A Company of Three Read online

  I needn’t have worried; Patrick took care of that.

  We’d seen her go into the rest room to change. We both waited outside.

  “Are you waiting for Irene?” I said.

  “Of course,” he answered, “aren’t you?”

  “Patrick—”

  “Let’s do a scene with her,” he said. “She’s smashing.”

  “All right.” I had had something else in mind, but saw it was hopeless, for tonight.

  “May I buy you a cheesecake at Wolf’s?”

  “Wolf’s?” she said. “Isn’t that famous?”

  “Yes it is, so you must,” Patrick said. He took her hand—he was shameless. “I’m mad for your work.”

  “I like yours. That was funny, that scene you did.”

  “Thank you.” His last scene had been an adaptation from a Salinger story. It wasn’t a stretch—it being basically how he behaved in real life.

  “Yesterday,” she was saying, “I had bagels and lox.”

  Where was she from? I couldn’t quite get it.

  Patrick said, “How lovely for you.”

  SHE WAS FROM Coffeyville, Kansas, she said after class, and had been in New York for three months. She wore a short white dress that in the deepening night drew light from the sky. The three of us carried our jackets. A student played the flute outside Carnegie Hall and Irene dumped the change from her purse in the open case at his feet. Her cowboy boots clumped on the sidewalk.

  “How was working with Clarence?” I asked.

  “Oh listen,” she shook her head, “he ignored what I did, said, didn’t do,” she rolled her remarkable eyes.

  I glanced up at Patrick, who was trying not to smile.

  “But this morning I figured it out.” We stepped out from the curb to cross Fifty-seventh at Sixth, when the light turned green; Irene ran and we followed, horns blasting. “I said to myself, now really, what do I see? And I said back to myself, well, he’s crazy, y’know? And yes, by this scene in the play he is crazy. He’s beside himself, trapped.”

  A waiter with hair like a blob of black paint directed us to a table at Wolf’s.

  “All he knows is how to fight,” Irene continued, “and he clings to it, hoping it will save him. Though it won’t. But when he sees I’ve become as bad off as he has, he still has enough love to try to get me out, even if he can’t save himself. So okay. If he’s so obsessed with his own thing, how would he notice how bad I am too? I had to be crazier somehow than he is.” She smiled, and picked up her menu.

  She was wired. Her face was flushed. “Though I shouldn’t have hit him,” she added, “not without warning him.” Her hands were very small, the fingernails bitten. I thought she was wonderful.

  She looked at Patrick, who was giving her his undivided attention, chin propped on one hand. “I can talk to you easier while you’re sitting down,” she said. “Is your height a hindrance in finding work?”

  “No,” he said, “all my producers build sets to scale.” He watched her as though he had fallen in love. When Patrick decided he liked someone he adored him, all out, no holds barred. He did it with me. On his first visit to my apartment he circled the rooms, looking at all of my ordinary things, saying “So this is your kitchen. (Here is your table, is this your chair?) Here are your weights. (Do you use them here, or bring them out to the open space of the room?)” I had the feeling that if I weren’t there he’d have been going through drawers.

  We got our cheesecake and Patrick watched scrupulously as she ate. “Irene Jane,” he said, “eating cheesecake.”

  She put down her fork. “Are you making fun of me?”

  Patrick blushed; his hands fluttered up to his hair, trying to arrange it, and then he got up and walked off toward the phones.

  “What did I do?” she said. I began to explain, but she got up and went after him. The first woman I’d liked in months and I had to be with Patrick. She probably thought we were lovers.

  They returned a few minutes later, smoking Gauloises, behaving like old, old friends.

  “No, I know what you’re saying,” she told him. “I had this acting teacher once, well, that’s not how it sounds, she was my only acting teacher.” She sat down, touched my hand, leaning close: “I’m practically an amateur, if you want to know the truth.” She looked back at Patrick. “But Rose, God I loved her. She taught me to act. She made you be in your body and somehow it came. She was old and fat, with a horrible cough, carried cartons of Salems in her bag. But she was the best Juliet I’ve ever seen. She was trying to tell me how to do it one day and I couldn’t, so she showed me. She took off her glasses, shut her eyes, said the lines, and I swear it was like she was young, beautiful, in love.” Irene’s voice had softened. She laughed. “Rose was a hoot. Once she said to this guy, Get it up, you look like a limp prick.”

  “Oh my,” Patrick said.

  We sat drinking coffee and talking until the bright lights, the dazzling chromes and the voices around us felt like a permanent part of my brain. Outside, the night rush of the traffic was soothing. Irene’s dress looked like snow. “So what scene will we do?” Patrick said.

  “Am I drunk?” said Irene. “I feel like I’m drunk.” She leaned her head for a heartbeat against my shoulder. “We’re doing a scene?”

  “Of course,” Patrick answered. “The three of us, aren’t we?”

  “I thought it was a foregone conclusion,” I added.

  “Great!” she said. We exchanged numbers, then she dashed across the street, late for a dinner engagement, heading to the Sixth Avenue subway. I watched the motion of her legs in her boots, the sway of her hips—and my breath felt shallow.

  “Oh no,” Patrick said. He had turned back and seen my stare. “I’ve committed a major misdemeanor.”

  “Forget it,” I said, as we started west.

  “You could have told me.”

  I stopped and said, “What did you do with my paper?”

  “God, I don’t know, left it in class, or somewhere. It’s only a paper, don’t be a bore. I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway, you have excellent taste,” he said. We passed the Winter Garden Theater. “What is it about her?”

  “She doesn’t wear black.”

  “Yes, very refreshing.”

  “She’s not anorexic.”

  “Even so,” Patrick said, “I thought Melinda was a very nice girl.”

  I’d met my old girlfriend, Melinda, at a Macy’s White Sale. Four years of Carnegie Mellon had left me fed up with actresses. I’d roamed the corridors of Bloomingdale’s, Alexander’s, Saks, running my hands over luggage or shoes or shirts I had no intention of buying—perhaps a dishonorable system of meeting women, but I’ve heard worse. My results had been fairly good. Melinda, however, had left New York for six weeks in June and returned weighing eighty-two pounds. One morning she cried for three hours after eating a doughnut and I just lost my patience. I also liked stewardesses. I’d met a fantastic Asian woman named Candace on a plane the Christmas before, and we had maintained a bimonthly fly-in affair.

  “What scene shall we do?” Patrick asked.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’d like to do Coward. But, really, we don’t have to.” Patrick was good in Noel Coward, and he knew I knew it.

  “That would be fine.”

  “You probably want to work with her alone.”

  “Patrick, I’m only attracted to her. Besides, she may be engaged to her sweetheart in Kansas, who knows?” We were standing outside of my building. An elderly woman passed by us, and peered up at Patrick as though searching for the top of a very tall tree.

  “You know we’re both frauds,” he said. “We thought she was cute because of her name and her boots, but now we’re intrigued because of her acting.”

  “True,” I said, “true.” There was nothing worse than getting a crush on someone and then finding out that their acting was atrocious.

  “No matter,” he said. “I hope you marry and have thirteen child
ren. I’ll be the lonely avuncular friend who dines with you Sundays.”

  “Shut up. You have any auditions this week?”

  “No, nothing. You?”

  “I can’t even try for a while, too much work for school.”

  “Are you learning anything?”

  “I suppose. I better go.” Patrick was lingering. “What are you doing tonight?” I asked him.

  “I don’t feel like going home….” He surveyed the street, withdrawing. “It’s a beautiful night. I’ll go walking,” and he set off.

  “I’ll give you a call,” I said to his back. He lifted an arm and dropped his fingers in a wave. I stood, momentarily pondering his extremist habit of either staying excessively inside, or never wanting to be at home at all. I felt guilty. I should have suggested dinner. I thought of how hard it must be to start over, given what he had already achieved. I went into the foyer, wondering fleetingly what had become of the man Patrick had met in Rhode Island. But I had Irene’s phone number out by the time I got in my door. I laid it down on my three-legged telephone table—one side propped up by a nail hammered into the wall—and tried to remember if she had touched Patrick tonight. Was she a “toucher,” or could I safely interpret her touching of me as flirting? I went into the kitchen for a beer. No, I wouldn’t call her. She wouldn’t be home, I recalled, and I’d see her soon enough. Through rehearsals our romance could evolve at a natural pace. I imagined her cowboy boots lined on the floor of my closet, her face on my pillow.

  I opened a window, leaned out: the super and his wife sat on lawn chairs in front of the building; a black man with a paisley valise in his lap sat on the stoop across the street. The cool air flowed over my eyebrows. The theater, I thought, reminded of nights when, from my parents’ apartment in Jersey, I’d gaze at the lights of the city and think like a corny movie actor or a song—just wait.

  TWO NIGHTS LATER I sat up reading for class at two in the morning, the radio turned up to drown out the resound of a car alarm. It was only when I became aware of another sound, the apartment’s buzzer, that I realized the car alarm had stopped. Cursing, I rose from my bed and turned off the music. Drunks liked to sleep in the building’s foyer and they buzzed down the row of names on the intercom to be let in. When the ring sounded again I went into the living room, peeked between the slats of the venetian blinds, and looked out at the street. It was eerily quiet, then a figure stepped away from the building and into my view, and I saw it was Patrick. I raised the blinds, opened the window. He looked up, holding something white to his face, and after pushing the buzzer to let him in I grabbed my keys and ran down the stairs.

  “Oh, you’re dressed,” he said, sighting me. “I didn’t wake you.” He had progressed a single flight and leaned heavily with one arm on the bowed, pitted wall; his words were uncannily precise, coming as they were from under a bar rag he pressed to his mouth and nose.

  The stairway was dark enough that I didn’t see the blood until I stood beside him. Even then, I couldn’t see much. There was blood near his eye and soaking through the rag; I thought I could smell it. I smelled liquor too.

  “What happened? Were you mugged?”

  He let me help him up the stairs, said he’d been kicked in the ribs and the hip. Inside the apartment I saw that the cut at the top of his cheekbone wasn’t bleeding anymore. He took the rag off his face and revealed that the blood from his nose had stopped too; it was swelling, and he dabbed away redness from there and the side of his mouth. He touched his nose.

  “Is it broken?” I asked.

  “I’ll just use the bathroom,” he said, turning to it. “All right?”

  “There’s some stuff, a first-aid kit,” I said to the door. “Under the sink.”

  “Thank you,” he answered.

  “You don’t need to go to the hospital, do you?” He must not have heard.

  When he emerged he’d put a Band-Aid on the cut and wiped off his face; his features looked blurred, and the front of his shirt was splattered with blood. We went to the kitchen for ice and sat down at the table.

  “I was walking,” he told me. “I may have stopped at a bar. Or two.”

  “How many were there? Did it happen in the street?”

  “Three. There were three.”

  “Were they armed?”

  “No, but what could I do?” He didn’t seem angry.

  “Goddamnit,” I said. “How much money did they get?”

  He patted his pockets, withdrew his wallet and opened it. “None. I didn’t have very much.”

  “Did you resist? Were you drunk? Are you going to report it?”

  “Robert, don’t,” he said sharply. “Really.” He caught me off guard. I felt chastened, a child interfering in an event I had neither capacity nor experience to understand. He arose from the table and at the sink dumped out the ice I had wrapped in a towel. “Let’s talk in the morning,” he said, his back to me.

  “You want to sleep here?”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said.

  I got him a pillow and a blanket for the couch and then went to bed myself, less bewildered by the way he had spoken to me than by the strange passivity of his reaction. The Patrick I knew would have fought back, and told me about it with great indignation. He was physically strong. Although he didn’t dance anymore he swam, he lifted weights, played tennis—thrashing me soundly the few times we played. He’d spent his youth fending off bullies because, from the age of thirteen, he had taken ballet. Furthermore, he had told me, he was too tall not to know how to defend himself—his tallness, instead of deflecting aggression, provoked it.

  But what I had seen that night was an air of defeat, then an annoyance with me for being its witness. Maybe, I decided, I was reading into what had to be a humiliating, frightening experience. We would hash it all out eventually. But in the morning he was gone, and we never spoke of the incident again.

  2 Casting

  Our first rehearsal was scheduled to be conducted at Irene’s apartment. That afternoon Patrick had called to say he would be late. Would I call Irene and reschedule for one hour later? I said that I would and then didn’t. I put on my leather bomber jacket. Patrick told me I looked like a hood when I wore it, but someone who wore penny loafers was no one to talk. He probably had the largest pair of penny loafers on the eastern seaboard.

  I had been downtown that morning to pick up my belongings from where a play I’d been doing had closed. It had barely been a part. I came on in act 3 in a letter sweater tossing a football and grinning like a fool, the director’s idea of a boy at sixteen. But it had provided a modicum of salary. My parents were paying my tuition and rent. Soon, I thought, I would have to get another job. I walked over toward Sixth on West Fourth Street through quickly moving pedestrians in the brisk air, and the more modest street sounds of the Village compared to Midtown, when I saw Irene alight from a gleaming black Jaguar in front of her building: the boots, the beautiful legs, a red dress that went whipping around her as she pushed the door closed. Over her dress she wore a thin jacket, and she clutched her arms as the man in the car, leaning over the passenger seat, talked to her through the open window. I was practically upon them when she turned and said, “Hi!”

  She took me by the arm to the window. “Neal, this is Robert from my acting class. Robert, Neal Parks.” He had wispy blond hair, small features crowded together at the center of his face, and ears that, somehow, looked pointed.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Is she any good?” I honestly didn’t know what he was asking; I feared a sexual inference. “Can she act?” he clarified.

  “Oh. Absolutely.” I stepped back on the sidewalk, realizing that he looked slightly familiar. His car was so shiny I could see myself in it.

  “Thursday then, sweetheart?” he said to Irene. “Nice meeting you, Rob,” and he pulled away, nearly hitting a cab that zoomed by on his left.

  We were outside of a coffee shop; beside it was where Irene lived. If my building was crumbling then Irene’s
had already crumbled. It was an old tenement, inhabited, mostly, by aging hippies and fifties bohemians. Across the street was an erotica store, the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique.

  Irene pushed open the broken front door and we trod up the rickety stairs. “Neal is terribly successful,” she said. “He’s on a soap and has all these commercials. We rendezvous at the Waldorf-Astoria. He’s stuck in a terrible marriage.” She smiled dazzlingly, then unlocked number six.

  A black cat sat waiting inside, purring as loudly as an outboard motor; she scooped him up in her arms.

  “St. Martin,” she said, kissing him on his short snout, “who his mother loves more than any creature in existence. This is Robert,” she said very gently. To me she said simply, “He doesn’t like men.”

  I followed her down a dim hallway, passing by several small rooms, to a living room at the front decorated with a shaggy yellowish rug, books crammed into milk crates, Salvation Army-type furniture; on the far wall was a makeshift curtain sectioning off another room, and from behind it came the sound of copious weeping.

  “Ruth!” Irene said. Giving the cat a last kiss on the head, she set him down. “Excuse me.”

  She slipped behind the curtain. The room had a fusty, unventilated smell, and the weeping got louder. At least she didn’t live with a man, I thought. She reemerged, took my arm, and led me back down the hall.

  “This is my room,” she said, showing me into a space about as big as a cell; she was now somber and abrupt, like a nurse dispensing with an unwanted visitor. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m early, I’ll go out and come back later.”

  “Oh, please don’t.”

  “Patrick’s going to be late.”

  “Then we can talk!” Once more she shot off her sparkly smile, and left.

  St. Martin was stretched out at the foot of her bed, his chin on his paws. He rolled up his gold eyes without moving his head, indicating he wouldn’t much like the idea of me sitting down on the bed as well. There was no place else to sit since the bed took up half the room. I went over to inspect the photographs resting on a footlocker under the window. One was of a middle-aged woman, hands folded primly, standing in a field. Looking closer I saw that she had the same eyes as Irene. They were almond-shaped, long, so far apart and deeply set that in the shadow that fell across her face, she looked almost as though she were wearing a mask. I picked up the other photograph and gingerly sat down on the bed near the pillow. St. Martin slowly lifted his head and regarded me.