On Honeymoon in Sicily

She thought they were paulownias, and I didn’t care. They were lovely, in their way, but we’d been traveling since five that morning and hadn’t even found our rooms yet. I was starving.

“You don’t see trees like that in the Northwest,” she said, still admiring them.

“No,” I said, still ignoring them, still looking at the map I’d just purchased in broken Italian from a shop that seemed to sell strictly amaro and arancini.

“I don’t even think they grow in Mexico,” she said.

I thought of Mexico, how well I knew the language compared to this. In fact, I’d spoken Spanish on accident several times: asking for directions, asking where I might find film, asking for jitomate instead of pomodoro, queso instead of formaggio, I said por favor instead of per favore . . .

“Catalpas aren’t the same . . . similar, but not the same,” she mused.

“I think we go this way. Didn’t the host say it was near the cathedral?”

“. . . I think they’re all leguminous, at least they seem to be.”

“Will you please stop with the paulownias? We need to find our rooms.”

“You’re the one who got the directions, I didn’t.”

“I know but still. We can look at the trees later.”

A group of Vespas whined past us, smoke and dust billowed down the narrow street. Around a curve, a garbage truck was blocking the way, and the Vespas came back, whining, wheezing, covering us with the filth of the street. She said something, but I didn’t make it out. I didn’t ask her to repeat it.

“Do you have any water?” she asked.

“No. You drank it all on the train.”

“You should’ve told me that.”

“There’s a shop. Get some.”

“Okay but don’t be a dick.”

“Sorry, I’m hungry. You’re thirsty, get some water.”

“Fine,” she said, and went into the shop while I looked dumbly at the map, turning it in my hand. The cathedral should be just to the left.

“What are you eating?” I said when she came out, chewing.

“Chocolate.”

“Did you get one for me?”

“The guy gave it to me.”

“Thanks. Come on.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“It doesn’t seem like it . . .”

After several twists and turns, we found ourselves in a small piazza, the same one we’d been in before, where I bought the map from the amaro/arancini store. I looked down at the map. Then back up.

“This map is fucked,” I said, and went into the store. I bought two arancini (para llevar and not da asporto) and then went back outside.

She was sitting on a bench. I put my pack down and sat beside her. I ate one of the arancini. She said nothing. The paulownias were there, across the piazza, blooming. I could tell she was looking at me, but I didn’t return her gaze. I kept my eyes fixed on the trees, their arrow-like panicles of blue-purple flowers plump in the thick, Mediterranean air. I looked at her, then at the remaining arancini, then at the trees. I ate the arancini, and after I did it struck me: these were the most beautiful trees I’d ever seen.

Who’s Will Oldham?

It seems like one of those things people say, that there are only six archetypal characters, and we more or less all fall into them. In some way.

I once knew someone, a friend but not a close friend, more than an acquaintance, though, but less than an intimate, yet definitely more than a friend of a friend . . . Anyway, he was someone I knew and had drinks with on occasion, and he seemed to fall pretty clearly into one of the six archetypes. His wife did anyway. If you marry an archetypal character, surely that makes you one too, right? I guess I’m not sure.

This friend and I used to live in the same neighborhood in LA. He married a woman in the film industry. She was mostly an actor. By her own account she was a great actor. By all accounts she was beautiful. The only people who thought she wasn’t beautiful were people who resented her beauty. To these people she was pretentious. I never saw her act. Not on screen anyway.

My friend was overjoyed that she agreed to marry him. Their seduction was quick, and a bit lopsided. He was head over heels in love with her, and she knew it. With a blasé flip of her wrist, she agreed to tolerate him in marriage. I should mention that he was not ugly. In fact, he was very handsome, and people said so. That’s why she agreed to marry him. She wanted beautiful children and together they would certainly make them.

I lost track of them when they moved from LA to his parents’ small town. Nearly twenty years passed. I didn’t really think of them that much. He wasn’t a close friend.

Then, weirdly, we found ourselves living in St. Louis. All of us. My wife and child. And the two of them and their kids (all beautiful). My wife’s aunt lived in St. Louis. She was having some health issues, so we moved there to help out. It wasn’t terrible. It was fine. I loved the way the summer nights stayed warm and humid. In St. Louis, you can sweat sitting still.

We started hanging out again. My friend and I. They had a little backyard, and we would go over for barbecues. She floated across the patio as if she were starring in a film from the Criterion Collection, with her creme de violette and her martini glass. There was an enormous oak tree off the patio. The grass beneath it wouldn’t grow. It was always dark, and always damp. The sun just couldn’t break through. In the fall the acorns were everywhere. They fell in odd and unexpected percussions against the deck. You could hardly walk. A huge umbrella over a table protected us from the erratic barrage. But in summer, at backyard barbecues, my friend’s wife’s air of elegance bedazzled the scene. It was as if we were in the Hollywood Hills, and not The Delmar Loop.

I could see there was something else there now, too. She was in her forties, still lovely, but unable to hide the fact she resented her position in life. She always spoke of the people she worked with in LA, in her 20s. Some of them had gotten somewhat famous, and she dropped their names in a weird display of what might have been. He worked in a minor role at an independent radio station, and she would mention meeting this or that musician. We were supposed to be impressed. We rarely were—Who’s Will Oldham?—but we would politely lift our eyebrows as if to say, “wow, you met him . . .”

She didn’t work. She hadn’t acted in years. One of the kids had behavioral issues. They had to take him out of school. She was homeschooling him. The marriage was struggling. She blamed my friend for her misery and spoke openly about how he had no ambition.

It was difficult for us to witness. She said once, drunk on champagne, that she married the wrong man. She should’ve married someone in film. A director. Someone with drive or money or both. She should’ve stayed in LA. She said this out loud! There, on the patio under the oak tree. Beautiful kids falling out of her, clinging to her. After she said it, she laughed and said, “oh well . . . cheers!” She raised her glass and we all awkwardly raised ours, even her husband, in a toast to something we weren’t quite sure of.

This went on for a few years. Those depressing backyard barbecues. We spent a Thanksgiving with them, once. And New Year’s. Despite the tragedy of the situation, I liked them. I liked him a lot. I started to think of him as a close friend, much more than an acquaintance, something close to an intimate, certainly more than a friend of a friend.

Then we moved back to the coast. It’s been a few years. I’ve lost touch with him again. The kids would be teenagers by now, nearly out of the house. I have no idea if they’re still together, still in St. Louis, if she’s still floating across that patio beneath that enormous tree. It’s weird, sometimes I think of them. There in the backyard, drunk. Just sitting there not talking to each other. He staring at her, and she holding a martini glass with a distant look in her eye. Acorns dropping in thunks all around them.