A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  So of course, things did happen, did change.

  EARLY IN THE SPRING Patrick got a play at a regional theater in Kentucky, but was fired the third day of rehearsal. He glossed over why, just as we never really understood what had happened at the Guthrie. Irene was amazing in the lead in a showcase, but nobody came, and then again it was summer, and we were all in a similar frame of mind; not expecting anything to happen, and not even quite remembering what it was like when it had. Patrick did The Importance of Being Earnest in Brooklyn and was wonderful, but nobody came. I had had several near jobs that fell through. I continued to send out my pictures and résumés, although certainly not as hopefully as I once had. Nothing we did seemed to have any relation to what we got.

  Patrick complained about pain in his knee and chewed aspirin like candy. He began using a walking stick when it rained, to take the pressure off his knee. He went on a radical macrobiotic diet and fainted one day getting out of the pool. He blamed his appearance for the difficulties in his career, which wasn’t like him.

  “If only I were handsome,” he said. “In fifth grade I said a novena to the Blessed Mother to make me smashing and, as you can see, it didn’t work.”

  Irene ran out of money and had to get a regular job. She started waitressing at a new restaurant on Seventh Avenue South, but she detested it and came home traumatized every night.

  “I’m just no good at it,” she complained, “I have no aptitude. How come what I’m good at is negligable?”

  One day during the lunch rush she dropped a tray of food in the café, splattering diners with soup and pasta, and one of them, a well-dressed middle-aged man, as she described him, slipped her his card, saying “Call me as soon as you can.” The guy was a shrink. On the card he had scribbled his home number, beside PLEASE! underlined thrice.

  She explained to me what had happened while pacing and alternately smoking and gnawing on her nails. St. Martin worriedly circled her.

  From my post at the doorway of the kitchen, well out of her way, I said, “He was trying to pick you up.”

  “Do you think?” Stopping and squinting at me through a tornado of smoke. “No, I seemed mentally ill.”

  “Irene, it’s a come-on.”

  “It is?” She stubbed out her cigarette and, picking up St. Martin, sat down at the dining table; the cat sniffed at a streak of mustard on the collar of her blouse. “It’s just that that tray on the floor felt like my life.” St. Martin kept sniffing and she put him down. “Are you positive he’s a jerk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I better go cancel the appointment,” she said.

  “You made an appointment?”

  “Yes. At the end of the day. I didn’t call him at home or anything, I called his office.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I thought it might help.”

  “Just like that?” I asked. “On the advice of a total stranger?”

  She nudged St. Martin aside and got up, looking so weary—her fine shoulders slumped, and she emitted a faint aura of food, sweat, and faded flowery powder—that I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her, but I resisted. Occasionally, I let myself remember what I could remember about that night in the pool, or it came to me unawares and I didn’t try to repress it—as she hung the drapes at the windows one warm sunny day, the blue bringing out the sheen of the blonde wood of the bookcases, muting the dinginess of the carpet. She stood up on the air-and-heat unit in cutoffs and my eyes skimmed her slim hips and her strong white legs and I wondered if that was what it would be like with a wife, always being in the vicinity of the woman you slept with, the woman you knew in that way, so that even the most banal household activities would radiate sex.

  As predicted, she succumbed to Andre numerous times. She fought seeing him, but soon Patrick and I could read the signs of an impending lapse. Irene was so transparent—the opposite of Patrick. She would be quiet at dinner, then she would grow restless, switching the TV or the stereo on and off, and when we complained she’d defiantly state that she was going out.

  Patrick always gave in. “Where, Irene?”

  “Only out,” she’d reply.

  Then he or I would say we were going too and if she let us, we prevented another night of Andre. That spring, if she had been an alcoholic, Andre was the bar.

  “Why?” I said to her one morning. “Just tell me why you do it.”

  “He’s wise,” she said softly.

  “Wise, how?” I said. “Outside of the theater?”

  She studied the rain tracing lines against the window and said, “He’s definite. With him I know where I am. Whatever else he is, he is solid, substantial. Whereas my life—” her voice broke and she asked, “Well, what do I have?”

  “You have me,” I said, “and Patrick.”

  Yet the next night she was restless again.

  She exploded out of her room. “I have to get out, let’s go out. We never go out anymore.”

  Without looking up from his book Patrick said, “We went out last night to the theater.”

  “Doesn’t count,” she said, “I mean out. Walking, a café, a bar, on the town.” Petulant, already dressed up in boots, a dress, her face made up; her hair, now long, piled on top of her head.

  It was already eleven. I had an audition in the morning.

  “You’re afraid you’ll get bags beneath your eyes?” she asked me, and she said it mean. “God, Robert, you’re such an actor.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I hated her, and looking at her, I thought she was ugly. She had gained just enough weight so she looked plump in the cheeks.

  “Now children,” Patrick said.

  “Why do you have to be perfect?” she said. She threw out an arm, “You lift that damn barbell every day, you get an audition you always go and you always prepare. Don’t you ever have a day when you just don’t care?” she asked me.

  “Don’t be daft, my love,” Patrick said. “Of course he does. He’s only more practical than you are.”

  I had been sitting on the couch throughout her attack, which had materialized from thin air. I stood up. “I beg your pardon, but you don’t give a fuck what I do, unless it interferes with something you want.”

  “Real-l-ly,” she said.

  “Really. I’m such an actor? You’re such an actress, arrogant and temperamental and so fucking emotionally draining I’ve just about had it.”

  At that, she swept out the door—only Patrick made her come back and apologize, ruining the exit.

  IN JULY I GOT a message on my service from a commercial agency. I’d sent them a picture and probably eight hundred postcards, attracting the interest of an agent who in all likelihood would send me out once or twice and then relegate me to the “never works” file. I’d heard it took forty auditions to get one commercial, that expert commercial actors got one in twenty. To have any serious chance of working you had to audition all the time, and to audition all the time you had to know people—agents and casting directors. Each theater or production company, every advertising agency and soap opera, had a casting director—who would keep getting you in there. You needed a break to escape from the cycle of the catch-22. You needed some kind of notice to get noticed at all. I didn’t feel optimistic.

  I knocked off my shift early and, after a spit and a shine in the men’s room, left for my appointment with Mr. Paul Joyce.

  The secretary had said on the phone, “Mr. Joyce wants to meet you.”

  “Oh, fine,” I’d replied, in an artificially casual voice.

  Stay calm, I thought, in the agency’s reception area, a stark corporate-type space, the unyielding fluorescent lights making me nostalgic for the clutter and closeness of Harry White’s office.

  A slim balding man in a tailored gray suit approached me from the mouth of the inner sanctum and asked if I were Mr. Holt.

  “Paul Joyce,” he said, “May I call you Robert?”

  I walked with him past the secretary, who was told to please hold hi
s calls. Normally my interviews with agents were conducted in the twenty-second intervals between calls from the Coast.

  “Splendid, you match your picture,” he said as we were seated.

  His office was spare, but I preferred it to the office of another agent I’d recently met who had a wall behind his desk covered by Liza Minelli’s face. He asked me a few questions, about Crispins and Carnegie Mellon.

  “Well, Robert,” he said then. “Bryan Johannes said I should meet you. He said you were extremely good-looking and talented and that I had better snatch you up before someone else did.”

  I stared at him, humorless without intending to be, and he smiled, displaying a perfect set of small even teeth.

  “How do you know Bryan?” I said.

  “I worked at the office that represents Bryan before I came here,” he said.

  “Oh.” It was Patrick’s office too.

  “I only handle commercials,” Paul told me, “an occasional soap, but Ms. Cohen and I have talked about adding another agent for stage, if that interests you. Are you open to commercials?” he asked. “I think you might do very well in the young daddy category, shall we try it?”

  That was ironic, I thought. Some father I’d make. But thinking that hurt. “All right,” I said.

  He took a paper from his drawer.

  “I’d like to sign you,” he said. He handed me a contract. “Take it home and read it and call me in the morning, will you? I’d rather you didn’t sign for less than a year—and I’ll need more pictures, will you drop some by?”

  We stood. “If you have any questions, call anytime,” he said. “You might want to pay more attention to the commercials when you’re watching TV than you normally do. The energy’s high.”

  At home I found Patrick’s address book and called Bryan.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I saw your picture on his desk and told him he ought to call you. How’s it going?”

  “Oh, well, you know—um, it can be hard, so that’s why—” No, I thought. Remember the unwritten rule: never sound negative. “Paul asked me to sign with him for commercials,” I said.

  “He’s a very good agent. I never did commercials—well, one. It takes a knack, and I didn’t have it. But they’re good to do if you can, they can free up your time for the theater.”

  “I’ll try it,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  “Robert? Just keep doing whatever you can, and eventually it happens.”

  Patrick was thrilled.

  “I must remind you,” he said, “that Bryan was very impressed with your work on The Rehearsal and at Crispins.”

  “Have you seen Bryan since he’s been back in town?” I asked Patrick.

  “Oh, once or twice,” he said, as if he wasn’t quite sure.

  Irene came home. I was already having doubts. “Listen,” she said, “if he wants to sign you he wants to get behind you. It means that he’ll really send you out, if he has the connections—”

  “Bryan said he was good?” Patrick asked. “Then he must be.”

  She and Patrick agreed that I was a good type for commercials, whatever that meant.

  We sprawled on the couch, our television on the coffee table, displaced from its usual, more discreet position in a corner of a bookcase, flipping channels as we watched commerical after commercial.

  “Oh, I know Paul,” Patrick said. “I met him, I know I did—snappy dresser, bald?”

  “Yes, that’s him,” I said. “Good teeth?”

  “Uh-huh. Nail polish?”

  “Nail polish? No, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s subtle,” said Patrick.

  “Look!” Irene said, and we looked, and there was Clarence on the screen taking a shower slathered in Coast soap. Suddenly seeing him on TV was typical; you would think that an actor had died, and then out of nowhere their face would go by on the side of a bus, or their name would appear on a cast list in the paper. Actors were titans, I thought, as Clarence shot a big toothy grin at the camera and turned his face into the dazzling spray, they never gave up.

  I STARTED GETTING commercials almost immediately. I watched TV constantly and read magazine copy into the bathroom mirror. At my first auditions I snuck out the scripts for further study at home. Some days I had as many as three auditions a day. In the humidity of July and August I carried changes of clothing from agency to agency or ran back to the apartment between young daddy calls—casual dress, or upscale “caj,” depending on the client—and young businessmen calls, requiring a suit. Everything happened so fast once I met Paul that I hardly registered the initial rejections, or felt bothered by the continuing rejections—alongside the successes—that were simply a part of my new life.

  Commercials called for an essence. I had to quickly convey the essence of daddyness and that was all. I’d arrive slightly ahead of my appointment, look over a monologue or dialogue, go in and do it and go home. Then wait for callbacks. When I got the booking, I got paid handsomely. Bookings took only a day, and often produced those fantastic bonuses, holding fees, and residuals.

  It wasn’t Shakespeare. All the acting I did was happy. I was happy because of this product—this shampoo! this diaper! this motor oil!—and you could be too! And there was plenty of money. Even the actors had a sheen about them, an air that said—up! happy! success! Everybody was nice: the casting directors, the smiling clients lining the long gleaming conference tables, the production people—only a little bit artsy, and somehow more polished, like the actors, than people in the theater. I had expected actors to be actors—thought I’d see the same people at a call for a Honda commercial that I’d see for an off-Broadway play. But the world of commercials, closer to modeling really, was its own unique place. I learned to be, on demand, a laser beam of enthusiasm. It was gravy, compared to waiting tables. I had a skill, I looked right, and now I could use all my time for paving the way to true success. Even friends of my parents were impressed. The doormen thought I was a star. I met gorgeous women. The checks mounted. I’d laugh when they came in the mail. Onward and upward, I thought. Bryan was right. It happened, and it wasn’t really that hard.

  I WAS COMING HOME one night and saw Irene jump out of a cab at Union Square. I was a block north, and by the time I got to the corner where she’d gotten out, the light changed and I had to wait. I watched her walk rapidly and disappear into our building.

  At home she was sitting on the couch and had turned on one light, the lamp to her side. It was quiet except for St. Martin, meowing and pacing in front of her. She hadn’t taken off her coat, and her purse lay on the floor.

  “You okay?” She didn’t look at me. “Irene?”

  “Yes. St. Martin be quiet,” she said, and he ran away and leapt up on the air-and-heat unit and watched her from there.

  She said she had agreed to meet a producer that night in his office, he said he’d discovered Ali McGraw, but when she got there the building was deserted. He was casting a play she had read for, and so she hadn’t been worried. He boasted about other work he had done, about the time he met Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn, he said, was waiting with him and another man for a table in a restaurant and someone came in from the street and, right there in the foyer, started fondling her, had her up against the wall with his hands on her breasts and she didn’t do anything, like she didn’t know how to defend herself or it didn’t occur to her that she could or should, and he had to pull this stranger off her. It was a rough business, the producer said. Marilyn was great but she slept her way up, as most famous actresses did.

  The producer was older. Short, fat, little red eyes, round stomach pushing at the buttons of his sweater, and after they’d talked awhile he told Irene that she was adorable, that he would use her in the play, and now could they fuck?

  Irene took a deep breath. She said she didn’t feel that way about him. He said he thought they had an understanding and she said he had misunderstood. Then he began to whine and kept asking and the room and the building felt even more empty. She sta
rted to feel that she was talking for her life. Finally, defeated, he said, not even a hand job? And she said no, she was sorry, and they went down together in the elevator and he unlocked the front door and let her out and she walked away casually until she was far enough away. Then she broke into a run and got a cab. Everything was okay, she said, she was only humiliated and felt terribly, gruesomely naive.

  “Don’t tell Patrick,” she said.

  “No, no I won’t.” I couldn’t scold her, I couldn’t judge her. Here was this great looking woman who should have been having a wonderful life, with this spectacular talent that no one cared anything about, and now she felt ashamed, as if it were her fault some pervert would grovel for a hand job.

  She went to her room to change clothes and I made tea. I saw from the illumined clock on the Con Edison building that it was eleven. She came back in an oversized sweater and we drank the tea.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with Patrick,” she said. “He doesn’t whistle anymore.” She half smiled. “He and Bryan are seeing each other again.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I don’t know, Bryan sees women too.” She was very small in the sweater; “And Sidney hasn’t been sending Patrick out.” Sidney was Patrick’s agent. “In Mira’s last week he did Shakespeare’s Jacques”—she and Patrick were in a new class with Mira Rostova, who had coached, among others, Montgomery Clift—“and he was lovely, but his hands—they were shaking, he was all nerves for the longest time.”

  I tried to look concerned, but I felt annoyed. Lately Patrick seemed not even there, a bare slip of himself—and now this.

  “I got the Mennen ad.”

  “Hooray, that makes nine.

  “There’s something else,” she said. No, I thought, nothing else, let’s just be ordinary now, let’s be quiet. “I called Andre, I called him just—damn it, to get an audition—I didn’t know what to do. He said to come over, we’d talk, he’d see about something. He was being very nice, said it was wrong that I wasn’t working. But when I got there he didn’t answer the door. I thought I had the wrong buzzer, I thought he had moved and I had forgotten, but of course he hadn’t.