Eating With the Angels (6 page)

‘You should try our
spaghetti con le seppie nere,
’ she said earnestly, her brown eyes boring into mine, her grip getting firmer. ‘It’s the best this side of the Rialto.’

I nodded, dumbly, my insides lurching. I was battling the oddest compulsion to tell her my whole life story. It was insane.

‘I have a husband,’ I could not keep myself from blurting out. ‘But he didn’t come with me. I mean, he was supposed to …’ but Signora Marinello was already shaking her head.

‘Don’t worry about nothing, Constanzia,’ she said in her loud, comforting voice. ‘Just let Marco take care of you.’

At this, Marco appeared at my side again. ‘Have you had enough?’ he asked.

Seriously, I could have listened to his voice all day. It purred without trace of an accent, his English faultless, the muscles in his jaw grinding beneath his tanned cheeks. Actually, I hadn’t had enough, we’d tasted a lot of things, but they were all snack-sized. There was room for more. Yet that same tinny flavour I’d tasted after my breakfast porridge was batting at my taste buds again, throwing what should have been the aftershocks of Do’ Mori’s enchanting
treats out of kilter. I shrugged in a non-committal fashion and smiled at him.

‘Okay,’ Marco said briskly. ‘Let’s go.’

I waved goodbye to Signora Marinello, fending off an absurd desire to take her with me, but she merely waved fondly back and turned to the thirsty septuagenarian again. We retraced our steps through the lanes and alleyways towards the Rialto Bridge and I’m ashamed to say I was afraid to ask Marco where we were going or what we were doing in case he said: ‘What do you mean, we?’ I liked being a ‘we’ with Marco. The idea of being just a me for the rest of the day, the week, the month, my life held little or no appeal. But was that really me, alone in a foreign country, trit-trotting around, my tongue hanging out, behind a handsome stranger who for all I knew chopped vulnerable women like me into tiny pieces and spread them on Signora Marinello’s bread as a light mid-morning snack? I wasn’t sure.

I slowed down, letting the gap between myself and Marco grow. The sun was too hot. Where it once felt warm and comforting it now scalded and suffocated. I could feel the wine that had tasted so crisp at Do’ Mori drawing the moisture out of my body, making my temples throb, my mouth dry as sandpaper. I came to a standstill but could feel myself swaying. I was on the steps near the top of the bridge, tourists jostling me, shoving me out of their way. The back of Marco’s head disappeared into the crowd.

‘Mary-Constance,’ a thin voice crackled behind me. It sounded just like my mother and I whirled around, startled, bumping into a little girl on crutches and knocking her into the arms of her father who hissed at me in an unrecognisable language. I was sweating, my heart thumping like a jackhammer. ‘Mary-Constance!’ I again heard someone say in my mother’s irritated tone. I spun around again but there were no small, disappointed American women anywhere to be seen. Instead, an overweight elderly man with three cameras around his neck brushed past me, misjudging the width of his enormous hips
and knocking me off balance. I staggered sideways, my legs buckling as my hands flapped blindly in front of me, finding — thank heaven — the warm stone of the bridge’s ancient railing. The fat ribbon of sparkling canal water stretching beneath and beyond me suddenly seemed dazzling; the whole scenario blurred into a golden shimmering haze.

‘Marco,’ I cried weakly, because while most things seemed unfamiliar and out of focus, one thing was clear: I was about to faint. And, being me, I would quite likely land on something recently deceased and foul-smelling. ‘Marco,’ I whispered as darkness clawed at the sides of my eyes. I needed rescuing, whether he was an axe murderer or not.

The world turned black. I was gone.

When I came back, I was, you have probably guessed it, in his gondola. Well, where else would I have been? Seriously, it hardly surprised me at all, the day was turning out so strange. And you know what, I have since met another woman who fainted in Venice and woke up in a gondola so it’s not even really that far-fetched. Of course she was in the gondola before she fainted but still.

Anyway, when I woke up I was lying on that blue and gold brocade-upholstered love seat and the gondola was moving swiftly and silently through the busy canal. It took me a few seconds to work out what was happening. At first I thought the buildings were moving and I was staying still. It was an odd sensation: I felt disconnected from consciousness, as though I were flying in a dream. (Actually, it reminded me of the way I felt the time Fleur talked me into a night of tequila slammers.) My hand ran across the gondola seat’s smooth brocade and found a tassel, which I fingered like a blind person reading Braille. I was in Venice, in a gondola, I told myself trying to breathe into the pain in my head. I was with Marco, I reminded myself, as the calming sound of the boat slicing through the city’s waterways comforted me. At least I assumed I was with Marco. I felt less comforted. Well, was I with Marco? Or was some
other gondolier I knew even less spiriting me away? I twisted around to find that it was indeed Marco standing behind me, steering us down the canal. He smiled at me and my panic leeched away.

‘What happened?’ I asked him, my voice feeble and odd again.

‘Don’t worry,’ he answered me. ‘I’m taking care of you.’

‘But where are we going?’

‘It’s too hot out here,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you somewhere cool.’

It was okay, he was rescuing me. It occurred to me that had I not drunk wine at 10 in the morning on a hot day in a foreign city without a husband to supervise me, I might not have needed rescuing. But the damage had been done. The wine had been drunk. The husband remained in New York. The gondolier was taking me somewhere cool.

And so I simply rolled back onto my brocade bed and stared straight at the intense Venetian sun so that it obliterated the sight of everything else. I didn’t want to think about whether this was a good idea or not, going who-knew-where with Marco, a man I didn’t know but somewhere deep inside, down below, wanted to. I knew it was a strange thing to let happen, I mean I was sort of being kidnapped but I didn’t seem to mind. It was just like being an ordinary tourist, I figured, only cheaper as I hadn’t had to pay for the ride.

We turned off the Grand Canal into a smaller one and after half a dozen twists and turns, each canal darker and narrower than the one before, we came to a wooden grate on the side of a building. Steadying himself against the crumbling concrete, Marco pulled the grate up, sliding the gondola into the darkness inside, his hands shimmying along the stone wall to steer it, his body stretched above me, his T-shirt rising to reveal a line of hair peeking out from his pants leading to — yes, well, never mind.

We were in some sort of Venetian garage, I supposed, the murky basement of someone’s palazzo where they parked their boat but to be honest I wasn’t really thinking about it too much. I wasn’t thinking about anything too much. Apart from Marco. That line of
hair. That taut brown skin. Look, I could string this out forever and try to make myself look like something other than an adulterously wanton slut but I think we all know where this is going so let’s skip straight to it.

Marco tied the gondola to a post and came to kneel beside me, placing his cool hand on my hot head. I didn’t know whether to feel like a five-year-old kid or the happy hooker. I wanted him to look after me, be gentle with me, but I wanted more as well. I wanted him to take me in his arms and make love to me. The word ravish even sprang to mind. I am such a cliché. Who gets ravished these days anyway? By a handsome gondolier? In Venice?

Well, in this instance, me. Yessiree. I have to say. I was ravished. He ravished me. Completely and utterly. Twice.

One moment his hand was on my forehead, my eyes slipping and sliding off his, and the next his lips were on my skin, my back arching to bring my body up to meet his. There was no way we weren’t going to have sex and I knew it. I think I knew it when I first saw him, from the back of my water taxi, when he smiled and raised his eyebrow at me. And if I didn’t know it then I sure as hell knew it when he cleaned my disgusting shoe. Marco was what every recently separated woman (and a few still married ones as well) dreams of and deserves.

He slid me down onto the floor of the gondola and I lifted my arms so he could slip off my tank top. I wasn’t even embarrassed about the doughy squidge of my middle, or the way a soft roll poked out from underneath my too-tight bra. He kissed his way down to my breasts, nibbling at them through my lingerie. It drove me wild. I couldn’t get my jeans off quickly enough, kicking them and my
g-string
(second honeymoon wear; I usually chose underwear with far better restraining properties) down the gondola and pulling him on top of me, then pushing him off again so I could help wrench off his T-shirt, claw at his pants.

Then we were both lying there, naked, staring at each other with such intensity it almost scared me. And without a word, I slithered
out from underneath him and moved astride him, so I was on top — which is most unlike me I can tell you, for reasons of having a pot belly that looks a heck of a lot flatter when I’m lying down. But there I was, sitting up straight in that dark watery garage, the gondola rocking gently in the wake of our movement, our separate parts sliding into place as though we were made for each other, a fat, heavy drop of water falling from somewhere into the darkness beyond us every few seconds in an almost stupefying rhythm.

I’m not going to bore you with details of the sex because, let’s face it, it’s nowhere near as interesting reading about sex as it is having it, especially if it is with Marco. You can trust me on that one. Just the touch of his skin was electric. Where it merged with mine — on my thighs, my belly, my breasts — it made me fearful I would ignite, burn up and disintegrate. Words just cannot do it justice. It was explosive, completely and utterly intensely explosive. I had never had sex like that before in my life and I doubted that I ever would again. It was out of this world.

Afterwards, we lay in the gondola, side by side, holding each other.

‘I’ve never done that,’ I said into the darkness, ‘with anyone but my husband.’

Of course, Marco didn’t even know I had a husband but I have to say it did not seem to bother him in the slightest. He didn’t even flinch. Just held me, my head on his chest, the sturdy thump of his heart filling me with hope.

But then Tom’s face, his dear lovely face, wafted into my mind and my post-coital happiness completely dissolved, leaving nothing but guilt and dread and self-loathing in its place. I started to cry, not little girlie sniffles either, but great big man’s howls, my mouth stretched open as though my grief were too big to get out, my face swimming with tears, my chest aching with heaving sobs.

How could I do this to Tom? Betray him? Cheat on him? Act so unlike me I couldn’t even recognise myself? Sure we were going
through a rough patch, maybe had been for a while, but weren’t couples supposed to cling to each other for support when the going got tough? Not desert each other and turn to total strangers for comfort even if the comfort was extremely good. Better than extremely good. Un-freakin’-believably extremely good?

I stopped crying and felt Marco move next to me. My tears had bothered him as much as my confession that I was married. It was weird to be lying there next to him, skin on skin, having shared so much of our earthly flesh but nothing else. Basically, he was still a total stranger to me. I didn’t know the first thing about him, which worried me but perversely, nor did I want to ask him anything. He was just too darn good for me, that was the problem, and I didn’t want to do anything to scare him off. He could row out into the world and get 100 lost and lonely wives all a lot better-looking than me with just a snap of his delectable fingers. And I hadn’t had my share just yet. Not by half.

To my shame, and I am a good lapsed Catholic girl with hearty Jewish genes so I know when I should feel shame or not, I felt a pang then, fierce and forceful. But not of longing for my lost marriage nor guilt at my betrayal nor even doubt at the sense in my recent
decision-making
. But of hunger.

I was hungry.

Marco gently extricated himself from my arms, sat up, handed me my bra and looked at me, his eyes frank and uncomplicated.

Please, I thought to myself, please. Let him say the right thing.

‘Let’s eat,’ Marco said, standing up and reaching for my hand. ‘You must be starved.’

Well, had I not already been lying down you could have knocked me over with a feather. Marco had just made mad passionate love to me in a way no one ever had before and now he wanted to take me out to eat. Oy. And they say there’s no such thing as the perfect man. For a moment I just stared at him in adoration. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he had meant I must be starved of sex. Perhaps the way I had soaked up his touch, his skin, his lips, his whispering in my ear, had made it obvious how seldom Tom and I had made love in recent months. Or was that years? Don’t ask me where the passion in my marriage went. I didn’t even notice how much we’d had until it was gone. Until it was too late.

We were best friends, Tom and I, we loved each other a lot. But I didn’t think Tom found me sexy any more, thought he hadn’t for a while. When he looked at me it was quite often with a frown or a kind of wrinkle of disapproval and while I certainly still desired him, that wrinkle could not help but cool my own ardour.

‘You will love Bentigodi,’ Marco said as he untied the gondola. ‘The chef there is positively inspirational. Just wait until you taste her
sarde incinte in agrodolce.
Fantastic.’

He had meant starved of food not sex after all and it looked like I was going to be sated on both counts. This was turning into quite
some second honeymoon, I could not help but think. I nestled back in my brocade nest as Marco pulled the gondola out into the canal, closed the grate and we slid away. It was amazingly quiet, just the almost imperceptible groan of the oar against its holder and the occasional pad of Marco’s shoes on the rug at the back of the boat.

I watched the laundry fluttering on the clotheslines stretched from building to building across the canal above me. A gorgeous set of sheets, sky blue and adorned with white puffy clouds, flapped against the real thing far beyond; two sets of bright red overalls accompanied an entire row of enormous beige bloomers.

‘
Sinistra
,’ Marco hollered, and we turned left into a wider canal. I turned my head lazily to one side as another gondolier shouted out something in return. There were so many questions to ask but it didn’t feel as though they were in my head. It felt as though they were circling on the outside, like a cartoon character that’d been hit on the head with a frying pan, tweet tweet.

Thoughts of Tom kept trying to invade my thick skull but I just wouldn’t let them. I wanted to feel happy for a while, not make too much of anything. I wondered if Marco would marry me and I would move to Venice and have babies with him. Then I realised that didn’t really gel with the whole not-making-too-much-of-anything business so I stopped. Then I thought about how I could think about having babies with Marco, a complete (well, almost) stranger yet not with Tom, my husband of 10 years. This made me so unhappy that I stopped thinking about anything and instead just let my eyes slither over the doors and windows that we passed as we sliced through the smooth waters of La Serenissima.

Despite the serenity of the surroundings, the subject of children would not stay far away. I guessed it was at the root of Tom’s
no-show
, or at the root of the problems causing the no-show. Tom wanted babies and I wasn’t sure; it was as simple as that. But what wasn’t I sure about? If I could contemplate having little Marcos, why not little Toms? I scratched at my nose and fidgeted in my nest. Little
Toms. Why not? But if I knew the answer, it was scurrying around just beyond my comprehension and any attempt to pin it down proved fruitless.

‘Just relax,’ Marco said behind me, obviously seeing me squirm. He made a delectable little groan as he pushed the gondola back out into the hectic rush of the Grand Canal. ‘You are in the most beautiful city in the world and there’s no better way to see it than from the water.’

He had a point, so I pushed aside the noisy clatter of dissension going on in my brain and leaned back into that blue and gold brocade, my head turning to take in the lavish hotels, the fine palazzi and their crumbling poor relations on either side of Venice’s main street.

‘I’m taking you up to the Cannaregio,’ Marco said. ‘It’s the old Jewish quarter. Not so many tourists. A lot of good food.’

The air was full of the sounds of other people going about their business, their vacations, their day-to-day lives, and I let the magic of Venice wash over me, comfort me, keep me from wondering what the hell I was doing. Every now and then I would twist around to smile at Marco, check he was still there, that I hadn’t drifted into some parallel universe where lovely things stopped happening to me. But there he was, his eyes — his crow’s feet just in their infancy — shining at me.

‘How old are you?’ I asked him at one point.

‘Twenty-nine,’ he answered me, his eyes twinkling. ‘And you?’

I sank down in my seat, pretending I hadn’t heard him. There was only a four-year gap but still, it was in the wrong direction.

Luckily, before I could even wonder why I was thinking about our age difference, we arrived at the Ca’ d’Oro pier. Marco came to an arrangement with the gondolier there about leaving his boat and led me through another maze of unmarked lanes and canals, clearly no mystery to him at all, until we arrived at a back-street
osteria
, all white walls and dark wooden furniture and cool, clean tiled floors.

It was less than two hours since we had eaten but I told you, I’m not normal in this regard. I was feeling so many different sorts of hunger by that stage I could barely tell one from the other.

Anyway, no sooner had we sat down than a pink-faced waitress in her 20s came over to us bearing handwritten menus. Marco waved them away.

‘Sarde incinte in agrodolce,’ he ordered. ‘And
fondi di carciofo.
For two.

‘Pregnant sardines,’ he translated for me. ‘The chef here makes the most beautiful stuffed sardines — you’ll see how different they are from the sarde in saor that you had at Do’ Mori. That’s the traditional Venetian way of preparing them but here, everything has a twist. That’s what I love about it. And the fondi, the artichoke hearts, they are delicious too. You won’t see them much outside Venice either.’

‘How do you know so much about food?’ I asked him, just wishing he would keep talking.

‘I know a lot about everything,’ he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking but he remained completely serious. And boy, did he look gorgeous serious. His earnest brown eyes buzzed around the room, checking out the kitchen, the other patrons, the jittery waitress. He drummed his fingers on the table. Actually, even his fingers looked good enough to eat. I was ravenous.

When they arrived the pregnant sardines looked so magnificent I almost didn’t want to disturb them. They sat on their plain white plate, fat and succulent and lightly fried, their middles swollen with a blissful stuffing of breadcrumbs, orange juice, raisins, pine nuts, olive oil and parsley. We ate them with our fingers, Marco’s glistening with oil as he licked them, looking more delectable than ever. The fondi did not look quite as enticing, sitting greeny-grey and slightly tongue-like in their marinade of oil and lemon, but they tasted divine, almost like a well-aged perfectly cooked slice of beef, believe it or not. And don’t you just love it when vegetables taste like meat?
But after the initial burr of deliciousness faded away, again I felt that funny sensation at the back of my throat where I knew a heavenly aftertaste should have been.

‘Is everything OK?’ the pink-faced waitress asked. I had thought her rude at first but I could see now she was just run off her feet.

‘Great,’ I beamed at her encouragingly. I always feel sorry for restaurant staff. I had been a kitchen lackey myself so knew that it was true that it was one of the most stressful jobs a person could have. We human beings don’t take our food lightly, especially when we are paying through the nose for it.

‘You know your brother was here,’ the waitress said, quite knocking the stuffing out of me because she wasn’t looking at Marco when she spoke but at me.

‘
My
brother?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t think so.’ Emmet’s idea of a trip did not involve international travel, that much I knew. He would never in a million years be in Venice. I didn’t even think he had a passport. It was inconceivable that he was there. Of course I had thought I had heard my mother on the Rialto Bridge not so long ago but that was before I fainted from the heat and the effects of a crisp dry white so early in the morning.

‘Was there anyone there?’ I asked Marco all the same. ‘When I fainted?’

He wiped at the fondi oil left on the plate with a chunk of crusty white bread. ‘I was there,’ he said and bit off the end of the crust, his teeth outlandishly white and efficient.

My ears must have deceived me, I decided. The waitress was mistaken. She had moved away by then and was clearing another table, one hand distractedly trying to push a rogue chunk of strawberry blonde hair behind one ear. Marco was certainly not acting as though anything untoward had happened. Would he not be interested to learn my brother was in Venice? It was ridiculous. I opted to think nothing more of it, leaning back in my chair and resting my hands on my belly. I felt fabulous.

Marco took this in and seemed pleased. ‘You know, there is nothing like a little gelato to finish a good meal,’ he said. ‘Paolin on Campo San Stefano has changed hands but I think the liquorice gelato there is still the best.’ He pushed back his chair and stood up.

We meandered back to the gondola, then hit the canal again. It was busier now, our progress slow, the water clogged with gondolas, each one, unlike ours, stuffed full of tourists. It occurred to me that I was keeping Marco from working.

‘You must be missing out,’ I said, twisting around to talk to him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not missing out on anything,’ he said and I felt another lurch of happiness. ‘I own 12 other gondolas,’ he continued, ‘and it has been a good summer.’

‘I thought gondoliers could only have one gondola each,’ I said. ‘That they sort of got passed down from father to son.’ I had read this somewhere, along with the fact that gondoliers do not and have never sung to their passengers.

‘Sometimes still it goes from father to son,’ Marco said, steering us gently through a bottled water delivery boat and two gondolas linked together, holding a dozen glazed-eyed tourists between them, ‘but it doesn’t have to. And the authorities say that each gondolier must have only one gondola but these boats are expensive and not many of the younger guys can afford to buy in so I loan them the money and they pay me back, with interest.’

I must say I was a little surprised at the lack of romance in this response. ‘So how did you get to be a gondolier?’ I asked.

‘My father is in the business and so was my grandfather before him,’ he answered. ‘That’s the old way.’

I stroked the blue velvet on the cushion I was hugging. Now this was more like it.

‘So this is your dad’s gondola?’ I asked.

‘
Destra
,’ Marco hollered, indicating a right turn. ‘Destra. No, my old man wouldn’t be seen dead in this.’

‘But why? It’s beautiful.’

‘Yes, but it’s a new kind of beautiful.’ The exertion of rowing lengthened his vowels. It was like listening to music. ‘It’s made by a friend of mine in Switzerland. It’s fibreglass and at 20,000 euro nearly half the price of having a wooden gondola made the old-fashioned way.’

I squeezed the cushion tighter. There was absolutely no reason why this should disappoint me but it did. I shook my head. I was expecting Marco to be perfect but really I had no right to expect anything. Why should it bother me that he was unromantic when it came to tradition? That he had a good eye for commerce? He was overly romantic in other ways after all. Even if he seemed a little, well, closed off, I supposed. And although I hated to admit it, he didn’t have much of a sense of humour. But did that matter? When everything else was so right?

‘Where is Campo Stefano?’ I changed the subject.

‘Not far from your hotel,’ Marco told me, ‘if you would rather go there. The gelato can always wait. It will still be there tomorrow.’

I held my breath, knowing what I wanted to say but afraid to actually say it. And while I’m not known for putting off the opportunity to eat, in this case there was something I wanted much, much more than ice cream.

‘The hotel,’ I croaked. Bits of me were calling out for the touch of that man’s hands in a way I had never even imagined before. I found myself wishing, screw tradition, that the gondola had an outboard motor to move quicker through the canals to the Gritti Palace. My clothes felt hot and restrictive, my breath was short. The only word I could think of to describe the way I felt was desperate. I was desperate for him. I was dripping with desperation for him. It was a foreign feeling and sort of scary because I realised that if he simply dropped me off at the pier and kept going I would probably shrivel up and die.

But he turned into the Santa Maria del Giglio traghetto stop and
after a brisk conversation with the gondolier there, who was slothfully sprawled in a chair on the pier, his cigarette burning, newspaper pages spread around him, he tied up his gondola and reached for my hand. Five minutes later we were up in that beautiful pistachio room and I was quivering as Marco’s thumbs strummed my collarbone. We stood opposite each other in front of the open picture-postcard window and he slowly removed every last stitch of my clothing until I was standing there naked as a jaybird, shaking with anticipation.

Look, if you think it’s easy for me to recount this part it is not. I am not a standing-around-naked-as-a-jaybird-shaking-with-anticipation type of person. I had worn joke T-shirts to bed with my husband for the past decade of my life and he was the only one apart from my mother to have seen me in the raw since I can’t remember when. So for me to be standing there with not one single of my 10 (ahem) extra pounds disguised, exposed in broad daylight to a man about whom I knew nothing, except the satin feel of his smooth brown skin and the way that just looking at him filled the hole inside me, well, I can’t explain how out of character it was. And how wonderful. I felt like the old me had flown out that window and was swooping over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and circling the shiny dome of Santa Maria della Salute light as a feather, leaving a new me standing there throbbing with desire.