Steve Martin

The Pleasure of My Company

This all started because of a clerical error.

Without the clerical error, I wouldn’t have been thinking this way at all; I wouldn’t have had time. I would have been too preoccupied with the new friends I was planning to make at Mensa, the international society of geniuses. I’d taken their IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90? I fell short of genius category by a full fifty points, barely enough to qualify me to sharpen their pencils. Thus I was rejected from membership and facing a hopeless pile of red tape to correct the mistake.

This clerical error changed my plans for a while and left me with a few idle hours I hadn’t counted on. My window to the street consumed a lot of them. Nice view: I can see the Pacific Ocean, though I have to lean out pretty far, almost to my heels. Across the street is a row of exotically named apartment buildings, which provide me with an unending parade of human vignettes. My building, the Chrysanthemum, houses mostly young people, who don’t appear to be out of work but are. People in their forties seem to prefer the Rose Crest. Couples whose children are grown gravitate toward the Tudor Gardens, and the elderly flock to the Ocean Point. In other words, a person can live his entire life here and never move from the block.

I saw Elizabeth the other day. What a pleasure! She didn’t see me, though; she doesn’t know me. But there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesn’t mean they weren’t, in some metaphysical place, already in love. Elizabeth was pounding a FOR LEASE sign into the flower bed of the Rose Crest. Her phone number was written right below her name, Elizabeth Warner. I copied it down and went to the gas station to call her, but the recorded voice told me to push so many buttons I just gave up. Not that I couldn’t have done it, it was just a complication I didn’t need. I waved to Elizabeth once from my window, but maybe there was a reflection or something, because she didn’t respond. I went out the next day at the same hour and looked at my apartment, and sure enough, I couldn’t see a thing inside, even though I had dressed a standing lamp in one of my shirts and posed it in front of the window.

I was able to cross the street because just a few yards down from my apartment, two scooped-out driveways sit opposite each other. I find it difficult-okay, impossible-to cross the street at the corners. The symmetry of two scooped-out driveways facing each other makes a lot of sense to me. I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I don’t know how they can do it. Isn’t a curb forbidding? An illogical elevation imposing itself between the street and the sidewalk? Crosswalks make so much sense, but laid between two ominous curbs they might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Who designed this? Daffy Duck?

You are now thinking I’m either brilliant or a murder suspect. Why not both? I’m teasing you. I am a murder suspect, but in a very relaxed way and definitely not guilty. I was cleared way early, but I’m still a suspect. Head spinning? Let me explain. Eight months ago a neighbor downstairs, Bob the appliance repairman, was knifed dead. Police came to interview me-it was just routine-and Officer Ken saw a bloodstained parka on my coatrack. Subsequently the lab found fibers from my parka on the corpse. Can you figure out my alibi? Take a minute.

Here it is: One night a naked woman burst out of Bob the appliance repairman’s apartment, hysterical. I grabbed my parka and threw it around her. Bob came and got her, but he was so polite he made me suspicious. Too bad I didn’t get fully suspicious until a week later, just after naked woman had penetrated his liver with a kitchen knife. One day, the naked woman, now dressed, returned my parka, unaware that blood and other damning evidence stained the backside. I was unaware too until savvy cop spotted the bloodstain when the parka was hanging on a coat hook near the kitchen. The cops checked out my story and it made sense; Amanda, hysterical woman, was arrested. End of story.

Almost. I’m still a suspect, though not in the conventional sense. My few moments of infamy are currently being reenacted because the producers of Crime Show, a TV documentary program that recreates actual murders, love the bloodstained parka angle, so I’m being thrown in as a red herring. They told me to just “act like myself.” When I said, “How do I do that?” they said to just have fun with it, but I’m not sure what they meant.

I’m hoping that my status as a murder suspect will enhance my first meeting with Elizabeth. It could jazz things up a bit. Of course, in the same breath I will tell her that I was cleared long ago, but I’ll wait just that extra second before I do in order to make sure I’ve enchanted her.

The larger issue, the one that sends me to the dictionary of philosophy, if I had one, is the idea of acting like myself. Where do my hands go when I’m myself? Are they in my pockets? I frankly can’t remember. I have a tough time just being myself, you know, at parties and such. I start talking to someone and suddenly I know I am no longer myself, that some other self has taken over.

The less active the body, the more active the mind. I had been sitting for days, and my mind made this curious excursion into a tangential problem: Let’s say my shopping list consists of two items: Soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. Soy: tart and salty. Talc: smooth and silky. Yet soy sauce and talcum powder are both available at the same store, the grocery store. Airplanes and automobiles, however, are similar. Yet if you went to a car lot and said, “These are nice, but do you have any airplanes?” they would look at you like you’re crazy.

So here’s my point. This question I’m flipping around-what it means to act like myself-is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet we’re available in the same store. The store of Existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensa’s loss.

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events. Like the morning the toaster popped up just as a car drove by with Arizona plates. Connection? Or coincidence? Must the toaster be engaged in order for a car with Arizona plates to come by? The problem, of course, is that I tend to behave as if these connections were real, and if a car drives by with plates from, say, Nebraska, I immediately eyeball the refrigerator to see if its door has swung open.

I stay home a lot because I’m flush with cash right now ($600 in the bank, next month’s rent already paid), so there’s no real need to seek work. Anyway, seeking work is a tad difficult given the poor design of the streets with their prohibitive curbs and driveways that don’t quite line up. To get to the Rite Aid, the impressively well-stocked drugstore that is an arsenal of everything from candies to camping tents, I must walk a circuitous maze discovered one summer after several weeks of trial and error. More about the Rite Aid later (Oh God, Zandy-so cute! And what a pharmacist!).