Siracusa (15 page)

L
IZZIE AND
I
HOOKED U
P
late morning at the open market. Lizzie cranking on about exhaustion, showing no sign of it, nudged me this way and that under the blue-and-white-striped umbrellas, declaring it great before we barely had a glimpse. A friendly humble busy place with stands built of wooden boxes. We mingled with Sicilian women with bra straps hanging down their arms, admired piles of slimy octopus and calamari tossed onto sheets of ice, the vats of almonds and walnuts, aluminum tins of huge red peppers sliced open, gutted like fish and charred black around the rims, looking fresh from an autopsy.

Lizzie insisted we try every orange—twelve varieties, she counted. We sat on a bench, tasted them, fed them to each other, she tucked a few away for Michael—always about Michael, save some for Michael—then dragged me into a bakery where the cookies were so hard they might have been excavated from a quarry. Lizzie ranted about how much women used to hate it when men on the street said
Smile
, and how now they sign off with smiley faces and weeping emojis.

“That was never a Maine thing,” I said.

“What?”

“Saying ‘Smile’ to a woman.”

“Of course not. Nobody walks in Portland. They drive.”

“They walk.”

She smacked my arm. “I can’t believe you’re even having this conversation with me. I’m on a ramble. Saying ‘Smile’ and emojis have nothing to do with each other, but thank you for acting as if they do.”

I broke off pieces of a cookie for her while we crossed a funky bridge out of Ortigia into the ugly part of the city. Streets were wider, spacious cracked sidewalks in front of plaster apartment buildings aka future rubble. Lots of imagination at work—air conditioners stuck through holes cut by someone obviously blindfolded at the time, bundles of electric wires scrolling up walls and into windows.

“I was talking about emojis,” said Lizzie, “because I’m trying on ideas like dresses. I’m fishing stuff out of a trunk in my brain—like telling a woman to smile, I mean how outdated is that? Fifteen years? I have nothing to say but I’m hoping to find that I do have something to say, that there’s a future in one of my sentences. A future in a sentence. A book. A measly article.”

I can’t always track Lizzie but I like listening to her jabber.

“Suppose I’m over?”

“Bullshit.”

“I can’t get work, Finn. Nobody’s interested. I don’t know most of the editors, what’s left of them, what’s left of magazines. I send out queries. I charm people at dinner.” Lizzie covered her
face. “Give me a second,” she said from behind her hands. “Everyone’s getting fired or offered early retirement. Kent Steinhardt, who was stupid enough to divorce his wife, marry someone thirty, and have a baby, got laid off at
The Atlantic
. I can’t work at a website, not that they’d hire me, I’d be the same age as everyone’s mother. What is this cookie? Almond? I’m halfway around the world—not really, but sort of—and all I can think about is myself. Pathetic. I am pathetic. And, by the way, don’t kiss me again and don’t act like you didn’t.”

“How was it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come work for me.”

“Very funny.”

“Ditch Michael, move to Portland.”

“Taylor would love that. You would love how miserable it would make her. Seriously, suppose I’m brain dead?”

Brain dead and fucked besides. I didn’t say that, didn’t break the news, was wrestling with whether I should. She snuggled in like old times, wrapping her arm around me, tucking into my shoulder. There’s always heat coming off Lizzie.

“Let’s hijack one of those boats in the harbor,” I said. “Let’s do it, rent one, see what happens.”

“From hijack to rent? Finn, what’s happened to us?”

It was wry the way she said it—not moaning or wailing or laughing it off, could have gone those directions too now that I think about it, but it was her offhand coolness, the way she gutted the feeling that got to me. For real, it could have been different.

My mom said, “She’s a merry one,” when she met Lizzie.

“Finn, you know.” Lizzie was seeing where my pea brain was heading. “There are some people who shouldn’t marry. Some people are best single, and pity the ones who marry them. And you know what else?” She shoved me sideways against a lamppost and poked a finger in my face. “There are some people who dump all their misery into marriage, make wedded bliss their neurotic nest, and the best version of them lives outside that ugly place.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Lizzie grinned.

“I’ve got a surprise,” I told her.

By then I knew I wanted to keep my trap shut, but I wanted to make her happy. Like my pop giving Oscar a steak bone when we knew he was going to be put down the next day. Yeah, like that. Lizzie, poor innocent dog, about to be put down. Not by me. It was a matter of time. Michael’s pussy was in Siracusa. Lizzie would find out. Michael set it up, brought her here. Vicious sick fuck.

Look, I’m bad. Once a woman followed me into the men’s room, I locked the door, did the deed, and told myself it never happened, and worse pretended it hadn’t a month later when the lady blew through town again, but in my rule book this was different. Bringing her to Siracusa—Michael had built a bomb and lit the fuse.

I steered Lizzie down the block and under a flapping awning into Voglia Matta. Gina had tipped me to it. “Best gelato in town. Best anywhere.”

We sat outside at a tilting tin table and had gelato for lunch—brioches sliced open slathered with pistachio, coconut, and chocolate. Lizzie made happy noises. Finished the meal with Americanos, and as we walked away, she looked into the bag of cookies. “Only Nutella left. How does something this cloyingly sweet and as sticky as glue get popular? Maybe I can write about Nutella. Look at that sign. Van Gogh Video Games.” Lizzie dug out her phone and snapped a photo of the shuttered store. “Van Gogh and video games, a perfect match. In Sicily no less.”

That’s kind of how I’ve got her framed now in my head. The way her face lit up when she found something ridiculous.

Dorothy said I avoided the hotel room. Two hundred fifty dollars an hour for that wisdom. She said avoiding my family is my MO and why I spent a good hour in what passed for a bar, a table with a plastic cloth, red wine and white, next to reception, hoping to catch Michael. Playing gumshoe. If I caught him, he might ship her out. I was running interference. Let Lizzie deal with heartbreak somewhere safer and kinder. But he didn’t show, neither did Polish American Wonder Woman, and finally I let myself into the suite. Snow, dreamy at the mirror, didn’t hear me or didn’t care. I never knew what was up with her—was she preoccupied or just didn’t give a shit that Daddy was home? Standing sideways peeking at her reflection with one of her smug smiles, she unbuttoned a bit of her shirt and pulled it down to expose a bony sweet shoulder. She licked it. Licked it and strained to watch while she did it. I considered walking in again, a do-over, it kind of stunned me. Then she faced
the mirror square on, blinked rapidly, her eyes rolled back in her head—

“Snow.”

She turned. I expected something. Fluster. Something. She only waited.

“Where’s your mom?”

She thumbed toward the bedroom door. Inside I found Tay flat on her back, arm over her face. Tay never lies on the bedspread in a hotel room, and can do fifteen minutes on how disgusting hotel spreads are. I switched on the light.

“Turn it off.” Her voice wobbled.

“What’s wrong, babe?”

“Close the door.” She let loose with sobs, smothered her face with the pillow.

“What the hell happened?”

Finally she pushed herself up. She was a mess, eye goop drooling around her red eyes and down her cheeks, neck stringy as a chicken, every tendon at attention while she struggled for composure.

“I should never have shown her the Caravaggio. It’s provocative sexually. Too provocative for a girl as sensitive as Snow.”

“It’s not porn, babe.”

“You didn’t see it, Finn. You weren’t with us.”

My wife’s a lot of sharp angles. That movie,
Edward Scissorhands
? He reminded me of Tay, a vulnerable type who might slice you up. I did my best to hug her without getting knifed by an elbow.

“I shouldn’t have scolded Snow about the blind man. I
embarrassed her. It’s entirely my fault. I upset her. And when she pretended to faint—”

“What?”

“In front of the painting. She dropped to the floor, like the saint in the painting.”

I laughed.

“You don’t get it, Finn. You never get anything.”

I let her go. She can suffer if it makes her happy. Weird thing about Tay. Even when she’s mean, she’s a sad sort.

“What did Lizzie say about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Snow said—” Tay wiped her eyes some more, shook her head.

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“She said they laugh at me.”

“Lizzie and Michael? No way. No one laughs, you’re not funny. I’m sorry, I’m an asshole. Bad joke. I don’t think anyone laughs. Just Dani. Dani, our lady of the reception desk, thinks you’re a laugh riot.”

“At me. Laughs
at
me. Like I’m silly or stupid. They think I’m ridiculous.”

I looked at her in a crumple, lips twitching. “Snow didn’t say that.”

“I just told you she did,” said Tay.

“If you’re bawling, it’s over Michael. Snow said, ‘Michael
laughs at you.’ It’s Michael you care about. Michael you’re preening at. Snow’s no fool.”

“I’m not going to dinner.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do.”

I got the hell out of there. “Be nicer to your mother,” I told Snow. “You’re a lot like me, kiddo, secretly you’re a handful.”

Snow didn’t look up from her iPad.

“I
WANT A RING
.”

I’d dozed off. Opened my eyes to find her face a whisper away.

“My parents asked about a ring.”

Had not wanted to sleep at all, irritated it happened. Any moment without all my faculties seemed risky. I scooted back against the headboard (the way a frightened person might escape a spider).

“Mikey?”

Stood up, pulled on my briefs, sank down again. Off balance. Woozy. Took a bottle of water off the floor and gulped most of it. Couldn’t go from horizontal to vertical quickly. Could no longer spring up. My springing days were over. Julien could. Julien, my alter ego, could have left by the window and scaled four floors down. I got lost sorting out the ways I had aged out of the situation I was in.

“I could send a photo to my parents. I could post it. Do you want to rub that on me?”

“Not this second, thanks.”
Not this second, thanks?
I’d forgotten what conversation I was supposed to be having.
Would you like to rub lotion on my breasts? Not this second, thanks.
“Post it?”

“A photo of my hand with the ring. On Instagram and Facebook—”

“Kath, no.”

“I’d just, like, put
from mystery man
. Not
engaged
.”

“Kath. Katarina”—remember to use the endearments—“would you want to be with a man who . . . who was capable of . . . ?” She squinted, displeasure or confusion hard to tell. Beware of hypotheticals, keep it simple. “I can’t do that to Lizzie. I told you. I am not that kind of man. I can’t risk her finding out while we’re here. It’s cruel.”

“I want a ring, Mikey.”

Had to mollify, no choice. With K I had to proceed as if nothing had changed. Had rendezvoused with her as soon as Lizzie went off with Finn to the market to cavort, to collect tales of salami. The better to enchant me with. Such a tender thing, the responsibility she felt to keep her husband amused. Look where it got her.

“I won’t post it.”

Two more days in Siracusa. “If you count today, three,” Kath had said, coveting the time left on the first adventure of her life.

She had a view of the centaur’s ass from an attic room small and dismal enough to be in a college dorm. Felt idiotic having sex on a single bed. After sex we could study. Or the roommate would show up.

Keep her on the string. Do whatever it takes. “When we’re back in New York—I swear, I’ll buy you a ring as soon as we’re back.”

“Today, Mikey.”

We’d pretended it had all gone well, that my cock hadn’t failed in the line of duty. Quite perversely it had made it in and then gone limp. My conscience turned out to reside there.

“Are you sleeping with her too?” she said.

“No,” I lied.

Couldn’t get it up earlier with Lizzie either, but she said, “My luck, eat me,” and spread her legs.

K wiggled naked on the bed, her magnificent breasts lolling this way and that. “Giovanni Di Battista,” she said.

“Our primo artist”—Dani, K’s collaborator, had told her about him, supplied a glossy brochure. “Artesa Jewels. Inspired by the sea.” Sea horses with diamond scales. Octopus pins with ruby eyes. Gaudy stones. Attention getters. Rings for a Las Vegas moll. That’s who I was—a high roller with a chippie when I strolled into Giovanni’s shop with K hanging off my arm.

We had left the hotel separately. K had insisted I get the directions. “You’re the man,” she had said, a dubious assertion when she could tell me like a dog to sit. I was thinking about my credit card. Lizzie paid the bill. What did these rings cost? Should I take euros from an ATM? Either way she would notice.

I was screwed. Obsessing about that distracted me. When K, flattened against a building, popped out into my path, I gasped like a girl.

“Woo-hoo,” she said.

Knew where the others were. Taylor with Snow at the Caravaggio. Finn and Lizzie at the market, although who knew where their spirits might take them. Hopefully to bed. Wise to proceed furtively, sneaking for K a turn-on—or as she said, “a fun thing”—now that our days of secrecy were numbered. “I can’t wait till we go public,” she said. She must have learned that expression from the posse that got her here. Making a game of it, she’d peek around a corner, wave back an all-clear. In between she bobbed beside me, a skip in her step. When we paused to appreciate a fountain—“really old,” she called it—she stretched in the sun. “Feel my arms,” she said with happiness. “They’re baking.”

Siracusa had splendor hidden in the dross. The stunning Piazza Duomo, the lesser but lovely Minerva where we’d dined the first night, and now this pleasant modest square with its really old fountain across from two stories of polished stone, the interior visible only through a porthole window. Artesa Jewels. K peered in. What she saw left her breathless, and she entered in awe, gazing at the mosaic ceiling as into a starry night and then into the welcoming smile of Giovanni. Ready to serve, advise, and personally unveil his treasures.

“I am Giovanni. How may I help you?” he said, deducing our native language, at which he was probably genius. Or was it obvious?

K’s grip on my arm tightened, a prompt. “We are shopping for a ring,” I said.

Everything was more beautiful in Italian, K was more beautiful in Italian, and Giovanni caressed her with the language while gliding her from one display case to another. Beautiful,
bellissima
.
Seducente
, enchanting—translating the prosaic English into the language of love. He sees where her eye falls. Before she knows what she wants, he knows.

Giovanni was younger, more suited to K, slim and sprightly with a mustache that curled at the ends. Considered trying to fashion a match. Betrayals all around, the more the merrier, anything to loosen the choke of obligation and guilt. To divert the storm. To avoid catastrophe. Although the situation was out of my hands, such speculation was conceit; I was a bystander now, flotsam caught in the current. The Sicilian, tanned to a coppery glow with a snarl of long hair (to match), could sing his syllables and be moved by his own art. When the first ring she tried fit, the Italian declared, “You are my woman.
Tu sei la mia donna.
”

For us to admire the ring, K held out her hand, plump and soft. “My fingers are fat,” she said apologetically. Of her nails painted purple: “I’ll change the color.”

“Women do this.” Giovanni confided his woe. “They think they are not beautiful enough for my creations. When is the opposite.”

“It’s ginormous,” K giggled. The ring dwarfed her finger. “I could punch out your eye. What is it?”

“Morganite,” he said of the glassy pink rock. He angled a light to catch its sparkle.

“Morganite?” said K.

“Cousin to the emerald.”

Hopefully a distant cousin. A cousin once removed, surely a much cheaper cousin. Had to be cheaper than the gold sea urchin
encrusted with diamonds lying to the left. I was about to ask the price when she whispered, “I want something I’ve heard of.”

“Something?”

“A stone.”

“What else do you have?” I asked, but now she was emboldened to make a selection of her own.

“Could I try that?” She pointed, as did Giovanni to the very same one, and they laughed. From there she tried many until onto her finger he slipped a ring you needed a pickaxe to scale: a pileup of gold wrapped around something smooth, large, bullet-shaped, and red.

K studied it closely. “Look.” She pointed to the setting. “See all the tendrils.”

How could I miss them when their tips were diamonds?

“This ring,
speciale
,” said Giovanni. “One night I dream I am in a sea bed.” He waved his arms, wiggled his fingers. He was seaweed. He was undulating. “When I wake up I skip the espresso and go to work. For a Sicilian to skip the espresso. A Sicilian man, he opens the window, he say hello to the day, he has espresso, and then . . .”

“What’s the stone?” I said.

“Oxblood coral.” Its rarity, its color, its
passione
—he waxed on, spinning a web of desire.

“Isn’t the sea horse cute?” said K of the eighteen-karat creature curled around the stone.

Giovanni knew about sea horses too. So romantic.
Così romantico.
They mate for life.

“I love it, Mikey.”

The jeweler wrote the price on a card and palmed it across the glass. Thirty-five hundred euros.

Giovanni’s elbows rested on the display case. His hands were clasped, finally still. The deal was a done deal, K rosy with thrill. No other customers. No way to get lost, to escape. To feint, faint? I handed over my American Express.

“I want to wear it out,” said K.

Afterward she was too enamored with her ring to engage in drama. As if she had finally had the orgasm of her dreams, she was calm, spent, satisfied, thank God, pliable. “I’m doing the town with Dani tonight,” she said, letting me know she’d be out of my hair. Now she could afford to be generous, while I, at that moment, was too pussy-whipped to care. Frankly. If Lizzie turned up around the next corner, so be it.

Obliged her request: With her phone I snapped a photo of her hand. “I’ll send it to my parents when I get home,” she said. “A text from here costs too much. Or maybe I’ll wait and change my color so it looks prettier. Dani will know where I can get a mani.”

We stopped for Prosecco. Sat in plain sight. Toasted the future. “To us.” I was done with elaborate phrases of love and seduction. Something about Giovanni made them seem ridiculous. To us. Good enough.

She lifted the glass to her mouth and the ring snagged her nostril. “I don’t think I should sleep with it on,” she said.

The next morning: Lizzie.

“Oh God, you won’t believe who was at breakfast. Michael, you won’t believe. That woman who works at Tino’s, the hostess,
but how weird. I had no idea who she was. And then, when she reminded me, all I could remember was her vision board. Remember, she told us once about her vision board. I said to her, ‘Was this on your vision board?’ She kind of whooped. You’re looking blank, do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Vaguely.”

“Her name is Kath. I never knew that. She was on her way to swim. ‘To the rock,’ she said. That’s where they swim here. Lo Scoglio. She spoke Italian with so much excitement. Her entire face contorted. ‘Lo Scoglio.’” Lizzie did an impression. “She was sweet. She said we should go there. Everyone swims there in the day. The bar delivers drinks. It sounds like the place all the locals go, looking to score. What an innocent. She’d never been to Europe and now she’s partying on a Sicilian rock. Are you all right?”

“The usual. A headache. I drank too much.”

“You can’t sleep in, darling. Should I pet you? I can cure a headache. I’ve got some time. You have to hang with Finn and Snow today. On the boat. Taylor and I are going shopping. When we get back to New York, you should quit drinking. We should do it together. Like for a month.”

Buried my face in the pillow, groaning. Had to rope in Finn. Lizzie had to cheat. Not to give me a way out, but for a way to stay. When she found out about Kath, I’d need to even the playing field. Even the playing field? What a ludicrous expression. Who the fuck am I?

“What time is the boat?” I said.