A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  We got up and moved through the hot rooms, turning off lights behind us as we left. In the living room opposite the family room was her mother’s piano, a squat brown spinet, on top of which rested the same photograph Irene had of her mother in the field, and her parents’ wedding picture. I stared at Ray, years younger then than I was now, and could not see in his face the romantic Irene had described, a man who would spend his life mourning the neat, pretty woman standing beside him.

  “Does your father have a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “None that I know of. What my father does is work.”

  She put out the light and we got a drink of water in the kitchen and stood kissing at the sink. “I wish we could go somewhere,” I said. It wasn’t later than ten-thirty or eleven. We brought a blanket out to the yard and around to the side of the house farthest from her father’s bedroom and lay down together in the still-warm night.

  I slept in a small dusty room, separated from her by a wall. Ribbons papered two oversize bulletin boards across from her bed, for doing rodeo. Barrel racing—an event, she explained, of speed, nerve, and precision.

  “Good training for an actress,” she said. “Teaches you when you fall to get back on the horse.”

  IN THE MORNING I went to the kitchen and saw her through the window in the backyard. Her back to me, she stood with her hands folded behind her, wearing a faded print dress, thin enough that I could discern the outlines of her body.

  It was just after nine, dishes were drying by the sink; Mr. Walpers was gone. She’d left coffee for me on the stove. I sat down with a cup at the table and looked at the Coffeyville Journal, read an article with the headline, KANSAS, THE DRY STATE, about liquor, not rain; an old-timer describing joints built on the border of Kansas and Oklahoma; when the cops raided, everybody ran over to the Oklahoma side.

  I heard her boots on the back steps, the screen door, and she came into the kitchen. “Come here,” she said, and she took me to the window. “That’s the stable, where Mercury lived.”

  “You look sexy. Where’d you get the dress?” I recognized the four buttons on the front; it was her mother’s, the dress in the picture of her mother in the field.

  “In my closet,” she said.

  I put my arms around her and she put her hands in my back pockets. “I missed you last night,” I said.

  “Me too.” She smelled wonderful, and felt warm; her hair was silky against my face. “What are we doing today?” I asked. “You want to go to bed?”

  “Not here.” She extricated herself from me. “You want breakfast?”

  I leaned against the sink. “But he isn’t here.”

  “I couldn’t here, ever.” She opened a cupboard and pulled out boxes, turned back. “I have to tell you that my father—I don’t trust him, Robert.” There was actual hatred tingeing the words. I resisted the urge to say, why are we here then? You despise him, you love him? At least he wasn’t my father, at least he stuck around. She shifted her eyes from me, sighed. “And besides, I’ve made other arrangements.” She kissed me lightly, with a brief but effective tug on one of my belt loops.

  “Well good. If I don’t have sex three times a day I feel deprived.”

  “Oh, ha. You want cereal?” She set a dish on the table, her voice an odd mixture of vehemence and embarrassment. “It’s only—this house is all him, even if he’s not here.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  She sat down at the table, dejectedly. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Coming here.”

  “Oh hey, since we’re here let’s have fun. That Coffeyville Journal whetted my appetite for the sights.” She laughed.

  She had more coffee while I ate, and then we drove over to Sixth Street to visit her friend, Rebecca. Becca was married to Billy Wayne Boyers, and Irene had known the two of them since childhood. Billy Wayne was eight years or so older than Becca and Irene, and had held for both of them a certain glamour after he went to Vietnam and came back minus the first two joints of three fingers. But then Irene went to New York, and Rebecca married him. They hadn’t done badly, had kids right away, but lived in a nicer home than the crowded boxes I’d seen on Eleventh, a tidy white house with a decent-sized yard.

  Rebecca had long, straight, toffee-colored hair and red-rimmed brown eyes, and she answered the door holding a baby, another small child attached to her leg.

  “Oh, Becca,” said Irene, “this is him?”

  “Yep, this is Lonnie, and you know Billy Junior. Come on, honey,” she said to the boy, who was hiding his face, “show yourself to the nice people. He’s shy.” Irene got him to look at her, briefly.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” Becca said, meaning me, and putting her hand to her mouth, she laughed and said, “I’m sorry, you’re Robert.”

  “Yeah, this is the one,” Irene said, taking my arm. The twang that had flavored her speech in Missouri was reaching its apex. Becca showed us the house—they’d moved in recently—and we sat down in the kitchen with glasses of iced tea. “I saw you on the soap,” Becca said. “You look almost the same….” She peered at me as though she thought that as an actor I was capable of physical mutation.

  Becca put the baby into one of those slings and he slept while she and Irene talked. At first they tried to include me, but soon they were busy discussing local people and I sat back and listened until Billy appeared at my side, thrusting out to me a plastic toy soldier.

  “Yours?” I said, taking it. “Spiffy. How old are you?” His eyes were light brown and red-rimmed like his mother’s. He held up three fingers.

  “He lives down in some sleazy hotel on South Walnut,” Becca was saying.

  “No,” Irene said.

  “Got what he deserves, going back into those big professional shows at his age.”

  “How’d he get gored?” Irene asked. “Bulldoggin’?”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Wrestling steers,” Irene said.

  “Oh.”

  “Hank’s a fool,” Irene said. The ex-boyfriend.

  “Why, Billy,” Becca said, “you’ve brought every single toy that you own from your room and put it out on this floor.”

  It turned out that Becca and the children were leaving and Irene and I were staying here.

  We stood on the back stoop while Becca opened the garage and got the kids settled in the car. Next door an old man tended a lush green garden surrounded by sunflowers, big meaty faces buzzing with bees. The car pulled out of the driveway.

  “So,” Irene said quietly, “aren’t you going to take me inside—?”

  I did, bringing her back to the small master bedroom with the crib at the foot of the bed and the faint smell of sour milk, undoing the four large buttons at the front of her dress and lifting it, reverently, over her head, feeling vaguely nostalgic from the sight of the sunflowers and the old man in the garden for a life I’d never known. She took off my shirt, and I sat on the side of the bed and took off my shoes and socks, stood again, light-headed, heard the clank of my belt buckle hitting the floor, the hiss of my zipper; behind it, the whipping sound of the fan on a chair in the corner.

  “You’re not going to make a crack about the location?” she asked.

  “Uh-uh, not now.” I could think only of her hands, and the wetness of her mouth and the whip of the fan and forgot where else I was in the rest of the world, except with her.

  THAT WAS THE RHYTHM of our days, visiting after breakfast with relatives and friends, or sightseeing—the infamous Dalton Museum, and the cemetery where her mother was buried. Afternoons we returned to Rebecca’s house and that room. Becca worked afternoons at the five-and-ten while her mother took care of the children; Billy Wayne sold liquor in a package store.

  In the evenings we saw Irene’s father. He never asked questions, but Irene chattered to him about Missouri and New York, and he listened. We joined him for television after supper, our version of being gracious and showing an interest in his life. I
started to think, what the heck, he wasn’t so bad.

  Our fourth day Patrick called to say he had gotten the show on Broadway. Irene and I sat at the kitchen table, smiling.

  “You see?” I said. “You see how everything is going to be all right?”

  “Everything’s all right now,” she said.

  “Sure, but—”

  “It’s lovely. Let’s wait and see, you don’t have to make it mean something.” Her face had gone tight, closed. The play itself was weak, his role small, but the role was a good one in which he believed he could easily shine.

  “All I mean,” I said, though I’d meant more, “is the one thing he needs is visibility.”

  “Careful,” she said, “you sound like an agent.”

  “What does—?”

  “Just leave it, okay?”

  She sat silently in the car as we drove to Rebecca’s, staring out the window. But at Sixth Street we made love, still at the stage where our bodies solved everything.

  Afterward, lying on top of the sheets, listening to the clip-clip-clip of the fan, she ran her hand over my chest and then rested her fingers against my ribs. “In my next life,” she said, “I want to be physically strong.” She drew her hand over my stomach, “I guess I want to come back as a man.”

  “You really believe in that stuff?” I asked her. As I understood spiritualism, or the version of it she had studied, your being chose every aspect of your life according to the needs of your soul’s development.

  “Sure.” She leaned over me jauntily, eyes bright, hair tangled; herself again.

  “What’s it like to be strong?” she asked.

  “I don’t think about it.” I laughed.

  “I bet it feels good.” She ran a hand down my thigh.

  “Okay,” I said, “if you believe in it, how come I chose my father?”

  “I don’t know, maybe sometimes God chooses … maybe you chose your father, and then God gave you David.”

  I gathered her into me, loving her very much, and kissed her.

  “You say nice things,” I said. We made love again.

  That night after supper, we returned to Rebecca’s to meet Billy Wayne. Billy Jr. answered the door silently, his father behind him.

  Billy Wayne was a short man but powerfully built, topped by a small round head set close to his shoulders. Dark hair and penetrating eyes. He wore Levi’s and a belt buckle of a steer head studded with rhinestones. But he was in no way a Floyd—there was stature, substantiveness in him. Vietnam, I presumed, irresistably drawn to the partially severed fingers of his right hand.

  Once we had exhausted the usual topics of weather and the fair, everybody sat sipping Coors while a breeze sighed in through the open back door. Cre-eak, tip went Billy Wayne’s chair; he maintained a precarious balance by supporting himself with the toe of one boot positioned underneath the flat top of the table. Becca got up to give little Billy his bath, and feeling like a third wheel with Becca gone, I went to keep her company.

  She knelt at the side of the tub, the ends of her long hair dragging in the suds. “You like kids,” she said, “don’t you?” Billy squealed, smacking at the surface of the water, “C’mon, honey, stop it. Maybe you and Irene will have kids someday.” Then I heard Irene’s and Billy Wayne’s laughter.

  In the hallway I heard it better, waves gushing out from the kitchen. Her head was thrown back, her throat arched; I could only see the back of his head, his broad back against the chair. Slam, the front legs of his chair. They stopped laughing and she was looking at me; maybe I had stood staring at them for too long. I summoned a demeanor of normalcy, fetched my beer and left. But I could tell she had slept with Billy Wayne. Once Becca and I rejoined them in the kitchen, the party was over. Irene said we should go.

  “We could have stayed,” I said at the car. “You were having fun.”

  “I’m tired,” she yawned, getting in.

  “Me too.” At Morgan Street, in her father’s driveway, she squeezed my arm.

  “Know what? I love you,” she said, and when we were in the house she got physical, but I couldn’t help feeling that I could have been anyone, that she was just generally excited, maybe from seeing Billy Wayne again.

  “Oh, come on,” she said, trying to pull me from the entry way into the family room. “Let’s put on the TV and fool around.”

  “I thought you were tired,” I said. “Besides, I thought you had a thing about this house.”

  “What’s wrong, grouchy?” she said, putting her arms around my neck. Ever since we’d come here she’d worn clothes that I didn’t recognize—the T-shirt she had on tonight, her mother’s dress.

  “I’m tired,” I said, wishing that she would mention something about our life. I made it a test in my head, which she failed.

  “’Night, love,” and she went to bed.

  I couldn’t sleep. The more I tried not to think of what I’d been thinking the more I did. I convinced myself that if she’d told me the truth about Billy Wayne, that he had been more than a friend, I wouldn’t be bothered. She had said she’d had a crush on him, but that didn’t mean “sleep with.” Or did it? Should I have assumed they had been lovers? If so, what did that mean? Who else was there in Coffeyville besides Hank and Billy Wayne?

  Ages ago she had offered to sleep with me, no strings attached. In the era of Neal. Which meant she had always loved me but chose her real lovers according to other more mercenary needs. Or else we were all interchangeable. What would have happened if Neal hadn’t been such a heel? If he had been even a halfway decent person? Or Andre? Or Floyd? What did it mean when she said she loved me? How could I trust her if I couldn’t trust her actions?

  I drifted off into that twilight world between waking and sleep, of flickering images that didn’t track—when I jolted awake it was morning.

  I’d decided: I had to know where things stood. She’d have to be honest with me. I recognized the doughy smell of biscuits baking wafting into my room.

  “Hi!” She’d been looking out the window, drinking coffee. Huge smile. Why was she so happy today?

  I got a cup for coffee, and she came up beside me.

  “Well, kiss me.” I did. “Oh, that was real good,” she said flatly, so I kissed her again.

  “Irene,” I said, “I love you very much.”

  “I love you too. How come you’re so serious?”

  “No reason.” I couldn’t do it, couldn’t ask her.

  She opened the oven, inhaled the fragrance of the biscuits, and said, “There’s a sale on at Weinberg’s. The Western store, remember?”

  I’d wanted to buy her some boots. I sat down and looked at the ad in the Coffeyville Journal. “I can’t believe it’s called Weinberg’s. Makes me imagine a yarmulke built into a cowboy hat.”

  She said, “Robert. Can I buy you one?”

  “What?”

  “A hat,” she sat down at the table. “Oh come on, if I bought it for you, you’d wear it, wouldn’t you? No? Okay, then you can’t buy me boots.”

  AT WEINBERG’S, AFTER choosing a gaudy pair of white boots with blue peacocks, she had me in front of a three-way mirror trying on hats. Stetsons. Straw. Gray, brown, tan, and black. She’d get one off the shelf and stand by me while I tried it on, to see all of us together: her, me, the hat.

  “No, you’re right,” she said finally. “A hat isn’t you, is it?” We put back the hat, the heels of my shoes and her boots knocking on the wooden plank floor.

  “It wasn’t that you didn’t look good,” she said. “You looked too much like these guys I grew up with.” I had wondered whether that was the point. “You’re my Eastern boy, aren’t you?” She kissed me.

  Near Rebecca’s she wanted to show me the fairgrounds. She drove, under the vast cloudless sky. It wasn’t too hot yet. The weather took its time and worked up to the heat, rarely cooling down before eight or nine o’clock. There remained signs of the big event at the fairgrounds, a gamey smell of animals mingled with dust as we d
rove by the empty holding pens, workers’ trucks parked outside the permanent structures. We parked and got out behind the grandstand, one bank of permanent bleachers facing the ring. I followed her partway up, and waited so long for her to say anything while she looked around—squinting a little, smiling to herself—that I wondered what she saw. This corral was a theater to her, sets struck, lights gone, but redolent of worlds, emotionally dense and rich.

  She’d only competed here once or twice, but the local riding clubs paraded around the ring every year on opening day, and the fair was such a central event in the life of the town, as marked and anticipated as the motions of the weather, I could imagine hundreds of smaller dramas enacted against the background of the fair, or overlapping with the fair. Dead dramas hovering here, written down in the books of minds, alive in consciousness, memory.

  She leaned forward, and I thought she would speak, but then she sat back and relapsed into herself again, as a power saw growled into life in the distance.

  “Getting hot,” I said finally.

  “Yeah … Robert,” she said, looking at me, something in her eyes, “make love to me here.”

  “Here? You’re crazy.”

  She smiled. “We could go down under the bleachers.”

  I scanned the area we had driven through just beyond us and saw a man come out of one of the buildings and get into a truck.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, we’d be too exposed.” She stood and stomped down to the ground, unmistakably angry.

  “Irene—”

  “Forget it. Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  “So, where to?” She’d taken the keys from her pocket and they dangled from one of her fingers while she waited impatiently on the driver’s side.

  “Sixth Street?” I said. “Weren’t we going to Sixth Street?”

  She shrugged like good-as-anywhere-else and got in.

  I barely got in—the car leaped and shot forward, dust rising in clouds. She had it up to sixty on the goddamn dirt road before I said, “Come on.” She slammed on the brakes; the car bucked and jolted to a stop, and for a good twenty seconds we sat in a dust cloud.