Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

Accompanied by Morton, I nosed through the house and came into a room piled with cardboard boxes and empty picture frames. An oval mirror leaned precariously against the floor. Four wooden kitchen chairs were alternately inverted and nested on each other.

“Anything you want in here?” asked Morton.

“I’ll look,” I said.

Morton excused himself, saying he had to sort out some papers. I knelt down and browsed through a couple of boxes. At the bottom of one I found a metal container the size of a shoe box. It had a built-in lock but the key was long gone. I thought it would take a screwdriver to bust it open, but I gave it an extra tug and it had enough give to tell me it had only rusted shut. A little prying and the lid popped up. Inside were a bundle of letters, all addressed to Granny, all postmarked in the late ’70s. Two of them had return addresses with the hand-printed initials J.C. They were from my father. I picked up the box, knowing that this would be the only thing I would take from the house.

I found Morton in the living room, which, because of the exterior shade and small windows, was exceedingly dark. He sat in an armchair that had been upholstered with a sun-bleached Indian blanket. He had a handful of papers that he shuffled then spread open and rearranged like a bridge hand.

“Has your sister contacted you?” he said.

“Not that I know of.” I loved my rejoinder, grounded as it was in a fabulous paradoxical matrix, and perfectly e -less.

“So you don’t know?” he said.

“Know what?”

“You and your sister,” he said, “are splitting approximately six hundred and ninety thousand dollars.”

I stayed in the house for another hour, glimpsing faint memories as I moved from one room to another. These were not memories of incidents, but were much more vague and beyond my reach. They were like ghosts who sweep through rooms, are sensed by the clairvoyant, and then are gone.

Clarissa and Teddy had wandered far away from the house and now had wandered back. She appeared at the screen door with a “How’s it goin’?” that expressed an impatience to leave. I said good-bye to Morton, slid an arm around Teddy, and lifted him into his car seat, which made him scream. I put the metal box in the backseat and we drove back to the motel.

We sat in the dining room and I could tell that the trip was starting to wear on Clarissa. Our blistering escape had not solved her problems back home. Earlier I watched her call her sister as the phone battery gave out, and now she seemed in her own world, one that excluded me. Then she laid her hand across her wrist and jumped. “I lost my watch!” she said. She checked around her, then left me with Teddy while she searched the room and car. She returned-no watch-and explained that it had been a gift to herself from herself, and I assumed it had a greater history than she was telling me. Perhaps a reward for a personal accomplishment whose value only she could understand. “What do you think,” she said, “are we ready to head home?”

“Now?” I said.

“In the morning.”

“I want to go back to Granny’s for an hour or so.”

This annoyed her. She wanted to leave before dawn, and she persevered. “I need to get back,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” This was the first time Clarissa had had a hint of surliness, but she made up for it later that night.

She and I were bunked in the same room. This motel was the kind a traveler would consider a charming, memorable find, as its architecture and decoration perfectly identified a specific year in a specific decade in a specific location that could not be seen anywhere else. Built in the ’30s, the bathrooms had porcelain sinks and tubs that weighed a ton. The rooms were long and narrow and the ceilings and walls were lined with long planks of dark pine. Wrought-iron hardware strapped each doorway and artisan-crafted sconces silhouetted tin cutouts of cowboy scenes through translucent leather shades. Clarissa and Teddy took one end of the room and I slept at the distant other on a sofa bed that sunk in the middle with a human imprint. We had amused each other by spreading ourselves on the floor and playing a game with a deck of cards that at one time had been so waterlogged it was three times its normal height. Clarissa and I tried to play gin, though we struggled to remember the rules, but Teddy made it impossible because he kept grabbing the cards and rearranging them. Clarissa began calling him Hoyle and I would say to him, “What do you think, Billy Bob, can I play that card?” And he would either pick up the card and drool on it or slide it back to one of us, which would make us laugh.

Clarissa and I were now used to seeing each other in our underwear. We both slept in T-shirts and underpants. She turned out the lights and we slipped into our respective beds. She spoke softly to me from across the room. “What was it like today?”

“Thanks,” I said.

“For what?”

“For asking,” I said.

“Daniel,” she whispered, I think to say, of course she would ask.

We didn’t speak for several minutes. I didn’t want to tell Clarissa about the inheritance because I wanted to digest it myself first, and I didn’t want anything external to affect our little trio. Then there was a rustle of sheets, then footsteps. Clarissa came across the room and knelt beside my bed. She reached her arm across the blanket until she found my shoulder and laid her hand on it. Her fingers crawled under my sleeve and began a small back-and-forth motion. She rested her head on the bed and her hair fell against my arm. I didn’t move.

“Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Oh, Daniel,” she whispered.

I didn’t know what to do.

“I love that you love Teddy.” The upper one-eighth of her body caressed the upper one-eighth of my body. She moved her hand from my shoulder and laid her palm against my neck with a slight clutch.

“We should go to the house tomorrow, if that’s what you want. I’m sorry about today. I’m just impatient; impatient for nothing.”

She closed her eyes. My arm, with the bed as a fulcrum, was locked open at the elbow and sticking dumbly out into the room. It was the part a painter would have to leave out if he were going to make the scene at all elegant. I evaluated Clarissa’s tender contact and I decided that it was possible for me to put my free hand on her shoulder and not have the action considered improper. I bent my elbow and touched her on the back. She didn’t recoil, nor did she advance.

I didn’t know if Clarissa’s gestures toward me were platonic, Aristotelian, Hegelian, or erotic. So I just lay there, connected to her at three points: her hand on my neck, my hand on her back, her hair brushing against my side. I stared at the ceiling and wondered how I could be in love with someone whose name had no anagram.

Later, she dragged her hand sleepily across my chest and went back to her bed, leaving a ghostly impression on me like a hand-print of phosphorus.

Teddy woke later than usual and Clarissa and I slept through our usual 7 A.M. get-up. By nine, though, we had eaten, packed, and loaded the car. We got to the end of the motel driveway and when we stopped, I said, “I don’t want to go back to Granny’s.” And then Clarissa argued, “But you said you did.” Then I came back, “It’s out of our way.” Then Clarissa said, “I don’t mind. I think you should go.” Out of politeness, we had switched sides and argued against ourselves for a while to show that we understood and cared about each other’s position. Clarissa turned right and we eventually found ourselves once again driving among the pecan trees.

There were no cars out front and the house was locked up. I knew what I wanted to do, find Granny’s grave. Clarissa said, “I’ll leave you,” and ran after Teddy, who had charged immediately toward the river. I stood before the house and listened to the breeze that rustled through the groves. I decided to walk near the river, upstream, to avoid the bustle of Clarissa and Teddy, who were downstream. I started out, but the pink Dodge caught my eye. I returned to it, felt around under the paper sacks filled with dirty laundry, and got the metal box I had chosen as my sole artifact of my life with Granny.