The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  “What would I do?” he said. “I’d find the nicest, best-looking chick I could find and rip her clothes off and plank her right there.”

  I was a little taken aback. “But she wouldn’t be moving. You would really fuck her?”

  He said absolutely he would. “I’d find the nicest, mintest chick I could find and carry her off to an alley and rip her clothes off and start hammering the shit out of her.”

  “But she wouldn’t be responding!” I again protested.

  “So what? I’m talking about a mint chick now, a really mint chick. If she was mint I wouldn’t care if she was moving. Or, okay, if she wasn’t moving, I’d just click the remote on for a second, and she’d start fighting a little, and then she’d be moving, and then I’d turn her off and I’d hammer on her some more.”

  “But then she’s fighting you,” I said. “That’s rape.”

  “Well, yeah, it’s rape, I guess,” he said. “Call me a sick fucked-up guy, but that’s what I would do. Now my friend Jerry, he’s a ladies’ man. He probably wouldn’t shove it in and start whaling on her. He’d probably eat her out, suck on her tits and all that.”

  “But that’s not really right, either,” I said, feeling increasingly confused and unhappy.

  “I know,” he said. “Or—maybe he’d just look at her, I don’t know.”

  “I suppose it’s all basically equivalent,” I said, thinking out loud. “I mean, unbuttoning one button is just as bad, since it’s done without her say-so. But I don’t really believe that, for some reason. I think there are levels to it. I personally would just undress her.”

  “What, undress her and pound your pud, man?” he cried. “You’d just unbutton a few buttons and catch a bit of tit and go, Oh, sorry I had to lay a hand on you, and then you’d fucking masturbate, man? What a waste! I’d fucking jump in there. I’d fucking yank the remote from you and start whaling on her. What’s the difference? As far as I can see there’s no difference between just tearing her clothes off and hammering on her.”

  “I guess not, essentially,” I said. A brown and white cab drove slowly by but it didn’t stop. “Still—there she is standing there, in a certain position, not moving. She’s dry! How could you possibly want to fuck her?”

  “Easy, I’d just move her arms around, adjust her legs.”

  “But, I’m telling you, she’s dry!” I was trying to give him every chance to reconsider and retract.

  “All right. Say I see this incredible chick coming out of NAPA.”

  “Out of what?” I asked.

  “Out of NAPA. Auto parts. I haul her to the alley, I rip her clothes off, and I try to stick it in her, and she’s a little dry, right? Then I notice that there’s some fucking grease in the bag she’s carrying, this tube of axle grease she’s bought for her husband, right? I squeeze some of that on my cock and I fuck her with the help of that, and then I leave her there, and she wakes up, and she goes, What the fuck? Or no, I dress her back up, and I put her back where she was in front of the store, and I take off, and I click the remote, and she’s there on the street, and there’s this tingling in her cunt, and she goes to wipe herself later, and this fucking black grease smears all over her hand, and she thinks, What the fuck is going on here?”

  “I don’t understand why you have to haul her off to an alley,” I said. “Why not right there in front of the NAPA store?”

  He looked at me as if I was unable to understand the obvious. “I could never do it on the street. I couldn’t do it in public. Even though everyone’s frozen stiff. With my luck, one guy’s eyeball would still be moving around, and he’d see me and he’d be able to give a positive ID. I’d haul her off somewhere secluded and hose the shit out of her until my dick was sore. Then I’d start thinking about some banks.” He got a faraway look, imagining it all. “Ah-hah, but what if I click on the remote while I’m fucking her, so she fights me a little, and she sees my face? What do I do then, huh? What do I do then?”

  “You don’t mean you’d kill her, do you?” I said, with some actual horror in my voice. “Are you married?”

  “Yeah, I’m married.” On cue, he brought out a family photo of his wife and one blond kid and one infant and displayed it proudly. Then he said, “No, I wouldn’t kill her. Actually you know what? I’d rather be invisible, then I’d jump on the chick and hose her while she was fighting me the whole time. I wouldn’t care, why would I care?”

  “That’s rape,” I said again.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Okay, but now, say it was someone you knew.”

  “A chick I knew?”

  “Right,” I said. “Someone you really thought was beautiful.”

  “Someone I’d always wanted to fuck and she’d turned me down?”

  “Okay, yeah,” I said.

  “I’d probably kiss her before I hosed the shit out of her. I’d hit the remote and I’d say, ‘You turned me down, but you’re my puppet now.’ ” Then he had a further thought. “No, okay, say if she was a nice girl, a really nice girl. Say I go after her, thinking I’m going to hose her, and I hit the button on the remote and freeze her, and then I’m starting to grab her tit or something, and something comes over me, and I can’t go through with it, even though I want to so bad, and a big tear runs down my face, and I say, ‘I could have had you, but I let you go.’ Right? That would be a real tearjerker. And I take off. But first—mint!—this would be mint!—first I write my phone number on her tit. Right? That’s what I would do in my imagination, but I’m telling you what I would do for real, right? I’d go after somebody I always thought was great-looking, like this chick I know from high school, Christine—her mother is fucking fantastic. Her mother is nice. Yeah, Wheelers’ is probably the first house I’d go to—I’d hose the shit out of Christine’s mother, then I’d hose the shit out of Christine.”

  I was distressed by this conversation with the security guard. I felt that he and I were radically different sorts of people (a realization that can be in itself dispiriting, because you want the rest of randomly encountered humanity to be comprehensible), but at the same time I felt that a case could be made for our fundamental likeness, and I really didn’t want to be like him. Morally, I am different from that security guard—no, let’s not mess around: morally, I’m a little better than he is. I am. But I acknowledge that some of the things I have done are—let me just say it—rape-like acts that some observers would condemn more vehemently than they would condemn the security guard’s offhand remote-control fantasies, because I should know better, and because, in my own case, they really happened.

  But I mention the security guard, and Arlette the paralegal, and my friend Bill Asplundh, not so as to raise the fretful subject of rape theory. I just want to point out what I think is my own oddity: unlike any of those I questioned, what I want to do, and what I in fact end up doing, in the Fold is to live out my perennial wish to insert some novelty into the lives of women. Arlette wanted to mash her clit-folds into the life of a woman; the security guard wanted to insert his small-minded dick into the lives of women; but I don’t want to be quite that direct. Instead I replace the white chalk in Miss Dobzhansky’s hand with blue; I put the fortune-cookie fortune under one of Joyce’s bottles; I leave the vibrator where the woman in the library can find it. I am still imposing my will on their lives, of course—but I want to arrange things so that they discover my imposition, and I want the imposition, however calculated, to have an element of simulated fortuity. I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by. In college I bought four brand-new copies of Kinflicks and left them one by one on a sidewalk near a gingko tree in front of one of the freshman dorms so that women on their way to class would see them and bend to pick them up and take them off with them. (A woman in my own dorm had told me that the book was very “orgasmy”—I hadn’t read it then, and still haven’t.)

  Whi
ch brings me at last to my own self-published erotica, or “rot.” A while back, while I was lying out in the sun in my yard on a beach towel, I became interested in the idea of using the Fold to have a woman encounter my very own words. Too undisciplined to write simply for the pleasure of writing, I nonetheless felt able to write as long as it served some specific sexual end. At first I imagined hovering at a bookstore a few shelves away from a woman who appealed to me: as she pulled a book off the shelf and began to flip through it (something like Eva Figes’s Light), I would fermate and inscribe dirty messages in the margins, like “I need a big jumping clit under my tongue right now!” Then I’d watch her read my annotation and shake her head with disgust and replace the book. But maybe she wouldn’t replace the book; maybe she would buy the book anyway; maybe she was in fact in the bookstore looking not for a copy of Eva Figes’s Light but for a live nude tongue on her jumping clit; maybe my marginalia would be taken by her as a portent of sexually fructifying times to come.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback. I hadn’t read it, though I’d heard of John Mortimer. She glanced at the back, then flipped to the first page, then skipped to somewhere in the middle, where a scene caught her eye. She read for a few seconds, and then she did what I was hoping she would do: she curled the corner of the page under her fingertip so that she would be able to turn to it immediately when she needed to—thus signaling to me that she was definitely going to look at the next page. I snapped my fingers to invoke the Clutch and gently removed the Mortimer novel from her hands and wrote on the page that she would be turning to, in as elegant a cursive as I could muster, I need to pop my nuts on a pair of small sexy tits right this second!! I snapped out of the time-clutch and watched her from a safe distance as she turned the page and read what I had written. She did an almost imperceptible double take, then flipped around in the book to see if there was anything else handwritten. She looked about her, noticed me absorbed in a copy of The Princess of Cleves, and, because (though somewhat rough-hewn) I look “intellectual” (the glasses), she was reassured that whoever had written that desideratum in the book she had picked up had done so a while ago, perhaps months ago, and was in any case no longer in the store. Then she sighed conclusively and put the book back on the shelf and inspected something by Muriel Spark called Loitering with Intent. Titles are so important to lonely browsers. I could of course have written something dirty in that book, too, but I resisted the urge, not only because it would have made her fearful that someone was singling her out somehow, but also because I couldn’t for some reason make myself write nasty things in a book written by a woman. I could deface John Mortimer without compunction, but not so Muriel Spark. I hovered there until the woman in black cotton finally left (with Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and then I bought the Mortimer myself, since I had ruined it. I still have it; I mean to read it someday.

  Many, most of my fold-adventures are like that—inconclusive; wastes of time by some standards. But I like when my little schemes don’t really work out—I still feel that I have created some bond between myself and the woman with whom I have decided to meanwhile away the time. The woman in black will eventually forget about the writing I did for her at the top of the page of Paradise Postponed, since it is difficult to retain the active memory of minor incidents which are in a small way inexplicable and random-seeming, and yet for a short time that evening, for a few hours, she might possibly have entertained herself by speculating about what sort of person would browse Waterstone’s writing apostrophes of smut in modern English novels. She might have brought it up that weekend at a dinner party—maybe someone was talking about the history of the Waterstone’s building and she would be reminded of the oddity I had given her and start to tell the story and realize that she would be slightly embarrassed to repeat in company what I had written, and then someone else at the table, a catty gay man, would say, “Oh, come on, Pauline, you can’t bring us this far and not finish us off, we’re grown-ups after all,” and she would repeat to the dinner party, in her own thoughtful, even voice, surprising herself that she did in fact remember the text, “Well, I believe that it said, ‘I need to pop my nuts on a pair of sexy little tits right now.’ Exclamation point.” And there would be whooplets of mock-shocked mirth. All because of me, all because of me.

  7

  LET US, THOUGH, BRIEFLY RETURN TO THE TIME I WAS OUTSIDE on the beach towel in the yard, since I did go on to imagine writing more than mere expostulations in paperbacks that morning, and the manner in which events developed as a result of my imaginings is quite typical of my Fold-life. (Maybe interlife would be a good word for the portion of my life I spend between-times, in the Fold.) I turned over a number of distinct thoughts that morning, but mainly I thought of writing a brief amateur sex story of my own and planting it where a woman might find it. I envisioned becoming a writer of private erotica—a rotter, a secret member of the literoti. Specifically I envisioned dashing off something about a woman on a ridem lawn-mower that I would print out, staple at the corner, and put in a plastic food-storage bag with a twist-tie closure and bury in the colder, unsiftable sand just below where some warm-skinned sunbathing woman was idly digging as she lay face-down on her towel on a beach somewhere.

  I was during that period without Fold-powers—I had not, as a matter of fact, been able to disrupt sidereal time at will for eight full months, a fairly long fallow period for me, and while at first I had as usual been relieved not to have the distracting option of stopping all the clocks whenever I wanted to think or spy or feel, I was now really quite desperate to get back some of the old magic. What if I never accomplished a successful Drop again? Horrible. I wanted immediate controlled nudity. The calendar, the year-at-a-glance wallet calendar I carry around with me, that marvelous invention in which twelve locomotive-shaped months in series pull the miscellaneous freight of a full year of days along, had become my enemy. What had I done with all that free time? What had I done with my life, my interlife? Often on my mind was the slogan devised by some self-helper about ten years ago—“Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” It is a good, exciting, up-rewing slogan. But it was beginning to occur to me to wonder what the person who thought it up had done with the rest of his life, following the momentous minute when he first conceived of it. Has he been himself helped by his own snappy bumper sticker? Has he done anything else of note aside from writing it? Is his mightiest accomplishment going to be merely the invention of a memorable formula that urges others to accomplish something? And was the world any better for his having written what he had written? The world has recognized its inspirational value and fully metabolized it; individual lives have perhaps been in some cases improved as a result of its existence—high school homework may have been done that wouldn’t have been done, new leaves may have been turned over, difficult phone calls may have been made—but now its own big moment of efficacy is finished, it can no longer surprise us into sudden effort, and yet the person who thought it up is almost certainly still with us, living out, not Day 1, but Day 1,234, or Day 3,677, of the sadly anticlimactic rest of his life—repeatedly experiencing, as we all do, those brief calendrical regrets when it is no longer the toddlingly innocent fifth or sixth of a given month but somewhere early in the teens, midway down, and then suddenly it’s the twenty-sixth and the month is going forever, the one and only October you will be given that year, and the false o
ptimism of a new young month is about to begin, like a stock split that without changing any fundamentals makes the price per share look alluringly cheap all over again; and then the “3” of the new month’s date again slides into the “5,” and the “5” mutates into the “12,” each of the thirty or thirty-one successive numerical dates carrying with it, regardless of what actually happens on that day, a default mixture of emotions that results simply from its location on the scaffolding of the calendar—a specific ratio between the residual determination to get whatever difficult or distasteful things there are outstanding done in the days of the month that remain and the growing despair at the many difficult or distasteful things that simply cannot get done in the days that remain and must be carried forward to the next month. The calendar was my enemy because I had no control over it anymore, no option of postponement, no eject button, and I had not been in control of it for over eight months.

  On the other hand, my coordinator, Jenny, had not had any work for me that day, so I was free. I had been assigned to work at an architectural firm in Cambridge, but then they called and canceled and nothing else had turned up. I lay in bed for a while, took a shower, and wandered out to the back yard (my landlord’s yard, really) with a large heavy dry beach towel. I don’t know now what the date was, but I do know that it was early in the month, when I still felt full of hope (or perhaps it was so late in the month that I felt the undisturbed and imminent hope of the next month in full force), and it was sometime in the late spring. It was one of the first times I had gone out to lie in the sun that year; it was a clean, bud-popping blueout of a temperate-zone Boston weekday. A hundred very small hippopotamus-shaped clouds were on the march overhead, and though I like and respect a rigorously cloud-free morning as much as anyone—when the only possible seconds of shade you can expect out on your towel are those strangely paranormal ex-machinas when a high cruising bird (a gull on its way to inland Dumpsters) or an almost inaudible airplane comes momentarily between your eyelids and the sun, raising your consciousness of the conical geometry of umbral coincidence—given that there were all these evenly spooned-out clouds, regularly dispensing an ideal interval of coolness every five minutes or so, during which the trees regained their green depth and I had the opportunity to appreciate the heretofore-unnoticed sweat on my stomach, and given that I was nothing but a temp and lacked for the time being the one thing that kept my pride intact, which was my fermational gift, I was nonetheless quite happy with what the day had to offer. I invariably feel lucid and pleased with life after a shower anyway (there is an illusion of mental acuity that accompanies a thoroughly moistened and rejuvenated sinus-system and the sensation of wet hair-ends on the base of the neck), but seldom more pleased with life than when I can go directly from the tiley shower out to a clean warm sunlit beach towel on the lawn. I took off my watch and my glasses and set them on the edge of the towel, next to the Fieldcrest label; I took off my T-shirt and laid it gently over the portable phone, lying nestled in the grass, to keep it from overheating. I extended myself stomach-down on the towel (a blue-and-white-striped towel; the blue stripes were detectably warmer than the white ones) and let the weight on my ribcage produce a moan of utter contentment.