“That is funny,” he says. She hears him close a door. She can no longer hear Trevor’s voice. “In my mind, this is my gift to you. I tell myself, Anja will thank me when it’s over. Finally, I will teach my friend something she does not already know! In the meantime, though, I want to make sure I explain one thing: we will not be looking back. We will be looking through.”
“Cue the violins,” she almost says, then stops herself. She has hurt his feelings once already. Instead she says, unconvincingly, maternally, though it is not her intention, “All right.”
* * *
• • •
NINE MONTHS AGO, when Anja emptied the filing cabinets of Pieter’s papers, she redistributed her own into multiple drawers. Her short-lived attempt at organization was a way of what her manager, Scott, called “taking stock,” but the choices involved in the act of grouping and categorizing her documents—by film? by kind? by date?—overwhelmed her, and so the papers have remained in the half-coordinated state in which she left them.
Still, it does not take her long to find the yellow envelope inscribed in Tenn’s looping hand, his Key West address in the upper left corner, the address of Pieter’s New York apartment scribbled across the middle vivid as a photograph. In those letters and numbers are the limegreen window paint of their first shared home, the burnt smell of the neighbor’s Turkish coffee, the gluey backs of the crumbling shower tiles. The pages of Call It Joy are curled at the edges. She resists the impulse to read the play again from start to finish. It is enough to see the words Gisele, Frankie, bungalow, jukebox, Bangkok. She slips the pages back in the envelope, carries it gingerly out of the bedroom, closes the door softly behind her as if someone were asleep on the bed, and sets it in the empty spot on the bookshelf that once held the novels of John Horne Burns.
The days pass slowly. She continues to fail miserably at her project of laziness, abandoning her post at the window for hours at a time to search websites for properties in places she has never lived: Malta, Sydney, Ljubljana. The listings are vague and overpromising, the sites cluttered with outdated statistics and dim photographs. She tries to limit her inquiries to more temperate zones, which are better for her skin and her frangible bones, and yet she feels continually pulled north. She cheats on Malta with Edinburgh, Sydney with Sendai, Ljubljana with Vancouver. They are all cities without associations or connections, without the lure of romance or memory. Glossy brochures arrive in the mail; agents leave breathy telephone messages entreating her to “come in.” She enters her original name—Anja Blomgren—on the online forms, and when the mail and the messages come for that girl, it feels something like Sandrino’s spirits pushing through.
On Monday, a large truck arrives and two men drop off stacks of white tables and folding chairs. A few minutes later, more cars and vans line up behind it, and from them emerge women carrying sheet cakes from local bakeries, teenagers lugging large plastic jugs of lemonade and water and coffee urns, and the musicians with their instruments in leather cases. The tulips look on nervously at the once-perfect grass already trampled, bracing themselves for the onslaught. The newspaper called for rain, but so far Anja and the flowers and the grass are out of luck: the weather is warm and fine.
One by one, the front doors of the brownstones open and men appear with light sweaters tied around their necks, their wives ahead of them pushing strollers over the cobblestones. As the sun sets, the boxes of delivered pizza are opened, the lemon squares and cake slices are devoured, and the coffee is poured into cheap Styrofoam cups that will plague the park for the rest of the summer. The music plays on. With each torch lit against the darkness, Anja’s dread gathers force. At precisely eight o’clock, her door buzzes.
Though it is only the second time Sandrino has been inside Anja’s apartment, he walks Trevor through it as if he has come triumphantly home. He speaks with territorial pride of the fireplaces, the pocket doors, the wainscoting, the intricate moldings along the arches, the gold and marble inlays. “It just goes and goes,” he says, taking Trevor’s hand and pulling him down the center hallway. Anja orients them to Pieter’s original four rooms and explains that, as the apartments around them became available over the years, they bought them up and tore down as many walls as they could to give the place an openness. She insists she was not imperious or greedy. The more room she had in this city, she says, the less likely she was to flee.
Sandrino cares less about the history of the apartment than about finding the room best suited to his purposes. Eventually, he chooses the parlor off the middle bedroom for its circular shape and wet bar and tall windows, and because, with those windows open, the music coming from outside is distinct but not intrusive. He sets the tote bags on the parlor floor.
“I made Trevor in charge of the food and drink,” he whispers sheepishly, as he takes out three bottles of cheap red wine, from which he quickly scratches off the price tags, two containers of spreadable cheese in large white tubs, a box of plain water crackers, and a bag of pizza-flavored chips labeled FAMILY-SIZE in bright orange letters. He arranges these items on the bar and leads a series of toasts: to Anja, to his nonna, to Tennessee.
The wine is flat and sugary, the cheese unspeakable, but they help to blunt Anja’s dread. She is hosting a children’s party. She is indulging her boys in a harmless game. While she and Trevor look on, Sandrino clears a space on the floor in the middle of the room, unfolds a small rectangular Oriental rug with silk tassels at the short ends, and places one tall glass candle in each corner. The candles are imprinted with the faces of saints. When he requests pillows, Anja finally understands that he means for the three of them to sit on the floor. She refuses. Her legs. So they drag in a small card table from the guest room, and he places the rug and the candles on top of it.
He seats Anja at the head of the card table in the darkened room, with himself and Trevor across from each other in the middle. At his instruction, she places the envelope containing Call It Joy in the center between the lighted candles. Then Trevor takes a thin lumpy cigarette from his pocket and holds it up for them to admire. “Our medium has arrived,” he says.
Sandrino turns to Anja. “This is OK?”
“You didn’t ask her ahead of time?” says Trevor. He closes his fist over the joint.
“I’m sorry,” says Sandrino. “So much on my mind!”
“Let me see it,” Anja says. Maybe some magic will happen here after all.
The first time she smoked, she was with Frank and Tenn, the five of them lying around—on pillows! Oh, her young back!—in Rome, Ahmed passing her the kif as Frank looked on protectively. Since then, she had more than a few with Hovland to relax her into various roles. Once with Peter Fonda at a bar in Gramercy. Once with the doorman in Pieter’s building. It was always men who introduced it into the proceedings, men who carried it with them or knew how to get it. Though she has smoked cigarettes with women in washrooms and film trailers and backstage dressing rooms all her life, never once has a woman pulled a marijuana cigarette from her purse and offered to share it with her. It would seem too tribal, Anja thinks; she herself would find it arrogant and, yes, a little queer.
She brings the joint to her nose, hoping for the sweet hay smell of kif, which permeated the apartment at Via Firenze for all her days there, but this offering of Trevor’s is dry and flavorless. “We do this now?” she says, holding it above the candle flame. Sandrino cautiously nods. She fills her lungs with the sharp smoke, holds it in for a moment, closes her eyes, and then lets it out so gently that her breath barely disturbs the air.
“Holy shit,” says Trevor. “She’s a pro.”
“No,” she says, handing the joint back to him. “But I did learn to be elegant about it.”
After they each partake twice, Sandrino places his right hand in her left and directs her to take Trevor’s. They reach awkwardly across the table to complete the circle, keeping the envelope inside it and the candles a
t their elbows. Outside, the violins play a cheerful vivacious melody, a rite of spring. It is appropriate, says Sandrino, for this act of communion, this celebration, this happy reunion of old friends.
They stay quiet and still for a while, listening to the music and the stray voices from the square. When Sandrino begins to speak, repeating some sort of Italian chant Anja cannot translate, he squeezes her hand as if they are on a plane taking off. She has forgotten how the hands of young men are both strong and soft, their strength a promise for the future, their softness an echo of the past, so that they carry both with them until the softness is no longer necessary. Even Trevor’s hands grip hers forcefully as Sandrino continues to chant. He says Tenn’s name. He says her own. He introduces himself and Trevor to the empty room.
The walls sway with shadows. The candles have flavored the air cinnamon. Sandrino asks her to say something to Tenn that only he would understand. Something happy. It will reassure him that she is who he says she is, that the three of them can be trusted, that they have sought him out in friendship, with respect, with esteem.
She shakes her head.
“Please,” he says. “It can be something small. Search your mind.”
She goes back to Via Firenze. Frank is monitoring the effect that her first taste of kif is having on her. I’ve never seen you laugh until now, he tells her. Really laugh. You were so serious before. You belong here in Rome with us.
“The pale roses,” she says to Sandrino now. “The pale roses at Gandolfo.”
“Good,” he says. “Say it one more time.” As she does, he takes their hands, lays them on the envelope, and closes his eyes.
Anja does the same. It feels good to include Frank, to hear his voice. An extravagance. All of this is an extravagance.
“Now think of the last words Tennessee Williams spoke to you,” Sandrino says. “Say them in your head.”
I’m leaving as soon as I possibly can.
“Good,” Sandrino repeats. “You’re doing good.” He pats her hand.
In the next city, she will miss Sandrino. Does he know she has stayed here this long because of him? When he gets back from Italy, it will be September, and she will be gone.
“Now we wait,” he says.
“For what?” says Trevor.
“A disturbance.”
Outside, they are replaying Beethoven’s spring sonata, the piece that began the evening. It sounds mournful without a piano. How still the room is now, bracing for the disturbance. But when the disturbance does not come and does not come and does not come, and the music ends, and Sandrino shifts in his chair and he clears his throat and he repeats his chant, and Trevor sighs, and their sweaty hands slide off each other, Anja—she cannot help herself—starts to laugh. She bites her lip and shuts her eyes more tightly to stop the tears. Trevor starts laughing, too, and then, much to her relief, so does Sandrino.
Anja opens her eyes. There is Frank, standing in the window, his back to her, as if checking for rain. He says nothing, or he has nothing to say. It is not like him to be silent, to visit her and not offer the gift of his face, his voice. It is not like him to be angry with her, but she senses his anger in the room. She does not tell Sandrino what she is seeing, though she knows it will give him pleasure. She moves her lips silently. I am sorry we troubled you, she tells Frank. I am sorry I did not come when you needed me. I was afraid, she says. Tenn and I were more alike than you knew.
She blinks, and he is gone. How much of him will survive?
Sandrino lowers his head. He tried his best, he says, with a shrug. Some people don’t want to be disturbed. And even if they do, he reasons, to reach them takes more than one attempt, especially if they are long dead. The fragment diffuses. Or it didn’t survive at all. “Just because a man is famous,” he says, “a big force in the world, in history, doesn’t mean his chance to survive is better. A nothing person on the outside, I think, has the same chance as Tennessee Williams or a king . . .” He looks up at Anja. “Or you.”
“That is logical,” says Anja.
“Is it?” He laughs again.
“Yes.”
“You think I am pazzo.”
“Of course not.”
“I actually do,” Trevor says. Again they all laugh.
“I agree with Sandrino,” Anja says. “The actual force of a person’s consciousness is unknown and cannot be measured. It would not surprise me if it were much stronger or much weaker than the person imagined—the ‘nothing person’ or the ‘something person.’ And that if it were strong enough it could, as you say, push through.”
“Grazie,” he says.
“It makes me think of stars,” Anja says. “When I was a girl, I was taught that most of the ones we see in the sky are long dead, that their light is just now reaching us, that when we gaze up at night we are looking into the past. It used to scare me, this notion of the sky as a vast, endless tomb. All that death flying back at us. But then Pieter taught me that it is not quite true. Only a small number of the thousands of stars we can see with our naked eyes have died. The dead light, though, is indistinguishable from the light of a living star. They burn side by side. You cannot tell the difference between them.”
Anja has no respect for the act of looking back. It is a mark of weakness, of self-indulgence. The word “memorial” is cursed to her. When she seeks comfort or companionship from the dead, she thinks not of the men themselves, the four men who formed the constellation of her life, but of the stars. This was much too romantic an idea to admit to Pieter. It is possibly too romantic even for Sandrino. She can hardly admit it to herself. But she reasons, still, even now, that if she can watch the stars, it is not too much of a leap to imagine that she herself is being watched, and that whoever is doing the watching can see that she is, at every moment of her life, surrounded. They can see that her rooms are never empty.
“Maybe let’s quit with all the stoner talk and get to the play?” Trevor says. “That’s what we’re all really here for, right?”
“Anja?”
She takes the envelope from Trevor’s hands. She is delaying. Frank is gone again. All of them are gone. “To do this properly,” she says, “we are going to need better wine.”
9.
AN EDUCATION
For all their plan-making and manipulations in Portofino, Frank and Tenn did not discuss with much seriousness how long Anja would stay with them in Rome, or what their obligation was to her beyond a few introductions. She’d simply handed her little white suitcase to Luca’s ancient cousin, sat beside him on the boat to Rapallo, taken the backseat in the Jag, and then the spare room in the apartment on Via Firenze. All the while, she maintained a silence that was both anxious and resolute, speaking only to ask how much farther it would be, and how soon she could meet their friends. She was evasive on the subject of her mother. All she said, after Tenn pressed her, was that Bitte had established a rapprochement with Signor Ricciardi, who’d locked her away in her old room above the kitchen, and that she likely wasn’t even aware that Anja had left Portofino. Frank found her story more than a little implausible. Anja was more likely to drug her mother’s chamomile tea and run as quickly as she could down Via del Fondaco than Bitte was to let her out of her sight. They’d learn the truth sooner or later.
When they introduced Anja to Paul and Ahmed as “the runaway,” she didn’t quibble with the description. They smoked some kif in their living room, sprawled out on pillows, and she fell instantly asleep. Frank carried her up the stairs and, for the second time in their short association, tucked her into a bed they’d provided for her. He unpacked her suitcase, as much to snoop as to help her feel at home. She’d brought cotton dresses in faded flowered prints, none of them white; some silver jewelry; an English Baedeker guide to Rome and Central Italy published in the thirties, heavily annotated in a faded language he assumed was Swedish; a small zippered bag of cosmetics and
tonics; undergarments, stockings, and two pairs of shoes; and her passport. In the passport photo, her hair was boyishly short, her expression haunted and hard, her lips a thin line with a distant smile behind it. Her place of birth was listed as Malmö, her date of birth as June 2, 1936. Frank did the calculations twice, both times in disbelief: two months ago, she had turned seventeen.
His experience with women had led him to assume that most were a few years older than their stated age; still, the fact that Anja was five years younger, and little more than a child, filled him with fear. Suddenly, the fisherman was in the room beside him, and the boys from Testa del Lupo; suddenly Anja was walking out of the water at Paraggi in her transparent suit. Watching her sleep, a rush of tenderness, an urge to protect her, dissolved his fear, and the men vanished. And it occurred to him then, as he quickly and quietly reassembled her suitcase so as not to let on what he knew, that maybe Tenn wasn’t so certain that Anja would make a great actress after all. Maybe he was so accommodating of her, so willing to give her a role in the little drama of their lives, because she gave Frank something to do. With Anja for a project, he’d spend less time, or no time at all, with Alvaro.
The next morning, they took her shopping on Via Condotti. The clothes she’d brought from Portofino were not flattering enough to meet Luchino Visconti later that afternoon and Anna Magnani as soon as possible afterward. In fact, Anja seemed to have packed her frumpiest frocks, as if she expected to audition for the role of milkmaid or housekeeper. Frank found her a sleeveless sundress with black and white polka dots splashed with pink roses, which the saleswoman at Gandolfo claimed was inspired by a painting by Renoir. The dress made Anja look slightly older, in her early twenties at least, especially with her hair pulled back, as the saleswoman suggested. Frank had yet to tell Tenn about the passport, and he wasn’t sure he ever would. Keeping secrets from him gave Frank a charge.
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