The Pleasure of My Company (11 page)

It was nearing two and I
wondered if Clarissa was going to show up this time. There was no reason to
think that she wouldn’t, as she had slipped a handwritten note under the door
earlier in the week with a sincere but formal apology, promising we would resume
the following week at our usual time. I assumed that this was the standard
apology that one learns in chapter 15 of the therapist’s handbook: Don’t give
out too much personal information. But the idea of the dispassionate shrink
slinking up the patient’s stairs and secreting a note under the doorjamb
probably wouldn’t go down well with whatever board would review such things.
Still, Clarissa was only a student and allowed to act like one.

Friday
at two o’clock—precisely when the second hand fell on neither side of
twelve—Clarissa knocked, pushing open the door that I had purposely left ajar.
She said, “I’m so sorry.” Clarissa was an apology champion. “Are you all right?”
I asked, probing for information I already knew but wanted her to tell me. “Oh yes,”
she said, “I couldn’t get a…” She was about to say “babysitter” and then
realized it would reveal too much and she changed mid-sentence to “I got tied
up and there was no way to reach you.”

“Would
you like something to drink?” I offered.

“Do you
have a Red Bull?”

Red
Bull is a potent caffeine-infused soft drink that turns grown men into
resonating vibraphones. Drinking a Red Bull is more impressive to me than
drinking a bottle of Scotch. Several years ago after my first Red Bull—which
was also my last—I got in marksman position on the living room floor, opened a
pack of playing cards, and repeatedly dealt myself poker hands. I computed that
good hands came in bunches; that one full house in a shuffle implies a
possibility of more full houses. And lousy hands in a shuffle only create the
possibility of more lousy hands. So Red Bull was not allowed in my house, only
because this little episode lasted nine hours. Clarissa’s request for the
caffeine recharge indicated to me that she was going to have to be bucked up if
she was going to make it through my session.

“I don’t
have any Red Bull but I know who might,” I said.

I
excused myself to go to Brian and Philipa’s amid protestations of “you don’t
have to” from Clarissa. I peered into her apartment and saw Brian flaked out on
the sofa, his jaw hanging open like a drawbridge. I didn’t have the heart to
wake him. I came back to see that Clarissa had settled into the easy chair and
was staring at the floor. She was wearing a prim pink blouse that made her look
so wholesome it was as if Norman Rockwell had painted a pinup. She had a bloom
on her cheeks that lied about her real age. Her face had gentle angles, one
rosy thing sloping into the next, and it suggested none of the hardness she
must have experienced. It seemed as though she were determined to stay
innocent, to hang back even though life was dragging her painfully forward. And
all my conjecture bore out because she looked up at me and tried to say, “And
how are you?” She choked it out but couldn’t continue. She looked down again
and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I
was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t
even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her
halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on
life’s happiest days.

Clarissa
didn’t apologize for her broken voice, which meant that she was, in these few
moments, being personal with me. Her apologies were a way of maintaining
distance and formality. She turned toward the window and braced herself up a
few inches to see the sidewalk. I knew that soon I would manoeuvre myself into
position to see what she was looking at. Everything seemed to be okay and she
turned back to me with an empty sigh. “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like I’ve
been to heaven and been brought back to earth. I’ve seen how things should be
and now I’m here seeing how things really are.” Her head glanced around again.

I got
up, folded my hands across my chest, and leaned against the wall. I could see
the raven-haired woman on the street, hand in hand with the boy—the same boy I
had seen her with at the mall—and I wondered why Clarissa, if she had someone
to watch her child, would have them tag along on her work rounds. As I listened
to Clarissa and watched the plotless drama on the street, I noted a black
Mercedes turn the corner and cruise by. I noted it because it was the second
time I had seen it in less than a minute and it was significantly under speed.
This second time it passed, the raven-haired woman saw it and took a few steps
back. The car slowed to a stop, then reversed itself. Clarissa saw me looking
out the window and she rose and turned to me, scared. The car was now stopped
in the street, carelessly angled. The driver got out of the car and left the
door open, approaching the woman and child. He was groomed like a freshly cut
lawn. A trim beard framed his face; close-cut grey sideburns fringed his bald
head. His suit was well cut and dark and set off by a stark white shirt. I
could hear him yelling and cursing. He was wound tight and unwinding rapidly
in front of us.

A
horrible chain reaction occurred. The man, who looked like an Armani-clad
Mussolini, increased his screaming and made his hand into a beak and began
poking at the woman like an angry swan. She was knocked unsteady with each jab
but defended herself with angry, equal shouts. But the man lost control and
pushed her too hard. She lurched back, tripping. But she was holding the hand
of the boy and as she fell, he fell with her. With this blow the chain reaction
became uncontained, entering my apartment. I felt the shove that drove the boy
to the ground and experienced his terror at the noise and violence. I was down
the steps running toward the scene, hearing Clarissa screaming and running
behind me, hearing Tiger barking from Philipa’s window. I took the steps in
threes as the legendary slow-motion of panic set in and turned seconds into
minutes. I wondered, in these moments while time stretched itself, why I could
not step off a curb but stairs did not present a problem. Why could I not
rename the curb to stair step and be on my way? Why do I see the light from a
lamp as a quantity and not as a degree? Because it was written on the bulb,
that’s why. I suddenly knew what my enabler was: language. It was my enemy.
Language allowed me to package similar entities in different boxes, separate
them out, and assign my taboos. I was at the bottom of the stairs when time
caught up to itself. A child’s scream broke my thoughts; chaotic and angry
voices jarred me. I heard my breath gasp and heave as I turned and headed
toward the lawn.

The
attacker pushed his voice to a rasp and I heard him yelling cunt, cunt, you cunt.
I was barrelling across the grass when he turned and grabbed the child’s arm,
trying to pull him up, but I threw myself between them and covered the boy like
a tarpaulin. The man tried to pull me off, but I had clenched my fist around a
countersunk lawn sprinkler and I was impossible to move. He began to kick my
ribs. Fuck you fuck he said.

He tore
at my shirt trying to lift me off the boy, whose shrieks had intensified, had
penetrated Philipa’s apartment, and had roused an angry superman. For the next
thing I knew, the bearded man had been lifted off me and thrown against his
car. And I saw Brian holding him there, standing between me and him, while
Tiger gnarled a few feet away. The man was foaming and spitting and he swore at
Clarissa and jerked himself away from Brian, who was twice his size and a
hundred times more a man, and who continued to menace him, forcing him back to
his car. Before he peeled away, Brian took his foot and kicked the Mercedes
door, which I realized later had probably created a three-thousand-dollar dent.

Clarissa
swept up her boy, who was wailing like a siren. She held the back of his head
against her and he slowly calmed. The scene quieted, and we stood there in
silent tableau, but anyone coming upon us would have known that something awful
had just happened. Clarissa approached where I lay in a clump on the ground and
asked was I all right. I said yes. She pointed to the raven-haired woman and
said this is my sister Lorraine, and I said that’s Brian. And Brian stood there
like Rodin’s Balzac. He looked around, “Everybody okay?” Yeah, we all said.
Then Clarissa urged the child forward and said, “This is Teddy.” Teddy held up
his arm, spreading his fingers and showing me a grass-stained hand. My shirt
was torn open and Clarissa touched my exposed ribs. “Ouch,” I said. And I was
pleased that I had chosen the perfect word for the occasion.

After
making sure that Mussolini was gone and couldn’t see our destination, we five
soldiers marched up to my apartment. Brian took charge and I asked if he had a
Red Bull and yes, he did. Then I wondered if I had made a mistake; I worried
that it might be dangerous for Clarissa to have a Red Bull now, when she was
most inclined to load a gun and mow down her child’s attacker. I decided to put
her on crime watch. If ever there was a moment for my Quaalude-laced wheatgrass
drink, it was now, but I had long since decided that spiking punch was a bad
idea, bordering on the immoral. Anyway, I was nervous about the chemical
collision of an upper and a downer, and wondered if the combination could
create a small explosion right in the can.

Teddy
scrambled around my apartment on hands and knees, occasionally rising on two
feet and moving hand over hand along the windowsill. Brian stood like a sentry
and was asking questions like “Who was that guy?” that never quite got
answered. But I did know what he was: an angry, unmanageable tyrant, haunted by
imagined slights, determiner of everything, father of Teddy, ex-husband of
Clarissa. This marriage couldn’t have lasted long, as she’s young, the boy’s an
infant, and the husband’s too violent to have been with her a long time. I
assumed that Clarissa would have left when his monstrous streak first appeared
and that he had no reason to hide it once he was in possession of her.

Clarissa’s
sister, who evidently had flown in from somewhere to stand sentry over Teddy
until the crisis passed, was the most upset at Mussolini and also was the most
lucid, rattling off all his worst qualities to Clarissa and listing all the
legal and practical ways to intimidate him. “Clarissa, I know you can’t hate
him because he’s the father of your child, so I’ll hate him for you,” she
said.

Clarissa
quaked imperceptibly, and I watched her contain herself. She pulled herself
inward, doing what she had to do as a mother: think how she could protect
Teddy. She looked around the room as she thought, holding each position for an
instant before shifting her head or body. As ideas occurred through her, she
would respond to them physically. She shook her head; she would express dismay;
her lips would tighten. Finally she whispered, “I can’t go home. Where can I
go?”

Lorraine
said, “You can stay with me.”

“No,
no,” said Clarissa. “He knows where your hotel is.”

I said,
“You could stay here for the night. All of you.” They all looked at one another
and knew it was a good idea.

A few hours passed. Brian
had secreted Clarissa’s car behind the building and parked it in Philipa’s
space; if Mussolini drove by later and saw her car in the street he would bang
down every door in the neighbourhood trying to find her. Lorraine and Clarissa
were going to sleep in my bed with Teddy between them. I would sleep on the
sofa. Philipa brought in a sack of fried chicken, a donation. Tiger smelled it
and gave me an imbecilic grin of anticipation. I offered him a leg and tried to
switch it at the last second with a palmed dog biscuit, but he wasn’t fooled,
even after I had smeared it with chicken grease. I made the sofa into a bed
with a blanket I borrowed from Tiger, which was covered with a wide swath of
dog hair.

As
night began to fall I started to worry. When Clarissa went to sleep, she would
naturally turn out the lights in my bedroom, which would prevent me from
turning out the lights in the living room, which meant I would be sleeping
under 1125 watts of power. Later in the evening, I noticed she had left a
night-light on, which meant I could kick off the fifteen-watt range light. But
that was it. I was attempting sleep in the land of the midnight sun. I turned
facedown and buried my head in the cushions. After a restless twenty minutes of
pretending, I heard a door creak and then footsteps headed my way. Clarissa’s
hand touched my shoulder and I turned.

“I just
wanted to say thank you.”

“Oh,” I
said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Daniel,
I was lying in bed thinking about all this and I realized I won’t be able to
treat you anymore. It’s not proper for you to know all this about me. I’ll have
to ask them to refer you to someone else.”

“Do the
same rules apply even if you’re only an intern?” I asked hopefully.

“Even
more so. I have to show respect for how things are done,” she said. “It would
be serious for me not to report this.”

Clarissa
was Mother Teresa to my leprosy. She leaned in toward me. I watched her lips
part and close; I heard her breath between the words. In close, her voice
changed. Lower, more resonant, like wind across a bottle top. In close, her
beauty trebled. Her hair fell forward and scattered the hard light on her face
into softer shadows. Her hand rested languidly on the sofa, palm up, almost
like it wasn’t part of her, and the pale side of her wrist was lost and wan,
longing for sun.