‘Jesus, not the one with the perm?’ I’d had a weak moment back in the ’80s. Not pretty.
I collapsed back on my pillows. It was all so implausible. Me? Restaurant critic for the New York Times? Chefs on both coasts devoured every word of those reviews; fortunes were made and lost. How would a person like me get a job like that? There must have been 10,000 other people better qualified. And I didn’t know how to find the front door of the New York Times let alone score the prized top food job. The job Ruth Reichl had made famous with her razor-sharp reviews. Ruth Reichl! I was just not good enough. I teetered on the fence between below average and average, just like I’d been told to. The New York Times was a big grown-up place for clever people to work at. How the hell did I get in there without wearing an overall and pushing a broom?
Now, if you think I’m being a little over-the-top here then maybe you are not aware of the hold the New York Times has on the population of the city — especially the dining fraternity, which is everyone. If that paper runs a story about your restaurant opening on its front page, you will never have an empty table. Ever. If it dumps on you, the phone will instantly fall chillingly silent, rarely to ring again. Remember New York is a town where people eat out three, four, maybe five times a week — half the apartments don’t even have dining tables, the city is their dining room — and trust me there’s nothing a New Yorker loves better than to know more than the next guy where’s the best place to get the spiciest dumplings, the juiciest soft-shelled clams, the plumpest Louisiana crayfish. That Wednesday food section is devoured by millions of eyes and discussed over millions of water coolers. It is big-time. Bigger than big-time.
‘But I’m nobody,’ I told Fleur, my head reeling.
‘You were nobody,’ she corrected me, ‘until Ty Wheatley got a hold of you.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He took you to France, cut your hair, clued you up on wine, and got you into that job. Him and your new best friend Paris.’ She did not make my new best friend’s name sound like a romantic city, she made it sound like something oozing goop in the bottom of a dumpster.
‘You know her?’
‘Everyone knows her now, thanks to you. She was just some deeply unsexy anonymous PR hack until Ty hooked you up and clung to your coat-tails while she made you famous.’
‘But am I any good?’
‘Connie, you’re probably one of the most talked-about women in town. In two years you’ve closed down a whole bunch of restaurants and made a whole bunch of millionaires. New York Magazine ran a cover story on you — you posed wearing nothing but a few cleverly placed bunches of fruit. You have a legion of fans that adore your every word and you get big sacks of fan mail. You were stalked for a while, too, by some waiter who lost his job after you wrote that he smelled of sour underpants and desperation.’
‘I did not!’ That was upsetting. I would never say anything like that about a waiter. I loved waiters. I had been one. I had probably smelled of sour underpants and desperation myself.
‘Sorry, sweetie,’ Fleur said. ‘You did. Actually, you turned into kind of a bitch.’
‘You’re just saying that because I’m mad you stole my husband.’
‘I didn’t steal your husband, Connie. You threw him out.’
‘But,’ I stuttered, ‘but, but, but …’
But what was the point in being a thin blonde restaurant critic for the New York freakin’ Times if you had no husband, a creepy boyfriend, staples in your head, and were a bitch?
Miraculously, in the wake of that realisation Fleur and I managed to reach something of an understanding. She pointed out that I had already tortured her with phone calls and emails and face-to-face verbal abuse sessions; if I wanted to skip all that a second time, she said, we could just go straight to not talking to each other and that would be okay by her. This was not a bad plan but the thought of not having her in my life right then when I really desperately needed her, needed someone, seemed a trifle too much to bear. Without Tom, she was my most trustworthy anchor to the past, to me. Besides, my anger at her, at Tom, at the two of them, kind of ebbed away after its initial powerful swell and was hard to hold on to. I didn’t feel as though it was permeating anything other than my stunned outer layer, which left me oddly capable of making quite a sensible suggestion.
‘Could we skip forward even further and just make up with each other, then?’ I offered. ‘I mean I could just take your word that we’ve been through all the crap and we could just come out the other side.’
‘Oh, could we?’ Fleur’s face brightened, her eyes sparkled above their panda patches of blurry mascara. ‘Honestly?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
She sprang out of her chair and jumped back onto the bed with me. ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you so much, Connie. You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘There’s a lot I wouldn’t believe,’ I told her, ‘if people didn’t keep insisting it’s all true.’ The New York Times? Wow.
Signora Marinello squelched back into the room then, handing me a tray bearing a sad little sandwich, a floury-looking apple, and a glass of unidentifiable juice. It did not look like something the most important restaurant critic in the world would contemplate for even a second but I was starving. Fleur went back to her chair so I could sit up and eat.
‘It’s good you make up,’ Signora Marinello told her. ‘Constanzia need her real friends.’
It had been weeks since I had eaten anything — what an unconscionable thought — and in an ideal world my first meal would have been much more of an exotic feast. In an ideal world I might have had, I looked at the clock — it was just after six — a handful of freshly roasted salty pistachio nuts (pistachio!) to get my juices flowing, followed by a little something soft and tangy to ease into the meal. Tom often made a simple tomato, avocado and buffalo mozzarella salad for me at home in the summer. It wasn’t anything fancy but when the Jersey tomatoes were at their best, there was no better way to eat them. He bought the cheese fresh from Murray’s and got his basil leaves extra peppery from his well-trained upstate organic farmer at Union Square. Then he drizzled his favourite olive oil, a nutty Italian one that played right into the hands of the avocado, over the top and served it with grilled ciabatta for a bit of crunch. The soft subtle tastes of the understated cheese and smooth avocado mixed with the tartness of the tomatoes and topped with a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt were enough to get you seriously thinking about what you might eat next. In my ideal world, I decided, while I was on the subject, my heart hankered after sweet, rosy milk-fed lamb but it was past spring and out of the question. Perhaps a beautifully grilled fillet of Chilean sea bass? I knew the world was in danger of being fished out of the poor suckers but then God shouldn’t have made them so darn good to eat. I would have it served on a risotto made with lemon zest, freshly podded English peas, fried capers, and the lightest of lobster stocks, with a simple arugula salad dressed with aged Balsamic on the side. As for dessert, well after that long it would have to be chocolate — and a lot of it. Soufflé perhaps, mousse, most likely. And then an espresso strong enough to make most grown men, Italian ones, wince. Oh, the thought of it! I would drink … what would I drink? Champagne. Without question. Buckets of it.
‘I think is turkey,’ Signora Marinello said doubtfully. ‘They say no to scramble eggs.’
She and Fleur watched as I opened the sandwich to check for mustard: a fruitless search as it turned out, the whole collection was the same shade of dreary off-white but nonetheless I seasoned the limp-looking turkey with salt and pepper and hesitantly took a bite. The bread was fresh in the way that only white sliced bread can be when it’s a week or more out of a commercial oven, but other than that the experience was deeply depressing. I rolled the first bite around in my mouth, chewing it down to the smallest amount so I could swallow it. It tasted of nothing — hardly surprising, I don’t know what I was expecting — and I gave up halfway, washing it down with the bland juice of some
completely made-up composite fruit and sinking back down into my bed, suddenly hopelessly exhausted.
‘I’ll go,’ said Fleur, seeing this.
I smiled at her, happy that sleep, my escape from tasteless turkey and terrible truths, was close at hand.
‘What about Tom?’ I had to ask. ‘I know it’s weird, Fleur, but I really need to talk to him. I have to find a way to get my head around the whole pre-pretzel thing. Would that be okay? Would you ask him to come see me?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Whatever you want.’ But her eyes were unhappy as she turned and left the room.
Ashlee, the bubbly flight attendant from my flight to Italy, came the next morning to take me to the gym for rehabilitation therapy. Actually, I had gotten used to imagined fragments from my unconsciousness turning up in my real life by then. The squat balding waiter from Alla Madonna turned out to be a wry orderly by the name of George who flirted outrageously with Signora Marinello using only monosyllables and a series of quite impressive eyebrow manoeuvres. The Pucci-clad mushroom vendor from the Rialto markets worked in the hospital kitchen and pushed the stack of meal trays from room to room. And I had seen one of the nasty grandfathers from the Giudecca pushing a toddler past my doorway, a regular visitor to a woman my age down the hall — his daughter, who had suffered a stroke and would be in the ward for a while to come.
Hunger still gnawing at me, I had attempted oatmeal for breakfast but given up after just a few spoonfuls, much to my nurse’s disgust. It was grey and lumpy and approximately one million miles away from that creamy elixir poured from the silver tureen at the Hotel Gritti Palace. Plus it sure as hell was not followed by piping-hot freshly baked pastries the way I liked it to be.
Anyway, when Ashlee showed up and introduced herself as my physical therapist I was hardly surprised at all and immediately checked out her ring finger, which indeed sported a giant engagement ring. She took me down to the hospital gym and to my horror produced a big rubber ball from a collection of equipment at one end of the room.
‘This is not a good idea,’ I told her. ‘This could end in disaster.’
‘Just relax and take your time, Connie,’ she said in a decidedly return-your-seat-to-its-upright-position voice. ‘You are in a safe environment. Nothing can happen to you but I need to assess your physical ability and see how you are doing, so we can plan your future treatment. Okay? Can you do that for me?’
The problem was that there were things about my physical ability Ashlee didn’t know. Namely, I didn’t have any. Throughout my entire schooling I had been plagued by a combination of excessive height and extreme uncoordination. I was always the last person chosen for any game at gym class and could not even walk onto a basketball court as a spectator without falling over my own feet and landing on my ass. I had a permanent bruise on my hip from banging into desks and doorknobs and still bore scars on both of my knees from tripping over for no apparent reason on any hard surface, preferably asphalt, something I continued to do on a regular basis well into my … well, my current surroundings spoke for themselves.
So when Ashlee lined me up and started throwing that big red ball at me, my life flashed in front of my eyes. It was pretty much like a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. If they were going to judge my recovery on my sporting prowess, I was in big trouble. Predictably, I failed to catch the ball even once. I just couldn’t stop closing my eyes whenever she threw it at me.
‘I’ve always been like this,’ I told her as I flailed around trying to pick the stupid thing up off the floor and throw it back. Even when it wasn’t in the air I couldn’t get a hold of it. ‘It’s nothing to do with the pretzel.’
She wrote something down on her chart.
I prayed to God to help me say something that wouldn’t make me seem more incapacitated than I was. ‘Look!’ I said brightly and attempted a string of star jumps, the one athletic feat I’d always been able to handle as long as I got into the rhythm. Unfortunately, rhythm eluded me on this occasion. The left side of my body seemed to be working on a slightly different time frame from the right side, leaving my star jumps lop-sided to say the least. Ashlee rather predictably looked unconvinced and with a your-nearest-exit-is-over-here sign indicated that I should follow her to the opposite corner of the room where, much to my horror, she revealed a treadmill.
Now, I might have woken up with muscly thighs and been told I was a runner. But as far as I knew I had barely been able to master putting one foot in front of the other at a slow pace let alone a fast one and I baulked at trying to do so now, especially as it was on a machine and even more especially as it was some sort of a test.
‘Just stand on the sides and I’ll start it slowly,’ Ashlee said, guiding me onto the stupid contraption and pressing the buttons with her long lacquered nails, that engagement ring picking up the fluorescent light and glowing like something out of an old Star Trek episode.
‘When you are ready, step onto the belt and start walking.’
In the flash of an eye I was lying in a crumpled heap on the felty carpet behind the machine. It did not smell good. I was not the first person to land there and those before me had not necessarily enjoyed my level of bladder control. It did not strike me as a very rehabilitating experience.
Ashlee scribbled something else down on her clipboard before coming to help me up.
‘I’ve always been like this,’ I told her. ‘You’d better put that on your chart or people will get the wrong idea.’
She smiled at me in a tolerant fashion — as though I’d just handed her a leaking bag full of vomit — and I slumped into a wheelchair. I could have walked back to my room but all that humiliation had taken it out of me.
‘How was that, Constanzia?’ Signora Marinello wanted to know as she helped me back into my bed.
‘It’s hard to say,’ I told her.
‘Connie has some balance and coordination issues,’ Ashlee reported. ‘We might want to let Dr Scarpa know about her progress. He has asked to be kept informed.’
So, Marco was taking an interest in me after all. This cheered me up significantly, as you can imagine, despite the fact that even though Ashlee was obviously engaged she got a real goofy look on her face when she said the words, ‘Dr Scarpa’. An awful thought crossed my mind at that and as soon as she left the room I asked Signora Marinello to help me dispel it.
‘Marco’s not engaged is he?’ Well everyone else was, including myself, so maybe Ashlee had every right to look goofy when she said Marco’s name. She was exceptionally pretty after all, surely just the sort he would be attracted to.
‘Engaged? To be married? Dr Scarpa?’ Signora Marinello thought that was hilarious. ‘He has too much fun being not engaged, I think.’
I felt unreasonably relieved at hearing this. I was still having trouble separating my coma feelings from my actual feelings as far as Marco was concerned. The thought of his hands on my ribs, his thighs against mine, the minty warmth of his breath on my neck, all seemed too real to leave me feeling like just another patient. I shuddered in my bed at the memory of him groaning in ecstasy as his gondola rocked vigorously in that darkened basement. But when I turned to look wistfully out the window and fantasise some more, I found my alleged fiancé, Ty Wheatley, standing there looking at me. I shuddered again. But in a different way.
Ten
‘MC, darling,’ my alleged fiancé drawled in his Prince Charles accent, ‘at last I get a quiet moment alone with you.’ He was holding an extravagant bunch of lilies, which I hate. ‘For you,’ he said, waving them at me with a dramatic flourish. ‘Your favourites.’
Oh brother.
‘I leave you to it,’ Signora Marinello said quickly, making as if to leave. I no longer needed full-time care so I was sharing her with three other patients.
‘No, don’t go!’ I didn’t want to be left there with Ty. ‘I might need a …’ Of course, I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was I might need. A new identity? A sawn-off shotgun?
‘Yes?’ Signora Marinello was not exactly helping me. In fact, I think she was trying to wean me off her. ‘Might need which, Constanzia?’
‘I had thought to bring some champagne,’ Ty drawled, ‘but I wasn’t sure it would be allowed. You’re looking so much better today, darling. More like your old self.’
He’d obviously forgotten that my old self looked nothing like that.
‘I leave you to it,’ Signora Marinello said again and this time she did.
‘I do have something else for you, though,’ Ty said, and he pulled a neatly wrapped blue box out of his pocket.
It was from Tiffany. Can you believe that?
‘Darling,’ he said, handing it over. ‘I do hope you like it.’
Well, what would you do? It was from Tiffany! I stared at him, then at it, then opened it, pulling greedily on the white satin ribbon and gasping like a ’50s actress when I saw what lay nestled inside the box. It was a bracelet; not that I was big on bracelets but this one was a beauty. It was a delicate circle of linked gold crosses with tiny diamonds set in between. It looked like the world’s most beautiful daisy chain. I didn’t know what to say. People like me just didn’t get given things like that.
‘It’s to go with the earrings I got you for your birthday,’ Ty said.
Okay, so people like me were wrong.
‘It’s fabulous,’ I murmured weakly.
Encouraged, he slipped it onto my wrist where I have to say it looked spectacular. How strange it was, though, to be accepting such a gift from a man about whom I could remember nothing more than sharing a few monosyllables over bite-size buckwheat pancakes. And now we were getting married! I supposed I should bring up this subject but while I knew I should tread delicately, I couldn’t quite remember how treading delicately went.