Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  Soon, though, he was pushed from the shelter of the tent onto the path beside the low wall where the washerwomen stood ready to hang their laundry. There, in the sun, Alida Valli waited for him in her blue and white petticoat, carrying a parasol, a black shawl draped over her shoulders.

  “Piacere,” said Alida, absently, at Visconti’s introduction. That they’d already met, and briefly exchanged pleasantries, in Trastevere, didn’t matter; for stars to remember you, you had to have been of some use to them. Alida’s eyes were fixed not on her costar, but on the horizon, where clouds of black smoke had begun to appear above the garden wall.

  Visconti and one of his assistant directors, Franco Zeffirelli, took their places behind the camera, which was set up on the grass beside the path. First Visconti peered through the lens, then he gave Zeffirelli a look, and then Zeffirelli nodded and Visconti took his place. The camera, perched on a tripod, was tall and wide as a gorilla, Visconti with his arms around its waist and his head on its shoulder as if to comfort it. He directed Tenn and Anja and Truman to sit on the far stone wall beside him with the rest of the crew, outside the range of his camera, where they watched Frank pace in anticipation of his cue to action.

  Should Frank look at Tenn, crossing his legs and trying not to lock eyes with him? Should he try to catch Anja’s eye, which followed Alida’s every graceful glide, every girlish twirl of her parasol? Should he banter with Alida herself, or was her avoidance of him part of a code he didn’t understand, a way of coming to the scene pure of association? Only Truman had the courage to meet Frank’s eyes, and wave his little paw, and call out something Frank couldn’t hear, just as Visconti barked his orders, and the ladies came rushing to him to dab his and Alida’s sweaty faces, and the camera began to roll.

  After all Frank’s fussing, all his hours of practice and sleeplessness, how easy it was for him, that day on the gravel path of the Villa Godi, to disappear into the body of Gabriele Rossini. It came as naturally as if he’d never read Tenn’s typed words on the onionskin pages, as if, for his entire life, the man called Gabriele Rossini had been dressed in the costume of a working-class wop from Jersey named Frank Merlo. The lines came to Frank with the same ease as they did when he asked a young woman to dance. He didn’t need Anja’s trick. He gazed at the frantic, beseeching face of Alida Valli and held the Countess there, on the ropes, for a delicious moment. And then he let his gaze travel, slowly, hungrily, down the length of her heaving, corseted body as he said, “He can’t stay here forever, Signora.”

  “Swine!” said Livia. “Tell me what you’ve done with him!”

  Gabriele folded his arms. The fire raged in the distance, behind her, as she tried to pull away. The wind was blowing the fire toward the villa. The sheets drying on the line snapped in the breeze. In moments, Livia believed, the men would discover her lover, Franz Mahler, in the granary. Gabriele could save her from ruin, but it would cost her. He was telling her how. He was a poor man of evil design, she a noblewoman who’d already debased herself. Each of them had met their match.

  “When grain catches fire . . .” said Gabriele, and paused—

  Already he was approaching his final line. So far, he and Alida had accomplished their scene in one take. Along the way, he’d lost awareness of who watched him, if the cameras were even still rolling, if Visconti had fallen asleep, if Tenn and Anja and Truman had jumped off the ledge. None of that would matter. This was how extinguishment felt. Maybe this was how it was for Tenn to burrow his way through the tunnel. Whatever this sensation was, this delicious rush, Frank wanted more and more and more of it. Gabriele Rossini would soon die in that fire, never to be heard from again, and Livia Serpieri, lucky, for once, and for the last time in Senso, would be spared. But, at this moment, neither of them knew their fate.

  “It explodes.”

  14.

  SUDDEN MOVEMENT

  The house sits atop a high green ridge—the broker does not call it a cliff, though it is most certainly a cliff—and faces west over the sea. From the edge of the ridge to the private beach is a journey that requires fifty-seven stairs. When the weather allows, Anja takes the stairs slowly, gripping the reinforced handrail. She is in no hurry. The descent is a greater challenge than the climb. With each steep step she feels the deep downward pull, strong as the tide. If she does not stop herself at the landings, she will tumble all the way to the rocks, lie splintered and bleeding on the sand, and that is not how all this will end. At the bottom, she removes her shoes and all of her clothes and swims. Over the nine months she has lived here, the water temperature has yet to rise above frigid. She craves the shiver that shoots through her as she dives into the waves. One day it will be the shiver that stops her heart, and then she will simply float until the sharks devour her. That will be better.

  The house occupies four thousand square feet of the ten wooded acres now deeded to her. It swallows all of the apartment furniture and leaves many empty corners and closets to spare. The broker emphasized the house’s durability, openness, and innovation: the box shapes connected by glass breezeways, concrete floors and walls, exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water, the flat roof engineered to withstand more than six feet of snow. It is the roof’s flatness that had given Anja pause, but then the broker explained the science behind how it could bear all that weight, and how pitched roofs were lazy and all too common in these parts and made for sloped ceilings on which she would constantly be hitting her head. Anja signed the papers on that first visit, and she moved in by the end of the month. Her one disappointment in the house is that it faces west instead of east, but there are no houses on the peninsula’s eastern shore. The land there is protected. If she wants to see the sun rise over the opposite horizon, she needs to drive. On the weekends, there is a bus.

  There is a little town she rarely goes into, though it pleases her to know it is there. Besides, everything can be delivered nowadays: groceries, books, films, clothes, the Arab man who untangles the knots in her back and legs and cracks her bones. When going into town is required, Ray, a hired man, takes her in his noiseless hybrid car. Ray waits in the lot outside the office of her new doctor, her new dentist, her new post office, her new colorist, whose name also happens to be Ray. It is the doctor who prescribed the Arab man, the doctor who promised the massage and chiropractic treatments would help her walk with less pain. So far, she feels no difference. He warns her about all those dangerous stairs. She should never have told him about them. She is tempting fate, says the doctor. The weather here changes in an instant.

  “Do you have someone looking out for you?” he asks.

  “No.”

  He writes down the name and number of a private nurse. “You don’t want the state involved,” he says. “You have no family at all?”

  “No.”

  “No friends nearby?”

  “No.”

  “Surely—” He stops himself.

  “Surely what?”

  “No . . . devoted fans?”

  This she ignores.

  He gives her the name of an alarm service. All it requires, he says brightly, is the wearing of a discreet necklace she can tuck into her blouse. No one will see it. The necklace detects sudden movement and impact. Once alerted, the paramedics arrive within minutes, even all the way out there. “You should consider it.”

  She does not consider it.

  She sits on the patio watching the team of men mow the lawn and prune the trees. She pays them a sizable monthly fee to maintain the grounds. They look out for her. So do the Rays. So does the postman. So does her manager and her line producer and Sandrino, all of whom call her on Skype regularly, if at odd hours. They crane their necks to peer over her shoulder as she talks, trying to catch her in the act of something, looking for clues. They know where she lives but not how to find her.

  She wants tulips in all of those beds, she says to one of the gardeners. W
hat is spring without tulips? But the time to plant them is long past, he tells her. Summer is around the corner. They will plant the bulbs in the fall, he says, rows and rows of them, in alternating colors, just as she described.

  And roses, she says.

  Of course, he says; fall is also the time for roses. He asks—people are always asking—what else she wants.

  15.

  HIGH WATER

  From Vicenza, they drove as far San Giuliano, parked the Jag in a garage, and hired a private vaporetto to take them directly to the Excelsior. Frank and Tenn had stayed in this same grand hotel two years ago, in the midst of one of their summer storms. Now, under clear skies, under the rainbow of Tenn’s gift of Senso, it looked even grander. Out of superstition, Frank arranged for a suite in the southern wing, which had a view of the city, because last time they’d had a beach view in the northern wing. The nightingales had been quiet then. This year, if Frank had his way, they’d sing through the night and into the morning, and so he slipped the man at the front desk one hundred thousand lire in exchange for the invented crisis that forced Signora Blomgren to move from her original suite next door to the other side of the building.

  It was a Saturday in September, and the beach was crowded. The three of them lay beside each other on orange chairs and took turns swimming and fetching granitas from the bar. Frank didn’t remember having ever slept as soundly as he did in that chair, the sun gently painting his skin with its fine golden brushes. His arms sliced through the water with great force, his lungs filling and refilling with nourishing air. He could swim clear across the Adriatic, strap a Slav on his back, carry him back to the shores of the Lido, and still have breath to spare. As far as the eye could see (his eyes could see all the way to Russia, to California), gorgeous brown limbs surrounded him. “Bravo, ragazzo,” Visconti had said, only yesterday, and clapped him on the back. Frank could still feel the force of his hand on his shoulder blades. When you lived your life in triumph, it possessed your body as entirely and unshakably as guilt or shame or fear. This was better.

  Anja’s trip to Vicenza had not been as successful as Frank’s. The evening of the Senso shoot, she’d declined Truman’s offer to drive her to Portofino, stay with him above the Delfino for the rest of September, and make peace with her mother. She’d failed again to catch the eye of Alida Valli, who retreated into the Castello immediately after her scene on the gravel path with Frank. What she wanted more than anything, she’d told Frank, was to stroll arm in arm with him and Tenn through the streets of Venice, and so, after dinner, they fulfilled her request. Frank and Tenn wore linen suits with bright ties, Frank in a dark jacket, Tenn in beige, Anja in her Renoir dress from Gandolfo. They’d all eaten too much and needed to move their legs. They walked lazily from the dock to Piazza San Marco, where they stopped for a while to smoke and consult the useless map in search of a route to the Palazzo Gritti, which, if Frank remembered correctly, had a pleasant veranda.

  “This city weighed heavily on me two years ago,” Tenn said, “but it has a delicacy to it now.” He ran his hand along the smooth stone as they turned onto a street so narrow it barely fit them three across. “It’s that quality I love most in people and in cities,” he went on. “Delicacy. Lightness. I have found it so scarcely.”

  In his new body, soaked in triumph, Frank understood that Tenn was referring to Key West—their home—and to him, his home. Now was the time for Frank to say that he saw those same qualities in Tenn, and that they were among the many sources of his love. But then they turned another corner and came upon a pack of tourists drunkenly weaving, lost, loud, their voices echoing up to the swirling bats, and the moment, like so many before it, passed.

  Anja’s hand in Frank’s was delicate, childlike. She allowed him to pull her along, to point out dresses and furs and jewelry in the storefront dioramas. She told him that, as soon as they returned to Rome, she was moving into Hovland’s rooms by the Colosseum. From there, he would take her to Erice, where she would stay for as many months as they could stand each other. Beyond Sicily, she said, her life was a diary of blank pages. “But I am glad to leave you,” she said. “It is not that I will not miss you, or that I am not grateful. I want Hovland to leave me, too. Eventually. I need to find out if I can survive alone, without my mother, without my aunt’s money, without men.” She preferred to learn this while she was still young, she said. She didn’t want to be one of those women who went through life in constant fear that the ice beneath her feet might suddenly give way. “What a tragedy it would be never to take that plunge,” she said, “to never know how long I would last in the frigid water.”

  They gave up on Palazzo Gritti. On their way to Harry’s Bar, they came upon Piazza San Marco again, but this time it was flooded above their ankles. A sign of luck, Frank decided. The acqua alta had not spilled onto the Venetian streets two summers ago. The winds had stayed calm. Now the flags in the square flapped madly in the breeze of the scirocco, and they were sloshing their way barefoot through the warm overblown Adriatic, their shoes and socks in their hands, their pants rolled to just below the knee, the hem of Anja’s dress skimming the surface of the water as she kept it from flying up.

  “Stop laughing at us!” Frank, doubled-over in laughter, shouted at the pigeons.

  “They don’t understand English,” Anja joked.

  “Vaffunculo, piccioni,” Frank shouted again, shaking his fists at them. “We’ll eat you for breakfast!”

  At Harry’s Bar, they dried their feet with towels and drank amari for warmth and to help with their digestion. When their stomachs settled, they ordered martinis. It grew very late very fast. They watched the Aga Khan stumble out alone onto the Calle Vallaresso. The bar was filled with young men in silk shirts and gold necklaces, their hair, like Frank’s, slicked back and shining. They overheard the bartender tell a disappointed old woman, her neck and ears dripping with diamonds, that she’d just missed Truman Capote by a matter of days.

  “This place is where the good and bad queens of the continent go to die,” Tenn said.

  “It’s heaven,” said Frank. The last time they were here, they’d argued in the toilets before they’d ordered their first drink. They’d spent the rest of the night on opposite sides of the room, glaring at each other, daring the other to be the first to make peace. This was better.

  “I need to walk some more,” said Anja.

  So off they went again, taking the long way around the Piazza, away from the sea, though they needed the vaporetto to take them back to their hotel. They were too drunk to remember to look up at the street names or to read the map or to care that they’d gotten themselves immediately lost. At this hour, the side streets were mostly empty. Gone were the cries of children, the thrash of the motorized sweepers. Gone were the women and the girls. They passed packs of boys on scooters; gondoliers stowing their boats for the night; the lone young man leaning one shoulder against the grate of a storefront, his head bowed to hide his face from the light. This man’s double appeared again on the next street, and then again on the next, unless they were going in circles, in which case there he was again, the same young handsome man with his shoulder on the grate of the pasticceria, lifting his head at the exact moment Frank lifted his.

  “Do you know about our game?” Frank asked Anja.

  “Frankie, no,” Tenn said.

  “Don’t be such a prude,” he said, playfully. “Come on, let’s play. It’s the perfect time of night.”

  “What game?” Anja asked.

  “The game called cruising,” said Frank. “The winner is whichever one of us picks up the best-looking boy.”

  “That’s enough, Frankie,” Tenn said.

  “It’s the art of queens,” Frank went on. He couldn’t get his words out without slurring, but he was too happy, too giddy, to apologize for anything, and they had only one more night in Venice. Besides, this was a celebration. He was going to be a s
tar. They were going to be stars, Frank Merlo and Anja Blomgren. Him first, then her. They’d join Tenn in his constellation, and the three of them would light up the world.

  “You speak our language, don’t you?” Frank asked her.

  “I don’t know if I do,” she said. “Maybe if you point me in the direction of the vaporetto, I will walk on ahead, and I will see you for breakfast in the morning.”

  “You think I know how to get to the vaporetto?” Frank said, laughing. It was all so terribly funny. “There must be a bar open somewhere.”

  “I have had too much already,” Anja said. “Perhaps you have, too?”

  “A bar to ask the way to the vaporetto,” Frank said. What a beautiful word, he thought, vaporetto, like little vapor, like breath. A little breath would carry them across the lagoon to their grand bed in their grand hotel, where he and Tenn and some boy of astonishing beauty would make love to the crashing of the waves, the boy in his gold necklace, Tenn with his gasping hunger, Frank between their bucking bodies gleefully extinguished.

  “We go straight, then right,” said Tenn, holding the map. “Toward the campanile.”

  The game, the first time they had played it, had been Frank’s idea. Nine times out of ten, he won by a mile. Alvaro. Mario. Pierre. Walid. Names offered and forgotten in the same moment. Frank was at his most alluring when he cruised the street or the beach or the piers, those stages for his wrestler’s physique, his square jaw, his legs. Oh, how the boys praised his dark eyes, his sultry mouth! Tenn did not have the same allure. When they cruised together, the boys saw only Frank. That power enlarged him. But he felt no guilt. He knew how the power shifted once they got the boys back to the apartment the hotel the house, their disappointment upon seeing what Frank had between his legs, the happy surprise of what Tenn had between his. Once they removed their clothes, Frank was the first to switch off the lamp. Then the fumbling in the dark, the anonymous limbs, the scrambling for position, and, finally, that sweet extinguishment. The power between them evened out. This was better.