Eating With the Angels

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘I’ll have the gnocchi di patate al tegamino and use the primo basil from my private supply,’ Tom was saying, ‘and throw in the galletto al mattone as well, not too heavy on the mushroom sauce either, Paolo, I saw how you were plating up last night, don’t drown the poor bird. Bring some spinach focaccia as well, and make it snappy, huh, I’m dealing with a very hungry woman here.’

  He looked so loose and happy talking about food, my Tom. So at peace with the world and himself. So … unfamiliar to me when it boiled down to it. Had I not been able to make him loose and happy when we were together? Had he not been at peace with me?

  ‘Keep going,’ I said when he turned back to me. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘It was the day we were going to go to Venice,’ he said, ‘you know, to try to start afresh. We got into a fight in the morning. About butter. God, Connie, this is such ancient history … are you sure we have to go over it again?’

  ‘It’s not ancient history to me,’ I said. ‘Please, Tom. Keep going.’

  ‘We had a fight — you really don’t remember? You stormed out, said you were going for a walk.’

  I did vaguely remember us shouting at each other over the breakfast dishes although it could have been a generic memory, I couldn’t pinpoint the specifics. And I had been known to walk off a head of steam in my time.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And so I turn up at the airport at four in the afternoon like we planned and fly off on our second honeymoon alone while you stay in New York, move out of our apartment and start your new job as the queen of dining and wining.’

  This just sounded so unlike me I still could not believe it. I was just not the fail-to-turn-up-on-your-second-honeymoon type. Even in my dreams, my subconscious, I was the one who turned up, the one who did what was expected, who obeyed the rules … for a while, you know, in the case of Venice, until I decided to do unto someone else what was not being done unto me. And on my second honeymoon, when you really should expect things to be done unto you. Big-time.

  ‘You’re sure nothing else happened to me?’ I asked Tom, determined to find an explanation for my out-of-character behaviour. ‘I wasn’t mugged or kidnapped or drugged or brainwashed or something? It just doesn’t seem like me, Tom. You have to admit it. Maybe I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ His face had hardened and I decided to steer clear of any suggestion that Ty Wheatley had kidnapped me in case there was incontrovertible proof otherwise.

  ‘So you stayed in Venice. Without me.’ All the same, I thought it might not hurt to try pointing the finger back at Tom a little.

  ‘It was some second honeymoon, let me tell you,’ he said in a surprisingly genial fashion. ‘The food was crap but the markets were okay. Of course, I pretty much only left my room to buy vodka.’

  Was this really happening? My life was getting more and more peculiar as the minutes ticked by.

  ‘And Fleur?’ Tom looked uncomfortable again and took off his jacket. He was wearing a cool striped shirt with floral collar and cuffs and he looked good. Very good. Delectable even. Like the Tom I had married. Better, possibly.

  ‘Christ, Connie, the way things have turned out I feel so bad, you know, I feel like a real fucking shit but you have to remember that you left me. It wasn’t the other way around. You left me.’

  I did have to remember that. But it wasn’t easy. ‘But didn’t you try to get me back? Didn’t you try to talk some sense into me? Didn’t you fight for me?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? You dump me from a great height for that, that fucking faggot without so much as a moment’s notice and I am supposed to kill myself to get you back? I don’t think so, Connie. I’ve got my pride. I mean, fuck that.’

  I had hurt him, horribly, that much was plain. He was still so angry.

  ‘You just take up with Old Money Bags and start your new life like you never even had an old one. Shit, Connie. Forget it. Then I bump into Fleur one night and we end up having a few drinks and talking about stuff, and you know …’

  ‘… one thing led to another. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve read the book, I’ve seen the movie.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, babe.’ The anger whooshed out of him.

  ‘What was it like, then?’

  ‘It was like I didn’t know you any more, Connie, that’s what it was like, but I knew her. She was still the same old Fleur I had always known. And she took me under her wing and bolstered me.’

  ‘And I didn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know that you are the bolstering type, babe.’

  He was right. I needed bolstering myself, more likely. But had Tom bolstered me? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that my heart was breaking all over again and there was no surgeon in the world that could put that back together.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, tears I did not want to shed suddenly leaking out of me. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish I could turn back the clock and try harder, Tom. I don’t want to be with Ty Wheatley. I don’t even know him. I’m just so scared of what’s going to happen. I want to go back to the way things were.’

  Poor Tom, he looked as unhappy as I felt and next thing I knew he was sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking me slowly, just like he always had when I’d been hurt or upset. I felt so safe there, wrapped up in his arms, his warmth, his concern, that it took me quite a while to notice that he didn’t smell like himself. He didn’t smell of anything.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re not using sage any more,’ I said, pulling back from him to reach for the Kleenex.

  ‘Too much, according to you,’ he answered and there was an edge to his voice. ‘Oh yeah, you’ve probably forgotten,’ — he was rueful rather than mean, but still nowhere near as warm as he had been before — ‘Pippo passed away not long after you and I broke up and he left me the restaurant. Yeah,’ he said, smiling with his mouth if not his eyes at my reaction. ‘Pretty cool, huh? I mean it broke my heart to lose him but to get my own restaurant, well. So, anyways, I relaunched it — man, I can’t believe I am having to tell you this — as Tom’s and …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you reviewed it and gave it one star.’

  One star?

  The nicest way to kill a restaurant. The kiss of death. A no-star restaurant people would go to just to see how awful it was, a two-star restaurant they would go to because they knew it would be good value for money, a three-star restaurant they would go to because they couldn’t afford a four-star restaurant, and a four-star restaurant they would save up for so they could stick it to their friends who hadn’t been there yet.

  A one-star restaurant they would most likely ignore.

  ‘Wow. Fleur told me I was a bitch,’ I said sorrowfully, ‘but I’d hoped she was exaggerating.’ I waited for Tom to argue but he didn’t. How it must have hurt to have the woman who had been by his side half his life deal such a horrible blow at such a crucial time. I hated me. I was a bitch. ‘So what happened to Tom’s?’ I asked in a small voice.

  ‘I closed it and turned it back into Il Secondo,’ Tom replied. ‘Then I got a guest spot on the Food Network and actually things kind of looked up from there. Don’t worry, Connie, you didn’t kill me. Just knocked me out cold for a while.’ He looked shamefaced when he realised what he’d said but I just laughed and said: ‘Hello. Anybody there?’

  The truth was I was so relieved that I hadn’t killed him that I nearly kissed him. And the other truth was that I had been thinking about kissing him for a while. The only thing that stopped me was that it would have meant betraying Fleur, cheating with her partner, and I didn’t think I could do that, even though as far as I was concerned she had done it to me, but then I probably wasn’t a good person to judge.

  At that moment, a delivery boy bounced in the door bearing a steaming brown paper sack from Il Secondo.

  ‘Thank you Lord!’ I crowed, grateful that the dangerous moment had passed. ‘Finally, something’s going my way.’

  But as Tom started t
o unload the food onto the tray in front of me, and I felt the warmth of the hot dishes — the spicy potato dumplings and the piping-hot Cornish game hen — on my chin, my cheeks, my eyes, as the steam rose from the food, it struck me that something was missing.

  The gnocchi was made with Tom’s peppery basil, I knew that, I’d heard him ask for it and the sauce was a spicy veal ragout, Pippo’s secret recipe, surely Tom wouldn’t have changed it, it was sensational. And the way he had always cooked game hen was to marinate it in rosemary and garlic. He loved the pungent aromas of those Italian herbs as did I. But there was not a trace of any of them in the air of my hospital room. I could feel the steam from the food on my skin, in my nostrils even, yet where I expected to find the scintillating smells of rosemary and basil there was nothing.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Tom was setting my meal up, tucking a napkin into the front of my hospital gown and organising the dishes in front of me.

  ‘You changed Pippo’s gnocchi sauce?’ I asked him, my head spinning a little. ‘You don’t use garlic in the chicken any more?’

  ‘What, are you crazy?’ He sniffed the air. ‘You can’t smell it?’

  I sniffed the air myself. Again, nothing. My hand shook slightly, fear nibbling at me, as I speared a dumpling, piled it high with the veal ragout and took a bite. The gnocchi was silky as I pushed it across the roof of my mouth. I felt strings of mozzarella sticking to my top teeth and rolled them away with my tongue, catching every morsel of milk-fed veal in its slow cooked tomato sauce as it swirled around inside my cheeks.

  Oh, I could feel that delectable mouthful of Il Secondo’s signature dish, all right. I could feel it just fine. Better than the next person even.

  I just couldn’t taste it.

  I could not taste a thing.

  Eleven

  So, turns out those thin thighs hadn’t come cheap after all. I had paid a far higher price than joining a gym or spending hours on my knees at Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering. I had paid the highest price imaginable: my taste. I would have given anything else, anything but that. Truly, the memory loss was nothing in comparison. I’d been getting used to it, whatever it was and whatever caused it, because while it might have been weird and surreal and deeply frustrating, it wasn’t an arm or a leg. It was just two years and nine months of my life. And there were people who could help me plug that hole.

  But my taste! That was a different matter. If I didn’t have my taste I had nothing. I was nobody. Even the old Connie, the pre-New York Times version, relied on her taste for her job, her enjoyment, her reason for freakin’ living. Without it I could just not see the sense in having survived the coma. I mean what was the point? It seemed cruel beyond belief. I was bereft. I screamed and howled and cried and not even the sight of the gap between my thighs could distract me. I would have had my fat squashy joined-up ones back in a heartbeat if it meant I could savour sweet and sour and salty again. I prayed to fall back into a coma and die. I pleaded for Signora Marinello to inject me with something lethal. I was wretched beyond comprehension. Wretched.

  ‘I can see why you might be upset,’ admitted Marco two days later when he finally came to see me. I was so distressed I barely stopped to notice how hot he was. Barely. Little morsels of desire still managed to infiltrate the terror that ravaged me, but this only added to my generally anguished state.

  ‘Loss of these senses is not entirely uncommon after a head trauma,’ he told me, ‘but I’m intrigued because usually it’s when there is some damage to the cribriform plate, which in your situation is not the case, and even then it is rare for there to be no sense of taste at all. Are you positive about that? That there is no taste?’

  Was I positive? What a question. It wasn’t like taste was a small matter to me, it was a big matter. The biggest. Did Marco really think I would not fully explore the extent of my loss? He could be a real jerk sometimes that guy, morsels of desire or not. Of course I was positive, and I wasn’t relying on hospital slop to test out my taste buds either. No, after finding myself unable to taste Il Secondo’s finest, I had sent Tom to Gray’s Papaya for a hotdog with extra mustard then to Delmonico’s for take-out lobster Newburg. I’d despatched Fleur to Guss’s Pickles for a selection of the house favourites, to the pushcart on 54th Street for Rolf’s famous bratwurst and Berliner sausage combo and had even begged my mom to go to Two Little Red Hens for a slice of the city’s best New York cheesecake — the ultimate in the battle between sweet and tart — but it was useless. All of it, useless. I could tell hot and cold, crunchy and smooth, soft and hard, fresh and stale, but I could not smell or taste a thing. I knew what the food should taste like, there was nothing wrong with that part of my memory, but it simply did not register when I sampled it.

  ‘As I say, there has been no injury to the face, the nose,’ Marco said. He put one hand on my jaw and one on my forehead, which normally would have driven me wild but I was too busy hyperventilating with fear for my future to appreciate his touch. ‘However, I have seen far milder injuries even than yours where there has been some damage to the neural pathways, which has led to malfunctioning of the olfactory bulb.’

  ‘Speak English,’ I snapped. ‘These are my taste buds we’re talking about.’

  ‘No, they’re not actually,’ he said and I saw that coldness in him again, that thread of steel that on occasion rendered him strangely inhuman. ‘There is nothing wrong with your taste buds. It is a nerve issue. And in time, the damaged nerves may repair themselves and your ability to smell and taste may return.’

  ‘May repair themselves? You mean they may not? Can’t you operate? There must be something you can do. I can’t go through life not tasting anything. I may as well just …’ I tried to think of what I may as well just do. Lie around listening to Courtney Love and smoking pot all day like my brother? It was unbearable.

  ‘There is no treatment for ageusia or dysgeusia,’ Marco said, ‘which are the technical names for what you are suffering, and that is surgical or otherwise. I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with it.’

  ‘You can’t just leave it at that,’ I cried. ‘This is my taste we are talking about. It’s how I make a living.’ A good one too, probably, if I was working for the New York Times. ‘It’s all I have.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to get something else,’ Marco said, and he turned on his heel and left the room.

  I was devastated. Totally devastated. And there was no one there to share my devastation. I was totally alone. Had never felt more alone in my old life or this torturous new one. I turned over and reached for the bag of grapes Ty had brought me from the Whole Food Market, pulling off a luscious, fat, nearly black one from the top of the bunch and popping it in my mouth.

  I bit into it and felt the tight skin pop open, the soft pulp squirting inside my mouth, but there was no tartness on my tongue, no sweet after-bite. There was nothing.

  Oh, the despair.

  I know what you are probably thinking about now. You are thinking, boy, is this depressing, and it started out such fun. And what’s more, it was about to get worse.

  ‘Darling,’ Ty Wheatley said after planting one of his dry little kisses on my eyebrow the next day. ‘Wonderful news. I’m allowed to take you home.’

  Home? I had been so busy panicking over my inability to taste anything that it had not occurred to me to think about going home. Home was the last thing on my mind. Signora Marinello had followed Ty into my room and was eyeing me nervously as he spoke, which in turn made me jumpy. Why would Signora Marinello be nervous about Ty taking me home?

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said. Had it occurred to me to think about going home, I might have pondered the question of where home actually was. I had assumed it would be with Tom; but Tom’s home was with Fleur now, Fleur and Agnes, not me. I obviously lived somewhere else. ‘You mean you’re going to take me to your place?’ I asked Ty.

  ‘Our place,’ he corrected me. ‘Our home. And Cayenne and Jalapeno are very excited.’

  �
��Cayenne and Jalapeno?’ We had excited peppers?

  ‘The cats, darling. Cay-Cay and Happy. They can’t wait. They’re scratching the armoire in excitement as we speak. They can just tell something is happening. It’s hilarious.’

  Oh brother.

  He had a different cream linen suit on, I noticed, but it was still crinkled and he was wearing a loathsome bow tie too, blue with little red elephants on it. Worse still, when he sat down in the visitor’s chair, his pants rode up and I saw he was wearing matching blue socks that also sported little red elephants. I was shocked. Beyond belief. You can see what I mean about things getting worse.

  Actually, when I say I was shocked, I’m not joking. And I don’t mean I was surprised, I mean I was stunned. Dazed. Confused. Such a state was I in, in fact, that almost before I knew what was happening I was being bundled up in readiness to be returned to our apartment on the Upper East Side: 63rd and Park, the home of MC Conlan, Ty Wheatley and their two adorable little Kitty McKittingtons (I kid you not), Cay-Cay and Happy.

  Ty simply packed up what belongings I seemed to have, handed me a hideous greige outfit he’d brought from ‘home’ — the sort of thing Paris would wear but not look like a dead person in — then ordered a car (he drove everywhere in a Lincoln, just like my grandmother) to be waiting outside in half an hour.

  I remember standing in my little bathroom at the hospital, staring at myself in the unflatteringly lit mirror. Ty had brought in ‘my’ enormous make-up bag and it was bulging with mysterious lotions and potions that I hardly even recognised. I had been a moisturiser-only girl in my old life, a bit of lipstick and mascara and a dab of blusher if I was going out but on the whole I preferred the minimalist approach. MC, though, had a massive collection of concealers, foundations, powders, eye shadows, lip-liners, glosses and cellulite creams, for heaven’s sake. I might not have had a whole brain but I still knew that even if I had cellulite no cream was going to get rid of it. Oh, what had become of me?