In interviewing a series of bond brokers, I sought out someone who could satisfy my requirement of extreme dullness. I felt that the happier a broker was, the shadier he was. If he was happy, it meant that he thought about things other than bonds. Happiness meant he might be frivolous and do things like take vacations. I wanted a Scrooge McDuck who thought about only one thing, decimal points. Since I was a person whose own personality rose and fell based on the input of another person, meetings with these brokers were deadly. The more somber he was, the more somber I would become, and we would often spiral down together into an abyss of tedium.
I interviewed four brokers at several firms in the Santa Monica area. It was the second one who was stupefyingly dull enough and who gave me a siren’s call when I met with his rivals. His name was Brandon Brady, and he was so dreary that I’m sure that the rhythmic alliteration in his name made him faintly ill.
What made me finally choose Brandon was not his colorlessness but my perception of the depth of his narrow, hence thorough and numerical, mind. I was sitting with another broker, whose own deadly personality challenged Brandon ’s. It would have been a tough choice based on flatness alone. But when this broker laid out his plans for me, he started with a proposal to buy a ten-year bond starting next Wednesday.
“There’s a problem with buying a ten-year bond next Wednesday,” I said.
“And what is that?”
“If I buy a bond next Wednesday, ten years later it would come due on a Saturday, but I couldn’t cash it in until Monday. I would lose two days’ interest.”
He checked his computer then looked at me as if I were a wax model of myself: I seemed like a human, but something was wrong.
And that was that. I went back to test broker number one, who made the same gaffe. But it was Brandon, who, after I had proposed buying a bond next Wednesday, got out a calculator and made a clatter as he ran his fingers over it, then frowned deeply. “Well,” he said, “they’ve got us on this one. Why don’t we wait a few days and see what other bonds come up?” I knew I had found my man.
Clarissa and Teddy’s entry into the new apartment was biblical. It was as though they had been led into the promised land. Throw rugs of sunlight crept across every bedroom floor, and I had placed cheap plants in every empty corner, copying a home decor catalogue I had found in the mailbox. I marched Clarissa around the place and she took a breath of delight in every new room, which gave me pleasure. I had budgeted for just enough furniture to make the place functional, so it looked a little spare, but if my twelve-year plan was to work, the cash would have to flow as though through an hourglass. Clarissa had some furniture that she coerced a friend with a pickup to deliver, and Teddy’s colorful possessions were quickly distributed throughout the apartment. Clarissa installed a phone, which I viewed suspiciously at first, then finally forgot about. The place filled out incrementally, a few framed photos appeared, and by the end of the month it looked as though a family lived there. Except.
Except that the space between me and Clarissa remained uncrossable. Sometimes I felt an intense love coming from her toward me, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of Teddy. I gave it time, and it was easy to give it time, because Teddy’s antics often kept any serious discussion at bay. If my hand rested against Clarissa’s, it was only a moment before I had to move it to snag Teddy. When he ambled around the apartment, Clarissa hung over him like a willow. There was no such thing as a solitary moment. I began to allow a phrase in my head that would never have been allowed across the street. The imperfect ideal. As strict as my life across the street had been, it was just as loose at the Rose Crest. Teddy’s chaos left me in structural shambles, and I think I could tolerate it because the source of the chaos was unified. He was a person beyond logic; he was the singularity.
It is disappointing when you discover that the person you love loves someone else. I made this discovery twice. The first was one evening when the three of us sat down to our usual meal. These dinners were the fantastic disorder at the end of my rigorously structured days spent with my nose in financial magazines and reports. I had grown to anticipate them and participate in them with a new-found looseness. Clarissa and I chipped in and had food delivered, and there was a lot of freewheeling talk accompanied by the opening of white paper bags containing napkins and picnic utensils and tuna sandwiches and mustard packets. This crinkling noise and snap of the plastic tops of containers of mayonnaise always sparked us into thrilling recaps of the day’s most mundane events, and months later I realized that these half hours were sacred.
After Clarissa had set Teddy in a high chair and thrown a few morsels of tuna in front of him, he fisted a glob of it and stuck it in his mouth, then turned to her and grinned. Clarissa’s face beamed and broadened, her focus was only on him; there was nothing else, no apartment, no jobs, no schoolwork, no life other than the joyful force that streamed between them. And there was no me. I sat and waited out the absorption, which flickered when Clarissa reached for more food and finally both alit back on earth.
Clarissa’s studies progressed and she engaged herself in them with fervor, and she grasped the language of psychology quickly. The vocabulary and concepts came easily to her and she hinted that she had an affection for the subject matter that the other students didn’t. At night she would catch me up on what she had learned during the day, give me shorthand analyses of syndromes and disorders, and then would go over comments she had made in class to get my opinion of them.
Clarissa was always thoughtful toward me and would express her gratitude for my assistance in her life, and I would thank her in return, which always left her puzzled. The impact she and Teddy had had on me was made clear one afternoon when a packet of mail arrived, forwarded from my old address. One of the envelopes was from Mensa. I opened it and read that it had been discovered that, as I had guessed, my scores had been compromised by human error, and would I like to take the test again? My first thought took the form of a shock: Human error at Mensa? What chance then did McDonald’s have, and the Rite Aid, and CompUSA? My second thought took the form of a semantic shudder at the phrase “human error”: Is there any other kind? My third thought was No, I didn’t want to take the test again, because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.
One night I got a phone call from Clarissa asking if it was all right for her to be home later than usual. “Would you be okay? Were you going out?” she asked, “Can you watch Teddy; is Teddy okay?” Sure, I said.
Teddy and I had an evening of bliss. He was the model child and I was the model adoptive/uncle/friend. We cavorted on the bed, we played trash can basketball, we played “Where’s Teddy?” at professional levels. Finally a cloud came over him and he conked out on my bed and I slid him over and rested next to him. My lighting rules were still in effect and the soft thirty-watt lamp on my chest of drawers was balanced nicely by the solar glow in the living room. My door was ajar and I could see the front window and door as I lay in relative darkness. I used this solemn time for absolutely nothing, as I drained my mind of thought.