The Pleasure of My Company Read online

  The letter went on, but I didn’t. Sitting graveside, I knew that these few words would be either my death or resurrection. Two months later, on a still California night, I would know which. It was there that I breathed my last breath in the world that I had created.

  Clarissa and Teddy came up along the river. She spotted me and yelled “hey,” then picked up Teddy and came over. “Guess what?” she said, holding up her arm. “I found my watch. I love it when lucky things happen.”

  Clarissa fired up the Neon and drove us out to the highway, where we settled into the ache and discomfort of the long road home. We didn’t speak for a while, though I kept a broad smile on my face meant to hide my clammy shakes. All of us including Teddy were impatient to be home, and our three-motel trip to Texas turned into just two motel stays on the way back because of Clarissa’s driving diligence. She kept us on the road deep into the night, and I often worried that we weren’t going to find a motel with a vacancy.

  I felt inadequate around Clarissa as we drove. I waited for her to speak before I felt allowed to. I tended to agree with everything she said, which made me not a real person. There were times when we drifted into solitary thought with no awareness of the passage of time. Once we started to again sing “California, Here I Come,” and I bleeped myself with a loud buzzer tone when words with the letter e came up. Clarissa turned to me and laughed, “You know what we are, we’re a mobile hootenanny.” I roared at the word “hootenanny.” Then we fell to silence again. In Albuquerque we had the best tacos of our lives, and I forced Clarissa to stop at the municipal library for ten minutes where I Xeroxed twenty pages from various investment books while she fluffed and dried Teddy.

  Endless road engendered endless thought. Local architecture provoked in me nostalgia that I could not possibly have. Night caused distracting roadside images to fade into nothing. In the backseat was a pile of letters that radiated unease. Flashbacks of Clarissa’s moonlit body presented themselves as floating pictures. My father’s letter had finally been delivered to its ultimate reader. Over the next few hours, I experienced emotions for which there were no names. I felt like a different kind of pioneer, a discoverer of new feelings, of new blends of old sentiments, and I was unable to identify them as they passed through me. I decided to name them like teas, Blue Malva, Orange Pekoe Delight, Gardenia Ochre Assam. Then I worked on new facial expressions to go with my newly named emotions. Forehead raised, upper lip puffed, chin jutted. Eyes crossed, mouth agape, lower teeth showing.

  I would sit in the backseat and hold Teddy on my lap when he was squirmy in his car seat. But when he was sacked out, I would sit in the front and mentally play with my $350,000. What I knew about finance had been gained through osmosis, but I estimated that I could, without risk, get about 6 percent on my inheritance. This meant that I could withdraw $41,747 a year for twelve years before the principal was depleted. Forty-one thousand dollars a year was twice what I was living on now, which I wouldn’t really have needed had it not been for my next question to Clarissa. It was 9 P.M. and we were tired. “Can you slow, and pull off?” I said.

  “Here?” she said.

  The reason she said “here” was because we were on the darkest, loneliest highway on the darkest moonless evening. “It’s a fabulous night and us folks ought to pop out and look at various stars.” I spoke with an echo of a drawl to make my e-less sentence sound more reasonable.

  She slowed and stopped. The mechanical hum of the car had become accepted as silence, but when we got out of the car, the further, deeper silence of the desert shocked us both. Holding Teddy, I leaned against the car and pointed out the dipper, then the North Star, then Jupiter. A meteor caught my eye but Clarissa turned too late. Clarissa and I didn’t speak, but this quiet was different from the stiltedness in the car. The air was cold and brittle but was punctuated with surprising eddies of heated winds.

  It was going to take some acting on my part to keep her from knowing that my mouth was on a three-second delay from my brain while it tried to eliminate the letter e from everything I was about to say.

  What I wanted to say was, “There’s a three bedroom at the Rose Crest for rent. Would you and Teddy like to share it with me?” but it was shot through with e’s. So instead I slouched back onto the fender and said, “I was shown a big vacant flat across from my pad. I’m thinking of taking it. If you want to, you could stay. I could watch him so you could study.” There was a long pause. “You could stay in your own big room. I don’t mind waking up with junior on nights you just want to conk out.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I wanted to keep talking so I would never have to hear her answer.

  “How much is it?” she said.

  “I would pay all our monthly bills, food, all that. You could finish school.”

  “Why would you do that?” she said.

  Because I am insane. Because I am lonely. Because I love you. Because I love Teddy. “It could work for both of us,” I said. “I’d watch him and you could go to school.”

  “Can I let you know?”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “We would be sharing, right?” she said.

  She meant, sharing and that’s all. I nodded yes and we got back in the car.

  Twelve hours later she said, “I think it could work. You’re sure you’re okay with it?”

  “I am.”

  The drive from Granny’s had been one of escalating greenery, ending in the sight of home. The scrub of southern Texas had given way to cacti, which had given way to the occasional oasis in Arizona, which had given way to the pines and oaks of California, which turned into curbs and streets. When we finally pulled up in front of my apartment, I stuck my foot out of the car, put it on the grass, and said, “Sleet, greet, meet, fleet street.” Clarissa looked at me like I was crazy.

  Over the next few days, every habit of mine returned with a new intensity, as though I owed it a debt.

  There were two letters waiting for me when I returned. One was a kindly but brief note from my sister informing me of Granny and our inheritance, the other from a law firm in San Antonio informing me of the same. Ida’s letter, though less emotional than a letter from Granny, still had the same embedded goodness, and I wrote her back apologizing for my years of silence, listing a few of my dominant quirks so she could understand me a bit better. The letter was so good that I copied it and sent it to the law firm, too, though I realized later they could use it against me in court and try to keep the money for themselves. But they didn’t.

  The FOR LEASE sign was still up at the Rose Crest, but I didn’t want to make any moves until the cash was in hand, and the money took several weeks—of course—to become mine. I had to prove who I was, which was not easy. I thought my argument to them—that I was me because no one else was me—was convincing, but it was not what they were looking for. I had to prove my lineage. My documents were vague. I had no driver’s license and could not find my birth certificate. Ultimately the legal firm came to a decision; they had no one to give the money to but me, and my sister had vouched for me, so enough was enough and they sent me the dough.

  I now had an actual reason to call Elizabeth the Realtor. Not having a phone, I got the address of her company and walked there, even though the route proved to be almost impossible. I wondered if my path, when viewed from an airplane, would spell out my name. Just before giving up, I found a crosswalk for the handicapped that had two scooped-out curbs and used it as a gangplank to get to Elizabeth’s block. I left a note that said I was interested in the apartment.

  She drove by several hours later and I ran down the stairs before she could get to my door. Elizabeth must have developed an extremely sophisticated wealth detector because she suddenly began treating me as a viable customer who was swimming in cash, even though I was sure that nothing in my behaviour had changed. Even after I made her drive me across the street, which wasn’t more than twenty steps, she maintained a professional front and showed no exasperation. Or m
aybe she perceived my indifference toward her and was trying to win me back.

  Within the hour, I’d leased the three-bedroom and even negotiated the price down fifty dollars a month. I had another eight days on my monthly rent and I told her I would move in at week’s end. I watched Teddy several times that week and Clarissa showed no signs of backtracking.

  I was now purchasing a newspaper every day and perusing the financial section. I diligently followed bonds, mutual funds, and stocks and noted their movement. Movement was what I hated. I didn’t like that one day you could have a dollar and the next you could have eighty cents without having done anything. On the other hand, the idea that you could have a dollar and the next day have a dollar twenty thrilled me no end. I was worried that on the day my dollar was worth eighty cents I would be sad, and on the day it was worth a dollar twenty I would be elated, though I did like the idea of knowing exactly why I was in a certain mood. But I saw another possibility. If I bought bonds and held them to maturity, then the fluctuations in their value wouldn’t affect me, and I liked that their dividends trickled in with regularity. This meant that my mood, too, would constantly trickle upward and by maturity, I would be ecstatic.

  In interviewing a series of bond brokers, I sought out someone who could satisfy my requirement of extreme dullness. I felt that the happier a broker was, the shadier he was. If he was happy, it meant that he thought about things other than bonds. Happiness meant he might be frivolous and do things like take vacations. I wanted a Scrooge McDuck who thought about only one thing, decimal points. Since I was a person whose own personality rose and fell based on the input of another person, meetings with these brokers were deadly. The more sombre he was, the more sombre I would become, and we would often spiral down together into an abyss of tedium.

  I interviewed four brokers at several firms in the Santa Monica area. It was the second one who was stupefyingly dull enough and who gave me a siren’s call when I met with his rivals. His name was Brandon Brady, and he was so dreary that I’m sure that the rhythmic alliteration in his name made him faintly ill.

  What made me finally choose Brandon was not his colourlessness but my perception of the depth of his narrow, hence thorough and numerical, mind. I was sitting with another broker, whose own deadly personality challenged Brandon’s. It would have been a tough choice based on flatness alone. But when this broker laid out his plans for me, he started with a proposal to buy a ten-year bond starting next Wednesday.

  “There’s a problem with buying a ten-year bond next Wednesday,” I said.

  “And what is that?”

  “If I buy a bond next Wednesday, ten years later it would come due on a Saturday, but I couldn’t cash it in until Monday. I would lose two days’ interest.”

  He checked his computer then looked at me as if I were a wax model of myself: I seemed like a human, but something was wrong.

  And that was that. I went back to test broker number one, who made the same gaffe. But it was Brandon, who, after I had proposed buying a bond next Wednesday, got out a calculator and made a clatter as he ran his fingers over it, then frowned deeply. “Well,” he said, “they’ve got us on this one. Why don’t we wait a few days and see what other bonds come up?” I knew I had found my man.

  Clarissa and Teddy’s entry into the new apartment was biblical. It was as though they had been led into the promised land. Throw rugs of sunlight crept across every bedroom floor, and I had placed cheap plants in every empty corner, copying a home decor catalogue I had found in the mailbox. I marched Clarissa around the place and she took a breath of delight in every new room, which gave me pleasure. I had budgeted for just enough furniture to make the place functional, so it looked a little spare, but if my twelve-year plan was to work, the cash would have to flow as though through an hourglass. Clarissa had some furniture that she coerced a friend with a pickup to deliver, and Teddy’s colourful possessions were quickly distributed throughout the apartment. Clarissa installed a phone, which I viewed suspiciously at first, then finally forgot about. The place filled out incrementally, a few framed photos appeared, and by the end of the month it looked as though a family lived there. Except.

  Except that the space between me and Clarissa remained uncrossable. Sometimes I felt an intense love coming from her toward me, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of Teddy. I gave it time, and it was easy to give it time, because Teddy’s antics often kept any serious discussion at bay. If my hand rested against Clarissa’s, it was only a moment before I had to move it to snag Teddy. When he ambled around the apartment, Clarissa hung over him like a willow. There was no such thing as a solitary moment. I began to allow a phrase in my head that would never have been allowed across the street. The imperfect ideal. As strict as my life across the street had been, it was just as loose at the Rose Crest. Teddy’s chaos left me in structural shambles, and I think I could tolerate it because the source of the chaos was unified. He was a person beyond logic; he was the singularity.

  It is disappointing when you discover that the person you love loves someone else. I made this discovery twice. The first was one evening when the three of us sat down to our usual meal. These dinners were the fantastic disorder at the end of my rigorously structured days spent with my nose in financial magazines and reports. I had grown to anticipate them and participate in them with a newfound looseness. Clarissa and I chipped in and had food delivered, and there was a lot of freewheeling talk accompanied by the opening of white paper bags containing napkins and picnic utensils and tuna sandwiches and mustard packets. This crinkling noise and snap of the plastic tops of containers of mayonnaise always sparked us into thrilling recaps of the day’s most mundane events, and months later I realized that these half hours were sacred.

  After Clarissa had set Teddy in a high chair and thrown a few morsels of tuna in front of him, he fisted a glob of it and stuck it in his mouth, then turned to her and grinned. Clarissa’s face beamed and broadened, her focus was only on him; there was nothing else, no apartment, no jobs, no schoolwork, no life other than the joyful force that streamed between them. And there was no me. I sat and waited out the absorption, which flickered when Clarissa reached for more food and finally both alit back on earth.

  Clarissa’s studies progressed and she engaged herself in them with fervour, and she grasped the language of psychology quickly. The vocabulary and concepts came easily to her and she hinted that she had an affection for the subject matter that the other students didn’t. At night she would catch me up on what she had learned during the day, give me shorthand analyses of syndromes and disorders, and then would go over comments she had made in class to get my opinion of them.

  Clarissa was always thoughtful toward me and would express her gratitude for my assistance in her life, and I would thank her in return, which always left her puzzled. The impact she and Teddy had had on me was made clear one afternoon when a packet of mail arrived, forwarded from my old address. One of the envelopes was from Mensa. I opened it and read that it had been discovered that, as I had guessed, my scores had been compromised by human error, and would I like to take the test again? My first thought took the form of a shock: Human error at Mensa? What chance then did McDonald’s have, and the Rite Aid, and CompUSA? My second thought took the form of a semantic shudder at the phrase “human error’: Is there any other kind? My third thought was No, I didn’t want to take the test again, because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.

  One night I got a phone call from Clarissa asking if it was all right for her to be home later than usual. “Would you be okay? Were you going out?” she asked, “Can you watch Teddy; is Teddy okay?” Sure, I said.

  Teddy and I had an evening of bliss. He was the model child and I was the model adoptive/uncle/friend. We cavorted on the bed, we played trash can basketball, we played “Where’s Teddy?” at professional levels. Finally a cloud came over him and he conked out on my bed and I slid him over and r
ested next to him. My lighting rules were still in effect and the soft thirty-watt lamp on my chest of drawers was balanced nicely by the solar glow in the living room. My door was ajar and I could see the front window and door as I lay in relative darkness. I used this solemn time for absolutely nothing, as I drained my mind of thought.

  Tonto.

  That’s who I felt like when I heard the footsteps coming along the second-floor walkway. I thought to myself, “There are two of them, Kemosabe, and they’re coming this way.” I heard Clarissa ‘5 voice, then a man’s. They spoke slowly, each response to the other delivered in the same whispered tone. Her answers were shy; his questions were confident and cool. They passed the window and I saw him looking at her as she looked down, fumbling for her keys. The door opened and he stood outside while she moved in, putting her purse down and turning around to him. He spoke to her, and he stepped into the apartment. Her hand touched the light switch and the hard overheads went out, sending my body into rigor mortis. But I watched. They spoke again and he put his hand on her arm, pulling her toward him. She responded. He moved his hand, sliding it up under her hair. He drew her into him and rested his forehead on hers, and I watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply to absorb her. His lips brushed her cheek and I saw her surrender, her shoulders dropping, her arms hanging without resistance. His hand went to her back and urged her, pressing her against him. Her arm went up to his waist, then around his back, and he moved his lips around to hers and kissed her, her arm tightening, locking on his back, her other arm sliding up to his elbow. Her head fell back and he continued kissing her, standing over her, then he stepped back and looked into her eyes, saying nothing.

  It is hard to find that the person you love loves someone else. I knew that my tenure with Clarissa and Teddy would have an end.

  It was early June, and I had continued my pattern with Teddy, and had continued to incrementally withdraw my attachment to Clarissa. There were other nights, nights involving quiet door closings and early morning slip-outs. These sounds made my detachment easier, even though there was no official announcement of a pledge of love, even though, as far as I knew, there was no introduction of the new man to Teddy, which I felt was wise of Clarissa and protective toward her child.