The Pleasure of My Company Read online

  She was already focused on me and she set her things down without even looking where she was dumping them. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. I said, “You’re not.” “Well, almost,” she added.

  I didn’t say anything about her apologizing for being almost late. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the concept even. If you’re almost late, it means you’re not late, so what are we talking about?

  The thing I like about Clarissa is that she starts talking immediately, which gives me the opportunity to watch her without saying anything.

  “You won’t believe what happened to me. Yesterday I had a return flight from San Francisco. I really wanted to leave at eight but could only get the reduced fare on the five o’clock. I get to the airport and the five o’clock is cancelled, and they’ve put us on the eight o’clock flight and charged us the full fare! But now my car’s parked at Burbank and the eight o’clock goes to LAX, so now I have to pay for a taxi to get me to my car. AND I lost three extra hours in San Francisco.”

  It seems as though little ills like this are always befalling Clarissa, which makes her seem younger than she actually is. Once she lost her passport right before a trip to Mexico. Once her cell phone battery went dead at the same time as her car battery. But if Clarissa is hapless, it is not the definition of her. Because I see something that describes her more clearly. It occurs in the pauses in her speech when her eyes fix on an air spot roughly waist-high and she seems to be in a trance. And then suddenly it’s as if her mind races, trying to catch up to real time, and she continues right where she left off.

  If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.

  Or is it that I think too much?

  My redress with the Mensa people is going well. Here’s the progress so far: I am thinking of writing a letter asking them to rescore my test. My potential inquiry could be embarrassing for them. They would be compelled to look harder at my results and install me as a full Mensa member, with apologia, if there is such a category. Right now, there’s not much more I can do other than wait for me to write the letter.

  I don’t know if I want to approach Elizabeth the Realtor until the Mensa thing is worked out. My membership would be nice to drop over drinks on our third date. If I get the feeling there might not be a third date, I have no qualms about moving it up to our second date, or even blurting it out on our first date right after “hello.” I am thinking about her because I spotted her twice today, once going and once coming. The apartments across the street are not easy to rent, lucky for me, and therefore numerous showings are required in order to find the one customer who is willing to pay top dollar for the mediocre. When she pulled up in front of the Rose Crest, every one of my senses went on alert. I slid open the window, and I swear the scent of lilac or lavender wafted toward me even though she was at least a hundred feet away. The aroma was so heavy I tasted it on my tongue. I gripped the windowsill, burying my fingers in the aluminium groove. I saw her angle herself out of her diesel Mercedes with the practiced perfection of a beauty queen. I heard her shoes hit the asphalt with a clap.

  She went into the building, never moving her cell phone from her ear, and twenty minutes later I saw a couple in their thirties, Porsche-equipped, pull up and park half in the red zone. Oh, I can read them like a book: too much money in the Porsche, not enough left over for the rent. This is a young hotshot three years into his first good job, and the one thing he wants is a Porsche. Sort of the boyhood dream thing. Finally he gets the car and has a strong attachment to it. The wife came later, but dang, he still loves his Porsche. So they think they have plenty of money for rent until they start checking into prices and find that their affordable number of bedrooms has shrunk by 1.5.

  I could imagine myself living with Elizabeth. Panty hose at breakfast, high heels before lunch. I wonder if the age difference is a problem? She must be forty-two. I must be, say, thirty-five. (Of course, I know my own age, and I have no qualms about mentioning it. It’s just that I would act older than I am if I were with Elizabeth, and I would act younger than I am if I were with Zandy the pharmacist.) I doubt that Elizabeth would want to live here in my place. I assume she lives in some fine rental property, the choicest out of the hundreds she must handle daily, and gotten at a bargain price. So obviously I would be moving in with her. But would she be tolerant when I started listing my peculiarities? Would she understand my need for the apartment’s lightbulbs to total exactly 1125 watts when lit?

  I sat waiting at my window for Elizabeth to re-emerge, my eyes shifting from her car to the apartment’s security gate and back again. The thing about a new romance like this is that previously explainable things become inexplicable when juiced with the fury of love. Which led me to believe, when I saw the trunk of her car mysteriously unlatch and the lid slowly yawn open, that it was caused by the magnetic forces of our attraction to each other. Now, looking back, I realize it was a radar feature on her car key that enabled her to open the trunk from forty feet, when she was just out of my sight line. When she got to her car, she reached in the trunk and handed her clients two brochures that I suppose were neatly stacked next to the spare tire.

  They stood and chatted curbside, and I saw that this wasn’t a perfunctory handshake and good-bye; she was still pitching and discussing the apartment. This was my opportunity to meet my objet d’amour. Or at least give her the chance to see me, to get used to me. My plan was to walk by on my side of the street and not look over her way. This, I felt, was a very clever masculine move: to meet and ultimately seduce through no contact at all. She would be made aware of me as a mysterious figure, someone with no need of her whatsoever. This is compelling to a woman.

  When I hit the street, I encountered a problem. I had forgotten to wear sunglasses. So as I walked by her, facing west into the sun, while I may have been an aloof figure, I was an aloof figure who squinted. One half of my face was shut like a salted snail, while the other half was held open in an attempt to see. Just at the moment Elizabeth looked over (I intentionally scuffled my foot, an impetuous betrayal of my own plan to let her notice me on her own), I was half puckered and probably dangerous-looking. My plan required me to keep walking at least around the corner so that she wouldn’t find out I had no actual destination. I continued around the block, and with my back now to the sun, I was able to swagger confidently, even though it was pointless as I was well out of her sight. Ten minutes later I came round again. To my dismay, Elizabeth and her clients were still there, and I would again be walking into the 4 P.M. direct sun. This time I forced both my eyes open, which caused them to burn and water. The will required to do this undermined my outward pose of confidence. My walk conveyed the demeanour of a gentleman musketeer, but my face expressed a lifetime of constipation.

  Still, as freakish as I may have appeared, I had established contact. And I doubt that her brief distorted impression of me was so indelible that it could not, at some point, be erased and replaced with a better me.

  Which leads me to the subject of charisma. Wouldn’t we all like to know the extent of our own magnetism? I can’t say my charm was at full throttle when I strolled by Elizabeth, but had she been at the other end of the street, so that I was walking eastward with the sun behind me, squintless and relaxed and perhaps in dusky silhouette, my own charisma would have swirled out of me like smoke from a hookah. And Elizabeth, the enthralling Elizabeth, would already be snared and corralled. But my charisma has yet to fully bloom. It’s as though something is keeping me back from it. Perhaps fear: What would happen to me and to those around me if my power became uncontained? If I were suddenly just too sensational to be managed?
Maybe my obsessions are there to keep me from being too powerfully alluring, to keep my would-be lovers and adventures in check. After all, I can’t be too seductive if I have to spend a half hour on the big night calculating and adjusting the aggregate bulb wattage in a woman’s apartment while she sits on the edge of the bed checking her watch.

  Around this time the Crime Show called, wanting to tape more footage for their show. They needed to get a long shot of me acting suspicious while I was being interrogated by two policemen who were in fact actors. I asked them what I should say, and they said it didn’t matter as the camera would be so far away we would only have to move our mouths to make it look like we’re talking. I said okay, because as nervous as it made me, the taping gave the coming week a highlight. The idleness of my life at that time, the unintended vacation I was on, made the days long and the nights extended, though it was easy for me to fill the warm California hours by sitting at the window, adjusting the breeze by using the sliding glass as a louver and watching the traffic roll by.

  Eight days after my last sighting of her, I again saw Elizabeth standing across the street, this time with a different couple but doing the same routine. She stood at the car, handing over the brochures, and then dallied as she made her final sales pitch. I decided to take my walk again, this time wearing my sunglasses to avoid the prune look. I outdid myself in the clothes department, too. I put on my best outfit, only realizing later that Elizabeth had no way of knowing that it was my best outfit. She could have thought it was my third- or fourth-best outfit, or that I have a closet full of better outfits of which this was the worst. So although I was actually trying very hard, Elizabeth would have to scour my closet, comparing one outfit against another, in order to realize it. This outfit, so you know, consisted of khaki slacks and a fashionably frayed white dress shirt. I topped it off with some very nice brown loafers and matching socks. This is the perfect ensemble for my neighbourhood, by the way. I looked like a Californian, a Santa Monican, a man of leisure.

  I attained the sidewalk. I decided this time not to look like someone with a destination but to go for the look of “a man taking his dog for a walk.” Though I had no dog. But I imagined a leash in my hand; this was so vivid to me I paused a few times to let the invisible dog sniff the occasional visible bush. Such was the depth of my immersion in my “walking man” character. This time full eye contact was made with Elizabeth, but it was the kind where even though her eyes strayed over toward me, she kept on talking to her clients, in much the same way one would glance over to someone wearing a giant spongy orange fish hat: You want to look, but you don’t want to engage.

  A plan began to form. As I passed her, I noticed the two opposing driveways coming up, which meant I could cross the street if I wanted and end up on her block. In order to walk near Elizabeth, I would have to reverse my direction once I had crossed the street. But it seemed perfectly natural to me that a man would walk down the street, decide to cross it, then go back and read the realtor sign before going on. This required a little acting on my part. I came to the low scoop of the driveway and even walked a little past it. I paused, I deliberated, I turned and looked back at the sign, which was about a dozen feet from where Elizabeth was standing. I squinted at it, as if it were too far away to see, and proceeded to cross the street and head in Elizabeth’s direction.

  She was facing away from me; the sign was behind her and stuck into the flower bed, which was really more of a fern bed. She was wearing a tight beige-and-white paisley skirt, and a short sleeve brown blouse that was bursting from within because of her cannonball breasts. Her hair was combed back over her head and held in place by a black velour hair clamp, which fit like headphones. Her feet were plugged into two open-toed patent leather heels and were reflected in the chrome of her Mercedes’ bumper. I couldn’t imagine any man to whom this package would not appeal.

  As I approached her, I felt a twinge where it matters. And if my theory is correct, that sexual attraction is usually mutual—an evolutionary necessity, otherwise nobody would be doing it with anybody—then Elizabeth must have been feeling something, too. That is, if she ever looked over at me. I came to the sign, leaned over, and pretended to read the description of the apartment, which was reduced to such extreme abbreviations as to be indecipherable. What’s a rfna? I had to do mental somersaults to align the fact that while I was reading Elizabeth’s name, her actual person was by now two steps behind me.

  I stepped backward as if to get a better view of the sign and, I swear this was an accident, bumped right into Elizabeth, glute to glute. She turned her head and said airily, “I’m sorry,” even though it was I who had bumped into her. “Oh, excuse me,” I said, taking all the blame.

  “Are you the realtor?” I asked.

  “Yes I am,” she said and she browsed inside her purse without ever losing eye contact with me.

  “How many apartments are there for rent in the entire complex of apartments?” I said, using too many words.

  “Just three. Would you like a card?”

  Oh yes, I wanted a card. I took it, palming it like an ace of spades, knowing it was a memento that I would pin up on my bulletin board. In fact, this would be the first item on the board that could even come close to being called a bulletin. “That’s you,” I said, indicating with a gesture that the name on the card and the name on the sign were one and the same.

  “Are you looking for an apartment?” she asked.

  I said something exquisite: “I’m always looking to upgrade.” I muttered this casually as I sauntered off. The wrong way, I might add. The next opposing scooped-out driveways were so far out of my way that I didn’t get home for twenty-five minutes, and while I walked I kept looking back over my shoulder at my apartment, which had begun to recede into a pinpoint.

  Once home I reflected on the encounter, and two moments in particular stood out. One was Elizabeth’s response to my inquiry about the number of apartments for rent. “Just three.” It was the “just” I admired. “Just a few left,” “Only three and they’re going fast” was the implication. Elizabeth was obviously a clever saleswoman. I figured that three were a lot of empty apartments for this building, and that the pressure was on from the owners to get them rented fast. I’ll bet they knew what they had in Elizabeth: the very, very best.

  The second moment—contact between me and Elizabeth—was harder to relive because it had occurred out of my sight, actually behind my back. So I had to picture the unseen. Our—pardon my language—butts had backed right into each other like two marshmallows coming together in a sudden splat. Boing. If I had intended this sort of physical encounter I would be a different kind of person. The kind I am actually not. I would never do such a thing intentionally, like a subway creep. But I had literally impressed myself upon Elizabeth, and at our next meeting we would be further along than I ever could have imagined, now that she and I had had intimate contact. My hip had touched hers and hers had touched mine. That’s probably more than a lot of men have done who have known her a lot longer.

  My third contact with Elizabeth, which occurred one week later, was a total failure, with an explanation. I was coincidentally on the street when Elizabeth pulled up and got out of her car. Nothing could have seemed more casual, more unplanned, than my presence in front of the Rose Crest. She unfolded herself from the Mercedes, all legs and stockings, and gave me a jaunty wave. I think she was even about to speak to me. The problem was, I was taping my long shot for the Crime Show, in which I was supposedly being interrogated by two cops on the street.

  So when Elizabeth waved, I was approached by two “policemen” who seriously overacted in their efforts to make me look guilty by snarling and poking at me. Luckily it was a long shot, so their hambone performances couldn’t be seen on camera. No Emmy for them. I thought I was pretty good. We were given no dialogue to say, but we had been asked to spout gibberish while a narrator talked over us. They weren’t recording us, they just wanted our mouths to be moving to make it
look like we were talking. One “policeman” was saying, “I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m moving my mouth, it looks like I’m talking.” And then the other one would say, “Now I’m talking, I’m moving my mouth like I’m talking.” Then they would say to me, “Now you talk, just move your mouth.” So I would say, “I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m talking back to you,” and so on. I couldn’t wave to Elizabeth, even though she’d waved at me, as it would have spoiled the scene. I must have looked strange, because even though it was eighty-five-degree weather, I was wearing the blue parka with the bloodstain to look even more suspicious for the camera. This couldn’t have made Elizabeth too comfortable, particularly if she’d had any inclination toward viewing me as her next husband.

  I am always amazed by what lies buried in the mind until one day for no particular reason it rises up and makes itself known. That night in bed, a vision of Elizabeth’s face entered my consciousness, and I saw clearly that she had grey-green eyes. It was a small fact I hadn’t realized I knew.