“I tried to exorcise that day from my dreams,” said Anja. “I had almost forgotten it even happened.”
“Maybe it didn’t,” Tenn said. “Who but us is left to say for sure?”
“It would come into my mind like a story I overheard, like a scene I had read in a cheap paperback. Not something that could have possibly happened to me, to my mother, to us. Then I look up at a movie screen and that horror flies back at me, the boys with their spears and those bells, the pile of bodies stabbing and biting! And your name blazed across it in triumph!”
“I’d hoped you’d never see that film,” said Tenn, tenderly. “That abortion of a film. But, Anja, I wanted you at the play. I took great pride in it. Suddenly Last Summer was an exorcism of my own. I spent months in New York to get it staged perfectly. It was Frank who convinced me not to tell you in advance that it had some vague echoes of Portofino, Frank who asked me not to insist that you fly back for the premiere. He expected the play to close quickly and fade into obscurity, and who could blame him? A one-act freak show of cannibals and lobotomies and moral decay! He prayed for a flop, I’m sure of it, purely on your account. But then we got such excellent notices—from Brooks Atkinson no less; do you remember that one? ‘A superb achievement. A genius of necromancy.’ Those words meant the world to me—and by the time the film came around, faster than anyone thought possible, it was too late. We didn’t see much of you in those years anyway, did we, when you were coming up so fast in the world? I seem to recall Frank writing you letters, attempting to reach you on the phone in various hotels, and getting no reply. Do you want me to describe the effect your vanishing act had on him?”
“I put his name on the list at every premiere. I used to watch the door, hoping he would step through it. But you kept him so busy. And Hovland—he demanded a great deal from me. When Frankie and I could finally find a time to speak, always late at night, always across oceans, I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. I begged him to come and live with me.”
“Those are your excuses?”
“Frankie always had a plan, but it never came to pass,” she said.
“I should have written you something then,” said Tenn. “On the heels of that awful film, back when I still had the magic, back when the heart was still in fashion. Frankie urged me to, but—my last best thing . . .” He took a long, deep breath. “If you recall, we were with Miss Anja Blomgren at the first fork in her life. We were the ones who put you on this path you’ve been on. Isn’t it almost romantic—in that sad way of romances—to be here together again, just the two of us? When maybe you can help me, the way Frank and I helped you?”
“You speak his name with such little effort,” she said.
This took him aback, and for a few moments they sat in silence. It came as no surprise to Anja that Frank had tried to shield her from Suddenly Last Summer, or that Tenn did not think she needed shielding. Frank would always treat her like the damsel in distress no matter how much armor she displayed, whereas Tenn would credit her with more strength than she actually had. Perhaps these were the two types of men in the world: those who kept trying to save you, and those who would forever test you. It was still too soon to tell which type Pieter would turn out to be.
Finally, Tenn said: “I’ve been speaking of Frank Merlo—and writing about Frank Merlo—for a long while now. You would know this if you hadn’t maintained such an untraversable distance.”
“You left him in that cancer ward to rot,” Anja said. Her hands began, again, to tremble. “When all he wanted was you. Just you. He wrote to me of your cruelty. Your absence. The other men you paraded around. It shocked me, how far you had fallen, the depths of your selfishness. I wanted to see you today so that I could judge you merely as weak rather than malicious, and so that I could forgive you, but it is too difficult when I hear you speak his name, and when I remember him as he was. Frank was a man of pure goodness, one of the very few I have known in this life. If you want to write a play with heart and muscle and poetry, write it about him. For him. Not for me.”
“I’ve tried,” said Tenn. “Each time, I’ve failed utterly.”
“Try again.”
He shook his head. “I can’t get him right,” Tenn said. “I thought I’d preserved him in amber as Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo, but that was a Polaroid, now faded. How do I write about The Horse when, the last time I saw him, he was the skeleton of a sparrow? I wanted to do right by him in my memoirs. I wrote of our devotion to each other, of our final night together. It was my chance to tell the world of that goodness of his, of our long association, of his death that broke my life in two. But now here you are with your poison arrow, your accusations of mendacity. Of opportunism.” He was slurring his words, growing more agitated by the minute. “What do you know of us, anyway?” he asked. “What, really, are you so certain of? I’ve written poems for Frank; shall I read you one? I gave Frank’s ghost a voice and a name in Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Did you go to see the premiere of that play last July? No? You’re in good company. No one else did, either.”
Anja listened, regretting some, but not all, of what she had been wanting to say for twenty years. But she was thinking, suddenly, not of Frank—not of opening his letter in Madrid, not of calling the hospital in a panic and being told it was too late, not of vowing then and there never to speak to Tenn again—but of her mother. Anja had never gotten Bitte right, either; she weighed too much, she was impossible to account for, it was a burden even to make the attempt, and so she had given up trying. Tenn, apparently, had not. She watched him take off his glasses, wipe the lenses with his napkin, and put them back on. Without them, he looked a decade younger, even with the puffiness under his eyes and the deep lines that surrounded them. He began to eat ravenously the steak and potatoes that had long gone cold. It was then, maybe, watching him, her long-ago friend now a falling star, to whom she had finally said her piece, that she felt the crack in her anger. The first glimmer of sympathy, uncoupled from pity. Her hands went still.
The boy who had escorted him appeared in the window and gave Tenn a wave. He leaned on the side of a parked car and lit a cigarette. Anja was grateful for him. Tenn would need him, now, to navigate the streets.
“Write me something about Frank,” she said. Their time was nearly up. “Something you haven’t written before.”
Tenn looked back and forth from Anja to the man in the window. “I had an encounter,” he said. “This month in Key West. With Frankie. What I want to tell you is: The Horse was with me.”
“Frank was there,” Anja said, skeptically. “With you.”
“Yes,” said Tenn.
It was then that he began to cry, and she took his hands in hers for the second time that day, and the last time in this life. She looked over at the boy, ticked her head toward Tenn, but he just held his cigarette out as if to say, When I’m done, lady. He struck a model’s pose, there on Park Avenue, in his cowboy boots and flared jeans and mane of bushy blond hair.
Tenn had slunk far down in his chair. “Is that your companion?” she asked him.
“That’s Kurt, yes,” he said. “He looks after me. Makes sure I get from place to place without a scene.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“What did I say his name was?”
“Kurt.”
“I think that was the last one,” he said, and collapsed in laughter. “This one is Ted. Their names are never longer than one syllable.”
Eventually, Ted came inside and stood discreetly near the entrance to the restaurant, his hands thrust in his pockets, a few feet from the maître d’. Tenn showed no signs of standing up. It was past three o’clock, and though Anja had nowhere she needed to get to, she was eager for escape. She planned to put on her sunglasses, call Pieter during his office hours, and spend the rest of the day in an air-conditioned museum.
“I will wait for you to send me s
omething,” she said to Tenn.
“Did I tell you what happened in Key West?”
“Next time,” she said.
“You will hear from me,” he said. “And then you’ll visit me in Bangkok. I’ll have Kurt find a grand hotel for you.”
She asked him when he was leaving, though she sensed that this, like the reunion with Frank in Key West, was another of his fictions or fever dreams, that, though Tenn traveled often and widely, he had no credible plans to move himself, old and infirm, to the other side of the world.
“I’m leaving as soon as I possibly can.”
She smiled at him. “Then I will come see you in Bangkok,” she said.
Six months later, alone in his bedroom at the Hotel Elysée, four blocks from the Waldorf, he took one too many pinkies and died.
Anja heard the news on the radio in a taxi speeding up Sixth Avenue. She had chosen not to leave New York, having ultimately declined the lead role in Svoboda’s play, which went instead to Jill Clayburgh. She chose Sequence instead, which meant she chose Hovland. He agreed to film just outside the city so she could be close to her astronomer.
A few months after Tenn’s death, a large manila envelope arrived for Anja at Pieter’s apartment building. Recognizing the Florida address, she opened it immediately in the lobby, the doorman watching her every move, as he always did, whenever the elusive Anja Bloom passed through. She pulled out a seventeen-page play entitled Call It Joy, dedicated to “A.B. and F.M.” There was no letter or note attached.
Anja expected to see Call It Joy produced or published somewhere eventually, but the years went by and the biographies appeared, and the play was never mentioned. There was no record of the title in his archives or in his letters. She came to believe that she was in possession of the single surviving copy. She showed it only to Pieter, this gift that Tenn had given her and Frank alone. She kept it in its original envelope, postmarked April 11, 1983, at the back of the file cabinet in the apartment with all of her old marked-up scripts. And then, like so many things of great significance, it was forgotten.
“Until you, Sandrino,” she says.
7.
MEN OF FEELING
No one wanted to call on a Portofino doctor, who weren’t known for their discretion, so Sandro patched them up in private. He took care of himself first, and then, one at a time, he tended to the rest of them, sprawled on the floor of the women’s muggy apartment off Via del Fondaco. With one hand, he held an ice pack on the side of Jack’s head; with the other he unwrapped rolls of gauze, a safety pin between his lips. He poured iodine on their cuts and covered them in nylon bandages. He worked quietly, with calm and efficient determination. When he finished with Frank, he rubbed him above the ear with his knuckle the way he might do for a puppy.
They’d brought the Swedes back to their rented flat thinking it was the closest approximation of a home they had in the world, but, as the night went on, after they bathed and changed into clean clothes and took turns clutching Maja to their chests, they said they couldn’t breathe between those walls. They couldn’t bear to be left alone; they saw the boys’ faces when they closed their eyes; their chants echoed in their heads; and so Frank offered to put them up at the Splendido for as long as they needed. Though Tenn was ready to be done with them—they were marked in some way, he declared to Frank; he called them ill starred—he reluctantly agreed.
They checked in the Swedes long after midnight to a room at the other end of their floor, sedated them with a couple of pinkies from Tenn’s stash, and tucked them into twin beds separated by a nightstand. Bitte immediately threw off her covers and, eyes half closed, stumbled over to Anja’s bed and curled up next to her, chin to shoulder, like a child frightened by a storm.
Frank kept them company from the armchair in the corner, his head in his hands, watching the Seconal work its magic on their breathing. First Anja’s slowed, then Bitte’s, to the same rhythm. It comforted him, their rising and falling chests, the animal sensuality of their snorts and drool and sudden jolts. Surely, he and Tenn painted a similar picture each night. The heat they generated was an unspoken code, a signal. What was the signal if not, We belong here. What was the code if not, I’ll protect you. If only Frank could watch him and Tenn as he watched the women now, their bodies in their purest state, suppressing the rowdy forces of mind and memory. It was a love play in itself.
He dozed in and out, his dreams uneasy, haunted. At first light, he switched off the lamp and gently closed the door. His footsteps were loud in the wide hallway lit by flickering sconces. He thought, what happened at Testa del Lupo just hours before will not change me. He had already been hardened by life. In a jungle in the Solomon Islands, he’d knelt beside Thomas Brunner of Abilene, Texas, a boy his age, a fellow jarhead, cut down by enemy fire, blood spurting from his jugular. The bullet had missed Frank by less than a foot. In that foot was both a reprieve and a commandment: use well this gift of a future. Jack’s demons were more obvious, black crows perched on his shoulders, pecking at his eyeballs. Life had already hardened all of them, and maybe that was what drew them to each other, how they could recognize each other at Truman’s party. If it wasn’t true for Anja two nights ago, it was true today. Testa del Lupo would change her—she had changed before Frank’s eyes—the only question was how.
It took a few more hours of fitful sleep for Frank’s hands to stop shaking. It took Tenn a go at the typewriter. They fetched coffees from the Splendido bar and carried the porcelain cups to a bench at the far end of the private garden, hidden from the other guests by a canopy of bougainvillea. Someone designed this garden for tranquility and protection: the bushes of soothing lavender and rosemary, the peekaboo views of the quiet sea far down the slope, the locked wooden gate two men tall. How many other lovers had stolen an hour to sit on this same block of carved stone, to throw one leg over the other’s and huddle close, to idle in the silence of a long association whose terms were clear enough, only to disturb the peace with dreaded talk of what came next?
“I want a part in Senso,” Frank said. He’d heard these words in his head so often, that they sounded disembodied spoken aloud.
“What kind of part?”
“Any part.”
Tenn thought a moment. In this scene, a moment was too long.
“You surprise me,” Tenn said. “Should I be surprised?”
When Frank didn’t respond, Tenn kissed him, softly, on his left temple and pulled him tighter. “What about Anja?”
“Both of us, if you can,” said Frank. “But, Tenn? Me first.”
“Visconti’s gone full opera again,” he said. “From what I can gather. The set’s in chaos.”
“And here’s not?”
Tenn mimed the crumpling of Visconti’s letter and the tossing of it into the flowerbeds. “Chaos tends to find me,” he said. “A hazard I should have warned you about before you hitched yourself to me. Too late now, I’m afraid. Listen. I’m thinking already. What would you say if I made you a soldier in the Risorgimento? There can never be too many soldiers in a war movie. I’ve only been conscripted to write the love scenes, but Bowles has a hand in the war scenes. He won’t mind squeezing in another line or two. One look at you in uniform and he’ll write you a ten-minute soliloquy.”
“That sounds good.”
“From what I’ve seen of the script so far, the soldiers do a lot of shouting and a lot of marching and a lot of drinking. I recall that in one scene they’re standing around in their private quarters scrubbing their laundry—shirtless, no doubt, if I know Visconti—when Alida Valli barges in looking for her lover. You’ll fit right in. How did I not think of this before? You forgive me?” He patted Frank’s bare thigh.
“And Anja?”
“That’s a tougher sell. She’ll never pass for an Italian, not even a Venetian, not without shoe polish. Then again, Visconti wanted Brando to play Mahler—that’s the
Austrian officer, the lead, for Christ’s sake—so he may not stand on ceremony with our apprentice.”
“She’d make a fine Austrian,” Frank said.
“She’d make a fine assassin.”
Frank and Tenn agreed on one undeniable fact: Anja had an icy exterior—an arresting chill, Tenn called it—and it was too soon to tell how that translated to the screen. It was on the depth and density of the ice that Frank and Tenn disagreed. Frank believed the ice was thin, that all it would take to crack it, to melt it, and thereby free Anja from her mother’s clutches, was love. Romantic love had the most potential, of course, but the love of a trusted friend—him, for example—love given or love received, might also do the trick. Tenn, on the other hand, believed that young Anja Blomgren was already frozen to the core, that some twisted thing had happened to her in Sweden, and that the damage was irreversible. This upset Frank, at which point Tenn said, “Oh, baby, don’t you see? They’re the lucky ones.”
We are men of feeling, Tenn said to him, warm to the touch, live wires, and we would always be so. “Such is our lot in life. It’s a curse, this state of being, but our particular sexual proclivity neither caused nor cured it, nor was it its symptom. Whether we fuck men or women does not factor.” (Indeed, Tenn said, he counted some of the most fiercely heterosexual men he knew among the most deeply and painfully afflicted with the curse of feeling.) One of its few benedictions was that, in some—“think Brando,” he said, “think Kazan, think Anna, think Tennessee Williams, think Frank Merlo”—it gave rise to the making of art, and this making, if not the art itself, provided temporary relief from the heat, the illusion of control over passion, a taste of power.
“You say, ‘think Frank Merlo,’” said Frank, “but Frank Merlo hasn’t done shit when it comes to art.”
“Not yet, maybe,” said Tenn, “which is why you’ve asked me what you’ve asked me.”
Leading Men Page 11