Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  “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.

  “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.

  Toy Symphony

  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.