“What else?” she said. “What else are you planning to tell him?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“For God’s sake, Robert.”
“What?”
“He was shitty in that show tonight, and you’re not going to tell him?”
“Why should I?”
“He has more talent than both of us put together,” she said. “But it won’t amount to anything if he doesn’t take it seriously.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“I will. But he needs to hear it from you.”
“Why from me?”
“He listens to you.”
I stared at her, miffed. I did not feel like getting sucked into Irene and Maria’s dire need to look after Patrick. I hated how everything this winter was a crisis. Apparently he had an affair with the mysterious Benton that did not work out well. Why should I watch for his reappearance? I didn’t even know Maria, and as far as I did, everything about her struck me as exaggerated. Patrick was already given to drama and posturing; he didn’t need any encouragement.
“Where do you think he went at Christmas?” Irene asked.
“He went to LA,” I said.
“But that isn’t where his family lives,” she said, “and why was he so secretive about it?”
“He said he went to visit a friend, Irene. Friend, I imagine, meaning lover. And despite his protestations, you have surely figured out that Patrick doesn’t get along with his family, yes?”
“Why wouldn’t he say he was visiting a lover?”
I picked up her beer and drank it, then beckoned for the check. “Oh c’mon, you know how he values all things—genteel. It fits in with his general attitude, as if he’s above sex. Christ,” I said, “can we get a check?”
Irene wasn’t in a hurry. “I just feel so worried about him, since Christmas. He doesn’t seem right.”
“Why don’t you stop it. Why don’t you stop worrying about Patrick and Neal and the business—God, Irene, sometimes these days I don’t even know you.”
“Well, I don’t know you,” she said stonily.
“Translation?”
She looked off at the empty dance floor. “I can’t talk to you anymore. You’re not interested in talking to me.”
“Oh, right, I’m the problem.”
“I make you deeply, fundamentally uncomfortable, don’t I, Robert?”
“What’s that supposed to—”
“Forget it,” she said, “can we forget it?”
“Fine with me.” We got the bill and paid it and left.
The night was bone-crushingly cold. We walked in silence down Broadway.
“You’re getting a cab?” I asked. I could walk home.
“Yes,” she said.
I turned west, but feeling guilty checked back and saw a cab go shooting right by her. She hadn’t hailed it, only walked onward, small in her long black cape.
I ran to catch up with her, “Irene,” and she turned as though I had slapped her. “Aren’t you getting a cab?” I asked.
“I’m walking.”
“It’s cold, it’s late,” I said. “You can’t.”
A cab pulled up and I opened the door. Once she was inside I leaned in.
“Drop it, will you?” I said. “I’ll call you.”
She turned away.
I walked home as quickly as I could, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind raced. I didn’t know who was wrong or right. I fell asleep and then a snatch of conversation replayed itself in my head. Maybe I was wrong for distrusting Maria, but I didn’t see why I should trust anyone. Then I couldn’t feel at all who I was or how I felt and my pulse and my heart boomed in the dark. I put on the light, listened to a couple of Lou Reed songs on the radio, stared at the walls of my ugly, ugly room.
IRENE AND I TALKED on the phone the next week and ended up fighting again.
“Give me your opinion,” she said. “I want to break with Lynn Singer, and I’m thinking of quitting the show. Lynn’s doing nothing for me, and Gina will die in that show.”
“There’s an expression, Irene,” I said, sighing. “A bird in the hand is worth—”
“You don’t understand! I can’t take this anymore! I have to do something.”
“Calm down,” I said.
“Calm down,” she repeated, and quietly seethed.
“This business is hard,” I reminded her. “Did you just get that news?” To her silence I added, “Look, if you didn’t want my advice, then why did you ask?”
“You’re so fucking selfish, Robert. I think you’ve found your true niche in directing. Egomaniacs seem to flourish there,” she said, and hung up.
As it happened, her show closed three days after our disagreement. There was a small fire backstage, damaging props and a section of the curtain, and management used it as an excuse to cancel.
It closed during the first week of April when everything had thawed. The city was liquid and then there was one final freeze, a shower of snow and a few days of suspended, soul-testing cold. Brenda’s husband had gone out of town and we’d planned to spend the night together alone, but Patrick had tickets to a new show for all of us and Brenda wanted to go. Afterward, at Jimmy Ray’s, Patrick was courtly; Brenda liked him as I knew she would. Irene, chain-smoking, carried on about how rotten the show was—the acting, the directing, the acts were too long.
Outside it was too cold to even walk a block, and Brenda and I got into a cab. She said, “Boy, the play wasn’t that bad.”
“Irene isn’t herself lately,” I said. “She isn’t usually negative. She’s been under stress. Career stuff. I think you’d really like her if you got to know her.”
Outside the door to my apartment, Brenda said, “You’re a little in love with her, aren’t you?”
I got her inside, pulled her to me, and said, “I’m a little in love with you.” We stood kissing, leaning against the door, still in our coats. “Put on music, light candles, distract me. I’m feeling guilty,” Brenda said.
My spirits sank, momentarily, with the thought that there wasn’t an act in the world that did not carry with it complications.
I had a radio and plenty of candles. I lit a dozen of them and set them around the room. I’d bought champagne, and while I poured it she put up her hair. It would come down, littering the bed with the bobby pins she’d used. But we tried to keep it up since frequently, in the heat of passion, I’d flip her over, and the next thing I knew she’d be crying “Ow, don’t, you’re pulling my hair.” I wondered if this occurred with her husband, though I assumed that it didn’t. I pictured him as supernaturally graceful, making love in a suit.
Before we fell asleep I got up and blew out the candles, and as bluish light leaked through the blinds and I felt her warmth, we drowsily made love again. Then I awoke and the room was fully lit from the open blinds in the living room. She slept soundly, her hair scattered darkly over the sheets. I put on my shirt and went to close the blinds, when the phone rang. It was Irene.
“Robert?”
“Just a sec, okay?” I set down the phone; I was standing in the freezing cold foyer without any pants.
I shut the bedroom door gently so Brenda wouldn’t wake up.
“Were you asleep?” Irene said.
“No. What’s wrong?”
“Well, last night Patrick and I, we went to Bradley’s.” I glanced into the kitchen at the clock; it was already noon. “So it was late by the time I got home.” She heaved a long sigh. “You know, usually, Patrick comes in and walks me to the door, but it was really late and I told him to go on—” I thought she’d been attacked, hurt. “And I went in,” she said, “and….”
“Irene? Are you okay?” My heart pounded.
“Oh yeah, yes. But, you see, I came in last night and Ruth had tried to kill herself. I found her, and I had to get her to the hospital, and now, really, everything’s okay, and I came back here and cleaned everything up. But then I thought I should try to sleep—I don’t feel like
I can.”
“You want me to come down?” I said. I was already calculating how long it would take.
“Would you?”
“Yeah, listen. Give me half an hour.”
“Thanks, Robert. I’m just—”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay, bye.” Clean it up, she had said. Then there had to be blood. I took a quick shower, then I sat on the bed and kissed Brenda lightly.
“Oh, hi,” she said, putting her head in my lap.
“Brenda, wake up.”
She blinked, “Why are you dressed?”
I told her and she sat up, hugging a pillow to her chest, “But why do you have to go? She’s not lying there and dying at this moment, is she?”
I stood and said, “I’ll see you later.”
“No, you won’t. I’m at tremendous risk being here, you know that. I don’t have all day.”
“Then I’ll talk to you later.”
Brenda got up and strode past me and into the bathroom. I followed her, but the door closed and was locked.
The shower went on and I left, thinking, well, that could be that. I didn’t give a damn. There was crunchy ice on the front steps; the air was very cold, stinging my face, and I felt that freezing sensation inside my nose. The scant row of trees lining the street, each one small, ever struggling, wore icy jackets that sparkled in the sunlight.
Irene opened the door to the freezing apartment in a T-shirt and jeans. I looked down at St. Martin and saw the short fur on his back being ruffled by air coming from somewhere behind them. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” I kissed her on the cheek. I heard a sound like the tinkling of bells. “You have the windows open?” I asked, closing the door. I went past her to the first room off the hall, a sort of cloakroom, and saw the long curtains flapping. The window was open wide; next to it hats hung on the wall, and many scarves were waving in the breeze. I shut the window, and as I did, saw that one of the scarves had tiny bells sewn to its hem; when the window was down the sound stopped. She stood in the doorway. “Go put something on,” I told her.
“I felt I should air out the apartment,” she said.
We went to the next room, her room, and while I closed the window she took the photographs off her footlocker and rummaged for a sweater. “Look what Patrick got me last night,” she said, indicating a bunch of violets in a small crystal vase.
I closed the rest of the windows, and in the bathroom I saw that the shower curtain was missing. I knew that whatever she had done she’d done here, although there were no other signs. It smelled of disinfectant.
Irene sat on the edge of her bed, in a sweater and socks, St. Martin looking up at her with what so appeared to be a sympathetic expression that I almost liked him. I sat at her other side, put my arm around her. She felt tense and was shivering. I got her back against the pillows and pulled up the blanket, dislodging St. Martin, who screeched at me and hissed. “Glad to see he hasn’t changed,” I said, and she laughed a little.
“I’m so happy to see you,” she said. She had her knees drawn up and she buried her face in the blanket that covered them.
“Are you warmer?” I asked her.
“Yes,” and she looked back at me.
“You could have called me last night,” I said.
“No.”
“Or you could have called Patrick to come back.”
“No, well, he said that he wasn’t going home. He was planning to stay out. I wouldn’t have called him anyway. There wasn’t time. She’d—cut her wrists. She was lying in the bathroom, out cold.” She shuddered. “I thought she was dead, and her hair … her beautiful dark red hair ... was matted with blood.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I reached her mother on the phone,” Irene said. “She’s flying in tonight.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yes.” Her eyes were glassy, steel blue; their light flickered, dimmed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It never crossed my mind that she would do this,” she said, “that she was capable of this.” She gazed at the floor. “I mean, there was always something wrong with her, one thing or the other. But she’s had a good career—she won an Obie, did you know that? A few years ago. Things hadn’t gone well lately—God.” She bit off the word, made a fist of her hand, pressed it to her mouth, and brought it down; when she looked back at me her eyes changed again, suddenly wary. She had wanted me here, but all that had happened between us over the winter came up like a wall.
A lump rose in my throat. “Can you sleep?” I asked her.
“I think so.”
“Look, I’ll stay though,” I said. “I’ll just sit in the living room for a while to be sure you’re okay.”
“You will?”
“Yes.” I stood.
“Robert? Thanks.” She settled into the bed and I shut the door gently.
I thought of Ruth’s hair. I thought Irene was strong and brave. I thought that whatever our differences, every time I saw her act I fell in love with her again. It all made me sad. I looked out the windows down to the street. Shadows lay on the sidewalks. People hurried by, bent from the cold. Watching her act was like watching a girl out in dark space alone. Fearless. Electric with life. I thought of the violets Patrick had bought her, and how he had said he was staying out. And then I realized what should have been obvious. He’d been going to pick someone up. I had never really considered how it was for him being gay, and now as I did the idea of shame rose in my mind; shame coexisted with secrets. It didn’t make sense in reference to Patrick, and yet it did.
I thought again of Ruth’s hair, which was thick, very rich in color, and remembered once thinking that it didn’t fit her, her paleness, her thinness—as though it were heavy, as though all of her strength had been sapped to sustain it.
Now everything seemed deflated, drained of hope, by what she had done, and I hated her for it.
• • •
I LEARNED SOMETHING that night. I started to see how much my love for Irene had to do with what she was and what I was not, with her goodness, her generosity. She was, in fact, hopeful, as it was so hard for me to be. It was her hopefulness that let her down—her gorgeous, unbridled sense of expectation.
Spring came, and then it was June—the streets clean and golden. One day Irene and I went to the island park at Hudson and Bank to rehearse a scene. She wore a blue-and-white flowered halter dress, and the traffic and the bench we sat on all became part of the scene. Later we walked to the river, where people sunned on the piers.
“Irene,” I said, “Patrick and I are going to Andre’s theater to work for the summer.” I’d dreaded telling her.
“Oh,” she said, solemn, but seemingly fine.
“You’re okay?” I said.
“I’m okay.” I walked her home, went uptown—and as I opened my door the phone rang.
“Hi,” she said, “it’s me. I’m going too, he just called.”
“Did you have a premonition?” I asked. “You took it awfully well.”
“No, I didn’t. Patrick told me yesterday morning. I threw things and cried for two hours.”
“Well, he could have told me he told you, or you could have told me.”
That night we sat out on Patrick’s fire escape, the metal still warm, the smell of onions and garlic wafting out from the kitchen where he was cooking dinner. From the gardens voices rose and the sweet scent of flowers and trees. She was still wearing her blue dress, pulled up and bunched at her thighs so her legs were free—both of us hanging our legs off the side, holding the rail. Patrick was whistling. She had a sweater draped over her shoulders. Her knees were tan in the semi-darkness. The light behind her haloed her hair. It was a night perfectly free and open, cut loose from time. I thought that she felt as I did, as though the building behind us, the rail at our arms, the slats under our legs, were the flimsiest props and sets. Only we were real, suspended together in the clear, windless night: “
Oh God,” she said. “Robert, it’s summer.”
6 Summer School
Crispins was part of a summer arts festival scattered across three villages in Litchfield Hills, Connecticut, a bucolic place of rolling hills, farmland, and picturesque country inns. We bought bicycles, and rented a house down the lane from the small sign in the shape of an arrow reading DRAMA, THIS WAY. The house was at the edge of the larger of the three villages, where the theater was located. The arrow pointed the way to the yellow brick building that housed the stage and the theater’s offices, not far from our rehearsal space in the town community center. The costume and scenic shops were closer to the main street, back doors flung open to an arbored walkway, in a huge white barnlike clapboard structure, a former hotel, whose upper stories housed apprentices and staff. The total area of Crispins covered only a mile, but in summer it jumped with activity. And in the mornings or the long afternoons, you would see Andre in his jaunty summer cap and jacket with the epaulets strolling his domain.
The attention he had lavished on Crispins for thirty years—people called it his wife and child—had paid off in its steady, quiet success, its understated prestige. Actors would kill to work there, but if Andre didn’t like a person for whatever reason, even murder couldn’t get him a job. Once there, we were all members of a quasi-extended family in a sort of summer camp for actors. “Here,” Andre said in his opening address to the company, “star and novice alike, young and old, work together shoulder-to-shoulder for the love of the play.” If the egalitarian ideal was not the reality, there was nonetheless an atmosphere of camaraderie. Everyone had left their regular lives and lived together, and, because Andre had handpicked each of us, we were a congenial group. Too congenial, perhaps.
We didn’t all last until the end of the summer, as it turned out.
OF THE THREE OF US, my contract was the best going in. I was hired as a member of the Young Company, and did six roles that summer, the most valuable acting experience I yet had. Andre employed Patrick for the Main Stage. Bryan Johannes, the summer’s leading man, was quite tall (not as tall as Patrick), and was breezy and dapper. Patrick was his standby—though in a stock season of short runs, Andre never intended Patrick to go on in Bryan’s roles. Patrick was there for insurance, but mostly to play several bit parts.
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