Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

The news of her death left me disturbingly unaffected. At least for a while. I wondered if I were truly crazy not to feel engulfed by the loss and unable to function. But the sorrow was simply delayed and intermittent. It did not come when it should have but appeared in discrete packets over a series of discontinuous days, stretching into months. Once, while tossing Teddy into the air, a packet appeared in the space between us, and vanished once he was back in my grip. Once, I positioned my palm between my eyes and the sun, and I felt this had something to do with Granny, for it was she who stood between me and what would scorch me. It was not that I missed her; she was so far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare. She lived in me dead or alive. Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them, for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.

The day after the letter was Easter Sunday. It reminded me that as an adolescent I was primped and combed and then incarcerated in a wool suit that had the texture of burrs. I was then dragged to church, where I had to sit for several hours on a cushionless maple pew in the suffocating Texas heat. These experiences drained me of the concept of Jesus as benevolent. I did, however, proudly wear an enamel pin that signified I had memorized the books of the Bible.

That Granny’s death fell so close to this nostalgic day was just bad luck, and that Easter I lay in bed gripped in a vise of reflection. It was after ten, and although my thoughts of the past were viscous and unbudging, the darkness in the room intensified my hearing, allowing me to keep at least one of my senses in the present. Amid a deep concentration on a potato salad of thirty years ago, I heard a car door slam, followed by hurried steps, followed by a quiet but persistent knock on my front door. I threw on pants and a T-shirt and opened the door without asking who it was.

Clarissa stood before me in a shambles, with Teddy clinging to her like a koala bear. I had not seen either of them at all during Easter week.

“Are you up?” she asked.

“I’m up,” I said, and Teddy, holding out his arms, climbed over onto me. Clarissa came in, glancing toward the street. “He’s back?” I said.

“He was here all week and things were tolerable at least. But today he started getting agitated. It’s like he’s on a timer. He began phoning every five minutes, which got me upset, then he suddenly stopped calling and I knew what was next. I heard a car screech outside my apartment and I knew it was him, so I got Teddy and bumped his head hurrying him into the car seat.” By now her voice was breaking and she soothed Teddy’s head with her palm. “Can I just sit here or stay here for a minute or maybe the night till I figure out what to do?” But she knew she didn’t have to ask, just stay. Teddy gripped my two forefingers with his fists and I moved them side to side. “Do you have anything?” she asked. “Any baby wipes or diapers or anything?” I had it all.

We followed our previous routine. Clarissa and Teddy slept in my room, and I slept on the sofa under lights so bright I tanned. Around 3 A.M. there was baby noise and I heard Clarissa’s hushed footsteps as she lightly bounced Teddy around the bedroom. Her door was cracked open and I said, “Everything okay?”

She slid a bladed palm in the doorway, opening it by a few more inches. “You awake?” she asked. “C’mon in, let’s talk,” she said. We passed Teddy off between us several times as we entered the bedroom. I knew what the invitation was about, camping buddies. But she seemed to have something on her mind of a verbal nature. Clarissa accommodated my lighting requirements by closing the door just enough to create a soft half-light in the bedroom. After a while we put Teddy in the center of the bed, and though he still was wide awake, he calmed and made dove sounds. We were lying on either side of him and I put my hand on his grapefruit stomach, rolled him onto his back, and rocked him back and forth.

“What’s going on with you these days?” asked Clarissa.

And I told her of Granny’s suicide. “The funeral is the day after tomorrow,” I said. “But I can’t be there.”

“Do you want to be there?” she asked.

“What could I do there? What good would I be?” I answered.

“I think I should leave for a while,” said Clarissa. “Would you like me to go somewhere with you? We could drive to Texas, you, me, and Teddy.”

“Too late for the funeral,” I said.

“Yes, but you would be there; you would have shown up for her.”

Upon hearing Clarissa’s suggestion, my mind did a heroic calculation resulting in an unbalanced equation. On one side of the equals sign were the innumerable obstacles I would face on such a trip. I could list a thousand impossibilities: I cannot get in an elevator. I cannot stay on a hotel floor higher than three. I cannot use a public toilet. What if there were no Rite Aids? What if we passed a roadside mall where one store was open and the others were closed? What if I saw the words “apple orchard”? What if the trip took us in proximity to the terrifyingly inviting maw of the Grand Canyon? What if we were on a mountain pass with hairpin turns, or if, during the entire trip, I could not find a billboard bearing a palindromic word? What if our suitcases were of unequal sizes? How would I breathe at the higher elevations? Would the thin air kill me dead? How would we locate the exact state lines? And what if, at a gas station in Phoenix, the attendant wore a blue hat?

On the other side of the equation was Teddy. I could imagine Teddy cooing in the back while pounding arrhythmically on his kiddy seat, and I could imagine ideas for his next amusement streaming through my head from Needles to El Paso and displacing every neurotic thought. I could imagine trying to distill his chaos into order and taking on the responsibility of his protection. And there was Clarissa, who would be seated next to me; who, now that I was no longer a patient, could be asked direct questions instead of being the subject of my oblique method of deduction. I still knew very little about her, only that I was in love with her. These two factors pulled down the scale toward the positive. But I settled the matter with a brilliant dose of self-delusion. I manipulated my own stringent mind with a new thought: What if I could convert one present fear into a different and more distant fear? What if I could translate my fear of the Grand Canyon into a fear of Mount Rushmore? What if I could transform my desire to touch the four corners of every copier at Kinko’s into an obsession with Big Ben? But my final proposal to myself was this: What if during the entire trip I would not allow myself to speak any word that contained the letter e ? This is the kind of enormous duty that could supersede and dominate my other self-imposed tasks. I quickly scanned my vocabulary for useful words-a, an, am, was, is, for, against, through-and found enough there to make myself understood. Thus “let’s eat” would become, “I’m hungry, baby! Chow down!” I couldn’t say, “I love you,” but I could say, “I’m crazy about you,” which was probably a better choice anyway. I could call Clarissa by name, Teddy would simply become something affectionate like big man, bubby boy, or junior. One minor drawback, I couldn’t say my own name.

This idea of condensing my habits into one preoccupying restriction seemed so clever that it filled me up with ethyl and I said to Clarissa, “Okay, I’ll go.” Even though I had not officially started my challenge, my response was my first stab at an e -less sentence.

It was decided we would leave in the morning. Clarissa was afraid to return home to pack; her bright pink car didn’t have the stealth we needed for even a night run. She would have to buy clothes on the road. She had a credit card that she said was at its bursting point, with a few hundred dollars left on its limit. She had her cell phone but no charger, so we would have to be conservative in its use. We waited until 10 A.M. when I could withdraw my remaining thirty-eight hundred dollars for the trip.