Siracusa (10 page)

T
AY MAY HAVE DRESSED HER
like a doll, talked for Snow like she was a ventriloquist’s dummy, but you can’t keep a Dolan down. What a crazy-assed thing to do. That’s my girl. That’s a Dolan in action. No Seddley’s popping herself in the Trevi Fountain, strutting around, striking poses.

Excuse my bragging. I don’t experience the thrill of fatherhood often. Even when I think I’ve got my daughter to myself, a chance to have some fun, tweak her funny bone, Tay turns out to be lurking. Here’s a fact. When we go places, I drive and Tay and Snow ride in back. It started when Snow was a baby. Tay would buckle Snow in the car seat and stay there to “keep her company.” Why not, we weren’t going far. Snowy cried when Tay rode up front. Sad for the kid to cry, I agreed. It got to be habit or whatever you call it when a bad idea becomes status quo. If I’m in a good mood, I call myself the chauffeur. If not, I shut up and drive. My mom shakes her head every time we cruise over to her place. “This doesn’t make sense to me, Finn.”

The cigarettes. It boils down to that. If Tay rides in back,
she’s less likely to smell them or detect stray bits of tobacco. So hey, I live with it.

Snow put on a show the tourists won’t forget.

What did those folks think if, say, they weren’t looking at the fountain and then glanced over and spied this innocent under the falls? Was it a miracle, a visitation, a mirage? An angel? A saint? I’m kidding. Kind of. I’m Catholic. I might have already mentioned that ’cause if you’re Catholic, is it ever fucking not on your mind? I eat guilt for breakfast. I’ll take life with a side of guilt—that’s a joke we cracked like once a month. What’s on the menu? Life with a side of guilt? I didn’t go to college but I did go to Sunday school. I know Oceanus wasn’t a Christian, and he is the dude presiding over the homoerotic festivities at the Trevi Fountain.

Naked men frolicking with horses. Who are we kidding? I don’t care, mind you, I’m only pointing out something that might not be in the guidebooks but anyone with half a brain could see.

“The grandest fountain in Rome,” said Tay.

Grander now that a Dolan’s been in it. Two Dolans.

Here’s how it happened in case you’re confused. You might be used to reading in order: first this, then this, then this. No problem. Michael was telling Snowy about a man who kills his kids and commits suicide. Why would anyone tell a child that story? Drunk doesn’t explain it. More like twisted. Sick. You take the measure of a man not when he’s sober but when he’s drunk. That’s when the uglies come out. He didn’t mean it, he was drunk. Bullshit, he meant it. I’m an expert on drinking.
That makes me an expert on human nature. Later I’ll tell you my theories. I’ve got categories. Drinking’s a national pastime. It’s bigger than football and its culture is as fucked up, and that’s about as smart as I get. I can give you the lowdown on all the year-rounders who come to my joint just from clocking their booze consumption.

As I was saying, Michael was filling Snow’s head with nightmares. I was pissed but I wasn’t going to punch him. Maybe I should have. He’d crossed a line. A fight sometimes solves a dispute cleaner and quicker than words. You fight, it’s over. Take it outside. I say that now and then. A guy’s nose bleeds, he gets a shiner, big deal. A Dolan protects his own, but Lizzie looked miserable. When Lizzie’s upset, she’s like a cartoon character with zigzags in her eyes.

I couldn’t do it to Lizzie. Or to Taylor’s vacation.

Still, what’s a vacation if it doesn’t get crazy? All this civility, after you, shall we share, this relic or that, let’s toast. Let’s fight. It’s as good a route as any to magic memories.

This night was unforgettable. Snow snuck into the fountain, filling my heart with pride.

The second we were out, I heard Tay shout, “Run.”

I grabbed Snow’s hand. “Hold on, baby.” The crowd parted like the Red Sea. No one wanted to get wet and we were soaked. Nuts too, they figured. Tay caught up and we barreled down this
via
and that. Were the police on our asses? I kind of hoped so but not, if you know what I mean. Ducked under a relic of some sort, didn’t know what the hell it was. Half expected Tay to whip out her guidebook and give us the lowdown—when it
was built, note the trickle of water from a nearby sewer—but she was bent over, gasping like she’d run the marathon. Snow was one bedraggled devil, hair plastered, that top with ruffles slapped to her skin. She should have looked miserable but my daughter was blissed out.

As soon as Tay caught her breath, she was dancing around Snow. I hadn’t seen Tay so hyped up in years. She even forgot she has reservations about that thing called touch and hugged me. All three of us looked like we’d been fished out of a well.

“She’s a Dolan,” I told Tay. I whispered it in the elevator. I had a boner and was pressing against her. Maybe my imagination was running wild but I thought she was pressing back.

“She’s a Dolan.” I said it again later in the bathroom. Tay all dried off, prim and perfect in that thin silky robe of hers. She wears it wrapped tight as if the north wind were going to show up and try to blow it off her. Still I was putting the moves on, nuzzling her neck.

“Snow,” she said.

Code. “Snow” means no sex, not happening, kid alert. The kid might hear. What? What can she hear? I’ve never known Taylor to even squeak. She’s a silent fuck. I shouldn’t call my wife a fuck, it’s disrespectful. I’m not taking it back, just letting you know that I know that I shouldn’t but fuck it I am. Thought a lot about why I wanted Tay. Talked to Dorothy the shrink about it. Started going to Dorothy after we got back. Part of Tay’s power is, “I’ll let you.” The grant-a-favor thing she’s got going is powerful.

Most men aren’t fucking their wives. I should say most wives
aren’t fucking their husbands. I know that from the business I’m in.

Tay, genius at buzzkill, started in with the face cream: a dab on each cheek, one on her forehead. She got up close and personal with the mirror while she rubbed in circles, using two fingers, middle and ring. Same go every night. She and the mirror have a good relationship. She and the mirror are tight.

She saw me watching. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Giorgio’s coming at nine tomorrow. We’re going to the Vatican.” She turned on her electric toothbrush.
We’re done here.

“Snow’s a Dolan,” I said again. There’s more than one way to fuck my wife.

I met the Swedes later, spent an hour sandwiched between them at a rave, everything strobe-streaked an inky sick yellow-green, violent music. They were slithery, could do things with each other while their hands and legs got tangled up with me. Thought about opening a restaurant in Sweden.

O
NLY DRINK WA
S SAVING MY
SANITY
. Brought home by my wife, I was told. Behaved badly, she said, although I had no memory and seriously doubted that assessment. No memory of the Trevi Fountain. No memory at all of the previous night except for clicking, phoning, ranting, raging. My hand itchy for the phone. Lagging behind, plowing ahead, jockeying for privacy. Deluging K with texts and messages. Clicking, phoning, ranting, raging. No answer, no indication whatsoever that she was anything but a figment. The fish at dinner, the waiter extracting a perfectly intact spine. After that, nothing (remembered) till morning.

Although earlier:

I’d called the restaurant. Again. Six p.m. Roman time. Noon in New York. Made the calculation repeatedly, compulsively. Here this, there that. K arrived at eleven. Her job to answer. She will answer. Magical thinking.
She will answer
, I told myself as the phone rang. God, I felt ordinary. Ordinary. I whipped
myself with it. The phone rang and rang. Eventually Tino answered. Tino, oily with charm, silky manners. “Mr. Shapner, hello. Wonderful.”
Wonderful
was Tino’s word. He used it willy-nilly. “Will you honor us with a reservation? No?” Of what assistance could he be?

“I had offered Kath some help, a connection, is she there?” Polite. Impersonal. Vague about details.

“Kath did not come in today,” said Tino with a sigh, implying that she had let us both down. Was he lying? He was lying. She was standing right there, dabbing at tears with a cocktail napkin. She’d probably confided all. “Tino and Tessa are my second family,” she’d said. Hell, she babysat their grandchildren.

“I hate you. I hope you die,” K had said months before, lying on her back in the sun.

She’d spoken the words, then turned her head toward me.

I’m not a sun guy, by the way. Brought the
Times
, was sitting up, Yankees cap, sunglasses, reading about yet another
Hamlet
coming next fall, wondering why I didn’t like Shakespeare more, the dramas not the comedies, and if I would ever admit it, glancing over often to appreciate how juicy she was. Sunbathing in Central Park was against my religion, creed, or whatever affiliations to which I belonged. But she loved to lie in the sun, loved the park, bounced and jiggled all the way there, her body barely contained in the briefest of light summer dresses. The fabric adhered to her thighs, getting stuck between. She tugged at it now and then. What miracle of science caused a young woman’s skirt to cling like that on an unseasonably warm and windless spring day? I was certain I wouldn’t be seen, L safely
distant, downtown at some event. Still, I adhered to the rules of the road, the road rules of philandering husbands. Leave enough space for a person between us. A man and woman cannot be faulted for occupying the same sidewalk. “Central Park, fresh air. Yippee.” She’d clapped, her hands upright, a happy baby clap. I acquiesced, feeling generous, gracious, letting her life be mine, a favor I occasionally granted.

She’d lain on the grass, spoken the words, and turned toward me. “I hate you. I hope you die.” How refreshing. She could still summon the spite of a teenager.

It was, I knew, the first time K had admitted she loved me.

But then.

—

On our third day in Rome:

“Is this a Prius?” Lizzie asked.

“My first wife was a Prius.”

The spell broke. It was as if the hypnotist snapped his fingers.

Why did Lizzie ask the cabdriver the question? She wasn’t interested in cars. We didn’t own one. What would make her ask that? How unexpected she was. I’d forgotten that (and everything else). She’d crawled into the taxi like a cat. Lizzie did that sometimes. Even at a restaurant. Everyone else slid into the booth. She might prowl across the seat, then settle, slipping her legs down, unfolding upright. Some leftover thing from childhood, I’d always assumed. Was it charming? I’d never been able to decide. It was unself-conscious. Lizzie probably had never noticed that other women didn’t do it. In the class photo, there
she was: the third-grader in the front row who forgot to keep her ankles crossed.

The seduction had begun that morning in the hotel room. She’d plunked into my lap.

“Jesus, Lizzie, you’re crushing my balls.”

“Oops.” She adjusted. No, she wouldn’t say where we were going, only that she’d done a Taylor’s worth of research. “You will love it. I promise you.” She felt terrible for me, awful, her face crumpled thinking about it. On all our trips I’d searched out the thing that would enchant us and I’d been too immersed in work. “Struggling with your creative demons. Poor Michael. Come on.” She pulled me along. “You were awful last night and now you must make up for it. Don’t ask where we’re going.” She held up a small waxy bag and shook it. “Italian gumdrops. Never too early for sugar. You are going to love this surprise.”

No resisting. Trundled down to the lobby and out, a stop at the kiosk where Lizzie anguished, the white daisies versus the tipped. “Dunked in dye,” she called them.

The doorman hailed a cab. In she crawled, sat, and leaned forward to hand the driver the address. “No problem,” he said.

“Do you speak English?” she said.

“Yes.”

She proffered the candies.
“Delicioso,”
she insisted. Close enough: Spanish.

“Thank you,” he said.

Naturally she was emboldened, his
Thank you
was flawless, and desperate to connect with a native, “Is this a Prius?” she asked.

“My first wife was a Prius,” the driver said.

We fell apart.

Like that I remembered I loved her.

Our destination: Cimitero Acattolico. Final resting place for non-Catholics, mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Americans who had visited Rome and died there. Whose lives had ended far from home. Lizzie showered euros on Paolo the driver, with whom conversation had continued to confuse and entrance.

“Does Italy have national health care?” Lizzie asked.

“Only on Saturdays and Sundays,” said Paolo.

I had been possessed. I had had an illness: K. Now the fever had passed, broken by laughter.

Surrounded by parking spaces and spotty grass, enclosed by a wall built of large crumbling blocks (of concrete or no? sand? stone?), the site from outside was more suggestive of Third World than antiquity, of an end, which it was, being full of the dead, than a beginning, which it was for us, an improbable land of rebirth.

Adding to the confusion or simply misleading, the top of a pyramid loomed in the distance. “The Romans had a crush on the Egyptians after they conquered them,” said Lizzie. “That’s the tomb of Cestius.”

“A man with a large ego.”

“The earliest known narcissist.”

Our connection was heady. Banter flirtatious.

“We’re visiting the poets,” she announced, and paused before entering. A significant pause. Touched me to see it. Her eyes closed, she took a calming breath. She was making a wish. I knew what it was:
Please let this deliver.

Inside she directed me left into chaos. Divine chaos. Tombstones, marble slabs, carvings and sculptures vied for attention like children in a classroom, all waving their hands,
me first me first
. A park where life, death, and art jockeyed for space and love.

Its palette was cool, not sun-baked like the rest of Rome, we agreed, and now we agreed on everything, but the deep primal green of a forest owing mainly to the cypress trees, erect and severe, and the density of other foliage—box-cut hedges, a tumble of snarly low growth creeping over and around tributes and remembrances, the myriad ways grief had inspired the living. By turns modest, whimsical, poetic, emotional, grandiose—it was instantly an overwhelming experience. I could not remember when I had been so smitten.

Above all it was a peaceful park with gravel paths, a sense of refuge, but Italians are failures at order.

“They can’t help themselves,” said Lizzie. “They are essentially mad, no, comical. Everything reflects it, even this cemetery, except perhaps churches, although . . .” She unclipped her hair, shook it out, and pinned it back again, an action she performed so frequently in a day it could be described as a tic, yet I found it just then inexplicably sexy. . . . “In those churches with Christ bleeding on all those crosses—he was nailed, he bled, see the red paint, here it is as clear as day not implied or suggested, this man suffered big-time although worshipping pain runs counter to comedy, still there is humor in the excess.” She babbled on, doubled back, reconsidered, her usual dance. All of it captivating once again.

She had a map. Of course Lizzie had a map, grinning,
knowing it was silly to navigate this cemetery like a city, left at the angel, right at the cross.

While the man followed along—stepping carefully, taking detours in and around the graves, trying not to tread on anything sacred—his attention wandered, sidetracked by the sudden appearance of his conscience.

I felt ill, sick to my stomach, not worthy of this woman who wanted only for me to have an enchanted day. She knew I was back, not why I’d been absent. As we traipsed around, her voice grew gayer. She didn’t peek at me nervously when she thought I wasn’t looking, and her smile, no longer beseeching or needy, relaxed into a genuine expression of pleasure.

She has a beautiful smile, the man remembered. She surrenders to feeling.

Should I confess?

The notion took me by surprise. Confess? Knew I shouldn’t. Not under any circumstances. Ignore the inclination. Why confess a fever anyway?

Although:

I was responsible. Truth was never my friend, an overrated virtue I’d always thought, but for the first time I had to admit I wasn’t entitled to K. Wasn’t forced into the affair by Lizzie’s deadly personality. I’d betrayed Lizzie.

What does a man do with an ugly truth? Will it fester? Will it fade?

We sighed over Keats. The romantic poet John Keats, dead at twenty-five of tuberculosis, insisted on anonymity—no name on his stone, which was rough, plain, and altogether unassuming.

This Grave / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / Young English Poet, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at
the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone. / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. Feb 24th 1821.

“‘The malicious power of his enemies.’ Who were they?” said Lizzie.

“Fate. His publisher. The riffraff aka public that didn’t buy his books.”

“Maybe Keats didn’t know who his enemies were. Do you always know who’s out to get you?” said Lizzie.

That remark skipped by, unremarked on, noted only in retrospect.

In life one rarely knows which remarks of the hundreds uttered in the course of a day will turn out to be auspicious. In fiction, foreshadowing is planted and flagged in some (hopefully or desperately) subtle way, drama demands it.

As we sat on the grass and lay back, propped up on our elbows, I confessed that my book was a bear, that I wasn’t at the end, as I’d led her to believe, but blocked in the middle.

Lizzie listened, making cooing sounds of comfort. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there. I have a good feeling about this one, Michael.”

“How did this day become about me?” I said, laughing.

“It’s hard to be in a cemetery and not have it be about you,” said Lizzie. “Not you specifically. I’m not criticizing you. I mean every feeling comes up here.”

Manipulating. That I’ll confess. By confiding my pain, I was paving the way for sympathy, making the case for extenuating
circumstances, for mental illness. Like Julien, my alter ego, my fictional hero, I was incapable of not playing the angles.
Men do this
, I thought.
I don’t want to lose her.

Knew too that I would steal every moment of this adventure for my novel, every feeling, even the way the gravestone looked as I lay on the ground, as if it were my own. Like me, Julien would confide his crisis of confidence. He would muse about foreshadowing. Like Keats, Julien would rage at the fates. Nothing would be wasted.

Shelley’s stone, a flat white marble slab, was bland in comparison to Keats’s. “Read it in your gravitas voice,” said Lizzie.

“Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

“Optimistic, philosophical,” she said. “He died unexpectedly, drowned in 1822 at the age of twenty-nine. He was a cheater. Poor Mary Shelley.” Lizzie took a blade of grass and, with her hands together and pressing it between her thumbs, she blew, making horrible honking sounds, a childhood trick, before going on to mourn Mary’s choice of a husband. “And what do you make of this?” she said. “After Shelley drowned, his friends cremated him on the beach, and one of the friends noticed that his heart wasn’t going up in flames as speedily as the rest of him. The man snatched it out and somehow returned it to Mary in England, and in some reports she kept it wrapped in a sheet, in others a silk purse in her desk drawer where it was discovered by her son after she died and buried with him sixty-seven years later.”