Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  TENN

  I don’t understand. Are you on dope? Where are my pills?

  FRANK

  I don’t take pills. Clean living.

  TENN

  What kind of monster are you? I’m an old man. I’m sick. You could have killed me. Why did you do this?

  (sorrowfully, a wail)

  Why didn’t you just kill me?

  FRANK

  (He stares down at him for a long moment, conveying a pity not unlike compassion. His hands again on his hips, he shakes his head.)

  Tennessee Williams!

  (He jogs across the stage, into the bar and through the saloon doors)

  TENN

  (clambering to his feet and standing at the edge of the bedroom, calling out again)

  Why did you do this to me? Tell me!

  FRANK

  (from offstage)

  Ask Gisele!

  (At the sound of her name, Gisele lifts her head for a moment before going back to her reading. Tenn—confused, agitated—hastily puts on his clothes from the night before, which are in a pile on the floor beside the bed. He grabs the pill bottles on the nightstand, opens them and shakes them. They are all empty. He throws them to the floor. He fishes out Rafe’s pills from his pants pocket and swallows them dry before hurrying into the bar. When he sees Gisele at the bar, he stops.)

  GISELE

  (mischievously)

  You got my present.

  TENN

  A hustler? That’s what you call a present?

  GISELE

  He’s not a hustler. He’s a friend of Rafe’s from Miami. His name is Angelo. He came in a few weeks ago for the first time. You were in New York, I think, or maybe Chicago. I’ve been keeping a close eye on you, Tenn. Since Frank, and since Teddy moved away, I’ve been trying to get to you. To reach you. But I don’t have those powers anymore. When I saw this man, Angelo, I did a double take. I thought, oh, there’s the Horse, he’s here to dance. Simple as that, like it was 1955. I couldn’t take my eyes off the man. Put him in Frank’s clothes, I thought, slick back his hair, he’s his exact copy. I showed him and Rafe photos of him. I have so many photos of the four of us—what will I do with them? I talked to the kid all night. He’s a dancer who wants to act, just like Frank was. He got that dreamy look about the movies the way Frank used to. He has that same sweetness, that intuition. He’s nothing like Frank when he talks, but when he’s just standing there? He took my breath away.

  TENN

  So you thought it would be a good idea to whore him out to me?

  GISELE

  I wanted to give you some joy. Did it work?

  TENN

  (looks over, dreamily, at the bed)

  It did. And it did not. I knew and I did not. But even when I knew, it didn’t matter. I was in Frankie’s arms again.

  (a beat)

  Can you call that joy?

  GISELE

  Yes, I think you can. A writer can live on illusions. They can be enough. I might be a writer, too.

  TENN

  He told me he loved me. He said it, plain as day. Like it came easy. “I love you, Tenn.” That’s when I knew for sure it wasn’t Frank. There’s your illusion: the words, not the body.

  GISELE

  I don’t understand.

  TENN

  You don’t understand because you are not aware that Frankie Merlo never once in our fifteen years together said those words to me. He wasn’t hoarding them. He wasn’t being miserly. He could have said the words anytime he wanted. “I love you, Tenn.” How easy it would have been! His heart was plenty big enough for love. He told everyone he loved them, everyone but me. Because he was incapable of lying. Frank was many things, but a liar wasn’t one of them.

  GISELE

  You’ve believed that all this time? That Frank didn’t love you? You still believe it?

  TENN

  (dreamily, distractedly)

  You may have helped me after all, Gisele. You’ve given me the idea for a play more melancholy than that one about the old man in the bar. This one stars that same man. He even looks a bit like me. He once was a big name in certain circles. What nobody knows is that he’s lived all his years without once having been loved by another human being. Not his mother, certainly not his father, not a single one of his lovers. They all used him in one way or another. Do you think I’ll get back to Broadway with this one? What shall I call it?

  GISELE

  Frank must have told you a thousand times. You just couldn’t hear him.

  TENN

  Women have slit their wrists for love of you. You have Rafe. You have your brother. How much longer, do you think, will Teddy last? What are you doing here with me, with these queens, when you should be with him? I’ve never had anyone. Only illusions. You’ve kindly reminded me of that.

  (walks toward the door)

  I’ll find Teddy the best doctor in the country. He’ll be well taken care of. Treated like a prince. Then I’m going to Bangkok, and I promise you this, I’m never coming back.

  CURTAIN

  * * *

  • • •

  “WOW,” SAYS TREVOR, after he delivers the play’s final line. He sits back against the sofa, still holding the page in his hand. “It’s even worse than you said.”

  A throbbing at Anja’s temples has replaced the pot’s gentle woolliness. At the end of Scene One, she excused herself to drink a large glass of water and swallow three aspirin and check her face in the bathroom mirror. She applied some light makeup, a bit of tightening cream under her eyes, and pinned up her hair in case she grew queasier than she already was. When she returned, she found the boys kissing passionately at the end of the sofa, Sandrino’s hand on the back of Trevor’s head smashing his face harder into his own. “Method acting?” she joked.

  The mood is darker now, the square empty and quiet except for the hiss of the fountain.

  “I kept waiting to feel something,” Trevor says. “For the first few pages, I almost did, but then, as it went on and on, I just wanted the guy to shut up and die already. The whole thing was so self-indulgent.” He looks to Anja for approval, but all she is willing to give him at this moment is a blank stare.

  “He writes on the front page, ‘first draft,’” says Sandrino. “He would have made it better.”

  “Think about somebody seeing this play in fifty years,” Trevor continues. “By then, no one will know the name Tennessee Williams. For a work of literature to be great, it has to be timeless. You don’t need a history lesson to understand Blanche DuBois or Maggie the Cat. They just are. Everything you need to know about them’s in the script.” He folds his arms petulantly, his face miserable, as if personally aggrieved.

  “Why did you expect any different,” says Anja, “when I told you I had read it?”

  He looks at her sheepishly. “I thought you were hiding something—”

  “—Even though I told him you would not do that,” Sandrino cuts in.

  “I might do that,” Anja says. “But not in this case.”

  “All right,” says Trevor, “so I had these fantasies that we’d put on this great never-before-seen play together.”

  Finally, thinks Anja, he admits what she has known all along.

  “I don’t mean I’d be in it or anything,” he goes on, “but that me and Sandro, we’d drive you around places, be like your secretaries. And all these people would come to see it, and be crying at the end. And when you won a Tony for producing it or directing it or even starring in it or whatever, you’d thank us in your acceptance speech. I know it’s stupid, but that’s what I was expecting.”

  “That was very childish of you,” Anja says.

  “What can I say? I’m a child.”

  “I am curious,” says Anja. “Why is it not enough for you
that here on these pieces of paper, disintegrating before our eyes, are the words of a writer you claim to revere, words only you and three other people in the world have had the privilege to read? Words that could very well constitute the last play Tennessee Williams ever wrote? Why do you need more than that privilege? My curiosity is sincere.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, of course it’s a huge deal, and I’m super grateful for the privilege, I really am, but—”

  “But it’s more important to you that Anja Bloom says your name at the Tony Awards.”

  “No, that’s not it. That’s not totally fair.” He goes back to his cheap wine, leaving her what’s left of the second bottle of Margaux. “The point is: Is a play still a play if it’s not performed? If only four people have read it, and three of them are sitting here in this apartment? Don’t you think Tennessee Williams would want this play put on no matter what, even with its flaws? OK fine, maybe not put on but, at the very least, turned over to a biographer by now? The fact that you’re hoarding it, that you want to destroy it seems—” He stops himself, shrugs, takes a sip of the wine. “Well, I’m just saying.”

  “Just saying what?” she presses him. “Tell me how it seems to you, my hoarding.”

  “Please don’t,” Sandrino says to Trevor. “We are the guests of my friend.”

  “No, Sandrino,” says Anja. “I would like to know.”

  “It seems selfish,” Trevor says. “Like, really selfish. Like, I mean, I one-hundred-percent agree that the play isn’t great. You were totally right about that. And I’m disappointed, not only because it won’t win any Tonys, but because, I don’t know, I wanted to believe Tennessee Williams made this amazingly beautiful work of art right before he died, that he left the world this one last incredible gift, and that, because you knew him personally, and had this personal history with him, you were too blind to see its true value. And then here comes me and Sandro to open your eyes to it. OK, so that didn’t happen. I’m getting over it as we speak. I’m mourning that little daydream here in real time.” He smiles at her. “But I guess what I’m saying is, just because the play’s kind of crappy is no reason to stuff it in a closet. It’s definitely no reason to destroy it. You’re always saying you like to argue, so tell me, how is that not selfish?”

  Sandrino tries to answer for her, but she stops him.

  “Because I wanted to protect him,” Anja says.

  “From what, embarrassment?”

  She nods.

  “He wrote some pretty bad plays in his time, especially in the seventies. This one’s actually not much worse than the one-acts I saw in Provincetown last fall. Have you ever actually SEEN Something Cloudy, Something Clear? It’s no day at the beach.”

  “I am not referring to Tenn,” she says. “I am referring to Frank.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Frank did love him, whether he said the words or not. I saw the two of them up close. I lived in their little apartment. I knew Frank’s heart. No one should be led to believe otherwise. When I read this play the first time, I imagined what would happen if it was mounted. I did not want people to start digging into Frank’s life, to write articles about him, to bother his family in their grief, to print his picture next to the bad reviews. He did not deserve that. He still does not deserve that. The less attention the world pays to Frank in that way, the better. Let him rest in peace.”

  “Well, it’s way too late for that now,” Trevor says, looking confused. “Have you ever Googled him? It’s not like Frank Merlo’s some big secret.”

  “I am aware of that,” Anja says. Her head is pounding. “I’ve read the books.”

  “Then what about Frank were you trying to protect?”

  With the sweep of her arm she scatters the cursed pages to the floor. “Goddammit!” she says. The suddenness of the act, the force of her anger, the word itself, takes her by surprise. “I wanted Tenn to get him right. To bring Frank back to life just as he was. It was his last chance! When I received the play in New York, twenty years after Frank died, I hoped to find in it the man I knew: his goodness, his love. It was like a child’s love, suffocating, endless. Do you see that in these pages?”

  “To me, at least, it looks like he tried?” offers Sandrino.

  “No,” Anja says. “He did not try. In here there is the double of Frank with his earring and his scar. There is the symbol of Frank with its aromatic roses. There is the memory of Frank, blurred by Tenn’s guilt and Tenn’s longing and Tenn’s desire. Mostly guilt. Instead of the real Frank, there is instead—you are right, Trevor—the real Tennessee, an old man talking and talking about himself, begging us to feel sorry for him, making excuses. But we feel nothing. We just want him to—how did you put it?—shut up and die.” She gathers the pages from the floor and stuffs them back in the envelope. “When I read this thirty years ago, it made me furious. Now I remember why.”

  “So what are you going to do with it?”

  “What we discussed,” she says. She goes to the kitchen and opens and closes drawers. “May I borrow your lighter?”

  “It’s cashed,” Trevor says.

  “What a pity.” She turns to the oven and flicks on the burner. The flames shoot up with a pop and then settle. In the guest bathroom is a metal wastebasket.

  “Can we just talk about this for five more minutes?” asks Trevor. “Will you at least let me try to convince you, now that I’ve read it, to contact his archives? You don’t really have a reason not to, from what I’ve heard. I bet they won’t even do anything with it. They’ll barely know it’s there.”

  “Then it will not matter if they never get it.”

  “But—” Sandrino says, waving his arms in that way Italians do to generate words. “But—it is a piece of history you kill. To erase it, poof!, like it never happened—do you feel you are . . . authorized . . . for that?”

  “He’s right,” says Trevor. “Just because Tenn gave it to you doesn’t mean it’s yours.”

  “He did not just ‘give it to me,’” she argues. “He made it for me. Did you not see my name at the top of the page? But even if he had not, you are both too sophisticated to think that art belongs to the artist. Or have I overestimated you?”

  “I still think you have a responsibility,” Trevor says.

  “To whom?”

  “To history!” Sandrino repeats. “To give history all the evidence. I think of this play like an experiment. It did not go right, but still it should be recorded. If the fruit flies—”

  “I assure you,” says Anja, interrupting. “There is no woman fitting Gisele’s description in all of Key West. Her character is a version of me and—more than that—a vehicle for me. A small vehicle, as it turns out. At the time he wrote this, remember, I drew very big audiences. Tennessee was hoping I would fall in love with Gisele and that I would want to play her, and that people would flock to see me, and it would revive the corpse that was his career.”

  “Ah,” says Trevor, smugly. “But the part was too small for you, so you stuck it in a drawer.”

  “Of course not!” Anja says. “I am not so vain. If it was a great part, I would have taken it, no matter how small it was.”

  She notices the self-satisfaction on Trevor’s face, the doubt on Sandrino’s. She considers, for a moment, as the burner crackles, the veracity of the statement she has just made. She wants to believe she is telling the truth, that her dismissal of the play back in 1983 was on account of Frank, and the merits of the script itself, and not her own ego. Was she so ambitious then? Is she still? The turquoise flames undulate like waves. They watch her, wondering what she will do. Is it possible that she, too, was hoping—then and now—to pull from the manuscript a work of great genius, her own shiny new vehicle? Has she been holding on to it for all these years, neglecting to hand it over to the archives or to some ardent and scrappy young Williams scholar, i
n hopes that one day she might turn it into her own triumph?

  Who’s she kidding, Sandrino tells her, she could draw a big crowd today if she wanted.

  In fact, adds Trevor, she’d draw the biggest audience of her career, because nobody, especially Americans, can resist a comeback. She is not Elizabeth Taylor, Trevor goes on, as she shuts off the burner (she will give them five minutes); she is uniquely herself. There is no one else like her, and there is no one better to put Tenn’s last words about Frank into perspective, to do right by her old friend.

  What a story it would be, they say (this time it is both of them, their eyes wide and dreamy); the great Anja Bloom emerges from seclusion to produce and direct and star in the lost last play of Tennessee Williams. It gives you the chills to imagine, does it not? Yes, it does, they say. Yes, it’s no Streetcar. Yes, Hovland is not here to direct it. Yes, it’s got these warts. The warts are the story.

  “I do not want to ‘come back,’ as you call it, in a story of warts,” says Anja, the spell they are putting on her already breaking. “I do not want to come back at all. What I want—what I have been wanting for years—is to leave this place. It has no hold on me now.”

  “If that were really true,” says Trevor, “you’d already be gone.”

  11.

  ARRANGEMENTS

  Jack Burns was the last person Frank expected to intrude on him in Rome. It was the morning after the Fontanone dinner, and they were all standing around the Via Firenze living room, Frank and Tenn and Anna and Anja and Paul and Ahmed, hands on their hips, deciding how to kill the day. Any other August, they’d have escaped by now to a pensione in Rimini, but, for the foreseeable future, the Senso script was holding Tenn and Paul hostage. Tomorrow, Anna was off to Sicily to visit her family for the Ferragosto holiday, and Anja had an appointment with Hovland—she would not call it a date, but who knew where it would lead?—to see St. Peter’s for the first time. Today was the last time they would all be in town together.

  Tenn insisted that he and Paul had not made enough progress on the script to justify an afternoon of faffing around Rome. Paul countered that not even ditchdiggers worked on Saturdays, and besides, was not the mind like a field, and like a field must not the mind go fallow for periods of time if we were to rely on its continued fertility? Anna and Anja nodded loudly, their first moment of harmony since meeting the night before. Ahmed mentioned the benefits of stretching the mind with kif on its days off, so that when it snapped back it had a different shape, a little wider on one side and longer on the other. Laughing along, Tenn said that, by this point, Paul’s mind was more than sufficiently stretched, and, as for his fertile field, Tenn was happy to let it go fallow, but first it had to produce an edible crop. What’s more, Tenn went on—it was around then that the buzzer sounded with what would be Jack’s telegram—he did not appreciate Paul’s comparison of their heady hours to those of common laborers, or their poetic words to ditches.