The Pleasure of My Company Read online

  I put my hand on his stomach to tickle him and found that my palm extended over his entire rib cage. I picked him up and hoisted him above my head, balancing him in the air on my stiff right arm, which he seemed to relish. I twisted him from side to side and he spread his arms, and for a few moments he was like an airplane on a stick. This simulation of flight seemed to please him inordinately, and his mother, who must have sensed that her boy had gone missing, said from over my shoulder, “Are you flying, Teddy? Are you flying in the air?”

  In the morning, they slipped away like a caravan leaving an oasis, and the return to quiet unnerved me.

  The next few days were stagnant. I was distressed to think that my regular visits from Clarissa were over. I wondered how I was going to fill those two hours that had become the binary stars around which my week revolved. I was also concerned for Clarissa, who had not contacted me in several days. I wondered if I had been ostracized from the group because I represented a horrible memory. But on the day and almost the hour of my regular visit, I saw Clarissa crossing the street with Teddy, carrying him under her arm like a gunnysack full of manure. Her other arm toted a cloth bag stuffed with baby supplies that bloomed and poked out of its top.

  I opened the door and started to say the h in hello, but she cut me off with, “Could I ask you a favour?” The request held such exasperation that I worried she had used up all the reserve exasperation she might need on some other occasion. “Could you watch Teddy for a couple of hours?” Without saying anything I came down the stairs and relieved her of the boy. I then understood why she had carried him like a sack of manure. “He needs changing,” she said. And how, I thought. Going in my apartment, Clarissa added, “I’ll change him now and that should hold him.” Clarissa, who was clearly on the clock, rushed the diaper change, pointed to a few toys to waggle in front of him, gave me a bottle of apple juice, wrote down her cell phone number, tried to explain her emergency, said she would be back in two hours, added that Lorraine had gone back to Toronto, kissed Teddy good-bye, hugged me good-bye, and left.

  Thus I went from being Clarissa’s patient to becoming her son’s baby-sitter.

  Teddy and I sat on the floor and I poured out the contents of the bag, which included a twelve-letter set of wooden blocks. These blocks were the perfect amusement for us, because while Teddy was fascinated with their shape, weight, and sound as they knocked together, I was fascinated with the vowels and consonants etched in relief on their faces. It was not easy to make words with this selection. Too many C’s, B’s, G’s, X’s and Y’s, and not enough A’s, E’s, and I’s. So while he struggled to build them up, I struggled to arrange them coherently. Whatever I did, Teddy undid; when he toppled them, I rebuilt them, and when he stacked them haphazardly, I rearranged them logically. Two hours went by and when Clarissa returned, she found us in the middle of the floor, transfixed.

  Two days later, I agreed to watch Teddy from four to six and she offered to pay me five dollars an hour, which I refused.

  Occasionally I amuse myself by imagining headlines that would trumpet the ordinary events of my day. “Daniel Pecan Cambridge Buys Best-Quality Pocket Comb.” “Santa Monica Man Reties Shoe in Mid-Afternoon.” I imagine these headlines are two inches high and I picture citizens standing on street corners reading them with a puzzled expression. But the headline that was now in my mind was prompted by a letter from Tepperton’s Pies, which I pinched between my stunned thumb and bewildered forefinger: “Insane Man Chosen as Most Average American.” The letter began with “Congratulations!” and it told me that I had won the Tepperton’s Pies essay contest. It went on to describe my duties as the happy winner. I was to walk alongside the runners-up in a small parade down Freedom Lane on the campus of Freedom College. We would then enter Freedom Hall, walk on the stage, and read our essays aloud, after which I would be presented with a check for five thousand dollars.

  I was getting a little nervous about the letter’s frequent repetition of the word “Freedom.” It could be an example of a small truth I had uncovered in my scant thirty-five years of life: that the more a word is repeated, the less likely it is that the word applies. “Bargain,” “only,” “fairness,” are just a few, but here the word “Freedom” began to smell like Teddy’s underpants. But what difference did it make? I am not a political person—in college I voted for president of the United States. He promptly lost and I never wanted to jinx my candidate again by voting for him. But whatever was the political underbelly of Freedom College, I was going to make five thousand dollars for reading an essay aloud.

  That week I practiced reading my essay by enlisting Philipa to listen to a few dry runs and coach me. Her contribution turned out to be so much more than just a few pointers. Philipa saw it as an opportunity to express to someone, anyone, just how complicated the simplest performance can be. She told anecdotes, got mad, complimented me, sulked, screamed “Yes!” and generally took it all way too far. Her goal was to impress upon someone, anyone, mainly herself, just how difficult her work was, that a nobody like me needed professional guidance. She almost had me convinced, too, until I realized I was much better when she wasn’t in the room.

  Friday came and Clarissa dropped off Teddy with a warm thank-you and a bundle of goodies. She gave me a hug that I had trouble interpreting. It could have been, at its highest level, a symbolic act indicating her deepening love for me; at its worst, well, there was no worst, because at its lowest level, it was symbolic of the trust she’d bestowed on me as the temporary guardian of her child. When she left, Teddy burst into tears and I held him up at the window so he could see her. I’m not sure if it was a good idea, because no matter what spin I tried to put on it, he was still looking at his mother leaving. Left alone with Teddy, I then began the game of Distraction and Focus. The object of the game was to Focus Teddy on something he liked and to Distract him from something he didn’t. That afternoon I discovered a law that states that for every Focus there is an equal and opposite Distraction and that they parse into units of equal time. Five minutes of Focus meant that somewhere down the line waited five minutes of Distraction.

  Within the first hour, I had exhausted my repertoire of funny faces and their accompanying nonsensical sounds. I had held up every unique object in my apartment. I had taken him on my forearm seat and marched him around to every closet, window cord, and cabinet pull. We had stacked and restacked the wretched wooden blocks. In a desperate move, I decided to take him down to the Rite Aid, which I remembered had a small selection of children’s toys, and I was hoping that Teddy, the man himself, would indicate exactly which of them would put an end to his frustration.

  There was about an hour of daylight left and I toddled him down my street to the first opposing driveways of my regular route. I had a moment of concern about crossing with him in the middle of the street but decided that extra care in looking both ways would ease my mental gnaw. And so Teddy became the first human ever to accompany me on my tack to the Rite Aid. He, of course, had no questions, no quizzical looks, no backsteps indicating he thought I was nuts, and I felt almost as if I were cheating: It seemed to me that if one is crazy, it’s unfair to involve someone who doesn’t understand the concept. If, as the books say, my habits exist to keep demons at bay, what was the point of exhibiting them in front of someone who was so clearly not a demon? Who, in fact, was so clearly a demon’s opposite?

  It was dusk, and the interior of the Rite Aid was bathed in its own splendid white light, which democratically saturated every corner of the store. The light was reflected from the polished floors and sho-cards so evenly that nothing had a shadow. I held Teddy’s hand as I led him down the aisles, heading for the toy section. We passed a display of crackers that held him enthralled, and it took some doing to lure him away from those elephantine red boxes spotted with orange circles and blue borders. As I cajoled him with head nods and high-pitched promises of the delights that awaited us just around the aisle, I noticed Zandy looking directly at us from her
high perch in Pharmacy. She didn’t do anything, including looking away. A customer intervened with a question. She turned toward him, and in the second it took to shift her attention, she turned her face back to me and emitted one silent, happy laugh.

  I now had Teddy moored in front of a hanging display of games and toys, and not only did I show him everything, I presented each prospect as though it were a tiara on a velvet pillow. And he, like a potentate reviewing yet another slave girl, rejected everything. He kept looking back and mewing and, unable to point, threw open his palm with five fingers indicating five different directions. Somehow, and I’m not sure telepathy was not involved, he navigated us back to crackers. This was his choice, and I saw that it was a good one, because what was inside was textural, crushable, and finally, edible.

  It was night by the time we left the drugstore. Teddy and I played motorboat and moved into the darkness. The gaily lit Rite Aid receded behind us like a lakeshore restaurant. We walked along the sidewalks and driveways, passing the apartments and parked cars, hearing the occasional helicopter. I held Teddy in one arm and the crackers in another. We came alongside a high hedge bearing waxy green leaves and extending the full length of a corner lot. It was a dewy night but not cold, and there was a silence that walked with us. Teddy held out one arm so that his hand could graze the hedge. He let the leaves brush his palm. He watched and listened, and would sometimes grab and hold a twig to feel it tugged out of his hand as I moved him forward. Soon he established a sequence of feeling, grabbing, and then losing the leaf. I reseated him on my arm so he could lean out farther, and then slowed my walk to accommodate his game and extend the rapture. I came to the end of the block and it was like coming out of a dream.

  Clarissa arrived promptly at six to find Teddy and me at the kitchen table in front of two dozen dismembered saltines. The box was torn and bent, and the wrappers were strewn across table and floor. This would have been a mess of the highest order except that nothing wet was involved. We made the transfer and she offered to help me clean up, but I shooed her out, knowing she had better things to do. At the door she said, “By the way, he’s back in Boston and calmed down. He even sent me a support check.” This small comment made me think all night about atonement, about what could be made up for, what could be forgiven, about whether Mussolini’s obligatory check meant I should forget about the clobbering I’d received. I decided that the answer would be known only when I saw him again and would be able to witness my own reaction to an offer of contrition.

  Speech day at Freedom College was drawing menacingly close and Philipa continued to rehearse me even though I did everything I could to indicate to her that I was sick of the sound of my own voice and weary of her relentless fine-tuning of me. I performed once for Brian—the first outsider to hear me—and he complimented me so profusely that I felt like a three-year-old who had just had his first drawing taped to the refrigerator. Brian then offered to drive me to Anaheim on the day of the award, and I accepted, happy to know I would have a familiar face in the audience. Later I realized I had made no plans to get to the event and Brian was my only real possibility. We would leave at 8:30 A.M., he said. It would take an hour and a half to get to Anaheim. The Freedom Walk begins at eleven, and the speeches start at noon, to be over by one. Brian had gotten all this information off the Internet and printed it out for me, which he proudly cited as a demonstration of his growing computer skills.

  The night before my speech, I carefully set my alarm for 7 A.M. I double-checked it by advancing the time twelve hours just to be sure it went off. Then I puzzled for a dozen minutes over whether I had reset the clock correctly, and had to redo the entire operation to confirm an LED light was indicating P.M. and not A.M. I carefully selected my wardrobe, choosing my brown shoes, khaki slacks, a blue sports coat, and a freshly laundered white shirt that I was careful not to remove from its protective glassine bag, lest a hair or dark thread should land on it in the night. I put several inches between my choices and the rest of my clothes for speedy access. I showered in the evening, even though I fully intended to shower again in the morning. This was a precaution in the event something went wrong with the alarm and I had to rush, but it was also part of my need to be flawlessly clean for the reading. Two showers less than eight hours apart would make me sparkle and squeak to the touch. My sports coat, a fourteen-year-old polyester blue blazer, had never known a wrinkle and would stand in stark contrast to my khaki pants. My outfit would be smooth, blue and synthetic above, crinkly, brown and organic below. In a perfect fashion world, I knew above and below should be the same, either all smooth blue and synthetic or all crinkly brown and organic. I marvelled that, like soy and talc, these two opposites would hang on the same body.

  During these hours, I was making a transition from my imperfect everyday world where the unpredictable waited around every corner, into a single-minded existence where all contingencies are anticipated and prepared for. I laid out my hairbrush, toothpaste, socks, soap, and washcloth. I cleaned the mirror on the medicine chest so that I wouldn’t see something on it that I would think was on me. This was important, because I wanted absolutely nothing to intrude upon my single and direct line to the podium, and nothing to distract me during the four-and-one-half hours that there would be between waking and speaking.

  Knowing I would probably be too nervous to fall asleep on time, I went to bed at eight-thirty instead of my usual ten-thirty, building in an extra two hours to fidget and calm down. I lay centred in the bed, intending to sleep facing the ceiling all night, without inelegant tossing and turning and scratching and noise-making.

  I reached for my universal light switch, which was located just out of reach on my bedside table now that I was in the centre of my bed. I had to hinge my body over to snap off the lights. Then, there I was, in perfect symmetry. The white sheets were crisp and freshly laundered. There were no body residues from the night before to contaminate me after my shower. I went over my speech in my head, and once I had done that, I allowed myself a moment for self-congratulations. I was, I said to myself, the Most Average American. Most Average, Most Ordinary. I had become this solely through my own efforts, and had succeeded not only once, but twice, with two different essays. I couldn’t wait to tell Granny and asked myself why I hadn’t already written her with the great news. Of course it was because I wanted to wait until I had the award in hand before bragging about it. It’s the Texas way.

  In the morning I was only slightly askew. The top sheet and blanket had barely moved. I must have slept at a rigid, horizontal version of “ten-hut!” that would have made Patton proud. There was an empty moment before I remembered what today was, but when I did, my voltage cranked up and the ensuing adrenaline rush cleared my sinuses.

  The first thing I did was to sit on the edge of the bed and go over my speech. Then I stood and delivered it again, this time adding in a few planned gestures. Satisfied, I stepped out of my pyjamas and folded them into a drawer, and put on my robe for the seventy-two-inch walk to the bathroom. I took off the robe and hung it on the back of the door. I turned on the shower and waited the fifteen seconds for it to adjust. Stepping under the water, I let it engulf me and was overcome with pleasure. When my delirium abated, I soaped and scrubbed my already clean body.

  Out of the shower, my every action was as deliberate as a chess move. Towelling off, folding, hanging, everything going smoothly until hair. I had determined not to comb it but to brush it once, then shake it so it would dry into a flopover. I had done this a thousand times, but today it resisted the casual look it had achieved after virtually every other head shake of my life. However, I had mentally prepared myself for this uncertainty. If I was to style my hair with a head shake, I had to accept the outcome of the head shake. And though I could have picked up my brush and teased it into perfection, I didn’t.

  Brian arrived on the nose at eight-thirty, and it was a good thing, too, since by that time I had been standing motionlessly by the door for twenty-two mi
nutes, mostly as an anti-wrinkle manoeuvre. He and I were dressed almost identically except he wore a tie. Blue up top, brown down below, the only difference in our clothes being in designer eccentricities. My white shirt had stitching around the collar; his didn’t. My coat was polyester, his was wool, though they both had the same sheen.

  “No tie?” he asked.

  “Should I?” I answered.

  “I think so,” he said.

  I went to my closet and retrieved my one tie. A tie that was so hideous, so old, so wide, so unmatchable, so thick, so stained, that Brian made me wear his. “Come on, buddy,” he said, and we started off. “Got your essay?” he asked. “Yes, and an extra set from Kinko’s, just in case.” I had folded my speech lengthwise and put it in my breast pocket. This caused a tiny corner of the white paper to peek out from my lapel, which I nervously tucked back in every three minutes for the rest of the day.

  Brian had idled the car in the driveway, making it easy for me to enter as I didn’t have to step over a curb. I hung my coat on a hanger and put it on a hook in the backseat. He made me co-pilot, handing me the directions and saying, “We’ll take the 10 to the 5 to the Disneyland turnoff then left on Orangewood. We’ll save some time because then we’ll be headed away from Disneyland and out of traffic.” He backed out of the driveway, telling me to put on my seat belt, but I really couldn’t. It would have cut across my chest and left a wide imprint across my starched white shirt. We turned the corner onto Seventh and I stiffened my legs and pressed them against the floorboard, raising my rear end into the air. This kept me in a prone position with my shoulders being the only part of me touching the car seat. I wasn’t sure whether I did this to prevent wrinkles or to prevent myself from slipping into a coma. The answer came later when my legs fatigued and I slowly lowered myself down to a sitting position and nothing happened: I did not blow up, faint, or die. But I remained intensely aware that my khaki pants were soon going to be streaked with hard creases across my fly front.