The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  “That’s quite all right,” she would say. She would be very unflappable and pleasant. We would wave good-night.

  In my room, I would throw myself on the bed and sigh with relief—nothing bad had happened! I would think that I should ask her out for a bite to eat, since it was dinner time. I better ask her out right now, I would say to myself, before she gets undressed or has a shower, while we are both still in the ceremonially friendly mood-envelope. I would hop up—and then I would think better of it. The problem would be that I was right on the brink of being perceived as a threat by her, and I wouldn’t be able to risk seeming sinister or sleazy by making any advances now. And I wouldn’t have to. The fact that we were in side-by-side rooms would feel increasingly relevant as the evening progressed: time would be on my side. I would lie back on the bed with my hands on my forehead, listening to the sounds from her room. Despite the doors connecting us, her room would turn out to be surprisingly uneavesdroppable-on. I would hear her water run for a while—perhaps a very quick shower, more likely a face-wash and a toothbrushing. Fifteen minutes would pass. I would hear her unlock several locks and go outside. She would be on her way to dinner. I would wait and then Drop and hide behind a corner and watch her. She would decide to dine at the lugubrious woodgrain-Formica-and-waitresses-with-Early-American-bonnets restaurant that was linked to the motel, just because she was tired and it was close by. I would buy a local paper from a machine and go inside and take a menu and sit down somewhere, ignoring the PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU sign, and then I would stop meddling with time. I would be deep into menu-parsing when Adele walked in. There would be very few folks in the restaurant. The hostess would seat Adele at a nearby table. When Adele said, “Thanks,” I would look up with pleased surprise. I would say hello. She would be carrying a copy of Mirabella, still wearing the pink sweater. When she sat down, I would lean over and ask her, “After you’ve read your magazine and I’ve read my newspaper, will you join me for dessert?”

  And of course she would say yes.

  The two of us would pretend that we didn’t exist for half an hour. While I ate my pot roast, I would rattle the newspaper with a serious air and read it more thoroughly than I’ve read a newspaper in years. Finally there would come an indecisive moment after our dinner plates were removed. I would look up again and say, “Dessert time?”

  She would get up and come over. “I shouldn’t, but I will,” she would say. “The list looks interesting.” We would discuss what an apricot crumble might in reality be, pretending to be more in the dark than we were. Then I would apologize again for the mix-up with the rooms. I would say that it was pure absent-minded stupidity on my part.

  She would say, “It’s the second weird thing that has happened to me today.”

  “Oh?” I would prompt. “The second?”

  Yes, she would reply. She would tell me that she had been driving along the Mass Pike a few hours earlier, minding her own business, listening to a Suzanne Vega tape, when all of a sudden this voice had come on the speakers saying that he was someone in a car that she had recently passed and that he had used his powers to replace the tape in her cassette player with the one she was hearing. She would report that the tape had turned out to be, as you might expect, pornographic. “Really kind of strong stuff in places,” she would tell me. “Kind of disgusting, actually.”

  “How very lurid and suggestive and mysterious,” I would say in reaction, making perplexed noises. I would question her further: did she have any idea how such an audiocassette could have made its way into her tape-player?

  She would say that she had no idea. I would tell her that I was convinced that there were still one or more major phenomena in the universe that were as yet unknown or were radically misunderstood. “Are you a scientist?” she would inquire. I would say no, with a light laugh, and tell her that I was a temp in Boston, returning from seeing relatives in Pittsburgh. She would say that she was doing linguistics at the University of Chicago. She would be interested in language acquisition in children from bilingual families. We would talk quite happily about language acquisition in children from bilingual families for a long while, since I am interested in that subject myself. She would let me pay for her dessert.

  Before we left, I would take a deep breath and say, “You have to forgive me. I’m desperately curious to know what sort of stuff was on that pornographic cassette. Was it just him huffing and puffing?”

  “Nothing like that,” Adele would reply. “It was fairly elaborate. It was a whole story.”

  I would lean forward, intrigued. “Really?” I would watch her think over what she remembered of it. I would notice her mentally putting aside the first images that came to her from it because she didn’t want to discuss them with me.

  She would say, “It was about this woman who—well, there was a UPS man …”

  “Figures,” I would say dismissively.

  “And a neighbor boy,” she would continue, “and the boy’s girlfriend. And a lawn-mower.”

  I would look alarmed. “Not something violent with a lawn-mower.”

  She would shake her head.

  “So just your standard porn, basically,” I would say.

  She would think that one over. “I guess so. There were a great many dildos, which is fine, I guess—whatever. But then—I don’t know—golden showers? Actual out-and-out defecation?”

  “Yuck,” I would exclaim.

  “I don’t mean,” she would add, “that they were defecating all over the place. It was done with some taste and refinement. But still, there was a general overemphasis on the anal side of things, in my view.”

  “Fascinating,” I would say.

  “And I’m not saying,” Adele would open-mindedly go on, “that there isn’t some merit to checking in on that part of the world from time to time. I know that it’s richly furnished with nerve-endings. But to give it top billing …”

  I would agree wholeheartedly and shake my head at the error of laying too much stress on that area. Then, however, I too would be forced to demonstrate my open-mindedness. “I mean, it certainly doesn’t hurt to include it in the festivities from time to time, occasionally. But it’s more to reawaken one’s appreciation of the usual avenues than as an end in itself.”

  Adele would suddenly start laughing.

  I would look inquiringly at her.

  “Nothing, nothing,” she would say. “Something just popped into my head and struck me as funny. It’s nothing—it’s not funny at all. It’s just that ancient expression ‘Hershey highway.’ ” Having said it, Adele would lean forward, her hands on her face, laughing hard. “Oh boy, sorry.” She would lift her water glass an inch off the table and then set it down, clearing her throat, still laughing a little. “Sorry. It’s just that if you could have heard this tape, on and on about ‘up her butt’ and ‘in her ass’ and ‘show me that tight little ass,’ God. Sorry.”

  I would laugh politely. “What sort of voice did the man on the tape have?” I would ask.

  “A very sort of straight-arrow voice,” Adele would say. “No Boston accent or anything. Maybe a bit like your voice. Quite deep, though.” She would give me a look and I would have a feeling that she was on the verge of asking me if I had made the tape. (The stately pace of sound-waves in the Fold would further explain my altered timbre.) But she wouldn’t ask. Possibly she wouldn’t want to know that I was the Arno Van Dilden behind Marian the Librarian. She wouldn’t want me to be a liar and a trickster and a sneak, but a genuine, somewhat-fun-to-talk- to one-time dessert companion, which is what I would genuinely want to be for her as well. We would walk back up the slope to the motel. Our respective keys would make jingly sounds. I would be so sleepy by this time that I would hardly be able to stand.

  I would ask her, “Are you leaving at the crack of dawn or will you be able to have some breakfast?”

  She would say that she would probably just get something at a drive-through.

  “Well,” I would sa
y, shaking her hand, “good luck with your bilingual research.” We would go into our rooms. I would take a shower and get in bed and fall asleep thinking about light-switches that go up and down without making a clicking sound. It would only be about eight-thirty, real time. The effort involved in trying to be likable, on top of the lack of sleep, would have completely wiped me out. Two hours later, the phone would ring.

  It would be Adele. “Did I wake you up?”

  I would say no.

  She would say, “The reason I’m calling is, you know what? I think you unintentionally made off with my washcloth.”

  I would pretend to think back. I would remember. “Right, of course. I was flustered.”

  Adele would say, “I believe that you had it on top of that pile of reading material.”

  “You’re right,” I would say. “Do you need it? I’ll bring it right over.”

  “Well,” she would explain, “I’m thinking of taking a bath, and a bath is just not a bath without a washcloth.”

  I would indicate that I agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. “The washcloth is one of the more versatile things you can bring with you to the bathtub,” I would say. I would tell her how much I liked it when I got soap in my eyes and I squeezed out the washcloth and scrubbed my eyes really hard with it, making the sting of the soap miraculously go away. Adele would tell me how as a child she had arranged her dolls at the foot of the tub and used wet washcloths as blankets, tucking them in. I would ask her whether she had raised her dolls bilingually. She would say that in fact she had developed several doll languages. We would share a few more thoughts on this rich and interesting subject.

  “Well,” she would finally say.

  “How do you want to work this?” I would tentatively ask. “I could just bring one over. You’ll hear a knock and I’ll just hand you one. I took a shower earlier, but I only used one.”

  “I took a shower earlier, too,” Adele would say. “But I can’t sleep now.” She would hesitate. “If you’re not decent, or you don’t want to go outside in the cold, I was thinking that there seems to be a door leading directly from your room to my room. I’ll keep the chain on my side hooked on, because I’m not … well … anyway, you could just hand it through the gap in my door.”

  I would tell her what a good idea I thought that was. “Let me see if my side opens.” I would undo the chain and the slide-lock on my side and open my door, revealing a second, knobless door on her side. “My side is open now,” I would say. “I’ll hang up and get the washcloth.”

  “Okay, see you in a second,” she would say.

  The white square of fabric would still be resting on top of the pile of dirty magazines. I would fold it up neatly, like a blank business letter, and knock once on her inner door. After a series of unbolting noises, the door would open a crack. Adele’s eye and the corner of her mouth would appear. “Surprise,” she would say.

  “I’m so very glad to have found you at home,” I would gallantly offer.

  Adele would put her hand to the gap and I would stuff the washcloth through. “Have a good bath,” I would say.

  She would thank me and apologize for disturbing me so late.

  “Don’t be silly,” I would say. “Do you read in the bath? I have the local paper. But I guess newspapers are not really bath matter. I do have, though, as you saw, a stack of dirty magazines. Ah, I forgot—you have Mirabella, so you’re all set.”

  “I’ve already read everything in Mirabella except the horoscope page,” she would say. “I suppose I could read it again. I do love to read in the bath. In that … pile,” she would innocently ask, “are there any magazines that you could recommend?”

  I would be taken aback by the idea of a recommendation. “To be quite honest,” I would say, “I had just laid them out on your—on the bed in your room there, pretty much at random, when you unlocked the door and found me. I haven’t really studied them. Why don’t I drag them over now, and we can take a look.”

  “Okay,” she would say, elongating the second syllable with a trace of doubt.

  I would exaggerate the “oofs” of lifting the weight of fourteen magazines. It is remarkable, though, how heavy a pile of men’s magazines can be. They would make a deep heavy rectangular sound when I let them drop from a few inches above the brown carpeting, a sound that would momentarily remind me of newspaper-recycling efforts and the closing of car doors. (It would make sense that dropped newspaper bundles and car-door-closings would be related, since car doors are in fact filled with old newspapers as sound-damping insulation.) With an air of bemused superiority, though with a distinct undertone of boyish excitement, I would read off the names of the magazines. “Let’s see. There’s Celebrity Sleuth and Leg Show, Max, Fox, Lips. What’s this one? Ah, Best of High Society, Assets, Club, Hooters, Velvet, High Society, Swank, Tail Ends, Gent …”

  She would ask, “Why in the world do you need so many?”

  “I only do this in motels,” I would explain. “I have to have the entire bed covered with open magazines. Ideally I’d have twin beds covered, and be able to pivot back and forth between both pictorial bedspreads.”

  “It seems a little excessive,” Adele would say, justifiably.

  “Does it?” I would ask.

  “Expensive, anyway,” she would say.

  “This pile cost eighty-five dollars,” I would tell her. “So it would make me feel much better, much less wasteful, if someone else besides me got some use out of them. It’s like not wanting to drink alone.” I would tell the story of how, when I was packing to leave for college and I had to get rid of all the dirty magazines of my adolescence, I couldn’t bear to throw them away, so I took them to the park in a paper bag and left them in a place where drunks sometimes slept, figuring that they might have a second life there. “Now I know that there are bookstores that buy used magazines,” I would say. “Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury. Now that’s a great store. Have you been there?”

  Adele would say she thought she had, once. Encouraged, I would tell her another story, about a time when I was in the Avenue Victor Hugo one Sunday afternoon when a very serious Lebanese-looking man brought in three heavy boxes of old Penthouses. The used-book buyer looked at the boxes, but he didn’t issue store credit for them right away. Instead he called out to an assistant, a woman of twenty, black hair, glasses, who had been in the back shelving some old mint Frederik Pohl paperbacks, each one in a protective plastic collector’s sleeve, and told her there were three boxes of Penthouses. The assistant sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the boxes. I thought she was just going to count the magazines. And she did count them. But as she lifted each one, she flipped through it, opening it to its center-spread, glancing at the picture, and then closing it back up and putting it in a neat pile. I hovered near the fancy slipcased editions of Poe, observing all this, trying to puzzle out her behavior. The woman didn’t seem to be motivated by a desire to get a look at each Penthouse pet. (“Pet” is offensive, in my opinion.) She sighed in a bored or perhaps resigned way as she did it. Her movements repeated themselves automatically. She didn’t mind opening these magazines, baring them right down to the bent ends of their center-spread staples in the front of the store, in the presence of anyone who happened to be there, but she did it not out of interest but because it was simply part of her job. What exactly, though, was she looking for? I wondered. And then I understood. The store was not going to accept any magazine onto which someone had come. Having been burned in the past by greedy unprincipled men who tried to unload their utterly unresellable porn-libraries, they now had instituted a firm policy of flipping through every issue to make sure that none of its pages were stuck together. The Lebanese man had stood uncomfortably by while all this was going on. Fortunately, he had not personalized a single page of his entire collection.

  “Nor have you, I take it,” Adele would say when I finished telling her my Avenue Victor Hugo story.

  “That’s right,” I would answer. �
�Each of these magazines is as impersonal as the next. Which ones do you want to look at?” I would tell her that Swank was said by insiders to be temporarily in the ascendant and that Leg Show was interesting and funny at times. I would pretend to be more of a connoisseur than I am. Showing someone your pornography collection was, I would reflect to myself, a very straightforward form of exhibitionism: Here are my private sexual things, it said. Look at them, like them, hold them.

  As I fed magazines through the gap in the door, Adele would leaf through them, at first attentively, then less so. She wouldn’t react as I had hoped. “I don’t know,” she would say several times with different intonations. I would push a few more through to her. Finally she would say, “No. I don’t go for this. The skin has an unreal look. All the women look the same. Why do men need so many identical pictures in one month?” She would finish flipping through the last magazine. “No. I just don’t think I can take any of these to the bath with me; I don’t think I can take seeing any more pictures of women’s vaginas. I’ve never seen so many vaginas in my life. Here.”

  She would slip the magazines back through the gap in the door to me. I would pile them up neatly as they reappeared, two by two. I would try to recoup through explanation. I would tell her that bringing out all your magazines and arranging them on the bed was sort of like getting an erection. First your periodical pornography is folded away in darkness in a drawer or a bag or a box, stored in its most compact form, and then you bring it out, you flap it around in the light, you increase its two-dimensional surface area. I would grant her that there was a feeling of sameness at times, that sometimes I got surfeited, that my interest went through phases. (Which would be a true statement: I rarely used porn when I had Fold-powers, since all the world was a dirty magazine then.) But in general, I would say, men unfortunately do want the same thing over and over—a different woman identically posed is the only difference they need. I would tell her that each tiny variation between two women’s bodies constituted a huge difference from a sexual point of view. The same body wearing different clothes or with different-colored hair didn’t read as sexually different; it had to be a different body. I would tell her this not as if I were pleased about it, but as if it were simply the way it was. For some women like when men tell the truth about themselves.