The mood, you could say, was gone.
‘Luca? I think he has better things to do than train a brain-damaged cat to attack you.’
‘It’s not Luca, Connie, it’s Luke,’ Marco said. ‘And I’m not Marco, I’m Marc. That Italian crap is just something Marinello and he cooked up when they worked together to help the hours pass quicker. Jesus, what has that fucking thing done to my back?’
He took off his shirt, and although I was smarting from him being so terse with me, I am embarrassed to say that the mood came right back. He truly was a perfect specimen (well apart from the claw marks with their little beads of blood that Gertrude had gouged out of his flawless brown skin, that is).
‘Eeergghh,’ I said, abandoning Gertrude and approaching Marco for a closer inspection. What can I say? The man appealed to me on levels that only my hormones can explain.
‘Well?’ he asked again. ‘How bad is it?’
‘I think we should go over to the house and put some antiseptic lotion on it,’ I suggested. ‘And you might want to borrow a shirt from your dad.’
‘And then we’re getting out of this shit-hole, okay? I’m taking you to the Frisky Oyster and then we’re driving back to Manhattan. I fucking hate this place.’ He stomped across the road, shirtless, and I followed meekly behind him.
What was I going to do in Manhattan, I wondered? Did Marco realise I didn’t actually have anywhere to live but there in Shelter Island? Was he going to take care of me the way Luca had? Make sure I ate even though I wasn’t hungry? Put fresh flowers in my room? I watched the muscles under his bloodied back move beneath that beautiful skin as he strode across the road in front of me and I wished then that he did not have such an overwhelming physical effect on me, because it occurred to me that I didn’t actually like him very much.
Just as I thought that, Gertrude made one of her cute little circles in front of him and he kicked her so swiftly up the rear she didn’t see it coming. Of course, she weighed 20 pounds so she didn’t exactly go flying through the air and I bet it hurt Marco almost as much as it hurt her, but she howled in pain and humiliation anyway and my cheeks burned for her.
‘Hey, buster, just you leave her alone,’ I cried. ‘Jeez, that was mean, Marco.’
‘I told you, my name’s Marc,’ he said acidly, shaking his foot. ‘And who gives a shit about some stupid cat?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘And so does Luca. You can’t just turn up here and start beating up on his animals. That sucks.’
‘Well, he’s really pulled a fast one on you, hasn’t he? Don’t let that old bastard get to you, Connie. You’re not his type. Trust me.’
He was mad at his dad. So mad. And I could see it as clear as I could see the enormous Gertrude sitting gingerly on her aching tush. He was a grown-up, clever, successful 29-year-old just trying to get back at his father for whatever crimes had been committed in the past. So Luca had worked too hard and abandoned his family. He knew it, didn’t he? He was sorry, wasn’t he? Marc was behaving like a spoilt little brat and I knew from experience that if you hung on to blame it turned rancid and bitter inside you. All the good looks in the world could not hide that sort of ugliness.
‘Why would I trust you?’ I asked him, my hands on my hips, my loins no longer throbbing. ‘I don’t even know you. You turn up here with some dinner reservation after hardly giving me the time of day for I don’t know how long and I’m supposed to trust you? Well, I don’t. I think you’re a tight-ass namby-pamby big old brain surgeon who’s still pissed off his parents got divorced, Well, get over it Marc. You’re a grown-up now. You should stop torturing your dad and get a life.’
I pushed past him, picked up that big heap of a cat and charged into the house — where I found Tom, flaming red in the face and about to punch out the lights of M. DuCroix whose white chef’s jacket was spattered with tomato sauce.
‘Just go back to your own country and stop poisoning ours with your disgusting offal and your stupid fucking roux,’ Tom was yelling.
I looked at him, looming in a vile fashion over poor M. DuCroix, and I knew then that we did not belong together. Tom did not want me the way I was, the way I wanted to be and I did not want to be the person he desired. I’d tried being her: it had made him angry and ended up with me walking out on the day we were due to fly off on our second honeymoon together. I didn’t need my memory to know we were a gone-burger. And Tom could pretend to be Italian all he liked but I was through with make-believe.
‘Where’s Ty?’ I asked, which stopped him mid-rant.
‘Your boyfriend has a migraine,’ Tom said in a simpering voice. ‘He’s taking a nap upstairs. Where the fuck have you been?’
‘For crissakes, you think the old bastard would have a decent first-aid kit,’ Marc roared from the downstairs bathroom. ‘Connie, could you at least give me a hand here?’
My heart was sinking, and so was the cat in my arms. She was too darn heavy. I placed her gently on the floor, apologising for any part I may have unwittingly played in her maltreatment. She gave me quite a nice look as she headed out the door again, turning to make sure I followed. Which I did. There was no one left in that house for me.
Out front in his garden Luca was crouched over a row of baby carrots. He looked up as we approached.
‘Hey you,’ he said softly. ‘Why the tears?’
I was crying, of course I was, copiously. The tears just swept down my cheeks, I could feel them dripping on my collarbone. When I went to speak I realised that I couldn’t. There was a ball of despair in my throat that was choking me. I panicked, waving my hands around like Ty with a thousand flies.
‘Breathe,’ Luca said, getting to his feet. ‘Breathe, Connie. It’s okay. Just breathe.’ And he guided me down the grassy terrace to a bench, half-hidden in the leaves of a vine that grew over a rickety wooden fence between his place and the overgrown garden of his neighbour.
I tried to breathe but it seemed a foreign thing to do and I was so busy crying I didn’t know if I could fit it into my schedule.
‘Take it easy,’ Luca said in his gentle gravelly way, and he started rubbing my back in a slow easy rhythm. ‘You’re doing fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine. Too many cooks spoiling the broth, huh?’
‘Marco’s just —’ I started. ‘And Ty’s got — and Tom—’ His name exploded out of me and I felt a pain so sharp I wondered how I would survive it. ‘He doesn’t want me,’ I sobbed. ‘And it’s not even me anyway.’ But the words wouldn’t come out properly.
‘Let it all go,’ Luca said. ‘Start again, Connie.’
‘Why did this happen to me?’ I wept. ‘My life is such a mess. I don’t know who to be with or what to do and without my taste I just feel like a big old waste of space, an empty slate. I don’t know who I am without my taste, Luca. It would be like if Marco lost his hands and couldn’t operate any more. Or if you lost your …’ I tried to think what Luca couldn’t do without. ‘If you lost your hands and your voice … and your legs,’ I added. But I didn’t have the same conviction I had about myself without my taste or Marco without his hands. Maybe that was why Luca wanted Marco to come back down to earth with the real people. Maybe he was a little one-dimensional. Maybe it was good to use more than one bit of your body in case you lost one vital piece in a nasty pretzel accident.
Luca kept gently rubbing my back, didn’t say anything, and I hiccupped loudly and gave an unladylike belch, which ended my crying jag.
‘You think there’s more to me than my taste, huh?’ I asked him and he nodded. ‘You think I can have an okay life without it?’ He nodded again.
I contemplated this seriously, for the first time; actually, when I thought about it, it wasn’t so scary. I would still be able to walk in the sun, take aerobics classes with octagenarians, drink beer on the porch, feel Gertrude warm and furry beneath my fingers. I could shop and talk and go to the movies and get my hair done (sooner rather than later) and even travel to Italy or Spain. I could write still, I hadn’t real
ly thought about that. Maybe I could write a whole book about not being able to taste. Maybe that would sell better than that other dreadful tome Ty and Paris were trying to hock. Maybe it would be made into a movie and Charlize Theron would play me. I laughed.
‘How cool would that be?’ I asked Luca. ‘Charlize Theron.’
He just raised an eyebrow and nodded.
Maybe I should take his advice, let it all go and start again. It wasn’t as though my life had been perfect before. Why was I clinging to it? So, I had been the New York Times restaurant critic, the most powerful arbiter of taste in the entire country, and that had been snatched away from me. But it was only a job! There were other jobs. I could still see and hear and feel, couldn’t I? A wave of optimism spread through me and tickled my insides. I looked around at Luca to see he had been watching me, reading my thoughts, and he looked proud, almost smug, like he had been waiting for me to reach this conclusion.
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know shit,’ he said, ‘but what I see. And there’s a hell of a lot worse things you can be than an empty slate.’
I was suddenly very aware of the warmth of his thigh against mine on the garden bench.
‘I dreamed about you,’ I told him. ‘When I was in the coma. I told you that.’
‘You did,’ Luca said.
‘Marco was there too,’ I said carefully, ‘and Signora Marinello. We went all over Venice eating the most exquisite food.’
‘Venice, huh,’ Luca reached beneath the bench and pulled a couple of beers out of a cooler, flipping the tops off of them. I don’t know how long they’d been there, they weren’t icy cold, but they were perfectly drinkable and the bubbles went well with my optimism.
‘We started out at this place called Do’ Mori eating cichetti,’ I told him. ‘You know, it’s like tapas, but Venetian.’
‘I know about cichetti,’ Luca said. ‘You have the polpette? The meat balls?’
I nodded. It was like being back at the squero again. ‘And the tuna,’ I said. ‘And Signora Marinello’s fresh-baked bread with fried shrimp and zucchini. Then we went some place else and I had pregnant sardines stuffed with pine nuts and breadcrumbs and we had fondi, the artichoke hearts. God, it was all just so delectable. But turns out I wasn’t even there.’
‘Oh, you were there all right,’ said Luca, taking a chug from his Bud. ‘Just not in the usual way.’
‘Luca, I was in the hospital in a coma.’
‘Cenando con gli angeli,’ he said matter of factly. ‘Eating with the angels. That’s what my grandmother said when it happened to her: “I’ve been eating with the angels.” Sounded kinda nice, I always thought.’
A lump rose in my throat; my heartbeat quickened.
‘Nonnina, now there was a woman who loved food,’ Luca continued. ‘And whatever she cooked she had grown herself or if she hadn’t she could throw a stone and hit the guy who had. Well, so she said.’
‘She was in a coma?’
‘She had a stroke, pretty severe. I got to sit with her a couple of nights, held her hand, talked to her. She wasn’t lucid, not most of the time anyway, but one morning she woke up and turned to me and she was all there. “I’ve been eating with the angels,” she said and she told me she’d been having bean stew with grilled veal and stuffed crabs with fennel risotto and pollastro in squaquaciò — that was chicken done her favourite way.’
‘What were the angels doing?’
‘Feeding her, in her dream, that’s what she told me. Her own grandmother was there, she said. And some little kid she’d been to school with who’d drowned. My grandfather was there. And so was I, she told me. And it made her happy to be going where she was going. She wasn’t scared any more.’
I started to cry again. ‘That’s so sad,’ I said. ‘Did she …?’
Luca nodded. ‘Not even an hour later but you’re missing the point, it wasn’t sad. She was happy. She was going to be eating with the angels for ever. That’s what she said. There are worse fates, believe me.’
‘You think that’s what I was doing? Eating with the angels?’
‘Uh-huh. Yes, I do. But your angels weren’t taking you away, Connie, they were bringing you back. You could have died, but you didn’t. First, Marc saved you with his surgery; then Eugenia saved you by looking after you; and now …’
Luca had been in my dream. What did that mean?
‘Now, what?’ I asked him.
‘Now you don’t need angels. You don’t need anyone. You can do it yourself, girl. You are doing it yourself.’
He was right and I felt it so deep in my bones it was like a transfusion of hope from some higher being. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath … I was an empty slate but I could fill myself the way I wanted to. I was not going to veer in one direction because of the way my mother was, or in another one because my husband wanted me to, or in a different one because of the things one very sexy asshole I hardly knew made me feel. I was me, Connie Farrell. Yes, I liked that name and I was sticking with it.
I opened my eyes and smiled at Luca.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’
We followed the slope downhill close to where the section flattened off and there, clinging leafily to the rickety wooden fence, was a tomato vine extraordinary in that despite its virulent greenery, there was only one ripe red tomato hanging from it.
‘I’ve been thinking about Nonnina all day,’ Luca said, kneeling down and cupping the single fat fruit gently in one hand. ‘She brought the seeds for this vine over from Mazzorbo. They don’t come much more heirloom than that. Every year she harvested more seeds and replanted. Then my mom did the same thing. Never tasted tomatoes like it. Luckily for me she froze seeds as well because darned if I’ve been able to get any fruit these past few years. Sometimes the seedlings just withered up and died on me. Sometimes the vine grew, but the tomatoes never ripened. No matter what I did, nothing. Then this morning I see this sitting here. Just showed up when it was good and ready.’ With one deft movement of his hand he plucked the plump tomato off the vine.
‘Luca!’ I gasped. ‘You should save it for something special!’
‘This is something special,’ he said and pulling a pocket knife out of his jeans, he sliced the fat red fruit deftly in two and handed me the bottom half.
It was the perfect temperature and as smooth as a stone. Its juice ran gently down its sides and into the palm of my hand. Luca, his green eyes shining at me, bit into his half and my mouth watered just looking at him. I took a bite myself, the juice running down my chin, my hand, my arm. At first I thought there’d been an explosion, that my head had been knocked clear off my shoulders. The sourness of the first bite hit the roof of my mouth like a high-pressure hose and then at the back behind my teeth there was a tingle as the acidity hit home. Finally I felt the sweetness echo in my throat as I sucked on the seeds and chewed the flesh. The sweetness.
I could taste it.
‘Oh my God,’ I whispered. ‘Luca. Oh my God.’
‘So,’ his smile was tender, his green eyes far from curious, ‘you think it needs salt?’
I shook my head, licked tomato tang from my lips. It needed nothing. And neither did I. I had it all right there and it was so simple, so beautiful, so perfect. Everything was all right.
And it was delicious.
Epilogue
Come on, you must have known there would be a happy ending. Maybe not there in the middle when it was all such a hopeless mess but towards the end when I was juggling all that man flesh out at Shelter Island? Now that had potential. Hey, for a while there it looked as though I could actually have had my pick of happy endings: with Marco (yeah, right) or Tom (not likely) or even, if I decided to care a whole lot more about antibacterial detergents, Ty.
But Luca?
Well, I was dumb (pardon me) not to have seen it sooner. He told me in my dream that he had everything I needed, and that I should tru
st him and everything would be all right. If I hadn’t been sexually obsessed with his son or blindsided by my ex or hounded by my fiancé, I might have seen it sooner. I just needed to stand back and look at the thing from a distance.
And when I did, boy, was he my cup of tea.
It’s taken a while for us to settle down, I guess. There’s a 15-year age gap, after all; we think about some things differently. Kids, for example. Luca wouldn’t mind a couple more but I just need to make sure that’s what I want. They’d be cute, though, those bambinos. I mean look at Marco. Anyway, number-one priority is to make sure I’m not stepping back into another relationship where I’m being shaped by someone else. We don’t live together, for example. Luca’s out on the island and I have a really badly decorated apartment on West 17th Street. We spend weekends together and one or two nights during the week, which we spend curled up in bed surrounded by empty Chinese take-out boxes. We drink beer and eat cereal out of the box and I know I told you my Sailor’s Delight washed-rind cheese was only hours away from reaching its prime, but I ate it before it got there. What’s more I had it on bread slightly lacking in salt with quince paste I had to scrape mould off of. I haven’t darkened the door of a four-star restaurant since I got my taste back and nor probably will I. I’m a regular at The Red Cat, my favourite bistro just around the corner, and I like eating cheeseburgers on the beach with Luca or fries and pies at Nick’s with Eugenia.
My taste has come back, but it has changed. Boy, has it changed. I no longer care if my turbot comes with a béarnaise mousseline or my pig’s trotter with 65-year-old red wine vinegar or your choice of pens to sign the check, madam. I like to eat my food, not describe it, which is what I told Toby, my editor at the New York Times, when I met up with him. He seemed quite relieved; to be honest, I think he might have found me a bitch to work with. In fact, he told me he found me a bitch to work with. So restaurant reviewing is now a thing of the past. My publishers dropped me like a hot potato when they found that out, thank God. My book never hit the streets. I still write for the Times dining section though only now I write about the people who produce our food, about where it comes from and how it gets to us. I’m freelancing too for the annual produce issue of Gourmet and I’m loving it. I get to meet eccentric chicken farmers, organic beet growers, nutty bakers, and lovable confectioners. Plus I have time to do the things I want to do, like walk in the park, tend the garden I have growing up on my roof terrace, and avoid chunks of stewed apple that Agnes flings at me from her high chair when I look after her every Thursday.