Any Day Now (22 page)

“You've got to see the David,” Charles had said. “It's a must-see.”

“Wasn't that nice, giving us tips like that?” you said.

So you let them do only what you wanted. You accepted them into your body, accepted the ram and batter of their long, dry summer, the near-throttle of their arms around your neck, the terrific, Vaselined pain of the virgin boy.

In the tent, you pulled out bills from the front pocket of your backpack: $300. “It's more,” I said.

A bonus for being “good.” You said “gud” like Vivien Leigh.

You took me out for dinner that night as promised, some little over-priced
trattoria
facing a piazza. We drank a lot of wine, tore through a lot of cash. We sat there so long that we heard Serge and Jane four times.

“She's multi-orgasmic,” you said. “You women are so lucky.”

I wasn't fixated on the image of those old boy-belles dripping all over the back of your thighs. I wasn't torturing myself with the mysterious extra $50, figuring you'd given yourself the full experience. Experience in 1969 was all.

No, I was stuck on a photo from yesterday's paper. I'd known, as I'd stared at it, before I'd stuffed all the pages into a trashcan, that it was a bad idea to look at it too long. It would burn my eyes for days, maybe even years, and at twenty I had a long way to go. It was a black-and-white close-up of the shag carpet in Roman and Sharon's living room. The blood was, of course, black. They'd cut the baby out of her.

“I don't think I can hear this one more time,” you said when “our” song came on again. I started to tell you that wherever we went in Europe that summer, Serge and Jane would likely be with us, but you were already talking about Greece, how Charles and Dave said it was so laid back there and so cheap. “You know the Israelis run those kibbutzim like work camps,” you said.

I wanted to tell you that Roman Polanski hadn't killed his wife, that he'd never apparently been faithful to her either, but that was just his crazy, fucked-up, Polish, child-of-the-Holocaust way, that he loved Sharon, that he was devastated by her death. I wanted to tell you how Charles Manson and his scary band had slipped into his home one night and killed Sharon and her friends in a fit of ecstasy. I wanted to tell you about their baby boy and the carpet. But I kept it for myself, for my sense of horror, and because it was mine.

By then, you were losing your Carolina drawl and complaining of a migraine coming on, signs that things were getting back to normal. That night you slept head up, feet down, while I slept feet up, head down, the one configuration we hadn't tried yet. I took the fluorescent David into my sleeping bag that night, my man in Florence.

When we woke in the morning, the tent was down around us and people were standing above.

“OK?” someone asked. There'd been a huge storm in the night, our neighbours told us. “Hurricane,” one woman said. “No, no,” another woman said. “
Tempèsta
.”

Up close they looked smaller, friendlier. One older man in bathing trunks gave me his hand to lift me from the wreckage. “Your tent,” he said, clucking with displeasure, “finish.”

“Kaffee?”
a woman asked and you trotted off with her in the direction of a dry, upright tent.

The man was trying to ask me how we had stayed put all night. Most of them had taken refuge in the camp café.

“We didn't know there was a storm,” I told him. “We were sleeping.”

“Sleep,” he said, nodding, but I could see he was as mystified as I was.

William pushed me toward her. I had no choice but to smile, bow, introduce myself. “You play wonderful,” she said. That deep-in-the-throat accent. German? Hungarian?
She
was wonderful. Twenty maybe, with a face that was all dew and classical sculpture. Unplucked eyebrows. She was my height, with inspiring, womanly proportions.

I told her I'd been a bit off in the Ravel tonight. “Off?” she asked. The adorable eyebrows furrowed.

I had not played freely, I tried to explain. “I played like this,” and with jaw tight, mouth pursed, I plucked an imaginary guitar as if it were a saw I was filing my nails on. “Ohhh,” she breathed and nodded, smiling even more. She hadn't a clue what I was talking about. “You play wonderful,” she said again.

Back in the trailer at Camping Paradiso later, William quizzed me: How old did I think she was? Where was she from? He was washing his one white shirt in the sink, pouring water on it from an Evian bottle. His belly — primed nightly with Florentine pizza and pistachios — shone like a church dome. He was tan everywhere else on his pushing-fifty body. Even I was getting a bit of colour here.

“She wanted to meet you. I could tell,” he said. “She was there in the square last night and the night before. She was watching you the whole time, Thomas.”

“She's nice,” was all I said, not wanting to give him anything, not even the pleasure of a few shared manly comments.

“She's
real
nice,” he said, still scrubbing the armpits of the shirt. The night before, when he'd harped on my ongoing failure to close the trailer's refrigerator correctly — this was after complaining about my generally dispirited performance — all I could say in defence was: “Your shirt stinks.”

“Of course, she's very, very young,” he added. “Not that that would bother
me
. Or you either, I would imagine.” He kept scrubbing and I got up to pull down my bed from the wall. It protruded into the microscopic space of the trailer, bringing me closer to him than I wanted to be.

“I'm going to bed,” I said. Already I was wondering: A note? A walk? Coffee?

“Ah, love,” said William.

We'd brought the show to Florence after failing on the streets of Quebec City. That was the way William did things: one failure fueled the next. He blamed our Quebec debacle entirely on a South American pipe player named José, a swarthy little guy William insisted really came from Queens. José wore hot-pink satin pedal pushers, a shamrock-green toreador jacket and white plumed hat. But the
pièce de résistance
was the orange and turquoise parrot that perched hour after hour on José's shoulder while he played his silver pan pipes.

“You have to grant that visually it's arresting,” I said to William on the third night. We'd just finished another rousing rendition of “Ave Maria,” William missing more notes than usual as I played moribund backup.

“‘Ave Maria' is much better for voice,” I'd told William when we'd begun rehearsing in March.

“I know that,” William had said.

William didn't fight with you. He just ran over you. When it came to adapting the classical repertoire for more popular consumption — he called what we did “taking it to the streets” — he was particularly shameless.

“‘Ave Maria' was never intended for flute and guitar,” I'd said. No matter. There we were playing it in Vieux Québec. Playing it to no one. As the crowds drifted around Champlain's statue, licking sloppy cornets of ice cream in the shadow of the great Frontenac, they drifted right by us, right down the hill to where José and bird were playing “El Condor Pasa” and raking in the loonies.

William assured me it hadn't been like this the previous summer, the summer of '89: “They loved us. They bought our cassettes.” This was what William counted on. The coins tossed into the hat were nice, but the $10 for cassettes was better. “It continues the experience for our listeners,” said William. And then he told me again — he told me this every day — “They
loved
us last summer.”

The ”us” had included a cellist and harpist, a rather more interesting musical configuration. But then William and the cellist, a melancholy, but pretty, young woman named Ninette, had had a falling out. He was bedding both her and her sister, and Ninette evidently didn't like that. Eventually the harpist got a better-paying gig.

Enter
moi:
master guitarist and master of sore-luck. My three-year marriage had busted up; I'd filed for bankruptcy shortly after, and no one had hired me or my guitar — not one single wedding — in six months. I'd spent the year before joining William's Les Musiciens Magiques pressing buttons on an espresso machine at a Van Houtte's.

“Accomplished flutist seeks equally gifted guitarist for local and world tours. Play classical repertoire and popular favourites. Money negotiable,” read the bulletin-board ad at McGill's Faculty of Music. The popular favourites had me concerned.

“Don't worry,” William said when I called. “Do you know ‘Michelle'?”

“The Beatles' ‘Michelle'?”

“You're with me, Thomas,” William said.

He also told me not to worry about expenses. What this meant, I learned later, was that I would be helping William pay back an $8,000 bank loan for plane tickets, van and trailer rental, plus two months' worth of gas.

But I'd have to try out in Quebec City first. Mid-June was a bit early in the season, William admitted, as we staked out a spot in a square below the Frontenac. But not to worry, he said, zipping up his rain parka. We'd win them over. We serenaded chunky Americans in summer white who sometimes had the courtesy to last through a set. We held court to groups of golden-agers bused in from Shawinigan and Trois-Rivières. The men leaned against the railing looking over the St. Lawrence, watching boats and girls. Their wives — battalions of fluffed redheads in matching short sets — chatted in loud
joual
.

One night it poured. I held the umbrella as William tooted out John Denver's “Annie's Song” — “You fill up my senses!”
—
while my upturned guitar case filled up with water. That night we made $3.62. William bought himself a Whopper with it.

On the tenth day, he said, “Let's go to Europe.”

I woke thinking about the girl in the piazza. So did William.

“Ever been with jail bait?” he asked. He was already on his third cup of coffee. The mud he concocted in his old espresso maker made me ill, I'd discovered with my first cup the first morning of our tour. I'd had to bolt from the trailer, and though I didn't actually throw up, the smell of it still turned my stomach quivery. I hadn't touched a drop since, waited instead until we went into Florence proper each afternoon and bought a latte while we set up. But the thing with the coffee fixed — not as in repaired — something in our relationship. William regarded me from there on out as a lesser man.

“Jail bait?” I repeated, as if I'd never heard the expression.

“Young stuff, you know,” he said, leaning against the trailer's Lilliputian counter, slurping his beloved muck. “Last year,” he said, sitting down way too close, “last year in Vienna, this girl started hanging around. She loved our music, always put Deutschmarks in the hat, bought two cassettes. ‘For my
Mutter
,' she said. We were all a little bit in love with her. Did I tell you that Ninette sometimes did it with girls? And Henri, the harpist, he thought this Viennese vision fancied
him
. He was going through emotional contortions over how he was going to deal with his wife.
I
kept my mouth shut. And my eyes open. God, what a thing to behold. Only it was young beauty, if you know what I mean. When I think about it, I don't actually know if she was all that beautiful.” William put his cup down, absorbed in the deep questions he was asking himself. Then he looked at me. “Youth
is
beauty,” he said.

“I'm going to take a crap,” I said. It was the only way to get William to shut up. I'd discovered this the first week in Amsterdam, where he'd begun telling me the story of his life. There wasn't any particular chronology to it. We always seemed to be somewhere in the middle. Usually it was the story of William versus the world, William the conqueror (that was the part with women), William the bringer of music to the unwashed millions.

“Go, go,” said William, who took his own bodily functions extremely seriously.

I went outside, walked around a while. Camping Paradiso was built on a massive hill overlooking Florence, very scenic, not very practical. At least the part for trailers was almost level. By the time I got back to ours, William was packing us up to go into town.

“Ah, the hills of Toscana,” he said when he saw me. “You should take your lady love through the countryside for a little drive.” He offered to disconnect the van from the trailer so I'd be mobile.

“No strings attached,” he said.

I laughed, not at his pun but at the idea that William would ever do anything for nothing.

“She won't even come back probably,” I said.

“She'll be there,” said William.

She was. You couldn't miss her. A gleam came off that girl. This time she was dressed in a red and white polka-dot halter dress and white gladiator sandals. The thongs came up nearly to her knees.

William waved at her as we began the first set, while I smiled as warmly in her direction as I could. Under other circumstances I would have cringed at William's lack of subtlety, but someone had to acknowledge her. Now she'd have to come up afterward.

We weren't half bad that night in the piazza, though my phrasing in the Villa-Lobos verged on choppy and William let loose too much in “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.”

“Mozart isn't supposed to be played as if he's Brahms,” I'd told William back in rehearsals.

“You can't make a living as a purist,” he'd said and put so much schmaltz into the next few pages that I was sorry I'd said anything. William could always go further over the top.

But we were pretty on during that first set. And the audience was with us. At the start of our European tour — heady with the bigger crowds — I'd had to keep reminding myself that not one of these people had gone to the trouble of buying a ticket, taking the Métro, filing body-to-body into Place des Arts. No, these easy-to-please folks were listening to me because they just happened to be walking by. Especially in Florence in the summer where everything seemed like happy happenstance.

We closed the first set with our usual showstopper, Haydn's “Toy Symphony”: my torment. Early on, I'd tried to get William to play it straight, but he'd said, “What's the point? It's a silly piece to start with.”

His point was to make it sillier. Among the amps and mikes and cables we carted everywhere was a cardboard suitcase filled with kazoos, tambourines and triangles. This was William's finest moment: when he got to pick the fools from the audience to play the fool instruments. He had a certain pattern: young, buxom women for the tambourine, straight men to play the triangle, and little kids or little old people to play the kazoo.

I watched him that night, feeling afraid and hopeful. He picked a Stallone look-alike to play kazoo. Then a little brother and sister to play toy trumpets. He searched the crowd for a tambourine player, standing on his tiptoes, putting his hand over his eyes, walking out into the crowd, milking it. He walked past my polka-dot princess, then walked back.

“
Signorina
,” he said to her and put out his hand. The crowd applauded his good taste as he walked her up to join the line of performers. As she took her place, to the left and front of me, she turned and gave me a smile that made me clutch the neck of my guitar.

William gave his usual pre-performance instructions to the ensemble. “No, no, no!” he chided the big Italian when he came in on his kazoo notes prematurely. The crowd went nuts.

“This is slapstick, not music,” I'd told William the first time we performed this piece publicly. In rehearsal, William had always just said, “Oh, and here's where the others come in.” In fact, I'd been so furious that first time I could barely play the second set. “
Calme-toi
,” William had said. “You'll be laughing all the way to the bank.”

So far I hadn't been to the bank. In fact, so far the whole question of money had resembled our vague playing of “Ave Maria.” I had no clear idea how much we were making.

“Are you going hungry?” William had asked one night in Venice, when I'd pushed for a total, or at least a figure or two. I had to admit I wasn't.

“Are you having a good time?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Just like money,” he said. “Everything is a sometime thing.”

And he'd been right about the “Toy Symphony.” People ate it up. They clapped, they whistled, they threw coins: centimes, pesetas, liras.

That night in the piazza, as our
musiciens
gonged and clanged and kazooed their way through Haydn's musical joke, I was too high to care about anything. A vision stood before me: a girl whose posterior parts formed a serious counterpoint to the beat of the tambourine as she slapped and shook it, whose tawny braid flicked her bare shoulders double time. At one point I heard her singing along with the familiar melody. I might still be on Earth. But probably not.

When it was all over and the ensemble had taken their bows, William bade the crowd
adieu, arrivederci, Auf Wiedersehen
, and delivered his usual multilingual plug to stick around for “more musical magic.” Then he tucked his arm into our tambourine player's and walked back to me. She was smiling. He whispered something in her ear. She smiled more.

“Thomas, meet Sabrina,” said William.