Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  They set off, Frank and Tenn behind the old man on an uncushioned wood plank, as transfixed by the deep knots of muscle in his back, muscles neither of them would ever develop sitting at a desk or even dancing with a professional troupe, as they were by the shoulders of Portofino itself, those twin mountains on both sides of the harbor trying as best they could to hide the orange and gold town from the curious world. It was just as they were turning away from the town toward the open water that Frank spotted Anja rushing out of the Delfino.

  “Stop!” Frank said to the old man. “Fermo!”

  “Che succede?”

  “Just stop right here for one minute. Don’t move. Non si muova.”

  She wasn’t watching where she was going. She looked back and forth from the piazza to the water, scanning the boats and the faces of the tourists waiting for them along the embankment, her hand on top of her head to keep her hat from flying off. She collided with a little boy and didn’t stop to see if he was OK. In her other hand, she carried a small white suitcase.

  “At long last,” said Tenn. “The string of pearls is broken.”

  “She’s coming with us,” Frank said.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WHAT DID YOU do for a living?” the new nurse asked Frank. That was how they spoke of his life now, all of the nurses, in the past tense. He didn’t correct this one. She was moving him to a private room, making conversation so he wouldn’t ask why.

  “I slept with Tennessee Williams,” he said.

  That old joke.

  “How nice,” she said. She had her hand on his lower back, lifting him onto his feet. She’d brought a wheelchair just in case. “What do you say, want to do this the easy way?”

  Her nametag said Fay Newton. She had a wide face and close-set eyes like an owl. “I can walk, Fig,” he said. It made him smile, an owl called Fig Newton. Maybe it was the gas.

  He walked around the ward to wish the other guys good luck. There were ten of them now. It was the middle of the day and most were asleep. He sat on the edge of their beds to catch his breath between goodbyes. Frank was the only one with lung cancer. The rest of them had it in the liver or the brain. As bad off as he was, plenty worse had come through.

  “You gettin’ sprung?” asked Blind Sid. Every guy had a sick name. They gave them out to pass the time.

  “That’s what they tell me,” said Frank. Blind Sid could use a little hope.

  “Good for you,” he said. “I don’t want to see you back in here.”

  “You won’t see me no ways,” Frank said, in his best James Cagney.

  Blind Sid had been a carpenter for a living. Legs, the guy across from him, had been a postman. Pinky and Grumpy and Giggles had had office jobs. Robin Hood had sold real estate. Pluto had taught science at a high school in Teaneck. Muscles Marinara had managed a pizza shop. There was one colored guy they called Jazz. Cueball had painted houses. The Horse—he’d been an assistant. (Sometimes he said “secretary.”) A long time ago, he’d driven a truck and danced and fought in the Marines and had walk-ons in some B movies. No, nothing they would have seen.

  “Mr. Merlo,” said Nurse Fig, from the doorway. “I’ve got to get you upstairs.”

  He patted sleeping Giggles on the chest. When he stood, the head rush got him a little dizzy. He steadied himself so the nurse wouldn’t see. But the walk back across the ward did him in. “Just this once,” he said, falling into the chair. “For you.”

  “You’ll sleep better in your own room,” she said in the elevator.

  “I did fine down here.”

  “It’s not a place you want to be forever,” she said.

  “So that’s where you’re taking me?” he asked. “A place I’ll want to be forever?”

  They went up. She parked him in front of a closed door, walked around the chair to open it, then pushed him into a small windowless white room. It contained a single bed, an armchair, an oxygen tank, and a low table piled high with cords and blinking machines. They’d already brought his flowers and cards and books up and arranged them on the nightstand like a still life.

  “Not everybody has this luxury,” Fig said. She pulled him up alongside the bed and hit the brake. “Someone’s looking out for you.”

  “Who’s footing the bill?”

  “That’s not for me to know,” she said.

  For the past few months, the thick of summer, Frank had been going back and forth from Tenn’s apartment on Sixty-fifth Street to the cobalt unit at Memorial. They’d hand him a long white gown to put on and then he’d lie on his back on the long table like the Bride of Frankenstein, his arms at his sides, his head immobilized in a steel chamber. Four pins, thick as bolts, pressed against his jaw and temples to keep him still while the doctor positioned a giant metal eye at an angle just over his heart. “Ready?” he’d say, just as the eye shot two hundred beams of gamma radiation into his lungs at the precise locations of the tumors. Sometimes the visit lasted just a few minutes, sometimes more than an hour. When it was over, the nurse unbolted him from the chamber and sent him down to the ward to rest with the guys. He got there on his own two feet, never once accepting the wheelchair. If he had enough strength, he was free to leave the very same day, take a taxi back to Sixty-fifth Street, or sit on a bench in the park. If he was too weak, he’d stay the night in the ward, head home in the morning in time to catch Tenn at the typewriter, and then he’d sleep some more.

  They told him the treatments could go on for months, for years. “All we can do is see where it hits you next,” said the doctor, and once they did see where it hit him next, they’d hit it right back. The more Frank learned about the treatment, the simpler it became. The blurs would keep appearing on the X-rays of his lungs and his liver and his brain, but the eye would never run out of gamma rays to point at them. It was a race, and Frank had always been good at races. The quickest to the pin. A sprinter. A fighter.

  He hated the sight of the black burns on his chest, his tender shriveled nipples, the ugly rashes, his skin flaky and dry and sore. Catching his own face in the mirror, the sunken cheeks, the bulging eyes, frightened him. But it was the fatigue he hated most of all. He longed to swim, to dance, to fuck. When he woke each day in Tenn’s apartment, he vowed to do one of the three. But it was always already the early afternoon, and it took all his strength just to get from the bedroom to the living room sofa. He spent his days watching soap operas, Gigi on the cushion beside him licking his fingertips, Mr. Moon having died in April of ’54, eight months after being disinvited to Truman’s party. Tenn was always out somewhere. Friends called with nothing to say, brought him food he couldn’t eat, stories he couldn’t quite keep up with, as evening came on and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Still, this was a rhythm, a routine that could go on and on (months, years) and he didn’t care what Al and Dan and Connie and the priest said, it was bad luck to write a will in this sorry state. Writing a will was the same as admitting the race was run. He’d do it eventually, he promised them, but only once Indian Summer came around.

  Blind Sid was the one who’d told him about Indian Summer. Sid had been in and out of Memorial for ten years—“nine years longer than you,” he reminded Frank, “so buckle up”—and he’d seen it all. Every guy who came through the ward, Sid said, had had a stretch of time—a few days, a week, a month, longer if he was lucky—when the cancer left his body, when his muscles suddenly kicked back in, when he could eat a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs without barfing it up, when his mouth filled with spit and his dick with blood. Sid was still waiting for his Indian Summer. He hoped that, when it came, his sight would come back with it. His daughter had grown into a young woman; he wanted to see her strawberry-blonde hair down to her shoulders. Like the weather, Sid said, you had no warning when Indian Summer would come on, but when it did, that was when you took care of your business, said your goodbyes, made your confe
ssions, gave the wife one last good screw, because winter was about to flatten you and this time you weren’t gettin’ up.

  All that was still to come, Frank had said to everyone who’d listen, though only Sid seemed to believe him. In the meantime, he’d settled into the rhythms of his shrunken world, the trips from Sixty-fifth Street ten blocks south to Memorial, from the cobalt unit to the ward, from the bedroom to the living room. He and Gigi kept to themselves while Tenn and Angel crossed in front of them, checking their watches, making their plans. Then, last week, without a goodbye, Angel flew off to Key West, and it was just Frank and Tenn alone together in the apartment. This, too, the strange and familiar rhythm of sharing a home with Tenn, Frank had settled into.

  With Angel gone, Frank had hoped Tenn might sleep beside him on the queen-size bed. He longed for the fat and skin and sweat of another body cradling his, rocking him to sleep. No, it was not just any body he longed for; he longed for Tenn’s body, Tenn’s fat and Tenn’s skin and Tenn’s sweat, the soft brush of Tenn’s mustache on the back of his neck. Tenn’s was the body he came home to, the only one that could protect him.

  “After you’ve swallowed all those pinkies,” Frank had said, “my coughing won’t wake you. You’ll get through the night just fine if you just give it a try.” He didn’t want to beg, but it sounded a lot like begging. “Pretend it’s 1953 and this is just a summer cold. Pretend you don’t hate me.”

  “I could never hate you, Frankie,” he said. He picked up the electric fan and his favorite pillow and headed for the living room sofa. “But you’ll be more comfortable with that nice big bed all to yourself.”

  When Tenn shut the door to the bedroom, Frank crawled to the end of the bed, reached his arm out, and bolted himself in behind it.

  Every night since, whether or not Tenn had come home from wherever he roamed in Manhattan, Frank turned that lock. Let him change his mind, he thought. Let him find his mercy—his compassion, his heart—but don’t let him find the bedroom door open when he finally comes to comfort him. Let him not find Frank splayed before him on the bed like a whore. Let him wonder why the door had been locked at all. Let him bang his fists on it in fear that he couldn’t get to Frank in time to save him. Let Frank hear his anguished pleas.

  A week ago, in the morning, was the last time Frank had seen him. Tenn came into the bedroom while Frank was dressing. The car was downstairs for his nine o’clock appointment at Memorial.

  “Let me help you,” Tenn said.

  “I can put on my own shirt,” said Frank.

  “As you like.”

  Frank was wearing only his fluffy white robe. The lifting of his shirt from the hanger knocked the wind out of him. The heat was already heavy on the windows, the fans whirring. He waited for Tenn to leave the room so he could remove the robe, but Tenn just stood there in the doorway, leaning his shoulder on the frame, staring. He stared at Frank the way you stare at a mouse you don’t have the heart to sic the cat on. Their eyes met. And then, because Frank was already late, and because Tenn should see—for once, up close—the entirety of his ninety-eight pounds racked and gasping for air, the wreck of burnt bones the Little Horse had become, he let the robe drop to the floor.

  “Jesus, Frankie,” Tenn said. He fell to his knees.

  He left town that day, or so Frank was told. Milk Train was opening in Virginia. Tenn would have gone anywhere, though, made any excuse, just to escape that apartment, to put distance between himself and the whining skeleton Frank had become. Frank knew him like a book. He knew he paid for this private room on this quiet floor, for the oxygen tank, for the blinking machines and the better meals and the extra devotion of Nurse Fig, for the Bride of Frankenstein gown and the incinerating eye. He knew this was the most Tenn would do, here at the end of their long association. He had no more illusions. The only thing he didn’t know was how soon Indian Summer would come, and if Tenn would come back in time for one last day in the sun.

  8.

  THE SURVIVAL HYPOTHESIS

  The city, hateful as it is, has burst into bloom. In the park below Anja’s apartment window, the tulips stand in proud formation. A row of purple, a row of pink, a row of yellow, the lawn at their feet a bright pool of green. A spiked iron fence protects the park. Twice a week, a team of men in orange shirts comes to caretake. They jump from their pickup truck, unlock the arched gate, fan out over the grass and mulch to spear the invading trash, skim and dredge the fountain, wipe the bird droppings from the statues, sweep the cobblestone pathways, and then they lock the gate behind them, throw the bag of trash into a pickup truck, and speed off.

  If Anja is sitting at her window when the wind is high and blowing east, the spray from the fountain cools her face and neck and her bare arms. She closes her eyes, thinks of somewhere else. Every night at ten o’clock—she is often at the window at that time, just before she falls asleep—the jets and the fountain lights switch off with a sudden splash, plunging the entire square into darkness. Then, at ten thirty, even in heavy rain, the sprinklers pop on. She once thought it wasteful, all this attention to a park the Association opens to the public only six times a year. Now she wishes that the caretakers were the only ones permitted access, and that they worked on the weekends, too, when the scraps of paper pile up, attach themselves to the railings, and float in the water like unread messages. In two weeks, at the annual Memorial Day strings concert, the children will come trampling in for the start of the season, spilling their ice cream cones, scarring the grass, beheading the tulips with their sugary breaths.

  Lately, Anja has taken to sleeping on the cushioned bench beneath her open window. The master bedroom has always been too stuffy, cooked by one too many radiators, their valves rusted shut. She endured the stuffiness for Pieter, who could never get warm enough. Their bed is perfect in its current state, adorned with the Amish quilt handmade for her as his gift for her seventieth birthday, the two king-size pillows plumped and unwrinkled, the top sheet folded in a straight line over the lip of the coverlet. That is how she left it, at least, many weeks ago. Sometimes she forgets about the room, tucked away in the back corner of the bloated apartment, far from the noise and color of the square. Anja can sleep anywhere. She has lost so much height that the length of her body, head to toe, is exactly equal to the length of the little bench.

  The problem is that their heavy old wooden file cabinets remain in the distant bedroom, relics from the days Pieter lived alone in this apartment as a young professor, when he rented out the second bedroom to graduate students. His papers are gone, of course, but somewhere mixed up with her scripts and contracts and head shots and fan mail lies Call It Joy, which Sandrino and Trevor, mostly Trevor, insist is a treasure—a “guaranteed classic,” Trevor calls it—despite her insistence to the contrary.

  Oh, my dear boys, she thinks. Don’t you know? A late work, completed in haste, out of desperation to prove yourself and reclaim your genius and spark a rebirth and win back the critics who abandoned you, while death looked over your shoulder, that is not a treasure. That is something you pray your friends will destroy.

  They don’t know, they don’t believe her, so they press her. They resist her unromantic notions, as well they should. They question her objectivity, her perspective. In the weeks since the fruit fly lecture, these first warm Mondays of spring, they come to her in the city to make their case. Perhaps they think that the closer they get to the apartment that holds Tenn’s manuscript, the more likely she will be to lead them up the hill and let them read it.

  By they, she means Trevor. She always means Trevor. Each Monday evening, as she approaches the wine bar at the bottom of the hill, she can’t help it, she hopes—just once is all she asks—that she will find Sandrino alone, without the chattering boy, waiting for her. She is always disappointed. For one thing, Sandrino is in love with Trevor. He reaches for his hand under the table; he never interrupts him; he gazes at him like a child at the magi
cian who pulls the quarter from his ear. For another, they are both incapable of arriving on time.

  Though the film series is over, they have kept up their Monday evening tradition. The maître d’ puts a RESERVED sign on the one low table in the corner of the bar. The other patrons are perilously perched around them on high wobbly stools, hunched over their fifteen-dollar glasses of cabernet. The boys sit beside each other across from Anja on the banquette, their backs to the street, one of those cheerless battery-operated candles fake-flickering between them. What she would give for a real flame, for smoke, for dripping wax to dip her fingertips in, for a hand reaching for hers under the table. What she would give to hop onto one of those high barstools with no fear of it tipping over.

  In as few words as possible, Anja has answered all of their television questions she once rebuffed. This, too, is on account of Trevor, who slips them between talk of aesthetics and art and weather, as if to trick her into confession. When she indulges him, what great pleasure it gives her to see the pleasure his pleasure gives Sandrino. She indulges Trevor not to unburden herself, but to see Sandrino’s eyes go wide with the pride of having procured this living legend, this friend of his father’s, for his zealous boyfriend.

  Maybe, then, it is not Sandrino’s indulgence, but her own. Are they comparable pleasures, being procured for and being procured? Whatever the case, these Monday evenings, the only break in her project of laziness, reacquaint Anja to the power she once had and mostly gave up, that of holding an audience in the thrall of her whims.

  When every response is true, what leads her to say yes instead of no to the questions, to favor this reason over that reason as an explanation for her career decisions, to choose him rather than him or him or him when she is asked, so casually, what she misses? She misses them all. Her life without them is unbearable. Television questions force them into taxonomies, pressing her to admit he belongs in one period of time and he in another, when the truth is they were all one man smashed into pieces and scattered across her life. Each one contained the others. When Pieter cut his finger, Hovland’s blood stained the knife. When Frank pulled her close behind him as they walked out of the surf at Paraggi, the body shielding her from the men’s stares was the body of her father.