The Pleasure of My Company Read Online Free PDF Page A

another five hundred words while Zandy, delicious as a meringue,
went about her work in full view. I did not really want to write another five
hundred words or even two hundred words, but it was easy enough considering the
trade-off. There were several dull pencils in a box on the display, so dull
that when I wrote with them the wood scraped against the paper, but I buckled
down and began my second patriotic essay in two weeks, after a lifetime of
none.
    America
lets me choose not to be a pioneer. I am uplifted by doing ordinary work. The
work of society, the common work of the world…
    And so
it went. I was impressed with myself because this essay expressed the exact
opposite idea of my first essay—one week I said I had the pioneer spirit and
the next week I didn’t—and I wrote both opinions with such ease that I believed
I could take any subject and effectively argue either side. This skill would be
valuable in dating. Just think, I could switch positions midstream if I sensed
my date reacting badly.
    While I
was writing, I barely looked up at Zandy, since I’d realized what a foolish
enterprise this was anyway. There is no pleasure in staking out a woman and
eyeing her endlessly. I get no more joy from looking at a Monet for twenty
minutes than I do after five. A glimpse of Zandy was all that was necessary,
and perhaps I used her as an excuse to get out of the house. I signed this
second essay using a pseudonym—Lenny Burns—and dropped it in the bin. I bought
some foam earplugs (not that I needed them, but at two dollars a dozen, they
were too cheap to pass up) and went home.
     
    My ceiling is not
conducive to counting. Its texture is created by pulling the trowel flatly away
from the wet plaster, leaving a rippled surface, as though a baker had come in
and spread around vanilla icing with a spatula. Counting prefers symmetry of
some kind, though at my level of sophistication I can get around most
obstacles. The least interesting ceiling for me now is one that is practically
counted out already: squared-off acoustical tiles with regular punctures that
simply require a little multiplication on my part. Each tile has sixty-four
sound-absorbing holes times the easily calculated number of tiles in the
ceiling. Ugh.
    But my
irregular ceiling—no tiles, no quadrants, no recurring punctures—takes a little
thought on my part to slice up, count, and quantify. Like an ocean, its surface
is irregular, but also like an ocean it’s easy to imagine an unbroken plane
just below the surface of the undulating waves. Once I can imagine an unbroken
plane, the bisecting and trisecting of my fairly square ceiling becomes much
easier. Triangles, rectangles, and interlocking parallelograms are all
superimposed over the ceiling, and in my mind they meld into the birthday-cake
frosting of the plaster.
    The
problem with counting is that anything, any plane, any object, can be divided
infinitely, like the distance covered by Zeno’s tortoise heading for the finish
line. So it’s a problem knowing when to stop. If I’ve divided my ceiling into
sixty-four sections (sometimes irregular sections just to annoy myself), I
wonder whether to halve it again and again and again. But that’s not all. The
sections must be sliced up in three-dimensional space, too, so the numbers
become unmanageable very quickly. But that’s the thing about a brain: Plenty of
room for large numbers.
    Sure, I’ve
gotten some disbelieving stares when I’ve tried to explain this little habit of
mine to, say, a bus seatmate. I’ve watched a guy adjust his posture, or get up
and move back several rows, even if it meant he now sat next to someone else
who was clearly on the verge of some other kind of insanity. You should know,
however, that my habit of counting began early—I can’t remember if I was a teen
or bubbling under at age twelve. My mother was driving up Lone Star Avenue and
I was in the backseat. A gasoline truck pulled up next to us at a stoplight