Eating With the Angels

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘Why in the world do you want to marry me?’ I just out and asked him as he shuffled around on the porch trying to avoid the last watery rays of sumptuous evening sun.

  ‘My darling, we are perfect for each other,’ he said, getting a spotty handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his brow. ‘We belong together, you know that. We like all the same things, we like all the same people, we share all the same dreams and goals.’ He was sweating on his upper lip and looked supremely uncomfortable. ‘I just want things to be the way they were, MC. As before. When I knew what you wanted.’ He started as a bug flew past and flapped his hand wildly around in front of his face. ‘We talked about growing old together and having our “own” table at Daniel and vacationing in Paris, eating at l’Arpège and going to Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo.’

  ‘We did?’ I was genuinely surprised. He couldn’t eat wheat, shellfish, dairy products or nuts.

  ‘We did, my darling. We talked about the books you were going to write about cheese and French bread and champagne. About the Times, about publishing tie-ins, about our future together in New York.’

  ‘I just don’t remember,’ I said, more to myself than him as the doorbell rang again. My head was itchy underneath my turban so I pulled it off, revealing my purple ends to the world and to Ty, whose eyes nearly popped out of his head. He staggered to the porch chair and sat down, fanning himself. It didn’t matter now if Marco saw my purple hair, I supposed, because I was hardly going to be able to sneak off and make mad passionate love to him when my pesky betrothed was right there in the house.

  Through the glass slider I could see Luca open the door and act kind of stand-offish with his son, which surprised me a little, standoffish not being a trait I associated with him. But it turned out it wasn’t Marco at the door at all.

  It was my husband.

  ‘Tom!’ He was holding a big wicker hamper, which Luca, with something of a wry smile, took off his hands. I thought seriously for a moment of pushing Ty over the porch railing onto the lawn below but instead leaped through the doorway into the living room and threw myself into my former loved one’s arms, swinging him around so he was facing the other way.

  ‘Babe, what happened to your hair? It’s … well, it’s just not you.’ He took me in his arms nonetheless and pulled me so close to him I could feel how pleased he was to see me, if you know what I mean. ‘God, you smell good.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him. ‘Where’s Fleur?’

  ‘At home. Listen, babe, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Is there somewhere private we can go?’

  I was flummoxed, to say the least, but Luca came to the rescue.

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said referring, I hoped, to the small matter of my fiancé on the porch and his accomplice in the kitchen. ‘You might like to show Tom upstairs.’

  I grabbed my husband by the hand and pulled him up toward my room. ‘Back in a minute,’ I said gratefully to Luca. It was terrible what I was doing to his house, turning it into a receptacle for men I was no longer interested in but engaged to, or interested in but no longer married to, or interested in and just plain hoping I might get to sleep with. I trusted he would understand.

  Still, I was having a hard time maintaining my composure. ‘Tom, what’s going on?’ I asked flopping onto my bed. He sat down awkwardly beside me.

  ‘You said you missed me. You said you wished I was here.’

  It was true, I had said those things and I’d meant them at the time because I was sad about being engaged to Ty. But that was yesterday.

  ‘I’ve left Fleur,’ Tom said. ‘My life’s a mess without you, Connie. I want you back.’

  My mind turned to gumbo.

  ‘You’ve left Fleur?’ I was appalled. ‘And Agnes?’ Even more appalled. ‘For me?’ A flutter of hope. A wave of pity. Some nausea just for good measure. ‘Tom, that’s crazy!’

  ‘No, Connie, it’s not. Can’t you see?’ He turned to me on the bed and his dear handsome face was twisted in anguish. ‘I don’t belong with them, I belong with you. We never should have split up. I never should have stayed in Venice without you. I should have turned right around and come straight back to New York and fought for you with everything I had. We know each other so well, babe, we’re soul mates, we belong together. I can’t think of anything but you. It’s driving me crazy. I want things to be the way they were, Connie. Just me and you, the brunette you. I don’t care if you can’t taste anything. I don’t care that you don’t work at the New York Times any more. I can take care of you properly now. We belong together, babe, you know we do.’

  He was the second person to tell me we belonged together in less than half an hour. Yet had he ever said it to me before? Had Ty? I struggled to understand what belonging together really meant; what would make me belong to someone and not someone else, but I couldn’t make sense of it.

  ‘Tom, what about Fleur and the baby?’

  ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Connie. I’ve been thinking about nothing else since you were in the hospital. I was wrong to let you go and I was wrong to start seeing Fleur but I can fix it all now. Fleur will be fine, she’s strong, babe, stronger than you or me, for that matter. It’ll be tough to begin with but I’ll look after her and Agnes, you know, financially. The important thing is to set things right.’

  Ty showing up had thrown me for a loop but having Tom sitting on my bed declaring undying love for me was proving almost too much to process. I thought of the way I hankered for him when I came out of my coma, but I hadn’t known then about Fleur and the baby. Could I break up a family, my best friend’s family, to get back the man I once loved and still possibly did? Did I want a man who would do that?

  It didn’t feel right but I didn’t know what to do about it. ‘Well, what was in the hamper?’ I asked him, by way of a diversion.

  ‘I’m going to make you your favourite meal,’ he said with that loose smile that brought back so many happy memories. ‘Stuffed zucchini blossoms, melanzane parmigiana, sugar-snap risotto, baked orata, chocolate zabaglioni. What, you don’t like that any more?’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to believe this,’ I said and a nasty little rumble reverberated in my stomach, ‘but it’s maybe going to get a little crowded in the kitchen here tonight.’ I tried to make light of the situation. ‘You’re not the only one who has turned up with cooking knives, Tom. This is kind of awkward but …’

  He looked perplexed.

  ‘Ty is here,’ I said brightly. ‘He arrived just before you did.’

  Tom started nodding and saying, ‘yip, yip, yip,’ under his breath like he was agreeing with a whole bunch of stuff although under the circumstances I thought that was probably unlikely and besides, I wasn’t actually saying anything.

  ‘So, so, so,’ he said, and his lips were white as he chewed at them with his teeth. ‘What’s he here for? Ty. What’s he here for?’ He was angry, a sort of suppressed anger that added a certain resonance to the nasty feeling in my gut.

  ‘Well, whether I like it or not I am still engaged to the guy, Tom,’ I said gently, ‘and he came to surprise me with a romantic dinner. Although of course he doesn’t cook for himself so he brought Monsieur DuCroix to do it for him.’

  ‘DuCroix? From Le Petit Cochon? That cocksucker. To cook for you? That little French faggot, what the fuck would he know?’

  Actually, now he was annoying me. Sure, it wasn’t an ideal situation, him leaving his wife, my best friend, and their baby for me, who was engaged to a man who had turned up with one of the city’s best French chefs to talk about our wedding. But it wasn’t ideal for me either, and you didn’t see me tearing my hair out over it and Lord knew I had more of an excuse to be doing that than he did.

  ‘What’s Monsieur DuCroix ever done to you?’ I asked Tom, who was pacing around the attic room rubbing at his chin.

  ‘Just fuelled the city’s obsession with the fucking French. Jesus, how many French people are there living in
New York, anyway? Hardly more than a handful and yet it’s foie gras this and Ducasse that and Bouley blah blah blah. It makes me fucking sick.’

  It was a song he’d been singing since way back when and I’d thought it was pretty stupid then too. What did it matter if New Yorkers liked French food? Who cared?

  ‘You know, it doesn’t mean nobody likes Italian, Tom,’ I said to placate him. ‘But maybe we could talk about this another time.’

  ‘Fucking A,’ Tom agreed. ‘How about now we talk about you not marrying Ty. The guy’s a fucking dumb-ass, you know that, I know that, everyone knows that.’

  ‘I’m not going to marry him,’ I said. ‘And I probably would have told him that by now if you hadn’t appeared out of nowhere and gate-crashed my romantic surprise.’

  ‘So, give him his fucking marching orders,’ Tom demanded. ‘Tell him to take his puffed up little frog and get lost.’ Talk about irritating! He was so freakin’ overbearing. If I was going to call off my wedding I would do it for my reasons, not just because my estranged husband told me to.

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ I said and I felt prickly in a way that was horribly familiar. Then the doorbell rang again. This time I knew it must be Marco — I wasn’t engaged to or estranged from anyone else — and my stomach gave a little flip. ‘I’ll just go and get that,’ I said, relieved to escape the tension. I slipped out of the room and down the stairs where Luca had opened the door and was welcoming his son.

  ‘So, I guessed it must be you,’ Marco said when he saw me standing goofily at the foot of the stairs, suddenly shy in his presence. ‘Though I was expecting a blonde.’

  He was wearing a white T-shirt, dark blue jeans and boat shoes, and had a caramel-coloured jacket slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Guessed it must be her what?’ Luca wanted to know.

  ‘Staying with you,’ Marco said, coming over and giving me a kiss on the cheek, a squeeze on my upper arm lasting just a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary.

  ‘Who the fuck is this?’ Tom demanded, clomping down the stairs just at the moment I was looking longingly into Marco’s eyes.

  ‘This is my son Marc,’ Luca said politely. ‘He’s just joined the queue.’

  ‘The queue?’ Marco looked around and took in M. DuCroix in the kitchen, Ty sweating nervously on the porch and Tom looming above me on the staircase. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘This is my ex-husband Tom,’ I said by way of introduction. ‘And that’s my fiancé, Ty. And this is his chef, M. DuCroix, who’s going to be cooking for us tonight.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ Tom said, pushing me out of the way and marching into the kitchen where he picked disdainfully at the Frenchman’s mise-en-place: poking at the truffles, mocking the frogs’ legs, turning his nose up at the bottles of Bordeaux. M. DuCroix called something vaguely hysterical in French to Ty, who came in from the porch, shook hands with Marco, saw Tom in the kitchen, and went right back out to the porch again.

  I half expected Buster Keaton to start opening and closing doors. It was farcical, to say the least. I looked pleadingly at Luca, who was really my only ally, but he merely shot me a wicked grin, shrugged his shoulders and offered his son a beer.

  ‘No thanks,’ Marco said coldly. And then he turned to me. ‘It’s you I came to see.’

  Naturally, I blushed like an idiot and became transfixed with his belt buckle.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Luca said evenly and melted away, leaving just Marco and me in the living room with only the sounds of M. DuCroix and Tom arguing in the kitchen and Ty babbling into his cell-phone on the porch.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Marco said. Like a lamb to the slaughter I followed him blindly out the door, down the driveway, across the road, and onto the smooth pebbles of the beach.

  ‘You came here for me and you weren’t even sure it was me?’ I asked him as we walked along the shoreline.

  He nodded, smiling at me. Those teeth. Those lips. That dimple.

  ‘You’ve made quite an impact on me, Connie,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to get to know you better.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I laughed, mirthlessly. This was like a dream. My dream. The handsome gondolier turning his attentions on the unlikely damsel with the purple hair.

  ‘In fact, I have dinner reservations tonight at the Frisky Oyster in Greenport,’ he said. ‘For the two of us. They don’t usually take late reservations — you have to book a month in advance — but I managed to talk the maître d’ around. It’s the hottest ticket on the North Fork: you know, it’s like Babbo in the country.’

  ‘You booked a table for the two of us?’ I asked him, trying to keep the incredulity out of my voice. ‘Like, on a date?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘Like that.’

  I wanted to stop right there and have sex with him on the beach, I really did. Never mind going to the Frisky Oyster, I was the frisky oyster. And he didn’t need to feed me, to spend money on me, to impress me with his power over a hot-ticket maître d’. He’d already done enough just by coming all that way to see me. I just felt so pathetically grateful that someone like Marco, someone drop-dead gorgeous, someone even Fleur, my former, current, and soon to be former again if Tom had anything to do with it, best friend would consider too good for a mere mortal, had shone his light in my direction. Things like that didn’t just happen to me.

  ‘You don’t mind my hair?’ I asked Marco, flicking at the ends of my purple bob.

  ‘Well, you must have a hat,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘As long as it’s okay with your dad.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with my dad,’ Marco said, impatiently kicking at the pebble.

  ‘You don’t want to see him, to visit with him a while?’

  ‘Constanzia,’ he said in a dark oily voice full of the promise of sweat and aching thighs, ‘I told you, it’s you I came to see.’

  He pulled me to him then, right up close, and I could feel how pleased he was to see me as well. But instead of politely moving my hips away as I had done with Tom, I pressed myself right into Marco and wriggled. I felt a hot rush scream through me from my toes to the top of my head and an embarrassing groan escaped my lips. A groan that made it clear I had not been in such close proximity to a hot-blooded male in quite some time.

  But the groan did not last long. Marco silenced me by holding one of his glorious fingers up against my lips while his other hand, firm against the small of my back, pulled me closer still. He stroked my cheek, pushed a purple tendril behind my ear. He was just so goddamn gorgeous to look at I almost had to turn my head. But his eyes, so full of darkness and desire were mesmerising, drawing me in.

  ‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Please.’ But I didn’t know what I was begging for. I just knew that whatever I had right at that moment wasn’t enough. He was overwhelming me, I didn’t know how to handle it. He shimmied me up the beach, thigh against thigh, away from the water, and slowly, gently, lowered me to the ground, between two dinghies upturned beneath a willow tree. Eyes still on mine, he slid one of his knees between my legs where I was sure he could feel the throbbing, then came down to join me. I barely had a chance to remember I was seven years older than him.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said to me, just a whisper away from my mouth, before moving his lips down to my neck, murmuring into my skin and taking me places I hadn’t been in quite a while. ‘You’re so beautiful, Connie,’ he crooned, ‘I want to take you right here on the beach. I want you so badly. I want all of it, baby.’

  I felt a little squeamish at the talk, I admit, I was never much of a one for the running commentary, but I wasn’t in it for what Marco was saying to me. I was in it for what he was doing to me. My brain could turn off, poor beleaguered thing, and let my body do all the work.

  ‘You are just incredible.’ My eyes were closed as he whispered in my ear, every breath lighting torches throughout my nervous system. ‘Amazing. You are — Jesus fucking Christ!’ The change in temp
o was frightening. Marco was suddenly bucking on top of me like a wounded steer. ‘What the fuck is that?’ he shrieked, writhing around, bruising me significantly in the process. ‘Get it off! For fuck’s sake, get it off!’

  He flipped off of me and jumped to his feet, leaving me spreadeagled on the sand — but at least I could see what the problem was.

  Gertrude.

  The little she-devil had jumped on Marco’s back and was clinging there like a rucksack, her claws attached to his skin through the cotton of his expensive T-shirt.

  Flustered, I scrambled to my feet and tried to pluck the wretched cat off but she just dug her claws in, leaving Marco screaming in pain.

  ‘That old bastard,’ he roared. ‘That fucking old bastard.’

  ‘It’s Gertrude,’ I told him, leaping around and trying uselessly to relieve him of her. ‘The cat.’

  He finally reached one long arm over the opposite shoulder, grabbed the cat around the neck, sustaining several bites in the process I might add, and with one mighty wrench pulled her off his back and flung her across the pebbles into the long grass where she hit the ground with a bloodcurdling yowl.

  I know it must have hurt, having her cling to his skin and all, but frankly I thought it was a little uncalled for. I scurried over to where she was lying, relieved to see her shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what had just happened.

  ‘It’s okay, girl,’ I said soothingly, giving her a pat.

  ‘That fucking cat,’ Marco spat. ‘I bet he taught her to do that.’