Eating With the Angels (18 page)

Much as I searched, though, there were no comfy slouchy clothes. Nothing for MC to mooch around in at home, no Juicy couture or spandex. There was one pair of jeans but they were hanging up with creases pressed into them. Not the sort of thing you would lie on the floor eating Doritos and watching old movies in, that’s for sure. It was quite the opposite of my old wardrobe, which consisted solely of clothes you could lie on the floor and eat Doritos in. Probably MC wasn’t allowed Doritos, I pondered, running my hands over the rows of beautiful clothes and ignoring anything taupe. Finally, I slipped into a simple black linen shift, found a pair of heels I could walk in, did my best with my frightening array of make-up, then took a deep breath and made for the library.

‘Oh but darling,’ Paris looked unnerved by the sight of me, ‘the taupe is so much more suitable with a hat.’

‘Why would I wear a hat?’ I asked her. ‘We’re only going out to dinner.’

She laughed. ‘Well, it’s your signature, MC. You don’t want people recognising you even if you’re not strictly working. It won’t do any harm to look as if you are, by the way; it’s not as though anyone has gotten hold of the terrible truth after all. No, we’ve managed to keep that under wraps, thank God. Go and get the taupe hat will you, Ty?’

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I snapped at my fiancé who looked justifiably nervous. ‘I am not wearing a hat. Can we just go eat? I’m starving.’

Predictably, I suppose, my first outing as the reborn MC Conlan was a total disaster. The restaurant was gorgeous. I hadn’t realised that Alain Ducasse had stooped to a casual spin-off, and even though an entrée in a casual spin-off could still set you back $40, it wasn’t an intimidating place. It was all white and glass and modern with gashes of orange, approachable staff and the magical touch, I thought, of having toast brought to the table in a funky modern toast rack with homemade peanut butter, jelly and unsalted butter. But Paris and Ty fussed about like a pair of old mother hens, not just over me, but over everything; which table we sat at, which seats we chose, what wine, the lighting, the music.

Frankly, it was embarrassing, and it made me so nervous I lost a huge glob of peanut butter and jelly down the inside of my dress and had to be escorted by Paris to the ladies’ room to remove it. She and Ty then proceeded to pick the place to pieces, sucking every ounce of enjoyment out of the meal, not that there was much in it for me in the first place because it all looked so exquisite but tasted of diddly-squat. I don’t know why I ordered the lobster Caesar salad because I had already discovered there is no reason to eat lobster if you can’t taste it, but I chomped my way through it as Ty and Paris plotted the course of my recovery and tossed around various solutions to the problem with which I had presented them: my tastelessness.

Actually, there was a little something going on between those two. Not sexual, exactly. I think he probably was one of those
non-practising
anythings, and maybe so was she, but there was a frisson between them that certainly did not exist between him and me. They kind of got each other. In fact, I bet if she had been better-looking he would have been engaged to her but she didn’t quite fit the bill on that front. This unfamiliar glamorous, blonde MC Conlan, on the other hand, I could see she was going to look a million dollars on the
society pages! Never mind that she was marrying a man who had a thing for her new best friend and was separated from a man who preferred her old one. I was halfway through the first biteful of the most perfectly cooked piece of coconut-and-lime marinated cod when this thought struck me. The fish was piping hot and fell onto the fork in fat juicy flakes but the absence of even the slightest suggestion of what I knew must be the most wonderful flavour proved my undoing. I dropped my knife and fork onto the table with a clatter and burst into noisy, wet, undignified tears.

By the time it became clear that I was incapable of pulling myself together, my companions were so embarrassed that they agreed to put me in a car back to the apartment to ‘get some rest’ while they finished their meals with grace and pomposity (my words, not theirs).

I walked out of the restaurant, head bowed to hide the tears streaming down my face, my heart breaking as I wondered how in the hell I was ever going to get my life back. But when the driver turned to me and said ‘Home?’ I got an idea that silenced my fear.

I blew my nose and gave him my West Village address.

Home was exactly where I wanted to go.

Of course, the home I was going to was no longer mine. It was Fleur who buzzed me up when I sobbed through the crackling intercom that I’d run away from Ty. When I stepped into the hallway, the place was filled with the sound of Agnes hollering. I guess she was quite cute in an orangutan sort of way but she sure could make one heck of a racket. Cats, in comparison, seemed a very peaceful alternative; I never thought I would find myself preferring cats to anything else but every decibel issuing from Agnes’s lungs seemed to push Cay-Cay and Happy a notch up my approval rating scale.

‘Sweetie, what’s happening?’ Fleur hugged me as well as she could while jiggling the baby. ‘What do you mean you’ve run away?’

‘Park Avenue sucks,’ I sniffed, looking around me. ‘And I have no place else to go.’

Our apartment had been totally remodelled. The dull brick walls that we had happily lived with for so long were painted a lovely soft yellow; the scratched and damaged floor boards had been stripped and re-varnished a lighter colour; there was new modern furniture and no sign of the velvet Elvis hanging that a friend of Tom’s had brought back from Vegas and that we had found hilarious. There was nothing amusing about the apartment now. It was a picture of good taste, but different from Ty’s. It looked lived in and loved, not just copied out of some fancy magazine. Our old kitchen, which was bigger than most West Village kitchens but still tiny, had been totally overhauled. The old gas cook-top on which I had burned many sleeves and dish towels had been replaced by some fancy integrated thing with a grill plate and a steamer. There was a new island with an under-counter fridge and freezer that pushed out into the living room, making a breakfast bar and trending the room up hugely. In all, the apartment looked approximately one million times nicer than when I lived there and, to be honest, this did not help my frame of mind. Also, the bathroom, which in my day had been a particularly unpleasant shade of flaky and bubbling green, and had smelled strongly of rotting water, was now gleaming with white mosaic tiles from floor to ceiling. Worse, there was a built-in wardrobe in the bedroom not to mention a new king-size bed that I tried so hard not to notice I nearly broke my ankle tripping over it.

The only thing that cheered me up slightly was that baby Agnes had taken over the tiny second bedroom that Tom and I had used as an office, which he in particular had loved. He would be cranky about that I was sure — not that I wanted him to be but hey, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t hope that his life without me wasn’t shitty in some way. He would be unimpressed, I guessed, that his favourite room wasn’t even big enough for all that baby stuff. Fluffy toys and other juvenile paraphernalia were spilling out from a trunk in the corner of the living room, taking the edges off the funky renovation.

‘Nice,’ I said, trying to avert my eyes from the baby vomit on
Fleur’s shoulder. ‘Really nice. You’ve done a great job.’ The sofa didn’t look like a fold-out but it was long enough for me to sleep on. It was red velvet with a purple mohair comforter draped across one corner and purple beaded cushions piled up along the back.

‘Connie, can I get you a cup of tea or a juice or something?’ Fleur suggested. ‘You look whacked.’

Fleur looked pretty whacked herself. I wondered how much of the day Agnes had spent screaming.

‘Actually, if I could just borrow some pyjamas,’ I said. ‘I really need to lie down.’

Fleur stopped in her tracks, mid-jiggle. ‘Pyjamas?’ she echoed. ‘You want to stay the night? Connie, um. Shit. Are you sure that’s a good idea? What will Ty say?’

‘He won’t know,’ I said, sitting on the sofa. ‘I guess I can sleep on this. Or maybe we could borrow your mom’s fold-away bed. Didn’t you sleep on it here for a while when you were waiting to move into your apartment on Mulberry Street?’

Agnes squawked then, so loudly I wondered for a while if she had pierced my eardrum. Fleur eventually got a pacifier in her mouth and then dumped her in a little chair-thing on wheels that she pushed around with her feet, hitting the walls and the furniture with a series of dull thuds that were disconcerting but at least not deafening.

‘Connie,’ Fleur said, sitting down on the sofa and turning me around to face her. ‘I know this must be hard for you, sweetie. And if things aren’t right at home with Ty then we have to try to do something about that.’

‘He and Paris are so busy organising me they hardly notice I’m there,’ I said. ‘It’s all about getting me back to work so I can promote my new book.’

‘Oh honey.’

‘And the book is awful, Fleur. You should see it. It has words like “cut-throat” and “fraternity” in it. If it wasn’t for the freckle I wouldn’t know it was me on the cover.’

‘It’s hard, sweetie, I know it is. And you shouldn’t feel any pressure to do anything Ty and Paris tell you to. Not if you’re not comfortable with it. But the thing is — AGNES! Not the lamp! Jesus!’

The little monkey was grabbing at a low-level lampshade with sticky fingers that were leaving dirty paw prints. At the sound of her mother’s sharp voice, though, she turned around, her mouth curved down into an upside down ‘u’, and spat the dummy, literally, shrieking with such volume that I thought the new paint would flake clean off the walls.

‘My God, that’s horrible,’ I said to Fleur, not that she could hear me. She picked Agnes up and tried to shush her but the little moppet was yowling at the top of her lungs. She did not seem very shushable.

‘The thing is, Connie,’ Fleur continued nonetheless, jiggling up and down and patting the raging baby on the back of her head, ‘I do understand and I want to help but you can’t — FUCK! Oh shit. You little — Jesus Christ. She just bit me on the ear! I can’t believe it. Oh darling, I’m so sorry. Mommy’s sorry. Oh shit, that hurt.’ Agnes was so busy looking pleased with herself she momentarily forgot to keep up with the caterwauling. I could see two tiny tooth marks in Fleur’s ear, the lobe glowing red and painful, but at least there was no blood. Agnes obviously noticed this the same time as I did and started up with the caterwauling again. Fleur looked on the verge of tears herself. She jiggled again and started up with the patting, but her face was crunched in pain. It would hurt to have your ear bitten like that, I thought. And then have a baby screech in it straight after. I had a thick fuggy feeling in my own head. It was tiredness. I needed to lie down. I slipped off my shoes and stretched out on the sofa, pulling a cushion underneath my head for a pillow and dragging the comforter onto my prone body. My eyes wanted to close and my ears were right behind them. I wondered if Fleur could perhaps do something about the screaming baby.

‘Isn’t it Agnes’s bedtime?’ I suggested. ‘She must be tired after all that, um, yelling.’

‘Connie,’ Fleur said, and there was a sharpness to her voice that caught my attention. ‘I do understand,’ she continued, ‘and I do want to help you and I love you and I am so grateful we are friends again but this is a pretty complicated situation. I don’t know how to put this to you without hurting your feelings or upsetting you, but you can’t stay here. You can’t stay in my apartment.’

The rattle of a key in the lock of the apartment door stopped any further exchange and Tom came in brandishing a paper bag that sprouted a loaf of ciabatta, the leaves of a decent-sized bunch of celery and a healthy head of cilantro. I felt a flutter of excitement at the thought of his gazpacho, quelled almost straight away by the dull thud of remembering my tasting status.

Agnes screamed even louder at the sight of her father and the noise seemed to fill the room, flattening we mere mortals up against the walls.

‘Connie,’ Tom said, eyes wide with surprise, as he dumped the groceries in the kitchen. ‘What’s happening, babe? Is everything okay?’

‘Connie’s come to stay, Tom,’ Fleur said, as Agnes continued to screech out her lungs. ‘She’s run away from Ty.’

‘You’re kidding me. What did he do to you, that piece of shit, what did he do? Jesus, Fleur, can’t you do something about that crying? What’s going on here? You know Connie needs quiet.’

Fleur switched the baby onto her other hip, her lips thinning and her eyes narrowed. ‘Well, she’s not going to get it here, which is what I was just explaining, Tom.’

Tom looked so concerned it made me feel mushy inside. I pulled myself up and made room for him to sit down next to me on the sofa. ‘Babe, tell me what’s happening.’

Fleur spun around at this and took Agnes into her room, no doubt to see if there was anything other than a pillow that would silence her. The room felt gloriously empty in her absence.

‘Ty didn’t do anything,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘I just don’t know him. Paris is there and they’re so busy managing me it just feels
wrong, Tom. It creeps me out. This is the only home I know.’ I looked around. ‘Although of course you have done so much with the place I barely recognise it.’

Tom shrugged his shoulders and looked guilty. ‘Well, it’s all Fleur’s work, mostly,’ he said. ‘You know, I was pretty happy with it the way it was. She likes all this interiors stuff.’

‘Right,’ I said limply. ‘So, that baby sure makes a lot of noise.’

‘You’re telling me. I love her and all, of course I do, she’s my little angel, but with the restaurant and the show, I’ve got quite a lot on my plate, to be honest. There’s not a whole lot of sleeping going on, that’s for sure.’

I’d assumed he was a guest on some other TV programme but it turned out he had one of his own,
Il Secondo
, which had tracked his progress from the relaunch after his one-star review nightmare (oops) to the impressive success he was now enjoying, with a few recipes thrown in along the way. It rated well, apparently, very well even, and meant the tables were full every night as New York hopefuls booked in to see if they could make it on to the small screen.