‘So, I hear we’re getting hitched,’ I ventured, sounding a little more like Katharine Hepburn than I meant to.
Ty pulled his collar away from his neck somewhat nervously. ‘When your divorce comes through,’ he said, ‘which should be any time soon, my dear. I’ve spoken to Thomas Keller and made a tentative date for the spring. It took quite some cajoling but I think he will do a wonderful job and the space is gorgeous. Perfect.’
‘Thomas Keller?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘The French Laundry Thomas Keller?’ His Yountville, California, restaurant was world famous. I had dreamed of going there but never had the balls to dream of getting married there. Mind you, why would I when I was already married?
‘Darling, yes, of course,’ Ty answered me, ‘but he’s here now, in New York, at the Time Warner Center. Per Se, you loved it. Four stars, my sweet. Trust me, it’s divine.’
I was getting married to a man who said ‘divine’? In the spring? I was speechless. In fact, I just about gave myself another subdural haematoma trying to think of something to say that didn’t express disbelief at finding myself betrothed to a well-heeled balding businessman who I had actually assumed was gay. Even if he did have superb taste in jewellery and the muscle to have our wedding reception catered for by one of America’s undisputed top chefs.
‘Oh, you didn’t tell me,’ Ty said then, breaking the silence with a quiver of excitement, ‘Paris brought you the book! You must be thrilled, darling. What do you think?’
I had no idea what he was talking about but he was reaching for the Kate Spade shopping bag that Paris had left in my room after her last visit. He opened it and pulled out a paperback, a publisher’s proof copy, his cheeks reddening in a way I could not believe anyone would ever find attractive, especially me.
As he turned it over, I saw on the jacket a sexy-looking woman sitting in a restaurant wearing a busty short-skirted suit, her face hidden behind a big white hat, her slender legs clad in spiky heels and crossed delicately beneath the table. Stars something, the title read, with something something something in smaller letters below it. I squinted at it, not sure that I was seeing correctly. The author’s name, in big red letters, was MC Conlan. MC Conlan? Lord in heaven. That was me.
‘Give,’ I croaked to Ty, stretching out my arms, my fingers wiggling, diamonds twinkling, the correct words not quite on the tip of my tongue. ‘Give, give, give.’
Mistaking my horror for delight, he only too quickly handed the book over.
‘You know Jeffrey Steingarten thinks you could well be the next best thing,’ he said smugly. ‘We’ll have to get him over for cocktails when you’re up to it. He’s promised to review you in Vogue and I think we might just make Hot Type in Vanity Fair. Fingers crossed for the Times bestseller list, MC. You’re a shoo-in, so they say.’
Stars Struck, the title read: In Search of the Sublime New York Dining Experience. I felt the breath disappear from my lungs. Surely to God I had not written a food memoir? Seriously, no one but Ruth Reichl should ever have bothered. No one but her had enough to say or could say it without sounding like a tight-ass nincompoop. Especially not me. I particularly had nothing to say. It was inconceivable I would write a book. Yet, on close inspection, the woman on the front cover was definitely me. She just looked so much more sophisticated than me, so much more confident and aware of her allure, so grown-up and sort of pleased with herself. In short, so unlike how I saw myself that I had to keep checking her right hand, perfectly poised to cut into a piece of prime rib, to make sure it had the same freckle on it that mine did. What’s more, according to the blurb on the inside back jacket, this woman on the cover who was apparently me lived on the Upper East Side with her publisher partner and their two cats. Cats? And there was me thinking I would rather eat a cat than own one as a pet. In fact, hadn’t I been mildly famous (in the Village, or a pocket of it) for saying that somewhere?
‘I don’t,’ I said to Ty. ‘I can’t. It’s too …’
‘Thrilling, yes, I know,’ he agreed, even though whatever I had been going to say was not anything he was likely to agree with. ‘As soon as you’re on your feet we’ll get together with Paris and reschedule the book tour. I know it’s a setback, MC, but with a small amount of rearranging we can get right back on track, I know we can. And of course there’s that much more interest in you now that you’ve triumphed over, well, tragedy, I suppose. I don’t think media coverage will be a problem somehow. Not at all. Paris is delighted about that much.’
My mouth was opening and closing like the last of the Chilean sea bass. ‘Have I? Do I?’ I was close to making some sense, I knew I was. If I could just line the words up and get them out maybe I could get somewhere. ‘Did I do something really bad?’ I finally asked him. I just could not believe that a nice girl like myself had woken up in the middle of such a nightmare. ‘I think I must have done something really bad.’
‘No, no, no,’ soothed Ty. ‘The timing wasn’t brilliant but for goodness’ sake it was an accident. And I hold myself to blame to a certain extent,’ he said — and get ready for this because here comes the high note on the sad-o-meter — ‘over that whole Atkins business.’
Oh yes. You read it right. Atkins. More specifically, the Atkins Diet, the low-carb high-protein regime of which I had long been an enthusiastic adversary. It was the curse of the complex carbohydrate, I had firmly believed, the enemy of all serious food lovers. A swizz, a gyp, a wicked waste of eating hours. Yet it turned out that the reason I had pillaged Woody Allen for his pretzel was because, in a bid to starve off enough pounds to slither into a Vera Wang wedding gown that Ty had chosen and for which I was already being fitted, I had resorted to the Atkins Diet. The conclusion that had been drawn was that after a couple of months of low or no carbs, something inside me had snapped, making me lunge for the forbidden snack. If it hadn’t been so sad it would have been funny. But it was sad. So sad that I started to cry and could not stop, despite my husband-to-be ineffectually patting me on the shoulder like I was some precious Burmese feline or something.
‘Please,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m having a bad day. You should go.’
I think Ty was relieved at this suggestion. He stepped back and straightened his jacket, which was crumpled, of course, it being linen and everything.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow, my dear,’ he said. ‘Try to get some rest. I’m dining at Le Bernadin with Eric tonight. He was asking after you, you know. And Mario Batali sent the most exquisite bouquet to the apartment. I had them in the jardinière Jean-Georges gave us as an engagement present. You were unconscious, my darling, there didn’t seem any point in bringing them in here. Oh, I’m meeting with your editor at the Times tomorrow — he’s insistent on an update, MC, and I didn’t think you’d want him to see you like this so I thought it best if I handled it myself. You don’t mind, do you? Anyway, I must dash. Take care and I’ll see you tomorrow.’
I found everything about him so astonishing it gave me a stomach-ache just thinking about it. He was such a name-dropper! Tom and I had always laughed at people like that. ‘Oh, Emeril this and Alain that and Jeremiah yada yada yada.’ Didn’t he know you only showed off about people like that when they weren’t your real friends? When I thought about it, though, he always was a bit of a second-hand rose, hanging around on the edges of the in-crowd. He obviously didn’t know that he would never naturally be hip, some people simply weren’t — me included. But the ones with money like Ty could at least get a foot in the door … even if it was never properly opened to them.
I was extremely tired and emotional after his visit but Signora Marinello assured me that being extremely tired and emotional was probably the best I could hope for in the next while. She said a lot of people in my position went on to be treated for depression and that I should not consider it a failing if it was felt I would benefit from antidepressants.
‘Will little white pills bring my old husband back?’ I asked her.
‘Nice bangle,’ she said instead,
checking out my wrist. ‘Mister White Pants give that to you? Good taste, Constanzia. Lucky you.’
Lucky indeed. I looked at the bracelet again but the diamonds no longer sparkled quite so glitteringly. I slipped it off my wrist, pushed it under my pillow then turned over in my bed and closed my eyes.
‘Well, hello you,’ a gentle voice roused me out of a deep dreamless sleep sometime in the early evening. As always when I woke up these days, a row of pretzels tormented me by dancing in front of my eyes until I remembered why I was where I was and blinked hard to get rid of the little bastards. Tom, my supposedly soon-to-be ex-husband, was standing in the doorway with that same uncertain look on his face that Fleur had had in the exact same spot the day before. He was holding a bunch of red gladioli, my real favourites. Tom knew me. How he knew me.
‘God, Connie,’ he said and his voice, so familiar, sent shivers up my spine. ‘Do you have to look so beautiful?’
Well, what can you say to something like that? Tom had never been one to say anything other than exactly what he felt: he was known for being overly frank, for want of a better word, and while at times that could be hurtful or annoying or, worse, embarrassing, it meant you were never in any doubt about how he felt. So I knew, then and there, that he really did think I was beautiful and I knew he always had thought that. So why the hell, I asked myself, sitting up in my hospital bed, was he schtupping my best friend and not me?
‘You think?’ I asked, then threw back the bedclothes. ‘That’s not the half of it. Turns out I’m a size six.’ I won’t say it felt entirely right exposing myself to the man who was happily ensconced with my best friend, but then it didn’t feel entirely wrong either. He would always have been the first person to whom I’d crow about waking up thin. Besides, a tiny little part of me that I was actually trying very hard to ignore was quietly pointing out that no one had actually said they were happily ensconced. Fleur hadn’t. And neither had Tom. Of course, he was only just getting started but I couldn’t have said he looked happy. He looked … like Tom. My Tom. My little buddy since I was four and my husband for the past — however many, I kept getting confused — years. He didn’t look like the father of Fleur’s baby at all.
He seemed a little stunned at the sight of my much-diminished body but I think it actually perked him up. His face relaxed and he strode over to me, bending down to kiss me on the forehead, further checking out my slim hips and runner’s legs as he did so. And why wouldn’t he? I could barely keep my eyes off them myself. There was actually a gap between the tops of my thighs. A gap. Can you believe that? Just like Elle Macpherson. I thought of all the times I had promised God that if he gave me thin thighs I would go to church/give up chocolate/join a gym, never for a moment thinking that I just might one day get my wish. And I hadn’t even had to go to church or give up chocolate; or if I had, I didn’t remember so in some respects it didn’t seem like such a high price to pay.
‘Earth to Connie,’ Tom said. ‘Hello. Anybody there?’
I snatched up the bedclothes. I would stare at my legs again later when he was gone I told myself, turning my attention back to him. He was sitting bolt upright in his chair, his face white and panicked, the flowers splayed across his legs. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by that.’
I suppose ‘Anybody there?’ was probably not the best question to ask someone barely out of a coma but he looked so darn wretched I decided not to take it further. Before I started an argument I wanted to find out why we were no longer together.
‘A fine old mess I got myself in this time, huh?’ I said, sounding far more flippant than I felt. My stomach may have been concave but there was still room in it for butterflies.
‘Fleur says you have some sort of amnesia,’ Tom said. He looked so worried. ‘That you can’t remember the past few years.’
‘Yup,’ I agreed, ignoring the involuntary clench in my internal organs at the sound of my best friend’s name. ‘Where I’m coming from I’m still happily churning out reviews for the Voice and married to you.’
We looked each other in the eye and it was a seriously weird, sad moment.
‘Tom, I know this is —’
‘Connie, you have to —’
The clumsiness was hard to handle. I mean, you’ve gathered I’m no stranger to the awkward moment but none of them, not even one up until that point, had ever been with Tom. When you’ve known each other since kindergarten, there’s not much call for awkwardness. We’d been watching each other pee for more than 30 years, for heaven’s sake.
‘You first,’ I said with forced amiability, trying to break the cycle of discomfort. ‘Go on. You have all your faculties.’
Tom shook his head. ‘This is all so, I don’t know, bizarre, Connie. I just keep trying to put myself in your situation and I can’t for the life of me even begin to imagine what you are going through but — Jesus, does that thing on your head hurt?’
‘My hair?’
‘No, babe, the scar.’
Hearing him call me babe made a lump rise up in my throat. I had forgotten what a sexy voice he had. How long had it been since he had called me babe?
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Part of me wanted to jump out of bed and fall into his arms but chances were I would trip before I got that far and end up with a whole new coma and a completely different bunch of lost memories. Instead, I abandoned any attempt at a tearful reunion or polite chitchat and cut straight to the chase. ‘What happened to us, Tom? I just don’t get it.’
‘Jesus, Connie.’ At that moment Tom looked older than his 36 years. His skin was lined around eyes that were droopy with weariness: whether from being up all night with an 11-month-old or finding out his wife couldn’t remember leaving him I didn’t know, but either way he wore his troubles on his face for all to see.
Still, my blood pumped warmly around my body at the sight of him. Not quite as warmly as it did when a certain neurosurgeon/ gondolier was in the room but it pumped all the same. Put it this way, I certainly did not feel like I wasn’t married to him. Not at all.
He was reading my face as much as I was reading his, his eyes flitting from one to the other of mine. Did he think I looked older than 36? Did he like my new body, my new hair? Did he still think I was cute like I thought he was? Had I known how lucky I was to have him when I had him? It was hard to imagine how we had gotten there, to that point, staring at each other across a sterile hospital room wondering what we liked about each other and what we didn’t, wondering why we weren’t married any more.
‘What happened?’ I asked him again. ‘Tell me, Tom, please. I know it must be hard for you, seriously I do, but I’m in the dark here. It’s like I’ve woken up a whole new person and I don’t know what the old person did but from what I’ve heard, I can’t say I like the sound of her. But I still need to know what happened and you can tell me, so please, please, please do.’
He hesitated for a moment, but I knew he would do what I asked. We were old, trusted, tried and true friends, no matter what.
‘Ty Wheatley,’ he said flatly, ‘that’s what happened.’
Well, that much I knew. ‘But how?’ I asked. ‘I hardly know the guy and suddenly we’re engaged? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t sound like me, Tom. And on top of everything you know how I feel about crumpled linen. Jeez, like who can afford the dry-cleaning? How could someone like Ty Wheatley have happened to us?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he answered showing some signs of irritability that I suppose were not exactly unwarranted. ‘It’s your story. I wasn’t there, you know, as events unfolded.’
‘Yeah, well I’m a little hazy on the details too, what with the whole pretzel thing,’ I shot back, feeling fairly irritable myself. ‘So as far as I’m concerned I wasn’t there either.’ I checked myself, though, because Tom was still my best chance of gathering the details of how my life had gone off the rails so I couldn’t afford to alienate him. ‘Come on,’ I pleaded again. ‘Help me out here.’
/> He softened. ‘All I know is that one minute you’re walking through the Village talking to me on your cell-phone and the next you’re cutting me off to take a call from someone else. Then I’m at Kennedy Airport waiting for you and finally, arrivederci, I’m in Venice on my own.’
I saw myself again on Bleecker Street, the beautiful brisk morning after the lobster tails at Gotham, my coat pulled close, tears in my eyes, Ty Wheatley on the cell-phone, the smell of vanilla frosting thick in the air. I checked myself. I was confused again. Things weren’t connecting. Ty Wheatley on the phone? I felt something horribly like guilt curdling inside me. But why would I feel guilt? What had I done?
‘Dinner.’ My Pucci-clad mushroom-seller interrupted us with a plate of something that looked like an old sneaker boiled in slimy green pond scum. Pieces of corn and carrot slid across the top in a slick of something oily and the plate was stone cold. The whole thing looked repulsive.
‘No thank you.’ I pushed it away, although frankly flushing it down the toilet would have been doing the poor sucker in the next room a favour, if that was where it was headed.
‘Suit yourself,’ Mrs Pucci said. ‘Like I care.’
‘You were much better as a mushroom-seller,’ I told her as she left the room.
‘Ain’t we all,’ she answered as she disappeared out of sight.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tom suggested and his face brightened, making him look more like the old (younger) him that I remembered. ‘Why don’t I ring the restaurant — they won’t be busy yet. Want me to order for you? They can deliver before the rush.’
What a husband, I thought to myself. What a perfect husband.
‘Bring me the mozzarella di bufala,’ Tom instructed whoever answered the phone at work, ‘and the insalata di noci with extra gorgonzola.’
My eyes glazed over at the thought of that sharp, creamy cheese with caramelised walnuts and pear. Something soft, something crisp, something crunchy. I could hardly wait.
Eating With the Angels Page 16
