Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  Q: “Don’t you miss working?”

  A: No.

  Q: “How do you just let it all go?”

  A: Pride.

  Q: “You must be happier now than you were then?”

  A: Yes.

  Q: “Tell me something about it you miss.”

  A: Him.

  Q: “Don’t you miss working?”

  A: Yes.

  Q: “How do you just let it all go?”

  A: Fear.

  Q: “You must be happier now than you were then?”

  A: No.

  Q: “Tell me something about it you miss.”

  A: Him.

  Q: “Don’t you miss working?”

  A: You make the mistake—everyone does—of concluding that the project of laziness on which I have recently embarked is not a form of work, to assume that if I am not acting I must be in a state of rot. I admit that I am no good at laziness. I have been an American too long, suspicious of indolence and directionless dreaming. That is why I will soon leave the country, as you know. That is why this city hates me—not for my fadedness, but for my wasted potential. Before I leave, though, I have a great deal of unlearning to do. To be successfully lazy you must be satisfied with what you already know and what you will never know. I am training myself to sit at my window in the company of the tulips, one more flower in the row, in full acceptance of my relative beauty and uselessness. My finishedness. It is excruciating. I cannot stop myself from considering my so-called contributions to the art; from assessing my capacity to reemerge; and, in my weakest moments, from looking back with syrupy fondness on my accolades and reviews and fans. It would be a triumph, I think, to achieve acceptance, to empty myself of myself without the convenience of death. I wonder if anyone has ever done it. I want to be the first.

  Q: “How do you just let it all go?”

  A: You buy two $2,500 tickets and fly to Los Angeles for a charity production of Love Letters starring a seventy-five-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. She has not done a play in twenty-three years, but this one is for AIDS, so she has made an exception. They wheel her onto the stage in a frock the color of cantaloupe and a gray chinchilla coat. The other ticket is for Scott, your new manager, whose lover died at forty from the disease and who bursts into tears when he sees Dame Liz in the flesh. Her earrings are so big and gold and heavy they make her head droop. Her back is shot, Scott says; she’s held together with pins and plates; she’s in terrible pain; she’s hopped up on Vicodin. You jump to your feet to applaud her along with Scott and the tuxes and sequined gowns around you. Liz is so decrepit, you wonder if she can speak at all. You keep applauding because you do not want to find out whether or not she can go through with the performance, you hope they call the whole thing off, it has gone far enough, it is cruel to exploit her, a million dollars for AIDS victims or not. The first half is tortuous. Liz is out of tune. She delivers her lines with a cloying screech. You prefer to keep your eyes on James Earl Jones sitting beside her in his dark suit, impassive as a judge, indulging her out of respect. Then, midway through, something changes. Liz recalibrates, settles into the character of Melissa, who is growing old before your eyes. I’m fat, I’m ugly, my hair is horrible! she says, with a poignancy that is somehow both subtle and overwhelming. They’ve put me on all sorts of new drugs, and half the time I don’t make sense at all. It could have become parody, but it does not. Liz rises above Melissa by inhabiting her without irony or self-awareness. At the curtain, she does what you are now certain she has planned to do all along: she rises triumphantly from her metal chair, as if cured by art, and takes a bow. So much for the pins and plates. So much for your misguided pity. She is radiant. Her neck is long, her earrings light as tin. She will save the world. Her talent is far beyond yours. Your own talent may be significant; you have even been compared to her; but you know your place. You will not let yourself be wheeled onto a stage unless you are certain you can stand up and dance across it.

  Q: “You must be happier now than you were then?”

  A: I do not want to insult you by keeping up the fiction that only the young believe happiness can be measured, let alone compared. Besides, what you really want to know is whether I would trade one time of my life for another, which of course I would. At this moment, I would trade my twenties for my childhood, my teenage years for any decade, my sixties for my forties. (Ask me in the next moment, and my answer will likely be different.) Today and tomorrow, though, my time in this moment, even in this body, I would not trade for anything. I suspect you boys feel the same. Pieter, Hovland, Frank, my father—I would not go back to any of them if it meant giving up the gamble of these last days or months or years of life. It would be an insult to think that because I am old and afraid of falling, and because I was once a star and a great beauty and a rover who scaled the Barabar caves, and because the only glitter left in my life is buried deep in the fibers of the carpet, and because you hear me say I am working hard to teach myself to become a tulip, that I have no faith in the brightness of my future.

  Q: “Tell me something about it you miss.”

  A: You think I deserve a love story. This is the best I can do.

  He came for someone else, but I was the one he chose. They are different things: being loved and being chosen. Being chosen is the more powerful drug. It enslaves you. And what you miss when it ends is not the man who did the choosing, but that rush of having been seen by him, and then plucked from the weeds, and then gathered up and hoarded and, yes, owned by him. These desires are out of fashion, but that does not make them any less true. I am sorry to speak in generalities. I am not trying to be elliptical. I am trying to tell you, in case you do not already know, that you will be loved by many men but chosen by only a few, and that knowing the difference will save you from making a fool of yourself. Pieter loved me. Frank loved me. My father loved me. You love me a little, in your own way. You should see yourselves, hanging on my words. Your wine is going warm. You see me not as I am, but through a prism of projections. It pleases me to be loved; it makes me what you call “happy” to act the part of the loved one for you, which is what I did for them—Pieter and Frank and Tenn and my father, even Sandro and Jack—for all those years. Hovland, though, was the only one who saw me clearly, the only one who saw clear through me, which is why he chose me, and also why he could not love me. I never acted for Hovland. Not once. Not even the night we met, when he came looking for someone else. I did not have to, once he chose me. What you see of me on screen is what I see when I look at myself in the mirror; all Hovland did was turn his camera into a mirror.

  “You don’t miss seeing yourself, then?” Trevor asks her, interrupting. “I’d miss that for sure. I know Fabio here would.” They both laugh.

  “Me? This guy can’t walk by a mirror without making love to it,” Sandrino says.

  “And this guy’s bathroom looks like a Sephora exploded,” says Trevor. “I didn’t know a person could need more than one type of blow dryer.”

  Sandrino makes a show of grabbing a fistful of his abundant hair, pulling it above his head, and then letting it fall back into place exactly as it was. “This does not happen by accident,” he says.

  The boys keep her later and later with their back-and-forth. Or she keeps them. It is hard to say. Each week, as the bar thins out, and she finally convinces them that she absolutely must go, playing the part of the old lady (I need my sleep!), they walk her home, one on each side of her, to make sure the city causes her no harm. Their first Mondays in the wine bar, she was back long before the fountain shut off. She had plenty of time to sit in the fading light waiting for that up-sweeping westerly breeze, the tickle of spray on her skin a half-tender, half-vulgar violation. Now it is long past dark by the time they reach the top of her hill, and the fountain is still, and the sprinklers are churning away at their low work, and televisions have turned most of the windows in the square blue. She stands on
the little stone path outside her door between the two tall boys, tired of talking and of refusing, again and again, their (Trevor’s) requests to see the manuscript she should have destroyed years ago.

  “You want to get rid of it?” asks Sandrino.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “You don’t want anyone but yourself to possess a copy of it?”

  “Correct.”

  “But to just throw it in the fire, that would be—”

  “Sacrilege,” says Trevor. “Blasphemy. A crime.”

  “Stai calma,” says Sandrino, patting him on the back.

  “A mercy,” says Anja.

  “OK,” says Sandrino. “We must show you respect. It is your wish. Your property.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “But I’m sure you agree we must also show respect to Tennessee Williams. Unless I am mistaken, he did not give you permission to destroy his work. What do you say we call him and ask him, in a way that is proper? Give him a chance to say goodbye?”

  “This is your fancy talking again,” says Anja.

  Sandrino usually drinks one or two glasses of wine, but tonight, by her count, he refilled his glass four times. He has been more nervous lately, less forthcoming, less joyful, which Anja has attributed to his plans to spend the month of August in Italy. Does he fear losing Trevor to a summer fling? Does someone wait for him in Livorno, other than the ghosts of his father and mother? Will he miss her? She stops her own thoughts. Television questions! She is spending too much time in the company of these young romantic men. She should know better, how easily a mind and heart can be corrupted.

  “What are you smiling at?” Trevor asks her.

  “What I propose is a séance,” Sandrino is saying. “Not now, not tonight. We need to plan to do it the correct way. Next Monday, instead of the wine bar.”

  “It’s his idea,” says Trevor.

  “I did it before,” says Sandrino. “Back home, with my fidanzata. I helped her believe.”

  “He never misses an opportunity to mention his ex-girlfriends,” Trevor says. “Was this the one with the big feet or the one with all the birds?”

  Sandrino ignores him, for once, mesmerized by his own diversion. “Here is how it is accomplished: we light many candles. We put a photograph of Tennessee Williams into a gold frame. We hold hands around a circle, with Call It Joy in the middle. We sprinkle flower petals on top maybe, but those are just for show. We have already something that he touched: the pages. Are they typed or did he write them with a pen? By pen is better. And, of course, we have you there, his friend from when he was living. He will want to talk to you again, yes? You made your peace with him the last time you saw him, in New York?”

  “I suppose I did,” says Anja.

  “Good. We will ask him for his permission to read the manuscript. This will make you more calm, Anja. Less feelings of guilt. And when he gives it to us—how could he say no to us? We are his type, you said! Young and handsome! Ha ha!—we read the pages out loud together, each taking a part, with him there with us in the room, like a director. It will be beautiful.”

  “This is the best idea ever,” Trevor says.

  They both go quiet awaiting Anja’s reaction. Purposefully, she drags out the suspense by looking over at the heavy-set man walking his miniature dog around the perimeter of the park. The man has stopped to monitor the suspicious scene of two tall men having cornered that old lady who never speaks to anyone. Didn’t she used to have a natty old man with her to complete the pair? What became of him? The heavy-set man lives directly across the square from her. It is not a place where neighbors seek each other out as friends; it is a place where they make sure they know every owner’s face but rarely acknowledge each other beyond a prim “good morning,” where they engage each other only when there is a disturbance to the natural order: a concert in the park, a lost cat, a late-night invasion of tall interlopers on the stoop. Anja nods and smiles at the man, an all-clear.

  “We burn the pages after we read them?” she asks Sandrino.

  “Yes,” he says. “That way, we receive them, but we do not preserve them.”

  “Unless you change your mind, of course, and you want to keep them,” Trevor offers.

  “Must they be special candles or will any cylindrical wax product suffice?” asks Anja, with mock seriousness. “I have some old birthday candles in a drawer. Shall I wear a veil?”

  Sandrino narrows his eyes. “Are you making me a joke?” He is standing in her shadow, but she can still see the hurt on his face.

  “Oh Sandrino,” she says, “you really believe all this?” She touches his elbow. “Because it sounds to me like a stunt the two of you have cooked up.”

  “I’m not so talented an actor,” Sandrino says. He ticks his head at his friend. “Him yes, but not me. Besides, I would not ‘cook up’ a stunt against you. I would not do anything to go against you.”

  “Then tell me,” she says, her hand squeezing his arm. “Before I fall asleep here standing up. I would like to understand why my friend the neuroscientist believes there is a path from the material world to the spirit world.” She will enjoy the music of his explanation. She wants back the boyish fervor that, just moments ago, returned the color and joy to his face. She wants him to be sweet on her again.

  “I grew up believing,” Sandrino says. “From the time I was a very young child. My nonna was always seeing people who were not there. To her, it was no fuss. They gave a kind of—fullness—to her life. For her, I pretended I saw them, too, because in her little room at the top of the stairs I felt—maybe it is your word—chosen by her, but if that is not what you mean by that word, then blessed is what I felt. Strong, at least, more strong than my sister or anybody else in the house, because I was her favorite. I hoped that one day I could stop pretending. I kept looking and listening for the people in the empty hallways. And then finally, I was ten years old, and in her bedroom I heard a voice that was not hers, except I was looking straight at her face. ‘Is that your sister?’ I asked; somehow I recognized her, even though she died before I was born; and she said yes, that is your Zia Carmela, and my nonna went back to her sewing like it happened to us every day. I was so happy! That one voice, a real voice, was all I needed to be convinced. It didn’t make me afraid. No, I became less afraid of everything. Not so lonely anymore. More patient. More grown-up. And so, when the time came, that is why I picked neuroscience to study, to see if it could convince me why I should not believe anymore. Could the university scientists tell me my nonna and I were wrong? That we did not hear Zia Carmela say, clear as you are hearing me now, E ora, dimmi tutto? And so far, nothing I read in my courses tells me it is impossible that some fragment of our consciousness cannot continue after our flesh and bones rot away. And if the fragment can continue, there is no reason we cannot see it, hear it, feel it, or somehow communicate with it. The survival hypothesis, it is called. To me it is more than hypothesis. It is what I believe.”

  Later, on this cool May night, now Tuesday morning, Anja lies on the bench beside her window unable to sleep. She is in no way surprised that Sandrino and his poor demented nonna insisted on believing that some part of their dead floated among them, that they were desperately fighting their way back to them through the loud material muck. It also does not surprise her that he had not mentioned his belief in the survival hypothesis until now, that it took the guzzling of nearly an entire bottle of Sancerre for him to summon the courage to admit something so fantastic to a friend seemingly devoid of sentiment. Artist or not, Anja is still the partner of one of the more prominent quantum astronomers. Was.

  She remembers the parties in Rome, Lugano, and San Remo, how they kept going and going, how they carried her from glittering room to glittering room beyond the hours she wanted to stay, how the Italians could never let you go, the words “good night” a lament, an apology, an admission of defeat. Buo
na notte, buona notte, she would mutter, her head bowed in shame, pushing her way through the door. No wonder Sandrino believes we do not end, that the party will always go on.

  She calls him at his apartment the next day. He is surprised, and happy, to hear from her. She never calls him unless her annoyance at his lateness has turned to concern. She hears Trevor’s voice in the background. She tells Sandrino that she has given his idea more thought and that, grudgingly, she will go along with it. “Monday is a holiday, though,” she reminds him. “Memorial Day. There will be children and violins in the square. It will be loud.”

  “Memorial Day!” he says, delighted by the fittingness of the word. He seeks Trevor’s advice about the noise. A little violin music will fit the mood nicely, they decide together, but the children will not. “By dark they will be gone, no?” he asks. “For the séance it must be dark dark dark. No light at all except the light we bring. Even better if we start at the hour of midnight.”

  “Sandrino—”

  “I’m sorry, you’re right. Not midnight. I act silly. We will come at eight o’clock—we will not be late, I promise—and by the time we arrange all the pieces, the children will be gone to bed. Thank you for opening your house to us. We will bring wine and some food. Your only part to play is to unlock the door and produce for us the pages.”

  “I want to be clear,” Anja says. “I am not a believer. I think of this night as my gift to you. To you, Sandrino, for your friendship, which has brought some joy to this year, to this city. I hope you will not ask more from me than that.”