The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  I admitted that he had a point, but countered that the sight of breasts in a bra, without the bra visible, might be kind of wonderful: if you could see her breasts moving as they would move in a bra and yet the bra was out of the picture it might be a totally novel kind of semi-constrained motion—not even the kind of motion you would expect in zero-gravity environments, because the undersides of the breasts would be held relatively firmly, within the limits of the give and take of that particular bra, but the top would shake a little more where it wasn’t being held. Maybe the sight of breasts in invisible bras would be incredible. But he was probably right, I conceded, the nipples would probably have that flattened quality of faces pressed against panes of glass; and what makes the sight of kids squishing their faces against glass comic is that it takes away their “faceness” and substitutes a sort of monstrous nostrilly planar expression. It would be strange to see the shape of the bra outlined in indented plump back-skin. There might be some interest, we agreed, in seeing extremely saggy breasts hoisted up in an invisible bra, since the idea of sag is very stimulating, as is the notion of hoisting.

  But, though it interested me, what Bill had to say about X-ray vision didn’t really bear on the Fold, so I went ahead and described to him the possibility of halting the universe and remaining mobile oneself, as if the idea had just occurred to me for the first time. What would he do if he had some machine that could switch everything off and he was here in this restaurant? Bill answered without hesitation that the first thing he would do is go back to the kitchen and try to find and copy the curry-powder recipe. His voice went low and he said that he might even take a little curry powder, if there was a lot of it, home with him, looking awed at his own wish to thieve. “Okay,” I told him, “but after you had all the curry you knew what to do with, then what? What would you do vis-à-vis that woman over there?” I indicated a blond woman in black whom he had noticed with approval earlier. “Would you go over there and check out her tits, or what?”

  “Possibly,” he said. He asked me a few more questions about how quickly he would be able to switch time on and off. Then he said, “No, what I would probably do is hide out so that I could watch couples I knew. I’d be very curious to see that.” His idea surprised me, since I have almost no active interest in seeing couples I know have sex, or seeing couples at all. I have of course seen it from time to time, but only in pursuit of other sights or experiences. After Rhody broke up with me, in part over the very issue of time-perversion, she started going out with an older divorced man, and I did hide out behind the tired gold wing chair in her bedroom and watch them have sex once or twice (well, six times)—and the last time in fact I did a very very wrong thing. Rhody was on her knees, with her ass way up in the air, licking and biting the pillowcase of the pillow she held, which was our favorite way for a while, and I felt violated and hurt that she would be doing this now with him, with this divorced consultant who looked like the “before” sketch in a NordicTrack ad, so I stopped time with my fingernail clipper (each time I snipped a fingernail, time toggled) and pulled the guy off her and out of her and hauled him to the garage, where I tied him securely to a piece of plywood; then I stationed myself in exactly the same position that he had been in, with my cock inside Rhody, and clipped time on, and was pleased to hear her surprised change of tone: “Oh yeah! Wow! That’s good! Like that!” I pulled out and let my cock rest against her tailbone and pressed down on it with the heel of my hand, which was something we used to do a lot that she liked, because when I shot she liked to feel the come-tangents reach up her back. I could sense her immediate surprise as I did this—Could it be?—and just before she looked back to see if it was really me, I stopped everything and got the divorced guy out of the garage and put him back where he had been and stuffed what was left of his erection back in.

  “What’s wrong?” Rhody said, as soon as I clipped time on.

  “Nothing,” said the divorced man. He tried to pretend to be fucking her with abandon, but he was almost completely limp by now.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Rhody. “What’s wrong?”

  “I had the strangest hallucination,” he said. “I thought I was tied up against a board, looking up at the skis in the ceiling of the garage. Beyond weird. Sorry, baby.”

  Rhody comforted him. Lying on the bed with his hands doing unpleasant things with his own chest hair, he began describing the “incredibly vivid” out-of-body experience he had just had of being tied up, staring at the skis. Eventually the two of them tiptoed giggling off to the laundry room to find some rope and the ski boots. I left soon after.

  Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of Metropolitan on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits PAUSE, but finds that instead of pausing Metropolitan, Metropolitan continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame—so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote PAUSE button in the scene I offered him—it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents.

  One other woman, a paralegal at a small firm in a building with a statue of Edward Coke in front, gave me a long and interesting answer to my question one evening, when we were working late assembling the documents in a huge real estate sale-and-leaseback agreement. Her name was Arlette. We walked around and around a conference table, piling one copy of some ancillary agreement on top of another in a soothing rhythm, and eventually I asked her for her thoughts on what she would do with a PAUSE button that stopped life rather than videotapes. Let me try to record what she said exactly—I took a few notes at the time. “Well,” she said, “I think first I would just sit and think for a while and try to comprehend the fact that I was the only person around who was able to move. Then I’d plan out the little revengeful things I could do. I’d bring it to work, definitely. I could put some of those Dennison colored dots on Stephen Milrose’s evil face, one by one. While he is sitting there at Tuesday Conference, making his nasty little comments, shooting everyone down, ridiculing people for no reason, I’d pick a word, some harmless word that he says a lot, like for instance ‘backside.’ Every time he said that some deal or some client was going to ‘turn around and bite us in the backside,’ I’d hit the PAUSE button and stick a yellow dot on his face. I would love to do that! They would add up, too! That would give me enormous satisfaction, to see his face fill up with a rash of dots. Nobody would say anything, but he’d be covered. He loves to say, Time out, time out.’ I’d be merciless—every time he said, Time out,’ making that T with his hands, I’d time-out for real and stick a little green dot on his face. It would be such a screech to see his evil little face get totally covered with yellow and green dots. So that kind of thing is number one—performing little pranks like that on the top two or three true assholes on this floor. I’d have to get that out of my system. But then I would have to think, I’d have to think …”

  I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to prejudice her response in any direction.

  “Well,” she said finally, with some decision, “what I think of is going over to Mark Thalmeiser and chitchatting with him about something or other, and while he’s looking at me and blinking innocently, I’d pause him right in the middle of one of his blinks and stan
d over him and take out my boobs and sort of fluff them in his eyes. First I’d take a big powder puff and get them all powdered up, and then I’d fluff my nipples in his eyes. That would be fun.”

  “Would that be classed as an act of revenge, or an act resulting from sexual attraction?” I asked her.

  “Both. Mark is sex on wheels, in a way. His wife is sex on wheels, too.” She looked at me significantly.

  “Yes?” I said, stretching the word out.

  “Yes. I don’t really like Mark, I like Mark’s wife. Well—I like them both. She has the best mouth. It’s sort of like Leslie Caron’s mouth. No—here’s what I would do if I had a remote that freezes the world. I’d be in a florist’s shop, and Kari Thalmeiser would come in to get some cut flowers. She dresses beautifully, in an expensive loungey way—yellow pants and that kind of thing—but she pulls it off. She would lean into the flower-cooler to smell a bunch of flowers, cold flowers, and I would pause her as she’s smiling, with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of some really filthy-looking flower. Or no, better yet, some bunch of nice simple pretty flowers, like carnations. Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s my turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips—and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ”

  “Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?”

  “Never,” said Arlette. We laughed because it was so obvious an impossibility. Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it. I pushed my glasses up on my nose Clark Kentishly, forgetting that I was in a period where pushing my glasses up actually did trigger a time-stopping Drop. Out of curiosity, realizing I’d triggered a Drop, I slipped my hands under immobile Arlette’s skirt to see if talking about Kari Thalmeiser had made her detectably wet. It had not. Her idea was to her at that moment no more than a verbal flourish, a rhetorical bit of self-display—her exuberant pleasure was in being cheerfully shocking as much as it was in really feeling the sexual charge of her flowershop-idyll. But I had the strong suspicion that there would be a residual effect—that when she got home from work she would think again about Kari and the flower-cooler and, without the distraction of my being there as an audience, would allow herself to become worked up by it, and I found that I wanted very much to see that happen.

  So I followed her home, pushing up on my glasses when it was necessary, as when I slipped past her as she was frozen in the act of opening her door. Standing silently in out-of-sight corners and closets, I watched her take off her work clothes and sit at her kitchen table in her sweats eating a bowl of rice with soy sauce while she watched the news. When she had finished her rice, she began tugging and twirling her pubic hair. She tapped her middle finger to her opening and smelled it. And then she went to the bedroom. It was almost dark by then. She had a solidly sexy field-hockey-playing sort of body. No snake tattoos anywhere; no pierced body-parts. She made herself come twice, first with her fingers, wrongways around in the bed with her feet on the wall, one fingernail tickling the frustum of her ass, and the second time with her Hitachi vibrator—and the second time her eyes were closed in bliss and her left arm was thrown sideways on the bed, so that her hand, palm up, was out in midair, looking as if it wanted something to hold. I pushed up my glasses, stopping events in progress, and emerged from the shadows of the open closet and knelt so that my big silent dim-witted dick hung near this upturned palm. I wanted to close my hands around her hand, around my dick. It was as if her description of what she would impermissibly do with Kari Thalmeiser made it okay for me to give her a handful of myself unasked, though of course I knew that it really didn’t. There is nothing so sexy as seeing a solid young dyke coming with her legs bent in a diamond shape, feet together, and one of those Hitachi camping flashlights, those Hitachi huge-eyed deep-sea exotic fishes, doing its blunt tireless thing in her Marianas Trench. I risked being seen, emboldened by how loud the vibrator was, timing my mastur-strokes to the shaking of her knees and the somewhat Zen-like whooshing of her breathing, and when she began to come for the second time I did in fact stop time for an instant and laid my dick in her palm and closed my fist around her fist, and squeezed on it so tightly my knuckles turned yellow, sliding within my skin in and out of her grip. As the inexorability of my clasm began I pulled down on my glasses so that she and I were living coterminously, and as she came I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm and then squeezed the last semi-painful droplets of my orgasm out on her curled fingers. I let her just begin to register the fact of my cooling slime on her arm after she finished coming herself before I stopped time and toweled her off and left. The next day she looked at me oddly—she said, “Were you …?” and “Did you …?” and then stopped. I said, “Was I what?” smiling innocently. She didn’t pursue it.

  Now that I have recorded it here, it seems to me that Arlette’s flowershop story and my behavior in her apartment afterward may mark the end of one phase of my Fold-life and the beginning of another. I was always, or almost always, quite careful, even painstaking, in my sexual adventures in the Fold up until then, but Arlette’s recklessness liberated me, at least to a degree. I still revere the word “painstaking,” as I always have—I pronounce it and think of it as if it were divisible into “pain” and “staking,” because the “staking” contributes a tweezery sort of push-pinned delicacy to the connotation and is in its pointedness the secret reason for the word’s success, even though technically it merely means taking pains, or exerting oneself. But sometimes when I’m recording detailed notes as I remove a woman’s clothes (“left bra strap fallen” or “panties inside out and worked partway into asscrack”) so that I will be sure to replace everything perfectly, just as it was, I feel a gurgle of Arlette’s joyful who-gives-a-fuckness working in me, and I want to strip the entire city of Boston and mound all the clothes together in the middle of Washington Street and dance on top of them screaming, “We’re totally fucking naked, we’re totally fucking naked!”—or failing that (since sudden widespread big-city nudity could lead to rapes and other unforeseen turbulence), I might want to strip everyone in an idyllic small town like Northampton and see how they would adjust to it. That actor on Unsolved Mysteries could do a nice twenty-minute segment about the event—the Quiet Little College Town That Stripped. Nobody would connect it to me and my Solonoid. Since Arlette, I have taken many more risks; I have increasingly wanted to give the world something to digest—something big and anarchic and sloppy but not (I hope) harmful or even particularly embarrassing in any permanent way to the individuals concerned. Probably my decision to assemble something on paper ab
out my life flows in part from this urge.

  But I do have limits and hesitations. Only a few days after my evening chat with Arlette, I was waiting in the lobby of the same building for a cab to show up. It was about eleven at night. A Hammermill box full of backup documents was to be put in a cab to go out to a partner’s house. (The partner was sick but, good man, planning to work all night.) The cab was delayed. Every so often I spotted a rat moving fast across the plaza in the dark. The security guard was in a chatty mood. I knew him slightly. He was in his forties, with some serious dental problems. Once, when I had stopped to say hello for a second, he had raved about a piece of music on his radio—“Listen to this, I just love it! I wish I knew what it was. It’s mint!”—proud of himself for his sudden affinity for what he took to be Rachmaninoff or Bruckner or somebody. I listened for a phrase or two and inquired whether it wasn’t the theme from Love Boat. His face went through a male menopause as he realized that I was right and that his attempt to demonstrate his culture had betrayed him into humming enthusiastically along with a tired old TV show. So in a general way I thought I liked him. While I was waiting for the cab, I decided to ask him what he would do if he had a remote-control device that, instead of pausing a video, froze the entire universe. He understood the sexual implications of what I was asking immediately.