Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

The next few days were stagnant. I was distressed to think that my regular visits from Clarissa were over. I wondered how I was going to fill those two hours that had become the binary stars around which my week revolved. I was also concerned for Clarissa, who had not contacted me in several days. I wondered if I had been ostracized from the group because I represented a horrible memory. But on the day and almost the hour of my regular visit, I saw Clarissa crossing the street with Teddy, carrying him under her arm like a gunnysack full of manure. Her other arm toted a cloth bag stuffed with baby supplies that bloomed and poked out of its top.

I opened the door and started to say the h in hello, but she cut me off with, “Could I ask you a favor?” The request held such exasperation that I worried she had used up all the reserve exasperation she might need on some other occasion. “Could you watch Teddy for a couple of hours?” Without saying anything I came down the stairs and relieved her of the boy. I then understood why she had carried him like a sack of manure. “He needs changing,” she said. And how , I thought. Going in my apartment, Clarissa added, “I’ll change him now and that should hold him.” Clarissa, who was clearly on the clock, rushed the diaper change, pointed to a few toys to waggle in front of him, gave me a bottle of apple juice, wrote down her cell phone number, tried to explain her emergency, said she would be back in two hours, added that Lorraine had gone back to Toronto, kissed Teddy good-bye, hugged me good-bye, and left.

Thus I went from being Clarissa’s patient to becoming her son’s baby-sitter.

Teddy and I sat on the floor and I poured out the contents of the bag, which included a twelve-letter set of wooden blocks. These blocks were the perfect amusement for us, because while Teddy was fascinated with their shape, weight, and sound as they knocked together, I was fascinated with the vowels and consonants etched in relief on their faces. It was not easy to make words with this selection. Too many C ’s, B ’s, G ’s, X ’s and Y ’s, and not enough A ’s, E ’s, and I ’s. So while he struggled to build them up, I struggled to arrange them coherently. Whatever I did, Teddy undid; when he toppled them, I rebuilt them, and when he stacked them haphazardly, I rearranged them logically. Two hours went by and when Clarissa returned, she found us in the middle of the floor, transfixed.

Two days later, I agreed to watch Teddy from four to six and she offered to pay me five dollars an hour, which I refused.

Occasionally I amuse myself by imagining headlines that would trumpet the ordinary events of my day. “Daniel Pecan Cambridge Buys Best-Quality Pocket Comb.”

“Santa Monica Man Reties Shoe in Mid-Afternoon.” I imagine these headlines are two inches high and I picture citizens standing on street corners reading them with a puzzled expression. But the headline that was now in my mind was prompted by a letter from Tepperton’s Pies, which I pinched between my stunned thumb and bewildered forefinger: “Insane Man Chosen as Most Average American.” The letter began with “Congratulations!” and it told me that I had won the Tepperton’s Pies essay contest. It went on to describe my duties as the happy winner. I was to walk alongside the runners-up in a small parade down Freedom Lane on the campus of Freedom College. We would then enter Freedom Hall, walk on the stage, and read our essays aloud, after which I would be presented with a check for five thousand dollars.

I was getting a little nervous about the letter’s frequent repetition of the word “Freedom.” It could be an example of a small truth I had uncovered in my scant thirty-five years of life: that the more a word is repeated, the less likely it is that the word applies. “Bargain.”

“only.”

“fairness,” are just a few, but here the word “Freedom” began to smell like Teddy’s underpants. But what difference did it make? I am not a political person-in college I voted for president of the United States. He promptly lost and I never wanted to jinx my candidate again by voting for him. But whatever was the political underbelly of Freedom College, I was going to make five thousand dollars for reading an essay aloud.

That week I practiced reading my essay by enlisting Philipa to listen to a few dry runs and coach me. Her contribution turned out to be so much more than just a few pointers. Philipa saw it as an opportunity to express to someone, anyone, just how complicated the simplest performance can be. She told anecdotes, got mad, complimented me, sulked, screamed “Yes!” and generally took it all way too far. Her goal was to impress upon someone, anyone, mainly herself, just how difficult her work was, that a nobody like me needed professional guidance. She almost had me convinced, too, until I realized I was much better when she wasn’t in the room.

Friday came and Clarissa dropped off Teddy with a warm thank-you and a bundle of goodies. She gave me a hug that I had trouble interpreting. It could have been, at its highest level, a symbolic act indicating her deepening love for me; at its worst, well, there was no worst, because at its lowest level, it was symbolic of the trust she’d bestowed on me as the temporary guardian of her child. When she left, Teddy burst into tears and I held him up at the window so he could see her. I’m not sure if it was a good idea, because no matter what spin I tried to put on it, he was still looking at his mother leaving. Left alone with Teddy, I then began the game of Distraction and Focus. The object of the game was to Focus Teddy on something he liked and to Distract him from something he didn’t. That afternoon I discovered a law that states that for every Focus there is an equal and opposite Distraction and that they parse into units of equal time. Five minutes of Focus meant that somewhere down the line waited five minutes of Distraction.

Within the first hour, I had exhausted my repertoire of funny faces and their accompanying nonsensical sounds. I had held up every unique object in my apartment. I had taken him on my forearm seat and marched him around to every closet, window cord, and cabinet pull. We had stacked and restacked the wretched wooden blocks. In a desperate move, I decided to take him down to the Rite Aid, which I remembered had a small selection of children’s toys, and I was hoping that Teddy, the man himself, would indicate exactly which of them would put an end to his frustration.

There was about an hour of daylight left and I toddled him down my street to the first opposing driveways of my regular route. I had a moment of concern about crossing with him in the middle of the street but decided that extra care in looking both ways would ease my mental gnaw. And so Teddy became the first human ever to accompany me on my tack to the Rite Aid. He, of course, had no questions, no quizzical looks, no backsteps indicating he thought I was nuts, and I felt almost as if I were cheating: It seemed to me that if one is crazy, it’s unfair to involve someone who doesn’t understand the concept. If, as the books say, my habits exist to keep demons at bay, what was the point of exhibiting them in front of someone who was so clearly not a demon? Who, in fact, was so clearly a demon’s opposite?

It was dusk, and the interior of the Rite Aid was bathed in its own splendid white light, which democratically saturated every corner of the store. The light was reflected from the polished floors and sho-cards so evenly that nothing had a shadow. I held Teddy’s hand as I led him down the aisles, heading for the toy section. We passed a display of crackers that held him enthralled, and it took some doing to lure him away from those elephantine red boxes spotted with orange circles and blue borders. As I cajoled him with head nods and high-pitched promises of the delights that awaited us just around the aisle, I noticed Zandy looking directly at us from her high perch in Pharmacy. She didn’t do anything, including looking away. A customer intervened with a question. She turned toward him, and in the second it took to shift her attention, she turned her face back to me and emitted one silent, happy laugh.