Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  When it was finally dark, Frank and Sandro closed themselves in the kitchen, poured shots of anisette into their espressos, and turned the portable radio on low. At Frank’s suggestion, they played briscola for money with the deck of Italian cards he’d brought from Rome. Tonight, Sandro had all the luck. He won the first round by twenty points and the next by eighteen. Frank pushed the stack of lire toward him in theatrical frustration.

  Whether it was the cards or the anisette or Jack’s improved condition Frank didn’t know, but the heaviness had lifted from Sandro’s shoulders. Maybe it hovered just above him, between the top of his head and the ceiling, ready to descend at any moment, but for now he sat up straight in his chair, and he tapped his feet to Nilla Pizzi who sang too slow for tapping, and he talked of the future as if it were bright. He was only thirty-one years old, he said. His father had lived to ninety-six, a miracle of health. Jack would be his lifelong friend. His children and grandchildren would read The Gallery—all of Jack’s books, he corrected himself—in the original English. Every August, the two of them would travel to an exotic place as far as their money would take them, a place where they had no one to answer to: Lisbon, Cairo, Beirut. The rest of the year, he’d be happy enough with his animals, and Jack would have his typewriter.

  When Frank asked whose children Sandro was referring to, he said, matter-of-factly, “Mine.” He hoped at least one of his sons, if he was so lucky to have sons, would take over his veterinary practice, but, if not, they could do something else, anything else, that required an education. He wanted even his daughters to learn English, which was the key that would unlock the world for the next generation. He said all this as he racked up more points in briscola, collecting aces and threes hand over fist. When he noticed the bewilderment on Frank’s face, he said, “There is always a woman in the picture, no?”

  His woman lived not far from here, Sandro said, in San Vincenzo. She was a schoolteacher, the younger sister of his compare Nunzio, known to Sandro since he was in short pants. Her name was Floria. It was Floria who’d taught him the importance of English, she who gave him lessons in grammar when he visited. It was difficult to make time for her, but he managed. He never spoke of this woman in front of Jack, but he knew of her and that, sooner or later, perhaps once they married or the first child was born, she would require more of Sandro than she did now, more than she had over these last three years of the men’s affiliation. Beyond that, Sandro said, he and Jack would have their Augusts, and maybe more. Because if he wanted to take these holiday trips with his friend, the famous American writer, who was she to complain?

  Frank was no stranger to arrangements, but this one was not so simple to organize in his head. Why had Sandro not mentioned it until now? Why had Jack not mentioned it at all? How many lives could a person lead at one time, and how did you keep them from crashing into each other? Meanwhile, he lost track of the game. Sandro continued to amass his fortunes, chattering on amiably about a change of luck, a clear day tomorrow, another night of restful sleep to the sound of the waves. Frank’s thoughts turned to Jane Bowles, wife of Paul, whose very existence he’d all but forgotten in the haze of kif and Ahmed and the parade of Ahmeds before him. At least Jane was off having love affairs with women; he doubted that the same was true of this Floria, that she had adventures far beyond conjugating verbs for children in some one-room schoolhouse in San Vincenzo.

  “When will you see her again?” Frank asked.

  “Floria?” He shrugged. “Next month sometime. After I drive Jack home to Firenze. She likes me to come on Sundays. I spend many hours on the train.”

  “All that back and forth would make me tired,” said Frank.

  “No, I don’t think it would,” Sandro said. “Not you. Not us. We are not the tired kind. The switching, the in-between, the this and the that, it gives us life. You can’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  Sandro leaned forward, clutching his cards to his chest. “The fact that some men choose to live in chains when they could be free.”

  Frank considered this. “You don’t think that all you’ve done is add another chain?”

  “You mean Jack?”

  “I mean either one of them. You break free of one just to tie yourself to the other.”

  Frank had come close to this double knot with Alvaro. Just as Tenn expected Frank’s time and attention, so Alvaro had come to expect them of Frank. Worse: Frank came to demand equally precious things of Alvaro—his immediate availability, his unfailing good humor, his complete submission—and when Alvaro could not or did not provide them, Frank felt forsaken. The contract too closely resembled the negotiations and obligations of love. It was better to enter into no more than one such contract, even an unspoken one. It was better to remember the boys for their elbows and scars, not their hearts.

  He started to say this to Sandro, in so many words, but in the middle of it, they heard Jack knocking around in his room. He appeared in the kitchen doorway moments later barefoot, still mummified in the blanket, shielding his eyes from the lamplight. It was past ten o’clock. He had slept, off and on, for nearly twenty-four hours, with or without Sandro’s pills. “I’m starving,” he said.

  “That’s very good!” said Sandro. He stood and, giving Jack no chance to resist, grabbed his shoulders and kissed him on the lips.

  Jack pushed him away, as if by instinct. “My sunburn!” he said, rubbing those assaulted shoulders. He sat down in Sandro’s chair and poured a shot of anisette in his empty espresso cup.

  “Take small sips,” Sandro said. “Don’t drink it all in one gulp.”

  “I will make you some pasta,” Frank said. “I’m hungry again myself. It’s the ocean air. You too, Sandro?”

  “For pasta?” he said. “Always.”

  They had plenty of fresh tomatoes and vegetables, but Frank wanted to fix for Jack the dish his mother used to make when he was coming off a fever: long pasta with butter, olive oil, cheese and extra red pepper. The butter, otherwise unnecessary, was there to soothe the soul, the red pepper to kill the germs. As he boiled the water and grated the block of parmigiano and uncovered the strips of dried linguini that Marika had left them, Jack and Sandro fell into a wordless game of scopa. Whether or not Sandro intended it, Jack won most of the tricks. He smiled smugly when he swept up a four of clubs and a three of cups with his settebello. “I guess things are looking up for me,” he said.

  His forehead was cool to the touch. When he let the blanket fall, he didn’t shiver. He devoured two bowls of the pasta (which turned out perfectly, with just enough bite, the sauce clinging to the noodles as they raised them to their lips, their lips glistening with butter), and he continued to win at scopa even after Frank joined in. He told an off-color joke about a Marine that got him laughing in that grunting way of his; he’d heard it from an officer in his company, a gentle giant of a guy named Abernathy, somebody he’d lost touch with and wished to see again.

  If tonight were the first night Frank had met this Jack Burns, he’d scarcely have imagined him to be anything but an amiable fellow soldier who must have passed out on the beach. Jack even poured them each a shot and toasted his “two able nursemaids, who brought me back from the brink.” He felt renewed, he said. “I have shed my chrysalis,” he said, triumphantly, pointing to the blanket on the kitchen floor. And yet, when Frank turned to Sandro expecting to see relief, he saw that the heaviness had descended again.

  * * *

  • • •

  FRANK WOKE THE NEXT DAY close to noon in the same clothes, with no memory of how or when he made it to bed. He made an espresso for himself, ate a cornetto left for him on the kitchen counter, and set out with his dog. On the beach, he immediately encountered Sandro and Jack, who had just returned to the umbrellas from a walk. The day was hazy and windless, the clouds again shielding them—or at least attempting to
shield them—from the violent sun.

  “You are looking very well,” Frank said to Jack. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and, over his bathing trunks, a long-sleeved shirt printed with loud geometric shapes.

  “I’m stealing your name,” said Jack, puffing out his chest. “I am the Horse now.”

  “I keep telling him not to push,” said Sandro, “but one thing does not change: he still ignores my advice.”

  “Tenn won’t stand for you being the Horse,” said Frank. “I won’t stand for it. How about we call you”—he remembered the blanket— “the butterfly.”

  He made a sour face. “Am I so delicate?”

  “Yes,” said Sandro. “The name is perfect. Blond hair, blue eyes, white teeth, red skin. And that shirt! A color explosion!”

  “You might as well just call me a fairy.”

  “Would it be the first time?” Frank teased, and, playfully, Jack kicked sand at his feet. Mr. Moon barked at him in rebuke.

  “Call me what you want,” said Jack. He tossed the hat to the ground and unbuttoned his shirt. “I’m going for a swim.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Certainly not,” Jack said, but before they could stop him, he’d stripped off the shirt and sprinted for the water.

  Sandro and Frank rushed toward him, but they couldn’t catch him. They stood at the edge of the surf, lifeguarding, Mr. Moon beside them splashing maniacally. Jack ran in a few yards, where it was still shallow and translucent, then dove into a cresting wave. He appeared on the surface moments later, bobbing, to catch his breath. Then he backstroked north. Just as they lost sight of him, he turned around and headed back south. He made this loop a number of times, always just about to disappear, then reversing course. The water was frigid. The shock to the system was worth it, though, for the view Frank had seen yesterday: the tropical aquamarine of the wide shoal against the ancient black sand, the pastels of the sleepy town beyond.

  Sandro kept shouting to Jack and waving him back to shore. When, finally, after twenty minutes, he headed in, Sandro rushed to the house, grabbed a large towel, and held the towel before him like a matador. Jack stepped into it, smiling broadly, shivering.

  This shivering, the natural kind, stopped soon enough. They sat for hours under the umbrellas. The beach was close enough to the house that they could hear the phone if it rang. It did not ring. Frank took out his binoculars so Jack could point him in the direction of Elba.

  Though little could be made of Elba but a blurry blotch of green, Frank still spent a while gazing at its peaks, imagining the terror of solitary confinement on an island, even a beautiful one in the middle of the Tyrrhenian, even one that, according to Jack, was almost a hundred miles wide. Though Frank vaguely recalled that Napoleon had armies of men with him, he pictured the great man wandering alone up and down the mountains in his muddy uniform, foraging for food like a Neanderthal, crying unabashedly, growing mad, his glory years slipping further and further into memory. In Frank’s mind, Napoleon was still out there, trudging around in his black boots; if he kept his binoculars trained long enough on the island, he might just spot him emerging from a cave.

  Frank wanted to talk more about Napoleon, but Jack kept bringing the conversation back to Shelley, the poet, who’d been shipwrecked on this same coast a few hundred miles north, between here and Portofino, a month before he turned thirty. Frank admitted he knew nothing of Shelley, that he had no appetite left for poetry after eating up novels and plays and history and opera, that even these he hadn’t found a taste for until he’d come back from the war, a time when beauty was all he was after. “I guess I’m still in that time,” he said.

  “And why not,” said Sandro.

  Jack, who wasn’t much for beauty, had loved every kind of book and every kind of writer for as long as he could remember, he said, as long as they were any good. He’d brushed up on Shelley in the days leading up to their trip here because, unlike Keats, the poet hadn’t stuck with him, either. He still didn’t love Shelley the way he loved Keats—“the way every fairy schoolboy loves Keats,” he said—but he had come to appreciate him. In fact, the evening of the day he’d arrived at Villino Brunella, he’d recited one of Shelley’s poems, “To Night,” alone in the twilight of the empty beach in order to summon his ghost. He wanted something from Shelley’s ghost, he said, but he wasn’t sure what. His permission, maybe. His protection. His blessing, at least. Jack figured, we’re two writers stranded here on the same shore, we might as well get to know each other.

  “This I did not know,” said Sandro.

  “Do you have to know everything?” Jack said.

  “You don’t come across as the mystical type,” said Frank.

  “Because I’m not a sentimentalist,” he said. “And yet you call me a butterfly.” He smiled. “You want to know the most fun this butterfly had in Africa, during the war? It wasn’t gazing at the orange sunsets over the fever trees. It was watching the guys who got diarrhea from being too lazy to scald their mess gear rush past my tent, tearing down their britches. To me, this was a perfect comedy.”

  “This is why you recovered!” Sandro said, with awe in his voice. “Because the dead poet, you prayed to him, like we pray to the saints for intercession.”

  “I choose to believe it was the whiskey and the Campari and the anisette that healed me,” said Jack. “But just in case—” He stood and stepped out from under the shade of the umbrella. Their only company were the sullen teenagers and the families many yards away on the public beach. Jack turned northward, dug his feet into the sand, extended his arms, and recited:

  Death will come when thou art dead,

  Soon, too soon—

  Sleep will come when thou art fled;

  Of neither would I ask the boon

  I ask of thee, belovèd Night—

  Swift be thine approaching flight,

  Come soon, soon!

  “Bravo!” said Sandro, as Jack took a bow. “What is the meaning?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Frank.

  Jack looked down at them, shaking his head. “It’s the last stanza of the poem. He’s describing the refuge of darkness, of sleep specifically, a refuge that the day, that light, can never give you. The poem’s about wanting it always to be night, because only at night can you be completely hidden. And how death is the ultimate night, but you don’t want that quite yet. You want a close approximation that’s not so permanent.”

  “It sounds like Shelley had some secrets,” said Frank.

  “So I was right,” said Sandro. “It was fate for you to read this poem before you needed sleep. The saints could not have done better.”

  Later, after lunch and just before they all took refuge in sleep, when Sandro was out in the garden, Frank followed Jack into his bedroom. “When I walked in on you yesterday,” he asked him, “what were you writing? You can tell me it’s none of my business.”

  “It’s none of your business,” he said, his good humor suddenly gone, as quickly as it had come on. He removed his shirt—there were blisters on his shoulders Frank hadn’t noticed earlier—and climbed into bed. “I told Marika to make us steaks tonight. I’m sick of all this fish. Could you get the shades?”

  “I’m going back to Rome in the morning,” Frank said, making the decision as he spoke the words. A wave of relief washed over him. “I hope I’ve been of some help.”

  “Not the way he wants you to be,” Jack said, his face turned away, half buried in the pillow. With that grim snigger, he said, “He thinks a pep talk can raise the dead. I tell you, I hate the sight of him. The idea of him.” He pulled the blanket tighter. “Listen, I meant what I said before. It was big of you to come. Brotherly. I won’t forget it.”

  Frank called Tenn to let him know he was coming back, but there was no answer. He napped, played with the dogs on the beach before the dinner of roasted beef and zucchini blo
ssoms and fresh green beans in tomato sauce. The three of them made a brief passagiata up and down the Viale della Vittoria, nodding at the men walking toward them. Afterward, their hands sticky with gelato, they played more scopa, more briscola, at the kitchen table. Sandro begged Frank to stay one more night, the heaviness so thick on him now it hunched him over. He said there was music in the piazza on Tuesdays; the younger men would come out for it; Mr. Moon and Lucky were just getting to know each other. Frank declined. He thought to himself: I am going to Rome to be a soldier, to gussy myself up like Napoleon, to swim against sleep, to try a new thing. He avoided being alone with Sandro. He had more than done his part for him. For both of them. By eleventhirty, all three lay in their separate beds.

  * * *

  • • •

  FRANK WOKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night to the howling of the dogs. He heard a door slam and someone shouting in the next room, which was Jack’s room. Moments later his own door burst open. Sandro.

  They rushed to Jack, disoriented by the dogs jumping in the doorway and at the foot of his bed. He tried to speak but all that came out was wheezing. He couldn’t get enough air to form a word. There was panic in his eyes. The lid of his right eye had gone slack. His sheets were drenched in sweat.

  “What’s happening?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t know!” said Sandro. “I came in to check on him. I find him like this. Worse than the first night. He doesn’t respond.”

  “We have to get him to a hospital.”

  “I called Dr. Vassallo,” said Sandro.

  “Jack said he’s a quack.”

  “He is not a quack!”

  Jack closed his eyes. When they touched his arm to rouse him, it was stiff as a block of wood.