‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside. It’s cooling down out here.’
He was making pesto with herbs from his own garden; that’s what the food processor was there for. I sat on the breakfast bar as he mulched up cilantro and mint with sesame seeds, ginger root, rice wine vinegar, honey, and garlic. I imagined what it would taste like and it was good. Not particularly Italian — Tom would have had a fit — but I think I would have liked it. Then he spread the pesto thickly on a sliced bun, grilled a couple of hamburgers, added fresh arugula, a slice of Amagansett cheddar and some pickle, and that was dinner. Boy, it looked great and felt just fine too. The bread was fresh with a crunchy crust and light flesh, just like the burger itself, and I could sense the chunky pesto on my tongue. It did mean something that he had grown the cilantro and garlic himself and was making it from scratch. He was right about that. In fact, it felt so darn good I ate the burger in about one second flat and Luca had to make me another one.
‘Were you a neurosurgeon before you were another species of doctor?’ I asked him. Like Gertrude’s head injury, it suddenly seemed obvious.
‘I certainly was,’ Luca agreed, delivering my second helping. ‘Not as good as Marc but as damn near it. And I was just like him too. Didn’t stop to think about those outcomes for a lot of years, either. And when I did …’ He stopped what he was saying and went back to the fridge for a Bud. ‘You want one?’
I nodded. ‘When you did what?’ The pickle was really good in the burger.
‘When I did I found that I could not get up out of bed and go to work any more. And in the meantime, my beautiful wife had stopped loving me and so had everyone else.’
You see what I mean about saying extraordinary things? He dropped this on me with a casualness you might expect of someone with whom you shared such confidences all the time.
‘Well what made you start to think about outcomes?’ I asked, chugging on my Bud. I’d never drunk beer before but now wine seemed pointless. The new me liked bubbles. I didn’t even mind burping.
‘I met someone,’ he said, compiling his second burger. ‘An eight-year-old girl who’d been hit by a cab up on East 89th Street. Actually, eight is probably the best age to have a head injury like that but all the same, this little girl, Megan, was in bad shape. I did three, four maybe, even five consecutive surgeries to remove blood clots from both frontal lobes. Every time we started to wheel her out of the OR she’d start to bleed and we’d have to go straight back in again. We worked on her for 13 hours. It was written up from here to London to Sydney and everywhere in between. Hailed as a great success.’
His elbows were on the table as he took bites of his burger in between sentences. He shook some Kettle Fry chips onto my plate and then onto his own.
‘What happened to her?’ I asked.
‘She survived the surgery, which is generally all I would know or, to tell you the truth, care about. But one day Eugenia came and sought me out, said she had someone to show me. She brought me up to NICU and took me in to see this little girl, cute as a button, wide awake and smiling like a Cheshire cat.’
‘What you would call a good outcome,’ I said.
‘What you would call a good outcome,’ he agreed. ‘Except that while I was there this pretty young woman came in, carrying a box of crayons and some kids’ magazines. Megan started to cry, wanted to know who that woman was. Eugenia tried to calm her down but she got pretty wound up. She wanted the woman to go away and leave her alone and she wouldn’t stop crying until the woman did.’
‘Well, that seems reasonable,’ I said. ‘What was the problem?’
‘The problem was that the woman was her mother,’ Luca said. ‘After her accident, Megan never recognised her ever again.’
I thought ashamedly of the attraction I had felt at the thought of forgetting my own mother. But then I had beaten it. And I wasn’t eight years old.
‘That’s horrible,’ I said.
‘It sure was,’ Luca agreed. ‘That’s the scary thing about the brain. As much as we can fix it, we don’t know how it will work once we’re done. We think we know it all but we don’t know a fraction of what we need to. Anyways, I didn’t know who to feel more sorry for: Megan, who thought her mother had abandoned her and as far as she was concerned never saw her again; or her mother Lauren, who had to cope with a daughter who never accepted her, who screamed when she came into the room. The thing was, once I started to feel sorry for either of them, my days as a neurosurgeon were over. I was out of there in a matter of months.’
‘And your wife?’
‘Gone,’ he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. There was a twitch in his cheek that over-rode his gruffness and I felt sad for him. ‘And who could blame her? Left me for a North Fork winemaker. They live in Napa now, making a pretty damn fine chardonnay. She’s happy,’ he said as he took a swig of beer. I knew he was the sort of person who would be happy that she was happy and that reassured me that bizarre as it was, I was in the right place. In good hands.
There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward, not even when Gertrude let rip one of the loudest ‘p-roooots’ I have ever heard emanate from a non-human.
‘Is there something you need to tell me about that cat?’ I asked Luca.
‘You already know all there is to know about that cat,’ he said, clearing the table.
I woke up the next morning to find Gertrude’s head lying on the pillow next to me. She slept like a human, with her body under the covers. And when I opened my eyes and looked at her, she opened hers and looked straight back.
‘Well,’ I said to her, ‘you’re the most action I’ve seen in a long time, if you don’t count Frankie. How depressing is that?’
She stretched her legs out straight in front of her and padded her paws, sans claws, gently on my chest. It was such a girlfriend thing to do that I found my heart swelling with affection. Who knew? Maybe I was a cat-lover after all.
We got up and both had Luca’s homemade granola for breakfast, she sitting on the table and eating it out of the bowl just like me but without the spoon. She had a pretty good sense of humour for a cat.
Luca had left me a note asking me to go to the medical centre to help him out with the senior citizens’ exercise class. There was a bike in the basement I could ride, the note said, adding that it might be a good idea to wear a helmet. He’d drawn a map, which was pretty simple. The medical centre was only a couple of miles down the main road.
When I got out of the shower the phone was ringing and I picked it up, expecting to take a message for Luca. But to my complete and utter horror it was Ty. My darling brother Emmet had apparently given him the number and he seemed pretty agitated.
‘My dear, how could you leave Manhattan without telling me? Paris and I have been beside ourselves. You can’t just up and run off to the middle of nowhere, MC. Now that you are so much better we should be thinking about your schedule. We can’t afford too many more delays. There’s the launch to organise, we’re thinking Craft — Tom Colicchio’s such a fan. Then there’s the book tour: we’re looking at 17 cities so far. You’re hot property; Paris thinks it could all be quite explosive marketing-wise. How do you feel about that?’
I felt sick is what I felt. I felt he had the wrong person. I felt like I wanted to hang up and ride my bike to the medical centre. I didn’t want to have a book or 17-city tour or a fiancé who cared more about those things than the fact that I had no interest in getting married to him which, by the way, he had so far failed to mention.
‘Well, a person could just about forget that there was a wedding to be planned,’ I said moodily, ‘what with all this work, work, work. I’m glad you’ve got your priorities straight, Ty.’ It was a mean thing to do because of course I had no intention of marrying him. But still.
‘Oh my darling!’ He at least had the good grace to be horrified. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s not till the spring so I didn’t think it necessary to discuss it further but you are right, MC, of course, yo
u are right. And it will be majestic: the grandest day of our lives. I didn’t mean anything by not bringing it up sooner. It’s just that Paris has been working so hard on the tour and you disappearing like this, well it’s thrown me. It’s truly thrown me. And Cay-Cay and Happy are missing you too, darling. Happy’s gone potty on the hall carpet twice since you came home and left again. I don’t know how Consuela will remove the stains, really I don’t.’
‘I have to go, Ty,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
I disconnected but stayed where I was. The thought of having a majestic wedding to a man whose cats went ‘potty’ on the carpet had rendered me incapable of moving. I thought of the other grandest day of my life, my first wedding: the sumptuous stuffed zucchini blossoms, the dancing at Il Secondo, the feeling of having everyone I loved — and their neighbours’ neighbours — watching my husband swear his undying love for me and me only … Snapping out of my paralysis, I picked up the phone and dialled my old home number, hoping like crazy that Tom would pick up. For once luck was on my side. He did.
‘Hey babe,’ he said, and I could hear Agnes gurgling into the receiver. ‘So good to hear your voice. How are you doing? Emmet tells me you’ve moved to Shelter Island. By the ocean. Connie, are you crazy? Estelle will have a fit. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, I’m helping out this doctor friend of mine,’ I said breezily, cursing my blabbermouth brother. ‘Chez Conlan was proving unconducive to my well-being.’
‘Now there’s a surprise. Aw, shit. Can you hold a moment?’ I heard the phone at his end clunk down as he talked to the baby. ‘Do you have to keep doing that?’ I heard him say. ‘That’s like the third time since your mommy went out. Jesus. Phwoar. Okay, maybe this time. Are you there, Connie?’
‘I’m here,’ I said, knowing my voice sounded sad.
‘What’s the matter?’
There was so much the matter I didn’t know where to start.
‘I miss you,’ I said in barely a whisper. ‘I miss our old life.’ I thought at first he hadn’t heard me as all I could hear was the sound of Agnes goo-ing and ga-ing.
But eventually he spoke, and his voice was sad too. ‘I miss you too, babe,’ he said. ‘I miss our old life as well.’
‘At least you’ve got a wife and a kid. Just what you always wanted.’
‘Well, maybe it was what I always wanted, but it’s not exactly who I always wanted it with.’
We both fell silent. I felt so sorry for him. And me. And the screwed-up way our lives were turning out.
‘What’s happening, Tom?’
He gave a chippy little laugh. ‘Fleur and I are falling apart, that’s what’s happening. I just can’t do it all, Connie. I have my show; I have the restaurant, I can’t take my eye off the ball there, it would be suicide; there are only so many hours in the day yet Fleur wants me at home doing this with Agnes and that with Agnes and she’s so fucking pissed off at me all the time home is the last place I want to be.’
I felt sorry for Fleur too. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the way she wanted her life to turn out, either. But still, she had a loving family and a nice apartment. I had nothing. I tried to feel bitter and resentful but I have to say that to my credit, I couldn’t pull it off. I just felt sad for all of us.
‘I better go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I wish you were here, Tom.’
‘Me too,’ he answered softly and I felt the tears well up in my eyes. We both clung on the line, neither of us saying anything, until Gertrude, the madam, padded across the kitchen bench and disconnected for me with one press of a fat ginger paw.
‘Are you calling me a slut?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll have you know that’s my husband you just hung up on.’ But she just turned her little left-hand circle in front of me and led me down to the basement where she stopped in front of an old-fashioned bike with a bulky black Evel Knievel helmet in the wicker basket attached to the handlebars and I put my depression on hold.
It had been quite a few years since I’d been on a bike and I take umbrage at the suggestion that it’s something you never forget. I had forgotten and it was nothing to do with the pretzel. I was just rusty. The first few attempts I had at mounting the darn thing and moving forward ended up with me and it in a heap on the ground while Gertrude sat there looking straight out to sea as if the whole ugly event embarrassed her. Then, when I finally got the hang of it and coordinated my legs to push the pedals before the bike could fall over, she kept crossing in front of me so I was forced to wobble to a halt. Finally, I just stopped and asked her what she wanted. She was staring at the wicker basket and so, begrudgingly because I knew it would look stupid but really it was the sensible thing to do, I put on the helmet. At this Gertrude jumped into the basket. She manoeuvred her enormous body around so that she was pointing straight ahead like a statuesque figurehead on some ancient ocean-going vessel.
We made a pretty odd picture, I imagined, as I pedal-pushed up Luca’s leafy street and made a right into South Ferry Road. Gertrude was no lightweight and I was hardly in good shape myself. Lord knew what help I would be to the senior citizens when it came to the exercise class.
Luckily, there was next to no traffic on the road so my erratic cycling was not a danger to anyone but myself and Gertrude. In fact she may even have provided a bit of ballast.
Luca’s workplace didn’t look like any medical centre I had ever seen before. It was a sprawling shingle building surrounded by towering oaks, a well-kept garden and a white picket fence. It looked like the sort of place someone else’s grandparents might have lived in. Gertrude leaped nimbly (quite a sight) out of the basket as we neared and I followed her in the door.
‘Hey there,’ said Luca from behind the reception counter at the far end of the room, a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose and a messy pile of paperwork in his hands. ‘With you in a moment, Mrs Hansen,’ he told a harassed-looking mom. Her scowling toddler stopped building a tower and started throwing blocks at Gertrude, who sat smugly about one inch out of his range. ‘Have to introduce the new aerobics teacher to our senior citizens.’
‘Aerobics teacher?’ I repeated, horrified, as he shuffled me down the hallway and into a big empty meeting room of some sort, where a motley-looking bunch of pensioners were dressed up in a lurid collection of exercise combinations doing a series of creaky uncoordinated stretches.
‘This here’s Connie,’ Luca bellowed, saying to me in a lower voice, ‘you have to shout or they won’t hear a goddamned thing.’
‘Good morning Connie,’ the motley-looking bunch bellowed back, excepting one old-timer in obscene orange cycle shorts who was a few seconds behind the rest and called me Bonnie instead.
‘Connie is going to be taking your aerobics class today,’ Luca shouted, leading me over to an ancient tape deck. ‘Just press play and when it stops, turn the tape over. Most of them can’t hear it anyway. Going clockwise around the room, you have Doris, Daisy, Ginger, Hank, Maryanne, Lil, Nancy, Jenny, Meg and Paddy. The guy asleep on the bench at the back is Marshall; watch out for him, he’s a groper.’
‘But I don’t know anything about aerobics,’ I protested, stunned. ‘I’m a walker. Or a runner. Depending who you talk to. I’ve never even been in a gym. That I know of.’
‘So,’ said Luca with a grin, unmoved. ‘Improvise.’ He pressed play and released Jerry Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ into the room. ‘I’ll take you out for lunch after you’re done,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’ And he left.
Nancy, Jenny and Meg shuffled to the front and formed a straight row facing me, mirroring my every move — even though all I was doing was scratching my shoulder and looking around for Gertrude.
‘She’s not very good so far,’ Nancy said loudly to Jenny. ‘She doesn’t even bob up and down.’
I started bobbing up and down in time to the music, going lower and lower each time, the three stooges in front matching me bob for bob.
‘Jane Fonda uses her arms on the video tape,’ Meg shout
ed over her shoulder to Hank in the cycling pants, who was way at the back and, if I’m not mistaken, only in it for the bird’s-eye view of Daisy’s not insubstantial rump.
I started punching my arms forward and backward the way I’d seen on TV ads for exercise equipment. ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’ I found myself shouting as I shifted from bobbing up and down to going from side to side, my arms punching the air.
‘She’s good!’ Jenny shouted. ‘She’s better than Doris’s daughter. The fat one with all that underarm hair.’
Doris punched the air happily behind her, deaf as a post to all but Jerry Lee Lewis’s great balls. Actually, it was fun. Next came Elvis with his blue suede shoes; I had to hand it to those old-timers, their hips might not have been the originals but they could sure as hell swivel them if they had to.
We finished 40 minutes later with a rousing conga-line around the outside of the community room: Gertrude, who had joined the fray halfway through, in front; me next; and my merry band of followers, minus Marshall who was still asleep on the bench, all bringing up the rear — jumping and shimmying and sticking our legs out sideways.
At the end, there was a flurry of gnarly old high-fives and a lot of appreciation, marred only by a small altercation between Maryanne and Lil, who had apparently been deliberately pinching Doris’s love handles in the conga line. Something about a boyfriend they once shared back in ’45.
‘I could do something, you know,’ Ginger pulled me aside and told me shyly while the others shuffled their way towards the exit, ‘with your hair. If you wanted me to.’
Well, I was keen to go blonde, remember, and it did look strange, what with being all uneven and half brunette and everything. Ginger’s own hair was cut in a very neat bob and was a beautiful coppery colour that matched the eyebrows she had more or less neatly drawn on above where her old ones used to be.