A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  I’d come to the men’s department. There was a fabulous head of long hair bent over an underwear rack: dark, glossy, as sleek as the hair of a violin bow. I couldn’t see her face. Married. Yes, that would be fine. She looked up—a face like a Siamese cat, compact, finely wrought—and, damn, if I didn’t know her. I walked over to her anyway. She stared at me, trying to place me. Brown eyes, almost black. White, white skin.

  “Robert Holt.”

  “Brenda.” Rough, sexy voice.

  “Drama crit,” I reminded her. “How come you’re not in class?” I asked.

  She sized me up a second longer, replaced a package of Jockey briefs, said, “Exhaustion, despair.” She lifted her brow in a look that said, You?

  “I needed socks.”

  “I’m married,” she told me. “Unhappily so.”

  I must have come upon her at the perfect psychological moment.

  “You want to get coffee?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  I bought a pair of socks for verisimilitude, and we went to the store restaurant and sat at a table that rocked whenever I changed my position in the slightest. Brenda ordered water; coffee, she said, gave her the jitters. She kept her jacket on.

  “What made you decide on directing?” I asked. She looked bored, sitting low in her chair, her long legs stretched under the table, cramping mine. “Are you an actress?”

  “God, no.”

  I set my elbows on the table and it wobbled prodigiously, so the coffee sloshed out on the saucer; Brenda’s water tossed in the glass. “I’ve worked in film,” she said. “I’ve done sets….” Her eyes said, I’ve been around. “I’m going into directing for power.”

  “Oh.” At least she was honest.

  “I’ll probably fail and wind up as somebody’s secretary.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” She waited for an answer.

  “Well, I was being polite but—” I was paralyzed, my hands now in my lap, not daring to touch the table or go for the coffee. “You’re obviously a determined person—”

  “You know what I’d like?” she said, interrupting. I had no idea. “I’d like to be the head of a studio. I’d like to be William Paley. I’d like to fire people and sign checks for millions of dollars.”

  I imagined her body, lean, paradoxically pliant. I took a chance and slunk down in my chair, stretched my legs out alongside of hers. She didn’t move.

  “You’re nice,” she said. How would she know.

  “You’re gorgeous.” A pause, her eyes studying me.

  “I’m thirty,” she told me.

  “Oh, really?” I pressed my leg against hers; the table shivered, stilled. “You have some time?” I asked her.

  “You have an apartment?”

  David had given me a MasterCard at Christmas for use in emergencies and it was burning a hole in my pocket. We went to the Waldorf-Astoria.

  After that we established a schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:40 to 2:55. We both had a break between classes and we met at school, in an obscure costume storage room to which Brenda had procured a key. It was hot there, and dark, the windows blacked out, the only illumination coming from a droplight we found near the couch. As soon as we got the door shut we’d be pulling at each other’s clothes, feeling our way to the couch, knocking into the dust-smelling garments hanging heavily around us. One of us would reach down to turn on the light and then it got slow, languid, our bodies slick from the heat. Having skipped lunch we’d be hungry, and I’d bring bags of nuts we fed to each other, still locked together.

  Leaving was hell—the mad dash to the rest room, where I attempted to clean myself up with the wood-chipped industrial paper towels, under the glaring fluorescent lights.

  Brenda was as different from Irene as a woman could get. She’d grown up in the Village, the child of communists who had marched for the Rosenbergs in the fifties. Her husband was a public defender, and I enjoyed imagining her on the edge of great danger, the target of a kidnapping plot being devised by thugs her husband had sent to the Tombs, as I held her in my arms. She and her husband were embroiled in a struggle for power, she explained.

  I was finished with my longing-for-love phase. My new passion for directing had me in a focused-on-nothing-but-work phase, with Brenda taking care of my libido. Irene proclaimed that after the high moral tone I had taken with her for sleeping with a married man, I was acting like a hypocrite. When she met Brenda her eyes went straight to the ring, and she gave me a withering stare. By then, Irene was driving me crazy. As the winter wore on, her angst, and her yearning for justice in a business that had promised her near-instant glory and then reneged on the deal, began to grate on my nerves.

  THE NEXT STEP in Gina Lloyd’s precarious career had fallen through, leaving Irene behind, stuck where she was. One night around six she showed up at my door, drawn and mournful, that now familiar darkness beneath her blue eyes. I’d had a great day with Brenda, then running lights for a play I’d designed. I can’t say I was happy to see her. Lately I hadn’t called her as often, and I would sometimes cancel when the three of us had plans.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I’ve been walking.”

  “Come in,” I said. “I’ll make coffee.”

  She removed her wet cape and spread it over a chair in the kitchen. She stood near me at the stove sighing, rubbing her arms desultorily; she sat down in one of the chairs, put her hands on her knees, and gazed at the floor.

  “I went on in the show last night. Gina was sick.” Her head sank lower. “I was terrible, Robert, I was terrible. I was stiff. Everyone knew, they felt it. I hadn’t had rehearsal since when? November.” She got up and went to the window above the sink: it faced a wall, and falling snow. “I hate winter,” she said.

  The kettle whistled. I poured the water over the coffee grounds.

  “Today, know what I did?” she said. “I’d had an audition for some pilot at CBS—well, they taped the audition and sent it to the Coast, but then changed the part I was up for to a man. However, they thought I was lovely, or somebody thought I was lovely because I was summoned today, to this cathedral of an office.” She chewed on a thumbnail. “This woman casts for the movies in LA. She’d like me to call her when I go on in the show, or have a part on TV, it doesn’t have to be much, ten or twelve lines. Or when I’m on Broadway.” She laughed. “I wanted to tell her that I can’t get seen for off Broadway, let alone Broadway!”

  She turned from the window. She held herself, at the sink, and I focused on her sweater, tight at the midriff. Her waist looked so small, I thought I could encircle it with my hands. “All of these things are happening to me,” she said, “and yet nothing happens.” She sat down at the table.

  “It will,” I said.

  “Oh God,” she stretched her arms out along the table and slapped it—“I was terrible last night, you can’t know.” She sat up straight. “It was humiliating…. ‘Be patient,’ Lynn Singer tells me today, ‘you’re a good commercial type’—forget the fact I don’t get commercials. You know it’s much harder to get a theater agent as long as I’m tied up with Lynn.” She picked up her coffee, set it back down. “I just walked in the snow.” She looked back at the window distractedly, then at the clock. “God, I gotta go.” She got up, packaged herself in the cape.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she said again. And that was that. Two or three days went by before I heard from her again. She called me one morning about eleven o’clock.

  “Listen, I can’t reach Patrick. I’ve been trying for days. I’ve left messages on his service and he won’t call me back.”

  It was a Sunday. He’d had a general audition for the Manhattan Theatre Club on Wednesday. It probably hadn’t gone well. He had been optimistic, had read an entire script to me on the phone as a rehearsal.

  “He’s probably in bed,” I told her.

  “Why? Is he sick?”

  “I doubt it. Sometimes he just goes to bed. Like for a w
eek.”

  “Don’t you worry?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow is Andre’s class. He’ll show by then.”

  “I don’t like this…. We should go up there.”

  “I can’t. I’m working tonight and I’ve got a thousand—”

  “How would you feel if something happened to him? We’d never know, no one would know.”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “You’re underreacting.”

  “Irene—”

  “I’m going. Come or don’t come, it’s your choice.” She hung up. I kicked a leg of the telephone table and the whole thing collapsed.

  “Oh, terrific,” I said.

  I grabbed my jacket, looked out the front windows: another beautiful day. There was a little wind, and it raked up the top layer of snow from the ground, swirling it over the street. If she wasn’t feeling hysterical herself, I thought, she assumed everyone else was. I picked up the phone again and called Patrick, but he didn’t answer.

  When I got to his building she stood at the top of the steps, studying the roster of tenants. “I rang him forever,” she said.

  “Try it again,” I told her.

  She pressed the buzzer. He lived on the fourth floor, at the top. “Could he hear us if we yell?”

  “He’s in the back.”

  “Oh, that’s right. What if I can get one of the ground-floor neighbors to let us out to their garden, y’know? We could throw stones.” She rang a few of the buzzers and nobody answered. Finally a man stuck his head out a window on the second floor.

  “Whaddaya want?” he called down.

  “I’m sorry for bothering you,” Irene said. Then she looked back at me, “We could ask the—”

  “It’s freezing, y’know that?” the man said.

  “Would you mind telling me where we might find the super?” she said.

  “There aren’t any apartments here,” the man said. “Everybody’s lived here for years.” He had a black beard and he pulled at it, nervously.

  “We don’t want an apartment,” she said. “You’re the super?”

  I realized she was about to ask him to let us into Patrick’s apartment, which I thought was an inexcusable invasion of privacy. But by now she’d succeeded in freaking me out. “We’re a little concerned about our friend,” I said, “one of the tenants. Patrick O’Doherty?”

  “O’Doherty?” said the super. “I don’t know O’Doherty.”

  “Very tall?” Irene said.

  “Oh, O’Doherty. What’s the matter?”

  Irene explained, and the super shut his window and appeared a minute later at the front door. “Okay, c’mon.” We trooped up the stairs.

  “What’s he got,” said the super, “mental problems?”

  “We just want to be sure he’s all right,” Irene said.

  “Sometimes,” said the super, “an old lady falls down. Sometimes it’s drugs. I got six buildings here on this street and sooner or later, couple times a year, something’s gonna happen.” Cheery guy, I thought. Judging by his darkly restrained excitement, these calamities were the high points of his life.

  He shook his head ominously, and banged on the door. There wasn’t any answer. “Okay,” he said quietly, “I’m gonna open it up.”

  He unlocked it and the door swung open.

  We stepped in. “Patrick?” Irene said.

  “Patrick,” I said.

  He peeked timidly around the corner of the alcove, “Robert? Irene?”

  “I don’t have better things to do,” said the super, looking disappointed. “O’Doherty, answer your phone,” and he left.

  “Thank you!” called Irene. “We’re terribly sorry.”

  Patrick sat weakly back down on his bed. “I thought he was a burglar, I thought I was through.”

  “Guess I’ll go,” I said to Irene, annoyed. “She was worried,” I said to Patrick.

  “I’m depressed,” he told her.

  She sat down beside him, “But you can’t just lie down and give up.” I looked at the book he’d been reading, Vanity Fair.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I hate myself when I’m like this.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” she said.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “I’m depressed too,” she said, “Robert’s depressed.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She ignored me. “Everybody’s depressed. It’s winter. No one I know has gotten a part in anything for months. It’s not only you.”

  He lay down again, folding his long pale hands on the lap of his robe. “Go away.”

  She stood, and, changing her tactics, said, “Patrick. How many days have you been in this bed? Since Wednesday?”

  “I think so,” he answered her tentatively.

  “Get up,” she said. “I mean it. Go take a shower and get dressed. We’re going out.” He didn’t move.

  “Go on,” Irene said. “We’ll go to a movie, I’ll make us lunch.”

  When I left, the shower was running and Irene was in the kitchen opening a can of chicken noodle soup. If she had convinced my super to open my apartment I would have been livid. And yet I had to admit that she was good for him. But her inference that I didn’t care irked me. If I had ordered him out of bed he would have never spoken to me again. And why did she say that I, too, was depressed? Was I depressed? Last night I had dreamed about my father—a dream in which everything was pervaded by the murkiness of his absence. I roamed the earth in a perpetual fog, where objects and people kept dissolving into mist.

  The thing I liked about directing was that it was not about me. Not as acting was. As a director I had to step back. Only then could I distinguish the meaning of the parts. Directing was about concept, about surfaces as well as depths; it was formal and even logical. Being submerged in a self could never be.

  IN MARCH, PATRICK appeared in a Sam Shepard play. It was poor, both the production and his performance, but my parents came opening night, Patrick’s old friend Maria, and Irene and me. Then we all went out to a gloomy basement bar near the theater. My mother wore what I called her Ethel Merman fur, and got on quite well with Irene, who was charming, if thinner than ever. Maria had come with a very young, very handsome man named José, whom she ignored.

  “So, tell me,” Maria said, turning to me, “how is he? Really.”

  She wore her hair pulled back tightly, had a long thin nose, liquidy eyes, nails like talons. Maria had taken care of Patrick when he hurt his knee, and he had said he would die for her. He’d known her since he had first come to New York, when they worked together as dancers. I’d seen her on Broadway; she was wildly successful.

  “How, really, is Patrick,” I said cynically. She leaned forward, wrapping her hand with the red daggers around her glass. Her blouse bared the tops of her small, lovely breasts and I found it difficult to keep my eyes on her face.

  “How do I say it,” said Maria, “he’s well? He’s happy?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Her eyes dropped to the table, mine to her chest, she looked up, my eyes leaped to her face—and I saw that her expression could not have been any more serious.

  “As far as you know,” she said in a low voice, “he isn’t seeing Benton, is he?”

  Who the hell was this guy? “Benton who?” I said. “I don’t know him.” Something about Maria made me cautious.

  “Oh … Really?” She opened her purse and took out a card, held it out to me. “I want you to do me a favor. Just please, if Patrick sees Benton—as far as you know, call me, yes?”

  With, I’ll admit, a wolfish leer at her breasts, I accepted the card.

  My mother and David got up to leave and after they’d said goodbye, Maria called to Patrick. “Patrick, I want to dance.” She arose from the table like a queen and he took her hand.

  I looked at José, who was shredding a napkin, and said, “So, José, what do you do?”

  “I’m a dancer,” he said without looking up. What a night.
>
  Maria and Patrick started lightly, doing disco, but got gradually stagier, adding complicated moves, swing steps and lifts, and soon the others on the dance floor sat down and they took over the space. It hit me with a jolt, with a visceral shock of adjustment, that Patrick was dancing. He was amazing. I had always thought of him as elegant, but disembodied somehow, willfully detached. Now I could see him as he must have been on the stage: elemental, immediate. I had this strange feeling of seeing him for the first time, or of discovering a person that until now I had only glanced at. Patrick hoisted Maria from one side of his body to another, spun her away from him, spun her back, turned, let her drop, caught her at the last second with his arm; she threw back her head and laughed, and they were in motion again.

  I turned to Irene and said, “Hey, wanna dance?”

  She laughed. “Oh yeah, sure.”

  The song ended and a new song began, with a slower, irregular beat. Maria and Patrick did a syncopated Ginger and Fred. At the end Maria returned to the table sweaty and flushed, lifting Patrick’s arm in the air like after a knockout: “This is a man,” she said, “this is a dancer.”

  “Thank you very much, Maria,” he said, limping. “I’ll be in agony tomorrow.” She barked something in Spanish to José, who put money on the table and gathered their coats. She hadn’t let go of Patrick’s hand; she half sat, half leaned against the end of the table and pulled him to her. It was settled that Patrick would share a cab home with Maria and José. I would wait for Irene, who had disappeared and was taking forever coming back to the table. The three of them left and took with them the life of the place. Irene showed up and wanted to finish her beer.

  “So what did you tell him about tonight?” she said, after a pause.

  “What, about the show? Not much, I liked his entrance.”