The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  While her tea was steeping, she pulled out a book. She seemed not to have a bookmark, and yet I noticed that she didn’t have to flip around to find her place. (I learned later that Rhody always automatically remembered her place in a book. She was not good with phone numbers, and even her Social Security number gave her trouble occasionally, but the page number of her current book would just come to her without effort as soon as she held it and saw the cover. Sometimes, she told me, the number would even occur to her at odd times during the day, and she would think, Two hundred fifty-four, what a mysterious and suggestive number! It would take her a second to realize that the number seemed unusually fine simply because it was where she was going to resume her reading. Nineteenth-century novels were all-important to her. It wasn’t a question of her liking them; they were a neurological necessity, like sleep. One Mrs. Humphry Ward, or a Reade, or a Trollope per week supplied her with some kind of critical co-enzyme, she said, that allowed her to organize social sense experience. It was nice if the novel was good, but even a very mediocre one would do; without a daily shot of Victorian fiction she couldn’t quite remember how to talk to people and to understand what they said. I miss her.)

  She lifted the teabag out of her cup with a spoon and bound its string tightly around the bag-and-spoon duo, squeezing most of the water that was left in the leaves out into the cup. I had never been exposed to this method of managing a used teabag before, and I was thrilled by it; and I don’t need much more than this to fall in love, after my fashion. I wanted very much to know what book she was reading. I pulled out my mechanical pencil, which, though it had lost its efficacy as a stand-alone Fold-probe some months earlier, still worked in concert with the special equation that I had adapted from a journal of mathematics. I wrote it on the placemat: the Strine Inequality. I had come across the germ of it in the Birkhoff Library at Harvard on a Sunday afternoon in a state of Tourette’s syndromish meditativeness that I knew by now often presaged a Fermata discovery. I opened an issue of The Canadian Journal of Geometry at random and was surprised by how many symbolic systems mathematicians had pressed into service: Greek and Russian letters, of course, but the British pound sterling sign? Capital letters in a florid script that looked as if it came from a wedding invitation? From a short paper entitled “Minimally Gilded Hodge Star Operators and Quasi-Ordinary Handlebodies Within a Localizable 4-Manifold Whitney Invariance,” I copied out an equation, as follows—

  Several hours later, at the Ritz Carlton bar, guided by a will greater than my own, I substituted several of the international textile care-labeling symbols for key variables in the original, and changed the equal sign to a less-than-or-equal- to sign. I felt as if I were speaking in tongues as I watched my possessed hand draw a crossed-out iron and a crossed-out triangle (“no bleach”) and a stylized half-filled washtub with a large hand in it (“hand-wash”). When I had finished with the substitutions and the Strine Inequality stood complete on the page, there came a sound, a sound of distant chronic liposuction, of fine cosmetic work being done on the cosmos, nips and tucks tactfully taken, infinitesimal hairplugs of time removed from distant star-systems, where they wouldn’t be missed, and arranged in quantity serially for me to live through. I was free once again to roam the Fold. To return to time I only had to erase the inequality sign, disabling its potency.

  That was the formula I wrote down on the placemat at the Thai restaurant. When it had taken effect, I went over to Rhody and lifted her book from her hand. It was a green Virago paperback called Lady Audley’s Secret, by Mary E. Braddon. The back cover said that Lady Audley’s Secret had “shocked the Victorian public with its revelations of horrors at the very heart of respectable society and its most respectable women.” Encouraged, I thumbed through it, reading things like “bonnet” and “gaudily-japanned iron tea-trays” and the sentence fragment “he amused himself by watching her jewelled white hands gliding softly over the keys, with the lace sleeves dropping away from her graceful arched wrists.” I came to the inside of the back cover; on it, Rhody (or Rhoda E. Levering, according to the name inscribed in the book) had made several notes. Her handwriting had a self-assured intelligence. The only note that I could make any sense of, though, was:

  Sexiness of men who take off their watches in public

  She used, as I did, the back of her book to jot down passing observations. I put the book back in her grip, and I unbuttoned her shirt and found out what I could about her breasts. A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness. (Women who read Virago Modern Classics almost always have fascinating breasts.)

  I had planned to study a review of the new Mazda 929 in Road & Track during dinner, but obviously that was not possible now. I was tempted to walk to a bookstore in the Fold and pick up some other Virago to show off to her, but I thought better of it: too aggressive a manufactured coincidence. Instead I erased the Inequality to end the time-transplantation and, once back in the swing, pulled out a turn-of-the-century biography of Edward FitzGerald by A. C. Benson that I had been halfheartedly reading; I held it open with the edge of my plate. The waiter came. I ordered dinner in a fairly loud, friendly voice in order to draw Rhody’s attention. When I had handed over the menu, I dropped my eyes immediately to my book as if I were impatient to get back to it, and then absent-mindedly began moving my watch up and down on my wrist. I knew “Rhoda E. Levering” was watching me. I turned a page, lifting the plate so that it would clear, and went back to playing with my watch. Suddenly I looked up, caught Rhody’s eye, and gave her a friendly hello-look. I felt bad about doing this, because I know how hard it is to go back to a book, no matter how engrossed you were in it, when you are alone at a table in a restaurant and you become aware of someone else who may or may not be lonely, and may or may not be curious about you—suddenly, whether you welcome it or not, there is a fiery transversity connecting the two of you, where before there had only been a narrow rectilinear green-carpeted Thai restaurant that tolerated solo readers.

  I returned to my book, deliberately making ugly lip-pursed faces to show that I was deeply caught up in Edward FitzGerald—and to release Rhody from the tyranny of the transversity if she wanted to return to Lady Audley’s Secret. Without lifting my eyes from the page (though I was still sure that her black-rimmed glasses were flashing in my direction), I raised my left hand and very slowly and teasingly pulled on the flap of my watchband until the tiny gold prong of its buckle hung free of the slightly elongated second hole. Like a stripper delaying a moment of conclusive disrobing, I held the unbuckled watch in place for a time, turning my wrist slowly within its loosened embrace; finally I slid the buckle off the strap and caught the face of the watch as it fell from my arm. I did everything as smoothly and unsuddenly and strokingly as I could, not as if I were aware of Rhody and trying to entice her, but as if I were reading with such intense concentration that my unconscious watch-removal movements were being slowed to a fraction of their normal speed by the rapture of my literary appreciation. I set the watch down just above my open book, the two curved segments of the band forming a seagull shape. Then I looked directly and inquiringly at Rhody again. Her eyes fell to her page.

  That was the big moment of the evening. We ignored each other from then on. Just after she asked for her check, she walked past me to the bathroom. I whisked out my mechanical pencil and restored the complete Inequality on my placemat and used the Fold’s ideal privacy to count the number of tampons in her purse. There were five. I erased time back on and let her use the bathroom. When she emerged, I Dropped again and counted tampons: there were now four. Since I have had miserable luck befriending women at the height of their periods, I didn’t try to say hello to her then. Instead, on my calendar I marked a day two weeks later, when she was likely to be at or near ovulation, and on that day I staked out her address on Marlborough Street after work. She got home around six-thirty. Half an hour later she reappeared in jeans. I followed her discreetly to the Harvard Book Store Café on Newbury. Just before she went
into the store, I completed the Inequality on a pad of paper and slipped in ahead of her. I crouched in one of the aisles, near the Mrs. Humphry Wards, and erased my way into time. (I didn’t want to seem to have materialized out of thin air to anyone in the store.) I stood up, holding a random book; I put the book away; and then I pulled a Virago paperback off the shelf. I heard someone step into the fiction aisle, and I was almost sure that it was Rhody, and it was. I turned and regarded her blankly, innocently, and then went through a pleased frown of recognition. She returned the favor. (Naturally I was holding the book in such a way that my watch was plainly visible.) I will skip the “Weren’t you at the Thai Star a few weeks ago?” exchange that followed, since there was nothing newsworthy in it—I will just observe that, despite my having produced and directed the entire coincidence, I was as overjoyed and nervous and relieved when she started talking away about the subdued greatness of Mrs. Humphry Ward as if I really had fortuitously run into her.

  “You know what really interested me about you?” she said several weeks later, after we had been on a harbor cruise and had had lunch twice. “You may not remember this, but while you were reading that time at Thai Star, you took your watch off and put it just above your book.”

  “So you were watching me!” I said. “I was very aware of you.”

  “Yes, I was watching you. You took your watch off, and you seemed to luxuriate in every tiny step of the process. I’ve always liked the sight of a man taking off his watch. It doesn’t need to be an expensive watch, though I prefer leather to metal bands.” She lowered her voice. “I like the rubbing of the wrist afterward.”

  “How interesting,” I said. “It’s just a habit of mine—I guess I started doing it in study hall in high school. It seemed grown up.” (This was not altogether untrue.)

  Rhody said, “I was enamored of this one guy, a physics major, in college who used to go through a ritual of getting set up to study at one of the tables in the library. He slipped off his shoes—he always had immaculate white sweatsocks on, and very clean pale jeans—and he arranged his watch next to his textbook, with one strap folded under the other.”

  “He sounds like a real catch,” I said.

  “But the interesting thing is that only a few days before I saw you take off your watch, someone at work did the same thing at a meeting, and I was reminded of how kind of … seductive it is, even though in that case I wasn’t at all interested in the person who did it. Just in his wrist. In fact, I even made a note in back of the book I was reading at the time about how sexy it is to watch a man do that. So there. Isn’t it weird the way things like that always happen in twos?”

  I agreed that it was weird, and we got off into a discussion of Rupert Sheldrake and the morphic resonances that purportedly aid protein synthesis. That evening she brought me back to her apartment to show me the actual note in the back of Lady Audley’s Secret. We ended up having sex for the first time. (There was a memorable moment when my hands were flat against a Sierra Club wall calendar as I fucked slowly in and out of her mouth. And there was another memorable moment when she put a cucumber in the microwave for a few seconds to take the chill off and I twisted the corkscrew we had used on the bottle of Cabernet into one end of it and she let me watch her cuke herself with it, holding it by its blond wooden handle.) I am not saying that it is a total impossibility that the two of us could have gotten together at the Thai restaurant if I had simply walked over to her and struck up a conversation. I might have cruised her successfully without subterfuge. But it’s just as likely that she would have politely sent me away. I’m less suave with a woman when I haven’t had a preview of her breasts. So the moral is: Rhody was quite wrong in assuming that the Fermata was intrinsically antithetical to seduction. I used the Fermata to seduce her.

  13

  I WAS IN A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN WHEN THINGS ENDED WITH Rhody. I had given her a glimpse of my inner life, and she had unambiguously rejected it. But I realize now, in putting Rhody down on paper, that good, tangible things grew out of our truncated relationship. If I had not seen and acted on that note about men and watches in the back of her copy of the Virago paperback, I would probably not have had the later idea of writing smutty expostulations in paperbacks just before women browsed them, and if I hadn’t thought of that, I probably wouldn’t have conceived of using the Fold as a rotter’s retreat and leaving the outcome where a woman might find it. In a way, Rhody’s spurning the glimpse I had given her of my secret freed me to investigate its potential further.

  After the time on the Cape, I wrote a little more: one story about a naked woman suspended above one lane of the Callahan tunnel on a black rope trapeze net during rush hour, looking down through its square mesh at the cars filing slowly beneath her and pissing generously on them as their moon-roofs slid open; one story about a man teaching a young woman to touch-type on his antique Oliver No. 9 manual typewriter, holding his hands over her hands and closing his eyes and feeling her fingers sink one by one into the deep counterweighted letters and knowing she was spelling H-I-P-S and being unable to resist putting his hands on her hips, then feeling her fingers type B-R-E-A-S-T-S on the round black cuplike keys and being unable to resist palming her breasts and pulling her back against him; one story about a group of scuba-diving Caribbean tourists corrupting the angelfish with aerosol cans of cheddar cheese, sometimes making cheese hearts in the water that the fish then momentarily echoed as they fed, sometimes squirting it on wet-suited arms or breasts and letting the fish nip it off; one about a woman letting her pet hermit crab walk lightly all over her back while she read Barron’s and dreamed of blue-eyed men with tons of money; one about several caves of stalagmites, each one a different color, that, when broken off and inserted into a vadge, glowed, their stumps releasing bidet-like streams of warm subterranean mineral water.

  I spent some personal time with Ami Pro and a copier and saddle-bound a number of copies of these several stories, along with the one about Marian and the ridem lawn-mower, in pamphlet form, using as a cover the pale blue cover of something called Tales of French Love and Passion—a heavily ironic reissue of a cheesy 1936 edition of several mildly risqué stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had ordered through the Archie McPhee catalog. I left my homemade booklet in lots of places—in copies of Self and The American Scholar just before they were shoved through mail-slots, in women’s bathrooms at dance clubs, under the Gideon’s Bible in several rooms of the Meridien Hotel, on coffee tables during cocktail parties, inserted in the library’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article on “Life, Meaning and Value of”—but nothing resulted from all this effort that was anywhere near as exciting to me as the simple sight of Michelle, the Cape Cod woman, dunking her dildo in her bathwater and shaking it off.

  The peak of my life-imitates-rot phase came on the Massachusetts Turnpike one Saturday. I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea—the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand—the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope—I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely dis
tracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester.

  I was driving in the slow lane. My window was open; the car was booming with air noise. My left (wristwatched) arm was outside; I was making my hand into a wing shape to see whether I could create lift, and making it dive and climb against the wind. A woman driving a small blue car appeared in the rear-view mirror. No expression is as impassive as a woman’s seen in a rear-view mirror: it has an impassiveness so impartial and comprehensive that it cries out to be surprised. She was going faster than I was and impassively began to pass me; I lost sight of her for a minute as she entered that place where passing cars don’t exist—a kind of Fold-effect of the rear- and side-view mirrors. I accelerated very slightly, so that when she did pass, it would take longer. I had only seen her face for an instant, in fact I had only had time to notice that she was a woman of twenty or so with lots of thickly wavy multihued fair hair driving alone, but my very sketchy simplistic sense of her windshielded face merged with my equally simplistic sense of the headlights of her unflashy blue car to turn her instantly into a well-developed character in my imagination. As she invisibly pulled closer to me in the fast lane and I heard her tires singing and sensed how close she was to me, the idea that she was soon going to pass me became swoonsomely powerful: the steering wheel seemed to become flexible and expand in widening ripples; I felt that I was a glowing lump of something melting on the fly. I could not believe that in a matter of thirty seconds or so this person was going to pull up next to me and that I would be able to look over at her; when she did I felt I would shout or weep.