Free The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

course, are of no assistance except in the most general way. Maps show
streets, but not obstacles. If only city maps could be made by people like me.
They wouldn’t show streets at all; they would show the heights of curbs, the
whereabouts of driveways and crosswalks, and the locations of Kinko’s. What
about all those drivers who can’t make left turns? Why aren’t there maps for
them? No, I was forced to discover my route by trial and error. But because I
now had a catalogue of opposing driveways and their locations in my head,
noted from various other attempts to find various other locations through the
years, I was able to put together a possible route before I even started. With
a few corrections made spontaneously, on my third attempt I finally established
a pathway to the mall, and for three evenings afterward I fell asleep wrapped
in the glow of enormous pride.
    Having
a route to the Third Street Mall meant that I was out in public more, so I had
to come up with some new rules to make my forays outside my apartment more
tolerable. When I was relaxing at the Coffee Bean having a java, for example, I
drew invisible lines from customer to customer connecting plaids with plaids,
solids with solids and T-shirts with T-shirts. Once done, it allowed my anxiety
     

     
    meter to flat-line. I got
a kick out of the occasional conversation that arose with a “dude.” One time,
while enjoying my coffee, a particular tune was playing somewhere in the
background. The melody was so cheerful that everyone in the place became a
percussionist one way or another and with varying intensity. For some it was
finger-drumming and for others it was foot-tapping. I was inspired to blow on
my hot coffee in three-quarter time. But the oddest thing of all was that I
knew this song. It was a current pop hit, but how had I come to know it? How
had this tune gotten to me, through the mail? Somehow it had reproduced,
spread, and landed in my mental rhythm section. While it played, I and
everybody else in the Coffee Bean had become as one. I was in the here and now,
infected with a popular song that I had never heard, sitting among “buddies.”
And there was, for three long minutes, no difference between me and them.
    The
chairs and tables of the Coffee Bean spilled onto the mall like an alluvial
fan. I grabbed a seat that was practically in the street because I could see at
least a full block in either direction. No need, though. Because what went on
within the perimeter of the sidewalk café was enough for an afternoon’s
entertainment. People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity
was interrupted only by their individual variety. My eyes roved around like a
security camera. Then I was startled out of my reverie by the sight of the
one-year-old who had passed by my window last week. His hand was held tightly
by the same raven-haired woman, and he leaned in toward the doorway of a
bookstore, straining like a dog on a leash. In answer to a voice from inside,
the woman turned toward the door and let the child’s hand loose. The boy
careened the few steps inside and I saw him lifted into the air by two arms behind
the glass storefront. Everything else in the window was obscured by a
reflection from the street. The raven-haired woman was not the mother; this I
had gathered. The raven-haired woman I assumed to be a sitter or friend. The
child clung to the woman behind the glass, and when I saw that it was Clarissa
who emerged from the shop, holding this child, so much of her behaviour the
previous week suddenly made sense.
     
    On the way home, I
mentally constructed another magic square, but one of a different order; this
square fell under the heading of “Life”:
     
    I tried a few things in
the empty centre square, but nothing stuck; anything I wrote in it seemed to
fall out. As I studied the image, this graphic of my life, I realized it added
up to nothing.
    As I
walked home, the day was still sunny and bright. Something