“Thirty-three,” I said. “I thought you were late twenties,” she said. I explained, “I never go out in the sun.” She said, “Must be hard to avoid.” I thought, Oh goody, repartee. But Philipa quieted. It seemed—oddly—that she had become distracted by my presence, the very person she was talking to. Her eyes, previously darting and straying, fell on me and held. She adjusted her body in the sofa and turned her knees squarely toward me, foreshortening her thighs, which disappeared into the shadows of her skirt. This made me uncomfortable and at the same time gave me a hint of an erection.
“When’s your birthday?” she asked.
“January twenty-third.”
“You’re an Aquarius,” she said.
“I guess. What’s yours?” I asked.
“Scorpio.”
“I mean your birth date.”
“November fifteenth.”
I said, “What year?”
She said, “Nineteen seventy-four.”
“A Friday,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, not recognizing my sleight of hand. “Do you date anyone?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m dating a realtor.”
“Are you exclusive?”
“No,” I said. “But she wants me to be.”
Then she paused. Cocked her head like Tiger. “Wait a minute. How did you know it was a Friday?” she finally asked.
How do I explain to her what I can’t explain to myself? “It’s something I can do,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t know, I can just do it.”
“What’s April 8, 1978?”
“It’s a Saturday,” I said.
“Jeez, that’s freaky. You’re right; it’s my brother’s birthday; he was born on Saturday. What’s January 6, 1280?”
“Tuesday,” I said.
“Are you lying?” she asked.
“No.”
“What do you do for a living, and do you have any wine?”
“No wine,” I said, answering one question and skirting the other.
“So you want some wine? I’ve got some upstairs,” she said. Open, I’ll bet, too, I thought. “Okay,” I said, knowing I wasn’t going to have any. Philipa excused herself and ran up to her apartment with a “be right back.” I stayed in my chair, scratching around the outline of its paisley pattern with my fingernail. Soon she was back with a bottle of red wine. “Fuck,” she said. “All I had was Merlot.”
Philipa poured herself a tankard full and slewed around toward me, saying, “So what did you say you do?”
I wanted to seem as if I were currently employed, so I had to change a few tenses. Mostly “was” to “am.” “I encode corporate messages. Important messages are too easily hacked if sent by computer. So they were looking for low-tech guys to come up with handwritten systems. I developed a system based on the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’” I had lost Philipa. Proof of how boring the truth is. She had bottomed-up the tankard, and I know what wine does. Right now I was probably looking to her like Pierce Brosnan. She stood up and walked toward me, putting both hands on my chair and leaning in. I kept talking about codes. She brushed my cheek with her lips.
I knew what I was to Philipa. A moment. And she was attached to Brian, in spite of the recent storm clouds. And I was attached to Elizabeth even though she didn’t know my name. And I knew that if Philipa and I were to seize this moment, the hallway would be forever changed. Every footstep would mean something else. Would she avoid me? Should I avoid her? What would happen if she met Elizabeth? Would Elizabeth know? Women are mind readers in the worst way. But on the other hand, I knew that if I dabbled with Philipa that night, I could be entering the pantheon of historical and notable affairs. There is a grand tradition involving the clandestine. The more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a drunken one-off and more like the stuff of novels. And this perhaps would be my only opportunity to engage in it.
By now, Philipa’s eyelashes were brushing my cheek and her breath was on my mouth. With both hands, I clutched the arms of my chair as if I were on a thrill ride. I pooched out my lower lip, and that was all the seduction she needed. She took my hand and led me into my own bedroom. I’m sure that Philipa was lured on by my best asset, which is my Sure-cuts hairdo. I’m lanky like a baseball pitcher, and the Sure-cut people know how to give me the floppy forehead at a nominal price. So without bragging, I’m letting you know that I can be physically appealing. Plus I’m clean. Clean like I’ve just been car-washed and then scrubbed with a scouring pad and then wrapped in palm fronds infused with ginger. My excellent personal hygiene, in combination with the floppy casual forehead, once resulted in a provocative note being sent to me from my former mailwoman. Philipa never saw females going in and out, so she knew I wasn’t a lothario, and I had come to suspect that she regarded me as a standby if she ever needed to get even with Brian the wide receiver.
I never have interfered with a relationship, out of respect for the guy as much as for myself, but Brian is a dope and Philipa is a sylph and I am a man, even if that description of myself is qualified by my failure to be able to cross the street at the curb.
The bedroom was a little too bright for Philipa. She wanted to lower the lights, so I turned out three sixty-watt bulbs but had to go to the kitchen to turn on a one-hundred-watt bulb and a fifty-watt bulb and two fifteens, in order to maintain equity. It is very hard to get thirty-watt bulbs, so when I find them I hoard them.
She still didn’t like the ambience. The overhead lights disturbed her. I turned them off and compensated by turning on the overheads in the living room. But the light spilling into the bedroom was just too much; she wanted it dim and sexy. She went over and closed the door. Oh no, the door can’t be closed; not without elaborate preparations. Because if the door is closed, the light in the bedroom is cut off from the light in the living room. Rather than having one grand sum of 1125 watts, there would be two discrete calculations that would break the continuity. I explained this to Philipa, even though I had to go through it several times. To her credit, she didn’t run, she just got tired, and a little too drunk to move. Our erotic moment had fallen flat, so I walked her to the door. I hadn’t succeeded with Philipa, but at least I could still look Elizabeth straight in the eye.
After Philipa left, I lay in the centre of the bed with the blanket neatly tucked around me; how Philipa and I would have mussed it! Inserted so neatly between the bed and the sheets, I thought how much I must look like a pocket pencil. My body was so present. I was aware of my toes, my arms, my weight on the bed. There was just me in a void, wrapped in the low hum of existence. The night of Philipa had led me to a quiet, aesthetic stillness. You might think it odd to call a moment of utter motionlessness life, but it was life without interaction, and I felt joy roll over me in a silent wave.
As long as I remained in bed, my relationship to Elizabeth was flawless. I was able to provide for her, to tease out a smile from her, and to keep her supplied with Versace stretch pants. But I knew that during the day, in life, I could not even cross the street to her without a complicated alignment of permitting circumstances. The truth was—and in my sensory deprivation I was unable to ignore it—I didn’t have much to offer Elizabeth. Or for that matter, Philipa (if that were to happen) or Zandy (if she were to ever look at me).
I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was finally static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life.
The next morning I decided to touch every corner of every copying machine at Kinko’s. Outside the apartment I ran into Brian, who was lumbering toward Philipa’s, wearing what I suspect were the same clothes he had on yesterday. He had the greasy look of someone who had been out all night. Plus he held his cell phone
in his hand, which told me he was staying closely connected to Philipa’s whereabouts. His size touched me, this hulk. And after last evening, with my canny near-seduction of his girlfriend, I felt I was Bugs Bunny and Mercury to his Elmer Fudd and Thor.
I decided to pump Brian to find out how much he knew about my night with Philipa. I trudged out my technique of oblique questioning: I would ask Brian mundane questions and observe his response.
“I’m Daniel. I see you sometimes around the building. You an actor, like Philipa?”
Now if Brian cocked his head and glared at me through squinted eyes, I could gather that he was aware of my escapade with his girlfriend. But he didn’t. He said, “I’m a painter,” and like a person with an unusual name who must immediately spell it out, he added, “a house painter.” Then he looked at me as if to say, “Whadya think about that?”
His demeanour was so flat that not only did he not suspect me, but this guy wouldn’t have suspected a horned man-goat leaving Philipa’s apartment at midnight while zipping up his pants. He didn’t seem to have a suspicious bone in him. Then he rattled on about a sports bar and a football game. Staring dumbly into his face to indicate my interest, I realized Brian would not have been a cuckold in the grand literary tradition. In fact, he was more like a mushroom.
I had felt very manly when I first approached Brian, having just had a one-nighter with his girl, but now I felt very sheepish. This harmless fungus was innocent and charmless, but mostly he was vulnerable, and I wondered if I was just too smooth to be spreading my panache around his world. “Hey, well, best of luck,” I said and gave him a wave, not knowing if my comment was responsive to what he had been talking about. Then he said, “See ya, Slick.” And I thought, Slick? Maybe he is on to me after all.
My Kinko’s task was still before me, so I turned west and headed toward Seventh Street, drawing on all my navigational skills. Moving effortlessly from one scooped-out driveway to the next, I had achieved Sixth Street in a matter of minutes when I confronted an obstacle of unimaginable proportions. At my final matched set of 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 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 shrink me. Clarissa does both. It could be, though, that she’s not shrinking me at all, that she’s just asking me questions out of concern, which would be highly unprofessional.
“How… uh…” Clarissa stopped mid-sentence to regroup. She laid down her things. “How have you been?” she finally asked, her standard opener.