Siracusa (11 page)

“His heart was in a desk drawer for sixty-seven years?”

“Oh, no. Around for sixty-seven in total but in a drawer for only thirty-nine.”

“Bullshit.”

Lizzie threw up her hands. “I knew you would think so.”

“Who believes this?”

“It’s been reported in
The
New York Times
, on the BBC, a doctor in a medical journal even speculated that Shelley must have had a calcified heart. I asked Dr. Curtis. He thinks maybe it burned slower ’cause it was protected by the rib cage. Although no mention in reports of a rib cage. How does a heart get back to England? No one mentions embalming. There were no coolers then; picnics were carried in baskets. The refrigerator wasn’t in anybody’s house until the twentieth century. Can you imagine the smell coming from that desk drawer?”

“A literary lie?”

“Yes. Just a great big lie. How perfect that Mary Shelley, author of
Frankenstein
, ends up with her husband’s heart. How ironic that this romantic poet’s heart doesn’t burn? Like he’s heartless, like her freaky creation. Why is success not enough? Why does a writer need myth?”

Was she trying to zing me? Was she talking about my first play? No indication. She was kneeling, brushing twigs off the marble, tidying. She looked up, grinning. “I have uncovered a literary fraud of less than momentous proportions. Do you think I could get it published? We can deduct the trip and I’ll cause a sensation and get my career back.

“I need a story,” she sighed. “This seems like a good place to pray, doesn’t it? ‘Please, an idea, please come to me.’”

“You’ll think of something,” I said, although doubtful.

She left daisies on the stone, placing them carefully crossing the stems. “
Ius iurandum accipiens tibi fidem spondeo officia omnia sodalitatis praestare, quantum in me sit
,” she said.

“What is that?’

“‘I pledge to you that I will execute all the duties of the club, insofar as I am able,’” said Lizzie. “In high school I was elected an
aedile
in the Latin Club. The SPQR.
Senatus Populusque Romanus
—the Senate and the People of Rome. That was the oath of office. And the only Latin I know.”

“I love you.”

God, it was awful. I could see she was grateful.

Having sex in a cemetery didn’t seem right, but it seemed right to want to have sex with Lizzie in this cemetery. Lizzie today, lush enough to be Elizabeth, earthy enough for a roll in the grass, hoisting her skirt to scratch a bare thigh. How could I resist the most irrepressible version of my wife? Besides, if we made love, the urge to confess would be subsumed under the need to come. For as long as it lasted. For only as long as it lasted, but God, already I needed a respite from guilt and shame. It was sex or tell.

Considered making a pass, then realized she was crying.

A moment of confusion. Had I confessed and didn’t realize it?

Crying that way Lizzie did, sweet Lizzie who hated to cry.
Her face reddening, her cheeks plumping as her lips tightened, refusing to give in, tears squeezing out nonetheless. She burst out crying. I wrapped her in my arms.

She pushed me away and pointed.

The monument by the stonewall was so poignant, so sad, Lizzie brilliantly said later—now she was even brilliant—that it seemed to be grieving for everyone.

An angel lay prostrate over a stone tomb. Not a cuddly sort of angel generally located in proximity to puffy white clouds, this angel was lean and limber, life-sized and human save for its graceful and elegant wings protectively draping the tomb’s sides. The angel’s head was buried in its arms, except one forearm hung limply over the front. This was the tell: The angel had cried itself into exhaustion.

“Emlyn was the sculptor’s wife,” said Lizzie, regarding the sole engraving. “The wife of William Wetmore Story.”

“Imagine loving your wife that much,” I said. Only when Lizzie didn’t respond did I hear the implication. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes it is, Michael.
Ius iurandum accipiens
et cetera. I will execute the duties insofar as I am able.”

She was cheerful about it. Understood my limitations, was under no illusions. Now I was primed to confess. Upside, lose guilt, banish shame. Downside, there appeared barely to be one. Lizzie knew whom she’d married. Could not shock her. Besides, we were in a cemetery. In the face of death, all things fall into perspective. Even betrayal is a minor offense.

“Finn is thinking of cheating,” said Lizzie.

I waited. What was next?

“With a lobsterwoman. A woman with muscles.” She giggled at that. “I thought, why not, Taylor will never notice, he deserves to be appreciated, but we’re all on vacation together and if I know something about them that you don’t, it feels wrong. Out of balance. Not betrayal but like betrayal. I’ve felt lonely, really frightened about my work, my writing, and now that I know how much you’ve been struggling, I feel guilty. I think I let Finn confide because I felt so distant from you. It’s not right of me or even fair to Taylor. It was sneaky of me.”

“I forgive you.” For effect I uttered a short bark of amusement. “Finn cheating—” I considered it. “Hardly sneaky not to have told.”

“I tell you everything. I don’t have secrets from you, so when I do it’s a big deal.” She traced my lips with her finger.

“I’ve been a rotten husband.”

“You’re right. You’ve been a horrible crank.”

I slid my hand up her skirt.

“Later.” She wiggled away. “Don’t you wish you could live here?”

“It would keep life in perspective, perhaps too much.”

She dug the map out of her satchel, turned it this way and that. “Where are we? Aha, come on, now the finale.”

She brought it to a close with drums and cymbals. Gregory Corso, beat poet, counterculture hero of the angry 1960s and ’70s, decades now sugarcoated—peace signs and free love, what was that war? Vietnam? There’s a great Vietnamese on 88th and 2nd, prefer it to Chinese, less greasy. Corso, king of irony, soul
mate of her father’s. She was raised on his poetry. It was read to her as bedtime stories. His photo was on her father’s desk. “A large soft man with a big square face, oversized sunglasses, shirt untucked, wiry gray hair, possibly never combed ever, unkempt.” She brought him to life as we stood over his small clean white marble plaque, the ivy neat around it. “Corso’s ashes are buried here along with the remains of a joint. He had an entire manuscript of poetry stolen, and he survived the trauma to publish more.”

She was pleading with me to identify with this survivor. Then, to prove that no one understood me better, she quoted a poem of his.

I ran up six flights of stairs

to my small furnished room

opened the window

and began throwing out

those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:

“Don’t! I’ll tell awful things about you!”

“Oh yeah? Well, I’ve got nothing to hide . . . OUT!”

She continued reciting until Corso threw out everything—beauty, death, love, the kitchen sink—until finally he realized, “Humor was all that was left.”

Humor, the last man standing. Laughter, the cement in our fragile edifice. Laughter, when all else fails, this is why we belong together.

Lizzie passed a test she didn’t know she was taking. K was gone. Three days of suffering, obsession, and rage, and now I was rushing her into oblivion. Soon, in memory, K would be the predator and me her prey.

I knew how these things worked.

We left a message for Finn and Taylor passing on dinner. Lizzie slipped off her thong in the elevator. Made love as soon as the room door closed behind us. I hiked her onto the bureau. “Oh.” I heard her surprise and then the sigh as we began the rhythm of connection and self-absorption, the miracle of sex.

“Do you think people with children make love like us?” Lizzie said later in the afterglow when the bottle was almost empty, the toy flares sparking the air seemed as magical as shooting stars, and our togetherness was intense and apparent, even waiters kept their distance and the pushiest Italian respected it.

I watched her sleep that night, feeling a misery. She surrenders to sleep wholeheartedly as she does to everything, on her back, legs splayed, one arm flung out, expecting me to lift it out of the way and, after I do, only then will she turn on her side, tug the pillow lower, and curl up. If she’d awakened, I’d have confessed. But she didn’t, and in the morning, everything was bright and foreign, New York City seemed as far away as childhood, and we flew to Siracusa.

H
OW DO
I
WANT
you to meet Siracusa?

On a bone-white china plate, spaghetti—ropy, its color a light tan—tousled with tiny clams, baby tomatoes, parsley, and showered with toasted bread crumbs.

Finn, swirling red wine in the bowl of his crystal glass, whispering its name, Amarone, as if he were enticing a mermaid to enchant him.

Snow breaking open a fig, gnawing the insides, discarding a shred of skin, and starting in on another. It was something to behold. Primal.

“She’s staring,” said Snow in that flat affectless voice. We were at a narrow small rectangular table, Snow next to Michael, me opposite, Finn and Taylor at either end.

Michael sweating. It was unseasonably hot, we were told, and might change in an instant, that was June here. The wind had died and the air eerily still. He patted his forehead often with his large white napkin.

Taylor worn-out from her tussle with the hotel receptionist, nursing a grudge, looking sour.

We had dined outdoors that first night on Piazza Minerva, in front of a pink palazzo with filigreed balconies and impossibly tall windows. Outdoor spotlights artfully placed made us and history look our most glowing. How beautiful we were. How beautiful everyone was—starched white tablecloths, black lacquered chairs, the silverware substantial, the china plain and regal, the pasta sublime, as was a Sicilian dish—potato, octopus, orange, and olive. The waiters, handsome and charmingly inattentive, stood in a cluster talking as if they were at a party of their own.

Finn flicked an olive at Snow. “They eat horse in Sicily, did you know that, Snowy?”

“Finn,” said Taylor, a warning.

Snow plucked the olive off the cloth and popped it in her mouth.

Maybe Siracusa begins there, seeing her closed mouth working as she separated the pit from the flesh and then pushed the naked pit out with her tongue.

“Cavallo,”
he said. “That means ‘horse.’ Watch out for
cavallo
on the menus. They put orange in everything too.”

Or should I begin this way. Snow’s hand in Michael’s as we came off the plane in Catania. “Michael, she wants to ride with you.” Taylor, sitting behind, had leaned in between our seats.

The hotel sent two taxis, whose drivers greeted us silently with creased, stained (the blotches looked like olive oil) cardboard signs.
Hotel Rondine
, they said, the
R
with a fancy curlicue bottom.

Our driver—sullen, bony, and baked to a very dark shade of tobacco—could have been anywhere from forty to seventy. The tacky signs must have signaled danger for Taylor, a premonition of disappointment that Finn had been looking forward to—the shock of her sudden emersion into something genuinely other—not taking account of the fact that when it happened, he would have to deal with it. Finn didn’t always think things through.

I was relieved that I wasn’t squished into a car with Taylor to experience her dismay as we entered Siracusa and trolled along empty streets—people do add something, don’t they? I think it’s called life—passing dilapidated low-rise apartment buildings, glimpses now and then of a practical seaport with tugs and small freighters.

Snow, in her new bloodred goggle sunglasses, sat squeezed between Michael and me in the tiny Fiat. Italians are wild for sunglasses—extreme sunglasses—and on their last night in Rome, the Dolans had lost their marbles in an eyeglass store. Finn’s black frames decorated with a slim line of silver circled his head and wrapped his ears in one sleek piece as if it were fiberglass. His lenses, large and square, were tinted rose, or as he said grinning, rosé. Taylor’s tortoiseshell frames with
PRADA
stamped along the side had oval lenses way too big for her. With her blimp eyes and skinny body, she could have been a character in
Frozen
. The sunglasses transformed them all into a cartoon family. Falling for native fashion and not realizing until you’re home that a fever had overtaken you is a hazard of travel.

How happy I was. Deliriously so. I could begin that way, the
saddest. On the plane I had started a Sicilian murder mystery,
To Each His Own
by Leonardo Sciascia, finally relaxed and peaceful enough to experience the privacy and contentment of reading. The ability to concentrate, that’s something I miss now. I think of concentration as a friend who has moved away and I will never ever hear from again.

But not that day.

When, in Rome, in the cemetery . . . when exactly as I had written it in my head . . . when every inch of what I’d painstakingly researched and plotted unfolded as I’d hoped, I’d lost it. I blamed my tears on my encounter with the angel of grief, and that sculpture was achingly sad, but it wasn’t that. It was relief. I must have understood more than I realized, how fragile things between us were. Now I do nothing but look at things other ways, flipping them up and around, examining them, trying to understand at the very least my own obtuseness. I think, I really do torture myself with this: Surprises don’t come from people we know well, certainly not people we love. We call them surprises but they are inevitabilities. I must have been playing a role, a starring role, in an inevitability.

Sometimes I remind myself of my mother—not often, she was content and I am restless—but she was obtuse too. When I was twelve, we were robbed. There was hardly anything to take, but a certain amount of ransacking had happened. She came home from the library where she worked, and, noticing the house was messy, cleaned up, humming all the while. She was cheerful, a big hummer. It drove my sister and me crazy.
She was always humming Joni Mitchell. Then Dad walked in and said, “What the hell?” and she realized the TV stand was empty. Our miserably small TV was missing.

Siracusa would be a honeymoon. I was that euphoric. Michael was back. Present. Finally. With me. I opened the car window and let in a hot wind.

On arrival by car, Ortigia, the ancient enclave in Siracusa, is hidden. Only a few streets in this maze are wide enough for a normal-sized automobile. Most everyone parks along the perimeter. Our modest hotel on the east side of this finger of an island faced a parking lot. Or, put more positively, it looked out across a lot and street to an iron balustrade and, beyond that, to the bright blue-green Ionian Sea.

We walked in to find Taylor at the reception desk, rapping her knuckles on the counter, her steely posture intimidating even from behind. Without looking back at us, without as far as I could tell knowing of our arrival—did she hear the door open?—she lifted an arm and Snow slid into place by her side. “We can’t call Gloria to straighten this out because Lizzie made the reservation.”

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“The room.”

She had already seen it. It was not acceptable.

“It’s small. It looks out the back into nothing. Nothing.”

“You can have our room.”

“They are the same,” said the receptionist, a fresh, neat-looking young woman well trained to be pleasant.

Finn, silent, stood back and at an angle, his attitude obscured
by his absurd glasses, although conveying an air of distraction in his sideways stance. He always managed a certain with-them-but-not.

“‘Dr. Ashley felt that color has a great deal to do with the well-being of the emotionally disturbed,’” I said.

“What?” Taylor swiveled around.

Truly I don’t know why that line popped to mind. Why, at that moment, did I seek to crack Finn up?

“Nothing. I don’t know why I said that. It’s a quote from the movie
High Anxiety
. Mel Brooks.” I didn’t mention it was a movie Finn and I had seen together. “I was just trying to break the . . . seriousness.”

“Lizzie,” said Michael in his tired tone.

I didn’t dare look Finn’s way.

“We don’t want to stay,” said Taylor.

“Oh.”

“The bathrooms are tiny.”

I did marvel at the receptionist—oh, the poise in someone so young who didn’t even have a uniform to bolster her authority. She betrayed not a hint of irritation.

“We can’t get a refund,” Taylor went on. “The rooms are prepaid and there is a seven-day cancellation policy. Did you know this wasn’t refundable? When we gave our credit cards, did you know?”

“No. Not sure. I don’t remember. How much will you be out if you leave?”

“Seven hundred fifty euros.”

While Taylor looked to Finn for the go-ahead to forfeit the dough or his refusal to stop her, Michael gave his name.

“There is something here for you.” The receptionist unclipped a folded piece of stationery from our reservation card and slid it across the desk. Michael opened it, read it, closed it, and slid it back. “This isn’t for me.”

“You are Signor Shapner?”

“Yes, and yet not for me.”

“What is it?” I asked.

Michael shrugged.

“Do you have a suite?” said Taylor, now looking to upgrade.

The young woman spent a while consulting the computer, hitting keys, searching the screen, banging them some more, you’d think she was booking an around-the-world tour. The hotel, a dilapidated stone palazzo, could not have had more than twenty rooms. How could it take this long? “Yes,” she said finally.

“With a view of the water?”

The receptionist nodded, and as they began to wrestle with price, Michael interrupted, “Would you mind if we registered first, Taylor? I’m dead. I need to sleep. Is that all right?”

“Of course,” said Taylor. “Please go ahead.”

“What was that note?” I asked as we squashed ourselves and our luggage into the elevator.

“An invitation to scuba dive. Made no sense.”

“To scuba dive? What a riot. That is the last thing you would do.”

Michael gave me a look.

“Get real. It is. The hotel must supply or sell the names of its guests to local businesses. Welcome to Siracusa.” I leaned in for a kiss.

I suppose that’s where Siracusa began. With me supplying the cover for his lie.