The Pleasure of My Company Page 5
“Ohmigod,” she said, “did you make this?” and she picked up some half-baked pun-intended ceramic object from my so-called coffee table, and I said yes, even though it had a factory stamp on the bottom and she knew I was lying, but I loved to watch her accommodate me. Then she halted, threw the back of her hand to her forehead, murmured several “uhs,” and got on the subject of her uncle who collected ceramics, and I knew that Clarissa had forgotten that she was supposed to ask me questions and I was supposed to talk. But here’s the next thing I noticed. While she spun out this tale of her uncle, something was going on in the street that took her attention. Her head turned, her words slowed and lengthened, and her eyes followed something or someone moving at a walking pace. The whole episode lasted just seconds and ended when she turned to me and said, “Do you ever think you’d like to make more ceramics?”
Yipes. Is that what she thinks of me? That I’m far gone enough to be put in a straitjacket in front of a potter’s wheel where I can sculpt vases with my one free nose? I have some image work to do, because if one person is thinking it then others are, too.
By now the view out the window had become more interesting, because what had so transfixed Clarissa had wandered into my field of vision. I saw on the sidewalk a woman with raven hair, probably in her early forties. She was bent down as she walked, holding the hand of a one-year-old boy who toddled along beside her like a starfish. I had looked out this window for years and knew its every traveller, could cull tourists from locals, could discern guests from relatives, and I had never seen this raven-haired woman nor this one-year-old child. But Clarissa spotted them and was either curious or knew something about them that I didn’t know.
Then Clarissa broke the spell. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a magic square.”
Clarissa arched her body back while she studied my proudest 256 boxes.
“Every column and row adds up to four hundred ninety-one thousand, three hundred eighty-four,” I said.
“You made this?”
“Last night. Do you know Albrecht Dürer?” I asked. Clarissa nodded. I crouched down to my bookshelf, crawling along the floor and reading the titles sideways. I retrieved one of my few art books. (Most of my books are about barbed wire. Barbed wire is a collectible where I come from. I admired these books once at Granny’s house and she sent them to me after Granddaddy died.) My book on Dürer was a real bargain-basement edition with colour plates so out of register they looked like Dürer had painted with sludge. But it did have a reproduction of his etching Melancholy, in which he incorporated a magic square. He even worked in the numbers 15 and 14, which is the year the print was made, 1514. I showed the etching to Clarissa and she seemed spellbound; she touched the page, lightly moving her fingers across it as if she were reading Braille. While her hand remained in place she raised her eyes to the wall where I had tacked up my square. She then went to her Filofax and pulled Out a Palm Pilot, tapping in the numbers, checking my math. I knew that magic squares were not to be grasped with calculators; it is their mystery and symmetry that thrill. But I didn’t say anything, choosing to let her remain in the mathematical world. Satisfied that it all worked out, she stuck the instrument back into its leatherette case and turned to me.
“Is this something you do?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you use a formula to make them?” Something about my ability to construct the square piqued Clarissa’s interest; perhaps it would be the subject of a term paper she would write on me, perhaps she saw it as a way to finally categorize me as a freak.
“There are formulas,” I said, “but they rob me of the pleasure.”
I could tell Clarissa was dying to write this down because she glanced at her notepad with longing, but we both knew it would be too clinical to actually make notes in front of me. So I pretended that she didn’t look at the notepad and she pretended that she was looking past it. Problem was, there was nothing past it, just wall.
Then Clarissa said, “Have you ever thought of using this… ability, like in a job?”
“I have, but haven’t come up with anything yet, Clarissa.” I had rarely, if ever, called Clarissa by name, and as I said it I knew why: It was too intimate and I felt myself squirm.
“If you were using your talents in a job, do you think it might make going to work less stressful?”
“Sure,” I said, not meaning it. And here’s why. I know that I have eighteenth-century talents in a twenty-first-century world. The brain is so low-tech. Any boy with a Pentium chip can do what I do. I could, however, be a marvel at the Rite Aid, making change without a register.
“Daniel, do you have any male friends?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Brian upstairs.”
“It’s good for you to have a male friend. What do you two do?”
“Jog. You know, work out.”
This was, of course, a lie, but it was the kind of lie that could become true at any moment, as I potentially could work out or jog if I chose. I’m not sure if Clarissa had ever seen this masculine side of me before, which must have sent a chill through her. Then her focus was torn away from me by an internal alarm that she couldn’t ignore. She quickly checked her watch and wrapped things up with a few absentminded and irrelevant homilies that I took to heart, then forgot immediately. She collected her things and went out the door with a worried look, which I could tell was unrelated to our session.
The next morning I woke up to the sound of Philipa’s stereo. I can never make out actual songs; I can only hear a thumping bass line that is delivered through my pillows, which seem to act like speakers. I got up but stayed in my pyjamas and swept the kitchen floor, when there was a knock on the door. It was Brian. Uh-oh. What does he know? Maybe Philipa broke down last night and confessed to our indiscretion and now he was going to bust me open. I sifted through a dozen bon mots that I could utter just before he punched me, hoping that someone nearby would hear one and deliciously repeat it to my posthumous biographer. But Brian surprised me: “Wanna go jogging?” “Sure,” I said. “Around the block?” he said. “I can’t go off the block,” I added.
“Okle-dokle,” he said. “You change, I’ll be downstairs.”
I was stunned that after my lie to Clarissa about my passion for jogging, a redemption should materialize so suddenly and so soon. The moral imperative to turn this lie into a truth was so strong in me that I said yes even though I have never jogged, don’t get jogging, don’t want to jog, especially with The Brian. I might jog with a girl. But I saw this as a way to straighten things out in heaven with my therapist/social worker. I went to my bedroom and put on the only clothes I had that could approximate a jogging outfit. Brown leather loafers, khaki pants with a black belt, an old white dress shirt, and a baseball cap. When Brian saw me in this outfit his face turned into a momentary question mark, then he relaxed, deciding not to get into it. “To the beach and back,” he said. “Oh no, just around the block…,” I said, trying to thwart him. How do I explain my conditions to him? This lug. “Okay, around the block,” he said and started off.
Brian, in jogging shorts, ventilated T-shirt, and headband, looked like an athlete. I looked like I was going off to my first day of high school. Brian was disappearing into the distance and I dutifully tried to follow, but instead stepped out of my left shoe. I continued to hop in place while I slipped it back on and began my initial, first ever, run around any block since graduation. Brian took it easy on me, though,
and I was able to close the distance between us. I wished Elizabeth were finalizing a deal on the sidewalk as we whizzed past so heroically. We went around the block once, pausing only while a family unloaded kiddy transportation from a station wagon. Brian jogged in place; I breathed like a bellows. When we started up again Brian ran across the short end of the block and I followed. But Brian came to the corner and, instead of turning, dashed across the street. I couldn’t follow. I stayed on my block and ran parallel to him with the street between us. Brian seemed not to care that he was violating my aside to him, which obviously he had not understood to be binding. Brian seemed to think that this is what guys do; they jog parallel up the street. Then he suddenly dashed across the street again, joining me on my block, as if nothing had happened. The two jogging guys were together again. I sensed that Brian’s betrayal of our pact was done with the same thoughtless exuberance of a dolphin leaping out of the water:
It was done for fun.
Even though Brian was moderating the pace for me, I still felt a euphoric wave of my favourite feeling: symmetry. Though he was yards ahead of me, we were step for step and stride for stride. My energy was coming from Brian by way of induction. I was swept along in his tailwind. I was an eagle, or at least a pigeon. But then I saw where Brian was going. He was heading straight, straight across the street. I already knew that Brian did not see my request to stay on one block as an edict; he saw it as a whim, a whim that could be un-whimmed in the heat of athletic enterprise. There before me was the curb, coming up on Brian and hence me. This time, though, I felt my pace slowing but oddly not my sense of elation. I saw Brian leap over the curb in a perfect arc. Oh yes, this made sense to me. The arc bridged this mini-hurdle. If I could arc, I could fly over it, too. The curb could be vanquished with one soaring leap. I was ten paces away and I started timing my steps. Six, five, four, three, two, and my right foot lifted off the ground and I sailed over the impossible, the illogical. The opposing curb timed out perfectly. I didn’t have to adjust my step in the street before I flew over it, too, and inertia propelled me into the grass, where I collapsed with exhaustion, gasping for air as if I were in a bell jar. Brian turned around, still jogging in place. “Had it? That’s enough for today. Good hustle. Good hustle.”
My legs were shaking uncontrollably and I was thankful that I was wearing ankle-length khaki pants where my limbs could vibrate in private. Even though I walked back the long way, across three sets of scooped-out driveways, I now knew that I could run across the street at the curb. I could jog over them, fly over them. Brian had liberated me, had shone a spotlight on the wherewithal that had always been inside me, but needed to be coaxed out by human contact.
The next morning I sprang out of bed and promptly fell over. Overnight my muscles had tightened around my bones like O-rings. I would have screamed in pain but it seemed inadequate. I lifted myself back into bed while my mind scanned the medicine cabinet. Nose drops. Tums. Aspirin… yes! I could legitimately take four. Off I went to the bathroom, which gave me the opportunity to take measure of exactly where I was hurting: everything below the beltline, every connective tissue, every lateral muscle. They hurt not only in use, but to the touch. Next to the aspirin was something in a blue jar called Mineral Ice. The bottle was so old it was a collectible. But it said analgesic on it and I had a vague recollection of using it in college. So I swallowed the aspirin and took the Mineral Ice back with me to the bed and began applying the menthol gel to my legs, my thighs, my buttocks. After a few moments it began to tingle, which I assumed was evidence of its pain-relieving properties.
But oily gels don’t stay where you apply them. They ooze. They creep like vines and spread themselves to places they’re not supposed to go. Like testicles. Mine had somehow come in contact with the stinging concoction, which was now migrating over the eyelid-thin skin of my genitals like flames consuming a field of bluegrass. And there is no washing this stuff off. In fact, the more soap and water are applied, the worse it gets. Soap seemed to act like an agent, enabling it to transpire deeper into every pore. All I could do was lie there and wait for it to peak. And peak it did. Alps. Matterhorn. I would have cursed the Virgin Mary but I knew it was not her fault, so I cursed Brian, whose fault it most directly was. Forty-five minutes later, the throbbing subsided, but there was still the suggestion of an icy breeze wafting around my testicles until way after lunch. Which reminds me that the taste of menthol somehow infected my tuna sandwich, even though I was careful not to handle it without the waxed paper.
That afternoon, Brian knocked on my door and I knelt down in the kitchen and hid. I was just making doubly sure that there would not be a second invite to go racing around the block at blinding jock speed.
By the second day my hard line toward Brian began to soften. I stopped thinking he’d done it to get even with me. After all, he had provided me with an astounding moment of conquest, the recollection of which would momentarily numb my tendons.
Not until the third day did I begin to emerge from my invalid state. My muscles began to return to normal and I assumed they were better for it; yes, I was now in tip-top shape. My mind had sharpened, too, because a plan had begun to form that would impress Elizabeth with my newly found machismo. I would wait until she was showing apartments at the Rose Crest and then jog by at a nice casual speed. This would possibly erase and replace her previously formed image of me as a person to be avoided. The occasion presented itself the next weekend. Saturday was becoming the busy realtor day at the Rose Crest, and Elizabeth was in and out hourly with lots of street time spent in front of the potential renters’ automobiles for the final sales chat. I was ready to go in my jogging outfit, same brown loafers (with thick socks this time to prevent them from falling off), same khaki pants, and same white shirt, and all had been cleaned and ironed (except for the shoes, though I had thought about it). It was not so much the jogging part that I thought would turn Elizabeth’s head but the leap over the curb that I knew would hold the magic. I’m smart enough to know that Elizabeth had no doubt seen dozens of men leap over curbs without her falling in love with the leaper, but I do believe this: When an endeavour is special in a person’s life, others discern it intuitively and appreciate it more, like the praise a child receives for a lumpy clay sculpture. And as ordinary as such an event might be, it can be instilled with uncommon power. So I reasoned that my leap, my soaring, arcing flight, would have a hero’s impact upon her and would neutralize my earlier flubs.
It was not until 2 P.M. that Elizabeth became engaged in a street conversation that seemed it would last long enough for me to parade my newly cultivated right stuff. There was no time for me to delay, think twice, or balk. I had to do it now. I ran down my apartment steps, took the walkway, cut the corner of the grass, and was heading to the end of the block with effortless but mighty strides. My sudden appearance caused Elizabeth and her clients to look toward me. I liked my pace. Easy, confident. Soon the curb was nigh. I checked traffic out of the corner of my eye. No cars. I began to adjust my step—so many details of the week’s earlier triumph were coming back to me! I pictured myself airborne while Elizabeth took it all in. But I was not twenty feet away when a squeezing sensation took hold in my chest. This was the familiar ring of panic. The curb suddenly did not make sense, nor did my impending leap over it. I was rapidly collapsing in on myself, and the curb seemed to have reacquired all of its old daunting properties of impossibility. However, I was still shooting forward like a cannonball when, just this side of the point of no return, I put on the brakes and urked to a cartoon halt, and for a second I was the Road Runner and the curb was the Grand Canyon. I was back where I’d been four days ago, only this time the love of my life, and her clients, were watching. Even as I stood there, barely balanced, drenched in humiliation, leaning over the precipice trying to regain my centre of gravity, my mind pumped out one clear thought. It was not the idea of the soaring arc that had liberated me, nor was it the thrill of the pace. It had been the presence of B
rian, the person who had so confidently led me, who had made my successful leap so possible. He had allowed me to put one foot in the conventional world, and I was about to place down the other. But my conventions, it turned out, could not be broken overnight, because they had been forged in my brain like steel, and nothing so simple as longing could dislodge them. By now I was flushed with embarrassment and hoped that Elizabeth had not registered my failure.
Let me tell you about my mailbox. It is one of twelve eroded brassy slots at the front entrance of my building. It is also my Ellis Island, because, as I don’t have a phone or a computer, and I disconnected my TV, everything alien that comes to me comes through it first. The Monday after my dismal showing with Elizabeth, I went to the mailbox and retrieved six pieces of mail, took them to my kitchen table, and began sorting them into three piles. Into the Highly Relevant pile went two personal letters, one hand-addressed. In the Relevant pile, I put the mail that wasn’t personal even though it was addressed to me—ads, announcements, and so on, because anything with my name on it I consider relevant. Third were the letters addressed to “resident” and “occupant.” The Irrelevant pile. I had considered a fourth pile, because to me, resident” is quite different from “occupant,” and I have struggled and succeeded in coming up with a practical usage guide. Yes, I’m a resident and occupant of the Chrysanthemum Apartments, but if I went out on the sidewalk and put a large cardboard box over me and sat on the lawn, it could be said that I was an occupant of the cardboard box but not a resident of it. So “resident” letters could be sent only to my apartment, but “occupant” letters could be sent to cardboard boxes, junked cars, and large paint cans that I could stick my feet in. “Occupant” letters could legitimately be considered Very Highly Irrelevant.
The two letters that arrived that day were not insignificant. The first was from the Crime Show, informing me that the taping was completed on my episode and thanking me for my participation. Enclosed was a copy of the waiver I had signed that exempted the producers from all responsibility and made me liable for any lawsuits resulting from my appearance. It was probably not clever of me to sign it, but I wanted to be on TV. Plus, it seemed like it would be the nice thing to do. The letter also informed me that the show would be on several weeks from now and to keep checking my local listings for the exact date and time.