Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “Whatever this is would go great with gin,” said Tenn, plucking off a flower.

  The shortcut led, eventually, to a church and, behind it, a cemetery. Behind the cemetery, a cliff. “Oh well,” said Tenn, with a grin in his voice. “Not such a great shortcut after all.” They made their way slowly and clumsily down an uneven stone path toward the tallest structure in the distance, the mausoleum.

  At the Splendido they had as comfortable a bed as money could buy in one of the grandest hotels of the world, but it was onto the muddy grass in front of the wall of skeletons that they fell, kissing madly, and where Frank, emboldened by the darkness and the wall that blocked the moon, pulled his pants down to his ankles. He switched off the flashlight. “Promise me,” he said, his palms pressed to the firm ground, laughing, “after this: no more graveyards.”

  The only sounds were the Ligurian Sea bashing the rocks below and Tenn’s sweet words in Frank’s ear as he arranged himself behind him, just the right words, always at the tip of his tongue in these circumstances, to convince Frank of the joy his body brought him by the simple fact of its Frankness. His was not just any body; it was the body into which Frank Merlo had been miraculously born. It was the one and only Frank Merlo body that existed and would ever exist and could never be copied, and it pleased him so very much, its shameless revelation of itself again and again and again. Tenn had been looking for Frank’s body all his life, he said, from the moment he’d first been pulled, as if by a wild undertow, to the body of another man (he could hardly recall who he was), and now that this body was entirely in his grasp, his arms locked so tightly around his chest that it squeezed his ribs and lungs and heart, he would never let it go.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY WOKE THE NEXT MORNING at the Splendido to a desperate telegram from Paul Bowles. He was having trouble with his part of the Senso script, and with Ahmed, and with his liver. DOWN TO 112 LBS, the telegram shouted. He begged Tenn to skip Verona altogether and drive back to him in Rome instead, right away, or else, implied the block letters, he would die of anxiety, frustration, malnourishment, heatstroke, and neglect. Ahmed was not chaperone material, not with so much kif around and street whores in cheap supply.

  Writers in danger everywhere.

  The new plan—the replacement for the drawbridge plan, which Frank and Tenn concocted on the spot—was for Paul and Ahmed to remain in Rome until Tenn and Frank rejoined them later that day. They’d taken an apartment on the same floor of 11 Via Firenze, just down the hall from the one he and Tenn shared with Mr. Moon. Tenn would work on his Senso love scenes on one of their two sunny fourth-floor terraces, Paul would complete his revisions on the terrace a few feet away, never out of Tenn’s supervisory sight, and by the end of the week they’d both deliver their scripts by hand to Visconti, who was shooting on location nearby in Trastevere.

  Whether or not those scripts would include dialogue from a horselike soldier of the Risorgimento was never discussed. Frank was too ashamed to ask, to reopen the hands he’d put before Tenn in supplication in the hotel garden; it was also possible that Frank was afraid that his answer would be yes, and he’d have no choice but to put on the soldier’s uniform and speak his lines. What if the costume didn’t fit? What if he lost his voice? What if he wasn’t any good?

  He’d had a night to sleep on Anja’s charges against him, and a sunrise swim to focus his mind. He resolved to clear his good name with her before they left Portofino. On the way to the harbor with Tenn and their luggage, he asked the driver to drop him off at her apartment on Via del Fondaco. After getting no response from buzzing her door, he left word for Anja with the landlady. When or whether Anja would receive that word, he didn’t know.

  It unsettled Frank to be out of favor with anyone for long, especially a woman. He wasn’t accustomed to the guilt that bubbled up from it. The storms he’d had with his father and his brothers and cousins over the years, and with Tenn, earlier this summer especially, storms that shook the windows and kept him up at night and even drew blood, always passed quickly. But women, he knew, carried their storms with them.

  The dark rages of women, in the face of which Frank was rarely brave, transformed him back into the little boy he’d been trying hard to grow out of, thumb in his mouth, crouched under the dining room table watching his mother’s and aunt’s skirts pass back and forth. Sometimes he didn’t come home right away after hearing his mother call him from the front door; sometimes he corrected his father’s English; for this, his mother would give him a hard smack on the culetto and a stream of curses; but then, moments later, she’d pull him to her breast, rest her head on top of his, and sob. The sobbing would go on for a few minutes until, as if remembering what he’d done wrong, she’d push him off her in a fury, only to find him later in the night and suffocate him again with a faceful of kisses. Frank never knew which mother he’d wake up to.

  He’d spent entire summer afternoons studying her from under the table, listening in on her conversations with his sisters and Mrs. Covelli from next door, watching her in the rare moments she thought she was alone, when she’d sit in his father’s recliner to smoke and sing and crack her knuckles, something he’d never seen a woman do before or since. What he came to learn about his mother was that she broke every pattern. There were times she kindly kept his dinner warm for whenever he showed up after her call, or when she laughed along with him, lustily, scornfully, at his father’s butchered English. There was no way to predict or track her storms. The only thing about her that never changed was that she forgot nothing and forgave no one.

  At the harbor, Tenn walked in wide circles around their stack of suitcases, checking his watch. The boat to Rapallo was late. He shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun, trying to spot the charter Frank had arranged. “You took your time,” he said, when Frank showed up with a gelato he’d stopped for on the way down the hill. “You’re sure this friend of Luca’s will come through? It’s quarter-past!”

  “If you don’t trust me to get us from one place to the next,” Frank said, “you can look for a new travel agent.”

  “Don’t be sour,” Tenn said. “Not when we’re about to spend hours together in tight conveyances.”

  By way of apology, Frank offered him a lick.

  The mounting anxiety Frank felt had another cause: he was in no hurry to return to Rome. He was eager to see Mr. Moon, of course, and Anna, too, but otherwise, he was going back to a city and a summer plagued with storms. In the months before they escaped to Portofino, the same old argument had come between him and Tenn.

  His name, this time, was Alvaro.

  Frank had met Alvaro last summer, the summer of ’52, and then the heat and the long solitary afternoons of the summer of ’53 drove Frank straight back to him. He’d been tired of skulking around the apartment in hopes Tenn might finish his work early, of the weeks and weeks without so much as a love-smack on the ass from the man who shared his bed. He dreaded the drowsy siesta hours in the centro storico with its sad pulled-down grates and shiftless, starving cats. The sound of radios muffled behind shutters was enough to get him sobbing.

  Alvaro had nothing to his name but hours in the day, and, like most Italians, his greatest talent was passing the time. Frank knew he could always find him in the Piazza dei Monti, and that Alvaro was always happy to be found, sitting on the top step of the fountain with his hands behind his back and his chest puffed out, ready for whatever came along. Alvaro demanded nothing from Frank but orders: drive me to Trastevere on your motorbike (hop on, Signor Merlo!), fetch me a cup of water (here it is, Signor Merlo, nice and cold), put your mouth here (at your pleasure, Signor Merlo). Alvaro had little patience for indecision, for hesitation, for sadness of any sort. A few hours of ordering this agreeable young man around, directing his various forms of attention for hours at a time, stanched Frank’s restlessness. Every few days or so—it was wrong to be greedy, but oh how hun
gry Frank was for Alvaro every day that sultry June and July—he walked the few blocks to the Monti, locked eyes with him, ticked his head in the direction of the bar at the corner of the Piazza and Via dei Serpenti, and watched him bid a hasty goodbye to his friends for an afternoon and evening of Il Duce, Signor Merlo.

  Frank returned from these episodes satisfied, temporarily well braced for the empty days ahead in the apartment, and grateful rather than desperate for whatever crumbs Tenn let fall from his plate. When Tenn seemed open to the telling, Frank recounted again for him, as he’d done after his first meeting with Alvaro the year before, all the particulars of the boy’s puppy-like obedience and excitability, the dirt under his nails, his soft hairy belly. Tenn liked most to hear the ways in which Alvaro resembled Frank, and so these were the details Frank emphasized. When Tenn did not seem open to the telling, or Frank sensed he was spoiling for a fight, or that, in that moment, he was craving tenderness over titillation, he’d improvise a story about Alvaro spurning him or not showing up at all. To account for the missing hours, he’d describe a sightseeing trip that never happened or a nap on the beach he never took. Whether Tenn believed him or not didn’t matter; they’d embrace and make love or head to Tre Scalini for a bite or the cinema for a late movie.

  Most often that summer, though, Frank returned to the apartment to find Tenn in their bed with some skinny and bruised piece of trade he’d plucked from Via Nazionale out of loneliness and revenge. Then the storm would come. Tenn called Alvaro a filthy hustler, “the lowest scrap of trash on the heap,” to which Frank pointed to the terrified trick at that very moment ransacking the sheets in search of his underwear. “Does this one even speak English?” Frank shouted. “Did you even ask his name?”

  Tenn: Giovanni!

  Frank: They’re all Giovannis!

  Tenn: Same as your Alvaro!

  Frank: His family comes from the village of Sant’Angelo! Fifty miles from mine! He likes strawberry gelato! His mother is blind in one eye!

  Tenn (throwing up his hands): The gallantry! The propriety! Such fine young gentlemen they are, too noble for the likes of me!

  Frank: Every day I come for you first thing—you, Tenn! Not him! I come on my tiptoes so I don’t disturb you, hoping, telling myself, maybe it’s one of his good days. And what do I find? Tenn’s in bad shape again. Drunk or sad or both. Every day since we got here. Needs something he can’t tell me, I just know I don’t have it, he doesn’t even want it from me. So yes, I go find Alvaro. Isn’t that what we’ve always done? And don’t I make sure you’re OK before I leave? Don’t I kiss you on my way out the door?

  Tenn: Just before you slam it shut!

  Frank: Just after I check your pill bottles!

  Tenn: Well, I’m tired of being treated like a stupid, unsatisfactory whore by the Bubu de Montparnasse!

  Books thrown across the room. A table overturned. The neighbor banging her broom handle on the wall. A shattered vase. Silence so thick it choked the throat. The click of the bedroom doors, shut but not locked, in case forgiveness came early. Angry, fitful sleep. Dreams rueful and tender. Curtain. No applause.

  In the morning, they basked in forgiveness. When done right, forgiveness costs a fortune. When it came to forgiveness, he and Tenn spent flamboyantly after every argument. To Frank’s mind, their forgiveness for each other was a stockpile of gold coins in trunks in an endless vault. They’d spent nearly all of it those first two months of summer in Rome, before Portofino, and still it replenished itself, earning interest with every peaceful day that followed. With every declaration of forgiveness came a promise to behave more kindly, to give more thought to the feelings of the other, to remember they were lucky to be immune from the troublesome things that beleaguered most men—money, children, women—but not from jealousy. Didn’t they used to know that? When did they forget?

  It was in these moments, in the glow of a forgiveness morning, with the sopranos at the Opera below the apartment serenading them with their practice arias, their voices floating up to them like wishes, that Frank came closest to declaring his love for Tenn. The most he could offer, though, in the light of all that had been said, was forgiveness. It lasted a few hours, a day at most, and then the drama went up again: same lines, same props, same thunderous climax. The run lasted weeks, Alvaro growing more tan, more fond, Frank greedier, wilder, itchier, Tenn less open to the telling.

  One morning in early July, Tenn told Frank, “I’ve booked a trip to Barcelona.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Incredible as it seems to you, I am quite capable of applying for my own passage.”

  “You’re going alone, I mean.”

  “Meglio solo che mal accompagnato” was his response, and with that he was gone.

  It was not better for Frank to be alone, he found, those three long weeks Tenn spent in Spain. With Alvaro all to himself, he was at first ravenous with him, but then quickly Frank grew distracted and, finally, cruel. A going-nowhere boy, Frank called him. A waste of his time and money. Alvaro raised his arm to hit him. He spit at Frank’s feet instead. His eyes were not angry, but afraid. Despondent. Betrayed. “Coward!” Frank shouted back, as Alvaro took off down the dark narrow street. Frank had demanded to be taken there and for Alvaro to kneel before him out in the open, but even this scene made him tired. He could only play the dictator for so long. It was not in his nature.

  With all the time in the world, the entire apartment his playground, Frank did little but sleep and read novels and scribble the occasional postcard. He typed half a letter to a talent agent back in New York, then tore it up. There was no agent, no one in show business in the States, who wouldn’t somehow, eventually, sniff out his affiliation with Tenn, and Frank was still young enough to think that a self-made man was the only kind worth being. Could it be that hard to make one’s self out of one’s self? Generations of American men, weaker than he, with less charm and drive, had done it, why not him? In the meantime, he stood at the open window and sang along with the sopranos. Carmen. This, too, got the neighbor’s broom.

  If Frank couldn’t be trampled, if he couldn’t make himself into something quite yet, he at least wanted to be useful to Tenn, as he’d always promised to be. So he arranged for Paul and Ahmed to meet Tenn in Barcelona, and then for the three of them to travel to Rome, and while all that was happening it was he who talked to the landlord about airing out the apartment at the end of the hallway for Paul and Ahmed to rent. It was Frank who plumped the pillows in their rooms and swept the terrace where Paul would work on the Senso script. When Tenn finally returned from Spain, that last week of July, he carried two armfuls of forgiveness, and what a lovely mess it was, the rose petals and the gold coins falling from him as he crossed the threshold, Paul and Ahmed behind him in the doorway like bridesmaids.

  Tenn came back light from Barcelona. He’d left the blue devils behind, he said, and when he was free of them there was always the chance, however remote, that they’d never find their way back to him. Before Tenn, Frank had never heard of the blue devils. He’d had the blues, of course, which hung around for a while like rain clouds, but the sun always burned them off quick and he’d turn back to his old gay self. Tenn’s blue devils were like wildcats, he said, who lived under his skin. And when you have wildcats living under your skin, they can wake at any moment, day or night, and make you shake and shudder and cry out and weep. The pills put them to sleep but never for long. They clawed and howled again without warning. Frank was one of the few who could tell when they’d awoken. He’d catch a glimpse of Tenn at a party, laughing or clinking his glass, carefree to the room of naked eyes, but there were the little paws scratching at his face, there was the anguished mewing. Frank would cross the room to stand beside him, put his arm around his waist. It helped, Tenn had told him, to have a Horse to hold him up under that ungainly weight.

  In those three weeks in Barcelona, away from Frank, Tenn had add
ed some pages to Battle of Angels. He’d watched a bullfight. He’d swum and eaten paella and spoken French. Franz Neuner, “the sexual impresario of Barcelona,” according to Bowles, had procured some entertainment for him. Through it all, Tenn said, he’d been lonelier without his Frankie than he’d been with him, the kind of loneliness achievable and recognizable only by a separation. Mal accompagnato, it turned out, might not have been so bad. “What a sorry companion I make for anyone young and alive,” Tenn had scrawled to Frank on a postcard. When it arrived, the day after his return, Frank took a match to it. He had no use for the words of the blue devils.

  On the drive up to Portofino, Frank’s head nuzzled in his lap, Tenn told him stories and they laughed for the first time in months. (He’d left the bullfight midway through, he admitted, because he was deeply offended by the spectacle. “It wasn’t the cruelty to the bulls that was so hard to swallow”—he began to laugh then, and the ease of it, its anticipatory delight, its catlessness, got Frank laughing too—“It was the roly-poly matadors! You don’t sit out in the heat, choking on the stench of bull blood, to look at pudgy figures bending and twisting.”) All the way through Tuscany and into Liguria, Frank slept off and on, waking always to his voice. This was how it had been for years. This is how it could keep being.

  And now they were going back to Rome. The boat to Rapallo was late, but here it came, rounding the harbor and headed toward them, a glorified canoe helmed by a skeletal shirtless man well into his seventies.

  “This old hat rack is Luca’s cousin?” Tenn asked.

  “He might have said uncle.”

  “Or nonno.”

  The old man waved them over to the launch. “You can fit all this?” Frank said to him, gesturing at their stacks of luggage.

  “No problem!” he said brightly, smiling with his clapped hands and his missing front teeth. He proceeded to open various secret compartments in the hull, tuck the bags in at expert angles, and somehow the little boat swallowed every one of them with room to spare. “Allora!” he said, when he slammed the doors shut.