Eating With the Angels, Page 4

  For a moment the world stopped spinning.

  Lust, the Jackie Collins sort, completely overpowered me.

  It was the most sensual experience I have ever had. And I know what you’re thinking: on her honeymoon? But it was only a second honeymoon with the same husband, remember, not very meaningful at all when you think about it. Especially, you know, in the circumstances.

  Anyway, so there he was, smiling and raising an eyebrow. It was a moment to die for. My mouth was hanging open in awe though and I hadn’t had the presence of mind to shut it, so it was probably not quite so sensual an experience for him. I just kept staring, slack-jawed, as he laughed and slid further away from me. I drank in the breadth of his shoulders as they twisted with his oar, the swivel of his hips as he danced gracefully back and forth on those long, lean legs. Then without so much as a backward glance he turned off the Grand Canal and disappeared into Venice’s vast watery network, leaving me panting in a way most inappropriate for an until-very-recently happily (yes, well …) married woman. Luckily my water taxi pulled up outside the Hotel Gritti Palace, where a smiling doorman reached for my hand and pulled me onto the pier.

  Thoughts of the delectable gondolier evaporated as I took in my home for the next week. The Gritti Palace had none of the Moorish extravagance of some of its neighbours but was one of the best-known hotels in the city. I had chosen it because it was a favourite of Ernest Hemingway and because I’d heard of someone who’d stayed there during the famous Venice acque alta when the waiters had worn waders and carried people to their tables through the flooded restaurant. Naturally that kind of dedication to the experience of eating appealed to me.

  My room was perfect. Truly. It was painted a perfect green, not a shade I had cared too much for until then. It was the colour of a pistachio, real pistachio (my second favourite nut after the macadamia) not the colour called ‘pistachio’ that shows up in the windows of chainstore clothing shops dumping end-of-season lime-green pants.

  With its smoky gilt mirror, ornate gold-leaf bed-head, glass lanterns and luscious brocade drapes and wall hangings, it was a room made for honeymooners. I looked around, expecting this thought to bring with it a tug of misery, a burr of terror, but none came. I didn’t want to be there in that beautiful room without Tom; of course I didn’t. It was far from what I had imagined. But on the other hand it wasn’t all wretched. This unnerved me. It wasn’t right. I stood in the silence of the beautiful room and tried hard not to think of those bronzed arms stretching and bending in the fading sunlight outside. What the hell was the matter with me? I should have been vomiting with grief and crying till my ears bled at the way things had turned out, not feeling vaguely pleased at having immediately found someone new to ogle. The silence grew suffocating so I squared my shoulders and threw open the picture-postcard window, letting Venice in. It was like being hit in the face by the smell of onions caramelising, the promise of things to come, and it distracted me. A peal of laughter floated up from the terrace below, accompanied by the faint clink of glasses and the tinkle of cutlery. I propped myself up on the sill and drank in the view. Across the canal to my left the dazzling dome of the Santa Maria della Salute was now standing in shadow, the pinks and purples of the city and sea dulled to a hundred muted greys. To the right, I could see the sculptures in the canal-side terrace of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Below me a vaporetto chugged along the canal, its wake sending water to slap at the sunken hotel walls. Someone shouted, a throaty roar bounced back, more clinks and tinkles, water lap, lap, lapping. I was starting to feel very odd. The city seemed to be disappearing and appearing again in waves of misty pastels like a dream. My eyes were suddenly desperate to close, my mind was calling out for darkness, and it occurred to me I was exhausted. Being left by my husband might not have been what I was expecting but it was hard work all the same. Leaving the window open, I climbed into the great big bed, my eyes lingering on the telephone. I should call Tom, I thought. Of course I should. Instead, lulled by the sounds of my Venetian fantasy, I slept.

  Sometime in the night I woke up, confused by where I was and without whom. I dragged myself out of bed and over to the open window again, my eyes travelling across the terracotta tiles of the hotel roof and down to the Grand Canal. It was almost silent now; the city was asleep. But in the darkness I could sense something out there, something to do with me. It seems crazy, I know, but haven’t you ever had the sensation someone was watching you? Weariness clouded my vision as I peered into the blackness. I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear something — a watery something, an oar perhaps, moving in the murky waters of the midnight canal? Yes, there was a boat, moving so slowly it was almost stopped. I could almost make out its shape, an inky grin, opposite the hotel entrance on the far side of the canal. I squinted and peered further out the window but it was pitch-black and my eyes didn’t seem to be adjusting. All the same, I thought I could identify a figure, and I thought the figure was not altogether unfamiliar. The breadth of those shoulders, the width of those hips. I shook my head. Impossible! What would a man with whom I had only exchanged one look (albeit a humdinger) be doing outside my hotel in the middle of the night? Either I was losing my mind or it was an extraordinary coincidence or a total outrage. I pondered this, my heart hammering, breath held tight in my lungs. My mind did not feel lost, I didn’t believe in coincidences and, to my shame, the thought of a total outrage held a certain allure. Enormously. In places separated from my husband for less than two days.

  I stepped away from the window — I was giving myself the creeps — and started unwrapping the chocolate from Tom’s side of the bed. Well, if he was going to desert me there would be a price to pay. It was dark chocolate, which I love, with little chips of crunchy cocoa bean all through it. Tom was not a chocolate fan. He liked custards and sponges and all things creamy. I looked at the phone. What would he be doing now, whatever time it was in New York? And never mind ringing him, why hadn’t he rung me? He knew where I was. On our second honeymoon. In this beautiful room with its big puffy bed and pistachio walls. I lay on the bed and picked up the phone but I couldn’t work out what the time difference was, digits bounced around meaninglessly in front of my eyes and I had trouble recalling our home phone number. Well, we never were the sort of couple to ring each other all the time. We never rang each other at all. But you would think I could have concentrated on remembering the number, not found my mind straying, no matter how I tried to steer it in a different direction, toward that black slice of boat and its solitary occupant slowly moving down the canal outside my window. I slipped the phone back into its cradle, shut my eyes tightly and thankfully went back to sleep.

  When I awoke again, the sun was just coming up and it was a beautiful day. I was ravenous. I called room service and ordered everything I could think of, groaning with delight when the order was delivered in a heated trolley, its tabletop set as if for visiting royalty. From a huge silver tureen I ladled out a bowlful of the most unbelievably creamy, buttery, salty, silky porridge I have ever had. It smelled divine and tasted heavenly although I thought I could detect a funny aftertaste, a sort of bitter sweetness, a bit like cough syrup. I chased the porridge down with fresh melon and a selection of pastries that I just could not leave alone. The coffee sucked, but then I had high standards on that front — it had to come from Colombia and have two shots with just a suggestion of steamed full-fat milk — but it helped get rid of the medicinal hint of sourness lurking at the back of my throat. I ate so much I had to lie down again. I can pack away a lot of food — it never fails to amaze, and sometimes frighten, people who’ve not eaten with me before. I think it’s because I’m tall with decent hips. There’s a lot of me to fill. One of the questions people most often ask about being a restaurant critic is if you ever get sick of food; I think the fact that my answer was always no was why I was not bad at my job. Even then, lying on my bed at the Hotel Gritti, my stomach swollen with carbohydrates and animal fats, I was thinking about lunch and where
I might have it and what it might be and what Tom would or wouldn’t like about it. But then I decided I would not let myself think about Tom and made a point of lying on his side of the bed, which up until that point had remained smooth and empty.

  Trying as I was not to think about him and all, it took me a while to realise that I missed his smell. He always smelled so good, Tom. And it’s not like he wore an aftershave: he had no time for that sort of thing. But he had a sort of sweet, base man smell, mixed with a bit of garlic and the faint suggestion of sage, one of his favourite herbs, and that kitchen sweat that most people found disgusting but I found delectable. The thought of it propelled me to reach for the phone again and without thinking about it too much, I dialled our home number.

  ‘Hello,’ Tom said, sleepily, when he picked up. ‘Hello?’

  So, he was there. I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. He was not dying of a ruptured scrotum or dead in a ditch. He was lying in bed. Alone. In New York.

  ‘Hello?’ he said again, sounding more awake, sounding angry. ‘Who is it? Jesus Christ, did you hear me? I said who is this?’

  Who do you think it is, I silently screamed at him. It’s your wife, you freakin’ asshole. The one you didn’t come on vacation with. I’m lying in bed. Alone. In Venice.

  I was so taken aback I hung up. I know! I hate it too when people do that in movies but in that split second I just could not for the life of me think of anything better to do. I lay there, my heart palpitating for a few minutes, wondering if my breakfast had digested. If he didn’t give a fat rat’s ass about me, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose another moment worrying about him. Now that I knew he was alive and well, as I had suspected, and not just doing it in some place else, doing it in the same old place, I was going to get on with having the time of my life. I leaped up, pulled on jeans, a tank top and my most sensible shoes, which weren’t really that sensible, and headed out into the still empty alleys of Venice.

  The nerve! The cheek! The … How could he possibly — I mean how dare he? Actually, I was at a loss to articulate my anger at what my husband could or couldn’t do or had or hadn’t done. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I’m telling it as I saw it. I was furious with him, of course I was — not to mention hurt and confused and anxious about the future — but the fury felt sort of one dimensional or fake or something. Inside me lurked a suspicion that I knew more than I was letting on but how could I? I couldn’t work out what scratched at my innards, so instead, I walked. I would go to the famous Rialto food market, I decided, the pounding of my feet on the cobbled pavements calming my inner turmoil.

  Venice is the perfect city for walking, almost as good as New York, and I was a big walker then as I am now. I had learned long ago that if you had breakfast too early in the day you could squeeze an extra meal in somewhere along the line and this must at all costs be avoided. Like I say, I can eat a lot, definitely more than average, but I still can’t eat as much as I want to. Not without relying entirely on elasticised waistbands and comfort gussets anyway. When I first hooked up with Tom in high school and we started to eat our way around Manhattan, my butt pretty much ballooned to very non-Cindy Crawford proportions and I found myself veering towards stretch fabrics in dark colours on discount clothing racks.

  Those last extra pounds, I eventually admitted, were doing me no favours and I had to lose them, but how? Eating less was out of the question. It was a hobby. So I knew I had to introduce some form of exercise. I had the hand-eye coordination of a snake so that counted out most sports. I sprained my ankle the first time I tried aerobics (and that was just walking up the stairs to the gym) so that wasn’t an option. I hated running because, well, only thin pert people with shiny ponytails ran, so that left only the preferred weight-loss method of the day, bulimia. But as someone who had spent most of her mealtimes trying hard not to barf up what had been cooked for her, I just could not contemplate barfing on purpose.

  I was lamenting this sorry state of affairs to Tom one day as we were about to get on the subway when he stopped me, plucked the token out of my hand, grabbed my arm, and pulled me back up the stairs.

  ‘Walk it off,’ he said, and from that day on I walked it off. I far preferred seeing New York from the sidewalk anyway, and most places I’ve been to since, I start off on foot. That way you get to check out the local faces before the tourist attractions plus you see who is going where to eat and what it looks like in real life, as opposed to just reading the blurb in various (usually hopelessly inaccurate) guidebooks.

  That morning — it had just gone eight — Venice took my breath away as I sloughed off all thoughts of my nebulous marital status and negotiated the narrow streets behind the hotel, hitting only a dozen or so dead ends before happening upon an arrow pointing to the Piazza di San Marco. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, on the way to the Rialto markets, but then in Venice nothing is, strictly speaking, on the way to anything else so it hardly mattered.

  I hit the square from the west side popping out into its huge expanse without realising how far I had come. The basilica rose in front of me, its domes and spires gleaming in the sunlight. It looked like something in which a crazed James Bond villain would live while plotting to take over the universe. The campanile loomed straight-forwardly next to it. The sky seemed too blue, the scene too colourful. I felt wobbly all of a sudden. Alone. Mind you, there was practically nobody in the square, which is not what I was expecting. Everything I’d heard about Venice suggested I prepare for crowds. My friend Roberta, who was a fledgling (that means unpublished) author and trust-fund kid of moderate proportions, had come back from Venice the previous summer determined to dampen my enthusiasm for the place, saying it was packed to the gills with sock-and-sandal-wearing eastern Europeans. It smelled funny, she said. It was falling down. Everything was so old. Enough with that water already. Now I’d been on vacation with Roberta before and knew that what she really liked in a holiday destination was a colourful cocktail bar with lighting so bad that she could still appeal to men 10 years her junior, so I took what she said about Venice with a grain of salt. Tom, however, was delighted to hear her trashing my dream destination. We’d fought about it afterwards I remembered, as I weaved my way through the upmarket stores to the north of San Marco. It was as though Tom resented me having my own private dreams. Had I ever told him this? Had I even realised it? I tried to remember the details of the argument over Venice but they were hazy; I couldn’t recall the outcome. Well, actually, I supposed this was the outcome.

  My attention was grabbed at that moment by some extremely good ‘Louis Vuitton’ bags set up on the steps right outside the real Louis Vuitton shop.

  ‘You like? You buy?’ the treacle-coloured man selling them asked me.

  I was tempted. I opened my mouth to start bargaining, something I could only bring myself to do over handbags and shoes, but suddenly I felt ashamed of myself. Hadn’t I just been contemplating the breakdown of my marriage? What kind of a woman, a wife, could be so easily distracted? By fake pocketbooks?

  I was still beating myself up about this when I arrived at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. I had seen it so many times, in magazines, books, films, on ancient oils and water colours in countless art galleries, and here it was, just the way it had looked hundreds of years ago, steps up and over either side and market stalls in the middle. I felt a lump in my throat, a soupçon of loneliness. I wanted to turn to someone and slap at them and say, ‘Wow!’ in the way that used to annoy Tom so much but there was no one. Well, there were lots of people but no one I felt I could slap.

  But hey, it was a beautiful sunny day and I was in Venice. On the Rialto Bridge no less, within spitting distance of the markets I had been dying to see for so long — so screw having no one to slap, screw being dumped, screw everything but the moment. I threw my hair over my shoulders, held my head high and marched over the bridge, looking up the bustling canal as barges delivered growers’ produce to the markets and restaurateurs loaded u
p for another day of business.

  I heard the market before I saw it: raucous voices raised as prices were broadcast in strenuous Italian. ‘Radicchio due e cinquanta, cavolo uno cinquanta al kilo, carciofi soltanto un euro al kilo.’

  The only Italian I knew, I’d learned at the hand of Pippo Marzano so I was pretty good on fruit and vegetables, passable on meat and fish, and excellent on modest swearwords. My heart started to beat quicker in my chest as I got closer. I just love a good food market. You could find me at Union Square first thing most market days, picking over the Hudson Valley kale, pouncing on the wild arugula, sniffing at the pineapple sage, fondling the Keith’s Farm garlic. Actually, Tom and I usually went there together. He came alive at the market too. This bit of Venice he would have loved.

  I stepped off the bridge and headed for the red awnings of the historic market stalls, middle-aged Italian men pushing me out of their way. This was a place of business, I could feel them grumbling, not a circus. ‘Maledetti turisti,’ I thought I heard one mumble, which I think means ‘bloody tourists’ to you and me. Suddenly I regretted my jeans and tank and pale pink Gucci loafers. I looked like a tourist and I didn’t want to; I wanted to wrap a scarf around my head and put on sloppy pants and clogs and shop like a chef.

  The first thing I saw, of course, was a stack of soft orange zucchini blossoms, poking hopefully out from their crates as though there was any chance in the world they weren’t going to be stuffed with something deliriously creamy and deep-fried. ‘Five euro a kilo for porcini,’ the mushroom-seller barked at me in Italian. I moved closer to the zucchini blossoms. They were a perfect colour, buttery and plump and moist: not at all wilted. But as I contemplated them — the flower of the vegetable that nearly ruined my wedding — the strangest thing, the first in a series of strange things, happened.