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Annotation

In a recent interview with Steve Martin on NPR's Fresh Air, host Terri Gross asked her guest: "Do you remember the point in your career, when people started to realize that you are smart?" The host was referring, of course, to Martin's zany comedic roles that qualify him as a loveable nut. After all, it is tough to equate "King Tut" from Saturday Night Live, as an author of fairly serious repute. Martin, in reality, is an immensely talented writer; his "Shouts and Murmurs" and other brief pieces in the New Yorker were enjoyable and set his writing reputation even before his first novella, Shopgirl was released. His latest, another slim volume, The Pleasure of my Company, emphasizes Martin's status as a promising and talented writer.

Martin's protagonist is a thirty-something single guy, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose life is constrained by his obsessive-compulsive behavior. Daniel informs us that his middle name originates from the pecan plantation his "granny" owns in Southern Texas, but we realize it is a fitting name for a "nut." Daniel is a cute one though, even despite his many quirks. His biggest obstacle, one that prevents him from venturing out on long walks anywhere, is his fear of curbs. To avoid them, he searches for opposing "scooped out driveways" in his California town, and draws mental maps that will take him successfully to his favorite hideout-the local Rite Aid. The Rite Aid with its clean lines and atmosphere is like heaven to Daniel and he never tires of walking the aisles, checking out supplies and the cute pharmacist, Zandy. "The Rite Aid is splendidly antiseptic," explains Daniel, "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." Among Daniel's other obsessions are ensuring that the total wattage of all the bulbs in a house equal 1125 and periodically having to touch all four corners of copiers at the local Kinko's.

No wonder then that Daniel finds his love life a bit constrained. He keeps himself happy by eyeing Elizabeth, the real-estate agent who often works across the street, by mixing drinks for his upstairs neighbor, Phillipa, and with his weekly visits by his caseworker, Clarissa. Of course, there is Zandy at Rite Aid. All along, Daniel supports himself on generous gift checks sent him by his grandmother in Texas.

Daniel is anything but an average guy but amazingly he wins the "Average American" contest sponsored by a frozen pie company. Daniel is such pleasant company, because for the most part, his outlook on life is always sunny and bright. For a brief moment, when he meets the other finalists of the essay competition, he is sad. "We weren't the elite of anything," he notes, "we weren't the handsome ones with self-portraits hanging over their fireplaces or the swish moderns who were out speaking slang at a posh hotel bar. We were all lonely hearts who deemed that writing our essays might help us get a little attention." However, this sinking feeling is only temporary and Daniel reminds himself that he only wrote the essay at the Rite Aid to have a "few extra Zandy-filled minutes."

It is hard not to make comparisons between Daniel and the autistic protagonist Christopher of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Like Christopher, Daniel has some curious insights about the world around him and these casual observations woven into the text make for delightful reading. Referring to his caseworker, Clarissa, Daniel observes: "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 at me in the face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar."

Towards the end of The Pleasure of my Company, the story moves along quickly. Daniel becomes involved with Clarissa in a way and they travel to Texas, both for their individual private reasons. By novel's end, Daniel has conquered his fear of curbs and Clarissa has accommodated his obsession with

bulb wattage. The Pleasure of My Company is a delightful novel as warm as the California sun. Martin has

managed to capture in Daniel, the essence of a likeable zany man. Daniel's eventual success at having a happy life despite his many handicaps, is uplifting because it reminds us that life is not all bad all the time. It is always fun to root for the underdog and have him win. It might take some doing but Martin shows us that there are indeed "takers for the quiet heart."

Steve Martin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Steve Martin

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Steve Martin

The Pleasure of My Company To my mother and father

If I can get from here to the pillar box If I can get from here to the lamp-post If I can get from here to the front gate before a car comes round the corner… Carolyn Murray will come to tea Carolyn Murray will love me too Carolyn Murray will marry me But only if I get from here to there before a car comes round the corner… – MICK GOWAR, FROM OXFORD ’S ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF

POETRY FOR CHILDREN

This all started because of a clerical error. Without the clerical error, I wouldn’t have been thinking this way at all; I wouldn’t have had time. I

would have been too preoccupied with the new friends I was planning to make at Mensa, the international society of geniuses. I’d taken their IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90? I fell short of genius category by a full fifty points, barely enough to qualify me to sharpen their pencils. Thus I was rejected from membership and facing a hopeless pile of red tape to correct the mistake.

This clerical error changed my plans for a while and left me with a few idle hours I hadn’t counted on. My window to the street consumed a lot of them. Nice view: I can see the Pacific Ocean, though I have to lean out pretty far, almost to my heels. Across the street is a row of exotically named apartment buildings, which provide me with an unending parade of human vignettes. My building, the Chrysanthemum, houses mostly young people, who don’t appear to be out of work but are. People in their forties seem to prefer the Rose Crest. Couples whose children are grown gravitate toward the Tudor Gardens, and the elderly flock to the Ocean Point. In other words, a person can live his entire life here and never move from the block.

I saw Elizabeth the other day. What a pleasure! She didn’t see me, though; she doesn’t know me. But there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesn’t mean they weren’t, in some metaphysical place, already in love. Elizabeth was pounding a FOR LEASE sign into the flower bed of the Rose Crest. Her phone number was written right below her name, Elizabeth Warner. I copied it down and went to the gas station to call her, but the recorded voice told me to push so many buttons I just gave up. Not that I couldn’t have done it, it was just a complication I didn’t need. I waved to Elizabeth once from my window, but maybe there was a reflection or something, because she didn’t respond. I went out the next day at the same hour and looked at my apartment, and sure enough, I couldn’t see a thing inside, even though I had dressed a standing lamp in one of my shirts and posed it in front of the window.

I was able to cross the street because just a few yards down from my apartment, two scooped-out driveways sit opposite each other. I find it difficult-okay, impossible-to cross the street at the corners.

The symmetry of two scooped-out driveways facing each other makes a lot of sense to me. I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don’t know how they can do it. Isn’t a curb forbidding? An illogical elevation imposing itself between the street and the sidewalk? Crosswalks make so much sense, but laid between two ominous curbs they might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Who designed this? Daffy Duck?

You are now thinking I’m either brilliant or a murder suspect. Why not both? I’m teasing you. I am a murder suspect, but in a very relaxed way and definitely not guilty. I was cleared way early, but I’m still a suspect. Head spinning? Let me explain. Eight months ago a neighbor downstairs, Bob the appliance repairman, was knifed dead. Police came to interview me-it was just routine-and Officer Ken saw a bloodstained parka on my coatrack. Subsequently the lab found fibers from my parka on the corpse. Can you figure out my alibi? Take a minute.

Here it is: One night a naked woman burst out of Bob the appliance repairman’s apartment, hysterical. I grabbed my parka and threw it around her. Bob came and got her, but he was so polite he made me suspicious. Too bad I didn’t get fully suspicious until a week later, just after naked woman had penetrated his liver with a kitchen knife. One day, the naked woman, now dressed, returned my parka, unaware that blood and other damning evidence stained the backside. I was unaware too until savvy cop spotted the bloodstain when the parka was hanging on a coat hook near the kitchen. The cops checked out my story and it made sense; Amanda, hysterical woman, was arrested. End of story.

Almost. I’m still a suspect, though not in the conventional sense. My few moments of infamy are currently being reenacted because the producers of Crime Show, a TV documentary program that recreates actual murders, love the bloodstained parka angle, so I’m being thrown in as a red herring. They told me to just “act like myself.” When I said, “How do I do that?” they said to just have fun with it, but I’m not sure what they meant.

I’m hoping that my status as a murder suspect will enhance my first meeting with Elizabeth. It could jazz things up a bit. Of course, in the same breath I will tell her that I was cleared long ago, but I’ll wait just that extra second before I do in order to make sure I’ve enchanted her.

The larger issue, the one that sends me to the dictionary of philosophy, if I had one, is the idea of acting like myself. Where do my hands go when I’m myself? Are they in my pockets? I frankly can’t remember. I have a tough time just being myself, you know, at parties and such. I start talking to someone and suddenly I know I am no longer myself, that some other self has taken over.

The less active the body, the more active the mind. I had been sitting for days, and my mind made this curious excursion into a tangential problem: Let’s say my shopping list consists of two items: Soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. Soy: tart and salty. Talc: smooth and silky. Yet soy sauce and talcum powder are both available at the same store, the grocery store. Airplanes and automobiles, however, are similar. Yet if you went to a car lot and said, “These are nice, but do you have any airplanes?” they would look at you like you’re crazy.

So here’s my point. This question I’m flipping around-what it means to act like myself-is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet we’re available in the same store. The store of Existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensa’s loss.

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events. Like the morning the toaster popped up just as a car drove by with Arizona plates. Connection? Or coincidence? Must the toaster be engaged in order for a car with Arizona plates to come by? The problem, of course, is that I tend to behave as if these connections were real, and if a car drives by with plates from, say, Nebraska, I immediately eyeball the refrigerator to see if its door has swung open.

I stay home a lot because I’m flush with cash right now ($600 in the bank, next month’s rent already paid), so there’s no real need to seek work. Anyway, seeking work is a tad difficult given the poor design

of the streets with their prohibitive curbs and driveways that don’t quite line up. To get to the Rite Aid, the impressively well-stocked drugstore that is an arsenal of everything from candies to camping tents, I must walk a circuitous maze discovered one summer after several weeks of trial and error. More about the Rite Aid later (Oh God, Zandy-so cute! And what a pharmacist!).

My grandmother (my angel and savior) sends me envelopes periodically from her homestead with cash or cash equivalents that make my life possible. And quite a homestead she has. Think Tara squashed and elongated and dipped in adobe. I would love to see her, but a trip to Helmut, Texas, would require me to travel by mass transportation, which is on my list of no-no’s. Crowds of four or more are just not manageable for me, unless I can create a matrix that links one individual to another by connecting similar shirt patterns. And airplanes, trains, buses, and cars… well, please. I arrived in California twelve years ago when my travel options were still open, but they were quickly closed down due to a series of personal discoveries about enclosed spaces, rubber wheels, and the logic of packing, and there was just no damn way for me to get back home.

You might think not going out would make me lonely, but it doesn’t. The natural disorder of an apartment building means that sooner or later everyone, guided by principles of entropy, will inadvertently knock on everyone else’s door. Which is how I became the Wheatgrass guy. After the murder, gossip whipped through our hallways like a Fury, and pretty soon everyone was talking to everyone else. Philipa, the smart and perky actress who lives one flight up, gabbed with me while I was half in and half out of my open doorway (she was a suspect too for about a split second because the soon- to-be-dead guy had once offended her in a three-second unwelcome embrace by letting his hand slip lower than it properly should have, and she let everyone know she was upset about it). Philipa told me she was nervous about an upcoming TV audition. I said let me make you a wheatgrass juice. I wanted to calm her down so she could do her best. She came into my apartment and I blended a few herbs in a tall glass. Then, as a helpful afterthought, I broke an Inderal in half, which I carried in my pocket pillbox, and mixed it into the drink. Inderal is a heart medication, intended to straighten out harmless arrhythmias, which I sometimes get, but has a side effect of leveling out stage fright, too. Well, Philipa reported later that she gave the best audition of her life and got two callbacks. Probably no connection to the Inderal- laced drink, but maybe. The point is she wanted to believe in the wheatgrass juice, and she started coming back for more at regular intervals. She would stop by and take a swig, sit a while and talk about her actress-y things, and then leave for her next audition with a tiny dose of a drug that was blocking her betas.

If the moon is out of orbit one inch a year, eventually, somewhere in a future too distant to imagine, it will spin out of control and smash into, say, India. So comparatively speaking, a half an Inderal in a wheatgrass juice once or twice a week for Philipa is not really a problem, but if I’m to stay in orbit with Philipa, my own prescription count needs to be upped. Easy for me, as all I have to do is exaggerate my condition to the doctor at the Free Clinic and more pills are on the way. My real dilemma began one afternoon when Philipa complained that she was not sleeping well. Did I have a juice drink that might help? she asked. I couldn’t say no to her because she had grown on me. Not in the way of Elizabeth the Realtor, who had become an object of desire, but in the way of a nice girl up the stairs whose adventures kept me tuned in like a soap opera.

Philipa couldn’t see that she was in the charmed part of her life when hope woke her up every day and put her feet into her shoes. She lived with a solid, but in my view, dimwit guy, who would no doubt soon disappear and be replaced by a sharper banana. I went to the kitchen and blended some orange juice, protein powder, a plum, and a squirt of liquid St. John’s Wort from the Rite Aid, and then, confidently motivated by poor judgment, I dropped in one-quarter of a Quaalude.

These Quaaludes were left over from a college party and had hung out in my kitchen drawer ever since, still in their original package. I didn’t even know if they were still potent, but they seemed to work

for Philipa, because about ten minutes after she drank my elixir, a dreamy smile came over her face and she relaxed into my easy chair and told me her entire history with the current boyfriend, whose name was Brian. She commented on his hulking, glorious penis, which was at first phrased as “… great dick…”- Philipa had begun to slur-and then later, when she began to slur more poetically, was described as a “uniform shaft with a slight parenthetical bend.” Evidently it had captivated her for months until one day it stopped captivating her. Brian still assumed it was the center of their relationship, and Philipa felt obligated to continue with him because her fixation on his fail-safe penis had drawn him into her nest in the first place. But now this weighty thing remained to be dealt with, though Philipa’s interest had begun to flag.

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 marveled 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 sniveling, 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 traveler 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 humor 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 rearview 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 color 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 canceled, 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 aluminum 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 reemerge, 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 demeanor of a gentleman musketeer, but my face expressed a lifetime of constipation.

Still, as freakish as I may have appeared, I had established contact. And I doubt that her brief distorted impression of me was so indelible that it could not, at some point, be erased and replaced with a better me.

Which leads me to the subject of charisma. Wouldn’t we all like to know the extent of our own magnetism? I can’t say my charm was at full throttle when I strolled by Elizabeth, but had she been at the other end of the street, so that I was walking eastward with the sun behind me, squintless and relaxed and perhaps in dusky silhouette, my own charisma would have swirled out of me like smoke from a hookah. And Elizabeth, the enthralling Elizabeth, would already be snared and corralled. But my charisma has yet to fully bloom. It’s as though something is keeping me back from it. Perhaps fear: What would happen to me and to those around me if my power became uncontained? If I were suddenly just too sensational to be

managed? Maybe my obsessions are there to keep me from being too powerfully alluring, to keep my would-be lovers and adventures in check. After all, I can’t be too seductive if I have to spend a half hour on the big night calculating and adjusting the aggregate bulb wattage in a woman’s apartment while she sits on the edge of the bed checking her watch.

*

Around this time the Crime Show called, wanting to tape more footage for their show. They needed to get a long shot of me acting suspicious while I was being interrogated by two policemen who were in fact actors. I asked them what I should say, and they said it didn’t matter as the camera would be so far away we would only have to move our mouths to make it look like we’re talking. I said okay, because as nervous as it made me, the taping gave the coming week a highlight. The idleness of my life at that time, the unintended vacation I was on, made the days long and the nights extended, though it was easy for me to fill the warm California hours by sitting at the window, adjusting the breeze by using the sliding glass as a louver and watching the traffic roll by.

*

Eight days after my last sighting of her, I again saw Elizabeth standing across the street, this time with a different couple but doing the same routine. She stood at the car, handing over the brochures, and then dallied as she made her final sales pitch. I decided to take my walk again, this time wearing my sunglasses to avoid the prune look. I outdid myself in the clothes department, too. I put on my best outfit, only realizing later that Elizabeth had no way of knowing that it was my best outfit. She could have thought it was my third- or fourth-best outfit, or that I have a closet full of better outfits of which this was the worst. So although I was actually trying very hard, Elizabeth would have to scour my closet, comparing one outfit against another, in order to realize it. This outfit, so you know, consisted of khaki slacks and a fashionably frayed white dress shirt. I topped it off with some very nice brown loafers and matching socks. This is the perfect ensemble for my neighborhood, by the way. I looked like a Californian, a Santa Monican, a man of leisure.

I attained the sidewalk. I decided this time not to look like someone with a destination but to go for the look of “a man taking his dog for a walk.” Though I had no dog. But I imagined a leash in my hand; this was so vivid to me I paused a few times to let the invisible dog sniff the occasional visible bush. Such was the depth of my immersion in my “walking man” character. This time full eye contact was made with Elizabeth, but it was the kind where even though her eyes strayed over toward me, she kept on talking to her clients, in much the same way one would glance over to someone wearing a giant spongy orange fish hat: You want to look, but you don’t want to engage.

A plan began to form. As I passed her, I noticed the two opposing driveways coming up, which meant I could cross the street if I wanted and end up on her block. In order to walk near Elizabeth, I would have to reverse my direction once I had crossed the street. But it seemed perfectly natural to me that a man would walk down the street, decide to cross it, then go back and read the realtor sign before going on. This required a little acting on my part. I came to the low scoop of the driveway and even

walked a little past it. I paused, I deliberated, I turned and looked back at the sign, which was about a dozen feet from where Elizabeth was standing. I squinted at it, as if it were too far away to see, and proceeded to cross the street and head in Elizabeth ’s direction.

She was facing away from me; the sign was behind her and stuck into the flower bed, which was really more of a fern bed. She was wearing a tight beige-and-white paisley skirt, and a short sleeve brown blouse that was bursting from within because of her cannonball breasts. Her hair was combed back over her head and held in place by a black velour hair clamp, which fit like headphones. Her feet were plugged into two open-toed patent leather heels and were reflected in the chrome of her Mercedes’ bumper. I couldn’t imagine any man to whom this package would not appeal.

As I approached her, I felt a twinge where it matters. And if my theory is correct, that sexual attraction is usually mutual-an evolutionary necessity, otherwise nobody would be doing it with anybody- then Elizabeth must have been feeling something, too. That is, if she ever looked over at me. I came to the sign, leaned over, and pretended to read the description of the apartment, which was reduced to such extreme abbreviations as to be indecipherable. What’s a rfna? I had to do mental somersaults to align the fact that while I was reading Elizabeth ’s name, her actual person was by now two steps behind me.

I stepped backward as if to get a better view of the sign and, I swear this was an accident, bumped right into Elizabeth, glute to glute. She turned her head and said airily, “I’m sorry,” even though it was I who had bumped into her. “Oh, excuse me,” I said, taking all the blame.

“Are you the realtor?” I asked. “Yes I am,” she said and she browsed inside her purse without ever losing eye contact with me. “How many apartments are there for rent in the entire complex of apartments?” I said, using too many

words. “Just three. Would you like a card?” Oh yes, I wanted a card. I took it, palming it like an ace of spades, knowing it was a memento that I

would pin up on my bulletin board. In fact, this would be the first item on the board that could even come close to being called a bulletin. “That’s you,” I said, indicating with a gesture that the name on the card and the name on the sign were one and the same.

“Are you looking for an apartment?” she asked. I said something exquisite: “I’m always looking to upgrade.” I muttered this casually as I sauntered

off. The wrong way, I might add. The next opposing scooped-out driveways were so far out of my way that I didn’t get home for twenty-five minutes, and while I walked I kept looking back over my shoulder at my apartment, which had begun to recede into a pinpoint.

Once home I reflected on the encounter, and two moments in particular stood out. One was Elizabeth ’s response to my inquiry about the number of apartments for rent. “Just three.” It was the “just” I admired. “Just a few left.”

“Only three and they’re going fast” was the implication. Elizabeth was obviously a clever sales- woman. I figured that three were a lot of empty apartments for this building, and that the pressure was on from the owners to get them rented fast. I’ll bet they knew what they had in Elizabeth: the very, very best.

The second moment-contact between me and Elizabeth-was harder to relive because it had occurred out of my sight, actually behind my back. So I had to picture the unseen. Our-pardon my language-butts had backed right into each other like two marshmallows coming together in a sudden splat. Boing. If I had intended this sort of physical encounter I would be a different kind of person. The kind I am actually not. I would never do such a thing intentionally, like a subway creep. But I had literally impressed myself upon Elizabeth, and at our next meeting we would be further along than I ever could have imagined, now that she and I had had intimate contact. My hip had touched hers and hers had touched mine. That’s probably more than a lot of men have done who have known her a lot longer.

My third contact with Elizabeth, which occurred one week later, was a total failure, with an

explanation. I was coincidentally on the street when Elizabeth pulled up and got out of her car. Nothing could have seemed more casual, more unplanned, than my presence in front of the Rose Crest. She unfolded herself from the Mercedes, all legs and stockings, and gave me a jaunty wave. I think she was even about to speak to me. The problem was, I was taping my long shot for the Crime Show, in which I was supposedly being interrogated by two cops on the street.

So when Elizabeth waved, I was approached by two “policemen” who seriously overacted in their efforts to make me look guilty by snarling and poking at me. Luckily it was a long shot, so their hambone performances couldn’t be seen on camera. No Emmy for them. I thought I was pretty good. We were given no dialogue to say, but we had been asked to spout gibberish while a narrator talked over us. They weren’t recording us, they just wanted our mouths to be moving to make it look like we were talking. One “policeman” was saying, “I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m moving my mouth, it looks like I’m talking.” And then the other one would say, “Now I’m talking, I’m moving my mouth like I’m talking.” Then they would say to me, “Now you talk, just move your mouth.” So I would say, “I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m talking back to you,” and so on. I couldn’t wave to Elizabeth, even though she’d waved at me, as it would have spoiled the scene. I must have looked strange, because even though it was eighty-five-degree weather, I was wearing the blue parka with the bloodstain to look even more suspicious for the camera. This couldn’t have made Elizabeth too comfortable, particularly if she’d had any inclination toward viewing me as her next husband.

I am always amazed by what lies buried in the mind until one day for no particular reason it rises up and makes itself known. That night in bed, a vision of Elizabeth ’s face entered my consciousness, and I saw clearly that she had gray-green eyes. It was a small fact I hadn’t realized I knew.

*

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 longer 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 favorite: 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 behavior 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 submoments: 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 submoment broke down into even more sub-submoments: 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 pedaled 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 footstep. 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 center-parted hair, long and ash brown, fell straight to her shoulders and framed her pale un-made-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 center 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.

“Thirty-three,” I said. “I thought you were late twenties,” she said. I explained, “I never go out in the sun.” She said, “Must be hard to avoid.” I thought, Oh goody, repartee. But Philipa quieted. It seemed- oddly-that she had become distracted by my presence, the very person she was talking to. Her eyes, previously darting and straying, fell on me and held. She adjusted her body in the sofa and turned her knees squarely toward me, foreshortening her thighs, which disappeared into the shadows of her skirt. This made me uncomfortable and at the same time gave me a hint of an erection.

“When’s your birthday?” she asked. “January twenty-third.” “You’re an Aquarius,” she said. “I guess. What’s yours?” I asked. “Scorpio.” “I mean your birth date.” “November fifteenth.” I said, “What year?” She said, “Nineteen seventy-four.” “A Friday,” I said. “Yes,” she said, not recognizing my sleight of hand. “Do you date anyone?” “Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m dating a realtor.”

“Are you exclusive?” “No,” I said. “But she wants me to be.” Then she paused. Cocked her head like Tiger. “Wait a minute. How did you know it was a Friday?”

she finally asked. How do I explain to her what I can’t explain to myself? “It’s something I can do,” I said. “What do you mean?” “I mean I don’t know, I can just do it.” “What’s April 8, 1978?” “It’s a Saturday,” I said. “Jeez, that’s freaky. You’re right; it’s my brother’s birthday; he was born on Saturday. What’s

January 6, 1280?” “Tuesday,” I said. “Are you lying?” she asked. “No.” “What do you do for a living, and do you have any wine?” “No wine,” I said, answering one question and skirting the other. “So you want some wine? I’ve got some upstairs,” she said. Open, I’ll bet, too, I thought. “Okay,” I

said, knowing I wasn’t going to have any. Philipa excused herself and ran up to her apartment with a “be right back.” I stayed in my chair, scratching around the outline of its paisley pattern with my fingernail. Soon she was back with a bottle of red wine. “Fuck,” she said. “All I had was Merlot.”

Philipa poured herself a tankard full and slewed around toward me, saying, “So what did you say you do?”

I wanted to seem as if I were currently employed, so I had to change a few tenses. Mostly “was” to “am.”

“I encode corporate messages. Important messages are too easily hacked if sent by computer. So they were looking for low-tech guys to come up with handwritten systems. I developed a system based on the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ ” I had lost Philipa. Proof of how boring the truth is. She had bottomed-up the tankard, and I know what wine does. Right now I was probably looking to her like Pierce Brosnan. She stood up and walked toward me, putting both hands on my chair and leaning in. I kept talking about codes. She brushed my cheek with her lips.

I knew what I was to Philipa. A moment. And she was attached to Brian, in spite of the recent storm clouds. And I was attached to Elizabeth even though she didn’t know my name. And I knew that if Philipa and I were to seize this moment, the hallway would be forever changed. Every footstep would mean something else. Would she avoid me? Should I avoid her? What would happen if she met Elizabeth? Would Elizabeth know? Women are mind readers in the worst way. But on the other hand, I knew that if I dabbled with Philipa that night, I could be entering the pantheon of historical and notable affairs. There is a grand tradition involving the clandestine. The more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a drunken one-off and more like the stuff of novels. And this perhaps would be my only opportunity to engage in it.

By now, Philipa’s eyelashes were brushing my cheek and her breath was on my mouth. With both hands, I clutched the arms of my chair as if I were on a thrill ride. I pooched out my lower lip, and that was all the seduction she needed. She took my hand and led me into my own bedroom. I’m sure that Philipa was lured on by my best asset, which is my Sure-cuts hairdo. I’m lanky like a baseball pitcher, and the Sure-cut people know how to give me the floppy forehead at a nominal price. So without bragging, I’m letting you know that I can be physically appealing. Plus I’m clean. Clean like I’ve just been car-washed and then scrubbed with a scouring pad and then wrapped in palm fronds infused with ginger. My excellent personal hygiene, in combination with the floppy casual forehead, once resulted in a provocative note being sent to me from my former mailwoman. Philipa never saw females going in and

out, so she knew I wasn’t a lothario, and I had come to suspect that she regarded me as a standby if she ever needed to get even with Brian the wide receiver.

I never have interfered with a relationship, out of respect for the guy as much as for myself, but Brian is a dope and Philipa is a sylph and I am a man, even if that description of myself is qualified by my failure to be able to cross the street at the curb.

The bedroom was a little too bright for Philipa. She wanted to lower the lights, so I turned out three sixty-watt bulbs but had to go to the kitchen to turn on a one-hundred-watt bulb and a fifty-watt bulb and two fifteens, in order to maintain equity. It is very hard to get thirty-watt bulbs, so when I find them I hoard them.

She still didn’t like the ambience. The overhead lights disturbed her. I turned them off and compensated by turning on the overheads in the living room. But the light spilling into the bedroom was just too much; she wanted it dim and sexy. She went over and closed the door. Oh no, the door can’t be closed; not without elaborate preparations. Because if the door is closed, the light in the bedroom is cut off from the light in the living room. Rather than having one grand sum of 1125 watts, there would be two discrete calculations that would break the continuity. I explained this to Philipa, even though I had to go through it several times. To her credit, she didn’t run, she just got tired, and a little too drunk to move. Our erotic moment had fallen flat, so I walked her to the door. I hadn’t succeeded with Philipa, but at least I could still look Elizabeth straight in the eye.

After Philipa left, I lay in the center of the bed with the blanket neatly tucked around me; how Philipa and I would have mussed it! Inserted so neatly between the bed and the sheets, I thought how much I must look like a pocket pencil. My body was so present. I was aware of my toes, my arms, my weight on the bed. There was just me in a void, wrapped in the low hum of existence. The night of Philipa had led me to a quiet, aesthetic stillness. You might think it odd to call a moment of utter motionlessness life, but it was life without interaction, and I felt joy roll over me in a silent wave.

As long as I remained in bed, my relationship to Elizabeth was flawless. I was able to provide for her, to tease out a smile from her, and to keep her supplied with Versace stretch pants. But I knew that during the day, in life, I could not even cross the street to her without a complicated alignment of permitting circumstances. The truth was-and in my sensory deprivation I was unable to ignore it-I didn’t have much to offer Elizabeth. Or for that matter, Philipa (if that were to happen) or Zandy (if she were to ever look at me).

I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was finally static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life.

*

The next morning I decided to touch every corner of every copying machine at Kinko’s. Outside the apartment I ran into Brian, who was lumbering toward Philipa’s, wearing what I suspect were the same clothes he had on yesterday. He had the greasy look of someone who had been out all night. Plus he held his cell phone in his hand, which told me he was staying closely connected to Philipa’s whereabouts. His size touched me, this hulk. And after last evening, with my canny near-seduction of his girlfriend, I felt I was Bugs Bunny and Mercury to his Elmer Fudd and Thor.

I decided to pump Brian to find out how much he knew about my night with Philipa. I trudged out my

technique of oblique questioning: I would ask Brian mundane questions and observe his response. “I’m Daniel. I see you sometimes around the building. You an actor, like Philipa?” Now if Brian cocked his head and glared at me through squinted eyes, I could gather that he was

aware of my escapade with his girlfriend. But he didn’t. He said, “I’m a painter,” and like a person with an unusual name who must immediately spell it out, he added, “a house painter.” Then he looked at me as if to say, “Whadya think about that?”

His demeanor was so flat that not only did he not suspect me, but this guy wouldn’t have suspected a horned man-goat leaving Philipa’s apartment at midnight while zipping up his pants. He didn’t seem to have a suspicious bone in him. Then he rattled on about a sports bar and a football game. Staring dumbly into his face to indicate my interest, I realized Brian would not have been a cuckold in the grand literary tradition. In fact, he was more like a mushroom.

I had felt very manly when I first approached Brian, having just had a one-nighter with his girl, but now I felt very sheepish. This harmless fungus was innocent and charmless, but mostly he was vulnerable, and I wondered if I was just too smooth to be spreading my panache around his world. “Hey, well, best of luck,” I said and gave him a wave, not knowing if my comment was responsive to what he had been talking about. Then he said, “See ya, Slick.” And I thought, Slick? Maybe he is on to me after all.

My Kinko’s task was still before me, so I turned west and headed toward Seventh Street, drawing on all my navigational skills. Moving effortlessly from one scooped-out driveway to the next, I had achieved Sixth Street in a matter of minutes when I confronted an obstacle of unimaginable proportions. At my final matched set of scooped-out driveways, which would have served as my gateway to Kinko’s, someone, some lad, some fellow, had, in a careless parking free-for-all, irresponsibly parked his ’99 Land Cruiser or some such gigantic turd so that it edged several feet into my last driveway. This was as effective an obstacle for me as an eight-foot concrete wall. What good are the beautiful planes that connect driveway to driveway if a chrome-plated two-hundred-pound fender intersects their symmetry? Yeah, the driver of this tank is a crosswalk guy, so he doesn’t care. I stood there knowing that the copiers at Kinko’s needed to be touched and soon, too, or else panic, so I decided to proceed in spite of the offending car.

I stood on the sidewalk facing the street with Kinko’s directly opposite me. The Land Cruiser was on my right, so I hung to the left side of the driveway. There was no way to justify the presence of that bumper. No, if I crossed a driveway while a foreign object jutted into it, I would be committing a violation of logic. But, simultaneously driven forward and backward, I angled the Land Cruiser out of my peripheral vision and made it to the curb. Alas. My foot stepped toward the street, but I couldn’t quite put it down. Was that a pain I felt in my left arm? My hands became cold and moist, and my heart squeezed like a fist. I just couldn’t dismiss the presence of that fender. My toe touched the asphalt for support, which was an unfortunate maneuver because I was now standing with my left foot fully flat in the driveway and my right foot on point in the street. With my heart rapidly accelerating and my brain aware of impending death, my saliva was drying out so rapidly that I couldn’t remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. But I did not scream out. Why? For propriety. Inside me the fires of hell were churning and stirring; but outwardly I was as still as a Rodin.

I pulled my foot back to safety. But I had leaned too far out; my toes were at the edge of the driveway and my body was tilting over my gravitational center. In other words, I was about to fall into the street. I windmilled both of my arms in giant circles hoping for some reverse thrust, and there was a moment, eons long, when all 180 pounds of me were balanced on the head of a pin while my arms spun backward at tornado speed. But then an angel must have breathed on me, because I felt an infinitesimal nudge, which caused me to rock back on my heels, and I was able to step back onto the sidewalk. I looked across the street to Kinko’s, where it sparkled in the sun like Shangri-la, but I was separated from it by a treacherous abyss. Kinko’s would have to wait, but the terror would not leave. I decided to head toward home where I could make a magic square.

Making a magic square would alphabetize my brain. “Alphabetize” is my slang for “alpha-beta-ize,” meaning, raise my alphas and lower my betas. Staring into a square that has been divided into 256 smaller squares, all empty, all needing unique numbers, numbers that will produce the identical sum whether they’re read vertically or horizontally, focuses the mind. During moments of crisis, I’ve created magic squares composed of sixteen, forty-nine, even sixty-four boxes, and never once has it failed to level me out. Here’s last year’s, after two seventy-five-watt bulbs blew out on a Sunday and I had no replacements:

Each column and row adds up to 260. But this is a lousy 8 × 8 square. Making a 16 × 16 square would soothe even the edgiest neurotic. Benjamin Franklin-who as far as I know was not an edgy neurotic-was a magic square enthusiast. I assume he tackled them when he was not preoccupied with boffing a Parisian beauty, a distraction I do not have. His most famous square was a kingsize brainteaser that did not sum correctly at the diagonals, unless the diagonals were bent like boomerangs. Now that’s flair, plus he dodged electrocution by kite. Albrecht Dürer played with them too, which is good enough for me.

I pulled my leaden feet to the art supply store and purchased a three-foot-by-three-foot white poster board. If I was going to make a 256-box square, I wanted it to be big enough so I didn’t have to write the numbers microscopically. I was, after the Kinko’s incident, walking in a self-imposed narrow corridor of behavioral possibilities, meaning there were very few moves I could make or thoughts I could think that weren’t verboten. So the purchase didn’t go well. I required myself to keep both hands in my pockets. In order to pay, I had to shove all ten fingers deep in my pants and flip cash onto the counter with my hyperactive thumbs. I got a few impatient stares, too, and then a little help was sympathetically offered from a well-dressed businessman who plucked a few singles from the wadded-up bills that peeked out from my pockets and gave them to the clerk. If this makes me sound helpless, I feel you should know that I don’t enter this state very often and it is something I could snap out of, it’s just that I don’t want to.

Once home, I laid the poster board on my kitchen table and, with a Magic Marker and T square, quickly outlined a box. I drew more lines, creating 256 empty spaces. I then sat in front of it as though it were an altar and meditated on its holiness. Fixing my eyes on row 1, column 1, a number appeared in my mind, the number 47,800. I entered it into the square. I focused on another position. Eventually I wrote a number in it: 30,831. As soon as I wrote 30,831, I felt my anxiety lessen. Which makes sense: The intuiting of the second number necessarily implied all the other numbers in the grid, numbers that were not yet known to me but that existed somewhere in my mind. I felt like a lover who knows there is someone out there for him, but it is someone he has not yet met.

I filled in a few other numbers, pausing to let the image of the square hover in my black mental

space. Its grids were like a skeleton through which I could see the rest of the uncommitted mathematical universe. Occasionally a number appeared in the imaginary square and I would write it down in the corresponding space of my cardboard version. The making of the square gave me the feeling that I was participating in the world, that the rational universe had given me something that was mine and only mine, because you see, there are more possible magic square solutions than there are nanoseconds since the Big Bang.

The square was not so much created as transcribed. Hours later, when I wrote the final number in the final box and every sum of every column and row totaled 491,384, I noted that my earlier curbside collapse had been ameliorated. I had eased up on my psychic accelerator, and now I wished I had someone to talk to. Philipa maybe, even Brian (anagram for “brain”-ha!), who I now considered as my closest link to normalcy. After all, when Brian ached over Philipa, he could still climb two flights up and weep, repent, seduce her, or buy her something. But my salvation, the making of the square, was so pointless; there was no person attached to it, no person to shut me out or take me in. This healing was symptomatic only, so I tacked the cardboard to a wall over Granny’s chair in the living room in hopes that viewing it would counter my next bout of anxiety the way two aspirin counter a headache.

Clarissa burst through the door clutching a stack of books and folders in front of her as though she were plowing through to the end zone. She wasn’t though; she was just keeping her Tuesday appointment with me. She had brought me a few things, probably donations from a charitable organization that likes to help halfwits. A box of pens, which I could use, some cans of soup, and a soccer ball. These offerings only added to my confusion about what Clarissa’s relationship to me actually is. A real shrink wouldn’t give gifts, and a real social worker wouldn’t shrink me. Clarissa does both. It could be, though, that she’s not shrinking me at all, that she’s just asking me questions out of concern, which would be highly unprofessional.

“How… uh…” Clarissa stopped mid-sentence to regroup. She laid down her things. “How have you been?” she finally asked, her standard opener.

I couldn’t tell her about the only two things that had happened to me since last Friday. You see, if I told her about my relationship with Elizabeth and of my misadventures with Philipa, I would seem like a two-timer. I didn’t want to tell her about Kinko’s, because why embarrass myself? But while I was trying

to come up with something I could tell her, I had this continuing tangential thought: Clarissa is distracted. This is a woman who could talk nonstop, but she was beginning to halt and stammer. I could only watch and wonder.

“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 traveler, 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 color 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 pajamas 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 favorite 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.”