The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  She read the entire story, and when she finished she put it back in the plastic bag and twisted the twist-tie around it and buried it in the sand where she’d found it, marking its existence with three little shells. Then she reached back and re-clasped her top and turned over. I watched her stomach rise and fall as she breathed. I fancied that she was breathing a little faster than she would have been if my words hadn’t just gone through her mind. I was in her mind. There were things about what she had read that she didn’t like, or that seemed dumb to her, but even so it was working on her and making her want to go home. She sat up, put on a loose faded shirt that went almost to her knees, unpinned her hair, and walked up a path to a set of newish condos on one end of the beach. I did the usual business of pausing her as she unlocked the door so that I could slip past her and hide somewhere in her apartment. I hate hiding in women’s apartments when they are there, because I suddenly become in doing so an intruder, and all those awful hider-in-the-house movies inescapably come to mind, and the music threatens to turn tritonally ominous. The last thing in the world I want is to be seen as a threat.

  But happily, I’m good at remaining undetected in close quarters with a woman. I have never yet scared anyone. And this particular woman’s place was perfect, since it was all open and loft-like, with a bedroom supported by columns up a spiral flight of stairs. I sat on her bed listening intently to her putterings below, and when I heard her steps on the stairway, I stopped time and went down and past her (ducking under her arm) and sat on a chair in the kitchen. The tops of my ears were getting a little sore from all the time-pervertive pulling and pushing on my glasses, but it was a tiny price to pay. The water began running in the pipes, always a good sign. I pushed my triune crotch-lump against the cool Corian edge of the countertop.

  Eventually I Dropped and went up to see whether it was the sink or a shower or a bath and found her bent over, naked, rummaging around in the back of a drawer, while the lower tap filled her tub. I studied her profile for half a minute: she had a lively, somewhat thin face, oily from sunscreen, with a high nose bridge, a nose that was more intelligent-seeming than her eyes, if that makes sense. (Though I have to be careful about evaluating the intelligence of women’s eyes in the Fold, since a person’s look varies so radically from instant to instant, and I could just be catching her at a moment of unflattering inattention.) The corners of her mouth were tight as she reached in her drawer. I couldn’t see what her hands were searching for under her folded sweatshirts and leggings, but I had my hopes.

  Just before a woman takes a bath, as the water is running, her nudity suddenly releases all of its charged ions of lewdness and becomes wholly artistique: she is naked in order to bathe herself, and bathe is such a smooth-surfaced, wide-voweled, modest word that you can appreciate the particulars of her beauty without any of your own erectile fierceness getting in the way. She is suddenly a modern dancer, a water-sprite, a wood-nymph, a naturist, her tits are not conceivably tits but breasts, and no matter how funkily they are shaped they appeal to the lovingly appreciative Ansel Adams in us rather than to the groper and pocket-pool player. This despite her manifest protosexual charms, her softly domey areolae, the Moorish arch her ass made in giving way effortlessly to her thighs, all of which I was able to review thoroughly for the first time with her up and on her feet. I didn’t spend too long in that early Fold, though, eager for her to get on with her intention, whatever it might be. I got out of sight and turhed time on and distracted myself by reading half an article in Conde Nast Traveler on a lake system in Canada (my bather’s name, given on the magazine’s address label, was Michelle Hoffman), and then, when I heard the water stop, I checked in on her again.

  Her bath had begun. Her knees were above the surface of the water, the kneecaps flat and square, and the water was clear (no genitally irritating bubble bath for this woman), and she had just lifted one arm, so that long pale-green streamers and trailers of water poured stilly off of it. Her hand loosely held a red washcloth, soft with a surround of unfailing water. I could easily have knelt in the bathtub with her and jacked looking at the way the riverine trails of water joined at her elbow and fell off her, a little like those festive triangular vinyl flags hung around used-car lots.

  (Actually no—they didn’t make me think of a used-car lot at all at that moment; they made me think of the way a woman’s urine falls from between her legs, confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan of hard-to-source cockscomb-triangles. I used to think that the reason why women’s urination sounded so intricately different from men’s had only to do with the end-points of this splayed outflow, since there were so many separate points of collision with toilet water, as opposed to the single focused plunge of the continuous male stream—but the other day, listening to Joyce pee in the ladies’ room from the next stall, I realized that it isn’t only that. The more important difference is that male urine makes no noise as it flies out of the penis-knob, because it has become, due to the inordinate length of the male urethra, a coherent, laserlike flow. The only noise that men make, then, is the noise their departed urine produces later, in colliding with whatever texture and substance it collides with. But women’s urethras are not stealthy. They are short, since they are not needed to help pulse out a comeshot (I ignore the touchy subject of fejaculation, or ejillulation, here); their urine wings excitedly out rather than releasing itself in a single laminar column, and this exit-spraying itself makes a distinct noise, a likable, high whistle-warble-hissing that you can hear over the broadcast of complex terminal splashings. “Making water” as a euphemism applies much better to what women do than what men do.)

  But I didn’t want to come yet with Michelle—I was curious about whether she had any sexual plans herself. To be honest, my feelings had been a little hurt that she had not brought home the story I had written for her to keep forever—although I consoled myself by thinking that maybe she was just being considerate in reburying it, not wanting to interfere with some top-secret interlover dropoff. I did feel a little rejected, and I was hoping to restore my cheer by watching her do something all by herself that would serve as real concrete proof that I had gotten to her in an actively crotchy sense. Just a bath was not enough. Kneeling by the edge of the tub, I spotted something dark in the water near her feet. Her toes were curled around it. When I put my head very close to the surface of the lavishly chlorinated water, steadying myself on one of her knees, I determined that the object was, as I had of course hoped but hadn’t really allowed myself to expect, a large black realistic rubber dildo. She was bathing with her rubber dildo—oh poetry! She was relaxing, letting her eyes close, not thinking about that single-minded submarine cruising around out of sight, beyond her bent knees, but because it was unquestionably there in the water with her, it was working under her thoughts and keeping her just on the edge of conscious arousal. It was time to take some chances with her.

  I removed all the clothes from the tall wicker laundry hamper that stood under the bathroom window and piled them on her bed and got inside the hamper with a wrinkly dark-gray linen shirt of hers tied loosely over my face; though I was in something of a fetal position, and though I could not see all that well through the linen, I could at least get some notion of what was going on as she proceeded with her bath. I used my glasses to Unfold; at once her hand tightened on the red washcloth and lots of water fell along her arm. Then nothing much happened for a long time. She wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with the washcloth several times, and she sighed a total of three long sighs. There were splashes whose nature I couldn’t determine. She shaved her legs for a while. She ran some more hot water and stirred it around. Once or twice she whispered aloud, going over fragments of remembered conversation, as far as I could tell. She did what looked to be a set of leg lifts. When the pain in my knees became too acute I Dropped, climbed out, and took a break downstairs, finishing the article on the Canadian lakes. I sang the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere,” walking around in her living room.
I left my clothes in a little mound on her coffee table and went back upstairs and stuffed myself back in her hamper with the linen shirt over my head; I knew good things were going to happen. After ten or fifteen minutes she stood, letting the water pour off her, and toweled herself. I was on alert to push up my glasses at any second if she decided to throw the towel into the hamper, but she didn’t. After she dried her hair, she put the towel around her shoulders, and then she planted her hands on the edge of the bathtub and knelt with one leg in the bathwater and one outside on the floor. “Ooh that’s so cold,” she said, when her vadge touched the rounded edge of the tub.

  I was too crumpled in the hamper even to think of doing anything physical with my richard, but all I wanted in any event was the sight I was seeing; the sight of her leaning forward on her hands and rocking the weight of her hips down against the edge of the tub. “Where is that cock?” she said. “I want to see that cock.” She fished around in the water and pulled out the dildo and looked at it. She dipped it several times in the water and pulled it out, shaking it each time, evidently liking the way it glistened. Then she worked herself down the edge of the tub and suctioned the black dick onto the tiled shower wall at about her eye level. She moved her face over it, kissing it in the most wonderfully fetishistic way, and biting on it. “You like when I suck that big dick, don’t you?” she said. She put two fingers down on the edge of the tub and rocked forward on them, so that her clit was straddled. She let the head of the rubberdick pass over her closed eyelids, and then she stood up a little, one leg still in the bathtub and one out, and stroked her slit very fast while she circled the wall-mounted dick with her nipples. When she had straightened her legs completely, she was able to lean herself against the tile wall with the rubberdick between her legs and move its resilience over her clit-lump. Her forehead and nipples touched the cold green tile. She kissed the towel on her shoulders once. I was dying with visual happiness.

  “You want this ass?” she asked the dildo and seemed to get an affirmative answer, for she turned away from it with her hands on the edge of the tub, wiggling her ass back and forth in front of it. The suction base lost suction and the cock fell suddenly onto a scallop-shell soap dish. “Aw, did I shock you, honey?” she said. “Am I going too fast for you?” She dipped it in the bathwater again, shook it off, and, straddling the tub, stuck it back on the edge of the tub and sucked it. “See how easy it is to get you hard again?” she said. She stood over it, pulling up on her pubic hair so that she could see her clit, and she said to the dildo, “You ready to fuck this nice clean cunt? Because I sure am ready for you. I bet you are. Are you big and stiff enough to fill this hungry cunt?” She bent her knees until its rubber head found her, and then she sat down hard on it. She fucked it bouncingly for a little while and then got off of it and went to get a mirror and propped it up so she could watch her rubberman going in and out. She fucked it some more. In the haze of the shirt of hers that I was wearing I watched her finger orbit her clit-folds until I was ready to weep at the lyricism of it. Was Michelle this nasty on a regular basis? Maybe not. She’d really had to grope to find the dildo in her dresser in the first place. This was not an everyday sort of autofuck for her, I didn’t think. My UPS truck might have had something to do with it.

  I kept perfectly still, hardly breathing, while she came closer and closer to coming. She would stop suddenlyjust before she came, fucking slowly up and down on the dildo some more, then frigging for a while. She started making some incredible clenched-teeth noises, followed by pheasanty sounds so superb that I was surprised I had been able to live without them. Her little finger went into her asshole and she squinted, cleared for takeoff. She started saying, “Oh fuck this cunt, baby, fuck it, fuck this cunt,” over and over. Then her face wrenched itself into a squinting accelerated grimace and I pushed up on my glasses, stopping her right in the middle of her dildorgasm.

  I climbed out of the hamper, very slowly because I was stiff. I studied her climax-face from every angle, trying to record its transient extremity in my memory. I held her perky little finger, which was still hooked in her ane. I rested my ear on the edge of the tub about three inches from her open boat and stared at the finger that was bestirring itself around her bright-pink pumped-up nerve; and beyond it at the very soft inner skin stretched tight around my fellow American, my fellow rubber hider-in-her-house. I loved what I saw. I licked her knuckles; I tapped my dick against her breasts to see how they quivered; I straddled the tub just as she was straddling it, facing her, and beat my richard savagely until I was almost there. When I was ready I stood and said, “Let me be there with you, honey, you’re so sexy, please let me come on your face,” in a strange almost singsong pleading voice, and without waiting for an answer from her I let all of my burning bechamel jump out onto her tightly closed eyes, unable to resist doing so even though I knew that I would probably regret it afterward—not least because it would be so much trouble to get all of it off her eyelashes and eyebrows. When I was done I sat down on the tub for a second to rest. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t crazy about the way my come looked on her closed eyes, but the beauty of her ecstatic expression survived it; in fact the existence of the outcome of my orgasm on her still-coming face seemed entirely irrelevant, as it should have. I turned time on for the tiniest fraction of a second, so that she would have a tactile flash of the sensation of liquid warmth, in case it would add a novel touch to her clasm, and then I spent a good ten minutes tamping and gently rinsing every sign of my sperm off of her. I put her dirty clothes back in her hamper. I took a last look around to be sure I had left everything in order. I stood behind her and flashed time on again for a second or two to be sure that, post-orgasm, she didn’t suspect that she had had company, and when I was convinced that she felt safe and unviolated I went downstairs and got dressed and let myself quietly out. It hadn’t really happened.

  I intended to leave my UPS story buried in the sand where she had marked it with three shells, in case she wanted it at some future date, but as I mounted my borrowed motorcycle, vanity overcame me and I hustled back to dig it up. Then, still in the Fold, I drove slowly home. I kept thinking of Michelle’s bath as I cruised down the shoulder of Route 3; I ardently wished I had a picture of Michelle’s come-face (before I had come on it myself, I mean): it was the kind of sight that could enhance your life for a decade. Sadly, Polaroid pictures taken in the Fold don’t develop properly—I know because I’ve tried. There was a woman in an airplane bathroom once: I saw her flipping through a Playboy “Girls of Summer” issue at the airport gift shop and then kept tabs on her in the plane, and when she went to the bathroom I knew she would probably be coming and I Dropped and got a key from a pocket of one of the flight attendants and opened the door and found her with one heel in the steel sink and the other propped in the air where the door had been, coming stunningly, and I borrowed a passenger’s Polaroid and took her picture, but through some oddity of Fold-chemistry that I will never understand, the greens appeared only very faintly, and the oranges and reds did not show up at all, so my own visual memory was all I had. It surprises me, incidentally, that nobody has launched a men’s magazine called O-Shots, devoted exclusively to close-up photographs of women’s faces in the midst of orgasm. At the end of each photo layout would be a little official-looking certificate of authenticity, signed by the model, that said, “I hereby certify and swear that I did reach one or more female orgasms during the photo shoot herein pictured and that my expressions are neither fiction nor semifiction but are the true, unsimulated result of my own pleasure and amusement.” I would subscribe. Or perhaps an O-shot calendar—the March orgasm-face, the November orgasm-face?

  The guy whose motorcycle I had borrowed was sitting sullenly against a tree near where I had dismounted him. The note that I had pinned to his leg was crumpled in his hand; it said, I have borrowed your bike. Wait here and I will return it to you shortly. Sensibly, he had waited, but he wasn’t happy about it. I parked the bike in
front of him and walked home and lay down on the grass. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Time turned back on everywhere. I was exhausted. The total elapsed Strine-time had been almost eleven hours; elapsed real time, a little over two hours. In the space of a single “day” I had become a modestly successful amateur pornographer. “Rot makes life,” I sighed happily to myself, thinking of lonely old Henry James, and then I dozed for a while on the blue striped towel.