Eating With the Angels (2 page)

It was an experience that opened my eyes to the true potential of food; that showed me we had all the ingredients, the skill, the talent of the French and Italians right here in America but just needed a personality of our own to pull it off — and you could argue that this set me on the road to my illustrious career. Chez Panisse does that. But still, it wasn’t Venice. And as my Italy-bound plane took off from Kennedy Airport all those years later, I felt my stomach attempting to stay on the ground, just like it did on my first honeymoon. ‘Stop!’ I had fought the urge to shout to the cockpit on my first honeymoon. ‘I forgot something!’ Of course, then I’d had Tom beside me to hold my hand and whisper comforting thoughts in my ear. This time, he was the something I forgot.

Perhaps there had been a terrible accident, I hear you cry. Perhaps he was on his way to his own funeral. Perhaps he was lying in a ditch or collapsed over his steering wheel; or his private parts had got caught in his suitcase zipper and he was crumpled on the bedroom floor bleeding profusely from his nether regions. Perhaps my mother had finally found the real Connie, the one she was clearly convinced
the nurses had swapped me for at the hospital, and had talked Tom into flying away on honeymoon somewhere else with her.

Yes, perhaps. But in my heart I suspected he was alive and well, just doing it someplace else. We’d had a fight on the phone earlier in the day, although when I tried to remember the details they were jumbled up in my head. Was there a single thing I’d said that could have led him to believe I didn’t want him to come on our second honeymoon? Not that I could remember, but then we’d had so many fights in recent months that I couldn’t nail down this particular one as being anything out of the ordinary.

That in itself was a depressing realisation. I guess you don’t need an analyst to tell you that if all your arguments are blurring into one then your marriage is probably in trouble. According to my mother, I have all the intuition of a desert rock but even I could see that lurching from one disagreement to another with little to distinguish them spelled danger. I loved Tom, I had always loved Tom, I couldn’t imagine ever not loving him, but sitting there in that over-sized seat on that Italy-bound airplane, an uneasiness sloshed around inside me like badly made borscht, something I’d had the bad luck to sample on at least three separate occasions.

Our second honeymoon had been engineered to patch the holes in the life raft of our marriage. But what could possibly save us now? That was what I was left wondering as I stared out through the clouds and watched the towers of Manhattan growing smaller and smaller beneath me.

As soon as Ashlee was back on her heels, I summoned her and asked for more champagne. I knew drinking alcohol at high altitude was bad for you but there are times in a girl’s life when only French champagne will do and this was definitely one of them.

I sipped the Moët and let the bubbles dance around on the back of my tongue and top of my throat. It tasted drier up in the air, but still did the job, buoying me up, lightening my mood. Moët is my favourite even though most arbiters of taste prefer its fancy close
relation Dom Perignon: every now and then I can actually afford the poor cousin, which goes a long way in my book.

Of course Tom didn’t like champagne, preferring (no surprises here) the dry red Italian wines that Pippo brought over from the old country or a decent pinot grigio if he could find it. If I had champagne I had it on my own or with Fleur, who drank anything that came in a bottle and, more than once, things that came in chipped old cups and greasy old jars. Tom didn’t care for anything French. He wrote off the entire nation as a bunch of arrogant know-nothings, in doing so often managing to sound much like one of those himself. I thought I knew why, especially as he had gotten so angry when I suggested this. New York is a food town, a restaurant town, THE restaurant town, everyone knows that (apart from all the inhabitants of San Francisco and most, apparently, of Vancouver). Anyway, forget about them, mere pretenders to the throne; New York rightfully wears the crown and there are levels at which all loyal subjects worship. At the bottom, there are your pushcart pretzels (more about them later, a curse on you Woody!) and hot dogs, then there’s the pizza-by-the-slice joints, Chinatown’s noodle bars, your neighbourhood trattoria, the expensive theme restaurant, your fancy bistro and, at the top of the chain, there’s the likes of Jean Georges, Le Bernadin or Daniel, the four-star restaurant in which the who’s who of Manhattan parade and preen while picking at Monsieur Daniel Boulud’s delightful fare. Many of the city’s finest chefs have trained under M. Boulud and gone on to shine in their own rights. Tom, of course, was not one of them and perhaps resented his position at the neighbourhood trattoria level.

I took him to Daniel for a romantic night out once and he was utterly scathing from the moment we walked in off East 65th Street and took in the elegant hall stretching to the maitre d’s desk, never mind the private dining room and chic bar off to our right. He glared at every captain, bus boy, hapless bystander and fellow diner we passed on the way to our table on the raised outer side of the grand two-tiered dining room. The plush velvet drapes, the vigorously
well-heeled clientele, the ornate floral displays, the impeccable service, the hypnotising smells and sights seemed to catapult him into a dark and ferocious mood. Me, I was transfixed by the diamonds glinting, the necks craning, the staff gliding around the room like well-rehearsed ballerinas, part of the ceaseless ebb and flow of restaurant theatre. But Tom failed to be impressed by any of that; instead he snapped at the sommelier, argued with our delightful waiter, ridiculed the entire premise of a tasting menu, hissed at me that I had more money than sense — and then he tasted the food.

Suddenly he went quiet.

The Jerusalem artichoke soup with black trumpet mushrooms and sage oil removed his scowl but the nine-herb tortellini with Parmesan foam shut him up big-time. After one forkful of the guinea hen with porcini and glazed Muscat prunes, the colour drained from his face completely. With each mouthful he looked more despondent and by the time my hand was reaching out to scoop up the last of his fig tart, having long finished my own chocolate upside-down soufflé, I thought he was going to cry. It was that good.

Now some young chefs might have taken this experience and turned it into something to strive for but not Tom. He turned it into something to strive against. He just loved that flawless French food so much he took against it and all other things even slightly ooh-là-là.

‘Top-up?’ Ashlee smiled, her face a symphony of sympathy as she offered me more Moët. I couldn’t decide whether to smile and nod or whether to smash the glass on the armrest and shove it into her neck scarf, but in the end I went with the smiling and nodding.

‘Fabulous,’ I said as I raised my glass at her then turned to the window to hide my mortification. The ridiculously puffy clouds were doing their best to disguise the distance that grew between me and my husband but with every breath I took I felt the miles stretch further and further.

How did I get here? That’s what I kept asking myself as I swatted away the awful peanut-free freeze-dried whatever-they-ares
that Ashlee insisted on offering, that great hopeful diamond of hers winking meanly at me. Where did it all go wrong?

We had been growing apart these past few years, I could see that from 35,000 feet. The whole solo honeymoon whoopsie perhaps shouldn’t have come as quite such a surprise.

We came at everything from different angles, Tom and I, even food, which we both adored and around which we had developed our jobs, our lives. I loved to eat and he loved to cook — you would think this would be the perfect combination and in some respects it was but in others we were on opposite sides of the soup pot. After the
dump-truck
incident at kindergarten, for instance, so soon after that he still had snot running into his mouth and tears flowing down his cheeks, I remember being genuinely surprised at his distress. Ignore the whole Play-Doh part of the scenario and what reason was there to make a cake but have people eat it? It looked so good — pink with yellow frosting — what else was he going to do with it?

When we were at high school we compared our homemade sandwiches with great interest; the difference being that even if I didn’t like something, I would still eat it whereas Tom simply could not stomach even a simple tomato sandwich on white bread if it was under-salted or over-peppered or slightly soggy. As for peanut butter and jelly — forget about it. That was for the riff-raff and he was certainly not riff-raff. I liked that about him then. I liked that he knew what he wanted and nothing else would do. He couldn’t care less about hanging out with other teenagers, shooting hoops or smoking cigarettes or doing whatever else was considered hip. Instead, we spent our afternoons on eating adventures, happily schlepping up to Papaya King for hot dogs or down to Katz’s for pastrami or over to 6th Street in the East Village for dhosas.

Tom opened my taste buds, really. He changed my world. Before him, food was something I had to choke down without retching (Play-Doh gâteau, for example) or throw in the garbage without my mother seeing me.

Mom was, and still is, the world’s most awful cook. I know that sounds uncharitable but seriously that’s just about the nicest way I can put it. Her taste is all in her — actually, I don’t know where her taste is but it is not in her mouth. Or her nose. You only have to walk into her apartment and smell the slightly past-its-prime chicken breast marinating in sake and acidophilus yoghurt to get an inkling of this. And unlike other awful cooks, who usually buy their meals ready-made or leave the cooking to someone else, my mother has boundless, truly boundless, enthusiasm in the kitchen and absolutely no idea how unpalatable her heinous concoctions really are. Without a shadow of a doubt she is taste-blind, completely and utterly.

Mind you, I think that my father should shoulder some of the blame. He has an iron constitution. I’ve never even seen him hesitate, let alone retch, the way my brother Emmet and I used to before our tender juvenile stomach linings hardened up and stopped resisting things that were slightly off, a funny colour, indescribably seasoned, or hopelessly mis-matched with something equally awful. But not only does Pop to this day wolf down her inedible meals, he encourages her. ‘Estelle, you’ve surpassed yourself yet again,’ he’ll say, rubbing his stomach and leaning back in his chair. ‘Aren’t I the lucky man?’

Mom will ignore him — that’s their marital dynamic — but next thing you know she’ll be poring over Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, changing the ingredients to match whatever’s left over in the fridge or suits her mood, until the end result bears no relation whatsoever to the name of the dish nor certainly the picture. I’ve never worked out why she loves that cookbook so much because Mom has always thought food should be ‘thrown together’, something that, in my opinion, should only be practised by seriously talented chefs. But the things my mother throws together are not things that should be seen in the same city, let alone the same street nor, heaven forbid, the same plate. They are things that should be thrown in opposite directions at great speed while you head to the nearest diner, quick smart, without so much as a backward glance.

‘Cranberry omelette? What’s not to like?’ she would say, serving up something that looked as though it had been removed in a surgical procedure and called, like most of her inventions, Estelle’s Surprise. ‘Try it with the aged salami, it’s spectacular,’ she’d suggest although the word ‘aged’ was not one you wanted to hear at meal time in our house, trust me. ‘Look, your father’s eating his.’

When I was young, I used to beg her to follow the recipes just to see what would happen but she always refused. ‘They all make such a fuss,’ she would say, even of Julia. ‘Who wants to make such a fuss? It’s only food.’

She’s a complicated woman all right, my mother. On the one hand relishing her own ‘flair’ for cooking but on the other belittling its importance in the great scheme of things. You can imagine how thrilled she was that her daughter became a restaurant critic married to a chef.

Anyway, by the time Tom and I hooked up as 15-year-olds it was no wonder I was ready and willing for him to educate me about food that tasted good and stayed down. By then he had already befriended Pippo and was sweeping floors and polishing glasses and worming his way into the Marzanos’ affections. All he ever wanted to do was cook there and while this wasn’t much of an ambition, boy did I admire him for having it at such a young age.

Knowing what his home life was like, I could see why he loved Pippo. Tom’s dad was a big, brutal beast of a man who successfully bullied his four sons into hating his guts. His mom was a nervous wreck with more than a passing fondness for the sherry bottle and who could blame her? Well, Tom did but anyone else who counted her bruises or watched her limp up and down the stairs to their apartment thanked God that she was finding solace in something.

So, little Tommy, the youngest of the four, got himself out of the Farrell clan and into the Marzano one, pronto. Pippo and his wife ’Cesca, whose two daughters had long flown the coop and had no interest in Il Secondo, could not have been happier. And Tom really
was at home in an Italian kitchen, anyone could see that. Like I say, he even looked Italian in certain lights, usually low-wattage ones. I told him that once and he pretended to be annoyed, brushing me off, but secretly he was delighted. I know because he made me fall squash risotto, my favourite, and it wasn’t even on the menu that night.

Anyway, a mediocre student in most subjects, I myself managed to get accepted into NYU thanks to good grades in English and the help of my teacher Mr Johansen whom Tom always suspected had the hots for me.

My mother was horrified with my choice of journalism and this was before it even had anything to do with food. Where she came from, reporting on people’s activities happened behind closed doors, through a crack in the curtains, one hand clutching the telephone. You sure as hell didn’t do it out loud in public with your name attached in capital letters.