The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

of her nose was askew, as though someone had dialled it to three.
Her skin, though, was so dewy and fresh I couldn’t quite turn to go. I picked
up my sack of Chap Sticks, and she said, “Don’t forget your change,” and then
she added a wonderful thing: She said, “See ya.” I had to stay there a second
and take her in before I was able to unstick my gummy feet from the floor.
     
    It was nearing two and I
wondered if Clarissa was going to show up this time. There was no reason to
think that she wouldn’t, as she had slipped a handwritten note under the door
earlier in the week with a sincere but formal apology, promising we would resume
the following week at our usual time. I assumed that this was the standard
apology that one learns in chapter 15 of the therapist’s handbook: Don’t give
out too much personal information. But the idea of the dispassionate shrink
slinking up the patient’s stairs and secreting a note under the doorjamb
probably wouldn’t go down well with whatever board would review such things.
Still, Clarissa was only a student and allowed to act like one.
    Friday
at two o’clock—precisely when the second hand fell on neither side of
twelve—Clarissa knocked, pushing open the door that I had purposely left ajar.
She said, “I’m so sorry.” Clarissa was an apology champion. “Are you all right?”
I asked, probing for information I already knew but wanted her to tell me. “Oh yes,”
she said, “I couldn’t get a…” She was about to say “babysitter” and then
realized it would reveal too much and she changed mid-sentence to “I got tied
up and there was no way to reach you.”
    “Would
you like something to drink?” I offered.
    “Do you
have a Red Bull?”
    Red
Bull is a potent caffeine-infused soft drink that turns grown men into
resonating vibraphones. Drinking a Red Bull is more impressive to me than
drinking a bottle of Scotch. Several years ago after my first Red Bull—which
was also my last—I got in marksman position on the living room floor, opened a
pack of playing cards, and repeatedly dealt myself poker hands. I computed that
good hands came in bunches; that one full house in a shuffle implies a
possibility of more full houses. And lousy hands in a shuffle only create the
possibility of more lousy hands. So Red Bull was not allowed in my house, only
because this little episode lasted nine hours. Clarissa’s request for the
caffeine recharge indicated to me that she was going to have to be bucked up if
she was going to make it through my session.
    “I don’t
have any Red Bull but I know who might,” I said.
    I
excused myself to go to Brian and Philipa’s amid protestations of “you don’t
have to” from Clarissa. I peered into her apartment and saw Brian flaked out on
the sofa, his jaw hanging open like a drawbridge. I didn’t have the heart to
wake him. I came back to see that Clarissa had settled into the easy chair and
was staring at the floor. She was wearing a prim pink blouse that made her look
so wholesome it was as if Norman Rockwell had painted a pinup. She had a bloom
on her cheeks that lied about her real age. Her face had gentle angles, one
rosy thing sloping into the next, and it suggested none of the hardness she
must have experienced. It seemed as though she were determined to stay
innocent, to hang back even though life was dragging her painfully forward. And
all my conjecture bore out because she looked up at me and tried to say, “And
how are you?” She choked it out but couldn’t continue. She looked down again
and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I
was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t
even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her
halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on
life’s happiest days.
    Clarissa
didn’t apologize for her broken voice, which meant that she was, in these