Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “Those crocodiles may be invisible to us,” said Tenn, “but for him they are very real. This is a country beyond convention, governed by mood, by fancy. By vanity. The only way to thrive in it is to govern yourself the same way. No wonder it so thoroughly and wantonly seduces the English and the Americans, the men in particular. Italy is everything the Anglo man is taught not to be: undisciplined, permissive. Pretty.”

  “Pretty?” said Truman.

  “I’ve seen this clerk and hundreds, maybe thousands, like him,” said Tenn. “I can tell you he spent more than a few minutes in his bathroom mirror this morning to admire himself after putting on his postal uniform. He combed his hair and set it with spray. He stood proudly in that stiff dove-gray shirt, in that smart little cap. He rubbed his chin and turned his face from side to side, his own deep brown eyes enchanting him. The average Italian postal clerk is more conscious of beauty than the professional American landscape painter.”

  Frank listened with annoyance, not because Tenn noticed the clerk, of course—Frank had noticed him, too, how could he not, yesterday morning when he’d sent the telegram to Anna to check on Mr. Moon—but because they had something more important to discuss than the curious nature of the Italian male species, a topic he and Tenn had long exhausted. He decided to interrupt them, something he rarely did, otherwise they could go on all night.

  “Sandro—Il Dottore—wants you to help Jack,” he said to Truman. “You and Tenn both. He needs you. In all the . . . commotion the past few days I forgot that Sandro came to me. He thought I’d understand. I don’t know what he needs you for exactly, but it’s for something only another writer can do. Jack has a new book—”

  “The Strange Guy,” said Tenn.

  “Something like that,” Frank said.

  “An autobiography?”

  “Sandro is very worried,” Frank went on. “Jack’s other books flopped, and the publishers don’t want this new one at all. But Jack won’t let it go. He thinks it’s more of a masterpiece than the first one. Sandro says he’s going to keep drinking until the publisher agrees with him, and if he keeps drinking, it’s going to kill him.”

  “Those novels didn’t flop,” Truman said. “They were drawn and quartered. The Voice of a Generation Gone Flat. Amidst my glee, I remember I almost felt sorry for him. Vanquishing a rival is, from time to time, bittersweet.”

  Thumbing through The Gallery, Tenn said, “I thought I’d at least heard of every fairy writer of some repute.”

  “You’ve been too busy with your starlets,” said Truman. “Take my copy if you want. It’s not even signed.”

  Tenn set the book back down on the bar. “Someone we know must have slept with him,” he said indifferently. “Or is he a prude on top of everything? I can assure you I’ve never met a more joyless person.” He picked up the book again. “On second thought,” he said, handing it to Frank over Truman’s head, “keep this for me, Frankie. A souvenir. We’ll never see the man again. And no doubt we’ve seen the last of Sandro.”

  “You can’t think of anything at all you’re willing to do for him?” Frank asked. “I agree he’s a nasty sort, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like him much, but if he’s really so bad off, shouldn’t we try to help? He’s a fellow soldier. And he is—well, he’s one of our kind, whether we want him to be or not.”

  Tenn looked at Truman. Truman looked at Tenn. “My Little Horse,” Tenn said. “Sometimes I forget you’re not a writer. Then you say something like this, and I’m reminded.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think what your clod of a jockey here means is that Il Dottore is overreacting,” said Truman.

  “Precisely,” said Tenn. “When you think of how Jack is now, think of me after Summer and Smoke.” He walked over to Frank, put his arm around his shoulders, and turned to Truman. “We were in Fez,” he began. “I was in a pit of depression so deep not even the African sun could find me. In the middle of the night I forced Frankie to pack up our things and drive us to Casablanca. But the pit was there, too, just as deep, filled with quicksand. I convinced myself that if I didn’t get off the continent, it would swallow me up. I wasn’t on the verge of a breakdown; I was broken and down and out. I was nearly catatonic, babbling like an infant.” He turned to Frank. “Did you call the authorities, baby? Of course you didn’t. He called the agency and booked us on the next ship to Marseilles. He carried my bags onboard for me, two on each arm, as if I were a cripple. The trip was a horror. It took three days. I couldn’t touch the food. I told the other passengers I was dying of cholera. Frank held my sweaty hand under the table. In Marseilles, we switched boats for Rome. It wasn’t until we breathed the air off the Italian coast that I could start climbing my way out of the pit, and there was Frankie at the top with his arm out, pulling me up onto solid ground. If Sandro wants to save Jack, that’s what he’ll have to do: acquaint himself with the mud. Roll around in it for a while. Build up the muscles in his arms. Not pass his millstone off to people he hasn’t known for longer than a weekend, not to mention fellow writers with dubious hopes for Jack’s success. If we try to intervene, Frankie, what you don’t realize is that Jack will resent us for treating him like a charity case. He’ll be humiliated. And in the end, when it all goes wrong, he’ll blame us.”

  “She has a point,” said Truman.

  Frank had not known Tenn to be unkind, but he did know him to perform unkindness for his fellow writers. All the writers Frank knew did it, as much for sport as to make themselves appear more confident and self-assured than they really were. The unkindness armored them. The only trouble was that, for Tenn at least, the armor fell away the moment he was alone, leaving him with the fear of retribution and the guilt of having mortally wounded someone who hadn’t deserved it, which was when he’d turn to Frank for reassurance that, no, he wasn’t a monster, that, yes, he’d singlehandedly made the careers of many, and that, in the malice and enmity department, Truman was far worse. Truman was as much Tenn’s rival as he was Jack’s, after all; for that matter, so was Paul Bowles and Gore Vidal and Don Windham and even Bill Inge. These rivals also happened to be his best friends, and the only ones, Tenn claimed, who understood him fully.

  Frank longed so much for that full understanding of Tenn that, last summer, he’d spent a few hours a day in the air-conditioned public library in New Orleans attempting to write a play of his own. Jersey Song, he’d titled it, in double-thick all-capital letters, underlined, at the top of the page. He didn’t have much school, but he read like a fiend—everything from Salvador Dalí’s memoir to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces—and people told him he composed the most entertaining letters. He was as much at home in a box seat at the symphony and the opera as he was doing the Lindy hop at the back of a Chelsea dance hall. For Jersey Song, he had in mind a traditional three-act structure, a leading lady inspired by his Aunt Marie (who’d be played by Anna Magnani, of course), and a rough outline for the set design, sketched in pencil on the back of the script. But Jersey Song never got sung. As a playwright, Frank chased words the way a dog chased birds. When he could finally come up with a line, he’d immediately cross it out. A letter he could toss off in his own voice no sweat, but when it came to putting a voice in someone else’s mouth, he froze. His characters sounded like cheap knockoffs of Serafina Delle Rose and Stanley Kowalski. He left the library each afternoon with ink-stained fingers and forearms he’d scrub in the bathroom sink before Tenn could ask any questions.

  The failed experiment with Jersey Song gave Frank greater respect for Tenn than he already had, but it also caused an earthquake in their otherwise happy French Quarter apartment. The earthquake was Frank’s realization that not only was he not and never would be a writer, and not only was he not and never would be much of an actor or dancer, but, as none of those things, he had no natural place in Tenn’s world.

  Tenn had slept through that earthquake
, but, the next morning, Frank noticed, the crack in the ground between them, the one only Frank could see, had grown into a crevasse. It was still possible to leap over, but the leap was more dangerous than it had been the night before; there was a great chance he’d fall into the crevasse and get himself stuck there. Tenn may have sensed this distance, but he had no idea Frank had tried and failed to write a play, let alone that its failure had led Frank to doubt their compatibility and to go so far as to question whether he had a place at all in Tenn’s world. For Frank, though, the expansion was the omen he’d always feared would come. He stared down at the crevasse’s jagged edges, the threatening darkness between them, with both fear and relief that the day had finally arrived. Every couple, he suspected, was separated by at least a crack; there was no such thing as solid ground or a perfect union, not in a war or a country and not among lovers; the trick, though, was not to acknowledge it. Once you did, once it jolted you awake, as it had for Frank, you became fixated on its progress, and the very act of tracking that progress ensured its inevitability.

  It was also very possible that he was wrong about all of this, that the earthquake, and the crack, and the crevasse, and the leap over the edges, and the dog chasing after birds, weren’t the right metaphors at all. Maybe it was Frank’s inability to describe it accurately—the poverty of his language compared to the riches of Tenn’s—that doomed him. If he was unable to describe a thing, if he couldn’t settle on its metaphor, how could anyone else, including the man he loved, understand him? And what if the thing he was trying to describe, the thing he was so desperate to define so that he could hold it and protect it, was the very life he was leading with that man he loved? What then? They couldn’t call the thing marriage, and, even if they could, Frank didn’t want the word. At best, it was a mistranslation. At worst, it smelled of garages and empty milk bottles and the floor mats in his father’s Chevy. Marriage belonged to his cousins and to Luca and Teresa and to Ike and Mamie Eisenhower; it was not the proper word for what he had with Tenn, and it never would be. Neither was friendship; neither was love affair. Someday, someone would come up with the proper word. In the meantime, the only hope for a man of few words was in comparison, in the pointing out of two other men and saying, That is us, too; they are the metaphor I was looking for. Frank had yet to meet those men. They weren’t Truman and Jack Dunphy; he’d seen enough of them in the past couple years to know that much. He still held out a hope, however vague, that they might be Sandro and Jack Burns.

  “If Sandro can’t handle him,” Truman was saying, “some other sycophant will come along. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had one waiting in the wings. As I’m sure you know all too well, Frankie, the only way to soothe a writer’s ego is to stroke it. You can’t train it to lower its expectations or to settle for less. Jack Burns didn’t come to Italy to study at the University of Humility. He came here because his family and friends at home saw his guts splashed all over the newspapers, and he couldn’t bear to face them. He wanted to live among a naïve people who’d treat him like the demigod he imagined himself to be, who’d be enthralled by the faint whiff of an American reputation. I don’t blame him, really. I, too, have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

  Frank shook his head.

  “I wrote that as a punch line, you know,” said Tenn, pleased, clearly, by Truman’s invocation of Blanche DuBois. “But the audience never laughs. They identify too much with the character, with the tragic element. Every time I see them clutch their pearls and hear those sympathetic ‘aww’s from the seats, I consider the scene—the entire production!—a failure. They should be howling!”

  “If it’s any consolation,” said Truman, “I agree with you that the scene is a failure.”

  Frank had never found the humor Tenn found in Blanche, and he certainly didn’t find it in Jack. “It doesn’t feel right to be laughing at him,” he said. “He’s in pain.”

  “You can only save one writer at a time,” Tenn said, his hand on Frank’s shoulder. “The weight of two of us would sink the lifeboat.”

  In the Marines, Frank had learned a different approach to rescue. Every man was his brother. To sit idly by while his brother was drowning was an act of treason. It didn’t matter if your brother was a loudmouth or a screw-off or a mean son of a bitch, you still had to drag his sorry excuse for a body onto the boat before he went under. Instead of making this argument, which Frank knew he couldn’t win, and which would only lead to Tenn and Truman mooning over him as a romantic soldier, he steered the conversation, as delicately as possible, toward what had happened at Testa del Lupo. It was clear, though, that Truman knew nothing more than they did about those events or had no intention of telling them if he did.

  Meanwhile, the yachts pulled into the harbor and disgorged their hungry passengers onto dry land and then through the doors of the Delfino, which burst open every few minutes with another group in sundresses and straw hats. Everyone knew Truman. Not only was he patient with each of the women and men who came up to greet him, but he seemed to welcome their advances and to grow taller and more animated the longer they engaged him. In this way, Truman was more like Frank than Tenn, whose nerves often got the best of him in crowds, who shrank under the weight of too much attention at premieres and receptions. The whiskey and the pills helped up to a point, but only when Frank could calibrate and regulate them for Tenn; left to his own devices, Tenn drank too much of the whiskey and, to counteract the effects, popped too many of the pills, and by the end of the night he’d lose himself completely.

  Truman was sorry they were leaving Portofino, he told them, after Jack Dunphy appeared briefly and admonishingly on the stairs. It was time for him to go up and claim his hamburger. Lady Dunphy did not feel up to guests tonight, Truman said, otherwise he’d invite them up for an espresso and to watch Truman digest his reheated sandwich. Truman promised to make it up to Frank and Tenn with an invitation to visit them again in Taormina, possibly in the fall, on their way to Morocco? If not, then in the late spring of ’54, after the rainy season? Truman and Dunphy had already lived for three years in Sicily, in a vertiginous villa called Fontana Vecchia that had once belonged to D. H. Lawrence, where the rent was cheaper and the men darker and more accommodating than in the north. They were excellent hosts, Truman reminded them, and it was quieter in Taormina, more discreet.

  If it were Frank’s place to do so, he’d have put forth the idea that came to him as Truman went on and on pining for Sicily, which was that, since he and Dunphy had such spacious accommodations and such an appetite for guests, and since Frank and Tenn had already spent happy hours there a few summers back, they should invite Sandro and Jack to stay with them, or invite Jack alone. What better place, with the ghost of D. H. Lawrence looking on in benediction, to give their countryman a change of scene, a place to lick his wounds and dry out. But Frank was learning, ever so slowly, that other men’s hearts, even Tenn’s, weren’t as big and simple and practical as his; if they were, they’d be drafting a telegram to be sent to the bungalow in Marina di Cecina. Frank wasn’t always able to say out loud what was in his heart, but he was usually damn good at acting on his loving intentions. It frustrated him that he hadn’t had much luck in Portofino so far—first with Anja, now with Jack—and so maybe it was a good thing that he and Tenn were moving on.

  They said their goodbyes to Truman, who disappeared up the stairs of the Delfino, and walked tipsily through the piazza toward the Splendido. Neither wanted to hail a car. They were enjoying the chance to replace the horror of Testa del Lupo with the cool breeze from the harbor and the lights the booze made blurry and the man playing mandolin in the doorway of a shuttered pasticceria. Frank carried Truman’s copy of The Gallery. When they came upon Anja and Bitte’s apartment off Via del Fondaco, they were surprised to see one of the windows lit by a lamp and a shadow moving across it, since the women still had one final free night at the hotel. They stood a moment, watching the silhou
ette bend and straighten, bend and straighten, as if doing calisthenics. They did not ring the bell. Strange how much could pass between people in just a few days. Frank hoped he’d see Anja again, but, once they separated here, he’d have no way to find her. Her life had no clear direction. It would be up to her to seek him out and, finally, to express her gratitude for all that he and Tenn had tried to do for her.

  The farther they got from the piazza, the darker and emptier the streets, the more at ease Frank felt walking with his arm around Tenn’s waist. Never mind that Italian men sat in each other’s laps and slobbered all over each other as a matter of custom; in the affection between queers, no matter how muted, there was an instantly recognizable difference. Frank shook his flashlight at the oncoming pedestrians, dazzling their eyes, both to identify them and to give him and Tenn a moment to unlink their arms and then wave a friendly, but not too friendly, buona serata. The drinks had not completely dulled their nerves. At every turn, they half expected to come upon the band of savage boys, or the carabinieri who’d decided to ask the Americans a few questions after all about the body found at Testa del Lupo. Frank quickened his pace.

  Midway up the hill, Tenn took the flashlight and turned into a dark, narrow alley. “A shortcut,” he said. The walls of the alley were covered in vegetation, a form of flowering ivy or kudzu that grew wildly all over town. It gave off a sharp, tangy scent—something like honeysuckle but much less sweet—that filled the air like smoke.