I WENT OUT TO Missouri two weeks before Irene and Patrick arrived. Lemon Sky was the first show of the season. People walked out, people cried, people waited to talk to us; there were nights of such a split in the audience that while some people jumped to their feet at the end, others actually booed and hissed. Every night I felt psychologically excavated.
One night after the show I got in the car—this boat, a green Buick with a black hardtop I’d been given to use—and drove, and then turned onto a road running through fields that went on forever. It was so flat, and the sky was immense. I stopped and got out right there in the middle of the road, in the center of those fields, and beheld the sky: a black dome with more stars than I’d ever seen and in colors more various, silver, white, gold, orange, copper, and even red almost, red stars. I was full of my father and my mother and my whole life—it was all around me, in the faint breeze rustling in the field and in all that vast quiet of the sky, in the way that Strasberg explains van Gogh’s painting of his shoes as a moment when you can look at your shoes and see within them your life.
I didn’t think anything at first, standing there, but then words rose to my mind: I will never be enough to make up to her for what he did—large enough, good enough, strong enough, careful enough. It wasn’t about my father at all, it was about my mother and me. I remembered her picking me up when I was very young and he was gone, had only just left, and what I had felt was her size, her strong neck and firm powerful dancer’s back and shoulders, how large she was in comparison to me—and my thought, how will I comfort her? There was so much of her and so little of me. She was still that giant woman with that giant grief, and I was still small.
Then for the first time, hearing the wind in the field and smelling the sweetness of the hay, under the stars I felt pure sorrow, as though I were four again and he had just left.
The town wasn’t much, a town square with an old courthouse and two rows of shops that closed before nightfall. There was a movie theater seven miles out, and a bar named Reno’s. The one nearby restaurant that stayed open late was a Pizza Hut. The campus was pleasant, grassy with a couple nice old stone buildings. The theater was The Barn, having once housed farming equipment and mules, once owned, like much of the town and the campus, by an argricultural tycoon named Noble Nankin. At the college was a Nankin Hall and a Nankin Chapel, and contemporary Nankins, still living in the town, invested heavily in The Barn’s summer season. The town remained surrounded by farms: I could smell hogs on the wind.
They put me up at the old Nankin Manse with Tony, the actor who played my father, and with the college librarian, Wally Press, a very strange individual. His looks weren’t unusual, ordinary brown hair, medium height and build, medium age, early forties, I figured. A few clothes, maybe two pairs of slacks and three nearly identical shirts. But he had somehow missed out on the most rudimentary social graces; it seemed never to occur to him that he was supposed to make the person he was with comfortable, or to keep the more intimate aspects of his psyche even vaguely private.
He showed me around the manse when I got there and helped me choose a room. But first he confided, verging on tears, “They’ve fired me. I don’t have another job, or anywhere to go.” To my silence he sadly concluded, “I’m allowed to live here another month.”
It was a big white house with columns circa 1890: beveled glass in the front door, a formal parlor and a wainscotted smoking room, a dining room, and a music room with a grand piano, where Wally said college receptions were held; across the back of the house was a large kitchen opening out to a patio and yard. It stood at the top of a hill, overlooking the town, the campus, and the valleys beyond. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms that were available. Wally opened one door and presented me with a drab, shag-carpeted room at the back, stripped of its original furniture. “The one next to it is mine,” he said emphatically, and then nodded at the room opposite: “That’s Tony’s.” Since Tony had only arrived earlier this morning—I hadn’t met him yet—the easy way Wally had of referring to him was mildly disconcerting.
He just stood there—we were still standing at the doorway—with his bland eyes fixed dully on me.
“What about that one?” I asked, pointing at the closed door diagonally across the landing.
“It’s haunted,” he said.
“Yeah? By who?”
“Bella Nankin,” he whispered, “his wife.”
“Oh. Can I see it?”
He shrugged and started down the hall with an attitude I read as, suits me, pal, it’s your funeral. When he opened the door I knew I would take it: four-poster bed, fireplace, and spacious windows with a view for miles. “She lay on that bed,” Wally said, staring at it, “looking out at the town. Stroke,” he explained, “paralyzed. Her and Noble owned everything then…. She could see it, but she couldn’t move.”
“Uh, hmn … well, I’ll take it.”
“One night before I moved in,” Wally said, “three businessmen were here, to audit the college books—” visions of small-town graft, garnished paychecks, impounded cars “—and they stayed in the other three rooms.” A tight pursing of his lips, his reaction, I surmised, to my singular foolhardiness. “In the middle of the night all three woke up at the same time and looked out at the hallway. They heard moaning and crying sounds coming from her room.” He told me about half-buried tunnels in the basement that led to the campus, false stairways in the attic leading nowhere, the sealed servant’s quarters to the rear of the second floor, behind Tony’s room.
After our initial meeting I hardly saw him. He constructed little meals in the kitchen he carried upstairs. Once, when we passed on the stairs, he said ominously, “three weeks,” and I didn’t understand. “One week,” he said, two weeks later, and I got it. He had been talking about the time he had left in the manse. He went away two days after Irene and Patrick arrived, packed his belongings into a rented Chevy van, quietly and, for a change, stoically, refusing our offer of help.
Bella Nankin didn’t bother me. I slept well and peacefully, once I had dealt with my own personal phantoms. I pored over the scripts of Lemon Sky and Same Time, Next Year, the play in which I would direct Irene and Patrick. It was a two-character play about love spanning twenty-five years. The lovers, each married to someone else, meet one weekend and have an affair they repeat thereafter every year. It was funny, moving, sexy, and I knew we could make it the hit of the season.
Most of the actors were semiprofessional, from Kansas City or Nebraska and other neighboring states. Colin’s brother Hugh had negotiated contracts for Irene and Patrick and accepted them as my cast without an audition. I’d been afraid of Patrick going to pieces under the strain.
A few days before they were due in, Patrick called in the middle of the night in a panic. “Oh, hi,” I said, switching on the lamp by the bed; I picked up my watch: after three.
“You were asleep. I’m sorry, often you’re reading—”
“It’s okay.” I lay back down and waited. He tried to pretend there was nothing going on: “I’ve been looking at a book about the state of Missouri. One major city at one side, the other at the other side. St. Louis, the last bastion of the civilized East. Kansas City, gateway to the West.”
Jesus, I thought, is this what we’re talking about?
“It says here that having put Jefferson City, the capital, in the middle of the state,” he continued—“who knows why they did it, anyone could have seen it would cause problems. Well, nobody wanted to live there, all of the state officials were living in St. Louis and Kansas City and attempting to commute, and an ordinance had to be passed that required them to live there.”
“Is this why you called me?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you’d be up.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“… Isn’t it terribly conservative there?”
“… It isn’t like you’re coming here to live, Patrick.” It was hot in the room, I kicked off the sheet. “If nothing’s wrong,” I s
aid, “I’m hanging up.”
“Don’t.” His voice was suddenly urgent. I sat up, now completely awake and intent upon him.
“Patrick?”
“Please, I—”
“It’s okay, I wasn’t all the way asleep, what is it?” His please had plummeted to the pit of a tone that frightened me, and yet the word “please” itself was so formal. “Patrick?”
I had an intimation of his loneliness beyond anything I, or Irene, could provide; had a sense of that very distant plane from where he, increasingly, seemed to regard all of life.
“I—don’t know that I can do the play,” he said.
This I could deal with. “Listen,” I said. “Nerves really aren’t that unusual. Everyone has them sometimes. Stop overreacting.”
“But think of a race car driver,” he said. “He has to believe he can control the car, otherwise his career is over.”
“What you need is to regain your confidence, that’s why you’re coming out here, okay?”
“All right,” he said.
“The part’s perfect for you, and it’ll be just the three of us, no other pressures.”
He seemed to feel better by the time we hung up. But I was plagued by the idea that he had been talking about more than acting, and his trouble with nerves disturbed me more than I had let on. It was too pronounced, such severe nerves signaled more than a response to rejection and a few bad experiences in the business—things we all went through—as if it all prodded much deeper wounds. And his allusion to race car drivers bothered me too. I lay in bed, pictures of smashed, smoking cars running through my head.
I sat in my underwear with the sheets twisted around my ankles. Too hot to sleep. I decided to put on the wheezing air conditioner that protruded from one of the windows, but I had to close another window first and it stuck, wouldn’t budge. I put my forehead against the wall. Here, even so far from New York, everything felt difficult and painful again. He let everything hurt him too much; love, the lack of love, acting.
I tried the window again and it slid down. The air conditioner grunted and choked. I lay flat on my back in the darkness.
I felt something—a coolness. Something else. Someone. Bella. I raised myself up on my elbows. Said crazily, jokingly, urgently, “Bella, get out.”
I PICKED THEM UP in the Buick at the airport. Irene wore a short skirt, a blouse knotted at the waist, her red cowboy boots. Patrick had on new Ray-Bans he said he had purchased to be inconspicuous in Missouri—which of course didn’t work.
“Look at you,” Irene said, hanging on to my hand after she’d hugged me. “Doesn’t he look good?” she asked Patrick.
“Dare I say you look relaxed, Robert?” Patrick said.
“He’s even smiling,” said Irene. “No, it must be a twitch.”
“I’m smiling,” I said.
“The Midwest becomes you,” said Patrick.
“This is worse than the Midwest,” said Irene, glancing at an old sunburned guy in a cowboy hat walking by, others from the flight meeting up with relatives; lots of polyester—“this is the Plains.”
But in the car with the windows open and the warm bright air flying in, she said, “God, I feel like I’m home.”
Patrick said, “I may prefer Paris,” but I could tell he was excited.
“I’m not in the least relaxed,” I told them. “The show’s been fantastic and I’m sure tonight it will be a disaster. The weirdest thing has been happening to me. I don’t get nervous anymore—I mean, I get nervous but I feel tired, like I’m about to fall asleep.”
“I wish that would happen to me,” Patrick said.
“No, you don’t,” I told him. “I’m guzzling coffee, I’m dunking my face in ice water. Last night I did laps around the parking lot.”
“So when you really want to sleep,” Irene said, “you should pretend you’re about to play Hamlet.”
“Yeah, ha.” I told them more about the house, with its hidden tunnels and rooms. “The car’s for all three of us,” I said, pulling up the road leading to the manse.
“I don’t drive,” Patrick said.
“Don’t you?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Hate driving,” he answered.
“I drive,” said Irene. “I love to drive.”
“There it is,” I said.
“Gee, I feel like a star,” said Irene.
“You are,” I told her.
We left the luggage in the foyer while I showed them the downstairs. Patrick tested the piano in the music room and found it in tune; played three sonorous chords, and then, going back to the foyer to continue upstairs, Irene let out a shriek that lifted my scalp from my head. She had turned the corner first, followed by me and Patrick. “God,” she said, clutching at us for support, “I’m sorry, but you scared me.” It was Wally, standing perfectly still on the stairs at about the midpoint, in the center of a step, his hands folded calmly in a fig leaf position, gazing down at us. Triangles of light—green, yellow, red, blue—from the stained glass window at the top of the stairs played along the wall to his side.
He remained where he was, expressionless, while I made the introductions, then he disappeared into his room. “Oh boy,” Irene said softly, “are we in Missouri.”
“What a character,” said Patrick.
Irene said, “I’ve got five or six cousins just like him.”
THE NEXT DAY we began our rehearsals for Same Time, Next Year. Patrick was nervous, but his character was a nervous, careful guy and I told him to put his anxiety into the character. Very slowly, he did, and by the end of the first week he and Irene were finding exceptional ways to relate to each other. We got a lot of comic mileage out of their extreme physical relationship—we really milked it.
One day when we broke from rehearsal Patrick rushed off to a fitting and Irene and I stopped for a Coke at the machine just outside the swinging wooden doors of the auditorium. “You want one?”
“No, sip of yours.”
“Good, I don’t have enough change.” I gave her the car keys. She had a fitting after Patrick’s; I had to meet with the guy designing the sound. She took a long sip, handed me back the can. “Irene,” I said, “I’m not sure how you feel anymore about acting. But if you want it, I know you can have it.”
I wasn’t only impressed with Patrick; Irene was sublime. Her work just kept growing. Her character was by now so interestingly developed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was onstage.
She seemed pleased. “You really think so?”
“Yeah. Oh yeah. I do.”
“Thanks.” We went outside.
“See ya,” I said, and walked away across the blacktop, sun on my head, subtly shaken, thinking, if we weren’t such good friends I would think I still had it bad for Irene. Of course I had invited this situation. I’d known what directing Irene and Patrick in this play would be like. Now, when he kissed her, all the old feelings came flooding back. I finished the Coke, followed the curving drive onto the short road that led to the campus apartments. I knew plenty of other women, that wasn’t the problem. I just couldn’t stop being in love with her.
I couldn’t live with her day after day, learning her habits, her humor, the capacity for love she had that I so often saw in relation to Patrick—her energy, her evocative inwardness—and stop feeling it. Her acting made me feel callow and shy.
MOST EVENINGS WE drove out to Reno’s for a drink after rehearsal. A perfectly square-shaped dark place, with an out-of-date Donna Summers still moaning to a climax on the jukebox. There were blue burlap curtains on the small windows, and greasy oilcloths on the tables. You could get dry sandwiches and slimy french fries at Reno’s if you could talk someone into making them for you. There was usually just the bartender, Ben, there, or the owner, a loud, big-haired, middle-aged woman named Hildy, who liked to table hop when Ben was on duty, as though Reno’s were the mecca of the Plains.
“What in the world is he doing here?” Patrick said, the first
night we saw Ben. But for the next two or three nights, even though Ben was behind the bar pouring drinks, Patrick ignored him. Ben was thirty, a tall husky man with black eyes, gaunt cheeks, and a long patrician nose. He was quiet, rather stolid, and lived here, it turned out, instead of in Kansas City or Cleveland, cities he had tried and abandoned, because it was easier, cheaper.
One night during a pause in our conversation, Patrick decisively stubbed out his cigarette and said, “Excuse me.” He went and sat at the bar and he and Ben started talking, and that was that.
“Well,” Irene said, seeing Patrick was not in a hurry to get back to our table, “now life gets scintillating.” She took a cigarette from Patrick’s pack of Gauloises and lit it.
I watched her smoke for a minute and said, “Give me a drag.”
“You’re not taking up smoking at this late date, are you?”
“I don’t know, maybe.” I inhaled and, unexpectedly, liked it.
Irene and I left and went to the Pizza Hut for dinner where, anyway, the music was more up to date. Irene put on Diana Ross singing “I’m Coming Out” and we toasted Patrick and Ben with our water glasses.
“I hope it works out,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be great if he found someone he could last with?
“I had a dream last night about our theater,” she said. “I woke up sure we should start by next summer.” Since Floyd’s, the idea had come up now and then between the three of us, and since coming here we’d begun to discuss it more seriously.
“I keep thinking it’s the one way to do what we really want to,” I said.
“It could really be good,” she said, “we know all these really good people. We’d just have to worry about the business stuff, but not the quality of the work. We could maybe lure Alix back from Boston, you think?”
She picked the pepperoni off her slice of pizza and put it on mine; the air-conditioning was up too high and she got cold, and I gave her my jacket.
A Company of Three Page 19