Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  The woodpile quickly became an object of fascination for the duck. She roots in between the logs and bangs at the bark with her beak until some breaks off, to see if there are bugs underneath. Now that everything is frozen, there is much less for her to eat there, but once in the fall I lifted a bottom log for her and she found an ant colony and several worms which she consumed with much lusty beak smacking. She is a dirty eater. She snuffles in mud and grass and then goes over to the plastic wading pool that we set up for her and drinks from it, and streams of dirt flow from her beak as she scoops up the water. When she has found a patch of wet earth or weeds that particularly pleases, she makes a whimpering sound of happiness, as a piglet would at the udder. I had no idea that ducks were capable of such noises. In coloration she resembles a tabby cat.

  The other day I pried up a log from the stiff ground and turned it over so that Greta (that’s the duck’s name) could have a once-over on it before I brought it inside. It’s not just that I want to give her a treat; it’s also that I don’t want to be bringing termites or strange larvae into the house. She rooted all over the exposed underside, as if she were Tele-typing a wire-service story on it. Finally she located, hidden in a crevice, a brown thing that excited her. She was able to pry it out: it was a frozen slug. Its slime had grown ice crystals, giving it a kind of fur. I couldn’t tell if it was hibernating or dead. The duck tumbled it around in her beak and tossed it into the water (whose icy edges she’d broken earlier), and eventually much of it went down her gullet. She bobs her head to work things down into the lower part of her neck, and I suppose her gizzard goes to work on them there.

  Chapter Six

  from A BOX OF MATCHES

  Good morning, it’s 6:08 a.m.—late. When I got up and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs I could see three light effects. One was the white spreadsheet of the moonlight on the floor, and one was more moonlight barred with long banister shadows on the floor downstairs, and one was the hint of pale yellow and blue of dawn arriving beyond the trees. Or maybe it was the glow of the convenience store in the next town. I got up late because I stayed up late working on that thief of time, a website. Nothing so completely sucks an evening away as fiddling with the layout of a website. By the time I was in bed reading “The Men That Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service, Claire was asleep in her blue fleece bathrobe and it was eleven o’clock.

  But now I’m up and little flames are growing like sedums from the cracks in today’s log wall, and I still have a little while before I have to drive Phoebe to school. Every morning the coffee makes me blow my nose, and then I toss the nose-wad into the fire, and it’s gone. The fire is like a cheerful dog that waits by the table as you feed it life-scraps.

  Our bedroom was still quite dark when I got up. I felt for my glasses on the bedside table in that tender way one uses for glasses, as if one’s fingers are antennae, so as not to get smears on them. The smear of a fingerprint makes it impossible to concentrate on anything; it’s much worse than the round blur in your vision made by a speck of dust. The glasses made a little clacking sound as I sat up and put them on—oh yeah, baby. The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.

  My hand seemed to know just where my glasses would be, and this reminded me of something that I noticed about five years ago in a hotel bathroom. I wish I’d taken photographs of all the hotel rooms I’ve been in. Some of them stay in my head for a while, and some disappear immediately—those many shades of pinky beige. I remember well two of the hotel rooms that Claire and I stayed in on our honeymoon—one a fancy one, and one in an unprosperous little town. There was a bathroom behind an accordion wall in that one.

  Claire has just come to say good morning. She said that she could tell that I hadn’t been up for too long today because of the newer smell of the coffee. She has a good sense of smell. In college there were coed bathrooms; one time she knew that it was I who had surreptitiously peed in the shower stall. Right now she’s unhappy that the last American manufacturer of a certain kind of wooden spoon has gone out of business. She saw a woman on the news saying, “This was my life. My grandmother made spoons, my mother made spoons, and now it’s finished.” Claire likes old people—not just relations, but old people in general. She’s become friends with the catty woman down the street, and she is used to the smell of oxygen from oxygen tanks. I’m glad she likes old people because it means that when I get old she will be less likely to be disgusted with me.

  I’ve known Claire for—let me figure it out—twenty–three of my forty-four years. More than half my life I’ve loved her. Think of that. We met on the stairs of a dormitory; I was carrying my bicycle down and she and her roommate were walking upstairs carrying bags of new textbooks. We lived on Third North, the third floor on the north side, a hall of extremely young boys and girls (so they seem to be now) who, because we all shared a large bathroom, quickly became chummy. Claire and her roommate gave cocktail parties every Tuesday at 4:30, using the floor’s ironing board as a bar. I walked out in the snow with them to buy the liquor: I was twenty-one, and Pennsylvania had one of those tiresome laws.

  When Claire was a little drunk, she would rock slowly to reggae and her lips would get cold. Her mouth, however, was warm and her teeth sharp. I cultivated a rakishly nutty air: I discovered a fine prewar toilet on the curb and carried it into my room, propping the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary inside. But Claire had a thing for a very handsome sandy-haired boy named William. Many had crushes on William because he was gentle and aloof and had an appealing way of clearing his throat before he spoke. Rumor had it that his penis was unusually attractive, but I never saw it. William’s father was a famous surgeon, and one day William borrowed some thread and showed us how to tie the knots that famous surgeons use on wounds. He never drank. When, maliciously, I tried to slip a little gin in his tonic, he sipped and handed the glass back to me with a reproachful look. I still feel guilty.

  Claire had a thing for gentle William, as I say—and then one evening, after one of the ironing-board cocktail parties, she asked me out on a date with her to walk to the cash machine. I said that a walk to the cash machine would be very nice. In those days she wore a thrift-store cashmere coat and soft Italian sweaters and, though her mother pleaded with her, no bra. And her lips were soft, too—much softer and somehow more intelligent than others I’d kissed, and though I hadn’t kissed that many lips I’d kissed some.

  I went with her to the dentist when she had her wisdom teeth out. Afterward she slept curled for a long time, a small beautiful person; there on her desk in a glass of water were the two enormous teeth. They were like the femurs of brontosauri. How those giant teeth could have fit into her head I don’t know.

  So this morning when I reached for my glasses, I remembered noticing in a hotel how my hand had gotten better at knowing just where the soap was in an alien shower. My lower mind would hold in its memory a three-dimensional plan of the shower that included the possible perches for the soap: the ledge, the indented built-in soap tray, the near corner, the far corner. I would wash my face, then put the soap down somewhere without thinking about it, then shampoo; and then, still blind from the shampoo, I’d want to wash my lower-down areas, and even though I’d been turning around and around in the shower, I was able to use the north star of the angle of the shower-flow to orient myself, so that without looking I could bend and find the bar of soap under my fingers, often without any groping.

  Chapter Seven

  from A BOX OF MATCHES

  Good morning, it’s 4:19 a.m., and I can’t get over how bright the moon is here. We’ve lived in Oldfield for over three years now and the brightness of the moon and stars is one of the most amazing things about the place. Even when there’s a big chunk taken out of it, as there is now, the moon’s light is powerful enough that you can sense, looking out the window, what direction it’s coming from
. When you look anglingly up, there’s this thing high in the sky that you almost have to squint at. The small, high-up moons seem to be the brightest ones.

  I fall asleep a little after ten reading a software manual, and now I’m up and waiting for the train whistle. The fire today is made partly of half-charred loggage from yesterday, but mostly from thin apple branches that I sawed up when I got home from work. I tried the ax first and had a heck of a time. But a handsaw will slide right through with wondrous ease, sprinkling handfuls of sawdust out of either side of the cut, like—like I can’t think what—like a sower sowing seeds, perhaps. Anyway the fire took to burning so readily that I’ve had to move my chair back a little so that my legs aren’t in pain through the flannel.

  The thing that is so great about sitting here in the early morning is that it doesn’t matter what I did all yesterday: my mind only connects with fire-thoughts. I have an apple to eat if I want to eat it—picked in the fall and refrigerated in a state of semi-permanent crispness.

  The whole dropping-of-the-leaves thing and the coming of winter is one of those gradual processes that becomes harder to believe each year it happens. All those leaves were up there firmly attached to the trees, and they’re gone. Now, incredibly, there are no leaves on the trees. And not only that, but it’s becoming impossible to conceive that there ever would have been leaves on the trees. It’s like death, which is also becoming harder and harder for me to understand. How could someone you know and remember so well be dead? My grandmother, for instance. I can’t believe that she is dead. I don’t mean that I believe in a hereafterly world, I don’t. But it does seem puzzling to me that she is now not living.

  This year there was a particular moment of leaf-falling that I hadn’t encountered before. I went outside at sunrise to feed the duck—this was sometime in October. There was ice in her water when she jumped in: hard pieces of something that she thought might be good to eat but weren’t particularly when she tumbled and smacked them around with her beak. While I was waiting for my daughter Phoebe to come out, I began scraping off the thin ice layer on the windshield using my AAA card, and then I heard a leafy rustling a few hundred years away. I looked in the direction of the sound, expecting to see a coon cat or a fox. What I saw, instead, was a middle-sized, yellow-leafed sugar maple tree. It was behaving oddly: all of its leaves were dropping off at the same time. It wasn’t the wind—there was no wind. I stood there for a while, watching the tree denude itself at this unusual pace, and I came up with a theory to explain the simultaneity of the unleaving. The tree was not as tall as some of the other trees—that’s the first thing. And it was the first night-freeze of the year. So we can imagine all the twigs of the tree coated with the same thin but tenacious coat of ice that I was encountering on the windshield. Now the sun had risen enough to clear the dense hummock of forest across the creek, and thus sunlight was striking and warming the leaves on this particular tree for the first time since they’d frozen. The night-ice had sheathed the skin, holding the leaf in place, but the freeze had also caused the final rupture in the parenchymatous cells that attached the leaf-stem to its twig: as soon as the ice melted, the leaf fell. I had some confirmation of my theory when I noticed that the leaves on the sunward side of the tree were mainly the ones that were falling.

  My son, who is eight, had a plan for the leaves this year. He filled six large kraft-paper bags with them, and saved them in the barn, so that when my brother and sister-in-law came to visit with their children he could make an enormous pile. His plan worked, which is not true of all his plans. The pile was big and the leaves were dry, not soggy, and my sister-in-law and I took lots of pictures of smiling children leaping around piles of leaves and flinging them in the air, and I had that moment of slight fear when I knew the future. I knew that we would remember this moment better than other perhaps worthier or more representative moments because we were taking pictures of it. The duck hovered near the rake, hoping that we would get down to a slimy underlayer where the worms lived. But there wasn’t one.

  I found out yesterday that one of the town elders has died. He sounded perfectly fine over the phone when I talked to him in November—gravelly-voiced but fine. When I was taking out the garbage yesterday, walking up the ramp that leads into the barn, I suddenly imagined this aged man turning from a living human being to skull and bones—and I was amazed in the same way that I’m amazed when the leaves fall and we’re left with skeletal trees every year. Really I’m glad my grandparents were cremated. I don’t like the idea that their skulls would be around somewhere. Better and more dignified for them to be completely parceled out.

  Chapter Eight

  from A BOX OF MATCHES

  Good morning, it’s 4:50 a.m.—I just took such a deep bite of red apple that it pushed my lower lip all the way down to where the lip joins up with the chin. There is a clonk point there, and a good apple can do that, push your lower lip down to its clonk point. Sometimes you think for a moment that you’re going to get stuck in the apple because you can’t bite down any farther. But all you have to do is push the apple a little to the left—or pull it to the right—and let the half-bitten chunk break off in your mouth. If you do it slowly, it sounds like a tree falling in the forest. Then start chewing.

  Phoebe said something yesterday on the way to school that I thought was very true. While I was finishing feeding the duck, she came out in her perfectly ironed blue jeans, carrying a piece of toast in her mittens and crouching like a Sherpa beneath the load of her backpack. She’s fourteen. We both got in the car, and I turned the heater on full. It roared and hurled out a blast of icy air. Phoebe held a mitten over her mouth and nose and said, “It’s cold, Dad, it’s cold.” I said, “You’re not kidding it’s cold—it’s really cold.”

  As I took hold of the steering wheel, I made an exaggeratedly convulsive noise of frozenness, and Phoebe looked over and saw that I was hatless. Then she noticed that my hat—a tweed hat with a silk inner band—was stuffed down near the hand brake. It had been in the car all night, cooling down. She reached for it, and in that abrupt way that people have when they’re trying to conserve warmth, she held it out to me. “Put this on,” she said.

  The thick tweed looked tempting, but I knew better and I said, “If I put this on I’m going to freeze.”

  She took the hat back from me and held it over the heater vents for a few seconds. “Try it now,” she said.

  The heater, as it turned out, had not warmed the hat to any perceptible degree: the silk inner band was a ring of ice and my head recoiled at the chill. I said: “Yow, yes, that’s going to be better.”

  “You’ve got to get cold to get warm,” Phoebe said.

  Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It’s true with money and love, too. You’ve got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go on a date to the cash machine, so I didn’t actually have to ask her. Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm.

  By the time I dropped Phoebe off and gave her a dollar for a snack, my hat was as comfortably situated on my head as if it had hung on the coat tree all night.

  Henry was building a Mars city when I got home from work. He went upstairs and came out of his room with an enormous Rubbermaid storage container full of Legos. It seemed bigger than he could handle. Each Lego piece is as light as a raisin, but they become heavy in the aggregate.

  “Do you need some help with that?” I asked him.

  “No, thanks, I think I can do it,” said Henry.

  “That’s certainly a lot of Legos,” I said.

  “Dad, you should see how I get it up the stairs. It takes me about an hour.” He stepped down each step very slowly, his heels treading on the edges of his too-long sweatpants
. “Sometimes I get in hard situations where I’m balanced on one toe. It’s not very pleasant.”

  I’ve turned the top half-log over—it looks like a glowing side of beef now.

  VINTAGE BOOKS BY NICHOLSON BAKER

  A Box of Matches

  Nicholson Baker explores the thoughts of a man named Emmett who wakes every day before dawn to try and figure out what life is about.

  Fiction/0-375-70603-8

  Double Fold

  With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of the destruction of hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers. Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating look at the American library system.

  Nonfiction/0-375-72621-7

  The Everlasting Story of Nory

  Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now offers an enchanting idiosyncratic portrait of nine-year-old Nory Winslow. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll’s Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-76375-9

  The Fermata

  Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish, The Fermata may be the most successful fusion of literature and eros since Ovid and Boccaccio.

  Fiction/0-679-75933-6

  The Mezzanine

  Startlingly inventive and filled with offbeat wit, this wondrous novel turns a ride up the escalator of an office building into a dazzling meditation on our most familiar relations with objects and one another.