Eating With the Angels (24 page)

‘I better go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I wish you were here, Tom.’

‘Me too,’ he answered softly and I felt the tears well up in my eyes. We both clung on the line, neither of us saying anything, until Gertrude, the madam, padded across the kitchen bench and disconnected for me with one press of a fat ginger paw.

‘Are you calling me a slut?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll have you know that’s my husband you just hung up on.’ But she just turned her little
left-hand
circle in front of me and led me down to the basement where
she stopped in front of an old-fashioned bike with a bulky black Evel Knievel helmet in the wicker basket attached to the handlebars and I put my depression on hold.

It had been quite a few years since I’d been on a bike and I take umbrage at the suggestion that it’s something you never forget. I had forgotten and it was nothing to do with the pretzel. I was just rusty. The first few attempts I had at mounting the darn thing and moving forward ended up with me and it in a heap on the ground while Gertrude sat there looking straight out to sea as if the whole ugly event embarrassed her. Then, when I finally got the hang of it and coordinated my legs to push the pedals before the bike could fall over, she kept crossing in front of me so I was forced to wobble to a halt. Finally, I just stopped and asked her what she wanted. She was staring at the wicker basket and so, begrudgingly because I knew it would look stupid but really it was the sensible thing to do, I put on the helmet. At this Gertrude jumped into the basket. She manoeuvred her enormous body around so that she was pointing straight ahead like a statuesque figurehead on some ancient ocean-going vessel.

We made a pretty odd picture, I imagined, as I pedal-pushed up Luca’s leafy street and made a right into South Ferry Road. Gertrude was no lightweight and I was hardly in good shape myself. Lord knew what help I would be to the senior citizens when it came to the exercise class.

Luckily, there was next to no traffic on the road so my erratic cycling was not a danger to anyone but myself and Gertrude. In fact she may even have provided a bit of ballast.

Luca’s workplace didn’t look like any medical centre I had ever seen before. It was a sprawling shingle building surrounded by towering oaks, a well-kept garden and a white picket fence. It looked like the sort of place someone else’s grandparents might have lived in. Gertrude leaped nimbly (quite a sight) out of the basket as we neared and I followed her in the door.

‘Hey there,’ said Luca from behind the reception counter at the
far end of the room, a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose and a messy pile of paperwork in his hands. ‘With you in a moment, Mrs Hansen,’ he told a harassed-looking mom. Her scowling toddler stopped building a tower and started throwing blocks at Gertrude, who sat smugly about one inch out of his range. ‘Have to introduce the new aerobics teacher to our senior citizens.’

‘Aerobics
teacher
?’ I repeated, horrified, as he shuffled me down the hallway and into a big empty meeting room of some sort, where a motley-looking bunch of pensioners were dressed up in a lurid collection of exercise combinations doing a series of creaky uncoordinated stretches.

‘This here’s Connie,’ Luca bellowed, saying to me in a lower voice, ‘you have to shout or they won’t hear a goddamned thing.’

‘Good morning Connie,’ the motley-looking bunch bellowed back, excepting one old-timer in obscene orange cycle shorts who was a few seconds behind the rest and called me Bonnie instead.

‘Connie is going to be taking your aerobics class today,’ Luca shouted, leading me over to an ancient tape deck. ‘Just press play and when it stops, turn the tape over. Most of them can’t hear it anyway. Going clockwise around the room, you have Doris, Daisy, Ginger, Hank, Maryanne, Lil, Nancy, Jenny, Meg and Paddy. The guy asleep on the bench at the back is Marshall; watch out for him, he’s a groper.’

‘But I don’t know anything about aerobics,’ I protested, stunned. ‘I’m a walker. Or a runner. Depending who you talk to. I’ve never even been in a gym. That I know of.’

‘So,’ said Luca with a grin, unmoved. ‘Improvise.’ He pressed play and released Jerry Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ into the room. ‘I’ll take you out for lunch after you’re done,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’ And he left.

Nancy, Jenny and Meg shuffled to the front and formed a straight row facing me, mirroring my every move — even though all I was doing was scratching my shoulder and looking around for Gertrude.

‘She’s not very good so far,’ Nancy said loudly to Jenny. ‘She doesn’t even bob up and down.’

I started bobbing up and down in time to the music, going lower and lower each time, the three stooges in front matching me bob for bob.

‘Jane Fonda uses her arms on the video tape,’ Meg shouted over her shoulder to Hank in the cycling pants, who was way at the back and, if I’m not mistaken, only in it for the bird’s-eye view of Daisy’s not insubstantial rump.

I started punching my arms forward and backward the way I’d seen on TV ads for exercise equipment. ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’ I found myself shouting as I shifted from bobbing up and down to going from side to side, my arms punching the air.

‘She’s good!’ Jenny shouted. ‘She’s better than Doris’s daughter. The fat one with all that underarm hair.’

Doris punched the air happily behind her, deaf as a post to all but Jerry Lee Lewis’s great balls. Actually, it was fun. Next came Elvis with his blue suede shoes; I had to hand it to those old-timers, their hips might not have been the originals but they could sure as hell swivel them if they had to.

We finished 40 minutes later with a rousing conga-line around the outside of the community room: Gertrude, who had joined the fray halfway through, in front; me next; and my merry band of followers, minus Marshall who was still asleep on the bench, all bringing up the rear — jumping and shimmying and sticking our legs out sideways.

At the end, there was a flurry of gnarly old high-fives and a lot of appreciation, marred only by a small altercation between Maryanne and Lil, who had apparently been deliberately pinching Doris’s love handles in the conga line. Something about a boyfriend they once shared back in ’45.

‘I could do something, you know,’ Ginger pulled me aside and told me shyly while the others shuffled their way towards the exit, ‘with your hair. If you wanted me to.’

Well, I was keen to go blonde, remember, and it did look
strange, what with being all uneven and half brunette and everything. Ginger’s own hair was cut in a very neat bob and was a beautiful coppery colour that matched the eyebrows she had more or less neatly drawn on above where her old ones used to be.

‘You’re a hairdresser?’

‘First person on Shelter Island to use a blow dryer,’ she said, slapping me in a conspiratorial fashion on the arm. ‘Come by my place tomorrow afternoon. Luke’ll tell you where. I’ll bake cookies!’

At the mention of cookies, Marshall sat straight upright and started thrusting his arms forward and back as if he were on some sort of rowing machine.

‘You missed it again, you old fool,’ Ginger said. ‘And that doesn’t mean you get away without making a donation.’

‘Aw, don’t get your undies in a bunch,’ Marshall said gruffly. ‘Who’s the fox?’

‘Just ignore him,’ Ginger advised me. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Come on you,’ she pulled on one of the old man’s arms, ‘I’m not going to let you do to her what you did to that nice girl from Greenport. You just have to learn to keep it in your pants, Marsh.’

Afterwards Luca took me to the Shelter Island Heights Drugstore for lunch. I hadn’t known that places like that still existed anywhere in the US, let alone a two-hour bus ride from Manhattan, but there it was: a corner drugstore with a coffee shop inside. We took a seat at the counter and Luca ordered a coke and a cheeseburger while I went for the toasted bagel with cream cheese and onion, which had the creamy–crunchy combination I had come to look forward to.

‘Doris tells me you were pretty good,’ Luca said, sipping his Coke. ‘Seems like improvising suits you.’

‘They could move pretty fast for old dudes,’ I told him, making short work of my bagel.

‘That diet of yours coming along okay?’

‘If you think I’m fat now, you should have seen me before,’ I told him. ‘I’m the proverbial shadow of my former self.’

‘Oh, I doubt that somehow,’ he said, taking a bite of his cheeseburger. Clearly, he really liked cheeseburgers and I had to say this one looked mighty good for a drugstore offering: fresh sesame bun, lean beef patty, crisp lettuce, and a slice of thick
buttery-coloured
cheese. He had a lick of mustard at the corner of his mouth and without even thinking, I leaned across and wiped it away with my thumb.

He looked at me, those green eyes twinkling, and a hundred thousand different sensations swept through me.

‘I dreamed about you, you know,’ I said. ‘When I was in the coma. I mean I didn’t know it was a dream, it seemed real at the time. But I met you and you were building a gondola and you were kind of cranky about the world. Sort of like you are now.’

It didn’t seem to surprise him at all. He just laughed.

‘What did you do when you were sitting with me, Luke?’

‘Held your hand, talked a little. Sometimes to Eugenia, sometimes to you.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, just crap, you know. Me, Marc, life, you — although I was kind of hazy on the details as far as you were concerned.’

‘But why? Why me?’

‘Like I said, you looked like someone who could do with some company.’

‘But there must have been other people in comas that looked the same way.’

He smiled. ‘None of them had Eugenia on their side,’ he said. ‘She wanted me to talk to you and so I talked.’

‘Hey, Luke, can I borrow you for a moment?’ It was the pharmacist from the drugstore. ‘Judy Watley’s in here with that same skin rash.’ He looked at me, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s hardly eating talk, I know. It’s moved right up her thigh, Luke, and she wants more of the same cream but I think —’

Luca stood up off his stool and told me he wouldn’t be a minute.
I picked up a cinnamon donut from the platter on the counter and took a bite. The sugar crunched between my teeth but without the taste, it was a depressing experience.

‘Hey, where did Luke go?’ Ursula, the waitress was holding the telephone and looking for him. ‘I have a call for him.’

Seriously, it was like
Happy Days
. These people hadn’t heard of cell-phones.

‘He’s with the pharmacist. He won’t be long,’ I told her.

‘He’s in the drugstore, he won’t be long, honey,’ Ursula said, quite coquettishly for someone who was 80 in the shade, into the phone. ‘Do you want to leave a message with his friend?’ She looked me up and down then turned away so it was harder to hear what she was saying. ‘I don’t know but she’s tall and skinny and has funny hair. Sort of brown and white and different lengths like a punk rocker or something. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, sure honey, I’ll tell him. You make sure you come by and visit, won’t you? It’s been a long while. Bye-bye.’

Gertrude, who had clearly gotten bored sitting in the truck, scared the shit out of me then by jumping up onto Luca’s stool, which also made Ursula jump sky-high and clutch at her bosom.

‘That cat gives me the creeps,’ she said, at which Gertrude’s claws extended and gripped the vinyl of Luca’s stool.

‘You should watch what you say around her,’ I advised. ‘She’s the sort who bears a grudge.’

Ursula looked at me as if I were nuts but when she turned her back, Gertrude up-ended the sugar bowl with one swift movement of her paw. She looked me straight in the eye, then jumped off the stool and strode back into the drugstore.

‘I guess I had better be going,’ I said to Ursula, handing over $20 for the check. Twenty dollars went a hell of a long way further on Shelter Island than it did on that other island, that was for sure.

‘Be a honey and tell Luke that Marc called, will you?’ she said, giving me heart palpitations at the mention of his name. ‘Sounds like
he might be planning on paying us a visit.’

‘Oh really?’ I tried to keep my voice casual. ‘When?’

‘He didn’t say,’ Ursula said. ‘Sometime soon though I guess for him to be ringing here looking for his dad.’

Sometime soon? Oh brother. I had some serious hair dyeing to do. And a bit of waxing — just a bit — would not go astray either.

The next morning I tried going for a run to see if I really liked it or not. I got about a half mile down the beach and had to stop I was retching so hard. It was kind of galling that Gertrude seemed to be able to handle the pace yet I was wheezing like an old accordion and crippled by cramp. We returned to the house at a sprightly walk and I rang Ginger to ask if she could do my legs as well as my hair. Marco was indeed coming to visit, Luke had rung him when I’d passed on Ursula’s message. Not that the waxing had anything to do with Marco, you understand. I mean, I wasn’t going to sleep with him or anything just because I was staying in his Dad’s house and he was coming to visit and I couldn’t stop thinking about the muscles in his thighs and his exceedingly cute butt and the square breadth of his shoulders and the — well, need I say more?

Ginger’s house was a cute little cottage hidden behind a statuesque stand of white oaks down by Chase Creek. A dog the size of an elephant was standing on her porch, hackles raised and barking fit to bring the place down until one look from Gertrude sitting proud in her wicker basket silenced him and he ran whimpering around the side of the house.

Ginger had a huge kitchen fresh out of the ’50s with jars of preserves stacked neatly in open shelves and fresh flowers on every
surface. It was mostly yellow, which was a little bit unsettling, but she’d set up her hairdressing supplies at one end of the kitchen table and without too much fuss and bother she got on with the job at hand. She apologised for not having a mirror for me to look in while she was cutting my hair but as I was still suffering from the mild delusion that it was not me looking back at myself from my own reflection — not helped by the Botox — I can’t say it bothered me as much as it might another person.

She evened up my hair as well as she could, given that I didn’t want it too short (punk rocker, my eye) and by the time she finished she had given me most of a cute little bob not unlike her own, except my hair was still much chunkier on the side where my scar was. But if you overlooked the asymmetrical shape and the dark roots and blonde ends, it was definitely an improvement.

While we waited for the colour to take, she filled me in on everyone in the neighbourhood and all their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and the people who’d lived in the houses before them and their sons and daughters too. Ginger had lived on the island her whole life as had her husband, Harvey, who owned the hardware store just down from the drugstore. The place hadn’t changed so much, according to her. So the summer folk who had built big houses stayed once in a while but a person could go the whole year without ever bumping into one of them and it was still, according to her, the most beautiful place on God’s earth — so what did it matter?

Naturally, I was desperate to ask her about Marco but I sort of fluffed around for a while asking about other stupid things, like where you could get the best fish (Bob’s Seafood), the freshest greens (Pete’s Produce), the biggest milkshake (Jim’s Coffee Shop).

‘They sure pushed the boat out naming places, huh?’

‘Well, there’s no need for anything more fancy, is there? It is Bob’s seafood and Pete’s produce and Jim’s coffee — although he’s not the original Jim, but still, he’s a Jim nonetheless.’

‘So, what was Marco’s mom like?’ I finally asked her.

‘You mean Marc? Marc’s mom?’

I was having trouble adjusting to his real name. I nodded.

‘Oh, Serena was just about the prettiest girl I’d ever seen,’ Ginger said. ‘What hair she had, Connie. It was jet-black and hung straight as an arrow down her back like a bolt of silk. Of course, she was probably too young when she married Luke. Hardly 20 years old and pregnant straight away. They used to come here in the summer when Luke was at college and Marc was a baby. Luke Junior’d work pumping gas down at Piccozzi’s but I don’t know that he had to, Luke Senior was putting him through med school and all, but he’s never been one to sit around wasting time, has Luke. Then it got that he was so busy at the hospital that just Serena and Marc would come here for the summer. I can still see her now, pushing that stroller up the hill in a flowery sundress and a big straw hat.’

She sounded beautiful, like someone F Scott Fitzgerald would sit on the porch and moon over for decades. I bet Marco would want to marry someone just like her.

‘Then they divorced and it was just Luke here on his own, poor soul. Everyone on the island has tried to marry him off at some stage but he just says he’s not going to make the same mistake twice. He’ll know the right one when she comes along, so he says. But he hasn’t known her yet! Now this hair of yours is resisting my dye, Connie. Should be done by now but I think it needs a few more minutes.’

We decided she should wax my legs while we waited but what I hadn’t realised was that she had never waxed a leg before in her life. She’d just been to the drugstore and bought a Veet home waxing kit. Well, how hard could it be, she asked?

Quite hard as it turned out. She got the wax strip on my calf all right but when it came to pulling it off she told me she was too scared.

‘Just do it,’ I soothed. ‘I don’t mind. It won’t hurt.’

I was wrong. It hurt so much I just about hit the roof. She was doing it too slowly or too quickly or something and the second strip
was just as bad. By the third, she was crying, Gertrude was howling, I was near back in a coma, and we had only done one stripe on the front of a single leg. I had to wax a matching stripe on the other leg myself. It was quite traumatic for a beauty salon experience. And once Ginger dried her eyes and stopped shaking, we decided that the backs of my legs and my bikini line would just have to wait another day.

Of course, all this took somewhat longer than anticipated and it was only when my scalp started tingling in a mildly painful way that had up until then been disguised by the far worse pain in my shins that we remembered my hair dye.

‘Oh, my,’ was all Ginger said when she washed out the chemicals in the kitchen sink. And when she finally brought me a mirror I could see why. The woman in the looking glass now had purple hair.

‘Well, it’s not completely purple,’ said Ginger, and she was right. Only the bits that had once been blonde were purple, the roots were actually quite a nice rich chocolate shade, which I think might even have been my natural hair colour. Of course, no one was going to notice the nice rich chocolate with all that purple on the go. And what the heck would Marco think?

‘Isn’t this the same colour that Jenny and Nancy and Meg have in their hair?’

‘Well, yes,’ admitted Ginger. ‘But I thought on you it would look different.’

Turned out, it was the only colour she had. Also turned out she had only worked as a hairdresser for three weeks back in the ’60s when the place that was now an empty lot had been a hair salon. That was before it burned to the ground after someone, it had never been established who (although I now had my suspicions), left the heated rollers turned on too close to the hairspray over Thanksgiving.

It was too late to go to the drugstore for more dye and Ginger did not think my hair could take it anyway. I just had to believe that surely Marco would rather see me purple than bald. It was only hair, wasn’t it? I put on my Evel Knievel helmet and cycled home.

When Luca saw me, his jaw dropped down to his chest and he looked at me in a very peculiar way, like he’d never really seen me before or something.

‘It’s only hair,’ I snapped grumpily and he recovered himself immediately.

‘Actually I like it,’ he said. ‘Very pretty.’

I thought about Serena with her bolt of black silk running down her back and then showed him the two red spotty landing strips up the middle of my shins.

‘You want to borrow my razor and do the sides and the backs?’ Luca said as he started to unpack a sack of groceries. I didn’t but I felt a little tug on my heart at the offer.

I went upstairs and pretended not to ready myself for Marco’s arrival, but just before seven I heard a car on the gravel outside and dabbed extra lip gloss on my lips. Then when the doorbell rang I lost my nerve, picked up a silk scarf and wrapped it around my head the way I’d seen David Bowie’s Somalian supermodel wife do. The effect on me was much more British charlady than Somalian supermodel but it did hide the purple. The doorbell rang again. Maybe Luca was in the garden and couldn’t hear it. My heart hammering in my chest, my loins aching with longing, my teeth clenched in anticipation, I followed Gertrude down the stairs and, as the doorbell rang for the third time, I pulled open the door.

Ty was standing there with a huge bunch of lilies and a funny little man in a white chef’s outfit. ‘MC, what’s that on your head?’ he asked, aghast.

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded. I couldn’t remember being less pleased to see someone. If Marco was a 10 on my lust scale, my fiancé was a zero. Below zero.

‘Darling, I’ve brought Monsieur DuCroix from Le Petit Cochon to cook for you,’ said Ty, looking fondly at Monsieur DuCroix, who in turn motioned to three state-of-the-art coolers a driver was unloading from a town car.

‘May we come in?’ Ty asked nervously.

Frankly, I didn’t want him to but what could I do? I opened the door wider and Gertrude pushed past me. She headed straight for the Frenchman: but the moment she rubbed her great ginger carcass against him he went quite red and started sniffing and sneezing and babbling hysterically in French.

‘Could you, please, MC?’ Ty pleaded.

‘Could I please what?’

‘Do as Monsieur DuCroix says,’ he cried across the din of the yowling cat and the burbling chef.

‘I don’t know what Monsieur says, Ty, I don’t speak French.’

‘Oh, but you do,’ he cried. ‘We taught you. Madame Solange at the Institute taught you. Surely you haven’t forgotten that!’

Monsieur was hopping around now, with Gertrude clinging to his trouser leg. Actually, it was pretty funny. ‘Fa fa fa fafa,’ it sounded to me like the Frenchman was saying. ‘Achoo. Fa fa fa fa.’

‘Get rid of the cat, MC,’ cried Ty. ‘Monsieur is allergic. And what happened to its ear? What sort of cat is it anyway?’

Alerted no doubt by the various screams and shrieks, Luca appeared from the garden with an armload of vegetables, which he quickly dumped in order to separate Gertrude from the little Frenchman. She could tell when people were allergic, he said, and stuck to them like glue just to be curmudgeonly.

‘This is Ty, my, erm —’

‘Fiancé,’ Ty interrupted, stepping forward and taking Luca’s hand. ‘You must be Dr Scarpa Senior. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking such good care of MC. Of course, I’m hoping to lure her back to the city and I’ve brought along Monsieur DuCroix to help me in this endeavour. Could we possibly trouble you for the use of your kitchen, Dr Scarpa? I know it’s short notice but I really wanted it to be a surprise. Please forgive the intrusion. Driver, if you could be back here at 11 that would be superb.’

‘It’s Luke,’ said Luca. ‘And you can trouble me all you want.
Knock yourself out, Mr DuCroix. Does your driver want a drink before he goes? Anything I can get you, buddy? No? Try Jim’s up on the main road. Good cheeseburgers.’ He turned then to the shaky little chef, picking up one of the crates of provisions, and guided him to the kitchen, leaving me alone with Ty.

‘You should have called and told me you were coming,’ I said, heading out onto the porch, knowing he would follow me. ‘And I would have told you not to.’

‘MC, I feel terribly bad about our conversation yesterday. I realise that I may have sounded overly concerned with your book tour and that’s not how I meant it to be. I’m concerned about a lot of things, of course I am, we all are, not the least of them being your health and welfare and our wedding, my darling, I should have mentioned the wedding and our life together, the one we planned. I’m trying to make it up to you, MC, that’s why I’m here. I’d like you to come home.’

Listen, I’m not a hard-hearted person. I hadn’t been before the pretzel and I wasn’t one after. I felt sorry for Ty; I could see he didn’t quite know how to handle the situation he found himself in but then neither did I. And I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how I’d got into the situation in the first place. He was a nice enough man, if you liked that sort of thing, which I seriously could not believe I did. And neither could I imagine what he saw in me. If you took away the fact that I was the
New York Times
restaurant critic, I was just not his type. And something had taken away the fact that I was the
New York Times
restaurant critic, so where did that leave us? It left us as a
well-to
-do wannabe with a pretentious palate and a lot of allergies engaged to a woman whose job he probably wanted but could never ever have and who now no longer had it herself.

‘Why in the world do you want to marry me?’ I just out and asked him as he shuffled around on the porch trying to avoid the last watery rays of sumptuous evening sun.

‘My darling, we are perfect for each other,’ he said, getting a
spotty handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his brow. ‘We belong together, you know that. We like all the same things, we like all the same people, we share all the same dreams and goals.’ He was sweating on his upper lip and looked supremely uncomfortable. ‘I just want things to be the way they were, MC. As before. When I knew what you wanted.’ He started as a bug flew past and flapped his hand wildly around in front of his face. ‘We talked about growing old together and having our “own” table at Daniel and vacationing in Paris, eating at l’Arpège and going to Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo.’

‘We did?’ I was genuinely surprised. He couldn’t eat wheat, shellfish, dairy products or nuts.

‘We did, my darling. We talked about the books you were going to write about cheese and French bread and champagne. About the
Times
, about publishing tie-ins, about our future together in New York.’

‘I just don’t remember,’ I said, more to myself than him as the doorbell rang again. My head was itchy underneath my turban so I pulled it off, revealing my purple ends to the world and to Ty, whose eyes nearly popped out of his head. He staggered to the porch chair and sat down, fanning himself. It didn’t matter now if Marco saw my purple hair, I supposed, because I was hardly going to be able to sneak off and make mad passionate love to him when my pesky betrothed was right there in the house.