Eating With the Angels (13 page)

‘You’re engaged too?’

‘I’m engaged too,’ she said quietly, ‘and I have a beautiful baby girl who is 11 months old.’

It was my turn to cry again then, I couldn’t keep the tears away. How could I not know something like that? How could I not have sensed that this woman with whom I had shared every detail of my life since college had entered that next all-important stage of being a grown-up? But when I thought about it, I had noticed that there was something different about Fleur. She looked like a new mom. It was a look we had noticed (and been quite scathing of I might add) in other women in the past. It gave her a softness, an aura, a clichéd glow, that she hadn’t had before. The happy glitter of motherhood. It suited her.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Agnes,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, Fleur, that’s beautiful. I love that name. That was Tom’s grandmother’s name.’

‘Yes.’ She said softly, sweetly, lingering over the word. A wave of nausea swept over me. ‘Who’s the father?’ Something, it must have been fear, was pulsing violently in my stomach.

‘Oh, sweetie,’ Fleur said so sadly that I knew the answer before she said the words. ‘It’s Tom.’

I’m going to leave out the obvious histrionics that occurred after that little bombshell was dropped. For a start it’s kind of a blur and for a finish I said some pretty nasty things that might give you cause to think my mother was right when she suggested I had come back mean.

This, I gather, was pretty hard for Fleur as she had already heard much of it before; you know, the first time when it had actually happened. Now when I look back I feel more sorry for her than for myself. I mean, imagine telling your best friend you’ve stolen her husband only to have her forget so you have to tell her all over again? I didn’t see it that way right then, of course. I was incredulous, hurt beyond belief and angry. For a few seconds there I even considered grabbing Signora Marinello’s surgical scissors and cutting off that thick, shiny lustrous head of hair. How could she? How could he? How could they? And a baby! If I’d been steadier on my feet I’d have stood up and decked her and then gone out and found Tom and decked him too. Of course, I was wearing a backless surgical gown and disposable underwear so riding the subway to Il Secondo would have had its problems. Still, on a better day I’d have given it a shot.

‘She stole my husband,’ I cried when Signora Marinello came in to see what the ruckus was about. ‘Tom. She took him.’

Fleur was no longer in the bed with me but curled in the visitor’s chair, her face red and blotchy with crying, her mascara smudged below her eyes. ‘I did not,’ she hiccupped, looking at my nurse for support, but Signora Marinello sensibly busied herself with her paperwork. ‘She gave him away.’

‘Why would I do that?’ I beseeched her. ‘Why would I? I love him, Fleur. I’ve loved him since I was four years old.’ This was a bit of an exaggeration but I thought I had every right to feel aggrieved.

‘Connie,’ she argued, ‘you tossed him aside like a used dishrag the moment you took up with Ty Wheatley.’

I gagged, literally gagged.

‘I what?’

‘You dumped —’

‘I took up with Ty Wheatley?’

‘You’re
engaged
to Ty Wheatley.’

At that moment I felt so cut adrift from the real me that I truly wondered what had been the point in surviving my surgery. I was a foreigner to myself and a fiancée to a man in impeccable cream linen suits. Frankly, I didn’t think it got much worse than that and in a week, or two weeks, or however the hell long it had been of bleak moments, that, I felt, was the bleakest.

A cavernous black hole claimed my insides, growing deeper and darker with every breath I took. I felt empty. Totally empty. It was like a hunger. A terrible, frightening hunger.

I sat up straight. Actually, it wasn’t like a hunger. It was hunger.

I was hungry.

The whole waking-up-out-of-a-coma thing had thrown my culinary radar for a loop, that was true, but at the moment of finding out that my husband had fathered a child with my best friend, I felt my old friend — appetite — return in spades. Maybe there was a reason for living after all. A rich fennel risotto with fresh-shaved Parmesan, perhaps. Or a fillet of grilled orata with salad greens and something tart, lemon-coriander vinaigrette perhaps, on the side.

‘Can I get something to eat?’ I asked, abruptly switching my attention to Signora Marinello. My mind raced with possibilities. ‘Scallops maybe?’ I could think of nothing but their plump sweetness, a satiny beurre blanc on the side.

Signora Marinello looked at me like I’d lost my mind (in retrospect, I got a lot of that). ‘Where do you think you are, Constanzia?’ she asked. ‘21 Club? Scrambled egg, maybe, I can do. But I think no to scallops. Still, is good that you are hungry. I tell you, is all downhill from here.’

She started out of the room but thought better of it, stopping to give us both a stern look and jabbing the air with her chubby finger. ‘Now you two should behave yourself while I’m gone, okay? Remember, Constanzia, you need quiet. Quiiiiiii-eeeeeeet.’

Fleur and I both sniffed and nodded. My mind cleared of dining options, I remembered where we had been up to in our discussions. Ty Wheatley. Ty Wheatley and me.

‘Wait,’ I called to my nurse’s retreating back. ‘Did someone called Ty Wheatley ever come to see me?’

‘Is he kind of English,’ she asked, ‘with white pants sitting up high, like this?’ She pulled her waistband up in an unflattering Gomer Pyle imitation. I nodded.

‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded. ‘But you not so happy to see him. You keep asking for Tom.’

Fleur let out something of a whimper at this and Signora Marinello shuffled off, relieved, I imagine, to escape the rather overcharged atmosphere in the room.

‘Well, this is going well,’ I said nastily.

‘Just you tell me what is the right way to tell your former best friend that you live with her ex-husband when you’ve already told her two years before and that was bad enough.’

Fleur was wretched, any fool (aw, I just keep doing it!) could see that, and put like that I could see it would be kind of a bummer.

‘Do we speak?’ I asked her. ‘Are we still friends?’

She shook her head, those beautiful curls bouncing around her face so cheerfully it was hard to believe she was unhappy. ‘When you took up with Ty we kind of started moving in different circles so I guess we grew apart then,’ she said, ‘but when Tom and I got together …’

How it hurt to hear her say that. My Tom. And my Fleur. Together? What had I done to deserve that? As far as I knew, Fleur had always believed in Tom and me. Hadn’t she counselled me on how to save our marriage when it foundered in the doldrums? Hadn’t she told me in the car on our wedding day that if there was one thing in the world of which she was sure it was that Tom loved me and only me with all his heart and soul?

I stopped and ran that sentence through my mind again at a slightly different speed. Fleur had insisted that Tom loved me and only me and I had assumed that these were simply encouraging words in desperate times, but maybe she had reason to know for certain that Tom loved me and only me. Maybe she had suggested a bit of Fleur-loving along the way.

‘Did you and Tom ever? While we were still?’

‘How could you even think that, Connie? I would NEVER do that to you. Ever. Maybe I did have a little crush on Tom before but nothing ever came of it — nothing ever would have — until you dumped him so badly, and ran off with Ty. You broke Tom’s heart. I just helped pick up the pieces and then, you know, it just happened.’

A smorgasbord of feeling churned inside my shrunken stomach. ‘So how long since we spoke to each other?’

‘Nearly two years but of course like most of Manhattan I read all your reviews — especially after that business with the place that closed down when you said you would fly to the Australian outback, in Coach, and eat live witchety grubs on the end of a stick rather than go there again.’

‘I said that?’

‘You sure did.’

‘In the
Voice
?’

‘No, Connie, in the
New York Times
!’

‘THE
New York Times
?’

‘Yes, THE
New York Times
.’

The look on my face must have clued her in to my ignorance. ‘Oh my God,’ she said limply. ‘No one told you you’re the
Times
restaurant critic?’

The
Times
restaurant critic? Hell-o-o! I’d spent days lying in that hospital bed listening to all kinds of doom and gloom about my swollen brain and my messed up love life and nobody had bothered to tell me I had reached the pinnacle of my career? Every food writer in New York — if not the whole country — dreamed about one day sharpening their pencil for the
New York Times
. It was the most prestigious job in the world of restaurant criticism. I thought of the critics whose words I had chewed up and swallowed in the past: Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller, Biff Grimes — although I was never so keen on him — and my hero Ruth Reichl, much of whose review of Le Cirque 2000 I could probably still quote verbatim.

‘Fleur, you wouldn’t kid around with me on something like this would you?’

‘Connie,’ she said and she allowed herself a smile, which made her look much more like her Mona Lisa self, ‘it’s true. You’re the real McCoy. You wear wigs and hats and dark glasses; and restaurateurs live in terror of you. There’s a picture from your high-school yearbook pinned up in half the kitchens in New York.’

‘Jesus, not the one with the perm?’ I’d had a weak moment back in the ’80s. Not pretty.

I collapsed back on my pillows. It was all so implausible. Me? Restaurant critic for the
New York Times
? Chefs on both coasts devoured every word of those reviews; fortunes were made and lost. How would a person like me get a job like that? There must have been 10,000 other people better qualified. And I didn’t know how to find the front door of the
New York Times
let alone score the prized
top food job. The job Ruth Reichl had made famous with her
razor-sharp
reviews. Ruth Reichl! I was just not good enough. I teetered on the fence between below average and average, just like I’d been told to. The
New York Times
was a big grown-up place for clever people to work at. How the hell did I get in there without wearing an overall and pushing a broom?

Now, if you think I’m being a little over-the-top here then maybe you are not aware of the hold the
New York
Times has on the population of the city — especially the dining fraternity, which is everyone. If that paper runs a story about your restaurant opening on its front page, you will never have an empty table. Ever. If it dumps on you, the phone will instantly fall chillingly silent, rarely to ring again. Remember New York is a town where people eat out three, four, maybe five times a week — half the apartments don’t even have dining tables, the city is their dining room — and trust me there’s nothing a New Yorker loves better than to know more than the next guy where’s the best place to get the spiciest dumplings, the juiciest soft-shelled clams, the plumpest Louisiana crayfish. That Wednesday food section is devoured by millions of eyes and discussed over millions of water coolers. It is big-time. Bigger than big-time.

‘But I’m nobody,’ I told Fleur, my head reeling.

‘You were nobody,’ she corrected me, ‘until Ty Wheatley got a hold of you.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He took you to France, cut your hair, clued you up on wine, and got you into that job. Him and your new best friend Paris.’ She did not make my new best friend’s name sound like a romantic city, she made it sound like something oozing goop in the bottom of a dumpster.

‘You know her?’

‘Everyone knows her now, thanks to you. She was just some deeply unsexy anonymous PR hack until Ty hooked you up and clung to your coat-tails while she made you famous.’

‘But am I any good?’

‘Connie, you’re probably one of the most talked-about women in town. In two years you’ve closed down a whole bunch of restaurants and made a whole bunch of millionaires.
New York Magazine
ran a cover story on you — you posed wearing nothing but a few cleverly placed bunches of fruit. You have a legion of fans that adore your every word and you get big sacks of fan mail. You were stalked for a while, too, by some waiter who lost his job after you wrote that he smelled of sour underpants and desperation.’

‘I did not!’ That was upsetting. I would never say anything like that about a waiter. I loved waiters. I had been one. I had probably smelled of sour underpants and desperation myself.

‘Sorry, sweetie,’ Fleur said. ‘You did. Actually, you turned into kind of a bitch.’

‘You’re just saying that because I’m mad you stole my husband.’

‘I didn’t steal your husband, Connie. You threw him out.’

‘But,’ I stuttered, ‘but, but, but …’

But what was the point in being a thin blonde restaurant critic for the
New York
freakin’
Times
if you had no husband, a creepy boyfriend, staples in your head, and were a bitch?

Miraculously, in the wake of that realisation Fleur and I managed to reach something of an understanding. She pointed out that I had already tortured her with phone calls and emails and face-to-face verbal abuse sessions; if I wanted to skip all that a second time, she said, we could just go straight to not talking to each other and that would be okay by her. This was not a bad plan but the thought of not having her in my life right then when I really desperately needed her, needed someone, seemed a trifle too much to bear. Without Tom, she was my most trustworthy anchor to the past, to me. Besides, my anger at her, at Tom, at the two of them, kind of ebbed away after its initial powerful swell and was hard to hold on to. I didn’t feel as though it was permeating anything other than my stunned outer layer, which left me oddly capable of making quite a sensible suggestion.

‘Could we skip forward even further and just make up with each other, then?’ I offered. ‘I mean I could just take your word that we’ve been through all the crap and we could just come out the other side.’

‘Oh, could we?’ Fleur’s face brightened, her eyes sparkled above their panda patches of blurry mascara. ‘Honestly?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

She sprang out of her chair and jumped back onto the bed with me. ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you so much, Connie. You wouldn’t believe it.’

‘There’s a lot I wouldn’t believe,’ I told her, ‘if people didn’t keep insisting it’s all true.’ The
New York Times
? Wow.

Signora Marinello squelched back into the room then, handing me a tray bearing a sad little sandwich, a floury-looking apple, and a glass of unidentifiable juice. It did not look like something the most important restaurant critic in the world would contemplate for even a second but I was starving. Fleur went back to her chair so I could sit up and eat.

‘It’s good you make up,’ Signora Marinello told her. ‘Constanzia need her real friends.’

It had been weeks since I had eaten anything — what an unconscionable thought — and in an ideal world my first meal would have been much more of an exotic feast. In an ideal world I might have had, I looked at the clock — it was just after six — a handful of freshly roasted salty pistachio nuts (pistachio!) to get my juices flowing, followed by a little something soft and tangy to ease into the meal. Tom often made a simple tomato, avocado and buffalo mozzarella salad for me at home in the summer. It wasn’t anything fancy but when the Jersey tomatoes were at their best, there was no better way to eat them. He bought the cheese fresh from Murray’s and got his basil leaves extra peppery from his well-trained upstate organic farmer at Union Square. Then he drizzled his favourite olive oil, a nutty Italian one that played right into the hands of the avocado, over the top and served it with grilled ciabatta for a bit of crunch.
The soft subtle tastes of the understated cheese and smooth avocado mixed with the tartness of the tomatoes and topped with a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt were enough to get you seriously thinking about what you might eat next. In my ideal world, I decided, while I was on the subject, my heart hankered after sweet, rosy milk-fed lamb but it was past spring and out of the question. Perhaps a beautifully grilled fillet of Chilean sea bass? I knew the world was in danger of being fished out of the poor suckers but then God shouldn’t have made them so darn good to eat. I would have it served on a risotto made with lemon zest, freshly podded English peas, fried capers, and the lightest of lobster stocks, with a simple arugula salad dressed with aged Balsamic on the side. As for dessert, well after that long it would have to be chocolate — and a lot of it. Soufflé perhaps, mousse, most likely. And then an espresso strong enough to make most grown men, Italian ones, wince. Oh, the thought of it! I would drink … what would I drink? Champagne. Without question. Buckets of it.