A Company of Three

by Varley O'Connor

  Stacey lived with another girl in a rented house not far from ours. I rode home leisurely, admiring the scenery with boozy sentiment. I was singing and riding no-handed by the time I got to the sign that said, DRAMA, THIS WAY. It struck me as hysterically funny, then it pissed me off, and I stopped and took it. I pulled it out of the ground—it came up with jolting ease—and tucked it under my arm. I rode quietly up the driveway, humming a couple of bars of “Goodnight Irene.” Irene and Patrick’s bikes were gone. I went inside for a hammer, and planted the sign near the porch door so it pointed to the entrance.

  Stacey’s house was closer to the farm and smelled strongly of cows. The curtains were closed but a light burned behind them. I knocked on the door.

  “Robert.” She had on a striped robe and it looked like she’d just washed her hair. “Robert, hi. How are you?”

  “Okay, Stacey. How’re you?”

  She appeared to be in shock. She kept blinking.

  “I—uh, I’m sorry about what I said to you last night at the party.”

  “Oh, that’s okay.” She gripped the sides of her robe and said, “Well—do you want to come in?”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks.” She thumped inside and I followed her into a comfortable room of colonial furniture and overstuffed chairs, but ended up sitting down at the dining-room table to its side, under an amazingly ugly wagon-wheel chandelier. I was suddenly stone-cold sober.

  “You want—can I get you something?” she asked.

  “Yes, do you have anything to drink? Anything with alcohol, I mean, or any grass?”

  She smiled. “I have both. Here,” indicating a liquor cabinet, “help yourself. I’ll be right back.”

  She thumped into a dark passageway. She was actually kind of cute, I thought. She had sort of full, pouty lips. I found a bottle of scotch and poured myself two or three fingers. On top of the cabinet was a photograph of her and her famous father standing beneath a marquee. What was it with these girls and their fathers?

  She came back and sat at the head of the table and rolled up a joint, lit it, and gave it to me.

  “Wow,” I said, “pretty good. You want some?”

  We passed it back and forth a few times. I sipped the scotch.

  “You’re really a good actor, Robert,” she said.

  “Yeah? Thanks.”

  “You study with Andre?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two years.” I felt mellow; the room was getting soft and blurry. I could still smell the cows and they smelled good.

  “I would love to study with him.”

  “He’s a good teacher.” Her hair was drier. I noticed her eyes again, what a light blue they were.

  “So you live in the city?” She had her chin propped in her hand, her elbow on the table, watching me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too, with my dad and my stepmother on Riverside Drive. Do you know my father?”

  “Yeah—well, I don’t know him, I know who he is.” I took an involuntary gander at the photograph to my side. Stacey just stared at me. She was funny, she didn’t seem to mind silences at all.

  “Why don’t you come over here and sit next to me?” I said.

  With that same peaceful acceptance she got up and thumped over, stood next to me, her hips against the table. Oh, I’m gone, I thought. I hadn’t believed I would go through with it; I’d thought I would get stoned and then ask to sleep on her couch. But her robe had come loose, or she’d loosened it so it gaped, and she didn’t have anything on underneath: I could see her crotch, for God’s sake. I reached out and pulled her onto my lap and we started kissing; I opened the robe, and said, “Where’s your bedroom?”

  We got up and I followed her down the hall. If anyone else was home there weren’t any signs. Her bedroom was neat, one narrow bed, a dresser, a chair. She took off her robe, laid it down at the foot of the bed. I came up behind her and ran my hands down her body; she had very soft skin, and the sight of her unclothed from behind was very exciting. But then she sat down on the bed, lay flat on her back, swung up her big foot—and looking down at her, she looked very small, much smaller than she had on my lap or in her clothes. It was either the cast or her body in contrast to the cast, but how she looked startled me—her smallness, her foot, as though this small girl was attached to this tremendous affliction. I sat down beside her and saw this tiny blue vein jump at her temple. I unbuttoned my shirt. She sat up, opened my belt and my jeans, and I stood up and took off my clothes, and lay down on her. Since she had laid down, there wasn’t anything even moderately romantic in it.

  Then—it must have been the moonlight—she swiveled her head away and upward, and her light blue eyes got even lighter, so pale they looked almost white, like she didn’t have any irises, and it frightened me. I took her chin with my thumb and turned her head back down and then it was okay, but my heart was pounding and suddenly the trick of her eyes and her body underneath me excited me incredibly. I lifted her hips, positioned myself, and drove into her deeply. She moaned, but I didn’t want to hear her.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  It wasn’t making love and it wasn’t even sex and soon she wasn’t even a part of it, and it was fantastic, I thought I could do it forever, going faster and harder until, from what seemed a great distance, I heard a high, shrill sound that I didn’t want to hear, that wasn’t me, but it got louder and I had to stop. She was crying.

  “What,” I said. “Stacey.” She turned her head away. “Stacey.” She wouldn’t look at me.

  I pulled out and rolled over to the side of her.

  “Hey. Stacey, come on. Stop crying. What’s the matter?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  God, I wanted to get up and leave.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. She sat up and wiped her face, and then she went down on me, and I let her. But when it was finished she stayed sort of lying on my legs and kissing them.

  “Stacey, come here.”

  I felt terrible, I felt sorry for her. I got her to come up beside me and I put my arm around her so that she was lying against me, her head against my neck. I smoothed back her hair; it was still damp and very soft, really soft silky hair; she smelled like soap and the sweat of a very young girl.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “we can do it again in a—”

  “No,” I said, “that’s all right.”

  “Sex makes me cry,” she said.

  Great, I thought. Fabulous, and as I stroked her hair, which she seemed to like so much and appreciate, I thought, What happened to her? I imagined all kinds of things, and the longer I lay there the worse I felt. I was falling into a long black tunnel of pain and if I kept lying with her and stroking her hair, I would never get out. She nuzzled me and sighed.

  “Stacey. I have to go home.”

  “Now?”

  I got up, and as I put on my clothes had a horrible thought.

  “Did I hurt you?” I asked. “Did I hurt you before?”

  “No, it’s me,” she said, moping and putting on her robe. She walked me to the door.

  “When you get back from tour the summer will be over. If I give you my number in the city, will you call?” Oh, what to say. Then she said, “Irene went with Andre, didn’t she?”

  I looked into those pale blue eyes, and knowing that she could be cunning and hurtful like I was, made my answer easier.

  “Stacey, I won’t call.”

  “Oh—”

  Then I saw that her question hadn’t been badly intended, that she said it because she liked me, and felt for me. I thought I should say something—you’re nice? You’re pretty? Don’t do this anymore with people you don’t know? Instead I said, “Well, good night.”

  “Good night.” The door shut and I heard her thump back to bed. It was cooler outside. Not much. My head hurt. Fuck it, I would go home.

  The sign remained where I’d put it. One of their bikes was parked by the porch door. It wasn’t that
late but the lights were off and I went straight to my room and to bed. In the morning when I left they were both gone.

  ENDINGS WITHIN OUR knowledge are poignant for everyone. But actors are always walking away; from jobs, groups of people, not knowing what will be next, when we’ll be acting again. At the close of our last show I returned to the empty theater, stood on the stage, and looked out at the house. It was modest but old, with a certain faded grandeur: a golden-fringed olive green curtain; a floral carpet—the original worn thin, threads showing through; plaster carvings in the shape of chariots on the box seats; ceiling fixtures like twelve-pointed stars. I took it in like a deep cold breath. The theater was my home. This stage, like all of the others, was where I belonged. Having this home, this life, this work, I could walk confidently in the world. I took one last look, turned resolutely, and left.

  I didn’t call Patrick and he didn’t call me. But in late September I saw him in the Drama Book Shop, perusing the uppermost shelves of the Restoration aisle. He had on a white shirt, opened at the neck, and a partially unknotted tie; his jacket, hooked on a finger, swung over his shoulder. I approached him, so happy to see him that my smile felt ready to crack wide open. “Patrick.”

  “Robert,” he smiled back.

  “You look great,” I said.

  “I had an audition.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Fine. It went fine. You’re looking well too.”

  “I feel well.”

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “I missed you too,” I said, relieved.

  We talked about what we’d been doing since Crispins. He’d reactivated his Screen Actors Guild membership and was going up for bits in film as well as theater. We both thought that we should enroll in a new acting class. Andre’s was canceled through December, as it was every third year while he traveled “for respite and inspiration.” I’d heard that he always brought along a pretty woman. This year, then, Irene was the lucky winner.

  “Look,” he finally said—we’d been in the aisle for half an hour—“you want to get coffee?” We went to Joe Allen, then back to my place and talked for hours. By the end of the night we’d decided to get an apartment together. I was fed up with mine, he was tired of living alone, and we could afford something nicer together than we could on our own.

  WE RENTED A LARGE apartment on Fourteenth Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place, smack in the middle of a thronged discount shopping district and the spillover from Union Square Park, a hangout for junkies. Close by were the tree-lined blocks of brown-stones where we had really wanted to live.

  “We can either afford a tiny brownstone apartment or plenty of space in a building with no character,” Patrick had said.

  We were on the sixteenth of twenty-one floors, at the quiet back of the building, facing north: we had a view of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, its lights changing colors for holidays, and we could see into about forty windows of another large building.

  “Good grief,” Patrick said, “throw out the TV.”

  It must have occurred to me that by moving in with Patrick I would see Irene again. But he and I hadn’t discussed her. He tried; I wouldn’t listen. Patrick and I had, of course, been friends before Irene Jane Walpers. My one stipulation was that we would get a subscription to the Times and he would pay for half.

  “But that’s such a commitment,” he said. “I like to read it religiously, but if it’s there in the apartment and I’m busy and I can’t, I am ravaged by guilt.”

  “You just like to steal mine,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd,” he replied, but I won.

  By day three we had our belongings in place. That afternoon we went up on the roof with chaise lounges we’d bought at one of the stores on the street. There was a call in Back Stage for actors “of all sizes ages and shapes” for a pool party scene in a film that would shoot on Martha’s Vineyard the following week. The one catch was that you were required to be tan: we had four days.

  “We’re insane,” Patrick said. “Battalions of copper-toned men have been marching back from Fire Island since early September.”

  “Here,” I said, “have some lotion.” He was whiter than me, Irish white, wearing shades and an oversize swimsuit with seahorses on it.

  We had a great view from the roof, twenty-two stories up, and it was late in the day and the heat had abated.

  “I like your lotion,” Patrick said, “it smells like a piña colada.” After he’d used half the bottle he opened the Times, holding it away from his body. “Do you have any idea how many important people have died this year, Robert?” he asked.

  “Don’t read the obituaries,” I said. “You always read the obituaries first. It’s morbid.”

  “I don’t. It’s an article. Elvis. The divine Joan Crawford. Groucho Marx, Nabokov, Ethel Waters—Zero Mostel. Maria Callas…. It’s the end of an era.”

  I got up and walked to the edge of the roof and looked out at other people sunning on terraces, patios, small islands sticking off concrete hulks—at the complicated rivers of traffic, the spires, the smokestacks, the miniature trees. I stared, feeling powerful, certain, and strong. I felt ready to take on all of it.

  I lay back down, read a section of the paper; traded with Patrick, read another; took a nap. When I awoke it was cooler still but my skin clung uncomfortably to the plastic chair.

  “Do you think we’re getting anything?” I asked Patrick.

  “No—the sun’s gone. It’s nice up here though.”

  “I’m going down,” I said. I folded the chair. “It’s getting late. You’re staying up?”

  “For a little while, yes. With my eyes closed I am lying in the tropics.” A siren wailed from down in the street. I felt edgy, hungry, as if some part of myself already knew which of the two of us—of the three of us—would finally make it, and why, and what would happen then. I went to the door that led to the stairs, but before I opened it I turned and looked back at Patrick, his feet hanging way off the end of the lounge, and at the lights of the city behind him as they started coming on.

  Part II

  7 Return

  On the morning of the day when Irene dropped back into our lives, a postcard of Westminster Abbey arrived. We’d gotten the Tower of London, Red Square, and a grisly image of the dead Lenin in his glass coffin. I’d glance at the side with the writing, never actually reading what it said, and deposit her missives on Patrick’s desk in his room. If one came when Patrick collected the mail, he always left it on prominent display, lately propped against his new lapis lazuli cigarette box on the coffee table in the living room. That morning, about to put Westminster Abbey faceup on his desk, I read the first line: Dear Robert and Patrick, interesting order, I thought, How’s everything there? “A-OK,” I answered, setting it down. “Since you asked, things are going exceptionally well.” I grabbed my jacket and went off to a day of classes.

  Truthfully, things could have been better. I’d been going at the business for more than four years, I was nearly twenty-seven, and where was I? Crispins had been my best job, but it changed nothing, did not make the job of getting jobs any easier. Still, I prided myself on being a realist. Life went on, and yet sometimes, alone—mapping a scene, dressing hurriedly for work or for school—I would suddenly lose track of where I was and what I was doing for no apparent reason, and feel such a disassociation from everything I thought of as myself that it was as though this blankness, this freeze had come from outside, instead of arising from within.

  Patrick got work as an extra in films or TV. With his arresting physicality he often got an upgrade—a single line, or a silent bit, all of which seemed to end up on the cutting room floor, except a burglary scene in Kojak. But he had his own methods of sustaining himself. Occasionally he would leave the apartment abruptly at night and be gone for several hours. I had an idea of where he was probably going, but one night he asked me along—and we walked at a backbreaking pace all over Manhattan, d
own side streets, along avenues, by the rivers and parks, where it was populous and where it was deserted, where only distant reflections lit the ground beneath our feet, to the Battery Tunnel and then up to the Nineties on the East Side, stopping once to use the John in some seedy bar on Avenue B. By the time we headed home it was 3 A.M. But Patrick still did not look relaxed, and so we went to an after-hours joint and got drunk in a way that we never had before. I slept through the entire next day; Patrick was out of the apartment as early as ever, off to the gym.

  Living together, our lives began to fall into a kind of rhythm. But portions of his life still seemed mysterious. I took a book of his off our shelves in the living room one afternoon and saw written inside on the flyleaf: Benton Millston Caruthers III. For a second I looked at it as if I had come upon any other name, one I hadn’t heard of, and even laughed. (I thought, What kind of affected jerk writes his whole name with the third in a paperback copy of Jackie Susann?) Patrick sat reading on the couch. In a loud voice, I read out the name. He looked up and I said, “Maria told me to call her if you ever see him. Everyone wants to protect you from him.”

  “Yes, well, they can’t,” Patrick said, shortly.

  “Do you see him?” I asked.

  “Not in years,” and he stood and left the room.