The Pleasure of My Company

The news of her death left me disturbingly unaffected. At least for a while. I wondered if I were truly crazy not to feel engulfed by the loss and unable to function. But the sorrow was simply delayed and intermittent. It did not come when it should have but appeared in discrete packets over a series of discontinuous days, stretching into months. Once, while tossing Teddy into the air, a packet appeared in the space between us, and vanished once he was back in my grip. Once, I positioned my palm between my eyes and the sun, and I felt this had something to do with Granny, for it was she who stood between me and what would scorch me. It was not that I missed her; she was so far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare. She lived in me dead or alive. Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them, for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.

The day after the letter was Easter Sunday. It reminded me that as an adolescent I was primped and combed and then incarcerated in a wool suit that had the texture of burrs. I was then dragged to church, where I had to sit for several hours on a cushionless maple pew in the suffocating Texas heat. These experiences drained me of the concept of Jesus as benevolent. I did, however, proudly wear an enamel pin that signified I had memorized the books of the Bible.

That Granny’s death fell so close to this nostalgic day was just bad luck, and that Easter I lay in bed gripped in a vise of reflection. It was after ten, and although my thoughts of the past were viscous and unbudging, the darkness in the room intensified my hearing, allowing me to keep at least one of my senses in the present. Amid a deep concentration on a potato salad of thirty years ago, I heard a car door slam, followed by hurried steps, followed by a quiet but persistent knock on my front door. I threw on pants and a T-shirt and opened the door without asking who it was.

Clarissa stood before me in a shambles, with Teddy clinging to her like a koala bear. I had not seen either of them at all during Easter week.

“Are you up?” she asked.

“I’m up,” I said, and Teddy, holding out his arms, climbed over onto me. Clarissa came in, glancing toward the street. “He’s back?” I said.

“He was here all week and things were tolerable at least. But today he started getting agitated. It’s like he’s on a timer. He began phoning every five minutes, which got me upset, then he suddenly stopped calling and I knew what was next. I heard a car screech outside my apartment and I knew it was him, so I got Teddy and bumped his head hurrying him into the car seat.” By now her voice was breaking and she soothed Teddy’s head with her palm. “Can I just sit here or stay here for a minute or maybe the night till I figure out what to do?” But she knew she didn’t have to ask, just stay. Teddy gripped my two forefingers with his fists and I moved them side to side. “Do you have anything?” she asked. “Any baby wipes or diapers or anything?” I had it all.

We followed our previous routine. Clarissa and Teddy slept in my room, and I slept on the sofa under lights so bright I tanned. Around 3 A.M. there was baby noise and I heard Clarissa’s hushed footsteps as she lightly bounced Teddy around the bedroom. Her door was cracked open and I said, “Everything okay?”

She slid a bladed palm in the doorway, opening it by a few more inches. “You awake?” she asked. “C’mon in, let’s talk,” she said. We passed Teddy off between us several times as we entered the bedroom. I knew what the invitation was about, camping buddies. But she seemed to have something on her mind of a verbal nature. Clarissa accommodated my lighting requirements by closing the door just enough to create a soft half-light in the bedroom. After a while we put Teddy in the center of the bed, and though he still was wide awake, he calmed and made dove sounds. We were lying on either side of him and I put my hand on his grapefruit stomach, rolled him onto his back, and rocked him back and forth.

“What’s going on with you these days?” asked Clarissa.

And I told her of Granny’s suicide. “The funeral is the day after tomorrow,” I said. “But I can’t be there.”

“Do you want to be there?” she asked.

“What could I do there? What good would I be?” I answered.

“I think I should leave for a while,” said Clarissa. “Would you like me to go somewhere with you? We could drive to Texas, you, me, and Teddy.”

“Too late for the funeral,” I said.

“Yes, but you would be there; you would have shown up for her.”

Upon hearing Clarissa’s suggestion, my mind did a heroic calculation resulting in an unbalanced equation. On one side of the equals sign were the innumerable obstacles I would face on such a trip. I could list a thousand impossibilities: I cannot get in an elevator. I cannot stay on a hotel floor higher than three. I cannot use a public toilet. What if there were no Rite Aids? What if we passed a roadside mall where one store was open and the others were closed? What if I saw the words “apple orchard”? What if the trip took us in proximity to the terrifyingly inviting maw of the Grand Canyon? What if we were on a mountain pass with hairpin turns, or if, during the entire trip, I could not find a billboard bearing a palindromic word? What if our suitcases were of unequal sizes? How would I breathe at the higher elevations? Would the thin air kill me dead? How would we locate the exact state lines? And what if, at a gas station in Phoenix, the attendant wore a blue hat?

On the other side of the equation was Teddy. I could imagine Teddy cooing in the back while pounding arrhythmically on his kiddy seat, and I could imagine ideas for his next amusement streaming through my head from Needles to El Paso and displacing every neurotic thought. I could imagine trying to distill his chaos into order and taking on the responsibility of his protection. And there was Clarissa, who would be seated next to me; who, now that I was no longer a patient, could be asked direct questions instead of being the subject of my oblique method of deduction. I still knew very little about her, only that I was in love with her. These two factors pulled down the scale toward the positive. But I settled the matter with a brilliant dose of self-delusion. I manipulated my own stringent mind with a new thought: What if I could convert one present fear into a different and more distant fear? What if I could translate my fear of the Grand Canyon into a fear of Mount Rushmore? What if I could transform my desire to touch the four corners of every copier at Kinko’s into an obsession with Big Ben? But my final proposal to myself was this: What if during the entire trip I would not allow myself to speak any word that contained the letter e? This is the kind of enormous duty that could supersede and dominate my other self-imposed tasks. I quickly scanned my vocabulary for useful words-a, an, am, was, is, for, against, through-and found enough there to make myself understood. Thus “let’s eat” would become, “I’m hungry, baby! Chow down!” I couldn’t say, “I love you,” but I could say, “I’m crazy about you,” which was probably a better choice anyway. I could call Clarissa by name, Teddy would simply become something affectionate like big man, bubby boy, or junior. One minor drawback, I couldn’t say my own name.

This idea of condensing my habits into one preoccupying restriction seemed so clever that it filled me up with ethyl and I said to Clarissa, “Okay, I’ll go.” Even though I had not officially started my challenge, my response was my first stab at an e-less sentence.

It was decided we would leave in the morning. Clarissa was afraid to return home to pack; her bright pink car didn’t have the stealth we needed for even a night run. She would have to buy clothes on the road. She had a credit card that she said was at its bursting point, with a few hundred dollars left on its limit. She had her cell phone but no charger, so we would have to be conservative in its use. We waited until 10 A.M. when I could withdraw my remaining thirty-eight hundred dollars for the trip.

I got in the car and said, “It’s a long trip for us. I want our roads to know not much traffic.”

“Huh?” she said.

“In honor of our trip down south, I’m trying to talk Navajo,” I said. Clarissa laughed, thank God, and pulled away from the curb.

We knew we would never get to Texas in time for Granny’s funeral, but the journey had another grail: I would be able to see Granny’s farm one last time before it was sold due to the lack of an interested relative to run it.

April in California is like June anywhere else. It was seventy by 10 A.M., heading up to eighty. Even though our reason for fleeing L.A. was somber, the spontaneity of our trip inspired a certain giddiness in us, and Clarissa laughed as we pulled up to the Gap and she ran in for T-shirts and underwear and socks. Teddy looked at me from his car seat and burbled while manipulating a spoon. I, the passenger/co-pilot/lookout/scout who was incapable of taking the wheel, wondered what I would do if asked to move the car. Grin, I suppose. After the Gap I hit the Rite Aid, and my knowledge of its layout sped me through dental hygiene, hairbrushes, everything feminine that Clarissa might need on the trip.

“I got you razors and things,” I said. This was going to be easy; I had yet to miss the letter e.

I got back in the car and checked the glove compartment for maps. There were a few irrelevant ones, but the California map would at least get us to Arizona. Pinpointing my current parking spot on a map of the entire state of California was impossible, so I hoped that Clarissa knew how to get us out of town. She turned over her shoulder and fiddled with Teddy. Then, she didn’t even ask where to go, just started driving south.

The traffic stopped and started along Santa Monica Boulevard, but soon we drove up a centrifugal cloverleaf onto the freeway where Clarissa stepped on it and accelerated to blissful speeds. It was as if the car had grown wings, letting us soar over the red lights and curbs and crosswalks. I wondered if the reason I was crazy, the reason that I had no job, that I had no friends, was so that at this particular moment in my life I could leave town on a whim with a woman and her baby, saying good-bye to no one, speeding along with no attachments to earth or heaven. The moment had come and I was ready for it. We rolled down the windows and the air whipped around us; Teddy chortled from behind. In honor of Philipa’s dog, Tiger, I stuck my head out the window and let my tongue flap in the breeze while Clarissa changed the lyrics and sang “ California, Here I Went,” and kept time by thumping her palm on the steering wheel.

There were unpredictable and unaccountable slowdowns until we passed some shopping outlets in Palm Springs, where suddenly the road widened and flattened as though it had been put through a wringer. We pulled in for fast food at lunchtime, barely stopping the car. After four hours of driving we had not lost our zing but had quieted into comfortable smiles and inner glows. Clarissa checked her messages once. She listened, disappointment slithered across her face, and she turned off the Nokia. I took the phone and stowed it in the car door, which had a convenient space for miscellaneous storage.

We continued heading south with the sun still high. I stole the occasional glance and could see Clarissa in relief. Each eyelash was clearly defined against the crisp background of desert and sky. She was an array of pastels, her skin with its pink underglow set against white sand and the turquoise blue of her blouse. I assembled from the sight of her, from memories of her, a clear picture of Clarissa’s most touching quality: her denial of sadness. Only the most tragic circumstances could take the smile from her face and the bounce from her walk. Even now, as she fled from terror, she looked forward with innocence toward a happiness that waited, perhaps, a few miles ahead.

Contained in the hard shell case of Clarissa’s Dodge, I was remarkably and mysteriously free from the stringency of the laws and rules that governed my Santa Monica life. So I decided to engage Clarissa in conversation. Clarissa must have decided the same thing, because before I could speak, she launched into a soliloquy that barely required from me an uh-huh.

“I think Chris saw me as his dolly,” she said. I knew from her icy inflection on the word Chris that she meant her inseminator. “But there was no way I could see it until we were married,” she went on. “He’s borderline; that’s what I figured. A belligerent narcissist. He needs help, but of course why would someone seek help if one of their symptoms is thinking everyone else is wrong? I think I’m a narcissist, too. I’ve got a lot of symptoms. Four out of six in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. It seemed to me that “Chris” was simply a violent son of a bitch. But I didn’t have to live with him. If I had to justify someone to myself, I, too, would throw a lot of words at him. The more words I could ascribe, the more avenues of understanding I would have. Soon, every intolerable behavior would have a syntactical route to my forgiveness: “Oh, he’s just exhibiting abstract Neo-juncture synapses,” I would say, and then try to find treatments for abstract Neo-juncture synapses.

The difference now between me and Clarissa was that she was yakking and I was thinking. I felt I was in conversation with her; but my end of the dialogue never got spoken. So my brilliant comments, retorts, and summaries stayed put in my cortex, where only I would appreciate their clever spins and innuendos.

The route from California to New Mexico essentially comprises one left turn. The monotony of the road was a welcome comedown from the emotional razzmatazz of our tiny lives in Santa Monica. We had practically crossed Arizona by day’s end, and just shy of the border, we checked into the Wampum Motel, a joint with tepee-shaped rooms and the musty scent of sixty years of transients. It fit our budget perfectly because nobody wanted to stay there except the most down and out, or college students looking for a campy thrill. The antique sign bearing the caricature of an Indian was enough to cause an uprising.

I’m not sure why Clarissa put us all in one room. Since I was paying, maybe she was honoring the budget, or perhaps she saw us as the Three Musketeers who must never be torn asunder. She got a room with twin beds and one bathroom. The lights were so dim in the room that I had no wattage problem. All I had to do was leave the bathroom light on, open the door one inch, and the room would be perfect for sleeping.

This arrangement also provided me with one of my life’s four or five indelible images: After an excursion to the Wampum diner, we retired early to get a jump on the next day’s drive. While Clarissa showered, Teddy slept securely in one of the twins, buffered on two sides by a pillow and a seat cushion. I had gotten in the other bed and turned out the light. I huddled up, trying to warm myself under the diaphanous wisps that the Wampum Motel called sheets. The room was lit only by moonlight, which seeped around every window blind and curtain. I heard the shower shut off. Moments later Clarissa came quietly into the room, leaving the bathroom light on per my request but closing the door behind her. To her, the room was pitch black, but to me, having adjusted to the darkness, the room was a patchwork of shadow and light. Clarissa, naked underneath, had wrapped herself in a towel and was feeling her way across the room. I was officially asleep but my eyes were unable to move from her. Standing in profile against the linen curtain and silhouetted by the seeping moonlight, she dropped the towel, raised a T-shirt over her head, and slipped it on. Her body was outlined by the silvery light that edged around her and she was more voluptuous than I had imagined. She then crouched down and fumbled through a plastic bag, stood, and pulled on some underwear. I wondered if what I had done was a sin, not against God, but against her. I forgave myself by remembering that I was a man and she was a woman and it was in my nature to watch her, even though her ease with taking off her clothes in front of me could have been founded on the thought that she did not see me as a sexual creature.

As compelling as this event was, I did not infuse it with either the tangible heat of desire or the cool distance of appreciation. For whichever approach I chose, I knew it was bound to be unrequited, and so my dominant feeling for the rest of the night was one of isolation.

The morning was a blur of Teddy’s needs. Things clanked and jars were opened and Clarissa turned herself away for breast-feeding. Though we slept well, we were both tired and car-lagged from the travel. Still, we were on the road by 7 A.M. and very soon we were in New Mexico.

New Mexico held me in a nostalgic grip, even though I had never been there. Only after we’d spent six hours crossing it before arriving in El Paso did I realize what was affecting me. It was that southern New Mexico was beginning to look, feel, and taste like Texas. Northern New Mexico was comparatively a rain forest; it looked as if an extremely choosy nutrient were coursing underground. Rocks burst with color. Rainbow striations shot across the walls of mesas, then disappeared into the ground. Dusky green succulents vividly dotted the tan hills, and the occasional saguaro stood in the distance with its hand raised in peace like a planetary alien.

But southern New Mexico was arid, eroded, and flat. As we drove, Clarissa liked to turn off the air-conditioning, roll down the window, and be dust-blown. I was beginning to sunburn on the right side of my face, and we screamed a conversation over the wind that ripped through the car. She told me that her bank account was being depleted fast, that she was worried she would have to quit school, thus ruining her chances of ultimately achieving a higher income. She said she was concerned that she would have to move back to Boston per her ex’s demand, and she didn’t understand why her ex even cared about whether they were in Boston as he seldom exhibited any interest in Teddy. All this bad news was delivered without self-pity, as if it were just fact, and I felt a strong urge to cushion her fall as her life was collapsing. But I lacked any ideas to support her except cheerleading. I suppose I could have been a moral voice, but I was beginning to doubt my status in that department, too.

Our conversation reminded me that I was also in financial trouble. Granny’s intuition had saved me many times, but that form of rescue was now over. I wondered if my pretense of having no need of money, to myself and to Granny, was childish. My paltry government check was insufficient to support my grand-compared to some-lifestyle. I knew that without Granny’s occasional rain of money, there was going to be, upon my return to Santa Monica, a housing, clothing, and food crisis.

In El Paso we found a Jimmy Crack Corn motel that fit within my new scaled-down notion of budget. I joked, “Discomfort is our byword.” To her credit Clarissa laughed and agreed. We stayed in separate rooms as we sensed a wretched bathroom situation, and we were right. Barely enough room for the knees.

The motel had made one attempt at landscaping, a ramshackle wooden walkway arcing over a concrete-bottomed pond. However disgusting it was for Clarissa and me to look into its murk, Teddy considered it Lake Geneva; he wanted to swim, frolic, water ski, and sail in its green sludge. We wouldn’t let him come in contact with the mossy soup, so dense that it left a green ring around the edge of the concrete, but I did make paper boats that Teddy was allowed to throw stones at and sink.

In the morning, Clarissa’s shower woke me and I could time my ablutions to hers thanks to the paper-thin walls. We cleaned our teeth, peed, and washed simultaneously, enabling me to appear outside my door at the same time she appeared outside hers, and by 7 A.M., with Teddy already lulled into a stupor by the motion of the car, we were on the final stretch to Helmut, Texas.

What happened under the pecan tree qualifies as one of those events in life that is as small as an atom but with nuclear implications.

Clarissa and I had checked into a local motel, just a short hop from Granny’s, that practically straddled the Llano River. It was set in a gnarly copse of juniper trees whose branches had woven themselves into a canopy that threw a wide net of shade. We were lucky to have found a low-cost paradise that had a number of natural amusements for Teddy, including nut-finding, water-squatting, and leaf-eating, and it was easy to idle away a few hours in the morning while we laboriously digested our manly Texas breakfasts.

Before lunch, Clarissa drove me to Granny’s. I had no recollection of how to get there, though a few landmarks-the broadside of a white barn, a derelict gas pump, a cattle grate-did jog my memory. But when we left the highway and drove among the pecan groves whose trees overhung the road to the farm, I experienced an unbroken wave of familiarity. The trees grew in height and density as we neared the farmhouse, which was sheltered by a dozen more trees towering 150 feet in the air, protecting it from the coming summer heat. The house was a single-story hacienda, wrapped around a massive pecan tree that stood in the middle of a courtyard. The exterior walls were bleached adobe and the roof-line was studded with wooden vigas. A long porch with mesquite supports, sagging with age, ran the length of the house on three sides, and a horse and goat were tied up near a water trough. The trees overhead were so dense that sunlight only dappled the house even at this moment of high noon. A few rough-hewn benches were situated among the trees. Attached to the house was a ramada woven with climbing plants, at the end of which a tiled Mexican fountain flowed with gurgling water, completing this picture of serenity.

There were three cars parked outside, two were dilapidated agricultural trucks and one a dusty black Mercedes. We pulled up and got out. A man in a tan suit swung open the screen door. He held a slim leather portfolio that indicated he was official. He said hello to us with a relaxed voice and we heard the first southern drawl of the entire trip. We introduced ourselves and when I said I was “Dan, grandson of Granny,” there was a frozen moment followed by, “Oh yes, we’ve been looking for you.”

Clarissa went off to the fountain to show Teddy its delights. I went into the farmhouse with Morton Dean Argus, who turned out to be the lawyer for the estate. He explained he had driven all the way from San Antonio and had stayed here on the farm for the last three days to sort out issues among the few relatives who had arrived in pickup trucks after the news got out. “Y’all arrive a half hour later and I would-of been gone,” he said.

Everything useful in the house had been sacked. Everything personal remained. Antique family photos still hung on the walls, but the microwave oven had been removed. The stove, a 1930 Magic Chef Range, was too ancient to loot, the marauders having no idea of its value to the right aesthete chef. A cedar chest filled with Indian rugs had been mysteriously overlooked. There were the occasional goodies, including period equestrian tack used as wall decor, as well as a small collection of heavy clay curios of sleeping Mexicans, whose original bright colors had patinated to soft pastels.

Morton Argus told me that Granny had been cremated and interred on the property under a tree of her designation. He told me that a one-page will had been read and that certain items-really merchandise-had been distributed to a few workers and relatives. My sister, Ida, had been there, he said, and I felt a pang of guilt that my sequestered lifestyle hadn’t allowed her to contact me more quickly so I could have met her at the house. It was Ida, he said, who coordinated the dispersal of furniture to a small swarm of needy relatives.

Ida was three years younger than me. She’d moved to Dallas, married young, and borne children, and she seemed untouched by the impulses that took me inside myself. “Did my dad show up?” I said. Morton asked me his name. “Jack,” I said. No, he hadn’t.

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 traveler 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 cutouts 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 artifact 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.

She slowed and stopped. The mechanical hum of the car had become accepted as silence, but when we got out of the car, the further, deeper silence of the desert shocked us both. Holding Teddy, I leaned against the car and pointed out the dipper, then the North Star, then Jupiter. A meteor caught my eye but Clarissa turned too late. Clarissa and I didn’t speak, but this quiet was different from the stiltedness in the car. The air was cold and brittle but was punctuated with surprising eddies of heated winds.

It was going to take some acting on my part to keep her from knowing that my mouth was on a three-second delay from my brain while it tried to eliminate the letter e from everything I was about to say.

What I wanted to say was, “There’s a three bedroom at the Rose Crest for rent. Would you and Teddy like to share it with me?” but it was shot through with e’s. So instead I slouched back onto the fender and said, “I was shown a big vacant flat across from my pad. I’m thinking of taking it. If you want to, you could stay. I could watch him so you could study.” There was a long pause. “You could stay in your own big room. I don’t mind waking up with junior on nights you just want to conk out.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I wanted to keep talking so I would never have to hear her answer.

“How much is it?” she said.

“I would pay all our monthly bills, food, all that. You could finish school.”

“Why would you do that?” she said.

Because I am insane. Because I am lonely. Because I love you. Because I love Teddy. “It could work for both of us,” I said. “I’d watch him and you could go to school.”

“Can I let you know?”

“Naturally,” I said.

“We would be sharing, right?” she said.

She meant, sharing and that’s all. I nodded yes and we got back in the car.

Twelve hours later she said, “I think it could work. You’re sure you’re okay with it?”

“I am.”

The drive from Granny’s had been one of escalating greenery, ending in the sight of home. The scrub of southern Texas had given way to cacti, which had given way to the occasional oasis in Arizona, which had given way to the pines and oaks of California, which turned into curbs and streets. When we finally pulled up in front of my apartment, I stuck my foot out of the car, put it on the grass, and said, “Sleet, greet, meet, fleet street.” Clarissa looked at me like I was crazy.

Over the next few days, every habit of mine returned with a new intensity, as though I owed it a debt.

There were two letters waiting for me when I returned. One was a kindly but brief note from my sister informing me of Granny and our inheritance, the other from a law firm in San Antonio informing me of the same. Ida’s letter, though less emotional than a letter from Granny, still had the same embedded goodness, and I wrote her back apologizing for my years of silence, listing a few of my dominant quirks so she could understand me a bit better. The letter was so good that I copied it and sent it to the law firm, too, though I realized later they could use it against me in court and try to keep the money for themselves. But they didn’t.

The FOR LEASE sign was still up at the Rose Crest, but I didn’t want to make any moves until the cash was in hand, and the money took several weeks-of course-to become mine. I had to prove who I was, which was not easy. I thought my argument to them-that I was me because no one else was me-was convincing, but it was not what they were looking for. I had to prove my lineage. My documents were vague. I had no driver’s license and could not find my birth certificate. Ultimately the legal firm came to a decision; they had no one to give the money to but me, and my sister had vouched for me, so enough was enough and they sent me the dough.

I now had an actual reason to call Elizabeth the Realtor. Not having a phone, I got the address of her company and walked there, even though the route proved to be almost impossible. I wondered if my path, when viewed from an airplane, would spell out my name. Just before giving up, I found a crosswalk for the handicapped that had two scooped-out curbs and used it as a gangplank to get to Elizabeth ’s block. I left a note that said I was interested in the apartment.

She drove by several hours later and I ran down the stairs before she could get to my door. Elizabeth must have developed an extremely sophisticated wealth detector because she suddenly began treating me as a viable customer who was swimming in cash, even though I was sure that nothing in my behavior had changed. Even after I made her drive me across the street, which wasn’t more than twenty steps, she maintained a professional front and showed no exasperation. Or maybe she perceived my indifference toward her and was trying to win me back.

Within the hour, I’d leased the three-bedroom and even negotiated the price down fifty dollars a month. I had another eight days on my monthly rent and I told her I would move in at week’s end. I watched Teddy several times that week and Clarissa showed no signs of backtracking.

I was now purchasing a newspaper every day and perusing the financial section. I diligently followed bonds, mutual funds, and stocks and noted their movement. Movement was what I hated. I didn’t like that one day you could have a dollar and the next you could have eighty cents without having done anything. On the other hand, the idea that you could have a dollar and the next day have a dollar twenty thrilled me no end. I was worried that on the day my dollar was worth eighty cents I would be sad, and on the day it was worth a dollar twenty I would be elated, though I did like the idea of knowing exactly why I was in a certain mood. But I saw another possibility. If I bought bonds and held them to maturity, then the fluctuations in their value wouldn’t affect me, and I liked that their dividends trickled in with regularity. This meant that my mood, too, would constantly trickle upward and by maturity, I would be ecstatic.

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.

Tonto.

That’s who I felt like when I heard the footsteps coming along the second-floor walkway. I thought to myself, “There are two of them, Kemosabe, and they’re coming this way.” I heard Clarissa’s voice, then a man’s. They spoke slowly, each response to the other delivered in the same whispered tone. Her answers were shy; his questions were confident and cool. They passed the window and I saw him looking at her as she looked down, fumbling for her keys. The door opened and he stood outside while she moved in, putting her purse down and turning around to him. He spoke to her, and he stepped into the apartment. Her hand touched the light switch and the hard overheads went out, sending my body into rigor mortis. But I watched. They spoke again and he put his hand on her arm, pulling her toward him. She responded. He moved his hand, sliding it up under her hair. He drew her into him and rested his forehead on hers, and I watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply to absorb her. His lips brushed her cheek and I saw her surrender, her shoulders dropping, her arms hanging without resistance. His hand went to her back and urged her, pressing her against him. Her arm went up to his waist, then around his back, and he moved his lips around to hers and kissed her, her arm tightening, locking on his back, her other arm sliding up to his elbow. Her head fell back and he continued kissing her, standing over her, then he stepped back and looked into her eyes, saying nothing.

It is hard to find that the person you love loves someone else. I knew that my tenure with Clarissa and Teddy would have an end.

It was early June, and I had continued my pattern with Teddy, and had continued to incrementally withdraw my attachment to Clarissa. There were other nights, nights involving quiet door closings and early morning slip-outs. These sounds made my detachment easier, even though there was no official announcement of a pledge of love, even though, as far as I knew, there was no introduction of the new man to Teddy, which I felt was wise of Clarissa and protective toward her child.

On a particularly disastrous afternoon I was in charge of Teddy and he and I engaged in a battle of wits. My mind was coherent, rational, cogent. His was not. As compelling as my arguments were, his nonverbal mind resisted. We had no unifying language or belief. I wanted a counselor to mediate, who would come and interpret for us, find common ground, a tenet we could agree on, then lead us into mutually agreed-on behavior. All this angst was focused on a cloth ring that fit over a cloth pole. He screamed, he wanted it, he didn’t want it, he cursed-I’m sure it was cursing-and there was absolutely no avenue for calm. But there were moments of transition. The moments of his transition from finding one thing unpleasant to finding another unpleasant. And he would gaze into my eyes, as if to read what I wanted from him so he could do the opposite. But these transitions were also moments of stillness, and in stillness is when my mind churns the fastest. I looked into the wells of his irises, into the murky pools of the lenses that zeroed in and out.

I had spent time with him; I had been the face, on occasion, that he woke up to. I was fixed in him; my image was held in his consciousness, and I wondered if his recollection of me had slipped beneath the watermark of his awareness and entered into a dreamy primordial place. I wondered if he saw me as his father. If he did, everything made sense. I was the safe one, the one he could rage against. The one from whom he would learn the nature, the limitation, and the context of the cloth ring on the cloth pole.

I constructed a triangle in my head. At its base was Teddy’s identification of me as hero, along its ascending sides ran my participation in Teddy’s life, however brief that participation might prove to be. At the apex was the word “triumph,” and its definition spewed out of the triangle like a Roman candle: If one day Teddy, the boy and child, approached me with trust, if one morning he ran to my bedroom to wake me, if one afternoon he was happy to see me and bore a belief that I would not harm him, then I would have achieved victory over my past.

But my thoughts did not mollify Teddy; he wanted action. It was now dusk and he continued to orate in soprano screams. I decided a trip to the Rite Aid was in order, and he softened his volume when I swept him up and indicated we were on our way outside.

The sky over the ocean was lit with incandescent streaks of maroon. The air hinted that the evening would be warm, as nothing moved, not a leaf. Teddy, a strong walker now, put his hand up for me to take, and I hunched over and walked at old-man speed. We walked along the sidewalk and I occasionally would playfully swing him over an impending crack. I approached the curb, where I normally would have turned left and headed eight driveways down to where I could cross the street. But I paused.

My hand smothered Teddy’s. I looked at him and knew that after my cohabitation with Clarissa was over, he might not remember me at all. Yet I knew I was influencing him. Every smile or frown I sent his way was registering, every raised voice or gentle praise was logged in his spongy mind. I wondered if what I wanted to pass along to him was my convoluted route to the Rite Aid, born of fear and nonsense, if what I wanted him to take from me was my immobility and panic as I faced an eight-inch curb. Or would I do for him what Brian had done for me? Would I lead him, as Brian had me, across the fearful place and would I let him hold on to me as I had held on to Brian? Suddenly, turning left toward my maze of driveways was as impossible as stepping off the curb. I could not leave Teddy with a legacy of fear from an unremembered place. I pulled him toward the curb so he would not be like me. Recalling the day I flew over it with a running leap, I put out one foot into the street, so he would not be like me. He effortlessly stepped off, swaying with stiff knees. I checked the traffic and we started forth. I walked him across the street so that he would not be like me. I led him up on the curb. I continued my beeline to the Rite Aid, a route I had only imagined existed. Across streets, down sidewalks, in crosswalks and out of them, all so Teddy would not be like me. I was the Santa María and Teddy was the Niña and Pinta. I led, he followed. I conquered each curb and blazed a new route south and achieved the Rite Aid in fifteen minutes.

As I entered the store, I did not feel any elation; in fact, it was as if my triumph had never happened. I felt that this was the way things were supposed to be, and I sensed that my curb fear had been an indulgence so that I might feel special. I let Teddy’s hand go and he shifted into cruise. I followed him down the aisle, sometimes urging him along, once stopping him from sweeping down an entire display of bath soaps. I did not, however, prevent him cascading an entire bottom row of men’s hair coloring onto the floor.

I sat Teddy down and tried to group the dyes in their previous order. Men’s medium brown, men’s dark brown, men’s ash blond. Men’s mustache brown gel. A woman’s arm extended into the mess and picked one up. Her skin was exposed at the wrist because her lab coat pulled back as she reached. She wore a small chrome watch and a delicately filigreed silver bracelet, so light it made no noise as it moved. As her arm reached into my vision, I heard her say, “Is he yours?”

I looked up and saw Zandy, who was a full aisle’s length away from her pharmacy post, and I wondered if she had intentionally walked toward us or was just passing by.

“No, he belongs to a friend.”

“What’s his name?” she said.

“Teddy.”

“Hello, little man,” she said. Then she turned to me, “I fill your prescriptions here sometimes, so I know all your maladies. My name’s Zandy.”

I knew her name and she knew mine, but I told her again, including my middle name, and she cocked her head an inch to the sky. We had now gotten all the hair dye back on the shelf, and Zandy stood while I crouched on the ground wrangling Teddy. Zandy wore panty hose that were translucent with a wash of white, and she had on running shoes that I assumed were to cushion her feet against the concrete floors of the Rite Aid. While I took in her feet and legs, her voice fell on me from above:

“Would you like to get a pizza?”

Teddy and I, led by Zandy, walked around the corner to Café Delores and ordered a triple something with a thin crust. I looked at Zandy and thought that she occupied her own space rather nicely. I thought of the status of my love life, which was as flaky as the coming pizza. I knew it was time. I decided to summon the full power of my charisma and unleash it on this pharmacist. But nothing came. It seemed there was no need because Zandy was in full charge of herself and didn’t need anything extra to determine what she thought about me. I said, “How long have you worked at the pharmacy?” But instead of answering, she smiled, then laughed and put her hand on mine, and said, “Oh, you don’t have to make conversation. I already like you.”

Zandy Alice Allen proved to be the love of my life. I asked her once why she started talking to me that day and she said, “It was the way you were with the boy.” After seeing her for several weeks, I recalled Clarissa’s front-door kiss. I emulated her seducer and one night at Zandy’s doorstep, pressed her against me. Her head fell back and I kissed her. Her arms dropped to her side, then after a moment of helplessness, she raised her hands and held my arms. She drew in a breath while my lips were on hers, and I think she whispered the word “love,” but it was obscured by my mouth on hers.

Once we were at lunch and she asked how old I was and I told her the truth: thirty-one. Months went by and she got to the heart of me. With a cheery delicacy she divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious. The unacceptable ones were those that inhibited life, like the curbs. But Teddy had already successfully curtailed that one; each time I approached a corner, I envisioned myself as a leader and in time the impulse vanished. The other intolerable ones she simply vetoed, and I was able to adjourn them, or convert them into a mistrust of icebergs. The tolerable ones included silent counting and alphabetizing, though when Angela arrived she left me little time to indulge myself. We compromised on the lights, but eventually Zandy’s humor-which included suddenly flicking lamps on and off and then dashing out of the room-made the obsession too unnerving to indulge in.

It took six months and a wellspring of perseverance for me to stop the government checks from coming in. I was able to go back to work for Hewlett-Packard and I moved up the ladder when I created a cipher so human that no computer could crack it. Zandy and I lived at the Rose Crest after Clarissa left, though she and Teddy stayed in our lives until one day they just weren’t anymore. I knew that what happened between Teddy and me would one day be revealed to him. One night Zandy and I were in bed and she leaned over to me and whispered that she was pregnant, and I pulled her into me and we entwined ourselves and made slow and silent love without breaking our gaze to one another.

Angela was born on April 5, 2003, which pleased me because her twenty-first birthday would fall on a Friday, which meant she would be able to sleep late the next day after what would undoubtedly be a late night of partying.

When Angela was one year old, Zandy took her out to a small birthday fete for little ladies only and I was left alone at the Rose Crest. From the window I could see my old apartment and see my old lamp just through the curtains. This was the lamp I had once dressed in my shirt and used as a stand-in to determine whether Elizabeth could have seen me look at her, and now at the Rose Crest I felt far, far away from that moment. I indulged myself in one old pastime. As I looked across the street, I built in my head my final magic square:

Other names came, but the square overflowed and the confusion pleased me. I shifted away from the window, turning my back on the apartment across the street. I moved to the living room and sat, silently thanking those who had brought me here and those who had affected me, both above and below consciousness. I thought of the names in and around the magic square. I thought of their astounding number, both in the present and past, of Zandy and Angela, of Brian, of Granny, even of my father, whose disavowal of me led to this place, and I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.