The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  The woman in front of me at the library, it now occurred to me, was older than that sixteen-year-old girlfriend of so long ago, and she might be willing to have the strange resemblance between ball-hair and spermatazoa pointed out to her—but then again she might not. So much depended, of course, on how you presented the information—a tone of self-surprised irrepressibility often worked best. My ex-girlfriend Rhody once had a barbecue and invited six or seven friends over. My job was to get the charcoal to light. Standing with my feet planted far apart, leaning over the small hemispherical grill, I fanned the coals so strenuously and rapidly with the Arts section of the Globe that my balls started flapping backward and forward in exactly the same rhythm as my arms. It was a unique experience, to be able to feel those cocktail onions to-ing and fro-ing with such gusto. I stopped to get my breath and as the flames grew looked up at the woman standing near me holding a drink (one of Rhody’s friends from work), and I said to her, in an amazed voice, “My balls are actually flapping. It’s a new experience.” She nodded sideways, smiling, and sipped her drink; she didn’t seem to mind my telling her that. I fanned the coals some more and then we talked briefly of barbecue starter-coils. “But you seem to like flapping,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that.” God, how I treasure those little flirtatious moments.

  The book-checkout line was not short, so I had plenty of time to think as many sexual thoughts as I wanted to while I looked at the blue shoulder strap and freckled skin of Ms. Henna in front of me. The title of her book was exerting ever more roentgenizing power over my state of mind; I was almost out of control. Naked, naked, naked, naked, naked. I wanted so very much to see her back and big soft buttcheeks. I imagined her face-down on a massage table, with her soft hair pinned out of the way, her eyes half closed, dreamy from the steam room, a white towel over her legs. I would walk in bearing a large white bowl with a green rim that was filled with quarts of semi-cool tropical oil and a dozen or so stone eggs of various marbled colors. I would set the bowl on a small rolling table very near her head and begin to stir and tumble the stone eggs slowly with my hands in the oil, like a sedated saladier, so that they clicked and clocked against one another and against the sides of the bowl, and then I would let my hands close around two of them, a reddish one and a black one with gray and violet markings, and I would press these into the muscles of her back, on either side of her spine, cupping them in my palms. I would work my hands alternately as a purring cat works its paws, so that the stone eggs would palpate themselves slowly down her back, carrying their own oil with them. When they threatened to go dry, I would drop them back in the bowl, and jostle their submerged forms again with my fingers, and I would select two others; these I would again hold against her, manipulating them with my hand muscles so that they turned end over end under my slippery palms. She would try to guess by feel alone what colors they were: “Hmm, I think the left one is gray and white stone shot with pink,” she would say. But no, it was a quartzy blue. I would help her turn over so that she was on her back and I would turn the slippery eggs on her high thigh muscles and on either side of her mound, and then I would have her choose which two she wanted inside her. She would pick two and I would palm the stone eggs in, so that I could hear the muffled clocking sounds as one hit the other, and as I pulled my hand away, she would bear down with her muscles and I would see the skin of her vadge stretch as she gave birth to one of them, like those wonderful midnight sea-tortoise egg-laying scenes on Nature, where you can see the tortoise’s vagina swell and stretch over the sand pit as another egg appears, and it would fall out all slick in my hand.

  The more graphic and specific my sexual imagery grew, the more the relatively simple idea of strapping the vibrating Butterfly onto her became, by contrast, tame and gentle and uninvasive—the very least I could do for her. Her neck-holes, her back, had the definite look of a vibrator-lover, anyway. I let her check out her book (she and the library man had a moment of feeling eye contact, as I had expected) and walk out onto the street, and then I brought the universe down and got out the Butterfly. My plan was to put it on her as she walked home, because I thought that she would feel it less, perhaps, if she was in a state of movement than if she was sitting down. But I had to be sure that it wouldn’t startle her—I wasn’t interested in disturbing her or making her feel she was losing her sanity. Consequently I had to test the product out on myself: I kicked off my pants and underpants, and, placing a Handi Wipe between the pleasure-nubbins of the machine and my scrotum so that I wouldn’t be exposing Ms. Henna to any of my germs when I did finally strap it on her, I stepped into its straps and pulled it snugly in place. I walked around the lobby of the library with it on, looking at the high corners of the room and concentrating on what it felt like. I was surprised to find that, though fairly tight, the black straps around my ass and thighs weren’t perceptible at all as I walked. What was perceptible, unfortunately, was the width of the Butterfly itself between my thighs. Perhaps if the bulk of my genitalia weren’t in the way the device would have nestled more comfortably, but even then it might be instantly apparent to the woman that something was there. I recalled reading a news item about a large woman who shoplifted portable TVs by walking out with them between her legs; but it wouldn’t do here to have a shape that the woman could feel as she walked. But all was not lost—I found that when I was sitting down, even with my legs crossed, it was as if the rubbery shape of the Butterfly didn’t exist. My body adjusted instantly to its presence. I put the two free Sonic-brand batteries in the pink plastic battery case and turned the dial until the vibration started. On full, the noise was appallingly loud. She would hear it. Even at the lowest level, which is where I would have it when I put it on her (so that it would remain below the threshold of consciousness, would be a vibration that was perceptible only as a change of mood, not as an actual physical signal), it made a sound that was not so much a buzz as a kind of low chuckling. My only hope now, I realized, was that she wasn’t going to walk home, but was going to take the bus or the subway, where the transit noise would mask its noise. As for the feeling of the Butterfly on my own equipment: it was not positively unpleasant, but didn’t feel at all wonderful, either (maybe the Handi Wipe was part of the problem), which I was on the whole pleased about, since it made the fact that women come so hard with vibrators all the more mysterious and womanly and different from male pleasure.

  I got dressed, got back in line, flipped on the universe, and checked out my books, looking at my watch to make the checker-outer hurry. Outside, I spotted the woman at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth, where she was waiting to cross the street. I loitered, hoping that she would go down the steps to the T, which, lucky for me, she did. I was observing her in the shadows; nobody could see me and so nobody would notice if I suddenly disappeared from where I was standing. I stopped time and caught up with the woman. Her name, I found, hastily looking through her purse, was Andrea Apuleo, a perfectly reasonable name, though like all names something of a surprise for the first few minutes if you have had the opportunity to develop an idea of the person in advance. She lived in Chestnut Hill. I hopped down the stairs ahead of her and took a seat on a bench on the platform, so that when I got on the same train as she did she wouldn’t have any suspicion that I had been following her. (I was pretty sure that she hadn’t gotten a good look at me in the library.) When a C train finally showed up, ten minutes later, she took one of the forward-oriented seats and I took one facing sideways. I had been worried about Andrea’s bodysuit, thinking I might have to take it off or slide it to the side, but when I began putting the Butterfly on her in the Fold I found that it worked beautifully to hug the device tight against her inner drapery. It could be set very low and yet she would feel something. I shook the battery case to awaken it within the Fold and turned the dial and brought it down to the barest hint of vibration—and then I thought better of it: the first time I turned time on in this sequence, she should just have the device strapped on,
unvibrating, so that her body would get used to its presence. Over a series of six or seven time-perversions I gradually increased its flutter-level. Pretending to read, I watched her. At a certain point, she made a peculiar expression that was clearly pleasure and covertly reached down to feel between her legs to find out what was going on (nobody was sitting next to her): just before she would have felt the shape of the alien Butterfly with her hand, I stopped time and removed it. Satisfied that there was nothing there, Andrea sat back, and when I had reinstalled the machine and gradually accelerated its vibration with the thumb dial, as the train accelerated between Copley and Kenmore, she let herself feel good, her hands resting on the back of the seat in front of her, her head resting on the black glass of the window. She wanted to look as if she were having a long and complicated train of memories of something faintly sad and peaceful in the distant past, as if her thinking were accompanied by a soundtrack of Gregorian chant, but I could read through her veneer of inner peace to the sexual fizz that was definitely there. Very slowly her lips parted and her mouth opened, or almost opened: her lips were only in contact in the very middle, where there was a fuller part. By this time I had abandoned my book, unable to keep from looking directly at her. The train rhythm sounded like appetitive, appetitive, appetitive, appetitive. In a book called Love Cycles, about hormonal rhythms, parts of which I have read with great interest, Winnifred B. Cutler (Ph.D.) cites a study by Sullivan and Brender in a 1986 issue of Psychophysiology in which women were shown “sexually stimulating videotapes” while their faces were wired with electromyographic sensors. Consistently their zygomatic muscles (one of the several sets of smile muscles) contracted subtly as they watched the tapes, an effect which the researchers took as an indirect marker of arousal, like pupil dilation. Since reading around in this book (and I must point out in passing that Dr. Winnifred Cutler is photographed with a very slight Mona Lisa-esque zygomatic smile in her jacket photo, and that, according to the flap, the book’s publication date was October, the month, says Dr. Cutler, that male hormones reach their highest levels), I had been on the lookout for these secret zygosmiles, and had not noticed many—but I think that between Copley and Kenmore Andrea Apuleo was offering the world a stunning example of one right in the T.

  Just as I resumed time after turning the Butterfly up almost to full, she noticed me looking at her, and our eyes caught and laser-locked; I tried to tell her with my look that I understood how good it felt, though she was doing a tremendous job of suppressing it, and that I was the only one in the train who could see what she was going through, and that I was very moved to be able to witness it and would make no sign to anyone else of what she was letting me see. I nodded, closing my eyes, and looked at her again: giving the nod to her approaching clasm. She looked away, up at the ads for temporary agencies over the windows, and then she looked back at me, and I watched her put her lower teeth over her upper teeth, her eyes getting bigger and browner and fuller—and (I am almost sure) she came. Then she took a deep breath and gathered her hair in an O made of her forefinger and released it and reached down again tentatively to her legs, so that I had to fermate quickly and remove the Butterfly from her and wipe it off (using several Wet Ones) and put it back in the case so that it looked unused. I put it in a blank manila envelope. Time rolling, I smiled at her again, in a wowed, foolish sort of way, and she smiled uncertainly back, not quite sure how to explain to herself what had just happened. At the Chestnut Hill stop she stood and passed where I was sitting. I said, “Excuse me?” and handed her the vibrating Butterfly in its envelope and then touched my fingers to my lips. I didn’t get off at that stop because I didn’t want to unnerve her or seem threatening; I reached home an hour later feeling that, in making gifts of two of my sex toys, I had turned the day around.

  6

  I HAVE WRITTEN ALMOST ALL BUT THE BEGINNING CHUNK OF this autobiographical work not sunk in the Fold but moving forward in “real time” (a term that Rhody, my ex-girlfriend, hated, though, let me tell you, substitutes are hard to come by), over two weeks of evenings, sitting at my desk in my room, smelling the smell of burning dust given off by my high-intensity lamp. I thought when I began this recital that I would write every word of it in the Fold, but, like most of the extreme ideas that I find so exciting when I first have them, I have had to abandon it in the execution. Writing is solitary enough (especially the way I’m writing now, which is with a set of earbuds in, listening to music, and thus existing unaccompanied in the very middle of a vast artificial stereophonic space, like one of those tiny figures, each accompanied by its perfunctory shadow, in a Le Corbusier drawing of an urban landscape) without intensifying the sense of solitude by stopping time. Also, the radio stations don’t broadcast when the universe is stopped. And furthermore, writing takes a great deal of time. A paragraph can take an hour! I’ve already noted that I have spent close to two years in the Fold: which makes me really thirty-seven, not thirty-five, if you measure my age by my internal cellular time. Were I to add to that secret aging all the time I will ultimately spend writing this book, I might begin, would probably begin, to look noticeably older than my birth certificate says I am, and I have no interest in inverted remakes of Dorian Gray.

  Reading over what I’ve put down so far makes me conscious of many imbalances and omissions, but there isn’t too much I can do about them. I do, though, want to point out sooner rather than later that my sexual life has not been entirely made up of the sorts of Fermating activities I just described at the library. Rhody and I had good, friendly sex (though I tended to talk too much throughout, perhaps), real-time sex, and we were together for long enough, a little over sixteen months, that we were able to marvel at how many incremental variations a couple could come up with—variations so minor that they couldn’t really be codified. It wasn’t a question of distinct “positions” but of—I don’t know—crystals grown in slightly different concentrations of a reagent, or grown in the presence of one or more trace impurities, or grown while subjected to faintly stronger or weaker gravitational fields. And we did even from time to time try new things, in the textbook sexual sense. I cut an unpeeled avocado in half one Sunday, along its poles, and pulled it apart so that one half held the blunt, slimy seed. Though not a devotee of food-sex mixtures as a general rule (not whipped cream, not peanut butter, not champagne), I do think avocado flesh is so extremely similar in its slippery bland softness to the labial rheology that it makes sense for a woman to cup half of one in her hand and press it against herself so that the big nub of the seed noses at her natcho. Rhody seemed to like it, and I was gung-ho, too—but while I was testing out our new guacamole recipe I had the further idea of cutting a small hole in the avocado skin and stuffing Rhody’s electric toothbrush at an angle into the fresh flesh so that the brush head was buried somewhere near the seed. That was how she good-naturedly came, in fact, and came big, holding the humming toothbrush-driven avocado-half between her legs while I played with the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck. I record this here in passing so that I won’t seem, with all of my somewhat aberrant sneaking and skulking in the Cleft, totally devoid of more typical sexual instincts.

  And just what would other people think of the Fermata? What would they do if they were me? Although I have up to now been able to keep my powers a strict secret, I have gone through periods when I have been eager to get some idea of what others would do in my place. I am superstitious, though, about describing what actually goes on—fearing, even when I put it hypothetically, that if I conjure up the possibility in too complete detail for someone else it will no longer be my secret and hence my temporal competence will leave me forever—so superstitious in fact that I often instead ask about ideas in the neighborhood of my secret, such as what a person would do if he had X-ray vision. What would he look at if he had X-ray vision? I had an interesting talk with a man named Bill Asplundh about this. Bill is one of the few truly fast-typing non-gay temps I have run across—he types much faster than I do. He d
rifted into temping while working on a master’s in something or other, as I did, and now he genuinely likes it. We were at a Chinese restaurant one time when I asked him what he would look at if he had X-ray vision. He was eating a yellow curry chicken dish. He said that the first thing he would do would be to look through the walls while the cooks were making up their curry powder, since it was extraordinarily good curry powder and he wanted to be able to duplicate it at home. Then he admitted that he would probably use it to look at women. “But what people don’t think about when they talk about X-ray vision,” he then said, suddenly animated, “is two things. First, what you’re talking about is not a blanket sort of X-ray vision, where your sight penetrates through any substance, but a very specific sort of X-ray vision that only goes through clothes. Textile X-ray vision is what we’re talking about. That’s pretty obvious, but perhaps less obviously, think about what you’re going to see when you see a woman who is wearing clothes but you can’t see the clothes she’s wearing. You have this idea that you’re going to see her with no clothes on, that her breasts are going to be there looking the way they would look without a bra on, but remember, she has a bra on, you just can’t see it, so you’re going to see indentations where the seams are, and if it’s a push-up bra, her breasts are going to look all squished out of shape, not the way you imagine them at all. And think if she’s wearing some kind of support pantyhose, and it’s tight—you’re going to see all this squeezing around her rear end and stuff like that. You’re going to see the panty lines there, red lines, but without the panties actually being there.”