A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  “I merely came in here,” she said, “for an opinion. So sorry if I disturbed you.”

  “I gave it.”

  “It bothered me, Robert.”

  “What the idiot said? The moron? A guy who’s probably been to the theater twice in his life?”

  She collapsed on the couch by the door, dramatically. I was sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs near the piano, clear across the large room from her.

  “Come here,” I said.

  “No.” A pause, “You come here.” I got up and crossed the room. It felt like slow motion, wading through oceans, the longest walk of my life.

  “Don’t be mad at me,” I said, standing over her. “You’re the last person I want to be mad at me.”

  “Why?”

  The scent of the roses—the literal heat I felt in the zone between us. “Because I’m in love with you,” I said.

  She starting crying. “What?” I said, sitting down next to her. “Don’t cry, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it isn’t that. I’m in love with you too.”

  I sat there, my entire body an ache, and I couldn’t move. She pulled her bare feet up beneath her and turned to me, put her arms around me, pressing her head into my neck—the feel of her, utterly known and entirely foreign.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to do,” I said tenderly.

  WE’D BEEN IN BED for the whole day, it seemed, when Patrick came back. He slammed the front door.

  “What was that?” she said. We were lying on our sides facing each other.

  “Patrick,” I said.

  He came up the stairs. “Irene?” he called. “Robert?”

  “He sounds upset,” she said.

  “Mm, yeah,” I wrapped one of my legs around hers, “We’re not here.”

  “Where is everyone?” and he opened the door.

  There wasn’t anything we could do except move away from each other—I sat up, startled. We had the lamp on beside the bed so we weren’t even sheathed in darkness.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “I mean why are you doing it?”

  “Are you waiting for an answer?” I said. He came to and left, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “Oh, no major trauma,” she giggled, turning to me and hugging my legs. “He probably thought you were reading. Lie down.”

  “Why is he so weird?”

  “He always was, lie back down.”

  “Not like he is now.”

  “Never mind.” She straddled my legs.

  “I’m distracted.”

  “Not much.”

  “Did you hear the door?”

  “Yes, he left.” She lowered herself down onto me.

  IN THE MORNING we took a shower together and made love again. “This has to stop,” she said.

  “Yeah, let’s go try your bed.”

  “No, I have a show tonight, remember?”

  “We’ll cancel it.” I was kissing her again and it was almost two o’clock; the sun slanted in through a crack in the curtains.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  “All right.” I released her.

  We ate at a diner in town, thinking we’d run into Patrick and Ben, feeling badly by then about what had happened. The natural light in the diner brought out the spectrum of her hair, reds, golds and browns, and the clarity of her eyes, and I felt myself flushing all over with pleasure and laughing at anything she said and grabbing her under the table.

  Still, we decided to drive over to Reno’s to find Patrick before going home. He wasn’t there, and neither was Ben. Only Hildy, bored and looking for company. As soon as we could we got away and drove to Ben’s.

  “He’s probably home now,” she said.

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  Ben was working on the house, and he hadn’t seen Patrick since early yesterday evening. They’d had a fight yesterday. “Will you tell him to call me?” he asked.

  “I think we blew it,” I said to Irene in the car.

  “I think he was worried,” she said. “He looked really worried to me.”

  “You’re worried. Nothing happened, he isn’t our son.”

  She slid over near me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Anyway, I’m sure he’s at home.”

  He wasn’t. She went to her room for a nap and I went to mine, sleeping the second my head hit the pillow. I woke to her knock on the door: “Robert?”

  “Come in.”

  “He isn’t back,” she said. It was seven.

  Oh well, we would see him at the theater.

  But he wasn’t there. She went ahead and made up—it didn’t occur to us that he might not show.

  At 7:45 she came out of the dressing room and said, “What’ll we do?” I went outside and hung around the stage door a minute, circled the theater, scanning the road and the parking lot: nobody tall.

  She was waiting for me in the greenroom. “I feel sick,” she said, and went into the John. I couldn’t play it, I probably could have if given twenty-four hours, but not tonight unless I did it on book. I was thinking we could delay, hold the curtain, when Patrick walked in.

  “Hello there. Time for a quick cigarette before make up.” It was 7:52. I followed him into the dressing room, watched him pat his pockets for a smoke and then take one from his cigarette box. He had misplaced his lighter. “I was with Ben,” he said, extracting a pack of matches from a drawer. “We lost track of the time.” I went upstairs and, crossing the lobby, was intercepted by willowy Larry, who held out to me a pack of Gauloises and a black Bic lighter, “Will you give these to Patrick?” he asked.

  “Why?” I didn’t immediately understand.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have any others.”

  I took them dumbly, saw Kate, and told her we were ready to start, and Larry was gone. Then it clicked.

  I went outside to the steps and watched stragglers coming into the theater, turned my face to the darkening sky, the new stars, thinking, oh please let me make it with Irene, I cannot be alone anymore.

  They played well, even got a laugh we’d missed every show all last week. The romantic parts seemed more passionate than usual but that may have been me. “Hot show,” I said, sticking my head in the dressing-room door. She was in her slip hanging up her dress. Patrick had already lit his post-show cigarette.

  “Come in and close the door,” he said, and as I did, “Robert. Irene. I’m sorry.” He sat on the edge of the dressing table, “Are you in love?”

  “Patrick,” she said, “you don’t have to embarrass us.”

  “I’m being sincere,” he said. “I’m inclined to suspect that it wasn’t strictly recreational.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, “in New York we could have a proper celebration. As it is, I’ll buy you a pizza.”

  Even so, it didn’t feel right. Irene and I sat across from him at the Pizza Hut, being careful not to sit too close together.

  “Do you plan on being the great love of each other’s lives?” he asked us. “You’ve eaten practically nothing, that’s a sure sign.” He sighed. “I suppose playing the show from now on will feel doubly adulterous. Let’s go see Ben.”

  We couldn’t not forgive him; the show had gone well, no harm was done. I handed him the cigarettes and lighter. He took them, and that was the end of it.

  “GALA NEWS,” PATRICK SAID, near the conclusion of the run. “Sidney called. For the first time in months. But I can’t hold that against him because in exactly one week I have an audition for a Broadway play.”

  “You’re going to get it,” I said. “I feel it. The tides are turning.”

  “Poor you,” said Irene. “Now you won’t be able to visit my father with us in Kansas.”

  “Oh, I’m dismayed,” Patrick said. “You’re really going? To Coffeyville? Robert, you must be in love.”

  Ben came to take Patrick to the airport the morning he left for New
York.

  “You won’t be nervous,” Irene said. “You’ll go to Maria’s masseuse in the morning and all day think of nothing but how good you were in this show.” She held his arm, her fingers lightly stroking the skin just above the inside of his wrist, a gesture she had used in the play.

  “If in return,” he answered, “you both agree to finish the honeymoon in Coffeyville. I can’t stand being around you anymore. And gain weight,” he added, getting into Ben’s truck. “I’ve never seen two people lose so much weight in a week, it’s obscene.”

  We watched them back out of the driveway. “We’re alone,” I said.

  “I’ll miss it here,” she said.

  “Maybe we’ll be here next summer.”

  “Next summer we’ll have our own place to work.”

  I’d forgotten. I’d fantasized Patrick on Broadway, she and I doing fabulously well, no need for a theater after all.

  “We’ll do plays that matter,” she said.

  We were packing when Colin called to say good-bye and in the course of the conversation I learned that Wally Press had been discovered on campus the previous day, living in a storage room in the English department. The building had been closed for the summer but with the school year coming up the custodial staff had gone in to clean. Someone’s suspicions were aroused by the strong scent of shoe polish emanating from the storage room off the main hallway. Imagine, living in a storage room for a month and still shining your shoes.

  “How creepy,” I said.

  “How sad,” said Irene.

  Part III

  13 Finding Irene

  We took 29 South through Kansas City, then cut over slightly southwest to Coffeyville. It was hot, and dry. We’d come at the end of a summer of drought. Kansas, Irene explained, was a place of extremes; of long droughts and sudden floods, of blistering heat and blizzards, of long empty days and violent tornados. Sky was everywhere, a good three-quarters of the view in any direction, like buildings were everywhere in New York. I had a sense, driving in, of high, far, lonely distances.

  “What’s he like?” I asked her. “What’s Ray like?”

  “Looks like an old cowboy.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I told you.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Christ no. We’d both probably be better off if we never saw each other.”

  Her hair was tied back, but the heat had strands around her face wet and sticking to her skin. She’d knotted the tails of her shirt, so an inch or two of midriff showed above her jeans. She turned off the highway and stopped for gas. We got out of the car and I bought a bottle of Mountain Dew, grabbed her, and held the cool bottle against her bare stomach, making her scream, pulled her to the side of the soda machine and kissed her.

  “Tired?” I asked.

  “We’re almost there.”

  The surrounding land was hardly broken by hills or trees: only fields, tiny cattle in the distance, a farmhouse and a silo, the road connecting to the highway and, everywhere, sky.

  “What do they grow here?” I asked her.

  She tucked a hand into one of my back pockets and we walked like that back to the car. “Mostly wheat, some alfalfa and corn.” Many families had recently lost their farms, she said: inflation, developers like her father, corporate operations. Livestock had always been big in Kansas, but influence these days was more with the banks and power companies, even still with the railroads, than it was with the ranchers and farmers.

  I watched the land stream away. As we came into Coffeyville she swung east around the fairgrounds and stopped at The Pig Stand, where I watched her devour two mean-looking barbecue sandwiches. I ate part of one, aware of two tables of families with young children, a table of teenagers on dates, and a group of farmers all enthusiastically eating.

  She’d told her dad not to wait for supper with us. We went down Eleventh, which ran parallel to the Missouri Pacific Railroad, dividing Coffeyville proper from Southtown. “The Daltons are buried down there,” she said. The Daltons were outlaws, shot robbing the old Condon National Bank in 1892. I’d been briefed on the Dalton Museum and the yearly enactment of the original shoot-out. We passed little row houses and bungalows stuffed between businesses, with short cement stoops and thin-armed girls holding babies in the waning daylight.

  “The college is in the other direction,” she said, “where I met Rose. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  Buildings gave way to more space again, larger homes set like ships on broad, parched, open lawns.

  The house was bigger and blander than what I’d envisioned: ranch style, wood and brick, late fifties. One lonely tree on the whole big front yard. Silence, a distant buzzing of insects. No sunset, no clouds in the sky, just the unabating heat and a foretaste of darkness, like the light was getting tired.

  She stopped halfway up the driveway and said, “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Do you? You okay?”

  “It can be real peaceful here …” She didn’t move to get out of the car. “Or it can be a tomb.” She shut off the engine.

  “Where’s his car?” I asked.

  “Shut away for the night.” I saw the double garage doors were closed. We got out our bags. “He’s had his supper and his dishes are drying by the sink. The paper’s been read and now he has on the TV.” We heard it as we went up the walk. “See?”

  “We could stay at a hotel,” I said hopefully.

  “Robert, he’ll hear.”

  “You didn’t even knock yet.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Irene Jane,” he replied.

  After an awkward moment of trying to manipulate our bags and ourselves through the narrow entryway, she put her arms around him and hugged him. He patted her once on the back, not coldly exactly, but as though he wasn’t used to hugging anybody. I could see Irene in the fineness of his features and the width of his mouth, although not in his eyes, which were small and close set. He was wiry, with close-clipped gunmetal gray hair, his face tanned and lined, and extremely good-looking.

  We sat down in a family room where he left the TV on, but turned down the sound. He was a smoker; I had heard it in his voice and smelled it in the room, a sooty peppery odor betraying a lack of ventilation and old curtains and carpeting that held it.

  “You look good, Daddy,” said Irene, positively beaming, perched on an arm of the couch.

  “Had your supper?” he asked.

  “Stopped at The Pig Stand,” she said.

  “First time in Coffeyville?” he asked me.

  “Yes sir, first time. I’m originally from New Jersey.” He kept looking at me. “Glen Rock and Fort Lee.” He hadn’t heard of them, evidently.

  “Missed the fair,” he said. The big Interstate Fair and Rodeo—Irene had told me about it as we circled the fairgrounds.

  “I know,” Irene said, “I’m heartsick.”

  Another silence.

  “How’s business?” she asked. He nodded.

  How would I get through a week of this? She got him to talk a few minutes more by inquiring after people he knew with interesting names like Ivy Knotts and Opal Hall. I was beginning to relax when she hopped to her feet and vanished into the murky hollows of the home.

  He sat in a bulky olive green vinyl chair and in it looked smaller than he was. Nonetheless, even considering the probability that I was prejudiced against him because he was laconic and had on a Western shirt, I didn’t think I’d like to get on his bad side. He took a pack of cigarettes from the table beside him, lit one, and smoked.

  “How’s the weather been?” I asked.

  “Dry.” The room was all browns, mustard yellows, and greens. There was a stereo and mostly empty shelves; stacks of magazines and old Books of Knowledge.

  “I thought you came from New York,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “You said New Jersey.”

  “I grew up in New Jersey, I live in New York.”

  He rose from his chair and turned up the TV. We watched
a new dramatic series about a detective, which didn’t seem to particularly interest him; he took in the commercials with the same quality of attention he gave the program. Irene returned for the climax of the show, interrupting it to ask her father whether he had someone in to clean.

  “Bonnie Lorraine,” he said, “same as ever.”

  “Daddy, she’s eighty years old! Well, I’ll clean up, but you’re going to have to find somebody else.”

  He smoked, his face turned toward the TV, only his eyes drifting vaguely and lazily in her direction when she spoke. Presently, at five minutes to the hour, the conflicts confronting the TV detective were resolved and Mr. Walpers got up and went to bed.

  I pulled Irene from the couch and onto the floor, saying “Help!” She kissed me and laughed.

  “Where were you?”

  “On the phone.”

  “Who’s Bonnie Lorraine?”

  “One of my aunts.”

  “Oh yeah, sister of Jean Rae and Wilma.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “We didn’t. Oh, but we did attempt to untangle the contradiction of my growing up in Jersey and living in New York.” Irene was the one person her father knew who was raised in Coffeyville and had left. People here, even the young who felt trapped in the town, were strangely rooted to it. It got under your skin, and people who lived here felt its pull inside.

  She untied her hair and sat up, and I slid my hand under her shirt and rubbed her back saying, “Actually, that’s kind of nice.”

  “It can be,” she said.

  Only days before, watching her onstage, I’d had the mistaken realization that I would be able to know her as I’d known, perhaps, only myself. But then she’d moved away from a table she had always moved toward before in the scene and focused on it with an expression I’d never quite seen on her face—something terribly pensive, shattered, and dark—and I felt confused and disoriented and distant from her. I saw how thoroughly she was herself, how I could never hope to know her as I had imagined, how much any concept of possession was in fact an illusion.

  That first night in her father’s house I felt similarly again, expectant as though the dark rooms around us, illumined, the rooms of her childhood, her past, would give her to me.