The Pleasure of My Company Page 7

  After the ritualized locking of both apartments, Elizabeth led the way back down the stairs and onto the street. She sprung her car trunk from forty feet, reached in it, and handed me a brochure. She stood there on the sidewalk just as I had seen her do so many times from my window. Only now it was me to whom she was saying, “This is a very desirable area,” and “Each apartment has two parking spaces underground.” I was in on it. I was in on the conversations I had only imagined. Even after these few minutes of talking with her, spending time with her, trying to see her as fallible, Elizabeth lived on in my psyche as unattainable and ideal, and I was still the guy across the street dreaming beyond his means.

  “What is your current apartment like?” she asked.

  “It’s a one-bedroom. But I’m starting to feel cramped,” I said. “Is it in this area?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Perhaps I should look at it. I can do swaps, deals, all kinds of things,” she said.

  I nodded happily, indicating that I appreciated her can-do, full-service attitude. The thought of Elizabeth in my apartment delighted me; it would be a small tryout of our cohabitation. But I wasn’t about to take her on my crazy-eights route to a destination only a few linear steps away. She might look at me askance.

  “I could come by tomorrow, or next week,” she said.

  “Next week is good.”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  “I’m changing it in two days and don’t have the new one yet. We could make an appointment now.”

  “You want to give me directions?”

  I said sure. “You come down Seventh Street toward the ocean.” She began to write in a spiral notepad. “Make a right on Lincoln, left on Fourth, right on Evans, left on Acacia. I’m at 4384.”

  Elizabeth looked at me askance. It didn’t take her realtor’s mind long to compute that my apartment was right across the street. It seemed absurd not to take her over there now, let alone to have given her directions to a location within skipping distance. She didn’t call me on it because I guess she’d seen stranger things, and we made arrangements to meet next Friday, right after Clarissa’s visit.

  Elizabeth drove off while I pretended to be about to step off the curb. My stall involved bending over and acting as if I had found something urgently wrong with the tip of my shoe. Once she rounded the corner, I took my regular paper-clip-shaped route home, checking the mailbox and retrieving what I already knew would be there, the second letter from Tepperton’s Pies telling me that Daniel Pecan Cambridge was in competition with Lenny Burns, Sue Dowd (who, if she turned out to be Elizabeth’s half sister would be bad luck for me), Danny Pepelow, and Kevin Chen, who was probably a spy.

  It was inconceivable that Clarissa hadn’t shown for her Friday appointment. I confess that disappointment rang through me, not only because our sessions were the cornerstone of my week but also because I couldn’t wait to observe her from my new perspective of secret knowledge. Something else besides disappointment went through me too; it was concern. For Clarissa not to show meant that something was seriously wrong; she didn’t even know how to be late. Her earnestness included fulfilling her obligations, and I guessed she would have called if I had had a phone. I used the hour constructively. I imagined Clarissa’s life as a jigsaw puzzle.

  The individual pieces hovered around Clarissa every time I saw her or thought about her, which now included a small male child, a raven-haired woman, her pink Dodge, her ringless fingers, her stack of books and notepads, her implied rather than overt sexuality. I stood her next to Elizabeth, her opposite. What I saw was Elizabeth as woman and Clarissa as girl. But something was confusing. It was Clarissa who had a child, and Elizabeth who was trolling for a husband. Clarissa, girl-like, had done womanly things, and Elizabeth, woman-like, was doing girly things. It was Clarissa who was being tugged at the ankles by a one-year-old, her schedule dictated by baby-sitters and play dates, and it was Elizabeth who made herself up every day, whose life was governed by the cell and the cordless. In my mind, Elizabeth was all browns and golds; Clarissa was pastels and whites. And although Elizabeth was adult and smart and savvy and Clarissa was scattered and struggling and a student, it was Clarissa who had every adult responsibility and Elizabeth who remained the sorority deb.

  I put this information on hold. I turned my focus to the Clarissa rebus I had laid out in airspace above the kitchen table. One piece missing: Where was Clarissa’s man? Her impregnator. I assumed he was already gone or in the process of being gone, that he was the source or subject of the distressed phone calls. He had been replaced by Raven-Haired Woman, who, I assumed, was a friend filling in for baby-sitters. Raven-Haired Woman was now demystified into Betty or Susie. Clarissa was living advanced juggling and was probably in a mess. Oddly, I now knew more about my shrink than my shrink knew about me, since I had never allowed her to penetrate beyond my habits, which of course is the point of their existence.

  I anticipated my next session with Clarissa because I would see what form her apology would take. Or at least the extent of the apology. If she explained too much, she would reveal too much (“my husband is gone and I’m on my own and couldn’t find someone to take care of my one-year-old”), and she’d risk violating what I suppose is a shrink tenet. On the other hand, if she under-explained, she might seem callous. She’d found herself in a spot all right and I was going to enjoy watching her wriggle free, because how she handled it would reveal how she felt about me.

  Forty minutes later Elizabeth, former woman-of-the-world turned sorority deb, showed up at my place on her tour through the available apartments of Santa Monica. She mistakenly knocked on Philipa’s door, which set Tiger barking. I called up the landing to her and her voice, like a melodeon, greeted me with an “Oh,” and she turned her scrap of paper right-side up causing the 9 to be a 6. She came down the steps at a bent angle, her torso twisted from trying to see the steps from around her breasts.

  I tried to appear richer than I was, but it was hard as I didn’t have much to work with. Mostly I had put things away that would indicate poverty, like opened bags of Cheetos with their contents spilling onto the Formica. I did set out a packet of plastic trash liners because I thought they were a luxury item. She came in and stood stock-still in the middle of the living room. As she surveyed the place, wearing a tawny outfit with her knees thrust a bit forward from the cant of her high heels, she gave the impression of a colt rearing up. Nothing much seemed to impress her, though, as she only seemed to notice the details of my apartment as they would appear on a stat sheet: number of bedrooms, or should I say number of bedroom, kitchenette, cable TV, which she flipped on (though it’s not really cable, just an ancient outlet to the roof antenna), A/C, which she tested, number of bathrooms (she turned on the tap, I presume to see if rusty water would come out). I loved it when she looked at my bedroom and declared, “This must be the master.” Calling my dreary bedroom a master was like elevating Gomer Pyle to major general.

  She sat in the living room, jotted efficiently on her clipboard, and asked me how I was feeling about the apartment across the street. “Had I decided?” I went into a rhapsody about the complications of my decision, about the necessity of contacting my nonexistent writing partner. I had been talking for a minute or so when I noticed a rictus forming on Elizabeth’s face. She was looking past me at waist level with her mouth dropped open and her writing hand frozen. I turned my head and looked at the TV, and my mouth went open, and if I had been writing, my hand would have frozen, too. There I was on TV, being shuffled along in mock arrest on the Crime Show. There was a long moment before I came out with “My God, that fellow looks like me.” What filled the long moment was my shock, not at the bad luck of the show’s air date and time slot, but at how I looked on TV. The blue parka made me look fat, which I’m not. It made me look like a criminal, and I’m not. The show then jumped to the long shot of me talking to the two policemen. Now we could see my apartment in the background, so there was no us
e denying the obvious. “Oh right, it is me,” I ventured. “I made a bundle off this,” and I nodded up and down as if to verify my own lie. Then I turned to Elizabeth and said, “All I’m saying there is ‘I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m trying to look like I’m talking.’” She looked over at me, then back to the TV, and I knew that she had identified me as someone dangerous.

  This moment was like a pivot. Everything in my little universe swung on its axis and reordered itself. Here’s why: Elizabeth, whom I had previously seen only on her turf, or through a window, or in my head, was, now that she had crossed the threshold of my apartment, an actual being who would demand closet space. I didn’t even have enough closet space for the clothes she was currently wearing. I knew that I could not share a bathroom with eighteen gallons of hair stiffener, and I began to see how clearly she misfit my life. At the same time, when she saw me on TV, her face hid a well-tempered revulsion. In these few elongated seconds, our magnetic poles flopped as she became ordinary and I became notorious.

  Elizabeth must have now viewed my apartment as a halfway house, since she asked me if addicts lived in the building. I said no and did a pretty good job of explaining the TV show, though when I began to explain about the murder downstairs she got the hiccups and asked for water. I felt a small surge of pride because the water from the kitchen tap was not murky or even slightly brown. Her cell phone rang and she spoke into it, saying “yeah” three times and hanging up. Her tone was as if the person on the other end of the line had heard stress in her voice and was trying to suss out her predicament with questions like, “Are you all right?” “Are you in danger?” and “Do you want me to come get you?” She was out the door, and I looked at her from my spot by the window and felt a twinge of the old longing, no doubt brought on by placing myself in the old circumstances.

  After seeing the two women side by side, Elizabeth actually before me and Clarissa in my mind, a thought came into my head that jarred me: Would it be possible to scoop up my love for Elizabeth and steam-shovel it over onto Clarissa? This thought disturbed me because it suggested that the personalities of the two women had nothing whatever to do with the knot of love inside me. It implied that, if I chose, I could transfer my adoration onto anyone or thing that tweaked my fancy. But my next thought set me straight. I knew that once love is in place, it does not unstick without enormous upheaval, without horrible images of betrayal flashing uncontrollably through the mind, without visions of a bleak and inconsolable self, a self that is a captive of grief, which lingers viscously in the heart.

  But Clarissa was making the decision easy for me. She reflected light; Elizabeth sucked it up. Clarissa was a sunburst; Elizabeth was a moon pie. So now my preoccupation with Elizabeth became a post-occupation as I turned my Cyclops eye onto Clarissa. Yes, I would always love Elizabeth in some way, and one day we would be able to see each other again. But it was too soon right now. Better to let her handle her own pain, with her own friends, in her own way. But Elizabeth was at fault here. She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me.

  Long after the sun had set, my thoughts continued to accumulate, spread, and divide. What were my chances with Clarissa? None. Clearly, none. In nine months of twice-weekly visits, she had not placed on my tongue one sacrament of romantic interest. And not only that, she spoke to me in the tone one uses with a mental patient: “And how are we today?” meaning, “How are you and all those nuts living inside you?” At least Clarissa knows I’m benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one’s spouse: “This is my husband. He’s benign.”

  In spite of the gleaming bursts of well-being that were generated by the idea of loving Clarissa instead of Elizabeth, in the deeper hours of the night I began to look at myself, to consider myself and my condition, to measure the life I’d led so far. I did not know what made me this way. I did not know of any other way I could be. I did not know what was inside me or how I could redeem what was hidden there. There must be a key or person or thing, or song or poem or belief, or old saw that could access it, but they all seemed so far away, and after I drifted further and further into self-absorption, I closed the evening with this desolate thought: There are few takers for the quiet heart.

  In the middle of the night I woke spooked and perspiring. I clutched the blanket, drawing it up to my mouth as protection against the murderous creature that no doubt was lurking in the room. I lay still in case it did not yet know I was there. I held my breath for silence, then slowly let it out without moving my chest. Eventually this technique caught up with me and I had to occasionally gasp for air. But no one killed me that night, no knife penetrated the blanket, no hand grabbed at my throat. Looking back, I can identify the cause of my panic. It was that my earlier Socratic dialogue with myself about the nature of love had no Socrates to keep me logical. There was just me, seesawing between the poles. There was no one to correct me and consequently no thought necessarily implied the next, in fact, a thought would often contradict its predecessor. I had tried to force clarity on my confused logic, and this disturbed my demanding sense of order.

  Two days later I saw a man in a suit and tie standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment next door. He was rail thin and for a moment I could have been in Sleepy Hollow except this man had a head and no horse. He swayed from left to right, scanning up and down the block for street numbers. He was all angles as he craned sideways and looked up, twisting at the waist to check an address he held in his hand. This one-man menagerie crabbed along the sidewalk, with his neck moving owl-like as he looked far and close.

  When he saw the address above the stairs of my building, it seemed he’d found what he was looking for. He collected himself and came up the steps and knocked at my door.

  “Daniel Cambridge?” he called out.

  I counted to three then opened the door.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Gunther Frisk from Tepperton’s Pies,” he said.

  We sat chair and sofa; this time with the TV off as I didn’t want an errant Crime Show to leak into my living room. He asked whether I would be available on March 4 to read my essay at Freedom College in the event I won. “I would check my schedule,” I said, “but I can always move things around.”

  “I have to ask you a few questions. Your age?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Married?”

  “Engaged.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I train boxers.”

  He chuckled. “The fighters or the dogs?”

  I made a choice. “The dogs.”

  “Ever been in trouble with the law?”

  “No.”

  I wondered when he was going to ask me a question to which I wasn’t going to lie.

  “Are you the exclusive author of your essay?”

  “Yes.” I marvelled at my ability to answer truthfully with the same barefaced sincerity as I’d displayed on my five previous whoppers.

  He explained the judging process to me, made me sign a document promising not to sue, gave me a coupon for a frozen pie, and left. I watched from the window as he walked back to his car, got in it, and sat. He picked up a clipboard from the passenger’s seat, gave it a befuddled examination, and then again elongated his neck as he looked out the windshield toward my apartment and back to the clipboard. I’ve only seen comedians do double takes, but here was one occurring in real life. He got out of his car, once again checking the clipboard against the street numbers. He came up my steps, shuffled in front of my apartment, and rapped a couple of times. I opened the door and saw on his face an expression of bewilderment, as though he had stepped into his shoes in the morning and they were size seventeen.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, checking his clipboard. “I … I … does Lenny Burns live here?”

  We just hung there staring at each other. Thank God my eventual response justified the eternity that elapsed before I spoke.

  “Dead,” I said. “Dead!”
My voiced raised. “Dead at twenty-eight!” I cracked out a half sob, drawing on the same intensity of belief I had employed when I wrote the name “Lenny Burns on the essay. For dramatic effect, I reeled backward onto the sofa. Could my experience with the Crime Show, I thought, have given me the skills of Pacino?

  Gunther stood in the doorway. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Mr. Burns lived here?”

  “He was a cousin; my third cousin removed from my stepmother’s side, but we were like this. You can’t imagine how sudden.., everybody in the building loved him.” My sincere belief in what I was saying made me choke up.

  “He was a finalist, too … just like you,” said Gunther.

  “Oh my God, the irony!” I cried. “We entered together. Lenny loved the idea that he might be typical, and once he got that into his head, he wanted to be the most typical. He would have loved to have been a finalist. Why couldn’t you have come yesterday, before he passed?”

  In the hallway Philipa came by and heard me keening inside. She saw the door wide open and the distressed posture of Gunther Frisk.

  She called in to us, “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Lenny,” said Gunther, trying to be helpful. “Lenny died.”

  Philipa’s face was so blank, so unresponsive, that it was possible to interpret her expression as sudden, catastrophic, morbid shock. I rose and pulled her in, holding her face against my shoulder in comfort. Also so she couldn’t talk. I said to Gunther, “Could you excuse us?” He muttered an apology, acknowledging that he might have just blurted out private information that would have been better delivered by a priest. “I will contact you,” he said as he back-pedalled out of my apartment.

  It was a shimmering Southern California day, and the light poured into the Rite Aid through its plate glass windows the size of panel trucks. The merchandise inside broke the light like a million prisms. Candy bars, laid out like organ keys, glistened in their foil wrappers. Tiers of detergent boxes bore concentric circles of vibrating colour. The tiny selection of pots and pans reflected elongated sideshow images. Green rubber gloves dangled from metal racks like a Duchamp, and behind it all was Zandy’s yellow hair, which moved like a sun, rising and setting over the horizon of ointments and salves.