Frank was the palm tree in the hurricane, slashed and bent by the wind, pushed to the point of splitting, as he waited for the calm of the inevitable eye. This life with Tenn, though far from tranquil, taught him patience. Like Tenn, he fixed his hopes on the greatness of whatever tomorrow might bring—the next knockout, the next trip abroad, the next party, the next boy—and dismissed or distrusted what came before simply for belonging to the black-and-white past. Their future together promised color in bright bursts: an orange house in Liguria to return to next summer, the costumes on the set of Senso in the fall, one day the green rooftops of Marrakech, the turquoise water off the coast of Key West when they finally made it home.
“Let’s not make them wait,” Frank called from the bathroom, though it was he who’d slept too long, as usual.
“You go on ahead,” Tenn called back. “I’ll meet you on the beach.”
“I don’t want to go alone.”
“Hitch a ride with the lovebirds. They need a referee.”
“They’re awful to each other, aren’t they? What do you make of them?”
Tenn gave no answer. When Frank got back to the room, he was hunched over his desk again, biting his lip as he crossed out lines and wrote between them in his mad scrawl. Another lightning bolt. Frank gave him a quick kiss on the top of his head and stood another moment at his side, the only sound now their breathing and the shushing of pencil on paper. How lucky Tenn was, Frank thought, to have another world to tunnel into. No matter that it couldn’t hold him or love him back. It was far more real to him, more urgent, more alive, than the world in which Frank buttoned his shirt, took one last look in the mirror, opened the door to the hallway, and shouted back, “Don’t be long.”
* * *
• • •
“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF them?” Frank asked Anja and Bitte as they waited on the beach for their new friends.
“I think they won’t show,” said Bitte. “The mean one got his way.”
“Which is the mean one?”
They laughed.
“Maybe his books are very good?” said Anja. “You hadn’t heard of them, either?”
But then there they were, in the distance, walking toward them in sunglasses, loud-patterned boxer swimsuits, Sandro with a short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned at the navel, Jack with a long-sleeved shirt covering him to the throat. Sandro waved wildly at them with both hands, like an immigrant from the deck of a steamer. Jack carried a canvas bag over his shoulder, his head bowed in defeat.
They found the private section reserved for guests of the Splendido and angled their chairs toward the sun. The Splendido section was so close to the water that the sand was cool. Frank saved the chair to his left for Tenn. Anja was on his right, then Bitte, then Sandro, then Jack and his translucent skin at the far end under a striped blue umbrella. They lay side by side in a perfect row, surrounded on all sides by perfect rows, a grid of bodies presenting themselves for the delectation of the gods.
The first time Frank encountered an Italian beach, its military precision shocked him: the sections organized by color and pattern, the cabanas numbered to correspond with the umbrellas, the young men who came through twice a day to rake the sand. In Jersey, you brought an old bed sheet and a cooler and six cousins and set up shop on the first free spot you found. Your knees rubbed up against the hairy back of the guy next to you, and nobody squawked about it. He couldn’t decide which he liked better. There was pleasure in the Italian order—you knew your place and your color and pattern; nobody stole your watch or kicked sand at your scrawny nephew—but he missed the messy collage of Monmouth and Asbury Park, where you tripped over radios and inflatable balls and the pots and pans people brought from their kitchens to make sandcastles.
Frank wasn’t the type to lie around. He’d had plenty of sleep, not too bad a hangover, and an espresso that got his legs buzzing. Yesterday’s weariness had burnt off with the morning mist. “Anyone for a swim?” he shouted down the silent row, loud enough for Jack to hear, though he ignored him. The Swedes shook their heads and smiled. Sandro was dozing. If Tenn were here, he’d at least be telling a story.
Anja said, languidly, “I’ll go in with you, but not for a little while. I’m still cooking.”
Today she and her mother wore tight-fitting one-piece swimsuits that barely covered their thighs and which tied behind their necks in little bows; in their hair, matching white bands framed their faces and exposed their foreheads to the rays. Did they own any clothes that weren’t the brightest white, and did they only buy them in pairs? In their identical uniforms, they were a blank canvas inviting you to paint them, and yet they were also forbiddingly pristine. You wanted to drown them in colored ink and you wanted to protect them from the slightest smudge. Their skin was smooth and unbroken by moles or blemishes or hair, their legs and arms shellacked with oil that smelled of rosemary. They wore no makeup or nail polish. No adornments or jewels of any kind. Bitte’s skin was tanning at a faster rate, a shade darker than her daughter’s, which accentuated the streaks of age barely visible at her throat and the corners of her mouth.
Until then, Frank hadn’t fully appreciated the beauty of the women. What had looked last night like flecks of gray in Anja’s eyes were now, in the bright sun and at the edge of the brilliant sea, a chalky white, like little chips in a blue plate. He wanted to tell her that the white was like the crashing surf and her eyes like the water, but that was more bad poetry, and besides, the surf was dull in comparison and God had mixed the water with too much green, and, on top of that, he didn’t want to give her the wrong impression. He flirted too much with women, Tenn said, but he did it more out of habit and manners and genuine appreciation than desire. When he flirted with men, it was usually toward some end—professional or otherwise, sometimes both—but, even then, the flirting was often unintentional, maybe even unconscious; only midway through a conversation would it occur to Frank that the man was in a position to help him in some way, or that what he’d taken as interest in his acting and dancing were naked attempts at seduction. In general, Frank wanted people to feel good about themselves; when they did, they made better company, and he had more fun.
And wasn’t having fun the point of everything?
It was no fun to sit around on a beach chair. It was a waste of time, no conversation, Sandro now snoring, Jack in hiding under the umbrella with his arms folded staring grudgingly at the waves. The dog would have made better company, but they’d left her in the apartment to lick her wounds. Frank stood and looked around for someone else to talk to, someone he’d met at Truman’s or spied on the yachts, but the only person he recognized was Luca, the boat guy turned luggage guy turned driver guy, who’d been taking him everywhere.
Luca stood with his fellow ragazzi over by his truck. Frank gave him a little wave. Should he approach him, introduce himself to his friends, propose a game of soccer? Luca lifted his chin at him as if to say, What do you need now? By which he surely meant, What do you need now, pervert? It was always a walk across fire with these men, for even the most innocent of purposes—a drink, a few rounds of briscola—and it was even riskier without Tenn. A pack of younger boys, too young by far, children really, were gathered behind Luca and his friends; they offered scooter rides to the tourists and rented them bikes by the hour. In a few years, they’d graduate to driving the tourists around in little vans. Frank wondered what, if anything, Luca would graduate into, or whether he’d just stay here driving starlets and rich queens around for the rest of his life.
To Anja he said, “I’m here to tell you you’re burning already.” He put his finger on her shoulder. “Ouch!” he said. “Come cool off with me.”
“The skin burns faster in the water, no?”
“That’s a myth,” Frank said. “True for regular water maybe, like in a pool, but salt water protects skin. It coats it in a kind of film. Look at me.” He took a step back into the ais
le of sand so she could see his entire body, bronzed from head to toe. “I spend hours a day in the ocean, and I never get sunburned.”
She eyed him skeptically.
“Trust me,” he said. “I lie only to men.”
“Go now,” Bitte ordered. “You’ve rested enough.”
In the blue-green bay, Frank and Anja floated beside each other for a long time. She was a good swimmer who, like him, favored the breaststroke. You could still look around and talk as you did it, and it moved you more quietly and elegantly among the others. Mostly they sculled back and forth from the deeper end to where they could stand and rest a bit. Every so often, Anja cupped handfuls of the salty water, splashed it onto her face, and then rubbed it in like cold cream. “Next you will tell me the Paraggi is the fountain of youth,” she said.
“It’s beautiful enough to be, isn’t it?”
She adjusted her white bathing cap and looked back at the rows of chairs. “When I am her age, I will return here.”
“You might never leave.”
She considered this. “Depends.”
First, she said, she had to find Bitte a husband. Only after she was settled could Anja breathe and choose her city and make her own way in the world. It was something, she said, bringing up a mother. It took patience and a hard heart. You had to give her the illusion of control and maintain a clinical distance from the decisions you made for her, decisions she believed to be her own but for which she took no responsibility. Only then would she release you. She had every intention of outliving you, of living forever, in fact, which gave you plenty of time—years upon years—to muck around in New York or Paris or wherever your dreams took you, as long as your dreams were big and had no chance of coming true. One day far into the future, broken but not destroyed, you could return to her, and she could mother you again, except that it would be the first time.
Anja hated modeling, she told Frank. If she did aspire to act, as Bitte claimed, it was only to give her brain and her limbs something to do while the cameras were on her. Becoming an actress was more Bitte’s dream for Anja than her own dream for herself, and as such it would propel her out of her mother’s orbit. In whatever city Bitte eventually landed, cuffed to a rich man, drowning in bejeweled dresses and suffocating through garden parties, Anja would stay for a brief time to ensure it would last, but soon it would become clear to Bitte that her daughter’s future as an actress lay elsewhere. “Preferably on the other side of the farthest ocean,” Anja said, with a laugh. Then, once her mother insisted that Anja go build her life and career in some distant city, she’d say her goodbyes, buy a small apartment with the money she’d surely be given, learn a trade or take up secretarial work, or do whatever she had to do so that, at night, she could gorge herself on art and ideas. History, science, music, poetry, dance, painting, theater, sculpture, she hungered for it all. She was twenty-two. By her own admission, she knew everything and nothing. She would never marry, she said, not unless the man allowed her to be a glutton in this way, not just on art and ideas but on other men, too. He would have to be very strong, and, from what Anja had already seen, strong men with an appreciation for art and ideas seemed to prefer the company of other men and not of women, especially women who required that particular form of strength.
It was not the conversation Frank hoped for or expected from his new friend. He tried to interrupt with stories of his own mother and sisters—their small, aproned lives he’d looked upon with pity and a kind of envy, so sure they were of their place in their house, their square block of Jersey, the world. At Anja’s age, he’d fled from their sights each morning in his uncle’s truck to make his deliveries; in the afternoons, he’d pick up his buddies and park at the beach for hours, smoking and whistling with them from the front seat of the truck at the girls stepping down from the boardwalk. Then he’d fled from them, too, those flightless boys, first for the war and then, when the war spit him back onto shore, for the city. It was the city, he told Anja, where his eyes finally adjusted, where he could see men as if for the first time, leading him into unmarked doorways and the bright life behind them.
“I am trying to imagine you behind the wheel of a milk truck,” said Anja.
Frank hunched his shoulders. “You think I’m too short, don’t you?” he joked. “Admit it! All you see is the top of my head.”
“No!” Anja said, embarrassed. “It is just—”
“I’m teasing you,” he said.
They were far out in the bay at this point, and his arms were growing tired. He guided Anja back to where they could stand. The sun beamed down on the backs of their necks and bounced back in their faces off the mirror of water, but she barely seemed to notice. Was now the right time to confess that the salt would not protect her? She stood neck-deep beside him, squinting, facing the beach. As she talked, she tapped little circles on the surface with her fingers like it was a piano.
She had no one to confide in, she said. No one to wrestle with, to discover, to tease back. For all her ambitions, Bitte kept them at a remove from the friends they made on their travels, inexplicably declining their invitations and distrusting their gestures of friendship. If Anja talked too much at parties, her mother would pinch her arm to warn her. Once, at a formal dinner, she’d pressed a fork into Anja’s thigh under the table until she went quiet. Bitte believed young women should remain mysterious, an unwritten story; whereas older women needed to perfect the art of storytelling in order to remain visible, to survive.
Anja was an only child. She evaded all of Frank’s questions about her father except to say that he was dead, a fact that seemed to give her comfort, or at least definition. Some of the other specifics of her situation—the blind aunt in Vienna, the family’s ample savings, the quiet childhood of ice-skating and Christmas markets and ponies and months of rainy days she spent indoors without friends—Frank knew already from their all-night conversation at the piazza bar; what surprised him was not the bitterness with which Anja referred to her life, and to her mother’s influences, but how desperately she wanted Frank to believe her. Until he sensed this undercurrent of desperation, Frank had had no reason to doubt that she was telling him anything but the truth.
“We should go in,” he said.
“I am boring you,” said Anja. She lay back and floated again.
He flicked a little water, gently, at her toes. “Secrets never bore me,” he said. “For some reason, people are always telling me theirs. Gossip’s more fun, though. And gossip about other people’s secrets? There’s nothing better than that.”
He didn’t know if it was just how the light was hitting her, but, from this angle, he could see through the fabric of her swimsuit. To spare them both this embarrassment, he got on his back, too.
She stretched her arms out and took his hand. “What I find from men of your type is that you always want women to perform for you,” she said matter-of-factly. “We did this for Truman and his Jack in the weeks after Signor Ricciardi turned us out. We did this all over France. Vienna, too. What we wondered out loud to each other, though, my dear mother and me, walking all the way to this beach up the hill and then down from Portofino because no one offered to drive us, is what happens at the end of the performance.”
“You walked here?” Frank asked. “To Paraggi? Why didn’t you tell me? I’m sure Luca could have picked you up along the way. I’m sorry, I should have checked. There are other drivers if you need one . . .”
“Will we have a place to go after the curtain? Will we be safe there? Will we have enough to eat? Will we still interest you?”
“I consider myself a gentleman,” Frank said.
On the other side of the beach, Luca and his friends had taken off their shirts to play soccer with the younger boys. At this hour, all of Italy was at rest: asleep, frolicking, digesting, making love. Frank craved not rest but adventure. Joy, at least. Thrills. He liked Anja, he wished her well, he felt
bad about her long walk and her inevitable sunburn, but, for someone so young, she was short on joy and long on complaints. He wondered what, if anything, might give her joy, and if they’d been brought together so that he could introduce her to it.
“Is there a place to dance in Portofino?” he asked her, hopefully.
She said there was a small club, but that it was too loud to hear yourself think.
“Why do you need to think if you’re dancing?”
When they saw Tenn step from the truck—it must have been four o’clock by then—they waved to him and pointed to the Splendido section.
“I have to go in now,” Frank said. “Did you want to stay?”
“No,” she said. “It’s time.” But she made no move toward the shore. Frank offered to race her, intending to lose by a length. She shook her head.
“Are you really leaving us this week?” she asked.
He reminded her of the trip to Verona for the Senso script, which Tenn had described in detail the night before. Visconti, the director, was insisting on the poetry of the dialogue, and Tenn needed to hole himself up in a hotel to write it. They were meeting Paul Bowles and his new lover, Ahmed, who were on their way to Verona from Rome. “Tenn’s one of the busiest writers in the world,” he told Anja. “Busier than Truman, that’s for sure, no matter what Truman says. Every day he gets an invitation to write something for someone, to appear here or speak there. Half the time when he wakes up he doesn’t remember what city he’s in.”
“That’s him,” she said. “What about you? Do you go everywhere together?”
Leading Men Page 5
