Frank was too young to be almost thirty-one. His body was still tight, but from what he saw of men in their bathing trunks or less, in every country Tenn took him to, all those beaches and saunas and walks in the park, it wouldn’t be long before his skin came loose from his legs and upper arms and his face dried to a prune. Who’ll want him then? He had no money in the bank. Tenn signed his meager paychecks, which barely lasted him until the end of each month. Though he’d gifted Frank a fat percentage of the profits from The Rose Tattoo in perpetuity, if Frank had learned anything in their six years together, it was that plays had shaky legs and that perpetuity wasn’t so long in the end.
If he stayed in New York for more than a few weeks at a time, he could start going to auditions again. He’d had ten walk-ons in movies in the forties, but nothing since he’d met Tenn. If he worked up the nerve, he could use Tenn or Audrey Wood or Kazan to get him through the door on Broadway or in LA. He’d set his sights on a leading man role, but he’d settle for a speaking part, or even a spot in a dance company, something—anything—to build on. He wasn’t a bad dancer. He was just getting started in ballet back in ’49. He missed how dancing made his body electric and numb at the same time, how he used to swim through the air, and how the swimming turned his head calm and clean as a fishbowl.
He looked around. Tossed his cigarette into the water. Alone in the darkness of the pier, facing the twinkling harbor, he stood on the tips of his white loafers and stretched out his arms. Held the pose. His middle wasn’t as strong as it once was, but his legs had the same power. The muscles in his chest strained his shirt buttons. He lifted his head to the sky, drank in the stars. He wished he could see himself.
When I’m gone, Frank thought, Tenn will have his pick. There was never not some starry-eyed wannabe trying to elbow him out of Tenn’s light. If he could see from here on his tiptoes into Truman’s apartment, surely he’d find one of the wannabes with his head thrown back in laughter at one of Tenn’s wicked remarks. “Oh Mr. Williams!” the boy was saying now, his thin wrists going limp. “Oh Mr. Williams, you are too much!” Half the men they met at those parties wanted to be Tenn; the other half wanted to be Frank; the difference was that none of them remembered Frank’s name the moment after hearing it. Why bother, they figured, a new one will be along soon.
“What do you do?” Jack Warner had asked him, four summers ago now, almost to the day. Tenn had brought him on the Menagerie trip to LA. They’d been lovers for close to a year.
“I sleep with Mr. Williams,” Frank had said, straight into the producer’s shocked eyes. He’d rehearsed the line, if not for Jack Warner then for the next person who asked. He’d intended to get a rise. To make an impression. He meant: I do that, yes, and I do it well, but I do much more. He meant business. When he’d rehearsed the line, the meaning seemed obvious, but it came off wrong. Nobody, Warner especially, took it for anything but a punch line. Tenn told that story a thousand times. It was one of his favorites. Just last week, in Anna’s kitchen, it came up again. Tenn leaned over and whispered something in her ear, and they both laughed and laughed. Then he slapped Frank on the back. “Isn’t that right, baby?” he said. The slap shrank him to the size of the dog. But Tenn and Anna were right to laugh. Other than sleep with Mr. Williams, what had Frank Merlo done with his life?
Tomorrow he’d come up with a plan. Tonight, maybe he’d have a drink after all. See how Tenn was making out upstairs. Take Martine for another spin, squeeze her ass when he dipped her, put a real scare in the uncle. Frank liked to play games. To perform. To be watched. He’d do more of all that, starting tomorrow. He figured he had one good decade of youth left in him. On the walk down the hill to the party that evening, Tenn had mentioned visiting the set of Visconti’s Senso back in Rome sometime in the next couple months, before they sailed to Barcelona, before they sailed to Tangier. Visconti was making two versions of the film, one in Italian and one in English, with Tenn and Paul Bowles contracted to write the American script. If they needed a speaking part from an equine Italian-American man at the last minute, then square in their sights the Horse would be, found money, a revelation.
Back inside the Delfino, the crowd had thickened. You could tell the crashing tourists from their day clothes and stiff guilty postures and darting eyes. They took up precious space in the corner and giggled at their luck. Why wasn’t there someone to give them the boot? It was past eleven; by midnight it would be anyone’s party, with the uninvited pouring in from the square, smelling the rich blood. If Frank had Truman’s fame and fortune, he’d run a tighter show. A quality show. He’d invite Maria Callas to sing for them, if only so he could finally see her in person. He’d clear a space for the dancers he’d studied with in Manhattan. The best parties didn’t skimp on the entertainment.
He took the stairs to the apartment, which should have been kept more privato, but the door was wide open and the room just as packed. The only faces he recognized belonged to Jack, passed out in a rocking chair, and Sandro, the Sentinel, standing beside him with his hands in his pockets. When he finally found Tenn, he was in the doorway of Truman’s bedroom, talking to the two palest, blondest women Frank had ever seen, one of whom was holding a white Maltese the size of a football.
“There’s the Horse!” Tenn said, and grabbed Frank by the elbow. “And just in time! These gorgeous ladies have me spellbound with the most delicious tale. A scandal if I ever heard one, and I’ve heard them all.” He pulled them into a tight circle. To Frankie he said, “One of these women is the mother and one is the daughter. I dare you to tell me which is which.”
It was obvious, but Frank politely shook his head all the same. “Impossible,” he said, and introduced himself with his broadest, toothiest smile and a wink for the daughter. Already, these fierce and delicate greyhounds, with their taut slender necks and their blue-gray marbled eyes set wide apart, had him spellbound, too. They wore identical white iridescent shift dresses and pearl chokers, the shorter one (the mother) in silver high heels that brought her up to her daughter’s exact height. They’d pulled their hair back in the same au courant style, which had the effect of tightening the mother’s skin almost enough to hide the telltale signs of age. A ringlet of the daughter’s hair had come loose and stuck out from the side of her head like an antenna.
“Bitte Blomgren,” said the mother.
“Anja Blomgren,” said the daughter.
“And this is Maja,” Bitte said, lifting the Maltese up to Frank’s lips as if he’d asked to kiss her. He scratched the back of her neck.
The presence of Maja irritated Frank. Truman had not extended his party invitation to Mr. Moon, Frank and Tenn’s black bulldog; he had his own bulldog, Bunky, currently waddling through the crowd, shining shoes with his mess of slobbers. Bunky didn’t much like the company of other canines, Truman had explained to Frank on the phone, least of all those of the same breed, and so Frank had been forced to abandon Mr. Moon to Anna’s divided attentions and the company of her vicious German shepherd. What made these ice queens so special that they were allowed to smuggle her in?
Weeks ago, Bitte was saying, the three of them had come to Portofino from their aunt’s cramped Vienna apartment, by way of a sightseeing trip in Paris and the Loire, by way of their home in Malmö, to stay with a widower of obscene and obscure wealth who’d set his sights on making Bitte his third wife. He’d set up mother and daughter in separate rooms above the kitchen on the eastern side of his villa. The widower slept until noon, due either to his advanced age or to late-night carousing or a combination of the two, but the girls were early risers. Each morning, a local fisherman, a brute with a smashed nose and hook-shaped scars on his bulging forearms, dropped off the day’s prime catch in the widower’s kitchen. From their shared terrace, Anja, sipping coffee and reading a novel while her mother wrote postcards inside, gave the beau laid fellow a little wave as he came up the walk; then, another day, Bitte, leaning over the railin
g to admire the view while Anja bathed, wished him a buon giorno. His subsequent visits to their respective rooms were quick and rough and wordless. They had yet to determine which of them had him first. In fact, they were still unsure whether he was aware they were not the same woman.
She would leave her door slightly ajar so that he’d find her sitting up in bed, pretending to be caught by surprise (that was Anja); or she’d stand in the doorway in her white silk robe, pull him in from the hallway and rarely make it as far as the bed (that was Bitte). Bitte recounted the details with matter-of-fact directness: the briny smell that lingered on her skin, his oily sunburnt chest covered in black hair coarse as wires, the filthy boots he never removed. His callused hands that sometimes bled. His animal grunts. She was bragging. Trying to impress them. This happened all the time around Tenn. Auditioning. Frank believed little of it, least of all that this insatiable sea-wolf couldn’t tell the two apart. We men are connoisseurs of bodies, he wanted to inform these Blomgren girls. No matter how many we’ve tasted, they are as distinct to us as species of flowers.
“Our new friends have gone native,” Tenn said to Frank.
Anja remained quiet and perfectly still during the story, embarrassed, maybe, by her mother’s gaucherie. Yet she kept her head up, regarding Frank and Tenn with a neutral radiance, and with a tranquility rare among the women in Tenn’s set. Starlets, agents, hangers-on, socialites, Mother Edwina, and even poor Rose Williams; Frank always sensed in them, as he did in Tenn, anxiety churning like a motor in their throats. The motor was at a constant whir, warping their voices into a tremulousness everyone but them could hear. It kept Frank on alert. Next to them, he was as steady and plush as a child’s toy. He was the man they turned to for comfort, or to confess, or simply to rest. Was this because he had no motor, or because he had no significance? Or did the absence of the motor confirm his insignificance? Whichever it was, Frank was the reliable kind, and he sensed that Anja was, too.
The widower was no longer in the picture, according to Bitte. He’d turned out his guests upon hearing of the sea-wolf’s visits. (But did he keep bringing the fish? Frank wondered.) It was the cook, the loyal cook, who’d betrayed them. The Blomgrens then befriended Truman, who found them an apartment in town until they could determine their next move. Money was a concern, but not an immediate one. For Bitte, the most pressing question was, Who will we be? The longer they stayed away from Sweden, the louder this question echoed in her dreams, and the more possibilities opened up before them. No one waited for them in Malmö, and she had no desire to see it again, especially during the dark months. Anja was a model who aspired to act; Bitte an artist who aspired to marry. For herself, Bitte wanted love and money in equal measure, by which she meant she wanted to swim in them, to drip with them. For her daughter, she wanted fame in proportion to her astonishing talent. But how? Where? Much of what they wanted they might find in Italy and certainly in the States, and possibly Spain or the south of France, but never in Sweden, not at the intensity they craved.
“Our country is dull, dull, dull,” said Bitte. “To live we require brightness. We are mad for it.”
Bitte spoke for Anja the way Tenn spoke for his lobotomized sister, Rose, as if Anja were too precious or too limited to choose her own words. Frank wondered if brightness was indeed what Anja required, and if anyone had asked her, and what exactly it meant. In the hour or so that Frank stood in the corner listening to her mother, fending off the parasites trying to break into their tight circle, the only words Anja had spoken had been her name.
That is, until Bunky, Truman’s prince of a bulldog, toddled into their field of vision, her head bowed to lick up crumbs, and Maja leapt suddenly from Bitte’s arms to greet her. The white puffball falling like a bomb startled Bunky, and his first instinct was to bite. Maja, fierce Blomgren girl that she was, bit back, but she was no match. In the span of a moment, Bunky went stiff, bared his teeth, lunged, and took another chunk out of Maja’s side. In a single motion, Bitte scooped her into her arms, turned her back to Bunky, and rushed across the room and down the stairs, her little dog whimpering and yelping and smearing her dress with blood.
Sandro rushed over and dropped to his knees. “Sono un veterinario!” he said, and “I will help!” as he cradled the still-raging Bunky at his side. He turned his head away from the direction in which Bitte and Maja had escaped.
“Why help this dog when our Maja is the one who is hurt?” Anja said to Sandro, which is when Truman appeared, hysterical, pushed Sandro out of the way, and sank to the floor. He lifted Bunky above him to inspect him, twisting him this way and that. Truman was so slight, so much a tiny creature himself in his round glasses and floppy hair and flailing skinny wings. Not yet thirty, he seemed far younger than Frank, a gawky child with practiced refinement and an alien brain. “Where’d she get you?” he cooed to Bunky in that impossible voice. His eyes and ears were all for him, as Frank’s and Tenn’s would have been had Mr. Moon initiated such a brawl, which of course he never would.
“She should be fine, Signor Capote,” said Sandro, standing over him. “There is no break of the skin. Thank you for this nice party.”
“Who the fuck are you?” said Truman.
Sandro opened his mouth to answer, but, before he could, Anja grabbed him by the arm and pulled him across the room.
Through all this, Jack remained out cold in the armchair.
An assortment of twittering parasites crouched down beside Truman and Bunky, rubbing Truman’s back, scratching Bunky behind the ears. “We saw it all,” they said. “We got here as soon as we could. Poor little Bunky! Poor Truman!”
Frank and Tenn rolled their eyes at each other, smiling. This was how it always was: after a night apart, lost in a parade of strangers and giddy acquaintances, they reunited in the final hours, faded into a corner, the faces and lights and music and clinking glasses becoming a silent blur around them. A brief intermezzo, scripted for them alone. Soon someone would interrupt, lure Tenn away, ask Frank to dance; or they’d stumble home together too drunk and tired to do much but collapse on the bed still in their clothes; or they’d argue over some perceived slight, and one of them, more often Tenn these days, would storm off; but until then, for the brief time after they found each other at the ends of these parties, they held one another’s attention entirely, hungry for stories and kisses and gossip, as enraptured as they’d been on the porch of the Atlantic House in Provincetown the night they met, their mutual rediscovery a reminder of who really belonged to whom, and of the falsity of both the gods of glitter and the demons of anxiety fighting that very moment to come between them. Two lovers locking eyes across a room: this was theater, yes, but it was something else, too. Brightness, maybe.
On that particular night, it was Jack Burns who came between them. “You see that guy I came with? Sandro?” he asked Frank. Sleep had sobered him up some, but he still wobbled. He had a bright pink crease across the side of his face from the piping in the armchair.
“There was some excitement,” Tenn said to Jack. “Of which the party was in sore need.”
“He’s helping out a lady’s dog,” said Frank.
“That sounds like him,” he said bitterly.
They led Jack through the crowd and down the narrow stairs, eager to rid themselves of him but also wanting to make sure he didn’t cause trouble, and that he found his . . . lover? Patron? They owed Truman that much. But Sandro and the Blomgrens were nowhere to be found. The bartender hadn’t seen them. Martine and her “uncle,” his hand on the small of her back, her neck arched as he touched his lips to it, stood dreamily at the edge of the dance floor. The trombonist, on a smoke break, shook his head. The kitchen was dark. Only the crashers, on the lookout always, had answers: first the old blonde lady came down crying with the little dog and then the younger one that looked like her in the same dress and the man in the blue suit with the curly hair met her and calmed her down, and the
n the three of them ran out in the piazza and see, there they are, on the beach.
They looked up, and out of the windows of the Delfino they saw Sandro holding Maja above the water. Anja and Bitte stood watching on the sand, two shadows, one with arms outstretched, one with arms folded, as Sandro dunked Maja in the salty water and held her in it up to her neck. He then wrapped her in a large white towel—a tablecloth from the restaurant, Frank guessed—and handed her to Bitte. Maja continued to wail, a carnival baby in a Baptism gown, as Sandro dried her and applied pressure to her wounds in the floodlight of a moored yacht. He’d rolled up his pants to his ankles, but his shirt was soaked to the skin. He looked like a fisherman himself, trudging out of the sea with a curious catch.
You couldn’t call what Maja was doing barking or even crying; what came from the creature’s mouth was more like the mournful and knowing fade of a siren. Only when Bitte handed her back to Sandro did she go calm again. He cradled the dog to his chest, gently cupped her left cheek with his right hand, and rested his chin on the top of her head. It’s possible she fell instantly asleep to the beating of his heart. When Sandro saw Jack approach with Frank and Tenn, he said, “Are you OK?” to which Jack shrugged and looked away.
“The little monster will live,” Sandro whispered, with a smile for the Swedes. “But bring her to me in the morning. I have things in my bag to help her. Things not for dogs, but won’t hurt dogs. Will stop the infection.”
“Sandro and his potions,” said Jack. “Just your luck you meet a warlock.”
The women ignored him. Sandro said that when they came to visit in the morning, he could introduce Maja—gently—to Jack’s dog, Lucky, who was currently under the care of their cook in their small hotel up the hill, on the Via del Fondaco. They were staying tonight only. By noon tomorrow, they planned to be on the road to Marina di Cecina, where they’d rented a bungalow for a much-needed holiday. They came to Portofino on a whim, not deciding for sure on the detour until minutes before they turned north at Livorno.
Leading Men Page 2
