Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

I walked through the forest and came upon a wooden bench-a half slice of a tree trunk-that faced the shallow and crystalline river. There was a hand-painted stone with Granny’s name and dates on it, and a small recently disturbed patch of dirt. This diminutive marker was under the tallest and most majestic pecan tree on the farm, and I guessed that was why Granny chose the spot. I sat on the bench and looked toward the river, trying to meditate on this house and land, but couldn’t. My mind has always been independent of my plans for it. I reached in the metal box and picked up the small cache of letters. I thumbed through them and took out the two from my father. I read the earlier one from 1979, which was about Granny. It was a snide criticism of how she ran her property, followed by some tactlessly delivered advice on how to fix things.

The second one was about me:

January 8, 1980

Dear G.,

I’m so glad you were able to see Ida before the trip. She’s our little heartbreaker don’t you think? I have a photo of her with a cotton candy we took at the San Antonio Fair. She looks like an angel. She knows exactly who Granny is too. We show her your photo and she says Granny. She’s only four and she seems brighter than everyone around her. The song says there is nothing like a dame and there ain’t. I didn’t know how much I wanted a girl, but when Ida was born, that was it for Daniel.

The letter went on, but I didn’t. Sitting graveside, I knew that these few words would be either my death or resurrection. Two months later, on a still California night, I would know which. It was there that I breathed my last breath in the world that I had created.

Clarissa and Teddy came up along the river. She spotted me and yelled “hey,” then picked up Teddy and came over. “Guess what?” she said, holding up her arm. “I found my watch. I love it when lucky things happen.”

Clarissa fired up the Neon and drove us out to the highway, where we settled into the ache and discomfort of the long road home. We didn’t speak for a while, though I kept a broad smile on my face meant to hide my clammy shakes. All of us including Teddy were impatient to be home, and our three-motel trip to Texas turned into just two motel stays on the way back because of Clarissa’s driving diligence. She kept us on the road deep into the night, and I often worried that we weren’t going to find a motel with a vacancy.

I felt inadequate around Clarissa as we drove. I waited for her to speak before I felt allowed to. I tended to agree with everything she said, which made me not a real person. There were times when we drifted into solitary thought with no awareness of the passage of time. Once we started to again sing “ California, Here I Come,” and I bleeped myself with a loud buzzer tone when words with the letter e came up. Clarissa turned to me and laughed, “You know what we are, we’re a mobile hootenanny.” I roared at the word “hootenanny.” Then we fell to silence again. In Albuquerque we had the best tacos of our lives, and I forced Clarissa to stop at the municipal library for ten minutes where I Xeroxed twenty pages from various investment books while she fluffed and dried Teddy.

Endless road engendered endless thought. Local architecture provoked in me nostalgia that I could not possibly have. Night caused distracting roadside images to fade into nothing. In the backseat was a pile of letters that radiated unease. Flashbacks of Clarissa’s moonlit body presented themselves as floating pictures. My father’s letter had finally been delivered to its ultimate reader. Over the next few hours, I experienced emotions for which there were no names. I felt like a different kind of pioneer, a discoverer of new feelings, of new blends of old sentiments, and I was unable to identify them as they passed through me. I decided to name them like teas, Blue Malva, Orange Pekoe Delight, Gardenia Ochre Assam. Then I worked on new facial expressions to go with my newly named emotions. Forehead raised, upper lip puffed, chin jutted. Eyes crossed, mouth agape, lower teeth showing.

I would sit in the backseat and hold Teddy on my lap when he was squirmy in his car seat. But when he was sacked out, I would sit in the front and mentally play with my $350,000. What I knew about finance had been gained through osmosis, but I estimated that I could, without risk, get about 6 percent on my inheritance. This meant that I could withdraw $41,747 a year for twelve years before the principal was depleted. Forty-one thousand dollars a year was twice what I was living on now, which I wouldn’t really have needed had it not been for my next question to Clarissa. It was 9 P.M. and we were tired. “Can you slow, and pull off?” I said.

“Here?” she said.

The reason she said “here” was because we were on the darkest, loneliest highway on the darkest moonless evening. “It’s a fabulous night and us folks ought to pop out and look at various stars.” I spoke with an echo of a drawl to make my e -less sentence sound more reasonable.

She slowed and stopped. The mechanical hum of the car had become accepted as silence, but when we got out of the car, the further, deeper silence of the desert shocked us both. Holding Teddy, I leaned against the car and pointed out the dipper, then the North Star, then Jupiter. A meteor caught my eye but Clarissa turned too late. Clarissa and I didn’t speak, but this quiet was different from the stiltedness in the car. The air was cold and brittle but was punctuated with surprising eddies of heated winds.

It was going to take some acting on my part to keep her from knowing that my mouth was on a three-second delay from my brain while it tried to eliminate the letter e from everything I was about to say.

What I wanted to say was, “There’s a three bedroom at the Rose Crest for rent. Would you and Teddy like to share it with me?” but it was shot through with e ’s. So instead I slouched back onto the fender and said, “I was shown a big vacant flat across from my pad. I’m thinking of taking it. If you want to, you could stay. I could watch him so you could study.” There was a long pause. “You could stay in your own big room. I don’t mind waking up with junior on nights you just want to conk out.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I wanted to keep talking so I would never have to hear her answer.

“How much is it?” she said.

“I would pay all our monthly bills, food, all that. You could finish school.”

“Why would you do that?” she said.

Because I am insane. Because I am lonely. Because I love you. Because I love Teddy. “It could work for both of us,” I said. “I’d watch him and you could go to school.”

“Can I let you know?”

“Naturally,” I said.

“We would be sharing, right?” she said.

She meant, sharing and that’s all. I nodded yes and we got back in the car.

Twelve hours later she said, “I think it could work. You’re sure you’re okay with it?”

“I am.”

The drive from Granny’s had been one of escalating greenery, ending in the sight of home. The scrub of southern Texas had given way to cacti, which had given way to the occasional oasis in Arizona, which had given way to the pines and oaks of California, which turned into curbs and streets. When we finally pulled up in front of my apartment, I stuck my foot out of the car, put it on the grass, and said, “Sleet, greet, meet, fleet street.” Clarissa looked at me like I was crazy.

Over the next few days, every habit of mine returned with a new intensity, as though I owed it a debt.

There were two letters waiting for me when I returned. One was a kindly but brief note from my sister informing me of Granny and our inheritance, the other from a law firm in San Antonio informing me of the same. Ida’s letter, though less emotional than a letter from Granny, still had the same embedded goodness, and I wrote her back apologizing for my years of silence, listing a few of my dominant quirks so she could understand me a bit better. The letter was so good that I copied it and sent it to the law firm, too, though I realized later they could use it against me in court and try to keep the money for themselves. But they didn’t.