Siracusa (22 page)

I
T
’
S FOUR M
ONTHS LATER
and I am deep in plans for a harvest festival. There are pretty displays of pumpkins on Monument and Longfellow squares and near the historic society on Commerce Street. The air smells piney; the holidays are not far off. This is the last month for tourists. Everything will slow down in November, well, it has already, the turning of the leaves came early this year. The Lil’ Whale Bakery is making pumpkin everything—bread, muffins, cookies, and pies. I have given my notice, however, to a very dismayed Mayor Beemer because it’s become clear that I can’t do my job and homeschool Snow.

The sixth-grade curriculum is daunting, but there are subjects of great interest to me, like early Greek civilization. Even the science is exciting: electricity, the metric system (it’s about time I learned that), and best of all, the ecology of the Maine coast. Perhaps next year, after studying Greece, we’ll all go to Athens. When a subject is more than I want to handle, I can buy tutorials for Snow to watch on her iPad. I have made contact with other homeschooling mothers on Facebook, and they have
advised me to start each day at the same time, with the hardest subjects first. We’ve created a nook in our sunny den where Snow and I can work side by side.

Snow, so smart and focused, will probably set a record and be in the seventh grade by March. I have enrolled her in some dance and theater classes where she can interact with kids her own age in a supervised environment. Now that she is nearly eleven—her birthday is next month—and still painfully shy, I am very aware and wary of the mean-girl syndrome. In spite of all attempts by that poor dead woman to turn her into a harlot, she remains pure.

About six weeks after returning from Italy, Snow and I visited New York City to see Penelope, who is having physical therapy, which she hates—especially the ankle lifts with the elastic straps—and to squeeze in some fun mother-daughter shopping. Who did we encounter as we exited the revolving doors of Bergdorf Goodman? Lizzie. She looked like a truck had run over her. She had dark circles under her eyes, sallow cheeks, messy hair. I doubt if she’d washed it in weeks. It had that oily sheen. No makeup of course, but she never did wear much makeup. Her rumpled shirt looked as if it had been plucked from the dirty laundry. The whites of her eyes were red; I noted that especially because it was almost ghoulish.

Given her wreck of an appearance, I would say her insides were out.

I will never forgive her for the blame she attempted to heap on my daughter. Truly I believe she is evil or at the very least
twisted. Still I was polite. With a Seddley, being polite is a way of life.

“Hello, what a surprise,” I said. “We’re visiting Penelope. She might have to have another surgery. She may walk with a limp forever.”

Lizzie made no remark to that, can you imagine? Not a word of greeting. She merely stared at Snow, who shrank backward. Best to remove my daughter as quickly as possible from what was clearly a hostile situation.

Later I wondered, had Lizzie been on some sort of medication?

In spite of everything, I have fond feelings for Michael. He’s a troubled man.

Siracusa ceased to exist the minute we left. We fell back into our old life. The trauma of Snow’s disappearing, the fear it aroused in me, however, has only grown—a bond between Finn and me as he feels it too.

I often think of that dinner in Rome, Lizzie attempting to perk up our conversation with her hostessy question: Why does your marriage work? Because, I told her, Finn and I both know, Snow comes first.

Snow is rarely out of my sight. Nevertheless, sometimes when she is in the back or front yard and I glance out the window and don’t see her, I break out in a sweat. My heart races. Often I dream, nightmares where I can’t find her, and wake up screaming. I keep some Valium and a bottle of water near the bed and take a half when that happens.

I have never brought up Finn’s smoking. I like knowing something about him that he doesn’t know I know. I like finding the bits of tobacco in his pockets or a cigarette or two in the glove compartment. Sometimes I mess with him by throwing them out. Michael was right. The only power worth having is secret power—how did he put it?—like having an ace up your sleeve or a gun in your boot.

I bought a beautiful pair of Prada boots, by the way. Navy suede. They help keep that fantasy alive.

D
ID
S
IRACUSA CHANGE MY LIF
E
? Dorothy asked me at my first session when I couldn’t shut up about it.

Found some good cheap reds. Finally got some respect from Taylor. Maybe it turned me into a dad. Gave me PTSD for sure. Tay says being worried about my kid all the time isn’t PTSD, it’s fatherhood and I’d resisted it.

Jessa, who caught an eight-pound lobster while we were in Siracusa, wears her dad’s fraternity ring around her neck. He died a couple of years ago, and when she talks, she holds the ring and swings it. I think of Kathy when she does it—how she bounced onto that tour boat and waggled her finger with the forty-pound ring. The flashbacks cooled me on Jessa. You never know what’s going to turn off the heat.

Sometimes late at night, after I close up my joint, I stop at St. Joseph’s and light a candle for her.

Now and then I send Lizzie texts, a photo of a flounder, my big toe, something that will make her laugh, but she doesn’t answer. Eventually she will. I’ll wear her down.

L
IZZIE WAS GONE
. The man didn’t admit to anyone that it bothered him. Turned up at his usual haunts except Tino’s; hit the Waverly Inn, the Monkey Bar at lunch. Enjoyed the speculation, how had the perfect couple broken up? No one knew about events in Siracusa. That was the advantage of traveling with people who were—how to describe them?—not you.

Lizzie’s riding off to the Catania airport in a taxi was my last sighting. Her friend Rachel came over with a mover for her belongings, and said only, “You’re a pig.”

Fuck Lizzie. I changed her life. Her talent was modest. Being with me gave her cachet. Bluntly, it got her hired.

She was never comfortable living in my shadow. Envy was in the subtext of her praise and worship and even her sexual heat. She returned to Berkeley with her tail between her legs, I heard, but is apparently back. Joel Fried spotted her recently having lunch at Pain Quotidien. Alone with her laptop. Eating avocado toast, Joel reported. She’ll probably write about that. She was always mining the ludicrous for ideas.

In retrospect, Kath was as much the stalker as I. We were to each other both stalker and prey. When I returned and opened my office door, it was as if Kath had peed all over it. Two computer files were open, one to my passwords, another to CheapOair. Armchair pulled up next to desk chair—she and her friends plotted her trip like girls at a slumber party, my office, my sacred writing space now a teenager’s bedroom. She left a bottle of purple nail polish on the floor and a sponge hanging from a knob in the shower.

As for Snow, she seems a part of Siracusa, phantom and real, enchantment and horror. Could not have happened and yet it did, and every day I find it harder to remember or believe.

Eventually, I’ll take Lizzie back. She will turn up, no question. Broke.

Although the man knew he was fine without her. For single, charming, talented men in their early fifties, the city was ripe with women waiting to be picked.

TRUTH or CONSEQUENCES
by Lizzie Ross

Published November 5 in
New York
magazine

We met at a literary party, those 6pm–8pm wine and cheese events that rarely happen anymore to celebrate the publication of a book about the Gulf War. Spring 2002. Wikipedia was a fledgling, born the year before, which meant the web was still figuring out how to track our lives, and, up to that time, we could still to some degree shape and alter our histories. He was somebody. I was not.

He slipped his arm around me as I passed and pulled me into his conversation. “This is—”

“Lizzie Ross,” I said. I knew all about him. He’d won a Pulitzer for his first play,
Dealing
. Written at twenty-one. Now he was thirty-seven.

Michael Shapner came blessed by my father. I had been raised in Berkeley, California, paradise for people who wanted to live in the past. “Lizzie, get out,” my dad said often. He had died the year before I met Michael. He’d fallen off the red Schwinn he rode all over the hills of Berkeley. A professor of political science (specialty civil liberties), he remained to his death lonely for New York City. He’d subscribed to the
New York Review of Books
(“and I read it,” he joked) and to the
New York Times
(always arriving a day late when I was a kid). He took me for Chinese dumplings and to foreign films. My bedtime stories were the poems of beat poet Gregory Corso, and my dad’s god was the dazzling essayist Murray Kempton, who wrote for the
New York Review of Books
as well as a column in the
New York Post
, to which my dad also subscribed. Kempton had written about Michael’s play and compared it to a jazz riff. As I said, Michael Shapner came blessed by my dad.

Our life together began that night.

I had been married before for a short time to a carpenter, living someone else’s country life, avoiding becoming anything much less the writer my dad had hoped for. I had a wild post-breakup affair on a detour to Maine with a charmer who was a Republican. My dad would never have approved of him. Finally, about to turn thirty, I made my way to New York City.

Michael had read my journalism and had clipped one of my articles.

When he told me that, I fell in love.

“Divine the insecurity and compliment it,” I heard him say not long after he’d used the trick on me. I heard him say many of the things he said many times. That one never varied. Most of them were improvisations. He never told a story the same way twice. Jazz riffs? Someone else would call them lies.

I loved his stories. I loved the way he commanded the room, his resonant deep voice. His stories were dramatic. His boot out of Yale for dealing drugs, which became the basis for his first play; his dusty, weary trek with lonely bus stop holidays in search of the dad who had abandoned his mother and him when he was five. This became the memoir
Bastard
. He was a raconteur who told stories as if he were writing a never-completed fiction. He kept revising it.

I loved that. I especially loved it because I knew the truth. There was no Yale, but a year at CCNY. The now dead father had turned up faithfully each weekend to take his son to the movies or Coney Island. Cleverly he did not begin telling the Yale tales until a few years after his play so they were never in print, but became lore, and even—although this is pretentious and he was—part of his myth. In the case of
Bastard
, his father was dead by then, his mother loyal. By that time he was addicted to lying. He told me the truth very late one night and very drunk. It sealed our love.

We lied together and eventually about everything, even the ice cream we hadn’t eaten that afternoon. It became a game to have something over the person you were talking to even though the person wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care if he did. We were social liars, amusing ourselves at dinner parties. Making it even
more wicked and fun, this was the New York world of literati—people both brilliant and smug. We goofed on all of them. Our lies were power, we imagined, although why I’m not sure.

We were giddy with lies. Every tiresome event became an adventure.

Eventually he lied to me because eventually a liar lies to everyone, that’s the truth. I had imagined I was exempt, especially since I knew his truth, but lying that way all the time for no reason is compulsion. Then, on a vacation with friends in Siracusa, a wreck of a city in Sicily, I discovered that he had, on the side, someone younger, sexier, more adoring, although as far as that last is concerned, how could it be possible? Siracusa, crumbling but sturdy, had survived invasions from Greeks, Romans, and Spaniards. The destruction of our marriage wouldn’t leave a mark, but it was there that games played on other people became a game played on me.

When this happened, Michael and I had been together thirteen years, eight of them married. We didn’t have kids. Our lies were our children. Perhaps not our children but certainly our dog. We and our lies were a family.

It turns out there are all sorts of foundations for marriage. Lying is one of them.

When this happened, I was no longer getting journalism assignments, and Michael had never lived up to his early promise. He was years behind finishing a book he wasn’t writing. I was desperate for work, desperate not to be discarded, imagining my every thought might somehow morph into the idea that would save me. Then I realized Michael was my ticket back.

I outed him in print, what you are reading right now. This literary god (to some) is a serial fabricator.

I am sitting in Starbucks reading the article. It looks great in print. The photo of me in Siracusa “looking haunted,” my editor said, sets the tone. My cell phone is on the table, and I’m expecting to hear from my agent. She submitted my book proposal to publishers last Friday with an early copy of the article. My agent is sure I’ll get an offer by noon, most likely several.

What I write will not be just an exposé of him but of us, a memoir of how I got sucked into his pathology, why it thrilled me, how our pas de deux became a madness. I felt uncertain and unworthy before Michael, trying to please a father I idolized. My agent feels that other women will relate to that.

I saved the bombshell for the book, poor Kath’s accidental death—that’s how I’ll tell it.

Michael and I were worth more married, I always thought. It turns out, I am worth more divorced.

People will say what they will.

From the time I left Siracusa, I have never spoken to Michael except through lawyers.

On a sweltering day in late July, a week after my return to New York, while floundering down a dismal stretch of 58th Street, I found myself face-to-face with Snow and Taylor. They’d been shopping at Bergdorf’s. I was about to scream, “Murderer,” but the fawn shied back against her mother. Poor frightened little thing, I thought instead. Can you imagine? My gut instinct
was to protect her. I was astonished at myself. By the time I had recovered my voice and venom, Taylor had hustled her into an Uber.

Michael will be hated with glee and land on his feet. He still gets royalties from his hit play, and even his second, more modest success produces a little. He won’t have to finish his novel. I’m sure his publisher would prefer a mea culpa. I’m sure he’s fabricating right now the insecurity that led to his downfall.

He can always move to Los Angeles, the land of reinvention. Or he might meet a woman here who can support him. He’s brilliant and witty. He likes sex.

I walk, that’s what I do mostly, walk a lot, trying to wear myself out, dull my brain, escape my guilt about leaving Kathy Bicks in Siracusa, never telling the police what I saw, acting entirely in my own self-interest. There would be no justice for her, no peace for her family. If you had asked me if I was capable of that . . . if I had thrown out that question: Suppose you had information about a murder but in telling it you might implicate yourself, what would you do? A fun after-dinner hypothetical posited while everyone was tipsy and splitting a tiramisu. Would I keep my mouth shut? Was I capable of that? I would have sworn no.

The hardest thing to accept is not that it happened, but the person I turned out to
be.