Read The Pleasure of My Company for Free Online

ticking and clicking behind her.
She’d talk to him as if he were a person, a person who could talk back. Often
when she said “Here, Tiger,” I would say to myself “No, here, Tiger,”
hoping doggy ESP would draw him toward my door, because I liked to look into
his cartoon face. Tiger was a perfectly assembled mutt, possessing a vocabulary
of two dozen words. He had a heart of gold and was keenly alert. He had a
variety of quirky mannerisms that could charm a room, such as sleeping on his
back while one active hind leg pedalled an invisible bicycle. But his crowning
feature was his exceedingly dumb Bozo face, a kind of triangle with eyes, which
meant his every act of intelligence was greeted with cheers and praise because
one didn’t expect such a dimwit to be able to retrieve, and then sort, a bone,
a tennis ball, and a rubber dinosaur on verbal commands only. Philipa demonstrated
his talent on the lawn one day last summer when she made Tiger go up to
apartment 9 and bring down all his belongings and place them in a rubber ring. Philipa’s
boyfriend, Brian, stood by on the sidelines drinking a Red Bull while shouting “Dawg,
dawg!” And I bet he was also secretly using the dog as a spell-checker.
    The
view from my window was quite static that weekend. Unfortunately the Sunday Times crossword was a snap (probably to atone for last Sunday’s puzzle, which
would have stumped the Sphinx), and I finished it in forty-five minutes,
including the cryptic, with no mistakes and no erasures. This disrupted my time
budget. A couple of cars slowed in front of Elizabeth’s realty sign, indicating
that she might be showing up later in the week. But the weather was cool and
there were no bicyclists, few joggers, no families pouring out of their SUVs
and hauling the entire inventory of the Hammacher Schlemmer beach catalogue
down to the ocean, so I had no tableaux to write captions for. This slowness
made every hour seem like two, which made my idle time problem even worse. I
vacuumed, scrubbed the bathroom, cleaned the kitchen. Ironed, ironed, ironed.
What did I iron? My shirt, shirt, shirt. At one point I was so bored I
reattached my cable to the TV and watched eight minutes of a Santa Monica city
government hearing on mall pavement.
    Then it
was evening. For a while everything was the same, except now it was dark. Then
I heard Brian come down the stairs, presumably in a huff. His walk was an
exaggerated stomp meant to send angry messages like African drums. Every
footstep boasted “I don’t need her.” No doubt later, in the sports bar, other
like-minded guys would agree that Brian was not pussy-whipped, affirmed by the
fact that Brian was in the bar watching a game and not outside Philipa’s
apartment sailing paper airplanes through her window with I LOVE YOU written on
them.
    Brian
strode with a gladiator’s pride to his primered ‘92 Lincoln and split with a
gas pedal roar. I then heard someone descending the stairs, who was
undoubtedly Philipa. But her pace was not that of a woman in pursuit of her
fleeing boyfriend. She was slow-walking in my direction and I could hear the
gritty slide of each deliberate footstep. She stopped just outside and lingered
an unnaturally long time. Then she rang my doorbell, holding the button down
so I heard the ding, but not the dong.
    I
pretended to be just waking as I opened the door. Philipa released the doorbell
as she swung inside. “You up?” she asked. “I’m way up,” I said, dropping my
charade of sleep, which I realized was a lie with no purpose. I moved to my
armchair (a gift from Granny) and nestled in. Philipa’s centre-parted hair,
long and ash brown, fell straight to her shoulders and framed her pale unmade-up
face, and for the first time I could see that this was a pretty girl in the
wrong business. She was pretty enough for one man, not for the wide world that
show business required. She looked sharp, too; they must have come from an
event, had a spat, and now