A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  I don’t know how long it lasted before, gently, she pulled away. She turned her head toward the door and I moved slightly back. “I wonder who lives here,” she said. “It’s quaint, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t look back at me. I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. She began slowly walking, watching the doors. She’d taken the strap of her bag from her shoulder and wound it around her wrist and then let the bag drag on the ground, and the dragging sound irritated me.

  “Irene, don’t.”

  “What?” She stopped and looked at me and I thought of grabbing her and pushing her back against the wall and kissing her again, but her eyes were too guarded and I couldn’t. Ahead of us, at the end of the alley, where the cobblestones opened out to the street, I saw the cars on Fifth Avenue going by.

  “Should I not have kissed you?”

  She shrugged, looked away.

  “Irene.”

  I took her arm, she looked back at me and I let her go.

  “You know I’m attracted to you, and I think you’re attracted to me too.” I knew it from the tiniest extra beat that existed between us, circling, albeit subtly. A clump of her short wavy brown hair, which she wore parted on the side and pushed back, had fallen over her forehead, and I wanted to put it in place with my fingers.

  “I’m already involved,” she said.

  “But are you attracted to me, that’s all I’m asking.”

  She sighed. “I’m involved.” We stood facing each other.

  “He’s married,” I said.

  She unwound the strap from her wrist, put the strap back around her shoulder, turned. “I knew you’d say that.”

  We simultaneously started walking toward Fifth.

  “Doesn’t that matter?” I said.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? Are you in love with him?”

  “No.” She was putting her script in her bag.

  Then what, I thought, was he that great in bed? She had a father complex? He had to be forty. We had come to the sidewalk.

  “You spend more time with me and Patrick than him,” I reminded her. “You see him, what, for an hour or two now and then if you’re lucky?”

  She stopped walking again, as angry as I was, and to avoid people passing she moved to the edge of the sidewalk, near an iron fence and a building. I followed her.

  “Well?” She looked away, at the Washington Square arch and the park.

  “Patrick never does this,” she said.

  “Does what?” I laughed. “Patrick’s gay, of course he doesn’t.”

  “I know he’s gay. That’s not what I meant.” But it was very Irene to skip over a detail like that. Bright as she was, being fresh out of Kansas, there was an occasional gap in her knowledge of life that you could drive a bus through.

  She turned and looked at me fiercely, her eyes very dark, her mouth taut. “I thought you liked me.”

  I laughed again, “I like you fine, I—”

  “No. I thought you liked me.” Her face had softened and I softened inside, but I still felt driven, and sad then, I realized, almost despairing. I wanted to say, Oh, I like you, I like you so much, I’m afraid I’m falling in love with you.

  “Robert?”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “We could, I mean, we could sleep together if you want to, but….”

  “What?” I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.

  “If you want to sleep together, then—”

  “Irene, don’t.” I said it too harshly; I touched her arm, said softly, “Don’t, okay?” I hadn’t wanted her to say it, especially not like that. I had wanted it only to happen and it hadn’t, and now I wanted to forget it.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You wanna walk?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t know if I had in a sense forced her to say what she did or whether it was her way of telling me that she was attracted to me, Neal or no Neal. But rather than analyze it, I did what I usually did when my pride was offended: I covered my tracks, I changed the subject, and I mentally erased the whole incident. I’d gotten so good at this, I didn’t even quite know I did it, it was that second nature. We entered the park and stood watching the children and the mothers at the swings. One little kid was wearing a stocking cap and when he’d go up on the swing the tassle would rise, so at the utmost arc of his ride the cap would stand straight up from his head like a cone.

  THE PALL OF THE argument faded. Somehow I knew that already a bond had been forged between her and Patrick and me and that, whatever happened, I wanted her in my life. Already, we had become a family. For a thousand reasons. For one or two. We were living the scene we rehearsed, that was one. We wanted to be Leo and Gilda and Otto. We all had a need for closeness, continuity, and we all hated our childhoods. On this last point Patrick lied, claiming, “We’re insanely happy. There are eight of us. We’re rather like the Kennedys.” They were Irish Catholic and lived in New England, but I suspected, based on his family’s turnout at a showcase he’d done the previous year—one lone tall sister—that that was the family he wished he had.

  3 The Beginning

  In early December Irene went on in the play on East Fourth. It was only for a night. That night, for some reason, Gina Lloyd, the girl Irene was standby for, couldn’t make it and Irene called me that morning to ask me to come. Then she called Patrick. Then Patrick called me. “Look outside,” he said. I went to the window and peered out the blinds: it looked gray. “Okay, what?” I said, back on the phone. It was a Saturday morning and I wasn’t quite awake.

  “They have predicted six inches by tomorrow,” he said. “It isn’t enough that she got absolutely no notice, so there isn’t time to get anyone to come. Now, it will snow.”

  “Maybe it won’t.”

  “Well, it will,” Patrick answered. “Just pray, or whatever you do in emergencies, and maybe it will wait until eleven-thirty-five.” On Saturday nights they did two performances, at eight and at ten. Irene had instructed us to come to the ten o’clock show since she’d need the first show to warm up. He and I discussed having flowers delivered before the first curtain.

  “She’s nervous,” Patrick said, “so she’s being a drip. She isn’t worried about the snow and said that it might be better if nobody comes.”

  “She doesn’t mean it.”

  “She won’t even call Andre, I’ll have to call him.”

  “Can he get a ticket?”

  “Well, if it snows that won’t be any problem. But no, they’re sold out. Fortuitously, she has three comps.”

  “You want to have dinner?”

  “Yes, if I can eat.”

  We agreed on a time. I hung up, put on the water in the kitchen, and pulled up the blinds. The sky looked metallic, a silvery gray with a hard, brittle light, and its density did not bode well. I looked at my watch: in less than ten hours she would be onstage. I wouldn’t have liked going on as she had to tonight, with only the two weeks of standby rehearsals the previous month. And Gina Lloyd was good. But of course all of this made the night more exciting.

  After dark the sky turned into a wadded, purplish mass. Patrick rang the buzzer at 7:35. He was wearing a suit and tie and his cashmere overcoat. I had on jeans and a sweater and my bomber jacket. “I’d tell you to change,” Patrick said, “but we have to pick up the flowers in Chelsea,” and he headed back down the stairs. “You said you were having them sent,” I called after him.

  “I’m getting a cab!”

  I caught up with him and we got a cab on Ninth Avenue.

  “Twenty-first and Seventh,” he said. “Then we’ll continue on to East Fourth.”

  “We’ll never get there in time,” I said.

  “We’ll make it,” he said. “I know this incredibly artistic man, he used to be a dancer but now he’s working in flowers. If you wire, it’s always the same old thing. Reginald is creating an original.”

  We got out in front of wh
at looked like a closed discount plant store. Patrick knocked on the door. It was 7:40. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  Someone opened the door from within a darkened space.

  “Reginald,” Patrick said, “you got fat.”

  “You didn’t,” Reginald said, cuffing Patrick affectionately on the arm. “You look exactly the same.”

  “Well, cut down on the sweets,” Patrick said. “This is Robert.” He lit a Gauloise. “Where is it?”

  “I just finished.” We followed the broad back of Reginald, practically all I could see, through a path between trees. The rich smell of wet soil and evergreen reminded me of the snow that hadn’t come, and I felt a good prescient jolt of tension in my chest, telling me that tonight would go well. We entered a small lighted workroom to the rear of the store. “Momentarily,” Reginald said, holding a finger next to his wide pinkish face. He turned to open an aluminum door in the wall and brought out a tall arrangement and set it on a counter.

  It was awful. The vase, a tubular shiny black ceramic, was about sixteen inches high; from it shot two parallel sticks. Another stick was propped horizontally between them, and at one of its ends was suspended a row of red berries. Three long-stemmed red roses and a burst of evergreen effectively floated among the sticks, and one snowball mum, propped up with wire, nodded off to the side like a pale, recalcitrant sun.

  “I thought, something festive,” said Reginald. “You know, for Christmas.”

  “Yes,” Patrick said. He looked at me.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It’s sort of—Oriental.” I glanced at my watch.

  Reginald told us the price and I nudged Patrick. “Pardon us,” Patrick said. “A brief conference.”

  We stepped out of the workroom and into the darkness. “Tell him to take out the roses,” I whispered to Patrick, “give us nine more and let’s go.”

  “I can’t do that. He’d be hurt.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Reginald called.

  “We’ll be right there,” Patrick said, “go ahead and wrap it up.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I don’t care.” It was too late to argue.

  Back at the counter Reginald said to Patrick, “You haven’t seen Benton, have you?”

  “Who?” Patrick asked.

  “God, I just think of him and I never miss dancing,” Reginald said.

  So Benton was a person, I thought.

  “Stay away from him,” Reginald said.

  “I’d love to chat,” Patrick said, meaning exactly the opposite, “but we must run.” We signed the card, paid, and dashed back to the cab. But we got stuck in traffic and when we pulled up in front of the theater, they had already closed the doors to the house.

  We stood on the sidewalk. “This isn’t our night,” I said.

  Patrick looked up at the sky. “Come on, let’s get dinner,” he said. We walked away, Patrick holding the red and green tissue-swathed arrangement. We had a couple of Bushmills, straight up, at the restaurant on the corner. A pipe had broken in the kitchen and they weren’t serving food, which made us postpone our dinner; we’d eat with Irene. We had another drink. The arrangement sat on the chair between us at our table by the window.

  “So who’s Benton?” I asked.

  Patrick pulled away enough of the tissue so that Reginald’s masterpiece was fully revealed. “Robert,” he said, after digesting the thing for a minute or two, “should we still give it to her?”

  I was aware that he had pointedly ignored my question, but I decided not to pursue it. “The vase isn’t bad,” I said. “We could dump it all out and just give her the vase.” This, Patrick considered.

  “Frankly, Robert, Reginald wasn’t much of a dancer either,” he said. We each took a rose and left the arrangement in the chair.

  Outside the sky hung low and the cars moved smoothly and strongly beneath it, like sharks underwater. A crowd was collecting in front of the theater. The first show had let out, but they hadn’t yet opened to seat for the second one. Two limos pulled up; people leaned off the curb, hailing cabs. We went into the lobby and didn’t see Andre.

  “Oh, I’m so nervous,” said Patrick.

  We shuffled around, hoping to overhear comments on Irene’s performance, but everyone chattered away about everything other than the play. The house was nice, with plush seats and a red curtain. It was an eclectic crowd: college students, lumberjack men, East Village divas in feathers, leather types, and nondescript people craning their heads toward the flamboyant. The show’s hard-core fans called out to each other in shrill, excited voices, embraced, blew kisses, waved scarves so their bright colors leaped and shot through the air like party streamers. The room pulsed at the edges of my mildly drunk consciousness, and, as the house lights went down, broke into scattered bursts of applause and shouts and with a crinkling of papers and coughs settled into a smooth, breathing mass as the illumined stage blazed through the darkness.

  Patrick sank into his seat, in fear. Andre was whisked down the aisle and seated beside us. When the star entered, with Irene in tow—she had to be dragged on the stage like a limp, helpless kitten—and stopped, struck her pose, and slowly, deliciously, spoke her first line, the stage was already so hot that the laughter went on for a minute or more. Irene played the role differently than Gina Lloyd, with a dead-on earnestness, and she played it precisely, her reactions as full and funny as anything she said. As soon as I could tell that the house had accepted her, were delighting in her, I relaxed.

  Then, in the tradition of seventies theater, at the end of the first scene Irene’s character had to be totally nude. It was quick, a flash in the light before blackout. I knew it was coming but even so—there, white in the darkness, in the big block of light underneath the proscenium arch, was her body. It was uncanny. I thought that my sexual feelings for her had been tucked away for the day in the future when she would tire of Neal Parks and come to her senses and love me. But when I saw her I felt myself jump. What I felt wasn’t sexual; I felt a shock at how she was exposed, and I wanted to protect her. I wanted to tell her to stop, to come down, to be sensible and to choose another life. Then it was gone, her body suspended above us like an image, or a sacrifice; and what I’d felt was still lurking in my skin. I told myself it was the Bushmills. I should have had dinner.

  The production surged on, rolling over us, pulling at us with its pace, its bright wit, its harsh edge. Irene’s character changed, like an old Hollywood heroine, from the amazed little girl we had seen at the beginning into a tough, steely “dame.” I thought clearly—yes, she would soon be a star. At the end she ran up the aisle to the back of the house and rushed into the arms of the director. Then she ran back to the stage and Patrick was laughing and stomping his feet—then we were all standing and clapping. After the bows the cast formed a tableau, a silhouette of arched backs and cigarettes; the stage lights blacked, and then the houselights came on. There was an inaudible collective sigh.

  “In the future,” Patrick said, “Gina Lloyd may stay home.”

  A man in the row ahead of us with a handlebar mustache and a brown leather vest turned and said pensively, “I don’t know…. She’s good, I’ll give you that. The new girl is good.”

  “She’s not good, she’s fabulous,” Patrick replied. “It’s an absolute case of the Carol Haney-Shirley MacLaine syndrome, dear.”

  Knitting his brow, the man turned away, thinking about it.

  “Mother of God,” Patrick said. “To be in a hit! I am so thrilled I’m about to explode. Well?” he said to Andre, who had started to file up the aisle; Patrick and I may as well have been clinging to his back as we followed, awaiting his pronouncement. But he only spoke when we reached the lobby, where I saw, through the glass, the start of the snow.

  “Unfortunately, I must be off,” he said.

  “No,” said Patrick, “you’re not going backstage?”

  Andre hadn’t even taken off his coat, in his characteristic way. I’d never seen him arrive at the theater except in a r
ush, and at the end of a play he always darted for the door.

  “Thank you for inviting me, Patrick,” he said. “Tell Irene I am pleased with the work and on Monday I will give her a note on the end of scene four.” He pulled up the collar of his London Fog coat, and hurried off in the gathering flurries of snow.

  “Well, he came,” I said to Patrick, who looked let down.

  “Thank God we’re here,” and he turned to the box office, “or she’d never know how brilliant she was.”

  We retrieved our roses from the usher, who’d kept them for us in a tin can of water. As we waited outside of the dressing rooms Patrick said, “When I went on in the Fosse production a friend of mine came back and told me, ‘All right, I have suggestions, but I know what you need to hear first is that you were good.’ So I’ll tell you, to start, you were good, you were very, very good.”

  “What was the criticism?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t remember. That wasn’t important.”

  She knew she’d been good. On her dressing-room table was a spectacular multicolored bouquet from Neal Parks.

  We went to Lady Astor’s, beautiful in the window seats with the snow falling outside. Long velvet drapes, candlelight, and the tinkling of glasses. We ate red steaks and drank a bottle of good red wine. Our conversation—of Andre, of the show, of how Irene’s life would be changed, once Gina Lloyd had moved on and the role became hers—was buoyant, overlapping, until sated on food and liquor and the excitement of the night, we subsided against the cushions of the booth, none of us talking, while Patrick smoked. I watched the black night through the tall rectangular window, made blacker by the whiteness of falling snow.