The Pleasure of My Company Read online

  On Sunday I decided to distract myself by going down to the Rite Aid and taking a look at Zandy. This was no ordinary girl watching. Zandy works at the pharmacy, behind an elevated counter. She’s visible only from the neck up as she sails from one end to the other. If I visit the pay phone/Coke machine alcove, I can get an employee’s view of Zandy’s pharmacy-white outfit against her pharmacy-white skin. She’s a natural California girl, except her face has never been touched by makeup or sun, only by the fluorescent rays of the ceiling lights. Her hair is almost unkempt, with so many dangling swoops and curls that I long for a tiny surfboard so I can go swishing amid the tresses. I have no designs on Zandy because the rejection would be overwhelming for me. Plus, she’s a genuine blonde, and I prefer Elizabeth’s dyed look.

  The Rite Aid is splendidly antiseptic. I’ll bet the floors are hosed down every night with isopropyl alcohol. The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth. Like every other drugstore on earth, it is filled with quack products that remind me of nineteenth-century ads for hair restorers and innervating elixirs. These days there is a solid percentage of products in the stores which actually work, but they’re on display next to liquid-filled shoe inserts that claim to prevent varicose veins.

  I pretended to stop for a Coke ‘n’ phone—even though my phone card was on empty—and saw Zandy gliding behind the counter, as though she were on skates. I moved to the end of the displays, pretending to read the instructions for the Coke machine, and good news, the wonderful minds at the Rite Aid had decided to move the Tepperton’s Apple Pie Most Average American essay contest placard next to the Coke machine, where I could tear off an entry form and, for the next few minutes, write another five hundred words while Zandy, delicious as a meringue, went about her work in full view. I did not really want to write another five hundred words or even two hundred words, but it was easy enough considering the trade-off. There were several dull pencils in a box on the display, so dull that when I wrote with them the wood scraped against the paper, but I buckled down and began my second patriotic essay in two weeks, after a lifetime of none.

  America lets me choose not to be a pioneer. I am uplifted by doing ordinary work. The work of society, the common work of the world…

  And so it went. I was impressed with myself because this essay expressed the exact opposite idea of my first essay—one week I said I had the pioneer spirit and the next week I didn’t—and I wrote both opinions with such ease that I believed I could take any subject and effectively argue either side. This skill would be valuable in dating. Just think, I could switch positions midstream if I sensed my date reacting badly.

  While I was writing, I barely looked up at Zandy, since I’d realized what a foolish enterprise this was anyway. There is no pleasure in staking out a woman and eyeing her endlessly. I get no more joy from looking at a Monet for twenty minutes than I do after five. A glimpse of Zandy was all that was necessary, and perhaps I used her as an excuse to get out of the house. I signed this second essay using a pseudonym—Lenny Burns—and dropped it in the bin. I bought some foam earplugs (not that I needed them, but at two dollars a dozen, they were too cheap to pass up) and went home.

  My ceiling is not conducive to counting. Its texture is created by pulling the trowel flatly away from the wet plaster, leaving a rippled surface, as though a baker had come in and spread around vanilla icing with a spatula. Counting prefers symmetry of some kind, though at my level of sophistication I can get around most obstacles. The least interesting ceiling for me now is one that is practically counted out already: squared-off acoustical tiles with regular punctures that simply require a little multiplication on my part. Each tile has sixty-four sound-absorbing holes times the easily calculated number of tiles in the ceiling. Ugh.

  But my irregular ceiling—no tiles, no quadrants, no recurring punctures—takes a little thought on my part to slice up, count, and quantify. Like an ocean, its surface is irregular, but also like an ocean it’s easy to imagine an unbroken plane just below the surface of the undulating waves. Once I can imagine an unbroken plane, the bisecting and trisecting of my fairly square ceiling becomes much easier. Triangles, rectangles, and interlocking parallelograms are all superimposed over the ceiling, and in my mind they meld into the birthday-cake frosting of the plaster.

  The problem with counting is that anything, any plane, any object, can be divided infinitely, like the distance covered by Zeno’s tortoise heading for the finish line. So it’s a problem knowing when to stop. If I’ve divided my ceiling into sixty-four sections (sometimes irregular sections just to annoy myself), I wonder whether to halve it again and again and again. But that’s not all. The sections must be sliced up in three-dimensional space, too, so the numbers become unmanageable very quickly. But that’s the thing about a brain: Plenty of room for large numbers.

  Sure, I’ve gotten some disbelieving stares when I’ve tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I’ve watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity. You should know, however, that my habit of counting began early—I can’t remember if I was a teen or bubbling under at age twelve. My mother was driving up Lone Star Avenue and I was in the backseat. A gasoline truck pulled up next to us at a stoplight and I became fixated on its giant tires. I noticed that even though the tires were round, they still had four points: north, south, east, and west. And when the light changed and the truck started rolling, the north, south, east, and west points of the tire remained constant, that the tire essentially rolled right through them. This gave me immeasurable satisfaction. When the next truck came by, I watched the tires rotate while its polar quadrants remained fixed. Soon, this tendency became a habit, then a compulsion. Eventually the habit compounded and not only tires, but vases, plates, lawns, and living rooms were dissected and strung with imaginary grids.

  I can remember only one incident of this habit prior to my teen years. Eight years old, I sat with my parents in our darkened living room watching TV. My father muttered something to me, and my response was slow. Perhaps intentionally slow. I replied disinterestedly, “Huh?” with hardly enough breath to make it audible. My father’s fist uppercut the underside of his dinner tray, sending it flying, and he rose and turned toward me, whipping his belt from his waist. My mind froze him in action and I saw, like ice cracking, a bifurcating line run from his head to his feet. Next, a horizontal line split him at midpoint, then the rest of the lines appeared, dividing him into eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and so on. I don’t remember what happened next.

  My counting habit continued into college, where its real import, purpose, and power were revealed to me. The class assignments seemed trifling, but the irresistible counting work seemed vital not only to my well-being but to the world’s. I added textbook page numbers together, divided them by the total page numbers, and using my own formulas, redistributed them more appropriately. Page 262 of Science and Environment could become a more natural page 118, and I would razor-cut the leaves from their binding and rearrange them to suit my calculations. I had to read them in their new order, too, which made study difficult, and then finally, as I added new rules and limitations to my study habits, impossible. Eventually my quirks were picked up by various professors and savvy teaching assistants, and they, essentially, “sent me to the nurse.” After a few days of testing, I was urged out of school. I then went to Hewlett-Packard, where I landed a job as a business communiqué encoder.

  One time, when I was working at Hewlett-Packard, I tried medication, but it made me uneasy. It was as though the drug were keeping me from the true purpose of each day, which was to count loci and accommodate variables. I slowly took myself off the pills and eventually I left my encoding job. Or maybe it left me. When the chemicals let go of my mind, I could no lo
nger allow myself to create a code when I knew all along that its ultimate end was to be decoded. But that’s what the job was, and I couldn’t get the bosses to see it my way. Finally, the government began providing me with free services and one of them was Clarissa.

  Clarissa the shrink-in-training clinked three times on my door with her Coke can. The knock of someone whose hands are full. The door opened on its own, and I remembered not hearing it latch when I entered earlier with my small sack of earplugs. Clarissa, balancing a cell phone, briefcase, sweater (pointless in today’s weather), Palm Pilot, soda can, and wrapped baby gift (she hadn’t wanted to leave it in the car), closed the door and made a purse-induced leathery squeak as she crossed the room. I liked her outfit: a maroon skirt topped by a white blouse with a stiffly starched front piece that was vaguely heart-shaped, giving her the appearance of an Armani-clad nurse. (Oh yes, I keep up with the fashions. I noted how close her outfit was to my own favourite: light cotton pants with a finely pressed white dress shirt. No problem, as I love to iron. Once I ironed a pillow almost perfectly flat.) “Hi,” she said, and “Hi,” I said back. “Oh,” she said, “sorry I’m late.” Of course she wasn’t. She just assumed she was late because the traffic had been murder. “Are you having a good week?” she asked.

  I was having a good week, though I couldn’t really tell her why. At least, not without her thinking I was obsessed with women. I didn’t tell her about my three encounters with Elizabeth, or about eyeballing Zandy at the pharmacy. So I lied and said… well, I don’t remember what I said. But I do remember a particular moment when, after I’d asked her how she was, she paused that extra second before she said the perfunctory “fine.” She wasn’t fine, and I could tell. I could tell because my mind has the ability to break down moments the way it can break down ceiling tiles. I can cut a moment into quarters, then eighths, then et cetera, and I am able to analyze whether one bit of behaviour truly follows another, which it seldom does when a person is disturbed or influenced by a hidden psychic flow.

  I couldn’t make out what was troubling Clarissa because she’s adept at being sunny. I’m going to tell you one of the joys of being Clarissa’s “patient.” While she is analyzing me, I am analyzing her.

  What makes it fun is that we’re both completely unskilled at it. Our conversation that day went like this:

  “Did you find a parking space okay?” I asked.

  “Oh yes.”

  I said they’ve been hard to find because of the beach-y weather.

  “Did you go out this week?” she asked.

  “Several walks and a few trips to the Rite Aid.”

  “You were fine with it?” she said.

  “Yeah. The rules are so easy to follow. Don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure what your rules are.”

  “I’ll bet more people have rules like mine than you think.” I asked, “What are your rules?” (I wondered if she’d fall for this.)

  “Let’s stick to you,” she said.

  Outwitted!

  The conversation went on, with both of us parrying and thrusting. I urged myself to never get well because that would be the end of Clarissa’s visits… wouldn’t it? Though she would probably have to stop one day when she graduates or when her course— meaning me—is over. One of us is getting screwed: Either she’s a professional and I should be paying her, or she’s an intern and I’m a guinea pig.

  Then something exciting happened. Her cell phone rang. It was exciting because what crossed her face ranged wildly on the map of human emotion. And oh, did I divide that moment up into millionths:

  The phone rang.

  She decided to ignore it.

  She decided to answer it.

  She decided to ignore it.

  She decided to check caller-id.

  She looked at the phone display.

  She turned off the phone and continued speaking.

  But the moment before turning off the phone broke down further into sub moments:

  She worried that it might be a specific person.

  She saw that it was.

  She turned off the phone with an angry snap.

  But this sub moment broke down into even more sub sub moments:

  She grieved.

  Pain shot through her like a lightning strike.

  So, Clarissa had an ex she was still connected to. I said, “Clarissa, you’re a desirable girl; just sit quietly and you will resurrect.” But wait, I didn’t say it. I only thought it.

  I stayed in my apartment for the next three days. A couple of times Philipa stopped by hoping for more joy juice. I was starting to feel like a pusher and regretted giving her the Mickeys in the first place. But I eased the guilt by reminding myself that the drugs were legal or, in the case of Quaaludes, had at one time been legal. I gave her the plain Jane concoctions of apple and banana, though I wrestled with just telling her the truth and letting her get the drugs herself. But I didn’t, because I still enjoyed her stopping by, because I liked her—or is it that I liked her dog? “Here, Tiger.” When Philipa walked up or down the stairway, so did her dog, and I could hear his four paws ticking and clicking behind her. She’d talk to him as if he were a person, a person who could talk back. Often when she said “Here, Tiger,” I would say to myself “No, here, Tiger,” hoping doggy ESP would draw him toward my door, because I liked to look into his cartoon face. Tiger was a perfectly assembled mutt, possessing a vocabulary of two dozen words. He had a heart of gold and was keenly alert. He had a variety of quirky mannerisms that could charm a room, such as sleeping on his back while one active hind leg pedalled an invisible bicycle. But his crowning feature was his exceedingly dumb Bozo face, a kind of triangle with eyes, which meant his every act of intelligence was greeted with cheers and praise because one didn’t expect such a dimwit to be able to retrieve, and then sort, a bone, a tennis ball, and a rubber dinosaur on verbal commands only. Philipa demonstrated his talent on the lawn one day last summer when she made Tiger go up to apartment 9 and bring down all his belongings and place them in a rubber ring. Philipa’s boyfriend, Brian, stood by on the sidelines drinking a Red Bull while shouting “Dawg, dawg!” And I bet he was also secretly using the dog as a spell-checker.

  The view from my window was quite static that weekend. Unfortunately the Sunday Times crossword was a snap (probably to atone for last Sunday’s puzzle, which would have stumped the Sphinx), and I finished it in forty-five minutes, including the cryptic, with no mistakes and no erasures. This disrupted my time budget. A couple of cars slowed in front of Elizabeth’s realty sign, indicating that she might be showing up later in the week. But the weather was cool and there were no bicyclists, few joggers, no families pouring out of their SUVs and hauling the entire inventory of the Hammacher Schlemmer beach catalogue down to the ocean, so I had no tableaux to write captions for. This slowness made every hour seem like two, which made my idle time problem even worse. I vacuumed, scrubbed the bathroom, cleaned the kitchen. Ironed, ironed, ironed. What did I iron? My shirt, shirt, shirt. At one point I was so bored I reattached my cable to the TV and watched eight minutes of a Santa Monica city government hearing on mall pavement.

  Then it was evening. For a while everything was the same, except now it was dark. Then I heard Brian come down the stairs, presumably in a huff. His walk was an exaggerated stomp meant to send angry messages like African drums. Every footstep boasted “I don’t need her.” No doubt later, in the sports bar, other like-minded guys would agree that Brian was not pussy-whipped, affirmed by the fact that Brian was in the bar watching a game and not outside Philipa’s apartment sailing paper airplanes through her window with I LOVE YOU written on them.

  Brian strode with a gladiator’s pride to his primered ‘92 Lincoln and split with a gas pedal roar. I then heard someone descending the stairs, who was undoubtedly Philipa. But her pace was not that of a woman in pursuit of her fleeing boyfriend. She was slow-walking in my direction and I could hear the gritty slide of each deliberate foo
tstep. She stopped just outside and lingered an unnaturally long time. Then she rang my doorbell, holding the button down so I heard the ding, but not the dong.

  I pretended to be just waking as I opened the door. Philipa released the doorbell as she swung inside. “You up?” she asked. “I’m way up,” I said, dropping my charade of sleep, which I realized was a lie with no purpose. I moved to my armchair (a gift from Granny) and nestled in. Philipa’s centre-parted hair, long and ash brown, fell straight to her shoulders and framed her pale unmade-up face, and for the first time I could see that this was a pretty girl in the wrong business. She was pretty enough for one man, not for the wide world that show business required. She looked sharp, too; they must have come from an event, had a spat, and now here she was with something on her mind. She sat down on the sofa, stiffened her arms against the armrests, and surprised me by skipping the Brian topic. Instead, her eyes watered up and she said, “I can’t get a job.”

  She definitely had had a few drinks. I wondered if she wanted something chemical from me, which I wasn’t about to give her, and which I didn’t have. “I thought you just finished a job, that show The Lawyers.”

  “I did,” she said. “I played a sandwich girl, delivering lunches to the law office. I was happy to get it. I poured my heart into it. I tried to be a sexy sandwich girl, a memorable sandwich girl, but they asked me to tone it down. So I was just a delivery girl. My line was ‘Mr. Anderson, same as yesterday?’ I did it perfectly, too, in one take, and then it was over. I look at the star, Cathy Merlot— can you believe how stupid that name is? Merlot? Why not Susie Cabernet?—and I know I’m as good as she is, but she’s the centre of attention, she’s the one getting fluffed and powder-puffed and…”

  Philipa kept talking but I stopped listening. By now her body was folded in the chair like an origami stork, her elbows, forearms, calves, and thighs going every which-a-way. She didn’t even finish her last sentence; it just trailed off. I think the subject had changed in her head while her mouth had continued on the old topic, not realizing it was out of supplies. She asked me how old I was.