The Pleasure of My Company Read online

  the pleasure of my company

  Steve Martin

  To my mother and father

  If I can get from here to the pillar box

  If I can get from here to the lamp-post

  If I can get from here to the front gate

  before a car comes round the corner…

  Carolyn Murray will come to tea

  Carolyn Murray will love me too

  Carolyn Murray will marry me

  But only if I get from here to there

  before a car comes round the corner. .

  — MICK GOWAR, FROM OXFORD’S ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF POETRY FOR CHILDREN

  This all started because of a clerical error.

  Without the clerical error, I wouldn’t have been thinking this way at all; I wouldn’t have had time. I would have been too preoccupied with the new friends I was planning to make at Mensa, the international society of geniuses. I’d taken their IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90? I fell short of genius category by a full fifty points, barely enough to qualify me to sharpen their pencils. Thus I was rejected from membership and facing a hopeless pile of red tape to correct the mistake.

  This clerical error changed my plans for a while and left me with a few idle hours I hadn’t counted on. My window to the street consumed a lot of them. Nice view: I can see the Pacific Ocean, though I have to lean out pretty far, almost to my heels. Across the street is a row of exotically named apartment buildings, which provide me with an unending parade of human vignettes. My building, the Chrysanthemum, houses mostly young people, who don’t appear to be out of work but are. People in their forties seem to prefer the Rose Crest. Couples whose children are grown gravitate toward the Tudor Gardens, and the elderly flock to the Ocean Point. In other words, a person can live his entire life here and never move from the block.

  I saw Elizabeth the other day. What a pleasure! She didn’t see me, though; she doesn’t know me. But there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesn’t mean they weren’t, in some metaphysical place, already in love. Elizabeth was pounding a FOR LEASE sign into the flower bed of the Rose Crest. Her phone number was written right below her name, Elizabeth Warner. I copied it down and went to the gas station to call her, but the recorded voice told me to push so many buttons I just gave up. Not that I couldn’t have done it, it was just a complication I didn’t need. I waved to Elizabeth once from my window, but maybe there was a reflection or something, because she didn’t respond. I went out the next day at the same hour and looked at my apartment, and sure enough, I couldn’t see a thing inside, even though I had dressed a standing lamp in one of my shirts and posed it in front of the window.

  I was able to cross the street because just a few yards down from my apartment, two scooped-out driveways sit opposite each other. I find it difficult—okay, impossible—to cross the street at the corners. The symmetry of two scooped-out driveways facing each other makes a lot of sense to me. I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don’t know how they can do it. Isn’t a curb forbidding? An illogical elevation imposing itself between the street and the sidewalk? Crosswalks make so much sense, but laid between two ominous curbs they might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Who designed this? Daffy Duck?

  You are now thinking I’m either brilliant or a murder suspect. Why not both? I’m teasing you. I am a murder suspect, but in a very relaxed way and definitely not guilty. I was cleared way early, but I’m still a suspect. Head spinning? Let me explain. Eight months ago a neighbour downstairs, Bob the appliance repairman, was knifed dead. Police came to interview me—it was just routine—and Officer Ken saw a bloodstained parka on my coatrack. Subsequently the lab found fibres from my parka on the corpse. Can you figure out my alibi? Take a minute.

  Here it is: One night a naked woman burst out of Bob the appliance repairman’s apartment, hysterical. I grabbed my parka and threw it around her. Bob came and got her, but he was so polite he made me suspicious. Too bad I didn’t get fully suspicious until a week later, just after naked woman had penetrated his liver with a kitchen knife. One day, the naked woman, now dressed, returned my parka, unaware that blood and other damning evidence stained the backside. I was unaware too until savvy cop spotted the bloodstain when the parka was hanging on a coat hook near the kitchen. The cops checked out my story and it made sense; Amanda, hysterical woman, was arrested. End of story.

  Almost. I’m still a suspect, though not in the conventional sense. My few moments of infamy are currently being re-enacted because the producers of Crime Show, a TV documentary program that recreates actual murders, love the bloodstained parka angle, so I’m being thrown in as a red herring. They told me to just “act like myself.” When I said, “How do I do that?” they said to just have fun with it, but I’m not sure what they meant.

  I’m hoping that my status as a murder suspect will enhance my first meeting with Elizabeth. It could jazz things up a bit. Of course, in the same breath I will tell her that I was cleared long ago, but I’ll wait just that extra second before I do in order to make sure I’ve enchanted her.

  The larger issue, the one that sends me to the dictionary of philosophy, if I had one, is the idea of acting like myself. Where do my hands go when I’m myself? Are they in my pockets? I frankly can’t remember. I have a tough time just being myself, you know, at parties and such. I start talking to someone and suddenly I know I am no longer myself, that some other self has taken over.

  The less active the body, the more active the mind. I had been sitting for days, and my mind made this curious excursion into a tangential problem: Let’s say my shopping list consists of two items: Soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. Soy: tart and salty. Talc: smooth and silky. Yet soy sauce and talcum powder are both available at the same store, the grocery store. Airplanes and automobiles, however, are similar. Yet if you went to a car lot and said, “These are nice, but do you have any airplanes?” they would look at you like you’re crazy.

  So here’s my point. This question I’m flipping around—what it means to act like myself—is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet we’re available in the same store. The store of Existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensa’s loss.

  Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events. Like the morning the toaster popped up just as a car drove by with Arizona plates. Connection? Or coincidence? Must the toaster be engaged in order for a car with Arizona plates to come by? The problem, of course, is that I tend to behave as if these connections were real, and if a car drives by with plates from, say, Nebraska, I immediately eyeball the refrigerator to see if its door has swung open.

  I stay home a lot because I’m flush with cash right now ($600 in the bank, next month’s rent already paid), so there’s no real need to seek work. Anyway, seeking work is a tad difficult given the poor design of the streets with their prohibitive curbs and driveways that don’t quite line up. To get to the Rite Aid, the impressively well-stocked drugstore that is an arsenal of everything from candies to camping tents, I must walk a circuitous maze discovered one summer after several weeks of trial and error. More about the Rite Aid later (Oh God, Zandy—so cute! And what a pharmacist!).

  My grandmother (my angel and saviour) sends me envelopes periodically from her homestead with cash or cash equivalents that make my life possible. And quite a homestead she has. Think Tara squashed and elongated and dipped in adobe. I would love to see her, but a trip to Helmut, Texas, would req
uire me to travel by mass transportation, which is on my list of no-no’s. Crowds of four or more are just not manageable for me, unless I can create a matrix that links one individual to another by connecting similar shirt patterns. And airplanes, trains, buses, and cars … well, please. I arrived in California twelve years ago when my travel options were still open, but they were quickly closed down due to a series of personal discoveries about enclosed spaces, rubber wheels, and the logic of packing, and there was just no damn way for me to get back home.

  You might think not going out would make me lonely, but it doesn’t. The natural disorder of an apartment building means that sooner or later everyone, guided by principles of entropy, will inadvertently knock on everyone else’s door. Which is how I became the Wheatgrass guy. After the murder, gossip whipped through our hallways like a Fury, and pretty soon everyone was talking to everyone else. Philipa, the smart and perky actress who lives one flight up, gabbed with me while I was half in and half out of my open doorway (she was a suspect too for about a split second because the soon-to-be-dead guy had once offended her in a three-second unwelcome embrace by letting his hand slip lower than it properly should have, and she let everyone know she was upset about it). Philipa told me she was nervous about an upcoming TV audition. I said let me make you a wheatgrass juice. I wanted to calm her down so she could do her best. She came into my apartment and I blended a few herbs in a tall glass. Then, as a helpful afterthought, I broke an Inderal in half, which I carried in my pocket pillbox, and mixed it into the drink. Inderal is a heart medication, intended to straighten out harmless arrhythmias, which I sometimes get, but has a side effect of levelling out stage fright, too. Well, Philipa reported later that she gave the best audition of her life and got two call-backs. Probably no connection to the Inderal laced drink, but maybe. The point is she wanted to believe in the wheatgrass juice, and she started coming back for more at regular intervals. She would stop by and take a swig, sit a while and talk about her actress-y things, and then leave for her next audition with a tiny dose of a drug that was blocking her betas.

  If the moon is out of orbit one inch a year, eventually, somewhere in a future too distant to imagine, it will spin out of control and smash into, say, India. So comparatively speaking, a half an Inderal in a wheatgrass juice once or twice a week for Philipa is not really a problem, but if I’m to stay in orbit with Philipa, my own prescription count needs to be upped. Easy for me, as all I have to do is exaggerate my condition to the doctor at the Free Clinic and more pills are on the way. My real dilemma began one afternoon when Philipa complained that she was not sleeping well. Did I have a juice drink that might help? she asked. I couldn’t say no to her because she had grown on me. Not in the way of Elizabeth the Realtor, who had become an object of desire, but in the way of a nice girl up the stairs whose adventures kept me tuned in like a soap opera.

  Philipa couldn’t see that she was in the charmed part of her life when hope woke her up every day and put her feet into her shoes. She lived with a solid, but in my view, dimwit guy, who would no doubt soon disappear and be replaced by a sharper banana. I went to the kitchen and blended some orange juice, protein powder, a plum, and a squirt of liquid St. John’s Wort from the Rite Aid, and then, confidently motivated by poor judgment, I dropped in one-quarter of a Quaalude.

  These Quaaludes were left over from a college party and had hung out in my kitchen drawer ever since, still in their original package. I didn’t even know if they were still potent, but they seemed to work for Philipa, because about ten minutes after she drank my elixir, a dreamy smile came over her face and she relaxed into my easy chair and told me her entire history with the current boyfriend, whose name was Brian. She commented on his hulking, glorious penis, which was at first phrased as “… great dick…”— Philipa had begun to slur—and then later, when she began to slur more poetically, was described as a “uniform shaft with a slight parenthetical bend.” Evidently it had captivated her for months until one day it stopped captivating her. Brian still assumed it was the centre of their relationship, and Philipa felt obligated to continue with him because her fixation on his fail-safe penis had drawn him into her nest in the first place. But now this weighty thing remained to be dealt with, though Philipa’s interest had begun to flag.

  The Quaalude drink became first a monthly ritual, then biweekly, then bidiurnal, and then I started hiding every night around 11 P.M. when she would knock on my door. My supply of the secret ingredient was getting low, and I was glad, because I was beginning to doubt the morality of the whole enterprise. She did say one night, as she waited for the plum/orange elixir to take effect, that the drink had rekindled her interest in Brian’s thing and that she loved to lie there while he did things to her. In fact, that’s the way she liked it now, her eyelids at half-mast and Brian at full. When I started to cut back on the amount of the drug, for reasons of conscience as well as supply, her interest in him waned and I could tell that Brian was on his way out again. For a while, by varying the dose, I could orchestrate their relationship like a conductor, but when I finally felt bad enough, I cut her off without her ever knowing she’d been on it and seemingly with no deleterious effects. Somehow, their relationship hung together.

  Santa Monica, California, where I live, is a perfect town for invalids, homosexuals, show people, and all other formerly peripheral members of society. Average is not the norm here. Here, if you’re visiting from Omaha, you stick out like a senorita’s ass at the Puerto Rican day parade. That’s why, when I saw a contest at the Rite Aid drugstore (eight blocks from my house, takes me forty-seven minutes to get there) asking for a two-page essay on why I am the most average American, I marvelled that the promoters actually thought that they might find an average American at this nuthouse by the beach. This cardboard stand carried an ad by its sponsor, Tepperton’s Frozen Apple Pies. I grabbed an entry form, and as I hurried home (thirty-five minutes: a record), began composing the essay in my head.

  The challenge was not how to present myself as average, but how to make myself likable without lying. I think I’m pretty appealing, but likability in an essay is very different from likability in life. See, I tend to grow on people, and five hundred words is just not enough to get someone to like me. I need several years and a ream or two of paper. I knew I had to flatter, overdo, and lay it on thick in order to speed up my likability time frame. So I would not like the snivelling, patriotic me who wrote my five hundred words. I would like a girl with dark roots peeking out through the peroxide who was laughing so hard that Coca-Cola was coming out of her nose. And I guess you would too. But Miss Coca-Cola Nose wouldn’t be writing this essay in her Coca-Cola persona. She would straighten up, fix her hair, snap her panties out of her ass, and start typing.

  “I am average because …,” I wrote, “I stand on the seashore here in Santa Monica and I let the Pacific Ocean touch my toes, and I know I am at the most western edge of our nation, and that I am a descendant of the settlers who came to California as pioneers. And is not every American a pioneer? Does this spirit not reside in each one of us, in every city, in every heart on every rural road, in every traveller in every Winnebago, in every American living in every mansion or slum? I am average,” I wrote, “because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood, with little attention drawn to itself, like the still power of an apple pie sitting in an open window to cool.”

  I hope the Mensa people never see this essay, not because it reeks of my manipulation of a poor company just trying to sell pies, but because, during the twenty-four hours it took me to write it, I believed so fervently in its every word.

  Tuesdays and Fridays are big days for me. At least at 2 P.M. At 2 P.M. Clarissa comes. She talks to me for exactly forty-five minutes, but she’s not a full shrink; she’s a student shrink. So officially she’s a visitor and her eyes are green. She brings a little gift bag each time, sometimes with packaged muffins, or phone cards, all of which I assume are donated. She asks me how I am
, and she always remembers something from last time that she can follow up on this time. If I told her that I planned to call my mother with the new phone card, she remembers to ask how the call went. Problematic for me, because when I say I’m going to call my mother I am lying, as my mother has been dead—is it six years now? Problematic for her, because Clarissa knows my mother is dead and feels she has to humour me. I know I’m lying and not fooling her, and she thinks I’m crazy and fooling myself. I like this little fib because it connects us at a much deeper level than hello.

  Clarissa makes several other stops on Tuesdays and Fridays to other psychiatric charity cases, which I’m sure have earned her several school credits. I was, it seems, one of the low men on the totem pole of insanity and therefore the recipient of treatment from a beginner. This I have scoped out one data bit at a time. When someone doesn’t want to give you information about themselves, the only way to acquire it is by reverse inquiry. Ask the questions you don’t want answered and start paring away to the truth. My conclusion about her was hard to reach because she’s at least thirty-three. And still a student? Where were the missing years?

  She’s probably reporting on me to a professor or writing about me in a journal. I like to think of her scrawling my name in pencil at the end of our sessions—I mean visits—but really, I’m probably a keyboard macro by now. She types D and hits control/spacebar and Daniel Pecan Cambridge appears. When she looks me in the face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar. I, however, think of her only as Clarissa because her movements, gestures, and expressions translate only into the single word of her name.

  Last Tuesday: Clarissa arrived in her frisky lip-gloss pink Dodge Neon. She parked on the street, and lucky for both of us, there’s a two-hour parking zone extending for several blocks in front of my apartment. So of course she’s never gotten a ticket. From my window I saw her waiting by her car talking on the cell phone; I watched her halt mid-street for a car to pass, and I saw its hotshot driver craning his neck to see her in his rear-view mirror. She was wearing a knee-length skirt that moved like a bell when she walked. Clarissa has a student quality that I suspect she’ll have her whole life. She’s definitely the cutest girl in class, and any romantically inclined guy looking for an experiment in cleanliness would zero in on her. Her hair is auburn—do we still use that word?—it looks dark blonde in the Santa Monica sun, but it flickers between red and brown once she’s in the apartment. And as Clarissa’s hair colour is on a sliding scale depending on light and time of day, so is her beauty, which slides on a gradient between normal and ethereal.