The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  Feeling Joyce’s mattress pad made me want to kiss her. I not only wanted to kiss her, which I could do easily using time trickery—I wanted her to know I was kissing her and to want me to be kissing her, which was a great deal harder to bring about. I turned on one of her kitchen taps; a trickle of water came out (water pressure is never good in the Fold), and I drank a little from one of her kitchen glasses. Just before I left her apartment and walked back to work, I placed, under an antique glass bottle on the sill of her sunporch-bedroom, entirely out of sight, without knowing exactly why I was doing it, a folded fortune-cookie fortune that I had found in a bowl of forgotten things on top of her refrigerator. It said, “Smile when you are ready.” Then I walked back to work. When I had put on my headphones and reassumed the lost, somewhat spiritual expression of the concentrating transcriber, I snapped everything back to life.

  But I had entirely misjudged my capacity to handle the sound of Joyce’s abruptly resumed business voice in my ears so soon after I had gotten such a huge and illicit idea of her apartment. The fact that she had no notion of what I had just done, that she did not know the full extent of my knowledge of her mattress pad, pained me much more than I expected—not because my unlawful entry was wrong, exactly, but because I felt that my fuller sense of her life was going to make it more difficult for me to ask her out, rather than easier. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her, with a friendly, almost marital sort of well-wishing affection; but also the harder it was to imagine my having dinner with her and pretending that I knew nothing except what she was willing to tell me. Her pubic hair, her braid, I could handle just fine: they were graphic sights and textures whose memories wouldn’t get in the way of any later, more preliminary flirtation, but still-lifes like the maple syrup and the Dover book on the kitchen table made me imagine spending my life with her, and how could I possibly spend my life with her if I had to keep the secret of my Fold-proficiencies and activities from her? This sort of doubt was not entirely unfamiliar, but in the past I had simply concluded (most recently after Rhody broke up with me over this very issue) that I was never going to get married, and I was content with that conclusion. This time, though, I found it depressing to think that I had just been in her apartment, in her life, sitting on her bed, and yet that if I didn’t act on my love—or whatever such a hybrid emotion should be called when you learn important things about a woman all in the wrong order—by asking her out, then I might not, in a year or so, if I ran into her on the street, even remember her name: I would have to use the Fold then simply in order to be polite to her.

  5

  OBVIOUSLY I WAS MISTAKEN IN PREDICTING EARLIER IN these pages that Joyce would play a minor role in my autobiography. I finished doing her tape and walked over to her office to deliver it, intending to ask her out. But she was talking to a witty charming SVP whom I found intimidating and didn’t want to compete with. Instead, I just nodded at them both and gave her the papers. At five o’clock I left. I got to my place feeling extremely sad, hopeless, almost tearful. On my desk were three vibrating dildos of varying degrees of stylization, along with a woman-designed vibrating butterfly, and a Jeff Stryker penis pump. They were all “mint-in-box,” as toy collectors say. I sat down in my chair and looked at them, feeling great waves of misery. I had ordered them from a company in San Francisco, paying extra for Federal Express delivery, in the momentary grip of the idea that I would be able sometime soon to watch Joyce use one or more of these devices on herself. I bought the penis pump as an afterthought, so that I would have it in reserve as a bargaining tool: “You go ahead and use these vibrating dildos for me, and I’ll pump my penis for you with this penis pump.” But I couldn’t afford these machines—almost two hundred dollars’ worth of sexual hardware—and it seemed pathetic and undignified for me to have them in storage in my life when I would never be able to use them with someone like Joyce. Sipping wine, with the radio playing some progressive jazz construct with the usual cleanly miked bongos and synthesized tribal flutes and pre-enjoyed Steely Dan chords, I filled out the return slip, wrote, Nobody to use these with, unfortunately, next to the REASON FOR RETURN line, and one by one I tucked them back in the carton they came in (they had been responsibly packed in recycled styrene), my self-pity mounting to impossible heights. I wanted … I wanted to tell Joyce my dream of a flying blue brassiere: that we would be stranded in a rowboat in the middle of a sulfur lake, and the only way we could escape is if she took off her shirt and removed her flying blue brassiere and kneeled in its cups and took strong hold of the straps and pulled up on them for lift, using them as a steering-bridle. I would ride piggyback, and she, noble bare-breasted horsewoman of Lycra, would lift us and swoosh us to verdant safety. I also wanted to tell her the dream I had many mornings just before I woke up, that my mouth was filled with an enormous wad of decayed Bazooka chewing gum: I had stuffed in eight or nine loaves of gum because the first taste was so attention-gettingly tart, but now it was changed for the worse—sticky and oppressive, almost doughy, almost friable, and I tried to hook its unpleasant mass out of my mouth with my finger and couldn’t remove it, but on waking I discovered that the gum-mass was in reality just my tongue, which as I moved up toward consciousness had made its sluggish presence known against the reviving nerves of the roof of my mouth. I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn’t my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.

  I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. I used a “tape gun” to tape it back up, just like the pros at Mailboxes USA. A tape gun is a triggerless machine with a handle that enables you to dispense tape from thick rolls one-handed. It has a set of sharp metal teeth that cut the tape at will, like the row running along a box of plastic wrap that can hurt your finger if you rummage overhastily in a drawer, but its whole function stands in swords-into-plowshares opposition to the gun—it is meant to seal, to mend, to hold together, rather than to injure and rend. I bought it at an office-supply store as a reward after an awful week working for the Department of Social Services typing Social Security numbers in boxes that were not spaced to fit either of the type sizes of the typewriter. Now, in my moment of despair, taping up the carton of sex toys, I lifted this nicely balanced tape gun and held it to my temple, and investigated my wish to die—and in doing so I immediately realized how laughably far I was from actual suicide, and how good, happy, lucky, fundamentally, my life was. The idea of trying to commit suicide over a box of vibrating dildos with a tape gun held at my temple struck me as almost comic. It got me over the hump of Joyce-loneliness. I decided that what I really needed to do was go to the library and get out some more autobiographies and read them, so that I would have a better idea of how to write this one properly. Before I left, I cut open the carton that I had just sealed up with tape and took out one of the vibrating dildos (not the Pleasure Pallas, a medium-sized Japanese-made one in the shape of Athena holding an oddly flamed torch of wisdom in her hands, the torch being in fact a pliant clitoris-stimulating projection; but rather the Monasticon, which was a large twisting Capuchin monk holding a clit-nuzzling open manuscript), and put it in my briefcase. I brushed my teeth. Then I reconsidered, and put the hot-pink vibrating Butterfly in my briefcase as well. It
would be a waste of life’s possibilities to send them dolefully back, I thought, just because I might never use them with Joyce. Much more sensible to distribute them free at the library.

  I was luckier than usual in finding the books I wanted. Maurice Baring’s autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory, was on the shelf, as was George Santayana’s Persons and Places, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, and Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House. I sat down at a large table and looked my books over. The particular library table I had chosen with some care, of course: it had one other resident—a petite woman in her late thirties with curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a short-sleeved top and earrings made of cloudy yellow glass. She was looking through several piles of microfilm copies, sorting them and circling paragraphs every so often. She spun her pen gently, silently, on the table as she read, as if it were a spinner in a child’s game. Her eyes moved with impressive speed over the chemical-smelling legal-sized pages, but she looked tired from spending hours gazing at the gray light of one of the library’s horrible microfilm readers, contending with the trembling magnified crotch hairs and scratches on its screen. I stopped time to find out what she had been microfilming: it turned out to be copies of Harper’s Bazaar from the late forties. I didn’t touch her. I wanted only to arouse her—or not even to arouse her, but simply to be a subliminal part of her life. I wanted her to become vaguely aroused, without knowing I was the source of her arousal.

  She needed, it seemed to me, to see, or sense, my Moving Psi Squares. I had in my briefcase three rarely opened envelopes. One held many one-inch squares of construction paper, some black, some pink. The second held one-inch squares I had cut out of fashion magazines and Garnet Hill catalogs, just faces: beautiful, interesting, exotic, or otherwise noteworthy women’s and men’s faces. The third envelope held squares I had cut out of a flyer I had gotten in the mail from a place called Elmwood Distributors, a somewhat low-end distributor of porn films, most of which were compilations, or “revues,” of surprising specificity, with titles such as Double Hand-Job Revue, Brunette Lactating Hermaphrodite Blowjob Revue, and Big Uncut Dick Facial Cumshot Revue. Each film was illustrated by a single one-inch-square still, some of which I had cut out. Now I arranged many of these squares randomly in a rectangle around the microfilm page that the woman was gazing at, took my seat, lifted my book, and snapped time on for a fraction of a second and then off again: snap snap. Then I went over to her and displaced each square in a counterclockwise direction, again took my seat, again snapped time on and immediately off. I did this repeatedly, dozens and dozens of times, wanting to offer her a pulsing marquee of images on the periphery of her vision as she read her forties Harper’s Bazaars. I must say, the work was tedious in the extreme—whenever I do my Moving Psi Squares I feel new respect for the most primitive of Sesame Street animated shorts, and I’m awed by Hanna-Barbera. (Sometimes, when I have less energy, I employ just one square, a face-square or a porn-square, something that I think, judging by the way the woman looks, might interest her, flashing it for an instant every minute or so in a different position on the open page of the book she is reading.) In the present case, the woman with the cloudy yellow earrings sighed and lowered her head for a moment. I stopped time and removed all the squares and put them away, then switched time on. She yawned, throwing her head back with her hands held behind her neck; then she pressed her thumb hard between her eyebrows. She thought she had been working too hard, seeing things—and in fact she had been seeing things: she had been seeing the little sexsquares that I was strobing into her life. I sensed her glance at me for a moment. I didn’t look up: I was paging in a leisurely, preoccupied way through Maurice Baring’s account of his years in Sweden. The woman yawned again and gathered her things. I had no idea what she was thinking. She walked over to the trash can beside one of the other tables. Just before she threw out some of the Bazaar pages, I stopped time and put my Monasticon vibrator on the top of the trash, where she might spot it peeping out of a paper bag. She did see it: she lifted the bag and peered inside, looked to her right and to her left, checked the contents of the bag once more. What on earth, she was wondering, was a brand-new, mint-in-box, sealed-in-plastic vibrating dildo representing a Capuchin monk and his clit-fondling manuscript doing in the trash of the Boston Public Library? She stood there for a second or two, pondering what to do, frowning, and then the bagged vibrator went quietly into her Boston University book bag. She walked toward the exit. I blew a kiss at her back. Good luck to her.

  That might have ended my generosity for the evening, since the library was closing, but for the fact that as I got in line at the checkout desk, a large tall woman appeared just in front of me. I am always glad to be in line behind a woman, because I can look at her freely without making her uncomfortable. This one had loosely arranged, very thick soft hair that was possibly dyed with henna—anyway, it was a deep red-brown color. She was the sort of plump person who people say carries it well. She looked great. She was wearing an indeterminate number of layers of very loose clothes with huge loose neck-holes that slumped overlappingly over one another like the eccentric orbits of several comets—one neck-hole was almost falling off her shoulder, exposing some sort of blue bodysuit strap that probably represented the deepest layer. It was a way of dressing and looking that I had never until then thought I liked, but on her I felt I could like it very much. The shoulder that was partially exposed had lots of sun freckles on it, which made it seem unusually smooth and touchable, like some sort of river stone.

  But it was not until I noticed the book that she was checking out that I was completely captivated: she was on her way home to read something called Naked Beneath My Clothes, a fairly recent book by a woman stand-up comic. I’ve looked at the book since: it is a sometimes funny, okay little book—but the greatness of it for me then was its title. For years and years I had been amazed by just this obvious truth, that we are all naked beneath our clothes; coming across a woman in the library holding a book which announced the fact in its title made me get that so-sexual-that-it’s-not-sexual melting feeling, as if my knees were no longer going to do what they were designed to do and my balls were going to droop past them like toffee and hang to my ankles, softened by the warmth of my longing. I knew that the woman had just wanted to take out this book because she wanted to laugh and she had been told it was funny, but it had this provocative title, and now she was, despite her relaxedness about sex, ever so slightly embarrassed to be checking it out of the library.

  Her embarrassment was, it seemed to me, directed forward, at the man working the card machine—a spindly nice-mannered ugly man who shaved too far down on the sides of his beard. But she knew that someone was behind her as well, and she could be considering that my eyes were on the freckles of her shoulder, and she might be able to feel them moving down her arm to read the title of the book again, Naked Beneath My Clothes—a fact that, because she held the book, was being asserted not as a general truth but as a truth specifically about her and her alone, prefixed by an “I am.” I very much wanted to see her naked beneath her clothes. And of course I could have easily enough. Yet I hesitated to drop into the Fold to remove all those layers, since I would have trouble remembering how they hung with such artful sloppiness over one another when it was time to dress her back up. (She wasn’t, thank God, wearing those leggings that terminate in a bit of lace!) Every curve and movement of her body cried out, “I’m extremely single at the moment and I’m available tonight to have a drink or two with a nice man who will listen to me and make me laugh.” I knew that she was feeling that this interval in the checkout line was her last chance to meet someone, and I knew that I was at least a better catch than the library staffer with the unsightly beard.

  But though I was, am, extremely single, and though I had suffered a serious attack of loneliness involving a tape gun only hours before, and was probably giving off the same rads of availability and generalized longing as she was, I didn’t strike up a conversat
ion with her, because I was smart enough to know by now to spare a woman like this my tentative but occasionally successful pickup technique, since even if we did go out to dinner a few times and have a few nights in bed, it would all be essentially sad, essentially wrong. I wasn’t the sort of man that she really wanted, and she wasn’t for me, either—there would be a temporary wonder and excitement in those loose neck-holes, and then the differences between us would doom us—and why do any of that, when all I really wanted to know was how, exactly, she was naked beneath her clothes? I could imagine some of the unseen her in advance, having undressed so many women on the sly in my life—I’m aware of certain connoisseurial correlations between the type of face a woman has and the type of back she has: in fact, I felt that I had a fairly well defined sense of how her back would look and feel, how high her hidden waist was. But breasts were always a wild card, and the ass, too (I mean the real-world ass, not the dirty-magazine ass), was a thing of a billion unique variations.

  I wanted, failing knowledge of her nakedness, simply to announce to her, in a quiet, serious voice, “I am, too.” And when she turned her face to me in sociable puzzlement, I would gesture at her book and say, clarifyingly, “I mean that I’m naked, too, beneath. Really, I am.” Maybe she would roll with this lameness. One of the very first times I ever made out with a girl was in a park when I was fifteen: we lay on a slight slope, among many short conifer trees. Eventually her hand undid my pants and went into my underpants, and she hoisted my moist troika out into the world and left it there. Neither of us looked down for a long time—I was concentrating on making her come without taking off her jeans, which was not all that easy. Finally we gave up, needing real privacy to make any headway, and then we both looked down, and there was a sight of my naked self that I had never seen, or never paid attention to—an almost shockingly awful sight: the ultra-pale skin of my horizontalized balls was stretched very tight, stretched to a state of egg-glaze glossiness (because the waistband of my too-small underpants was underneath them, pushing my balls up), and it was overwritten with many delicate, infantile blood vessels, as in a Lennart Nilsson photograph of the head of a developing fetus. And—adding considerably to the overall obscene effect—sparse hair follicles made little white bumps in the stretched skin. Though it was highly unpleasant, or at least unromantic, to look at (my girlfriend flinched, I think, seeing more of me than she had been prepared for just then), I couldn’t help noting to myself with some satisfaction how surprisingly spermatious the ball-hairs themselves appeared, with their long wispy tails and their ovoid follicle heads: hair-sperms surrounding the egglike testicles, trying to fertilize them, as if my body were offering to anyone who cared to look its own magnified, three-dimensional representation of the task that my gonads were programming their product to perform.