Eating With the Angels (19 page)

He’d really become something of a celebrity in my absence (as I thought of it). He too had featured in
New York Magazine
, guest starred at the Gourmet Food Institute, had appeared on the
Today
show no fewer than four times, and was talking to an agent about a cookbook.

‘Wow,’ was about all I could say. The celebrity had given him a certain confidence but it didn’t seem to have gone to his head. He was in the same apartment, after all, when no doubt he could have afforded a fancy-pants place somewhere else; and he was there talking to me, not hobnobbing with the big boys at Bungalow 8 or wherever they hung out.

‘I read the review I wrote of Tom’s,’ I told him sadly. ‘I don’t know why you are even talking to me. It was a horrible, horrible thing to do. If I found out it was you that gave Woody Allen the pretzel I would not be able to blame you.’

‘I would never do that, Connie,’ he said and I believed him —
and loved him so much I just wanted to curl up in his arms, order Venezuelan take-out and live happily ever after.

‘So, have you worked something out?’ Fleur emerged from Agnes’s room looking more than a little rumpled but without the baby.

‘What do you mean “worked something out”?’ Tom asked.

Fleur looked embarrassed. ‘Well, Connie can’t stay here, Tom. There’s no room. And it’s too noisy. Besides, it’s just not, you know, right. Oh Connie, honey, I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not really sure how to handle all this.’

‘I thought you were my friend,’ I said accusingly. ‘You stayed here with us.’

‘Sweetie, I am your friend. But I haven’t been for the past two years and in the days since I stayed here with you our situation has gotten a bit messed up, don’t you think?’

‘Well, you can’t blame me for you moving in with my husband,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember pointing a gun at your head.’ Of course, I didn’t remember anything else either but she was making me feel unwanted and I didn’t like it.

‘Hey, come on you two,’ Tom interrupted. ‘Fleur, babe, we can’t throw her out on the streets. This is Connie.’

‘Well she should go back to Ty until we work something out. She was happy enough there before.’

I started to cry loudly and wetly and, I am ashamed to admit, purposefully. ‘I don’t know about before,’ I wept. ‘I only know about now. And then. And I don’t belong with Ty. It’s all beige and he talks about Eric and Jean-Georges and Jeffrey Steingarten like they’re our friends and he irons the bed linen — on the beds. It’s horrible.’

‘Jesus, Fleur,’ Tom said, wrapping his arms around me. ‘Have a heart.

‘Of course you can stay,’ he soothed me. ‘And if Agnes gets too loud, Fleur can take her to her mother’s place.’

Having never had children — surely someone would have told me if I had left a baby sitting in a stroller somewhere — I didn’t know that having your husband say you would take the kid to your mother’s place if it got too loud was a crime tantamount to treason and punishable by being yelled at all night.

I slept like a baby myself. I must have had a good 11-hour stretch. But when I woke up, Fleur and Agnes had gone and Tom was sitting at the table looking grey with tiredness and sick with nerves.

‘I’m going to have to take you home, babe,’ he said, after making me a cup of coffee with a heart shape in the froth. He had a domestic version of the same coffee machine as Ty, only didn’t mind dirtying it up. I took a sip. It was piping hot and tasted of air. I struggled for words to stave off my ejection from the only place I felt I belonged.

‘This is my home, Tom. It’s the only one I know. I don’t belong anywhere else. You have to let me stay. Please.’

‘If it was just me, you could, I swear. But there’s the baby and Fleur and it’s really not a great time for us right now.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, just the usual stuff people go through when they have a kid, I guess. You know, we argue a lot, we don’t sleep, we hardly ever … well, you don’t have to know the details, Connie, but
fuck sometimes I wonder, I really do.’

‘Wonder what?’

‘If I did the right thing.’ He sounded exhausted, ground down, unhappy. My heart ached for him. And for me. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should have fought for you. I was just so fucking angry when you left like that. Jesus, you always knew how to make me angry, Connie, but Ty Wheatley? That just about killed me. And once Fleur and I hooked up I kind of let it slide. It seemed the easy thing to do. But the right thing? I’m not so sure.’

‘Don’t you love her?’ I didn’t know how I wanted him to answer that question. If he did love her it would hurt me, and if he didn’t it would hurt her.

‘I do,’ he said. Ouch. ‘But not like I love you.’

Oh brother.

I could feel it myself, the old comfortable attraction between us. Sure we had fought, what couples didn’t? Sure he had stifled me, but who was perfect? I certainly wasn’t. I needed bolstering, remember.

It occurred to me then that with Fleur and Agnes out of the apartment there was nothing to stop Tom and I doing what we had always done in perfect harmony — when we did it. I did not know how long it had been since I’d had sex. I’d seen films where orderlies had done heinous things to people in comas but I doubted Signora Marinello would have let that happen to me. The last sex that I knew of was the canal churner that blew the top of my head off but I had imagined it. I had imagined it real well. Damn, I was horny.

But I wasn’t as much of a slut in my real world as I was in my dreams. I’d lost my memory and my taste but I still knew better than to covet my best friend’s boyfriend. Although God knew I was in need of a good coveting and technically he was still my husband.

‘Maybe I should go home,’ I said, getting up and straightening my clothes, which I had sensibly not removed. ‘But I’m not going back to Ty’s.’

And that only left one place.

‘So, you remember where we live then?’ My mom must have been waiting just inside the apartment because I had no sooner pressed my finger on the buzzer than there she was, hidden behind the open door in the cramped hallway, her lips pursed, her eyes travelling accusingly up my body and stopping at the overnight bag I had gone back to Ty’s apartment and packed while he was out. ‘I thought you said next time there’d be cake. My own fault, I should’ve known better than to listen. Oh, excuse me,’ she said as I pushed silently past her. ‘Is it all right for me to talk to you this way? In my house? The house you’re coming to stay in?’

It was not quite the homecoming I might have hoped for but then I had not stayed a night in that apartment since I’d moved in with Tom at the end of the ’80s. And on the occasion of my leaving my mom had thrown a pair of old tennis shoes and my one-eyed teddy Rueben at my retreating back.

‘It’s Mary-Constance,’ she announced to the living room, as though they didn’t already know. ‘It’s not working out for her over in her fancy place on Park Avenue.’

Frankie, a new one from the one I remembered, leapt off the sofa yapping in a high-pitched frenzy. He hurled himself at me, instantly attempting sexual congress with my left leg. I tried to shake him off but he was stuck like Velcro, his little sausage hips vibrating and a glazed look in his dark eyes as he humped my Anne Klein trousers.

Emmet, who was sitting at the dining table in dirty sweats, drinking instant coffee and smoking a cigarette, shot me a huge grin while my Dad abandoned the
Times
crossword to get out of his La-Z-Boy and give me a hug. Nobody seemed to see or hear Frankie, whom I was sure was in the throes of a premature ejaculation.

‘Baby girl,’ my dad said in his soft warm voice, ‘it’s good to see you up and about. Welcome home.’ Actually, it gave me something of a shock to see him. He was so much smaller than I remembered. He was shorter than me. Had that always been the case? It must have been. And he’d lost hair, a lot of it, since the last time I remembered
seeing him. He looked like a little old man, like someone else’s father.

‘Can somebody do something about this dog?’ I asked, bending over to try and remove Frankie from his position around my ankle. His yapping had given way to a creepy kind of whimpering. He clung for grim death. ‘Pop, could you give me a hand here?’

My dad looked down and softly clicked his fingers, at which point the dog collapsed panting in a heap on the floor. I half expected him to reach out a paw for one of Emmet’s cigarettes. Pop smiled stupidly at the heinous creature and then back at me.

‘Why didn’t you come and see me at the hospital?’ I asked him. ‘I could have died.’

‘Ah, darling, I did,’ he answered, looking sheepish. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘Only Mary-Constance could be killed by a pretzel,’ my mother said dismissively from the tiny adjoining kitchen, where pots and pans were being banged for no apparent reason. ‘Always, you have to be different.’

‘I think being killed by a pretzel would be cool,’ Emmet drawled. I was pretty sure he was stoned. Well, it was 11 in the morning after all. ‘Beats cancer. Or diabetes. The sort where your legs go all green and black and then get amputated.’

I don’t know what it is about being back in the home where you grew up but it sure as hell brings out the childishness in me.

‘Oh, shut up, you big dope,’ I snapped.

‘Don’t you talk to your brother like that,’ my mom barked. ‘You’re not the Queen of Sheba here, you know. You’re a guest in this house.’

‘Yeah, and shut up yourself anyway,’ laughed Emmet flipping me the finger behind her back. ‘
Guest
.’

‘A five-letter word that means harmony,’ Pop said to himself, contemplating the
Times
.

It was like I had never left and the horror of it turned my stomach. Not even bothering to make a feeble excuse I just took my bag into the
bedroom I had once shared with Emmet. It smelled of old socks and I didn’t want to think what else. He had posters of women tennis players on all four walls and a collection of bongs on his dressing table. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and shaking a figurative fist at the unfairness of being stuck in the middle of such a nightmare.

That night my mother served up the worst macaroni and cheese I have ever not tasted in my whole entire life. I don’t know what she had put in it but it was brown, with chunks of carrot and beet sticking gluggily to the pasta. Don’t think about it for too long, you’ll be put off food forever. Emmet, who’d smoked so much pot his eyes were blazing red like raspberries, inhaled his like he’d never eaten anything before while my dad cheerfully ploughed his way through, congratulating my mother with every second mouthful.

I felt weak with hunger. I hadn’t left the apartment all day so I knew I had to eat some of it myself. It felt every bit as bad as it looked. The pasta was overcooked and the sauce so sticky it attached itself to the roof of my mouth in a huge ball. It just about had to be scraped off with a fork. The carrots were limp and the beets raw. After
half-a
-dozen forkfuls, enough to make sure I could get through the night without starving to death, I gave up, pushed my plate away and asked to be excused.

‘What’s the matter? Not good enough for you? Not up to your usual high standards?’ my mother asked.

‘I can’t taste anything,’ I said diplomatically. ‘There’s not much point.’

‘You’ve gotta eat, darling,’ my father said, smiling at me.

He seemed so detached. Had he always been that way?

‘I’m fine,’ I said, going over and giving his freckled bald head a kiss. ‘I should ring Ty.’

‘Tell the Wheat Man I said hi,’ Emmet instructed, his mouth full of food.

The Wheat Man was out again, much to my relief. I knew Fleur had rung him the night before to tell him where I was so I left a
message saying I was now going to stay at my folks’ place, that I needed a few days to myself. I asked him not to call me there and suggested he keep Paris off my back as well. Actually, I nearly caved in and asked for him to come get me. At least there was decent food at his house and my own beautiful bedroom with walk-in closet. But I remembered hearing him talk about me with Paris, and feeling the despair of not quite being the person to whom they were referring, and slunk off to bed to cry myself to sleep.

The next morning I toyed with a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. I was so hungry but it was like eating wet cardboard. Usually I loved oatmeal but I bought mine organic and untampered with from the Whole Food Market; the stuff Mom had was radiated with strawberry and vanilla flavouring and could be made in the microwave in 15 seconds. Of course, I couldn’t taste the difference but I knew it was there. It tainted the experience unforgivably, as did having Frankie trying to rut my slippers under the table.

‘Guess who’s got a little crush,’ Emmet grinned blearily as the foul creature’s yelps punctuated the air.

I was finding Frankie’s affections hard to stomach. He was just another example of how out of kilter my life was. Thirty-six-year-old women weren’t supposed to live at home with their parents. Restaurant critics weren’t supposed to have no sense of taste. Dogs weren’t supposed to have sex with human footwear.

Later, after my shower in the apartment’s tiny bathroom, I stared at my naked self in the steamed-up mirror. The weight was still coming off me and I was looking more and more like a stranger. According to the bathroom scales I was now 120 pounds. And the colour of my skin had faded to a pale and uninteresting shade of grey. I looked like a person who was getting ready to disappear and that was such a scary realisation that I put my pyjamas back on and went straight back to bed, napping on and off for the rest of the day until darkness fell and I could go to sleep for real.

Emmet bought me
Gourmet
magazine the next day but the
pictures just made me cry. I pulled my knees up in my bed until I took up the least amount of space possible and willed myself back to sleep but he was bonging up and the smoke was getting caught in my lungs and giving me coughing fits. I couldn’t even be bothered yelling at him to leave. Instead I stayed there, all scrunched up and choking, until I felt myself drift off. Well, I was probably inhaling enough to send me into the middle of the following week.

That night, my dad bought me a punnet of New York strawberries that he’d got from his friend Barney whose son had moved upstate to farm. At first the sight of them, so glowing with the vitality of summer, depressed me, but I’d always loved strawberries, especially New York ones, a much more rewarding prospect than their year-round California counterparts. And there’s a lot you can do with a strawberry without tasting it, as it turns out. Just twisting the hull and listening for the tiny ploop as it came out kind of cheered me up. Then when I bit into each fat juicy berry, I felt the pulp explode, the juices release, and the comforting grain of the seeds against the roof of my mouth. I savoured each biteful, imagining as much as I could, then swallowing with a gulp and feeling the berry mash slide down my throat.

‘Ah, don’t cry there, Connie,’ my dad said, sitting on my bed and looking at me sadly. I hadn’t known that I was crying, actually, but I dragged the back of my hand across my cheeks and he was right. I was trying to hide the awfulness of my situation from myself but it obviously wasn’t working.

‘Your mother thinks it’s unhealthy staying cooped up in here all day,’ he said.

‘What do you think, Pop?’

‘I think you should do what your mother says.’

That figured. He pretty much always thought that. I loved my dad, I really did. He was there, had always been there, for a hug or a kiss or a pat on the back but anything more exacting and he faded into the wallpaper of my memory. Anything for an easy life, that was his
motto. I could see it written on his gravestone. And while I was grateful that at least it meant he had shown me love and compassion in my life, I was sad that he had shown me so little of the person he really was.

Outside in the hallway, I heard Mom turn the vacuum cleaner on and start bashing it against the closed bedroom door. When I lived at home this had been her way of telling me to get up out of bed and I had always obediently done just that. I had always obediently done whatever she told me. I froze, a strawberry halfway to my lips. Anything for the easy life. Oh brother. Maybe I was my father’s daughter, destined to waft through life without making a dent. I returned the strawberry to its plastic punnet, uneaten, and turned back toward the wall.

‘Thanks for the strawberries, Pop,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a nap now, okay?’

‘Okay, Connie,’ he answered me, a little sadly maybe. Did he see myself in him? Did he regret it? I doubted I would ever know as I heard him shuffle out of the room, talk in a murmur to the Queen of the Hoover, and then, thankfully, there was silence.