Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “I’m taking him to the hospital,” said Frank.

  They wrapped him in a dry sheet and a blanket. His legs were as wooden as his arms. They lifted him off the bed and slung him over Sandro’s shoulder. He carried him out the front door and across the street to Frank’s car. They laid him in the backseat. The dogs chased them when they sped down Via Baldissera. Jack’s legs shook violently and kicked the back of Frank’s seat. Sandro didn’t know the way to the hospital. They had to stop and ask an old man on Viale Galliano. He pointed them in the opposite direction. “You grew up in this fucking place,” said Frank, swerving the car around. “You don’t know fuck-all about anything!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sandro said. He got on his knees and turned in his seat to face backward. He watched Jack as Frank drove, one hand on the headrest, the other gripping Jack’s wrist. “His impulso is very high,” he said.

  Eventually, Frank spotted the cross on the roof of the little hospital. He pulled up to the front, parked between two ambulances, and two nuns appeared. They helped get Jack inside. His arms and legs were useless. His body, red and blistered and stinking with sweat, had grown very heavy.

  A nurse wheeled Jack on a stretcher down a long hall. Someone used the word coma. It was the same word in Italian as in English. They were asked a lot of questions as they waited for a doctor to emerge from the hall. Sandro claimed to be Jack’s physician, a good friend of his family. Who Frank was didn’t matter; he stood off to the side, listening. There was no one else in the waiting room. The nurses seemed happy to have Frank to talk to.

  The doctor came out and declared Jack dehydrated but, otherwise, in no immediate danger. The sun had poisoned him, he said, but it would not kill him. They were filling him with fluids. They had a way to ease his breathing. They’d keep an eye on him and monitor his blood pressure and his oxygen and they had no doubt he’d wake up any minute. Jack was an American citizen, Sandro told him, an important one. The doctor replied that everyone who came into the hospital was important, no matter what country they came from. Still, they put a call through to the American consulate in Florence to inform them of the situation.

  “Should I see if there’s something Tenn can do?” Frank asked.

  “Like what?”

  Frank couldn’t think of anything.

  Sandro repeated the doctor’s words, “He will wake up any minute,” and so they waited. One hour, then two at the foot of Jack’s bed brought no change. The day wore on. Nurses came in and out, throwing around the word coma as casually as his name.

  Frank drove back to the house to get Jack some clean clothes and to find Mr. Moon. Marika was in the kitchen chopping onions. When he told her, in his best Italian, what had happened, she shrieked, steadied herself with the help of the counter, and then went back to the onions. “He is not a healthy man,” she said. “He should go back to America and leave poor Signor Nencini alone.” She turned to face Frank, holding up the knife. “You know, it’s because of him that Signor is that way—” She shook her head. “Before he showed up—”

  “Where are the dogs?”

  She hadn’t seen them. When she arrived, she said, she found the front door wide open letting in the flies.

  Frank went to Jack’s closet, took out a pair of pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a clean pair of briefs, folded them neatly, and set them on the desk to take with him. The room smelled rancid. He opened the windows and stripped the sheets from the bed. “Wash these,” he said to Marika, gruffly, and tossed the sheets on the kitchen floor on his way into the garden.

  “Did anyone call?” he asked, from the doorway.

  Marika said that no one ever calls.

  It was then he saw the blood on the flagstones. “What happened here?” he called back to her.

  She came out, wiping her hands on her apron. “This is from Signor Burns?” she asked.

  “No,” said Frank. “He wasn’t bleeding. We didn’t even come out this way.”

  They followed the trail of blood to the side of the house, where it stopped among the weeds. They retraced it back into the house through the kitchen. There were small smears in the corner beyond the table that Marika somehow hadn’t noticed. There were little spots in the hall and on the rug at the foot of Jack’s bed. When you’re looking for blood, you see it everywhere. They followed it out the front door and looked up and down the block. In the throng of the bicycles and scooters and mothers carrying picnic baskets, it was Marika who saw, farther down the street away from the beach, the two animal shapes—one black, one brown—moving in circles under a palm tree. Frank ran toward them.

  Lucky was fighting Mr. Moon for the small white bird in his mouth. It was from his right hind paw, which he kept raised as he limped and lunged at Mr. Moon, that the blood had dripped. Frank and Marika looked on impotently as he whimpered and growled and butted Mr. Moon’s head with his. Finally, he managed to tear half of the dried-out bird from Mr. Moon’s teeth, and the two retired to their separate sides of the tree, a carpet of white feathers and bird guts between them.

  “Che schifo,” said Marika, wrinkling her nose.

  Frank pointed to Lucky’s paw. “Jack’s whiskey glass,” he said. “You didn’t get all the pieces.”

  “O Dio!” she said. “Even the dog he makes suffer!”

  She carried Lucky back to the house as Mr. Moon trotted beside Frank, tail wagging in triumph. The glass was still wedged deep in Lucky’s paw. He wouldn’t let Marika or Frank touch it without whelping and kicking. They needed Sandro.

  It was after two when Frank arrived back at the hospital with Jack’s clothes; a pair of his shoes and ankle socks; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems and Lyrics, which he’d spotted on his nightstand; and four panini wrapped in wax paper. Marika had insisted on making the sandwiches of prosciutto and cheese with extra tomatoes and pepper, the way Sandro liked them. She would not leave the house, she’d said, until they returned; she’d clean up all the blood and air out the rooms and sit with Lucky until he calmed down. She was more worried about the dog than she was about Signor Burns because, according to her, “L’erba cattiva non muore mai.”

  Her words gave Frank a kind of comfort. Bad grass never dies. She was right that it kept growing back, thicker and tougher than before. This is what he was thinking, with vague hope, as he again watched Jack’s shallow breaths. The past few hours had not changed his condition. The doctor no longer spoke with the same confidence. Multiple times he used the words colpo apoplettico, which Frank needed Sandro to translate.

  “Stroke,” he said. He paced up and down the narrow space between Jack’s bed and the windowless wall, his hands on his head. While Frank was gone, he’d called a brain specialist in Volterra, a family friend, an expert in the field. Volterra was only one hour’s drive. He should have called him three days ago, he said, instead of that quack Vassallo.

  “You told me Vassallo wasn’t a quack,” said Frank.

  “He’s not!” His face went red. Then he began to cry. “I did everything wrong.”

  Frank tried to convince him he’d done the best he could, but, as he searched for words of reassurance, he wasn’t sure how true they were. He thought of the cloudy water in the glass, the sailing trip Sandro insisted on despite the conditions, the wrong turn on the way to the hospital. Floria. The bump on the right temple. If Tenn were in Jack’s condition, Frank would have caught up to him before he jumped into the ocean yesterday. He would have dived in after him. He would have never lost sight of him. He remembered the fear in Jack’s voice when he’d called him in Rome three days ago, and the hatred he expressed so matter-of-factly for the man now standing over his bed. What was Sandro really doing in his room in the middle of the night? Was anyone ever who he said he was?

  “Should I write to the mother?” Sandro asked. “She is the only one who matters to him.”

  They decided that they should wait for the s
pecialist to offer his assessment first, that by the time the cable reached Mrs. Burns in Andover, Jack would be much improved and she would have worried for nothing. It would be up to Jack to write to her, as he did regularly, and describe, in his own words, his harrowing days and nights, his miraculous recovery.

  Who knows, Frank told Sandro, this episode might work its way into Jack’s next book. To pass the time, he told him of Baron de Charlus’s pale yellow suit in Camino Real, which Frank had spotted on an old dandy mincing down Hudson Street, then pointed out to Tenn. The body of Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo? That was Frank’s horse body, muscle for muscle, down to the giant head and broad shoulders. That first name itself, Alvaro? He was Frank’s lover of many summers, yes, Sandro knew that already, but he was also Tenn’s gesture of permission, of understanding, of forgiveness.

  To all of this Sandro responded, with quiet defeat, that he had yet to see a single trace of himself in the words Jack had published.

  They ate their panini in distracted silence, the juice from the tomatoes dripping onto their laps, each tick of the wall clock on the half hour like the breaking of bad news. Then, just after five, Jack stirred. His first movement since they’d brought him in. They stood and shouted for the doctor, for the nurse, for anyone. Sandro took Jack’s hand and squeezed it as they waited, saying his name over and over, calling him back to him. Jack did not respond. His face was pale, all his Indian color suddenly gone. His legs jerked forward. He threw his head back against the pillow. His eyes popped open, as if from a terrible dream, but he didn’t seem to see Sandro and Frank, though they were inches from his face, assuring him he was going to be just fine. This all happened in the same terrible moment. He threw his head back again and, when he did, a yellow-gray foam, thick as snot, oozed from between his lips. Frank gasped. Sandro stuffed his hand in Jack’s mouth to hold his tongue down. The doctor rushed in and pushed them both out of his way.

  Would it have made a difference if the brain specialist from Volterra had arrived before the seizures? No one could say. What if Jack hadn’t gone swimming the day before, or drunk so much liquor the past few years, or spent that extra hour in the sun? No one could say. If that nameless boy at Testa del Lupo hadn’t bashed the side of his head with a rock, what then? What if Jack never stepped foot in Africa, or abandoned his home country, or chose to flood his brain with words as a way to make a living? No one could say, though Sandro kept asking. He asked the doctor, and the specialist who finally turned up, and Frank, as if the answers could change the outcome, which was that the man he loved, John Horne Burns, was dead at thirty-six. Which was that Sandro had failed to keep him alive.

  Frank believed in destiny, that every moment of a life was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and that death was the final piece of the puzzle snapped into place. You could move all the little pieces around, try to fit them one way or another, but sooner or later, depending on your luck, they fit together in the exact way they were meant to from the moment you dumped the pieces on the table, whether or not you liked the picture they ultimately formed. Maybe this was why Frank floated from the Marines to the stage to the film set, from women to men, from man to man, from driving a truck in Jersey to ironing shirts for the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. And maybe this was why, now, he had no tears for Jack Burns. The puzzle of him had been solved—he was dead at thirty-six, a washed-up drunk—and in that solution was a kind of relief.

  Once the hospital informed the American consulate, and they cabled a message to Jack’s parents, and arrangements were made for Jack’s body to be evaluated in Livorno and then, with due process, shipped home to Massachusetts, Sandro had no other part to play. On Jack he had no official claim. His name would never appear beside Jack’s anywhere but private letters and the backs of photographs. The family, and the state, took over. Sandro stopped asking questions of the doctors, of Frank. His footsteps echoed down the halls of the hospital. He sat silently beside Frank on the fifteen-minute drive back to the bungalow. By then it was night. The piazza was loud with horns and cymbals and the jerky syncopations of jazz.

  In the corner of the kitchen, on the hard ceramic floor, Marika held Lucky down as Sandro pried the glass from his paw. He poured an antiseptic into the wound and bandaged it, and then Lucky trotted away into the other room to find Mr. Moon, still holding up his hind leg but otherwise good as new. They were leaving Marina di Cecina in the morning, Sandro said. He ordered Marika to clean out the kitchen and to take the leftover food to his mother’s house as soon as his cousin returned the car. In the meantime, every floor in the house was to be mopped, every wall and surface scrubbed, every sheet and towel and window washed. He didn’t care if it took her all night. They would leave this place as if they’d never set foot here, and he would never return. Marika set about these tasks without complaint.

  Frank couldn’t bear to spend another night in that cursed house. His bag was already packed from the night before. He dragged Mr. Moon out to the front seat of the car and locked him in. He left Jack’s clothes and shoes and his book of poems on his nightstand.

  He found Sandro sitting at the table at the back of the garden, staring at the water. There was barely enough moon to light Frank’s way to him across the uneven stones. He told the man he was damned sorry. He’d gotten a bad break. Standing over him, his hand on his shoulder, he had the simultaneous urge to embrace him and to knock him senseless. Before either urge won out, he promised to write him with their forwarding address once he and Tenn left the country.

  Sandro nodded.

  Frank needed one more thing to say, some way to cut through the darkness. He decided on, “Jack was a great writer,” choosing, deliberately, that word—great—that had come so easily to Sandro in Portofino when describing him the night they met. “He’ll live forever in his books.” To Frank’s mind, this put a harmless, charitable end to their brief association.

  “He was a big child,” Sandro replied. He shrugged off Frank’s hand. “You know what he called it, that thing between his legs he never let me touch? His pickle. Like a little boy. It was a joke to him: us. For a man, he was all brains and no body. To take care of the dog was more easy.” He stood. “What I have been thinking, sitting here alone, waiting to see how fast you would leave me, listening to the music that will go on and on, is that right now Jack is where he wants to be. And he is happy in that place to blame me for everything bad that came to him.”

  He did not wait for Frank to drive off. By the time Frank turned the car around, he was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ROADS OUT OF LIVORNO were empty. Mr. Moon, curled in a ball on the seat beside Frank, began to snore. The dark mountains were lit by hotels with poolside terraces. Frank flew around the sharp curves and switchbacks, cursing the obstructed miles that stood like a punishment between him and Tenn. Until he described the gruesome scene to him—their new friend, five years younger than Tenn, just six years older than Frank, convulsing on a squeaky metal cot, blood vessels bursting in his brain, while Frank looked dumbly on—the fact of it would not touch him.

  On the outskirts of Rome, he felt a custodial affection for the prostitutes who waited in the roadside parking lots in front of the dance halls and gas stations. Their shamelessness, their open transactions, were a welcome change from the hushed subterfuges of the bungalow in Marina di Cecina. If Frank pulled over and paid one of the softer girls for her valuable time—as he’d done twice last summer, when the urge, or was it the boredom, came over him—she would gladly oblige, and then, an hour or so later, they’d both be on their way, their debt to each other tidily satisfied. No Sunday trip to her schoolhouse. No promise of August in Egypt. His mood suddenly lightened. It was the honesty of Rome, of cities in general, that drew Frank to them. The beach, the country, the mountains, the saltbox suburbs of Jersey, these were fertile ground for secrets and mysteries, for gossip and petty betrayals. The city’s gro
und was too rocky for all that. You got away with everything. Besides, you had opera tickets that night. Movie lines to go over. Some of the guys in the bar knew you by a different name.

  The apartment was empty. Lamps were left on, Anja’s bed was made, but Tenn’s (theirs) was not. Frank pressed his ear to Paul and Ahmed’s door at the end of the hall and heard silence. He walked down to Tre Scalini, and the wavy-haired bartender, Sergio, said he hadn’t seen Tenn all weekend. He went from bar to bar in the Monti and then the secret bars in the narrow alleys over by the Colosseum, the ones with the dimly lit back rooms and the false doors to basement stairways, all of them shuttered or shuttering.

  Tenn was nowhere and everywhere. On the walk back to Via Firenze, the men who approached Frank each took on Tenn’s proportions and features: his upside-down V mustache a little bushier than Frank liked it, his rounded cheeks, the slight lean on his left hip, the swing of his right arm as he pulled a handkerchief from his blazer pocket. Frank hurried toward him. But then, as he got closer, the man transformed into someone who bore no resemblance at all to Tenn, the man Frank knew best in the world, whose face he longed to see, whose arms he longed to hold him, with growing desperation. No mustache on this guy on Via Serpenti. Sunken eyes, crooked nose. All he could offer Frank was a halfhearted leer and a last-ditch look back over his shoulder when he crossed at the next block.

  Before climbing into their empty bed, Frank made it up carefully, tucking in the corners of the sheets and pulling down the quilted coverlet he wouldn’t need on this humid night. He left the lamp on in the sitting room and taped a note to the wall so as not to startle Tenn if he got home before morning. He lay awake for a long time, fighting sleep because—he could admit this now—he was afraid. The fear was an unfamiliar one, without direction or shape. It gathered in his chest and hardened in his throat, like he’d swallowed a small animal and it had worked its way back up through his windpipe and got stuck there, cutting off his air. He felt he understood, for the first time in all their years together, the terror of death that Tenn claimed to feel every day, the irrational certainty that it was coming straight for him at high speed.