Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  When Sandro handed Maja back to Bitte, she clawed for him and wailed again until he took her back in his arms. Her little chest heaved under the white tablecloth, her eyes wild and afraid. Bitte cocked her head at the dog and sneered.

  “We give her a few minutes more,” he said to Bitte. “She is still very scared.”

  Bitte walked off, producing a cigarette from some mysterious pocket inside her dress. Jack provided the lighter. It was a dry windless night, the waves not so much crashing as crinkling at their feet, then shyly retreating, as if embarrassed to have appeared at all.

  “Smart girl, that dog,” Anja said to Frank. “She sees an escape and she makes it.”

  “Who can resist a strong set of arms?” said Tenn. He came up behind Frank and squeezed his biceps. “She’s not the only smart beast in this menagerie.”

  “She’s afraid of your mother,” Frank said.

  “I was hoping to leave them both here with old Signor Ricciardi,” said Anja, watching Bitte remove her shoes with one hand and maintain her cigarette in the other. “The fisherman she told you about? Vittorio? He was not the disease, he was the symptom, if you understand me. And he was mine first.”

  She had begged Vittorio not to make so much noise, Anja told them, her mother now far out of earshot. She had been fully aware what could happen if they were discovered. If the fisherman couldn’t be silent and quick, he shouldn’t come to her at all. He liked to say Anja’s name, over and over, but she forbade it. The first few mornings, he followed her instructions, but they went out of their heads a few times, and they were lucky nobody heard. For her he removed his boots, though it was unwise and took up precious minutes. They had the timing down to the second Bitte stepped into her long bath. But then one morning Bitte woke early, which was unlike her, and threw off their timing. She saw him from her terrace and waved. He understood her wave, and that she was like Anja but not Anja. Vittorio was not picky. The idea appealed to him. He must have had a good laugh about it with his friends. But not with Anja, not in her presence. She never let Vittorio in her room again. Her mother misled them on that score. It was not a share, but a theft. The disease, not the symptom. Anja had learned a long time ago how Bitte fashioned her life stories to make herself bigger than she was, and that it was not only pointless to contradict or even clarify them, it was a betrayal.

  “And you loved this man, Vittorio?” Frank asked.

  Anja laughed at the question. “How old are you, Signor?”

  “Our Frankie is a romantic thirty and a half,” Tenn said, now squeezing his shoulders. “A young man with the heart of a schoolboy.”

  It was how most people, not just Tenn, knew Frank then: dreamy, fun-loving, the cutup easily seduced by the promise of a good party—all of which he was—and carefree, which he was not. Sincere and instinctively honest, he expected the same of others. He rarely questioned their intentions. As a result, Frank had been taken advantage of; he’d had his schoolboy heart broken again and again by girls who sniffed out the weakness in him. He’d always gone for the hard, inscrutable ones like Anja. He’d ask one on a date and then, when she didn’t show up, he’d spend countless hours waiting around for her, his resentment quickly turning to worry she’d come to some harm, then to the certainty he’d gotten the time or place wrong, and then ultimately to disappointment. If Frank had the talent to paint a self-portrait, he’d paint his face looking out a window at that moment hopefulness gave way to concern.

  Though he hated when people failed him, he forgave easily, except when he had to forgive himself for failing someone else. So he made it a point not to fail anyone. To always agree. To say yes to every adventure, especially of the romantic sort. Of all the people in Frank’s life, Tenn was the only one who knew how tightly he clenched his fists over his hours in the window, through his adventures of love. Only Tenn knew how Frank braced himself at all times for disaster, and to fight off whoever stood in his way. Tenn once said that, yes, Frank was a little horse, the name fit the shape of his body, but that he wondered sometimes if the horse was made of porcelain. Frank preferred to think of himself not as a horse at all, but as a fine but common instrument, a mandola or a chittara battente, carved from dense solid wood, banged up from night after night of being lugged around to parties. No one expected much from this dented common thing. When played, though, how sweet it sounded. What pleasure it gave. What comfort.

  Love and affection is what I got to offer on hot or cold days in this lonely old world, says Alvaro Mangiacavallo, the hero of The Rose Tattoo, the leading man Tenn based on him. Had Frank once said as much about himself, about their affiliation, or did Tenn simply understand Frank’s purpose on earth better than he did?

  Tenn’s hands on Frank’s shoulders, there on the sand in Portofino, soothed him. The muscles in his neck and upper back were like rubber bands stretched at all times to the point of snapping. Sometimes—at parties, on a stroll, even at the breakfast table across from Tenn or Anna—Frank caught himself with his shoulders tensely hunched and realized, again, that he’d been going through the world like that for hours, for days, for years. Relaxing the muscles was like telling himself very good news; his lungs filled with nourishing air; his eyes closed in sweet relief; but then moments later the bands pulled tight again. He did not consider himself an anxious person; he was simply on alert. Something terrible could happen at any moment, and for that inevitability he needed to be ready.

  “You see, Frank,” said Tenn, “the Scandinavians age at a faster rate than the men and women of the sunburnt countries. The difference is in dog years. When were you last a romantic, Miss Blomgren? Age . . . ten?”

  “Fourteen,” she said quickly.

  “What happened at fourteen?” Frank asked.

  She blinked. “Here she is,” she said, as Bitte rejoined them.

  It was long past midnight, and crowds were still pouring steadily down into the square from the hilly streets. In this way, Portofino was like the dozens of other port towns Tenn had taken Frank to on their summerlong stays in Italy. People stood around with their ice cream cones telling jokes and flirting and swaying to the music. Every once in a while, a startling burst of fireworks filled the sky over the fleet of boats. A car appeared out of nowhere and honked its way through the square, the driver shouting and pumping his arm angrily out the window. Then, slowly, as the ashes fluttered away and the eggy firework smell wore off and the yachts cut their radios, couple by couple staggered back up the steep narrow inclines, men in each other’s arms, men with women, packs of friends, their songs and shouts and laughter bouncing off the stone in hollow echoes. The colored lights strung from the lampposts blurred in the mist. The lights stayed on until dawn, when the guys setting up the fruit stands and fish stalls and flower markets unplugged them, and the mist burned off, and the boats whirred to life. That’s how it was the night the six of them and the patched-up dog crossed the square to a nameless bar for a nightcap that none of them needed, and stayed so long talking, dreaming, planning—one nightcap turning into three, to four—that the owner, whom Tenn paid a handful of lire not to kick them out, fell asleep slumped in a chair waiting for them to release each other. They emerged, squinting, into the second day of August, 1953.

  Ten years ago.

  Jack was gone now, of course, and Sandro lived blameless and cozy and unreachable in some Tuscan hill town. Anja’s most recent letter came posted from Madrid, where she’d been filming. She couldn’t get to New York until the fall, she wrote, but surely Frank would be out of the hospital long before then; the cobalt treatments would do the trick this time. She’d enclosed a Polaroid from a recent shoot in Marrakech, her head wrapped in one of those Moslem scarves, looking bored and triumphant astride a camel. She insisted on seeing him—“and Tenn?”—in Spain for the holidays. She loved Madrid so much that she’d purchased a floor-through apartment in a ramshackle building in La Latina, though she rarely spent more than a
few nights in a row there. Sometimes Frank imagined this apartment, which he’d seen only in Anja’s exuberant descriptions, as his next home: the sloping stucco butter-yellow walls, the tall windows dripping with flowers, the wrought-iron balcony that overlooked the tight oppressed streets of the Plaza de San Andrés. He’d roam these streets in the evenings on his way to late-night resistance meetings. He’d provide aid to the artists. He’d run money, arms, whatever the Movement found necessary. In this next life, he is put to good use.

  He set the photo on the little table next to the vases of flowers. With the last of the day’s strength, he turned a page of the letter over and scribbled Come now please I need you, one word per line, like a madman’s ransom note. He tucked the page back in the envelope, sealed it with a little spit and what was left of the glue, wrote RETURN TO SENDER on the front, and handed it to the nurse. For the rest of the day, a thousand hollow hours, he slept. He had no trouble nodding off, though he woke often and couldn’t dream. The men in his ward, their sudden shouts and strangled gurgles, kept him in that shallow pool of sleep. He didn’t mind the men. Their bodies and voices and breath kept him company, as they had in his Navy days. You couldn’t convince him he wasn’t back with his squadron, that they weren’t sailing out first thing. Quit clowning, Merlo, one of them said. Nicky? Sea Hawk? Get some shut-eye. We need your legs.

  When the night nurse woke him, she told him that he’d had a few visitors: Al and Dan, his sister Connie, the priest. There was always a priest. To the priest Frank was carrion. He’d be back. The others, too. Vivien Leigh, who’d thrown a party in his honor weeks before. Irene Selznick had dropped off an expensive tin of sweets. Someone else had called on the phone, the nurse said, but didn’t leave a name or a message.

  “Man or woman?” Frank asked her.

  “Woman.”

  “Woman,” Frank repeated. What was it this time, he wondered. A crisis of staging? Some diva actress pitching a fit? Was his precious Angel reading from a book of poems? No, Tenn had sent Angel back to Key West. This time it was the premiere of Milk Train, down in Virginia. Frank pulled the sheets up to his chin and turned on his side, wincing at the pressure of his ribs on the mattress. The nurse’s shadow disappeared from the wall. He pushed the button to get her back. He needed a blanket. He needed two blankets, and the oxygen. Every shiver turned the vise tighter on his chest’s tender bones. He could feel the necrosis in his lips, blue as ice, his skin cracking. He pushed the button again. This place couldn’t hold him. He would get to Spain. Anja would come and smuggle him out.

  Tenn used to tease Frank about his daydreams, his giddy contemplations, how he always jumped ahead to the happy ending, a different way of ending happy each time. Even that night in Portofino, in the nameless bar, drunk to high heaven, Tenn had proclaimed to their new friends, with pride, There are roses tattooed in my Frankie’s eyes. And he was right. Never, not for one moment, did Frank fear what Tenn feared—what most men feared—which was that he’d die alone. It was funny how it had all turned out, wasn’t it, Tenn? Wasn’t it almost funny?

  2.

  THE MUSE IN WINTER

  For thirty years, Anja has lived in his city. Now that he is gone, it turns to her an unfamiliar face. From the safety of the train, behind the thick-paned window, she recoils from its lopsided mouth, its filthy eyes. When she steps off the platform, it looks away in recrimination. Hatching a plan. Lying in wait. She would apologize or confess if she had cause, but she has no cause. What is the old saying? The heart takes no commands. She loved him, but she has never loved where he brought her.

  She climbs the hill toward the house they shared. She is coming from a meeting at the university, which has taken the last of his papers. In her bag is a letter on heavy paper signed by the chairman of the board of trustees, explaining the terms of the transaction. It has taken three weeks to pack up his effects, and now his books are all that remain of him in their house. To Goodwill went his clothes, to his daughter in Leiden the few letters and photographs he’d saved at Anja’s insistence. Pieter Meisner was a man entirely devoid of sentiment, and she was, if not his wife, the partner of his mind. Vacated by his body, she and their rooms have suffered little substantive change. The house had no claim on his body, and so it does not register the absence of his breath or his excretions or the touch of his tremulous fingers. They miss his ferocious brain, that generator humming all the days and nights, emitting its invisible vibrating vectors. She would vibrate, too, and return her own waves, the two of them hurling energy back and forth at each other even as they slept. Mornings they woke already buzzing.

  How still she feels now.

  But the city. The city grieves all of him, and has shifted from its halfhearted attempt to woo her to its campaign for revenge. The brick buildings narrow wrathfully as she walks between them on her way up the hill. If she does not quicken her pace, reach the square at the end of the block, the walls will squeeze her last breath out of her. Already she has slipped once and fallen on the cobblestones, spilling her bag of oranges, where they sizzled and foamed in the burning snow until, stumbling to her feet, she stuffed them back in the bag. She hurries on, her gaze fixed on the broad square, asking humbly, silently, for the protection of the dogs and the Jamaican nannies and their shrieking charges, but they cannot register her plea. She is just another rich old white lady carrying her groceries in a neighborhood of rich old white ladies busy with their projects.

  The little peace in her life Anja has found in only two places: a crowd, or with him. Everything else—all that in-between—has bedeviled her since Italy brought her into being. Now she dreads the party of two, being seated across from any person who is not him, a woman especially, her hand clasped clammily in hers, her face beseeching, besieging, digging her hollow. There is equal terror in the party of three, in negotiating the conversation, steering it one way or the other, trying to ensure that no one stays too long in the cold. If she must choose, give her a movie set or a stage. Give her an audience of eager nameless strangers drinking her in. Or, best of all, these days, give her her empty rooms—two blocks past the square, one block north, almost there almost there—where she will be, if not admired, then, at the very least, safe.

  She sees the young man on her front steps the moment she turns the corner, before he sees her. He rises at her approach. “You are Anja Bloom?” he asks.

  Without meeting his eyes, she sets down the grocery bag and reaches into her purse for a pen. “You have something for me to sign?”

  For this reason alone, she should have kept her name out of the newspapers after Pieter’s death. Apparently, it has not been enough to answer by hand the letters her manager forwards her each quarter, to autograph head shots and film stills, to, once, in a rare flare-up of sentimentality, walk to the hospital on the other side of the hill to grant the dying wish of a man in his fifties wasting away in his bed. Now, because she was too weak to believe Pieter would ever die, and prepared not at all for the aftermath of his going, she will be compelled to entertain in her front yard actors and film students and all other manner of the curious and needy, until she decides on her next and final city.

  But this young man produces no yellowing playbill, no decades-old glossy photo bought from one of those vintage shops at the bottom of the hill. “I am not a regular celebrity fan,” he says, with an attitude and affect she recognizes but cannot quite place. The most she can identify is that unmistakable mark of the Italian man: bold imperiousness shot through with shame. “Le mie condoglianze per la perdita di suo marito,” he says, with careful formality. Not a Sicilian, for sure. A Florentine, maybe. Educated. Or a skilled impostor.

  “Common-law,” she says, studying his face.

  “My father was Sandro Nencini,” he says in English. “That is my name also.”

  The lone tree in her yard shakes its fists at her. She picks up her bag and shoves it into the arms of the young man. “We can talk upstairs,�
� she says, and, as soon as they are inside, she slams the front door and turns the lock. Breathes deeply. Here, finally, in the stairwell, her back against the solid wall, she can gulp the sweet life-giving air.

  His boots drip brown salt on the living room rug. “Please,” she says, motioning to remove them. The west-facing windows drown him in light. His large and ungainly feet, sheathed in multiple pairs of multicolored woolen socks, are incongruous with his slender body. He unwraps his scarf to reveal a pleasing mutation of his father’s face, one made kinder by a softened Roman nose and blunted cheekbones. His mother must have been a girl from the country, plump and sweet and adoring. Likely against her wishes, he has decorated himself with a beard and mustache and the feminizing long hair favored by the youth of film departments since her day.

  He is very sorry to bother her, he says, helping himself to Pieter’s leather chair. The last thing he wants to do is to trouble her in her grief, especially given its recent onset, but he has come because he hopes he might be of some comfort, or at least an agreeable distraction, or maybe even a happy walk down what he calls—with no apparent discomfort with the cliché—“Memory Lane.” He couldn’t resist the chance to see her in person, he says, once he read the name Anja Bloom in Professor Meisner’s obituary in his university’s newspaper. Who would expect to find such a name in such a place, dropped into the history of the great astronomer’s life as casually and matter-of-factly as one of his distant stars? But of course, he says, in a phrase he must have scripted, she was one of Meisner’s stars, too. Did people tell her that all the time?