Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  He sat up against the headboard, sweating through his T-shirt, stinking from the beach and the hospital and the drive and the swampy Roman streets. The muscle and bone drained from his legs, leaving them hollow and tingling. He considered driving back to the edge of the city to stay in a hotel with one of the girls. He considered waking Paul and Ahmed, but his pride didn’t allow him to seek their help, and besides, what would he tell them? The blue devils have finally come for me? A man I hardly knew died before my eyes, and now I can’t sleep? That was the entire story, and yet it was not the half of it. If only that shadow in the open doorway was Tenn crossing the room to throw his body on top of his in protection. If only that distant click was his key in the lock. Only then would Frank be safe.

  He opened the top drawer of Tenn’s dresser and thumbed through his pill bottles until he found the pinkies. If the pinkies could chase Tenn’s blue devils away, they might do the same for his. He gulped one down and then, when it had no immediate effect, swallowed another. He stood there a moment, regarding himself in the mirror, waiting. The wildcat did not budge from his throat. He couldn’t brave returning to the bed, where the terror had first seized him. Then suddenly the floor buckled and sloped toward the window. He slid toward it. Gripping the frame for balance, he scanned the deserted streets below, the swaying rooftop gardens, the silent dome of the Opera. Two cats ran from one end of Via Firenze to the other. Another cat shot out from an alley and overtook them with a piercing yowl. The last thing Frank remembered from that night was thinking, At this hour, Rome is a cat’s playground.

  The next morning, when Tenn found him sprawled there on the hard stone tiles, he fell to his knees, gathered him up in his arms, and kissed him into consciousness. He stuffed an upper in his mouth to pull him out of the pinkies’ fog. How happy he was to see Frank, he said, how awful it must have been to watch the poor bastard die. Everything would be better, he said, now that they were reunited. The nightingales sang sweetly that morning, as if to banish death itself, because, no matter what his state, no matter how violent the storms had been, the return of the Little Horse always brought Tenn joy. Every man had one superb talent, one unique purpose. Frank’s was to bring joy. Why else had he kept staring at chairs in Marina di Cecina, wishing for Tenn to appear in them, if not so he could offer him joy?

  And yet Frank believed now, after almost a decade turning it over in his head, that this morning in Rome was the first hour of their long and fateful end. The sight of Frank passed out on the tiles after having “ransacked” his drawer of pills—it gave Tenn the germ of an answer, however wrongheaded and paranoid, for why, in the months and years that immediately followed, Frank grew moody and cold and started drinking and smoking more than he had ever done, for why he stayed in Key West, for why he seemed thinner, quieter, adrift. It gave Tenn all the reason he needed to watch Frank more closely, to study his moods, and because Tenn saw himself in these moods, he recoiled from them. Tenn was always looking for trouble, whether in his own body—his digestion, his heart, his white blood cell count—or in the ways the people around him, his friends and family and lovers, treated each other, how they loved with anger and fought with tenderness and conned their souls into submission. Something was always wrong. Something was always about to go wrong. Something that seemed right couldn’t possibly be all right. The tunnel in which Tenn lived was cluttered with calamities and ailments and heartbreaks strung together with the colored lights of poetry. For light and comedy and music, for the fleeting uncomplicated joys of desire and laughter, he had always turned to Frank. And when Frank could no longer offer these, he pushed him away.

  The night Jack Burns died gave Frank an answer, too, the one he’d long been after, the one all his hours of introspection had been designed for. It had come just before he’d left Villino Brunella, when he stood beside Sandro in the garden, his hand lying on his shoulder in a feeble attempt at comfort, just before the man bitterly shrugged it off. Like most long-sought answers, this one was the most obvious. The answer followed him over the narrow mountain roads out of Livorno, past the gaping mouths of the puttane, into the apartment he’d burst through in hopes of surprising Tenn. It followed him from there to Bakers Lane and to the cancer ward at Memorial. Frank had been wrong about joy. As purposes went, joy was, at best, incomplete. Frank Merlo was not here on earth just to bring joy to the great Tennessee Williams.

  He was here to keep him alive.

  12.

  HIM

  The Fredrik A. Blomgren Theater opened in Malmö fifteen years ago today, the eighteenth of December, the anniversary of his death. Though Anja is not in the habit of tracking such milestones, she cannot ignore the date on her plane ticket to Provincetown. She must have noticed when her travel agent arranged the trip that it fell on this day—in fact, that is likely why she agreed to it—but the significance of the date does not register until the woman at the security checkpoint hands the ticket back to her.

  She passes the flight rebuking the familiarity of the view from her tiny window. She has never seen the coastline of Sweden from the air, but surely it must be identical to these snow-tipped houses and icy harbors ringed with trawlers. If Anja were the sentimental type, she would search the frozen towns for the illuminated glass atrium of the Blomgren Theater, which today, at this very moment, four thousand miles to the north and east, hosts its annual birthday celebration. Instead she pulls down the shade. She takes out the paperback of Something Cloudy, Something Clear, which, though slim, she has struggled to read a second time. The bookmark is a slip of paper with the name, address and phone number of a different theater, of sorts, one much more intimate than her father’s, where she will be taken upon her arrival in Provincetown.

  Anja wrote the large checks that funded the construction of the FAB—as the Blomgren Theater has become known—the hiring of its staff, and its first five deliberately eclectic seasons of opera, Scandinavian folk music, satirical comedies, French farces, and children’s educational programming. Only performances that her father loved or would have loved. No Strindberg, Shakespeare, ballet, or solo piano recitals, none of which, to Anja’s recollection, meant much to him. The director dutifully mails Anja biannual reports that include audited budgets, glossy photos from recent shows, patron testimonials, handwritten letters from local government officials, and proposals for future productions. Anja participates remotely in administrative meetings once conducted by phone, now on Skype, so that the director can walk her virtually up and down the aisles, showing off the additions and renovations, the bright faces of the little girls and boys learning to sing.

  Anja’s cheery reaction to the children is for the director’s benefit. At the sight of the teenagers in the studio classrooms, though, Anja must avert her eyes. No, she says politely, she would not like to speak to Lina—a prodigy if we ever saw one! She reminds everyone of you!—to accept her gratitude. She would prefer to proceed with the business at hand. With the help of the city and other private donors, the FAB has reached a point of healthy financial sustainability, and, when Anja dies, its endowment will skyrocket. Lina will have a home on its grand stage for as long as she pleases.

  “It’s an honor,” says Keith, when he greets Anja at the terminal. He holds a bouquet of pink winter tulips. “May I give you a hug?” he asks, his sizable arms already around her, the flowers crushed between them, his abrasive shaved head grazing her temple. “We’re ten minutes max by car. Or did you want to stop at your hotel first?”

  “I’m not staying the night.”

  “Oh right, I’m sorry. You’re not on vacation!”

  Her small satchel contains only the two plays, a notebook, a half-drunk bottle of lemon water, and the red hat and gloves she bought at the end of the previous winter. She puts them on as she steps outside and Keith leads her to his car.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never been to P-town!” he’s saying. “It’s a place of pure magic, especially in the winter.
Totally quiet. No tourists. The real people stay on year-round: the artists, the poets, the Portuguese fishermen. It’s the only true community I’ve ever known.” He points through the windshield at the tall tower that dominates the landscape. “You see the monument? That stack of bricks has guided misfits here for a hundred years. And the light! If we have time, I’ll drive you to Herring Cove for the sunset. You can’t leave here without seeing the light.”

  The road is bumpy and empty and surrounded by windswept dunes and wild brush glittering with ice. Snow narrows it on both sides. They are halfway to their destination before they pass another car, and when they do, the old man behind the wheel waves at Keith and gives Anja a curious stare. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Nobody knows you’re here. It’s killing me, believe me, not to tell, but if I fu—if I mess this up, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “You can say fuck,” she says. “I am not a nun.”

  “Of course not,” he says. “I’m sorry. Fuck, I fucked up already.”

  She laughs.

  “All day I kept telling myself, ‘be professional, Keith, just be professional.’ But this whole thing is so intense. Not just the play, but you directing it, and at the A-House of all random places. You’re not just teasing us, are you? You think it’s really going to happen?”

  “Against my better judgment,” she says.

  The place is not at all random, she explains. Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo saw each other for the first time on the porch sometime in the late forties. A one-night stand that lasted fifteen years—or sixteen, or fourteen, depending on who told the story. Depending on how you defined “lasted.”

  Keith claims to know this bit of history, both from Memoirs, which he “swallowed whole” the year it came out, and from his new friends Sandro and Trevor. After numerous phone calls and emails, they showed up at his doorstep three months ago, the day after Anja received the permission to produce Call It Joy from the University of the South.

  They turn onto what Keith calls the main drag, which consists of one souvenir shop and bar and theater and restaurant smashed up against another. Though most of the businesses are closed for the off-season, wreaths and white lights and red bows decorate the doors and windows. A display of giant gift-wrapped presents in rainbow colors occupies the main square.

  “Frank liked it here,” Anja says. “What he didn’t like, I remember, was that there was no opera. He wanted to come back one day, but he never made it. As far as I know.”

  “I can ask around,” says Keith. “The old queens in this town know all the gossip. They’re basically living history.”

  “Like me,” Anja says.

  “No, I didn’t mean that!” he says. “I’m sorry!” He parks the car on the edge of a snowbank and turns to her. “Really, you don’t even look that old, especially up close. Oh my gosh, that came out wrong, too. I’m usually better at this.”

  “Please try to relax,” she says. “You are making me nervous, and I am not a nervous person.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says again.

  He guides her on foot around the corner, down a narrow street, and there, to her left, is the porch with the white posts, no more than fifty feet wide, next to the sign for the Atlantic House Bar. She gazes at it a moment before taking the two wide steps up onto it, gripping the post for balance. Without this little porch, Anja Blomgren would exist, but Anja Bloom would not. If Tennessee and Frank had never seen each other across these planks of wobbly wood—was it here? was it over there?—they would not have traveled through Italy together, and they would not have taken her to Testa del Lupo, and she would not have run away with them, seeking their protection, and if none of those things had happened, who would she be?

  “One thing I’ve always wondered,” says Keith, thumbing through his ring of keys for the one to the locked front door. “If you don’t mind me asking—”

  “Why did I stop making films?”

  “No,” he says, with a smile. “Well, yes, but I feel like everyone knows that. If by some miracle I got to be somebody’s muse, especially a great director like Martin Hovland, I’d never act for anybody else, either. Luckily I just do costumes now.” He pushes the door open and switches on the lights, revealing a cramped windowless barroom with low ceilings and wood-slatted walls adorned with nets and buoys and ship wheels and other nautical flourishes. She walks through it, testing the sight lines. “It’s freezing in here, I know,” says Keith. “We’re only open on weekends this time of year. And pay no attention to the stale beer smell; it goes away once the cleaners come.”

  Though the space is larger than its exterior suggests, she doubts the assurance of the new owner, Sally, that it can “easily” accommodate an audience of two hundred. “That would need to serve as one half of the stage,” she says, pointing to the large bar and row of stools that take up the left side of the main room. “The other half would go beside it. No other configuration is possible.”

  “I’m sure that’ll work,” says Keith. “Sally told me, ‘Give Anja Bloom whatever she wants. Tell her we’ll knock down walls if that’s what it takes. Just make it happen.’ If her sister didn’t up and die this week, she’d be here instead of me. And I’m telling you, she considered skipping the funeral.”

  After years of wrangling, Sally has recently purchased the Atlantic House and vows to return it to its former glory, the days when it hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, back when it appealed to patrons other than shirtless men and bachelorette parties. What better way to usher in the new era, wrote Sally in her letter, than with this astonishingly original and groundbreaking buried treasure of a play from the greatest American playwright of the twentieth century, starring and directed by one of its finest actresses?

  “The space is far from ideal,” Anja says. She notes the tacky stained-glass window in the far corner. She reaches up to run her hand along a large wooden oar hanging inexplicably from the ceiling. “But it does have meaning.”

  “Oh, we’ve got meaning up the wazoo,” Keith says, and leads her through another door to show her the framed photo of a young Tennessee striding naked across the beach. “We didn’t just hang that because you were checking the place out. It’s been in that spot as long as I’ve been coming. It’s like he’s been here the whole time waiting for you. Anybody can put on a play in an actual theater. This place takes imagination.”

  The FAB seats two hundred and ninety-nine guests, Anja tells him, in eighteen rows of plush fixed seats. Its cedar proscenium stage spans forty by thirty-six feet across, complete with a classic red velvet curtain and state-of-the-art soundboard and his-and-hers dressing rooms. The entire Atlantic House bar could fit in its wings alone.

  “Oh,” he says, deflated. “Are you trying to decide between your own theater and here? Because that’s like apples and oranges.”

  “No,” she says. Then, “I don’t think so.” Then, definitively, “No. But it is on my mind. The FAB has meaning, too. Of a different sort. I built it, but—this will sound strange—I have never seen it in person.” She walks over to the bar. “Do these work? I am craving a beer.”

  “You fit right in,” says Keith. He gets behind the bar and pulls the darkest draft they have, one for her and then one for himself.

  “You were going to ask me something,” she says.

  The beer is pleasantly warm, fortifying. The foam tickles her lips. When she turns to scan the room from what would be Tenn’s spot at Gisele’s Bar, the stool squeaks. She sees the audience elbow to elbow in folding chairs, their faces eager and trustful. The air is rich with roses. Has she grown sentimental? This is no place to mount the forgotten final play of Tennessee Williams, even with its warts. This is no place for the return of Anja Bloom. Worst of all, it is no place to bring Frank back to, Frank who loved the finer things, Frank of the grand dreams. The idea is too romantic, the corruptive influence of Sandrino, of Trevor. She m
ust fight it. She must come to her senses. She will. It is not too late.

  “Oh,” says Keith. “Never mind my question. It’s probably not appropriate.”

  “You want to know if I’m happy,” she offers.

  “Aha!” he says, playfully. “Wrong again. Who believes in happiness after forty? No. I may be a star-fucker, but the life choices of celebrities don’t actually interest me. The thing is, and this is truly embarrassing, I’m a closet filmmaker. I even have a degree from Chapman, not that it’s done me any good. All my stuff is terrible. Anyway, Hovland—he was a genius, no question—but what I’m wondering is, didn’t you ever want someone different? Just once? His work was so antirealist, so cut off from history, almost hostile to it, like god forbid it had a cultural correlation, god forbid you had dialogue that wasn’t allegorical. But what was the allegory?”

  She sits up straighter on the stool.

  He puts his hands up, as if in surrender, for emphasis. “I’m saying this as a huge Hovland fan. Really! I own the entire Criterion Collection. I’ve seen you die a horrible death in every single movie. This professor at Chapman—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—she called them snuff films. She said Hovland was either a horrible misogynist or you had a death wish, or both.”

  “If that’s how you were taught,” Anja says, “I am not surprised your films are terrible.”

  “Ouch,” he says. “Fuck, I deserve that.” He pours himself another beer. “Please, don’t tell Sally I badgered you. Pretend you weren’t annoyed.”

  “You are not badgering me,” she says.

  “Then, hey, between you and me and the horseshoes: did you or did you not want to cheat on Martin Hovland with another director?”