Please, I thought to myself, please. Let him say the right thing.
‘Let’s eat,’ Marco said, standing up and reaching for my hand. ‘You must be starved.’
Four
Well, had I not already been lying down you could have knocked me over with a feather. Marco had just made mad passionate love to me in a way no one ever had before and now he wanted to take me out to eat. Oy. And they say there’s no such thing as the perfect man. For a moment I just stared at him in adoration. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he had meant I must be starved of sex. Perhaps the way I had soaked up his touch, his skin, his lips, his whispering in my ear, had made it obvious how seldom Tom and I had made love in recent months. Or was that years? Don’t ask me where the passion in my marriage went. I didn’t even notice how much we’d had until it was gone. Until it was too late.
We were best friends, Tom and I, we loved each other a lot. But I didn’t think Tom found me sexy any more, thought he hadn’t for a while. When he looked at me it was quite often with a frown or a kind of wrinkle of disapproval and while I certainly still desired him, that wrinkle could not help but cool my own ardour.
‘You will love Bentigodi,’ Marco said as he untied the gondola. ‘The chef there is positively inspirational. Just wait until you taste her sarde incinte in agrodolce. Fantastic.’
He had meant starved of food not sex after all and it looked like I was going to be sated on both counts. This was turning into quite some second honeymoon, I could not help but think. I nestled back in my brocade nest as Marco pulled the gondola out into the canal, closed the grate and we slid away. It was amazingly quiet, just the almost imperceptible groan of the oar against its holder and the occasional pad of Marco’s shoes on the rug at the back of the boat.
I watched the laundry fluttering on the clotheslines stretched from building to building across the canal above me. A gorgeous set of sheets, sky blue and adorned with white puffy clouds, flapped against the real thing far beyond; two sets of bright red overalls accompanied an entire row of enormous beige bloomers.
‘Sinistra,’ Marco hollered, and we turned left into a wider canal. I turned my head lazily to one side as another gondolier shouted out something in return. There were so many questions to ask but it didn’t feel as though they were in my head. It felt as though they were circling on the outside, like a cartoon character that’d been hit on the head with a frying pan, tweet tweet.
Thoughts of Tom kept trying to invade my thick skull but I just wouldn’t let them. I wanted to feel happy for a while, not make too much of anything. I wondered if Marco would marry me and I would move to Venice and have babies with him. Then I realised that didn’t really gel with the whole not-making-too-much-of-anything business so I stopped. Then I thought about how I could think about having babies with Marco, a complete (well, almost) stranger yet not with Tom, my husband of 10 years. This made me so unhappy that I stopped thinking about anything and instead just let my eyes slither over the doors and windows that we passed as we sliced through the smooth waters of La Serenissima.
Despite the serenity of the surroundings, the subject of children would not stay far away. I guessed it was at the root of Tom’s no-show, or at the root of the problems causing the no-show. Tom wanted babies and I wasn’t sure; it was as simple as that. But what wasn’t I sure about? If I could contemplate having little Marcos, why not little Toms? I scratched at my nose and fidgeted in my nest. Little Toms. Why not? But if I knew the answer, it was scurrying around just beyond my comprehension and any attempt to pin it down proved fruitless.
‘Just relax,’ Marco said behind me, obviously seeing me squirm. He made a delectable little groan as he pushed the gondola back out into the hectic rush of the Grand Canal. ‘You are in the most beautiful city in the world and there’s no better way to see it than from the water.’
He had a point, so I pushed aside the noisy clatter of dissension going on in my brain and leaned back into that blue and gold brocade, my head turning to take in the lavish hotels, the fine palazzi and their crumbling poor relations on either side of Venice’s main street.
‘I’m taking you up to the Cannaregio,’ Marco said. ‘It’s the old Jewish quarter. Not so many tourists. A lot of good food.’
The air was full of the sounds of other people going about their business, their vacations, their day-to-day lives, and I let the magic of Venice wash over me, comfort me, keep me from wondering what the hell I was doing. Every now and then I would twist around to smile at Marco, check he was still there, that I hadn’t drifted into some parallel universe where lovely things stopped happening to me. But there he was, his eyes — his crow’s feet just in their infancy — shining at me.
‘How old are you?’ I asked him at one point.
‘Twenty-nine,’ he answered me, his eyes twinkling. ‘And you?’
I sank down in my seat, pretending I hadn’t heard him. There was only a four-year gap but still, it was in the wrong direction.
Luckily, before I could even wonder why I was thinking about our age difference, we arrived at the Ca’ d’Oro pier. Marco came to an arrangement with the gondolier there about leaving his boat and led me through another maze of unmarked lanes and canals, clearly no mystery to him at all, until we arrived at a back-street osteria, all white walls and dark wooden furniture and cool, clean tiled floors.
It was less than two hours since we had eaten but I told you, I’m not normal in this regard. I was feeling so many different sorts of hunger by that stage I could barely tell one from the other.
Anyway, no sooner had we sat down than a pink-faced waitress in her 20s came over to us bearing handwritten menus. Marco waved them away.
‘Sarde incinte in agrodolce,’ he ordered. ‘And fondi di carciofo. For two.
‘Pregnant sardines,’ he translated for me. ‘The chef here makes the most beautiful stuffed sardines — you’ll see how different they are from the sarde in saor that you had at Do’ Mori. That’s the traditional Venetian way of preparing them but here, everything has a twist. That’s what I love about it. And the fondi, the artichoke hearts, they are delicious too. You won’t see them much outside Venice either.’
‘How do you know so much about food?’ I asked him, just wishing he would keep talking.
‘I know a lot about everything,’ he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking but he remained completely serious. And boy, did he look gorgeous serious. His earnest brown eyes buzzed around the room, checking out the kitchen, the other patrons, the jittery waitress. He drummed his fingers on the table. Actually, even his fingers looked good enough to eat. I was ravenous.
When they arrived the pregnant sardines looked so magnificent I almost didn’t want to disturb them. They sat on their plain white plate, fat and succulent and lightly fried, their middles swollen with a blissful stuffing of breadcrumbs, orange juice, raisins, pine nuts, olive oil and parsley. We ate them with our fingers, Marco’s glistening with oil as he licked them, looking more delectable than ever. The fondi did not look quite as enticing, sitting greeny-grey and slightly tongue-like in their marinade of oil and lemon, but they tasted divine, almost like a well-aged perfectly cooked slice of beef, believe it or not. And don’t you just love it when vegetables taste like meat? But after the initial burr of deliciousness faded away, again I felt that funny sensation at the back of my throat where I knew a heavenly aftertaste should have been.
‘Is everything OK?’ the pink-faced waitress asked. I had thought her rude at first but I could see now she was just run off her feet.
‘Great,’ I beamed at her encouragingly. I always feel sorry for restaurant staff. I had been a kitchen lackey myself so knew that it was true that it was one of the most stressful jobs a person could have. We human beings don’t take our food lightly, especially when we are paying through the nose for it.
‘You know your brother was here,’ the waitress said, quite knocking the stuffing out of me because she wasn’t looking at Marco when she spo
ke but at me.
‘My brother?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t think so.’ Emmet’s idea of a trip did not involve international travel, that much I knew. He would never in a million years be in Venice. I didn’t even think he had a passport. It was inconceivable that he was there. Of course I had thought I had heard my mother on the Rialto Bridge not so long ago but that was before I fainted from the heat and the effects of a crisp dry white so early in the morning.
‘Was there anyone there?’ I asked Marco all the same. ‘When I fainted?’
He wiped at the fondi oil left on the plate with a chunk of crusty white bread. ‘I was there,’ he said and bit off the end of the crust, his teeth outlandishly white and efficient.
My ears must have deceived me, I decided. The waitress was mistaken. She had moved away by then and was clearing another table, one hand distractedly trying to push a rogue chunk of strawberry blonde hair behind one ear. Marco was certainly not acting as though anything untoward had happened. Would he not be interested to learn my brother was in Venice? It was ridiculous. I opted to think nothing more of it, leaning back in my chair and resting my hands on my belly. I felt fabulous.
Marco took this in and seemed pleased. ‘You know, there is nothing like a little gelato to finish a good meal,’ he said. ‘Paolin on Campo San Stefano has changed hands but I think the liquorice gelato there is still the best.’ He pushed back his chair and stood up.
We meandered back to the gondola, then hit the canal again. It was busier now, our progress slow, the water clogged with gondolas, each one, unlike ours, stuffed full of tourists. It occurred to me that I was keeping Marco from working.
‘You must be missing out,’ I said, twisting around to talk to him. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not missing out on anything,’ he said and I felt another lurch of happiness. ‘I own 12 other gondolas,’ he continued, ‘and it has been a good summer.’
‘I thought gondoliers could only have one gondola each,’ I said. ‘That they sort of got passed down from father to son.’ I had read this somewhere, along with the fact that gondoliers do not and have never sung to their passengers.
‘Sometimes still it goes from father to son,’ Marco said, steering us gently through a bottled water delivery boat and two gondolas linked together, holding a dozen glazed-eyed tourists between them, ‘but it doesn’t have to. And the authorities say that each gondolier must have only one gondola but these boats are expensive and not many of the younger guys can afford to buy in so I loan them the money and they pay me back, with interest.’
I must say I was a little surprised at the lack of romance in this response. ‘So how did you get to be a gondolier?’ I asked.
‘My father is in the business and so was my grandfather before him,’ he answered. ‘That’s the old way.’
I stroked the blue velvet on the cushion I was hugging. Now this was more like it.
‘So this is your dad’s gondola?’ I asked.
‘Destra,’ Marco hollered, indicating a right turn. ‘Destra. No, my old man wouldn’t be seen dead in this.’
‘But why? It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes, but it’s a new kind of beautiful.’ The exertion of rowing lengthened his vowels. It was like listening to music. ‘It’s made by a friend of mine in Switzerland. It’s fibreglass and at 20,000 euro nearly half the price of having a wooden gondola made the old-fashioned way.’
I squeezed the cushion tighter. There was absolutely no reason why this should disappoint me but it did. I shook my head. I was expecting Marco to be perfect but really I had no right to expect anything. Why should it bother me that he was unromantic when it came to tradition? That he had a good eye for commerce? He was overly romantic in other ways after all. Even if he seemed a little, well, closed off, I supposed. And although I hated to admit it, he didn’t have much of a sense of humour. But did that matter? When everything else was so right?
‘Where is Campo Stefano?’ I changed the subject.
‘Not far from your hotel,’ Marco told me, ‘if you would rather go there. The gelato can always wait. It will still be there tomorrow.’
I held my breath, knowing what I wanted to say but afraid to actually say it. And while I’m not known for putting off the opportunity to eat, in this case there was something I wanted much, much more than ice cream.
‘The hotel,’ I croaked. Bits of me were calling out for the touch of that man’s hands in a way I had never even imagined before. I found myself wishing, screw tradition, that the gondola had an outboard motor to move quicker through the canals to the Gritti Palace. My clothes felt hot and restrictive, my breath was short. The only word I could think of to describe the way I felt was desperate. I was desperate for him. I was dripping with desperation for him. It was a foreign feeling and sort of scary because I realised that if he simply dropped me off at the pier and kept going I would probably shrivel up and die.
But he turned into the Santa Maria del Giglio traghetto stop and after a brisk conversation with the gondolier there, who was slothfully sprawled in a chair on the pier, his cigarette burning, newspaper pages spread around him, he tied up his gondola and reached for my hand. Five minutes later we were up in that beautiful pistachio room and I was quivering as Marco’s thumbs strummed my collarbone. We stood opposite each other in front of the open picture-postcard window and he slowly removed every last stitch of my clothing until I was standing there naked as a jaybird, shaking with anticipation.
Look, if you think it’s easy for me to recount this part it is not. I am not a standing-around-naked-as-a-jaybird-shaking-with-anticipation type of person. I had worn joke T-shirts to bed with my husband for the past decade of my life and he was the only one apart from my mother to have seen me in the raw since I can’t remember when. So for me to be standing there with not one single of my 10 (ahem) extra pounds disguised, exposed in broad daylight to a man about whom I knew nothing, except the satin feel of his smooth brown skin and the way that just looking at him filled the hole inside me, well, I can’t explain how out of character it was. And how wonderful. I felt like the old me had flown out that window and was swooping over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and circling the shiny dome of Santa Maria della Salute light as a feather, leaving a new me standing there throbbing with desire.
Yes, it is fair to say that I was in the clutch of a post-separation lust from which I could not have extricated myself even if I’d wanted to, and so Marco and I went at it like jungle animals. And it was oh-my-God extraordinary. We made love until I thought every square inch of me was rubbed raw with the scratch of his whiskers, the rasp of his tongue, the nip of his teeth, the print of his fingers, the clawing of his nails. I felt things in parts of my body I had forgotten about, craved things I didn’t know I could have, offered him parts of myself Sister Thomas Aquinas is probably still churning up soil over.
And then we decided we would go out for dinner. Truly, if every affair were like that, we would all be having them. All the time. There was no room in my head for Tom at all. Not at all.
We showered together, which took a lot longer than any shower I ever took on my own, then I pulled on one of my little black dresses, slipped into my only pair of Jimmy Choos, and let Marco lead me once again through that magical collection of water and stone that was turning me into an entirely different woman.
‘You will like it in here,’ Marco assured me, as we came upon the doorway of the Trattoria Alla Madonna, an unpretentious older-style restaurant with an enormous vine growing up through a hole in the roof. ‘It’s where the Venetians eat.’
The place hummed with grumpy old waiters — it was like being in Peter Luger steak house in Williamsburg but without the porterhouse. An ice counter was constantly being re-filled with fresh whole fish, the tables buzzed with chatter. The smell of green beans and garlic filled the air and lifted my heart, already impossibly light. I felt Marco’s arm around my shoulder, steering me through the busy room to a table in a side alcove, the waiters acknowle
dging him grouchily. My feet hardly touched the ground. I floated.
‘I’ll have a beer,’ Marco directed a squat balding man with bushy eyebrows who showed us to our table.
‘A man who drinks beer lives a hundred years,’ he replied without a trace of humour.
‘And I’ll have a glass of soave,’ I chipped in. ‘So how long will I live?’
He showed no sign of having heard me, leaping nimbly out of the way to avoid a collision with a tray of spaghetti alle vongole, and disappeared into the throng of white-shirted waiting staff.
Actually, my wine arrived within minutes, but not so Marco’s beer.
‘A man who waits for beer lives two hundred years,’ our waiter said and this time I thought I detected a tremor of hilarity in those bushy eyebrows.
We ordered and then we ate, oh how we ate! Tiny little hard-shelled clams that I sucked on till the roof of my mouth stung; thick dark sausages with a white bean stew; spaghetti with fried zucchini and parsley; veal cutlets cooked in lashings of sweet, nutty butter; soft chunks of white bread that drank up spicy olive oil; green beans and fresh peas well-cooked in a salty broth; and, to finish, a chocolate torte so rich and delicious just one mouthful was enough.
Actually, just one mouthful was all I could manage. And by then the waiters had stopped being grumpy and were looking at me with what I can only describe as admiration.
Mr Bushy Eyebrows even pulled back my chair as I got up to leave and Alla Madonna did not strike me as normally being that sort of a joint.
We walked back to the hotel in companionable silence, the streets still alive with giggling tourists and star-struck lovers. It wasn’t until I caught our reflection in the window of a shop selling beautiful Italian linen that I saw that was what we looked like too. Or at least, I looked like that: Marco’s reflection was harder to catch. He was standing on the other side of me and the reflection of his features was blurred by the sheets and pillowcases and quilt covers draped dramatically on the other side of the glass.
Eating With the Angels Page 7
