A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  “Too bad,” I told him.

  The photo showed Irene in a pink spangled suit and a ten-gallon hat, swerving a horse by what looked like a barrel, two-thirds of the picture hidden by great clouds of dust. A real cowgirl, I thought.

  She reappeared, sans boots, and shooed St. Martin away. She sat down beside me on the bed with her legs crossed Indian-style, the skirt of her dress bunched up around her. I thought she smelled faintly of cinnamon. There was a run in the foot of her stocking and her hair was tossed from the wind outside. “Oh, that’s me,” she said, taking the picture—I had just realized, too late, that I was still holding it—“doing rodeo.” She studied the picture. “I set a record in Tulsa, and in my hometown I was rodeo queen. That may sound funny to you, but where I come from it’s a very big deal.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.

  She kept looking at the picture. “That’s my horse, Mercury.” She got up and put the photograph back in its place on the footlocker. “He’s dead now.” She stared down at the other pictures, then picked up the one of the woman in the field.

  “This is my mother,” she said.

  “She looks a lot like you.”

  “My mother’s dead too.” The words hung in the air. I felt I was wrong in thinking that I could get to know her. It wasn’t just Neal or the cat or the roommate—the whirl of activity I had been waiting to settle since I arrived. It wasn’t even her general demeanor—which always, since I had first noticed her in class, suggested that hers was a full, complete life, and that she, at the center, was thoroughly involved and not waiting for anything new. It had more to do with how she’d handled the pictures, how she had positioned them on the trunk like a shrine. She seemed older, like a woman with a past, although she was barely twenty-one.

  I wanted to tell her I was sorry her mother had died (I didn’t quite know what to think about the horse), but to say it seemed trite. She sat back down on the bed, again pulling up and crossing her legs, and the deep blue of her eyes, her body—the energy and heat that seemed to emanate from her—loomed larger than anything she said. The light slowly drained from the room, and as she turned on the lamp, a glow fell over us.

  She poured us glasses of wine from a gallon jug of Burgundy she kept in her room. Because her roommate was an alcoholic, Irene couldn’t keep wine in the kitchen. “Ruth,” she explained, “lives a life of catastrophe.” Today, for instance, at a go-see for a print job, she had opened her portfolio on the photographer’s desk and out scurried a frantic, undaunted swarm of cockroaches.

  “Oh God,” I said, “that’s disgusting.”

  “Yes, but it isn’t the end of the world. That’s why she was crying. For Ruth it’s representative of her entire life, that’s what she told me. I told her tomorrow we’d set off another bomb, but that didn’t cheer her up.”

  I laughed, and so did Irene. We both stopped on a dime, however, when Ruth—a bone-thin woman of maybe thirty, draped in long hair the color of an Irish setter—poked her head in the door.

  “Irene,” she said, “I’m going out,” and disappeared down the hall.

  Irene poured us more wine. “St. Martin, darling,” she said, “come and see mother.” The cat had slinked back in the room. He jumped up on the bed and settled down, curled by Irene. “Ruth’s had some wonderful work. She’s up for a play at the Kennedy Center. But she says she’s too old not to be more well known.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  She shrugged, looking shy. “I have an agent, well, just for commercials. Lynn Singer, do you know her?”

  Of course I knew Lynn Singer; she was among the better-known agents in the business. “Sure I do. Irene, that’s great.” So much for the concept of me as her mentor. Neal had undoubtedly gotten there first.

  “And I got a play. Well, for now I’m the standby, but I’m supposed to go in by the end of November.”

  “What’s the play?”

  She leaned over, reached under the bed and brought out a script and handed it to me. “It’s not Broadway, but I think it’s pretty good.”

  She was the standby for one of the leads in the most popular off-Broadway play of the year. Patrick had seen it five times, I’d seen it twice. It had both a cult following and the respect of the mainstream theatrical community. It was funny, stylish, tough, and nostalgic; one of those shows that charms everyone. How did she even get seen for the play? Lynn Singer had nothing to do with the stage.

  Patrick arrived, stooping into the room and delightedly scanning its meager contents. “What a dear little den,” he said. “You could hibernate here for the winter. Tonight, though, we’re reading the scene over champagne at One Fifth. Please, I insist. It will put us in the mood.”

  Afterward, he and I walked Irene home, and then continued to the uptown subway.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” he said as we waited on the platform.

  I was despondent; equally envious of Irene’s success and desirous of the death of Neal Parks.

  “Do you like the scene?” he asked me.

  The choice was typical Patrick; a bright, witty triangle play about love among artists, by Noel Coward, of course. In the scene I was Leo, a playwright, the close friend of Otto and Gilda, a painter and his beautiful consort. I appear unexpectedly at their garret in Paris, finding Otto out of town and Gilda alone. The following morning Leo and Gilda must break the news of their tryst to poor Otto, who does not take it well. The tone is theatrical and chic, and despite how much they rant and rave, and who sleeps with whom, you know that the three will yet carry on.

  “The scene is fine,” I told Patrick.

  “Would you rather play Otto?” he asked.

  I turned away and bought a paper, gave him half. “Here. No, I like playing Leo.”

  I looked away from him and down into the tracks where water had settled from the rain the night before; slow drips continued falling over the tracks from the ceiling above. I loved the subways in New York: the cool lonely tunnels, the sudden vibration, the sound of the trains in the distance, the lights against the wall—then the huge rush of wind as the train pounds into the station, the pfft! of the doors sliding open, and the assurance of delivery from one part of town to another, one world to another.

  Jimmy Carter was running for president and I scanned the headlines about the upcoming election. I looked over at Patrick, seated on a bench and happily reading. His unending legs were crossed at the knee and again at the ankles. He had on a black Lacoste shirt and an expensive-looking herringbone jacket. His script was rolled and tucked in the pocket. Penny loafers. In spite of his various neuroses, Patrick had a beautiful dignity.

  Patrick never competed with anyone. I, on the other hand, endlessly stacked myself up against others. For as long as I could remember, I’d had the sense of all things being just out of reach. I thought of all the times I’d waited for my father—not my stepfather, David, but my real father who’d left my mother and me when I was four and she was just twenty-two. We moved out of the city to New Jersey, where my mother’s parents lived, but every so often the first few years after he left, my father would call wanting to see me. My mother would get me ready for a weekend or a night with him. I can still remember the smoke from my mother’s cigarettes wreathing the air as we waited, the swish of her slippers on the linoleum, back and forth to the phone in her efforts to reach him; and her crushing disappointment. Me anxiously checking her face for the signs of what I soon learned was inevitable, that he wouldn’t ever come. When I was fifteen, I found out that he had moved back to New York. In an attempt to avoid child support—even though he could damn well afford it—he had been living in Atlanta. I was determined to be an actor by then and had my eye on an expensive apprentice program. He was a Broadway stage manager and I resolved to look him up and ask him for the money.

  “He isn’t your father,” my mother said. “David is your father, and if he ever hears what you’re doing, I’ll—” She didn’t finish, but glared at me, expect
ing that I would relent.

  I did not. I took the bus across the bridge and then rode the A train downtown. He met me at the stage door of the Longacre Theater and brought me inside, where he introduced me to the actors as their rehearsal dispersed for the day, the director, the stagehands—and then we went out to a bar and everyone, as in the theater, knew my father there. He had curly gray hair and although he was heavier than I had remembered, he was handsome. He patted me on the back and told me what a nice kid I had turned out to be. Men stopped by our table. I drank Cokes as I explained my interest in acting and the apprentice program I hoped to attend. “Sounds good,” he said, smiling, but people kept interrupting. He’d mentioned dinner on the phone and I thought that at dinner it would be quieter and I could ask him for the money. But he had forgotten dinner. I finally said that I needed the money and told him how much. “I haven’t got that kind of money to spare,” he said, laughing. A couple approached and sat down.

  “This is my boy,” my father said. In a little while I said that I had to go, and he told me to come back and see him anytime. I never saw him again.

  My mother married David when I was ten. She referred to him as “our savior.” We were constantly to remember how much he was doing for us, what he saved us from. I developed the conviction that my mother and I did not belong with David as his wife and son, that we lived our new lives only by a strange operation of grace and that anything—a lapse in duty, an unconscious look—could send us back to the time my mother hated, when we were continually disappointed.

  Looking down into the subway tracks I felt scorned by the universe. I was enjoying my black mood too, though, because in the script I had so far composed of my life that I expected to be overlooked, misunderstood, and then to succeed to an extent that surpassed all my hopes. I would achieve tremendous acclaim as an actor, I would be rich. I would eventually marry a ravishing genius of an actress and we’d be the modern-day Lunt and Fontanne. We would live in the Dakota, having drinks with the Bernsteins and the Lennon-Onos on quiet nights at home.

  Patrick assumed he was at least as fascinating as the Lennon-Onos, just as he was. I looked back at him, still reading the paper, sitting as gracefully on an uncomfortable bench as he might in a French drawing room. And at the sight of him I seethed with sudden, ashamed, covert resentment.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY I called him and we talked about Neal. He reminded me that the best women often had the worst taste in men. If possible, I should accept her as a friend. And so I bided my time, watching Neal on his soap whenever I happened to be home at 1:00 P.M. (his acting wasn’t bad, but his ears were definitely pointed) and putting together the puzzle of Irene Jane Walpers as much as I could. Through our rehearsals, a background emerged. Her mother had died of uterine cancer when she was twelve. Her father had bought her a horse to distract her as he threw himself into his own apparently unceasing grief. He turned Irene’s upbringing over to her great aunts, Wilma, Jean Rae, and Bonnie Lorraine, none of whom Irene had ever been close to. In high school she started to act, but upon graduation she only did rodeo and kept house for her father. Then she had a relationship with a tough, older cowboy-type guy named Hank and saw that she’d have to do something constructive with her life or she’d go crazy. Most of her friends were marrying men like Hank, having babies right away. In her town, she told me, you wouldn’t know that the sixties had ever happened. Guys went off to Vietnam, they came back or they didn’t, but nothing changed. Irene enrolled in Coffeyville Junior College, where she met Rose, her acting teacher, and everything shifted.

  Six weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday she got on a bus for New York. Rose had told her about the Actors’ Equity Association, where one could make contacts for places to live. On the day Irene met her roommate, Ruth was playing Handel on the stereo and reading the recently published diaries of Anaïs Nin; she lounged around the apartment in a gorgeous kimono. She was the fantastic opposite of Coffeyville, Kansas. The day Irene moved in, the black cat materialized on the fire escape outside of her window, underfed, an obvious stray. Irene called him St. Martin, in honor of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, whose name she had seen on the cover of the Handel recording. The name represented the endless potential of her new life. She wasn’t exactly a hick, she said, but New York—New York!

  She walked herself ragged through the hot month of August, making the rounds to theatrical offices. She was pretty and talented, but above all she was bold. She wasn’t aware of how hard it was to do what she was doing and so, very simply, she just forged ahead. She had, for example, auditioned for Andre’s class because she was there in the building and saw the auditions going on; she had no idea of Andre’s reputation or of what he could possibly mean to her career.

  It had become difficult to be seen for plays in New York on your own; having an agent was increasingly imperative. Most agents had signs reading, DON’T KNOCK! (I HAVE A DOG, HE WON’T LIKE IT) PUT YOUR PICTURE AND RÉSUMÉ UNDER THE DOOR AND WE WILL CALL YOU, and PLEASE, KNOCK AND IT’LL ONLY RUIN BOTH OF OUR DAYS. DON’T LEAVE A PICTURE, WE KNOW THEY’RE EXPENSIVE AND WE’LL ONLY THROW IT AWAY.

  I’d managed to get an agent, an old friend of my mother’s from when she was a chorus girl years ago. Harry White was about two hundred years old. He looked like his name: wavy white hair, skin so white it looked dusted with powder. The walls of his office were plastered with autographed head shots of famous dead people. I would call on him once or twice a week and we’d sit in his dark cluttered office and talk about the good old days. He was kind. Harry kept a sign posted on his door warning actors not to knock without an appointment. But if they did knock, or called on the phone, he heard them out. There were towers of résumés stapled to head shots stacked on his desk. In a passive way, he tried to get me auditions. I called him whenever I heard of a part I was right for, and he sent my credentials and picture in an envelope stamped with his name, and, nearly always, that was where it would end.

  Patrick refused to subject himself to this treatment. He attended the appropriate open interviews and auditions listed in Back Stage; he did a lot through the mail. Irene, however, had been instructed by Rose to make the rounds every day, nine to five—by 1976, an old-fashioned approach in most people’s minds. What the new approach was no one could quite say, but it had to do with connections established in vague, roundabout manners.

  Irene had made a list of every agent, casting director, nonprofit theater, and producer, and called on each one. If she failed to get an appointment she’d go back until someone would see her. She believed she belonged in the business; in her mind, there was no doubt about it. And as far as her campaign succeeded—as it did fairly well those first months in New York—her success was largely attributable to this very forthright air of entitlement and expectation. People could smell it, as they can smell doubt and trepidation. She seemed in so many ways then refreshingly unscathed, and people were drawn to that quality.

  I couldn’t be envious of Irene for long because I was also drawn to her. Once our rehearsals began, the three of us grew close, almost immediately. We skipped the interim steps of friendship and jumped to calling each other on the phone most days, seeing each other three or four times a week. We went out after class and rehearsals to Jimmy Ray’s, the Buffalo Roadhouse, the Collonades, often to Wolf’s and One Fifth. We went to parties in spacious white lofts, dingy storefronts, apartments crowning the cold black glittering rivers. Each week we saw one or two plays, despite our scant disposable incomes. We would “second act” plays, mingling with the sidewalk smokers at intermission and slipping into the theater among them, hoping to find three vacated seats.

  But before I accepted this triumvirate that was, on one key level, as unsettling as it was rewarding, I had to test, as it were, the romantic waters.

  PROBABLY CLOSE TO three weeks from our first rehearsal, a few days before we put up the scene, I went by the theater on East Fourth where Irene had a read-through of her play. This was he
r first standby rehearsal. She’d said they would be out at three.

  “Hello!” She held her script, bound in a folder, to her chest. She said good-bye to the women she had walked out of the theater with and kissed me on the cheek. “What a nice surprise.”

  “I had a class,” I told her. Behind her, through the outer glass doors of the lobby, I could see the banner spread above the doors to the house, covered with quotes from reviews, and to the sides blowups of pictures from the show. Irene’s eyes, dark blue in the clear cold air—her eyes always changed—glistened with excitement. “How’d it go?” I asked her. Boys were yelling at the gas station on the corner, and music drifted out to the street from somewhere nearby.

  “I’m too happy,” she said. I barely heard her; she spoke in a breathless stage whisper, furtively, but insistently.

  “What?” I moved closer to her—cinnamon, the warmth of her breath for a moment against my neck and ear.

  “I’m too—run.” She was off, barreling down the sidewalk, her coat like a billowing sail. I ran with her, our breaths getting louder than the sound of the traffic—the music behind us, the shouts of the boys fading into the distance, gone. We ran across Bowery and up Lafayette, west along Eighth, weaving in and out of the crowds, and I thought, God, she can run, while everything spun, my head throbbed, and I listened to the pounding of her boots.

  She cut south, in the direction of Washington Square. “Irene!” I called, falling back. How did she run in those boots? I had on heavy leather shoes and my feet felt like bricks, my cheeks warm in the air. We turned—I was running beside her again—and were in a cobbled alley, an enclave just north of the park, of converted stables and cottagey homes. Irene collapsed against a gray stuccoed wall near a door, and I staggered up to her. It was quiet. We were both breathing hard. No one else was around. Her coat was open and I didn’t think, just putting my hands on the wall at either side of her, bent my head down to her face and kissed her. I felt the cool air in my hair against my hot scalp, the heat of her lips. The wall under my hands was hard, gritty, cool; my hands were damp.