He paused as though waiting for someone to back this up but everyone was too busy staring at him in adoration, even someone with a recent head injury could spot that. And who wouldn’t adore him? My Marco! Those lips! Those hips!
‘Nurse tells me there seems to be some sort of retrograde amnesia or dissociative memory loss,’ Marco said in his smooth hypnotic voice. ‘This is not my field, Connie, I’m your surgeon. I’ll consult with my colleagues but as your post-operative scans are clear, there’s nothing to suggest that you should be at all alarmed. It is very common with — Connie? Nurse, is she listening to me?’
I was transfixed by the squareness of his jaw, the depth of his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders. He was just too drop-dead gorgeous to be a doctor, he should have been an actor playing a doctor, you know, in a daytime soap like Joey in Friends but taller and thinner and with better hair.
‘It’s just so weird to see you here,’ I said.
Marco took no notice. ‘It’s very common with head-injury patients to have no recollection of the accident in which the injury occurred,’ he told me in a clinical voice as though nothing had ever happened between us, as though I were just anyone. It was chilling. Of course, when I thought about it, I’d seen a glimpse of Marco’s coldness (even if I hadn’t recognised it as such) when he had talked to me about his cut-price Swiss gondolas. I’d been irked by his lack of idealism. He was a fairytale hero but seemed to lack the necessary romanticism. Mind you, at the time I had considered he had enough of everything else to make up for it. I possibly still did.
‘Connie?’ He barked my name with a briskness that stank of having too much of his valuable time taken up. I nodded, feebly, deeply apologetic, and willed myself to pay better attention. ‘It is very common to have no recollection of your accident,’ he said again but with less patience. ‘The brain is an extremely complicated organ with its own way of protecting your consciousness from any undue pain or stress. It had already been through considerable trauma when you presented. You had the subdural haematoma on your right temporal lobe but were lucky to escape what’s known as a contrecoup injury at the back of your head on the opposite side. This is where the brain moves vigorously around inside the static box of your skull after the impact.’ He made a gesticulation representing my brain moving vigorously around inside the static box of my skull. ‘Obviously, that would have complicated your recovery but I am sure Nurse has been through all this with you so if there are any questions …’
I could not believe he was just standing there looking at me with nothing in his eyes but a detached sort of professional interest. Was he afraid to show affection in front of my mother? Ashamed at what Signora Marinello might think of him after he left me alone in Venice? But then I remembered with a flush of embarrassment that Venice had been a long time ago, that my mother said I had never even been there; and anyway, how could Marco be both my thigh-throbbing gondolier and my brain surgeon? I groaned. What was real?
‘Is there pain?’ Marco asked, coming close to inspect my stapled scar. ‘There shouldn’t be pain. What meds do you have her on?’ He checked my chart and then leaned forward to closer inspect my wound. He did not smell like the Marco I knew, the man whose salty skin sang with an intoxicating mixture of vanilla and freshly ground black pepper. This Marco had no smell at all. I sucked up another groan as he stepped back, attempting a sympathetic look.
‘Tell me what you remember,’ he said, employing a gentler tone.
I looked at Signora Marinello for help but she just smiled encouragingly and nodded at me. My mother was silently tsk-tsking in the background. It was a non-noise I had long ago learned to ignore.
‘I remember,’ I started, ‘but then …’ I fizzled out.
‘Yes,’ Marco prompted, those eyes drawing me in. Was it a game? Did he want me to tell them?
‘I’m sure of it, you know, it’s just that …’ But I wasn’t sure. Far from it. I knew what that man tasted like, for God’s sake, yet he was a stranger to me. A total stranger.
As if to prove just that, Marco forced a tight smile, blew air out of his nose, and looked at his expensive watch, the sort of thing a real asshole would do. It was clear to me then that I was inconveniencing him and he gave a short throaty ahem no doubt intended to hurry me up.
‘I do remember,’ I said quickly, miffed but all the same not wanting him to give up on me and leave. ‘I remember you. The gondola, the cichetti, Do’ Mori. You said you were going to take care of me.’
Marco raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, his tongue pressed against the back of his top front teeth. It was the sign of someone who had no time for this sort of crap.
‘I did take care of you,’ he said crisply. ‘Now if you could just tell me what you remember of the accident, Connie. There are other people in this hospital, in this ward, much worse off than you who also need my help.’
My heart broke but whether it was a fresh break or it had already been broken, I couldn’t tell. And hindsight still does not help me there. I had been a moron (oops, shouldn’t use that one either) to think I was the only one for Marco, in the real world or the imagined one.
‘I remember being in Venice, at the squero,’ I answered haltingly, breathing in unshed tears and attempting to separate this cold efficient version of my gondolier from the warm magnetic one in my memory. ‘And all of a sudden my mom was there and then I was here. In the hospital.’
‘You don’t remember running in Central Park?’ Marco prompted. ‘You were running in Central Park when you fell and hit your head by the restaurant on the lake, the Boat House. Isn’t that the story, Nurse?’
Signora Marinello nodded in agreement but I was stunned. I didn’t run. I never ran. I hated running. I didn’t have the ponytail or the breasts for it. I was a walker. But those bony thighs, that tight little butt that lay underneath me — how could I explain them? If I didn’t know better, which in fact I didn’t, I would have to admit that I had indeed woken up with the body of a runner.
‘You must remember Woody Allen,’ my mom piped up from the background. ‘You bled all over Woody Allen. He had caramel-coloured corduroy trousers on and you held up his film. Winona Ryder had to stay in her trailer — you know, the one that stole all the clothes. The shoplifter. It cost him $10,000.’
I closed my eyes and willed the world to go away — it was too hard to be awake in — but the world would not obey my wishes. I opened my eyes and it was still there.
‘Connie?’ Marco’s voice was exasperated again. ‘Do you remember being in Central Park?’
I felt wheels and cogs shifting slowly, rumbling loudly in my head. Of course I remembered being in Central Park. I had grown up in a grungy tenement just a few blocks to the east of it, after all, it was practically my back yard. But when I tried to conjure up my most recent memory, there was a cloudiness that I was having trouble sifting through. I saw myself walking, my coat pulled tight across my chest, my body leaning into the wind. But it was my old body, the spongy one I knew, not the tight one I had woken up with. And I wasn’t in the park, I was striding past the Magnolia Bakery. My, how I loved those cupcakes.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure about anything. I remember walking but not running and that was the old me not this one. You weren’t in Venice?’ I just couldn’t believe I had dreamed it. ‘At the Rialto?’ I knew details of this man’s anatomy that I just didn’t have the experience to conjure up unaided. I had felt him and smelled him and tasted him and a host of other heavenly morsels. I could not have made it all up. I could not have. ‘It all seems so real.’
Marco turned to Signora Marinello, his luscious eyebrows raised. ‘I think we need a neuro-psychological consult on this one, Nurse, it’s out of my hands now. The wound is healing satisfactorily and the CT scans show that the swelling is no longer a risk to her health so I think it’s appropriate that I leave her to you.’
With that he turned on his heels and left the room.
All eyes wat
ched his delectable back as it disappeared. Even my mom had a sort of hungry look she didn’t normally possess. Not for long though.
‘Really, Mary-Constance, you couldn’t have made more of an effort?’ she admonished me before the sound of his feet had even faded away. ‘He saves your life and all you can do is babble on about who knows what and ask him stupid question after stupid question. What will he think? What do they say about manners, Mrs Marinado? Do they say when you come back mean you leave your manners behind as well?’
‘Time for Connie to have some rest now, Mrs Conlan,’ my nurse said. ‘Remember what I tell you about her brain. Needs quiet.’
I felt the dry chafe of my mother’s lips on my cheek and the loneliness of my predicament suddenly overwhelmed me. ‘Mom, can you get Tom to come in?’ I pleaded, grasping at her arm and pulling her back to me. ‘I need him here. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m scared.’
My betrayal of my husband, if indeed it existed, itched at my insides but I still needed him there with me, despite what I had or hadn’t done, what he had or hadn’t done, to navigate me through the awful fog in my head. My mother resisted my pull, straightening up and stepping away from me.
Paris chose that moment to stride into my room on ridiculously high heels, looking positively airbrushed and brandishing a Kate Spade paper shopping bag. ‘Darling!’ she cried, ‘C’est ici!’
I burst into tears. ‘Please go away,’ I sobbed, my chest heaving with despair. ‘I want Tom. And Fleur. Where’s Fleur? I need Fleur. Mom, will you tell her? Please, please, please.’
‘Well, I doubt whether she —’ my mother started in on me.
‘Really, there’s no need to —’ Paris spoke over the top of her.
‘QUIET!’ Signora Marinello roared with admirable authority. ‘Everybody out of this room right now. Leave Constanzia alone. She need REST. She need QUIET.’
‘Her name is Mary-Constance,’ my mother chipped in as she was herded from the room.
‘Although her fans know her as Emsie,’ Paris retorted.
This last comment lingered in the room after Paris had vacated it. Mary-Constance. Emsie. MC. The penny dropped. Paris was calling me MC. I felt ridiculously relieved. This skinny person with a new name quaking here inside me, unable to stop crying, a large chunk of her life disappeared into thin air, was really me. I was the right person! But I had preferred the name Connie for as long as I could remember so it was a mystery to me why I would have changed that. Only my mother called me Mary-Constance and I had never cared for it.
At that point in my recovery, by the way, I should mention that I was no longer entirely bedridden. You could be forgiven for thinking that I had been lying in bed all that time moving nothing but my tear ducts, my mouth and on a couple of occasions my hands but this is purely because, in the interests of a good story, I have chosen to leave out the details of my physical recovery. It mostly involves tubes and excretions that are frankly best not talked about.
In a nutshell, by the time I knew what was happening to me, by the stage I am telling you about now, my body had already been rehabilitated to an acceptable level. I no longer required a catheter nor round-the-clock intravenous support and monitoring. I needed assistance to get into a wheelchair and go to the bathroom but this was really a precaution, as I was pretty steady on my feet (despite the fact that my legs seemed barely big enough to hold the rest of me up). And I had suffered no injury but the one to my head, which apparently left me streets ahead of other inhabitants of Neurological Intensive Care, most of whom had been in car wrecks and were badly banged up. I was, indeed, one of the lucky ones.
Of course, I didn’t feel lucky. Quite the opposite. I was terrified by the notions that time had been lost and what I thought true had been imagined. What could I trust? To whom could I turn? Marco, my lover, appeared not to know me from Adam and my husband, according to my mother, was no longer my husband — I knew it was a bad sign that he had not been there already, that his name had not been mentioned. But how I yearned for him. Truly, madly, deeply, desperately yearned for him.
I slept after Paris and my mom left. It had been a huge day. When I woke up, it was Friday. I felt calmer. Signora Marinello was still there, shuffling around the room, waiting for me to wake.
‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ I asked her. ‘You’re always here.’
She laughed. ‘I work 12-hour shift,’ she said, ‘but you don’t know how much you sleep at night when I’m at home. Maybe 15 hours!’
‘I was in Venice, with Marco,’ I told her, desperate to sift something sensible out of the muddle in my mind. ‘I know I was. There are things I know about him, Signora. Things that I am sure I didn’t dream. Private things. You know. Very private.’
Her smile was so kind, I felt better for having it pointed in my direction.
‘Constanzia,’ she murmured. ‘You must understand …’
And there it was, all of a sudden: proof!
‘Constanzia!’ I said. ‘You see! He called me Constanzia. He gave me an Italian name.’
But Signora Marinello simply nodded. ‘We give all patients Italian names,’ she said. ‘Is a hangover from another doctor who used to work here. Was his little joke.’
‘But how would I know he called me Constanzia?’ The fog in my head had lifted enough for me to know this was important. I clung to it as if to a bright light at the end of a long dark tunnel but Signora Marinello just nodded expectantly again.
‘No matter how much we know about the brain,’ she said, ‘is still only tiny little piece of what there is to know. And you think there is a lot to learn about her when she is awake? Well, try her when she is asleep. Even more! No one really knows what happens in a coma.’ Her voice was conspiratorially low, as though she were telling me secrets she didn’t want real brain experts to hear. ‘But your ears? They the last thing to go to sleep, Constanzia. This we do know. I say just because your brain is asleep doesn’t mean your ears aren’t listening. I never tell you anything when you sleeping that I don’t want you to hear if you are awake. Dr Scarpa, now, he chit and chat and call you Constanzia. Tell you he’s going to take care of you. Maybe your ears take this to your brain and mix it with morphine and other sleeping drugs until you have a little cocktail of real things and dream things going on. You know those first few of days after your surgery we wake you up to see how you responding, then put you back to sleep again. No one knows what goes on in there during this time.’ She put her cool hand on my forehead again. ‘Not even you.’
I turned this over. She made it all sound plausible enough, she really did, yet I had tasted things in Venice that were as real as anything I had ever tasted anywhere else. I thought of the stuffed sardines at Bentigodi, sitting succulently in front of me, that heavenly stuffing of breadcrumbs, pine nuts and parsley bursting to get out.
‘But how would I know what Marco looks like?’ I asked her. ‘And you? How would I know that?’ I remembered her so clearly, leaning over the counter at Do’ Mori, her smooth voice telling me that I was going to be fine, that I was going to be better than I was before.
‘Constanzia, how long you been awake?’ she asked quietly.
‘Three days,’ I said, although I thought it might have been four.
‘Three weeks,’ she corrected me. ‘You been awake more than three weeks. But those first days you don’t remember. You see me and Dr Scarpa plenty before you know that’s what you are doing. This is a strange time for you, Constanzia, I know this. But you going to be fine. Will not always be like this. Will be better. Easier. You one of the lucky ones.’
That old chestnut. If I was that lucky, surely I would have skipped the whole blow-to-the-head coma thing and just gone on to be a supermodel. Signora Marinello sensed my scepticism.
‘Besides,’ she said casually, ‘you not the first person to wake up thinking you seen more of Dr Scarpa than you should have.’
‘I’m not?’
‘No!’ She was quite sure o
f it. ‘It happen all the time. But you don’t have to be in a coma to dream of that one, either. He’s a nice-looking man, no?’ She shook her head. ‘I think half the nurses in this place are dreaming of him as well as the patients, although if you ask me he’s —’ she thought better of what she had been about to say. ‘Never mind. Some people just like that, just made to dream about.’
‘Well, I dreamed of you too, Signora. Has anyone done that before?’
‘I don’t think it happens so often, my love,’ she answered, ‘so thank you. I always say you are a nice girl.’
I slept on and off for most of the day, waking in the afternoon as the door quietly opened. There was Fleur, my real best friend; not looking perfectly put together like Paris but radiantly beautiful, just the way a best friend of mine should look. Actually, she seemed different, quite different, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I reminded myself that of course she would have changed — it was nearly three years since I could remember seeing her. The night before I was to fly to Italy we had gone out, just the two of us, so we could discuss my plan of action for the second honeymoon. Fleur had always had excellent advice on underwear — it was she who had gotten me into a thong — and actually, when I came to think of it, the whole second honeymoon thing had been her idea in the first place. I’d always confided my woes to Fleur. She was the best listener and despite her ingrained natural flirtation skills, at heart she could be relied on to be a girl’s girl, a true friend, a best friend.
She shot me a hesitant smile from the door and I beckoned for her to come closer. I wondered if she had known that I was thin and blonde or if that was a surprise to her as well. I could not get past that, I really couldn’t.
‘Fleur,’ I said. ‘Thank God you’re here.’
‘Oh, Connie,’ she cried and flew towards me, flinging herself on the bed and enveloping me in her arms. ‘I’m so sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry.’ We wept together then, the way old friends do, loudly and gushingly, until the tears slowed and turned to embarrassed laughter and finally dried on our cheeks.
Eating With the Angels Page 13