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

with them too, which is good enough for me.
    I
pulled my leaden feet to the art supply store and purchased a
three-foot-by-three-foot white poster board. If I was going to make a 256-box square,
I wanted it to be big enough so I didn’t have to write the numbers
microscopically. I was, after the Kinko’s incident, walking in a self-imposed
narrow corridor of behavioural possibilities, meaning there were very few moves
I could make or thoughts I could think that weren’t verboten. So the purchase
didn’t go well. I required myself to keep both hands in my pockets. In order to
pay, I had to shove all ten fingers deep in my pants and flip cash onto the
counter with my hyperactive thumbs. I got a few impatient stares, too, and then
a little help was sympathetically offered from a well-dressed businessman who
plucked a few singles from the wadded-up bills that peeked out from my pockets
and gave them to the clerk. If this makes me sound helpless, I feel you should
know that I don’t enter this state very often and it is something I could snap
out of, it’s just that I don’t want to.
    Once
home, I laid the poster board on my kitchen table and, with a Magic Marker and
T square, quickly outlined a box. I drew more lines, creating 256 empty spaces.
I then sat in front of it as though it were an altar and meditated on its
holiness. Fixing my eyes on row 1, column 1, a number appeared in my mind, the
number 47,800. I entered it into the square. I focused on another position.
Eventually I wrote a number in it: 30,831. As soon as I wrote 30,831, I felt my
anxiety lessen. Which makes sense: The intuiting of the second number
necessarily implied all the other numbers in the grid, numbers that were not
yet known to me but that existed somewhere in my mind. I felt like a lover who
knows there is someone out there for him, but it is someone he has not yet
met.
    I
filled in a few other numbers, pausing to let the image of the square hover in
my black mental space. Its grids were like a skeleton through which I could
see the rest of the uncommitted mathematical universe. Occasionally a number
appeared in the imaginary square and I would write it down in the corresponding
space of my cardboard version. The making of the square gave me the feeling
that I was participating in the world, that the rational universe had given me
something that was mine and only mine, because you see, there are more possible
magic square solutions than there are nanoseconds since the Big Bang.
    The
square was not so much created as transcribed. Hours later, when I wrote the
final number in the final box and every sum of every column and row totalled 491,384,
I noted that my earlier curbside collapse had been ameliorated. I had eased up
on my psychic accelerator, and now I wished I had someone to talk to. Philipa
maybe, even Brian (anagram for “brain”—ha!), who I now considered as my closest
link to normalcy. After all, when Brian ached over Philipa, he could still
climb two flights up and weep, repent, seduce her, or buy her something. But my
salvation, the making of the square, was so pointless; there was no person attached
to it, no person to shut me out or take me in. This healing was symptomatic
only, so I tacked the cardboard to a wall over Granny’s chair in the living
room in hopes that viewing it would
     

     
    counter my next bout of
anxiety the way two aspirin counter a headache.
    Clarissa
burst through the door clutching a stack of books and folders in front of her
as though she were ploughing through to the end zone. She wasn’t though; she
was just keeping her Tuesday appointment with me. She had brought me a few
things, probably donations from a charitable organization that likes to help
half-wits. A box of pens, which I could use, some cans of soup, and a soccer
ball. These offerings only added to my confusion about what Clarissa’s
relationship to me actually is. A real shrink wouldn’t give gifts, and a real
social worker wouldn’t