The Pleasure of My Company Page 14

  On a particularly disastrous afternoon I was in charge of Teddy and he and I engaged in a battle of wits. My mind was coherent, rational, cogent. His was not. As compelling as my arguments were, his nonverbal mind resisted. We had no unifying language or belief. I wanted a counsellor to mediate, who would come and interpret for us, find common ground, a tenet we could agree on, then lead us into mutually agreed-on behaviour. All this angst was focused on a cloth ring that fit over a cloth pole. He screamed, he wanted it, he didn’t want it, he cursed—I’m sure it was cursing— and there was absolutely no avenue for calm. But there were moments of transition. The moments of his transition from finding one thing unpleasant to finding another unpleasant. And he would gaze into my eyes, as if to read what I wanted from him so he could do the opposite. But these transitions were also moments of stillness, and in stillness is when my mind churns the fastest. I looked into the wells of his irises, into the murky pools of the lenses that zeroed in and out.

  I had spent time with him; I had been the face, on occasion, that he woke up to. I was fixed in him; my image was held in his consciousness, and I wondered if his recollection of me had slipped beneath the watermark of his awareness and entered into a dreamy primordial place. I wondered if he saw me as his father. If he did, everything made sense. I was the safe one, the one he could rage against. The one from whom he would learn the nature, the limitation, and the context of the cloth ring on the cloth pole.

  I constructed a triangle in my head. At its base was Teddy’s identification of me as hero, along its ascending sides ran my participation in Teddy’s life, however brief that participation might prove to be. At the apex was the word “triumph,” and its definition spewed out of the triangle like a Roman candle: If one day Teddy, the boy and child, approached me with trust, if one morning he ran to my bedroom to wake me, if one afternoon he was happy to see me and bore a belief that I would not harm him, then I would have achieved victory over my past.

  But my thoughts did not mollify Teddy; he wanted action. It was now dusk and he continued to orate in soprano screams. I decided a trip to the Rite Aid was in order, and he softened his volume when I swept him up and indicated we were on our way outside.

  The sky over the ocean was lit with incandescent streaks of maroon. The air hinted that the evening would be warm, as nothing moved, not a leaf. Teddy, a strong walker now, put his hand up for me to take, and I hunched over and walked at old-man speed. We walked along the sidewalk and I occasionally would playfully swing him over an impending crack. I approached the curb, where I normally would have turned left and headed eight driveways down to where I could cross the street. But I paused.

  My hand smothered Teddy’s. I looked at him and knew that after my cohabitation with Clarissa was over, he might not remember me at all. Yet I knew I was influencing him. Every smile or frown I sent his way was registering, every raised voice or gentle praise was logged in his spongy mind. I wondered if what I wanted to pass along to him was my convoluted route to the Rite Aid, born of fear and nonsense, if what I wanted him to take from me was my immobility and panic as I faced an eight-inch curb. Or would I do for him what Brian had done for me? Would I lead him, as Brian had me, across the fearful place and would I let him hold on to me as I had held on to Brian? Suddenly, turning left toward my maze of driveways was as impossible as stepping off the curb. I could not leave Teddy with a legacy of fear from an unremembered place. I pulled him toward the curb so he would not be like me. Recalling the day I flew over it with a running leap, I put out one foot into the street, so he would not be like me. He effortlessly stepped off, swaying with stiff knees. I checked the traffic and we started forth. I walked him across the street so that he would not be like me. I led him up on the curb. I continued my beeline to the Rite Aid, a route I had only imagined existed. Across streets, down sidewalks, in crosswalks and out of them, all so Teddy would not be like me. I was the Santa Maria and Teddy was the Niña and Pinta. I led, he followed. I conquered each curb and blazed a new route south and achieved the Rite Aid in fifteen minutes.

  As I entered the store, I did not feel any elation; in fact, it was as if my triumph had never happened. I felt that this was the way things were supposed to be, and I sensed that my curb fear had been an indulgence so that I might feel special. I let Teddy’s hand go and he shifted into cruise. I followed him down the aisle, sometimes urging him along, once stopping him from sweeping down an entire display of bath soaps. I did not, however, prevent him cascading an entire bottom row of men’s hair colouring onto the floor.

  I sat Teddy down and tried to group the dyes in their previous order. Men’s medium brown, men’s dark brown, men’s ash blond. Men’s moustache brown gel. A woman’s arm extended into the mess and picked one up. Her skin was exposed at the wrist because her lab coat pulled back as she reached. She wore a small chrome watch and a delicately filigreed silver bracelet, so light it made no noise as it moved. As her arm reached into my vision, I heard her say, “Is he yours?”

  I looked up and saw Zandy, who was a full aisle’s length away from her pharmacy post, and I wondered if she had intentionally walked toward us or was just passing by.

  “No, he belongs to a friend.”

  “What’s his name?” she said.

  “Teddy.”

  “Hello, little man,” she said. Then she turned to me, “I fill your prescriptions here sometimes, so I know all your maladies. My name’s Zandy.”

  I knew her name and she knew mine, but I told her again, including my middle name, and she cocked her head an inch to the sky. We had now gotten all the hair dye back on the shelf, and Zandy stood while I crouched on the ground wrangling Teddy. Zandy wore panty hose that were translucent with a wash of white, and she had on running shoes that I assumed were to cushion her feet against the concrete floors of the Rite Aid. While I took in her feet and legs, her voice fell on me from above:

  “Would you like to get a pizza?”

  Teddy and I, led by Zandy, walked around the corner to Café Delores and ordered a triple something with a thin crust. I looked at Zandy and thought that she occupied her own space rather nicely. I thought of the status of my love life, which was as flaky as the coming pizza. I knew it was time. I decided to summon the full power of my charisma and unleash it on this pharmacist. But nothing came. It seemed there was no need because Zandy was in full charge of herself and didn’t need anything extra to determine what she thought about me. I said, “How long have you worked at the pharmacy?” But instead of answering, she smiled, then laughed and put her hand on mine, and said, “Oh, you don’t have to make conversation. I already like you.

  Zandy Alice Allen proved to be the love of my life. I asked her once why she started talking to me that day and she said, “It was the way you were with the boy.” After seeing her for several weeks, I recalled Clarissa’s front-door kiss. I emulated her seducer and one night at Zandy’s doorstep, pressed her against me. Her head fell back and I kissed her. Her arms dropped to her side, then after a moment of helplessness, she raised her hands and held my arms. She drew in a breath while my lips were on hers, and I think she whispered the word “love,” but it was obscured by my mouth on hers.

  Once we were at lunch and she asked how old I was and I told her the truth: thirty-one. Months went by and she got to the heart of me. With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious. The unacceptable ones were those that inhibited life, like the curbs. But Teddy had already successfully curtailed that one; each time I approached a corner, I envisioned myself as a leader and in time the impulse vanished. The other intolerable ones she simply vetoed, and I was able to adjourn them, or convert them into a mistrust of icebergs. The tolerable ones included silent counting and alphabetizing, though when Angela arrived she left me little time to indulge myself. We compromised on the lights, but eventually Zandy’s humour—which included suddenly flicking lamps on and off and then dashing out of the room—made the o
bsession too unnerving to indulge in.

  It took six months and a wellspring of perseverance for me to stop the government checks from coming in. I was able to go back to work for Hewlett-Packard and I moved up the ladder when I created a cipher so human that no computer could crack it. Zandy and I lived at the Rose Crest after Clarissa left, though she and Teddy stayed in our lives until one day they just weren’t anymore. I knew that what happened between Teddy and me would one day be revealed to him. One night Zandy and I were in bed and she leaned over to me and whispered that she was pregnant, and I pulled her into me and we entwined ourselves and made slow and silent love without breaking our gaze to one another.

  Angela was born on April 5, 2003, which pleased me because her twenty-first birthday would fall on a Friday, which meant she would be able to sleep late the next day after what would undoubtedly be a late night of partying.

  When Angela was one year old, Zandy took her out to a small birthday fete for little ladies only and I was left alone at the Rose Crest. From the window I could see my old apartment and see my old lamp just through the curtains. This was the lamp I had once dressed in my shirt and used as a stand-in to determine whether Elizabeth could have seen me look at her, and now at the Rose Crest I felt far, far away from that moment. I indulged myself in one old pastime. As I looked across the street, I built in my head my final magic square:

  Other names came, but the square overflowed and the confusion pleased me. I shifted away from the window, turning my back on the apartment across the street. I moved to the living room and sat, silently thanking those who had brought me here and those who had affected me, both above and below consciousness. I thought of the names in and around the magic square. I thought of their astounding number, both in the present and past, of Zandy and Angela, of Brian, of Granny, even of my father, whose disavowal of me led to this place, and I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my diligent and inspiring editor, Leigh Haber, as well as my conscripted friends who were forced to read various drafts and held in a cellar until they offered in-depth commentary:

  Sarah Paley, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah Solomon, Sherle and John, Victoria Dailey, Susan Wheeler, April and Eric and Mary Karr. I would also like to thank Ricky Jay, who in minutes assembled a short treatise for my enlightenment on magic squares from his own amazing library. And Duke.

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  STEVE MARTIN, The Pleasure of My Company

 

 

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