Eating With the Angels (27 page)

I opened my eyes and smiled at Luca.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

We followed the slope downhill close to where the section flattened off and there, clinging leafily to the rickety wooden fence, was a tomato vine extraordinary in that despite its virulent greenery, there was only one ripe red tomato hanging from it.

‘I’ve been thinking about Nonnina all day,’ Luca said, kneeling down and cupping the single fat fruit gently in one hand. ‘She brought the seeds for this vine over from Mazzorbo. They don’t come much more heirloom than that. Every year she harvested more seeds and replanted. Then my mom did the same thing. Never tasted tomatoes like it. Luckily for me she froze seeds as well because darned if I’ve been able to get any fruit these past few years.
Sometimes the seedlings just withered up and died on me. Sometimes the vine grew, but the tomatoes never ripened. No matter what I did, nothing. Then this morning I see this sitting here. Just showed up when it was good and ready.’ With one deft movement of his hand he plucked the plump tomato off the vine.

‘Luca!’ I gasped. ‘You should save it for something special!’

‘This is something special,’ he said and pulling a pocket knife out of his jeans, he sliced the fat red fruit deftly in two and handed me the bottom half.

It was the perfect temperature and as smooth as a stone. Its juice ran gently down its sides and into the palm of my hand. Luca, his green eyes shining at me, bit into his half and my mouth watered just looking at him. I took a bite myself, the juice running down my chin, my hand, my arm. At first I thought there’d been an explosion, that my head had been knocked clear off my shoulders. The sourness of the first bite hit the roof of my mouth like a high-pressure hose and then at the back behind my teeth there was a tingle as the acidity hit home. Finally I felt the sweetness echo in my throat as I sucked on the seeds and chewed the flesh. The
sweetness
.

I could taste it.

‘Oh my God,’ I whispered. ‘Luca. Oh my God.’

‘So,’ his smile was tender, his green eyes far from curious, ‘you think it needs salt?’

I shook my head, licked tomato tang from my lips. It needed nothing. And neither did I. I had it all right there and it was so simple, so beautiful, so perfect. Everything was all right.

And it was delicious.

Come on, you must have known there would be a happy ending. Maybe not there in the middle when it was all such a hopeless mess but towards the end when I was juggling all that man flesh out at Shelter Island? Now that had potential. Hey, for a while there it looked as though I could actually have had my pick of happy endings: with Marco (yeah, right) or Tom (not likely) or even, if I decided to care a whole lot more about antibacterial detergents, Ty.

But Luca?

Well, I was dumb (pardon me) not to have seen it sooner. He told me in my dream that he had everything I needed, and that I should trust him and everything would be all right. If I hadn’t been sexually obsessed with his son or blindsided by my ex or hounded by my fiancé, I might have seen it sooner. I just needed to stand back and look at the thing from a distance.

And when I did, boy, was he my cup of tea.

It’s taken a while for us to settle down, I guess. There’s a 15-year age gap, after all; we think about some things differently. Kids, for example. Luca wouldn’t mind a couple more but I just need to make sure that’s what I want. They’d be cute, though, those bambinos. I mean look at Marco. Anyway, number-one priority is to make sure I’m not stepping back into another relationship where I’m being shaped by
someone else. We don’t live together, for example. Luca’s out on the island and I have a really badly decorated apartment on West 17th Street. We spend weekends together and one or two nights during the week, which we spend curled up in bed surrounded by empty Chinese take-out boxes. We drink beer and eat cereal out of the box and I know I told you my Sailor’s Delight washed-rind cheese was only hours away from reaching its prime, but I ate it before it got there. What’s more I had it on bread slightly lacking in salt with quince paste I had to scrape mould off of. I haven’t darkened the door of a four-star restaurant since I got my taste back and nor probably will I. I’m a regular at The Red Cat, my favourite bistro just around the corner, and I like eating cheeseburgers on the beach with Luca or fries and pies at Nick’s with Eugenia.

My taste has come back, but it has changed. Boy, has it changed. I no longer care if my turbot comes with a béarnaise mousseline or my pig’s trotter with 65-year-old red wine vinegar or your choice of pens to sign the check, madam. I like to eat my food, not describe it, which is what I told Toby, my editor at the
New York Times
, when I met up with him. He seemed quite relieved; to be honest, I think he might have found me a bitch to work with. In fact, he told me he found me a bitch to work with. So restaurant reviewing is now a thing of the past. My publishers dropped me like a hot potato when they found that out, thank God. My book never hit the streets. I still write for the
Times
dining section though only now I write about the people who produce our food, about where it comes from and how it gets to us. I’m freelancing too for the annual produce issue of
Gourmet
and I’m loving it. I get to meet eccentric chicken farmers, organic beet growers, nutty bakers, and lovable confectioners. Plus I have time to do the things I want to do, like walk in the park, tend the garden I have growing up on my roof terrace, and avoid chunks of stewed apple that Agnes flings at me from her high chair when I look after her every Thursday.

Fleur and Tom are still together, by the way, and actually I think
they are a pretty amazing pair. She stands up to him in a way I never could because she knows so much about herself in the first place, who she is and what she will or won’t put up with, whereas I was too reliant on him for my identity to fight for it. They’re well matched. He’s full of bullshit and she won’t take any. Of course, I’ve never told her about Tom coming to Shelter Island that night, and I won’t. I don’t talk about it with him, either, and I know it makes him mad that I’m with Luca now but not as mad as it made him when I was with Ty, the dandy who incredibly lured me away to a well-heeled life sautéed in nonsense and peppered with pretension. But on that subject, rather unbelievably Ty and I have become good friends. I told you he was pleasant enough, I just never wanted to marry him and frankly, post-pretzel, I don’t think he wanted to marry me either. I suspect one day he will get over himself and fly off to far-flung parts with Paris or an off-Broadway chorus boy but in the meantime we meet quite regularly at the Fairway Café for brioche — sometimes, speaking of unbelievable, with Emmet.

Turns out the heated hand-towel investment was not a euphemism for a crack deal. Emmet indeed swindled the $20,000 out of Ty but then went on to make a small fortune, has paid him back with interest and is pretty much on the pig’s back himself. He still lives at home, of course, why wouldn’t he? But his drug use is positively recreational and in fact, he spends a bit of time with us at Shelter Island where we eat burgers and play gin rummy and drink beer and laugh at each other and ourselves. In fact, he’s coming to Venice with us next fall. Luca is taking us to Mazzorbo in the duck-shooting season so we can have wild duck soup followed by wild duck tagliatelle followed by roasted wild duck at Trattoria Maddalena, his favourite.

I’d like to tell you that Marco, sorry, Marc was coming too and that we were all one big happy family. But for a start that would be creepy and for a finish, he’s still a giant pain in the ass. He’s scandalised by his father’s relationship with a much younger woman whose brain he patched up but frankly he should walk a mile in my shoes. I’m the one dating the guy whose son I once imagined I had
done many disgusting things with, after all. Actually, that has been the subject of quite some angst on my part but I am getting over it with the aid of a neuropsychologist called Harvey who has helped me stand back from the close-up and see the big picture. He’s not only helping me pick my way through the minefield of head trauma recovery, but we’re doing time on Estelle recovery too. I suppose you could say I am a work in progress.

I haven’t reclaimed those two years and nine months, and I may never, but their importance is fading anyway. I’m concentrating more now on who I want to be rather than who I was and it’s weird how little the missing time matters. I wonder about that day I keep remembering, the one where I’m walking by the Magnolia Bakery after the butter fight, talking on the phone, deciding not to go to Venice. I wonder about that a lot. Harvey says it is probably significant in some way, it’s the major punctuation mark in my memory loss, after all. But he says there may not be one single magic key that unlocks the mystery, that there often isn’t, that it could be something as simple as the moment I realised that I’d had enough of Tom’s temper, that my life with him was over, that Ty could help me start another one. Actually, we had high hopes on the pretzel front for a while there, Harvey and I. He said it was possible that if I did suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome then pretzels could possibly trigger some sort of reaction that might fill a few gaps in my recent past. But after visiting the 20th pushcart where nothing was triggered except fleeting thoughts of Woody and my old friend hunger, we gave up on that. In fact, Harvey said he was developing a mild aversion to pretzels and couldn’t believe that I never got sick of them (which was not a psychological issue but interested him nonetheless).

Oh, and by the way, I’m not thin and blonde any more. I guess that had to happen. The real me is truly neither of those things. I’m back at just under 140 pounds with a traditional bikini wax, a wrinkly forehead and brunette hair that is heading towards being shoulder length once again and is the subject of much gentle mirth
between Luca and I, and you’ll laugh when I tell you why.

Luca’s certainty was something I admired in him from the start, before I even knew I had met him. But when I bit into that tomato and saw him smiling at me, I realised that it was not a generic certainty, that he was absolutely sure of me, of the future, of us. But how could that be?

‘How did you know?’ I asked him, later that night. ‘About me.’

‘Cenando con gli angeli
,’ he answered slowly. ‘Nonnina. I was one of her angels, I told you that.’

I nodded.

‘She said I had an angel too, in her dream.’ He laughed then, a shy almost embarrassed laugh.
‘La ragazza dei capelli viola
— the girl with the purple hair. Never gave it much thought, never made much sense until you came back from Ginger’s with that head full of lilac.’

I remembered the look on his face when he’d seen me with my horrible dye job, the feeling I’d had that he was seeing me for the first time.

‘You weren’t sure before then?’ I asked, my heart fluttering.

‘I had my suspicions from the moment I first laid eyes on you,’ he answered, ‘but show me a guy who doesn’t need a little help from the angels every now and then.’

Can you see now why I thank heaven. Soon-Yi didn’t bake cookies that day? The truth is, that pretzel didn’t ruin my life, it saved my life. Without it, I don’t know who I’d be but it wouldn’t be me. And I’d be minus a man who not only believes in angels and gives great peppermint foot rubs, but whose idea of a perfect meal is anything as long as I’m eating it with him.

It’s a matter of taste.

Without wanting to sound like Halle Berry at the Oscars, this book would never have happened without the enormous warmth and extraordinary generosity of a whole host of wonderful people. I’m lucky to have the friends and family I have and to meet the people I do along the way, I know that. Seriously, it makes all the difference! And as usual I want first and foremost to thank my husband Mark Robins, who not only cooks and cleans from daylight till dusk but also has enough faith in me for the both of us.

Sally Spector’s book
Venice And Food
(Arsenale) led me first to her door in the Cannaregio and then to the doors of many a fine Venetian eating establishment that I would otherwise never have discovered. Without them, the first few chapters of this book would be nowhere near as delicious. And the memory of lunch on her friend Luisa de Perini’s sun-drenched terrace near the Rialto is something that can still cheer me up on a wet grey day.

Big huge sloppy kisses and all my love always to my Rome-based cousin Frances Kennedy, who came to Venice to translate for me and without whom I would never have found real-life gondolier Davide Scarpa and gondola-maker Gianfranco Vianello nor would I have had so many laughs. (We’ll always have ‘half a date’, missus!)

In, New York, well, where do I start? By thanking Bridget Freer
who not only entertains me year after year when I descend upon her adopted city but who personally put in loads of spadework on the research front, including clinching a meeting with Ruth Reichl and getting my foot in the door of the James Beard Foundation. What a hero! And thanks too to her husband Ed, who lets me drag Bridget away and keep her out at night and then lets me come to their apartment and drink all their champagne. And welcome to the world Stella Needham!

Thanks to foodies John Mariani, Ed Levine, Adam Rappaport, Arthur Schwartz, Gael Greene, Marian Burros, and Erica Marcus, to name but a few — I still can’t believe they took time out to talk to me. And without the help of the book
Dining Out
by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page (John Wiley & Sons, Inc) and the encouragement of Caroline Stuart and Arlyn Blake at the James Beard Foundation, they might not have.

Thanks, too, to chef/owners David Waltuck at Chanterelle and the lovely John Villa at Dominic, for giving me their side of the story; and to Daniel Boulud, not for the crappy table but for coming to talk to me when he saw me taking notes. Good result.

As for former
New York Times
reviewer and
Gourmet
magazine editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, well, what can I say? She not only put on the Gourmet Institute — what a happy coincidence — at which I did a year’s research in the space of one weekend, but she took time out of her hectic schedule to meet with me. She probably is the only person who should ever have written her food memoirs (
Tender At The Bone,
Broadway Books, and
Comfort Me With Apples,
Random House). More importantly, she truly believes that inviting people into your house for dinner beats the heck out of a restaurant — and ain’t that the way it should be?

To Amy Rosmarin, thanks for the insight into tastelessness, so to speak. Joan Baren, you saved me that day on Shelter Island and I treasure the memory. And Richard Ruben: for the Greenmarket, the Red Cat, that African place in Brooklyn, every minute of your
company and for reading my manuscript, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

On the medical front, much appreciation to Gill Hood at Auckland ICU for her time and patience and emails, and to clinical neuropsychologist James Cunningham for his insight and humour and introducing me to raisin toast at Savour and Devour.

To all the usual suspects at Random House New Zealand, my deepest gratitude, as always. And I count myself very lucky to have Ann Clifford on my side come editing time. Missus, it’s always a pleasure.

As for Gwenny, you and Helen are going to read all my books before I let go of them now and same-same Rachy-rach, but differently, okay?

To my friends whose mothers can’t cook, thanks for sharing your disgusting stories and sorry if it gets you in trouble come the next family roast (charred with lumpy gravy). It seems many an ace cook has a mother of the ‘Estelle’s Surprise’ variety. My own was not one of them, by the way, let’s make that clear: our family roasts are not ones you want to miss out on!

Finally, to Anna, Ken, Angus, and Hugo, here’s to the future.

And to Kaywyn McKenzie, a real-life angel: you’re for ever remembered with wings and a halo.

All my love.

 SK