The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  11

  I’VE GOTTEN INTO A NEW AND BETTER WORK RHYTHM. I NOW spend every other twenty-four-hour period in Fold-furled isolation. I wake up at seven-thirty, and if it’s going to be a Fold day I thick-fingeredly snap time off, shake my watch to unfreeze it, and spend the whole next twenty-four hours enclosed within the quiescent seven-thirtyness of my room, working on this book. I have weaned myself from high-volume earbuds; I can think now without hearing music on the radio. Rarely, I take short walks. I eat lunch and dinner and go to bed exactly as I would were time in effect, and yet I have a whole stilled writing day funded with early-morning qualities of light that help me concentrate. After a “night’s” sleep, I wake the world with a second snap and have a shower and go to my continuing temp assignment at MassBank. It is not such a good thing for me to be spending half my life in the Fold, doubling my rate of aging, but I only plan to keep up this alternating schedule until I finish a little more of my autobiography. An unexpected benefit of the regimen is that real life, the life I spend in time’s flow, feels not unpleasantly elongated, as if I were ten years old again; my privately interpolated “yesterdays” push real events of only two or three days ago into the middle-distant past.

  Am I an alienated person? Some who have read this far might say so—some might say that a man who comes onto an unknown woman’s ecstatically squinting orgasm-face without her being aware of it is definitely an alienated person—or worse. And temps are prima facie alienated by virtue of their vocational rootlessness. But I don’t see that nasal, sociological-sounding word applying in any useful way to me. I get along well with people. I haven’t perhaps done such a good job of establishing my sanity in this sketch of my life, since I have had to concentrate on the episodes of temporal distortion that make my experience unique, and they almost always embrace the controlled mental disorder known as sexual arousal, but I’m not by any means a crazy person. I don’t have a flat affect. I’m friendly and likable. I go out on the occasional date. I have several male friends, even. I have had long-term relationships with three women, Rhody being the most recent. The only major difference between me and any number of residents of the greater Boston area is that I have been able to invent and make use of several sorts of chronoclutch. No, there is a difference, I think: I’m arrogant enough to believe, at least to believe sometimes, that the reason that I have been chosen over any other contemporary human to receive and develop this chronanistic ability (if there is indeed some supernatural temp agency doing the choosing) is maybe that I can be trusted with it—trusted at least not to do any real harm. Morals depend in part on consequence; consequence on time; and since my amoralities flourish and expire entirely in momentary pico-states of timeless inconsequence, the usual rules just don’t have the same prohibitive force. Nobody else should be entitled to take off women’s clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men’s does. Before Rhody broke up with me, she once told me that the attraction to having an affair with a painter (a figurative painter, she meant) was the possibility that he would really see her and know all that was to be known about the shape of her body—when she undressed for him there would be a thrilling completeness to her undressing. To nobody else would her physical self mean as much as it meant to his eye, and so her own nudity would feel sexier with him than with anyone else. I’m not a painter, I’m only a temp and an occasional creative rotter, and yet I do contend that when I strip a passing woman on the street because her face or body calls out to me, I see more in her than others do. Of course there is plenty of self-deception possible here. But I can truthfully say that I’m never disappointed, never—I’m never able to feel anything but love and gratitude toward a woman when I secretly take off her clothes. Say there is a low cesarean scar that nobody but her husband has seen at close range. Say there is some part of her body that I will see that she isn’t very proud of. In seeing it, I feel the goodness in me blossom—I know that she would be embarrassed about my having seen this feature, whatever it is, and I turn the knowledge of her imputed embarrassment into an upwelling of affection for her and her vulnerabilities.

  I would condemn in the strongest terms anyone else who did what I have done. But the thing is, I did it, I did it, and I know myself, I know that I mean no harm, I mean well. I want simply to know what every woman looks like and feels like. I mean only to appreciate what the ribs of a complete stranger feel like under my hands, or to hold some hair I haven’t held before, or to come in someone’s face while she is paused in her own orgasm. And since in the Fermata I happen to be able to act on these wants without troubling her—without shaming or frightening her or interrupting what she is doing or thinking, simply by stopping the entire known universe for a few minutes or hours, I feel that what I’m doing isn’t wrong enough for me to override my irresistible desire to do it. In fact, maybe what I’m doing is straightforwardly right and good! I never ogle or leer on sidewalks. The Fold has permitted me to perfect my surreptitiousness. Maybe every single woman I have stripped, if she knew me, if she could know now what my thoughts had been as I unzipped her dress and undid her bra, would want me to have stripped her and sucked her breasts and understood her body as it truly deserved to be understood.

  Rhody, however, didn’t view it that way. When I tried the idea out on her (on the plane home from our beach vacation), she was interested at first, and then later she turned against it, using awful and, in my opinion, off-base words like “necrophilia” to characterize it. Let me say that I am not a necrophile. The notion has no appeal. Liaisons among the undead are fashionable, but I don’t have a drop of vampiric blood in me. (I did, however, once put a pair of “nipple nooses” on the famous Anne Rice at Barnes & Noble some years ago, when I was at the height of my mechanical-pencil Fold-phase. I clicked time on for a minute or two so she would have a chance to feel them while she signed my copy of her book, which was going to be a birthday present for somebody. Then I removed them. If she noticed anything, she was extremely cool about it and didn’t let on.) The Fermata allows something to occur that is the exact opposite of the necrophilic ideal: it allows me enough time to take in a particular lived second of one woman’s life, the incremental outcome of so many decisions and misfortunes and delights and griefs, while she is in the very midst of fleetingly bringing it into being. The ability to investigate all aspects of her careless aliveness, where her clothes stretch, her body’s textures, her expression, her smells, the way she happens to be standing or moving, as they are fused in a single total instantaneous female delta-self, is the great lure of the Fold. The Fold allows me to do sexual justice to times when she is fully conscious, but not in the least self-conscious; “stalls,” Hopkins might have called them, in the daily fluidity of her life whose specific complex of qualities would have otherwise gone unseen by anyone—unphotographed, uncelebrated, unvalued, unloved. It is their randomness and, often, their very lack of overt sexiness that makes these instants so erotically precious. My sense of sight is infinitely and lovingly promiscuous, and each time I Drop I get another chance to love a chosen body as it really is: to see a woman’s ass, for example, when its owner-operator is talking at a pay-phone and thinking about other things than the fact that she has an ass, and her ass can therefore be completely itself.

  (For example, once I noticed a woman washing the long stretch of glass in front of the freezer-counter in the ice cream place where she worked, in a mall—she worked the cloth so vigorously over the glass that her ass circled unrestrainedly clockwise to counterbalance her hard work. She was wearing extremely tight stretchy jeans of a sort I can’t fully understand but can forgive, and I wrote out the equation I used back then to get into the Fold—an equation adapted from one I saw in a journal of mathematics—and I pulled her pants down and came into a sugar cone staring at the cleavage of her ass. But I see now that this isn’t in fact a good example of my appreciating an ass
while it is unselfconsciously itself, since the reason I was attracted to her was that I had been observing her for a few minutes beforehand, as she served a customer, and I had sensed how relatively unproud of her face and upper body she was, and how certain she was that her ass was her best feature, and how much therefore she had wanted to wash the glass boldly in front of her store, though it was quite clean, with her back to all the mall-boys. As their representative, on their behalf, I came.)

  The point is, in any case, that I could never get interested in a woman who was passed out drunk, or was sedated, in a coma, or dead; for then she is unconscious of me, and what I want is to be with her when she would be conscious of me but for the fact that I have interjected myself into a chink of her day so infinitesimally brief that she can’t know that I have come and gone.

  The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of semis—by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight—like (she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in The Harder They Come. I got animated, because I love talking about sex, and I impulsively decided that this was the right moment to begin to confess my Fold history to her, couching it first as a hypothetical case. All right then, I said to her, what did she think of the idea of some sort of chord on the piano that whenever you played it, stopped time? Say back when she was at Tufts, her piano teacher (someone on whom she’d told me she’d had a crush) had been working on a conclusive edition of a piece called Map, by a once forgotten but now increasingly respected twentieth-century composer named Mascon Albedo. Say that, in comparing the microfilmed manuscripts with the 1903 Yates and Boling edition of the work, Rhody’s piano teacher, Alan Sparkling, discovered a surprising number of significant errors and righted them. As his corrections accumulated, he began to feel not only that Map was a much greater work than anyone could have known, but also that he, Alan Sparkling, was developing a sure instinct for Albedo’s style. And his instinct told him that there was one chord which, even though it checked out as correct against several of the relevant manuscripts, still sounded quite wrong, or at least incomplete. It didn’t sound at all like the chord Albedo would have written at that moment in the piece. And it was a chord of crucial importance to the meaning of the work—a very soft chiming that arrived after a long stretch of murkier pianism that should have come off as strange and triumphant, but as it stood did not. The chord was surmounted by a fermata.

  Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was composing that particular movement of Map. Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals—there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps—things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that Map had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers Map gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in Map.

  Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map. He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music. Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

  All that week Rhody devotedly practiced Map, conscious of what an honor it was to be the first person to reanimate the cleaned-up version. It soon became clear to her that Professor Sparkling’s enthusiasm was justified: Mascon Albedo stood revealed as no mere minor-league friend of Luciano Berio, but as a leaping titan of pianism. Though the surface of the piece had struck her ear at first as knotty and over-intellectual, as she perfected her performance of it she found that on the contrary it had an almost disturbing secondary sensual appeal: it made her exceedingly aware of the physical reality of her own playing. If the piece required her to play a simple A-flat-major triad with her left hand, she would feel in doing so as if the black A-flat and E-flat keys were soft, low, tree-covered hills, smoothed by forgotten glaciers, and the C between them a fog-filled valley, over which her poised fingers were parachuting very early in the morning; an ordinary pile of perfect fourths and fifths would slice through her like the stave of a hard-boiled-egg slicer; she could sense the felt-covered hammers thumping against the piano wires as gently as the noses of sheep in pens or fish against glass; she felt with extraordinary vividness her right foot making its little jumps on the sustain pedal, hosing off any recent blendings and allowing a new concord to rise up clean from its mud-wrestling past. The piece seemed to rediscover the amazement every pianist should properly feel at the invention of the piano. Moreover, playing it did very odd things to her perception of time, though it did so only when she began right at the beginning and went straight through.

  Another piano student, Paul Mackey, knocked on her practice-room door on the eve of her lesson with Professor Sparkling. He asked her what she was up to. She was evasive, saying only that she was doing an Albedo piece for Sparkling. Paul seemed impressed and asked if he could hear some of it. Reluctantly at first, Rhody began playing it. Paul paced in the tiny room as he listened; he had the distracting habit of doing laps around the piano while he listened to his friends play. But the music was so powerful that Rhody found that she could successfully ignore him, at least until something unexpected happened. She came to the emended chord, the soft one dangling like a trumpet vine under the fermata, and played it, holding the sustain pedal down, and glanced up at him to get his reaction, and saw that Paul was completely motionless, halted in mid-step in some sort of trance. The chord slowly faded; when it was inaudible, Paul ajbruptly looked at her and said, “Why did you stop?”

  “Why did you stop?” said Rhody.

  “What do you mean?” said Paul. “You just hit that weird staccato chord and then stopped playing.”

  “It was hardly a staccato chord,” said Rhody. “It had a fermata over it, in fact. Look.”

  Paul examined the music and raised his eyebrows. “Well, you certainly played it like a staccato chord.”

  Rhody pondered Paul’s reaction for a second and then began a few bars back and finished the piece. This time there was no unusual behavior from Paul.

  That night she had a dream in which she did Kegel exercises with a vaginal
barbell until her PC muscles were so strong that when she went onstage under black-light and inserted a red Swingline 99 hand-held stapler in her vagina, she could staple a glowing airplane ticket with it. Professor Sparkling was in the audience, watching her staple the airplane tickets that the other men shyly brought up and held between her legs. He had a tube of phosphorescent motionlotion that he squeezed on the shaft of his penis so that, as he began to stroke it, it glowed with a pale blue light. He walked up the side stairs onto the stage and knelt before where she sat on a black Thonet chair. He held in one hand the manuscript of his paper on the history of Mascon Albedo’s deliberate disimprovement of Map. He was almost invisible except for his semi-soft glowing penis, although the EXIT sign cast a faint reddish tint on his wild Dershowitz-for-the-Defense hair and hairy shoulders; he placed a corner of the manuscript between her thighs and she lifted herself off the seat of the chair and positioned the jaws of the Swingline around the paper and groaned like a weight-lifter and tightened her vaginal muscles as hard as she possibly could and successfully got the stapler to force a staple through all nine pages. There was applause. Professor Sparkling bowed and walked away, stroking his penis in a scholarly way. In the background, the whole time, the fermata chord from Map chimed and faded, chimed and faded.

  Still under the influence of her dream, she went to her nine o’clock lesson in a state of disoriented, stumbling horniness. “This is a momentous occasion,” Professor Sparkling said archly. He sat as he usually did on a low couch with one ankle on the opposite knee, a copy of the piece open beside him. “All right,” he said and gestured to her to begin. She played. When she came to the fermata chord, she splayed her fingers to play it and brought her hands gently down and felt both middle fingers descend into the low white key-vales, curved as ballet dancers curve their middle fingers when they stand in second position. Relying on the sustain pedal, she looked over at Sparkling: like Paul the day before, Sparkling was frozen, staring, stopped dead in the act of scratching his upper thigh. She could make out the profane, broccoli-shaped outline of his cock and balls under his loose cuffed pants. Hurriedly, before the chord wore out, she lifted her skirt and slid first her left and then her right middle finger high up into her slot and tickled her cervix. Then she resumed playing the piece. When she finished, Sparkling applauded, as much for himself as for her. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, standing. “It’s a strange and moving piece, don’t you think?”