The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

scooped-out driveways, which would have served as my gateway to
Kinko’s, someone, some lad, some fellow, had, in a careless parking
free-for-all, irresponsibly parked his ‘99 Land Cruiser or some such gigantic turd
so that it edged several feet into my last driveway. This was as effective an
obstacle for me as an eight-foot concrete wall. What good are the beautiful
planes that connect driveway to driveway if a chrome-plated two-hundred-pound
fender intersects their symmetry? Yeah, the driver of this tank is a crosswalk
guy, so he doesn’t care. I stood there knowing that the copiers at Kinko’s
needed to be touched and soon, too, or else panic, so I decided to proceed in
spite of the offending car.
    I stood
on the sidewalk facing the street with Kinko’s directly opposite me. The Land
Cruiser was on my right, so I hung to the left side of the driveway. There was
no way to justify the presence of that bumper. No, if I crossed a driveway
while a foreign object
     

     
    jutted into it, I would be
committing a violation of logic. But, simultaneously driven forward and
backward, I angled the Land Cruiser out of my peripheral vision and made it to
the curb. Alas. My foot stepped toward the street, but I couldn’t quite put it
down. Was that a pain I felt in my left arm? My hands became cold and moist,
and my heart squeezed like a fist. I just couldn’t dismiss the presence of that
fender. My toe touched the asphalt for support, which was an unfortunate manoeuvre
because I was now standing with my left foot fully flat in the driveway and my
right foot on point in the street. With my heart rapidly accelerating and my
brain aware of impending death, my saliva was drying out so rapidly that I
couldn’t remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. But I did not scream out.
Why? For propriety. Inside me the fires of hell were churning and stirring; but
outwardly I was as still as a Rodin.
    I
pulled my foot back to safety. But I had leaned too far out; my toes were at
the edge of the driveway and my body was tilting over my gravitational centre.
In other words, I was about to fall into the street. I windmilled both of my
arms in giant circles hoping for some reverse thrust, and there was a moment,
eons long, when all 180 pounds of me were balanced on the head of a pin while
my arms spun backward at tornado speed. But then an angel must have breathed on
me, because I felt an infinitesimal nudge, which caused me to rock back on my
heels, and I was able to step back onto the sidewalk. I looked across the
street to Kinko’s, where it sparkled in the sun like Shangri-la, but I was separated
from it by a treacherous abyss. Kinko’s would have to wait, but the terror
would not leave. I decided to head toward home where I could make a magic
square.
    Making
a magic square would alphabetize my brain. “Alphabetize” is my slang for “alpha-beta-ize,”
meaning, raise my alphas and lower my betas. Staring into a square that has
been divided into 256 smaller squares, all empty, all needing unique numbers,
numbers that will produce the identical sum whether they’re read vertically or
horizontally, focuses the mind. During moments of crisis, I’ve created magic
squares composed of sixteen, forty-nine, even sixty-four boxes, and never once
has it failed to level me out. Here’s last year’s, after two seventy-five-watt
bulbs blew out on a Sunday and I had no replacements:
    Each
column and row adds up to 260. But this is a lousy 8 X 8 square. Making a 16 X
16 square would soothe even the edgiest neurotic. Benjamin Franklin—who as far
as I know was not an edgy neurotic—was a magic square enthusiast. I assume he
tackled them when he was not preoccupied with boffing a Parisian beauty, a
distraction I do not have. His most famous square was a king-size brainteaser
that did not sum correctly at the diagonals, unless the diagonals were bent
like boomerangs. Now that’s flair, plus he dodged electrocution by kite.
Albrecht Dürer played