The Pleasure of My Company (2 page)

The
Quaalude drink became first a monthly ritual, then biweekly, then bidiurnal,
and then I started hiding every night around 11 P.M. when she would knock on my
door. My supply of the secret ingredient was getting low, and I was glad,
because I was beginning to doubt the morality of the whole enterprise. She did
say one night, as she waited for the plum/orange elixir to take effect, that
the drink had rekindled her interest in Brian’s thing and that she loved to lie
there while he did things to her. In fact, that’s the way she liked it now, her
eyelids at half-mast and Brian at full. When I started to cut back on the
amount of the drug, for reasons of conscience as well as supply, her interest
in him waned and I could tell that Brian was on his way out again. For a while,
by varying the dose, I could orchestrate their relationship like a conductor,
but when I finally felt bad enough, I cut her off without her ever knowing she’d
been on it and seemingly with no deleterious effects. Somehow, their
relationship hung together.

Santa Monica, California,
where I live, is a perfect town for invalids, homosexuals, show people, and all
other formerly peripheral members of society. Average is not the norm here.
Here, if you’re visiting from Omaha, you stick out like a senorita’s ass at the
Puerto Rican day parade. That’s why, when I saw a contest at the Rite Aid
drugstore (eight blocks from my house, takes me forty-seven minutes to get
there) asking for a two-page essay on why I am the most average American, I marvelled
that the promoters actually thought that they might find an average American
at this nuthouse by the beach. This cardboard stand carried an ad by its
sponsor, Tepperton’s Frozen Apple Pies. I grabbed an entry form, and as I hurried
home (thirty-five minutes: a record), began composing the essay in my head.

The
challenge was not how to present myself as average, but how to make myself
likable without lying. I think I’m pretty appealing, but likability in an
essay is very different from likability in life. See, I tend to grow on people,
and five hundred words is just not enough to get someone to like me. I need
several years and a ream or two of paper. I knew I had to flatter, overdo, and
lay it on thick in order to speed up my likability time frame. So I would not
like the snivelling, patriotic me who wrote my five hundred words. I would like
a girl with dark roots peeking out through the peroxide who was laughing so
hard that Coca-Cola was coming out of her nose. And I guess you would too. But
Miss Coca-Cola Nose wouldn’t be writing this essay in her Coca-Cola persona.
She would straighten up, fix her hair, snap her panties out of her ass, and
start typing.

“I am
average because …,” I wrote, “I stand on the seashore here in Santa Monica
and I let the Pacific Ocean touch my toes, and I know I am at the most western
edge of our nation, and that I am a descendant of the settlers who came to
California as pioneers. And is not every American a pioneer? Does this spirit
not reside in each one of us, in every city, in every heart on every rural
road, in every traveller in every Winnebago, in every American living in every
mansion or slum? I am average,” I wrote, “because the cry of individuality
flows confidently through my blood, with little attention drawn to itself, like
the still power of an apple pie sitting in an open window to cool.”

I hope
the Mensa people never see this essay, not because it reeks of my manipulation
of a poor company just trying to sell pies, but because, during the twenty-four
hours it took me to write it, I believed so fervently in its every word.

Tuesdays and Fridays are
big days for me. At least at 2 P.M. At 2 P.M. Clarissa comes. She talks to me
for exactly forty-five minutes, but she’s not a full shrink; she’s a student
shrink. So officially she’s a visitor and her eyes are green. She brings a
little gift bag each time, sometimes with packaged muffins, or phone cards, all
of which I assume are donated. She asks me how I am, and she always remembers
something from last time that she can follow up on this time. If I told her
that I planned to call my mother with the new phone card, she remembers to ask
how the call went. Problematic for me, because when I say I’m going to call my
mother I am lying, as my mother has been dead—is it six years now? Problematic
for her, because Clarissa knows my mother is dead and feels she has to humour
me. I know I’m lying and not fooling her, and she thinks I’m crazy and fooling
myself. I like this little fib because it connects us at a much deeper level
than hello.

Clarissa
makes several other stops on Tuesdays and Fridays to other psychiatric charity
cases, which I’m sure have earned her several school credits. I was, it seems,
one of the low men on the totem pole of insanity and therefore the recipient of
treatment from a beginner. This I have scoped out one data bit at a time. When
someone doesn’t want to give you information about themselves, the only way to
acquire it is by reverse inquiry. Ask the questions you don’t want answered and
start paring away to the truth. My conclusion about her was hard to reach
because she’s
at least
thirty-three. And still a student? Where were the
missing years?

She’s probably reporting
on me to a professor or writing about me in a journal. I like to think of her
scrawling my name in pencil at the end of our sessions—I mean visits—but
really, I’m probably a keyboard macro by now. She types
D
and hits
control/spacebar and Daniel Pecan Cambridge appears. When she looks me in the
face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan
Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar. I, however, think of her only as Clarissa
because her movements, gestures, and expressions translate only into the single
word of her name.

Last
Tuesday: Clarissa arrived in her frisky lip-gloss pink Dodge Neon. She parked
on the street, and lucky for both of us, there’s a two-hour parking zone
extending for several blocks in front of my apartment. So of course she’s never
gotten a ticket. From my window I saw her waiting by her car talking on the
cell phone; I watched her halt mid-street for a car to pass, and I saw its
hotshot driver craning his neck to see her in his rear-view mirror. She was
wearing a knee-length skirt that moved like a bell when she walked. Clarissa
has a student quality that I suspect she’ll have her whole life. She’s
definitely the cutest girl in class, and any romantically inclined guy looking
for an experiment in cleanliness would zero in on her. Her hair is auburn—do we
still use that word?—it looks dark blonde in the Santa Monica sun, but it flickers
between red and brown once she’s in the apartment. And as Clarissa’s hair colour
is on a sliding scale depending on light and time of day, so is her beauty,
which slides on a gradient between normal and ethereal.

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.