Our apartment was beautiful but you wouldn’t say it felt lived in. I mean the guy cleaned the kitty litter twice a day, for Pete’s sake, and he’d somehow got the cats’ bowels in sync. Scary. But despite our differences on the hygiene front, Ty and I got on pretty well those first couple of days. He just let me do my own thing, which was not much, and he did his, which I didn’t care to know about. It didn’t bother me if he wasn’t there and it didn’t bother me if he was. I slept, I soaked in my own beautiful big bathtub, I slept some more.
He even brought me breakfast in bed: same thing every day, orange juice in a crystal glass and a perfectly soft-boiled egg. There was a rose on the tray and a linen napkin and everything and he’d bring it in wearing a neat off-beige paisley silk dressing gown over beige pyjamas and caramel-coloured slippers (the daredevil) bearing a gold crest. It was a bit like living with an extra from Gosford Park but it certainly had its up side.
The juice caught at the back of my throat when I drank it so I knew it was good and tart, and I could feel the little oddly shaped bits of pulp that let me know it was freshly squeezed, not made with concentrate, but there was no biting citrus flavour, no orange sensation, just the memory of what a good juice should taste like. I tended to cry a little bit every time I ate something but who wouldn’t? It was like going to the bank to make a withdrawal knowing you’d paid in a check for a million dollars only to find the account had been emptied out. The thought of what I could no longer do, what I no longer had, drove me to distraction which, believe me, wasn’t far.
One morning over breakfast, though, I decided to try my hardest to work with what I still had and once I stopped lamenting my lack of taste it was surprising what pleasure remained in the ritual of eating. The soft-boiled egg was really still quite pleasant. The white felt cool and fleshy and solid while the yolk was warm and creamy. I felt the yellowness of it. I fantasised about the flavour … racking my memory for tastes from the past, marvelling at how I had never really thought about how sweet eggs were before. I added salt and imagined the difference that would make to the egg, the sharpness it would bring. Then I remembered feeding Emmet a boiled egg when he was a baby in his high chair. I had turned my back on him for a moment to spread peanut butter on my toast and when I’d turned around again he had eaten the entire egg, shell and all. My mother had gone nuts, ranting and raging and accusing me of trying to kill him, which was way off bat as it took another 15 years for me to want to do that. I actually thought he was pretty cool when he was a kid. Anyway, throughout the rest of our childhood, any time we had eggs, my mother would pointedly say to Emmet in front of whoever else was there, ‘And don’t let your sister feed you the eggshells. They’ll kill you. She knows this.’
Ty was hugely encouraging about any efforts to rehabilitate my culinary skills. I got the impression it was something he and Paris had already discussed. The two of them sure as hell wanted me back on track but then I wanted me there too so I could hardly complain. He agreed that it was important that we still made an effort to eat as though I could taste. We should experiment, he told me, with my damaged senses, see exactly what I still had. I think he was scared that left to my own devices I might take refuge in chocolate with low-percentage cocoa solids and great gulps of Diet Coke, which pre-Woody Allen I had never liked but which now appealed on account of the bubbles.
‘So, wasabi still works,’ I said, tears streaming down my face, my nostrils ablaze, after we lunched on take-out Japanese from Matsuri in Chelsea. No delivery charge too expensive, in Ty’s eyes, when it came to the perfect northern Japanese lake fish. The fiery green horseradish burned the inside of my face as though nothing about me had changed yet while it throbbed inside my nose, there was no suggestion of the taste. The tempura shrimp roll turned out to be my favourite and I had previously not been a fan of tempura, finding the batter too bland. But now that I only had texture to go on, it was a pleasant surprise.
‘By the way, Paris has made a reservation for the three of us at Mix tonight,’ Ty said after he had talked me through the black grilled cod with sake paste — way too slimy by my account, thoroughly delicious by his. ‘Time we got you out and about.’
I chomped down on a piece of crunchy lotus root. The whole troublesome matter of my alleged best friend urgently needed addressing. ‘About Paris,’ I found myself saying. ‘You know how I feel about the cats? Same.’
I have since found out that this sort of impulsive behaviour is not uncommon among those who have hit their heads, but while it’s a more honest way to behave, it was something of a contrast to the cautious manner in which I had conducted most conversations prior to the pretzel. I squirm now when I think about some of the things I said.
Ty squirmed too. ‘But MC, you’re such pals. You adore each other!’
‘She’s bossy,’ I disagreed. ‘Her hair is too straight. She has big pointy fingernails and she doesn’t remember people’s names. She makes me nervous.’
‘But darling, Paris has been the key to your success. She has the contacts. A word in the right ear from Paris and you were the New York Times restaurant critic. The New York Times, MC. So long Biff Grimes! No, no, I don’t mean RIP Biff Grimes, darling, I mean so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu. And hello MC Conlan. She found you an agent, MC. She got you your book deal. She took you to Paris, to London, to Venice. You love her.’
‘She took me to Venice?’
‘Yes, my sweet, you did the cooking course at the Gritti Palace, remember? Oh, I’m sorry. Of course not. My mistake. This must be so frustrating for you. I can only imagine. MC, please, don’t cry, darling. Really. Should I call Dr Foster? I’ll get you a handkerchief. A valium? Some brandy? Good heavens, MC, I’m not sure what to do.’
Look, if you’re bored with all the crying, imagine how I felt. But how would you feel upon discovering you’d gone to Venice with Paris? She just did not look like a fun person to be on vacation with, or work with, or have dinner at Mix with. There were a lot of people I would choose to go to Venice with before I would choose her. Well, I thought I had chosen someone else … even if he hadn’t turned up. Or I hadn’t. Or whatever. Look, I was befuddled but not so befuddled that it hadn’t occurred to me that I must at some stage have gone to Venice with someone: how else would I have seen it, tasted it, delighted in it in such glorious technicolour in my coma? My imagination just wasn’t that good. And when I thought about it, it made perfect sense for me to have gone to the city of my dreams with my new best friend. Yet on finding out that it was she with whom I had gorged on cichetti at Do’ Mori and slurped up olive oil with thick chunky wedges of warm brick-baked bread at Alla Madonna, I wept inconsolably. My face crumpled, my cheeks shone with tears, my chest heaved with sobs.
Ty was most uncomfortable with such outbursts of emotion. He seemed to think there was no problem that a nicely laundered handkerchief couldn’t fix and was totally bewildered when the presence of such had little or no effect.
On that occasion, much to his relief, I took myself off to my darkened room, sobbed for a while longer, then drifted off to sleep.
When I woke up I heard voices in the living room. There was nothing wrong with my sense of hearing, that was for sure. I could hear almost every word and all I had to do was creep across the room and position my ear at the open crack of my door.
‘So what did Toby have to say?’ Paris was asking.
‘Well, he’s been very understanding so far I must say,’ my fiancé answered. ‘Any other editor might have cut her adrift but he seems to feel real loyalty; we’ve done well there, Paris. Anyway, Amanda Hesser is going to continue doing the interim reviews, which I feel okay about because we know she doesn’t want the job permanently. But she could be a threat all the same. She has a following, you know, and it wouldn’t do for it to build up while MC is out of the loop.’
‘It might serve us well to let MC know, do you think, about Amanda Hesser? She never liked her after that …’ I couldn’t quite tell what she said t
hen, but it sounded like ‘kerfuffle over the mussels’ or ‘kerfuffle over the truffles’. Either way, I wondered what the kerfuffle might have been. I had never been much of a kerfuffler and I had always liked Amanda Hesser, even though she was too thin and I never trusted thin food writers. I looked down at my hips. My, but there was not much to me. I had almost forgotten. I was a thin food writer myself now. Who knew?
‘We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot though Ty,’ Paris was saying. ‘We’ve lost her regular profile while she has this taste issue and I won’t pretend that’s not damaging. But there is still a lot of interest being generated by her accident and recovery in general. It could even end up helping the book.’
The book! I had forgotten all about it but the Kate Spade shopping bag was sitting on a leather chair in the corner of my room. I tiptoed over to it, least I disturb the plotting going on in the living room, and pulled out the advance copy of Stars Struck: In Search of the Sublime New York Dining Experience. What a stupid title. It was so phoney. I climbed back onto my bed. Ty had extremely good taste in bed linen, did I mention that? Everything had a thread count of about a million and the sheets and pillowcases and bedspread and blankets and cushions were all different shades of you-know-what but still much more tasteful than anything I would ever put together. I opened up my book and started to read.
Within moments the colour had drained from my face and the full extent of how far up her own ass MC Conlan’s head had burrowed hit home. Just the Foreword made me want to puke. I sounded like a stuck-up food snob who thought she knew more than anyone else in the universe and who could only just bring herself to share a tiny smidgeon of this special secret information with the little people.
Names dropped like hammers on the page: The Alains and Jean-Georges and Daniels and Marios of the world don’t head to Boise, Idaho, with dreams of making it onto the world’s culinary stage, do they?
I was sickened. Thoroughly sickened. Like a car wreck though, I couldn’t quite drag my eyes away. My eyes flicked over the pages and before I could stop myself I had turned to the review of Tom’s, my eyes skimming the words, my teeth biting into my bottom lip and almost drawing blood as I picked up phrases and sentences all heaving with subterfuge.
What a charming job Irish-born Tom Farrell has done with one-time no-frills neighbourhood favourite, Il Secondo, I had started off, which said it all. Imagine outing Tom as Irish in the first sentence! He would have died a thousand deaths. And he hated charming: charm was not Tom’s thing. He despised any suggestion of contrivance, strived for natural authenticity; too much, according to the review. His zucchini blossoms were delicious but out of place, I wrote; the old Il Secondo regulars seemed bemused by them, asking repeatedly for meatballs that weren’t on the menu. I had been a waitress at the old restaurant, I continued, and knew that aprons shouldn’t be stained with red sauce and water should have ice. I revealed myself as his ex, saying it was a difficult assignment as my former husband might wish he had never met me but that would not stop him from recognising me. Still, I hoped that the fact I was the Times reviewer would stop him from poisoning the soup.
It wasn’t a drubbing, really it wasn’t. In fact, bits of it were pretty funny. But I could read between the lines and tell how much I wanted to hurt Tom with that review, and he would have too. It was awful. Fleur was right. I had turned into a bitch. A king-of-the-hill, top-of-the-heap, number-one bitch. I felt sick.
Yet, when I turned to my review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se, the words rolled positively oleaginously down the page. Like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, I wrote, Maestro Keller controls the flavours with an expert hand. ‘Allegro,’ he exhorts some flavours — the salt in the cauliflower panna cotta, for example — while ‘pianissimo’ he whispers to the heirloom radishes. ‘Adagio,’ he commands the rillette de lapin. Encore! Encore! Encore!
What a piece of crap, I thought and I hurled the stupid book onto the floor where it skidded across the polished floorboards and hit the wall. Moments later, there was a knock on the door and Ty peeked in.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘our reservation is in an hour. Shouldn’t you be getting dressed? Paris thinks the taupe. We’ll be having cocktails in the library.’
I didn’t quite get the chance to tell him I was running away to join the circus so he could fuck right off and take Paris with him. Instead, with a churlish huff, I dragged myself off the bed and into my walk-in closet. It was fabulous. Almost a reason to be married to someone you didn’t even know. There was drawer after drawer of exquisite lingerie; rows of silk shirts; beautiful suits; gorgeous coats and jackets; and an entire section devoted to evening wear. It looked like Sharon Stone lived there. And as for shoes: they were stacked neatly on four shelves that ran around all three walls. There was a whole section of colour-coordinated running shoes, then another chunk of black plain heels, a similar collection of brown plain heels, then the same thing all over again in cream. And the evening shoes sparkled like crown jewels. There were Manolo Blahniks, Jimmy Choos. You name it and I had it: all the shoes I had ever dreamed of.
Much as I searched, though, there were no comfy slouchy clothes. Nothing for MC to mooch around in at home, no Juicy couture or spandex. There was one pair of jeans but they were hanging up with creases pressed into them. Not the sort of thing you would lie on the floor eating Doritos and watching old movies in, that’s for sure. It was quite the opposite of my old wardrobe, which consisted solely of clothes you could lie on the floor and eat Doritos in. Probably MC wasn’t allowed Doritos, I pondered, running my hands over the rows of beautiful clothes and ignoring anything taupe. Finally, I slipped into a simple black linen shift, found a pair of heels I could walk in, did my best with my frightening array of make-up, then took a deep breath and made for the library.
‘Oh but darling,’ Paris looked unnerved by the sight of me, ‘the taupe is so much more suitable with a hat.’
‘Why would I wear a hat?’ I asked her. ‘We’re only going out to dinner.’
She laughed. ‘Well, it’s your signature, MC. You don’t want people recognising you even if you’re not strictly working. It won’t do any harm to look as if you are, by the way; it’s not as though anyone has gotten hold of the terrible truth after all. No, we’ve managed to keep that under wraps, thank God. Go and get the taupe hat will you, Ty?’
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I snapped at my fiancé who looked justifiably nervous. ‘I am not wearing a hat. Can we just go eat? I’m starving.’
Predictably, I suppose, my first outing as the reborn MC Conlan was a total disaster. The restaurant was gorgeous. I hadn’t realised that Alain Ducasse had stooped to a casual spin-off, and even though an entrée in a casual spin-off could still set you back $40, it wasn’t an intimidating place. It was all white and glass and modern with gashes of orange, approachable staff and the magical touch, I thought, of having toast brought to the table in a funky modern toast rack with homemade peanut butter, jelly and unsalted butter. But Paris and Ty fussed about like a pair of old mother hens, not just over me, but over everything; which table we sat at, which seats we chose, what wine, the lighting, the music.
Frankly, it was embarrassing, and it made me so nervous I lost a huge glob of peanut butter and jelly down the inside of my dress and had to be escorted by Paris to the ladies’ room to remove it. She and Ty then proceeded to pick the place to pieces, sucking every ounce of enjoyment out of the meal, not that there was much in it for me in the first place because it all looked so exquisite but tasted of diddly-squat. I don’t know why I ordered the lobster Caesar salad because I had already discovered there is no reason to eat lobster if you can’t taste it, but I chomped my way through it as Ty and Paris plotted the course of my recovery and tossed around various solutions to the problem with which I had presented them: my tastelessness.
Actually, there was a little something going on between those two. Not sexual, exactly. I think he probably was one of those non-practising anythings, and mayb
e so was she, but there was a frisson between them that certainly did not exist between him and me. They kind of got each other. In fact, I bet if she had been better-looking he would have been engaged to her but she didn’t quite fit the bill on that front. This unfamiliar glamorous, blonde MC Conlan, on the other hand, I could see she was going to look a million dollars on the society pages! Never mind that she was marrying a man who had a thing for her new best friend and was separated from a man who preferred her old one. I was halfway through the first biteful of the most perfectly cooked piece of coconut-and-lime marinated cod when this thought struck me. The fish was piping hot and fell onto the fork in fat juicy flakes but the absence of even the slightest suggestion of what I knew must be the most wonderful flavour proved my undoing. I dropped my knife and fork onto the table with a clatter and burst into noisy, wet, undignified tears.
By the time it became clear that I was incapable of pulling myself together, my companions were so embarrassed that they agreed to put me in a car back to the apartment to ‘get some rest’ while they finished their meals with grace and pomposity (my words, not theirs).
I walked out of the restaurant, head bowed to hide the tears streaming down my face, my heart breaking as I wondered how in the hell I was ever going to get my life back. But when the driver turned to me and said ‘Home?’ I got an idea that silenced my fear.
I blew my nose and gave him my West Village address.
Home was exactly where I wanted to go.
Of course, the home I was going to was no longer mine. It was Fleur who buzzed me up when I sobbed through the crackling intercom that I’d run away from Ty. When I stepped into the hallway, the place was filled with the sound of Agnes hollering. I guess she was quite cute in an orangutan sort of way but she sure could make one heck of a racket. Cats, in comparison, seemed a very peaceful alternative; I never thought I would find myself preferring cats to anything else but every decibel issuing from Agnes’s lungs seemed to push Cay-Cay and Happy a notch up my approval rating scale.