He rallied for the opening. His attitude buoyed, he grew excited. He was back on Broadway, and even if he was in a flop he hoped he was wrong.
He got heaps of flowers and telegrams— “Who are all these people?” I asked in his dressing room after the show on opening night.
“You fucker,” I added, “you beat me to Broadway.”
“Oh, I beat you a long time ago, Robert,” he replied, gaily. Irene, Maria, Herbert, and I jostled each other in Patrick’s small dressing room; glad shouts and greetings echoed from the hallway. At last Patrick shut the door and changed, and we waited outside in the narrow passage as others walked by.
“It’s gotta run,” Maria said, “he’s king of Manhattan.” She looked somewhat frazzled, after having administered to Patrick’s nerves since morning.
“He was wonderful, wasn’t he?” Irene said to the world at large.
“He was treee-mendous!” Herbert said so that Patrick could hear, banging on the dressing-room door and then laughing with his entire body, staggering down the hallway and back, bumping into a matron in mink who was not amused.
“Let’s get drunk,” he said, “let’s get good and good and drunk.”
The party was held at a disappointing steak house smelling of newness, where the five of us sat at the end of a long banquet table bearing only a shiny white cloth. But drinks were served and people talked more, laughing louder to compensate for the environment and for the play. A few smaller tables behind us began to fill with others. Herbert did get good and drunk.
“Robert,” he said over the food, his magnified eyes bleary behind his thick glasses. “I’m not twenty-eight, I’m thirty-two.” I tried to determine how I was supposed to reply. He looked twenty-four in his black turtleneck, striped scarf, and army jacket hanging across the back of his chair.
“My therapist says to accept my age. Everyone!” he said. “Patrick! Irene! Maria! I’m thirty-two.”
“Oh,” Irene said.
“I’m thirty-two,” Herbert repeated. “How old are you, Maria?” he asked, taking a bite of roast beef.
“I’m not in therapy, you horrid man,” Maria said. She was overdressed in a white beaded tunic. Irene wore a sweater and skirt and pumps, one of which kicked me under the table.
“I know how old Maria is,” Patrick said. He didn’t eat, he drank vodka and was progressively despondent. All of us feared for a few seconds that he would say it, but his cornflower-blue eyes observed us with a fixed glassy stare—then they enlivened and he said, “Or I did know, but in deference to Maria’s timeless beauty I have forgotten,” and everybody laughed.
“How come you’re in therapy?” I asked Herbert.
“Oh, everything,” he said.
After the dishes were cleared Patrick leaned across the table and said to me, “I want to go. Will you and Irene come with me?”
The cast was going to someone’s apartment to wait for the Times, but Patrick couldn’t abide those mass vigils. We took a cab to a coffee shop, where we could see deliveries arrive at a newsstand. We drank coffee; nobody felt much like talking. Patrick sprang up when the Times hit the stand, and returned with the paper and soberly handed it to me.
“You read it and tell me.”
As soon as I saw the headline I knew the show was dead, but I read the review with Irene reading over my shoulder.
“Listen!” I said as I got near the end; a mention of Trevor McCann: “The tall Patrick O’Doherty was effective as Trevor McCann.”
“How generous,” said Patrick. “Effective. I feel like a spark plug, or a piston.” We paid the check and walked home.
The next morning the stage manager called the cast to tell them to collect their belongings from the theater by 4 P.M. It was fast and harsh, but not unusual. Patrick left us over an uneaten breakfast.
Irene said, “I’m scared.”
“I know,” I said. Patrick’s pallor had been deathly.
“He’s getting worse,” she said.
“This could blow over.”
“He picks up strangers for sex—did you know that?”
“Well—sure,” I said, deciding to underplay it. “A lot of guys do.”
“But with him it doesn’t seem—joyous. Do you know what I mean?” I nodded. “He’s all but admitted to me that he’s into rough sex.”
I didn’t know what to say. If she was trying to say he was self-destructive, I thought that was fairly obvious by now. I felt badly—and had felt badly for a long time—that the business was difficult for him. I felt badly that he’d lost his dancing, that his knee had been wrecked, that he had known someone named Benton—that he had to lie, that he couldn’t not lie, that for reasons I didn’t believe I would ever untangle he felt somehow trapped by the past and doomed. But where did it end? I thought of blood in the sink, pictured him stranded that night on the dark stairs of my apartment on West Forty-sixth, clutching the stained bar rag to his nose.
Whatever else I knew and suspected I did not want to discuss.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER I came home to find Patrick on the phone, a glass of vodka on the table beside his blue cigarette box, the living room smoky.
“Yes, well,” I heard him say, “having been through it myself I am deeply concerned. Yes, I had leukemia. I was seven years old.”
“Who were you talking to?” I asked, as he hung up.
He looked at me without any real focus, as an animal can. “A charitable foundation.”
“You said you had leukemia when you were seven.”
“Yes, and that I recovered.” He dropped the cigarette that clung to his fingers into the overflowing ashtray.
“You never had leukemia.”
He hesitated, “No.”
“So why did you say you did?”
“Because I understand. Occasionally, Robert, you are destitute of imagination.”
“You’re saying you understand what dying children feel like, Patrick? That’s sick.”
“I said what I did to communicate—” such a chore to explain to a soft head like me “—that I understand as much as if I had had the experience.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Of course it isn’t,” he snapped. “But I do understand.”
I don’t know what bothered me more, the lying or the weird identification; it was disturbing in a way that his long-term reading of the obituaries and his hypochondria weren’t.
SOON I WAS BUSY shooting commercials again. One day on a shoot for Avis I spent ten hours racing down a corridor at La Guardia Airport. I couldn’t walk the next day. The clients had wanted the perfect amount of breathlessness at the Avis counter, and while I was tracked by a camera throughout my mad dash, it was of the utmost importance that my tie fly back over my shoulder with the proper degree of urgency and panache.
Patrick was the same, and whenever I contradicted his unremittingly negative state of mind, he turned on me and said something cutting.
“That’s a fabulous part,” I said to him one afternoon.
“So what? I’ll freeze at the audition, or if I don’t I won’t get it anyway.”
Getting up one morning and finding him gone, I went back to bed. I lay watching Irene, and then moved into the heated space around her body. She opened her eyes.
“You have any appointments?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shifting herself up against me, “work at four-thirty.”
“He isn’t here,” I said.
“Good.” She rolled over on top of me under the covers. “You think he’s at the gym?”
“Let’s hope.” He didn’t go to the gym every day anymore, nor to church on Sundays, and we’d begun to encourage these activities that we used to see as compulsive. They seemed to help, yet only so much. He stayed out more nights.
“Your feet are freezing,” she said.
“Ignore my feet.”
“I missed you,” she said; “I missed you.” I’d been gone on another shoot the day before. After we made love I got u
p, and still in a lightheaded daze put on my sweatpants and got us the paper and coffee.
We read, riffling pages.
“Patrick thinks I should go off the Pill,” she said.
“Patrick does?”
“You know how he is about health stuff, and I’ve been taking it a long time, so I suppose he’s right.” She turned a page, continued perusing Arts and Leisure. “I’ll get a diaphragm, okay?”
“Why were you talking about it with Patrick?”
She shrugged, “I don’t remember how it came up.”
“Don’t you think it’s a subject to talk over with me?”
“I am talking it over with you.”
“A diaphragm’s fine.”
“You know, you’ve been busy, I see him more than you,” she sounded defensive. “I can go back on the Pill after—”
“I said it didn’t matter, didn’t I?”
She kissed my shoulder. “You want to get breakfast?”
“Irene, you know, he’s going to have to decide. If acting makes him this depressed he may have to quit and do something else.”
She didn’t answer for a second. “I know,” she said, and then sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
“And where’s Ben?” I said. There wasn’t any family there for him, no Ben, no Bryan, only us. Were the three of us going to go on forever together?
“Ben’s in Missouri,” she said, “where he lives.” Yes, yes, Patrick couldn’t live there, and I was afraid she’d berate me, tell me that Patrick had genuine reasons to feel discouraged and torn.
Her back was to me and I put my hand on her shoulder, “I’m sorry.” I slid my hand onto her chest and felt her heart beat against my palm. “I’m sorry about how things have gone.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you are.”
17 Phantoms
At a phone on the street on the last day of November I learned that the network had picked up the pilot. I would be starring in a nighttime dramatic series that would film in Los Angeles, beginning just after the first of the year.
It was rush hour and drizzling and I couldn’t get a cab; I walked to Second Avenue for a downtown bus. Where would I live? In a house? No, LA had apartments—and pools. I didn’t know anything about it except for the barest generalizations. We’d done the pilot on a mammoth soundstage in Burbank in a couple of weeks. I’d seen the studio and my hotel; parking lots lined with BMWs and Mercedes. One night we’d gone out to dinner in a white limo to some place with bad food, big prices, palm trees, and celebrities I’d never heard of. But it was balmy and dreamlike, with these little lights twinkling in the bushes.
Didn’t Patrick have friends in LA?
He wasn’t home. Irene was in her room folding laundry, taking a shirt from the plastic basket on the floor and spreading it out on the bed. St. Martin lay amidst the clothes in the basket. For the tenth time, I’m sure, she said, “Scram!” and he jumped out and scampered away. I sat down on her bed.
“Is it raining?” she said. “What, the show?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, star!” she said, and hugged me. “Oh, God, this is it.”
“I’m in shock.”
“Of course.” As always, at the advent of good news I felt goofy and emotional: the room looked so nice, the familiar old things, the pictures, the footlocker, the brick wall through the window bleeding with rain. I told her what details I knew and then I got nervous.
“You thought it was good, right? The script, the part—you want to read it again?”
“Robert, I told you, it’s excellent, more like a play. To tell you the truth I’m impressed they’ve picked it up because of the quality, and you definitely have the best part.”
We opened a bottle of wine. It looked like a first-season cycle of twenty-two shows, and according to Paul, everything was in place for the series to make it through this initial round anyway. Even if it wasn’t a hit, he believed it would jump me onto another show, or into film.
“We’re moving?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Wow.” She finished her wine and set the glass on the table.
“It could be really positive for you,” I said, “a new place.”
“It’s scary.”
But she had considered Los Angeles as a base. People had told her that Hollywood was packed with tall blondes who’d never acted in the theater and that she’d be unique. Still, there was little theater work on the West Coast.
“Maybe Patrick should move out there too.”
“I’d feel better about trying it,” she said, “if he came.”
“But he should get his own apartment. It’s time.”
She frowned. “Let’s introduce moving there first and tell him that later.”
Patrick came in dripping rain, sodden umbrella in one hand, the shillelagh from Cork in the other; he’d been visiting at O’Toole’s, but he wasn’t too drunk.
“I knew today was an auspicious day,” he said. “I’ve felt it since morning.”
We celebrated quietly at a small Middle Eastern restaurant, and he insisted on paying the check. It was warm, dimly lit; a flame flickered in oil on the table.
“We’ll have to give up the apartment and move,” Irene told him carefully. “Why don’t you come too?” He smiled.
“Tell me you’ll think about it,” I urged, and he promised he would.
But days later he declared that he couldn’t move to Los Angeles. He was a theater actor, and that was the end of it.
At the Equity office we checked out the “Apartments” section of the bulletin board to see if someone in Los Angeles wanted to trade, or had a sublet.
“Will you look?” I asked her. “I’ve got a crashing headache.”
She stepped over to the bulletin board. I sat down on the worn couch that faced Broadway. Actors stood in clumps writing things down off the boards, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, clutching copies of Back Stage, Show Business, and Variety. People forty, fifty, even sixty years old. In the hallway people waited to be seen for an open Equity call; folding chairs banked the walls and a power-starved deputy in run-down shoes sat officiously at a table, barking, “Number two hundred sixty-two!” Three women at the far end of the boards were discussing a recent extra call for a Woody Allen film. People began lining up at three in the morning, they brought along sleeping bags, and the line snaked from West Sixty-first to West Sixty-ninth by nine o’clock. One of the women had a hole in the back of her coat as big as a tennis ball. Glorious life, trying to act in this town.
I got up and went over to Irene. “You ready?”
“Just a sec. You’re upset, aren’t you?”
“You could say that.” We went out to the trash-blown street.
“You find anything?” I asked.
“A couple. Where are we going?”
“To lunch.”
She wore a new duffel coat and black tights. Her hair blew in her eyes. She tucked her arm through mine and put her hand in my pocket.
“It’s not a rejection of us,” she said. “But Patrick won’t change his mind, I could see that.”
We walked up Broadway to Fifty-seventh not saying very much. I had expected to feel relieved if he stayed in New York. But suddenly I knew I had really wanted him to come.
The restaurant was crowded, a country-kitchen place, where Irene had a penchant for their eggs Florentine.
“Maybe we’ll be back anyway,” she said.
“Irene, I don’t think we’ll be back, I really don’t think we’re coming back. Or anyway, it’ll be a while.”
I ordered a carafe of white wine and then took her hand: “You know what I want to do?” She shook her head. “Take you to Europe, to Rome and Venice and Paris and Amsterdam and Barcelona. To Greece.”
“When will you work?”
I laughed. Everything but the money was amorphous enough in my mind. I didn’t know what else to fantasize about.
“What’d you have th
is morning?” I asked her.
“Oh, nothing. But I got an audition for that play I interviewed for the other day. Here, look at this scene.” She took out a script from her bag and handed it to me.
“It’s a revival,” she told me. I skimmed it; it was a romantic comedy and the scene was very funny.
“You’d be great,” I said. “When do you go in?”
“Two weeks from tomorrow. I could—if I got it, which I probably won’t, but I could come out later, couldn’t I?”
“Sure.” I watched her sip her wine, about to say everything will be all right. But I was sick of saying that, thinking that. I didn’t want to have to say it and think it anymore.
“It’s tier one,” she said, “so I’d have expenses anyway … you know? Maybe I can just keep doing showcases for years and years until I’m better than everybody, and finally someone will have to pay me.” She set down her glass, “You think they have showcases in Los Angeles?”
“Forget showcases,” I said. “You can do film, and quality TV movies. It isn’t only sitcoms, you know.”
“I know.” Why wouldn’t she look at me?
“Don’t you want to go?”
“I’ll just be so worried about him.”
“We can’t—”
“I know.” We were silent a minute.
“Maria’s here, and Herbert.” I took her hand again, “Irene—” with all of the love and longing and hope I still had, “we’re going to have a good life.” She squeezed my hand back, and the density of all we had done and been through together vibrated between us; and Patrick.
“I want to go to Japan,” she said.
“What?” I laughed. “Okay, how about China?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is supposed to be a happy time, isn’t it?”
Patrick wasn’t in the least infected by nostalgia. The next day he said, “You won’t like the West Coast, Robert. I’m sure you’ll be back.”
“And I only have one friend in Los Angeles,” he said. “My friend Roger.” After all this time he’s giving me a name? I thought. We sat sharing the Times and drinking coffee at the table. “Roger lives in Los Angeles because he’s an attorney and his practice is there. Otherwise he would move here. He doesn’t like it there.”
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