Eating With the Angels (16 page)

At that moment, a delivery boy bounced in the door bearing a steaming brown paper sack from Il Secondo.

‘Thank you Lord!’ I crowed, grateful that the dangerous moment had passed. ‘Finally, something’s going my way.’

But as Tom started to unload the food onto the tray in front of me, and I felt the warmth of the hot dishes — the spicy potato dumplings and the piping-hot Cornish game hen — on my chin, my cheeks, my eyes, as the steam rose from the food, it struck me that something was missing.

The gnocchi was made with Tom’s peppery basil, I knew that, I’d heard him ask for it and the sauce was a spicy veal ragout, Pippo’s secret recipe, surely Tom wouldn’t have changed it, it was sensational. And the way he had always cooked game hen was to marinate it in rosemary and garlic. He loved the pungent aromas of those Italian herbs as did I. But there was not a trace of any of them in the air of my hospital room. I could feel the steam from the food on my skin, in my nostrils even, yet where I expected to find the scintillating smells of rosemary and basil there was nothing.

‘Are you okay?’ Tom was setting my meal up, tucking a napkin into the front of my hospital gown and organising the dishes in front of me.

‘You changed Pippo’s gnocchi sauce?’ I asked him, my head spinning a little. ‘You don’t use garlic in the chicken any more?’

‘What, are you crazy?’ He sniffed the air. ‘You can’t smell it?’

I sniffed the air myself. Again, nothing. My hand shook slightly, fear nibbling at me, as I speared a dumpling, piled it high with the veal ragout and took a bite. The gnocchi was silky as I pushed it across the roof of my mouth. I felt strings of mozzarella sticking to my top teeth and rolled them away with my tongue, catching every morsel of milk-fed veal in its slow cooked tomato sauce as it swirled around inside my cheeks.

Oh, I could feel that delectable mouthful of Il Secondo’s signature dish, all right. I could feel it just fine. Better than the next person even.

I just couldn’t taste it.

I could not taste a thing.

So, turns out those thin thighs hadn’t come cheap after all. I had paid a far higher price than joining a gym or spending hours on my knees at Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering. I had paid the highest price imaginable: my taste. I would have given anything else, anything but that. Truly, the memory loss was nothing in comparison. I’d been getting used to it, whatever it was and whatever caused it, because while it might have been weird and surreal and deeply frustrating, it wasn’t an arm or a leg. It was just two years and nine months of my life. And there were people who could help me plug that hole.

But my taste! That was a different matter. If I didn’t have my taste I had nothing. I was nobody. Even the old Connie, the pre-
New York Times
version, relied on her taste for her job, her enjoyment, her reason for freakin’ living. Without it I could just not see the sense in having survived the coma. I mean what was the point? It seemed cruel beyond belief. I was bereft. I screamed and howled and cried and not even the sight of the gap between my thighs could distract me. I would have had my fat squashy joined-up ones back in a heartbeat if it meant I could savour sweet and sour and salty again. I prayed to fall back into a coma and die. I pleaded for Signora Marinello to inject me with something lethal. I was wretched beyond comprehension. Wretched.

‘I can see why you might be upset,’ admitted Marco two days
later when he finally came to see me. I was so distressed I barely stopped to notice how hot he was. Barely. Little morsels of desire still managed to infiltrate the terror that ravaged me, but this only added to my generally anguished state.

‘Loss of these senses is not entirely uncommon after a head trauma,’ he told me, ‘but I’m intrigued because usually it’s when there is some damage to the cribriform plate, which in your situation is not the case, and even then it is rare for there to be no sense of taste at all. Are you positive about that? That there is no taste?’

Was I positive? What a question. It wasn’t like taste was a small matter to me, it was a big matter. The biggest. Did Marco really think I would not fully explore the extent of my loss? He could be a real jerk sometimes that guy, morsels of desire or not. Of course I was positive, and I wasn’t relying on hospital slop to test out my taste buds either. No, after finding myself unable to taste Il Secondo’s finest, I had sent Tom to Gray’s Papaya for a hotdog with extra mustard then to Delmonico’s for take-out lobster Newburg. I’d despatched Fleur to Guss’s Pickles for a selection of the house favourites, to the pushcart on 54th Street for Rolf’s famous bratwurst and Berliner sausage combo and had even begged my mom to go to Two Little Red Hens for a slice of the city’s best New York cheesecake — the ultimate in the battle between sweet and tart — but it was useless. All of it, useless. I could tell hot and cold, crunchy and smooth, soft and hard, fresh and stale, but I could not smell or taste a thing. I knew what the food should taste like, there was nothing wrong with that part of my memory, but it simply did not register when I sampled it.

‘As I say, there has been no injury to the face, the nose,’ Marco said. He put one hand on my jaw and one on my forehead, which normally would have driven me wild but I was too busy hyperventilating with fear for my future to appreciate his touch. ‘However, I have seen far milder injuries even than yours where there has been some damage to the neural pathways, which has led to malfunctioning of the olfactory bulb.’

‘Speak English,’ I snapped. ‘These are my taste buds we’re talking about.’

‘No, they’re not actually,’ he said and I saw that coldness in him again, that thread of steel that on occasion rendered him strangely inhuman. ‘There is nothing wrong with your taste buds. It is a nerve issue. And in time, the damaged nerves may repair themselves and your ability to smell and taste may return.’

‘May repair themselves? You mean they may not? Can’t you operate? There must be something you can do. I can’t go through life not tasting anything. I may as well just …’ I tried to think of what I may as well just do. Lie around listening to Courtney Love and smoking pot all day like my brother? It was unbearable.

‘There is no treatment for ageusia or dysgeusia,’ Marco said, ‘which are the technical names for what you are suffering, and that is surgical or otherwise. I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with it.’

‘You can’t just leave it at that,’ I cried. ‘This is my taste we are talking about. It’s how I make a living.’ A good one too, probably, if I was working for the
New York Times
. ‘It’s all I have.’

‘Then you’ll just have to get something else,’ Marco said, and he turned on his heel and left the room.

I was devastated. Totally devastated. And there was no one there to share my devastation. I was totally alone. Had never felt more alone in my old life or this torturous new one. I turned over and reached for the bag of grapes Ty had brought me from the Whole Food Market, pulling off a luscious, fat, nearly black one from the top of the bunch and popping it in my mouth.

I bit into it and felt the tight skin pop open, the soft pulp squirting inside my mouth, but there was no tartness on my tongue, no sweet after-bite. There was nothing.

Oh, the despair.

I know what you are probably thinking about now. You are thinking, boy, is this depressing, and it started out such fun. And what’s more, it was about to get worse.

‘Darling,’ Ty Wheatley said after planting one of his dry little
kisses on my eyebrow the next day. ‘Wonderful news. I’m allowed to take you home.’

Home? I had been so busy panicking over my inability to taste anything that it had not occurred to me to think about going home. Home was the last thing on my mind. Signora Marinello had followed Ty into my room and was eyeing me nervously as he spoke, which in turn made me jumpy. Why would Signora Marinello be nervous about Ty taking me home?

‘Holy shit,’ I said. Had it occurred to me to think about going home, I might have pondered the question of where home actually was. I had assumed it would be with Tom; but Tom’s home was with Fleur now, Fleur and Agnes, not me. I obviously lived somewhere else. ‘You mean you’re going to take me to your place?’ I asked Ty.

‘Our place,’ he corrected me. ‘Our home. And Cayenne and Jalapeno are very excited.’

‘Cayenne and Jalapeno?’ We had excited peppers?

‘The cats, darling. Cay-Cay and Happy. They can’t wait. They’re scratching the armoire in excitement as we speak. They can just tell something is happening. It’s hilarious.’

Oh brother.

He had a different cream linen suit on, I noticed, but it was still crinkled and he was wearing a loathsome bow tie too, blue with little red elephants on it. Worse still, when he sat down in the visitor’s chair, his pants rode up and I saw he was wearing matching blue socks that also sported little red elephants. I was shocked. Beyond belief. You can see what I mean about things getting worse.

Actually, when I say I was shocked, I’m not joking. And I don’t mean I was surprised, I mean I was stunned. Dazed. Confused. Such a state was I in, in fact, that almost before I knew what was happening I was being bundled up in readiness to be returned to our apartment on the Upper East Side: 63rd and Park, the home of MC Conlan, Ty Wheatley and their two adorable little Kitty McKittingtons (I kid you not), Cay-Cay and Happy.

Ty simply packed up what belongings I seemed to have, handed me a hideous greige outfit he’d brought from ‘home’ — the sort of thing Paris would wear but not look like a dead person in — then ordered a car (he drove everywhere in a Lincoln, just like my grandmother) to be waiting outside in half an hour.

I remember standing in my little bathroom at the hospital, staring at myself in the unflatteringly lit mirror. Ty had brought in ‘my’ enormous make-up bag and it was bulging with mysterious lotions and potions that I hardly even recognised. I had been a moisturiser-only girl in my old life, a bit of lipstick and mascara and a dab of blusher if I was going out but on the whole I preferred the minimalist approach. MC, though, had a massive collection of concealers, foundations, powders, eye shadows, lip-liners, glosses and cellulite creams, for heaven’s sake. I might not have had a whole brain but I still knew that even if I had cellulite no cream was going to get rid of it. Oh, what had become of me?

Anyway, there didn’t seem much else for it so I clumsily applied a modest faceful of products I was able to identify. The greige shift dress and matching cropped jacket were not what I would have chosen myself but a set of cherry-red lips cheered up my visage enormously. I never would have thought to wear cherry-red lipstick in my old life. I forced a smile and to my utter amazement I had to admit that, despite the tragedy of it all, if I removed my critical eye and ignored the fact that I didn’t look like me, the woman I did look like was not half bad.

Something, though, was still not quite right. Something apart from the fact that my hair was blonde on the good side of my head but dark both at the roots and on the other side. Ty already had me booked in with the new Frederic Fekkai, whoever that was. Could it be my eyebrows? They had definitely seen better days … I obviously plucked them a lot more than I used to and they were growing back quite oddly. I leaned in closer for further inspection and so did my mirror image, but up close she looked even less like me than before.

I was puzzled. But she was not. I was horrified but she was not. I was scared, but she was not. No matter what my inner emotion, she remained glassily smooth.

I burst out of the bathroom, my hands flapping in front of me in terror. I was going to end up in a wheelchair after all. I was paralysed!

‘I can’t move!’ I cried. ‘Look! I can’t move!’

Marco was standing there, signing some forms with Signora Marinello and Ty.

‘You’re moving pretty well if you ask me,’ he said, and despite my panic I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were running over me in a way that should have made me feel disgusted right there in front of my alleged fiancé but did not.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said. ‘I can’t move my face, Marco. What’s wrong with me? What’s the matter?’

He handed Signora Marinello the paperwork, sat me on the bed then ran those long lean fingers across my cheeks, around my eyes, along my hairline.

‘Very nice,’ Marco said. ‘I’d say it was Bill Howard up on East 73rd. He does the best work in town.’

‘The best work?’ I echoed.

‘Botox,’ Marco said. ‘He’s just plumped out your eyes and filled in your frown lines. Don’t worry. He’s done a great job.’

‘I’ve been Botox-ed?’

‘Everybody on the Upper East Side has been Botox-ed, Connie. You look good. In fact, you look great.’

His hand was still on my chin. I could barely concentrate on the shock of what he’d just told me. I’d always looked down my naturally well-proportioned nose at the nippers and tuckers and plumpers and suckers of the world, and now I was one?

‘Come along MC,’ Ty said, perhaps picking up on whatever danced in the air between Marco and me. ‘The car is waiting.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve discovered a last-minute cure for my taste
problem then,’ I said and to my astonishment my voice sounded all husky and Kathleen Turner-ish.

‘No,’ Marco said and he smiled at me, such a rare and blinding vision I just about jumped into his arms at the sight of it. ‘But if I do you’ll be the first to know. Make sure to keep in touch. I don’t generally get to enjoy normal conversations with my patients.’

I stood up and our eyes lingered on each other in a decidedly non-doctor-patient fashion.

‘The car, MC,’ Ty reminded me edgily and I can’t say I blamed him. The room hung hot and heavy with my slatternly lust.

‘Good luck, Constanzia,’ Marco said and he took my hand in his, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, his lips soft and perfectly moist on my skin. I closed my eyes and imagined the smell of him, which was quite glorious, so glorious in fact that I forgot to open my eyes again and it wasn’t until Signora Marinello and Ty both coughed loudly that I remembered where I was and let Marco go.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Don’t be,’ he answered and he was gone.

Well, you can only imagine the awkward moment that blossomed after that little exchange. I blushed to the roots of my roots as I pretended to look for things that I might have forgotten while Ty burbled details of our cats I wouldn’t have thought anyone but a veterinary gynaecologist would care to hear.

Finally, when there was truly nothing to do but leave, Signora Marinello was strangely subdued, shy almost, as she held me at arm’s length and studied me with her earnest brown eyes.

‘Don’t be frightened, Constanzia,’ she said. ‘Will all be okay. You’ll see. But remember your brain she is not better yet. You need your friends. Your real friends.’ She said this last in a whisper, which I took to mean that she did not count Ty among my real friends (which was fine by me, as I didn’t either). In fact, the only reason I was going with him was because nobody else had offered to take me anywhere. And because of the bracelet which Fleur had looked up on
the Internet and said cost $4000.

‘You know where to find me if you need me, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello whispered into my ear, pulling me into her warm doughy body. ‘I will always be here. Don’t forget. If you need me, just come find me.’

I hated those Park Avenue cats on sight. They were both fat and fluffy with floppy undercarriages that looked as though someone had unzipped them and taken the stuffing out. Cay-Cay — or was it Happy? I had no way of telling the snooty little creatures apart — actually arched her back and yowled at me when I stepped into the entrance hall of Ty’s 12th-floor corner apartment.

The place was enormous. Frankly, I felt like arching my back and yowling a little myself. You could have fitted Tom’s and my old apartment in the entry foyer. It was scarily spacious, with a hallway and bedrooms off to the left and a light-filled living room to the right. I followed Ty in that direction, trying to keep my jaw from dropping on the ground at the sight of his super-deluxe gourmet kitchen gleaming with stainless-steel bench-tops and sparkling with every appliance known to mankind — including a fully plumbed-in commercial coffee machine. It was the sort of kitchen someone like me might have dreamed of but never in a million years expect to have. I was staggered.