Eating With the Angels

  ‘Two glasses of pinot bianco, Signora Marinello,’ he instructed the matron. It was not quite 10 in the morning yet at that point I realised the dozen or so older men standing around in little groups chatting on either side of us were all sipping wine.

  Marco laughed at my surprise. ‘Venetians drink more than any other Italians,’ he said. ‘And they do it with pride.’

  At this, a florid-faced septuagenarian to my right slammed down his empty glass on the counter and nodded his head for another at Signora Marinello.

  She raised her eyebrows as she slid our glasses over to us and turned away again to fulfil his request.

  ‘Now,’ said Marco, as we clinked glasses, ‘I’ll tell you about cichetti. Venice isn’t known for its food, did you know this? Well, not any more. Never mind the fact that the Venetians were once the world’s leading traders and the first to invent the humble fork. Actually, the food here is as good if not better than anywhere else in Italy but you have to know where to find it. Any Venetian worth his salt will bring you straight to La Vedova in the Canareggio or here to Do’ Mori for cichetti. It’s a favourite tradition of ours, you won’t find many other Italians eating like this. It’s like tapas, you know, but Venetian-style.’

  Marco leaned over the bar and grabbed a couple of round white side plates.

  ‘Questi?’ he asked Signora Marinello, pointing to a round brown croquette the size of a small orange. She nodded and smiled, putting the croquette on the plate and passing it over to him. ‘Tonno,’ said Marco. ‘You’re going to like it. Trust me.’

  He held it up and I opened my mouth, taking a healthy bite out of the soft flesh. It was tuna, light, sweet, mixed with breadcrumbs, parsley and lemon, and gently fried. There was no way it should have tasted so delicate but it did — it made me want to sing. I closed my eyes and groaned, and Marco fed me the rest of it. With every mouthful I salivated at the thought of the next. It was delightful. Signora Marinello clutched her fat hands together in glee in front of her substantial bosom, her rosy cheeks shining.

  ‘Polpette,’ Marco said next and she plucked a meatball off a tray on the counter, plopped it ever so gently on the tasting plate and Marco again held it to my mouth. It was spicy and dense, pink and fleshy in the middle, crackling with pepper and obscenely moist. In other words, delectable. Before I knew it I had eaten the whole thing and my taste buds were crying out for more.

  ‘Ah,’ Marco said, moving closer to me and peering at the plates of vegetables sitting not far from me. ‘Peperoni,’ he told Signora Marinello, ‘and melanzane.’ She spooned grilled red peppers and long thin slices of eggplant onto a plate then passed it reverently to Marco who fed me, bit by bit, with a fork. The vegetables were lightly salted and bathed in a nutty olive oil that danced at the back of my throat. I was in heaven.

  ‘She look nice, don’t you think?’ Signora Marinello asked Marco in a loud voice. ‘Like a nice girl.’ It should have felt odd, Marco feeding me like that in front of her — I mean it was an extremely personal experience — but it seemed quite natural for her to be there, watching every movement, clocking every groan of pleasure or murmur of delight. Seems creepy when I say it like that but it wasn’t. We are just talking about eating, after all, about food.

  Next on the menu were thin slices of delectably fresh bread loaded with fried zucchini and fresh shrimp, adorned with nothing but a bit of chopped parsley, a squeeze of lemon, and freshly ground black pepper. I’m a bread freak — the mere thought of the Atkins diet turns my stomach — and that stuff was good. Not ciabatta, closer to a baguette but denser and according to Marco made on the premises every morning by Signora Marinello herself. In my opinion, there is no bread that tastes better than one made just yards and minutes away from where you are sitting. I’m a firm believer in this.

  Anyway, while he was feeding me these Venetian treats, Signora Marinello shuffled away only to return shortly afterwards with a plate of squid, tentacles gleaming, flash-fried in garlic, the hot smell still scorching the air. I devoured it. Marco then picked out a bite-sized mouthful of swordfish grilled to perfection; he folded carpaccio, ribbons of rare marinated beef, onto my tongue; and did not take his eyes off me for a second as I savoured sarde in saor, plump succulent sardines cooked with wine and a delicate vinegar in such perfect balance that it was simply stunning.

  ‘You are a woman who likes to eat,’ Marco said matter-of-factly, wiping a lick of oil from my chin with his thumb. It was true, I was, I knew that about myself. Some restaurant critics loved to cook, others to write, but me, I loved to eat. I didn’t care if no one went to the restaurants I wrote about; I didn’t care if they thought my writing was too flowery or not flowery enough or lowbrow or high-falutin’. I just wanted them to know what it felt like to taste some heavenly morsel cooked absolutely perfectly by just the right person at the exact moment you couldn’t think of anything you would rather be doing than eating it. Because that to me was good as it got. Period.

  Snapping to, I realised with a start that Marco was no longer at my side. I hadn’t even noticed him go anywhere. What was it with empty spaces where my menfolk should have been? I stood there, looking casually around the bar, then wiped my own chin, oily fingers lighting tracing the path of Marco’s long brown ones. His absence made me feel confused and sort of worried, my stomach churning for reasons that had nothing to do with Do’ Mori’s delectable fare, so I sought refuge in the motherly features of Signora Marinello. She was watching me intently and I couldn’t quite pick the look in her eyes — but the gist of it seemed to be concern.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I found myself telling her. ‘Really, I’m fine.’ At this, she leaned over, picked up one of my hands and held it in her own two warm, worn ones. Emotion inexplicably overwhelmed me. I fought the urge to jump across the counter and bury my head in her ample bosom.

  ‘You should try our spaghetti con le seppie nere,’ she said earnestly, her brown eyes boring into mine, her grip getting firmer. ‘It’s the best this side of the Rialto.’

  I nodded, dumbly, my insides lurching. I was battling the oddest compulsion to tell her my whole life story. It was insane.

  ‘I have a husband,’ I could not keep myself from blurting out. ‘But he didn’t come with me. I mean, he was supposed to …’ but Signora Marinello was already shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t worry about nothing, Constanzia,’ she said in her loud, comforting voice. ‘Just let Marco take care of you.’

  At this, Marco appeared at my side again. ‘Have you had enough?’ he asked.

  Seriously, I could have listened to his voice all day. It purred without trace of an accent, his English faultless, the muscles in his jaw grinding beneath his tanned cheeks. Actually, I hadn’t had enough, we’d tasted a lot of things, but they were all snack-sized. There was room for more. Yet that same tinny flavour I’d tasted after my breakfast porridge was batting at my taste buds again, throwing what should have been the aftershocks of Do’ Mori’s enchanting treats out of kilter. I shrugged in a non-committal fashion and smiled at him.

  ‘Okay,’ Marco said briskly. ‘Let’s go.’

  I waved goodbye to Signora Marinello, fending off an absurd desire to take her with me, but she merely waved fondly back and turned to the thirsty septuagenarian again. We retraced our steps through the lanes and alleyways towards the Rialto Bridge and I’m ashamed to say I was afraid to ask Marco where we were going or what we were doing in case he said: ‘What do you mean, we?’ I liked being a ‘we’ with Marco. The idea of being just a me for the rest of the day, the week, the month, my life held little or no appeal. But was that really me, alone in a foreign country, trit-trotting around, my tongue hanging out, behind a handsome stranger who for all I knew chopped vulnerable women like me into tiny pieces and spread them on Signora Marinello’s bread as a light mid-morning snack? I wasn’t sure.

  I slowed down, letting the gap between myself and Marco grow. The sun was too hot. Where it once felt warm and comforting it now scalded a
nd suffocated. I could feel the wine that had tasted so crisp at Do’ Mori drawing the moisture out of my body, making my temples throb, my mouth dry as sandpaper. I came to a standstill but could feel myself swaying. I was on the steps near the top of the bridge, tourists jostling me, shoving me out of their way. The back of Marco’s head disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘Mary-Constance,’ a thin voice crackled behind me. It sounded just like my mother and I whirled around, startled, bumping into a little girl on crutches and knocking her into the arms of her father who hissed at me in an unrecognisable language. I was sweating, my heart thumping like a jackhammer. ‘Mary-Constance!’ I again heard someone say in my mother’s irritated tone. I spun around again but there were no small, disappointed American women anywhere to be seen. Instead, an overweight elderly man with three cameras around his neck brushed past me, misjudging the width of his enormous hips and knocking me off balance. I staggered sideways, my legs buckling as my hands flapped blindly in front of me, finding — thank heaven — the warm stone of the bridge’s ancient railing. The fat ribbon of sparkling canal water stretching beneath and beyond me suddenly seemed dazzling; the whole scenario blurred into a golden shimmering haze.

  ‘Marco,’ I cried weakly, because while most things seemed unfamiliar and out of focus, one thing was clear: I was about to faint. And, being me, I would quite likely land on something recently deceased and foul-smelling. ‘Marco,’ I whispered as darkness clawed at the sides of my eyes. I needed rescuing, whether he was an axe murderer or not.

  The world turned black. I was gone.

  When I came back, I was, you have probably guessed it, in his gondola. Well, where else would I have been? Seriously, it hardly surprised me at all, the day was turning out so strange. And you know what, I have since met another woman who fainted in Venice and woke up in a gondola so it’s not even really that far-fetched. Of course she was in the gondola before she fainted but still.

  Anyway, when I woke up I was lying on that blue and gold brocade-upholstered love seat and the gondola was moving swiftly and silently through the busy canal. It took me a few seconds to work out what was happening. At first I thought the buildings were moving and I was staying still. It was an odd sensation: I felt disconnected from consciousness, as though I were flying in a dream. (Actually, it reminded me of the way I felt the time Fleur talked me into a night of tequila slammers.) My hand ran across the gondola seat’s smooth brocade and found a tassel, which I fingered like a blind person reading Braille. I was in Venice, in a gondola, I told myself trying to breathe into the pain in my head. I was with Marco, I reminded myself, as the calming sound of the boat slicing through the city’s waterways comforted me. At least I assumed I was with Marco. I felt less comforted. Well, was I with Marco? Or was some other gondolier I knew even less spiriting me away? I twisted around to find that it was indeed Marco standing behind me, steering us down the canal. He smiled at me and my panic leeched away.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked him, my voice feeble and odd again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he answered me. ‘I’m taking care of you.’

  ‘But where are we going?’

  ‘It’s too hot out here,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you somewhere cool.’

  It was okay, he was rescuing me. It occurred to me that had I not drunk wine at 10 in the morning on a hot day in a foreign city without a husband to supervise me, I might not have needed rescuing. But the damage had been done. The wine had been drunk. The husband remained in New York. The gondolier was taking me somewhere cool.

  And so I simply rolled back onto my brocade bed and stared straight at the intense Venetian sun so that it obliterated the sight of everything else. I didn’t want to think about whether this was a good idea or not, going who-knew-where with Marco, a man I didn’t know but somewhere deep inside, down below, wanted to. I knew it was a strange thing to let happen, I mean I was sort of being kidnapped but I didn’t seem to mind. It was just like being an ordinary tourist, I figured, only cheaper as I hadn’t had to pay for the ride.

  We turned off the Grand Canal into a smaller one and after half a dozen twists and turns, each canal darker and narrower than the one before, we came to a wooden grate on the side of a building. Steadying himself against the crumbling concrete, Marco pulled the grate up, sliding the gondola into the darkness inside, his hands shimmying along the stone wall to steer it, his body stretched above me, his T-shirt rising to reveal a line of hair peeking out from his pants leading to — yes, well, never mind.

  We were in some sort of Venetian garage, I supposed, the murky basement of someone’s palazzo where they parked their boat but to be honest I wasn’t really thinking about it too much. I wasn’t thinking about anything too much. Apart from Marco. That line of hair. That taut brown skin. Look, I could string this out forever and try to make myself look like something other than an adulterously wanton slut but I think we all know where this is going so let’s skip straight to it.

  Marco tied the gondola to a post and came to kneel beside me, placing his cool hand on my hot head. I didn’t know whether to feel like a five-year-old kid or the happy hooker. I wanted him to look after me, be gentle with me, but I wanted more as well. I wanted him to take me in his arms and make love to me. The word ravish even sprang to mind. I am such a cliché. Who gets ravished these days anyway? By a handsome gondolier? In Venice?

  Well, in this instance, me. Yessiree. I have to say. I was ravished. He ravished me. Completely and utterly. Twice.

  One moment his hand was on my forehead, my eyes slipping and sliding off his, and the next his lips were on my skin, my back arching to bring my body up to meet his. There was no way we weren’t going to have sex and I knew it. I think I knew it when I first saw him, from the back of my water taxi, when he smiled and raised his eyebrow at me. And if I didn’t know it then I sure as hell knew it when he cleaned my disgusting shoe. Marco was what every recently separated woman (and a few still married ones as well) dreams of and deserves.

  He slid me down onto the floor of the gondola and I lifted my arms so he could slip off my tank top. I wasn’t even embarrassed about the doughy squidge of my middle, or the way a soft roll poked out from underneath my too-tight bra. He kissed his way down to my breasts, nibbling at them through my lingerie. It drove me wild. I couldn’t get my jeans off quickly enough, kicking them and my g-string (second honeymoon wear; I usually chose underwear with far better restraining properties) down the gondola and pulling him on top of me, then pushing him off again so I could help wrench off his T-shirt, claw at his pants.

  Then we were both lying there, naked, staring at each other with such intensity it almost scared me. And without a word, I slithered out from underneath him and moved astride him, so I was on top — which is most unlike me I can tell you, for reasons of having a pot belly that looks a heck of a lot flatter when I’m lying down. But there I was, sitting up straight in that dark watery garage, the gondola rocking gently in the wake of our movement, our separate parts sliding into place as though we were made for each other, a fat, heavy drop of water falling from somewhere into the darkness beyond us every few seconds in an almost stupefying rhythm.

  I’m not going to bore you with details of the sex because, let’s face it, it’s nowhere near as interesting reading about sex as it is having it, especially if it is with Marco. You can trust me on that one. Just the touch of his skin was electric. Where it merged with mine — on my thighs, my belly, my breasts — it made me fearful I would ignite, burn up and disintegrate. Words just cannot do it justice. It was explosive, completely and utterly intensely explosive. I had never had sex like that before in my life and I doubted that I ever would again. It was out of this world.

  Afterwards, we lay in the gondola, side by side, holding each other.

  ‘I’ve never done that,’ I said into the darkness, ‘with anyone but my husband.’

  Of course, Marco didn’t even know I had a husband but I have to say it did not seem to bother him in the
slightest. He didn’t even flinch. Just held me, my head on his chest, the sturdy thump of his heart filling me with hope.

  But then Tom’s face, his dear lovely face, wafted into my mind and my post-coital happiness completely dissolved, leaving nothing but guilt and dread and self-loathing in its place. I started to cry, not little girlie sniffles either, but great big man’s howls, my mouth stretched open as though my grief were too big to get out, my face swimming with tears, my chest aching with heaving sobs.

  How could I do this to Tom? Betray him? Cheat on him? Act so unlike me I couldn’t even recognise myself? Sure we were going through a rough patch, maybe had been for a while, but weren’t couples supposed to cling to each other for support when the going got tough? Not desert each other and turn to total strangers for comfort even if the comfort was extremely good. Better than extremely good. Un-freakin’-believably extremely good?

  I stopped crying and felt Marco move next to me. My tears had bothered him as much as my confession that I was married. It was weird to be lying there next to him, skin on skin, having shared so much of our earthly flesh but nothing else. Basically, he was still a total stranger to me. I didn’t know the first thing about him, which worried me but perversely, nor did I want to ask him anything. He was just too darn good for me, that was the problem, and I didn’t want to do anything to scare him off. He could row out into the world and get 100 lost and lonely wives all a lot better-looking than me with just a snap of his delectable fingers. And I hadn’t had my share just yet. Not by half.

  To my shame, and I am a good lapsed Catholic girl with hearty Jewish genes so I know when I should feel shame or not, I felt a pang then, fierce and forceful. But not of longing for my lost marriage nor guilt at my betrayal nor even doubt at the sense in my recent decision-making. But of hunger.

  I was hungry.

  Marco gently extricated himself from my arms, sat up, handed me my bra and looked at me, his eyes frank and uncomplicated.