A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  “Now this, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know where I am.”

  A pale spill of moonlight came in from the doorway; otherwise it was dark. “I don’t know anything,” I said. “But I’ll try.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “I know I love you,” I said. I told myself not to keep saying it, that every day I would have to show her, and I wanted that: I did.

  “Let’s go in,” she said, and we went out to that strange light and the new milder air and walked up the slope through the rough grass. Inside the door we heard the TV, and the kitchen was dark except for reflections from the family room and the moonlight in the window above the sink.

  “Full moon,” she said, looking at the window. “We’re mad,” and sat down at the table, her face scraped of emotion, raw. “I feel so empty, I’m hungry.” I fixed her a sandwich and brought her some milk and sat with her while she ate.

  Looking at her father, enwrapped by the monotonous sound of the television, I thought that instead of shooting the horse he should have shot the TV. Soon he turned off the TV and went to bed, and the subtle, irregular sound of living things came in through the open window—and his absence or the food revived her.

  “Remember how I said after she died he was never any kind of a father?” she said. “Well, I don’t know if he ever was. My mother was everything. She wasn’t special, well, I thought she was. She taught me to appreciate music and books, and later I found that in plays there was more than what I saw around me, that I could get away, there was something else…. And, when I act, it feels like I have her again. Maybe because I have myself.

  “I don’t really know whether he loved her or not. I don’t know what comprised his love for her. Only his anger over her death. I remember thinking, It didn’t happen to you, you didn’t die….” Her voice softened and filled with sadness. “Her sickness was never explained to me. I was told she had ‘female trouble,’ and when she died I had the vague misconception that being female killed her.” She paused, and her eyes scanned the kitchen, the window.

  “The first time I acted in a big play with an audience all I was aware of was living my life as you do in a play, and can’t in life—being completely there in the present. I was totally there. Then it was over and there was this who-osh! of the audience. Clapping, just going wild. All of those people. I had been seen, after being invisible in this house. And it wasn’t just about me. It was about all of us. Being together and sharing that story. Being alive together in that one moment in time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  We sat silently, washed by the moonlight.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said. I walked with her down the hall and she said good night without looking at me and I went to my room and sat on my bed while she was in the bathroom. Mine was a junk room but had been her mother’s sewing room. There was an old Singer sewing machine in the corner, a mint green bookcase of poetry and American classics beneath the window that framed the tree in the front yard.

  Then she came to my door. “Robert, come sleep with me.”

  We got in her single bed, spread the sheet over us, and she curled against me, her back against my chest, and fell immediately asleep. I basked in her, in her breaths, my mind swimming with thoughts of her father in the next room. She’d described him to me once as reckless and I hadn’t seen that in him, not quite. Now I understood, knew the hardness and recklessness and definitiveness of his action in shooting the horse, how final an act it was against life, his daughter, himself. I thought nothing could be harder, deader, and with all my heart I didn’t want to be that: that one midnight-blue sharkskin suit in the closet, all that was left of his life’s blood.

  “Make love to me,” her voice; I’d fallen asleep. She was kissing me, it was warm, my skin filmed with new sweat. I was already hard and that didn’t seem right, but I kissed her.

  “No, no,” she said, “like you love me,” with an urgency in her. Her mouth was very hot.

  Her nightgown was up around her waist but now she wrenched it off. She was breathing heavily, and started talking again. “Irene, be quiet,” I said, and she stopped. Then she whispered to me, “Please, more,” and then the bed was slamming into the wall and I didn’t care and she cried out sharply, and I did too.

  15 Back

  In the morning I opened my eyes to her sitting at the side of the bed looking at me. She was dressed in her own clothes and rigidly solemn.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. “My father didn’t go to work. He’s in the kitchen and he wants to talk to you.”

  “To me?” I lay back down. I thought, He didn’t have the gun, did he?

  “Once you’ve talked to him let’s just have coffee and go,” she said. She stood and I caught her arm.

  “Irene?” Her eyes were full of tears. “Irene,” I said, “I love you better than anything.”

  “You do?”

  I pushed her hair out of her face. “Yes, yes. Why are you crying?” I pulled her to me and cradled her head against my neck.

  In the kitchen he was reading the paper. She poured me a cup of coffee. He put aside the paper.

  “Good morning. Sit down,” he said—not friendly but not breathing fire. “Come and sit down,” he said to Irene.

  She came, defiant, and sat down beside me.

  “What are your intentions in regard to my daughter?” he asked.

  I glanced at Irene, who looked appalled and then so amused that I hoped she wouldn’t laugh. This was more than a bit of a travesty on his part, when by any important measure he had never been there for her before. But I didn’t want things to get any weirder than they already were. As if it had long been decided, I said, “I’d like to marry Irene.”

  “Good,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s proper for you to visit my house again if you’re not married.”

  “Your house,” she stood, nearly knocking over her chair. She had gone white at the lips from anger. “We’re not getting married, Daddy. We never even discussed it,” she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

  “We haven’t discussed it yet,” I said, “but those are my intentions. Well, I ought to go pack.”

  Irene was packing loudly in her room. “Fuck him. Fuck him!” she said, “I’m twenty-five. At fifteen I would have had to be fucking somebody in his face to evoke a reaction.” We almost had, I thought distantly, unconcerned. I was feeling this happiness spread through my body like a new color. I’d marry her, we would get married, why hadn’t I known that before?

  She sensed my mood, “What? Robert, what?”

  “Let’s get married.”

  “Oh.” She went to her closet and on her way back I caught her hand.

  “I mean it, come on, we should, let’s get married.”

  “You really are nuts, you know?” she said.

  “Yeah, but I have to marry you.” I did this dumb nodding gesture and accompanied it with a sweep of one hand, imitating this actor we’d seen in a bad movie in Missouri. “Because you are the girl for me.” She was laughing, “So what do you say, Irene, huh?”

  “I don’t know, God, Robert.” She tried to pack again and I grabbed her around the waist from behind.

  “Come on,” I said—in a deep voice, “Oh my darling, my darling. So? Come on.”

  “Maybe I’d rather you ask me in New York over an expensive dinner.” She laughed, “I’d like you to kneel.”

  “Oh, you’d love that,” I said.

  “Go pack. Can we talk about it later?”

  “Okay.”

  I carried our bags out to the car and she followed. “Shouldn’t we say good-bye?” I said.

  “You can if you want to,” and I went once more to the kitchen where he sat smoking. “Good-bye, Mr. Walpers,” I said.

  “Good-bye. Tell Irene good-bye.” It was sad, even though you had to hate the guy.

  She drove.

  That heat, those fields spiraling away at each side of the road; t
he pale sky. We were on the highway heading south in the direction of Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she pulled up on the shoulder and stopped.

  “I just passed the exit.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to go to New York.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know.” She was looking at her hands in her lap. A car going by felt faster than a jet. I was afraid she’d start crying again.

  “I’m going to say something stupid,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Don’t—” she turned to me, “don’t die?”

  “I won’t. I’m not the type to die young. You’ll die first. I’ll linger and become a burden to our children.”

  She smiled. “Can we just sit here a minute?”

  We sat there awhile. I looked out at fields that weren’t harvested and parched like others I’d seen. Tender green shoots sprung back from the road in hundreds and hundreds of vertical rows.

  “What are they growing?” I asked her.

  “Soybeans,” she said.

  Soybeans, I thought, how miraculous, and she pulled onto the highway.

  16 Trevor McCann

  Patrick was waiting for us in the apartment when we arrived. In the kitchen his bottle of Geritol and a fifth of vodka were set side by side on the counter, as though one was a chaser for the other. He told us the head doorman, Angel Jacome, had removed his mustache, and there was an audacious new artificial flower arrangement in the lobby, had we seen it? Someone was circulating a petition to have it incinerated. His play would go into previews in three weeks. His character’s name was Trevor McCann, “a sympathetic chap,” Patrick said, “but quite a queen.” Meaning, unless he exaggerated—and after reading the script I saw he didn’t—that his first important dramatic role in New York would effectively type him.

  One night in bed Irene said, “Robert, you know that pact we made at Crispins? You know that it wasn’t meant seriously, don’t you?”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me and Patrick.”

  “I don’t. But I do. Irene, it isn’t the pact.”

  “I just wanted to tell you.”

  “Stop acting pessimistic,” I said, dismissing the issue. But I knew she was talking about our plans for a theater. She knew I wanted out. Shortly after we’d returned to the city she’d researched stock and regional theaters, but as Patrick appeared to have lost interest and I was distracted, she talked less about it as the weeks passed. Clarence was currently head of casting on a soap, where a young female role was coming up. He told Irene he’d call her. But when a week went by and then another, she was convinced he’d forgotten her.

  “So call him,” I said in exasperation, beginning our second fight of the evening, after one about money. (“So I’m touchy?” she’d shouted. “Just because if I didn’t live with you I couldn’t afford a goddamned Tampax?” We’d decided she’d go back to work part-time at the restaurant, and I would put money in a separate account and give her a checkbook. Always having to ask me for money, I reasoned, was what she most objected to.)

  “It’s Clarence,” I said. “Call him at home, you have the number.” It was a beautiful night and we’d planned to go out but we stood in my room, glaring at each other.

  “Wait,” she said. “I want to show you the script.” I sat in the chair in the corner, reminding myself to be patient. She smoked while I read it. The girl was a ditz, but it was a decent scene.

  “So?” I said.

  She sat on the bed, “I can’t play it.”

  “Why not?”

  “All the references to her chest.”

  Oh, please, I thought.

  “I don’t have big breasts, Robert.”

  “No? Really?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re—”

  “What? You can tell they want someone who’s stacked for this.”

  “Then how come Clarence sent it to you?”

  “He hasn’t called me.”

  “Call him, he’s probably busy.” She remained sitting on the bed, indecisively chewing on a nail. “Come here,” I said, and she came over and sat on my lap and I put my arms around her. “Look at the sky,” I said, and we looked up through the open window together. “The line of that building,” tracing it with my thumb.

  “It looks pasted on,” she said. “Like some kid cut it out of construction paper and stuck it on the sky.”

  “And see how the clouds are moving,” I told her.

  “The sky’s inside out,” she said.

  The clouds were dark violet and the sky was a lighter shade of gray blue, a sort of reversal.

  “All that,” I said, indicating the script, “is just—all that.”

  “I know,” she said. My hands rested against the warm skin of her back.

  “You need to call him,” I told her, “and do the audition. You know they don’t know what they’re looking for a lot of the time. They could see you and think, well, not stacked, but very nice.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “And then they might notice your legs and realize that was more what they meant.”

  She got up and went to call him and left a message.

  “It just seems so stupid, so small, you know?” she said, sitting back on the bed. “I know it’s not about me, the rejections—I don’t take it as personally anymore. But it doesn’t mean as much to me anymore. It’s too arbitrary. How can I believe in something this random? It doesn’t seem valid, or significant, and if it isn’t—

  “This is what I know,” she said emphatically. “Nobody cares whether I’m an actress—why should they?” She smiled, “Apart from you and Patrick.”

  “I think you think too much.”

  “I do?”

  “Maybe. Why don’t I call Gabriel tomorrow and get you an appointment?”

  “No, Robert, please.” Gabriel was Paul’s agent for stage. It wasn’t that I believed Gabriel could solve the problem of her career, he would simply be someone else to try. I hated feeling helpless where she was concerned, but whenever I introduced a connection of mine, especially since we’d come back from Kansas, she refused it.

  “I have to do it for myself, do it on my own. That’s what I need and want.”

  “No one does it on their own.”

  “I can’t have my entire life hooked into you, Robert. I’ve done that before.”

  “All right,” I agreed, fed up.

  “Please understand,” she said, coming to me.

  “You’ll do what you want to, whatever I think,” I began, but she kissed me, stroking my hair, and said, “Let’s take advantage of Trevor McCann.” She climbed onto my lap and I took off her T-shirt. Patrick, being Trevor McCann, had been home every night until the first preview. He was out days at rehearsal, but at night he seldom budged from the apartment. To have the place to ourselves seemed very luxurious. That night, after bed, we got dressed and went out into the freshness of autumn and walked down to Washington Square, and sat at a café on Thompson Street, eating Italian. It was the third week of October by then. I had met with a famous director about a feature; I’d turned down a soap. There was talk about other pilots and the pilot I’d already shot was suddenly back in contention. I knew—we all knew—that something big would come through for me.

  Later, Clarence explained that the role on the soap had been taken by an actress who played a small role on the show the previous year. The three of us watched her one afternoon; she was, indeed, well endowed.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “The kind that defy all the forces of gravity,” Patrick remarked.

  “But her acting’s okay,” Irene said.

  “She’s not as good as you,” Patrick said.

  “Oh, I don’t know…. Should I save up some money and—?”

  “No,” Patrick said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  That week, Irene and I attended a preview of Patri
ck’s play. It was not a good play, as he’d said, but it wasn’t bad enough to account for the disparity of the performances, the mishmash of styles and abilities.

  “But your part’s flashy and you’re doing it well,” I told him over drinks at Joe Allen. “You’ll be singled out even if it doesn’t run.”

  He looked drained, his long face pushed against one big pale hand, the other hand decorated by scars from cigarettes he’d forgotten. A series of faint red burns, in graduated stages of healing, striped two of the fingers of his left hand. People bustled about; wherever you sat in Joe Allen during the late-evening crush you would catch snatches of ebullient theater talk—somebody’s contract, or performance, or comeback. That night it made me tired.

  Irene was being quiet. “How was I?” he said to her.

  “I told you already, good.” She wrapped her hand around his arm, stroked the pale skin on the inside of his wrist. He had come, already, to hate McCann.

  “Well,” he said, “Miss McCann, queen of the prom, is limited. About that, we agree. She’s there for cheap jokes. Flashy? Well, yes, queens are. They’re rather like children, aren’t they? Or performing dogs.”

  “Patrick, don’t,” I said. “Don’t hate him so much.” It was starting to sound as though he hated himself. Nobody else thought of Patrick like that, and if he got typed, so what? If he was typed and he worked, he would at least have a chance to break out of being typed. I knew how he prided himself on being a person of dimension and grace, but he’d also always been someone who simply loved being onstage, playing anything, as long as he believed that he could. He’d said to me once, “I love all of it, Robert. Getting the call at half hour. Waiting back stage. Just spotting glow tape in the dark gives me chills.” Now nothing but bitterness, edge. No humor, no lightness, no Patrick.