Any Day Now (23 page)

“Sabrina?” I asked.

“You play wonderful,” Sabrina said to William.

“Sabrina, like in the movie?” I asked either of them.

“You play wonderful,” Sabrina said to me.

“
Grazie,
” I said. I couldn't believe her name. “We were more in sync tonight,” I said, but already I could feel panic setting in next to the elation. There was a half-hour between sets. How to fill it? With conversation? With food?

“Would you like a gelati, Sabrina?” asked William. He'd taken his flute apart, was blowing into the end of it.

“
Si
,” giggled Sabrina.

William threw me a come-hither look, hooked his arm through Sabrina's so that all I could do was hook my arm through her other arm. We walked through the piazza like this. It was hard to keep in step. I nearly tripped once. Sabrina giggled some more.

“He's drunk,” said William to Sabrina.

“I am not,” I said, but I smiled so she wouldn't think I was angry about anything, that I was, in fact, pleased about every little thing. When we got to the gelati stand at long limpingly last, William suddenly remembered the instruments.

“What was I thinking about?” he said.

Across the stones of the piazza, we could see my chair, my guitar case, the amps, plus the music stand advertising Les Musiciens Magiques de Montreal. “It'll be fine,” I said. I wasn't that eager for William to leave, I realized. He'd keep the chat afloat.

Sabrina was whispering something in William's ear.

“She says you're cute,” William said, making a face.

And then she was next to me, holding my arm, brushing my white shirtsleeve with her bare, brown youngness, leaning into my side, pressing her face into my neck, whispering into my ear.

“She says you're cute, too,” I said.

And William did the most surprising thing he'd done all summer: He blushed.

We did the second set without incident. Despite all our encouragement to crowd number one to “stick around for more terrific tunes,” crowd number two was totally new. Even when we were exceptionally on as we'd been that night, people tended to drift away. When a crowd seemed especially fickle, William would croon into the mic, “Walk on by,” a big, white, male Dionne Warwick in the piazza.

William didn't pick Sabrina for our audience-participation number for Part Two. Instead he picked a busty young Australian woman to open and close the legs of the giant nutcracker we used for our Tchaikovsky suite. I was relieved.

I didn't know what to think. Was she interested in me? Was she just flirting? Did she even know she was flirting? Was she — the worst imaginable possibility — interested in William?

I wasn't used to such simple questions. I was almost forty, used to dealing with women my age, used to dealing with more complication. My ex-wife left because she was trying to work out issues of gender power and I reminded her too much of her father, and besides, she didn't find the sex both obliterating and merging enough and then on top of that there was the unresolved matter of my not ever having dealt with failure/success and
my
father.

Now I was back to the basics. Was I cute enough?

“Sabrina's coming back with us,” William informed me after the last set.

“Us?”
I said.

“Don't worry,” said William. “She's yours.”

We packed up quickly that night, inspired by the woman watching us. Sabrina sat, her legs crossed high on the thigh, her sandalled ankle caught in the curve of her other ankle. I could barely concentrate. At one point I threw William's flute case in with the toys.

“Can't lose it this early, man,” William said.

Sabrina didn't offer to help us, even when we loaded up the dolly, both shoulders, both hands, and trudged out of there to the van, weighed down like hobos.

William talked all the way back to the campsite.

“We've had adventures, haven't we, Thomas?” he said at one point in his monologue. “God, I love Europe. People are so free here.”

From the depths of the van, we heard Sabrina echo, “Free.”

He'd cleared a place for her in the back, pulled down the jump seat. He'd also asked her to hold his flute case on her lap for the ride. I shot him a look when he did this.

“You want her to hold your guitar, too?” he offered. It had been a sore point all summer, the love he lavished on his Yamaha and the indifference he paid my guitar, handling the case way too casually when he thought I wasn't looking.

“You'd think it was your dick,” I said one night in Venice when he was rubbing the flute's body between sets.

“Both instruments of pleasure,” William had said. “And not just for me.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Otopeni,” said Sabrina and looked down at the flute case. I was totally stumped.

“And where might that be, Sabrina?” William asked.

“Bucaresti,” Sabrina said.

“Romania,” breathed William. “Hey, that Ceausescu guy of yours was real bad news, wasn't he? Good thing he's done for. Though that execution was gruesome business, I hear. Help me out,” he said, looking at me.

“We saw pictures of the palaces, the fancy cars, too,” I said, madly trying to remember the headlines. “So you're Romanian?” I said.

Sabrina gave me a look that carried some boredom.

“America?” she asked.

“No, Canada,” I said, instantly regretting it. Goodbye, fantasy. Now we were just two Canucks selling tunes in a piazza.

“Of course, it's all part of North America,” said William, talking faster than I'd ever heard him go before. Under other circumstances, with a group of Americans, for instance, he would never, ever have said such a thing. That's why we hung the Canadian flag next to our Musiciens Magiques sign wherever we went. “We don't want to confuse ourselves with our racist, piggy brethren to the south,” William said.

Now he was ready to denounce his citizenship.

“America,” Sabrina said again, not as a question.

“Yes,” breathed William and looked over at me. His eyebrows were shrugging up and down. I turned around to smile convincingly at Sabrina and to look at the lovely zigzag of her legs again.

We left the stuff in the van when we got to the campsite. We didn't even lock it, something we never failed to do, William being convinced that every campground was filled with other street performers eager to rip off a beat-up flute, a mess of worn cable and rusty kazoos.

“Bienvenue chez nous!”
bellowed William.

“Would you care for a glass of wine, Sabrina?” I asked.

“Yes please thank you,” said Sabrina and looked for a place to sit down. There was none, so she leaned against the trailer.

“We don't have any wine.” William said.

“Well, that was brilliant,” I said. Sabrina waited to be served.

“I think there might be a couple of beers in the trailer.” William looked really sorry, but didn't make a move.

I found one Heineken, one dusty Moreti under the sink, poured the Heineken into the one glass that wasn't chipped, gave the rim a squeaky swipe with the dish towel, clean and white in another life.

“Heineken,” I said to Sabrina, handing her the glass.

“Yes,” she said, looking nearly as enthusiastic as when she'd said earlier, “You play wonderful.”

I didn't know what to do with the other beer. Both William and I knew it was there in the trailer, but neither of us made a move for it. We sat on the ground, watching Sabrina as she drained her glass. She stayed leaning against the trailer, her feet crossed at the ankles. I tried to look as if I wasn't staring at the Grand Canyon or the Pyramids.

She smiled when she was done, held out her glass.

“Another one, Sabrina?” asked William.

“Yes please thank you,” said our guest. William struggled to his feet — those pizzas were dragging him down — ducked into the trailer. I smiled at Sabrina. She smiled back, recrossed her feet.

I pointed to the moon. One edge was blurry with cloud. “Look,” I said. “By tomorrow night it will be full.”

“I love moon,” said Sabrina.

“You do? So do I,” I said.

I could love her. We could be happy. We would speak French when the English ran out, and we'd sit in our little backyard where I'd perform the classical repertoire — never playing better — and toss off some folk favourites for fun. She would lie on the grass crossing her legs as high as the eye could see.

William was back. He'd poured the beer into a coffee mug.

“Fine stemware, William,” I said.

Sabrina waved to us with one hand, held the mug with the other. Down the hatch. She could drink a beer faster than anyone I'd ever seen.

All gone. But now what? William and I looked at each other. I was waiting for him to offer to go back down the hill and get some wine. I didn't know what he was waiting for.

Sabrina reached out her hands again. The mug was empty. I got up and went to get it, but tripped over an exposed root on the way and ended up travelling through the air for a moment before slamming against the side of the van. My shoulder and head hit first; I was in too much pain to know what hit after that.

Sabrina started laughing. A mad, husky laugh.

I was doubled over, holding my head, before I realized they were both next to me.

“Let me see if it's bleeding,” said William.

I tried to hold still, felt fingers on my scalp.

“No blood,” said William. “How do you feel? Are you light-headed? Are you seeing double? How's your balance?”

That's when Sabrina reached out her hand and slipped it inside the waistband of my black musician pants. Reached down as far as she could.

I looked up at her. The world was spinning.

“Oh, boy,” said William. “Guess old Billy will take a walk.”

But Sabrina reached out her other hand and slipped it inside the waistband of William's black musician pants. Tighter, much tighter, than mine, I noted. She really had to squirm her lovely fingers in.

What do three bodies do together, especially when two are hell-bent on one? The problem was that we were stone-cold sober and she had a pretty little buzz on. I wish we'd been even a little bit high so I could have missed some of the indignities of that night. Because while it had its glories — Sabrina licking my earlobes, Sabrina's gladiator sandals chafing my thighs, Sabrina riding me like the American bronco she needed me to be — the night had its moments to forget.

I had to watch — where else was I to look as we bounced and bomb-dived and banked together in the trailer's one double bed? — as Sabrina paid William's body the same attention she paid mine. Did I ever want to see what rose and fell below the dome of that belly? Did I ever want to hear William squeal? Did I ever, ever want to see a man I could only barely tolerate slam deliriously against the perfect little buttocks of the woman I could have loved?

“America!” Sabrina cried as I sucked one breast and William the other. The score was about even. We'd all had our turns as aggressor and receiver. We'd all come a few times. I looked over at William from my breast.

“O Canada!” he sang.

She was gone the next morning. It was probably better this way, we told each other: no jealousy, no rivalry.

“After all,” said William. “The music comes first.”

We were low-key all that day. William thought I should go see a doctor about my head, but I didn't bother. A not-unfriendly silence carried us back into the piazza that night. Sabrina didn't reappear.

It was only when William opened the toy suitcase for our End of Part One Showstopper that we realized just how deeply she had touched us. The tambourine was missing.

“Oh, shit,” said William and handed me the toy drum. I whipped up a wicked little syncopation, while he twittered on the bird caller. The crowd cheered as he went out among them, instruments in hand.

“Having a Harold Brodkey kind of death,” he wrote from Venice. “Care to join me?”

My daughter was with her father in Boulder for the summer and my client load was light — some people actually do get healthier, moving right along, off my beige and white loveseat and into life. “When, where and how?” I e-mailed back. “I've got six days.”

“‘Venice is a separate country,'” he answered later that day. “‘It floats at anchor inside its own will, among its domes and campanili, independent and exotic at its heart.' That's dear, departed Harold himself, and though I've been writing like a demon about this sinking marvel since arriving here six months ago, I still can't say it any better. I'm glad you're coming.”

He didn't want me staying with him, which would work out better for me, too. “I'll book you someplace properly Venetian; it
is
tourist season, though not high-high season, so we shall see. But let me be your guide in this separate country, my one and only Leticia. And don't worry. Some days I am almost myself. French kisses, your Sebastian.”

Leticia wasn't my real name and Sebastian wasn't his. They were the names we'd given each other at nineteen simply because we loved the sound of them. But they were names of such impossible romantic promise that I'd ditched mine the year Bert and I divorced, the same year I finally — and, as Paul (or Sebastian) said, not coincidentally — became board certified as a marriage, family and child counselor. But the name held for him: Sebastian Siskel, award-winning poet often, favourably, compared to Brodkey, essayist, thorn in the side of his philosophy department colleagues at Bard College, and the oldest friend of my life.

How sick was he now? Paul wasn't going to be a reliable source on this. Five years ago when the diagnosis came back HIV positive, he thought he had a year, tops. He made dramatic amends to friends and lovers, even his witch of a mother, even to me. He threw a huge New Year's Eve party that year in his Upper Westside townhouse. I flew in from L.A. We all had to come dressed as if it were Carnival in Venice. We all had to have a really swell time.

As I packed for Italy — a bit dazed…it had been a quick decision based on ancient sentiment and the closeness of death — what came back were the cats. Cats, cats everywhere. They'd been in every photo of Venice we shot on my Instamatic that end-of-the-sixties summer, the summer of Chappaquiddick, Sharon and Roman, and the man on the moon. In a box of photos marked 1969, I turned up one of Paul feeding a mangy tabby, a bridge — of course — in the background. I studied it for a while, looking for signs of our misadventure on his face. We were only twenty. I let myself cry a little as I sat on the floor of the den.

I flew out the next day, arrived in London, just making my connecting Ryanair flight to Trieste. Trieste was Paul's idea. We'd missed this city on our first Italian jaunt, but Paul said I couldn't afford to this time. “You can't really understand Europe without seeing Trieste,” he wrote. “Jan Morris, another writer with a change of sexual heart, not to mention body, calls it ‘The Trieste Effect.' Listen to what she says: ‘I feel this opaque seaport of my vision, so full of sweet melancholy, illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations too…. It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere.' Can that old girl write, or what? And, darling, while you're there, do have the Illy espresso at Cremcaffè. And have one for me, too.”

But even in his last e-mail Paul had remained vague about how I was to get from Trieste to Venice. “You might just have to wing this part. Remember how good we were at winging it? Our whole life was winging it. Can't wait to see you. Any day now.”

We'd agreed I would call when I got to Venice,
however
I got to Venice. But I called from Trieste, having missed the last bus to Venice for the day. Now I would have to stay over, hotel still to be found.

“Glad you called.” Paul answered after many rings, sounding exhausted.

“Remind me how we did this,” I said. “My feet hurt, I've got a killer buzz from one cup of coffee and I don't think my body can survive a lumpy
pensione
bed.”

I thought he'd laugh. “Paul?”

“Right here,” he said.

“Is everything OK?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Well, actually, there's been a change of plans.”

“You don't want me to come,” I said, realizing in that moment how mad an idea this had been. And what did I have to prove to him at this point anyway? That I loved him no matter what?

He started laughing. “You might kill me.” This made him laugh harder. Was he already on something — marijuana, heroin, laughing gas — for the pain? Eventually he was able to convey the information that there was not one single hotel room in Venice for that week and probably not for the entire rest of the summer, and that the only place he'd been able to find even one affordable room — “I mean less than $400 a night” — was in Lido di Jesolo. Just saying the name made him laugh so much he began to wheeze. I was so relieved he didn't want me to go home, that he wasn't on his way back to New York where he planned to return for the end-end, that I started laughing, too.

“You won't be laughing for long,
amore mio
. Call me when you get there.”

I wasn't laughing the next afternoon after humping my suitcase up to the third and steaming floor of Hotel Paradiso, then turning around and bumping back to the first floor because the large, blond concierge, who spoke a little Italian, but mostly Russian, had given me the wrong room key. I was spraying sweat when I finally pushed the door in. Paul had to have planned this. The little coincidence with the name, the fact that the room looked identical to every
pensione
room we'd shared thirty-five years before (when we could afford a room): beds like hammocks, décor by Goodwill and a single spigot in the all-tile bathroom serving as shower and room hose-down. I stripped and stood underneath, trying to cool off.

Outside on Via Andrea Bafile, the promenade, I realized this wasn't Italy at all. “It's fucking Venice Beach,” I said to Paul via cellphone.

“Isn't it tacky?” said Paul.

“It's non-stop hotels and all these scorched Hungarians and Germans are tromping up and down dripping ice cream everywhere.” I couldn't believe how annoyed, how ripped off I felt.

“Just like old times,” he said.

“It's not like it was. This isn't Italy.”

“But it is, darling,” he said. “Don't you remember?” And he told me where to catch the boat.

He neglected to tell me, though, that the boat ran only once a day between Jesolo and Venice. “Leaves at 9:30 every morning, returns at 5:00,” the tourist agent down the boardwalk told me. For an additional seven Euros, a tour bus would pick me up near, but not at, my hotel and take me to the dock. “But the boat's already left for today and it means I won't ever be able to stay in Venice for dinner,” I said.

“We have fine
ristoranti
in Jesolo,
signora
,” said the man.

“It's crazy,” I told Paul when I called him back. “I'm here for less than a week and I'm going to see more of this circus than I am of Venice. And I still haven't seen you.”

“Not much to look at anymore,” he said. “Remember how I worried about my weight? Well, I'm real svelte now.”

“I don't care what you look like,” I said and felt my throat, against my will, tighten.

But as the boat charged the waves the next morning, as we came within sight of the city where we'd been so impossibly young, I felt equal to whatever might be required of me. The Venetian light streamed over the water. It was forgiving light, mirage light. It would wash over Paul and me and reflect our best, once-upon selves. Whatever was supposed to happen would happen. We would have no regrets. We would live — though he would soon die — in that light. I could already hear myself describing our meeting to friends back home. It must have taken courage, they would say. But what closure.

I waited at the quay as Paul had instructed, but he didn't appear. I tried him at the number I had, but got only his answering machine:
Bon giorno, bonjour
, howdy — a greeting for everyone. I waited for an hour and then drifted with the crowds toward Piazza San Marco, still turning every few minutes to check for him. I became part of the pilgrimage trudging up and over countless bridges under the Venetian sun.

And then we were spilling into the vast space of the Piazza and people were snapping photos and stopping at kiosks and running to stand in lines. We flung our hungry selves into the physical reach of the place. So high, so wide. It was no longer a photo in an album, a bruise in my memory. For so long I'd held this place like a shrine to pain. And now I was back, standing in its dazzling light, spinning in its beauty.

I tried Paul again. This time, no message, just ringing. I ordered a sandwich and iced tea from one of the overpriced cafés in the Piazza, wandered from palace to basilica to palace, bought a black lace fan for too many Euros from one of the souvenir carts. I perspired and fanned, called half a dozen more times, and then at 4:30, still looking around, still thinking he would appear, went up and down over the bridges back to the quay, back to the boat, back to Jesolo.

Paul didn't answer his phone until after 9:00 that night. By then, I'd gone swimming in the Adriatic, their proximity to the beach the only thing the Jesolo hotels were good for. The sea had turned silvery pink from the setting sun, but I couldn't stay in the water long: the mosquitoes were like vultures. I'd had ice cream and vegetarian pizza and had watched the human show on the boardwalk.

“Did I misunderstand?” I asked when he picked up. “Did I get the time wrong? Were you out there all day looking for me?”

“No,” said Paul. “No, that wasn't it.”

“Were you too ill?”

“It was a bad day,” said Paul. “All around.”

“But why didn't you just call and tell me? You've got my cell.”

“I didn't know what to say.”

“I didn't come all this way for…” I stopped myself.

“For me to play coy?” he asked.

“Do you need help?” I said. “Because I'm here. I'm trapped in this stupid resort, but I am only a boat ride away. I can
help
.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Same place.” He wanted to know about the hotel, about the
turistas
, about what I'd eaten for supper.

“I'll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “When I see you.”

“No, now,” he said.

So I told him about the sundae I'd had with three kinds of gelati — coconut and mandarin and grapefruit, all layered with whipped cream and kiwi sauce. “Kiwi sauce,” he said. “I've never had kiwi sauce.” I told him about the three Hungarian women sitting at the table next to me in the pizzeria. “Euro-fashionistas,” I said. “None of them was under seventy, bronzed like those old Man Tan ads, billboards for melanoma, and dressed to the teeth.”

“I love it,” he said. “But how'd you know they were Hungarian? You don't understand Hungarian.”

“I asked them,” I said. “We had a nice little sign-language exchange about the mosquitoes.”

“I'm glad you're making friends,” Paul said.

I waited for nearly an hour again at the quay the next morning, called and got his message — a new message only in Italian — then took off, faster than the morning before. I walked into and through the Piazza. It was Friday and the crowds were thicker, the air heavier. Now I was pissed. What kind of manipulative passive-aggressive shit was he pulling now? Was this piece of Venetian choreography meant to make me yet
more
tolerant? Was he giving me one last, tough little lesson before he went?

I wanted to walk fast, in a huff, but the crowds slowed me down. I was on Villa delle Procuratie, according to the sign on the wall, a shaded, narrow walkway packed with expensive shops, everything for the procuring. Gusts of air conditioning reached me on the melting street, pulled me inside. I went into one shop, then another — bought a string of multi-coloured Venetian glass beads for my daughter, then bought another next door, a shorter string, in case she didn't like the first one, then bought another in a shop further down for myself, different than the first two because at seventeen Marisa was in an intense period of individuating. Last year Paul had said, “It must be difficult for her. You concentrate so hard on the people you love.”

When I found myself fingering a fourth necklace — in case Marisa didn't like either of the other two, or in case she preferred the one I'd bought for myself — I put it down and went back outside. It was so hot now that it made being a tourist feel like punishment. There was no place to go home to. I was a half-day and a boat ride from even a shower. I called Paul again and this time got a message made for me.

“Leticia, if you get this, all I can say is that I am really sorry. I can only imagine what you must be thinking. Your usual patience
evaporetto
, and oh, darling, you have been immensely patient with me in spite of what I have probably done and said over the years. I forget now exactly what I've said. Everything feels like just yesterday
and
a hundred years ago. OK, here's the thing. I can't go out today and I can't have anybody in. I know you could stand the sight of me — pale, cadaverous, retching every now and then — but see, I couldn't stand the sight of you looking at the sight of me. I think Harold had the same problem, though, of course, Ellen Schwamm was with him up to the end. Go figure
that
one out. Hey, did you hear they're trying to clean up our old guy in Florence, the David? And it's stirring up the usual Italian opera. Some experts say the only way not to destroy the marble is to use soft cloths and erasers. So there's some woman restorer going at him with mud masks and mineral spirits. Poor guy. One thing they know now: cheap marble. Michelangelo's stone wouldn't be used to build a sink today. Say hey, darling. I know this is beyond the beyond. But let's hope for better tomorrow. Have some kiwi sauce for me. Say hi to the Hungarians. And do take a gondola ride…worth every outrageous Euro. It's an ‘A' ride, the one we never took. Love you, truly do.”