Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

The FOR LEASE sign was still up at the Rose Crest, but I didn’t want to make any moves until the cash was in hand, and the money took several weeks-of course-to become mine. I had to prove who I was, which was not easy. I thought my argument to them-that I was me because no one else was me-was convincing, but it was not what they were looking for. I had to prove my lineage. My documents were vague. I had no driver’s license and could not find my birth certificate. Ultimately the legal firm came to a decision; they had no one to give the money to but me, and my sister had vouched for me, so enough was enough and they sent me the dough.

I now had an actual reason to call Elizabeth the Realtor. Not having a phone, I got the address of her company and walked there, even though the route proved to be almost impossible. I wondered if my path, when viewed from an airplane, would spell out my name. Just before giving up, I found a crosswalk for the handicapped that had two scooped-out curbs and used it as a gangplank to get to Elizabeth ’s block. I left a note that said I was interested in the apartment.

She drove by several hours later and I ran down the stairs before she could get to my door. Elizabeth must have developed an extremely sophisticated wealth detector because she suddenly began treating me as a viable customer who was swimming in cash, even though I was sure that nothing in my behavior had changed. Even after I made her drive me across the street, which wasn’t more than twenty steps, she maintained a professional front and showed no exasperation. Or maybe she perceived my indifference toward her and was trying to win me back.

Within the hour, I’d leased the three-bedroom and even negotiated the price down fifty dollars a month. I had another eight days on my monthly rent and I told her I would move in at week’s end. I watched Teddy several times that week and Clarissa showed no signs of backtracking.

I was now purchasing a newspaper every day and perusing the financial section. I diligently followed bonds, mutual funds, and stocks and noted their movement. Movement was what I hated. I didn’t like that one day you could have a dollar and the next you could have eighty cents without having done anything. On the other hand, the idea that you could have a dollar and the next day have a dollar twenty thrilled me no end. I was worried that on the day my dollar was worth eighty cents I would be sad, and on the day it was worth a dollar twenty I would be elated, though I did like the idea of knowing exactly why I was in a certain mood. But I saw another possibility. If I bought bonds and held them to maturity, then the fluctuations in their value wouldn’t affect me, and I liked that their dividends trickled in with regularity. This meant that my mood, too, would constantly trickle upward and by maturity, I would be ecstatic.

In interviewing a series of bond brokers, I sought out someone who could satisfy my requirement of extreme dullness. I felt that the happier a broker was, the shadier he was. If he was happy, it meant that he thought about things other than bonds. Happiness meant he might be frivolous and do things like take vacations. I wanted a Scrooge McDuck who thought about only one thing, decimal points. Since I was a person whose own personality rose and fell based on the input of another person, meetings with these brokers were deadly. The more somber he was, the more somber I would become, and we would often spiral down together into an abyss of tedium.

I interviewed four brokers at several firms in the Santa Monica area. It was the second one who was stupefyingly dull enough and who gave me a siren’s call when I met with his rivals. His name was Brandon Brady, and he was so dreary that I’m sure that the rhythmic alliteration in his name made him faintly ill.

What made me finally choose Brandon was not his colorlessness but my perception of the depth of his narrow, hence thorough and numerical, mind. I was sitting with another broker, whose own deadly personality challenged Brandon ’s. It would have been a tough choice based on flatness alone. But when this broker laid out his plans for me, he started with a proposal to buy a ten-year bond starting next Wednesday.

“There’s a problem with buying a ten-year bond next Wednesday,” I said.

“And what is that?”

“If I buy a bond next Wednesday, ten years later it would come due on a Saturday, but I couldn’t cash it in until Monday. I would lose two days’ interest.”

He checked his computer then looked at me as if I were a wax model of myself: I seemed like a human, but something was wrong.

And that was that. I went back to test broker number one, who made the same gaffe. But it was Brandon, who, after I had proposed buying a bond next Wednesday, got out a calculator and made a clatter as he ran his fingers over it, then frowned deeply. “Well,” he said, “they’ve got us on this one. Why don’t we wait a few days and see what other bonds come up?” I knew I had found my man.

Clarissa and Teddy’s entry into the new apartment was biblical. It was as though they had been led into the promised land. Throw rugs of sunlight crept across every bedroom floor, and I had placed cheap plants in every empty corner, copying a home decor catalogue I had found in the mailbox. I marched Clarissa around the place and she took a breath of delight in every new room, which gave me pleasure. I had budgeted for just enough furniture to make the place functional, so it looked a little spare, but if my twelve-year plan was to work, the cash would have to flow as though through an hourglass. Clarissa had some furniture that she coerced a friend with a pickup to deliver, and Teddy’s colorful possessions were quickly distributed throughout the apartment. Clarissa installed a phone, which I viewed suspiciously at first, then finally forgot about. The place filled out incrementally, a few framed photos appeared, and by the end of the month it looked as though a family lived there. Except.

Except that the space between me and Clarissa remained uncrossable. Sometimes I felt an intense love coming from her toward me, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of Teddy. I gave it time, and it was easy to give it time, because Teddy’s antics often kept any serious discussion at bay. If my hand rested against Clarissa’s, it was only a moment before I had to move it to snag Teddy. When he ambled around the apartment, Clarissa hung over him like a willow. There was no such thing as a solitary moment. I began to allow a phrase in my head that would never have been allowed across the street. The imperfect ideal. As strict as my life across the street had been, it was just as loose at the Rose Crest. Teddy’s chaos left me in structural shambles, and I think I could tolerate it because the source of the chaos was unified. He was a person beyond logic; he was the singularity.

It is disappointing when you discover that the person you love loves someone else. I made this discovery twice. The first was one evening when the three of us sat down to our usual meal. These dinners were the fantastic disorder at the end of my rigorously structured days spent with my nose in financial magazines and reports. I had grown to anticipate them and participate in them with a new-found looseness. Clarissa and I chipped in and had food delivered, and there was a lot of freewheeling talk accompanied by the opening of white paper bags containing napkins and picnic utensils and tuna sandwiches and mustard packets. This crinkling noise and snap of the plastic tops of containers of mayonnaise always sparked us into thrilling recaps of the day’s most mundane events, and months later I realized that these half hours were sacred.

After Clarissa had set Teddy in a high chair and thrown a few morsels of tuna in front of him, he fisted a glob of it and stuck it in his mouth, then turned to her and grinned. Clarissa’s face beamed and broadened, her focus was only on him; there was nothing else, no apartment, no jobs, no schoolwork, no life other than the joyful force that streamed between them. And there was no me. I sat and waited out the absorption, which flickered when Clarissa reached for more food and finally both alit back on earth.