A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  Another time, searching for a stamp, I discovered in Patrick’s desk a drawerful of Catholic paraphernalia: rosary beads, a missal, even a painted statue of Mary. He had rehung the tiny gold crucifix from his old apartment by the light switch inside our front door, but I’d always judged his attachment to it as ironic—he had made a crack once about the decorative value of a good hanging Christ. It would be very Patrick, I thought, to embrace the trappings of the Church without buying its doctrine, and since he had been raised a Catholic he might be keeping the items in the drawer for sentimental reasons, relics of a childhood he liked to remember, or imagine, as happy. But the drawer was the one to the right of the center, as close at hand as the stapler, the pens, the Scotch tape.

  Then in December, only days before Irene reappeared, a travel agent called for Patrick and asked me to tell him that his airline ticket for San Francisco was ready. He had said he was going to Los Angeles for the holidays, as he had last year. When he came in that afternoon I gave him the message.

  “San Francisco?” he said. “I’m going to LA, not San Francisco.”

  “The travel agent said San Francisco.”

  “She made a mistake,” he said quickly, with an annoyance disproportionate to a mere mistake.

  I took Patrick’s secrets personally, as signs that he simply didn’t trust me. Then too, every friendship has its codes, its unspoken agreements, and vital to ours was the cushion we allowed each other: the longer we were friends the more we both knew what we should and shouldn’t press.

  That night—a clear, cold night in December, I got home at seven. I had a guilty appreciation of the lobby of our building, whose decor Patrick called Las Vegas East. I entered through the sliding automatic glass doors, strode past the uniformed doorman at his circular desk, and caught a satisfied glimpse of myself in the mirrored back wall while pressing the “up” button at the elevators. Angel Jacome was on duty, head doorman, a compact martinet who would go down with the building like the captain of a ship. Charles worked most nights, mournful Charles, in his late fifties, with an ashy complexion and a soft lisping speech. If murderers came while Charles was on duty, well, those were the breaks. With Richard, a big Irish guy who worked afternoons, you might do better. Richard liked playing the horses and hit Patrick up for a loan every two or three weeks.

  Patrick wasn’t home. I took a long steamy shower, prior to going over to Brenda’s. She had separated from her husband just after I had returned from Crispins. We had a love nest in her new West Village apartment. The last time I was there I’d gone over early, at about five. She rang me in, and upstairs, there was Norm. The husband. He wore an old-fashioned tweed suit, a thin man who possessed such pronounced cheekbones they looked like they hurt. She opened the door and kissed me, and led me in with her arm looped through mine.

  “Norm, this is Robert,” she said. “Sit, we have a few minutes.” She nodded for me to sit too.

  Her apartment was tiny and Norm had been sitting on the bed. I sank into the one nearby chair, a canvas beach chair so low that my ass skimmed the floor. Brenda hauled in a chair from the kitchen for herself and Norm sat back down, and there we sat as Norm became visibly nervous and upset. He’d started trembling, and she had to have noticed but she kept talking.

  Eventually I got up and went to the bathroom and didn’t come out until he was gone.

  “Well, that was Norm,” she said then.

  “Why did you do that?” I said. How was he in court? I thought. A guy that nervous?

  “Norm’s a basket case,” she said, “that’s how Norm is.”

  “Are you still seeing him, Brenda?”

  “Yes, I see him, I have to. We’re in the process of getting a divorce. Do you not want me to see him?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “No,” I said, “just spare me having to socialize with him.” I wasn’t in love with Brenda. But the view I had had of the messiness of her marriage unsettled me. That sort of messiness was exactly what I didn’t want in my life. All the same, I wasn’t in a hurry to call it off. It was all too convenient.

  WHEN I SAW HER, her cheeks flushed, the smell of the dinner she was cooking an effusion of warmth, I stepped inside the apartment—that rich capsule—and took her in my arms.

  “Oh,” she said, “you are amorous tonight.”

  “Every night,” I said.

  “Let me go, I’m getting dinner.”

  She wasn’t a very good cook and I’d had a sandwich beforehand. She had brought the small table and chairs from the kitchen into the main room, but the bed and a fire in the grate at the foot of the bed were the feast. Although the stuccoed walls were a stark white, a colorful quilt was spread on the bed and the fire threw gradations of light.

  “Sit down,” she said, coming in with a large dish wrapped in a bath towel. She set the dish on the table, poured wine, and returned to the kitchen for a basket of bread.

  “Good wine,” I said.

  “Get drunk and you won’t know what you’re eating.” She took an edge of the towel and lifted off the cover of the dish. “It’s a casserole.”

  It had smelled a lot better than it looked.

  “You don’t have to eat it. Here,” she said, and passed me bread. “It’s fresh, I got it on Bleecker this morning.”

  “I’m not very hungry.” I drank more wine. “You know, you don’t have to cook, Brenda.”

  “Oh, I should. Norm and I—” she looked down at her wine glass, touched the rim with a finger, and followed the circle of the glass slowly around. “We went out too often, it was profligate.”

  “He’s obviously still crazy about you. Maybe you still have a lot to work out. Maybe I should get lost for a while.” She raised her eyes, and held mine.

  “I don’t want you to get lost, can’t we just go on as we have been?” She smiled, her face softening.

  “Can I come over there and kiss you?” I asked.

  She nodded, and I did, and in a minute she left me and went to the windows to pull the blinds. Then she matter-of-factly started undressing.

  “Let me,” I said. I slid her jeans down her legs, let them drop to the floor; pressed my lips to the lovely protuberance of her hip bone, across the soft flesh that led to the other.

  Later, under the covers, restored to the plane we most comfortably occupied together—sexed-out, entangled—we lay quietly, enjoying the heat of the fire.

  “Robert. Are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Get up, my legs have gone numb.”

  “God,” I said, “I’m exhausted.” I sat up and lowered my feet to the floor and got dressed. She had developed sleep issues and wouldn’t allow me to stay.

  She came with me to the door, wrapping herself in the sheet. Her long hair fell over her arms, and touching her breasts against the sheet, I kissed her good-bye.

  My legs felt detached going down the two flights of stairs and through the cold foyer. Sirens screamed from the direction of Seventh Avenue and on West Fourth a girl tripped and fell down on the sidewalk in front of me—Friday night, lots of kids from Jersey and the outer boroughs in town. The boy with her helped her up saying “Nancy, why the fuck you gotta be getting so drunk?” I crossed Sixth, thrust my hands deeper into my pockets while trying to hold my arms close to my sides for warmth.

  I turned north at the Washington Square arch, heading up Fifth. I thought of the play I was leaning toward for my thesis production, The Rehearsal, by Jean Anouilh. It felt right, its tensions, its slide from a light bantering tone, with only the suggestion of danger, to the reality of what was at stake all along—that the players were playing for their lives, as we all were. And there was a part for Patrick. A key image rose in my mind, of a tall man with a shattered glass in his hand. I sailed into the lobby, past Charles, nodding off at his station, and into the elevator, hoping that Patrick would be up. He could fail, I could fail, it could be bad for our friendship, but I knew he could play this, it was perfect for him. He’d be fabulous visuall
y, the height would be great. If I could create a rehearsal atmosphere in which he felt secure, he would probably make the production.

  I opened the door, and there was Irene.

  She sat on the couch, opposite Patrick, who sat in one of the chairs, at the far end of our living room, by the windows.

  “Hello, Robert,” Patrick said.

  “Hi,” she said, standing, but then in confusion—Patrick hadn’t stood—resumed her seat. I walked toward them: she had on what looked like a pajama top.

  “Hi, Irene,” I said, “how come you’re wearing your pajamas?”

  “Oh, I stopped by on the spur of the moment.” She laughed, picked up her drink and took a long sip—it stained her lips fuchsia. Her voice sounded shrill.

  “Let me get you a drink,” Patrick said, rising.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked.

  “Chambord.”

  I sat down in the chair beside Patrick’s, facing Irene. Her hair was longer, darker; she was pale.

  “How was Russia?” I said.

  “Cold.” She smiled, “London was nice though.”

  “Yes, I like London.”

  “I’d never been there before.” She glanced around the room, at the windows. “This is glamorous, with the lights? I like it,” she added.

  “Me too.”

  “Patrick said you’ve been in a movie.”

  “Oh, well—”

  “Oh, well?” Patrick said, coming back with my drink. He put it down, sat, relit the Gauloise he had set in the ashtray. “He is now a member of Screen Actors Guild, he won the role over sixty other aspirants, and earned two thousand dollars for three days’ work.”

  “But it was a stupid movie,” I said.

  “It’s a horror film,” said Patrick, “it’s supposed to be stupid. He had to be shot,” he said to Irene. “They pasted two metal discs to his skin, connected to two small balloons filled with red liquid.” Patrick had come along to watch the filming of my climactic scene.

  “I had to be shot in two places,” I said.

  “Special effects pushed a button,” he said, “which made a loud bang and set off a small explosion, a shock to the discs that burst the balloons, so the blood spurted out through cuts in his shirt.”

  “Did it hurt?” Irene asked me.

  “The explosion? No. Just like a tap.”

  “He had to do the reaction though,” Patrick said. “I thought you handled it awfully well, Robert. They got it in one take,” he said to Irene. “First he was shot in the chest, then he tried to escape and they got him in the side.”

  “Sure to go down,” I said, “in the annals of film history.” I stood, and drained my drink.

  “It’s good to see you,” Irene said.

  “You too. Welcome back.”

  I left the room, their silence growing behind me.

  In bed I thought, here we go again, and only a fool would feel as I do—I felt glad.

  IN THE MORNING, going through the living room to get to the kitchen, I saw that the heap of blankets on the couch was Irene. I put on coffee, waiting in the kitchen for it to be ready, and heard her call. “Patrick?”

  I walked out to where she could see me. “No, it’s me.”

  “Oh.” She sat up. “He was supposed to wake me.”

  “He’d be at the gym now, he’ll be back soon. You want coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She came and stood in the kitchen doorway, in her jeans and her pajama top. I pulled out a drawer and took out two spoons—as stiffly as I had behaved the first time I’d stepped on a stage.

  “Robert, don’t be angry with me anymore. I’ve missed you and Patrick so much.”

  I turned to her and knew, as I’d known last night, that she was very unhappy. I didn’t know when she got back or where she was living, but I imagined her at Andre’s, lying awake in his bed as she listened for his breathing to slow, and then getting up and coming here. For an instant every particle of my reserve was blasted away.

  “You are a very difficult person,” I said.

  “I know, I don’t have to be. Really I’m not.” Her hair in a tangle, one bare foot on top of the other, an old, familiar gesture.

  “Okay,” I said. I picked up the cups, gave one to her.

  “Okay,” she said, taking it, still hesitant.

  She’d folded the blankets neatly on the couch, but sat on the floor by the coffee table. I watched her take a sip of coffee, and then Patrick’s cigarette box caught her eye: an azure blue box that opened on silver hinges, an antique, not much larger than a pack of cigarettes; its surface was a mosaic of lapis lazuli. “Did you see that?” I asked, sitting down.

  “Last night,” she said, picking it up, cradling it carefully in her small hands.

  “We used to go visit it in the store. He loved it so much that I finally told him he had to buy it or I would.”

  “What’s it like, living with him?”

  “He takes Geritol.”

  “He doesn’t. For iron-poor blood?”

  “He does. He buys three bottles at a time.” We laughed, “He chugs it,” I said. “I found it in the kitchen and could not believe it. When I asked him about it he got insulted, said that some people looked after their health—this while he’s dragging on his cigarette, right? And then he tried to get me to try it, and when I refused he wouldn’t speak to me the rest of the day.”

  She fell back flat on the floor, laughing; sat up, wiping her eyes. “I’m so glad, Robert, so glad to be back.”

  AFTER THAT I SAW her once, twice a week. She didn’t speak of Andre. She talked about London as though she had been there alone. She described how seeing the famous historical sites made Shakespeare real to her; she could imagine becoming his women—living as they had lived then. In most ways she seemed to be the same Irene who had left us, intensely committed, ever open to change. But a new self-doubt had crept into her manner. I had a sense of her grasping at us for comfort, clinging to Patrick and me almost desperately. She was living with Andre, but clearly they were not getting along.

  In February, she worked in class for the first time that year. Andre kept stopping her.

  “No, no, no, no, what are you doing?” he said.

  The work wasn’t even that bad; it was good in fact, better than other things he had praised her for extravagantly. She started again and he stopped her, and then dismissed her scene partner.

  “Now,” he said to Irene, “this is unacceptable, amateurish, and crass.” He waved her away, flapping his hand repeatedly until she sat down.

  I had never seen Andre so boorish and unfair before, but it was even stranger to see Irene meekly accept his treatment.

  Patrick and I picked up a small single bed for nearly nothing and put it in our small extra room, so that she’d have a refuge.

  “SO YOU’D DO the character of Hero,” I said to Patrick, handing him a copy of The Rehearsal.

  He didn’t answer immediately; he extracted a petal from the flowers at the center of the table—irises that Irene had brought when she’d come to dinner—thought better of it, and tried to put it back.

  “I’m not expecting you to decide until you’ve read it,” I said.

  He fished the petal from the water; got it out, dried it off against his palm, and set it atop the bloom.

  “Hero,” he said, enunciating with special care. “Then I take it he’s a good character?”

  “Good? It’s a good part. I told you already.”

  “I’d like to play a good person, Robert.”

  Nobody liked to play good people, it wasn’t any fun. Besides, you were supposed to look for the good in the bad guys and the bad in the good guys. But of course Patrick believed in absolutes, which was why Hero was the role for him to play.

  “He’s not good,” I said, “he’s a drunk, among other things.… But he’s a drunk on account of regret. As a very young man he went against his ideals, and it’s ruined his life—in the sense that he can’t just ignore what happened
as some people might. That’s why Anouilh called him Hero, there’s a purity about him. Look,” I said, “read the play and then we can talk.”

  A few days later I came out of my room to the living room. He was acting out exchanges in the play for Irene.

  He struck a pose: “’Is there some double meaning behind your words, sir?’” He changed his position, taking the part of the other character: “Now I’m the Count,” he told Irene. “‘Since the invention of language, Villebosse, there has always been some double meaning behind the spoken word. In fact, words were invented expressly for that reason.’”

  “Patrick,” I said, “you know the whole play.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose I do.”

  “How many times have you read it?” I asked.

  “Well… I can’t be sure, twenty? Twenty-five?”

  Irene turned to the bookshelf where she stood, back to us, paging through a Roget’s Thesaurus.

  “It’s January,” I said to him, “we start in April. You’ll get it too set in your head. I’d just prefer it,” I said, “if you left it alone for now. Read it again in March, but just for yourself.”

  “Why?” he said, equivocating.

  “You know as well as I do that it’s different to play a part than to appreciate it from the outside. If you admire it too much, how will you play it?”

  His expression was bland. “All right,” he replied.

  Two nights later, he was reciting again to Irene: “‘One must ignore mirrors. They are traps for the weak. For my part I contemplate myself only in my old portraits painted by the best artists of the time.’” He turned to me. “Am I allowed to read Anouilh’s other plays?”

  8 Hero

  Brenda helped me with the auditions. I had hoped to avoid them. The cast wasn’t large, four men and three women, and I’d thought I could cast it with people I knew. But I was left short of two actors: the Countess, the most important woman’s part, and Villebosse, which required impeccable comic timing. We put an ad in Back Stage and were deluged with actors, well over a hundred. At the end of the first day of auditions Brenda and I sat in the studio theater, with three stacks of pictures and résumés. The tallest stack was still “undecided.”