Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “Five years too late, maybe.”

  “Or at just the right time.”

  Frank had paid close attention to Tenn’s words. “Temporary relief,” he’d said. “Illusion of control. Taste of power.” Still, he’d take those terms any day of the week. They were a heck of a lot better than what he was doing now, which was treading water. Being taken by the shoulders and pointed in a direction—toward Rome, a Risorgimento uniform, a line or two, a chance—gave him air. It wounded his pride to ask Tenn for anything, but it was just this once, he’d never do it again, not unless it was absolutely necessary. He’d have done it a long time ago if he hadn’t been caught up in the thrall and in the day-to-day tasks and plans and chores of Tenn’s world: train tickets, hotel reservations, repairs on the Duncan Street house, stains on their white dinner jackets, a cold compress for Mother Edwina’s feverish forehead, a last-minute sightseeing tour for Rose. He’d lost himself in their nightly entertainments and ministrations, the keeping happy of the other wives and the flirting with distinguished gentlemen, the after-hours fetching of pills from doctors easily bribed, the soothing of nerves, the demands for sex and the cruel refusals, all in support of the playwright and the theater and his and Tenn’s common cause. Willingly, happily, Frank had played this part, and now the time had come—with Tenn’s blessing, and with the promise of Anja’s company—to take on a bigger role.

  “I just hope Anja’s going to be OK,” Frank said. “In the head, I mean.”

  “She made it this far with that mother, she’ll be just fine. Once something freezes, it can’t get more frozen, it can only go the other direction. Who better than The Horse to melt her? I can hear it now: Drip drip drip. What a guide you’ll be through the Land of Feeling! But I still maintain she’s better off the way she is.”

  Frank thought a moment. “You’re saying an iceberg in Antarctica is as cold as the ice cubes in a cocktail?”

  “If you’re going to be an artist, Frankie—even just an actor—your first lesson is not to be so literal.”

  The plan for Anja, which they concocted on that stone bench and had yet to run by her, had a number of steps. The first was to find a distraction for Bitte here in Portofino. Could they salvage her engagement to Signor Ricciardi? If not, did Truman know another rich eligible bachelor, preferably one with a black cat and a heart condition? If that was a no, they’d do a thorough sweep of the yachts. However they distracted Bitte, Tenn said, they had to do it fast, to “get the drawbridge down.” Only then could they throw Anja over their shoulders, sneak her out of the castle under cover of night, and not stop running until they reached Verona.

  In Verona, the three of them would join Paul and Ahmed as scheduled. Paul and Tenn needed to hole up to finish the Senso script before Visconti’s deadline at the end of the month. In the meantime, Frank and Anja could explore the town, eat too much fried squid, pretend they were Romeo and Juliet, steal away to Venice for a few days if they could swing it, and run their Senso lines once Tenn and Paul had written them. If Frank visited a museum or library to educate himself on the Risorgimento, all the better. By the first of September, all five of them would drive to Rome in their matching Jaguar convertibles, Tenn and Frank and Anja leading the way, Paul and Ahmed behind them, the wind in their hair, their futures bright as the sunflowers on the Tuscan hills.

  Like most things, Anja’s full liberation would eventually come down to money. How much did she have and, more important, how much could she access? Surely Frank and Tenn could convince her to accompany them from Verona to Rome, but could she support herself after they left Italy in the fall? It was that step of the plan that might prove the most complicated. Tenn saw actress—or, at the very least, model—potential in Anja, and he wanted her around long enough to solve the mystery at her center, but he had not fallen for her decisively or romantically enough to provide for her the way he had provided for so many others, Frank included. It was possible Tenn would fall for her over time, given how necessary a person could come to seem simply by sticking around.

  Tenn was generous with his money. He was also easily flattered. More often than not, the two went hand in hand, and Frank had to be there to protect him from the influence of an obvious bootlicker. If Anja, who was incapable of flattery, even in the interest of self-preservation, found herself in need, Frank would be forced to appeal on her behalf to Tenn’s other weakness: the damsel in distress. As usual, Frank was getting ahead of himself. They had not yet arrived at that step. First, they had to get the drawbridge down.

  He went to Anja that very afternoon. She and Bitte had made no effort to check out of the Splendido, which meant one more night on Tenn’s dime. Jack and Sandro and their memories of Testa del Lupo were, by then, more than halfway to their bungalow in Livorno. With them gone, Frank saw no reason to ever mention the horrible events again. If the Merlos of Peterstown, New Jersey, had taught him anything, it was to keep ugliness out—with happy talk, with food, with music and out-loud dreaming—until it forced its way in. Now was the time for looking forward into the thawing warmth of possibility. And so, in the hallway outside Anja’s room, her mother safely behind the closed door, he handed her the ticket to the rest of her life.

  Which she refused.

  She was not yet ready, she said, for her life to begin. She needed more time.

  “You’re joking,” Frank said.

  She crossed her arms in defiance that could have been unease. Her elbows were still stained from the iodine Sandro had painted onto the cuts. Time, she explained, would help her determine whether her own vision for her life was the one she really wanted after all. She was referring to the portrait she’d painted for him in the water at Paraggi, the one of the gluttonous Madison Avenue secretary who gorged on ideas on her lunch break. She wondered if her imagination might come up with something better than this vision. She was still a girl, she said, and Frank should remember that a girl was always in a state of becoming. As she became, she had no intention of taking even the smallest step toward her mother’s vision for her, the one in which she slaved for the camera and the audience and for the men behind them. She had been a slave long enough, she said, with a tick of her head toward the room where Bitte was supposedly sleeping, and it was the overly dramatic raising of her voice that convinced Frank, more than the bruises on her arm or her sunburnt skin, that this country had already made its mark on her.

  “To be honest with you,” she went on, “I do not consider acting much of an art to begin with. There is something of the childish about it, no? A game we play when we are small to entertain ourselves and our parents until we grow up and do something serious.” She put her hand on his shoulder in a way he found almost maternal in its condescension. “Besides, I am acting right now. Are you not acting, as well? Do we not play our parts every minute of every day, even when we are alone? The myths we tell ourselves, the myths we allow our mothers and lovers to believe? It seems to take more patience than skill.”

  “You’ve never seen Vivien Leigh onstage,” Frank said. “Or Maureen Stapleton. Tallulah Bankhead.”

  “And if I had?”

  “You’d be transformed.”

  For a girl so smart, Anja was badly in need of an education, to see up close the art of the actress. She needed to witness the transformation, the possession. Frank had seen it many times, from just a few feet away in the wings. If you looked hard enough, you could see the demon in the act of possession, how it descended upon the woman, moved inside her, stretched the lines on her face, twisted her voice. You couldn’t see that and call it a child’s game. You couldn’t see that and not call it art. All of this he said to Anja in the hallway of the Splendido, and the more his passion could not convince her, the more resentful of her he became.

  “I guess I expected more gratitude,” Frank said, finally. “Tenn and I don’t have to do this for you, you know. Any of this.” He opened his arms to indicate the hotel, but what he
really meant, of course, was the privilege of her freedom, her education. Who was she to turn it down?

  “I do not remember asking you to educate me,” said Anja, her face an unscalable glacier. She went on, matter-of-factly, her arms still crossed, to recite a litany of other reasons for shoving Frank and Tenn’s gift back into their arms without a hint of appreciation. Chief among them was that Testa del Lupo had shaken her and Bitte more deeply than she could describe. To Frank and Tenn it was a brawl, but to the two women it was a violation. How could he not see that? Bitte hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence since the night of the attack. Anja could not leave her mother in such a state. “She’s not a strong woman,” she said. “She is my obligation. To dismiss that obligation, to dismiss everything that happened, is your arrogance. Your luxury. The way you fly about like bees, you and Tenn and men like you, we have seen it over and over, how you land on one pretty flower to suck all the nectar from it, and then move on to the next. I asked you this once already, and you did not answer. Let me ask it another way: do you ever think what becomes of the flower once you’ve sucked it dry?”

  “I’m not the type to move on,” said Frank.

  “Neither am I,” she said.

  That evening, when the hotel manager called to relay Anja and Bitte’s request to stay another night—not “one more night” but “another night”—Frank instructed him to stop charging Mr. Williams’s account if the women did not check out the next day. They avoided each other for the rest of their time in Portofino, which was not an easy thing to do when Frank was kicking her and her mother out of their hotel, and when there was more to say, and when, either because of or despite her accusations—he still wasn’t quite sure—he missed her.

  * * *

  • • •

  THOUGH FRANK RARELY SAW the pages themselves, he knew Tenn worked on multiple projects at once, projects that changed shape from play to story to poem and back again. His current pages were charging him up, but whether they were Battle or Orpheus or something else he’d actually abandon, Frank was still not yet sure, though in time it would become obvious. As Tenn drafted these projects, he wrote letters charting their progress to Audrey Wood and Kazan and Bowles and to whatever producer or director or actress or reviewer he had business with at the time, or with whom he wished to have business in the future. There was constant chatter, and so much of it! So much arguing back and forth with black stains on white pages! Just the thought of all those voices, real and imaginary, barking at him from New York or Los Angeles or pulled from the darkest and deepest caves of the mind, begging for attention, never at rest, gave Frank a headache. Because Tenn sensed this, or because he needed his own refuge from the chatter, he kept Frank apart from it, in his own quiet and well-appointed mansion behind an unlocked door, where Frank was happy to explore its many rooms and entertain their guests and fix the leaky faucets and—if he felt like it, as he often did—dance on the beds. Tenn could visit him at any and all hours, but he could never live there; it was too quiet.

  For Frank to ask for a part in Senso was to risk leaving the peaceful mansion for Tenn’s noisy crowd. The moment he did it, he wished for the moment back. And then the moment he wished for it back, he hated himself for the wish.

  It was almost luck, then, that Tenn didn’t mention Senso again.

  Without Anja’s cooperation with the drawbridge plan, they had no reason to stay in Portofino. Verona was calling, Senso was calling, not to mention Mr. Moon and Anna and their apartment in Rome with the view of the Opera and the prehistoric plumbing. Now that Tenn was charged up with his new manuscript, he could write anywhere he could drag his typewriter. He could write up a tree in a jungle under artillery fire, Frank used to say, as long as he had a branch to set his Olivetti on, and if the tree was where the best words came, or where the words came best, it was up to Frank to send the telegram with Mr. Williams’s sincere regrets and to make Mr. Williams’s increasingly preposterous excuses at the event he’d attend in his place and to find other ways to occupy himself until Mr. Williams climbed down from the tree and asked what day it was and how soon they could get the hell out of there.

  The soonest, said Frank, was tomorrow.

  “And what’s today?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Then we leave Wednesday.”

  Frank made the arrangements for the ferry to Rapallo, where they’d pick up the Jag from the garage. He was grateful for the task. So far, he had spent his Tuesday walking over the hills to and from Paraggi to swim, both to kill the hours and because it was best not to be seen in Luca’s truck.

  They ordered room service and then stopped into the Delfino for an after-dinner drink and to bid farewell to Truman. If anyone knew the latest gossip about the man found at Testa del Lupo, it would be Miss Capote, and they were eager to find out just what stories, if any, still swirled around the little paese.

  They found Truman alone at the bar, his legs dangling a foot above the floor, finishing off a screwdriver. Open in front of him was a book he wasn’t reading. They took the empty seats on both sides of him. He looked sourly at Frank as Tenn said “my kind of library” and ordered three Campari and sodas.

  The Delfino was busy for a Tuesday, though, in a resort town in the summer, every night was Saturday night, and everyone appeared to be engulfed in full-throated laughter or shouting at each other, all while eating and drinking with abandon, as if it would stay a Saturday in summer forever. It occurred to Frank that his life was not much different from this endless Saturday, that the Monday his father and brother spent every weekend dreading would never come for him as long as he stayed with Tenn.

  “Our friend dropped this by,” said Truman, and held up the book, a hardcover of The Gallery by John Horne Burns. “I tripped on it walking out of my apartment and nearly tumbled down the stairs. It was wrapped in brown paper, like a cut of raw meat or something indecent. I’m happy to say it’s more of the latter than the former.”

  “It’s that good?” Tenn asked.

  “He considers himself a genius,” said Frank.

  “He’s got a rare talent. Unfortunately, it’s for making a story of degenerate soldiers, queer bars, and syphilis dull as the Pledge of Allegiance. No wonder Mailer praised it to the skies.”

  “You’d heard of it before now?”

  “Believe it or not, Tenn, they still print the book pages even when you’re not in them. Of course I’ve heard of it. It was all the rage the year after Other Voices. The Very Important War Novel Everyone Must Read and all that. The Dark Underbelly of Naples. The Tale Untold Until Now. The Voice of a Generation, they called him. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same moniker they’d given me not ten months before. It appears critics measure time by the fruit fly. If I had a competitive bone in my body, I’d have been seething.” They all laughed. “Gore talked up the book all over town. It was his calling card. Then, when it started getting better notices than The City and the Pillar, he was suddenly struck dumb on the subject.”

  “Hysterical muteness,” said Tenn.

  “We both read The City and the Pillar the week it came out,” said Frank. “It made me blush. I don’t know how Gore got away with writing something like that.”

  “He didn’t,” Truman said. “Show me a Times review of a book by Gore Vidal since then. He’s shunned until further notice. A Broadway musical with a blank marquee. If he wants to publish a word these days, he’s forced to use an alias. He could take a lesson from Jack Burns. If you want to write a novel about queens in love and lust, just make it such a bore that no one notices, and they’ll call it a Literary Masterpiece. They were this close to giving The Gallery a Pulitzer.”

  “That was five years ago,” Tenn said. “Now he’s just a washed-up drunk.”

  “My sources tell me he and Il Dottore have skipped town,” said Truman. “I assume Il Dottore was the one who left the book as a parting gift. I�
��d have preferred a local amaro, or a treat for Bunky after the trauma those Swedes inflicted on him, but at least he put forth an effort.”

  “The effort would never have occurred to Jack,” Frank said, wondering if Truman had even seen the bouquet of white roses he’d brought to his party.

  “No, the Jack Burns passed out in my armchair didn’t strike me as the paragon of manners,” Truman said. “The grump doesn’t know how good he has it, flitting around Liguria with Il Dottore Bello at his side. Driving, no doubt. One part bodyguard, one part big brother, one part Emily Post. You and I know how good we have it, though, don’t we, Tenn? We could knock some sense into him.”

  “Add guardian angel to the list,” said Tenn. “Then add a dozen more heroic qualities, and you have my Frankie.”

  Truman and Jack Dunphy had belonged to each other for as long as Tenn and Frank. The four of them had traveled all over Italy together, once, disastrously, to the island of Ischia, where they’d had a terrible row over something Frank could no longer remember. Jack Dunphy kept to himself mostly, the shy type, rarely glimpsed in public, ten years Truman’s senior but going on thirty, as much the life of the party as a potted plant. “The old lady,” as Tenn called him, was as withdrawn and serious as Truman was clubby and vicious. More often than not, Frank ended up stuck next to Jack Dunphy in the backseats of convertibles, where Jack would fade into the leather or wilt in the sun under his wide-brimmed hat, leaving Frank to watch the landscape pass blurrily by. Being compared with Jack, and even with Sandro, made Frank uneasy, not because he didn’t like the guys—they were decent enough, as best he could tell—but because what he had with Tenn had come to seem bigger and fuller than either Sandro’s anxious chaperoning or the domestic arrangement Truman was describing.

  “My Jack’s upstairs this very minute broiling me a hamburger,” Truman said. “It’s the meal I most miss when I’m here. A hamburger with a side of potato salad. The Italians are in a constant battle with mayonnaise. Mostly it horrifies them. We bring over our own jars, especially if we’ll be in Sicily, where they don’t even stock it. Give me a hamburger and potato salad with extra mayo and a post office with regular hours and I’m ready to defect. You don’t know how many times I’ve walked to the piazza for stamps during business hours just to see the CHIUSO sign in the window and the clerk at his station shrugging as if there was a pit of crocodiles between him and the door.”