The Pleasure of My Company (8 page)

The two
letters that arrived that day were not insignificant. The first was from the
Crime
Show,
informing me that the taping was completed on my episode and thanking
me for my participation. Enclosed was a copy of the waiver I had signed that
exempted the producers from all responsibility and made me liable for any lawsuits
resulting from my appearance. It was probably not clever of me to sign it, but
I wanted to be on TV. Plus, it seemed like it would be the nice thing to do.
The letter also informed me that the show would be on several weeks from now
and to keep checking my local listings for the exact date and time.

The
second letter was an airy breeze of a handwritten note from Granny. I always
delay opening her letters in the same spirit as saving the centre of the Oreo
for last. Granny lives on her pecan plantation in southern Texas (hence, my
middle name, Daniel Pecan Cambridge). She is the one family member who
understands that my insanity is benign and that my failure to hold a job is not
due to laziness. The letter sang with phrases that I swear lifted me like a
tonic: “Life is a thornbush from which roses spring; all the hearts in Texas
are wishing for you; I smother you with the kisses that are in this letter.”
And then a check for twenty-five hundred dollars fell out of the envelope. The
irony is that the one person who gives me money is the one person I wish I
could hand the check back to and say no, only joy can pass between you and me.
I found it difficult to write back. But I did, stingy with loving words
because they don’t come out of me easily. I hoped she could read between the
lines; I hoped that the presence of the letter in my own hand, the texture of
it, the wear and tear it had received on its trip across five states revealed
my heart to her. I can’t explain why it’s easy to tell you and not her how she smoothes
the way for me, how her letters are the only true things in my life, how
touching them connects me to the world. If only Tepperton’s Pies had a
Most-Loved Granny essay contest, I’d enter and my fervour would translate into
an easy win. I could forward her the published piece in Tepperton’s in-house
journal and she could read it knowing it was an ode to her.

The
week had been one of successes and setbacks. There was the triumph of my run
with Brian and the failure of my peacocking for Elizabeth. There was my
excitement at receiving Granny’s letter but then the reminder of my own needy
status when the check fell onto the kitchen table. But overall, there was an uptick
in my disposition and I thought this might be the week for me to find the
elusive Northwest Passage to the Third Street Mall.

The
Third Street Mall is in the heart of Santa Monica on a street closed to traffic
and has hundreds of useful shops with merchandise at both bargain and inflated
prices. But it also has a Pavilions supermarket. I have been suffering along
with the limited selection of groceries at the Rite Aid because it’s the only
place to which I’d mapped out a convenient route. If I could manage to get to
the Pavilions, well, it would be like moving from Iraq to Hawaii. From barren
canned goods and dried fruit to the garden of Eden. Also, coffee. Jeez, the
Coffee Bean, Starbucks. I might not seem like the type who could sit at an
outdoor café drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It’s just
sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can’t imagine a neurosis that would prevent one
from raising one’s arm to one’s mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I’m
sure I could come up with one. I also like the idea of saying “java.” That is,
saying it with an actual intent of getting some and not as a delightful sound
to utter around my apartment.

I had
tried and failed in this quest for Pavilions before, and I know why: cowardice
and lack of will. This time I was determined to be determined, but there would
be trials. My initial excursions hadn’t allowed for anything less than
perfection. The route had to make absolute logical sense: no double backs or
figure eights, and the driveways had to be perfectly opposing each other. But
if I thought the way an explorer would—yes, there would be rapids, there would
be setbacks—perhaps I could eventually find the right path.

Maps,
of course, are of no assistance except in the most general way. Maps show
streets, but not obstacles. If only city maps could be made by people like me.
They wouldn’t show streets at all; they would show the heights of curbs, the
whereabouts of driveways and crosswalks, and the locations of Kinko’s. What
about all those drivers who can’t make left turns? Why aren’t there maps for
them? No, I was forced to discover my route by trial and error. But because I
now had a catalogue of opposing driveways and their locations in my head,
noted from various other attempts to find various other locations through the
years, I was able to put together a possible route before I even started. With
a few corrections made spontaneously, on my third attempt I finally established
a pathway to the mall, and for three evenings afterward I fell asleep wrapped
in the glow of enormous pride.

Having
a route to the Third Street Mall meant that I was out in public more, so I had
to come up with some new rules to make my forays outside my apartment more
tolerable. When I was relaxing at the Coffee Bean having a java, for example, I
drew invisible lines from customer to customer connecting plaids with plaids,
solids with solids and T-shirts with T-shirts. Once done, it allowed my anxiety

meter to flat-line. I got
a kick out of the occasional conversation that arose with a “dude.” One time,
while enjoying my coffee, a particular tune was playing somewhere in the
background. The melody was so cheerful that everyone in the place became a
percussionist one way or another and with varying intensity. For some it was
finger-drumming and for others it was foot-tapping. I was inspired to blow on
my hot coffee in three-quarter time. But the oddest thing of all was that I
knew this song. It was a current pop hit, but how had I come to know it? How
had this tune gotten to me, through the mail? Somehow it had reproduced,
spread, and landed in my mental rhythm section. While it played, I and
everybody else in the Coffee Bean had become as one. I was in the here and now,
infected with a popular song that I had never heard, sitting among “buddies.”
And there was, for three long minutes, no difference between me and them.

The
chairs and tables of the Coffee Bean spilled onto the mall like an alluvial
fan. I grabbed a seat that was practically in the street because I could see at
least a full block in either direction. No need, though. Because what went on
within the perimeter of the sidewalk café was enough for an afternoon’s
entertainment. People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity
was interrupted only by their individual variety. My eyes roved around like a
security camera. Then I was startled out of my reverie by the sight of the
one-year-old who had passed by my window last week. His hand was held tightly
by the same raven-haired woman, and he leaned in toward the doorway of a
bookstore, straining like a dog on a leash. In answer to a voice from inside,
the woman turned toward the door and let the child’s hand loose. The boy
careened the few steps inside and I saw him lifted into the air by two arms behind
the glass storefront. Everything else in the window was obscured by a
reflection from the street. The raven-haired woman was not the mother; this I
had gathered. The raven-haired woman I assumed to be a sitter or friend. The
child clung to the woman behind the glass, and when I saw that it was Clarissa
who emerged from the shop, holding this child, so much of her behaviour the
previous week suddenly made sense.

On the way home, I
mentally constructed another magic square, but one of a different order; this
square fell under the heading of “Life”:

I tried a few things in
the empty centre square, but nothing stuck; anything I wrote in it seemed to
fall out. As I studied the image, this graphic of my life, I realized it added
up to nothing.

As I
walked home, the day was still sunny and bright. Something bothered me,
though: the sight of a mailman coming off my block at two-thirty in the
afternoon. The mailman was never in my neighbourhood later than ten, and this
meant there could be a logjam in my planned events of the day. Earlier, when I
trotted down with an elaborately planned haphazard flair to check the mail—
jeez, I think I remember whistling—the slot had been empty and I assumed there
was no mail to sort, so I foolishly changed my schedule. Oh well, the day had
already convoluted itself when I sighted Clarissa on the street, and now I was
going to sort mail in the afternoon. Sometimes I just resign myself to
disaster.

Most favourite
mail: Granny’s scented envelopes from Texas (without a check). Least favourite:
official-looking translucent-windowed envelope with five-digit box number for a
return address. But today, at the godforsaken hour of two-thirty in the
afternoon, an envelope arrived that was set dead even between most favourite
and least favourite. It was plain white and addressed to Lenny Burns. No return
address on the front of the envelope, and I couldn’t turn it over until I analyzed
all my potential responses to whatever address could be on the back. Which I
won’t go into.

The
name Lenny Burns rattled around in my head like a marble in a tin can. There
was no one in my building named Lenny Burns, and the address specifically noted
my apartment number. The previous tenant hadn’t been anyone named Lenny Burns,
it had been a Miss Rogers, an astrologer with a huge pair of knockers. And
evidently there was some doubt about whether she earned her living exclusively
from astrology. The name Lenny Burns was so familiar that I paused, tapping
the letter on the kitchen table like a playing card, while I tried to come up
with a matching face. Nothing popped. Finally, I flipped over the envelope and
saw the return address, and I wonder if what I saw will send a shiver of horror
through you like it did me.

Tepperton’s
Pies.
Like Mom never made.

Oops. I
suddenly remembered that Lenny Burns was the pseudonym I had used on my second
essay in the Most Average American contest, written almost automatically while
I ogled Zandy. While I didn’t imagine that the contents of the envelope held
good news, I also didn’t think that it held actual bad news, either. The letter
informed me that not only was Lenny Burns one of five finalists in the Most Average
American contest, but so was Daniel Pecan Cambridge. And both of them are me.

So the
real me and a false me were competing with each other to win what? Five
thousand dollars, that’s what. And the competition would involve the finalists
reading their essays aloud at a ceremony at Freedom College in Anaheim,
California. This meant that my two distinct and separate identities were to
show up at the same place and time. This is like asking Superman and Clark Kent
to appear at Perry White’s birthday lunch. The other competitors, the letter
informed me, were Kevin Chen, who was, evidently, Asian American, and hence,
not average; Danny Pepelow, redhead-sounding; and Sue Dowd, whom I could not
form a picture of. I wondered what the legal consequences of my deception would
be; I wondered if I would have to blurt out in a packed courtroom that I had
been swooning in a lovesick haze over Zandy the pharmacist and therefore this
was a
crime passionel.
I calmed down after telling myself that any
action taken against me would probably be civil and not criminal, and if they
did levy a suit against me, it would be very easy to choke on a Tepperton pie,
cough up a mouse, and start negotiating.

The
next day, I was nervous about the inevitable arrival of the second pie letter,
the one that would be addressed to the real me. This led me to an alternative
fixation. I should capitalize it because Alternative Fixation is a technique I
use to trick myself out of anxiety. It works by changing the subject. I simply
focus on something that produces even greater anxiety. In this case, I chose to
plan a face-to-face encounter with Elizabeth the Realtor. I had on one occasion
written her a “get to know me” letter that I never sent because no matter how
much I approached it, how I rewrote it, I always sounded like a stalker. “I
have observed you from my window…” “Your license plate, REALTR, amused me….”
It all sounded too observant and creepy. Which made me ask myself whether I
actually was too observant and creepy, but the answer came up no, because I
know my own heart.

I had
to admit that my previous plans to impress her had backfired like a
motorcycle. It was time to do the manly thing: to meet her without deception,
without forethought. I decided to present myself as an interested renter, one
who is looking to move up to a two-bedroom to make room for an office, in which
I would be working with the renowned writer Sue Dowd on a biography of Mao.
This seemed to be the honest thing to do.