Free Siracusa by Delia Ephron Page A

easy. I felt a wizard. How natural it would be for them to fall into bed. They’d been there before. That, by the way, didn’t bother me.“No one is going to criticize you for abandoning the Pantheon. If you’d rather hit the market,” I told her.
    All she needed was permission to be lowbrow.
    The Pantheon is humbling. Built in 125 B.C. I’d already been, came to Rome years before with another woman, an art historian. (I received a liberal arts education from the women I dated.) She had known to come in wet weather, and for a long time we had stood inside that solemn cavernous space hypnotized by a perfect cylinder of rain falling through the oculus, its splash and tap on the marble floor.
    Being a tourist destination, the Pantheon was surrounded by opportunities to experience comic-book versions of ancient Roman life. Two gladiators waylaid us, drawn for sure by Snow’s beauty and because children are a mark. A correction: Snow wasn’t a child. I have not yet lit on the word for what she was at that particular moment in time. Not childlike if she ever was. Too silent, too composed—cunning, did I think that in Rome? On the brink of a spectacular blossoming, which made her, don’t misunderstand, erotic. Forbidden fruit, but erotic.
    “I’m Brutus,” said one.
    “Titus,” said the other.
    Their absurdity was irresistible. Two middle-aged men in short skirts, plastic brown chest plates festooned with plastic gold medallions, flimsy capes that would billow behind them should they ever find themselves in a chariot, sandals with leather straps winding up their hairy legs. Every day they tumbled out of bed and dressed in gladiator outfits. Did they have wives, children they kissed good-bye before donning plastichelmets with earflaps and stiff combs of feathers—one bright red, the other bright blue—sprouting from the top?
    They were pros, trapping us in a drama before we could protest, and obviously good-natured, who could resist? “Fair maiden, please kneel.” Their English was perfect.
    I expected Snow to cower or make a frantic dash for her mother, but astonishingly she knelt.
    “How many gladiators have you slain?” I asked.
    “Hundreds,” said Brutus or Titus, waving his plastic sword.
    “How many lions?”
    “Twenty. For four euros, we behead you, and you can take a picture.”
    “A deal.”
    Brutus and Titus struck poses on either side of Snow, lunging and thrusting. I stepped back to take a photograph and bumped into Taylor. Hadn’t noticed she was at my elbow. Realized then we were surrounded.
    “Snow’s upstaged the Pantheon,” I told her.
    A crowd pressed in, arms raised, phones held high for an unobstructed shot. They snapped the beautiful blond princess about to lose her head to the Halloween gladiators.
    Snow wore her stone face, her preternatural composure betrayed only by her eyes shifting this way and that. Was she scared, I wondered, but then she adjusted her position to give tourists on the right a better view.
    Taylor would record every inch of Snow’s life as she trekked her around. My conversations with Snow at dinner were at some point snapped. “Snow,” she would call, and Snow’s mouth wouldstretch into a facsimile of a smile. Here, however, Taylor gaped at all the people treating Snow as a tourist attraction. She rushed in to shoo away Brutus and Titus, and, as Lizzie said later, to get Snow’s knee off the dirty ground.
    I might like a child, I realized. That thought surprised and ambushed.
    I liked Snow’s hand in mine, her trust. Her intelligence and curiosity, visible and masked. She was intriguing, this girl who kept her cards close to her chest. I had never imagined a child like that, although children had not figured in my imaginings up to that time.
    Kath was young. She could have children. We could have kids together.

Lizzie
    A FTER DINNER I DECODED our way to Via della Panetteria and the sliver of a shop, Il Gelato di San Crispino, which is around the corner