she said and she sounded slightly out of breath, nervous, ‘I don’t know how to put this but basically you’re not married to Tom any more.’
By then, I guess I knew that but I can’t say it didn’t hit me like a sucker punch to hear it all the same. I had been avoiding the obvious but he would have been there, wouldn’t he? Signora Marinello would have spoken of him. I think I had felt as soon as I could recognise my feelings — even before Mom told me that it was Tom who went to Venice on his own not me — that he was not in my life any more. It was like a gap inside me, bigger than any gap in my head, in my memory. And emptier than any space I could ever have imagined. But the awful inescapable fact of the matter was that at just that moment I wanted to be married to Tom more than at any other moment in my whole entire life.
‘You’re engaged to be married to someone else,’ Fleur continued softly, compounding the agony.
‘Someone else?’ It seemed impossible.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would be married already but your divorce hasn’t come through yet.’
The relief at hearing that flooded through me so warmly I failed to notice the catch in my best friend’s voice. ‘Then it’s not too late,’ I said, feeling a surge of determination. ‘Maybe it’s not too late. I feel like I might have made a big mistake, Fleur. I need him here. I thought he would be here. Can you find him? Tell him?’
At this, Fleur burst into tears again, turning and burying her face in the crunchy hospital pillows. ‘Oh, Jesus, this is hard, Connie,’ she said, and though her voice was muffled I could hear every word. ‘I’m so sorry. I never … Oh, shit, fuck, I’m so fucking sorry.’
I misunderstood her anguish. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘it’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.’ Strictly speaking, it was Woody Allen’s fault but I wasn’t going to go there. ‘It’s just pretty weird this whole stupid coma-then-not-remembering-stuff thing, huh?’
‘Yessiree,’ she answered. ‘Pretty weird all right. And I think it’s going to get weirder.’ Her voice was all clogged up the way it gets when you’re not finished crying.
‘Is it true I never went to Venice?’ I asked her. ‘That I stood him up?’
‘You didn’t go, Connie. Tom went but you never turned up. You left him, sweetie. You left him all on his own.’
To what my mom told me I tended to add a grain of salt or a thousand, but Fleur I believed. She would not lie to me. Poor Tom, I thought, abandoned in a city he never w
anted to go to without the wife who had made him go there. I wondered if he had availed himself of the local hospitality the way I had, in my dreams. My dreams? God, I was confused.
‘It’s like the shower scene from Dallas,’ I told Fleur. ‘I’ve woken up and none of it really happened.’
‘It’s happened all right, Connie. You just don’t know it.’ We weren’t talking about the same thing but we were both right.
Fleur cleared her throat then and when she spoke her voice was shaky and scared, not a natural Fleur state at all. Like I said, she has the confidence of a European princess. ‘Connie, if you really don’t remember anything from the past couple of years then there are some things I have to tell you.’ She was twisting a pretty old-fashioned ruby ring on her ring finger.
‘You’re engaged too?’
‘I’m engaged too,’ she said quietly, ‘and I have a beautiful baby girl who is 11 months old.’
It was my turn to cry again then, I couldn’t keep the tears away. How could I not know something like that? How could I not have sensed that this woman with whom I had shared every detail of my life since college had entered that next all-important stage of being a grown-up? But when I thought about it, I had noticed that there was something different about Fleur. She looked like a new mom. It was a look we had noticed (and been quite scathing of I might add) in other women in the past. It gave her a softness, an aura, a clichéd glow, that she hadn’t had before. The happy glitter of motherhood. It suited her.
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘Agnes,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, Fleur, that’s beautiful. I love that name. That was Tom’s grandmother’s name.’
‘Yes.’ She said softly, sweetly, lingering over the word. A wave of nausea swept over me. ‘Who’s the father?’ Something, it must have been fear, was pulsing violently in my stomach.
‘Oh, sweetie,’ Fleur said so sadly that I knew the answer before she said the words. ‘It’s Tom.’
Nine
I’m going to leave out the obvious histrionics that occurred after that little bombshell was dropped. For a start it’s kind of a blur and for a finish I said some pretty nasty things that might give you cause to think my mother was right when she suggested I had come back mean.
This, I gather, was pretty hard for Fleur as she had already heard much of it before; you know, the first time when it had actually happened. Now when I look back I feel more sorry for her than for myself. I mean, imagine telling your best friend you’ve stolen her husband only to have her forget so you have to tell her all over again? I didn’t see it that way right then, of course. I was incredulous, hurt beyond belief and angry. For a few seconds there I even considered grabbing Signora Marinello’s surgical scissors and cutting off that thick, shiny lustrous head of hair. How could she? How could he? How could they? And a baby! If I’d been steadier on my feet I’d have stood up and decked her and then gone out and found Tom and decked him too. Of course, I was wearing a backless surgical gown and disposable underwear so riding the subway to Il Secondo would have had its problems. Still, on a better day I’d have given it a shot.
‘She stole my husband,’ I cried when Signora Marinello came in to see what the ruckus was about. ‘Tom. She took him.’
Fleur was no longer in the bed with me but curled in the visitor’s chair, her face red and blotchy with crying, her mascara smudged below her eyes. ‘I did not,’ she hiccupped, looking at my nurse for support, but Signora Marinello sensibly busied herself with her paperwork. ‘She gave him away.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I beseeched her. ‘Why would I? I love him, Fleur. I’ve loved him since I was four years old.’ This was a bit of an exaggeration but I thought I had every right to feel aggrieved.
‘Connie,’ she argued, ‘you tossed him aside like a used dishrag the moment you took up with Ty Wheatley.’
I gagged, literally gagged.
‘I what?’
‘You dumped —’
‘I took up with Ty Wheatley?’
‘You’re engaged to Ty Wheatley.’
At that moment I felt so cut adrift from the real me that I truly wondered what had been the point in surviving my surgery. I was a foreigner to myself and a fiancée to a man in impeccable cream linen suits. Frankly, I didn’t think it got much worse than that and in a week, or two weeks, or however the hell long it had been of bleak moments, that, I felt, was the bleakest.
A cavernous black hole claimed my insides, growing deeper and darker with every breath I took. I felt empty. Totally empty. It was like a hunger. A terrible, frightening hunger.
I sat up straight. Actually, it wasn’t like a hunger. It was hunger.
I was hungry.
The whole waking-up-out-of-a-coma thing had thrown my culinary radar for a loop, that was true, but at the moment of finding out that my husband had fathered a child with my best friend, I felt my old friend — appetite — return in spades. Maybe there was a reason for living after all. A rich fennel risotto with fresh-shaved Parmesan, perhaps. Or a fillet of grilled orata with salad greens and something tart, lemon-coriander vinaigrette perhaps, on the side.
‘Can I get something to eat?’ I asked, abruptly switching my attention to Signora Marinello. My mind raced with possibilities. ‘Scallops maybe?’ I could think of nothing but their plump sweetness, a satiny beurre blanc on the side.
Signora Marinello looked at me like I’d lost my mind (in retrospect, I got a lot of that). ‘Where do you think you are, Constanzia?’ she asked. ‘21 Club? Scrambled egg, maybe, I can do. But I think no to scallops. Still, is good that you are hungry. I tell you, is all downhill from here.’
She started out of the room but thought better of it, stopping to give us both a stern look and jabbing the air with her chubby finger. ‘Now you two should behave yourself while I’m gone, okay? Remember, Constanzia, you need quiet. Quiiiiiii-eeeeeeet.’
Fleur and I both sniffed and nodded. My mind cleared of dining options, I remembered where we had been up to in our discussions. Ty Wheatley. Ty Wheatley and me.
‘Wait,’ I called to my nurse’s retreating back. ‘Did someone called Ty Wheatley ever come to see me?’
‘Is he kind of English,’ she asked, ‘with white pants sitting up high, like this?’ She pulled her waistband up in an unflattering Gomer Pyle imitation. I nodded.
‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded. ‘But you not so happy to see him. You keep asking for Tom.’
Fleur let out something of a whimper at this and Signora Marinello shuffled off, relieved, I imagine, to escape the rather overcharged atmosphere in the room.
‘Well, this is going well,’ I said nastily.
‘Just you tell me what is the right way to tell your former best friend that you live with her ex-husband when you’ve already told her two years before and that was bad enough.’
Fleur was wretched, any fool (aw, I just keep doing it!) could see that, and put like that I could see it would be kind of a bummer.
‘Do we speak?’ I asked her. ‘Are we still friends?’
She shook her head, those beautiful curls bouncing around her face so cheerfully it was hard to believe she was unhappy. ‘When you took up with Ty we kind of started moving in different circles so I guess we grew apart then,’ she said, ‘but when Tom and I got together …’
How it hurt to hear her say that. My Tom. And my Fleur. Together? What had I done to deserve that? As far as I knew, Fleur had always believed in Tom and me. Hadn’t she counselled me on how to save our marriage when it foundered in the doldrums? Hadn’t she told me in the car on our wedding day that if there was one thing in the world of which she was sure it was that Tom loved me and only me with all his heart and soul?
I stopped and ran that sentence through my mind again at a slightly different speed. Fleur had insisted that Tom loved me and only me and I had assumed that these were simply encouraging words in desperate times, but maybe she had reason to know for certain that Tom loved me and only me. Maybe s
he had suggested a bit of Fleur-loving along the way.
‘Did you and Tom ever? While we were still?’
‘How could you even think that, Connie? I would NEVER do that to you. Ever. Maybe I did have a little crush on Tom before but nothing ever came of it — nothing ever would have — until you dumped him so badly, and ran off with Ty. You broke Tom’s heart. I just helped pick up the pieces and then, you know, it just happened.’
A smorgasbord of feeling churned inside my shrunken stomach. ‘So how long since we spoke to each other?’
‘Nearly two years but of course like most of Manhattan I read all your reviews — especially after that business with the place that closed down when you said you would fly to the Australian outback, in Coach, and eat live witchety grubs on the end of a stick rather than go there again.’
‘I said that?’
‘You sure did.’
‘In the Voice?’
‘No, Connie, in the New York Times!’
‘THE New York Times?’
‘Yes, THE New York Times.’
The look on my face must have clued her in to my ignorance. ‘Oh my God,’ she said limply. ‘No one told you you’re the Times restaurant critic?’
The Times restaurant critic? Hell-o-o! I’d spent days lying in that hospital bed listening to all kinds of doom and gloom about my swollen brain and my messed up love life and nobody had bothered to tell me I had reached the pinnacle of my career? Every food writer in New York — if not the whole country — dreamed about one day sharpening their pencil for the New York Times. It was the most prestigious job in the world of restaurant criticism. I thought of the critics whose words I had chewed up and swallowed in the past: Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller, Biff Grimes — although I was never so keen on him — and my hero Ruth Reichl, much of whose review of Le Cirque 2000 I could probably still quote verbatim.
‘Fleur, you wouldn’t kid around with me on something like this would you?’
‘Connie,’ she said and she allowed herself a smile, which made her look much more like her Mona Lisa self, ‘it’s true. You’re the real McCoy. You wear wigs and hats and dark glasses; and restaurateurs live in terror of you. There’s a picture from your high-school yearbook pinned up in half the kitchens in New York.’