Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

I couldn’t make out what was troubling Clarissa because she’s adept at being sunny. I’m going to tell you one of the joys of being Clarissa’s “patient.” While she is analyzing me, I am analyzing her. What makes it fun is that we’re both completely unskilled at it. Our conversation that day went like this:

“Did you find a parking space okay?” I asked.

“Oh yes.”

I said they’ve been hard to find because of the beach-y weather.

“Did you go out this week?” she asked.

“Several walks and a few trips to the Rite Aid.”

“You were fine with it?” she said.

“Yeah. The rules are so easy to follow. Don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure what your rules are.”

“I’ll bet more people have rules like mine than you think.” I asked, “What are your rules?” (I wondered if she’d fall for this.)

“Let’s stick to you,” she said.

Outwitted!

The conversation went on, with both of us parrying and thrusting. I urged myself to never get well because that would be the end of Clarissa’s visits… wouldn’t it? Though she would probably have to stop one day when she graduates or when her course-meaning me-is over. One of us is getting screwed: Either she’s a professional and I should be paying her, or she’s an intern and I’m a guinea pig.

Then something exciting happened. Her cell phone rang. It was exciting because what crossed her face ranged wildly on the map of human emotion. And oh, did I divide that moment up into millionths:

The phone rang.

She decided to ignore it.

She decided to answer it.

She decided to ignore it.

She decided to check caller-id.

She looked at the phone display.

She turned off the phone and continued speaking.

But the moment before turning off the phone broke down further into submoments:

She worried that it might be a specific person.

She saw that it was.

She turned off the phone with an angry snap.

But this submoment broke down into even more sub-submoments:

She grieved.

Pain shot through her like a lightning strike.

So, Clarissa had an ex she was still connected to. I said, “Clarissa, you’re a desirable girl; just sit quietly and you will resurrect.” But wait, I didn’t say it. I only thought it.

I stayed in my apartment for the next three days. A couple of times Philipa stopped by hoping for more joy juice. I was starting to feel like a pusher and regretted giving her the Mickeys in the first place. But I eased the guilt by reminding myself that the drugs were legal or, in the case of Quaaludes, had at one time been legal. I gave her the plain Jane concoctions of apple and banana, though I wrestled with just telling her the truth and letting her get the drugs herself. But I didn’t, because I still enjoyed her stopping by, because I liked her-or is it that I liked her dog? “Here, Tiger.” When Philipa walked up or down the stairway, so did her dog, and I could hear his four paws ticking and clicking behind her. She’d talk to him as if he were a person, a person who could talk back. Often when she said “Here, Tiger,” I would say to myself “No, here, Tiger,” hoping doggy ESP would draw him toward my door, because I liked to look into his cartoon face. Tiger was a perfectly assembled mutt, possessing a vocabulary of two dozen words. He had a heart of gold and was keenly alert. He had a variety of quirky mannerisms that could charm a room, such as sleeping on his back while one active hind leg pedaled an invisible bicycle. But his crowning feature was his exceedingly dumb Bozo face, a kind of triangle with eyes, which meant his every act of intelligence was greeted with cheers and praise because one didn’t expect such a dimwit to be able to retrieve, and then sort, a bone, a tennis ball, and a rubber dinosaur on verbal commands only. Philipa demonstrated his talent on the lawn one day last summer when she made Tiger go up to apartment 9 and bring down all his belongings and place them in a rubber ring. Philipa’s boyfriend, Brian, stood by on the sidelines drinking a Red Bull while shouting “Dawg, dawg!” And I bet he was also secretly using the dog as a spell-checker.

The view from my window was quite static that weekend. Unfortunately the Sunday Times crossword was a snap (probably to atone for last Sunday’s puzzle, which would have stumped the Sphinx), and I finished it in forty-five minutes, including the cryptic, with no mistakes and no erasures. This disrupted my time budget. A couple of cars slowed in front of Elizabeth ’s realty sign, indicating that she might be showing up later in the week. But the weather was cool and there were no bicyclists, few joggers, no families pouring out of their SUVs and hauling the entire inventory of the Hammacher Schlemmer beach catalogue down to the ocean, so I had no tableaux to write captions for. This slowness made every hour seem like two, which made my idle time problem even worse. I vacuumed, scrubbed the bathroom, cleaned the kitchen. Ironed, ironed, ironed. What did I iron? My shirt, shirt, shirt. At one point I was so bored I reattached my cable to the TV and watched eight minutes of a Santa Monica city government hearing on mall pavement.

Then it was evening. For a while everything was the same, except now it was dark. Then I heard Brian come down the stairs, presumably in a huff. His walk was an exaggerated stomp meant to send angry messages like African drums. Every footstep boasted “I don’t need her.” No doubt later, in the sports bar, other like-minded guys would agree that Brian was not pussy-whipped, affirmed by the fact that Brian was in the bar watching a game and not outside Philipa’s apartment sailing paper airplanes through her window with I LOVE YOU written on them.

Brian strode with a gladiator’s pride to his primered ’92 Lincoln and split with a gas pedal roar. I then heard someone descending the stairs, who was undoubtedly Philipa. But her pace was not that of a woman in pursuit of her fleeing boyfriend. She was slow-walking in my direction and I could hear the gritty slide of each deliberate footstep. She stopped just outside and lingered an unnaturally long time. Then she rang my doorbell, holding the button down so I heard the ding, but not the dong.

I pretended to be just waking as I opened the door. Philipa released the doorbell as she swung inside. “You up?” she asked. “I’m way up,” I said, dropping my charade of sleep, which I realized was a lie with no purpose. I moved to my armchair (a gift from Granny) and nestled in. Philipa’s center-parted hair, long and ash brown, fell straight to her shoulders and framed her pale un-made-up face, and for the first time I could see that this was a pretty girl in the wrong business. She was pretty enough for one man, not for the wide world that show business required. She looked sharp, too; they must have come from an event, had a spat, and now here she was with something on her mind. She sat down on the sofa, stiffened her arms against the armrests, and surprised me by skipping the Brian topic. Instead, her eyes watered up and she said, “I can’t get a job.”

She definitely had had a few drinks. I wondered if she wanted something chemical from me, which I wasn’t about to give her, and which I didn’t have. “I thought you just finished a job, that show The Lawyers .”

“I did,” she said. “I played a sandwich girl, delivering lunches to the law office. I was happy to get it. I poured my heart into it. I tried to be a sexy sandwich girl, a memorable sandwich girl, but they asked me to tone it down. So I was just a delivery girl. My line was ‘Mr. Anderson, same as yesterday?’ I did it perfectly, too, in one take, and then it was over. I look at the star, Cathy Merlot-can you believe how stupid that name is? Merlot? Why not Susie Cabernet?-and I know I’m as good as she is, but she’s the center of attention, she’s the one getting fluffed and powder-puffed and…”