Eating With the Angels (17 page)

The rest of the apartment was just as impressive. A tastefully planted terrace ran the length of the living and dining areas … you could look out French doors to Park Avenue from behind the kitchen bench. The whole place was sleek and uncluttered and screamed style and good taste and huge expense. It took me a while to realise, though, that everything was beige and I mean everything: walls, parquet floors, drapes, sofas, flower arrangements, lampshades, you name it, even the books on the book shelves all seemed to have beige spines. The cats were beige. The expensive-looking art on the wall was beige. Frankly, I thought it could have done with a splash of colour but what did I know?

I collapsed into a stylishly upright armchair and slipped off my high heels, stretching out my legs and wriggling my toes on the Persian rug underneath the coffee table. I could barely believe that I lived there. When Ty took my bag away and disappeared back down the hall with it I sat like a stunned mullet in my chair, just wondering what the hell was going to happen next. I looked around the vast perfectly decorated space for any signs that I might have had a hand in it but there was nothing of me in the room at all. It was too tasteful for that. Then Ty bustled back, rubbing his hands together. He settled himself on the stylishly upright sofa, removed a cushion from behind his back and placed it neatly at the opposite end, then patted the seat beside him, indicating that Cay-Cay or Happy should jump up, which one of them did, curling into a ball and eyeing me beadily. Then he picked up a remote control and the room was suddenly filled with sound, which also sounded beige. I was pretty sure I still liked Madonna and Ricky Martin but clearly Ty was more of an elevator music guy.

Anyway, it was surreal. We sat there, he and I, in our $3-
million-plus
apartment looking for all the world just like any other well-to-do New York couple enjoying a peaceful afternoon in the home we had painstakingly perfected. If aliens had landed in our living room they would have thought us the luckiest people alive. Who wouldn’t want a life like that? Park Avenue address, priceless art, beautiful jewellery. I could have woken up to a much worse scenario, put it that way, so rather than excusing myself politely and running into the street screaming, which was one of my options at around that point, I just wriggled my toes in that rug and stayed put. While it seemed strange, it didn’t seem stranger than anything else. And, looking back, that whole post-hospital period had a certain dream-like quality to it. I knew I was awake and in the real world but it was almost as though I was applying the rules of a dream world: not questioning anything, letting whatever happened happen, no matter how weird. Do you know what I mean when I talk about the rules of a dream world? In
a dream you never stop to question Bruce Springsteen’s appearance at your lavish wedding to George Clooney in the foothills of Nepal, do you? You never rise up and wonder why 2000 one-armed unicyclists are all eating Hungarian goulash. You don’t slap Johnny Depp’s hand away from your breast and extract your tongue from his mouth to say, ‘Stop that right now. I’m a happily married woman, Johnny. Behave yourself.’ No, you just sit back and see what happens.

Also, I was tired. So tired. That first day, deposited neatly in that stylish sea of beige, I felt a weariness so deep in my bones it frightened me. My eyelids felt like lead weights that lowered themselves in slow motion to my cheeks. Lifting them was an effort almost beyond me. Sleep seemed too small a solution to that sort of exhaustion. I felt like I needed to discover a whole different method of relief. Also, I didn’t know where my bed was but I did know that when I found it, I did not want to share it with Ty, no matter how high the thread count on the linen. This was a biggie. He was a nice enough man, if you liked that sort of thing. He was certainly generous and kind and understanding — if slightly handicapped by the broom handle stuck up his ass — and I didn’t mind staying at his house but I did not want his doughy flesh rubbing up and down against me. Yet when I sorted through the filing cabinet in my exhausted mind, the folder marked ‘Ways To Tell The Fiancé You Didn’t Know You Had That You Don’t Want To Sleep With Him’ was empty. The whole drawer, in fact, appeared to have been ransacked. But I was a person in need of a good long lie-down so I just had to deal with it.

‘Ty, I don’t like your cats,’ I said, ‘and I’m not going to sleep with you. Also I think you should paint at least one wall in here a pumpkin colour. Mango even.’

There was a long silence. His feelings were hurt, I could see that, but I was too tired to care. I just didn’t have the energy to dress things up the way I used to.

‘You don’t like the cats?’ He resorted to a sad sort of baby-ish voice. ‘But MC, they’re our little darlings.’

The one that wasn’t already on the sofa walked past me, its tail held haughtily upright, its hip swinging to brush my knee with its butt. I considered reaching out to give it a good tug but didn’t want to expend the energy.

‘I don’t know how things are going to work out,’ I said. ‘It’s all pretty strange, you have to admit, and I’m just not sure of … anything. Except, you know, I might actually be more of a tropical fish person. Anyway, I just need to find a way to get through the next little while until my taste comes back. If this is weird I’m sorry, Ty. But it’ll all be okay when my taste comes back.’

Ty flinched at this, his lips pursing and giving his mouth a look not unlike the asshole of one of his cats.

‘Yes, well, I can’t say your Dr Scarpa has been particularly helpful on that front,’ he said dryly. ‘It’s not like we’re just dealing with anybody’s taste after all. You’re MC Conlan of the
New York Times
, for heaven’s sake. People would kill for that job.’

I must have looked alarmed because he quickly clarified that I was not one of those people.

‘You got it fair and square, MC, by being the best placed person for the job. Paris put in a good word, of course she did, that’s how it works, you know that, and I did my bit too. Well, Toby’s an old friend. I was able to help you both out. It’s just a shame that Dr Scarpa doesn’t seem to take your taste as seriously as everyone else. But I’ve been talking to Dr Foster, MC, and she says she can clear her schedule and give you a couple of hours a day for the next two weeks at least. She thinks your memory issues may be some sort of dissociative symptom of
post-traumatic
stress syndrome, and, well, when you think about it half the damn country has post-traumatic stress syndrome these days so why shouldn’t you? And the taste, MC, well, Dr Foster thinks that might be part of it. She thinks she can help you get it back and you’re right, that’s what we must work towards. You must get it back.’

I agreed with him on that one but there were still a few gaps in need of filling.

‘Who is Dr Foster?’ I asked him.

‘Your therapist, darling. She’s worked wonders with you, truly she has. Wonders.’

I was in therapy?

‘And on the other matter,’ he cleared his throat, ‘the question of the sleeping arrangements, you have your own room, MC. You’ve always had your own room, the master bedroom with French doors to the terrace. I’m in the guest room past the library. I don’t expect that to change at all.’

We had a library?

‘We can go back to our Wednesday evening arrangement whenever you are ready, MC. Sevruga caviar, the Krug Clos du Mesnil and …’ he blushed and gave a little cough, ‘you know. As always.’

Well, this was some kind of engagement. ‘We don’t sleep together?’ Not that I wanted to, you understand, but I was quite interested in knowing why I didn’t. ‘Except on a Wednesday?’

‘Conflicting schedules, darling.’ He was squirming. ‘Your work load. My allergies. We just decided it would be better that way.’

Take away our flawless home, our gorgeous clothes and our successful careers and we really were a very odd couple.

‘So, finally I get to see where you live,’ my mother said as she stepped across the threshold the next day. ‘Nice colour. It’s so fresh.’ She looking approvingly around the living room and kitchen, adding: ‘So plain. Your father always wants everything so bright and cheerful. It drives me crazy.’

My father, as far as I knew, had never had an opinion on interior décor in his whole entire life. In fact, if you got him out of the apartment and asked him what colour the walls were, I doubt he would have been able to tell you.

‘So, do you remember anything yet?’ she asked, settling herself on the sofa (which might have looked fabulous but was actually a
bitch to sit on). ‘Other than your fancy Park Avenue address, of course. You don’t seem to have forgotten that. You don’t remember leaving your husband, breaking his heart, ruining your mother’s life?’

I felt an anger surge through me then as I looked at her trying to wriggle into a comfortable position, her eyes taking in every detail, no doubt totting up a running total in her head and calculating how much I wasn’t worth it. Why the hell was she so mean and why the hell did I put up with it?

‘You know what,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you here if you’re going to talk to me like that.’

Her jaw dropped in amazement. ‘Like what? I can’t remind you what you did, how you embarrassed me and your father? I couldn’t look Father Francis in the eye for a year after you left poor Tommy. It was a disgrace. And I’ll talk to you any way I want. I’m your mother. Unless you’ve forgotten that too.’

I stopped myself from going there because had I been able to choose whom I remembered, I couldn’t swear she’d make the cut. ‘Mom, you never even liked poor Tommy,’ I said instead. ‘You used to introduce him as “the dishwasher who stole my daughter”.’

‘Well, that was before he was on the Food Network,’ she answered, her eyes gleaming like nuggets of coal at my audacity. ‘I guess I just never got to see his good side, what with you nagging at him all the time.’

This stopped me in my tracks. Did I nag at Tom? I didn’t think so. I did whatever he told me to do most of the time. I was the peacekeeper, the pacifier, the good girl who would do almost anything to avoid a confrontation. Jesus, I even let him hijack my dreams, turn them into his. Chez Panisse for our honeymoon — what a crock. I couldn’t make Tom do a goddamn thing. I never had been able to, had hardly bothered trying. And sitting there with my mother’s sparkling eyes challenging me unblinkingly across the foreign floor of my alleged home, I realised that the well of self-doubt
into which she had dipped for so long had finally dried up. And that nagging was not my problem. Being bullied was my problem.

‘So nice of you to drop by,’ I said, suddenly standing up and gesturing toward the hall. ‘Next time we’ll have cake.’

There was a moment when I thought she was maybe going to sit her ground, refuse to move, but she thought better of it, standing up and straightening her sweater.

‘You’ve always had a mean streak, Mary-Constance,’ she said. ‘But who knew Woody Allen would bring it out in you? I never liked him, you know. I never knew what Mia saw in him. After Sinatra, what a choice. Those beady little eyes, that whiny little voice.’

‘See you later, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a nap now.’

‘And for such a fancy building your doorman looks cheap,’ she told me as I opened the door to the apartment for her. ‘That suit! And the hair growing out his ears must be an inch long.’

‘Say hi to Pop for me,’ I told her and then I closed the door, resting my forehead against the cool smooth surface.

‘So, that went well,’ Ty said, emerging warily from his end of the apartment.

‘You think?’

‘Well, at least you finally gave her our address, MC. Usually you insist on meeting her someplace else. Dr Foster will have more to say on the matter, I’m sure, darling. Tea? Lapsang Souchong?’

Actually, when it came to hot drinks I preferred coffee but it turned out Ty didn’t like using his fancy Italian coffee machine. It made too much of a mess, he said. To be honest, he seemed kind of fussy on the cleaning front: snatching away my glass before I could set it on the table, obsessively removing cat hair with one of those sticky brush things, rearranging his very deliberate collection of magazines on the coffee table if you were so presumptuous as to flick through one.

Our apartment was beautiful but you wouldn’t say it felt lived in. I mean the guy cleaned the kitty litter twice a day, for Pete’s sake, and he’d somehow got the cats’ bowels in sync. Scary. But despite our differences on the hygiene front, Ty and I got on pretty well those first couple of days. He just let me do my own thing, which was not much, and he did his, which I didn’t care to know about. It didn’t bother me if he wasn’t there and it didn’t bother me if he was. I slept, I soaked in my own beautiful big bathtub, I slept some more.

He even brought me breakfast in bed: same thing every day, orange juice in a crystal glass and a perfectly soft-boiled egg. There was a rose on the tray and a linen napkin and everything and he’d bring it in wearing a neat off-beige paisley silk dressing gown over beige pyjamas and caramel-coloured slippers (the daredevil) bearing a gold crest. It was a bit like living with an extra from
Gosford Park
but it certainly had its up side.

The juice caught at the back of my throat when I drank it so I knew it was good and tart, and I could feel the little oddly shaped bits of pulp that let me know it was freshly squeezed, not made with concentrate, but there was no biting citrus flavour, no orange sensation, just the memory of what a good juice should taste like. I tended to cry a little bit every time I ate something but who wouldn’t? It was like going to the bank to make a withdrawal knowing you’d paid in a check for a million dollars only to find the account had been emptied out. The thought of what I could no longer do, what I no longer had, drove me to distraction which, believe me, wasn’t far.

One morning over breakfast, though, I decided to try my hardest to work with what I still had and once I stopped lamenting my lack of taste it was surprising what pleasure remained in the ritual of eating. The soft-boiled egg was really still quite pleasant. The white felt cool and fleshy and solid while the yolk was warm and creamy. I felt the yellowness of it. I fantasised about the flavour … racking my memory for tastes from the past, marvelling at how I had never really thought about how sweet eggs were before. I added salt and imagined the difference that would make to the egg, the sharpness it would bring. Then I remembered feeding Emmet a boiled egg when he was a baby in his high chair. I had turned my back on him for a moment to spread peanut butter on my toast and when I’d turned around again he had eaten the entire egg, shell and all. My mother had gone nuts, ranting and raging and accusing me of trying to kill him, which was way off bat as it took another 15 years for me to want to do that. I actually thought he was pretty cool when he was a kid. Anyway, throughout the rest of our childhood, any time we had eggs, my mother would pointedly say to Emmet in front of whoever else was there, ‘And don’t let your sister feed you the eggshells. They’ll kill you. She knows this.’

Ty was hugely encouraging about any efforts to rehabilitate my culinary skills. I got the impression it was something he and Paris had
already discussed. The two of them sure as hell wanted me back on track but then I wanted me there too so I could hardly complain. He agreed that it was important that we still made an effort to eat as though I could taste. We should experiment, he told me, with my damaged senses, see exactly what I still had. I think he was scared that left to my own devices I might take refuge in chocolate with
low-percentage
cocoa solids and great gulps of Diet Coke, which pre-Woody Allen I had never liked but which now appealed on account of the bubbles.

‘So, wasabi still works,’ I said, tears streaming down my face, my nostrils ablaze, after we lunched on take-out Japanese from Matsuri in Chelsea. No delivery charge too expensive, in Ty’s eyes, when it came to the perfect northern Japanese lake fish. The fiery green horseradish burned the inside of my face as though nothing about me had changed yet while it throbbed inside my nose, there was no suggestion of the taste. The tempura shrimp roll turned out to be my favourite and I had previously not been a fan of tempura, finding the batter too bland. But now that I only had texture to go on, it was a pleasant surprise.

‘By the way, Paris has made a reservation for the three of us at Mix tonight,’ Ty said after he had talked me through the black grilled cod with sake paste — way too slimy by my account, thoroughly delicious by his. ‘Time we got you out and about.’

I chomped down on a piece of crunchy lotus root. The whole troublesome matter of my alleged best friend urgently needed addressing. ‘About Paris,’ I found myself saying. ‘You know how I feel about the cats? Same.’

I have since found out that this sort of impulsive behaviour is not uncommon among those who have hit their heads, but while it’s a more honest way to behave, it was something of a contrast to the cautious manner in which I had conducted most conversations prior to the pretzel. I squirm now when I think about some of the things I said.

Ty squirmed too. ‘But MC, you’re such pals. You adore each other!’

‘She’s bossy,’ I disagreed. ‘Her hair is too straight. She has big pointy fingernails and she doesn’t remember people’s names. She makes me nervous.’

‘But darling, Paris has been the key to your success. She has the contacts. A word in the right ear from Paris and you were the
New York Times
restaurant critic. The
New York
Times
, MC. So long Biff Grimes! No, no, I don’t mean RIP Biff Grimes, darling, I mean so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu. And hello MC Conlan. She found you an agent, MC. She got you your book deal. She took you to Paris, to London, to Venice. You love her.’

‘
She
took me to Venice?’

‘Yes, my sweet, you did the cooking course at the Gritti Palace, remember? Oh, I’m sorry. Of course not. My mistake. This must be so frustrating for you. I can only imagine. MC, please, don’t cry, darling. Really. Should I call Dr Foster? I’ll get you a handkerchief. A valium? Some brandy? Good heavens, MC, I’m not sure what to do.’

Look, if you’re bored with all the crying, imagine how I felt. But how would you feel upon discovering you’d gone to Venice with Paris? She just did not look like a fun person to be on vacation with, or work with, or have dinner at Mix with. There were a lot of people I would choose to go to Venice with before I would choose her. Well, I thought I had chosen someone else … even if he hadn’t turned up. Or I hadn’t. Or whatever. Look, I was befuddled but not so befuddled that it hadn’t occurred to me that I must at some stage have gone to Venice with someone: how else would I have seen it, tasted it, delighted in it in such glorious technicolour in my coma? My imagination just wasn’t that good. And when I thought about it, it made perfect sense for me to have gone to the city of my dreams with my new best friend. Yet on finding out that it was she with whom I had gorged on cichetti at Do’ Mori and slurped up olive oil
with thick chunky wedges of warm brick-baked bread at Alla Madonna, I wept inconsolably. My face crumpled, my cheeks shone with tears, my chest heaved with sobs.

Ty was most uncomfortable with such outbursts of emotion. He seemed to think there was no problem that a nicely laundered handkerchief couldn’t fix and was totally bewildered when the presence of such had little or no effect.

On that occasion, much to his relief, I took myself off to my darkened room, sobbed for a while longer, then drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up I heard voices in the living room. There was nothing wrong with my sense of hearing, that was for sure. I could hear almost every word and all I had to do was creep across the room and position my ear at the open crack of my door.

‘So what did Toby have to say?’ Paris was asking.

‘Well, he’s been very understanding so far I must say,’ my fiancé answered. ‘Any other editor might have cut her adrift but he seems to feel real loyalty; we’ve done well there, Paris. Anyway, Amanda Hesser is going to continue doing the interim reviews, which I feel okay about because we know she doesn’t want the job permanently. But she could be a threat all the same. She has a following, you know, and it wouldn’t do for it to build up while MC is out of the loop.’

‘It might serve us well to let MC know, do you think, about Amanda Hesser? She never liked her after that …’ I couldn’t quite tell what she said then, but it sounded like ‘kerfuffle over the mussels’ or ‘kerfuffle over the truffles’. Either way, I wondered what the kerfuffle might have been. I had never been much of a kerfuffler and I had always liked Amanda Hesser, even though she was too thin and I never trusted thin food writers. I looked down at my hips. My, but there was not much to me. I had almost forgotten. I was a thin food writer myself now. Who knew?

‘We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot though Ty,’ Paris was saying. ‘We’ve lost her regular profile while she has this taste issue
and I won’t pretend that’s not damaging. But there is still a lot of interest being generated by her accident and recovery in general. It could even end up helping the book.’

The book! I had forgotten all about it but the Kate Spade shopping bag was sitting on a leather chair in the corner of my room. I tiptoed over to it, least I disturb the plotting going on in the living room, and pulled out the advance copy of
Stars Struck: In Search of the Sublime New York Dining Experience.
What a stupid title. It was so phoney. I climbed back onto my bed. Ty had extremely good taste in bed linen, did I mention that? Everything had a thread count of about a million and the sheets and pillowcases and bedspread and blankets and cushions were all different shades of you-know-what but still much more tasteful than anything I would ever put together. I opened up my book and started to read.

Within moments the colour had drained from my face and the full extent of how far up her own ass MC Conlan’s head had burrowed hit home. Just the Foreword made me want to puke. I sounded like a stuck-up food snob who thought she knew more than anyone else in the universe and who could only just bring herself to share a tiny smidgeon of this special secret information with the little people.

Names dropped like hammers on the page:
The Alains and Jean-Georges and Daniels and Marios of the world don’t head to Boise, Idaho, with dreams of making it onto the world’s culinary stage, do they?

I was sickened. Thoroughly sickened. Like a car wreck though, I couldn’t quite drag my eyes away. My eyes flicked over the pages and before I could stop myself I had turned to the review of Tom’s, my eyes skimming the words, my teeth biting into my bottom lip and almost drawing blood as I picked up phrases and sentences all heaving with subterfuge.

What a charming job Irish-born Tom Farrell has done with one-time no-frills neighbourhood favourite, Il Secondo
, I had started off, which said it all. Imagine outing Tom as Irish in the first sentence! He would
have died a thousand deaths. And he hated charming: charm was not Tom’s thing. He despised any suggestion of contrivance, strived for natural authenticity; too much, according to the review. His zucchini blossoms were delicious but out of place, I wrote; the old Il Secondo regulars seemed bemused by them, asking repeatedly for meatballs that weren’t on the menu. I had been a waitress at the old restaurant, I continued, and knew that aprons shouldn’t be stained with red sauce and water should have ice. I revealed myself as his ex, saying it was a difficult assignment as my former husband might wish he had never met me but that would not stop him from recognising me. Still, I hoped that the fact I was the
Times
reviewer would stop him from poisoning the soup.

It wasn’t a drubbing, really it wasn’t. In fact, bits of it were pretty funny. But I could read between the lines and tell how much I wanted to hurt Tom with that review, and he would have too. It was awful. Fleur was right. I had turned into a bitch. A king-of-the-hill, top-of-the-heap, number-one bitch. I felt sick.

Yet, when I turned to my review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se, the words rolled positively oleaginously down the page.
Like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, I wrote, Maestro Keller controls the flavours with an expert hand. ‘Allegro,’ he exhorts some flavours — the salt in the cauliflower panna cotta, for example — while ‘pianissimo’ he whispers to the heirloom radishes. ‘Adagio,’ he commands the rillette de lapin. Encore! Encore! Encore!

What a piece of crap, I thought and I hurled the stupid book onto the floor where it skidded across the polished floorboards and hit the wall. Moments later, there was a knock on the door and Ty peeked in.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘our reservation is in an hour. Shouldn’t you be getting dressed? Paris thinks the taupe. We’ll be having cocktails in the library.’

I didn’t quite get the chance to tell him I was running away to join the circus so he could fuck right off and take Paris with him. Instead,
with a churlish huff, I dragged myself off the bed and into my walk-in closet. It was fabulous. Almost a reason to be married to someone you didn’t even know. There was drawer after drawer of exquisite lingerie; rows of silk shirts; beautiful suits; gorgeous coats and jackets; and an entire section devoted to evening wear. It looked like Sharon Stone lived there. And as for shoes: they were stacked neatly on four shelves that ran around all three walls. There was a whole section of
colour-coordinated
running shoes, then another chunk of black plain heels, a similar collection of brown plain heels, then the same thing all over again in cream. And the evening shoes sparkled like crown jewels. There were Manolo Blahniks, Jimmy Choos. You name it and I had it: all the shoes I had ever dreamed of.