Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “But, with respect,” says the actor. “That guy you’re describing is not the character in the play.”

  “Do not be fooled,” she says. “The last thing the world needs is another cartoon of Tennessee Williams. The portrait he painted of the man at Gisele’s Bar is cartoon enough. It is my job to find the shadows in it. It is your job to ensure the audience can see and feel those shadows.”

  With young Angelo, she takes a different approach. Though he has Frank’s wrestler body, his dark eyes, and even his large teeth, his version of Frank is barely distinguishable from his version of Angelo, which is barely distinguishable from himself. When she asks him, with as much patience as she can muster, “Are you acting at all?” he bursts into tears.

  At the time Anja let Sally make the casting decisions, she was trying to distance herself from the production. Her only stipulation was that Sally not hire Trevor, no matter how talented or well suited he might prove, to play Mark. Now, at Sally’s prodding, and Sandrino’s fanciful urging, Anja is again at the play’s center, and she regrets not having at least chosen her own actors. Still, she works closely with her three men through dinner, late into the night, and all the next day. They confess they are intimidated by her and by this opportunity to make names for themselves. They are aware that not a single person in the audience has paid all that money to see them. After winning the part, Mark had nightmares about forgetting his lines; Tenn upped his appointments with his acting coach and his therapist; Angelo started smoking again. Once they admit these anxieties to her, they improve. Tenn’s shadows appear in flashes. When he says, “Perhaps they’ve got the same daddy,” with all of the real Tenn’s merry wickedness, even Anja manages a laugh. When Frank tells Tenn, tenderly, “I never hated you,” just before the lights come down on Scene One, she forgets, briefly, that none of this is real.

  Because the nights are warm, and she cannot get enough of the sea air, and the drivers are Bulgarian teenagers who have never heard of her, she takes pedicabs back and forth from the hotel to the theater. The streets are crowded with men walking in packs, or hand in hand, some with children on their shoulders. They sit on each other’s laps on the ledge outside the pizza shop and greet each other with kisses on the lips. A troupe of shirtless men in high-heeled boots rides by on bicycles, their matching white boas trailing behind them like wings. The men here are not all young; many of the faces are ravaged, gray-bearded. They are not all beautiful or fragile or ashamed or threatened, but the town folds itself in on each and every one of them nonetheless, as if to shield them.

  A Boston Globe reporter comes to the set to ask her questions she has already answered in The New Yorker and The New York Times and Variety. Why did she hide the play for so long? How does it feel to be back onstage? Might this be another Streetcar? Instead she tells the reporter about the real Frank Merlo. The truck driver who loved Maria Callas. The fifteen years of tenderness and hostility and competition and adoration and suspicion he had with Tennessee Williams, the alchemy of which produced the playwright’s greatest works: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof yes yes, but also The Rose Tattoo and Night of the Iguana and Orpheus Descending and Camino Real and Sweet Bird of Youth and Suddenly Last Summer. All of these plays came into being during the Frankie years; nothing of consequence came after Frankie was gone. She asks the reporter—a child playing dress-up with a press pass and a recording app on her phone—if she can name a single Williams play after 1963. She cannot. Frank’s story has yet to be written, Anja tells her, to which the reporter replies, “Are there any plans to make Call It Joy into a movie?”

  Anja sends her away. The first dress rehearsal is about to start, exactly twenty-four hours before the real thing. The room has filled with roses. Keith fits her into her Gisele costume of blue jeans and silver sequins. He tries three blonde wigs of varying lengths, then settles finally on Anja’s natural hair, which he teases and sprays with a stiffener as she autographs a stack of programs for his friends shut out by the unaffordable tickets. The light and sound guys knock over the bedside lamp with their cables. At Anja’s insistence, the only audience permitted at the dress rehearsal are Sally, Keith, Trevor, and Sandrino.

  Anja wishes for a proper curtain—swags that hang from the ceiling, tiebacks with gold tassels, a pulley—but, as the play drags on, forced and stilted, it becomes clear that the hastily sewn fabric Keith pulls across the set is the least of its problems. Tenn backslides into his cartoon. Angelo goes stiff.

  When the end comes, mercifully, even the sound guy averts his eyes from Anja. Sandrino and Trevor slip out without a goodbye. Sally suggests to the cast that they try another dress rehearsal first thing in the morning, before the cleaners and the caterers and the decorators arrive to transform the club.

  “Call it a matinee,” says Sally, with manufactured brightness. The actors groan.

  Anja refuses to do the morning dress rehearsal. The only difference between tonight’s rehearsal and tomorrow morning’s, she tells Sally, will be the sunlight in the windows.

  She pulls Anja aside. Under her breath, she asks, “What can we do?”

  They need another week, another month, a new venue, a new cast. They need a new play. “Return their money,” Anja says.

  “No, seriously.”

  “I am quite serious,” says Anja. “Give me a figure—whatever amount is not recoverable—and I will write you a check.”

  Sally considers this. She looks out at the rows of empty chairs. She takes a few moments to decide how to respond. Perhaps she is thinking of the reporters, the live bodies of the donors, the white tablecloths and canapés, Ann-Margret. “Sleep on it,” Sally says. “Who knows—the sunlight of a P-town morning may make a difference after all.”

  “It is plausible that I will have had a bad fall overnight,” says Anja. “I am an old woman, you know.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “My offer stands,” she says.

  The cast is milling about by the door. For men who smell defeat, they are strangely buoyant. Perhaps they are as relieved as Anja that the entire ordeal will soon be over. Perhaps they will jump for joy when Sally tells them of the play’s cancellation due to Anja’s tumble down the steps of the Moroccan Tower.

  They have waited around to invite her out for a nightcap. “To mark the eve of the play’s historic debut,” says Tenn. It is a Friday night in Provincetown, the first of the autumn, the harvest moon. He knows a quiet bar nearby with an outdoor patio and fire pits and strong cocktails.

  “It’s called the Shipwreck,” Mark says, laughing. “Sounds about right, don’t you think?”

  “Bite your tongue, Twinkie,” Tenn says.

  “I will meet you there,” Anja says. She writes down the directions on the back of a program and tucks it into the front pocket of her jeans, which are far too tight. She cannot wait to get out of them. She cannot wait to go home.

  Her dressing room is one of the A-House’s restrooms into which Keith has crammed a cushioned club chair and an extra mirror beside the urinal. The walls are covered in old postcards and photos of men baring their chests, spreading their legs, presenting their hairless backsides. They watch her lasciviously as she removes her makeup and ties back her starchy hair. They invite her to best-body contests in the seventies and eighties with the promise of cash prizes. She senses their disapproval as she changes out of her shiny sequined top into a cardigan sweater and plain beige skirt and sturdy shoes. She wonders how many of the men in the photos survived those awful decades. When Sally returns this room, this place, to what she calls respectability, they will be lost again.

  Anja walks onto the porch, and there is Sandrino alone in the dark, leaning, ghostlike, against the railing. He is waiting for her. Everyone else has gone ahead.

  “Can I walk with you?” he asks.

  “Of course,” she says, taking his arm. “You may escort me to my chariot. These kids work ex
tremely hard. I tip them extravagantly. Did I tell you I am learning Bulgarian? Dobar večher, priyatno mi e. Good evening, nice to meet you.”

  “You won’t need a pedicab,” he says. “The Shipwreck’s around the block. Do your legs hurt you again?”

  “I am not going to the bar,” she says. “It is too painful to face them. The poor boys, they try their best, but they are making fools of themselves. And of me. And of Tennessee! If he could see it . . .”

  “Is that what you think is happening?”

  “You cannot possibly disagree,” she says. “The play is a disaster. Every part of it.”

  “I don’t disagree with that,” he says. “Even me, a dumb scientist, can see it does not ‘come off.’”

  “Thank you,” she says. “I am relieved to hear the words no one else has the courage to say to me.”

  The pull each other closer, as they walk down chilly Commercial, which tonight is busy with weekend tourists on their postdinner promenade. Their eyes are on Sandrino, surely thinking what a kind boy he is for taking his grandmother out on the town. Her head is wrapped in a flowered silk scarf tied under her chin. One of the banners flies above them.

  They sit on a bench in front of the post office so that she can scan up and down the street for a Bulgarian. Zdravei, she thinks. Svoboden li si?

  “Trevor and I were having a talk,” Sandrino says. He tucks his hair behind his ear. “Not about us. ‘Us’—it is finished. He is in love like never before, he tells me, straight into my face, like I will be happy to hear this news. I tell him he watches too much of the Mad Men, and he gets angry, his executive boyfriend is more handsome and more deep than the man on the show, he says, but it’s OK. We make up and fight, make up and fight a hundred times a day. You don’t approve of Trevor, I know, you never did approve, so it won’t hurt either one of you to tell you what he said tonight about the play, what we talked about after the rehearsal. What he said was that the problem is not the actors or the words of Tennessee Williams. The problem—it was Trevor who said it first—is you.”

  Anja laughs. The pettiness of fellow actors has never surprised or bothered or thwarted her. In fact, she has Hovland and Tenn and Anna—and yes, her mother—to thank for preparing her, and suiting her with armor, for such acts of war. “And what does Sandrino say on this subject?”

  He turns to her. Most men his age would not look her in the eye, but that is what he does. “What I say is that the play needs something from you, but you do not give it.”

  “And I suppose you and Trevor have helpfully identified that ‘something’ for me as well?”

  Before Sandrino can respond, she mounts her case against them. She defends her hours with the cast, the months of email exchanges with the line producer and the Festival director, the site visit, the reading and rereading of Tenn’s impenetrable final one-act plays. She has given everything, she asserts, but, as she speaks the words, she recognizes them as untrue.

  “My father had an expression,” says Sandrino. “He used to tell me, ‘If you are on the dance floor, you should be dancing.’ I see you in your costume on the stage behind the bar, wiping it down with a rag, I hear Tenn call you ‘Gisele,’ I hear you speak back to him, but you are not Gisele, you are not even there. I wonder, sitting in the audience, where did Anja Bloom go? You give this play your time, but not your faith. Not your respect.”

  This is what Sandrino wants her to consider, Sandrino who speaks in Trevor’s voice: that she has not given Call It Joy what she and Hovland gave each other in every film, not what Tenn tried for in his lines, which was the will to make it great. When it came to art, what mattered more, the ambition or the result of that ambition?

  She did not have an answer.

  “You and Trevor are not the only ones who think this?” she asks him.

  Again, he does not look away.

  “No one spoke up. None of the actors. Not Sally. Not Keith. Not one of them has any guts.”

  “You are who you are,” Sandrino says, matter-of-factly. “You are the great Anja Bloom! You are the director!”

  “That is naïve,” she says, furious with him, with all of them, with herself. “No one said a word to me because my name is on the checks.”

  She thinks back to her most recent conversation with Sally after the dress rehearsal, memorable now for the woman’s lack of reassurance, her absence of admiration for the stamp Anja had put on the play. For all the actors’ fawning over her “genius” decisions, they did not once praise her performance. She blamed their shyness and immaturity, Tenn’s self-indulgent script, the rushed rehearsals. Not once did she consider her own unworthiness. It embarrasses her now, her disregard for the character of Gisele Larson, for Tenn’s conception of her, for her role in his life. Anja had dismissed Gisele as a mere functionary, the grout between the tiles. Was she more?

  “Hovland had his expressions, too,” she tells Sandrino. “When he sensed anything other than my full commitment to a scene, he stopped the cameras and waved his arms and turned his face into a big frown. ‘What a sad day it is today,’ he would say to everyone on the set, ‘the day ambivalence murdered Anja Bloom.’ His greatest insult was to call someone ‘Hamlet.’ He did not tolerate the slightest ambivalence from the characters he wrote or the actors who played them. His characters and his actors were famous for their force of will and commitment and singleness of purpose.” She shakes her head. “To watch a Hovland film was to watch a runaway train.”

  “He was a good teacher,” Sandrino says.

  Anja can admit this now to herself, if not to Sandrino: in the years after Hovland died, she was too cowardly to perform without him. She was afraid to act alone. She cultivated this fear. It was an easy substitute for her grief over losing him. Pieter did not try to change her mind. When, finally, Pieter had her full attention, he wanted her to stand still, to choose him. Pieter wanted her mind all to himself, and for that he required her body. He wanted to come home each night and find her there, the newspapers and journals opened before her on the table. Her fear of performing without Hovland was a dog guarding the door, holding her in, shutting out everyone but Pieter. Then Pieter died, and fear proved an insufficient substitute for the new grief that overwhelmed her. She needed something stronger than fear. Pride. Arrogance.

  “There is nothing we can do now,” she says to Sandrino.

  “We can go to the bar,” he says. “You can buy the boys a cocktail. Or we can smoke a little, all of us—it can’t hurt. To make the mood lighter. To laugh. We have not been laughing enough. And you can talk, the four of you together, about Gisele. Angelo is a very good actor, we think. I think. He is better than Tenn. Trevor is too jealous to admit it, but it is true. Every second of the play is torture to Trevor because he is not on the stage.” Sandrino shrugs. “Maybe I will have a love affair with Angelo, for spite.”

  “Will everyone still be at the bar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trevor, too?”

  “No,” says Sandrino. “He went to sleep.”

  “Wake him up,” she says.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT IS EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning on the day of the premiere of Call It Joy, and the second and final dress rehearsal, hastily arranged at the Shipwreck, has come to an end. Anja unlocks the front door of the A-House to let in the grumbling cleaners, who have been waiting on the porch for them to finish. Overnight, with the cooperation of Sandrino and Trevor and the rest of the cast, she has cooked up changes in the production, of which Sally knows nothing. She will see them soon enough.

  Still half drunk, and more than a little high, Keith drives her back to her hotel on his way to his apartment. They both need rest before the five o’clock hair and makeup call. When she crosses the lobby in the clothes she left in the night before, her hair unpinned, the young man at the desk gives her a conspiratorial wink.

  On
her back on the pink bedspread, unable to sleep, she cannot stop scripting every possible worst-case scenario: flubbed lines, boos, yawns. She longs for the mercy of an electrical fire. To distract herself from these thoughts, here in the Moroccan Tower, she goes back to the set of Runaway in Marrakech in 1963. She conjures the heat, the crowds, that nasty spitting camel. She sees herself in the photo on the camel taken by Hovland, the one she sent with her letter to Frank in New York, the letter he returned to her with his plea scrawled across the back—Come now please I need you. His last words to her.

  All throughout her days here, Frank has been coming to her. On the streets of Provincetown, in her dreams, in the opera music Keith plays in the club. She looks across the porch of the Atlantic House, and there he is leaning against the wooden post, waiting for Tenn to notice him.

  And why should Frank not come to her? She has brought him into the light.

  She must sleep. She has been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. The lines in her face are ghastly. She is not above vanity. She lies perfectly still, careful not to disturb the maid’s sculptural arrangement of the pillows. She counts the wood slats in the cupola of the Tower, the threads of fringe hanging from the rim of the shade of the chandelier. Not since she was a girl, with her mother and father in the next room, has she had such trouble calming the beat of her heart. Her impression on the bedspread is itself an imposition. How heavy she feels now. It is suddenly very important that she keep the room pristine, that she leave no trace. At this hour tomorrow, she will be home.

  It is the thought of her new home, the brightness of the morning sun in her wall of windows, the sea just fifty-seven steps down, that finally gives her the peace she needs to sleep. When she wakes, it is already time to head back into town.

  Backstage, Tenn paces and puffs on an electronic cigarette. Angelo sits in the corner on the floor with his eyes closed and his legs crossed and his head bobbing. She leaves them be. She stands behind the curtain for a moment, her hand on the flimsy fabric, listening to the rumble of the crowd she has yet to glimpse. Keith reports that every seat is filled. People are standing three-deep against the back wall. One hundred and thirty thousand dollars and counting, says Sally, her seed money and more, and that is before the silent auction she engineered at the last minute. Every so often, Sally’s forced laugh rises above the din. She is furious with Anja, but Anja will not budge from her decision. This is good practice for your future with artists, Anja told her. If you hire them for their will and ambition, do not be surprised when they exert them.