A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  Here’s what I got out of Patrick about the whole Benton affair. Benton was Patrick’s choreographer in the last show he danced in, as I told you. A sour, envious, twisted man, with a small talent and large ambition. But Patrick fell for him hard, and you know Patrick—once he loves someone, he loves them. It was a national tour, and in St. Louis a new dancer joined them, a replacement for the boy who danced a duet with Patrick. His name was Jimmy, very young and unworldly, from a coal-mining town. He liked to imply he had hustled to get money for dance classes. Maria said he was wild and crazy, and that you could see that he wouldn’t live long. But he could dance, better than Benton, could maybe have been as good as Patrick had he lived.

  Patrick was drawn to him, and Benton saw this. But Jimmy and Patrick were only friends. Patrick was loyal, and was by then very much under Benton’s spell. Benton got what he wanted by intimidating people, crushing them really, and people mistook this for power and talent.

  Jimmy and Patrick danced their duet in the show’s second act, and Benton, living up to his self-publicized reputation for ruthlessness in getting what he wanted from dancers, pitted Jimmy and Patrick against each other, made the dance a competition. And he seduced Jimmy, made him fall in love, with Patrick’s full knowledge, and got what he wanted—a dance that was a fight without fists.

  Jimmy began coming apart at the seams. One night, drunk, Jimmy smashed Patrick’s window with a metal chair. Then he ran to his car. Patrick followed, telling Jimmy he was too drunk to drive. Patrick offered to drive him wherever he wanted to go. But Jimmy wouldn’t move over to the passenger’s seat, and Patrick got in the car.

  They drove out beyond the city, Jimmy drunk and self-lacerating, Patrick trying to calm him. It was late, and miles away on a deserted part of the highway Jimmy drove into a tree, shooting across the other dark lane that led back to town.

  It was hours before anyone found them. Jimmy died, Patrick’s legs were both broken, the right kneecap smashed. He had the first of three operations, and when he was well enough he went back with Maria to New York.

  But later, Benton kept coming around. It was as if Jimmy’s death had bound them together. Maybe this was why Patrick couldn’t resist, refuse Benton. There was no telling him not to see Benton, even though seeing him made him unhappy, reopened wounds, seemed the cause of Patrick’s dropping the new plans he’d started to make. Patrick got into the culture of rough sex, whatever you call it, with Benton. Maria says they left New York together for many months. She doesn’t know where they went. But Patrick came back alone. This would be just before he met you. She doesn’t think—and I don’t either—that Patrick sees him anymore. But he carries this, Robert. And I think that as the acting got harder, perhaps, he started acting out all of the stuff from the past again. And you see, he’s so ashamed. Not about being gay, maybe not even about things he’s done, but about being unhappy, despairing, he thinks it’s a sin. Patrick doesn’t believe in despair, ever, and he is despairing.

  This is bigger than me, and he loves you so much. He’s never stopped. He misses you desperately. Call him? I’m sorry.

  Irene

  I put down the letter and turned out the light. It was night but the blinds were open and the shadows of palm fronds sliced at the wall. They shifted in the wind. Such a strange sound, a rustle of cardboard, or sticks knocking together, not a sound of leaves that I knew. I lay on my bed, detached, floating somewhere on a new planet.

  Too late, it was too late. But his wretchedness pulled inside me, pulling me down through the bed and into the deep dark center of earth.

  19 The Visit

  I bought a pearl–gray Alfa Romeo. I bought a house—a Mediterranean villa–type house in Whitley Heights. I met a woman who had several key characteristics that weren’t anything like Irene. Jenny was twenty-four, and she’d already done dozens of guest spots and TV movies. She wasn’t bothered by my success. Her father wrote for TV and her mother was an agent. There was nothing tragic about Jenny. She liked aerobics and windsurfing and outdoor concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. She was quite tall, with long goldish brown hair and green eyes. Unfortunately, she constantly used three expressions: “I ask you,” “major bucks,” and “go for it.” I couldn’t help thinking that, inadvertently, they revealed her worldview. But early in our relationship this didn’t grate. I even liked it. Jenny got me to talk about why I was sad, sadness being my outstanding characteristic, one I barely attempted to cover.

  “You feel guilty about your success,” she said. We sat on a beach, and I had been gazing at the dark blue sky, the gray white-spotted water tossing underneath.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess.” Breathing the fresh sea air alongside a lovely woman, any regret stood out as an indulgence. “Don’t you ever?” I asked her.

  “Why?” she said. “I work hard at it, so do you. Why shouldn’t you be successful?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know.” From her lips, it was simple.

  “I’d like to make you happy,” she said, tipping her face.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Oh, it’d be a challenge.…”

  She had an amazing little house on Mulholland Drive with a view of the San Fernando Valley and an overgrown jungly yard. I sat outside the next morning at her redwood table drinking a cup of coffee and thinking, LA, what a beautiful, wondrous place. Then she got up and straddled me on the bench, her robe spilling open across her sturdy tanned legs. She wore leopard-print underpants and a men’s white undershirt, and my spirits sank. She had only distracted me; now all I felt was the absence of Irene.

  Everything Jenny said called up her ghost. Jenny was languorous—outside of her athletic exertions—and I yearned for Irene’s purposeful energy. Jenny always exhibited a sort of sameness, a smooth consistency, and I longed for Irene’s changeability.

  From the beginning Jenny was intent upon showing me how few strings were attached, how easy she was, and in my rush to escape Irene’s hold, I believed her. But that placidity in her disturbed me: she had no fire. I wondered whether it was the very lack of adversity in her life that did this to her, stripped her of any real passion, though this was the last thing I wanted to consider. I’d become repelled by the myth of having to suffer for art, to know life. I’d had enough of all that.

  One day in mid-March I received a message telling me to call Irene, an emergency, she said. We were stopped between takes on my last scene of the day and I had a few minutes to think. What would be her idea of an emergency? She’d reconsidered, was about to catch a plane—no.

  They would ruin me, I thought. She and Patrick together. She’d called about Patrick, attempting to pull me back in. She had sent the check ruthlessly, discarding me, but never Patrick. Now she hoped I would join her in playing, what, nursemaid to Patrick? Together they had embraced the past, nursing wounds and defeat. They had abandoned their goals, given in, sinking back into hopelessness and gray inevitability.

  My eyes swept the set rapidly—lights, cables, actors, technicians—I had it, I worked. They pined and brooded and were cynical. I had succeeded not because I was a finer actor than Irene or Patrick, nor because I was smarter or stronger, but because I refused to give up. I had managed to accept the rules.

  No. I stepped out of the lights, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. I was better off gone from Irene and Patrick, and as I always survived, I would survive losing Irene.

  He was probably hurt, perhaps badly. But I wouldn’t call him. Someone from makeup powdered me down, and I walked back on the set.

  THE SHOW AIRED IN APRIL. Jenny and I had just turned off the upstairs TV after watching the second episode of the series, then a movie starring two of Jenny’s friends. I was in the kitchen steeping tea—I’d quit drinking—when the phone rang and it was Patrick, sounding astoundingly well.

  “Hello, Robert. You were excellent,” he said, “by far the strongest actor on the show. Authoritative, that’s what I said to Irene. I’ve seen you look
better. Not on the pilot, I mean tonight.” Tonight’s show had been shot in January when I was a wreck.

  “Watch again in a couple of weeks,” I said. “I’ve regained my healthy good looks.”

  “You would. Pity for me, I lost mine in nineteen sixty-four,” and we laughed.

  His voice poured from the phone and thickened the kitchen—my spacious, well-stocked, revamped, state-of-the-art, handmade-cabinets kitchen; the cool brown Spanish tiles hummed with the weight of him. My new home wasn’t dense yet with anything in particular, and I’d thought I liked that, but when Patrick entered it—even with just his voice, it familiarized, leavened, was made replete with all of the nooks and crannies of myself that were indelibly marked by him. My past in New York was still so much realer than myself in Los Angeles and I felt something so much richer than resentment. What a classy thing to do, to just call me like this.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Well, I’m doing Proust, Irene’s doing Dostoevsky. The other big news is that I’ve been teaching for your mother.”

  “At the studio? She didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s dreadful putting those poor little girls up on pointe, but I’m loving the tap. Babies, miniscule three-year-old people. They act on me like a tonic. I no longer languish in bars afternoons. Thank goodness for your mother.”

  “That’s great,” I said, moved.

  “Oh, here’s Irene! Would you like to speak to her? Here she is.” Goddamnit, I thought.

  “Robert?” I couldn’t speak; I exhaled.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “We saw the show,” she said awkwardly, “well, both shows, and—I liked what you did. Really.”

  I rescued her, “Thanks. How was your play?”

  “Oh, fine. I enjoyed it. Well, here’s Patrick again.”

  He put his hand over the mouthpiece and mumbled something, and then got back on.

  “Her play was a disaster,” he said quietly. “Yes!” he called to her, and she must have left the room. The production was weak, the director and several of the actors weren’t good enough, although Irene’s part was exquisite for her, she was gorgeous.

  I wanted to smash something with the receiver—the entire New York theater, and the endless repetitious cycle of her noncareer.

  “How is LA?” he asked. “Please say it’s terribly glamorous.”

  “Well, it is. You should come visit,” I said, loosely referring to the undefined future which served as a convenient catchall.

  “I’d love to, when?” he said. Then he asked if Irene could come too. She might not want to, but what did I think?

  I agreed, I couldn’t resist. I needed their affirmation of my new life. I had twinges about the work, the place, the lifestyle that, especially during the call, seemed abrupt and too willed. I was exhausted from upholding my righteousness. I just wanted to see them.

  I hung up the phone and stood looking at the kitchen that buzzed with new possibility. Jenny came clomping down the stairs.

  “What’s up?”

  “We’re having visitors,” I answered, perversely intrigued by the idea of Jenny, Irene, and Patrick together, these dissimilar reflections of me. Agreeable as ever, Jenny offered to entertain them. The house had felt too big and empty, and Jenny had been glad to rent out her house and move here. It occurred to me for the first time, answering her, that this had likely been a mistake.

  THEY APPEARED TWO weeks later. I went down to the street to meet the cab.

  I’d forgotten her eyes; how the color changed according to her moods and to light—just then, navy blue lit with silver.

  “Hey,” I said. We stood awkwardly on the curb, neither one of us knowing what to do.

  The house was on the southernmost flank of the district, a cluster of homes on a hillside north of Hollywood, planned in the twenties to resemble a village in Italy. We progressed up the stairs that ascended the embankment to the front door, passing the flagstoned patio. The house was a pinkish fleshy color with a tiled roof, and ivy growing up the walls.

  “Isn’t this nice,” Patrick said.

  “Ivy … gee, you have rats?” Irene said.

  I had warned Patrick that I was living with someone, but encountering Jenny, he did a droll double take and then burst out: “You look like Irene!” For whom this comment was intended—Patrick was too discreet to utter anything he didn’t want heard—I wasn’t sure.

  We sat out on the back patio with drinks among the fruit trees and the pots of cacti Jenny had lined along the wall. Irene and Patrick were both dressed in black with jean jackets; I would see, over the next days, how Irene had gone haywire chopping necks out of T-shirts and sweatshirts, hacking sleeves and collars off blouses. She’d adopted a dark, raggy, punkish look. It had even influenced Patrick; all of his clothes were intact and neat as ever, but tended toward dark grays and blacks. They looked like a couple: twin toughs, a man and a woman, one tall and one small. They were relatives come from that dark fallen country I had left, speaking a language I could still understand, telling me, by speaking it only together, that I could never go back.

  She was thinner, and wan. I noticed the fingernails of her small lovely hands were bitten. Her hair curled over her shoulders, and her skin gave off such an impression of softness, suppleness, tenderly colored, delicate as a flower. The tough clothes only enhanced the effect: a soft, lost girl. She seemed older in her demeanor, though. Tired and impatient. But yearning somehow, hoping, longing. Sometimes she almost seemed to be listening to a voice inside, or for a signal from an invisible faraway place. In my own impatience, I had tried to make her a cipher, attempted to explain her intricacies to myself as a self-canceling flaw. Now her emptiness seemed only empty as water is clear. In my sentiment, in my lyricism, watching her eyes, I thought of deep, reflective pools.

  The first evening Jenny and I took them to a party in Malibu, celebrating the launching of a new movie magazine. We went in Jenny’s orange Bug, which she drove, with me and Irene squished together in the back, Irene holding both arms tightly over her chest, as though not entirely sure I wouldn’t molest her. When we pulled up by the gatehouse at the entrance to the estate she looked so disdainful I thought she’d start sucking her teeth. Patrick was fairly perky. At least he appreciated the beauty of the party’s setting: a great lawn flowing out from a Tudor-style home and ending in a pool overlooking descending cliffs and spectacular ocean. In the sky the last colors drawn by the setting sun were filtered by lights within paper lanterns strung in diagonals across the lawn to the pool. People held glasses sloshing with liquid and clothes rose and settled in the breeze.

  Inside, it was mobbed. Bette Midler came over the speakers and people were draped along the white couches, the stairs, and the walls beside the huge windows and the bright abstract paintings.

  “My, my, my,” Patrick said contentedly. Well-built young men and women in skimpy swimsuits strolled through the crowd with trays of drinks.

  A woman in a chartreuse crocheted number stopped in front of us and said, “Champagne?”

  Irene took one, Patrick smiled at her and said, “Doesn’t that look good.”

  “Oh, Robert,” he whispered to me, “I think she would send someone for morphine if we wanted it.”

  I laughed. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I’ve missed you, Robert. I think it’s too exciting, your being famous. Traveling as you do in the upper hemispheres of—oh my God, there’s that woman who had an epileptic seizure in the surf and drowned years ago on Doctor Kildare,” and he drifted toward her.

  I found Irene sitting outside on the steps leading down from the house.

  “Hi,” I said, standing over her.

  She looked up. “Hi.”

  I sat down and together we looked over the lawn and the pool to the ocean beyond.

  “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

  “I’m not feeling especially social.” She wore a black shirt with the sleeves gouged out, and as she ra
ised a hand to push back her hair I could see the whole beautiful line of her arm, her shoulder, and glimpse the swell of the side of her breast. I thought, Look, I’ll go get the car keys from Jenny and if we take off from here at a dead run, then drive fast, we can get as far as Tijuana before anyone knows we’re gone.

  She sighed. “He wanted to come.”

  “What? Patrick?” She nodded.

  “It’s hard seeing you,” she said.

  I put my hand on her arm, and she didn’t pull away. It had been easier to distinctly remember her body than her face. I could still close my eyes and exactly recall almost everything. I could see the exact shape of her knee, like no other knee, remember her feet. Sometimes I’d lie in bed nights remembering her body, amazed by how present it could seem.

  “Tell me how you’ve been,” she said, and looked up at the sky, speechless.

  “How are you handling this?” she said finally.

  This? “You do your work,” I said, “you don’t go for the hype.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You don’t buy what people say about you. You don’t jump every time somebody calls from publicity.”

  “Oh.” She wasn’t much interested.

  “Why don’t we go,” I said. I went to find Jenny and Patrick.

  I spotted him sitting forlornly off by himself, tucked away behind a table laden with cheeses and fruit and an enormous, abandoned gold lamé purse.

  Over the next three days I saw Irene and Patrick only for dinner, always at a restaurant, and was glad I didn’t have to see much of them, glad to have work as an excuse. In their dark clothes, thoroughly unimpressed with anything LA had to offer, they made me wonder why they’d come. Patrick tried to have a good time, even if Irene didn’t. Jenny showed them around while I worked. At night after dinner, as we were settling into bed, I would (seemingly) nonchalantly quiz her on the events of the day.

  The first night, with a casual counterfeit yawn, I asked, “How was today?”