The folk festival in Rome took place in the last days of August, and the organizers, while rejecting Tanner’s application, had allowed that performance slots sometimes opened up at the last minute. On the strength of that hope, and because Aunt Shirley had especially loved Rome, and because their Eurail passes were about to expire, they’d come down from Heidelberg four days early. In Heidelberg, where Tanner had played as an official invitee, albeit at eleven in the morning and to a disappointing crowd, they’d eaten free food, slept on cleanly sheeted German beds, and avoided cashing any of their remaining traveler’s checks.
In Rome, they subsisted on tavola calda and agonized about buying a gelato. There were a thousand sights to see, but the only safe place Becky could be while Tanner busked was either right beside him or in the baking, furnitureless apartment; she couldn’t walk alone without being hassled by Italian men. Although Edoardo had urged them to stay for as long as they liked, they were camping on a parquet floor with only sleeping bags for padding. The image of a Tuscan farmhouse, shared with a pair of privacy-respecting Germans, was like a dream of respite. The Roman heat had frayed her nerves, no performance slot had opened up for Tanner, and they had a week to kill before they hitchhiked to Paris for an outdoor concert, headlined by the Who and Country Joe McDonald, that people had been talking about all summer. There was also the matter of Becky’s period being overdue. She was only a few days late, but she worried that the exhaustion of her tube of jelly, which she’d understood to be redundant and hadn’t replaced yet, had been a bigger deal than she’d supposed.
The overnight flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, the cool rainstorms in Denmark, the warmth of Tanner’s reception in Aarhus, were now memories so distant that they might have been a different person’s. According to the little check marks in her travel diary, she and Tanner had made love three times in Aarhus and forty-six times since. Every day, whether she was seeing the sunflowers of van Gogh or just hanging out with American musicians, whether picnicking on the green flank of an Alp or being confounded by a shower that sprayed all over the bathroom floor, without a curtain or a sill, she’d felt delighted afresh to be in Europe, but every night she’d returned to a bitterness from which being loved and possessed by Tanner was her only escape.
Tanner’s kindness, to her and to everyone they met, was basically a miracle. Even when she was bleeding and bitchy, he didn’t get cross with her. When they sprinted to catch a train, only to watch it pull out of the station, he just shrugged and said it wasn’t meant to be. When she had the stomach flu in Utrecht and begged him to go alone to the mainstage event, he not only refused to leave her, he said that even the sound of her throwing up was dear to him. When she caught herself wishing he were more assertive, she had only to think of his openhearted curiosity, his readiness to be amazed, his honest praise of singers farther along in their careers, his head-shaking bemusement when someone insisted on being a jerk, and his beautiful way of slipping into a jam session—how he followed along unobtrusively, observing the other players, and then, when the moment was right, cut loose and really jammed, displaying his superior musicianship, and was always happy to explain, if someone asked, how he’d played some difficult lick. The back pages of her travel diary were filled with addresses of Europeans who hoped to see him again and had offered him and Becky lodging. The Continental music scene, with its ethic of sharing, could sustain them long after their traveler’s checks ran out. Though Rome and its heat, all the assholes on their scooters, weren’t to her taste, and though Tanner would eventually need to restart his career in the States, she was in no hurry at all to go home.
With the exception of Judson, who was too young to be relevant, her family had abandoned her. She hadn’t heard from Clem since their fight in February, Perry had spent four months in residential psychiatric treatment, at ghastly expense, and her parents had done their best to ruin her life. Not only had her father dispossessed her, with scarcely an apology, but her mother, instead of siding with her or sympathizing, had deferred to him without a murmur of resistance. Never in her life had her parents been so united against her or so cloyingly into each other. They’d returned from Albuquerque, after Easter, like a pair of newlyweds—little pats on the fanny, wet smooches, treacly endearments, her father mooning at her mother, her mother breathy and submissive. Equally obnoxious was their new religiosity. Her father now began every meal with a lengthy prayer, applauded by her mother with tremulous amens. Although Becky had her own faith, she knew better than to inflict it on people waiting to eat. Although she herself had been guilty of public smooching, she had the very good excuse of not being a parent with grown children.