A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. “You know who you want.”

  “I want everybody to get a good hearing.”

  She sighed, leaning back in her chair, and pinned up her hair—she’d been taking it down and putting it up since morning.

  “See this stack?” she said, pointing to the “ins.” “That’s who you call back.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You already transferred ten people from undecided to in. We’re seeing twenty-five actors the day after tomorrow, that’s enough.”

  “Brenda—”

  “Robert, it’s just a play, remember?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “People fail, you know,” she said. “Not just actors. People fail in business, there are failed teachers, failed politicians. I’m a failed wife. That’s how it is.”

  I’d had no idea she knew me so well, nor that I was so transparent, and I didn’t like it. My thoughts must have shown on my face.

  At last she said, kindly, “I don’t think who we do or don’t call back Wednesday will make or break anyone’s life.”

  I stared at her, studied those dark brown eyes I could almost fall into.

  “Hey, Brenda. You by any chance still have that key to the storage room?”

  “Deal,” she said, collecting the piles.

  The next day, Patrick told me that he needed a waistcoat. He said he had reread the play once since we last discussed it, and had discerned that in the play Hero remarks on the tightness of his costume as a physical correlative to Hero’s psychological distress, and Patrick wanted to begin to explore the sensation. Our wardrobe mistress sewed him one out of muslin for rehearsals, and he began to wear it evenings around the apartment.

  Just days before our first read-through I was walking east on Thirteenth Street and heard him call my name; I turned and saw him approaching, towering over people he passed, his brightly striped green-and-black cap shining out above the others like a beacon, an effulgence in the grayish early April day. He’d taken to wearing his woolen hat that winter after reading an article on a man who had gone mysteriously deaf following a brief unprotected exposure to the cold.

  He had a scarf wound around his neck and pulled up against his jaw. “Hi,” I said, “you know, it’s fifty degrees. Are you coming from the gym?”

  “I can’t do the play,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t—?”

  He glanced away nervously. “You know in the pool I always have my best thoughts. It came to me today. I realized that I can’t do it.”

  “Come on,” I said, “you want a drink, coffee? You have any appointments?” He shook his head no, and we went to the Cedar Tavern on University Place. We took a booth in back; Patrick ordered coffee, I ordered a drink.

  “You can’t quit now,” I told him.

  “Better I let you down now than later. I don’t want to do it if I can’t do it well.” He took off his hat, leaving one side of his hair flattened, then ran a hand through it, fixing it with this single gesture; and in a continual arc from his head to the inner pocket of his jacket he got out his cigarettes, tipped open the package, slid one out with a finger.

  “What you just did,” I said.

  He lit his cigarette and the smoke curled up between us. “Beg pardon?”

  “A lot of the character you can do without trying. He’s suave, smooth, y’know, he’s got to be—irresistable.”

  “Irresistable? Oh Robert, to whom?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Charming. All that shit you do.”

  His smile faded. “Exactly.”

  “But you’re already doing more,” I told him, “you’re already thinking about it on a deeper level. With the waistcoat.” He smoked, unconvinced. “Look, if you think you can’t do it, use that, use the fear.” I got more specific, “Hero lost what he wanted. He strikes out. Use your dancing, you know? What if that was the pinnacle? What if that’s it?”

  He stared at me. “Sometimes I think that.”

  “Sure, yes. Of course you do. Anyone would. So use it.” I waited, feeling much less casual than I was acting.

  “All right then,” he agreed. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it.”

  And it wasn’t that I was so assured of my power as a director, of my ability to draw from him the performance I wanted. But I had an instinct about him; he had to play Hero.

  In the play Hero destroys a young girl, in revenge against his friend the Count, who had once convinced him that Hero’s first love, now dead, was beneath him. And so Hero cruelly seduces the Count’s present love—the penniless governess of the Count’s children—and she leaves the Count forever. Afterward Hero can’t live, and he purposely challenges Villebosse, an expert marksman, to a duel with pistols.

  The first day of our rehearsal, I thought, I can’t pull this off. I looked around the table at my cast; the flaming hair of my Villebosse; the heavily made-up eyes of the woman playing the Countess; Patrick’s green-and-black hat on the table. How ever would this group come together into the vision of wit, truth, and emotional catharsis I had imagined?

  “I haven’t directed much,” I started. Fatal mistake. “I’m an actor. Which means that even though I have many ideas about The Rehearsal, what I care most about is the acting. We have to truthfully bring ourselves up to the material. The reality’s heightened and the events are compressed, but it’s very true to life. The thing to remember is that Anouilh writes people, first and foremost. To paraphrase Strasberg, you don’t have to play a person, you already are one.”

  The reading went well. Patrick did nothing, which pleased me.

  On the way home he said, “Robert, you should never devote yourself exclusively to directing. Acting is much too important to you.”

  “God,” I said, “it has to be, doesn’t it? Or why would we go through all the crap we have to in order to do it? I suppose it’s incredibly helpful to men, having to confront our emotions …”

  “Though it’s not about emoting,” he said. “That was a revelation to me, that you have to sneak up on the feeling, and that it is less about what you’re feeling than what you do about it.”

  “I used to practice sense memory in chemistry class,” I said.

  “How very precocious,” said Patrick. “Did you ever weep?”

  “Weep? I think it’s beyond me.”

  There were matters we couldn’t discuss, but somehow we got at them through acting talk.

  What I wanted from Patrick was his real involvement in the role, what I needed from him for Hero was his pain, the demon that resided in every actor. I had come to realize that a demon resided in each human being—a blister of pain, personal and tragic enough to fuel many parts. The difference between nonactors and actors was that actors learned to encourage it, mine it, like a treasure.

  Slowly, he let down his guard. What inner material he used for Hero I didn’t know. Any performance is a dense weave of associations, observations, old wounds, and desires. Eventually, too, the details become indistinct, as individual notes do in music, and from the actor’s perspective, he and the role come together into a rushing sensation like life. He is swept up and carried off by the imaginary events unfolding around him. Then it’s like skiing down a well-known but constantly changing terrain. I saw this happen with Patrick, and as it did, as his Hero took on this wholeness, this life, it threw out hints, flickers of light from the source. And I saw, as I had only intuited before, why I had imagined him as Hero, and what my own selfish reasons were for wanting Patrick. Patrick was sympathetic; no matter what he did you still cared for and felt for him. Hero was a wretched, malevolent creature, but the play could not succeed if the audience hated him. So here was Patrick, hurt, dangerous, real, and yet still innocent and magnetic.

  The night after the opening show, in the loft where we had the party, I cornered Irene to tell her how well it had gone.

  “He wasn’t even nervous,” I said. “When I went back, he was—” I didn’t know h
ow to describe it. “Just the usual Patrick, with that sort of sweet, eager expression he has, and then—to see him in the play. To see what he’s doing. I couldn’t believe it.”

  I kept having this double illusion of Patrick as my friend and Patrick as Hero—though I knew that I couldn’t take credit for what he had done. He had worked hard, and he hadn’t succeeded overnight. But the right part can free an actor; faith can free too. I felt proud of my faith in Patrick.

  “He makes the sign of the cross,” I said to Irene, “before going on.”

  “I’m sure with Patrick it’s very sincere. Where is he?”

  “Oh, gone. Off to some Irish bar uptown with Bryan.”

  “Bryan’s here?”

  “Yeah, he’s in town to do a play.”

  She came with me to the last performance, three weekends later. She sat beside me in the darkness, exceedingly still. In the seduction scene, with the girl in his arms, he turned his face away from her as if seeing the other girl, his first love, and I almost saw her myself. And when he turned back to the girl in his arms he lightly touched his face to hers. Awful, as though he were passing his grief into her. It was his best performance.

  The lights blacked and came up for the last scene, where Hero provokes Villebosse into the duel. Irene started to cry, to sob, loud enough that I was sure they could hear it onstage. The house was small, the audience level with the playing space, and I knew the effect was disturbed. For once this is not about you, damnit, I thought.

  She didn’t stay for the calls; she pushed by a group of people and ran out of the theater.

  I found her at the end of the hallway, slumped against the dirty white cinder-block wall. I hadn’t seen her cry in real life before and I was stunned by the spectacle of it, how she cried with all of her body, her shoulders heaving.

  “Irene,” I said coldly.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed.

  “What is it?” Earlier that day she had presented the picture of a young glamorous actress in her beige linen suit and silk blouse, her gold earrings bolts of ultra-worldly light in her hair. Now her ankles fell off to the sides of her shoes, and her shoulders were as hunched and sharp as an old woman’s.

  “Did you find what he did so extremely affecting?” She caught my sarcasm, and looked at me.

  “There is a quality in him,” she said. “No, it’s more concrete than that. I’ve felt it practically since the first day I met him, and to see him like that—”

  “Like what? He was wonderful, wasn’t he? This is what we’ve always wanted for him, isn’t it?” I couldn’t be patient.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “I’m going back.” But as I left she said firmly, “You don’t understand.” I stopped and turned.

  I felt thrown in a way I had never felt thrown by her before. Suddenly her reaction suggested depths I refused to acknowledge—in him and in her.

  It would be years before I could finally interpret this night, and the ways in which I had so closely, unconsciously, aligned art with life. But I saw sparks of it then, in her eyes.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Go ahead,” and she fumbled in her bag for tissue. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “What did you mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said gently.

  9 The Pool

  It was the tail end of a depressing and stagnant summer when I met Patrick’s sister for the second time, or rather I called her.

  All of that summer I’d stayed alone in the apartment, stuck looking after St. Martin, while Irene and Patrick worked out of town. Weeks after The Rehearsal Patrick was cast in a show at the Goodman and then a new play at the Guthrie in Minneapolis. Irene spent the summer in Pennsylvania, doing stock. I stayed behind in the city waiting tables, dutifully lifting my weights, and sending out head shots and résumés to no effect. Topping everything off, Brenda went back to her husband. Then I was saved, temporarily, by a job at a theater in Boston, the Boston Classic. It paid very little, but I didn’t care. I gleefully dropped Irene’s cat at my parents’ place and took off.

  I explored the redbrick streets of Boston, and walked through Harvard Yard, thinking of Patrick. I ended up calling his sister, Margie. The family business, it turned out, was wool on the mother’s side—the probable source of Patrick’s trust. His father and brothers were accountants, not occupations I would have envisioned for male O’Dohertys.

  Beneath the Boston accent Margie reminded me of Patrick, in her cheeriness and in the extremely interested attitude she took as she talked to me.

  “Oh, I don’t think Patrick’s ever gotten over my parents’ divorce,” Margie said. “Well, they’re technically separated, but they haven’t lived together for years.”

  So much for the happy family, I thought.

  “Ah well, Patrick is sensitive,” she said, “as you know. But he’s stubborn too. I can never get him to visit. Father doesn’t understand him. Father did make an attempt last year, inviting us all to a benefit at his alma mater, Boston College, do you know it?”

  “Not Harvard?” I said.

  “Harvard? No,” she replied. “Father and my other brothers attended Boston College.”

  “Did Patrick?”

  She laughed. “Goodness, no. It was always dancing for him, he ran to New York as soon as he could right out of high school and he’s never come back, not once.”

  I felt a sort of roaring in my ears. As she talked I wondered what wasn’t a lie. I stared at the phone as one might an unfamiliar, vaguely threatening creature.

  BY FALL IRENE was in North Carolina, playing the lead in a fifties comedy. Patrick remained in Minneapolis. He had become disillusioned. Derek, his director at the Guthrie, tormented Patrick with pages and pages of contradictory notes after each performance. In October, I received a letter from Irene.

  Dear Robert,

  I am thoroughly, from my toes to the tips of my hair, deliriously happy. There’s got to be something perverse in loving our work as much as we do. I would not even TELL you how happy I am if you weren’t working too. I wake up smiling. Okay, so it’s a silly comedy, but playing it eight shows a week I learn all kinds of things. Andre says keep it new, but I never have to try. And when I’m not working I loll in the grass or read or cook—all of these lovely, ordinary things. I mean, when I’m not at the theater I can live, because I’m not worrying about looking for work. What a relief.

  I have to tell you, and this is really the reason I’m writing, that Patrick’s unhappy. You probably know. Poor darling, he told me he thought that in straight theater, as opposed to musicals, where words and ideas are more important, it would be more refined. He didn’t expect all the power plays and ego. Derek’s a dog.

  But that isn’t what I want to say. I visited Patrick before I came down here—did he tell you? One night we stayed up until four and he told me that he did not hurt his knee on a jump. It was a car accident, Robert. Somebody died. I don’t have all the details. But he was on tour with Maria in a show and their choreographer, Benton somebody (have you heard the name?) who was also, evidently, his lover, was a total beast and somehow initiated the accident. This other boy died, this other dancer. Patrick could have died too. Benton basically set up the situation that led to the accident. Then when it happened, he wasn’t even in the car. Patrick said I could tell you, but he was drunk. He may not have meant it. But now you know. For me, it kind of explains things. The loss of his dancing was worse than we knew. It’s tragic, isn’t it? We have to be patient with him. He needs us.

  On a lighter note, his new friend, Herbert, from the show, is an absolute doll. Ha-ha. I mean kind of literally. He’s about my size and is completely devoted to Patrick. It’s an unrequited love (I mean, don’t even think of the height differential) and I can’t help but feel a great sympathy toward him. Unrequited or not, Patrick likes him. He teases him constantly, about his size and Canada, where Herbert is from, but if it weren’t for Herbert, Patrick would be back in New Yor
k by now.

  So call me. I doubt you’d ever write. Have fun, be brilliant. I miss you so much.

  XXOX love, Irene

  I put down the letter. I didn’t feel anything. I was not even sure it was true. Histrionics? Exaggeration? It just made me tired.

  I HAD BEEN HOME in New York for a month, it was well into November, when one night Irene called. “Hi, guess where I am?” Her voice sounded breathy, excited. “I’m here, in New York.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “Oh, well the star fell on his face and they closed the show. He went down right before my eyes center stage and didn’t revive.” She sighed, “They had to buy us out of our contracts so I got money. And here I am. I’ve been back five days.”

  I figured she was with Andre. Even as she proclaimed she despised him and would never, under any circumstances, see him again, there would be a relapse. Her work out of town had kept them apart, but it had also kept alive whatever was between them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—or makes the heart forget.

  “I’m not at Andre’s,” she said in a low voice, conspiratorially. “He has zero knowledge of where I am. I’m at a friend’s.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  She giggled, “Sorta. I’ve opened a bottle of Taittinger and I need you to help me drink it—can you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh Robert, I have so much to tell you. I missed you so much. I would have called sooner, but I’ve been down, just generally crazy—I don’t know, for no reason. I’m giving up Andre, I am, for once and for all and—I’ll tell you when you get here.” She gave me a Park Avenue address, and hung up.

  The address was a massive prewar brick and limestone building on Park in the Eighties. I’d always wanted to see an apartment in one of these buildings, though I didn’t expect anything on the scale of 2B.

  I was announced by the doorman, and went up. There were only two doors in the quiet hallway. I knocked on B, she opened the door, and at first I saw only her, in a red satin robe, her face flushed and smiling, hair back, a few strands straggling prettily forward. Behind her there was a stretch of gleaming white marble and a staircase rising up into a blueness that was as expansive as sky. She threw her arms around me; through the satin of her robe she felt damp and very warm, almost hot.