“A proper lunch is reason enough to take a break,” said Anna. “The artist and the ditchdigger, neither one can live without food, on that we can agree, no?”
“Followed by a nap, I assume,” replied Tenn.
“Certo,” said Anna. “Very reasonable. In this country, labor is for the morning and for the evening. Daytime is for food and for sleep, and the night is for love.”
“Brava, Signora Magnani!” Paul said.
Frank read the telegram and handed it to Tenn.
SERIOUSLY ILL PROBABLY DONE FOR NEED YOU LV-2324 RIGHT AWAY = JACK B
“You make it sound so orderly,” said Anja. “That’s not how Rome feels on the streets.”
“You have been on the streets?” Anna asked her. She took out a tube of lipstick and applied it as she spoke. “I did not say ‘orderly.’ I have no fetish for orderly. I said reasonable. We Italians are accused of excess, but the reality is that we are the only culture that has perfected the art of moderation.”
“You’ll find St. Peter’s Cathedral a prime example of Italian moderation,” said Tenn to Anja.
Frank stepped into the front hallway to place a call to Livorno. He expected Sandro to answer in a shaking, tearful panic, but instead, after the first ring, it was Jack himself.
“I already gave up on you,” Jack whispered. A Burnsian hello if Frank ever heard one. “How soon can you get here?”
“Are you feeling better?” Frank asked. “You don’t sound too terrible.”
“The shivers have mostly stopped,” he said, though Frank could hear them in his voice. “The double vision’s gone. But something’s still not right. It’s not the DTs. It’s not VD either; I’ve seen enough of both to know. And it’s not just a fever. I’m not the paranoid type. Will you guys come? We have a guest room.”
“What’s Sandro saying?”
“That I should sleep and stay out of the sun and quit drinking. Same old saw. I was in bed all day yesterday and what good did it do. He doesn’t know I wired you. He went for a swim and I snuck out. You have the address. He likes a surprise. He’s fond of you, and Tenn he likes enough. Please say you’ll come, Frank. Come today.”
“Can you get Sandro on the phone?”
“He’s out in the garden,” Jack said. “He’s pissed off at me. He’s got me cooped up like a criminal. Hold on.” There was a sound like a suitcase tumbling down stairs. “Look, I know I’m no peach. You think I’m an ass. I can’t change that. But I’m telling you I need you to come here, that I’m in a bad way. Why don’t you believe me?”
Jack’s desperation fit the telegram but not the man they’d met a week ago in Portofino, the man with no vocabulary for need or self-reproach, whose face was always half turned away from you even when he looked you straight on.
“It’s just that I’m sure you’re not as bad off as you think,” Frank said. “It’s the fever talking. I had a fever so bad once I saw rabbits flying across the room. You should listen to Il Dottore. If he tells you to stay in bed and quit drinking, then maybe—”
“He’s not a real doctor.”
“And we are?” said Frank. “Listen: there must be a hospital nearby. Get a second opinion if it’ll ease your mind.”
“He called another doctor,” Jack said. He lowered his voice again. “He was here yesterday, some quack from the navy base. Asked a bunch of dumb questions, blamed the heat, repeated verbatim every word Sandro said. They’re in cahoots!”
The living room at Via Firenze erupted in laughter. Frank could hear the clinking of glasses and the rattle of the window blinds being pulled up. The hall doorway filled with the afternoon light.
“If you let me talk to Sandro, there’s a good chance Tenn and I could make it over there soon,” said Frank, growing impatient. “He won’t be angry. I promise. You can’t think straight right now, but he can.”
“I’m not seeing flying bunnies,” Jack said. “I’m telling you, it’s not just a fever. They’re plotting something!” The shiver in his voice was more pronounced. “Leave today, please. Not tomorrow. Come see for yourself. Sandro’s very fond of you. Did I give you the address?”
“You did,” said Frank.
“Our backyard is ten steps from the water,” Jack said. “On a clear day, you can see Elba.”
“Exile does look better from a distance,” said Frank, hoping for a laugh.
“He’s coming in,” Jack said, and the line went dead.
Frank stood for a moment in the light, torn by his distaste for Jack and his natural instinct to speed to another man’s—in this case, Sandro’s—rescue. He owed the doctor more than he owed Jack, of course, for tending to them in Portofino. To Jack he owed nothing at all. Was he tricking him? Had Jack truly gone mad and done something to hurt Sandro, and was that why he couldn’t put him on the phone? Marina di Cecina was a three-hour drive—four hours tops—on an August Saturday.
“We have a compromise,” Tenn said, when Frank stepped back into the living room. “Anna’s going to fix lunch for us while Paul and I make some headway on the script. You and Ahmed will smoke a little kif down the hall, and Anja will learn from Chef Magnani how to make an amatriciana. Everybody wins.”
“Not such a good deal for Anna,” said Frank. “You surprise me.” He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her chest. She lay her head back on his shoulder and kissed him many times on the cheek.
“This is not charity,” Anna said. She extended her right arm as if casting a spell. “I am putting you all under my obligation. For the rest of today and tonight, after Tenn and Paul make their headway, we do what Anna says, we go where Anna goes, we sleep when Anna says we sleep. This will be the most expensive lunch of your lifetime.” She broke free of Frank, grabbed Paul’s hand, and pulled him and Tenn across the room into Tenn’s study. “Now get to work!”
Frank followed them. He told Tenn of his conversation with Jack. “He’s even more of a hysteric than we thought” was Tenn’s response, with almost a grudging admiration. “Or he’s just bored. You’re not seriously considering driving all the way out there, are you? Indulging his neuroses?”
“A busman’s holiday is still a holiday,” Frank said, playfully.
“How can a man be so beautiful and so cruel?” Tenn said. He leaned over, kissed him, and looked him in the eyes. “Lucky for me, you don’t mean a word of it.”
“I don’t,” said Frank, as Tenn gathered his papers from his desk. “But it did get me thinking.” He watched Tenn stick a pencil in his mouth and arrange himself at the desk behind the typewriter.
“Thinking about what, baby?”
“How bored I am here. In Rome. With nothing to do.”
“I can’t stop you from saving every writer in distress,” Tenn said, “if it gives you a purpose in life.” He said this absently as he loaded the typewriter with a clean sheet of paper. Behind them on the sofa, Paul scribbled in his notebook pretending not to listen.
Genuine cruelty between lovers was like this: accidental, offhand, overheard. Frank’s confession of boredom, Tenn’s instinctual dismissal, both sharp less in their accuracy than in their casualness. Two men could get used to living with this sort of cruelty as long as there was enough tenderness to blunt it and the nightingales kept singing and they smashed enough vases. If Jack was telling the truth, Frank wouldn’t mind playing nurse for him and Sandro for a little while.
In the kitchen, Anna was up on the step stool in her heels pulling down pots from the cupboards. “I can make my autograph in the dust!” she declared, and directed Anja to wash them. Frank closed the door on the unfolding scene.
“I’d have thought you’d want to stay here with us,” Tenn said to Frank, “for the night at least, before we lose the girls. Anna will not be happy with you.”
“It could be real,” Frank said. “You didn’t hear Jack on the phone. You wouldn’t ha
ve recognized his voice. Sandro could be a monster for all we know. A week ago they were strangers. If something happened, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind,” Tenn said. He handed Paul the page he’d been typing and then sat back with his arms crossed in thought. “It’s fine with me, Frankie. The mystery has sought you out, and now you must solve it. I won’t need the car. Will you take Mr. Moon? Let him run on the beach?”
“I had the same idea,” Frank said.
“Keep your bag packed,” Paul interrupted. “Visconti waits for no man.”
Frank’s entire body flushed warm. He looked over at the back of Tenn’s head. “What do I care about Visconti?”
“He didn’t run it by you?” Paul asked.
“Run what by me?”
Tenn was still focused on the page he was typing. Without turning his head, he said, “It’s up to the great director, not to me. He still has to approve.” When he finally looked up at Frank, pencil dangling from his mouth, his hair a mess of curls from Anna’s tousling, on his face was a mischievous joy. “I didn’t want you to get your hopes up, baby,” he said.
“So—you really wrote me in? An actual part? You found a way?” Frank asked. If he asked enough versions of the question, he might get the answer he wanted. He took a step toward Tenn, about to pounce, then steadied himself. “In all the commotion with Anja, I thought you forgot.”
“It’s not Hamlet,” Paul said. “It’s just a—”
“I don’t want to know!” Frank interrupted, his hands in the air, trying and failing to tame the grin that had run wild all over his face. “Don’t tell me one single thing about it until we hear from Visconti.”
“He’s not an easy man to please,” said Paul. “Visconti, I mean.”
“Listen to Paul,” said Tenn.
“I’ll leave the telegram in the hall,” Frank said, half listening. “It has Jack’s number on it. If Visconti wants me, you call me there, and I’ll jump in the car and rush back, I don’t care if Jack’s gasping for his last breath, I’ll come.”
“Please, Frankie,” said Tenn. “Try not to dwell on it. There’s a reason I didn’t tell you. Your heart—it breaks so easily.”
“This heart?” He beat his chest like a gorilla. “This heart is stronger than you think!” He cranked open the window and belted out Puccini—“Un bel dì, vedremo / levarsi un fil di fumo / sull’estremo confin del mare—Take that, sopranos!”
“Lucky for you this part requires no singing,” said Paul.
Frank reached over and goosed Paul so hard his notebook and pen went flying. Then he sat beside him on the sofa and watched them both at work—the back of Tenn’s head bobbing as he pounded the keys, Paul’s eyelids fluttering to stay awake. He allowed himself to imagine putting on the blue jacket of a Risorgimento soldier and clasping the wide gold belt across it. He stood tall beside his brothers-in-arms and summoned his pride for his country. Then he transformed into a hungry peasant, his undershirt torn at the seams, dirt smeared across his chest. Then he was a carriage driver, then an angry idiot on a bike for a moment of comic relief, then the brother of Alida Valli come back on a horse to save her.
Could he wait another second for Visconti’s call?
Could he learn to ride a horse?
“In every other circumstance, your heavy breathing would excite me,” said Tenn, swiveling around in his chair. He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. “But in this case, it’s just distracting. Why don’t you go find Ahmed before you go? You drive better a little high.”
For the few days, at most, that Frank planned to stay in Livorno, he needed only his bathing suit, a couple linen shirts, a pair of pants for the evenings, and the loafers already on his feet. From the nightstand, he grabbed the book he’d been reading on the French Revolution and stuffed it into his valise along with his shaving bag, a half-empty bottle of Vitalis, and biscuits for Mr. Moon. On a whim, he slipped a deck of Italian playing cards into the front pocket.
“What is that nonsense?” said Anna, when she saw him carry the valise into the hallway. When he explained, she said, of course, if someone is sick you must go to him right away, immediately, just as soon as you have a lunch of pasta and day-old bread and a nap afterward so that you can stay awake for the drive, and also after the last night in Rome of your best friend Anna who loves you and needs you probably more than this Jack Burns she hears is not such a good guy anyway.
Of course he would not miss Anja’s first amatriciana, he told her. But after that, while they took naps, he’d drive to Livorno, and with any luck he’d be back in the next day or two for the leftovers.
“Anna taught me her secret,” said Anja. She looked as comfortable in her sauce-splattered apron as Frank would look in an evening gown. Her hair was pulled back the way it was the night he met her, though the heat and the steam and the sweat on her temples had made it unruly.
“Let me guess,” said Frank. “Her secret is love. That’s what every Italian lady says—my mother, my zia—when you ask her what makes her sauce so good, she says, ‘it’s the love.’”
The women looked at each other and laughed, allies at last.
“Not quite,” Anna said. “We tell you love because we know it’s what you want to hear.”
“It’s the anger,” said Anja.
* * *
• • •
AFTER FUMBLING WITH THE MAP led to a few wrong turns, Frank eventually found the bungalow on Via Baldissera, a paved road that ended in the sand of the Ligurian Sea. If he drove any farther, he’d crash into a beached fishing boat and a scatter of families with small children watching the sunset from chairs and blankets.
He parked the Jaguar in the dirt on the side of a modest villino with a wraparound balcony and carried his bag and a bouquet of flowers to the front door. He knocked, got no answer, knocked louder. The door, unlocked, led directly to a sitting room that looked more abandoned than empty: a white leather sofa, ashtrays and magazines and books on a coffee table, a wet towel thrown over a wooden chair. He stepped in. The air was stale and close. Mr. Moon howled and pulled him back toward the street.
He followed a path of mismatched flagstones that ran the length of the far side of the house. When he reached the backyard, he found Jack in what appeared to be a ladies’ wide-brimmed hat squatting among the flowers in the garden, pulling weeds, looking as healthy and pink and perturbed as they’d left him in Portofino. Off to the side under a pergola in a folding chair sat Sandro reading the Corriere della Sera.
The bouquet seemed silly in Frank’s hand, not only because of the explosion of colorful flowers Jack was already tending to but because he was clearly too healthy to have earned them. The washed-up American author was dressed for a summer evening promenade: tan linen pants a few inches too short above the ankle, a blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a checkered scarf tied around his neck, all of which failed to cover or hide the only visible evidence of illness, which was that his entire body had been burnt lobster red.
If I leave first thing in the morning, Frank thought, I can catch Anna before she leaves for Sicily.
“Is this what you call a deathbed?” Frank asked.
Sandro looked up, tossed the paper on the table and, arms out, rushed to him, his face a cartoon of joyful surprise. He’d also spent too much time in the sun, but it had only turned him a darker shade of brown. He hugged Frank tightly and then kissed him hard on the lips as he held his face in his hands. “You are bread falling from the sky,” he said, “and we are starving!”
Jack stood, creakily, and steadied himself on the large palm tree that shaded them all. There was an empty tumbler on the ground behind the tree, half hidden by a leaf.
In a flurry, Sandro explained that Villino Brunella belonged to his family, who lived a few miles away. He and Jack chose this place over thei
r own private pensione in Ischia to save money, which turned out to be a very good idea after the surprise expense of Portofino, and because they could stay as long as they wanted, and because Sandro had been raised not far from here and was familiar with the region. The help used to stay in Villino Brunella, but now they were the help, Sandro joked, they were the poor relations in need of shelter from the fierceness of the August sun. “Look at what it did to my Jack,” he said. “This is why we hide back here under the trees and the grapes.”
“You’re not angry that Jack invited me?” Frank asked.
“What angry? Now we can celebrate that he is feeling better. We had a big little scare.”
Jack walked slowly over to Frank, wiping his hand on his pants, and held it out for him to shake. It felt both clammy and hot at the same time. “Really great of you to come,” he said.
“Doesn’t he look good?” Sandro asked. He was on the ground now with Mr. Moon, rubbing him expertly under his neck, which sent the dog into an ecstatic stupor. “If you saw this man two nights ago you would scream the way I screamed, so loud it waked the neighbor. But every day he gets a little bit better, and this afternoon he is able to work on the weeds after a good long rest. The red skin burn is not so good but I tell him he glows like an Indian and I am the cowboy. And here you are, another cowboy for us to play western with. Will you have a drink? Do you want to watch the sunset? How long can you stay? Where is Tenn? The extra room is already made up for Marika but she stays at my mother’s house with Lucky so Jack can sleep. No guests come except my mother. She sleeps on top of the covers but otherwise the bed has not been used.”
Leading Men Page 23
