Siracusa

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.

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

—
GREGORY CORSO
,
“Marriage”

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.