The second letter was an airy breeze of a handwritten note from Granny. I always delay opening her letters in the same spirit as saving the centre of the Oreo for last. Granny lives on her pecan plantation in southern Texas (hence, my middle name, Daniel Pecan Cambridge). She is the one family member who understands that my insanity is benign and that my failure to hold a job is not due to laziness. The letter sang with phrases that I swear lifted me like a tonic: “Life is a thornbush from which roses spring; all the hearts in Texas are wishing for you; I smother you with the kisses that are in this letter.” And then a check for twenty-five hundred dollars fell out of the envelope. The irony is that the one person who gives me money is the one person I wish I could hand the check back to and say no, only joy can pass between you and me. I found it difficult to write back. But I did, stingy with loving words because they don’t come out of me easily. I hoped she could read between the lines; I hoped that the presence of the letter in my own hand, the texture of it, the wear and tear it had received on its trip across five states revealed my heart to her. I can’t explain why it’s easy to tell you and not her how she smoothes the way for me, how her letters are the only true things in my life, how touching them connects me to the world. If only Tepperton’s Pies had a Most-Loved Granny essay contest, I’d enter and my fervour would translate into an easy win. I could forward her the published piece in Tepperton’s in-house journal and she could read it knowing it was an ode to her.
The week had been one of successes and setbacks. There was the triumph of my run with Brian and the failure of my peacocking for Elizabeth. There was my excitement at receiving Granny’s letter but then the reminder of my own needy status when the check fell onto the kitchen table. But overall, there was an uptick in my disposition and I thought this might be the week for me to find the elusive Northwest Passage to the Third Street Mall.
The Third Street Mall is in the heart of Santa Monica on a street closed to traffic and has hundreds of useful shops with merchandise at both bargain and inflated prices. But it also has a Pavilions supermarket. I have been suffering along with the limited selection of groceries at the Rite Aid because it’s the only place to which I’d mapped out a convenient route. If I could manage to get to the Pavilions, well, it would be like moving from Iraq to Hawaii. From barren canned goods and dried fruit to the garden of Eden. Also, coffee. Jeez, the Coffee Bean, Starbucks. I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor café drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It’s just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can’t imagine a neurosis that would prevent one from raising one’s arm to one’s mouth while holding a cup, though given time, I’m sure I could come up with one. I also like the idea of saying “java.” That is, saying it with an actual intent of getting some and not as a delightful sound to utter around my apartment.
I had tried and failed in this quest for Pavilions before, and I know why: cowardice and lack of will. This time I was determined to be determined, but there would be trials. My initial excursions hadn’t allowed for anything less than perfection. The route had to make absolute logical sense: no double backs or figure eights, and the driveways had to be perfectly opposing each other. But if I thought the way an explorer would—yes, there would be rapids, there would be setbacks—perhaps I could eventually find the right path.
Maps, of 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 bothered me, though: the sight of a mailman coming off my block at two-thirty in the afternoon. The mailman was never in my neighbourhood later than ten, and this meant there could be a logjam in my planned events of the day. Earlier, when I trotted down with an elaborately planned haphazard flair to check the mail— jeez, I think I remember whistling—the slot had been empty and I assumed there was no mail to sort, so I foolishly changed my schedule. Oh well, the day had already convoluted itself when I sighted Clarissa on the street, and now I was going to sort mail in the afternoon. Sometimes I just resign myself to disaster.
Most favourite mail: Granny’s scented envelopes from Texas (without a check). Least favourite: official-looking translucent-windowed envelope with five-digit box number for a return address. But today, at the godforsaken hour of two-thirty in the afternoon, an envelope arrived that was set dead even between most favourite and least favourite. It was plain white and addressed to Lenny Burns. No return address on the front of the envelope, and I couldn’t turn it over until I a
nalyzed all my potential responses to whatever address could be on the back. Which I won’t go into.
The name Lenny Burns rattled around in my head like a marble in a tin can. There was no one in my building named Lenny Burns, and the address specifically noted my apartment number. The previous tenant hadn’t been anyone named Lenny Burns, it had been a Miss Rogers, an astrologer with a huge pair of knockers. And evidently there was some doubt about whether she earned her living exclusively from astrology. The name Lenny Burns was so familiar that I paused, tapping the letter on the kitchen table like a playing card, while I tried to come up with a matching face. Nothing popped. Finally, I flipped over the envelope and saw the return address, and I wonder if what I saw will send a shiver of horror through you like it did me.
Tepperton’s Pies. Like Mom never made.
Oops. I suddenly remembered that Lenny Burns was the pseudonym I had used on my second essay in the Most Average American contest, written almost automatically while I ogled Zandy. While I didn’t imagine that the contents of the envelope held good news, I also didn’t think that it held actual bad news, either. The letter informed me that not only was Lenny Burns one of five finalists in the Most Average American contest, but so was Daniel Pecan Cambridge. And both of them are me.
So the real me and a false me were competing with each other to win what? Five thousand dollars, that’s what. And the competition would involve the finalists reading their essays aloud at a ceremony at Freedom College in Anaheim, California. This meant that my two distinct and separate identities were to show up at the same place and time. This is like asking Superman and Clark Kent to appear at Perry White’s birthday lunch. The other competitors, the letter informed me, were Kevin Chen, who was, evidently, Asian American, and hence, not average; Danny Pepelow, redhead-sounding; and Sue Dowd, whom I could not form a picture of. I wondered what the legal consequences of my deception would be; I wondered if I would have to blurt out in a packed courtroom that I had been swooning in a lovesick haze over Zandy the pharmacist and therefore this was a crime passionel. I calmed down after telling myself that any action taken against me would probably be civil and not criminal, and if they did levy a suit against me, it would be very easy to choke on a Tepperton pie, cough up a mouse, and start negotiating.
The next day, I was nervous about the inevitable arrival of the second pie letter, the one that would be addressed to the real me. This led me to an alternative fixation. I should capitalize it because Alternative Fixation is a technique I use to trick myself out of anxiety. It works by changing the subject. I simply focus on something that produces even greater anxiety. In this case, I chose to plan a face-to-face encounter with Elizabeth the Realtor. I had on one occasion written her a “get to know me” letter that I never sent because no matter how much I approached it, how I rewrote it, I always sounded like a stalker. “I have observed you from my window…” “Your license plate, REALTR, amused me….” It all sounded too observant and creepy. Which made me ask myself whether I actually was too observant and creepy, but the answer came up no, because I know my own heart.
I had to admit that my previous plans to impress her had backfired like a motorcycle. It was time to do the manly thing: to meet her without deception, without forethought. I decided to present myself as an interested renter, one who is looking to move up to a two-bedroom to make room for an office, in which I would be working with the renowned writer Sue Dowd on a biography of Mao. This seemed to be the honest thing to do.
I called the number on the rental sign, expecting to get, and prepared to deftly handle, the instructions that would take me through the telephonic maze that would finally connect me to her voice mail. But a miracle happened. She answered. Crackle pop, she was on a cell phone in her car. I explained who I was, Daniel Cambridge (a swell-sounding name when I leave out the Pecan), that I live near the Rose Crest, and that I was looking to move up. I left out the part about the Mao bio because, jeez, she’s not an idiot.
She told me she was between appointments, had twenty minutes free, and could meet me there in ten. I hardly had time to bathe. Well, okay, I said. I could postpone my conference call, I said. I hung up and cranked on my shower with stunning accuracy. Perfect temperature with one swing of the wrist. I stepped in, knowing I was on the clock, and yet I still experienced one recurring sensation intractably linked to my morning shower. The flowing, ropey hot water sent me back in time to home, to Texas, to the early hours of the morning. To save money, my mother had always turned off the heat at night, which made our house into an ice hotel. Every wintry morning, as a frosted-over adolescent, I made the chilly jaunt from bedroom to spare bathroom. Stepping into the steamy shower was the equivalent of being cuddled in a warm towel by a loving aunt, and now I’m sometimes rendered immobile by an eerie nostalgia in the first few moments of even a quick rinse. This sensation slowed me down like an atom at absolute zero, even though Elizabeth was at this very moment probably running yellow lights to fit me in.
I was towelling off at the window when Elizabeth the Realtor pulled up in front of the Rose Crest. She remained in the car for several minutes talking to herself. I realized she was probably using the hands-free car phone, at least I hoped she was, as one nut in the family would be enough. I threw on some clothes and scampered down the stairs, skipping across the street at the driveways. I was overcome with an impression of myself as an English schoolboy. I might as well have been wearing a beanie and short pants. As Elizabeth got out of her car, I appeared from behind her and greeted her with a “Hello y’all, I’m Daniel Cambridge.” I had not intended the slight country twang that affected my speech. And I do not know, if I perceived myself as an English schoolboy, why my greeting came out as though it were spoken by the cook on a wagon train. I suppose I was confused about just who I actually was at that moment. I had now committed myself to a drawl, and I was rapidly trying to uncommit. So over the next few sentences I fell into a brogue, then a kind of high nasal English thing, then migrated through the Bronx, searching until I found my own voice. I finally did, but not before Elizabeth had asked, “Where are you from?” to which I saved myself with, “I’m an army brat.”
I followed Elizabeth up one flight of stairs. She reached into her purse, producing a daunting ring of apartment keys that jangled like a tambourine. There was a delay while she flipped and sorted the keys on the ring, and she managed to open the door on the sixth try. There were three odours inside. One was mildew, one was tangerine, both emanating from the same source: a bowl of fruit rotting in the centre of the kitchen table. The third aroma was from Elizabeth, a familiar lilac scent that made itself quite known now that she was contained within the four walls of the sealed apartment. This scent thickened and intensified as though it were pumped into the room by a compressor.
Elizabeth swept the pungent tangerines into a paper bag and stuck them in the waste can under the sink, all the while talking up the glories of apartment 214. She wore a tight brown linen skirt that stopped about three inches above her knees, a matching jacket, and a cream silk blouse with a cream silk cravat. She turned on the air conditioner to max, which intensified the mouldy smell, causing us both to sneeze. She flipped on the built-in kitchen television to make the place seem lively and swung open the refrigerator to show me its massive cubic feet interior. Price seventeen hundred a month, she said, first and last, plus a security deposit.
“This is a great building,” she said. “Usually they want references, but I can get you around it.”
“Don’t worry, I have references,” I said, wondering who I meant.
This was the first time I’d had a chance to really see Elizabeth. She had always been either too far away or too close up. Now I could frame her like a three-quarter portrait and see all her details. She was ran. Probably not from the sun, I guessed. She wore several gold rings studded with gems; none was on her wedding finger. She had a gold chain around her neck, at the end of which was a pair of rhinestone-encrusted reading glasses. Her
eyes were blue. Not her irises, but her lids, which had been faintly daubed with eye shadow. Her skin had a hint of orange; her hair was a metallic gold, which darkened as it neared the roots. She was a collection of human colours that had been lightly tweaked and adjusted. Her efforts in the area of presentation made me admire her more.
Elizabeth was a prize object. She had picked up beauty tricks from everywhere; she had assembled herself from the best cosmetics had to offer. Any man she chose to be with would be envied, and made complete by her. A man who built an empire would certainly need Elizabeth by his side; he would need her and he would deserve her. I knew now that no matter how much I lied to her, the truth would come out about who and what I was, but I just stood there anyway, continuing my dumb charade while she radiated perfection.
She asked if I also wanted to see a three-bedroom down the hall that had just come up. I must have said yes, because the next thing I knew I was in the apartment next door, being shown each closet and bathroom. This place was unfurnished, and Elizabeth’s high heels clacked on the bare floor with such snap that it was like being led around by a flamenco dancer. I looked at the apartment with longing, as it was roomy, filled with light, and freshly painted. No tangerine rot here, and I told Elizabeth, who by now was calling me Daniel, that I would check with my co-biographer Sue Dowd to make sure the size of the place wouldn’t intimidate her and thus hinder her writing.