From the moment she met him, she could imagine being in bed with him but, also, simply linking her arm in his and strolling, slowly, across a bridge, talking about food, arguing about politics, chatting about nothing in particular. She could not, back then, imagine what love could be like when it grew, despite the cultural and personality differences that came up, despite the arguments and disappointments. She did not know that after just a few years, another person could become part of your DNA.
When your lover was that wealthy, it was possible to embark on a marriage that easily. Here they were, a young Englishwoman with a middle-aged Italian man in the 1990s, commuting between cities. Of course, Marble knew what people thought. Wealthy businessman, female gold digger, probably headed for a rough end. When the end of the marriage did come, it wasn’t in the way that most people would have expected.
Marble went to bed one Saturday night, slightly tipsy from the party they’d attended, and woke up the next morning a widow. Her husband had died in his sleep, quite peacefully, come to think of it, only it had happened at least forty years too soon.
For years to come, Marble would keep listening for the thud of her husband’s briefcase against the front door as he put his key in the lock. She would keep undoing his side of the bed as she used to when she expected him to come home late. She would imagine saying to her young son, There’s your dad, love, he’s come home. Only her husband had died so soon that he never knew his own child.
Sugar
It was the sugar episode that got Marble called into the CEO’s office. She hadn’t been up to George’s suite in months, since before she’d started dating the coffee guy. There was no need. They saw each other often enough in all those ways that the head of a media production company and one of his star presenters tended to see each other. Whenever she got back to London, she usually ended up getting lunch with him, anyway.
Sometimes, George’s wife Jenny would join them. Marble liked seeing them together. The teasing, the mock protests, the touch of a hand. George was one of the good guys, and Marble was sorry to see him feeling so uncomfortable. A viewer of influence had telephoned him about the sugar episode. In George parlance, that meant a big-money advertiser had dialed his personal line to complain about the show, bypassing the editorial group in the process.
“Was it the S-word?” Marble asked.
“I do believe it was the S-word,” George said.
Marble had simply reminded viewers of a few things that everyone already knew, and only then because someone had written in to the live program to ask why Marble didn’t profile more desserts made with cane sugar.
As many of my viewers know, I focus mostly on traditional, local foods. Many longtime recipes heralded as local traditions use cane sugar, but I prefer to talk only about recipes made with foods of local origin, indigenous foods or foods under local production for at least one thousand years. This is why I tend to stay away from recipes that use cane sugar, unless they come from Asia, where, as far as we know, it originated.
Sugar cane has traveled far from its indigenous territories, having been taken from Asia to Africa and other areas of the world, including the Americas. By the 1600s, sugar cane and the sweet liquid pressed from its stalks had taken hold in the Caribbean, turning some men into kings of commerce and others into slaves.
Marble was proud of that episode.
“Now, don’t get annoyed, Marble,” George was saying. “I’m just letting you know, okay? It’s just that you already had that argument with the Italian coffee tycoon about the exploitation of producers. And now you say that anything made in Europe with sugar can’t be considered traditional.”
“Cane sugar.”
“Huh?”
“Cane sugar. Not beet sugar.”
“Right.”
“And not just traditional.”
“Eh?”
“Local. Traditional foods of local origin.”
“Right.”
“Plus, we didn’t have an argument, the coffee guy and I, we had a difference of perspective. In the end, he came to understand what I was really saying.”
There had, in fact, been only those few moments of tension between Marble and the coffee man until they’d talked it out on the show, until they’d gone to dinner together the following month, until they’d stayed out late, talking, until they’d met the following weekend in Milan, until they’d kissed a long, tender goodbye before taking trains back to their respective cities. But she wasn’t going to tell George any of that. She didn’t want to get him thinking about the fact that her late husband had also been Italian. She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her.