A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  She was silent.

  “If it didn’t happen then, it would have happened another time,” she said. “But don’t ever tell him. Promise you won’t. Promise me, Robert.

  “When it got really bad, you know what?” she said. “Sometimes I wished he would die too. Because I couldn’t leave him. Because that would have spoiled an idea I had of myself.

  “You think I don’t understand obsession?” she said. “You think I don’t know what it means to have to do something with all of your might? Not to be able to consider anything else? That’s me. That’s me and acting. But it all got—mixed up. With men. With Andre and you and Patrick. Why the hell didn’t I go ahead with starting a theater myself? If that’s what I wanted. If that was the only way I thought I could have it. I was waiting for you. Always waiting for somebody else.

  “Waiting for somebody else to say yes, I can live?” she said. “I’m allowed to do the only thing that I can?”

  “You don’t hate me,” I said.

  “No.”

  A coldness went up my spine and constricted my skin. “I think he will die,” I said.

  “No, he won’t,” she said.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY he took a turn for the worse, and on that day of all days I got held up at the studio. Then, coming out, I couldn’t face it. I wanted to escape from him and Irene and my mother as I’d never wanted to escape before.

  I hadn’t told them exactly what time I’d be there. I parked in a lot a couple of blocks from the hospital and went into a bar.

  What did I want? For none of it to have happened. To get back. To not have to live with myself. To not know.

  To not have done what I did.

  But if he lived I could help, and only in that way could I undo it.

  If he died? God knew.

  A guy at the other end of the bar was having a conversation with his glass. Saying, “How are you tonight?” Listening. “Yes? I’m very well too.” Listening. “Well, I’m usually free on Wednesdays.”

  I got up and left.

  Between the buildings were hills in the distance, the scraggly outline of trees against the sky, the houses all lit up against the night, holding life.

  Irene jumped up. “He’s stable,” she said.

  It was ten o’clock and I had to convince the nurse to let me go in. But my legs shook.

  I opened the door and stood just inside, not even looking at him. Just standing there, being with him. I finally approached, and then I saw that his eyes were open.

  It seemed he could not turn his head. I couldn’t tell from where I stood if he was looking at me, if he knew I was there. He had to know.

  I stepped up to the bed. His cheeks were sunken, the purple and red colorations extended from his forehead down to his chin. But those eyes. Open and staring at me. I put my hand on his forehead, on the hurt, just lay it very softly there. His eyes opened a little wider.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “Patrick, you don’t—”

  “Forgive me,” he said again.

  “I forgive you,” I said.

  Very faintly, he smiled. “I forgive you too.”

  21 Home

  Irene and I stood in a loft in Little Tokyo, near downtown LA. Masses of wiring and boxes and rickety office equipment littered the space. Thick dust lay in clumps on the floor and coated the windows.

  “Are they responsible for hauling this stuff out of here if we take it?” Irene asked.

  “Could be we could use some of it,” I said.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “It could work.” Walls could come down or go up. It was large enough.

  Irene suddenly turned to the windows where rain that had threatened since morning began lightly smearing the glass. An unusual rain in California in May. “I hope he’s enjoying it,” she said.

  Patrick had insisted on keeping the apartment in New York. “If for nothing else,” he said, “but an occasional break from the weather here.”

  My mother had agreed to send Patrick’s and Irene’s things. Patrick rested at the house, attended by Herbert and Maria, who had flown in for the week. Physically, there would be no long-term damage, but we were acutely aware of the precarious nature of the psychic trip back. We could only believe, and take it a day at a time.

  In the weeks before Patrick got out of the hospital, we saw what to do. One day I had a revelation.

  “Once in a cemetery in Key West,” I told Irene, “I saw these two grave markers. A man and a woman, a married couple. Two flat slabs in the grass, one above the other. And beside them was another slab, another guy, and his marker said, BELOVED FRIEND.”

  Irene considered. “Touching,” she said. “But it would be nicer if, down the lane from our ramshackle theater—” we had not yet hit upon celluloid city as the place. “Perhaps a mile,” she continued, “or maybe two from our house, he lived with a guy. Someone for him. I mean, in lieu of your rather macabre ménage.” She shot to her feet. “I’m calling Roger.”

  We’d been at home. “I can’t believe that his address book has been sitting upstairs and I never thought of it!” she said. “Betcha I find the number.”

  She had. Roger came down. Who knew whether Irene’s matchmaking would take. But one thing we felt sure of was that Patrick’s secrets had to be dragged into light. And Roger was, well, hope. Patrick had visited San Francisco every Christmas to see him. Irene and I were hope, and Roger was too.

  So there would be Roger and Maria and Herbert and my mother and us, shoring him up.

  “And psychotherapy,” Irene insisted as part of the deal.

  He shored us up too. As soon as he could sit up and take nourishment he had begun to complain. “So I survived,” he said. “If I don’t get out of this room by tomorrow I’ll die of boredom.”

  On that irresistable, charismatic surface level of his, he remained the same.

  “We wouldn’t have wanted a totally different Patrick,” Irene said.

  As we began planning a theater, I remembered the inheritance Patrick should have received on his thirtieth birthday.

  “He didn’t get it, did he?” I asked Irene.

  “Well, no,” Irene said. “But he’s supposed to come into a slightly lower sum when he’s thirty-two.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “We could have used that money.”

  WE’D NEVER IMAGINED starting a theater in LA. But life was like that. You never knew. Rents were cheaper here, I had the house, and it seemed fitting that TV would finance the project.

  It was daunting, impossible, and the right thing to do. Miracles happened. Who knew? We could fail. But nothing I’d ever done had felt as important.

  Irene raced around the space marking out areas by dragging her foot through the dust. “Box office. Office. Reception. Storage. Dressing rooms. Light booth. House. Stage.”

  She stood stage center. She wore white and a big pair of shades, never mind rain.

  “You know,” she said, “Monroe didn’t make it until twenty-six.”

  “You may have to settle for twenty-seven,” I said.

  “To be or not to be,” she declaimed. “Can I play Hamlet?”

  I stood in the house, watching her.

  Dropping down to her knees she yelled, “Stell-lahhh! Hey. Good acoustics.”

  I laughed. “Not really.”

  “Come on, pard’ner,” she said, “pull up a chair and let’s talk.” We settled into a couple of desk chairs. “Well?” she said.

  I was letting it sink in. “It’s the best space we’ve seen.”

  “I’m really seeing it,” she said. “Little Tokyo. Gee. We’ll make our own little New York.”

  “It’s a start,” I said.

  She took off her shades and closed her eyes, feeling the place and listening to the rain. “When I was a kid,” she said, “about nine, I was in a variety show at the Methodist Church. I was one of a bunch of little girls who got to dance in alpine dresses—in Kansas! In the middle of summer. But they
set up these lights, and they put makeup on us. I got lipsticked and rouged. Like a woman. God, I looked and looked in the mirror. And I remember whirling under the lights. How I loved it. The brightness. The heat. I wanted to do it forever. I didn’t want it to stop.

  “After the show there was a picnic out in this weedy sort of desolate place. Everything that day looked so charged. I danced in the weeds, and everybody looked beautiful, these old funky cowboys who sat on the back of their trucks, the church ladies, a couple of dogs, and the sun beat down and after I couldn’t dance anymore I walked around talking to everybody and then I sat down by my mother and I remember seeing her like for the first time, separate from me. Somehow I felt who she was in a new way.

  “The lights were still glowing inside me so that everything and everybody was intensified, set off, perfect. There. I’d never felt more connected and more apart. Later, acting in high school it clicked, you know, that feeling for the world, that love, and how I could express it. But I think I first felt it that day in the church.”

  She leaned back and the office chair creaked. “Oh, good,” she said, “it reclines.” She stretched back and yawned.

  She ran her hand down her body, then looked at me from under half-lidded eyes. “Cleopatra,” she said, “queen of the Nile. Antony, kiss me.”

  I did.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I would like to thank my brilliant agent, Julie Barer, and my equally brilliant editor, Kathy Pories. I would also like to extend special thanks to Steven Varni, and to the following friends and colleagues for their invaluable information and support: Jeff Allen, Risa Allyn Bell, John DeVito, Carol Dines Rothenberg, Andrea Frank, Oakley Hall, Sands Hall, Bob and Meg Harders, Erika Insana, J. Patrick Landes, D.O., Michelle Latiolais, Peter Mendelsund, Richard Millen, Frank Miller, Margot Norris, David Parker, Jonathan Rabinowitz, Dianne Ramdeholl, Suzan Sherman, Daniel Stewart, Lynn Varley, Ann Varni, Suzanne Varni, Katherine Vaz, Tom Wallace, and Jeannette Watson.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2003 by Varley O’Connor. All rights reserved.

  Excerpts from Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year are used by special

  permission of the author and Samuel French, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN 9781565126886