“Not always.”
“Do you have a lover waiting for you in Verona?”
“No.”
“Then there’s a chance our show will go on here in Portofino,” she said.
“I suppose there is,” he said.
Finally, they swam toward the beach. When their feet could touch bottom, they walked and, to his surprise, she took his hand again, which was when he remembered, the level of the water now at their waists, the transparency of her swimsuit. He looked down and saw how little to the imagination it left, and then, in a horrible flash, how the people in the front rows, their chairs turned to the west, gawked at her. Awkwardly he moved in front of her to shield her as best he could without blocking their forward progress. He shot a look at an old man uncouth enough to point. Luca and the boys stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, the shorter ones on their tiptoes, as if at a parade. None of this Anja appeared to notice, not his efforts to conceal her and not the old man and not the eyes roving from her breasts to the dark patch between her legs to Frank and then back again. To the people on the beach, Frank must have seemed to be presenting her, putting on a show, while all the while she babbled girlishly in his ear of cities she longed to see—Rome, Athens, Tangiers—and had Frank and Tenn traveled there? And which of these cities did they love best? And how soon could she join them? And did the beggars really come right up to you with their open mouths?
He led her over the sand to their row, pulling her close behind him. His snarling eyes dared the crowd to utter a word. She continued her incessant chatter into his left ear. She was glad Tenn was finally here, she was saying. She found Tenn dashing, not only because he was the most famous artist she’d ever met but because it was the first time she’d heard that cowboy accent in real life. She almost didn’t believe Americans really talked like that. Her father had liked westerns. She’d never had the honor of attending one of Tenn’s plays in the theater, but she’d seen the film of Streetcar twice and fallen in love, like every girl, with Marlon Brando. Really, though, she said, she was in love with Stanley Kowalski, because Stanley was the brute she and every other woman longed for in spite of themselves, in spite of what was good for them. . . .
It was at that moment, at her mention of the brute, that it occurred to Frank that Anja was ashamed, and that, rather than being oblivious to what was happening to her on the beach, she was all too aware of it, of the effect of the water on the bathing suit her mother had bought for her. She had repeated Bitte’s exact words about Stanley from the night before as if they were her own. It was possible she only half knew what she was saying since she emerged from the water, that she’d been talking so much in order to distract herself, maybe even to distract Frank. When she had taken his hand, it had been for protection. “Go now,” Bitte had ordered. “You’ve rested enough.”
“You two look refreshed,” Tenn said now, as Anja quickly wrapped a towel around herself. She settled back into her chair and tilted the umbrella for shade.
“What do you say we get the hell out of here?” said Frank.
“Typical Frankie,” Tenn said to the group. “Just as I arrive, he’s ready to move on.”
From the corners of his eyes, Frank could still see the pointed fingers, all the drooling men and outraged old ladies and giggling children. He heard their giddy whispers. But it was also possible those people had gone back to their naps and their magazines, Anja’s display already forgotten. Had Frank imagined the entire scene? Was he so modest and prissy? Was the heat getting to him? Luca’s soccer game had resumed on the grass beside the parking lot. Sandro and Jack argued over a piece of paper, which Jack had torn from a book and held up to Sandro’s face.
“Where do you propose we go?” Bitte asked. “Everything is closed at this hour.”
“Can’t we rest a bit?” said Anja. The towel covered her from her chin to her knees.
“Frankie doesn’t know the meaning of the word,” said Tenn.
“There has to be something to do here,” said Frank. “Something to get our legs moving.”
Sandro grabbed the piece of paper from Jack’s hand, crumpled it, and turned his back to him. “Our padrona di casa told us of a walk along the sea,” he said to the rest of them. “She says it is the best view of Portofino from up high, very beautiful. There is a wild garden of statues.”
“Testa del Lupo,” said Anja. “On the other side of the mountain. Toward Santa Margarita. We have seen it.” She added, “We have had to do a lot of walking.”
“The head of the wolf,” said Tenn.
“Bravo!” said Sandro.
“The walk there and back is very long,” said Bitte. “But the view is worth it enough for a second trip. At sunset the colors must be even more spectacular, don’t you think, Anja? If we’re going to go together, and eat a little something first, which we should do so I don’t faint, and stop by the apartment to change clothes, we don’t have all the time in the world. Just to get to the walk takes a little drive.”
“Luca will take us,” Frank said.
4.
FALLING
He comes for her on Monday evenings, between six and seven. His habitual tardiness annoys her, but only enough for teasing, not enough to make it a point of contention. Possibly if he spent less time grooming and choosing his clothes—he is always impeccable, as if he has a date afterward, which maybe he does, Anja has never asked, it is not her concern, and besides, she does not want him to interpret any interest in that regard as grandmotherly, because she is not his grandmother, she is his friend.
He wears a tailored coat and a long fur scarf he wraps multiple times around his neck. The fur of the scarf matches the fur on the sleeves of his leather gloves. His jeans are complicated by zippers in odd places. The level of his dress prompts her to walk for the first time in years to the flat street at the bottom of the hill, the site of if not the more fashionable shops of the day then the ones appropriate for a woman her age, shops that sell dresses and suits in classic cuts, smart cardigans in slate and beige and silver, nothing too flashy, nothing that draws attention.
She lets the salesgirl talk her into a thin wool-blend coat in a gray-and-black crosshatch design she calls “London Plaid.” The coat will not be nearly warm enough, but its high asymmetrical collar gives it a certain daring, one that almost overcomes its frumpy below-the-knee length. At the register, Anja reaches over and grabs a red cable turtleneck from the holiday discount table and then a hat, scarf and gloves from the same line.
“Those are an incredible bargain,” says the salesgirl. “And because you’re buying the set you get an extra ten percent off!”
The last occasion Anja had to examine her accounts, at the settlement of Pieter’s estate, she had more than ten million dollars at her fingertips.
She keeps the new items in their sturdy boxes, where they were lovingly wrapped in lavender tissue paper and sealed with a sticker that bore the name and insignia of the shop. It seems such a shame to break the seal and to tear the fine paper that she puts it off for three months, and of course by then it is officially spring and the clothes are too warm after all, even the coat, and she wonders if her association with Sandrino will last into the next winter. Little Sandro, she calls him, though he is taller than his father by at least a head, and she barely reaches his shoulders.
On the Mondays he comes for her, always Mondays, because these are the nights a professor she greatly respects at the other university curates a film series, she cleans the front rooms of her apartment, not because he requires her to do so or has once remarked on her untidiness, but because she takes pleasure in the acts of straightening up and disinfecting and polishing, and because she learned late in life the illogical fact that pleasure tastes better hoarded and swallowed in one sitting than divvied up like sensible slices of cake. The hunger in between is not only bearable, it makes for perfectly agreeable company, just as rage would if she we
re rageful.
Her legs give her some trouble from time to time, so she walks slowly in fear of falling. Once an old childless widow falls, she is done for. Anja will not submit to a bright-faced nurse with a rubber handbag of sponges and plastic pans. Sandrino tells her it is not the fall that breaks the bone; the bone breaks on its own and sends you down, there is no way to prevent it, you might as well dance. Still, she takes his arm and lets him walk her through the square and up the cement steps to his preferred coffee shop. She is sad to see how the snowdrifts in the park have shrunk since the week before. She can hear the insidious little rivers beneath them splashing into the drains.
The snow is the only thing she loves about this city. It reminds her of home. She has been thinking more about home since Pieter died, and this, too, is a fall she would rather avoid, because once an old childless widow starts reminiscing about the snow on the roof of her childhood home, the blinding quiet of the woods beyond the yard where the white wolves ran free, the bright eyes of her father behind the costume mask, his silly laugh, she is done for. In all of her world travels, Anja Bloom has not once returned to her native Sweden, not even for the grand opening of the theater in Malmö that bears her father’s name.
When Sandrino comes for her, he smells of tobacco, cloves, marijuana. His great love, more than food and beauty and sex, is the various gentle highs that come with the burning in his throat. She does not mind that he is often “elevated,” as he calls it. At the café, they sit side by side on the cushioned bench, squeezed into each other by college students pretending to study, so close that the scent of his European cigarettes and bitter coffee lingers faintly in her hair and clothes for the rest of the week. The one night she shows her annoyance with him for arriving so late at her apartment that they miss the opening scenes of The Blue Angel, he responds by buying her a rose from one of those bins at a drugstore they pass on the way to the café. How silly she feels walking into the café carrying the rose in its clear cellophane tube in the company of this young elevated man, not that she pays any mind to what people might be thinking, not that anyone would think she was anyone but his grandmother.
It surprises her that they no longer talk much of his father and Jack Burns, and the events of Portofino and Livorno. After the initial run-through, the past has ceased to be a subject of their conversation. That first night, months ago in her apartment, he pulled from his bag with much ceremony a deck of Italian playing cards and a salt-stained copy of Poems and Lyrics by Percy Bysshe Shelley and a letter Jack had written to his mother in Andover but never sent. Sandro had kept the letter and the poems and the cards for himself, and after he died his wife passed them on to their son without explanation. The nature of the relationship between Jack and his father, if not the connection among the cards and the book and the letter, was clear enough, and not a shock to Sandrino or even, as best he could infer, to his mother. He only needed Anja to confirm it, which she did, and to tell him, if she knew, what became of the mysterious Jack. What was his last name? Perhaps he was still alive? Did this particular letter hold any special significance?
August 10, 1953
Darling mother,
I think the Eye-talians have finally turned me superstitious. I’ve convinced myself this bout of sunsickness I’m still fighting off came to me in direct retaliation for my last letter to you. Never should I have bragged so brazenly of my perfect health through that miserable Tuscan winter. Did you know gli Italiani believe you can catch your death of cold if you sleep without a shirt on? And if the breeze blows in through your open window while you’re lying in bed shirtless, you’re a goner. Don’t worry, I’m on the mend now and I’m still sporting the blue shirt you sent me. It has proven a good luck charm. Sandro’s not much of a sailor or a swimmer, and he can’t drive a car under a hundred kilometers an hour, but he makes a halfway-decent nurse when he puts his mind to it.
I’ve promised myself to write you more often after all those months of silence while I was finishing the book and the damp was seeping through the stones of La Bicocca. In the meantime, I’m waiting none too patiently for Warburg to come to his senses on Stranger, and then it’s just a matter of time before he sends the contract so I can set my sights on something new. I don’t promise I’ll make it back over when it comes out, not unless the Eye-talians make me a believer in miracles, too, while they’re at it.
I once worried that someday I’d have my fill of sensations, but now I’ve come to think such a satisfaction is an impossibility. I’ve become a warmer person in every way, and that’s not just the fever talking. You can’t live among a people for this long a time and not absorb them. They seep into you like the damp.
We have a buddy staying the week and he’s standing over me as I write this. He wants my company on the beach now that I’ve recovered enough to venture back in the sun. Can you imagine a fellow wanting my company? I tell you, I’m going soft. Don’t tell Dumps.
Will send a proper letter when there’s something improper to tell.
All My Love,
Jack
From her bookshelf, Anja pulled out Jack’s three novels—The Gallery, Lucifer with a Book, and A Cry of Children—and handed them to Sandro. She told him she had read every word of the first of these, and half of the second; she could get through only the first few pages of the third. John Horne Burns, this man his father loved, had won much acclaim in the late forties, she told Sandrino. He had a refined intellect and his books a wicked, satirical style. He was troubled and angry, arrogant and afraid, a genius and a washed-up drunk. The two men were not as kind to each other as he made it sound in the letter, not from what Anja had witnessed or what she had learned later directly from Frank Merlo. Anja had spent only three days with his father and Jack in Italy, though Frank had spent more.
Anja was not in the habit of withholding information, let alone holding her tongue, but that was what she did that first night Sandrino came for her with his bag of artifacts. She was moved by the tenderness with which he paged through the books written by his father’s lover, by the pride in his eyes when they rose to meet hers. The next time he visited, he said, “I Googled Frank Merlo. I saw he was the boyfriend of Tennessee Williams and that he died young. You don’t know how strange it is for me, my Papà hobnobbing with writers of plays and starlets. Reading poems in English. When I picture Papà, I see him down on one knee in the dirt, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth. I see him pulling a nail out of the hoof of a goat.”
When she told him how and when the six of them had met, a matter-of-fact account of the fighting dogs and the all-night revelry in the bar, he exclaimed, “Truman Capote! Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Impossible!” She held back what came in the days after their meeting, the trip to Testa del Lupo, the days Frank spent with them in Livorno, although—she reminds herself now—she never lied when Sandrino asked her a direct question. When she did not have a fact at the ready, she gave her opinion, and she made sure to distinguish one from the other. He wanted to know how his father and Jack Burns got along, whether anyone knew Sandro already had a wife. He wanted her to speculate what his father might have done if Jack had lived.
Eventually, Sandrino ran out of questions about those three days Anja spent with his father in Portofino in 1953, and he started asking what might be next for the two of them.
When he comes for her, the city sits back on its heels. For the evening hours she spends in his company—the walk from her house down the hill to the train, across the university quad, through the square and the park and up the stairs to the café, and then from there to the other train that takes her home—the city presents its upturned hands to her in supplication. But its forgiveness never lasts. Its mercy is temporary and conditional. The next morning, when she steps outside to sweep the trash from the sidewalk, it smells blood, and she hurries back in. Within the forty-four separate walls of her apartment, her hunger for his next visit, and for the city’s concomitan
t offer of mercy, is an agreeable companion. And yet, she sometimes thinks, she would give anything for rage.
She tries to summon rage with memories of her mother, with a stark appraisal of her age-ravaged body in the full-length mirror, with the image of Pieter’s blue gaping mouth, with the thought of Frank left to rot in Memorial Hospital, but the rage will not come. She has been too lucky; she is now too grateful. Her grief is no match for her hunger. Anja Bloom is beloved and proud and right of mind, a millionaire brimming with wanderlust, flush with the freedom and time to choose the next great place to spend her life. She will decide on that place soon—this summer, at the latest. The film series will end, and Sandrino will need nothing more from her, and she will release him.
Lima. Dakar. Melbourne. She will never run out of cities. If she continues in this manner of good health, there is a very good chance she will live long enough to punch one of those one-way tickets to Mars. At the prospect of this, she smiles to herself. Pieter would be unbearably jealous. The man who studied dwarf stars. For him, she still follows the progress of Gliese 581g. He had hoped to prove it habitable in his lifetime. He had hoped for more answers in his lifetime. What is his lifetime? His colleagues who outlasted him on earth are poring over his discoveries this very minute. In six months, The Astrophysical Journal will publish his article on hypervelocity stars. Anja’s films will still be playing in a hundred years. More. Both of their names appear in textbooks; they have been featured in documentaries that will be shown to generations of filmmakers and scientists. All this luck and gratitude, it does not cannot will not fill her. By the end, his skin went dry as paper. His gnarled knuckles were like mountains on a globe. She would give anything for rage. Her hunger is no match for her grief.
What Sandrino most wants to know is does she miss working. Twenty-four years is a long time, he informs her, which of course it is not, but to make that case to a young man is pointless. He says he can’t tell how she really feels about her “life in show business” from the way she talks about it. In one breath, he says, she’s relieved and emancipated; in the next, the longing weighs on her like regret. Which is it? They are in the café. They are in their seats waiting for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They are standing outside her front door at the end of another Monday night. It does not matter where they are, his questions are the same, asked in different words but always with that disarming mix of exuberance and disbelief and privilege and concern.
Leading Men Page 6
