Siracusa Read online

  Also by Delia Ephron

  NOVELS

  The Lion Is In

  Hanging Up

  Big City Eyes

  NONFICTION

  Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.)

  Funny Sauce

  HUMOR

  Do I Have to Say Hello? Aunt Delia’s Manners Quiz for Kids and Their Grownups

  How to Eat Like a Child

  Teenage Romance

  YOUNG ADULT

  Frannie in Pieces

  The Girl with the Mermaid Hair

  CHILDREN

  The Girl Who Changed the World

  Santa and Alex

  My Life and Nobody Else’s

  MOVIES

  You’ve Got Mail

  Hanging Up

  This Is My Life

  Mixed Nuts

  Bewitched

  (all above with Nora Ephron)

  Michael

  (with Nora Ephron, Pete Dexter, and Jim Quinlan)

  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

  (with Elizabeth Chandler)

  PLAYS

  Love, Loss, and What I Wore

  (with Nora Ephron)

  How to Eat Like a Child

  (with John Forster and Judith Kahan)

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Delia Ephron

  “The Whole Mess. . . Almost” by Gregory Corso from Herald of Autochthonic Spirit copyright © 1973, 1975, 1981 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ephron, Delia, author.

  Title: Siracusa / Delia Ephron, author.

  Description: New York: Blue Rider Press, [2016].

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007679 (print) | LCCN 2016013168 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399165214 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101621530 (ePub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Americans—Italy—Fiction. | Married people—Fiction. | Marital conflict—Fiction. | Adultery—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3555.P48 S565 2016 (print) | LCC PS3555.P48 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007679

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Delia Ephron

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Lizzie

  Taylor

  Michael

  Finn

  Rome, Day 1 Lizzie

  Michael

  Taylor

  Lizzie

  Rome, Day 2 Finn

  Michael

  Lizzie

  Michael

  Lizzie

  Taylor

  Finn

  Rome, Day 3 Michael

  Siracusa, Day 1 Lizzie

  Taylor

  Lizzie

  Taylor

  Michael

  Finn

  Siracusa, Day 2 Taylor

  Finn

  Michael

  Siracusa, Day 3 Lizzie

  Michael

  Finn

  Lizzie

  Taylor

  Michael

  Finn

  Lizzie

  Taylor

  Lizzie

  Siracusa, Day 4 Michael

  Portland, October Taylor

  Finn

  New York City, October Michael

  New York City Lizzie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?

  —GREGORY CORSO, “Marriage”

  Lizzie

  I HAVE A SNAPSHOT of me standing on Finn’s shoulders when I was twenty-nine, a trick we’d perfected. I would sprint toward him and work up enough steam to climb his back to his shoulders. I look triumphant and not a little surprised to have done this—it was unlikely I would ever stand on a man’s shoulders, having been neither a cheerleader nor a gymnast, and I am not physically daring (a deficiency). I was unhappy that day on a Maine beach fifteen years ago, but you’d never know it from the four-by-six glossy. Finn and I broke up that afternoon.

  In the photo I am looking at now, you can read my mind. I am depressed. I’m hunched on a stone bench, wearing a black quilted jacket, not flattering. There I am looking like winter on a June day. Behind me in the distance lies the little port, dotted with sailboats and small yachts, one of Siracusa’s few sweet spots.

  My hair, always a tumble, is messy in a way that suggests I hadn’t bothered with it. My eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. This seems intentional. I was confronting the camera, my face turned toward it but flat. I had neither the inclination nor the energy to strike a pose.

  Who took the picture? I can’t remember. Events that day are muddy. Suppressed? It’s been a year and some of us no longer speak, not the ones that you would expect or maybe you would. I didn’t. Since the photo is on my cell, odds are Michael is the photographer, although possibly not, because I am centered in the photo. The subjects in Michael’s shots are frequently missing the tops of their heads or their arms.

  Snow should never have been on the vacation at all. It was a grown-ups’ trip, but Taylor never went anywhere without her, so Finn said. Although you never know in a marriage who is responsible for what, do you? Husbands and wives collaborate, hiding even from themselves who is calling the shots and who is along for the ride.

  She was ten years old and a mystery, Finn and Taylor’s daughter. “She is brilliant,” said Taylor, but in England the year before Snow had spoken rarely and then softly. Her mother had ordered for her. The waiter would look at Snow studying the menu, clearly intelligent, and Taylor would speak. Snow often read straight through a meal, the iPad on her lap. When I asked her a direct question, she looked to her mother. Anxious, I’d thought. For rescue. “You prefer milk chocolate, don’t you?” said Taylor. “You loved that movie Pitch Perfect? Didn’t we see it three times?”

  For Michael and me Snow was wallpaper.

  I’ve barely begun, and undoubtedly with that remark, I’ve turned you against me. I’m like that, unpleasantly blunt. Some people like it, some hate it. I tend not to worry. Finn would be horrified to hear that even if he were not Snow’s father, but not Michael because he’s a writer. Writers often forgive cruel observations. They even admire them. It makes them feel empowered, justified,
off the hook for their own ruthless words. For doing that thing writers think is their right: taking a friend, swallowing him (or her) whole, and turning him into a character to suit their own fictional purposes.

  The trip was my idea, a moment of spontaneity, enthusiasm, and slight inebriation. Liquor played a role right from the start.

  Since our summer fling years before, Finn and I had maintained an attachment that neither of us fully understood. We were given to bursts of e-mail intimacy, intense for a few months, then lapsing for longer. The intermittent friendship was solely between us. We’d been at each other’s weddings, but the four of us never got together socially. Then I discovered that by chance we’d all be in London at the same time. We had dinner. Then another and another. We had little in common (except that Finn and I had history, which is not quite the same as something in common). They weren’t from our world—Michael’s and mine—which turned out to be relaxing, and yet they were curious and playful. Especially Finn. Taylor was obsessed with culture, which I admired, although I wasn’t. Good travelers, different travelers. “Where should we meet next year?” I’d said on our last night together. I raised my glass. “To next year.”

  I still wonder about that moment. What if I’d let that convivial feeling pass?

  Taylor mostly planned the trip, her thing, fine by me. Michael normally scours travel books for weeks before we leave, hunting out the obscure and offbeat—on a trip to Paris he’d whisked me off to the Musée de la Vie Romantique to see a cast of George Sand’s arm and her lover’s too, Chopin—but he was in the home stretch on a novel and utterly preoccupied.

  I’m used to this. I’ve done it to him. I haven’t written a novel, nothing major like that, but I write too, mostly articles for magazines and websites. Writers have to allow each other a private world. Finishing is always more compelling than anything else, than anything real. A thrilling narcissism sets in. It’s so much fun. I could never deprive Michael of that. I was good about tolerating it. I took pride in tolerating it. I put up with silent dinners—a “What?” two minutes after I’d said something interesting.

  “It’s not a good time to go anywhere,” he said.

  “It’s too late to cancel. It’s all in the works, much of it paid for. A break may help you, it really might. Please. I want it desperately.”

  An eight-day vacation—how could that hurt when I was adrift? Panicked. It was the most difficult time of my life.

  Taylor

  FROM THE START it was a conspiracy between Lizzie and Finn to be together. Michael and I were in the dark. We’d had such a lovely time the year before in London. We happened to be there when they were, and met several times for dinner. The fivesome was comfortable. Snow really enjoyed it.

  Why not repeat the experience?

  “That’s so brave of you to travel with Lizzie, she is terrifying,” my friend April told me. She remembered Lizzie from our wedding. As a toast Lizzie had recited three haikus she’d written about Finn, all about how she never thought he’d get married, and then she presented him with a book, Toilets of the World. The book was what it sounds like, photographs of toilets from Appalachia to Madagascar. That is Lizzie, highbrow and low, equally intimidating. Finn loved the book. He kept it on the coffee table. It was his childish notion of a shocker. At the time I found it only silly, the book a bit of foolishness. Looking back, reconsidering everything, I think it was a way for Lizzie to be there every day of our lives, reminding Finn of something, something about the two of them, a kind of I get you and she doesn’t. Eventually I got rid of the book and Finn never noticed. If something’s not in front of his face, it’s not on his mind.

  I spend a lot of time reconsidering what I thought, but it’s nobody else’s business. I’m certainly not seeing a shrink. I don’t have the problem.

  Way back when we first got married twelve years ago, Finn was starting the restaurant and we were a good team. I have class. He needed that. He became the hometown boy with something extra, me. I’m from the Upper East Side, the best private schools, Vassar, summa cum laude. My hair was long, thick, blond, and straight. I had power hair. That made me more of a catch. “If you have hair like this,” my mother said, “you only need to be half as pretty.” Once I’d snared a husband, I didn’t need long hair and chopped it off. Now I have it cut at the local men’s barbershop. Under my direction, Rudy does it short and slicked back off my face. I keep it smooth and shiny with a L’Oréal gel. No other woman in town goes to Rudy, and it’s safe to say that no other Portland woman of my acquaintance has my talent with home hair products. (I’m being funny here, and the reason I point this out is that people often don’t know when I’m funny and when I’m not.) Even though Finn complains about the money I spend on clothes, he likes a cutting-edge wife.

  It’s difficult to keep that up, to maintain originality in Portland, Maine. I find it a welcome challenge.

  Finn and I met when I was twenty-six (he was three years older) and teaching English at a private school in New York, Spence, the same one I’d graduated from. I’d stopped in Portland on the way to my summer camp reunion, and he was driving a water taxi, subbing for a friend (unlicensed, he told me later, and I guess that is part of his story). He showed me his “joint,” as he called his future restaurant, then just a dusty empty space with grimy leaded windows. We sat on the floor—it was actually a subfloor, the linoleum had been stripped off—and ate lobster rolls. I believed in him, believed that he would be successful, I’m not sure why. Perhaps mere instinct. As a mother I’ve learned that instinct is very important and some have it and some don’t. I have instinct. Besides, on the way there, he’d known every single person we passed. That impressed me. Now I realize everyone knows everyone in Portland.

  He wore khaki shorts with big flap pockets. When he came to New York, my mother was horrified. “Men in shorts,” she shuddered. And he pronounced the t in often, one of her personal pet peeves. Out to dinner at Gerard, where jackets and slacks are the rule, he wore them, but not socks.

  “You wanted to get away from your mother,” said April.

  I wanted to shine. It’s so much easier to shine in Portland.

  I had to improve Finn’s wardrobe, which I did by giving him presents, always coming home with a shirt or sweater, gradually weeding out the old. Once a week I threw something of his away or gave it to our cleaning lady for her husband.

  Lizzie sent me an e-mail in January. “So is it still Italy?” I was surprised. I’d expected her to forget. I said, “Snow’s heart is set on it.”

  “Works for us,” she wrote.

  Wonderful, I thought. I was excited. It would be like two adventures in one, traveling with them and in a foreign country. Besides, Lizzie and Michael could keep Finn busy because Snow and I don’t like to stay out late and Finn does. These differences that don’t matter at home can be a bit of a hiccup on a vacation. Also, honestly, there is such a thing as too much togetherness, and on a trip Finn and I sometimes run out of things to say. That would never happen if we were with Lizzie and Michael. Still, how stupid was I? Lizzie told me to make all the decisions. Of course she didn’t mean that, I realized later, because if Lizzie can’t force everyone to do what she wants, she’s not happy.

  When Lizzie e-mailed, Snow and I had already spent hours together at the computer Googling Venice: gondolas on shimmering water, ancient palazzos, sunburnt colors. “Streets of water?” Snow was captivated.

  By nature my daughter is reserved. I always say that Snow is living proof that still waters run deep. Not only is she shy, diagnostically shy (I’ll tell you about that later), but some might experience her as aloof. I live for her smiles. When she lights up, I do too.

  “We should do all of Italy, not just Venice,” I said.

  Snow nodded.

  This is a tradition, by the way, although I’m not sure it is anymore. Every June we would take a three-week vacation as a family. A blowou
t. Snow and I would decide where, and for months and months we prepared.

  As far as I am concerned there is no point in traveling unless it’s five stars. I cannot see flying across the ocean to stay in a hotel room with coarse sheets or with a worse bathroom than the one we have at home. I was figuring Rome, Ravello, Venice. Then Lizzie e-mailed, “How about going to Sicily?”

  I ran it by Gloria, our travel agent, who is a treasure. She suggested Taormina. She knew a gem of a place to stay, even knew the manager. Lizzie insisted instead on Siracusa. It doesn’t have a five-star hotel—that tells you something right there. A very ancient world, Lizzie assured me, off the beaten track. From Siracusa it was only an hour and a half to Taormina, which she called a tourist trap with a view. If I wanted to go I could hire a car. In fact, Taormina has an extraordinary ruin, a teatro greco, but to be accommodating I agreed to skip it. I’m very accommodating, although I’m not sure anyone realizes it.

  Lizzie is uncultured. That’s something you’d never suspect. “In London, she bragged about never having been to the Tate,” I told April. “Trips to other countries should not be wasted. Who brags about missing those remarkable Turners?”

  “What’s really wrong with Lizzie,” said April, “is that she doesn’t have children. Women who don’t have children are entirely different from those who do.”

  “She’s nice to Snow,” I said.

  “Nice isn’t what I’m talking about. This may be a terrible thing to say but women without children lack depth. Emotionally they’re stunted.”

  Secretly I have always thought that too. Until April said it aloud, however, I had never quite admitted it.

  So it was agreed. Lizzie and Michael would be with us on the southern part of the trip: Rome, Siracusa. Then we’d go alone to Ravello and Venice: Snow, Finn, and I.

  Finn never asks about vacations. I tell him where we’re going, when we’re leaving, and pack the clothes, even his.