A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  We rounded a bend and the road dead-ended. “Oh, look,” she said. Where the road stopped was a guardrail, and beyond it the land opened out and down into a valley. We stood a while looking at a profusion of bluish green pines, and the color, the scent, the silence echoed inside me. Then I looked at her again, said, “I like your hair longer. Where’d you get the tan?”

  “Oh, at my last, and final, commercial audition I met this man. Nothing serious. He took me to his house in the Hamptons.” Of course. There would always be men to take her to the Hamptons, to the Waldorf. “You know,” she went on, “this summer, this year has been—I’d like to get away…. Think about things, come back rested. If I could.”

  “What about Coffeyville? Can’t you go home?”

  “No. No, that’s out of the question.”

  “Is it?”

  “My father doesn’t care for me, I don’t care for him. It wouldn’t be restful.”

  “The air here smells so fresh,” she said. A quick burst of it blew her hair forward; I reached out and pushed a few strands off her face and then felt I shouldn’t have. I refocused again on the valley of trees, noticed the sky bleaching from blue to white.

  “My father—” she said. “When my mother died—” She stopped, folded her arms over her chest.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “No.” She gazed straight ahead, as if seeing something beyond the trees. “When my mother was sick in the hospital, my father would take me to see her after school. The last time she was sick he’d stay with her all day and come back to get me in the afternoons. One day I was waiting for him in my room, at the front of the house, so that through my windows I could see the driveway, and one day he drove in, but all the way in, not partway, and I knew it was over. I was so scared, I stood waiting for him to come tell me it wasn’t so. But when I saw him as he came up the walk, he looked up at me through the window. Yes, she was dead, I could see that. But also what I saw in his eyes was this, this hatred, like he wished it was me who had died. And that’s when I thought, I’m alone.” She stopped. “Later he said he hadn’t seen me, that on that day he’d been blind and hadn’t seen anything. But I was right, anyway; from then on he was never a father.” I touched her hair and she leaned into me, put her head against my shoulder, turned into my chest and I put my arms around her and held her. In a minute she pulled back. “You know what else it felt like?”

  “What?”

  “It’s getting dark—” she stepped away. “We’d better go.” We looked once more at the valley and then started back. She took my hand and I didn’t think anything about it except that it felt good and warm.

  After a while I said, “What else did it feel like?”

  “Well, I remember thinking for the first time that you really couldn’t have anything. That you could never truly hold anything in your hands. And if anyone said that you could, it was a lie.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Yes.” We saw the lights of the house, saw it was crowded; people cluttered the front steps and yard.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “Just fine, I think I’ll get drunk. We should mingle, but if Stacey harasses you give me a whistle.” Outside the front door she put her hands to the sides of my face, kissed me, and said, “Bye, chum, see you later.”

  Inside, the party extended down a hallway and into the kitchen and bedrooms; loud, bright-seeming, and smoky, and someone was playing the piano. Alix, svelte in a great long brown dress, introduced me to an agent she knew, who said I should call her the next time I performed in New York. I took her card, thanked her, and backed away, going out to the pool for a drink. Clarence stood by the other side of the pool with a fantastically beautiful woman, the actress who would play his wife in A Raisin in the Sun. She had very large eyes, and the extreme whites of her eyes glittered against her dark skin. Tazzia something. This was Clarence’s summer. He’d grown out his hair into little incipient dreadlocks, and wore a set of brass beads.

  On my second beer I headed into the house, and as I did, Irene lurched and then stumbled out of the house, after her shoe skittered over the patio and nearly fell into the pool. Automatically I reached out to take her arm and she straightened. “Lookit that, almost flipped it in the drink. Robert, hi!”

  “Take it easy,” I said. She smiled, patted me on the chest, and walked away. I saw Andre in the doorway, watching her. I managed to get inside without having to talk to him; the costume designer was singing a torch song by the piano. I shared a joint and had a long, boring conversation with one of the techies in the kitchen. Bryan, who had seen our first dress yesterday, walked by and gave me the thumbs-up sign—only, in an odd gesture, raising the thumb he put it to his mouth and kissed it. How typically Bryan, supportive, but hard to read.

  I wandered out of the kitchen and back into the living room, where the pianist was playing Scott Joplin. There was Bryan and his girlfriend and Cynthia’s TV-producer husband. Strange, I thought, that she should be married to a TV producer, or was it? But then I saw Irene and Andre, and incredulously observed that the lower halves of their bodies were absolutely glued together—at the sides. They were talking intently and her hand was positioned possessively on the center of his back.

  I went outside looking for Patrick, first to the back and then to the front yard. I spotted him sitting on the front steps, smoking and talking to skinny one-eyebrowed Morris, of all people.

  “Patrick,” I said.

  “Pardon me, Morris.” He rose and came out to me on the shadowy grass. “If you want to know anything about anything,” he said, “talk to Morris, he’s a fount of information.”

  “Irene’s coming on to Andre.”

  “She isn’t. Where?”

  We went up the steps past Morris and into the house, slinking away to the outskirts of the room where we wouldn’t be seen.

  “Over there,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” he replied. They had moved and he was sitting in a chair and she sat on the arm; one of his hands rested casually on her thigh. “Well, such is life,” Patrick said.

  “We should do something.”

  “What? I hardly think it’s any of our business, Robert.”

  “We should just let her do it?”

  “Well, certainly,” and with that, he turned to go back outside.

  I watched him leave, then I stared at the happy couple and finally stalked noisily past them—they didn’t flinch—and out to the bar. And as I ordered a beer there she was, with her impeccable timing and her thump: Stacey.

  “Hi, Robert, how are you? Where’s Irene?”

  “Stacey,” I said, “will you leave me alone?”

  “What?” she asked, somewhat surprised.

  “Just leave me alone” I said, and stomped off to the front yard, where I found someone who was about to drive back down the hill.

  AT HOME I SAT on the porch in the dark, illogically, stubbornly waiting for Irene to walk in the door. Pictures crowded my mind—their heads together, hers brown and his gray, her hip pressed to his. Andre wasn’t even someone you thought of as having a body. But of course he had one.

  What was she doing? Who was she? I thought of how whenever we would come out of a movie or play she would change, taking on the mannerisms of one of the actresses in the story. It didn’t seem like she was trying to do it but more like she’d been overtaken, as though this larger personality coming at her in the dark was irresistable. Andre, the pig, had once told us that most good actors did not have sharply defined personalities of their own, that they were vaporous and highly suggestible. When Irene worked, she studied the script very consciously; then she thought about it for a long time; and lastly, she hypnotized herself. “What do you mean, hypnotize yourself?” I had asked her. “I can’t explain it any better than that,” she had said. It was eerie. Even Patrick said once, “It’s scary how good she is already, having done close to nothing.” Who was she beneath the acting? And why, whenever I thought I’d b
egun to get near her, did she slip away?

  I must have been stoned because, on the porch, I began to believe that she didn’t have a soul, that losing her mother had wreaked irreparable damage. I gave up waiting for her, believing in her, and in bed I thought of her saying you couldn’t hold anything in your hands, and no one, it seemed, existed but me. There was only this house and the wind picking up outside and this summer that was nearly over and therefore itself nearly ceased to exist.

  IN THE MORNING Patrick and Clarence were home and Irene wasn’t. Around noon Patrick went off to a picnic, and I got ready to leave again on tour the next day. Presumably, Patrick would return to the city the following day, along with Irene. She hadn’t called, which I thought rude, since she was supposedly visiting us.

  About six o’clock I was in the kitchen ironing a shirt when Patrick came back. “Where’s Irene?” he asked, sticking his head in.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Excuse me for living.” When I took the shirt to my room I saw that he’d gotten a book and was reading on the porch. Shortly, the screen door swung open and I heard them talking, then her voice coming closer to me in my room, calling back to him. The door to the bathroom closed; opened.

  I went out to the hall.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” She wore a T-shirt and cutoffs and carried her outfit and shoes from last night. I followed her into the living room where she knelt by her suitcase, and began folding and packing her clothes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “We thought we’d have a beer and then go out to dinner, okay?”

  “No, I mean, what are you doing?” I repeated.

  “Oh.” She clicked the suitcase shut, and picked up her boots. “Well. I’m moving into Andre’s.”

  “You’re what?”

  She very deliberately set down the boots and unrolled her socks.

  “What about your cat?” I asked her.

  “Ruth will take care of him.”

  “You don’t have enough clothes.”

  She shrugged. “We’ll send for some, he’ll buy me some.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, ineffectively disguising my anger.

  “Why? Because I want to, why not?”

  “That’s an intelligent reason,” I said. “It seems to me your IQ has been dropping ten points an hour since you got here.”

  “Fuck you, Robert.”

  “Fuck you, Irene.” She’d been sitting in a straight-backed cane chair by a window to put on her boots. Now she stood, and the angle of light from outside cast a shadow over her face so that her eyes and brow became dark, volcanic.

  Patrick came in and said, “What’s going on?”

  Without turning I answered, “We’re having a private conversation.”

  “People having private conversations don’t shout,” he said.

  “Don’t you think,” I said to Irene, “that you should have done this earlier in the season when it would have made a difference?”

  “What is wrong with you?” she shouted.

  “Me?” I said. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Oh, Robert,” Patrick said, “don’t carry on.”

  I wheeled on him: “Don’t you ever, ever use that tone on me again.”

  “What tone?” he said. I glared at him. “Why don’t we sit down,” he said, “and discuss this in a civilized fashion.”

  “I don’t see anyone civilized in this room,” I replied.

  “Then stand.” He gave Irene a look and she sat back down; he took out his cigarettes, gave her one, lit it, lit one for himself, and sat down in the other chair, tossed the matches on the table between them. I went and leaned against the mantle.

  Nobody spoke for a minute. “There’s nothing to say,” she said. “He just insulted me to my face and I refuse to discuss anything further.”

  “In my opinion,” I said, choosing my words, “you are confused, and you are wrecking your life.”

  “What he’s saying,” Patrick said, “is that he’s worried about you.”

  “How does he know what will or will not wreck my life? I think not doing this is more likely to wreck it.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you admit it’s calculated, you admit you’re doing this to get something out of it—”

  “Yes,” she said, “damn straight I am.”

  “Then ‘confused,’” I said, “may be the wrong word.”

  “Listen,” she said, “I am so sick of hearing all the time how provincial I am, whereas it’s you who’s provincial. Maybe, maybe the core of this is that I realized, over the summer, that my first reaction when I left in June wasn’t genuine, just automatic. I was supposed to be shocked and I was. I thought I was. All year when he showed an interest in me I thought, No, he’s my teacher, he’s older than my father—I can’t. But why not? Who else makes more sense? I’m an actress, my acting means more to me than anything, and acting is what he knows, more than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s who I should be with, who I want to be with.” She had grown very calm, very sure of herself. She took a deep drag on the dregs of her cigarette and put it out.

  “That,” I said, “was an amazing justification.”

  “Oh Robert, grow up!” She’d lost it again. “You’re such a romantic. Haven’t you gathered that anyone who’s attracted to someone wants something from them? Looks, or just to be near someone who behaves—”

  “You are beyond justification, Irene. You’re in The Outer Limits.”

  “Forget it,” she said to Patrick. “He’s dead to me.”

  “Have you forgotten that Andre,” I said to her, “who-you-should-be-with, fired you from the-thing-that-means-more-to-you-than-anything?”

  “He’s apologized for that,” she said, “he admits it was a mistake.”

  “No, it wasn’t. He got what he wanted.”

  Enter Clarence. Well, he didn’t enter. The guy was making a break for the exit. But we had forgotten his presence and hearing him in the hallway we were taken aback; our three sets of eyes pinned him like a rivet where he stopped, just outside the room. “I want you people to know that I haven’t heard any of this, yes?” he said.

  “Yes,” Patrick said sadly, “we know you haven’t, Clarence.” Clarence went on, and we listened to the squeak of the screen door as he left; Irene tried to stare me down, but I didn’t give in, and she looked away.

  Then I said to her, as kindly as I could, “You don’t think much of yourself, do you?”

  “Whatever,” she answered, “has convinced you that you’re so intrinsically valuable?”

  “If I’m dead, you’re deader,” I said to her.

  “Please,” Patrick said, “you’re both getting far too esoteric. She’s having a dalliance and a nice vacation. And if Andre turns out to be good for her career, lovely!”

  “Yeah, you would say that,” I said. He had taken her side. “I’m not exactly surprised you would say that since everyone knows you’ve been sleeping with Bryan all summer.” The reddish shade of his face darkened, and one of his hands leaped to his head in a self-conscious combing motion.

  In fact, the Bryan affair was a recent development and I had thought little about it. What painted it lurid was the arrival of Bryan’s girlfriend last night, in for the party from California.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” Irene said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or why.”

  “You do too,” I said, and I walked out of the house. I headed into the forest, plunging headlong down a path, slapping aside the stray branches that struck at my face. But then I tripped on a log that lay at the side of the path. I picked it up and heaved it into the dense thickness of trees to my right, and when I looked down at the dirt where it had lain I saw it was moist, teeming with dark, wet things that I had unearthed. Feeling dizzy I turned and retraced my path. If only I’d never met her. A girl with a father fixation, all the way back to that guy in Coffeyville; Hank. I had one desire, I wanted to ge
t my bike and get out of here. It leaned against the wall by the porch door. Patrick came out of the house.

  “Robert—”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Come inside,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Does this have to do with last night?” he said sweetly. “How the two of you were pretending to be lovers, and then she was with Andre? I wouldn’t blame you if you felt embarrassed in front of the others—is that what’s bothering you?”

  I shook my head and laughed. “I didn’t think of that,” I lied. “But now that you mention it, that was shitty of her too. But no, that’s not it.” I kicked up the bike stand. “You know it isn’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh, Patrick.” He was dissimulating, I knew he was.

  “And why did you say what you said about Bryan?” he asked. “It isn’t so.”

  I was dumbfounded. “It is so.” Was Irene contagious?

  “I’ve always appreciated, Robert—” now he was acting hurt”—how, in most circumstances, you respect people’s privacy.”

  “Do you honestly believe that if something isn’t said, it isn’t there, Patrick? It isn’t real?” He averted his eyes. “I don’t care about you and Bryan. I don’t think you’re seeing Bryan in the way Irene’s chosen to see Andre, and even if you are, I don’t think it’s quite the same. But don’t lie about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Patrick. He drops you off in the morning, I’ve seen him. I don’t care, but I won’t pretend I don’t know.” He was picking at an imaginary piece of lint on his jeans. I walked my bike to the driveway, turned back, and he looked at me straight, head-on, seriously, and I thought I could see in his eyes that he knew he’d been wrong, but I didn’t stay to find out.

  THAT MORONIC PACT we had signed, what good was looking after each other someday if we didn’t look after each other now? Daylight waned and night began reclaiming the road and drawing the houses into its dark breast. I decided to get a drink at the bar that adjoined a hotel in the next village over, a place where the three of us didn’t go. I pumped the bike pedals vigorously, soothed by the feel of sweat breaking out on my brow, as if something were finally being released. There was nobody at the bar, just me and the bartender. The walls were papered with raised red chevrons, stinking of gin and despair. The mirrors were cloudy, the banquettes vinyl and worn. I ordered a boiler-maker and carried it to a booth. I would get drunk, get a room in the hotel. An older couple came in and sat at the bar. I got another drink. Two youngish women took a table by the door. A barmaid came on shift and stood sharing a newspaper with the bartender. I gazed, mesmerized, at the rows of strangly bright-colored bottles in such a dim place, and on my fourth drink I changed my mind; I’d go to Stacey’s. I scraped back my chair, downed the remainders, and went outside. It was still warm. A nearly full moon lit the road.