Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

The week had been one of successes and setbacks. There was the triumph of my run with Brian and the failure of my peacocking for Elizabeth. There was my excitement at receiving Granny’s letter but then the reminder of my own needy status when the check fell onto the kitchen table. But overall, there was an uptick in my disposition and I thought this might be the week for me to find the elusive Northwest Passage to the Third Street Mall.

The Third Street Mall is in the heart of Santa Monica on a street closed to traffic and has hundreds of useful shops with merchandise at both bargain and inflated prices. But it also has a Pavilions supermarket. I have been suffering along with the limited selection of groceries at the Rite Aid because it’s the only place to which I’d mapped out a convenient route. If I could manage to get to the Pavilions, well, it would be like moving from Iraq to Hawaii. From barren canned goods and dried fruit to the garden of Eden. Also, coffee. Jeez, the Coffee Bean, Starbucks. I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor café drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It’s just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can’t imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one’s arm to one’s mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I’m sure I could come up with one. I also like the idea of saying “java.” That is, saying it with an actual intent of getting some and not as a delightful sound to utter around my apartment.

I had tried and failed in this quest for Pavilions before, and I know why: cowardice and lack of will. This time I was determined to be determined, but there would be trials. My initial excursions hadn’t allowed for anything less than perfection. The route had to make absolute logical sense: no double backs or figure eights, and the driveways had to be perfectly opposing each other. But if I thought the way an explorer would-yes, there would be rapids, there would be setbacks-perhaps I could eventually find the right path.

Maps, of course, are of no assistance except in the most general way. Maps show streets, but not obstacles. If only city maps could be made by people like me. They wouldn’t show streets at all; they would show the heights of curbs, the whereabouts of driveways and crosswalks, and the locations of Kinko’s. What about all those drivers who can’t make left turns? Why aren’t there maps for them? No, I was forced to discover my route by trial and error. But because I now had a catalogue of opposing driveways and their locations in my head, noted from various other attempts to find various other locations through the years, I was able to put together a possible route before I even started. With a few corrections made spontaneously, on my third attempt I finally established a pathway to the mall, and for three evenings afterward I fell asleep wrapped in the glow of enormous pride.

Having a route to the Third Street Mall meant that I was out in public more, so I had to come up with some new rules to make my forays outside my apartment more tolerable. When I was relaxing at the Coffee Bean having a java, for example, I drew invisible lines from customer to customer connecting plaids with plaids, solids with solids and T-shirts with T-shirts. Once done, it allowed my anxiety meter to flat-line. I got a kick out of the occasional conversation that arose with a “dude.” One time, while enjoying my coffee, a particular tune was playing somewhere in the background. The melody was so cheerful that everyone in the place became a percussionist one way or another and with varying intensity. For some it was finger-drumming and for others it was foot-tapping. I was inspired to blow on my hot coffee in three-quarter time. But the oddest thing of all was that I knew this song. It was a current pop hit, but how had I come to know it? How had this tune gotten to me, through the mail? Somehow it had reproduced, spread, and landed in my mental rhythm section. While it played, I and everybody else in the Coffee Bean had become as one. I was in the here and now, infected with a popular song that I had never heard, sitting among “buddies.” And there was, for three long minutes, no difference between me and them.

The chairs and tables of the Coffee Bean spilled onto the mall like an alluvial fan. I grabbed a seat that was practically in the street because I could see at least a full block in either direction. No need, though. Because what went on within the perimeter of the sidewalk café was enough for an afternoon’s entertainment. People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety. My eyes roved around like a security camera. Then I was startled out of my reverie by the sight of the one-year-old who had passed by my window last week. His hand was held tightly by the same raven-haired woman, and he leaned in toward the doorway of a bookstore, straining like a dog on a leash. In answer to a voice from inside, the woman turned toward the door and let the child’s hand loose. The boy careened the few steps inside and I saw him lifted into the air by two arms behind the glass storefront. Everything else in the window was obscured by a reflection from the street. The raven-haired woman was not the mother; this I had gathered. The raven-haired woman I assumed to be a sitter or friend. The child clung to the woman behind the glass, and when I saw that it was Clarissa who emerged from the shop, holding this child, so much of her behavior the previous week suddenly made sense.

On the way home, I mentally constructed another magic square, but one of a different order; this square fell under the heading of “Life”:

I tried a few things in the empty center square, but nothing stuck; anything I wrote in it seemed to fall out. As I studied the image, this graphic of my life, I realized it added up to nothing.

As I walked home, the day was still sunny and bright. Something bothered me, though: the sight of a mailman coming off my block at two-thirty in the afternoon. The mailman was never in my neighborhood later than ten, and this meant there could be a logjam in my planned events of the day. Earlier, when I trotted down with an elaborately planned haphazard flair to check the mail-jeez, I think I remember whistling-the slot had been empty and I assumed there was no mail to sort, so I foolishly changed my schedule. Oh well, the day had already convoluted itself when I sighted Clarissa on the street, and now I was going to sort mail in the afternoon. Sometimes I just resign myself to disaster.

Most favorite mail: Granny’s scented envelopes from Texas (without a check). Least favorite: official-looking translucent-windowed envelope with five-digit box number for a return address. But today, at the godforsaken hour of two-thirty in the afternoon, an envelope arrived that was set dead even between most favorite and least favorite. It was plain white and addressed to Lenny Burns. No return address on the front of the envelope, and I couldn’t turn it over until I analyzed all my potential responses to whatever address could be on the back. Which I won’t go into.

The name Lenny Burns rattled around in my head like a marble in a tin can. There was no one in my building named Lenny Burns, and the address specifically noted my apartment number. The previous tenant hadn’t been anyone named Lenny Burns, it had been a Miss Rogers, an astrologer with a huge pair of knockers. And evidently there was some doubt about whether she earned her living exclusively from astrology. The name Lenny Burns was so familiar that I paused, tapping the letter on the kitchen table like a playing card, while I tried to come up with a matching face. Nothing popped. Finally, I flipped over the envelope and saw the return address, and I wonder if what I saw will send a shiver of horror through you like it did me.