“You’re going for Christmas?” I asked.
“Yes, of course … He and I went to Europe together.”
“You did?”
“Irene told me you’re taking her to Europe,” he said.
“Yes.” I didn’t want to distract him, just in case he had accidentally ingested a truth serum and was about to spill his guts.
But he sipped his coffee pacifically. “You’ll do your television show, go to Europe, and come back to New York.”
All at once I was furious; my jaws locked, and heat rose to my face.
“You go to LA for Christmas?” I said. “Not San Francisco?”
“Why, no. Why ever—”
“Nothing. Way back, this travel agent made a mistake.” I felt outright hostile. “You went to Harvard?” I said.
“Why, yes.”
He put down the paper and stared at me, bright and startled.
“Fuck it,” I said, and walked out of the room.
The following day he had an audition, and the day after that he got very drunk. There was a pattern to it. On normal days he got slightly less drunk. I didn’t much care. What had drawn us together before Irene, our commonality as actors and men, was for all practical purposes gone. What I had admired in him, his dignity and his belief in himself, was gone too. I’m sure he didn’t think much of me. But we pretended a bit in the time that remained. We could always pretend. My flare-up, our stifled interchange, after all, had barely got off the ground. Just as it never had. Us and our phantom friendship, I thought.
JOHN LENNON WAS SHOT that week, and people gathered outside the Dakota with candles, chanting old slogans as though with his passing they had lost their own youth. But I hated the sentimentalizing of his death. For me his murder underlined the reality of the more dangerous world we all lived in now.
I started packing right before Christmas. I packed books, filling boxes in my room, and then going out to the living room to separate mine from Patrick’s. We were taking nothing but clothes and books. Patrick would sublet our rooms furnished, he said, or claim the entire space as his own, make my room a gym until I came back.
The room looked set free, about to take its own journey. I cleared each shelf of books, wiping each one, then putting mine on the couch, and replaced Patrick’s. That old Jackie Susann paperback was smack up against Patrick’s Faulkner: Valley of the Dolls, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying. I opened the book and confirmed the Benton inscription. I closed it, considered burning it, ripping it up. Then I went to the window, opened it, and hurled the book out. It fell surprisingly slowly, as if it weighed nothing, getting smaller and smaller, shifting a bit in the air going down to all of the real life below. I lost sight of it, even, just as it reached the pedestrian level and vanished, perhaps behind the parked cars. I went back to packing, feeling I’d done a good deed for the day. About four I opened a beer and sealed up the boxes, enjoying the snap and rip of the packing tape and the tidy finished packages; stabilized, solid, secure.
Night fell and I got another beer after stacking the boxes in the front closet, thinking I’d take a shower, then we should go out. Because of Patrick, everybody was acting so apathetic about our impending departure that it felt slight, unimportant. Suddenly nothing about this huge break in my life felt real. I sat on the couch drinking the beer, and then another. The apartment transformed, seemed neither free nor encumbered nor anything much: It was just an apartment, indifferent to me.
The key turned in the lock and Irene came in.
“Where’ve you been?” I said. Her hair was back in a ponytail and wasn’t quite clean; she washed it every morning but today she hadn’t. She sat down in Patrick’s chair without taking off her coat.
“Call your service,” I said, something already splitting in my throat.
“I already did, I’m called back for the play.”
“Congratulations,” I said, “when?”
“After New Year’s.” She wasn’t looking at me. “I was walking,” she said.
“All day?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why were you walking all day?” There was a hardness in my words, a sort of ringing in my ears, and she started crying.
“Don’t,” I said, “don’t cry.” I got up and took my beer bottle to the kitchen just so I could breathe, so I wouldn’t yell at her. When I came back I sat again on the couch.
“Come on, we’ll work it out.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She had stopped crying.
Then say it, I thought. I wasn’t fucking going to say it for her.
“I’m not going,” she said.
I let out my breath and sat back on the couch. “Ever? Well, say it, Irene.”
“Don’t shout.”
“We’re talking about my fucking life—”
“My fucking life too. I can’t do it, I can’t,” and she jerked to stand up and walked away. “I’ve been trying to see myself, to believe myself doing this, and I can’t. I can’t see myself there.” She turned back. “For a while I was able to see myself there if I didn’t work, you know, in a house, just cooking and whatever, but I can’t do that.”
“I never asked you to do that.”
“I can’t see myself working there.”
“You predetermined that for yourself.”
She was so angry, her voice shook. “You have entirely forgotten what it feels like to be in my position.”
“What’s your position? Define it.”
“Well, maybe I’m sick of smiling all the time and pretending I’m so goddamn happy.”
“You’re not happy?”
She sat down again. “I am so sorry.”
“You’re supposed to love me.”
“I do. But I can’t do this.”
I looked around, trying to get my bearings; the room looked farther away, painted in watercolors, diluted. “Should I not have accepted the show? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“No, no, of course you have to do the show. But for me—it isn’t only always being in your shadow, it’s the work there, it’s everything combined.”
“The work there?” I repeated. “How much work do you have here? So you do this showcase, then what? Let’s say it’s a hit, then? You get an agent? You get a soap? How’s a soap any better than what I’ll be doing? Or a play, most plays? What is on Broadway, Irene? What is the longest-running show on Broadway? Other than A Chorus Line, a sex show, that’s what. Actors doing ballet in the nude and telling dirty stories, am I correct?
“Is it that then, the theater?” I said the words with contempt; the theater.
“If somebody offered me a lot of money, as they have you, I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe I can afford to be idealistic because it’s never happened to me.”
“You read the pilot,” I said. “You said it was good.”
“As good as it can be, Robert. God, what do you want me to say, it’s Shakespeare?”
“It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare.”
“No kidding. Look, just tell me—” her eyes looked so hurt. “Your idea about us having a theater, did you mean it? Did you?”
“Yes,” I was confused. It was hot, stuffy. “I mean—we can still do that, you know, later—”
“There won’t be any later, don’t you see that?”
“I can’t not do the show,” I said.
“I can’t move to LA.”
I got up, walked toward the door, turned around. “Why did you imply we’d get married? What did you mean when you did that?”
“I don’t know. … I was saying I loved you, which I do, I don’t know…”
“What if I were staying here, if I hadn’t gotten the show?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and that’s when I knew the finality of it.
She sat in the chair, still in her coat. The living room was no longer diluted but worn, exhausted, vague with uncertainty, sickly in front of the lights that burned through the window, the god
damned red and green lights on the Empire State Building. I heard the door and felt Patrick behind me.
“Oh! I’m sorry,” he said, as if he knew, and I went berserk, every doubt I’d ever had about her feelings for me exploding in my head.
“You tell him everything, Irene?” I said. “Tell him to get out.”
The door shut.
“Were you with him today?” I asked.
“No.”
“It’s him though, isn’t it?” I said.
“No.”
“It’s always been him, he doesn’t even have to take you to bed.”
“It isn’t him.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I was drowning in chaos, at sea all over again about who she was. I had watched her so carefully since the moment I first saw her, studying her as if she was the key to my life. The depth of her cruelty was incalculable—of her duplicity and her seeming. Otherwise she had been an illusion. Don’t let me believe it, I thought, as if she could hear. Stop me, stop this. She sat with her face in her hands, her hair falling over her shoulders. I imagined saying to her, Just get up and come over here, imagined her saying No, then I won’t be able to do this. I would say, Then why are you doing it?
But I didn’t speak for a long time, and when I did, I didn’t say anything brave. How had I convinced myself that I could have such a love, such a life? I had been wooed by a false life, a sham, by impossible things. It was all sham, and I wanted to cut it all out with a knife.
I was going to be alone, but I was going to be famous, hooray. Was it Arthur Miller who said, “If you’re not a success in America, you’re dead”? What I would have said: you’re a success, you’re dead too.
Part Four
l8 Despair
The light was too yellow, like the city was lit through yellows gels. The fabulous vegetation, the palms, the cyprus trees, poinsettias, birds of paradise, aloe, roses, and citrus trees all floated and glimmered in an aquarium of eye-straining yellow. The studio put me up the first weeks in a house on stilts overhanging a canyon on Sunset Plaza Drive, from where on clear days I could see the ocean. I thought incessantly of catastrophe—earthquakes and mudslides—and felt better when the apartment I’d sublet was ready: a lowceilinged, dark three rooms near LaBrea and Hollywood Boulevard, the landscape pleasingly flat. There was an antiseptic pool at the center of the complex, enclosed on two sides by tinted glass walls. It felt like a hotel.
Early in the mornings I’d get in my car and drive to the studio, drinking my coffee on the way. Anything I ate, I ate in the car, wearing shades. I felt like a spy, an imposter, an émigré from a dark fallen country. Work seemed easy. Maybe because I didn’t care. Well, I did care, but I was so busy measuring what my life was without Irene that there simply wasn’t room in my psyche for my old over-enthusiasm. I gave the work just what it needed and no more. At night I sat in the bath drinking gin. Some nights I called her, telling her that I had to be able to talk to her otherwise I couldn’t work. She tried to be cool, detached, as if it were possible for us to talk on that level. She accused me of attempting to manipulate her. She said I was making what happened harder than it needed to be—how could it possibly have been any harder? Often, I hated her. Sometimes I wished she were dead, and I told her so. It felt like she was. Our conversations nearly always degenerated into arguments that left me worse off, more bereft. I would call for a scrap of hope, for sustenance in my desert life, and received only a cutting shell of Irene, of love. She seemed to be teaching me—more finally and more painfully than she ever had before—the discrepancy between what I had thought we were and what we really were, which felt like nothing. She brought home to me the stupid, clichéd revelation that while I had thought I was getting closer to everything I had wanted, I had in reality gotten further away.
For Christmas, I flew back to New York, and Irene and I spent two days in our apartment, without touching, in silence, before breaking down the last night and indulging at five in the morning in a slow-motion feast of sex and regret. At the airport gate, I pushed her hair from her face, drinking her in. She had never looked as tired, as empty, as lost.
“You don’t want me to go,” I said, and she put her arms around me and held me, molding herself to me, and I believed that the separation wouldn’t last.
But then there was Patrick. If I called the apartment and Patrick answered I’d curtly say, “Irene, please.”
“Robert—” he’d say.
“There’s nothing to say,” I cut in.
“Whatever is going on between you and Irene should not affect us,” he said.
“Irene, please,” I repeated. For whatever part he had played in this, his intentions meant nothing to me. I didn’t want explanations and would not have believed them. Whatever crumbs of affection that remained between us before Irene defected were now, on my side, irreversably gone.
One night I called Irene when I couldn’t sleep. It was one or two in the morning on the West Coast and three hours later in New York.
“You answered the phone right away.”
“I brought it into my room in case you called.”
“You were sleeping.” I could see her lying on the pillow—her hair—the receiver, hard, cold against her warm cheek. She had gotten the romantic comedy.
“How was rehearsal today?” I held the base of the phone in my lap, sipping gin.
“All right,” she said.
“Tell me about it.”
“There isn’t really anything to tell.”
“Tell me anyway, I can’t sleep.”
“Tell you what? No matter what I say it won’t be right. If I’m up it’s wrong, if I’m down it’s wrong too, or should I ask about you?” Then she was crying.
“Don’t,” I said. “Wait a minute, I’m getting more gin.”
“No, don’t.”
“Just a sec.” I put a little more in my glass, taking my time, picking up the phone again like we were making love and I was drawing it out.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said, calmer.
“I’ll talk then,” I said. “It’s not so bad out here. Today I played a scene with almost nothing but my eyes. Of course, you have to know the shot. You can also strip everything out of your face and maybe do something with your foot, like you’re anxious and you’re trying not to show it and your foot can be flapping away. But then again you have to know the composition of the shot, the screen’s small, so it depends what else they’ve got in the shot, whether what you’re doing with your foot will even show. With the size of the screen you can really do detail. I’m telling you it’s not all full of shit.”
“I know it’s not full of shit.”
I waited, thinking of what to say next.
“You should go to bed.”
“I know, Irene, look. What about, when the show’s over, why don’t you come out and just look around a couple of weeks?”
“Robert—”
“Okay, never mind.”
“Can we—”
“I miss you. What am I supposed to do?” Silence. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go to bed.” I knocked back the rest of the gin.
“Why are you doing this to us? Grinding it in. Asking me over and over, making me say what I’ve already said and hate saying—”
“I can’t get through to you!”
“It’s my life,” she said, “my decision. It isn’t yours. You talk on and on about what we had—what did we have? I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought there was so much between us, so much understood without even having to say it. Now I don’t know who you are. You don’t care what I say, what I think. It’s only what you want, what you have to have.”
“You lied to me,” I said.
“Lied? Lied? Can you hear yourself? Ever, Robert? Let it go, please. Let me go.”
“So passivity on my part would be what, a badge of honor? I’m out here alone and you’re in New York with Patrick, and I’ll be a noble figure? No, thanks.”
“Am I with you?” I asked.
“Don’t,” she said.
“You’re no one,” I told her, “that’s who you are. You did this, Irene, I didn’t.”
“I know what I did.”
The next day I called in the afternoon and the machine clicked on. I knew they were listening.
“Goddamnit, Irene,” I said, “pick up the fucking phone.”
After that, I didn’t call for a week, but couldn’t help hoping that she would. Instead, I got a letter, my name and the address spelled out in her big loopy writing. I carried it through the quiet open walkway past the swimming pool to my door.
I didn’t feel like going inside. The one thing in my life that felt real was this.
It was a check, folded up in a sheet of typing paper, made out to me for $2,207.43, what was left of the account I’d kept for her. She didn’t want me, she didn’t want my money.
I sat down on the sidewalk, my back against the door. Was it some kind of insane courage? Devotion to a lost cause, to the theater? If I had failed, like Patrick, would she have loved me?
Sitting down on the ground, I felt lower than I’d ever felt. I looked up at the sun, the lightness, the brightness so far away.
But it wasn’t yet over. Adding insult to injury, a week later a real letter came, and this one was thick and black with her scrawl.
Dear Robert,
I know how you feel, what you think of me. But I know too, that you didn’t mean everything you said. That’s why I’m writing. I know the person I loved is still there, and I’m asking you to please put aside our problems because of Patrick. He needs you. Just call, just be there for him in any way that you can.
I’m realizing more and more that Patrick instigates fights. He puts himself in dangerous situations. And it’s much worse and more frequent. I’m frightened, and in a small sense now I understand.
A Company of Three Page 27