Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

Elizabeth was a prize object. She had picked up beauty tricks from everywhere; she had assembled herself from the best cosmetics had to offer. Any man she chose to be with would be envied, and made complete by her. A man who built an empire would certainly need Elizabeth by his side; he would need her and he would deserve her. I knew now that no matter how much I lied to her, the truth would come out about who and what I was, but I just stood there anyway, continuing my dumb charade while she radiated perfection.

She asked if I also wanted to see a three-bedroom down the hall that had just come up. I must have said yes, because the next thing I knew I was in the apartment next door, being shown each closet and bathroom. This place was unfurnished, and Elizabeth ’s high heels clacked on the bare floor with such snap that it was like being led around by a flamenco dancer. I looked at the apartment with longing, as it was roomy, filled with light, and freshly painted. No tangerine rot here, and I told Elizabeth, who by now was calling me Daniel, that I would check with my co-biographer Sue Dowd to make sure the size of the place wouldn’t intimidate her and thus hinder her writing.

After the ritualized locking of both apartments, Elizabeth led the way back down the stairs and onto the street. She sprung her car trunk from forty feet, reached in it, and handed me a brochure. She stood there on the sidewalk just as I had seen her do so many times from my window. Only now it was me to whom she was saying, “This is a very desirable area,” and “Each apartment has two parking spaces underground.” I was in on it. I was in on the conversations I had only imagined. Even after these few minutes of talking with her, spending time with her, trying to see her as fallible, Elizabeth lived on in my psyche as unattainable and ideal, and I was still the guy across the street dreaming beyond his means.

“What is your current apartment like?” she asked.

“It’s a one-bedroom. But I’m starting to feel cramped,” I said.

“Is it in this area?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Perhaps I should look at it. I can do swaps, deals, all kinds of things,” she said.

I nodded happily, indicating that I appreciated her can-do, full-service attitude. The thought of Elizabeth in my apartment delighted me; it would be a small tryout of our cohabitation. But I wasn’t about to take her on my crazy-eights route to a destination only a few linear steps away. She might look at me askance.

“I could come by tomorrow, or next week,” she said.

“Next week is good.”

“What’s your phone number?”

“I’m changing it in two days and don’t have the new one yet. We could make an appointment now.”

“You want to give me directions?”

I said sure. “You come down Seventh Street toward the ocean.” She began to write in a spiral notepad. “Make a right on Lincoln, left on Fourth, right on Evans, left on Acacia. I’m at 4384.”

Elizabeth looked at me askance. It didn’t take her realtor’s mind long to compute that my apartment was right across the street. It seemed absurd not to take her over there now, let alone to have given her directions to a location within skipping distance. She didn’t call me on it because I guess she’d seen stranger things, and we made arrangements to meet next Friday, right after Clarissa’s visit.

Elizabeth drove off while I pretended to be about to step off the curb. My stall involved bending over and acting as if I had found something urgently wrong with the tip of my shoe. Once she rounded the corner, I took my regular paper-clip-shaped route home, checking the mailbox and retrieving what I already knew would be there, the second letter from Tepperton’s Pies telling me that Daniel Pecan Cambridge was in competition with Lenny Burns, Sue Dowd (who, if she turned out to be Elizabeth’s half sister would be bad luck for me), Danny Pepelow, and Kevin Chen, who was probably a spy.

It was inconceivable that Clarissa hadn’t shown for her Friday appointment. I confess that disappointment rang through me, not only because our sessions were the cornerstone of my week but also because I couldn’t wait to observe her from my new perspective of secret knowledge. Something else besides disappointment went through me too; it was concern. For Clarissa not to show meant that something was seriously wrong; she didn’t even know how to be late. Her earnestness included fulfilling her obligations, and I guessed she would have called if I had had a phone. I used the hour constructively. I imagined Clarissa’s life as a jigsaw puzzle. The individual pieces hovered around Clarissa every time I saw her or thought about her, which now included a small male child, a raven-haired woman, her pink Dodge, her ringless fingers, her stack of books and notepads, her implied rather than overt sexuality. I stood her next to Elizabeth, her opposite. What I saw was Elizabeth as woman and Clarissa as girl. But something was confusing. It was Clarissa who had a child, and Elizabeth who was trolling for a husband. Clarissa, girl-like, had done womanly things, and Elizabeth, woman-like, was doing girly things. It was Clarissa who was being tugged at the ankles by a one-year-old, her schedule dictated by baby-sitters and play dates, and it was Elizabeth who made herself up every day, whose life was governed by the cell and the cordless. In my mind, Elizabeth was all browns and golds; Clarissa was pastels and whites. And although Elizabeth was adult and smart and savvy and Clarissa was scattered and struggling and a student, it was Clarissa who had every adult responsibility and Elizabeth who remained the sorority deb.

I put this information on hold. I turned my focus to the Clarissa rebus I had laid out in airspace above the kitchen table. One piece missing: Where was Clarissa’s man? Her impregnator. I assumed he was already gone or in the process of being gone, that he was the source or subject of the distressed phone calls. He had been replaced by Raven-Haired Woman, who, I assumed, was a friend filling in for baby-sitters. Raven-Haired Woman was now demystified into Betty or Susie. Clarissa was living advanced juggling and was probably in a mess. Oddly, I now knew more about my shrink than my shrink knew about me, since I had never allowed her to penetrate beyond my habits, which of course is the point of their existence.

I anticipated my next session with Clarissa because I would see what form her apology would take. Or at least the extent of the apology. If she explained too much, she would reveal too much (“my husband is gone and I’m on my own and couldn’t find someone to take care of my one-year-old”), and she’d risk violating what I suppose is a shrink tenet. On the other hand, if she under-explained, she might seem callous. She’d found herself in a spot all right and I was going to enjoy watching her wriggle free, because how she handled it would reveal how she felt about me.

Forty minutes later Elizabeth, former woman-of-the-world turned sorority deb, showed up at my place on her tour through the available apartments of Santa Monica. She mistakenly knocked on Philipa’s door, which set Tiger barking. I called up the landing to her and her voice, like a melodeon, greeted me with an “Oh,” and she turned her scrap of paper right-side up causing the 9 to be a 6. She came down the steps at a bent angle, her torso twisted from trying to see the steps from around her breasts.

I tried to appear richer than I was, but it was hard as I didn’t have much to work with. Mostly I had put things away that would indicate poverty, like opened bags of Chee•tos with their contents spilling onto the Formica. I did set out a packet of plastic trash liners because I thought they were a luxury item. She came in and stood stock-still in the middle of the living room. As she surveyed the place, wearing a tawny outfit with her knees thrust a bit forward from the cant of her high heels, she gave the impression of a colt rearing up. Nothing much seemed to impress her, though, as she only seemed to notice the details of my apartment as they would appear on a stat sheet: number of bedrooms, or should I say number of bedroom, kitchenette, cable TV, which she flipped on (though it’s not really cable, just an ancient outlet to the roof antenna), A/C, which she tested, number of bathrooms (she turned on the tap, I presume to see if rusty water would come out). I loved it when she looked at my bedroom and declared, “This must be the master.” Calling my dreary bedroom a master was like elevating Gomer Pyle to major general.