A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  We didn’t quite stop as we walked in, but we had to step aside for him to get by and outside to the waiting ambulance. Then there seemed nothing else to do but to go on upstairs.

  “Is there anything in the apartment?” Patrick said.

  “Only wine.”

  “Let’s go back out.”

  We rode the elevator back downstairs silently, ducking into the hallway of the service entrance to get outside.

  At the Cedar, Patrick went to get our drinks, and I sat feeling the bar and the streets and the night and the world filled with sudden death. Sounds were sharp, the smoke acrid. I watched a waitress serving food to four men: two burgers, club sandwich, a salad, the salad bowl patterned like a parquet floor. In the morning we would learn that the murdered man was twenty-three and recently married. He and his wife were eating dinner from trays and watching TV when someone knocked on the door. He opened it and was shot point-blank in the chest. The perpetrator fled and was not apprehended. There was evidence that the victim was dealing cocaine.

  Patrick set down my beer and a shot of Bushmills.

  “Thanks.” He sat across from me with a vodka on the rocks and lit a cigarette. “Have you ever seen him?” I asked.

  “No, have you?”

  “No.” Patrick had on a red V-neck sweater over a white shirt. “Did you notice the color of the blood?” I asked him.

  “It’s like that when it comes from a very deep place,” he said.

  “Yes?” The four men across from us laughed, then the laughter was drowned out by a new song on the jukebox and the ding of the pinball machine. I leaned forward, toward Patrick. “Whenever I see something dreadful, an accident, whatever, there is part of me standing aside and watching—myself. Thinking I have to remember this, everything I’m seeing and feeling. I also feel something like—gratitude, that if it’s something that happens, well, I want to know about it.” I sort of laughed.

  “There are things I would rather never see again or even hear about,” Patrick said. He stamped out his cigarette.

  For a moment I didn’t know how to react. Then I recalled Irene’s letter. The accident. Benton. The knee. Somebody dying. But if he had made an allusion to that shady event, I did not even know whether I was supposed to know about it. He had already clearly removed himself from the conversation. He acted ready to go. I said nothing more.

  SEVERAL NIGHTS LATER I awoke at 4 A.M.; there was a subtle but constant noise stealing my sleep and I had to stop it. I went out to investigate a ticking sound in the kitchen. I turned on the kitchen light and saw Patrick bent over the sink, dripping into it blood from his mouth and nose, and I had the impression that he was weeping.

  “Turn off the light,” he said.

  Hearing him breathe and the blood falling into the sink, I said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  He is ashamed, I realized, he doesn’t want me to see, and I went back to bed.

  In the morning I found him sitting in the chair by the coffee table gingerly smoking a cigarette, one side of his mouth raw, his nose swollen, and Irene, in her tatty white robe, setting coffee on the table.

  “Did you see this?” she asked. “He got mugged.

  “I know what you do,” she said to him, “Robert told me, you walk in the streets all night. You’ll get yourself killed and how will that be?”

  “Little mother,” he said.

  “My ass, Patrick. I hate you, I really hate you,” she said and stalked to her room.

  “Well,” I said.

  “She’s upset.” In a chatty tone.

  “You should be more careful.”

  When he didn’t answer I went back to my room and got dressed. I needed to get out. With no destination in mind I went down to Washington Square and then west. Maybe, as Irene had thought, he was only walking in places he should not have been walking, as we had walked that one night together, as he had maybe the night he’d been mugged before and came to my apartment, an incident of which Irene and I had never spoken. But after discovering him in the kitchen I couldn’t help but imagine worse things. For the first time since that icy morning at Ruth’s I thought of him picking up strangers—cruising. His long walks, his sudden departures and nights out did not seem innocuous anymore.

  I went past Sheridan Square and traveled west on Christopher Street. It was Saturday morning and gates were down over businesses, sex shops, and bars, quaint little restaurants that had been there for years. This was the heart of the gay scene; even this early men strolled the sidewalks, some of them dressed head to foot in leather, chains hanging out of back pockets, maybe on their way home after a long Friday night. Further on, near the West Side Highway, were the rougher clubs, desolate days and choked nights, the flip side you could say of Forty-second Street; gays certainly never having anything on straights in the vice department.

  I stood on West Street looking out at the wharves and abandoned buildings by the river that I’d seen at night from a cab. I knew that even smart, ambitious gay men checked out the scene. It was simply part of our generation, our time. But you could be swallowed up by it too. And it could be ugly, the little I knew of the worst of it making my skin crawl.

  I wondered if Patrick came here. Was he obsessed? Addicted to danger? Why? On the one hand: shame, violence, lies. On the other: the sweetness, the seeming openness. Now, I had to think, that openness was another kind of veneer.

  I turned and walked back on Christopher Street, glaring at men who eyed me, as if by staring it down it would all go away.

  I DIDN’T SEE Patrick again until the following morning. When I went into the living room I could see through the windows behind him the edges of the buildings flamed with the sunrise. He sat, fully dressed, reading the paper. Did he ever sleep?

  “If you’re getting up,” he said, “there’s coffee.” I got a cup and came back and sat with him to drink it.

  “Anybody die?” I asked. He was on the front page, undoubtedly he had already scanned the obituaries.

  “No one for whom I’ve had to mourn,” he said with some irony, “since Jimmy Durante.”

  “Going to church?” It was Sunday. He hadn’t yet put on his jacket and tie.

  “I’m trying a Mass in Riverside today,” he said.

  “Patrick.” He looked up from the paper. “What’s going on?”

  He closed the paper and set it on his lap. He turned his gaze to the chair arm.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve been remote,” he said. He groped for words, “I was very fond of Bryan, as you know….” I waited without expectation, though I wasn’t as angry as I had been yesterday. I remembered that Irene had always been more up on Bryan. Lately, especially, I had observed a trust between Irene and Patrick that went very deep. I would never forget a night Irene was sick with a strain of Asian flu, and burned with fever. She was sure she was dying and, swayed by her fear, I was ready to call an ambulance when Patrick sat down on her bed, swooped her up into his long arms and said, “There, you’re all right, it’s about to break and you’ll be fine in the morning.” She calmed and slept, and woke up the next day nearly well.

  “Oh, nothing’s really wrong,” he said finally. “I’m still young, and youth they say is everything, yes?”

  He smiled, nothing harsh or mocking in his demeanor. Okay, I thought. His subtext said I’m not fine, but I’d like to deal with it in my own way. Perhaps Irene’s outburst yesterday had been enough.

  In any case, that concluded the confrontation. There was obviously not a thing I could do. In any event, I did not need the mess, the senselessness. If he was determined to wallow in misery, I thought, let him.

  The next afternoon I came home from work and heard Irene in her room.

  “Hi.” I propped myself up with the door frame. She lay on her bed: fuzzy red socks, jeans, a T-shirt, the cat coiled up on the pillow beside her head. Her hair was in braids. “Cute,” I said, pulling on one. “What are you reading?” She showed me the book: A Mystic in the Theater,
Eva Le Gallienne on Eleanora Duse.

  “How’s the show?” she asked, still reading the book.

  “Rad’s falling in love with Silver.”

  “Is Silver a person?”

  “So to speak.” I took the book from her and closed it. “How you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  “Irene, have you quit?”

  “What?”

  “Acting.”

  She sighed, “Do we have to talk about it?”

  “Yes.” What a bully I was—and lonely.

  How come Patrick goes to church? I had recently asked her. That’s easy, she had said, to recapture a sense of the sublime.

  “I’m resting,” she said. “I can get another job if—”

  “No,” I said, “I have plenty of money, I didn’t mean—”

  “I just thought if I wasn’t acting then maybe it wasn’t right—”

  “I have plenty of money.” I honest to God didn’t care about the money. All I cared about was having enough so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. “You’re resting?” I said.

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to talk. Her skin looked translucent, she lay there as still as the cat.

  “Irene—” I wanted to talk about Patrick. Instead, I said, “Paul got a new agent for stage.”

  “Great.”

  “You want to meet him?”

  “Not now. Come on, there wouldn’t be any reason now. But thanks, really.”

  “Okay, well, let me know if you do.” I got up, paused in the doorway, heard her reopen her book, and St. Martin began to purr again.

  I thought I would read the Le Gallienne book after she did, and we could discuss it. But I was busy.

  “What is the point of confession?” I asked Patrick casually one night, “Explain it to me.”

  “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s to be released, to have a fresh start.”

  “Do you really believe in it?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s a beautiful idea.”

  Beauty, ideas. Evanescent as mist. Oh, he was a stellar actor. It would have been laughable had it not been so sad. He had finally become a good actor, honing his talent in the years since we met. Only to better play that everything was fine, turning emotions and truths on and off at will. I was good at it too, pretending I didn’t see anything odd in his reply.

  I recalled a conversation we had had once about acting, how it was less about what you were feeling than what you did about it.

  IN MAY, WITH SCANT warning, my soap went off the air. There had been rumors, but none of us on the show had believed them: ratings were steady and the show had run so long we deemed it invulnerable.

  Suzie cried in her dressing room. “We’ve been canceled!” she wailed. I felt a quick loss of breath. So much for my two-year contract. I would have needed a couple dozen lawyers to get out of my end, but apart from the protection the contract assured me while my services continued to be welcome, what was binding on paper remained elastic for the network.

  “Why am I crying?” she asked. “For months I’ve complained about wanting more time for my grandchildren. It must be the shock.”

  “You can get another show,” I said.

  “Oh no, never,” blowing her nose. “Give me a minute and I’ll feel relieved.”

  She explained what she knew, having to do with a corporate takeover, and then I went off down the hallway in search of Colin. Now in a turnabout I felt a heady sense of expanded possibility. I found Colin exiting wardrobe, marking his script with his automatic pencil, drinking coffee, absentmindedly listening to a last-minute comment called from the room he’d just left. Colin, like most people in television, could juggle an array of simultaneous tasks. Tallish and stout, with ripply bronze hair and aviator glasses, he cast an unswerving aura of absolute ease.

  “You look pleased, you foolish young man,” he said, as I approached. “Unless you haven’t heard the news.”

  “Call Hugh,” I said. “Tell him I’ll do the play if I can direct one.”

  “Like a house afire,” he replied. “Drinks, say—tomorrow evening?”

  “Great.”

  “Come,” he said then, “and we’ll talk about Silver’s childish demands on Rad’s valuable time.” We started together down the corridor to the rehearsal room, speaking of line changes. Ever the consummate professional, Colin wasn’t easily disturbed. There remained a full week of shows to get onto tape and he would attend to them as he did any other week of work.

  But my attention was profoundly split throughout the day between the work—I’d already gotten to the point where I could do most of the scenes with 60 percent concentration—and my altered, fabulous future. I was going back to the theater, or I was about to only begin in the theater, but this time, I thought, I would not be deterred. The soap had lasted just long enough to give me a name and a decent stockpile of money; the cancellation could have been part of a preordained plot to make my career in the theater possible. What luck!

  Colin’s brother Hugh was a professor of theater in a small college in Missouri, and the artistic director of a stock theater, where Colin directed a play every year. Colin had asked me to act for him this summer, and my new plan was to direct a play in which I could use Irene and Patrick.

  But now that the soap was canceled, Paul wanted me in town for auditions. We snapped at each other through a lunch at Café des Artistes.

  “I’ll be gone six weeks or two months,” I said, “it’s nothing. I just—I could never do anything before the soap, I was afraid to go out of town thinking something might come up. I’m tired of living like that. I thought now I could do a little of what I want to do finally.”

  If you were viable as an actor in other mediums, Paul thought, why do theater? Even Broadway, realistically speaking, had become a blundering brontosaurus kept alive for tourists. But he rested his hands on the table—his well-manicured nails were, indeed, lacquered the palest shade of pink—and said, “I want you on Broadway if you want to do theater.”

  “Yeah, me too, but—”

  “Robert.” Paul was unusually intense today. “They’re putting a hold on your pilot.”

  “Yeah?” I wasn’t sure what that meant. When I’d shot the pilot I hadn’t taken it seriously. The negotiations over what would transpire if it was picked up were so over-the-top, involved so much money that I had to banish it from my mind; the world I had glimpsed seemed to me more bizarre than a Beckett play. “Great,” I said evenly, “but they didn’t pick it up. What are the chances anything’ll come of it now? Really, Paul.”

  “They like you very much in Los Angeles, know that, all right?”

  I felt owned instead of complimented. “I just don’t want to do another soap,” I said, veering off the subject, “at least not right away.” I knew very well that all of the prospects he’d been alluding to could dry up, and I sat there feeling mad when for years I’d imagined I would be practically leaping tall buildings at such a moment. Mostly I felt disoriented: what the hell was going on? And how did I know what to do about it?

  I had to hold on to something. I figured I’d better hold on to my life—and my life, for better or worse, was Irene and Patrick. They would be fine if they could work. I told Paul I was going.

  12 Second Chance

  I read the play Colin had planned to direct me in while sitting at my desk. The windows were open and I heard a baby crying from somewhere outside, piercing through the other city sounds. The dark night outside, the circle of light from the small lamp on the surface of my black desk, illuminating my hands and the white paper of the script. Then the crying went away, and any consciousness of turning the pages vanished, until the script lay closed; I had been sitting there for I didn’t know how long. Finally sounds—and the smell of something burnt—seeped slowly, by increments, into my awareness, and I got up and walked out to the phone in the living room and called Colin.

  “It’s—I love it. We’re really gonna do this in a small town in Missouri?”
After the soap, the complexity and richness of the play lit up regions in myself I had almost forgotten: every inch of me felt alive, rife with dimension and possibility.

  He laughed, and I sat down on the couch, putting the phone on the floor. “The author is from that fair state,” he replied, “which I’m hoping will bring them to us in a more, shall we say, open mind.”

  “I think he’s more like me than anyone I’ve ever played,” I told him.

  “That’s exactly what we need,” he said, “passion, belief. To get away with this we must do it magnificently. The rest of the season, as you know, in balance, will be light: the musicals, and whatever you direct. Anything except for a comedy is out of the question.”

  “I like comedy, I’m up for a comedy.”

  He could have said anything to me. I took the script and went out walking, up past the Flatiron Building and over to Gramercy Park, finally landing in a coffee shop, where I didn’t look again at the play but had it there with me at the table while I gazed out the window at the street and thought about my father. I had believed, incorrectly, that he was really dead for me. I had stopped thinking about him first ceaselessly, then every day, and at last practically never. But in reading the script he lived again in my body, because he was imprinted in my sensations, in me, and I thought, sitting there—my own ghostly reflection in the glass of the window—Okay, you son of a bitch, let’s go, I’m ready for you now.

  The name of the play was Lemon Sky, by Lanford Wilson. I was Alan, twenty-nine years old in his narration and seventeen in the action. It’s the story of Alan’s failed attempt to live with his father and his father’s second family after years of living away from him. The play was about what it meant to be a man—a son, a father, and it touched on sexual abuse and homosexuality. I couldn’t wait.