Eating With the Angels

  ‘Sweetie, what’s happening?’ Fleur hugged me as well as she could while jiggling the baby. ‘What do you mean you’ve run away?’

  ‘Park Avenue sucks,’ I sniffed, looking around me. ‘And I have no place else to go.’

  Our apartment had been totally remodelled. The dull brick walls that we had happily lived with for so long were painted a lovely soft yellow; the scratched and damaged floor boards had been stripped and re-varnished a lighter colour; there was new modern furniture and no sign of the velvet Elvis hanging that a friend of Tom’s had brought back from Vegas and that we had found hilarious. There was nothing amusing about the apartment now. It was a picture of good taste, but different from Ty’s. It looked lived in and loved, not just copied out of some fancy magazine. Our old kitchen, which was bigger than most West Village kitchens but still tiny, had been totally overhauled. The old gas cook-top on which I had burned many sleeves and dish towels had been replaced by some fancy integrated thing with a grill plate and a steamer. There was a new island with an under-counter fridge and freezer that pushed out into the living room, making a breakfast bar and trending the room up hugely. In all, the apartment looked approximately one million times nicer than when I lived there and, to be honest, this did not help my frame of mind. Also, the bathroom, which in my day had been a particularly unpleasant shade of flaky and bubbling green, and had smelled strongly of rotting water, was now gleaming with white mosaic tiles from floor to ceiling. Worse, there was a built-in wardrobe in the bedroom not to mention a new king-size bed that I tried so hard not to notice I nearly broke my ankle tripping over it.

  The only thing that cheered me up slightly was that baby Agnes had taken over the tiny second bedroom that Tom and I had used as an office, which he in particular had loved. He would be cranky about that I was sure — not that I wanted him to be but hey, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t hope that his life without me wasn’t shitty in some way. He would be unimpressed, I guessed, that his favourite room wasn’t even big enough for all that baby stuff. Fluffy toys and other juvenile paraphernalia were spilling out from a trunk in the corner of the living room, taking the edges off the funky renovation.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, trying to avert my eyes from the baby vomit on Fleur’s shoulder. ‘Really nice. You’ve done a great job.’ The sofa didn’t look like a fold-out but it was long enough for me to sleep on. It was red velvet with a purple mohair comforter draped across one corner and purple beaded cushions piled up along the back.

  ‘Connie, can I get you a cup of tea or a juice or something?’ Fleur suggested. ‘You look whacked.’

  Fleur looked pretty whacked herself. I wondered how much of the day Agnes had spent screaming.

  ‘Actually, if I could just borrow some pyjamas,’ I said. ‘I really need to lie down.’

  Fleur stopped in her tracks, mid-jiggle. ‘Pyjamas?’ she echoed. ‘You want to stay the night? Connie, um. Shit. Are you sure that’s a good idea? What will Ty say?’

  ‘He won’t know,’ I said, sitting on the sofa. ‘I guess I can sleep on this. Or maybe we could borrow your mom’s fold-away bed. Didn’t you sleep on it here for a while when you were waiting to move into your apartment on Mulberry Street?’

  Agnes squawked then, so loudly I wondered for a while if she had pierced my eardrum. Fleur eventually got a pacifier in her mouth and then dumped her in a little chair-thing on wheels that she pushed around with her feet, hitting the walls and the furniture with a series of dull thuds that were disconcerting but at least not deafening.

  ‘Connie,’ Fleur said, sitting down on the sofa and turning me around to face her. ‘I know this must be hard for you, sweetie. And if things aren’t right at home with Ty then we have to try to do something about that.’

  ‘He and Paris are so busy organising me they hardly notice I’m there,’ I said. ‘It’s all about getting me back to work so I can promote my new book.’

  ‘Oh honey.’

  ‘And the book is awful, Fleur. You should see it. It has words like “cut-throat” and “fraternity” in it. If it wasn’t for the freckle I wouldn’t know it was me on the cover.’

  ‘It’s hard, sweetie, I know it is. And you shouldn’t feel any pressure to do anything Ty and Paris tell you to. Not if you’re not comfortable with it. But the thing is — AGNES! Not the lamp! Jesus!’

  The little monkey was grabbing at a low-level lampshade with sticky fingers that were leaving dirty paw prints. At the sound of her mother’s sharp voice, though, she turned around, her mouth curved down into an upside down ‘u’, and spat the dummy, literally, shrieking with such volume that I thought the new paint would flake clean off the walls.

  ‘My God, that’s horrible,’ I said to Fleur, not that she could hear me. She picked Agnes up and tried to shush her but the little moppet was yowling at the top of her lungs. She did not seem very shushable.

  ‘The thing is, Connie,’ Fleur continued nonetheless, jiggling up and down and patting the raging baby on the back of her head, ‘I do understand and I want to help but you can’t — FUCK! Oh shit. You little — Jesus Christ. She just bit me on the ear! I can’t believe it. Oh darling, I’m so sorry. Mommy’s sorry. Oh shit, that hurt.’ Agnes was so busy looking pleased with herself she momentarily forgot to keep up with the caterwauling. I could see two tiny tooth marks in Fleur’s ear, the lobe glowing red and painful, but at least there was no blood. Agnes obviously noticed this the same time as I did and started up with the caterwauling again. Fleur looked on the verge of tears herself. She jiggled again and started up with the patting, but her face was crunched in pain. It would hurt to have your ear bitten like that, I thought. And then have a baby screech in it straight after. I had a thick fuggy feeling in my own head. It was tiredness. I needed to lie down. I slipped off my shoes and stretched out on the sofa, pulling a cushion underneath my head for a pillow and dragging the comforter onto my prone body. My eyes wanted to close and my ears were right behind them. I wondered if Fleur could perhaps do something about the screaming baby.

  ‘Isn’t it Agnes’s bedtime?’ I suggested. ‘She must be tired after all that, um, yelling.’

  ‘Connie,’ Fleur said, and there was a sharpness to her voice that caught my attention. ‘I do understand,’ she continued, ‘and I do want to help you and I love you and I am so grateful we are friends again but this is a pretty complicated situation. I don’t know how to put this to you without hurting your feelings or upsetting you, but you can’t stay here. You can’t stay in my apartment.’

  The rattle of a key in the lock of the apartment door stopped any further exchange and Tom came in brandishing a paper bag that sprouted a loaf of ciabatta, the leaves of a decent-sized bunch of celery and a healthy head of cilantro. I felt a flutter of excitement at the thought of his gazpacho, quelled almost straight away by the dull thud of remembering my tasting status.

  Agnes screamed even louder at the sight of her father and the noise seemed to fill the room, flattening we mere mortals up against the walls.

  ‘Connie,’ Tom said, eyes wide with surprise, as he dumped the groceries in the kitchen. ‘What’s happening, babe? Is everything okay?’

  ‘Connie’s come to stay, Tom,’ Fleur said, as Agnes continued to screech out her lungs. ‘She’s run away from Ty.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. What did he do to you, that piece of shit, what did he do? Jesus, Fleur, can’t you do something about that crying? What’s going on here? You know Connie needs quiet.’

  Fleur switched the baby onto her other hip, her lips thinning and her eyes narrowed. ‘Well, she’s not going to get it here, which is what I was just explaining, Tom.’

  Tom looked so concerned it made me feel mushy inside. I pulled myself up and made room for him to sit down next to me on the sofa. ‘Babe, tell me what’s happening.’

  Fleur spun around at this and took Agnes into her room, no doubt to see if there was anything other than a pillow that would silence her. The room felt gloriously empty in her absence.
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  ‘Ty didn’t do anything,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘I just don’t know him. Paris is there and they’re so busy managing me it just feels wrong, Tom. It creeps me out. This is the only home I know.’ I looked around. ‘Although of course you have done so much with the place I barely recognise it.’

  Tom shrugged his shoulders and looked guilty. ‘Well, it’s all Fleur’s work, mostly,’ he said. ‘You know, I was pretty happy with it the way it was. She likes all this interiors stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ I said limply. ‘So, that baby sure makes a lot of noise.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I love her and all, of course I do, she’s my little angel, but with the restaurant and the show, I’ve got quite a lot on my plate, to be honest. There’s not a whole lot of sleeping going on, that’s for sure.’

  I’d assumed he was a guest on some other TV programme but it turned out he had one of his own, Il Secondo, which had tracked his progress from the relaunch after his one-star review nightmare (oops) to the impressive success he was now enjoying, with a few recipes thrown in along the way. It rated well, apparently, very well even, and meant the tables were full every night as New York hopefuls booked in to see if they could make it on to the small screen.

  He’d really become something of a celebrity in my absence (as I thought of it). He too had featured in New York Magazine, guest starred at the Gourmet Food Institute, had appeared on the Today show no fewer than four times, and was talking to an agent about a cookbook.

  ‘Wow,’ was about all I could say. The celebrity had given him a certain confidence but it didn’t seem to have gone to his head. He was in the same apartment, after all, when no doubt he could have afforded a fancy-pants place somewhere else; and he was there talking to me, not hobnobbing with the big boys at Bungalow 8 or wherever they hung out.

  ‘I read the review I wrote of Tom’s,’ I told him sadly. ‘I don’t know why you are even talking to me. It was a horrible, horrible thing to do. If I found out it was you that gave Woody Allen the pretzel I would not be able to blame you.’

  ‘I would never do that, Connie,’ he said and I believed him — and loved him so much I just wanted to curl up in his arms, order Venezuelan take-out and live happily ever after.

  ‘So, have you worked something out?’ Fleur emerged from Agnes’s room looking more than a little rumpled but without the baby.

  ‘What do you mean “worked something out”?’ Tom asked.

  Fleur looked embarrassed. ‘Well, Connie can’t stay here, Tom. There’s no room. And it’s too noisy. Besides, it’s just not, you know, right. Oh Connie, honey, I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not really sure how to handle all this.’

  ‘I thought you were my friend,’ I said accusingly. ‘You stayed here with us.’

  ‘Sweetie, I am your friend. But I haven’t been for the past two years and in the days since I stayed here with you our situation has gotten a bit messed up, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, you can’t blame me for you moving in with my husband,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember pointing a gun at your head.’ Of course, I didn’t remember anything else either but she was making me feel unwanted and I didn’t like it.

  ‘Hey, come on you two,’ Tom interrupted. ‘Fleur, babe, we can’t throw her out on the streets. This is Connie.’

  ‘Well she should go back to Ty until we work something out. She was happy enough there before.’

  I started to cry loudly and wetly and, I am ashamed to admit, purposefully. ‘I don’t know about before,’ I wept. ‘I only know about now. And then. And I don’t belong with Ty. It’s all beige and he talks about Eric and Jean-Georges and Jeffrey Steingarten like they’re our friends and he irons the bed linen — on the beds. It’s horrible.’

  ‘Jesus, Fleur,’ Tom said, wrapping his arms around me. ‘Have a heart.

  ‘Of course you can stay,’ he soothed me. ‘And if Agnes gets too loud, Fleur can take her to her mother’s place.’

  Thirteen

  Having never had children — surely someone would have told me if I had left a baby sitting in a stroller somewhere — I didn’t know that having your husband say you would take the kid to your mother’s place if it got too loud was a crime tantamount to treason and punishable by being yelled at all night.

  I slept like a baby myself. I must have had a good 11-hour stretch. But when I woke up, Fleur and Agnes had gone and Tom was sitting at the table looking grey with tiredness and sick with nerves.

  ‘I’m going to have to take you home, babe,’ he said, after making me a cup of coffee with a heart shape in the froth. He had a domestic version of the same coffee machine as Ty, only didn’t mind dirtying it up. I took a sip. It was piping hot and tasted of air. I struggled for words to stave off my ejection from the only place I felt I belonged.

  ‘This is my home, Tom. It’s the only one I know. I don’t belong anywhere else. You have to let me stay. Please.’

  ‘If it was just me, you could, I swear. But there’s the baby and Fleur and it’s really not a great time for us right now.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual stuff people go through when they have a kid, I guess. You know, we argue a lot, we don’t sleep, we hardly ever … well, you don’t have to know the details, Connie, but fuck sometimes I wonder, I really do.’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘If I did the right thing.’ He sounded exhausted, ground down, unhappy. My heart ached for him. And for me. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should have fought for you. I was just so fucking angry when you left like that. Jesus, you always knew how to make me angry, Connie, but Ty Wheatley? That just about killed me. And once Fleur and I hooked up I kind of let it slide. It seemed the easy thing to do. But the right thing? I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Don’t you love her?’ I didn’t know how I wanted him to answer that question. If he did love her it would hurt me, and if he didn’t it would hurt her.

  ‘I do,’ he said. Ouch. ‘But not like I love you.’

  Oh brother.

  I could feel it myself, the old comfortable attraction between us. Sure we had fought, what couples didn’t? Sure he had stifled me, but who was perfect? I certainly wasn’t. I needed bolstering, remember.

  It occurred to me then that with Fleur and Agnes out of the apartment there was nothing to stop Tom and I doing what we had always done in perfect harmony — when we did it. I did not know how long it had been since I’d had sex. I’d seen films where orderlies had done heinous things to people in comas but I doubted Signora Marinello would have let that happen to me. The last sex that I knew of was the canal churner that blew the top of my head off but I had imagined it. I had imagined it real well. Damn, I was horny.

  But I wasn’t as much of a slut in my real world as I was in my dreams. I’d lost my memory and my taste but I still knew better than to covet my best friend’s boyfriend. Although God knew I was in need of a good coveting and technically he was still my husband.

  ‘Maybe I should go home,’ I said, getting up and straightening my clothes, which I had sensibly not removed. ‘But I’m not going back to Ty’s.’

  And that only left one place.

  ‘So, you remember where we live then?’ My mom must have been waiting just inside the apartment because I had no sooner pressed my finger on the buzzer than there she was, hidden behind the open door in the cramped hallway, her lips pursed, her eyes travelling accusingly up my body and stopping at the overnight bag I had gone back to Ty’s apartment and packed while he was out. ‘I thought you said next time there’d be cake. My own fault, I should’ve known better than to listen. Oh, excuse me,’ she said as I pushed silently past her. ‘Is it all right for me to talk to you this way? In my house? The house you’re coming to stay in?’

  It was not quite the homecoming I might have hoped for but then I had not stayed a night in that apartment since I’d moved in with Tom at the end of the ’80s. And on the occasion of my leaving my mom had thrown a pair of old tennis s
hoes and my one-eyed teddy Rueben at my retreating back.

  ‘It’s Mary-Constance,’ she announced to the living room, as though they didn’t already know. ‘It’s not working out for her over in her fancy place on Park Avenue.’

  Frankie, a new one from the one I remembered, leapt off the sofa yapping in a high-pitched frenzy. He hurled himself at me, instantly attempting sexual congress with my left leg. I tried to shake him off but he was stuck like Velcro, his little sausage hips vibrating and a glazed look in his dark eyes as he humped my Anne Klein trousers.

  Emmet, who was sitting at the dining table in dirty sweats, drinking instant coffee and smoking a cigarette, shot me a huge grin while my Dad abandoned the Times crossword to get out of his La-Z-Boy and give me a hug. Nobody seemed to see or hear Frankie, whom I was sure was in the throes of a premature ejaculation.

  ‘Baby girl,’ my dad said in his soft warm voice, ‘it’s good to see you up and about. Welcome home.’ Actually, it gave me something of a shock to see him. He was so much smaller than I remembered. He was shorter than me. Had that always been the case? It must have been. And he’d lost hair, a lot of it, since the last time I remembered seeing him. He looked like a little old man, like someone else’s father.

  ‘Can somebody do something about this dog?’ I asked, bending over to try and remove Frankie from his position around my ankle. His yapping had given way to a creepy kind of whimpering. He clung for grim death. ‘Pop, could you give me a hand here?’