Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

I got in the car and said, “It’s a long trip for us. I want our roads to know not much traffic.”

“Huh?” she said.

“In honor of our trip down south, I’m trying to talk Navajo,” I said. Clarissa laughed, thank God, and pulled away from the curb.

We knew we would never get to Texas in time for Granny’s funeral, but the journey had another grail: I would be able to see Granny’s farm one last time before it was sold due to the lack of an interested relative to run it.

April in California is like June anywhere else. It was seventy by 10 A.M., heading up to eighty. Even though our reason for fleeing L.A. was somber, the spontaneity of our trip inspired a certain giddiness in us, and Clarissa laughed as we pulled up to the Gap and she ran in for T-shirts and underwear and socks. Teddy looked at me from his car seat and burbled while manipulating a spoon. I, the passenger/co-pilot/lookout/scout who was incapable of taking the wheel, wondered what I would do if asked to move the car. Grin, I suppose. After the Gap I hit the Rite Aid, and my knowledge of its layout sped me through dental hygiene, hairbrushes, everything feminine that Clarissa might need on the trip.

“I got you razors and things,” I said. This was going to be easy; I had yet to miss the letter e .

I got back in the car and checked the glove compartment for maps. There were a few irrelevant ones, but the California map would at least get us to Arizona. Pinpointing my current parking spot on a map of the entire state of California was impossible, so I hoped that Clarissa knew how to get us out of town. She turned over her shoulder and fiddled with Teddy. Then, she didn’t even ask where to go, just started driving south.

The traffic stopped and started along Santa Monica Boulevard, but soon we drove up a centrifugal cloverleaf onto the freeway where Clarissa stepped on it and accelerated to blissful speeds. It was as if the car had grown wings, letting us soar over the red lights and curbs and crosswalks. I wondered if the reason I was crazy, the reason that I had no job, that I had no friends, was so that at this particular moment in my life I could leave town on a whim with a woman and her baby, saying good-bye to no one, speeding along with no attachments to earth or heaven. The moment had come and I was ready for it. We rolled down the windows and the air whipped around us; Teddy chortled from behind. In honor of Philipa’s dog, Tiger, I stuck my head out the window and let my tongue flap in the breeze while Clarissa changed the lyrics and sang “ California, Here I Went,” and kept time by thumping her palm on the steering wheel.

There were unpredictable and unaccountable slowdowns until we passed some shopping outlets in Palm Springs, where suddenly the road widened and flattened as though it had been put through a wringer. We pulled in for fast food at lunchtime, barely stopping the car. After four hours of driving we had not lost our zing but had quieted into comfortable smiles and inner glows. Clarissa checked her messages once. She listened, disappointment slithered across her face, and she turned off the Nokia. I took the phone and stowed it in the car door, which had a convenient space for miscellaneous storage.

We continued heading south with the sun still high. I stole the occasional glance and could see Clarissa in relief. Each eyelash was clearly defined against the crisp background of desert and sky. She was an array of pastels, her skin with its pink underglow set against white sand and the turquoise blue of her blouse. I assembled from the sight of her, from memories of her, a clear picture of Clarissa’s most touching quality: her denial of sadness. Only the most tragic circumstances could take the smile from her face and the bounce from her walk. Even now, as she fled from terror, she looked forward with innocence toward a happiness that waited, perhaps, a few miles ahead.

Contained in the hard shell case of Clarissa’s Dodge, I was remarkably and mysteriously free from the stringency of the laws and rules that governed my Santa Monica life. So I decided to engage Clarissa in conversation. Clarissa must have decided the same thing, because before I could speak, she launched into a soliloquy that barely required from me an uh-huh.

“I think Chris saw me as his dolly,” she said. I knew from her icy inflection on the word Chris that she meant her inseminator. “But there was no way I could see it until we were married,” she went on. “He’s borderline; that’s what I figured. A belligerent narcissist. He needs help, but of course why would someone seek help if one of their symptoms is thinking everyone else is wrong? I think I’m a narcissist, too. I’ve got a lot of symptoms. Four out of six in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual .”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. It seemed to me that “Chris” was simply a violent son of a bitch. But I didn’t have to live with him. If I had to justify someone to myself, I, too, would throw a lot of words at him. The more words I could ascribe, the more avenues of understanding I would have. Soon, every intolerable behavior would have a syntactical route to my forgiveness: “Oh, he’s just exhibiting abstract Neo-juncture synapses,” I would say, and then try to find treatments for abstract Neo-juncture synapses.

The difference now between me and Clarissa was that she was yakking and I was thinking. I felt I was in conversation with her; but my end of the dialogue never got spoken. So my brilliant comments, retorts, and summaries stayed put in my cortex, where only I would appreciate their clever spins and innuendos.

The route from California to New Mexico essentially comprises one left turn. The monotony of the road was a welcome comedown from the emotional razzmatazz of our tiny lives in Santa Monica. We had practically crossed Arizona by day’s end, and just shy of the border, we checked into the Wampum Motel, a joint with tepee-shaped rooms and the musty scent of sixty years of transients. It fit our budget perfectly because nobody wanted to stay there except the most down and out, or college students looking for a campy thrill. The antique sign bearing the caricature of an Indian was enough to cause an uprising.

I’m not sure why Clarissa put us all in one room. Since I was paying, maybe she was honoring the budget, or perhaps she saw us as the Three Musketeers who must never be torn asunder. She got a room with twin beds and one bathroom. The lights were so dim in the room that I had no wattage problem. All I had to do was leave the bathroom light on, open the door one inch, and the room would be perfect for sleeping.

This arrangement also provided me with one of my life’s four or five indelible images: After an excursion to the Wampum diner, we retired early to get a jump on the next day’s drive. While Clarissa showered, Teddy slept securely in one of the twins, buffered on two sides by a pillow and a seat cushion. I had gotten in the other bed and turned out the light. I huddled up, trying to warm myself under the diaphanous wisps that the Wampum Motel called sheets. The room was lit only by moonlight, which seeped around every window blind and curtain. I heard the shower shut off. Moments later Clarissa came quietly into the room, leaving the bathroom light on per my request but closing the door behind her. To her, the room was pitch black, but to me, having adjusted to the darkness, the room was a patchwork of shadow and light. Clarissa, naked underneath, had wrapped herself in a towel and was feeling her way across the room. I was officially asleep but my eyes were unable to move from her. Standing in profile against the linen curtain and silhouetted by the seeping moonlight, she dropped the towel, raised a T-shirt over her head, and slipped it on. Her body was outlined by the silvery light that edged around her and she was more voluptuous than I had imagined. She then crouched down and fumbled through a plastic bag, stood, and pulled on some underwear. I wondered if what I had done was a sin, not against God, but against her. I forgave myself by remembering that I was a man and she was a woman and it was in my nature to watch her, even though her ease with taking off her clothes in front of me could have been founded on the thought that she did not see me as a sexual creature.