The Jetsetters

by Amanda Eyre Ward

  “The beaches, as you see, are small storms,” said Diana. At least, Cord thought she’d said storms. Maybe stones? “Etna down there is the wine,” said Diana. “Lava rocks, and then the sand-a. Sicily, it is so beautiful! And now you know.”

  Diana sat down.

  “What do we know?” said Cord. “I missed something.” Regan, who had been drawing in her notebook, looked similarly bewildered. “What are you writing?” asked Cord.

  “Do you really want to know?” Her timidity was heartbreaking. What had Matt—or motherhood—done to his sister, the girl who had made him eat Ethiopian food in Harlem, who had gotten up and gyrated with the belly dancers after a bit of honey wine?

  “Yes, Ray Ray! I want to know.”

  “Well, Malta was all about bones, in a way. Those skeletons in the church. All the violent attempts to take over, to erase the past…but you can’t erase bones. You can’t even burn them fully, or it’s hard to. So I guess I’m thinking about that, and hearing about the volcanoes here, what they buried, what remained…” She stared into a middle distance, seeing something Cord could only imagine.

  “That’s fascinating,” said Cord. She turned to him, seeming shocked to hear him take her thoughts seriously. She watched him quizzically, as if he were about to make fun of her. “It is. Really interesting,” he said, happy to surprise her by being kind, but also sad that she seemed desperate for such mild attentions.

  She shrugged, flushed. “I’m going to start thinking about my art again,” she said softly.

  Regan had once been a pink-haired student creating stunning collages—her large-scale images of genteel white Southern women made out of cut-up photos of slaves were brutal and brave. Cord didn’t know how to remind her of that student without making her feel embarrassed—didn’t know how to bring up the private investigator’s shocking photos again, since Regan had so firmly shut that door—so he was silent.

  Matt had stayed onboard, and despite the appalling fact that he was a grown man who didn’t want to set foot in Italy, being on her own seemed to suit Regan. Maybe she’d still become a great artist, flowering in her later years.

  Cord blanched. If Regan was in her later years, then so was he. While Cord was happy enough with his career, there was so much more he wanted to do. Marrying Giovanni seemed like the beginning of a fuller life; he was thankful to be so thrilled about what lay ahead. He just needed to stay sober. That was all. Cord knew that if he kept drinking, it would all slip away.

  “Honestly, it’s just nice to have some space to think about all this again,” said Regan earnestly.

  “Yeah,” said Cord. He turned to her. “Regan,” he said, “are you sure you don’t want to talk about Zoë’s email?”

  “I’m sure,” said Regan. “Please. Just let it be.”

  “But, Regan, he’s…”

  She fixed him with a stare. “Cord,” she said, so quietly he almost couldn’t hear. “Please. Trust me.”

  Trust her? Cord was confused. He’d always thought of Regan as a…well, kind of a sap. A doormat. It had never occurred to him for a second that she might be in control of her life. “But,” he said, “don’t you need my help?”

  She laughed—she actually laughed! “No,” she said. “But thanks. Thank you.”

  “Another town-a,” said Diana, standing again, her expression animated, her lipstick newly applied. “Very famous for the American people. They make-a the movie. Which movie? Al Pacino and the Godfather movie! Francis Ford Coppola, he comes here. You see some small towns and they are here. For example, Corleone? When he tastes wine? It is here. There is also Godfather Two.”

  The view outside the bus was lovely: brushy hills, farmhouses, and sweeping views down to the ocean. The bus entered a tunnel, but this did not stop Diana. “Now you know how we eat here. We eat the appetizer, and the pasta,” she said, her face shifting in shadows. “Pasta, pasta, pasta! We eat-a the pasta!” Diana yelled, in the dark of the bus.

  A man in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt said, “Yeah, baby!”

  Light spilled over them. “Now, Taormina!” said Diana. “Tonight, at the ancient theater, is Robert Plant. I will go. My husband, he pays, so I don’t know. I buy just something to eat and he does everything. It is right. I cook.”

  “Oh, darn,” murmured Charlotte, poking Cord. “I bet you hoped she was single!” Cord winced, then saw that Lee was listening. She raised her eyebrows.

  Tell her! mouthed Lee.

  Cord turned away, pretending not to understand.

  “I make-a the meatball-a,” Diana added. The man in the Jimi Hendrix T-shirt cheered again.

  “Now I have to introduce you to our mama. Mount Etna!” said Diana, pointing out the window at an enormous mountain, steel-colored against the turquoise sky.

  “Mount Etna,” said Charlotte reverentially. Cord gazed out the window at the slumbering volcano. Regan was sketching Mount Etna with a Splendido pen.

  “The first two extinguished cones-a on the left-a. Part of the touristic stations was destroyed by the lava flow.” Diana pulled out laminated photos. “Nobody is listening?” she said, peering over her audience, who seemed largely to be asleep. Cord tried to meet her eyes and look engaged. He wasn’t sure why he felt it was his job to keep Diana from feeling slighted, but he did.

  “You only care about the cooking, right?” she said, disappointed despite Cord’s best efforts. “Va bene. If you don’t know something, you ask-a. Now look,” she said. “Outside the window, some pine trees, coriander. More trees-a. Vegetation. Typical vegetation.”

  Diana sat down.

  “Vegetation,” whispered Charlotte, nodding, peering out the window. Regan wrote Vegetation in her notebook.

  They exited the highway and turned down a street bordered on either side by high, whitewashed walls. They passed what seemed to be a burned-out, vacant church with one of its three bells missing. Finally, the bus parked and Diana stood. “Here is il giardino di Villa Romeo!” she said. “Villa, what do you call a villa?”

  “House?” called Cord obsequiously.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Diana. “Anyway, we disgorge.”

  * * *

  —

  LEE AND CORD LEANED against a limestone wall. Cord touched the gritty surface. Blinding light, the smell of smoke, a feral cat watching them from a distance. “Italy!” said Lee, squeezing his arm.

  “Italy,” he said, kissing the top of her head, which smelled like mint. He whispered into her hair, “Stop giving me such a hard time.”

  “But seriously,” said Lee.

  “It’s not your deal,” said Cord.

  “Isn’t it killing you?” asked Lee. “Pretending to be someone you’re not?”

  Cord looked at her. He sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  “So tell her,” said Lee.

  “You say it like it’s easy,” said Cord.

  “I know it’s not,” said Lee. “Believe me.”

  “Why do we feel so responsible for her?” said Cord. “She’s supposed to be the adult. But I…”

  “I feel like I have to take care of her,” said Lee.

  “You, too?”

  Lee smiled sadly and nodded. He took her hand. “I love you,” said Cord. “You’re maybe the only one who knows me.”

  “Cord—” Lee began.

  He cut her off. “After you left, I waited by the phone every night,” he said, realizing he sounded like a petulant child, but unable to stop himself.

  Lee’s eyes widened. “That was twenty years ago, Cord.”

  “You told me you’d call every night.” Cord remembered sitting next to their big button phone in his pajamas. But it never rang. “You went to California,” he said, “and that was that. You didn’t even come back for Christmas.”

  Lee sighed, staring into a middle distance. “
I thought if I made a clean break…you guys would have a chance.”

  “A chance? What does that mean?” said Cord. “A chance of what?”

  “I just wanted…” said Lee. She looked away from him, biting her lip.

  “A chance of what?”

  “A chance to be okay,” said Lee. The anger in her voice took Cord by surprise.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I know,” said Lee. “I know you don’t.” She looked at him imploringly, her eyes clear and watery. “You don’t understand. That’s the point.”

  “So explain it to me,” said Cord.

  Lee shook her head. “Forget it,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I’m not going to forget it,” said Cord, growing incensed himself. “If you have some excuse…some way you want to justify why you ditched us to become a fucking movie star, then please, tell me what it is.”

  “I didn’t ditch you,” said Lee. “Calm down.”

  “You did ditch me,” said Cord, close to tears. He felt like an abandoned boy again. “You did ditch me,” he repeated.

  Cord remembered the day Lee had boarded a plane to go to college. During the drive back from the airport, sitting next to Regan in the backseat of Charlotte’s VW Rabbit, Cord had sipped his McDonald’s orange soda, cold through a plastic straw. Charlotte always got lost. She sometimes forgot to buy dinner. Once in a while, the power company cut the electricity. Lee had always been the one to find the bills and pay them, to make the lights come back on. Without Lee, Cord had realized, he was the one in charge. The world outside the car window seemed suddenly huge and fraught with possible disasters.

  “Cord,” said Lee now. “There were…there are things you don’t understand.”

  “Spare me,” said Cord. “Just spare me your theatrics, Lee.”

  “Okay,” said Lee. “You’re right. I should have called. I’m sorry.”

  She looked immeasurably sad. Cord knew something had been pried open—he had pried it open—but suddenly all he wanted was to shut it again. “And furthermore,” he said: a joke, a plea.

  “And furthermore,” said Lee.

  “BUON GIORNO! WELCOME TO my family home!” cried a man in a polo shirt wearing sunglasses and a red cap. Two black Labrador dogs rushed toward Regan as she and her family entered a courtyard surrounded by palm trees.

  The villa owner led them into his gardens, talking about his rainwater collection system, the “artifacts such as this olive press carved from a single piece of lava,” the pepper trees, aloes, prickly pears, persimmons, chestnuts, and apricots. Regan sighed as he showed them an aquamarine pool hidden behind the gardens. All this beauty—this sparkling pool, these gardens—existed beyond her tiny Savannah life.

  “Come-a to the kitchen!” called Diana. “It is time for Sicilian cooking school!”

  In the villa’s kitchen, Diana tossed eggplant caponata with red peppers. “Now, I set aside to fester,” she said, placing the bowl on a steel-top table. In the cramped, blue-tiled kitchen, she handed out vegetable peelers and explained how to create long, silky ribbons of zucchini, which would be tossed in olive oil, lemon juice, and mint to create carpaccio di zucchine.

  Cord was an eager student, grabbing a vegetable peeler and getting to work. Lee and Charlotte stood on either side of the schlump in the Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, who had found a bottle of unlabeled red wine and was struggling to pull its cork with a rusty wine opener.

  Regan, realizing that she herself was festering in the hot kitchen, situated next to a fierce stove on which two pots of boiling water sent plumes of steam into the air, headed for the wooden doors of the farmhouse.

  “Regan!” cried Lee. “Where are you going?”

  Where was she going? God only knew. In the courtyard, Regan sank into a chair. The sun felt nice on her scalp, and she noticed the scent of sage coming from somewhere, with a faint edge of lemon. She took a deep breath and looked at the ancient patio stones. The villa owner came outside, opened a pack of cigarettes. “Is it a bother?” he asked.

  It was a bother, but of course Regan said, “Oh, no.”

  The man didn’t pull out a phone or chat. He lit his cigarette and smoked it. The silence weighed on Regan. Her mind churned, trying to think of what to say, then berating herself for not knowing what to say. “Oh, dogs,” she blurted out. “I just love dogs.” She did not, in fact, love dogs. Regan actually disliked them—their dirty mouths and the way they went right for your crotch.

  “Eh,” said the man. He shrugged and looked the other way.

  Regan smiled. “Eh.” She was going to have to use that one. What would her days be like, pondered Regan, if she were the sort of person who answered inane statements by saying, “Eh”? What a cool, stress-free existence, to disconnect from other humans, to not give one hoo-ha about what they thought.

  Regan stood. It was time to say eh. “I’m going to need a taxi,” she told the man. He turned to her, raised an eyebrow. “All I do is make food,” said Regan. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner. I don’t know who signed up for a cooking class on vacation, but I didn’t come all the way to Sicily to stand in a hot kitchen and get lectured by Diana!” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “You want taxi?” said the man.

  “You’re goddamn right I want a taxi,” said Regan.

  LEE WATCHED HER CLOSETED brother, her lonely sister, her mother, who was growing old. Pain seemed to radiate from them, and Lee felt it enter her bloodstream. She wanted to lie down and sleep. At the same time, she was ravenous. Ever since Kiko’s incredible picnic lunch—that bread! Hot from the little AGA stove in his sweet kitchen in the house he’d grown up in!—it was as if a switch had been turned on. Lee felt as if she’d been starving for years and now couldn’t get enough.

  Her mind frightened her. How could she be a mother when she felt so unmoored, her emotions all over the map? And what of her giant appetite—did it mean she was pregnant? Paros had bought her a test in Valetta, delivered it to her room in a subtle brown paper bag, but Lee had been too frightened to even open the box. If she didn’t know she was pregnant, she didn’t have to make any decisions. Lee was good at compartmentalizing: it was what had kept her heading hopefully to auditions even as her prospects dimmed.

  Did she want to be pregnant? Lee didn’t know. She wasn’t skilled at understanding what she wanted. She could tell you what everyone in the cooking class thought of her, but she truly didn’t have any idea what she desired. When she tried to ask herself, there was a trembling silence.

  Lee’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down. There was a text message from a number she didn’t recognize. Lee frowned and opened it.

  Dear Lee, I cannot stop thinking about you. Do you believe in true love? Yours, KIKO

  He had asked for her number as they waited in line to board the Marveloso and she had spoken it aloud, not thinking he’d ever call. He was handsome, and she had felt so safe in his cave house. But did she believe in true love? No, she did not. Lee typed back:

  I’m sorry but I don’t.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WANDERED AROUND THE old Sicilian farmhouse, trailed by the two shaggy dogs that lived there. There was a giant hearth stacked with wood: Lee could almost imagine chilly winter nights on the overstuffed couch, reading by firelight, snuggled up with…Kiko.

  Lee frowned. She wanted to strengthen her bonds with her family, get the courage to pee on the stick, and figure out a new career path. She needed to find a way to feel more stable. Daydreaming about a Maltese tour guide did not further any of these objectives. Yet she gazed at the fireplace anyway. Did Kiko like snuggling by the fire?

  Her phone buzzed again, and she read:

  Let me convince you?

  Air Malta Flight 63

  6:10 p.m. departure

  From Rome,
Fiumicino—Leonardo da Vinci Intl. (FCO)

  To Malta Intl. (MLA)

  1h 25m, Nonstop

  This ticket is purchased in your name. Yours, KIKO

  * * *

  —

  THEY WOULD BE IN Rome in two days. What an adventure, to fly back to Malta! Lee put her phone away, feeling buoyed by Kiko’s invitation. At table, she breathed in the delectable smells, and served herself heaping portions of garlicky spaghetti, breaded chicken with roasted grapes, and spicy caponata. Regan had taken an early taxi back to the port, so Lee ate two slices of coconut cream cake.

  On the bus back to the Marveloso, Lee wrote Kiko back:

  Maybe.

  THE SHIP HORN SOUNDED, and from their table in Shells Restaurant, the Perkins family watched as the mighty Marveloso engines churned Sicilian waters, pulling away from the island and heading across the Tyrrhenian Sea to Naples.

  “I keep thinking about Malta,” said Lee, her chin in her hand.

  “You mean Kiko?” said Regan.

  Lee smiled shyly. “He was nice,” she said. “But I feel like I need to take a break from guys. I need to figure out my own self, honestly.”

  “A break?” said Charlotte. “What about Jason?”

  Lee sighed, placing her hands on either side of her plate. “I guess I might as well just tell you,” she said. “Jason dumped me for the girl on Me & My Robot. Alexandria Fumillini.”

  “The girl who owns him on the show?” said Cord.

  Lee nodded.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Regan. “He’s like her…pet.”

  “That about sums up the situation,” said Lee, shaking her head. Cord put his hand on hers. “And while I’m talking,” said Lee, her words speeding up. “I might as well tell you this, too. My career’s over. I haven’t booked a job since the Tampax commercial. I was lying about a big, new project. I was lying about Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”