Eating With the Angels (9 page)

‘Of course. And then?’

Well, I did not want to answer that question. I blushed thinking of what Marco and I had done in that plump cloud of a bed at the Hotel Gritti and skipped straight to the next meal.

‘And then we went to Alla Madonna and had hard-shelled clams and sausages with bean stew and green beans cooked with peas and —’

‘Chocolate torte,’ Luca finished for me. ‘The Madonna’s chocolate torte. So good just one mouthful is enough, huh?’

I nodded.

‘You are a woman who loves to eat,’ Luca said softly. Marco had said the same thing but without such tenderness. Tenderness. The
word bounced around in my head like a dry bean in an empty can bringing a lump to my throat. Why would the simple words of a kindly stranger make me feel like a dried-up little flower getting its first drop of rain after a long hard drought?

I nodded again and Luca moved his chair over to me, put one taut arm around my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. ‘You love to eat but nothing tastes right,’ he whispered, leaning into me, his lips so close to my ear I could feel his words as well as hear them. I kept nodding, tears splashing down my face onto hands that lay uselessly in my lap. What was happening to me? How did he know that?

‘You love to eat but nothing tastes the way it should. Nothing explodes on your tongue. Nothing dances in your mouth.’

I was sobbing now, big-time, that great big ball of grief I didn’t know I had trying to dynamite its way out of me.

‘Oh, Connie,’ sighed Luca and my name had never sounded so soft, so much like me. ‘I know what you need,’ I heard him say. ‘And you’re not going to find it in any trattoria or four-star restaurant or on a fancy white plate with a dozen different flavours. I’ve got what you want. Trust me. I’ve got it right here and it is so simple, Connie. So perfect. And when you taste it, everything will be all right again. Trust me. Everything will be all right.’

I turned my body toward him, lifted my face and looked straight into those green eyes, which were so clear and so true I felt I could dive into them. I believed that he knew what I wanted. That he could be trusted. That he could make everything all right. It was truly the weirdest thing. My thirst was gone, the throbbing in my temples had subsided to a distant roll of thunder instead of a deafening roar, I felt a calm the likes of which was totally unfamiliar to me descend around me, wrap me in its arms. Then Luca lifted his hand to my face and stroked my cheek so gently it was like a butterfly kiss, tracing the line of my jaw, running his fingers softly up the other side of my face, then tucking my hair behind my ear. His fingers stopped on my neck, his thumb on my cheek, his eyes on mine. It was a moment of such
intimacy words are barely adequate to describe it. In that split second I felt that I knew Luca like I knew no one else in the world and that he knew me, that we were somehow entwined at some deep unconscious level that until then I hadn’t known anything about. Yes, I know it sounds all crystal-gazing and kooky and he was old and I didn’t feel well but I’m just trying to explain what that moment was like, trying to give you an idea of the wonder of it, the magic, the way I just sank into it, closing my eyes and letting my mind explode with possibilities. None of which included opening them again to find Marco standing there staring at us with a look as sour as vinegar — for which, let’s face it, he could really not be blamed.

‘Eerggh,’ I said, pulling myself away from Luca’s touch, nearly falling off my chair in the process. Its legs scraped cruelly along the concrete and my butt caught the edge of the seat, sending a shooting pain up my spine.

‘I see you’ve met someone else, Constanzia,’ Marco said. ‘Although perhaps “met” isn’t quite the right word.’

‘Plagh, plagh.’ My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth again. My head was spinning. I felt so hot I thought I would explode. The magic was gone. My back was killing me.

‘So has he been giving you the old sob story about no one wanting to build gondolas any more? About the end of the era?’ His voice was snide and cold. He meant to be cruel but I looked at Luca and could see that he was not hurt, not defiant, not embarrassed, just full of that same disenchantment I had seen in him earlier.

‘I think I —’ I didn’t know what I thought. I was dizzy and hot and my back hurt, my chest hurt.

‘Marco,’ Luca said softly. ‘What do you want with her? Leave her alone.’

There was a loud buzzing in my ears. I wasn’t hearing properly.

‘What do you know?’ Marco asked, his voice so full of rage that even in my feverish state it was easy to recognise. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘I don’t need to know anything, Marco. That’s the difference between you and me.’ Luca’s voice was calm and smooth. He shared none of Marco’s ire.

‘Oh, here we go,’ my gondolier spat. ‘Let me guess — the
love-or
-money speech? Well you can fuck off because I have heard it all before and it still sounds like bullshit to me.’

I felt so weak I could barely keep my eyes open, yet my heart was hammering in my chest. What the hell were they talking about?

‘Do the right thing, Marco,’ Luca said softly. ‘Please. Do the right thing.’

‘I can’t,’ I interrupted them, even though the words didn’t sound quite right. ‘It doesn’t.’

‘Just look at her,’ Luca said with that extraordinary tenderness. ‘Have you ever stopped to think about her? Who she is? If she’s ever been truly loved? Who out there she might mean the world to?’

His words broke my heart. Just broke it. They really did. Because I didn’t know the answers to his questions myself. I didn’t know if I had ever been truly loved, if there was anyone out there to whom I meant the world. And it was too tragic to contemplate.

‘You don’t know shit, Dad,’ Marco said.

‘I know you like playing God, son,’ Luca replied levelly. ‘But you’re not.’

The realisation descended on me like a Roadrunner one-ton brick. Dad? Son? What the heck was going on? I had slept with Marco, was obsessed with Marco, but had just shared something unbelievably intimate with his
father
? I wasn’t sure how bad a sin that added up to but I was certain I would rot in hell for it, my mother would make sure of it. I would burn in the flames of eternity. I would roast, I would cook, I would char. I was already so hot I thought I knew what it felt like.

‘You’re a stupid old man, stuck in the past, refusing to move forward with the times,’ Marco spat.

‘I’m 51, you little shit,’ Luca replied calmly. ‘And I choose to
stick with what I believe in, which is what your grandfather and your great-grandfather before you believed in. It took a while for me to work it out, so you should learn from my mistakes. There are two types of people in this town, Marco, in this world. There are the ones who do it for love and the ones who do it for money.’

‘Oh,’ Marco snarled, ‘here we go. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re doing
her
for love?’

Luca jumped to his feet. I could tell that he was not a violent man but that he wanted to give Marco — his son! — a decent pop. I knew I should stand up and get between them, that it was somehow my fault and I should stop whatever was happening. But my bones were so heavy, my body would not obey instruction. Luca stood, the veins bulging in his arms, his fists clenched at his sides, energy radiating from him. He was not as tall as Marco but there were similarities, I should have seen them earlier.

‘I say,’ I heard a familiar voice. ‘What on earth is going on here?’ It was Ty Wheatley again. He’d appeared out of nowhere and stood, hands on hips, surveying the scene. The pain in my chest was getting worse, I thought perhaps I was starting to choke, my breath was getting swallowed short of my lungs. It was terrifying.

‘You know,’ I started to say again, but I felt icy fingers around my throat, that splitting pain in my sternum, pressure from my blood to get more oxygen.

‘What’s she saying?’ I heard a voice that made my starved blood run cold. ‘Can’t you tell me what she’s saying? Did she call for her father? I think she called for her father.’

Darkness was clawing at the edge of my eyes again but I turned out to the lagoon, that big bobbly blue blanket of sea, the brilliant sunshine all but blinding me. There was no mistaking that voice. ‘What’s she saying?’ I heard it again. And unlike the discombobulated voice I had heard earlier, this one had an image to go with it.

‘I’m warning you, Mary-Constance,’ my mother was looming over me, her eyes dark and unreadable. ‘Don’t do this to me,
Mary-Constance. Oh, what am I saying? Of course she’s going to do it. She always does it.’

I looked around for Luca, I wanted to find his hand, I needed his calm and his strength, but he had disappeared into a vast whiteness that roared around me in a deafening growl.

I turned my head the other way and Signora Marinello appeared behind my mother.

‘Give her time,’ Signora Marinello said. ‘She need time.’

My mind raced, flicking back to that airplane, to Ashlee, the water-taxi driver, the mushroom-seller in the Pucci shirt, cool sexy Marco, the waitress at Bentigodi, Fleur in a gondola, Luca — the man who looked at me the first time and saw all there was to see — and Ty.

Oh my God, I thought, as I tried to breathe but no air could get in. I gasped in terror, thinking this must be what it’s like to drown, to suffocate, to die, to leave everyone behind forever.

‘Breathe,’ I heard Signora Marinello urge. ‘For goodness’ sake! Breathe, Connie, breathe.’

And with a shudder that jerked every bone in my body, I breathed.

Sound exploded in my ears, my eyes flew open. A vast bright whiteness still surrounded me, a twisted collection of shiny metal reflected painfully in my face, the hisses and whirrs of unfamiliar machines echoed around my head like white noise.

It did not seem possible. Truly. Not possible. But a terrifying comprehension ran through my blood like hot chocolate in the snow.

I was not in Venice on a failed second honeymoon.

I was not sitting in the shadows on the Giudecca being fought over by the handsome Italian I had slept with and his disenchanted father whose fingers I could still feel on my face.

I was nowhere near any of that.

I was in a hospital room. And I was not a visitor.

Well, don’t look at me — I was as surprised as you are. I mean, one minute I am having the time of my life in the most romantic city in the world and the next I am lying in a strange single bed — attached to machines, for crying out loud — my mother’s angry voice buzzing in my ears and my mind unable to capture anything more than a fragment of a thought.

‘I’m not there, am I?’ I can remember asking whoever was in the room. But my voice was like a wisp of smoke; as it spread it got thinner and thinner until it just disintegrated into nothingness.

I wasn’t alone, I knew that much, and I thought that perhaps Signora Marinello was with me, leastways I had an image — I wasn’t sure how current — of her bending over me, that huge bosom bursting out of a nurse’s uniform, her hair springing loose from its bun, a light forming a halo behind her head. An angel. But then again how could that be? Signora Marinello was baking bread and frying squid and filling old men’s glasses with pinot bianco in a back-street bar in Venice. For a split second I imagined I could smell sizzling garlic and black pepper, drank in the flavour of that nutty olive oil, tasted the dry fruity wine at the back of my throat. But then the overwhelming presence of hospital antiseptic chased away the memory of anything even slightly pleasant, leaving me gagging, choking, gasping for air.

And as for my mother, what was she doing here? What was she doing anywhere? She had been at the squero, I thought hazily, yet I was certain she had also been there in the hospital, sitting on a bed — my bed, I supposed — her lips so pursed they looked ruffled, her eyes dark and accusing.

Well, I say I was certain she had been there but I wasn’t really. I wasn’t certain of anything. I couldn’t remember, truly remember, her presence; rather I had an impression of having seen it, her sitting there, the white lights, the loud noises, everything flashing like a murder scene in
CSI
. It was as though I were watching a video of my own life with some crazy person working the remote control.

I thought fleetingly of Marco then, saw flashes of my naked rump riding him in the parked-up gondola, his hands on my rib cage, his flawless features lost in ecstasy. Then a picture of Tom flashed onto the screen of my mind, him crunching on garlic seeds free for the taking at the Greenmarket, his eyes dancing with delight, my heart bursting with the simplicity of being with him. Even in my clearly incapacitated state I felt a healthy dose of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. What the hell had gotten into me? How could I have done that to Tom? How would I ever face him? I didn’t want to. The shame made me squirm.

Then the crazy person inside my head fast-forwarded to a moving collage of Ty Wheatley and my mom and the grandfathers from the Giudecca sort of swirling around me, all melded into one and chattering at the same time, clamouring for attention. I tried to shake my head to rid myself of them — it was like being kidnapped on the inside by Casper (the friendly ghost) and his best friend Sybil (of the many personalities).

‘She need rest,’ I heard Signora Marinello say. ‘All she need now is rest.’

I clung to the word like a rat to a drainpipe. Rest sounded good. Safe. If it was dark and I was asleep then I knew where I was and what was happening. Just the possibility of that filled me with
warmth and something approaching relief. I remembered the feel of Luca’s words on my skin and I longed for the sensation that had overwhelmed me as I looked into his eyes. Longed for it. Then I thought of Tom again and my disgrace chased Luca away.

‘Ooh, look, she’s crying,’ I heard an unfamiliar voice say. She sounded sort of freaked out, whoever she was. I tried to open my eyes but realised that they were already open, I just couldn’t see properly. I didn’t remember the world changing from dark to light but it had, although the whiteness of the room had bleached out all the details. Forms moved around, exaggeratedly tall and grey and thin, like aliens in a science fiction movie.

‘Crying?’ I repeated, although I’m not sure the words came out as I meant them. I didn’t mean to be crying. I didn’t feel any tears. I reached up to wipe my cheeks but to my anguish my arms stayed flat on the bed on either side of my body, ignoring my instructions for them to move. Was I awake? My God, was I even alive?

‘Her mouth moved!’ the same freaked-out voice cried out. ‘Nurse! Nurse! Her mouth moved.’

I can’t tell you the despair I felt then. If I thought I’d ever felt it before I was wrong. I felt as insignificant as a speck of dust. I had no control over anything. I wasn’t in charge of when I slept or woke or what I heard or saw or felt or thought or anything. I just lay there — but I wasn’t even sure if I was doing that. Little snatches of sight and sound kept coming and going but I couldn’t work out how often they were occurring or how long they lasted. Sometimes I knew I was awake and could identify what was happening, sometimes I knew I was dreaming — Luca was there, talking to me in soft whispers or Tom was sweating over the grill at Il Secondo. Marco’s legs were entwined in mine, Ty was showing me his new Prada shoes. I knew that time was passing but I had no idea at what rate; it came and went in surges that seemed like seconds but could have been hours or even days. You would think I might have put two and two together and worked out there was something wrong with me but I didn’t. My
twos were all in separate rooms not even knowing about addition, let alone making fours. All I knew was that I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t move and I didn’t seem to be able to communicate with anyone. I didn’t know what was happening or what had happened or what was going to happen. I was floating on never-ending clouds, unable to put my feet on the ground, unable to fly, unable to catch anything more than a morsel of comprehension at a time.

And I was tired in a way I had never been tired before. Exhaustion pressed down on me like a slowly descending ceiling, dark and heavy, pushing me through the bed and towards the centre of the earth, deep and suffocating. No longer lured by the safety of such emptiness, I battled to stay awake, to learn more, to understand what was going on. Of course, as soon as I relaxed and let down my guard, unconsciousness seeped into my bones and claimed me; the next thing I knew I was waking up again, angry at having drifted off, desperate to know what might have happened had I been there to see it.

I don’t know how long this went on for but when I think about it now I see a sort of Morse code in my mind — smooth dashes of unconsciousness punctuated by staccato dots of being awake. Time didn’t mean what it used to: seconds and minutes and hours were like words in a foreign language, I had lost the concept. I was awake or not in no particular order and my dreams seemed more life-like than my reality. But after a while it seemed that the periods of sleep were shortening and emerging from them was less of a struggle. Descending back into sleep again was also more of a smooth transition. My Morse code had turned into a smooth regular wave pattern. Voices came and went in whole sentences. People moved around me acting out sequences I could follow. I felt things on my skin, my scalp, in my heart. I sensed change. Progress, of sorts.

And then, one instant, one point in time that I couldn’t quite pin down, that same freaked-out voice I had heard earlier interrupted a dream where I was calling for Tom, begging him to take me home, to make me potato gnocchi.

‘She’s making a noise!’ the voice squawked. ‘Nurse! She’s making a noise!’

I tested my eyes to see if they were open. They were. This was good. I had meant for them to be open and they had obliged. I had made that happen. I was definitely awake. I felt my stomach muscles unclench slightly, the panic I had grown used to subside. So, the room was still a buzzing white blur, but it was a buzzing white blur that I recognised. My surroundings were familiar. This was where I was now. I knew that. As I looked around the room I realised that the general white blur was in fact separating into different shades of grey; the edges of the darker bits were becoming sharper, the blotches taking on real shapes. I could sense a window, a stout form (Signora Marinello?) shuffling in front of it, and another trim shape, clearly feminine, much closer, unmistakably leaning in towards me.

‘Emsie,’ the feminine shape said in the freaked-out voice, very close to my ear. ‘Emsie, can you hear me?’

Jesus, I thought, whatever had happened had turned me into a whole other person. Emsie? My stomach clenched again, panic returned. How was I going to sort out that mix-up when the power of speech was beyond me? How was I going to get these strangers to know who I really was? Maybe I had amnesia. But then again I knew who I was, I was Connie Farrell, wife albeit disgruntled of Tom, daughter of Estelle and Patrick, sister of space cadet Emmet, restaurant reviewer, friend, New Yorker, human.

Tom. His face snapped into focus, clear as a bell, and for a moment I thought he was in the room with me and my heart swelled with hope. Tom would help straighten out this whole hospital mess, I thought. And then we could just get over our marital hiccup and get on with our lives and I would never go anywhere without him or sleep with drop-dead gorgeous strangers again.

‘Emsie?’ The voice said.

‘Who the hell is Emsie?’ I said. I knew I had said it yet no noise came out. I could feel my lips moving, and I was sure they were
moving the way I wanted them to, but no air blew past my vocal cords, no sound permeated the room.

The feminine shape’s face peered straight into mine and before my eyes it morphed from a fuzzy blur with dark slits for eyes and a gash of pink for a mouth into a collection of crisp lines and muted colours. The face was extremely well made-up but its features were harsh and pointy and would have been ugly on a person without such flair for self-improvement. The hair was a perfectly coiffed blonde bob, razor-sharp.

‘Emsie,’ the voice said. The face’s eyes stretched wide open and its chin got longer, like a witch. ‘You’ve come back. Nurse!’ Her head twisted around yet her hair seemed to stay looking straight at me, like a helmet. ‘She’s back!’

I closed my eyes and drifted away again. I wasn’t ready to take up the challenge of not being Emsie. Just thinking about that creature’s hair had plum tuckered me out. But at some level I knew there was cause for celebration. I had woken up, opened my eyes, known where I was, and understood what was happening. That was the way things should be. A layer of fear was removed and discarded. It felt good.

When I opened my eyes again, it was Signora Marinello’s kind round face — no nasty angles there — peering into mine.

‘Constanzia,’ she said and I tell you, I was so thrilled not to be Emsie I would have wept had I been able to work out how to.

‘Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello repeated gently, speaking slowly, watching my eyes follow her lips. ‘You are in the hospital. You hurt your head. You been in a coma, Constanzia. Understand?’

I let her words sink right into me. I knew by the look in her eyes they were significant but the meaning of them at that time escaped me, rolled off me like water off an oil patch.

‘You hurt your head.’

I rolled this sentence over in my mind. Someone had hurt their head. Okay, I had that. I knew what that meant. It was bad.

‘You been in a coma.’

A coma. I thought of Karen Ann Quinlan, the only person I could think of attached to the word. She had died, hadn’t she? After years of being curled up and unconscious? So this person with the hurt head had been in a coma. I guessed that was pretty bad too.

‘Understand?’

I knew for a fact I did not understand. I couldn’t work out how this information she was imparting was connected to me. My eyes remained fixed on her face, searching her benevolent expression for clues.

‘You have two surgeries on your brain,’ she said. ‘You lucky to be alive.’

‘You have two surgeries on your brain.’

Something about that notion gripped my heart with an icy cold claw and squeezed it. I could hear it beating in my ears, felt the hot flush of shock in my cheeks. ‘You have two surgeries on your brain. You hurt your head. You been in a coma. You have two surgeries on your brain.’ Her words were hurling themselves at me like a battering ram.

‘You lucky to be alive.’

‘You.’

Oh my God. She was talking about
me
.

I had hurt my head? I had been in a coma? I was lucky to be alive?

She saw the panic in my eyes, the horror of comprehension, and her face crumpled like cocoa-coloured satin.

‘Is all right,’ she hushed me. ‘Ssshhhh.’

Of course when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. There was something wrong with my
brain
. That was why I couldn’t think straight, why I couldn’t tell real from imagined or now from then. But what did it mean? How long would I be like this? How long would it last, this awful cloudy soup in my head? How long would I be trapped inside this foreign personality? Questions jangled inside
me, fighting for attention, leaving me struggling to separate one from the other.

‘But where are we?’ I eventually managed, although again my lips formed only useless soundless words, puffing vacant queries into the room. Signora Marinello placed a cool hand on my cheek and the comfort was such I had to use all my willpower to resist the urge to drift off to never land again. I was hanging on to a thread of understanding, within reach of getting somewhere, of making the missing connection.

‘No talking, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello said soothingly. ‘We put tracheotomy in your throat, help you breathe. Hook you up to ventilating machine.’

I was suddenly aware of the suck and hiss of a mechanical lung reverberating somewhere behind me. I lifted an arm and, to my great joy, it didn’t stay lying flaccidly on the bed at my side, it did what I told it to. I brought my hand to my throat where my fingers clumsily butted into a cold hard plastic pipe sticking out of my skin. My eyes widened. This was serious stuff. I had pipes sticking out of me. I had a machine doing my breathing.

‘Okay, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello told me, calming my panic. ‘It come out soon. Only helping you a little bit now. You get better. Need rest.’ Her fingers stroked my cheek and although my heart was bursting with uncertainty, I just soaked up her touch and slithered off into the murky dark whirlpool my mind had become.