Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  Once, yes.

  “No,” she says.

  “Do you mind talking about him? About your life before him?”

  “What I mind are your television questions,” she says, coldly, though she likes him, and liked him immediately, even after he spoke his name. Italians have always won her over without effort. (If this were an Italian city, she would have been in its throes from the first.) It is obvious that he is using his father’s connection to her to seek wisdom and instruction, so she might as well get on with the lesson. “On television they say ‘Memory Lane,’” she explains. “Or in People magazine. The serious filmmaker does not let such a sentimental concept enter his head. He despises sentimentality. Nostalgia is his mortal enemy. What he seeks is disharmony, friction, the conflict of heart and mind. Not connection. The viewers make the connections if they wish.”

  In other words: Square One. And yet the boy seems to pay no attention to her lesson. His films will be schlock.

  “I am in graduate school for neuroscience, Signora,” he says, interrupting her, as if in apology. “On the medical side. I have seen many of your movies—most of them, I think, the ones that came to the theater. The library has a large collection, too, some even on the reel-to-reel—but I am not in the business of movies. I have much respect for them, of course, for work like yours. Artistic work. Film. And your husband’s contributions to his field.”

  “Your father was a doctor,” she says, not because it will be news to him but because she has just remembered.

  “Yes, he was. A veterinarian. But he helped people, too, with ailments not as serious. Fevers, asthma. He wrote prescriptions and set bones. He could even fix teeth. The last few years of his life, he also sold antiques out of a little shop. My mother used to joke, ‘I don’t worry when the fresh young girls come in. Your father likes only what is old and broken.’”

  She looks at the boy more closely: the smooth skin in the corners of his eyes, the faint rouge of acne on his cheeks. “He must have had you when he was very old.”

  “Is sixty-two very old?” he asks, and there is Sandro’s smile coming for her all the way from Portofino in 1953, the smile of the doctor, the weak-willed lover, the murderer. Sixty years, and still she recognizes it. How much of his father’s history does he know? “When he died I was seventeen,” the boy says. “He went to sleep after lunch and never woke up. The phone rang, an emergency at the clinic, and my sister tried to wake him. My mother and I were on the terrace smoking when we heard her scream. He didn’t like us to smoke. Every day we waited for him to sleep, and then we’d sit outside with a pack of Embassies and gossip about the neighborhood and the girls in my school and what my life was going to be.”

  Though she knows from his breath, she asks anyway, “Do you still smoke?” When he nods, she produces a pack of Camels from her purse. “I will join you.”

  “Inside?”

  “Why not?”

  She flicks the lighter and draws in the first earthy breath, more delicious than the purity of the stairway air, craving the poison of it. She has given up on her body. She wants to punish it for keeping on so stubbornly, as if out of spite.

  “I’d like to stop,” Sandro says, not stopping.

  Until his father died, he tells her, he had no interest in medicine. He was a young man already drifting. His job after school was to make deliveries for a family friend who owned a flower shop. When school ended, he planned to work full time making deliveries. If he had any ambition at all, it was to open a second flower shop in the next town, or to wait until the death of the family friend, who was childless, and take over his shop under his own name. But the day his father died, he said, it was like a switch turned on. As for the antiques, they’d never appealed to him; it was the potential for life, what you could do with it, the more-ness of it, that suddenly became the puzzle he must solve. The shell of life, what had been done and could not be undone—he was talking about history, about chipped figurines and grandfather clocks and handmade lace—held significance, but, for him, no romance.

  “Let me guess, then,” says Anja. She does not have to hear any more. “You discovered your calling was to save people. To help them. To give them that potential for life you speak of. So that they would not die before their time, like your father.” She has heard this story, or versions of it, a hundred times, an individual history presented to her as if it were singular, an original invention. She longs for a new story, for someone to convince her that his life has not already been led by a thousand men just like him in the years that have just passed. She longs for someone to surprise her. It is one of the many reasons she stopped making films; not only does she know the ending from the first page of the script, she knows the middle and the music and the minor characters as well. There is always a mother, and always a bed on which a loved one has died. There is always a decision resisted and then embraced. There is always a striking out on one’s own.

  “That would be the television reason, no?” he says, and there again is Sandro’s smile, except this time accompanied by the pulling back of his hair over his ears. A kind face, framed by soft waves, will get you only so far, she could tell him. As will charm. As will youth, and the privileges of your sex. And those eyes. If she were cruel, she would say: you will not be as lucky as he was, to die in peace in your bed after decades of sins, your country wife and dutiful children tiptoeing around the house in deference to your sleep. The Fates are less forgiving now. The century has beaten them down.

  “To help people wasn’t my reason,” he continues. “I don’t know if I had a reason. I know only that the switch turned on and filled with me light. But my education is taking a long time. Just after I started, a year into the university program in Perugia, my mother became sick. Lung cancer. Another reason to quit these. She went fast, but not so fast to save her the terrible suffering. It is her money that brought me to America. Here I have a better chance. The Italian university system—” He waves his hand as if swatting a fly. “It is full of superstition still. Hard science comes second to them. I want to be at the edge of the research—the cutting edge, as the expression goes. If you can’t be at the cutting edge, why bother to be anything at all? Open a flower shop. Make movies for Hollywood, and not the black-and-white kind they study in film school.” He sits tall against the back of the chair. “Can I ask you to guess what I have made my specialization?”

  “Why? Will it surprise me?”

  He shrugs. “I am interested, what you think I would choose to study. I feel that you know me, and that I know you. Is that strange? All I have are some pictures of you, and a few letters of my father’s that mention you by name, and this hour, so far, of conversation.” He picks up his knapsack, as if he is about to pull the memorabilia from it. Instead, he rests it on his lap. “And your movies, of course. Films, I apologize. I have seen more of your films than I pretended to see. My favorite is Echo.”

  “Your feelings of connection to me—if we can agree on that word—do follow,” Anja says. “You have watched me on screen. You have seen my body without clothes, a version of my body at least, with the light in all the right places. You have watched me live many lives and die each time. Did you notice I died in every film I made with Martin Hovland? It was a joke, almost, between us. To Hovland, there was no peaceful death. Your grandmother who passed with grace into the next life holding your hand, inside she was screaming. To make it otherwise on film was to perpetuate a dishonest myth. And so I screamed and clawed and won awards for the effort. I can show you stacks of letters from men and women who have written to me claiming to know me better than I know myself, just from how I have screamed and clawed. My Greek chorus with their unsolicited misinformed advice, trying to convince me that they alone saw what Hovland’s camera did not capture. That is your connection to me, Sandro; it is logical, but it is still an illusion. My connection to you, though—you say, ‘I feel that you know me’—has no logic.
It is just your fancy.”

  “I don’t know that word,” he says.

  “It means your whim.”

  He considers this. “Maybe,” he says. “But I felt it the moment you recognized my father in me. I was nervous to come here, and to show you the things I have to show you.” He turns the bag over in his lap. “But as soon as you saw Papa’s face in mine, my nerves dried up.”

  “Because you are a homosexual, too?”

  Without hesitation, he says, “That’s a word I know.” He smiles, holding her gaze. “But it’s not the one I use.”

  “Which one do you use?”

  “We say queer now, Signora.”

  “We said queer then.”

  He gives her an uncomprehending look, which may or may not be for show. Anja has always had trouble distinguishing genuine naïveté from the kind put forth as a bluff to buy time or to force the other person to show his hand. It was a strategy best suited to the young, though most people take too long to perfect it, and by then it is no longer as effective. He says, “It was under my impression that there were no words at all for us in those years.”

  It is possible that young Sandro is right, Anja thinks, that her time in Italy passed before language. The years certainly make no sound now. She does not envy his twenty-first-century generation, the weight of the voices and images they carry with them at the tap of a finger. Still, how it would please her to hear them, the voices of Frank and Tennessee, even Jack, even Sandro, any one of them. She can find videos of Tenn’s interviews, of course, in the library or from the internet, but in none of these videos can he call out again to her, or to Frank, by name from across the terrace above the Roman Opera. In none of them can he place his hand on the small of her back and lead her to the bar, saying, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Anja Bloom. Tenn was the last of these men she touched, in 1982 in New York, fat and doped-up and wearing an absurd beret. Of the four of them, Sandro was the one to whom she had paid the least attention, certainly the last she had ever expected to see again. But now here he was.

  “I would like to know this,” she says to him. “Did you come here to ask me something, or to tell me something? Or are you not sure yet? What are you so excited to show me that you think I am not already aware of?”

  “To show you something was my plan,” he says. “But maybe I am also looking to get something. And to learn something.”

  “That is many somethings,” she says.

  “You don’t want the company, then?”

  “This is more of an intrusion than company,” she says, but—and this surprises her—she does it in a way that signals, if only to herself, that she welcomes both.

  In Echo, her most recent film, her final film, she played a disgraced wife exiled to a seaside town in the Curonian Spit. For sixty-five minutes, she wandered the beach in an evening gown, encountering other abandoned women in various forms of dress, until she came upon her older sister, missing since their childhood. Wordlessly, her sister took her by the hand and led her through a marsh to an empty farmhouse, where they slept side by side, as they had done as children, and fused their dreams into the action-adventure plot that constitutes the third act of the film. In this plot, a deliberately jarring shift in tone and genre, the two sisters roamed Eastern Europe hunting war criminals and, in between kills, sang torch songs in roadside bars. Echo was not only Anja Bloom’s farewell to the screen twenty-four years ago, but the last film written and directed by Hovland, the man who had made her his muse, whose brain exploded in his sleep the month of its release. Fourteen films they made together, starting with Mercy in 1954. They had disagreed on some of the particulars of Echo, but in the end Anja admired it enormously, as she had all of Hovland’s work, and she even admired herself in it, which was less often the case, and to this day no one questions the influence on world cinema of both the film and her portrayal of the nameless exile.

  Anja’s mother brought her to Italy—there is always a mother—and Italy brought her to Frank, and Frank and Tenn brought her to Hovland, and Hovland brought her to Pieter, and then Pieter went screaming into oblivion and left her alone in this hateful city, and now Italy sits across from her again crossing and uncrossing his legs.

  3.

  WHITE

  Before the six new friends parted, at long last, outside the nameless Portofino bar in the purple dawn, they made a plan: sleep all morning, pack sandwiches and wine, and meet in the early afternoon on the beach at Paraggi. There was no time for one of those elaborate Italian lunches that dragged into midday, not with rain expected in the early evening. Jack grumbled about delaying their road trip to Marina di Cecina—they’d already paid for the bungalow, it was unfair to Lucky the dog and Marika the cook to keep them cooped up in the dreary albergo, he liked the rain, he didn’t want to come here to begin with—but, in this matter, as in life, he was weak-willed and darkly indifferent, and Sandro was a man of persuasive passions, and so they stayed on in Portofino one more day.

  Tenn had managed to sleep a couple hours, and by nine he was at the desk in their room at the Splendido. A telegram from Visconti had arrived, demanding an update on the Senso script, but it was Battle of Angels he was smashing up again that morning, inspecting each of the broken pieces for how it might be repainted, reassembled into a new shape, or tossed permanently on the trash heap. In four years, that play, retitled Orpheus Descending, would hit the Broadway stage, starring Maureen Stapleton, and flop. In between would come Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the last knockout Frank had seen, and probably ever would see. Strange to think that Cat was just a few months away then, forming itself in the back of Tenn’s brain as, hungover from Truman’s party, he picked through the wreckage that became Orpheus. Tenn never missed a day of work, no matter what debauchery had transpired the night before. If a new play wouldn’t come, he’d take up one from the trash heap, or he’d scratch out a poem or a story or ideas or a few sketches in his journal. He showed up to his job in the early mornings like a stonemason to a cathedral. When Frank woke each day—in Key West, in New York, here at the Splendido in the bed under the soft covers—it was always to the music of the man at his labor: the clatter of the keys, the slam and ding of the carriage return after return, the shuffling of papers, the sighing and stomping and creaking of the chair.

  Frank seldom got the chance to watch Tenn work, as he was doing now. Back home, Tenn had a separate office with a door he kept closed even when he was alone. He’d come out for another cup of black coffee, nod dazedly in Frank’s direction, then retreat back into his world of silent voices and invisible companions.

  He watched Tenn stick a pencil in his mouth, tip his chair back, prop his bare foot on the desk, and close his eyes. His pants were rolled up below his knees, his hair a mess of matted curls. He sat that way a long while, his hands folded at his waist, unmoving, deep in thought, the clock on the mantle ticking loud. In profile like this, without both of his baby-boyish cheeks visible, he looked older and more distinguished, the man of letters he was born, if not bred, to become. An artist should paint him from this angle, in this soft morning light. They should put him on a postage stamp. Tenn shook his head vigorously, as if eavesdropping on Frank’s thoughts. Then his lips softened into a faint smile over the pencil. They remained there in a long moment of self-satisfaction. Of peace. Confidence. To witness such a moment was like catching a wild animal taking a sunbath.

  Frank should have told him then and there that he loved him and would never leave him. Not how much he loved him, which was very much, but that he loved him at all, a fact Frank took for granted but Tenn claimed not to know. He should have told Tenn that he admired his stonemason life, that he was in awe of the churches he’d built and was building, their beauty and permanence, the sacred hearts that blazed within them. He should have said, I’m grateful for all you’ve brought to me, and for all you’ve brought me to, for all that you bring out of me. But Frank had never said anythi
ng of this sort to Tenn. He had never spoken the word “love.” The time was never right. He didn’t want to disturb him. His bad poetry embarrassed him. Frank was a tough guy from Jersey who worked construction, fought for his country, and imagined he might still have a kid or two someday, not to mention a woman to go along with those kids. He was afraid that once you gave something a name, it would turn on you. And maybe he knew, even then, that love was a currency he hadn’t spent all of yet, while Tenn had gone broke on Frank the first moment he saw him.

  The clock ticked louder. The sun forced itself on the windows. Up from the town came the clang of the church bells. It was Sunday, after all.

  In the clamor of the bells, Tenn lunged for his desk. His chair dropped behind him with a thud. He stood and riffled through the stack of pages next to the typewriter and scribbled something, and he didn’t seem to notice when Frank, now keenly aware of the late hour, climbed out of bed and walked naked in front of him on his way to the toilet.

  Was this lunging the lightning strike of the new title, Orpheus Descending? The first lines of Cat? Or just a scrap of dialogue he threw on the heap a minute later? Frank knew only as much of Tenn’s draft pages as he’d tell him, which some days was a lot—a character’s buried shame, a third-act revelation—and other days was nothing. Frank learned fast that to ask was to be denied, that the less interested he acted, the more likely Tenn was to pull a page from his typewriter, walk it out to the porch, and read it aloud to him. Mostly what he told Frank was that his writing was shit, that he was washed up, that he didn’t have another Streetcar in him and even Streetcar wasn’t the masterwork everyone thought it was, that no one worth a fig would finance another one of his plays, that he’d die poor and forgotten and not even Frank would come to his funeral, glad—giddy, in fact, relieved, ecstatic!—to be free of him. He’d fly into a rage at Frank for betraying him so heartlessly, for his secret wish to abandon him, and then, minutes later, he’d beg Frank’s forgiveness, remind him through tears of their many good years together—of Mr. Moon, of Duncan Street, of stepping off the boat in Genoa—and how many more of the good years awaited them if only he’d grant him one last reprieve. Please, Frank, please, he’d plead. Find it in your heart . . .