by Delia Ephron
Lizzie shouted, “Left turn here,” and finally I met the Rome of my picture books: a narrow street paved with age and soothing colors—saffron, a mustardy yellow, the dustiest rose. One of my guidebooks put it exactly right. “Rome is a bath for the eyes.” Even the moon cooperated, a horizontal sliver low in the sky, a smile at the end of the street, so perfect it could have been photoshopped in. “Snow,” I called, but she was way ahead entering the restaurant with Michael. I had to take a picture to capture my first truly Roman moment (if you don’t count ruins from a taxi, and I don’t), and that is why I didn’t notice at first a big black bird skimming across the cobblestones like a skiff across Casco Bay. When it was barely a nose from me, it thrust a tin cup in my face.
I screamed.
Only then did I realize that this big black bird was a nun. A nun in full regalia.
Thank God Snow was already inside the restaurant. I would have scared her.
“She probably wasn’t a nun,” said Lizzie at dinner. “Not if she was begging with a tin cup. She was simply dressed as one. I’m sorry she upset you.”
“It was just a surprise.”
“I know what you mean. Plus you’re tired.”
“Un Bellini pour madame,” said Finn. (He’s ridiculous with that French.) He always orders my drinks. He loves to pair a person with a drink. He told me that on our first date.
Because of the nun I was not quite myself for a while. Still, I couldn’t help but appreciate the aroma of fresh garlic that permeated Beppi’s, an attractive, unpretentious restaurant with gracious and attentive service. “Garlic is as potent as pot,” Lizzie whispered. “I’m getting a contact high.” She inhaled in an ecstatic way.
“What’s that smell? Is that you?” Finn snorted his way up Snow’s arm. She batted him as if she were swatting a fly, which only made him laugh.
Are you beginning to see how he drives his daughter crazy?
An odd thing. It only registered later when my head hit the pillow. Between jet lag and the nun attack, I was discombobulated enough to wonder if I’d imagined this, but when Michael opened the door to Beppi’s, he slipped something out of his pocket, unscrewed the top, and took a sip.
The man with the flask. Doesn’t that have an appealing wickedness?
He really, really was especially disarming that night. At dinner he continued to enthrall Snow, entirely my doing. I’d suspected that would happen if I asked him about his play Dealing, his first success. I was just a kid when it opened. I remembered my parents went to see it. My mother was shocked by the language. Isn’t it funny that years later, we were friends traveling together?
“Listen,” Michael said to Snow. “I’ll tell you this story but I was bad. I don’t want you thinking, I want to be like that when I grow up. Do you swear? ‘I, Snow Dolan, promise that I will never be like Michael.’”
Snow laughed the way she does, with her fist pressed to her lips.
Michael held up her right hand. “‘I promise to forget everything Michael says right after he says it.’”
She looked at me. I nodded.
“I promise,” said Snow.
Even though his story was about drugs, it was wonderful to see her hanging on his every word. She watches television, she hears the news, she goes to the movies. There is only so much screening a mother can do.
Michael had a hardscrabble childhood. He made it sound almost like a Grimms’ fairy tale or Harry Potter’s life before Hogwarts. He grew up in Brooklyn, in a scruffy neighborhood near Sheepshead Bay. He was mugged four times before he was ten. Play meant running up and down the aisles of the 99 cents store. “Stealing,” Lizzie whispered in my ear. His dad left when he was five, and he never heard from him again. How heartbreaking. His mother taught second grade in the public school. My Manhattan privileged life and his in Brooklyn were a world apart. “I lived there before Brooklyn was Brooklyn,” he said, “or when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, depending on your point of view.” He is so clever. The only times he came to Manhattan were for museum field trips, and he was very funny about his teachers herding them onto subways with bullhorns. Then he got a scholarship to Yale.
“His IQ is one-forty,” said Lizzie.
“That’s genius,” I told Snow.
“Ignore them,” said Michael to Snow. “If anyone here is a genius, it’s you.”
Her cheeks glowed from his flattery.
His roommates—Schuylar, Dexter, and Rachlan—were all rich WASPs while Michael didn’t even know that there was such a thing as two forks at a place setting until he visited Schuylar’s over Christmas vacation. “I had never seen a pureed soup,” he said. “Who would eat a soup so thick that it had wrinkles?”
I loved that detail and pointed it out to Snow.
They sold pot that Rachlan had grown over the summer. His roommates needed the thrill. Michael needed the money. He was trying to keep up with his friends, who regularly commandeered a choice table at Snookers, a Yale haunt for the wealthy and snotty. “I wanted to belong,” he said.
“Belonging is a stupid thing.” He said this especially to Snow. “Belonging is stupid. Standing out is what matters.” She sucked in her cheeks so I knew it registered.
“One day,” he said, “the maid came to pick up the laundry, and Rasky, who was stoned, gave her the laundry bag full of weed by mistake. He was an idiot whose parents had bought his way in. You can buy your way in and out of anything, did you know that, Snow?”
“Anything?” said Snow. That especially caught her interest. I loved how engaged she was. A rarity. She spoke so quietly, however, I wasn’t certain Michael had heard.
“Snow asked, ‘Anything?’” I told him.
Michael smiled at her and spoke as softly as she (how sensitive was that?). “There is a get-out-of-jail-free card for people with money and influence. If you stole all the silverware here, I bet your dad could pay the owners to make it go away, and you would get off scot-free.” (I was glad Finn had managed to inveigle a tour of the kitchen and wasn’t there just then. He might have something to say about that and it would have ruined the flow.) “Although”—Michael laughed now and spoke normally—“who would want to risk getting trapped in the Italian justice system? Swear you won’t steal the silverware.”
Snow clamped her mouth shut and refused to speak. That made us laugh.
The next thing you knew, all the dads drove up or flew in to plead for their sons’ futures. Don’t expel them. Isn’t it sad that his roommates had fathers to fight for them and Michael didn’t? They threw Michael under the bus. He was, they claimed, the ringleader.
“Why did you do it?” the dean asked him.
Michael made up his excuse on the spot. “I was doing research for a play.”
“I’d like to read it.”
“It’s not finished.”
“Leave it with Marjorie,” said the dean. Marjorie was his secretary.
“This is where a lie can lead you,” I told Snow, although Michael said if he hadn’t been terrified, he would have burst out laughing.
Imagine, this was our first night in Italy. I thought, if all the meals are this exciting and stimulating for Snow, it will be hard to go home.
“Time to cover your ears, Snow,” said Michael, doing it for her. “I got high and wrote a play in three days.” He took his hands off. “Did you hear what I said?”
Snow nodded.
“I don’t believe you,” said Michael.
“He ate three cantaloupes while he was writing it,” said Lizzie. “That’s my favorite part. The only part that’s true.”
“She always says that,” said Michael. “Ignore her.”
As instructed, he left the play with the dean’s secretary. For weeks he awaited his fate. His roommates had been transferred to other rooms to save them from further contamination. I can only imagine the terror and isolation. “It was
a wickedly harsh March. I’ll never forget how barren the campus looked,” he said. Finally he got a summons.
It was sleeting that day and he slid and skidded his way, nearly falling, and then dripped all over the dean’s Chinese carpet. The dean said, “I sent the play to Martin Loomis, and he wants to produce it.”
“Who’s Martin Loomis?” said Michael.
“Look him up,” said the dean. “You’re done at Yale but you have a future.”
“A year later his play opened on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize. You’re dining with a very famous playwright, Snow.”
I had Googled Michael before we took this trip to be better prepared to talk to him than I had been in London and had read the reviews of Dealing. “The reviews compared you to David Mamet,” I said.
“He’s better than Mamet,” said Lizzie, so quickly I worried I had said something wrong. “And he’s a novelist too.”
“Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross was also about salesmen,” I said.
“The men in my play sold pot, not real estate,” said Michael. “Out of their Yale dorm.”
“Michael’s play has broader themes,” said Lizzie.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“About how the rich close ranks against the poor, and WASPs against Jews. And he gave himself a girlfriend in the play who wanted him and not the snotty guys with the pretentious names,” said Lizzie.
“I wasn’t in the play,” said Michael.
“Excuuuussssse me.” Lizzie threw her napkin over her face. “The character of Peter was entirely fictional.” She lifted up her napkin to speak, which made Snow and me laugh. Then Michael clapped his hands over Snow’s ears again. “Once the play came out, all I had to do was show up and I got laid. There’s nothing like a hit.”
The most fascinating part to me was that, at the time it was produced, Michael could never talk about the inspiration for the play, its origins, getting kicked out of Yale, because he had to protect the dean. He was sly about it. All he ever admitted to was being a college dropout because the dean knew they were dealing other drugs too (Michael didn’t say what), and the police should have been notified. If anyone had really looked into the scandal, like a reporter, Yale would look bad. Instead the entire incident was swept under the Yale Chinese carpet.
“Several years after the play closed, he started telling people,” said Lizzie. “Informally. At dinners. It wasn’t news but it was a great story. We love stories. I’ll drink to stories.”
She raised her glass, and Michael remembered to include Snow, clinking her glass of Orangina first.
Then Lizzie said, and this was sweet, “Let’s drink to your wives and how well they dress.”
Finn wasn’t happy with the wine, it was tannic and too robust, a lot to be wrong with a red, and he insisted we get another before that toast, and then Michael said, “It might be interesting to be married to a woman who wears baggy clothes because then you’re the only one who knows the body underneath.”
“That’s the thinking behind the burka,” said Lizzie.
I did envy their repartee.
Lizzie
MICHAEL ENCHANTED AT DINNER, regaling Taylor and Snow with his boot out of Yale and into theater and fame, which became the monkey on his back. He left that part out. He left out the curse of early success. He never acknowledges what he has in common with Bret Easton Ellis. “Who is that?” my friend Geralyn said when I compared them. Geralyn is a therapist who lives in Berkeley and who helped scrape me off the pavement after this trip. She reads everything from The Jew in the Lotus to Donna Tartt and she listens religiously to Fresh Air, but she doesn’t know who Bret Easton Ellis is. Writers like Ellis never leave New York City (well, in his case, unless they move to Los Angeles to further their disintegration) because the only people who know who they are live in Manhattan.
Oh, the cynicism. The spite. Mine, I mean. The world in which Michael and I lived. I was jealous of Michael. That was new, and hard to admit, the result of my own shelf life expiring earlier than expected.
That first night, with Michael at his most disarming, I had the happiest sense of feeling free. Carefree. Finn was relentlessly naughty. I came out of the bagno delle donne and he was waiting. “Let’s take off.”
“We can’t.”
He blocked the way with his arm. I ducked under. “You are bad,” I said. “Bad. First of all, you’re playing with me.”
“What’s second of all?”
“You are full of shit. And you know I never cheat.”
Even that felt good. The flirting was a way to reclaim something I’d lost, a sense of possibility, I think. It was harmless, just the ridiculous way we relate or don’t. (Although I do vacillate on that—what it was, what it became, and my own guilt.) I was happily adrift in a sea of other, surrounded by chatter I didn’t understand, menus I couldn’t read, unfamiliar streets wending past destinations unknown. I was severed from hope and despair. From e-mail and texting. I’d sworn it off. Tweeting too and Instagram, not that it mattered. I had only four hundred followers. I felt pretty, all in black, an off-the-shoulder Donna Karan sweater, and for the first time in a long while I felt competent because I was the one with the maps. I am good at maps. Maps and where to eat are things I excel at. I had purpose.
Michael is a terrific raconteur, a skill he’d honed over the years. In his retellings, he plays with the facts, and I loved that. I found his stories as much fun the twentieth time as the first. He was dealing not simply pot but cocaine, he sometimes admits, and in other retellings, it wasn’t sleeting, it was spring, and he had only two roommates, and when he answered that second summons from the dean, he borrowed a jacket that Rachlan had left behind. Thanks to Rasky being a world-class cokehead, the navy blazer had a smattering of snow on the shoulders.
How perfect that Michael was telling this to a girl named Snow, but he gracefully slid over this detail, a concession to her age and innocence, and perhaps concerned that she did not know that her name was slang for cocaine. He was very dear with Snow. I never knew him to be interested in children, but I wasn’t surprised that she clearly adored him because he was good at everything he set his mind to.
Like stories.
This one was unbelievable and yet no one doubts it because, I suppose, his becoming a playwright encapsulates what we want to believe about life: that good comes of bad and all the absurdities play out in your favor.
In any event, the kicker: As he was leaving the dean’s, Marjorie the secretary followed him to the elevator and suggested sotto voce that before meeting Mr. Loomis he buy some Head & Shoulders.
The crowds were off-putting, no question about it. Siracusa would be easier, better, more authentic, I thought that first night, as we battled our way through. How sad that Rome, and Paris too, are no longer evolving, pulsing entities, but preserved as if in aspic to satisfy the fantasies of tourists. “Don’t knock tourism,” said Taylor when I compared Rome to Disneyland. I don’t know why I did. It wasn’t a particularly original thought, God knows. I was trying to find something to write about, some little notion that would jump-start my career. I floated stuff, anything. She took the remark personally. She’s Portland’s queen of tourism and I suppose it made her defensive.
Taylor was nearly run over by a nun. That night in the hotel room I started laughing, thinking about it, and couldn’t stop.
Snow appeared as fearful as she was the year before, the last time we saw her. I was curious to see if she’d outgrown her anxieties but apparently not. She did her frantic eye dance, darting looks this way and that before venturing out of the hotel into the streets. When she laughed, she covered her mouth, as if she were stuffing the laughter back in. Her laughter was soundless too. Was that a new development? I wasn’t sure. As usual, her mother ordered for her. They had matching food, linguini with clams. I noticed something else about Snow, perhaps because she was maturi
ng, but she had beautiful posture. She sat straight up in her chair, her back like a board. She was efficient. She ate all the clams first and then dealt expertly with the linguini, twirling it on the fork and polishing off every morsel. Taylor almost never took her eyes off her daughter, which must have been exhausting for them both, but what did I know? At the same time, it’s my impression that Taylor was well aware of her own impact, and that, when we were waited on, the waiter attended to her especially. She’s striking. All the men clocked her as she passed, tall and waifish in her stylish edgy clothes, one sleeve shredded, the other not, a slice of skin visible from a slash in the back, sleek, short unisex hair, eyes kohled, and of course her magnificent accessory, a beautiful blond daughter, herself in miniature.
I don’t think she’s sexy. I’m sorry, I never did. It was all too controlled, too bloodless.
The restaurant managed to do that thing they do so well in Rome, combine casual and elegant: the space, a series of cavelike rooms with stone floors and dark lacquered wainscoting, the tables dressed in white cloths, and the waiters both welcoming and formal in their white shirts, white jackets, black bow ties, and white cloths folded and draped over an arm. The food was glorious. Of course we can get branzino baked in a salt crust at some New York City fish restaurants, but it wouldn’t taste as fresh and sweet. Finn said the preparation was beyond the capabilities of his joint. I started with cacio e pepe. The burrata we all shared was sublimely creamy, and I figured I would be eating a lot of figs on this trip, as I tasted Michael’s served with prosciutto. Finn took care of the wine. He made a production of it—which the Italians loved—asking questions about fruitiness and balance, rolling the sample around on his tongue, and waiting a dramatic moment before pronouncing his approval. He told them he was on the lookout for cheap Sicilian wines. They seemed to admire that, think it wise. When he dropped the name of Angelo Gaja, the sommelier, or whatever that person is called in Italy, went wild. Finn was invited to the kitchen for a tour. “Angelo Gaja is a famous winemaker from the Piemonte region, chiefly producing a number of Barbaresco and Barolo wines.” I just Googled him and that’s what came up.
