Siracusa

by Delia Ephron

  I gave Snow a coin to drop into it and followed Gina into the church.

  Snow and I had read about Caravaggio, and we had laughed because, in his self-portrait, his thick eyebrows arched all the way down to his ears. I was about to remind Snow of that when I was captivated by the floor tiles. I had never seen anything so whimsical: identical squares, each an intricate abstract mosaic of black and white squiggly lines, curlicues, and funny dots of royal blue. They had been inspired by the sea, I am certain, because, well, I’m sensitive to art and its influences. The mosaic background of tiny scallop-shaped pieces could be made today only somewhere like China where they probably have no child labor laws. I could imagine the teeny-weeny fingers necessary to make them.

  I had to share the tiles with Snow.

  I glanced toward the apse where the Caravaggio was hung but then, on an instinct, peeked back outside to find her with the blind man, her hand in the goblet.

  “Snow?”

  She took her hand out.

  I had to laugh. “Are you testing to see if he’s really blind?”

  “Shush,” she said.

  Of course she was right. He could hear. I was so embarrassed. Later I wondered if perhaps my catching her doing something innocent and curious, but behind my back, prompted her subsequent behavior. Inadvertently I might have provoked her.

  No one was allowed close to the Caravaggio, hung as a sacred object between two overwrought Corinthian columns, behind a velvet rope. Tiles aside, this church with its bright white walls and electronic candles for offerings did not seem the proper venue for The Burial of Santa Lucia, I was thinking, as Snow and I squeezed into the crowd and got our first glimpse of the large gloomy oil painting.

  In the center of the composition were two half-naked gravediggers illuminated with golden light. I suppose Caravaggio intended to imply the light was celestial since this painting is about the burial of a saint, although the light didn’t appear to come from the heavens the way it usually does in religious art. There were no diagonal streaks emanating from above, for instance, more like arbitrary spotlights here and there to highlight the men’s nakedness. It seemed that Caravaggio was more interested in those gravediggers than anything. Their bodies were muscled, articulated, and gigantic. They could have been on steroids. The men, bending over, wielded shovels, about to dig. Between them on a pallet lay a young girl a little older than Snow, her skin waxy as if all the blood had been drained from her body.

  She lay there in a cave as if it were exactly where she was killed, in disarray, her dress pulled down to expose a single bare shoulder. Is this an erotic painting? I was confused and anxious. Should I have brought Snow? Those gravediggers, so massive, wore only what looked like giant diapers made of white sheets.

  I reached out to put my arm around Snow, but she edged sideways out of reach. I remember wondering if people noticed my daughter snubbing me.

  Gina, hovering behind and reeking of a sickeningly sweet perfume (the kind that can give you a migraine), recited the story behind the painting as if it were a recipe for minestrone.

  “Lucia refuse to marry a pagan. She want to be holy. A virgin. The pagans get angry. They say she has to have sex in a brothel.”

  “What is a brothel?” said Snow in quite a loud voice.

  “A house of prostitution, kiddo,” said a man to a rumble of amusement.

  Please don’t talk to my daughter, I wanted to say, but that’s dangerous, isn’t it? To have a contretemps with a stranger. We were trapped too. People pressed in from behind. Everyone was listening to Gina, who, like a top, once she began, kept on until she ran down.

  “They try to take Lucia. Lucia, she is like, how do you say, in cement. They bring oxen. No one can move Lucia to brothel.”

  Snow, gazing up at this enormous male sexual fantasy, fiddled with the strap on her tank top, easing it off her shoulder.

  “My daughter doesn’t need to know everything to appreciate an oil painting,” I told Gina, but she moved in between us.

  “To punish Lucia, they take her eyes with a forchetta.” Gina demonstrated, working her arm as if she were prying the eye out of a whale.

  “Forchetta?” said Snow, her gaze on the painting.

  “Fork,” I snapped. I fear I did snap, which is not like me. How could Gina know the word brothel but not fork? There was something sick about that painting, something evil. Something evil about Gina too. I wanted to sweep Snow right out of the church.

  “When that not kill her, they stab her in the neck,” said Gina.

  Snow sank to the floor.

  “Get up,” I said. “Are you crazy?” Everyone was looking at us now. I yanked Snow’s arm. It was dead weight. A man leaned over her. I pushed him away. “Mind your own business.”

  She was faking. I don’t know how I knew but I did. I slipped my arms under her, wrapped her waist, and pulled her up. She kept her legs limp. I pinched her hard. “Ouch,” she said, finally standing. I led her away from the crowd and through the church. A woman chased us. “Is she all right? Does she need water?”

  “What was that? What were you doing?” I said as soon as we were outside.

  Snow straightened her skirt.

  “Snow, answer me.”

  She looked around curiously as if the world were a fascination and I wasn’t part of it.

  “Lucia visit her,” said Gina.

  “Don’t do that again. It’s not funny.”

  Snow murmured.

  I leaned in to hear.

  What she said hurt me deeply.

  “We won’t need you anymore,” I told Gina.

  Somehow I got us to the hotel.

  Looking back, things deteriorated very quickly after that.

  Finn

  LIZZIE AND I HOOKED UP late morning at the open market. Lizzie cranking on about exhaustion, showing no sign of it, nudged me this way and that under the blue-and-white-striped umbrellas, declaring it great before we barely had a glimpse. A friendly humble busy place with stands built of wooden boxes. We mingled with Sicilian women with bra straps hanging down their arms, admired piles of slimy octopus and calamari tossed onto sheets of ice, the vats of almonds and walnuts, aluminum tins of huge red peppers sliced open, gutted like fish and charred black around the rims, looking fresh from an autopsy.

  Lizzie insisted we try every orange—twelve varieties, she counted. We sat on a bench, tasted them, fed them to each other, she tucked a few away for Michael—always about Michael, save some for Michael—then dragged me into a bakery where the cookies were so hard they might have been excavated from a quarry. Lizzie ranted about how much women used to hate it when men on the street said Smile, and how now they sign off with smiley faces and weeping emojis.

  “That was never a Maine thing,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Saying ‘Smile’ to a woman.”

  “Of course not. Nobody walks in Portland. They drive.”

  “They walk.”

  She smacked my arm. “I can’t believe you’re even having this conversation with me. I’m on a ramble. Saying ‘Smile’ and emojis have nothing to do with each other, but thank you for acting as if they do.”

  I broke off pieces of a cookie for her while we crossed a funky bridge out of Ortigia into the ugly part of the city. Streets were wider, spacious cracked sidewalks in front of plaster apartment buildings aka future rubble. Lots of imagination at work—air conditioners stuck through holes cut by someone obviously blindfolded at the time, bundles of electric wires scrolling up walls and into windows.

  “I was talking about emojis,” said Lizzie, “because I’m trying on ideas like dresses. I’m fishing stuff out of a trunk in my brain—like telling a woman to smile, I mean how outdated is that? Fifteen years? I have nothing to say but I’m hoping to find that I do have something to say, that there’s a future in one of my sentences.
A future in a sentence. A book. A measly article.”

  I can’t always track Lizzie but I like listening to her jabber.

  “Suppose I’m over?”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I can’t get work, Finn. Nobody’s interested. I don’t know most of the editors, what’s left of them, what’s left of magazines. I send out queries. I charm people at dinner.” Lizzie covered her face. “Give me a second,” she said from behind her hands. “Everyone’s getting fired or offered early retirement. Kent Steinhardt, who was stupid enough to divorce his wife, marry someone thirty, and have a baby, got laid off at The Atlantic. I can’t work at a website, not that they’d hire me, I’d be the same age as everyone’s mother. What is this cookie? Almond? I’m halfway around the world—not really, but sort of—and all I can think about is myself. Pathetic. I am pathetic. And, by the way, don’t kiss me again and don’t act like you didn’t.”

  “How was it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Come work for me.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Ditch Michael, move to Portland.”

  “Taylor would love that. You would love how miserable it would make her. Seriously, suppose I’m brain dead?”

  Brain dead and fucked besides. I didn’t say that, didn’t break the news, was wrestling with whether I should. She snuggled in like old times, wrapping her arm around me, tucking into my shoulder. There’s always heat coming off Lizzie.

  “Let’s hijack one of those boats in the harbor,” I said. “Let’s do it, rent one, see what happens.”

  “From hijack to rent? Finn, what’s happened to us?”

  It was wry the way she said it—not moaning or wailing or laughing it off, could have gone those directions too now that I think about it, but it was her offhand coolness, the way she gutted the feeling that got to me. For real, it could have been different.

  My mom said, “She’s a merry one,” when she met Lizzie.

  “Finn, you know.” Lizzie was seeing where my pea brain was heading. “There are some people who shouldn’t marry. Some people are best single, and pity the ones who marry them. And you know what else?” She shoved me sideways against a lamppost and poked a finger in my face. “There are some people who dump all their misery into marriage, make wedded bliss their neurotic nest, and the best version of them lives outside that ugly place.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  Lizzie grinned.

  “I’ve got a surprise,” I told her.

  By then I knew I wanted to keep my trap shut, but I wanted to make her happy. Like my pop giving Oscar a steak bone when we knew he was going to be put down the next day. Yeah, like that. Lizzie, poor innocent dog, about to be put down. Not by me. It was a matter of time. Michael’s pussy was in Siracusa. Lizzie would find out. Michael set it up, brought her here. Vicious sick fuck.

  Look, I’m bad. Once a woman followed me into the men’s room, I locked the door, did the deed, and told myself it never happened, and worse pretended it hadn’t a month later when the lady blew through town again, but in my rule book this was different. Bringing her to Siracusa—Michael had built a bomb and lit the fuse.

  I steered Lizzie down the block and under a flapping awning into Voglia Matta. Gina had tipped me to it. “Best gelato in town. Best anywhere.”

  We sat outside at a tilting tin table and had gelato for lunch—brioches sliced open slathered with pistachio, coconut, and chocolate. Lizzie made happy noises. Finished the meal with Americanos, and as we walked away, she looked into the bag of cookies. “Only Nutella left. How does something this cloyingly sweet and as sticky as glue get popular? Maybe I can write about Nutella. Look at that sign. Van Gogh Video Games.” Lizzie dug out her phone and snapped a photo of the shuttered store. “Van Gogh and video games, a perfect match. In Sicily no less.”

  That’s kind of how I’ve got her framed now in my head. The way her face lit up when she found something ridiculous.

  Dorothy said I avoided the hotel room. Two hundred fifty dollars an hour for that wisdom. She said avoiding my family is my MO and why I spent a good hour in what passed for a bar, a table with a plastic cloth, red wine and white, next to reception, hoping to catch Michael. Playing gumshoe. If I caught him, he might ship her out. I was running interference. Let Lizzie deal with heartbreak somewhere safer and kinder. But he didn’t show, neither did Polish American Wonder Woman, and finally I let myself into the suite. Snow, dreamy at the mirror, didn’t hear me or didn’t care. I never knew what was up with her—was she preoccupied or just didn’t give a shit that Daddy was home? Standing sideways peeking at her reflection with one of her smug smiles, she unbuttoned a bit of her shirt and pulled it down to expose a bony sweet shoulder. She licked it. Licked it and strained to watch while she did it. I considered walking in again, a do-over, it kind of stunned me. Then she faced the mirror square on, blinked rapidly, her eyes rolled back in her head—

  “Snow.”

  She turned. I expected something. Fluster. Something. She only waited.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  She thumbed toward the bedroom door. Inside I found Tay flat on her back, arm over her face. Tay never lies on the bedspread in a hotel room, and can do fifteen minutes on how disgusting hotel spreads are. I switched on the light.

  “Turn it off.” Her voice wobbled.

  “What’s wrong, babe?”

  “Close the door.” She let loose with sobs, smothered her face with the pillow.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Finally she pushed herself up. She was a mess, eye goop drooling around her red eyes and down her cheeks, neck stringy as a chicken, every tendon at attention while she struggled for composure.

  “I should never have shown her the Caravaggio. It’s provocative sexually. Too provocative for a girl as sensitive as Snow.”

  “It’s not porn, babe.”

  “You didn’t see it, Finn. You weren’t with us.”

  My wife’s a lot of sharp angles. That movie, Edward Scissorhands? He reminded me of Tay, a vulnerable type who might slice you up. I did my best to hug her without getting knifed by an elbow.

  “I shouldn’t have scolded Snow about the blind man. I embarrassed her. It’s entirely my fault. I upset her. And when she pretended to faint—”

  “What?”

  “In front of the painting. She dropped to the floor, like the saint in the painting.”

  I laughed.

  “You don’t get it, Finn. You never get anything.”

  I let her go. She can suffer if it makes her happy. Weird thing about Tay. Even when she’s mean, she’s a sad sort.

  “What did Lizzie say about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Snow said—” Tay wiped her eyes some more, shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What?”

  “She said they laugh at me.”

  “Lizzie and Michael? No way. No one laughs, you’re not funny. I’m sorry, I’m an asshole. Bad joke. I don’t think anyone laughs. Just Dani. Dani, our lady of the reception desk, thinks you’re a laugh riot.”

  “At me. Laughs at me. Like I’m silly or stupid. They think I’m ridiculous.”

  I looked at her in a crumple, lips twitching. “Snow didn’t say that.”

  “I just told you she did,” said Tay.

  “If you’re bawling, it’s over Michael. Snow said, ‘Michael laughs at you.’ It’s Michael you care about. Michael you’re preening at. Snow’s no fool.”

  “I’m not going to dinner.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you do.”

  I got the hell out of there. “Be nicer to your mother,” I told Snow. “You’re a lot like me, kiddo, secretly you’re a handful.”

  Snow didn’t look up from her iPad.<
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  Michael

  “I WANT A RING.”

  I’d dozed off. Opened my eyes to find her face a whisper away.

  “My parents asked about a ring.”

  Had not wanted to sleep at all, irritated it happened. Any moment without all my faculties seemed risky. I scooted back against the headboard (the way a frightened person might escape a spider).

  “Mikey?”

  Stood up, pulled on my briefs, sank down again. Off balance. Woozy. Took a bottle of water off the floor and gulped most of it. Couldn’t go from horizontal to vertical quickly. Could no longer spring up. My springing days were over. Julien could. Julien, my alter ego, could have left by the window and scaled four floors down. I got lost sorting out the ways I had aged out of the situation I was in.

  “I could send a photo to my parents. I could post it. Do you want to rub that on me?”

  “Not this second, thanks.” Not this second, thanks? I’d forgotten what conversation I was supposed to be having. Would you like to rub lotion on my breasts? Not this second, thanks. “Post it?”

  “A photo of my hand with the ring. On Instagram and Facebook—”

  “Kath, no.”

  “I’d just, like, put from mystery man. Not engaged.”

  “Kath. Katarina”—remember to use the endearments—“would you want to be with a man who . . . who was capable of . . . ?” She squinted, displeasure or confusion hard to tell. Beware of hypotheticals, keep it simple. “I can’t do that to Lizzie. I told you. I am not that kind of man. I can’t risk her finding out while we’re here. It’s cruel.”

  “I want a ring, Mikey.”

  Had to mollify, no choice. With K I had to proceed as if nothing had changed. Had rendezvoused with her as soon as Lizzie went off with Finn to the market to cavort, to collect tales of salami. The better to enchant me with. Such a tender thing, the responsibility she felt to keep her husband amused. Look where it got her.

  “I won’t post it.”

  Two more days in Siracusa. “If you count today, three,” Kath had said, coveting the time left on the first adventure of her life.