The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin Page B

Clarissa rebus I had laid
out in airspace above the kitchen table. One piece missing: Where was Clarissa’s
man? Her impregnator. I assumed he was already gone or in the process of being
gone, that he was the source or subject of the distressed phone calls. He had
been replaced by Raven-Haired Woman, who, I assumed, was a friend filling in
for baby-sitters. Raven-Haired Woman was now demystified into Betty or Susie.
Clarissa was living advanced juggling and was probably in a mess. Oddly, I now
knew more about my shrink than my shrink knew about me, since I had never
allowed her to penetrate beyond my habits, which of course is the point of their
existence.
    I
anticipated my next session with Clarissa because I would see what form her
apology would take. Or at least the extent of the apology. If she explained too
much, she would reveal too much (“my husband is gone and I’m on my own and
couldn’t find someone to take care of my one-year-old”), and she’d risk
violating what I suppose is a shrink tenet. On the other hand, if she
under-explained, she might seem callous. She’d found herself in a spot all
right and I was going to enjoy watching her wriggle free, because how she
handled it would reveal how she felt about me.
    Forty
minutes later Elizabeth, former woman-of-the-world turned sorority deb, showed
up at my place on her tour through the available apartments of Santa Monica.
She mistakenly knocked on Philipa’s door, which set Tiger barking. I called up
the landing to her and her voice, like a melodeon, greeted me with an “Oh,” and
she turned her scrap of paper right-side up causing the 9 to be a 6. She came
down the steps at a bent angle, her torso twisted from trying to see the steps
from around her breasts.
    I tried
to appear richer than I was, but it was hard as I didn’t have much to work
with. Mostly I had put things away that would indicate poverty, like opened
bags of Cheetos with their contents spilling onto the Formica. I did set out a
packet of plastic trash liners because I thought they were a luxury item. She
came in and stood stock-still in the middle of the living room. As she surveyed
the place, wearing a tawny outfit with her knees thrust a bit forward from the
cant of her high heels, she gave the impression of a colt rearing up. Nothing
much seemed to impress her, though, as she only seemed to notice the details of
my apartment as they would appear on a stat sheet: number of bedrooms, or
should I say number of bedroom, kitchenette, cable TV, which she flipped on
(though it’s not really cable, just an ancient outlet to the roof antenna),
A/C, which she tested, number of bathrooms (she turned on the tap, I presume to
see if rusty water would come out). I loved it when she looked at my bedroom
and declared, “This must be the master.” Calling my dreary bedroom a master was
like elevating Gomer Pyle to major general.
    She sat
in the living room, jotted efficiently on her clipboard, and asked me how I was
feeling about the apartment across the street. “Had I decided?” I went into a
rhapsody about the complications of my decision, about the necessity of
contacting my nonexistent writing partner. I had been talking for a minute or
so when I noticed a rictus forming on Elizabeth’s face. She was looking past me
at waist level with her mouth dropped open and her writing hand frozen. I
turned my head and looked at the TV, and my mouth went open, and if I had been
writing, my hand would have frozen, too. There I was on TV, being shuffled
along in mock arrest on the Crime Show. There was a long moment before I
came out with “My God, that fellow looks like me.” What filled the long moment
was my shock, not at the bad luck of the show’s air date and time slot, but at
how I looked on TV. The blue parka made me look fat, which I’m not. It made me
look like a criminal, and I’m not. The show then jumped to the long shot of me
talking to the two policemen. Now we could see my apartment