Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

America lets me choose not to be a pioneer. I am uplifted by doing ordinary work. The work of society, the common work of the world…

And so it went. I was impressed with myself because this essay expressed the exact opposite idea of my first essay-one week I said I had the pioneer spirit and the next week I didn’t-and I wrote both opinions with such ease that I believed I could take any subject and effectively argue either side. This skill would be valuable in dating. Just think, I could switch positions midstream if I sensed my date reacting badly.

While I was writing, I barely looked up at Zandy, since I’d realized what a foolish enterprise this was anyway. There is no pleasure in staking out a woman and eyeing her endlessly. I get no more joy from looking at a Monet for twenty minutes than I do after five. A glimpse of Zandy was all that was necessary, and perhaps I used her as an excuse to get out of the house. I signed this second essay using a pseudonym-Lenny Burns-and dropped it in the bin. I bought some foam earplugs (not that I needed them, but at two dollars a dozen, they were too cheap to pass up) and went home.

My ceiling is not conducive to counting. Its texture is created by pulling the trowel flatly away from the wet plaster, leaving a rippled surface, as though a baker had come in and spread around vanilla icing with a spatula. Counting prefers symmetry of some kind, though at my level of sophistication I can get around most obstacles. The least interesting ceiling for me now is one that is practically counted out already: squared-off acoustical tiles with regular punctures that simply require a little multiplication on my part. Each tile has sixty-four sound-absorbing holes times the easily calculated number of tiles in the ceiling. Ugh.

But my irregular ceiling-no tiles, no quadrants, no recurring punctures-takes a little thought on my part to slice up, count, and quantify. Like an ocean, its surface is irregular, but also like an ocean it’s easy to imagine an unbroken plane just below the surface of the undulating waves. Once I can imagine an unbroken plane, the bisecting and trisecting of my fairly square ceiling becomes much easier. Triangles, rectangles, and interlocking parallelograms are all superimposed over the ceiling, and in my mind they meld into the birthday-cake frosting of the plaster.

The problem with counting is that anything, any plane, any object, can be divided infinitely, like the distance covered by Zeno’s tortoise heading for the finish line. So it’s a problem knowing when to stop. If I’ve divided my ceiling into sixty-four sections (sometimes irregular sections just to annoy myself), I wonder whether to halve it again and again and again. But that’s not all. The sections must be sliced up in three-dimensional space, too, so the numbers become unmanageable very quickly. But that’s the thing about a brain: Plenty of room for large numbers.

Sure, I’ve gotten some disbelieving stares when I’ve tried to explain this little habit of mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I’ve watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity. You should know, however, that my habit of counting began early-I can’t remember if I was a teen or bubbling under at age twelve. My mother was driving up Lone Star Avenue and I was in the backseat. A gasoline truck pulled up next to us at a stoplight and I became fixated on its giant tires. I noticed that even though the tires were round, they still had four points: north, south, east, and west. And when the light changed and the truck started rolling, the north, south, east, and west points of the tire remained constant, that the tire essentially rolled right through them. This gave me immeasurable satisfaction. When the next truck came by, I watched the tires rotate while its polar quadrants remained fixed. Soon, this tendency became a habit, then a compulsion. Eventually the habit compounded and not only tires, but vases, plates, lawns, and living rooms were dissected and strung with imaginary grids.

I can remember only one incident of this habit prior to my teen years. Eight years old, I sat with my parents in our darkened living room watching TV. My father muttered something to me, and my response was slow. Perhaps intentionally slow. I replied disinterestedly, “Huh?” with hardly enough breath to make it audible. My father’s fist uppercut the underside of his dinner tray, sending it flying, and he rose and turned toward me, whipping his belt from his waist. My mind froze him in action and I saw, like ice cracking, a bifurcating line run from his head to his feet. Next, a horizontal line split him at midpoint, then the rest of the lines appeared, dividing him into eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and so on. I don’t remember what happened next.

My counting habit continued into college, where its real import, purpose, and power were revealed to me. The class assignments seemed trifling, but the irresistible counting work seemed vital not only to my well-being but to the world’s. I added textbook page numbers together, divided them by the total page numbers, and using my own formulas, redistributed them more appropriately. Page 262 of Science and Environment could become a more natural page 118, and I would razor-cut the leaves from their binding and rearrange them to suit my calculations. I had to read them in their new order, too, which made study difficult, and then finally, as I added new rules and limitations to my study habits, impossible. Eventually my quirks were picked up by various professors and savvy teaching assistants, and they, essentially, “sent me to the nurse.” After a few days of testing, I was urged out of school. I then went to Hewlett-Packard, where I landed a job as a business communiqué encoder.

One time, when I was working at Hewlett-Packard, I tried medication, but it made me uneasy. It was as though the drug were keeping me from the true purpose of each day, which was to count loci and accommodate variables. I slowly took myself off the pills and eventually I left my encoding job. Or maybe it left me. When the chemicals let go of my mind, I could no longer allow myself to create a code when I knew all along that its ultimate end was to be decoded. But that’s what the job was, and I couldn’t get the bosses to see it my way. Finally, the government began providing me with free services and one of them was Clarissa.

Clarissa the shrink-in-training clinked three times on my door with her Coke can. The knock of someone whose hands are full. The door opened on its own, and I remembered not hearing it latch when I entered earlier with my small sack of earplugs. Clarissa, balancing a cell phone, briefcase, sweater (pointless in today’s weather), Palm Pilot, soda can, and wrapped baby gift (she hadn’t wanted to leave it in the car), closed the door and made a purse-induced leathery squeak as she crossed the room. I liked her outfit: a maroon skirt topped by a white blouse with a stiffly starched front piece that was vaguely heart-shaped, giving her the appearance of an Armani-clad nurse. (Oh yes, I keep up with the fashions. I noted how close her outfit was to my own favorite: light cotton pants with a finely pressed white dress shirt. No problem, as I love to iron. Once I ironed a pillow almost perfectly flat.) “Hi,” she said, and “Hi,” I said back. “Oh,” she said, “sorry I’m late.” Of course she wasn’t. She just assumed she was late because the traffic had been murder. “Are you having a good week?” she asked.

I was having a good week, though I couldn’t really tell her why. At least, not without her thinking I was obsessed with women. I didn’t tell her about my three encounters with Elizabeth, or about eyeballing Zandy at the pharmacy. So I lied and said… well, I don’t remember what I said. But I do remember a particular moment when, after I’d asked her how she was, she paused that extra second before she said the perfunctory “fine.” She wasn’t fine, and I could tell. I could tell because my mind has the ability to break down moments the way it can break down ceiling tiles. I can cut a moment into quarters, then eighths, then et cetera, and I am able to analyze whether one bit of behavior truly follows another, which it seldom does when a person is disturbed or influenced by a hidden psychic flow.