Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “Don’t you miss working?”

  “How do you just let it all go?”

  “You must be happier now than you were then?”

  “Tell me something about it you miss.”

  But even at the height of her association with Hovland, she considered acting an indulgence—an arduous one, but an indulgence all the same. She has never believed the arts are a higher power than, say, science, or religion, or even athletics; and within the ranks of the arts, she does not put acting anywhere close to the top. She supposes that is because acting came so easily to her. If you cannot see the struggle in a thing, its intricate craftsmanship, the precious irretrievable hours it stole from a person’s life, how can you determine its value? The complex machinery of an excellent film, written and directed with a clear and uncompromising vision, yes, she admires that; the novels of Henry James and Virginia Woolf fill her with awe; she marvels at the Imagist poets; certain classical and contemporary music; and of course, painting and sculpture, though not so much the modern fare, with its high concepts and low execution. She always resented being called a prodigy. She does not see the honor in doing expertly the thing you were born to do.

  Even so, she reminds Sandrino, she has not been idle over these decades since Echo. She directed the stage version of Angle in London and in Amsterdam. She still sometimes tinkers with a collection of poems, though she fears they are derivative of the Imagists. She accompanied Pieter to various conferences and on extended research trips, including one to the South Pole. For two semesters in the late nineties, she taught an undergraduate course at NYU. She traveled far and wide to accept awards, and for each of them she wrote a new speech. It is only the past few years—she has lost track of exactly how many—that the city has held her hostage. Do not believe the press, she tells him; they are lazy with narrative. She is not Greta Garbo. The press makes history repeat itself so they are not forced to work too hard.

  Still, he keeps asking. There’s no other director who excites you? None of those Hovland disciples? He does not believe her when she tells him acting was not her first or even her second love, that it was simply a means to an end. It does not make sense to him that you can be preternaturally good at something—among the best of the twentieth century, if her various trophies can be trusted—if you do not love it, if it does not consume your very soul. He is a product of Italy, after all, his romantic sensibilities as reliable as the cheese and the olive oil. She is grateful to him for bringing Italy back to her, not because her time there was beautiful—much of it was not—but because it was the last place she lived as a young woman. Being a young woman exhausted her, but it was far less work than being a grown woman. And now that she is an old woman, mercifully invisible, finally granted the solitude and freedom she once feared, she finds that laziness is not the ugly word she was taught to despise. In fact, she has begun to experiment with laziness, to embrace its time-bloating vastness, its endless permissions. Lately, her Mondays with Sandrino are the only nights she leaves her house.

  The days he does not come are long. It seems equally impossible that Pieter is gone and Sandrino has appeared only recently. More than once she calls Sandrino by Pieter’s name, unnoticed until he corrects her, a flash of apprehension on his face. No, she is not going senile, she reassures him; she knows all too well who they both are; it is just that this is what they once did so much of, she and Pieter: sit beside each other and “mind-wrestle,” as he called it, for hours upon hours, disagreeing fiercely, concurring ecstatically, until hunger or exhaustion forced them to remember they also had bodies to contend with.

  Sandrino cannot blame her for falling back into a thirty-year habit, especially since she has not quite given it up. Anja has continued to wrestle with Pieter’s mind, imagining his reaction to the day’s news and then voicing her opposition or her commiseration. Pieter’s mind is as familiar and accessible as her own: his frames of reference, his maddening biases and blind spots, his predictable bugaboos and sacred cows. Debating him does not require his physical presence. So far, in the nine months since his death, he has been in the right roughly half the time. “You saw that coming,” she said to him the other day, turning over a page of The New York Times.

  After all these weeks screening ancient films and enduring solemn audience talk-backs with the curator, she should have expected that Sandrino would ask to change the subject. “I want to show you a little bit of my world,” he says, implying that he has so far felt confined to hers. His world is the graduate neuroscience program at the university, where he is completing his first year of coursework. It is also sushi restaurants (“What they do to those little fish!” he exclaims, “they are sculptures you can eat!”), predawn rowing on the river with a club of enthusiasts, craft beers, and drag bars. She feels equal parts relief and disappointment when it is the academic hemisphere he invites her into, by way of an upcoming lecture entitled “Learning and Memory in Drosophila.”

  “Fruit flies?” she asks him, laughing. “I give you the world of Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang and in return you offer me fruit flies?”

  He holds the flyer for the lecture in his hand the way he once held the rose. With mock incredulity, he says, “You’re not curious what those little buggers learn and remember?”

  “By now you are well aware how curious I am to learn everything,” she says. She accepts the flyer and folds it in half. “Of all the desires, curiosity is the only one capable of keeping a person alive.” Until she says this, she does not know if she believes it. She starts to catalogue for him all the forms of desire she can come up with—ambition, sex, love, the whole taxonomy—in order to argue on behalf of curiosity, but then she remembers Pieter, the most inquisitive man she has ever known, and she stops herself.

  “Something is wrong?”

  “No,” she says.

  No desire, no matter how strong, can save a person once the body betrays him.

  She unfolds the flyer. “It looks very interesting,” she says.

  “It’s the final lecture of the term,” says Sandrino. “Others have been more sexy—‘Epigenetics’ and ‘The Prefrontal Cortex’ and ‘Hierarchical Behavior,’ I think you would have liked those—but I was too nervous to invite you.” He explains that she is an Important Person and he is merely her fancy. On a movie set, he adds, the prop does not get the privilege of asking the star to join him in the warehouse with the rest of the equipment.

  “Is that how you think I treat you?” she asks him. “Like a prop?”

  This wounds him. “Of course not!” Their time together is the highlight of his week, he says, a happy break from his difficult studies. She reminds him of his teacher of English in Florence, and yet she is unlike anyone he has ever met.

  “I was Hovland’s collaborator,” she says. “Not his diva. Not his slave. With Pieter, too: a collaborator. He shared all his research and ideas and theories with me, even though I could barely speak his language. I think all I have ever wanted from another person, man or woman, was to collaborate with them, to wrestle. I do not want to be your teacher, Sandrino, and besides, you are too intelligent to be my student.”

  He smiles. “Then together we will learn everything there is to know about the fruit flies.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Why not.”

  “And other things, too, I can show you. If you truly are curious about everything.”

  Those mischievous eyes, that curl of the lip. It could be any year. They could be in any country. He could be any one of them.

  “I will meet you in the Marcus W. Lannon Lecture Hall,” she says, reading from the flyer. “Thursday, the twelfth of May, four p.m.”

  “Let me give you directions.”

  She shakes her head. Lannon Hall. Across from Calderwell, across the quad from Meacham. The names of the university lecture halls are like cities they once lived in and to which she never expected to return alone. Pieter is standin
g at the lectern at the front of the cavernous trapezoidal room, the giant white screen behind him. He is looking out at the audience, holding his silver laser pointer—his lipstick, she called it—over his right shoulder to show them the stars. He knows the placement of the stars with such precision that he need not turn around.

  “Will I meet any of your friends?” she asks Sandrino.

  “I don’t have friends in the program,” he says. “The social life, it is hard. We are so busy. And they have girlfriends and wives and some, they even have little children. They come in for class or their rotations and then they go. The friends I have told you about—Trevor, James and Roberto, Bryce who collects the old cars—they are guys I met in the clubs, or with the rowing. Or . . . online.” He shrugs. “We are not very close to each other. This city! Everyone tells me you must live here five years before you know for certain your friend is real. Five years is too long to wait!”

  “They are wrong,” Anja says. She means that it will take longer, or it may never happen at all, and that escaping to a better city is the only solution, but he has brightened, having taken her comment the other way, and so she does not correct him. Let him have hope. It occurs to her for the first time that Sandrino is lonely, though it is possible he has been talking of nothing but his loneliness from their first night together. His world, when he describes it for her (she is curious, she is always asking now, in these two weeks before the lecture), sounds full to the point of bursting: the frigid mornings on the river, the hours in the library, the dates three or four nights per week, the part-time data-entry job at the hospital for extra spending money, the English lessons to keep up with his classmates, the late-night shows and dancing and drinking, the occasional refuge of church on Sunday mornings when he craves the choir music. Half the people who overstuff life this way do it out of joy, because they cannot get enough of life’s bounty; they are gluttons, gourmands. Frank Merlo was one of these. The other half do it to distract themselves from loneliness, from the pit that will open up beneath them if they stop running. Anja has taken Sandrino for the former. But his youth and good looks, his ease with his body, may have deceived her. Why else, after the initial rush of her celebrity and her connection to his father, does he continue to spend his Monday nights in the mostly humorless and imperious company of an old woman—bereft as she is, haunted, overbearing, starving—if he is not desperate for distraction?

  “I have a confession,” he says.

  “How thrilling,” she says. It is the Monday before the lecture. The days have gotten long. It is light when they walk to the train.

  “My friend Trevor, he has been spying on us,” he says. “On you.”

  Trevor is the one he likes best, the boy of whom he speaks most often, the one with the shrine to Tennessee Williams in his apartment, the poster of Marlon Brando above his bed. Sandrino claims he is handsome, though he is never in the pictures he has shown to her from his phone. Trevor played Brick in his college’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and treated himself to orchestra seats he could not afford at the recent Broadway revival of Streetcar, but his favorite plays are the more obscure, experimental ones, the ones Tenn wrote after Frank died, the ones nobody loved: Small Craft Warnings, Out Cry, Clothes for a Summer Hotel.

  “I told him to meet us one night at the Archive and say hello, that you are not a person who is cold, that you would shake his hand warm, but like me Trevor is shy for certain things.” Here Sandrino lowers his head. When he is nervous, he loses his English. “A few of the Monday nights, he is at the same time to us at the coffee shop. He sits nearby where he can watch you and hear you. His headphones are empty. Off, I mean. He wants to hear the voice of someone who was a friend of his idol, Tennessee Williams. He read to me once out loud from the biography about your time in Italy with him and Frank.” Then he adds, quickly, “Of you he is a fan, too. You and Hovland. Trevor is a schoolteacher and an actor on the side in the community theater. Remember when I told you I saw Angle? It was Trevor who rented it for me pay-per-view and together we watch it. At the end we clapped like you were with us in person.”

  “Does he know my address, Sandrino?”

  “No!”

  “The neighborhood where I live?”

  Again he lowers his head. “The neighborhood I did let slip out of my tongue by mistake. But it is a big neighborhood, yes? He won’t find which apartment is yours. I promise you. Café Viva is enough. And the lecture. He is coming to the lecture. ‘To see her in the light’—this is how Trevor talks! Very dramatic!—and to meet you, finally to meet you face-to-face. That is a piece of my confession. I mentioned to him that you were coming with me to see the fruit flies. Another slip. I’m sorry. Trevor is someone, I don’t know—” He waved his hand at the streetlamp. “I can’t say no to Trevor.”

  She manages a smile and says, “It’s fine, Sandrino,” though his confession, and Trevor’s insinuation into their Thursday plan, stirs up a familiar but unplaceable unease.

  Later, after the screening of The Student of Prague, in the hard-won back booth of Café Viva!—she forgot the place even had a name, or that exclamation point at the end of it, that loud aggressive wish, Long may you live! We dare you!—she scans the crowded room for Trevor, though Sandrino claims he is not there, and she imagines that all the headphones are empty, that everyone is listening to her tell Sandrino the story she has chosen to tell him tonight, the story of the last time she saw Tennessee Williams. Maybe she is performing for him a little, setting the scene of the Waldorf Astoria in 1982, of the hustler on whose arm Tenn arrived and departed, of his mysterious gift that arrived at Anja’s house a few months after his death.

  Sandrino’s eyes go wide. “You will tell Trevor this same story?” he asks, with more eagerness than she has ever seen him show about anything, and it is this moment when she places the source of the unease she felt at Sandrino’s confession, which is that particular sadness of loving a man who loves other men. It is this moment when she knows for sure that she will lose him, that she was always going to lose him.

  Lately, everyone is talking about Iceland. Reykjavik is both close enough and far enough. To what? From what?

  When she does meet Trevor, three days later in the hallway outside Lannon Hall, she recognizes him immediately. He is in every way Sandrino’s opposite: blond and muscular, the American you see in cartoon posters, his features angular and patrician, his hair cut military-style everywhere but the front, where it crests and curls in a stiff wave. He wears blue jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt. His voice is high, feminine, though he makes an obvious and clearly laborious attempt to modulate it. What a Brick he must have made. Anja has already met him a thousand times.

  “An honor,” says Trevor, and kisses her hand.

  The professor behind the podium tells the audience that the head of a fruit fly is less than one millimeter across. The professor is not Pieter. He has none of Pieter’s flair. But he is solid, convincing, a wonk. Each fly head contains approximately 100,000 neurons, he says, a manageable number to study and manipulate but not without its challenges. The professor who is not Pieter trained the flies to form long-term memories by exposing them to the smell of mushrooms. His discovery was unexpected: the genes that helped create memory were the same genes that sensed light. The room buzzes. Sandrino makes notes on a legal pad in his mellifluous cursive; bent over the armrest, he keeps tucking his hair behind his ear. Trevor catches Anja looking at him and rolls his eyes as if to say, I don’t know what that guy’s talking about, either. But Anja does know, or at least she believes she does. It is common sense, the link between light and memory. Hardly worth a study at all.

  Afterward, the cubed cheese and sliced melon and sparkling water and Trevor sitting at her feet like a lustful dog. He is unworthy of Sandrino, Anja thinks, but simpatico enough, so she answers his questions with politeness and patience. That she has brought Trevor one of her presigned head shots seems to
give Sandrino the greater pleasure, as if the act has signaled her approval of him. Trevor has nowhere to put the photo, so he sets it faceup on a radiator behind him. Instantly she wants it back. She doubts the photo will make its way to the wall beside Brando. It is not Anja Trevor is after.

  His questions are all about Tenn and Frank and Truman, the lowest of the television questions Sandrino has never once tossed at her, even when he asked about his father. Anja would prefer to talk about light and memory, about Reykjavik, about Gliese 581g, about The Student of Prague, about anything other than the glitter of Italy in 1953. But look at the pride on Sandrino’s face. Look how it pleases him to be the vehicle that can deliver what Trevor wants. Look how he taps his feet in rhythm to music that is not playing. In her seat between Sandrino and Trevor, turning her head from one to the other, Anja considers the corollary that accompanies that particular sadness she has newly remembered: the corollary of electricity, the kind that can pass from one man to another through a woman. Despite her wariness about Trevor, it thrills her—in this moment, at least—to conduct this current, to allow it to animate her.

  “He told me you’re sitting on a gold mine,” Trevor says.

  “Is that what he called it?”

  “No!” says Sandrino. “I never said gold mine. Trevor!”

  “I call it a gold mine, then,” Trevor says. “It’s true that you’re the only one in the entire world who’s seen it?”