Any Day Now (21 page)

“We were Paris of Soviet empire,” Nona tried to explain to Carmel over tea the first afternoon. “
Mais c'est fini
,” she said and her eyes, sad even when she was laughing, looked for a moment so sorrowful Carmel had been moved to put her hand on Nona's shoulder.

“Oh, but we get over everything,” Nona said.
Gordon,
Carmel thought.

“But I don't understand,” Carmel pressed. “I see the latest fashions out on Rustaveli.” Tbilisi's main street — a post-Soviet mix of Benetton and austerity — was filled with women in Italian pumps, men in expensive leather jackets.

“Do not be fooled,” Nona said. “We Georgians are more proud than…I don't know the word in English…
prudente?”

Lasha was not being prudent. He'd been building up speed for the past few kilometres, as if they were in the final leg of something. Carmel's knees ached, her back, too. How long could they keep this up? She was exhausted from watching the windows and the mirrors and gripping her thighs.

“This is not my choice. It is Mother's,” shouted Lasha, and braked in his usual considerate fashion, madly veering left. They barrelled down a dirt road framed by tall poplars, a country lane. Greece. Portugal. Where was she? They'd entered an estate of some sort with a massive stone gate.

“Yes!” Andrée kept saying as they bumped along. “Nona told me about this place. It belonged to the Chavchavadze family, didn't it?”

“I do not like the way Georgians use it now to show…” Lasha stopped as he brought the Lada to a shuddery halt. “It is too difficult to explain in English.”

“Chavchavadze was a famous Georgian poet,” Andrée said, turning to Carmel. “From the eighteenth century, right?” she asked Lasha. “Or was it the seventeenth?”

“You can learn everything if you go in there,” said Lasha, pointing to a stone house among the trees. “There used to be a bear,” he added.

It felt, if that was possible, even hotter outside. Carmel hesitated after opening her door, though Andrée was already out and speeding away, her sandals spraying gravel.

“Big Russian bears, two,” said Lasha, making no move to get out. “They were most interesting.”

“I don't understand,” Carmel said. “Bears.”

“Nothing to understand,” said Lasha, talking to her in the mirror.

“But why were bears here?” pressed Carmel. The heat was beginning to make her feel testy. And then there were her knees, courtesy of Lasha.

“I show you,” said Lasha and he got out and gave her his hand.

Standing, Carmel found her thin summer skirt glued to the back of her thighs, but her knees held.

“We let your sister run after her movies,” said Lasha.

A few other cars were parked in the gravel: two black Mercedes and a couple of Ladas. “Tourists,” said Lasha, looking down at her. He had long, dark eyelashes, like fur.

“I'm a tourist,” said Carmel. “I'm a very hot tourist.”

“This will amuse you,” said Lasha. He took her hand the way you might take the hand of a small, pouting friend.

“I do like bears,” Carmel said. “I always went to see them first at the zoo.”

They crossed the gravel, made their way through a smaller stone gate. There was a cage, but no bears. The chain-link fence that surrounded even the ceiling of the small space — an outrage in a captivity-is-bad zoo like the one back home in High Park — was more rust than metal. A new-looking sign in Georgian and English was soldered to the front: Do not feed the bears.

“But there are no bears,” Carmel said.

“If there were, we could not feed them,” said Lasha. He still had her hand. His was warm and large.

“But there are no bears,” said Carmel, “so what difference does it make?” The heat was turning them into idiots.

“Ah!” cried Lasha. “Even if something does not exist as a possibility, you still cannot do it! Back in the USSR, you don't know how lucky you are, boys!”

“Rules for the sake of rules you mean,” said Carmel. But just saying the word “rules” meant she had to extract her hand. He was a
kid.

“Do you have one hundred years?” asked Lasha. “I could perhaps explain it to you then.” His eyes were so personally on her she felt dizzy.

“My knees hurt,” she said. “And it is so hot.”

“I miss the bears,” said Lasha and taking her dropped hand, tucked it under his arm.

When Andrée found them half an hour later sitting in the front seat of the car, she was breathless with information. “What a story! Privilege, then no privilege and now a return to, well, if it's not exactly a return to the old days, at least there's a renewed respect for the past. What I can't believe is how this spot — it's an oasis! — withstood all the destruction of the communists. And then everything since.” She stuck her head into the driver's window. “What are you two doing?”

“Cooling off,” Carmel said.

“We are cool,” said Lasha.

“I met an official delegation from Batumi. And some refugees from South Ossetia,” said Andrée. “When I told them I was making a film, they all wanted to talk to me. Why didn't I bring my camera? Not a crew, mind you, but at least I could have got some footage.”

“Remember up here,” said Lasha, pointing to his head.

“A camera's better, Lasha,” said Andrée.

“I've got my little Canon,” Carmel offered.

Andrée shook her head. “Nona wanted me to make sure I saw some eleventh-century church in the middle of somewhere around here. Altaverdi, was it? I guess I'll have to sit in back,” she said when no one moved.

From the back seat, Andrée's knees pressed into Carmel's back as she told them about the Chavchavadze family and their times. Georgian names, which sounded almost German with Andrée's exaggerated pronunciation, washed over Carmel. She began to let down her fearful watching, began to drift off as Lasha gunned them once again down a road going straight into the sky. Then they were spinning like the mad teacups at Disneyland as Lasha turned around.

“What are you doing?” yelled Andrée over the assault on the tires. Lasha barrelled back in the direction they'd come from.

“My mother has wrong idea,” he yelled back. “No more old things.”

Andrée started protesting, but Lasha kept going. A sullen silence came from the back seat, but Carmel felt inexplicably lighter. She was even beginning to relax into Lasha's driving style — half Grand Prix, half early space travel. And as long as they were driving, the wind, hot as it was, ran over her skin, lifted her hair. As they sped down a stretch so heavily canopied with trees that it felt like dusk, Carmel looked at her watch; she would have guessed 3:00, but it was nearly 5:00. Still, with day's end, the temperature seemed to be on the rise. She glanced over at Lasha and saw that even the back of his hand was damp.

“Can I help you take off your jacket?” she asked, but Lasha said, “Later, maybe.”

“I don't mind so much not seeing Altaverdi, Lasha. But I do mind not knowing where we're going next,” said Andrée. “We could at least stop and get some wine somewhere. We are in the wine district, are we not?”

Lasha looked over at Carmel. “We are? Excuse me. I forget.” And Carmel, though she knew she would pay for it later, laughed.

They drove, they drove, Lasha moving them through the green heart of his country. The wind raged through the car, making everything airborne. Carmel looked back to see Andrée taking notes on a fluttering pad. Story ideas? Landscape detail? “You turning us in to Nona? Or to the former KGB?” Carmel asked. Andrée didn't look up.

They used to travel like this as kids: Carmel in the front seat next to their father (those were the days before anyone realized this was dangerous), Andrée in the back next to their mother. Andrée was the excitable child, screaming when it would take a passing, oncoming car a second too long to get back into its lane, which on the two-lane roads surrounding Pembroke, Ontario, was frequently. Tommie, their mother, kept Andrée occupied in the back seat with endless games of Hangman. “Daddy does know what he's doing,” she'd tell Andrée. Though she was five years younger, Carmel got to navigate, turning maps this way and that. Still, being the supposedly calm one got you way less attention. She knew this by age five.

“Wait, wait! We just passed something. I saw an old tower in there.” Andrée was pointing to a grove of majestic trees on the right. Lasha didn't brake, overtook another car and darted back into the right lane.

“Lasha, this isn't fair,” said Andrée. “I'm really not happy with the way you've commandeered our trip.”

Lasha pulled over, Carmel shoving her palms against the dash to spare both her knees and her head. Lasha turned to face Andrée. He was sweating, but his expression was surprisingly calm, sweet even.

“I am sorry,” he said. “It is only that I do not like to live in past.”

“But the past produced some beautiful things, some great things. Besides, there is no present without the past. You know this. You're an intelligent person.” Andrée was talking even faster than usual. “And you said yourself that things were better before than they are now.” Lasha didn't say anything and Andrée pressed on: “Nona will be very disappointed that we didn't see Altaverdi. She specifically said we had to go there. She kept using the word
magique
.”

“What does a ruin say about country?” Lasha asked. “That we were great once? Once is very sad word.” And he turned back to the wheel and hurtled off, leaving them both, in different ways, breathless.

Just before seven they pulled into a town like many they'd already passed: a one-street village scrambling bravely up the rocky hills. This one was unavoidable — the road ran right through it. Lasha pulled to his usual exciting stop in front of what looked like someone's tumble-down home. He got out, opened the front door and motioned them to follow. Inside was a square, bare room with four wood tables set with metal chairs. “Sit,” he ordered them and disappeared behind a swinging door.

“I am so pissed,” said Andrée. She wasn't looking so dewy any more, was flushed an unhealthy shade of pink. “Why is he behaving this way? Nona won't be pleased when I tell her.”

“Tell her what? Your son's been a bad boy?”

“This isn't what we discussed. Nona had a whole itinerary written out. She gave it to him.”

“He's showing us what he thinks is important.”

“You going to jump his bones?”

“You going to jump his mother's?” asked Carmel. And Andrée had the decency to laugh.

Lasha came back with three frosty glasses in his hands and a large bottle of deep red juice under his arm. “Incredible,” Carmel kept saying, and drank and poured her way through three glassfuls. “Sour cherry juice is Georgian speciality,” said Lasha, watching her reactions closely. And then a small man was at the table with plates of food.

“Khachapuri,”
Lasha said and pointed to Carmel's place. “You would maybe call cheese pie? I don't know.” The man put a golden globe of pastry in front of her.

“Khinkali,”
and Lasha pointed to Andrée, in front of whom the man deposited a plate of steaming dumplings. “I order for you. I guess what you like.”

Andrée looked annoyed for a moment, but then she picked up a dumpling the way the little man mimed, peppered it (“More,” Lasha ordered), and holding it by its doughy little stump, bent her mouth into it. The man nodded, left looking happy.

They were helpless before such good things. Carmel went back and forth between the salty cheesiness of the pastry and long gulps of the cherry juice, while Andrée demolished all eight dumplings. Lasha ate a few slices of white cheese and drank a glass of Borzomi mineral water.

When the man came to clear the plates, Andrée asked Lasha for the bill. “I pay,” said Lasha.

“That wasn't the arrangement,” said Andrée.

“New arrangement,” said Lasha and smiled at the sisters, a smile they couldn't argue with.

The sun was going as they got back on the road, taking the worst of the heat with it at last. What was left was a soft warmth. They sailed through villages like the one they'd just left — stucco houses, a few cows on the hill, stands of peaches and apricots, another few houses and then…gone…until the next village.

But as the light went, Carmel began to notice a change in the landscape. The fruit sellers had left their stands and were now crouched at the side of the road, baskets piled high with peaches held between their feet. They watched the cars go and go, the pink light of dusk turning the fruit crimson. They waited with their peaches. Carmel saw the light fade on their faces in village after village.

“Andrée, look,” she said, but Andrée had crashed like she used to as a kid, sitting up, head back. She'd exhausted herself.

“She missed the best part,” Carmel said.

“Yes,” said Lasha.

“But why do they do that?” Carmel asked, as another town and another row of crouching peach sellers flew away behind them. It seemed so hopeless out there in the near-dark. All those sellers, all those villages. So many peaches.

“Someone might stop,” said Lasha.

“Do you like my country?” he asked later in the darkness. He asked this so earnestly that he might have been asking, “Do you love me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I like your country.”

Sharon! Roman! Sette morti! There was blood in the photos of
Corriere della Sera
, people tied up. Had he murdered her? you asked. We went from newsstand to newsstand, two American kids on the fly — Florence, 1969, summer of Sharon Tate and the man on the moon — willing it to make sense.

When we weren't staring at the hyped type, we sat in the café at our crazy, slanting campground, drinking Cokes and squeezing anchovy paste out of a tube onto our fingers. The paste was so fishy, so salty (so not American), we'd have to get up and buy more Cokes. In this way we worked our way through the last of your school loan and bail-outs from our families, burping quietly, and listening to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. It was the summer of their
scandale,
too.
Je t'aime moi
non plus
blasted from invisible speakers so that anytime anywhere everyone could hear Jane building up to a breathy climax.

And always the Davids were with us. From every hilly corner of Camping Paradiso, copies of the David kept watch. David of the short legs, David of the long legs, David of the long shlong. Terrible Davids, impossible Davids. Still they kept an eye on travelers, kept us grounded, reminded us where we were. This was not Southern California.

But was it Italy? Large, pink Bulgarians and smaller, sun-happy Germans camped toe to toe with us on the twenty-five-degree slope. They had tents the size of Winnebagos, tents with many flaps. On their camp stoves they put out stews and pancakes. Plunk these adaptable folks on a foreign slope, surround them with bad statuary, and they cooked! By then, we'd run out of cash for replacement propane cylinders for our one-burner stove. Your folks had promised more money in Florence. We waited, pressing out every last drop of anchovy paste, toothpaste and diaphragm jelly.

But mostly we wrestled with the hill. We slept heels down/heads up and woke feeling as if we'd paced all night like security guards. The head-down position lasted a few hours and then you felt a migraine coming on and I'd learned to dread those. At the end of the first week, I tried going with the angle, sleeping across the hill. When I began to roll in my sleep, I took the tent and you with me, our two-man canvas pup turning into a porcupine of poles and legs. We got hysterical, could barely breathe from laughing. Complaints hissed from surrounding tents, but now awake, you fucked me and told me I was everything.

It was a week of holidays. Saint this and Saint that and all the museums were closed. When they did open, it was at odd times. We kept missing the right hours. Maybe, you said, there is actually no art here, maybe only empty museums with beautiful names that open from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. on certain Sundays. Plus pizza, piazzas and postcards, and David's penis in plastic or plaster of Paris. You loved alliteration.

We waited at the big American Express office every day, two kids who looked like all the other kids that summer. You had a beard, I had long hair. We wore each other's T-shirts and underwear. You complained I was stretching everything out. “Look,” you said one morning, holding up a pair of white-grey jockeys. “Look what you're doing.”

My parents had recently bailed us out, wiring $100 to Frankfurt. We'd
had
to get out of Germany, where we'd ended up stranded on the Neckar River with a family who'd given us a hitch out of Bonn. They'd carted us to a campground where everyone put plaster ducks and chicks outside their dining flies and sat around in lederhosen drinking beer. It had been sociologically entertaining for the first bit, but then you began to fear we would be stuck there forever or even another day. You had the worst migraine there, throwing up in someone's plastic garden one night.

“This money cost us another $25 just to send. They really squeeze you,” my mother had written on the Western Union form where in a hundred words parents could say something to footloose kids. And then my father, always softening her, had added at the bottom, “Say hi to the Duomo for me.” We had, and to the Ufizzi, and to the Pontevecchio, to the outsides of these places. “I don't really care about art anyway,” you declared after a week. “Who needs the real thing, when you can buy such creative fakes? The Europeans really have a touch with plaster. We're way behind in this arena.” We'd spent our last thousand-lira note on a glow-in-the-dark David that you propped on my duffle in a corner of the tent. “He's on a mountain looking down like all the other guys,” you said.

But on our eighth night among the Davids you woke me and said you were so hungry you couldn't sleep. “You could eat me,” I joked, but you didn't like doing this much, which brought on a fight every so often.

The next morning we walked down the hill to American Express. No money, but a telegram from your father suggesting you get a job or come home, preferably both. He asked if we'd heard about “that terrible Tate thing.”

“I'm going to have to sell my body,” I said, thinking you'd laugh.

“Come on,” you said. “Workable ideas.”

“I've got really nice boobs. According to you.”

“No,” you said. “No way.” And then after the smallest of pauses, you said, “I'll sell mine.”

“I was kidding,” I said, but you didn't smile.

“OK, jewelry,” you finally said.

But the guys in the shops on the Pontevecchio didn't want my 10K-gold class ring from Santa Monica High, or your sterling star of David. I remember that the sun was falling into the Arno as we hiked back up the hill and that the dust disturbed by our sandals looked coppery in the light.

I thought we'd sit on the grass and watch the sun set, our usual evening entertainment, but you wanted to go in the tent. It was a steam bath in there. I could smell our laundry. “You thought I was kidding, didn't you? You know I can't let
you
do it. Anyway there's lots of rich queers around. You've seen them.” I hadn't. It was 1969. Homosexuals lived in the closet.

I'd saved a tin of stuffed grape leaves from a camp store in the Bois du Bologne: three for you, three for me. Oil dripped onto our zipped-together sleeping bags and you leaned over to lick it up. “But they're men,” I said.

“Guys have more money,” you said. “And a Mrs. Robinson would have to deal with a husband, right?” Your eyes, I remember, looked at me but weren't focused on me. “We're in this for the money, right?”

“This is a very bad idea,” I said. But I couldn't talk you out of it. I couldn't see either how we'd gotten to this conversation.

“What else are we going to do?” you asked when I began to cry. “Are you ready to go back? What about Israel?” Our kibbutz plan had started all this traveling, had been the justification for draining every cent from our savings accounts. But let's do Europe first, we decided in London; let's get it out of our system. By August we'd get to Israel and get serious. But being young pioneers settling the Golan had stopped sounding sexy. All that physical labour, all those rules, a language we couldn't read, though
Easy Hebrew Verbs
was one of two books still in my duffle. It had been so much nicer drifting, eating pizza, laughing each time Jane hit her last whimpery ohhh. “We'll get there,” I said.

But I had no ideas, and my head was feeling lighter by the day. We had the lira equivalent of $1.25. It would buy us one Coke and a bag of chips. I didn't say, No, don't. I didn't ask what you thought this might do to us. I never asked: How can you
possibly
do this
?
I leaned over to kiss you, hungry for reassurance, but also stirred by what we were willing to do for love. We got up only to pee, drifting from the afternoon heat into the cooler Mediterranean night. We joked about how all those orgasms were using up our remaining body fat. You told me that tomorrow night we'd eat out, we'd eat well.

I woke in the heat to find you fully dressed. You looked slicked up. You smelled like soap. “You don't have to come,” you said. “It might be easier if you stayed.”

But I couldn't bear the idea of watching our neighbours cook and dine — some never left our mountain — while you went away from me, down the hill, to meet someone we didn't know yet. I'd wait outside American Express, the place you thought was a likely pick-up spot. “Just don't look like you know me,” you said. “It could really turn someone off.”

It took, what? Five minutes? They
looked
rich, the two men in pressed khakis. Rich in that way of old, careless money. They came up to you as you stood bravely on the steps, practical questions on their forever-boy faces: Which way to the Duomo? How can we exchange American dollars for those Italian things? Would you like to fuck? Before lunch — our treat! — or after?

You were out of there so quickly, that when I looked up (I'd had to drop my eyes at some point) you were gone. I sat on the steps, watching the American boys and girls going in, coming out, people who looked, but couldn't possibly be, like us. I baked under the Tuscan sun. You'd given me the last of the lira so I could buy a gelati, but at the newsstand across the way, I spotted an
International Herald Tribune
and bought it.

“Fucking butcher, eh?” A guy in pimples and bermudas sat next to me as I returned to my spot on the steps. “Jeff, Canadian, here a week, seen zero Michelangelos, fucking museums. What about you?”

“Do they know why Roman Polanski did it?” I asked.

“What?” he said.

“Why he murdered her? Was it something to do with
Rosemary's Baby
?”

The boy's eyes studied me from his bad skin. I realized I hadn't had a conversation with anyone except you for weeks. “You're joking,” he said.

His traveling companions, two sturdy girls, came up. Tiny Canadian flags sprouted from the tops of their backpacks.

“It'll give you nightmares,” one of them said, pointing to my paper.

“Fucking Americans and their violence,” said Jeff, and the three pushed off.

It took me a long time to read the story. Many stories, really: interviews with Sharon Tate's mother and sister, with forensics experts, a side article on cults, a timeline of the terrible night. When I was done it was mid-afternoon and the sun had shifted and I knew just about everything I'd never wanted to know about the things people can do. I'd never eat again.

But the sun had depleted me; my hands shook from lack of everything. I went back to the newsstand and spent the last of our money on chocolate. Italian chocolate, we knew, wasn't like Swiss chocolate or Dutch chocolate or even English chocolate, but this was as dense and filling as steak. I ate the long bar, square by slow square, telling myself you would appear when I was done.

At 7:00, I walked up the hill. It had gotten cloudy in the last hour, so the sun wasn't doing its dance on the river. Somewhere around midnight, you lifted the flap of the tent and slipped in your backpack. I pretended to be asleep and when you crawled in and lay down, you pretended, too. I knew your breathing like my own. Before dawn you rolled into me, and we pretended some more — yawning, stretching, as if we'd come from deep, mindless sleep.

“We won't talk about it again. But if we don't talk at all, it will drive a wedge between us,” you said, rising on an elbow. You looked pale, used up. Your breath smelled. You seemed like someone else.

They'd been decent, you said. “They're from Winston-Salem, South or North Carolina, I forget which, so they kind of have that old Southern gentility.”

First, you'd had lunch at their hotel. “Full-out elegant,” you said. “I ate so much scampi, and I was so hungry and so nervous, too, I guess, that I was sick after. They were nice about that.” Calling through the bathroom door, getting you some
agua minerale
— I could see it.

“What were their names?” I asked.

You looked at me carefully. “They let me do only the things I wanted to.”

“Let?” I said. It seemed the wrong word. Wanted, too, seemed wrong.

“I don't have to tell you any of this,” you said.

I knew then what was different — your voice, like you'd been watching
Gone With the Wind
all night, birthin' babies with Miss Scarlet and Sissie, waiting for dear, darlin' Ashley to come back from that wicked ol' war.

“You sound like a Southern belle,” I said.

You slapped me, one terrific whack against my cheek whose sting spread to my mouth as I spun away. I felt my upper lip swell.

The boys weren't really boys, you said after you'd stopped sobbing and begging forgiveness. Dave was thirty-seven and Charles was forty-two. They were cousins. I'd been wrong: They'd been to Florence many times; they loved the hills of Toscana. You'd spent most of the time talking about the Italian masters. “They're kind of art buffs,” you said.

But after an afternoon stroll for gelati, you'd gone back to their hotel for a siesta. Dave was shy, you said, but Charles was more open about what you were there for. You were all lolling on the big hotel bed when he'd unzipped your pants. He'd made you come once in front of Dave, and then Dave had had his turn. And then you'd done it to them — hand, some mouth, you said. By then everyone was thirsty and they'd had room service bring up a bottle of wine. You'd thought it was probably time to collect and leave.

“But I didn't know how much to ask for,” you said. The light in the tent was underwater green now as the sun rose behind you.

“We'll up it,” Dave had said. Now you saw that he was the energy behind things. They would more than double the money — $250 instead of $100, if you went all the way. “We've been pretty deprived this trip,” Charles had said. “It's not easy being gay.” They didn't do each other, Charles had said.

“Except once in a while when one of us is dizzy with lust,” Dave had laughed. They liked you, they'd said. They liked that you could talk about art. They, old Florence hands, had even told you when the Ufizzi
might
be open that week.