Irene took my hand across the table and then took Patrick’s. “Do you know, it’s the beginning,” she said. “I know it now, there isn’t anything I would rather do.”
“I wouldn’t mind being kept by somebody fabulously wealthy and attractive who adored me to distraction,” Patrick said.
“Oh, be quiet.” She lifted his hand and then put it back firmly on the table.
“Soon it will be a new year,” she said. She was feeling fervent and sentimental and this was her night. She looked almost plain in her street clothes, face clean of stage makeup. “And this is the year we will always remember, since this is the year it is all going to start.”
She poured what was left of the wine into our glasses and offered a toast, saying too too dramatically, her head high, eyelids at half-mast, “It will be heaven in seventy-seven.” We laughed and drank. We got into our coats and went out in the snow and walked in the middle of the white street, where the snow was thick and there weren’t any cars. Patrick whistled a plaintive tune, testing the air, and Irene ran up ahead trying to slide, ran back and told us that it wasn’t slick enough yet, and made Patrick give her a ride on his back. She climbed up on the hood of a car and put her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist. He groaned, but she could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds.
4 Histories
“You had to be a tea bag?” Irene said. “How’d you do that?” She relit the joint and passed it across the table to me.
“I don’t know, you hunch down. You sort of—expand.”
“Like they’re putting you in the hot water?”
“Yeah. Oh, I remember. My arm was the string.” I took a hit off the joint and got down on the floor and demonstrated. We were at Patrick’s, and Patrick was ignoring us. The table was littered with half-eaten cartons of Chinese takeout and Patrick sat apart from us, in an easy chair near the couch. I had been telling Carnegie Mellon stories to Irene; Patrick was listening to the John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman rendition of “Lush Life” for about the tenth time, looking dour. He never smoked dope. The ashtray on the small table in front of him overflowed with butts. I got up from the floor. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, Patrick.”
Irene turned in her chair and looked at him. “Hey,” she said.
He didn’t answer and she looked back at me and shrugged.
“How many times you gonna listen to that song?” I asked him. It ended, he got up and put it on again, sat back down and lit another cigarette. I sat down at the table again and relit the joint. Patrick’s place was one large room, with an alcove for his bed. He had a cut-glass decanter for sherry, silver flatware, a subscription to the New Yorker. The apartment was exactingly neat, except for the shelves on brackets surrounding his bed, which were so overloaded with books that they threatened to topple and kill him in his sleep. Dominating the main room was a glossy painting of the Ansonia Hotel, bought during the run of his first Broadway show.
“What was I saying?” I said to Irene.
“Um … I don’t remember.” She dug an egg roll out of a crumpled paper bag.
“Isn’t that cold?” I asked her. “Tea bags. Then I had to be a block in a baby’s playpen.”
“I don’t get what that has to do with acting.” She studied the egg roll. “This is gross, why am I eating this? Robert, why am I eating this?”
“How should I know?”
“You want it?”
“No, I don’t want it.”
“You want it?” she said to Patrick. He glowered; she giggled. He ate practically nothing, subsisted for days on champagne and Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream.
It was mid-November, several weeks before Irene went on in the show. That evening we had performed our scene in Andre’s class to unanimous acclaim. Andre said Irene was a “marvelous, magical little gamin,” I was “coming along,” and Patrick “was better here than in anything we have seen him do yet.” We weren’t surprised. But after Andre spoke to us, he dismissed Irene and me and left Patrick sitting alone in front of the class. Patrick looked happy, loving the extra attention. Andre said, “Isn’t it so that if an actor has a quality, naturally he should let it be? That is, if he comes to me and I see that he can be sensitive, let us say, at the drop of the hat, this we will not need to work on.” Patrick shifted in his chair. “It would be fair for me to say please, do not bring in scenes in which you are sensitive, yes? I would want him to work on the opposite quality.” Patrick agreed. “You are very good at style,” Andre said. Patrick said, “Thank you.”
“Many actors,” Andre said, “do not understand style. From now on you’ll please bring me Odets, or Miller. Maybe some nice Michael Weller.”
Patrick inclined his head as though he couldn’t quite hear. “Realism?”
Andre nodded, “The kitchen, the sink. It is time.”
Patrick’s great shoulders drooped; his chest caved in toward his spine.
“Or,” Andre said, “give me kings. Give me Shakespeare, but please. Do not do any longer what all of us know you can do.”
Irene put back the egg roll, got up from the table, and sat on the arm of Patrick’s chair. “Oh, c’mon.” She wrapped her arm around his neck and patted his shoulder. “There, there.”
“Watson,” I said. “Elaine Watson.” Earlier, we’d been discussing new names for her. I picked up our list and went and sat on the couch. “Walters isn’t bad.”
“That’s practically Walpers. Maybe I should just leave it.”
“Maybe you should,” I said, as if she had come up with a wildly original idea. I had briefly tried Bob just because my mother hated it, but soon I’d switched back.
“Scrunch over,” Irene told Patrick. She sank into the space between the arm of his chair and his lean right hip.
“Darling,” Patrick said, “you know I love you, now get up and go sit on the couch.” Instead she went to the window by the door and opened it wide; a cool rush of air swept into the room.
“We should go out,” she told us.
“Go ahead,” Patrick said, disinterestedly. His song had ended and he didn’t move to play it again; the cigarette smoke drifted out of the room. He stood, took the list from me, and ripped it up, then took it and the ashtray to the trash in the kitchen corner.
“You don’t have to do Weller or whatever,” said Irene, sitting down beside me on the couch—she took off her boots—“just do kings.”
“Yes,” Patrick said, returning, “I’ll have to do kings.”
“Richard two and three,” she said, “then the Henrys.”
“Introduce me to your father,” Patrick said to me.
“Why?” I said quickly, suddenly tense.
“Well, for obvious reasons.” My stepfather was a Renaissance scholar, and I understood that Patrick wanted to confer with him about the kings. David would be flattered; he would spend hours with Patrick and they’d become friends. I could see it, the two of them sitting up past midnight in the study, my mother looking fetching in her emerald robe, plying them hourly with steaming Turkish tea and exquisite finger snacks delivered unobtrusively, geishalike, to the door.
“No,” I said. He’d been trying to meet my parents for months. In most instances I found Patrick’s rapacious curiosity amusing, but not here. I intended to keep the different portions of my life separate, cleanly divided, one from another. There was my life in graduate school, then my life with Andre, Patrick, and Irene. My restaurant life three days a week was in a drab Ukrainian restaurant on the Lower East Side. There was my sex life, consigned to the depths and shadows of department stores. Distinct, things were easier. It was difficult, for instance, to believe I was an actor destined for greatness while wielding a sponge across the slimy surface of a table at lunch hour. I told people I was a student of law. I sat back against Patrick’s couch and acted impassive. Irene sat closer to Patrick, her denimed legs tucked neatly underneath her. They started to speak as though I wasn’t there. Patrick propped his chin on the steeple he’d made of
his hands.
“Has he told you anything about his parents?”
“Not much,” she said, frowning and trying to look like a scientist.
“His mother is supposedly young and incredibly beautiful,” he said. “Name of Marilyn, as in Monroe. She was a chorus girl when he arrived,” he continued, nodding at me. “He was practically born in a trunk.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. Irene looked rapt.
“His stepfather is eminent for his knowledge of Shakespeare, they travel all over the world. These are sophisticated, interesting people and yet—” He lowered his voice. “He keeps them hidden away in New Jersey. They live in Fort Lee for God’s sake, and I’ve never even seen them.”
“Well, Robert, really,” she said to me, playing along.
“Oh, you’ll see,” Patrick said, as if warning her of the fatal defect in my character. “The next time he has a good part in a show, heed the way he encourages you to come on a Thursday, and how Thursday will never be the night the parents appear.”
“Why?” Irene said as herself.
“I don’t hide them away,” I said to Patrick, annoyed.
“He does,” Patrick said to Irene. “You begin to imagine huge walk-in closets with padlocks, filled with skeletons, or cash….”
I HAD TO GIVE in or come off as a hopeless neurotic. I promised to take him along to Fort Lee at the end of the month, amends for Thanksgiving when I had to work. Irene was to go too, but when the day arrived she was shooting her first commercial, a before-and-after bit for a cold medication.
A little stack of annotated Penguin editions of plays about kings rested on Patrick’s knee on our trip out of the city. He studied his notes and then, from the bus, looked pacifically at the scenery. It was a vigorous November day, the sky full of wind and blustering clouds. As the bus rolled over the George Washington Bridge, I watched the boats gliding across the water below us, above us the shining cables soaring into the sky. “I might have liked the life of a scholar,” he said. “Long hours in the library, only the whispering sound of pages turning.”
“I’d have to get out,” I said. “I only lasted through college because I was an acting major and hardly had to study.”
“I suppose I’m imbalanced. All those years of staring at my body in the mirror, you know, at the expense of my mind.”
“Do you miss it?” I was thinking of my mother.
“Dancing?” He looked away, out the window. “I don’t think about it. It makes me too sad.” We rumbled past the toll booths and into Fort Lee, past the shops in back of the thick, wind-filled air, emblazoned with light. My mother had given up her own dancing after my father had left us, and her bitterness over that and all my father had cost her was still with her. He had died just last year. True to form, she’d decided it was inconsequential that I know. He had stepped out of a bar, as he did every night after leaving the theater, and into the path of an oncoming taxi. It swerved but he fell, hitting his head sharply on the fender of a parked car, dying instantly, they said. I heard five days later, when David called me against my mother’s wishes. Since then, I’d kept a layer of coolness between her and myself. As a child I’d been crazy about my mother. I couldn’t remember being unaware of her beauty: her straight dark hair, cut at an angle so it sliced across her face, her sharp brown eyes, her lush body.
When I was in school, she’d pick me up and we’d often go into New York. At five and six I was obsessed with all things medieval. We’d go to the Metropolitan Museum. I loved armor, and she waited patiently as I circled glass cases enclosing the impressive metal men. Once, going home as the sun set—the gold light tinting her red coat orange—she stopped, touched my shoulder, and said, “I have to sit down.” We were walking along Fifth Avenue by Central Park and I followed her to a bench. She was crying. I held her hand, hating the stares of people passing by.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I will take care of you. I am your knight.”
“Oh, baby, no, I take care of you. You’re my little boy,” she said, pulling me to her.
I remember collapsing against her with relief. I’d forgotten that I was still a child, and as we got up and walked on, the world looked distinctly lighter, more hopeful than it had in all of the time that I could recall.
She’d taken a job in New Jersey selling makeup and doing runway modeling at a local department store. She’d talk about dancing again, and took classes to stay in shape. But once David, her savior, came along, dancing was “what she did as a girl.” She dedicated herself to the marriage with a fury I couldn’t understand. Suddenly our lives were thoroughly shaped by what she perceived to be his needs: We must always be quiet while David was reading; we must never make a mess because David isn’t used to children; we mustn’t speak at the table since David is accustomed to adult conversation.
When I was nine, I remember wandering into the living room where I heard their low voices. They stood facing each other, in profile. She had on her silk pajamas and he was still dressed. She moved close to him, taking his arms, and slid down along his body, dropping to her knees. “I would do anything for you,” she said, pressing her face to the base of his stomach, her arms encircling his hips. How could she? I’d thought angrily. Pledging herself to this stranger who seemed to have nothing to do with our twinship, our doubled lost lives?
MY PARENTS’ APARTMENT was in the town’s first residential high-rise, on an undeveloped expanse of brown land. It had a spectacular view of the city, all glass and cool light. As we knocked on the door I warned Patrick to take off his shoes, since my mother had covered the floors with white carpet. She herself had on four-inch heels, but these were a pair of her “indoor shoes.”
“You must be Patrick,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you.” Her dark hair gleamed, chopped into a fringe above her eyes and just north of her shoulders; she wore a stylish formfitting pantsuit in a soft shade of gray.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, kissing her cheek. “Where’s David?”
“What a beautiful home,” Patrick told her. “May I have a short tour? I’ve heard so much about you.” He followed her into the living room. He wasn’t being polite, he really liked corny middle-class things. He thought they were sweet. After poking my head into David’s study, I went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
“David’s gone out for snacks,” she announced, walking into the kitchen with Patrick smiling beatifically behind her. She put on tea, and shortly thereafter, David showed up, rumpled, a caricature of a professor. He had misplaced the list she had given him and lost a button on his best cardigan sweater in the car. “My,” he said, shaking Patrick’s hand, “you are certainly tall. I have an associate, in the history department, Saul Tabor—Marilyn, you know Saul. Saul is six-five. I believe you are taller than that.” David was five-nine or ten, a shade taller than my mother.
“Yes,” Patrick said, “I’m taller than that.”
“How tall is your father?” David asked. He took his glasses out of his pocket and put them on, for a better look at Patrick. He stood shoeless in the doorway to the kitchen in his coat, still holding a bag.
“Not as tall as I am,” Patrick said.
“You have any brothers?” David said.
“Yes, I have four.”
“How tall are they?”
“David, please,” my mother said, “you’re embarrassing Patrick.” She took the bag from him and attended to the snacks. The plan was for my mother and me to run errands while David and Patrick discussed the kings. We left them in David’s study with a snack table laden with tea and an assortment of biscuits, cheeses, and nuts.
As soon as we got out the door, she started in. “You never call me anymore.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Where did you get this horrible jacket?” She reached out to touch it—my leather—then squeamishly withdrew her hand and finished tying the belt to her trench coat. Her high-heeled boots clicked on the floor of the elevator.
“Pat
rick is lovely. I’ve seen him dance. What was it, some tacky little show by that person who thinks he’s Michael Bennett—? Anyway it was Broadway and your friend was featured. He would have to be featured, that height.” She may have had to quit dancing but she remained an expert. “You say he was hurt?”
“Knee, on a jump.”
“Shame.” We headed out of the elevator and into the parking garage.
“How was he?” I asked.
“In the show?” She unlocked the car, paused, put a many-ringed hand to her mouth: “He was—oh, very good.” She sighed. “Here, drive,” she said, tossing me the keys. “Take me to Teaneck.”
“Teaneck? What for?”
“I’ve got something to show you.”
I pulled the Dodge out as she took an Aquafilter from her purse and stuck in a mentholated Benson & Hedges; I heard the snap of her lighter. “Mom, open the window,” I said.
“Oh, sorry.” She cracked it.
“I thought you quit.”
“Well I did, I only smoke two or three a day.” I cranked my window all the way down. “Robert,” she said, “why do you insist on treating me like a leper?” I rolled it back up. I was looking forward to the drive, if we managed not to bicker. I liked driving and missed it in the city. I took a scenic route through neighborhoods nestled into hills, sloping down into a valley of parks and schools and autumn-swept woods, the streets flooded with leaves.
“Honey, are you happy?” she said.
“Mom. What kind of question is that?” As usual, she was wearing Shalimar. The smell of it was faint in the car, and mingled with the lingering scent of cigarette smoke and the smell of burning leaves outside.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“What, like a girl?”
“I suppose you wouldn’t tell me if you were.”
“I don’t like girls,” I said.
“Sure.”
“You know me so well?”
A Company of Three Page 5