Siracusa (3 page)

M
ICHAEL SUFF
ERS HORRIBLY
from jet lag, and it takes a few days before he’s functioning on all cylinders. Upon our arrival at Cesare Due, having left the taxi and deposited our luggage with the bellman, we collided. What I mean is, while entering the hotel we attempted to pass through the entrance at the same time and nearly became wedged there like cartoon characters. “Oh my God, you want a divorce,” I said.

Michael looked startled, as if a flowerpot, dropped from above, had narrowly missed him.

I started laughing. “That’s a joke, you know, because—”

“Because what?” said Michael. He’s querulous when he’s wiped.

“Nothing. Sorry. Forget it. I’m tired. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

I have learned when to back off, but here’s the thing. Michael has the most perfect manners. He unfailingly helps me on with my coat, lets women exit an elevator first, crosses to the street side when we walk together, and has never once preceded me
through a doorway. Before his appendectomy, when he was writhing in pain, he waited for me to enter the emergency room ahead of him. I always thought, and joked to my best friend Rachel, that if he ever walked through a door first, it would mean he was through with me. In Rome, lo and behold, he did it.

That’s how jet-lagged he was.

I wasn’t surprised that he wanted to sleep the day away, whereas I wanted only a short nap. After leaving a message at the front desk for Finn and Taylor, who had flown to Rome from Boston, I visited the carnival of activity at Piazza Navona, had spaghetti carbonara and a macchiato, and sat for a few lazy hours. Then I went back to the hotel, and was exploring, wandering down a labyrinthine corridor when from behind someone grabbed my hand. I swung around. Finn backed me into a corner.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Looking for you.”

“You are not.”

“Looking for the bar,” said Finn. “There it is.” He pulled me along.

With amber sconces providing the seductive glow of twilight and narrow leather banquettes, the tiny cavelike space had the requisite romantic anonymity of a perfect hotel bar. Couples who don’t want to be seen or remembered have rendezvoused here.

He peered around, saw no one serving, scooted out to wave down the hall, and scooted back. A waitress appeared a second later, slim and young in a seriously tight black skirt and a tailored white shirt buttoned to the collar, her hair slicked back in a twist.

“Do you speak French?” he asked her in English.

“No, but I speak English,” she said in English.

Finn ordered every bar snack blithely in French, and I do want to explain the significance of this. Finn speaks fluent French because, while the rest of us went to college, he crewed on French yachts. As a result, when in foreign countries, he has a status and respect far beyond his occasionally goofball demeanor and working-class roots. Speaking foreign languages can make an American something more than an American, made Finn something more than Finn. “Do you speak
lingua mista
?” he then asked. She smiled, and into his French he sprinkled some Italian as well as English words like
martinis
and
olives
.

“I can’t drink a martini, I’ll be on the floor. I’ll have a kir,
per favore
.”

“Per favore.”
He mimicked my terrible accent and told the waitress that I should be locked in language jail. Now the waitress was laughing.

“Do you live with your mother?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

In a minute he’ll get her to sing the Italian national anthem. Finn can get women to do things they normally do only in front of the mirror. Not that she’s singing the national anthem into her bathroom mirror, but you know what I mean. The first time we hung out together, we were wandering around the Portland harbor past ferries and cruise ships very late at night and Finn was quizzing me about everything. Did I like the Eagles (who didn’t?), pretzels salted or not (salted), could I salsa? No, but I could tap. I performed my routine to “Take Five”
from one end of the pier to the other. I’d studied tap when I was ten. I hadn’t tapped since and I have never tapped again. Finn.

“I brought you something,” he said. From his shirt pocket he handed me a shiny vacuum-sealed packet of peanuts that read
TWA
.

“TWA? That’s a dead airline.”

“Not to me,” said Finn.

In the middle of our fling, we’d flown to Montreal on TWA and had a big fight there, and I flew back alone. Finn had mentioned he hunts. He had a freezer full of elk steaks. “You eat them, I shoot them, so what?” he said.

“I don’t eat elk. I don’t go around pointing guns at animals, pulling a trigger, and watching them die.”

“You just ate fucking foie gras,” he said.

I had. At a great restaurant, Les Amis de Pierre.

“So you own a gun?” I said.

“A thirty-ought-six,” he said.

I’ll never forget the name because it was so weird. Then it occurred to me. “I bet you don’t believe in gun control?”

“Suppose I need to protect my family?” he said.

What was I doing with him? What? He was a Republican. Every digging deeper led to massive disagreement, even screaming, but I was having fun. Fun was Finn’s specialty. I felt free around him too. Fun and free turned out to be rare enough to create lasting affection.

I knew the affair was temporary. I was on my way to New York City. Besides, speaking of foie gras, Finn was dessert. To take him seriously was to commit to an all-sugar diet.

“Seriously, TWA? Where’d you get this?”

Finn grinned. I knew I’d get nowhere.

“Where are Taylor and Snow?”

“In the room. They’ll be down eventually.”

I ripped open the packet expecting to see black shriveled bits, and instead found perfectly ordinary golden-brown nuts. “Eat one, I dare you.”

Finn threw a few into his mouth and chewed.

Shortly I was on my second kir.

“Your eyeballs are spinning,” said Finn. “Wait till Michael sees you four sheets to the wind.”

“Michael might not come to dinner. He’s beat. I really love these green olives. What happened with Jessa?”

“Nothing yet. What do you think? Should I?”

“I’m not telling you to have an affair.”

“Are you available?”

“No, Finn, I’m not available. Will anyone do?”

“No.”

Finn was incapable of not flirting. I always ignored it. “When did you start smoking again?”

“Yesterday.”

“Liar.”

“Want a drag?”

“No, I don’t want a drag.”

He wrapped his hand around mine and pried the glass from it. “What are you doing?”

“Shut up.” He separated my fingers and placed the cigarette between them. At that moment I realized Michael was here.

“Lizzie smokes,” said Finn.

“Finn smokes. Take it back,” I told Finn. “I don’t want that awful smell on my hand. I thought you were sleeping through dinner?”

“I changed my mind.”

“Taylor doesn’t know I smoke. Don’t tell her.”

“Finn, we don’t want to know things about you that your wife doesn’t know.” I said this knowing that I knew many things about Finn that Taylor didn’t know (and Michael didn’t either). About Jessa, for instance. “We really don’t.”

“Speak for yourself. I don’t mind,” said Michael. “I like knowing people’s secrets. Then I can write about them. Disguised, of course. Macallan, if you have it,” he told the waitress. “On the rocks.”

Looking back, that trip tricked me out from day one. I
was
flirting. I offered Michael nuts without telling him that they were fifteen years old. In the beginning, I’d have to admit, I was collaborating with Finn.

T
HE MAN PHONED AGAIN
, feeling a fool. Her cell was turned off. Conclusion (obvious) he drew when unable to reach his lover, when one ring triggered her voice singing “Jingle Bells.” “I love Christmas,” she’d told him.

I was getting sloppy. K was not a “contact,” but more dangerously a pileup of “recents.” Would carelessness rescue me from ambivalence? Should I leave my cell on Lizzie’s unpacked suitcase?

I enjoy concealing, lying less so. Some may claim otherwise. I did both, do both. A secret is something you can play with, to keep or give away; a gift or a poisoned dart, it can be either. Concealing may be merely letting other people draw conclusions. As for lying, in this story, which is also my life, I will make a case for the charm of it.
“You will be fooled,” he said arrogantly.

I’d stopped in at Tino’s for a drink. Eight months ago. Early November. I did that occasionally when the writing wasn’t happening. Ducked out of my office and around the corner to the local Italian. Coffee break but no coffee. To jump-start the process
with Macallan. Writers have been doing that forever. Imagine I’m Irish. We fell into a conversation. Knew each other’s names already. Lizzie and I ate there every few months, and K always gave us the table Lizzie liked in the corner. I was ruminating about Julien, his particular need to be accepted and his disdain for the good opinions he craved. “Problems with Julien,” I told her when she settled onto the stool next to me.

“Is that your son?”

“I’m a writer. He’s a character.”

“Julien,” she said. “Cool name.”

I had to laugh at that. “Based on
The Red and the Black
. A modern version.”

She nodded. I knew she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Intentional on my part. Figured it would impress her. That she would be intimidated and flattered that a man as . . . what? As literate as I was sharing with her, talking to her as if she would know the book, know anything. Character matters. Hers. To seduce, a man divines a woman’s insecurity and compliments it. Kath needed respect. I say this in retrospect. Conversation moves too fast to be consciously aware of all one knows.

“What’s your given name?” I’d asked.

“Given?” She didn’t understand that either.

“Kath is short for what?”

“Kathy.”

“You’re beautiful.”

I didn’t expect to say that. Took me by surprise.

Katarina. I rechristened her after I laid her. It’s not her fault
that her parents had no poetry, bestowing on their daughter a nickname for a name. I’m here to correct the wrongs of her life.

“For God’s sake, Kath, turn on your phone. This is solving nothing.”

I soaked in the tub (Italian tubs are too narrow, let it be noted), dead tired from the flight, Lizzie mercifully off somewhere. She hits the ground running.

Two in the afternoon in Rome, eight in the morning in NYC. On her days off, K’s at the gym by nine. Spin class. Two, she’s in my office, naked. Where was she today?

With a man who wants to see those breasts as much as I did?

Blame it on the breasts. Some things must be . . . must be, fuck, what, experienced. They are a siren call. A deathbed regret. She hides them. Clever woman. Attempts to—although not successfully—under big things, oversized sweaters, slinky slippery tops that drop straight from her shoulders to her hips. Technically they resemble landmasses. She’s got two continents under there begging to be explored. They shift with the slightest adjustment of her body. She reaches for an olive. She takes a sip of water. She licks her lips. I swear, a movement that minute and her breasts are alive to it.

“If you want to write a woman, put in modifiers,” I told her. It was quiet at Tino’s at three p.m. Lunch over. Snacks only. A tasteless dip of chickpeas and pimientos, compliments of the house. She didn’t know what a modifier was. Kindly I explained: “Woman: ‘I’m just so crazy about you.’ Man: ‘I’m crazy about you.’” It was that easy to seduce her. Subtext.

She was friendly. It was her job to make diners welcome, happy, comfortable. Kath was ready with smiles. Sometimes, in uncertain situations, over her head as was often the case in conversation with me, her cheek twitched in a moment of indecision. She wanted to please. Was a smile the correct response?

I’d asked her about herself. Knowing that men rarely did. She’d been in the city ten years and was still circling, waiting to land. “There’s something here for me but I don’t know what.” She was earnest, a quality one doesn’t often encounter, genuinely puzzled by her life. “Why, at thirty-two, am I still living with a roommate rather than married with three kids in Bloomington?”

“I might be the reason,” the man suggested.

“Turn on your fucking phone, Kath. Fuck it. I’m going out.”

I was on my way to the bar for fortification. Dinner would be less irritating. Liquor oils the nerves. “First doorway on the right, signor.” The porter directed me.

As I was about to enter, an instinct that I was intruding caused a sharpening up. Have you ever found yourself wandering aimlessly through a museum and a painting stops you? Arrests you? Penetrates the self-centered fog. Like that. Tucked into the corner banquette was a woman, a stunner, brown hair in a tangle falling into her face, dark eyes lit bright and shining. I shifted to take it all in, the man whose hands cupped hers. She was pulling away, laughing. “Stop it, Finn.”

Lizzie.

A man doesn’t recognize his own wife. Because she’s happy.

Lizzie with Finn. Lizzie and Finn. Of course.

On the way to dinner, I detoured to the room. “Need to make a note about something,” I’d explained to them all gathered in the stylish paneled lobby overwhelming the space the way Americans do.

“For his novel,” said Lizzie. She waved a map. “I know where we’re going.”

“You start. I’ll catch up.”

“Of course we’ll wait. You’ll get lost.”

“Kath, pick up. Katarina, I have a plan.” I didn’t say,
Trust me
. Avoid clichés. I’m not a cad.
Cad
: an old-fashioned word but a good one. Best not to remind her of the many years between us. “I’m not a dog,” I said instead. “Impossibly difficult, I know, sweet Katarina, but be patient. This trip will solve everything.”

It will even be a favor to Lizzie. New York is finished with her. She had a modest little run but now it’s over. One day she will thank me.