The Pleasure of My Company (17 page)

Accompanied
by Morton, I nosed through the house and came into a room piled with cardboard
boxes and empty picture frames. An oval mirror leaned precariously against the
floor. Four wooden kitchen chairs were alternately inverted and nested on each
other.

“Anything
you want in here?” asked Morton.

“I’ll
look,” I said.

Morton
excused himself, saying he had to sort out some papers. I knelt down and
browsed through a couple of boxes. At the bottom of one I found a metal
container the size of a shoe box. It had a built-in lock but the key was long
gone. I thought it would take a screwdriver to bust it open, but I gave it an
extra tug and it had enough give to tell me it had only rusted shut. A little
prying and the lid popped up. Inside were a bundle of letters, all addressed to
Granny, all postmarked in the late ‘70s. Two of them had return addresses with
the hand-printed initials J.C. They were from my father. I picked up the box,
knowing that this would be the only thing I would take from the house.

I found
Morton in the living room, which, because of the exterior shade and small
windows, was exceedingly dark. He sat in an armchair that had been upholstered
with a sun-bleached Indian blanket. He had a handful of papers that he shuffled
then spread open and rearranged like a bridge hand.

“Has
your sister contacted you?” he said.

“Not
that I know of.” I loved my rejoinder, grounded as it was in a fabulous
paradoxical matrix, and perfectly e-less.

“So you
don’t know?” he said.

“Know
what?”

“You
and your sister,” he said, “are splitting approximately six hundred and ninety
thousand dollars.”

I stayed in the house for
another hour, glimpsing faint memories as I moved from one room to another.
These were not memories of incidents, but were much more vague and beyond my
reach. They were like ghosts who sweep through rooms, are sensed by the
clairvoyant, and then are gone.

Clarissa
and Teddy had wandered far away from the house and now had wandered back. She
appeared at the screen door with a “How’s it goin’?” that expressed an
impatience to leave. I said good-bye to Morton, slid an arm around Teddy, and
lifted him into his car seat, which made him scream. I put the metal box in the
backseat and we drove back to the motel.

We sat
in the dining room and I could tell that the trip was starting to wear on
Clarissa. Our blistering escape had not solved her problems back home. Earlier
I watched her call her sister as the phone battery gave out, and now she seemed
in her own world, one that excluded me. Then she laid her hand across her wrist
and jumped. “I lost my watch!” she said. She checked around her, then left me
with Teddy while she searched the room and car. She returned—no watch—and
explained that it had been a gift to herself from herself, and I assumed it had
a greater history than she was telling me. Perhaps a reward for a personal
accomplishment whose value only she could understand. “What do you think,” she
said, are we ready to head home?”

“Now?”
I said.

“In the
morning.”

“I want
to go back to Granny’s for an hour or so.

This
annoyed her. She wanted to leave before dawn, and she persevered. “I need to
get back,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” This was the
first time Clarissa had had a hint of surliness, but she made up for it later
that night.

She and
I were bunked in the same room. This motel was the kind a traveller would
consider a charming, memorable find, as its architecture and decoration
perfectly identified a specific year in a specific decade in a specific
location that could not be seen anywhere else. Built in the ‘30s, the
bathrooms had porcelain sinks and tubs that weighed a ton. The rooms were long
and narrow and the ceilings and walls were lined with long planks of dark pine.
Wrought-iron hardware strapped each doorway and artisan-crafted sconces
silhouetted tin cut-outs of cowboy scenes through translucent leather shades.
Clarissa and Teddy took one end of the room and I slept at the distant other on
a sofa bed that sunk in the middle with a human imprint. We had amused each
other by spreading ourselves on the floor and playing a game with a deck of
cards that at one time had been so waterlogged it was three times its normal
height. Clarissa and I tried to play gin, though we struggled to remember the
rules, but Teddy made it impossible because he kept grabbing the cards and
rearranging them. Clarissa began calling him Hoyle and I would say to him, “What
do you think, Billy Bob, can I play that card?” And he would either pick up the
card and drool on it or slide it back to one of us, which would make us laugh.

Clarissa
and I were now used to seeing each other in our underwear. We both slept in
T-shirts and underpants. She turned out the lights and we slipped into our
respective beds. She spoke softly to me from across the room. “What was it like
today?”

“Thanks,”
I said.

“For
what?”

“For
asking,” I said.

“Daniel,”
she whispered, I think to say, of course she would ask.

We didn’t
speak for several minutes. I didn’t want to tell Clarissa about the
inheritance because I wanted to digest it myself first, and I didn’t want
anything external to affect our little trio. Then there was a rustle of sheets,
then footsteps. Clarissa came across the room and knelt beside my bed. She
reached her arm across the blanket until she found my shoulder and laid her
hand on it. Her fingers crawled under my sleeve and began a small back-and-forth
motion. She rested her head on the bed and her hair fell against my arm. I didn’t
move.

“Oh,
Daniel,” she said. “Oh, Daniel,” she whispered.

I didn’t
know what to do.

“I love
that you love Teddy.” The upper one-eighth of her body caressed the upper
one-eighth of my body. She moved her hand from my shoulder and laid her palm
against my neck with a slight clutch.

“We
should go to the house tomorrow, if that’s what you want. I’m sorry about
today. I’m just impatient; impatient for nothing.”

She
closed her eyes. My arm, with the bed as a fulcrum, was locked open at the
elbow and sticking dumbly out into the room. It was the part a painter would
have to leave out if he were going to make the scene at all elegant. I
evaluated Clarissa’s tender contact and I decided that it was possible for me
to put my free hand on her shoulder and not have the action considered
improper. I bent my elbow and touched her on the back. She didn’t recoil, nor
did she advance.

I didn’t
know if Clarissa’s gestures toward me were platonic, Aristotelian, Hegelian, or
erotic. So I just lay there, connected to her at three points: her hand on my
neck, my hand on her back, her hair brushing against my side. I stared at the
ceiling and wondered how I could be in love with someone whose name had no
anagram.

Later,
she dragged her hand sleepily across my chest and went back to her bed, leaving
a ghostly impression on me like a hand-print of phosphorus.

Teddy woke later than
usual and Clarissa and I slept through our usual 7 A.M. get-up. By nine,
though, we had eaten, packed, and loaded the car. We got to the end of the
motel driveway and when we stopped, I said, “I don’t want to go back to Granny’s.”
And then Clarissa argued, “But you said you did.” Then I came back, “It’s out
of our way.” Then Clarissa said, “I don’t mind. I think you should go.” Out of
politeness, we had switched sides and argued against ourselves for a while to
show that we understood and cared about each other’s position. Clarissa turned
right and we eventually found ourselves once again driving among the pecan
trees.

There
were no cars out front and the house was locked up. I knew what I wanted to do,
find Granny’s grave. Clarissa said, “I’ll leave you,” and ran after Teddy, who
had charged immediately toward the river. I stood before the house and listened
to the breeze that rustled through the groves. I decided to walk near the
river, upstream, to avoid the bustle of Clarissa and Teddy, who were
downstream. I started out, but the pink Dodge caught my eye. I returned to it,
felt around under the paper sacks filled with dirty laundry, and got the metal
box I had chosen as my sole artefact of my life with Granny.

I
walked through the forest and came upon a wooden bench—a half slice of a tree
trunk—that faced the shallow and crystalline river. There was a hand-painted
stone with Granny’s name and dates on it, and a small recently disturbed patch
of dirt. This diminutive marker was under the tallest and most majestic pecan
tree on the farm, and I guessed that was why Granny chose the spot. I sat on
the bench and looked toward the river, trying to meditate on this house and
land, but couldn’t. My mind has always been independent of my plans for it. I
reached in the metal box and picked up the small cache of letters. I thumbed
through them and took out the two from my father. I read the earlier one from
1979, which was about Granny. It was a snide criticism of how she ran her
property, followed by some tactlessly delivered advice on how to fix things.

The
second one was about me:

January 8, 1980

Dear
G.,

I’m so
glad you were able to see Ida before the trip. She’s our little heartbreaker
don’t you think? I have a photo of her with a cotton candy we took at the San
Antonio Fair. She looks like an angel. She knows exactly who Granny is too. We
show her your photo and she says Granny.

She’s
only four and she seems brighter than everyone around her. The song says there
is nothing like a dame and there ain’t. I didn’t know how much I wanted a girl,
but when Ida was born, that was it for Daniel.

The
letter went on, but I didn’t. Sitting graveside, I knew that these few words
would be either my death or resurrection. Two months later, on a still
California night, I would know which. It was there that I breathed my last
breath in the world that I had created.

Clarissa
and Teddy came up along the river. She spotted me and yelled “hey,” then picked
up Teddy and came over. “Guess what?” she said, holding up her arm. “I found my
watch. I love it when lucky things happen.”

Clarissa fired up the Neon
and drove us out to the highway, where we settled into the ache and discomfort
of the long road home. We didn’t speak for a while, though I kept a broad smile
on my face meant to hide my clammy shakes. All of us including Teddy were
impatient to be home, and our three-motel trip to Texas turned into just two
motel stays on the way back because of Clarissa’s driving diligence. She kept
us on the road deep into the night, and I often worried that we weren’t going
to find a motel with a vacancy.

I felt
inadequate around Clarissa as we drove. I waited for her to speak before I felt
allowed to. I tended to agree with everything she said, which made me not a
real person. There were times when we drifted into solitary thought with no
awareness of the passage of time. Once we started to again sing “California,
Here I Come,” and I bleeped myself with a loud buzzer tone when words with the
letter
e
came up. Clarissa turned to me and laughed, “You know what we
are, we’re a mobile hootenanny.” I roared at the word “hootenanny.” Then we
fell to silence again. In Albuquerque we had the best tacos of our lives, and I
forced Clarissa to stop at the municipal library for ten minutes where I
Xeroxed twenty pages from various investment books while she fluffed and dried
Teddy.

Endless
road engendered endless thought. Local architecture provoked in me nostalgia
that I could not possibly have. Night caused distracting roadside images to
fade into nothing. In the backseat was a pile of letters that radiated unease.
Flashbacks of Clarissa’s moonlit body presented themselves as floating
pictures. My father’s letter had finally been delivered to its ultimate reader.
Over the next few hours, I experienced emotions for which there were no names.
I felt like a different kind of pioneer, a discoverer of new feelings, of new
blends of old sentiments, and I was unable to identify them as they passed
through me. I decided to name them like teas, Blue Malva, Orange Pekoe Delight,
Gardenia Ochre Assam. Then I worked on new facial expressions to go with my
newly named emotions. Forehead raised, upper lip puffed, chin jutted. Eyes
crossed, mouth agape, lower teeth showing.

I would
sit in the backseat and hold Teddy on my lap when he was squirmy in his car
seat. But when he was sacked out, I would sit in the front and mentally play
with my $350,000. What I knew about finance had been gained through osmosis,
but I estimated that I could, without risk, get about 6 percent on my
inheritance. This meant that I could withdraw $41,747 a year for twelve years
before the principal was depleted. Forty-one thousand dollars a year was twice
what I was living on now, which I wouldn’t really have needed had it not been
for my next question to Clarissa. It was 9 P.M. and we were tired. “Can you
slow, and pull off?” I said.

“Here?”
she said.

The
reason she said “here” was because we were on the darkest, loneliest highway on
the darkest moonless evening. “It’s a fabulous night and us folks ought to pop
out and look at various stars.” I spoke with an echo of a drawl to make my
e-less sentence sound more reasonable.