Page 51 of On Fire Island

In the days after Elizabeth (Liz) had graced us with her newfangled maternal presence, Ben woke up with the sun (his best time to write) and sat on the “lanai” (his best place to write) and came up with nothing. He pulled up the list of islands we had thought up, when still in Sicily, on his phone.

Corfu

Saint Bart’s

Galapagos

Venice

Cuba

Without me along for the ride, each one felt less appealing than the next. He closed the computer and lay down on the couch to think. I prayed he would come up with somewhere inspiring for the third installment of the three-book deal. Thinking back, he hadn’t even come up with Sicily; it had been my idea.

We were watchingThe Godfatheron a rainy afternoon at the point right before Michael’s young Sicilian wife gets blown up inthe car. We watched (or half watched) theGodfathertrilogy often, as background noise, and would always look up from whatever else we were doing to perform our favorite lines in unison.

“ ‘Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Saturday,’ ” we said, right on cue.

And that’s when it hit me. “Sicily!” I proclaimed, with a confident resolve.

Ben’s entire face had lit up. He’d responded in his best Marlon Brando, “You have made me an offer I can’t refuse,” before diving onto my end of the couch and kissing me all over my face.

We popped open a bottle of prosecco that had been sitting in our fridge for ages and ordered in a Sicilian-style pie and a Caesar salad to celebrate. By the time the delivery guy arrived with our food, we had already purchased two one-way tickets to Italy.

We would spend Christmas in Catania.

Most people advise getting in and out of Catania quickly, but Ben was never one to listen to most people. An idea was clearly brewing because, by the time we landed, he told me he needed a full day at a place called the Museo Storico dello Sbarco (translation: the Museum of the Landing). I knew better than to ask why. Questions were not welcome during the time Ben was coming up with a story—not from his wife and definitely not from his editor. Those times, before he got the basic plot points down in his mind, were the loneliest times of our marriage. He had no use for me and, honestly, if I even asked him to pass the olive oil, he could lose his train of thought and never get it back. When he was living in his head like that, there was little room for much else.

I had paired this trip with my ten-year sabbatical and was very excited to recharge and catch up on my personal reading. I had a TBR list as big as the Duomo.

Ben spent the entirety of our first day immersed in World WarII Sicily at the Museo Storico dello Sbarco. I could see his wheels turning as we sat in our bed that night, mapping out the rest of our journey. Unlike Lanai, where Ben had outlined much of the story and found a beautiful Airbnb for us to stay at in advance, Sicily was an open book—literally. We didn’t know where we would end up, but Ben assured me he would know when we got there.

By the time he had left the museum, he had his main character, an American named Jack Koslowsky. Jack had left behind the love of his life, his fiancée, Lucy Dubois, back in Louisiana, in order to fight the Nazis. Neither Jack nor Lucy knew she was pregnant when he shipped off. Jack was gravely injured during the invasion of Sicily and left for dead. A farmer, who was also hiding a young Jewish woman in his barn, subsequently saved him. The woman nursed Jack back to health, but not before the two had fallen in love.

“Wow,” I’d said, so turned on by his thought process, which he rarely revealed to me as it played out like that. We made love that night, I imagined like Jack Koslowsky and the beautiful Jewish stowaway in a bombed-out barn in a little town called _______.

The next day, we set out on our journey to discover the location of that little town.

Our first stop was Taormina, the jewel of Sicily, where we splurged and booked a suite overlooking the Ionian Sea at an old monastery turned five-star hotel. If Taormina were a painting, it would be theMona Lisa—beautiful, but hard to see through all the tourists. Within minutes of our arrival, I knew this would not be the place that Jack Koslowsky would settle, but I didn’t care. It was magnificent.

“Please tell me we can stay here for a few days,” I said, concerned we would leave before I got to try the eight flavors of gelatoand the signature lava scrub at the spa—courtesy of Mount Etna. We could see the active volcano in the distance from our window.

Ben pointed it out. “Absolutely—we are going to climb that tomorrow!”

At the top of Mount Etna, the guide spewed countless facts about the active volcano in front of us, as well as volcanoes in general. Ben listened intently, but only scribbled down one note.

In 2010, a volcano in Iceland stopped air travel in Europe for 7 days.

“I got it, Jules, I really got it,” he boasted proudly on the way back down the mountain.

“Are we still looking for Jack Koslowsky’s farm?”

“We are,” he said. “I’ll let you know when we find it.”

On our last morning in Taormina, we sat at breakfast on the terrace of the hotel’s restaurant, taking it all in. Ben was staring out at the garden, where cacti grew to be the size of palm trees, and palm trees the size of oaks, but I found myself lost in the table across from us. The fabulously chic couple seated there looked like they would fit in on any riviera. The wife possessed that casual European style, wearing a stunning combination of white and camel, accented by her gold watch and jewelry—all Bulgari. Of course, there was an oversize pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. The husband wore a pale pink button-down tucked into perfectly creased jeans with a Gucci belt and Ferragamo loafers. I pictured Ben in the pink shirt and laughed. But what really got me was their child: a well-behaved boy of around ten, also impeccably dressed, keeping himself busy on his phone as his parents read the LondonTimesin between bites of orange fennel salad and poached egg.

I was going to miss the orange fennel salad. I wondered if it was a staple everywhere in Sicily or just in Taormina.

I whispered to Ben, “Look how bored that poor kid is. It makes me think we should have two, you know, so they can entertain each other.”

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