Siracusa (9 page)

In reality, same fountain yet not. The lights were so bright, night was banished. Tourists milled about posing for pictures and tossing in coins. Shouting, loud laughter, teenagers screeching. Everyone clomping in big fat sneakers.

We couldn’t see the fountain in its entirety from the stone bench where Michael had parked himself. We joined him, Snow between us. I asked her if she wanted to throw in a coin—it meant she would return to Rome, I explained—but got that mini head shake, no. Did she want to get closer? She shook her head to that too.

For me, visiting the fountain was a pilgrimage. My dad and
the Trevi Fountain were all wrapped up with falling in love with Michael.

“When I was your age,” I told Snow, “my dad took me to see a famous Italian movie called
La Dolce Vita
. It was his favorite film.” Snow smoothed the creases in her skirt, giving no indication of interest. It didn’t matter. I was really telling Michael. I was reminding him. Our first weekend together, the only time we left bed was to go to the Film Forum to see this movie. My dad had died the year before. Taking Michael to
La Dolce Vita
was my way of introducing him to my dad.

“A famous scene takes place here. An American movie star, Anita Ekberg, has come to Rome. She was—oh God, she was as remarkable in the flesh as those gods are in marble. Tall and impossibly beautiful with long sleek blond hair like yours, and miraculous bosoms.” When I talked about Anita Ekberg, all I wanted to do was use overinflated words like
miraculous
and
bosoms
. “There was something about the giganticness of her breasts. . . .”

Here’s the thing about Snow’s wallpaperishness. I didn’t always consider the appropriateness, the effect of my words. She gave so little back, but I pulled Michael’s attention with that comment. His head swiveled my way, and, since he was drunk—he doesn’t jolt easily when drunk—I felt a rush of pride in my ability to engage him. Having won the prize of his attention, I talked faster to keep it.

“Marcello, a meltingly handsome Italian, is following Anita through the deserted streets of Rome, and when he arrives at
the piazza, she is in the fountain. Imagine this goddess, her mountainous breasts threatening to fall out of her black strapless dress, wafting toward the falls. ‘Marcello, come here,’ she calls.” This had become a refrain in our relationship. When I took a shower, I would shout,
Marcello, come here
, and Michael would join me.

I was wishing Snow gone. This was Michael’s and my love story.

“You look like a little angel from an Umbrian church,” said Michael.

“What?”

“La Dolce Vita.”

“I don’t remember that line.”

He smiled at Snow.

“Oh,” she said in her breathless whisper.

“Oh?”

“He told me,” she said, “when we looked in the window.”

When they looked in the window? They? Whose romantic memories was I summoning? What window? To this day I don’t know.

Snow tucked a leg under her and shifted toward Michael, turning her back to me.

“Marcello’s soul was up for grabs, like mine,” said Michael.

Oh please. Did I say that or did I only think it? He could be so affected. So full of shit.

“Marcello visits a friend who seems to understand what life is about. Life is about family.” Michael kept on, at first in a worn drunken ramble, then more lucidly, probably warming to the
sound of his own voice. “He meets the man’s two beautiful children, and his wife, who is gracious and welcoming. Later in the movie—”

I reached around Snow and rapped his back. “Don’t get into that.”

He said it anyway. “Later Marcello learns that this man has killed his children and himself.”

No flinch from Snow. No gasp.

“He was a sad, sick man,” I say.

Obviously he was if he did that, but the whole thing is left an uncertain mystery. Why would a seemingly contented man with everything to live for do that? It makes no sense except that the world is so soulless he can’t bear for his children to live in it, which is pretentious (like Michael) and utter garbage.

He continued to spin the tale for Snow in that wicked way he could intoxicate. What happens when Marcello accompanies the police and reporters to find the man’s wife and break the horrific news? “The perfect wife,” said Michael, “with the seemingly perfect life. She gets off a bus and along the street she ambles. The reporters, these vermin, swarm around her. ‘Do you think I am an actress?’ she says, puzzled to find herself an object of interest. ‘Do you think I am an actress?’ she says, confused yet flattered as she is about to learn the worst: Her husband has killed their children and himself.”

“What the fuck?” said Finn.

I hadn’t realized he was here.

He knocked Michael’s shoulder. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I brought it up.”

Michael bent his head down and curled around in the laziest way to see what the fuss was.

“What’s with that story?” Finn asked him again.

Taylor pushed in from behind, “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s designed by Nicola Salvi. I hope no one threw in a coin without me. Snow, that’s no place to sit, it’s filthy, who knows who sat here or has done what here?”

“Who gives a shit about that,” said Finn. “What’s with that story?”

“What story?” Taylor waved Snow up off the bench.

“It’s really my fault,” I said again.

While Snow slipped behind her, Taylor addressed Finn with the certainty of a mother: In this crowd she knew who the troublemaker was. “What is the problem?”

“Why the fuck does it matter if she’s dirty?” said Finn.

“Oh lord,” said Taylor. Oh lord what I didn’t know. Oh lord, watch your language, oh lord, not in front of our friends, or oh lord, don’t be rude to Michael, who could not have been ruder himself, like the great god Oceanus at the fountain, present but above it all.

“My husband is drunk,” I said. “I’m taking him back to the hotel.”

I couldn’t read his face, the bastard, and getting him up was like lifting a couch. Finn didn’t offer to help and I avoided his eye, avoided everyone’s, actually. “Seriously drunk,” I said. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We have the guide,” said Taylor.

“Oh, right. Dinner, then. We’ll make a plan.”

I tugged Michael along, propped him up as well as I could, my hand locked on his biceps. I didn’t hear a splash. Perhaps there wasn’t one. The falls were noisy, as was the crowd. We’d turned onto a high road, the fountain now below us on the left. Were we walking the right direction? I couldn’t manage Michael and the map. A boy wobbled by on a bicycle. I was about to stop him and ask but got sidetracked by two skinny guys in front of a souvenir shop. They had that slap-dash suave of young Italian men whose clothes are cool and hang just right, sunglasses at night. Babe-men. Who could resist staring? One straightened and strained the way you do when you are trying to get an eyeful. I turned to see what interested him.

The crowd around the fountain pressed against the railing. Pointing, shouting, catching whatever it was on their phones and cameras. Two officers on Vespas drove into the piazza. From our vantage I couldn’t see the falls, only one end of the still pond. A man sloshed into view, trudging through the water, carrying someone. All I could see were her bare legs and pink jellies.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Michael. “It’s better if we don’t know them.”

B
EFORE
I
CONTINUE
, I want to tell you about Track It Back, a game I play. You take an incident and work backward to the cause. For example, I wouldn’t have had Snow if my mother hadn’t sent me to Camp Windward in Camden, Maine, every August. A sailing camp. I loved boats. I loved getting them shipshape. I loved memorizing the parts—jib, bow, prow, keel. When I have insomnia I put myself to sleep reciting boat parts. At this camp everyone said
ahoy
instead of
hello
. Isn’t that cute? Every so often I still do that. I’m a fair sailor but I don’t like receding shorelines—watching land diminish, details evaporate. I never sail now and have put my foot down about Snow. Even with a life preserver it’s risky.

On my way to my camp reunion I stopped for the night in Portland and met Finn. Hence Snow. Hence it tracks back to Camp Windward.

As for what happened on our second night in Rome, I track it back to the tiff. Because of the tiff, I arrived late to the Trevi Fountain and Snow ended up under Lizzie’s influence.

“Why did you put ice cream on her nose?” I said to Finn. He is such a frustration. “That is no way to relate to your daughter.”

“How did you know?”

“How did I know? I saw.” Why did that matter?

Snow hated his teasing, I could tell. Once when he tugged her hair and pretended he hadn’t, I had considered whether we should all go to a therapist to fix Finn, to make him more aware of his actions, but on reflection I realized we might have to discuss other things. You can’t control what happens in a therapist’s office if more than one family member is allowed to speak. When Snow was five, at the suggestion of our pediatrician, we’d all visited a child psychologist for advice on how to handle Snow’s extreme shyness syndrome. I had to force Finn. The therapist asked questions about breast-feeding, implying it was odd that I did it until Snow was three and a half. Why was that odd? She sent Snow out of the room and inquired about our sex life. “How would you characterize it?” she asked. “I wouldn’t,” I told her. I refused to return.

Teasing is unacknowledged hostility. One Google turns that up but when I pointed that out to Finn, he said, “I’m not teasing. I’m kidding around.”

I’ve discussed his teasing at length with April. April has fraternal twins, boys, who are not IVF. Everyone assumes they are, which is irritating. Her boys are both hyperactive, and I don’t use that word carelessly. I’ll take shy over hyperactive any day. April is exhausted and her living room looks like a battlefield with plastic dinosaurs and Legos strewn from one end to the other. She’s given up on it. I suppose family counseling might work for
us if I insist that Snow always be present. Then we could stick to Finn and steer clear of intimate things that are irrelevant and inappropriate. Still, suppose the therapist asked to see us separately? As you can tell, I consider all possibilities.

Because of that tiff over his teasing, I missed an opportunity not for me but for Snow. All the preparation I had done before we left, all the magical moments I’d envisioned for her, and then Finn—he’s such a rug rat—scrambled me.

I had wanted Snow to hear the fountain before she saw the fountain. At the corner, she would stop, shut her eyes, and tune out everything except the rushing of the falls. Only then would I have led her into the piazza. Only then would she have beheld the magnificent Baroque fountain, the grandest in Rome.

After exchanging words with Finn, however, I couldn’t bear to walk with him. I let him hustle ahead in that quirky limping way I used to find endearing. He would never have that limp if he had a brain in his head, playing a fourth quarter with a torn ligament. It wasn’t even a championship game. With a throb I realized, because Snow had walked ahead with Lizzie, she would miss the moment I’d dreamed of. By the time I caught up, Finn was badgering Michael, who was dulled to stiff from drinking. Snow hadn’t even thrown in a coin, I don’t believe, and, with the kerfuffle, she knew to hide behind me, take a bit of refuge.

Michael is troubled the way I imagine geniuses are. He needs more caretaking than Lizzie can provide. Still, when Lizzie helped him up, I was struck by how tender she was with him, firm but calm, and very kind, and a little bit embarrassed, of
course. I watched them for a minute negotiating the steps, thinking,
How sweet
. How misled was I?

It’s hard to write about what happened next; my hands are shaking, my breath shortening, the memory cruel. The last thing I remember clearly was Finn saying “Yoo-hoo” to me. Yoo-hoo? Why would he say something that silly? I turned back to Snow and she was gone.

Here I draw a complete blank. I think I screamed, “My daughter, where’s my daughter?” Perhaps I screamed, “Snow?” I must have screamed. I’m sure I screamed. I scanned the crowd for a glimpse of her towhead, her pink top, the ruffled one I’d bought at this store I love called Little Pink Lady. It has the cutest tween clothes. How long was this eternity? Less than a minute.

“The fountain,” said Finn.

I swear, my first thought was,
What fountain?
Finn pointed, and I saw Snow in the Trevi Fountain, meandering through. Meandering is the only way I can think to describe what she was doing although I am well aware that a person cannot meander through water, even shallow water. Her route was leisurely, tacking this way and that—a dreamy fairy-tale girl in a world of her own.

“Get her,” I said.

Finn pushed through the crowd. By the time he’d leapt the railing and splashed into the fountain Snow had ventured under the falls. There she stood, her face raised as if to the heavens, her eyes closed, her arms held straight and stiffly, palms facing forward. Perhaps something sorrowful in a church had inspired her to create this angelic vision. We had visited two that day.

Finn carried her out in his arms. People cheered. He set her, wet as a fish, down on the pavement, and climbed out himself. I was sorry I didn’t have my phone at the ready and on video, but I looked around to appreciate the crowd’s enthusiasm, and thank goodness I did because two security guards were bumping their way through.

“Finn, run,” I shouted.

He grabbed Snow’s hand and obeyed.

Finn has a funny gait, a hitch because of his high school football injury, but he can still move fast. That I didn’t break an ankle on the cobblestones trying to catch them was a miracle. The streets are dreadfully uneven, being ancient. They must be brutal on one’s back. I can only imagine how many Romans have compressed discs. My mother broke her ankle in March slipping on an icy sidewalk when she came out of Gourmet Garage on 86th Street. This surprised me for many reasons. My mother usually orders her food from Butterman’s Specialty Gourmet. She has an account. They take phone orders and deliver. Perhaps since my dad left—“escaped” is the word Finn uses, and I have told him never to use it in front of Snow, who adores her grandmother . . . since my dad left, my mother must be expanding, trying all kinds of new things. However, I can’t imagine her pushing a grocery cart or carrying one of those baskets up and down aisles or toting her purchases home in a plastic sack. Heaven forfend, to use her expression. I can’t imagine her sorting through onions or selecting apples. That’s difficult, by the way, figuring out which apples are crisp and not
mealy. That’s something I could help her with. Perhaps she compared yogurts for fat content. Whenever she sees me she pinches my waist. Sometimes Snow’s too. Luggage, she calls it. “Are you carrying any luggage?” While we were in Italy, she was stuck on a couch with her leg elevated. Her ankle hadn’t healed properly and she had to have surgery. I might be on a verbal detour but that makes me laugh because, talk about a detour, Finn ducked into a gift from heaven, a stone archway where we were quite hidden. I had to hug Finn; he was a hero. I completely forgot how wet he was, and I got soaked too. That made me laugh so hard it was painful.

“Snow, for goodness’ sakes, the Trevi Fountain is a national monument. What were you thinking?”

She was back in a dream world, a glazed expression. That pretty pink top and her pleated polka dot skirt stuck to her skin; water trickled down her face. Her hair was matted, a snarly mess. She appeared neither to know nor care.

“Do you think I am an actress?” she said in her whispery voice.

“I think you’re wet.”

“Do you think I am an actress?” she said again.

I turned because she didn’t appear to be speaking to me. I thought perhaps someone was behind me, someone just over my left shoulder, but no one was there.

“You can be an actress, Snow. When you grow up, you can be whatever you want.”

We hustled her into a taxi. I felt guilty because I knew we
would soak the vinyl seats. Leaving something the way you found it has always seemed to me a rule to live by, but we had to take a taxi because we had no idea where we were. “Are you cold?” I asked Snow, patting her face with a tissue.

Sometimes Snow responds with a click of her tongue. She did that now. I used to think it signaled contentment, but truly I don’t know. My daughter is mysterious, and one of the remarkable things about Snow is how inventively she relates. Finn calls it “the cluck.”

We dripped through the lobby. Finn and I tried not to crack up, and Snow kept right by my side, her hand in mine. In spite of her shyness, I could see that she didn’t care about being judged. As a mother, that meant I’d done something right.

“
Buonanotte,”
said Finn to everyone we passed.

I was brushing my teeth when he came in and closed the door. I’m smiling as I write this but that’s all I’m saying because what happened next was private and the mirror wasn’t steamed from the heat we generated but it should have been.

Afterward, when Finn was sitting on the tub, he said, “That was a line from
La Dolce Vita
.”

“What was?”

“That actress thing Snowy said.”

“‘Do you think I am an actress?’”

“Yep,” he said.

“She was quoting?”

“The wife of the man who killed himself.”

“Good grief. Lizzie’s fault, I suppose. She must have told Snow.”

“Michael’s.”

“Honestly, Finn, you can’t imagine that Lizzie is responsible for anything. At dinner she said quite clearly how her father raised her on Chinese food, foreign films, and Gregory someone. Her dad’s favorite movie, she told me, was
La Dolce Vita
.”

I went to bed irritated and Finn went out.