“I was loyal to him.”
“But . . . ?”
She thinks a moment. “I decided at a young age on loyalty above all. Above taste, above preference, above politics. Loyalty above what every manager said was best for my career or my ‘image,’ neither of which ever meant a fig to me.”
“Loyalty above art?”
“If it came to that, yes. But it did not.”
“All that loyalty, just because Hovland discovered you?”
She looks at him. The life choices of celebrities don’t actually interest me, he had said. He meant gossip. Freudian speculations. Taxonomies. She takes him at his word. So she says, “Yes.”
“No” is equally true.
So is this, which will forever remain unspoken:
He came to her in the mornings, when her mother was asleep. Bitte was an insomniac, a word Anja did not learn until later, at her aunt’s apartment in Vienna, where she was forced to share a bed with her. For the first years of her life, his was the face Anja woke to, placid and kind and delightfully creased. When he smiled, she liked to trace with her fingers the lines that radiated, leaflike, from the corners of his eyes. Some curved down into his thick red beard, others up to merge with the lines in his forehead, still others ran back behind his earlobes. Her father. Fredrik. Pappa. Together they passed their brief hour in the mornings, sitting drowsily across from each other at the kitchen table inventing stories about the creatures that hid in the woods behind their house and the potions and spells and tricks Anja could use to defeat them on her way to school. Mornings when school was out, or he held her back to keep him company, they retreated to the farthest corner of the house, where he taught her songs on his guitar, and put on his records of German and Italian operas, and jumped on the furniture acting the part of the Skalunda Giant or the menacing Varulv or the cross-eyed troll in their made-up plays. The loud creak of Bitte’s footsteps on the stairs was their signal to stop. He rushed to greet her, and then to fix her breakfast of coffee and toast with melted butter and blackberry jam, and then to disappear again to give her peace. He worked nights making deliveries. Later, he took a second job in a warehouse. There was never enough money. If he slept, he did it in the afternoons, when Anja was at school, or, he told her, across the front seat of his little truck, the heat on, between stops. Meanwhile, Bitte took trains to Stockholm and to Copenhagen to apprentice with photographers and painters and sculptors. She was in search of her medium. The search required time and space. She rented a studio above a furniture store in the city, where she kept her expensive supplies and half-finished pieces, and where, on occasion, she brought Anja to model for her practice drawings. Once, an older man painted Anja’s portrait while her mother stood crouched behind him, her hand on his thigh for balance, to watch his strokes up close. The portrait took weeks. The boredom was agony. Anja grew accustomed to scrutiny. She grew into a statue. More men came to paint and dress and sculpt her. They arranged her in Greek positions. Bitte’s hand moved up their legs. Over time, the creases in her father’s skin deepened, his beard lost its softness and color, his eyes their serenity. It has become necessary to leave him behind, Bitte told her. He was useless to them. That they loved him—which they did—did not factor. She had married him out of love, and that love had not diminished; it had merely proven wildly insufficient. My parents were right, Bitte said. She was rescuing Anja from a meager man. So, mother and daughter began to make their secret preparations, and all the while Pappa drove his little truck and packed and unpacked boxes in the warehouse unknowing, and all the while he melted the butter for her toast and slathered it with the blackberry jam—like a housemaid, Bitte said—and all the while he came to Anja in the mornings with his crinkling leaf face, and they listened to comedy shows on the radio. And then one night, while he was out making his deliveries, she and her mother took a taxi to the ship. They would return to visit him, Bitte promised her, but not for many years. During that time, it was important not to write him any letters. To do so would open his wounds over and over, said Bitte, and to open his wounds would be cruel. The one long letter Bitte wrote in explanation, and which Anja signed with her own hand, would be enough. Her words would not come as a surprise. He was nothing special as a man, Bitte reminded Anja, but he was not stupid and he was not blind. From the beginning of their marriage, he was aware that he could not keep her—them—forever. That is why he had transformed himself into the maid, the clown, the bumbling troll. To provide a service. To make himself necessary. To borrow time. Bitte was grateful to him, she said; she had been as loyal as could be expected; but gratitude and loyalty were reasons less sufficient than love to keep yourself planted in rocky soil. Remember that. They would return to him someday, Bitte promised Anja again, wiping her face of tears, when they left Malmö for Paris, and once more when they left Paris for Vienna, but by the time they left Vienna for Portofino, he had driven his truck to the beach at Ribersborg and frozen to death inside it.
“And after he died?” Keith presses. “Even then, you didn’t give yourself permission to play?”
“I had all the permission I needed to do anything I wanted,” Anja says. “I was in no mood to play. I was grieving. I am still grieving for him.”
* * *
• • •
KEITH PUSHES OPEN ANOTHER DOOR to show her, just for fun, the expansive back porch, which is covered in nearly a foot of untouched snow. Abandoned tiki torches and striped umbrellas poke up through the drifts. Sally calls him on his cellphone to check on the progress of the site visit. They will charge a fortune for the tickets, she tells them on speaker, and all the money will go into the coffers of the annual Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Whatever build-out or restorations are required for the Atlantic House will be complete in time for the Festival next September. She has not rescued this historic shithole as a retirement plan, says Sally. She is in the business of creative placemaking. Together with the Festival, and the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Norman Mailer House, all within spitting distance, she will put the literary arts at the forefront of Provincetown’s identity once again, and she is thrilled to have the legendary Anja Bloom as a partner and a thought leader and a coinvestor in this artistic renaissance.
Keith holds the barking phone face-up on his palm like a tray of cookies. Anja looks helplessly between it and him.
“You’re a force, hon!” he shouts at his palm.
Already the play has gone from dim prospect to foregone conclusion, from Anja’s indulgence of Sandrino (not Trevor) to the cultural reawakening of a town whose face she has yet to see up close. Anja has rarely decided quickly on matters of art. She used to keep Hovland waiting months for her responses to his scripts and treatments, needing the time to immerse herself in the world he had designed, both to interrogate it and to submit to it, so that she could come back to him fluent in its language and color, armed to refine its rhythms and contours. The only occasion on which she acted on instinct over a long process of immersion and negotiation was the construction of the FAB. The idea came to her in a dream, and by the time she woke from it, she had built Pappa a theater.
“That’s spelled H-U-N, by the way,” Keith says, when he hangs up on Sally. “Seriously, though, that woman is on a mission. You couldn’t have appeared at a better moment in time.”
“What is ‘creative placemaking’?”
“Nonprofit speak. Sally’s just come from running a big museum in Chicago. I’m her Gal on the Ground here. My job is to nod and fetch and make sure she doesn’t step in dog shit. The new money in town treats her like a carpetbagger, but the truth is that her family’s lived here for decades. Thank god she’s a certified dyke, and Portuguese on top of that, and not greedy, otherwise she’d be dead in the water for staying away most of her life. Provincetown may be spitting up glitter and GHB, but the place has a soul, and so does she.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “What I can’t wait for, though, are the look
s on the guys’ faces when they show up this summer and find out the biggest club in Gayville is now the town cultural center.”
Anja needs an hour to herself, she tells him. Walking down the main street, hooded into facelessness, she peers into the houses and shops and empty restaurants. She expects dusty dioramas, sets abandoned mid-scene, but everywhere she looks there are signs of life. She is admiring a large oil painting in the window of a darkened gallery—three shirtless boys, heads bowed, backs taut, pulling their fishing nets to shore, the moon the color of lemon—when a man suddenly crosses the room behind it putting on a sweater. At the bend of a narrow side street she looks down into a basement café filled with construction workers hunched over their wax-paper lunches. One of the men senses her gaze, looks up, and toasts her with his half-eaten sandwich. As she walks past a darkened store selling homemade jewelry, up come the blinds and on come the lights and a young woman with braided hair flips the sign to OPEN.
Anja steps into the store for warmth and pretends to consider a necklace of hammered pewter coins as a Christmas gift for a niece she does not have. The two of you are close in age, she tells the young woman behind the counter; she has been living with her for many months, but now she is finally going back to school. New York City. Anja wishes to give her niece an amulet, of sorts, some token to protect her from the creatures that hide in the alleyways. The young woman laughs. She suggests pepper spray instead. She is not a city girl, she tells Anja; she was born on the Cape and still hasn’t found a good reason to leave it. Her braids are as tight as the rope the boys in the painting are pulling, will keep pulling forever, the nets overflowing with fish, the boys never coming to rest under the lemon moon. She holds the necklace against her chest so that Anja can picture her niece in it. The style is not to her own taste, Anja says, but her niece is the whimsical type, and coins are said to bring good fortune, so yes, she will take it.
The town cannot see Anja’s face, but she can see hers. It is the face of the girl who resembles the niece Anja will never have. Her cheeks are round and burnt, her forehead a high wall battered by waves. Her eyes are downcast not from shame but self-protection; look at them straight on, and you will dive into them without permission. The girl behind the counter wraps the tacky necklace in soft tissue paper scented with lavender. She hands Anja a flyer for a political action group she runs on Tuesday evenings above the shop. She watches Anja from the window as she descends the three slick steps. No one would believe Anja if she told them this town had a girl’s face. Look how hard it is working, she thinks, to convince itself of its maleness: its shores a fist swollen at the knuckles, its tall bald monument, this street she’s walking on a long throat choking as it bellows.
She meets Keith back at the Atlantic House at the appointed time. He drives her to Herring Cove to watch the sunset before her evening flight. They sit beside each other in his front seat facing the beach. She senses other cars pull up next to them in the parking lot, the drone of their engines, arms finding their way around shoulders, breath fogging the windows, but she cannot take her eyes from the burning sky, the flat slate sea. She has seen the likes of it before; she has never seen anything like it.
These days, there is nothing more simple than flying through clouds, over deep oceans, across great distances. The world is a small pond, the continents lily pads, women like her splashing from one to the other jolly as frogs. It is not as it used to be, back when there was no money and Anja was forced to rely on the largesse of obscure aunts and vague strangers, back when her obligation was to someone who was not herself. How heavy Anja was in those years after she left Malmö, dragged from station to station, shined up between arrivals and departures like silver from a velvet case. When her aunt in Vienna told her what her mother had kept hidden—that her father had died for love of them, a vagrant’s death, completely unaware of Anja’s miserable regret—she began to understand the power of rootlessness. No place had a claim on her. She released her remaining obligation, left her sleeping in their shared bed in the apartment in Portofino. She carried a suitcase down to the dock, stared out at the harbor much as she is staring now. Her fear of flight had turned to lust. And that is when, predictably, her men began to appear, those smashed pieces of Pappa, each offering her his version of home, until, one by one, they left her, just as she had left him.
Was it necessary for her men to ask her, as each of them did, why she never went back to Malmö? Was her resolve never to return, which hardened over the years, not a signal in itself to refrain from asking? Strange how her men were the most susceptible to the television questions. You don’t want to see your theater in person? That moving memorial? That enormous stage? That moonlit atrium? The singing children? The orchestra pit? The wings? The sopranos? The elaborate sets? That heavy curtain? Those studios? Those box seats? Those handsome ushers? The catwalks? The lobby? That marquee? Your father’s name—FREDRIK ALMAR BLOMGREN—in lights? How can you say you don’t deserve it? How can you be serious when you say you are unfit—you, of all people, the great Anja Bloom!—to walk through the door?
13.
GABRIELE ROSSINI
When the call from Visconti did not come after many weeks—by then it was early September—Frank concocted another visit to the Senso set, which had moved north to Vicenza. In the meantime, Visconti had rejected all of Paul’s scenes and put Tenn in charge of the revisions. Senso was based on the novella by Camillo Boito, but fidelity to the original was not the task for which the director needed Tennessee Williams. He needed Tenn to swell the hearts of the viewers, to infuse the dialogue with the passion of the film’s soaring score, and to make the romantic drama at its core as powerful as the war in the backdrop. Frank was too superstitious to ask Tenn what exactly his part might now become with this promising development.
They’d gotten another letter from Truman, who’d just arrived in Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht, which made the timing of a trip to nearby Vicenza not only right, but fated. No one was in a rush to see Truman, but the gossip he carried with him from Portofino was too tantalizing to resist. Frank argued that Tenn could work on the revisions in the hotel, while Anja gazed upon Alida Valli and Frank hung around the set trying to catch Visconti’s eye.
Tenn agreed to this plan immediately. He’d been looking for another escape from Rome anyway, now that Anna was in Sicily and Paul and Ahmed had moved on. He’d just sent all three acts of Orpheus Descending to the typist, and was spending much of his days skulking around the apartment consumed with shame and regret. He spoke of the Orpheus draft as if it were his own shit smeared across paper, shit that could never be spun into gold, shit that would sink his career, which, he insisted, had died with Streetcar with no hope of resuscitation. He was suffering from physical fits of suffocation—“air hunger,” he called them—and Frank could do nothing to feed him or calm him. The ends of seasons always brought on the blue devils. He stuffed rags into the cracks of the windowpanes to keep out the sound of the opera rehearsals; il teatro had switched to rehearsing the flutes, and the bouncy notes had taken up permanent lodging in Tenn’s head. So he was happy for Frank to make some calls to Vicenza to find a decent hotel, and then, while he was at it—why not?—to book the Excelsior in Venice for the weekend after.
When they arrived at the ancient Vicenza hotel, Tenn had a message waiting. He looked at Frank, folded the slip of paper in half, and stuck it in the pocket of his blazer. “Truman,” he said, rolling his eyes. “He wants to meet for dinner, but tonight I want us to dine à deux.”
In their room on the top floor, after he set up his typewriter and Anja was safely installed at the other end of the hall, he led Frank by the hand out to the balcony. The room overlooked a small patio enclosed by tall cypress trees and, in the middle distance, a sky-blue clock face on a tall brick campanile.
“What is it?” Frank asked.
Tenn pulled the slip of paper from his pocket and read it aloud. The message was not from Tr
uman; it was from Visconti. He wanted Frank on the set first thing in the morning, prepared for his scene on the footpath with Alida and the washerwomen. With some last-minute revision from Tenn, the complication now fit nicely into the plot and pacing of Senso.
He held the letter against his chest as Frank leaned in to kiss him. “I’m so relieved,” Tenn confessed. “It could have gone either way.” Visconti had another actor up for the part, he explained, someone with a few credits, but Frank had the sprezzatura he was after. “He remembered your magnetism, your fire, from the set in Trastevere. He needs Alida to feel the temptation and the danger.”
Frank drank in the words. Magnetism. Fire. Sprezzatura. Temptation. Danger. He fell against Tenn on the railing of the balcony, the sun setting over the tower, the gawkers on the patio hissing up at them with their beaten eyes. When Anja knocked on their door soon after, they went quiet and still on the creaky bed until her footsteps trailed off down the hall.
Hours later, Frank went in search of her. He and Tenn had run the lines—sixteen between them—again and again, but he wanted the rehearsal to go on, with Anja as his sparring partner. She didn’t answer her door. The innkeeper hadn’t seen her go out. Up and down the Contrà Cavour, Frank peered into the shops and bars, the clock tower everywhere he turned like a guide, a promise, an admonishment. The streets were glazed and shiny. Had it rained? He found Anja sitting alone in the window of an empty trattoria. For a moment he stood beside a streetlamp. She tore a chunk of bread into pieces she didn’t eat. She sat tall against the chair, staring straight ahead at the blankness of the opposite wall. If Frank didn’t know her, he’d take her for a bored child waiting on her father to pay their bill, sneaking sips of wine from the glass left behind on the table.
Frank needed the distraction of her. Her reassurance. Here he was on the last night of his life as he knew it, and she alone understood how it felt to have the future open up before you in the exact way you both orchestrated and feared. What if Visconti laughed at him? What if he discovered in him a great talent? What if film after film pulled him apart from Tenn? How could Frank watch over him if he was off on his own?
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