Steve martin the pleasure of my company

1. Do you think that Daniel belongs in Mensa? Why?
2. How does he describe Santa Monica? How does Daniel see the world differently than others? How does that present itself in his descriptions?
3. What is the point of the phone call on page 31, can you relate it to any similar situation in your life?
4. Is Daniel's cleanliness representative of something other than the need for a clean environment?
5. List three things that you keep in the back of your mind and do not often express.
6. Why does Philipa seduce Daniel? What part of the conversation do you think convinces her to go through with it?
7. How does Daniel's relationship with Brian begin?
8. What does the magic square say about Daniel? Who else does Daniel say is interested in magic squares? Why does he bring them up?
9. How does the magic square alter his relationship with Clarissa? Have you ever discovered a hobby that a friend had that shocked you?
10. The jog with Brian is a turning point in the book. Agree or disagree.
11. How does Daniel divide his mail? Is there a similar process in your life, anything that you divide into components? How does that kind of organization help someone?
12. Read the following quotes and choose which one you like best. Explain your choice with your understanding of the quotation.
a. "The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself from going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later." (Adams)
b. "The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessive to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear". (Maslow)
c. "Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence." (Bierce)
d. "Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."(White)

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.