Eating With the Angels by Sarah-Kate Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

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, screwbeing 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 up 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