“I guess he thought,” she said, “that I was making you go to Europe.”
“I already told him why I’m going. I told him I’ll find another agent if he can’t deal with it.”
“Yeah, but, here’s the thing. Tanner, here’s the thing. Maybe we shouldn’t go.”
He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “You don’t want to go?”
“No, I do, but—that’s just vanity. I couldn’t see it yesterday, but now I do. I want what’s best for you, not me. And Gig says it’s better not to go.”
“Of course he says that. He’s all about the money—if I’m in Europe, he’s not taking his cut.”
“But what if he’s right? What if it’s a career mistake?”
“He knows zilch about the scene there. He said it himself—‘I know zilch.’”
“He knows about the business here, though. If you want a record contract and you want to really break out, don’t you think you should listen to him?”
Tanner stared at her. “What did he say to you?”
“Just what I told you.”
“I thought Europe was a thing we were doing together. That it wasn’t just about the music—I thought we wanted to have an experience together.”
“That’s what I want, too. But … maybe it doesn’t have to be this summer.”
“Becky. Do you not want to be with me?”
There were tears in his eyes. They made her want to be with him.
“Of course I do. I’m in love with you.”
“Then fuck it. Let’s go to Europe.”
“But, sweetie—”
“Who cares if it’s a ‘career mistake’？ The only things I care about are being with you and celebrating life with music. As long as I’m with you—Becky. As long as I’m with you, there’s no such thing as a mistake.”
Across the street, in a yard dotted with eruptions of shaggy green grass, a man started up a lawn mower. It coughed and backfired in a cloud of blue smoke. The day was getting warmer by the minute, and the parsonage was just around the corner. Seeing the tears in Tanner’s eyes, and hearing him express, spontaneously, the exact same thought she’d had in the sanctuary—that only love and worship mattered—she felt as if her body might float into the sky. She took his hand and pressed it flat on her hip.
“Let’s go to my house.”
He knew right away what she was saying. “Now?”
“Yes, now. I’m so ready.”
“I’ve got practice at one thirty.”
“You’re the front man,” she said. “You can tell them it’s canceled.”
* * *
In Rome, in early September, in the apartment where they were crashing, they met a German couple in their twenties who were heading to a farmhouse in Tuscany that the woman’s father owned, and Becky had jumped on their invitation to come along with them, although technically it was Tanner, not she, whom the Germans had invited, after hearing him play. Her own fishings for an invitation, her feigning of a lifelong desire to see the Tuscan countryside, her unfeigned rapture at the description of the farmhouse, had gone unnoticed, and this was ironic, because Tanner cared more about people than places and had no gripe with Rome. Becky was the one who couldn’t wait to get away. The heat in Rome was suffocating, and the crash pad, though huge and well situated, within sight of the Campo de’ Fiori, was essentially unfurnished—room after room with sun-damaged parquet floors and nary a table, nary a chair. She and Tanner were camped out in the corner of what might once have been a ballroom, beneath a window open to a smell of rotting vegetables. In the far corner was an unfriendly young couple, purportedly from behind the Iron Curtain, who traipsed around naked and coupled, unquietly, on the room’s only piece of furniture, a gilded sofa twelve feet long. Half a dozen other long-haired travelers were accepting hospitality from a man named Edoardo, a spritelike Italian who wore tight white pants and thin-soled loafers, without socks, and lived in two properly furnished rooms behind the kitchen. Becky and Tanner had met Edoardo on a side street where Tanner was busking and Becky was sitting on the pavement, writing in her travel diary. When Edoardo had dropped a five-thousand-lire note in Tanner’s guitar case and invited them to crash with him, they hadn’t needed to be asked twice. The night before, under a pillow in their tiny hotel room, near the train station, they’d discovered a balled-up, crusty tissue that hadn’t been there in the morning.