A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  “Yes, I do.” Good old Marilyn, basically unshockable. “Honey, you know,” she said, “you don’t have to work. Now that you’ve gone back to school, David and I are willing—”

  “You’re paying tuition and rent, that’s enough.”

  “You should focus on your—”

  “You want to leave me some pride here, Mom? And while you’re at it, am I allowed privacy? I know what I’m doing. I really don’t need you to dictate my life.”

  “God, you’re touchy. What’s wrong, did you have a bad audition or something?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop here.” We were coming into Teaneck and there was a strip mall to our right. “I just need to pick something up.”

  I parked, and watched her walk into a stationer’s store. A guy maybe in his thirties with shoulder-length hair, who had come out of a bakery several doors down, looked her over, very openly. “Fuck you,” I said, through the window.

  Men were always looking at her and making comments. When I was younger it thrilled me. But lately I wondered whether it would ever end. I rested my arms on top of the steering wheel. The wind had died down, the light weakened in the late afternoon. What she had implied was that if I didn’t work I could see her more often. Which I had no intention of doing.

  She got back in the car and told me to turn left at the next intersection. Just past the Dairy Queen and an Interstate Bank we pulled into a parking lot, shielded on one side with a coppice of trees; on the other a cinder-block wall, demarcating an area for junked cars by a service station. But at the center was a small low building with shingled facing and a freshly painted sign reading MARI-JEANNETTE’S. The “s” swept back and underlined the letters, the “i” was dotted with a star.

  “Wow,” I said, genuinely pleased. “Is this what I think it is?” For years she had hinted about starting a dancing school with a friend; I had never believed her.

  “Jeannette put in bigger money so she gets her whole name. But I’ll do more teaching so I come first.”

  Inside it smelled of wood and varnish, the tang of fresh paint. “They’re doing the floors,” my mother said, beaming. But no one was there. The larger of the two studios was finished; rays of light from the windows glanced off the wall of mirror and shot down onto the lustrous honey-colored floor. She knelt at the door, checking the floor for tackiness with her finger. “All right,” she said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I told her.

  “What this room needs is sweat,” she said.

  “I’m proud of you, Mom.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, brushing my compliment off with a hand, “I need occupation. You’ll be required to come to recitals of course. Three year olds dressed up like daisies and falling all over the stage.” A phone rang. “Phones,” she said, “they’ve put in the phones! Be right back.”

  I went up to the mirror, curious as to how it attached to the wall. Bolts. Two pieces. You know what I did in those studios? Patrick had asked me. I learned to fly. Oh Robert, the work it takes to fly. Cracked feet splitting open and bleeding. Bones aching so you couldn’t remember what it felt like to live without pain. The life of the body. When I didn’t dance anymore I had so much free time. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There were nights I’d wake up thinking No, I missed class. You couldn’t miss class, it was worse than missing Mass, if you’ll pardon the rhyme. And then I’d remember. There were days I would fear that my body was rotting. Slowly weakening away, at last hopelessly atrophied. I wasn’t used to it being this case that only served to carry me around.

  My mother had danced from the age of three and hadn’t stopped—“not for more than two days, except for when you were born”—until my father deserted her.

  I backed away from the mirror, abruptly cognizant of my own reflection as she came heel-clicking back down the hall and her figure filled the doorway. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “Why couldn’t you have told me he died?” I stepped back against the wall, felt the barre dig into my waist.

  She put her hands in her coat pockets and said, “Well, it’s good you’re asking me, you’ve been thinking it, obviously, for so long that—”

  I felt my heart opening up like a flower; I tried to stand casually and as I waited it seemed that finally something would change. But then she leaned into the door frame so that she looked tough.

  “Robert, he destroyed my fucking youth.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Forget it? How can I forget it?”

  “I’ve heard this before,” I said weakly.

  “Really. Then why did you bother to ask?”

  “Can’t it for once be about me and not you?” I was shouting.

  She turned and walked off down the hall. The barre at my back, I bent toward the floor, my hands pressed to my thighs, feeling crushingly lonely, dizzy with all of the things that rushed in my soul, bits and pieces of the past that would not lie down.

  She sat at the edge of the desk in the reception area, about to light a cigarette. “No,” I said, taking it from her and putting it back in the pack. Since she couldn’t smoke she pretended to cry; dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up Kleenex fished from her purse. “Today of all days,” she said.

  AT HOME, DAVID and Patrick had switched from snacks to cocktails. I sat with them in the study, nursing a beer and stifling yawns while my mother fixed dinner and David held forth on the War of the Roses. But at dinner I must have come to. As we sat beneath the chandelier—the dimmer turned low to set off the lights of the city in the distance, the glow from the white couches and chairs of the living room, like ghosts afloat in the darkness—David said, “Marilyn, Patrick’s a Harvard man.”

  “Really?” she said. “What a small world.”

  “Well, Avery’s Harvard, fifty-two. Walter’s twenty-nine. In the math department,” he explained to Patrick, “old as the hills.” David was a Cornell man, forty-four. He launched into one of his favorite stories of how he’d chosen Cornell over Yale.

  Patrick smiled at him, entranced, and delicately nibbled at the tiny wing of his Rock Cornish hen. With the hens we had almond wild rice and cranberry relish, which struck me as suspiciously reminiscent of Thanksgiving. Patrick had dressed up, wearing a tie, his herringbone jacket, and a new pair of gray flannel trousers with razor-sharp creases. But his hair had grown quite long and didn’t stand up as it usually did; he’d tried to grease it into a style with a part, but as stiff and coarse as it was it had partially escaped, so that he looked vaguely electrified.

  “You never told me you’d been to Harvard,” I said to him later, as we cleared the table.

  “But I must have,” he answered.

  “No, when?”

  “After I left New York,” he said.

  “But I thought you went to Europe.”

  “I did go to Europe, but later.”

  “Oh. When were you in California then?” I was sure he had mentioned California.

  “Briefly,” he said, with a sniff. “California. Cowboys and Indians and the movies, there isn’t much to do.”

  “And where did you have the operation?” I asked. On his knee.

  “Why, in Boston, Robert. I’m sure I told you. Freshman year I was a handicapped student at Harvard. It worked out fine. All these smart, well-groomed people offering to carry my books.”

  I loaded the dishwasher while my mother showed Patrick her scrap-books in the living room: my mother as a ballerina; with Agnes de Mille; as a Rockette. (“A Rockette!” I heard Patrick exclaim.)

  The second Patrick and I hit the lobby I shouted, “Jesus, Goddamn.”

  “Was it awful for you?” Patrick said.

  “No,” I said, but the brisk night air felt good, bracing. There were faint stars in the huge black arc of the sky.

  “I’m sorry, but I like them very much.”

  “That’s all right. They like you.”

  “Do they?”

  “Oh yeah. Harvard, huh?”

  “It’s no
t such an outstanding achievement. My father and brothers went there. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have even gotten in.”

  “What do they do?” I said.

  “Something terribly boring. I don’t remember.”

  “Business?” Patrick lived off a small trust. He strode steadily forward, his eyes fixed on the lights of the bridge up ahead.

  “Marilyn looks a lot like you,” he said. “A feminine version, of course.”

  “Do you see them much? Your family. You ever get up to Boston?”

  “Not often.” Typical, I thought. He replied to questions about his past with terse answers and let subjects drop.

  “Who’s Benton?” I asked. We had come to the bus stop, a bench underneath a blue plastic kiosk. Patrick sat, and took out his cigarettes.

  “Did you hear me?” I said.

  “I heard you.” The beam of a street lamp cast a bluish tinge over Patrick’s face, enhancing an appearance of strain and exhaustion.

  “The florist, Reginald,” I went on, “said you should stay away from him. Why?”

  “I’d prefer not to discuss it,” said Patrick.

  “Reginald said he had something to do with dancing.” Then lucky for him, the bus pulled up. Equally lucky, two girls seated across from us were coming home from what seemed like a party. They laughed and talked drunkenly, making our conversation impossible. They wore tight pants with tremendous bell-bottoms, sported shags with pieces of hair directed out at their cheeks and down onto their necks like tendrils. Patrick smiled fondly, but he looked drawn and disturbed. I wondered what in the world I had inadvertently hit upon. I recalled the night he had shown up at my apartment, bloodied—recalled his distracted responses to my questions then, his abrupt dismissal.

  At the terminal we headed toward the downtown subway and the girls stumbled off in the other direction, singing a Cher song.

  “Ah, youth,” Patrick said.

  All of the newstands and snack shops were closed. We went down the ramp, the sound of our footsteps echoing off the tiled walls of the tunnel.

  On the platform he said, in tones of tender appeasement and strange, wistful apology, “Benton is no one. Benton is more—a bad frame of mind. To be avoided at all costs, you see.”

  The train sounded close by in the bowels of the earth and I had a quick, dreadful vision of my father’s death, the swerve of the cab, his feet flying out from underneath him, the strike of his head against the fender and the fall to the street where he lay on his side, his cheek pressed to the asphalt, next to the tire. We got onto the train, where an old man was sleeping. Above his head was a horizontal poster of one of the last “Miss Subways.” She had an old-fashioned hairstyle, teased at the crown and curved into a flip at the ends, and the copy said she lived in Far Rockaway, Queens. The train lumbered into motion, started picking up speed, and for an instant lost its lights so I couldn’t see Patrick beside me: I felt a grip in my gut. We rushed ahead into the dark as if we were rushing toward something voracious and unstoppably real.

  5 Winter

  Winter was eternal that year. The snow and the cold were relentless, and as the weeks and months crept along I began to forget that the trees had been green, and it seemed we had always lived in this stripped barren place, rushing from one lighted shelter to another. In January, a young and newly successful comedian named Freddie Prinze stuck a gun in his mouth and blew out the back of his head. Patrick did Henry IV, Prince Hal, and the Richards, but none of them succeeded. I could see that he was going through the motions. Acting was not the departure from myself that I had hoped it would be, but rather a journey into the very parts of myself I thought it would rescue me from. And Patrick held himself at a remove, walking trippingly among the mines. Irene and I sat at the back of the class dying for him. After each monologue he’d sit and listen to Andre’s criticism, a pleasant expression on his long reddish face, his hair cut again to its normal upstanding length, as tall sitting down as many of the class standing up. And one day as I watched him it occurred to me: How will he survive? Who will hire him? But more than anyone I’d ever met, Patrick was who he was in spite of. Who knew? I said to Irene. Maybe the air he breathed was thinner than ours. Maybe it took a while for things to reach him, up there where he lived. If anyone should have been able to play Shakespeare it was Patrick. What are the kings if not gigantic, glorious inventions?

  Irene’s work, on the other hand, had gotten so raw you could hardly watch it. One snowy day, the wind howling outside, the sky dark at 3:30 in the afternoon, our classroom so cold we were all wearing jackets, she showed up in a wisp of a nightgown and did a Maggie in After the Fall I will never forget. In the scene she becomes frightened; she imagines smoke billowing out from the closet, and by the time Irene got to the speech she went pale, white as a sheet. What, Andre asked, had she put in the closet to achieve that moment? “I saw myself dead,” she answered.

  My own work felt glib. I turned to directing in graduate school—and I began an affair with Brenda, a sexy, complicated woman I picked up at Saks.

  I met her at the end of January, the same day I had my first big fight with Irene. Irene had remained unflinchingly devoted to Neal. Neal was a gambler. Poor Neal, she would say, he owes all this money. He also had a child with an expensive disability. We were stomping through snow on Great Jones Street after attending a call for a show that was already obviously cast. I was in a bad mood; I didn’t have time for dead ends. Irene’s descriptions of the roles had tantalized me into coming.

  There were faint gray smudges under her eyes. Gina Lloyd, her unwitting nemesis, continued on in the show on East Fourth; might never leave, and this stroke of bad luck was consuming Irene. Her hair was shoved into a red felt hat and the rest of her was draped in an enormous black woolen cape. I hated the cape; she looked like a kid playing dress-up.

  “I’m beside myself, Robert,” she said. “I’ve tried not to think of it all morning, but Neal called me last night and it’s bad. The bottom fell out on pork bellies. He owes thousands and thousands of dollars.” A red-mittened hand appeared from the recesses of the black cape to smite at her heart. “He’s already in debt, as you know, and—”

  I stopped, snow whirling around us, and said, “I don’t care.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. I don’t care. I don’t know Neal.”

  “You’re selfish, Robert.” She looked like a waif, a match girl, a worker for the Salvation Army.

  “I’m selfish? Here’s a guy with a wife and child and a girlfriend on the side—I’ll let that one slip by, all right?” She was glaring at me. “What I won’t let slip by, what strikes me as nearly obscene, is how Neal, who’s got half the ad agencies in the city begging him to take more of their money, who’s got the whole network of CBS under his thumb, is determined to throw it all away.” I took a breath. A bit hyperbolic, but the point had been made.

  “I mean everybody I know,” I addended to my previous statement, “with one-eighth of what he’s got going would think they were in paradise.”

  “But I care about him.”

  I motioned in the direction of Broadway. “I’m going uptown,” I told her.

  “You said you had a class.”

  “I do. I’m skipping it.”

  “To do what?”

  “I’m going to bring my possessions out to the street and hold a yard sale for Neal.”

  Christ, it was cold. I walked to the corner, and she followed me. He could sell his Jaguar, and Irene could sell the presents he’d bought for her too. Now gracing her living room was a big fat color TV. (On which to watch Neal?) He’d given her a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, for research, in a bookcase with a “genuine walnut-stained facade.” It was pathetic how unimpressive his gifts were, as though he knew it wouldn’t take much to keep her. I wondered whether he still took her to the Waldorf-Astoria.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. We had stopped again, at the corner.

  I wanted to go. “Not
hing.”

  “We’ll be by the restaurant tonight.” She and Patrick often stopped by for a drink near the end of my shift.

  “I’m worried about Patrick,” she said. “Let me know later how you think he seems.”

  I looked at the gray patches under her eyes; the small bones in her face looked sharper, like she’d lost weight.

  “Y’know, you look terrible,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Why don’t you slow down? There was no reason to go to that call.”

  “You didn’t have to come if you didn’t want to.”

  “You wanted me to come.”

  “Thanks for the favor.” Her eyes were a hard crystalline blue. “You have the loveliest way of showing you care.”

  She turned and started down Broadway, calling back, “I just remembered, I can’t make it tonight.”

  Snow was packed at the collar of my jacket, was melting down my neck in icy rivulets. I had lost my damn scarf. Some guy with a briefcase knocked into me and I shouted, “Excuse me,” then headed uptown. I went about three snowy blocks before hailing a cab. Extravagant, dumb, skipping class, taking cabs in the middle of the day.

  The driver was a woman, with beautiful smooth chocolate skin. She had the heater full blast, and we traveled slowly in the snow. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror and I smiled. Here was the problem: you couldn’t be friends with a woman you’d once had a crush on.

  People labored along on the sidewalks. The light was weird; fuzzy and bright. The greens, reds, and yellows of the stoplights glowed through the falling snow; I watched the sweep of the wipers, the windshield filling with whiteness and then clearing. The driver had a bushy Afro. I wondered what it would feel like to touch: springy, soft, like the stuffing used to pack china. On Lexington Avenue headlights went on and the snow, the quiet cars, the hurrying people—the women in their pretty coats—became otherwordly, eroticized, slow, like a setting in a movie.

  We pulled up beside Saks. I smiled at the driver again and tipped her hugely, letting my fingers brush the skin of her palm as I gave her the money. It wasn’t natural, I thought, to live without love. Even the mannequins in the windows looked good. Of late, I had had one torrid night with Candace the stewardess who told me in the morning that she was engaged. I went inside Saks and down the wet aisles between the women selling makeup and perfume. I got on the escalator, rising up among the junk, all of it looking superfluous, tainted, forlorn with the holidays gone, like the day after an expensive failed show.