Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  Anja turned to him. She must have sensed his gaze of questions. When she recognized him, standing in the spotlight with his hands deep in his pockets, a girlish smile broke out across her face, and she beckoned him in.

  Frank hadn’t eaten since they’d left Rome. The trattoria was about to close, but they fixed him a plate of pasta and brought him a carafe of dark red wine. As he ate and drank, and the wine and Anja’s company worked their soothing effects, she read over the scene Tenn had just hastily rewritten for him and Alida Valli.

  “It’s not much,” he said, embarrassed, suddenly, by the flimsiness of the lines, the two onionskin pages so precious and fine they could float out the window on a breath of air. And yet these scant few lines contained more words than Frank Merlo had ever spoken on film.

  Anja set the pages aside. Then her face went dark, fretful, as if she’d just been told very bad news. She folded her hands on the table.

  “Anja?”

  She looked up. “What is it?” she said, sharply. She stood, knocking over the chair, and pointed toward the back of the restaurant at the waiter, who was wiping down tables. “Can’t you see there’s a fire?”

  “Oh God,” Frank said. “We’re doing this now.” He wiped his mouth. “Give me a second.” He tossed the napkin on the floor and got to his feet. Addressing Countess Livia Serpieri he said, “Your friend, in the granary, he’s not safe.” He said the line as menacingly as he could muster, as Tenn had instructed him, with the faintest of undercurrents of tenderness in the word “friend.”

  A flash of panic flew across Anja’s—Livia’s—face. Then, her fear masked by defiant confusion, she said, “I don’t know who you could be referring to, Signor. I have no friends here. Only servants.”

  “I thought you might want to know where the little mouse ran off to,” said Frank, with mock nonchalance. Tenn had given his character a name: Gabriele Rossini. It was Gabriele Rossini he was trying to become.

  “What do you want from me?” Livia asked, through clenched teeth, whispering so that the washerwomen couldn’t hear.

  The waiter had stopped his cleaning to behold this strange interaction. He stood with his hand on his hip and his eyes fixed on their little performance. Frank could see him out of the corner of his eye, and even this audience of one, the young man’s head cocked in bemusement, thrilled him. Distracted him. What would it be like tomorrow, when Visconti switched on the camera? What if it rained? What if the light was wrong?

  “You already memorized this?” Frank asked. “It took you two minutes?”

  “Memorized what?” said Anja, refusing to break character. “Are you mad, young man?” She clenched her teeth again. “You talked of a mouse in the granary, and I asked you, Signor, what do you want from me?”

  Then Frank couldn’t help it—those flared nostrils of hers, her awkward improvisation, the waiter calling the cook out from the kitchen to watch them—he started to laugh. Livia narrowed her eyes at him, wrathfully. She pushed the table aside. Now was not the time for horsing around. She needed him to be serious.

  Frank covered his face with his hands for composure. When he removed them, he made his best effort to regard Livia Serpieri with the lasciviousness the moment required. It was time for Gabriele Rossini to exploit the Countess’s wantonness, to put her in her rightful place. But again, his body convulsed in laughter, and this time Anja’s did, too.

  “Frank!” she whined, throwing up her hands, rather like an Italian, like Alida Valli would have done if this were the set and not the window of an empty trattoria on a rainy night in Vicenza. Anja couldn’t stop smiling. She couldn’t resist him, she said. That look on his face, like a boy who’d eaten too much chocolate. It was too funny for her to imagine Frank as anyone but Frank. “It is not your fault,” she said. “Still—are we here to practice or are we here to joke around?”

  “I want to practice,” he said.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  Earlier, with Tenn, Frank had gone stiff and anxious and breathless. He kept forgetting the lines. He’d needed the pages in front of him as they maneuvered around the twin beds in their hotel room. The words knocked around in his head in a jumble; they couldn’t make their way to his body. The words came easier with Anja, but no matter how many times they acted out the scene, he couldn’t keep from laughing, even after the waiter lost interest and went back to his cleaning.

  “Could this mean I’m ready?” Frank asked, hopefully.

  “No,” said Anja. He’d still not convinced her he was Gabriele. He shouldn’t need a costume.

  “The costume will help, though, right?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  The waiter started going from table to table, blowing out the candles. Frank and Anja stepped out onto Cavour. She took his arm as they walked back. In front of the hotel, in the middle of the empty street, she stopped and turned to him. “What is it?” she began again.

  This time, he was ready for her.

  At the end, she said, “Bravo!” and clapped, which sent off a scatter of pigeons.

  He bowed.

  “Try this trick,” Anja said. “When you say those lines to Alida tomorrow—today—pretend you are speaking to me. Pretend you are in this street, with no one around but me and the birds.”

  “Grazie, maestra,” he said, and bowed again.

  In the hallway, at the door of his room, he kissed her good night on both cheeks and turned away, but for a moment she lingered, and he thought she might start up the lines again, one last time, but instead she stood there with her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back, not moving and not speaking, like a girl he’d taken to a movie and walked gallantly to her parents’ front porch, and who was now expecting more.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she said, the brief spell breaking. “To leave your company, it is just—always difficult.” And she walked away.

  At four a.m., Tenn came out to the balcony, where Frank lay awake in his chair. “Oh, Frankie,” he said, his arms folded, shivering. “You didn’t sleep at all?”

  Tenn sat beside him in his bathrobe, his hand on Frank’s naked thigh, as the sky lightened. It was chilly, but he’d been too lazy and agitated to search the room for a blanket. Now he crawled onto Tenn’s lap and curled in on himself and he let Tenn cover him with his soft robe. The chair squeaked and strained under their weight.

  “We’re getting too old and fat for this kind of thing,” Tenn said, holding him more tightly as the sky turned flamingo pink.

  After a while, he led Frank by the hand to his bed. He wanted to get some work done. Frank lay under the covers watching him at his desk, and only then, to the soothing familiarity of his tapping fingers, could he finally catch a few hours of sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DAY WAS BRIGHT AND WARM. They drove the twenty miles north to Villa Godi, the sprawling Palladian palazzo where Visconti had assembled his crew. He offered a halfhearted wave as Frank, Tenn, and Anja crossed the great lawn. They waited in one of the courtyards, drinking coffee from small metal thermoses. Frank stood at the table of pastries, nervously gorging himself, one eye on the movements of the cameramen, the other on his shaking right leg. Where was Alida? Would Farley be here, too? His lips were oily from the buttery cornetti. There were no napkins. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He went over the lines again in his head. Visconti shouted something at a cameraman. In place of lights, they’d arranged large metallic shades on movable posts. Soldiers milled around in their uniforms, scratching their balls and attaching and reattaching the chinstraps of their helmets. Tenn lit a cigarette. Frank smoked three. When would he be fitted into his costume? Anja pinched his side, and he jumped.

  Truman arrived in a baggy white sweater that swallowed his tiny frame and a polka-dot scarf tied around his neck in a flouncy knot. What a queen,
Frank thought. He stood taller and squared his shoulders. Today he was the bold brutish seducer of a countess. He gave Truman swift awkward kisses on both cheeks, nearly knocking off his thick glasses. The four of them sat together on wicker chairs at the base of a stone column, waiting to be told something.

  “The ennui of the movie set,” Truman said, rolling up his sleeves to his wrists. He sipped on iced water from a long straw, both hands wrapped around the glass. Though she sat to his immediate right, he had yet to acknowledge Anja. “Hours of standing around for five minutes of action.”

  “Like cruising the Villa Borghese,” said Tenn.

  Truman’s hair was lighter than it had been just a month ago in Portofino, which he blamed on the long sun-splashed August days on the decks of Lopez’s yacht. He seemed incapable of speaking of much else but his trip around the Italian peninsula on La Gaviota, which employed a crew of twenty-six, “eight more than Visconti’s got with him today.” He turned to Anja. “It’s a pity your mother’s back with Signor Ricciardi. A billionaire homosexual can never have too many beards.”

  “How does she find herself?” asked Anja, feigning dispassion.

  “Well fed,” said Truman. He puffed out his cheeks. “Italian men prefer their wives fat and their mistresses fatter.”

  “Which is she?”

  “She wanted to invite you to the ceremony,” Truman said. “But you left no forwarding address.” He waved at Alida Valli, who had just appeared on one of the terraces, but Anja didn’t seem to notice her.

  “It was a small affair,” Truman went on, “hastily thrown together, though it’s safe to say not for an improper reason.” He laughed. “Ricciardi’s a widower, as you must remember from the months and months you lived under his expansive roof. His first wife was a baronessa from the north. Lombardia, I believe. They say your mother resembles the baronessa in the face, if not in the fortune. It’s almost noble, in a way, how he evened things out by marrying down.”

  “And to be so forgiving of Bitte after the sea-wolf incident,” said Tenn. “This widower’s heart is either very strong or very weak.”

  “In both cases, my mother wins,” Anja said.

  Truman raised his now-empty glass to her. “From where I sit, you both emerged victorious. Tenn tells me you’ve taken up with a dashing Danish auteur. He must be the real McCoy, or else I’d surely have heard of him. But don’t worry—obscurity is a disease soon cured by mediocrity. Is there wine?”

  “It’s ten o’clock,” said Frank, to Truman’s blank stare. He added, quickly, “It’s martini hour, of course!” which got the much-needed laugh.

  Frank had learned early on how to keep up with the back-and-forth among Tenn’s set—it was never too early to drink, it was never too late for another—but today his heart and mind and eyes were elsewhere. He watched Visconti pull a chair onto the grass under the shade of a tree and sit with the script in his lap. He watched him scribble onto the pages and shake his head and screw up his face and cross out what appeared to be entire lines with his pen. He watched Truman get up and walk over toward him, pick up a chair of his own along the way, and plant it beside him. He watched Visconti light up at the sight of the little man, then double over in laughter, then, after a few minutes, shoo him away, as if to say, enough games, I have work to do.

  All that watching and waiting Frank did, from the day Paul told him he’d been written into the film to now, and yet, when his moment finally came, it caught him by surprise. It was early afternoon by then, and they’d already walked twice through the courtyard to look at the statues and fountains and the terraced gardens. They were bored and hungry, and Frank was smoking another cigarette and telling Truman what had ultimately become of Jack Burns and Il Dottore. Truman had read about it in the papers, of course—the death of the American author John Horne Burns was, briefly, the talk of La Gaviota as it rounded the coast of Sicily, he said—but he had no idea that Frank had been anywhere close to Marina di Cecina, let alone at Jack’s bedside as he thrashed and frothed. “I told everyone on the yacht that he was murdered,” Truman said. “And no one who’d met him registered the slightest surprise.”

  “Sandro didn’t murder him,” Frank said. “But he did kill him.”

  “There’s a difference?” said Visconti’s voice.

  He greeted each of them warmly, and he even held Anja’s hands in his for a moment longer to say how glad he was to see her in Vicenza. It was time for Frank to get into makeup, he said, but before that it was time for them to join him for lunch. He’d used the morning to shoot some establishing shots of the view from the steps of the palazzo, but now that Farley had shown up, and the horses had calmed down, he was ready for the new scene Tennessee had added.

  The courtyard was suddenly filled with dozens of crew and actors in and out of uniform dining together at the tables. The pastries had been replaced with large bowls of pasta and fried fish and olives and cheese, vases of wildflowers expertly arranged, and bottles of water and wine. Visconti’s table, the only one covered with a linen cloth, was set up in the shade beside his piles of books and papers. “You were talking of murder and killing,” he said to Frank. “Not what I expected from such a sweet-faced young man.”

  “Frankie’s inborn gallantry uniquely qualifies him to detect subterfuge in others, even at its most subtle,” said Tenn. “He’s convinced John Horne Burns died not from some poisonous potion the doctor mixed into his whiskey, but from—what was your diagnosis, Frankie?—malignant neglect.”

  “In Portofino, Sandro was the picture of patience and benevolence,” said Truman. “I suppose that should have made any of us suspicious.”

  “I witnessed it all firsthand in Livorno,” Frank said, pouring himself a glass of wine.

  “Tell it,” Anja said to him, sensing, moments before Frank himself had, the attention the director was paying him. He’d motioned for Frank to sit beside him, after all. His chair was turned slightly toward his shaking right leg. Anja had had her moment at the Fontanone to impress her director with a story; this was his. His story did not require vampires for embellishment or misdirection; he could tell it just as it happened. But without her there to prompt him, he might have missed his chance.

  Frank spoke of the garden and the trail of dog blood and of Shelley, but mostly he spoke of Sandro’s incompetence: the quack from the naval base he called too soon and the specialist from Volterra he called too late and the cloudy glass on the nightstand and the forced dinners of broth and water. He spoke of Floria. Sandro was not evil, Frank said, opening his hands as if in supplication, as if he, on Sandro’s behalf, were pleading for mercy. He did not even consider Sandro cruel. He was incapable of striking a blow to the head of his lover, but he could lose sight of him when he swam out to sea. He could pretend that the swelling on his lover’s temple might last another day or might last the year, all the while expecting to see him again next August in Cairo and the August after that in Beirut and for many Augusts more. This was what Frank meant by killing that was not murder, by the deliberate blinding of the eye, by malignant neglect. Sandro was arrogant, he said to them. Had they ever met a doctor who wasn’t? He’d convinced himself that Jack was courting death, and then ignored all evidence to the contrary so that his wish might be fulfilled.

  “I found Jack at his desk writing the day he died,” Frank said.

  “A suicide note?” asked Anja.

  “I don’t think so,” said Frank. “He was feeling better. Coming back to life. At the time, I thought, you don’t write a letter to someone unless you plan to be around for the response. Now—” At this, Frank stood, the better to make his point, to hold the crowd, to show off his chest in his tight shirt to Visconti—“sitting here at a table of true artists, I’m thinking, isn’t everything you write—your plays, your stories, your scripts”—he looked at each of the men in turn—“a way of reaching into the future? Of claiming it for yourself? You imagin
e having tomorrow to finish it. You imagine an audience reading it and watching it.”

  “Frankie’s right,” said Tenn, admiring him. “They say artists crave immortality. I say we don’t give a fuck about the next life. It’s this one we want more of.”

  “More and more!” said Truman.

  “The doctor—I understand he was of a lower class than the American,” said Visconti.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “Even to call Sandro a doctor is an exaggeration. He’s more of a country catchall.”

  “Well, that explains everything,” Visconti said, without elaborating, uninterested in talk of immortality. He stood and squeezed Frank’s shoulders. “You see quella bionda là,” he said, pointing to the young woman carrying a stepstool. “She will get you into your makeup and costume. I will collect the stars. We shoot in one hour.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BLONDE PUT HIM in a baggy three-piece suit: brown wool pants, maroon vest, and a long matching corduroy jacket buttoned in just one place, at the top, below a black necktie undone at the throat. A different woman handed him a tan fedora not to wear, but to carry, so that he could hold it against his heart, as if pained, as he threatened the Countess. They—these women of Visconti’s crew—ministered to Frank as attentively as they had to Valli and the soldiers back in Trastevere, fussing with his collar and dabbing his cheeks with powder and even lacing his black boots. They took a step back, regarded him, took another step back, and then they came close again to adjust his cuffs and apply a gluelike substance to his brows. In the shade of the tent, Frank—Gabriele Rossini, the village merchant in his best suit—stood with his arms outstretched as the women circled him, wanting all this to go on, though he was sweating, as much from nerves as from the weight of the heavy fabric.