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July/Aug 2015 • Vol. XXXVII No. 4 • Fiction |

Labyrinth Two

black and white photo of four people sitting around a café table

In the photograph, they are not looking at the camera. They seem unaware that their picture is being taken. Left to right, they are Franco, Eliane, Sergio, and Daphne. The four are sitting around a small, round table in the Piazzetta on Capri having drinks—probably drinks before dinner at Gemma’s. At Gemma’s, they will run into Graham Greene and his companion and great love, Catherine Walston, who often have dinner there. Sergio, who knows everyone, will walk over to their table to say hello; he will also introduce Franco, Eliane, and Daphne to Graham Greene and Catherine Walston, and Eliane will summon up the courage to tell Graham Greene how much she likes his work—especially, she will say, The Quiet American. She might even confess to him how she, too, wants to be a writer. “Good luck then,” Graham Greene tells Eliane, giving her a hard, blue-eyed look and a smile that might be both ironic and dismissive. Then turning to Catherine Walston, he says a bit too loudly, “I find that the spaghetti alle vongole is reliably good here.”

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Lily Tuck is the author of five novels, including The News from Paraguay, which won the National Book Award, two story collections, and a biography of the Italian writer Elsa Morante. Her forthcoming novel, The Double Life of Liliane, will be published in the fall.

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