The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  At the same time I felt a blip of self-irritable disgust at the astonishing potency of these car-crushes and at how much mental air-time they consumed when I drove. It was insane to think that someone was more wonderful and mysterious just because she was passing me in her car. What could be more common than two people driving nearly side by side on a highway, one drawing abreast of the other? Why couldn’t I just relax and let her pass me without falling in total temp-love with her? And yet that was what was going on—and maybe it was going on for her, too: maybe she was listening to Terry Gross on National Public Radio and barely registering that some car (me) was off to her right, but maybe her hopes were rising and crashing addictively each time she passed a lone man at the wheel—maybe she was trying just as I had done to piece together a sense of the lovability and marriageability of each person based on the ludicrously inadequate information available—that is, on the driver’s head, on the state of origin of the license plate, on the general personality of the car (all cars are classifiable as cute/perky or elegante/mysterioso or Camaro/vulgaro), on whether one hand or two was visible on the steering wheel, and on the condition of the sheet metal. As her door-handle came in line with mine I tried to fight the desire to turn toward her but I couldn’t; I looked blankly at her just as she was turning to look blankly at me; then we both turned back and looked straight ahead at our lanes. At that moment, we were driving at almost exactly the same speed. We were close. It seemed miraculous to me that we could be in such states of seated repose, and yet could be separated by the surface of the highway, which was moving between us so fast that if I opened my door and tried to walk over to her and get in her car, my feet and shin-bones would be sanded down to nothing. With tormenting leisureliness she finally pulled ahead and put on her blinker and smoothed her blue car-butt over in front of me. (It turned out to be a Ford Escort, which always makes me think of escort services when I’m driving long distance.) Then I saw something riveting—a Smith College sticker on her rear window, with a University of Chicago sticker above it. I didn’t have to drive all the way to Northampton; Smith College was right here with me on the road! But I hesitated before I pushed up on my glasses, having never been through a full-blown chronvulsion in a moving car before. Would it be safe? Would my high rate of speed relative to the highway cause some unforeseen danger? Stopping the universe while driving at sixty miles an hour seemed an extremely rash and kinky thing to do.

  I kept staring at her taillights. I saw her look up at me briefly in her rear-view mirror. Then she fluffed her massive coarsely wavy hair so that some of it fell over the whiplash projection on the back of her seat. The high small round chrome lock on the curve of her trunk looked a little like what I imagined her asshole might look like. I decided that I would survive whatever happened. I waited a polite interval and then pulled over into the fast lane and sped up to pass her. We were on a slight downgrade. As I came closer to her, the same swooning feeling as before swept over me, except that now I and not she was bringing about this unspoken thrill; when our profiles were even I didn’t look over, knowing that she knew that I was passing her and wouldn’t look at me, because the rule in highway flirtation was not to look on the second pass. Instead I hit the clutch pedal and glided freely for a second or two right next to her, setting myself up mentally for the disengagement of the temporal drive-train, and then very slowly I pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose; when I let go of them the Smith woman and I were still side by side on the Mass Pike, but we weren’t moving forward. My radio was silent.

  My door was not easy to get open. I had to push with my shoulder to displace the jellied wind-flow. And the road surface around my car presented a strange sight: though motionless, it looked slightly foggy and indeterminate, as if photographed through a Vaselined lens; you couldn’t focus on it properly. When I gingerly got out, leaving my door open, and tiptoed around the back of my car, I found that the asphalt was in fact somewhat resilient underfoot; its speed relative to the soles of my shoes apparently made it impossible for the two physical surfaces to interact normally, and gave the road the characteristics of some sort of dense, even spongy ground-cover, like moss. The other oddity was that I heard hooting and roaring noises in my ears when I walked into or away from the direction that I had been driving: I supposed it was something to do with vectors and frozen sound waves and the Doppler effect, but I didn’t trouble myself over it. Instead I straddled the white line between the Smith woman’s car and mine and extended my arms so that I touched both near doors, hers and mine, connecting us two. I held that quasi-crucifixional position for a time, looking out at the hills and the cars ahead, considering that if I pulled on my glasses right then to resume time, my car would race off driverless and would eventually crash, and I, left in the middle of the road, would almost certainly be hit by one of the cars behind ours. I looked through her window at her, my face inches away from her profile. I went around and opened her passenger door, which was fortunately not locked, and cleared off the junk on the seat (mostly cassettes and several Books on Tape from the library) and got in next to her.

  I don’t have to point out that cars are extremely private places; the feeling that I was doing something of questionable ethics by entering this woman’s small glossy blue Ford was more intense than I could remember in recent fermations. I was sweating with the almost horrified excitement of my wrongdoing. The soles of my feet were warm to the touch. I was in her car. “Well, here we are,” I said aloud to myself. I couldn’t bring myself to find out what was up with her breasts, or do anything more radical in fact than rest my hand lightly on her accelerator leg (she was wearing a huge thick pink sweater with roses woven into it, and faded jeans); I had a sense of being dangerously far away from home, perhaps because the steering wheel and brake pedal of my own speeding car were so nearby and yet so peculiarly out of my reach. What should I do? Should I simply jack in the passenger seat next to her? I don’t as a rule like masturbating in cars. I could get out and stand in the road and jack onto her trunk lock or her driver-side window, or, having rolled down that window beforehand, I could jack directly into the interior of her car. But it would be rude to get my hard sauce all over the flowers on her sweater, which looked expensive and hand-knit, perhaps a favorite sweater of hers. Besides, my shoes might melt or catch flame.

  What I really wanted was just to be alive in this woman’s car for a second while she was driving it—so I climbed in the back seat and lay down and used my glasses to reactivate time for the quick count of five and then deactivated it again. It was wonderful to be riding in her car. She had some music going, something familiar, and I thought I could hear her humming quietly along with it. Her car was much quieter than mine. When my Drop was over I sat up and looked over at my empty car: it had drifted a little to the right (possibly the door’s “sudden” opening and consequent slamming shut) but though driverless for a few seconds it had maintained course fairly well, just as I had expected.

  I lay there in the Smith College woman’s back seat for quite a while, my head resting on her overnight bag, playing with a wavy sprig of her hair and trying to think of some way that I could possibly become a part of her life. Some of her hair was held with a large toothed clamp. I grew curious about what she was listening to and climbed back up beside her and popped the tape: it was a Suzanne Vega called Solitude Standing. She had gotten only halfway into the first cassette of the audio version of Gulliver’s Travels before abandoning it for some music. All at once I had conjured up a little plan. It would take time, but I wanted it to. She was worth it.

  This is what I did: I walked for almost an hour until I came to a mall with a discount store, where I bought a fairly high-quality tape recorder and some cassettes and batteries. (Bought: that is, left roughly the cash to pay for it in the appropriate cash register along with a note saying that this money was in payment for item number, etc., etc.) I also assembled a festive picnic lunch for myself at a deli and left money there. Several Arno-hours
later, I got back to my car and pulled out my Tales of French Love and Passion and sat in the Smith woman’s passenger seat. The name I got from her wallet was Adele Junette Spacks.

  “Hello and excuse me,” I said into the tape recorder in a lower voice than I usually have, looking right at Miss Spacks. “With the help of my benevolent autokinetic powers, I have taken the liberty of popping the Suzanne Vega cassette in progress and placing it on the seat beside you. I have replaced it with a tape of my own, the very tape that you are listening to now. I would prefer to remain anonymous, but I will tell you that I too am currently driving west on the Mass Turnpike,and that you passed me a little while ago, and that, though you may not have been aware of it, during those few seconds when we were driving side by side, I developed one of the more intense car-to-car infatuations I have ever experienced. I’ve decided that this time I will act on my feelings for once by offering you this homemade tape for your diversion. Please feel free to listen to it or not as you wish. Feel free to press the eject button at any time if anything on it distresses you. It does contain nudity and sexual situations—in fact, it contains a great deal of nudity and sexual situations. But it’s only words. I only mean to divert you while you drive. If my tape offends, please feel free to toss it out the window and accept my apologies. Please feel free, please feel free.”

  After this introductory spiel, I read aloud the story that I had written while kneeling next to the woman in the gray-green bathing suit on the Cape. Sitting so close to Miss Spacks in her car, in a silence thicker than any recording studio’s, I started to feel a little style-crampingly self-conscious as I got into the more graphic sections of the text, and my narrator’s voice began to lose authority; finally I had to transfer myself and the tape recorder from Miss Spacks’s car back to my own, where, with a confidence born of distance, I finished reading the rest of it in one take, more or less, without too many flubs. It was good to be making a tape for once, rather than having to transcribe someone else’s. Still, when I was done I was not completely satisfied. The one-hundred-and-ten-minute Memorex tape was not full, for one thing. And I felt ungenerous in offering this brand-new person my old rot. Indeed, I felt unfaithful to her, just as I had felt unfaithful to the Cape Cod woman when I had sprinted down the beach in the Cleft and checked out that girl. The old story had been part of an old seduction, and Adele Junette Spacks, who was unwittingly spending so much time “with” me, deserved something fresh in return, something rash, something more representative of what I was capable of coming up with right at that very moment on the road in her company. I ate lunch on the trunk of my car, thinking kink, kink, kink. Then I got out the Casio, which I had packed in my trunk, and in just twelve straight hours I wrote a second set of adventures for Marian the Librarian. I worked in a few of the sights I had witnessed in the Cape Cod bathroom. Here’s how Part Two went.

  14

  TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, MARIAN’S SEXUAL INTEREST inexplicably abated. She put all her dildi and appliances in the drawer that had once held David’s sweaters. The last two toys she had ordered—a tiny vibe, teasingly canine in appearance but molded from an impeccably comme il faut piece of pickled okra, and a giant Armande Klockhammer Signature Model—she didn’t even bother to try out before putting them in storage. She felt a mild snobbish contempt for people who devoted so much of their free time to solo sex-play. Her perennial garden, for example, was far more satisfying than a bunch of pastless, futureless orgasms. She read bulb catalogs avidly. After much study she ordered several hundred tulip bulbs from Mack’s. When they arrived, via UPS, she gently deflected the eagerly scrotal leer of her friend John in the brown truck. It felt exciting and strange to be more than a sexual being, to have interests. As she looked over the boxes of bulbs, however, she realized that she would need help cutting the beds and planting them all, so she hired the neighbor kid, Kevin.

  Ever since she had been mowing her own lawn, she had lost touch with young Kevin. He seemed to have grown an inch or two. He had gone out for the high jump, and he had acquired a girlfriend named Sylvie, whom he said was “a really special person.” For a whole weekend and three cool late afternoons he and Marian worked together preparing the soil in the beds with bags of peat and then setting in the bulbs. The dirt was cool through Marian’s gloves. After shyly asking whether she would mind, Kevin brought over his radio. At first she was a little irritated by the sound, which disturbed her bucolic alpha-state—but over time several of the songs separated themselves from the others. In one, a woman sang something about Solitude standing in the doorway. She sang, “Her palm is split with a flower with a flame.” Marian kept time to this song, first with her troweling, and then with her chin. When she had heard it the second time, she asked Kevin (feeling a little shy herself), “Who does this song?”

  Kevin looked up. “Suzanne Vega.”

  “Ah,” said Marian. “I like it.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” said Kevin. He was impossible to read. He dropped another dark bulb in a hole and gently mounded soil around it. Marian glanced at him several times. He had a gray track-and-field T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. When he pushed on the earth over one of her bulbs, she imagined the muscle in the side of his arm, as she had seen it when he had had his shirt off that day, long ago, at the beginning of summer, before she had learned to mow. And later, when the song came on again, he looked up at her and smiled and then went back to planting—and Marian noticed that his ears were quite red.

  She watered the bulbs in and forgot about them. The ground began to look cold—three long beds of very cold bulbs. As winter hit, Marian became caught up in a battle with a developer who wanted to build another mall outside of town. It was going to be enormous and in its own way wonderful—but there was already a shopping center with a discount chain in it that was working under chapter eleven, and the downtown would suffer, as it always did. She went out on several dates with a man she met at the mall meetings, and while she enjoyed talking to him (he was one of those men who have a passionate interest in some particular writer which at first seems sincere, and then finally ends up seeming almost arbitrary—in his case it was Rilke: he seemed to be getting things from Rilke that he could have gotten from any number of poets, while missing whatever it was that Rilke had uniquely), she nonetheless didn’t want to do anything more than kiss him cordially in her driveway.

  When spring finally came, she went out every day to her tulip beds to watch for activity. It was an unusually dry hot spring, and she felt that she should water to give her beds a good start, but she despaired at her hose. The faucet still leaked tiresomely. The sprayer was rusty. What would make her bulbs really happy, it suddenly occurred to her, was if she could get a plumber to adapt her own Pollenex showerhead so that it would fit on the end of the hose. She needed a very light, very delicate but insistent spray for her tulips—no garden sprayer could offer that. She also thought that the hose water was much too cold—she felt that the bulbs would do better with warmer water. She realized that she wasn’t thinking all that rationally, but her idea nonetheless was: hook up the garden hose to the shower-pipe, run the hose out the bathroom window, and fix the Pollenex showerhead onto the terminal end. Other ideas of interest followed on this one; she called a plumber.

  The plumber was a thin derisive man with the usual plumber body-smell who rolled his eyes at her plan, told her she could have done it herself, but agreed, since he was there, to do it for her. He fitted the hose ends and the Pollenex with Gardena quick-clamp adapters so that they could be quickly reconfigured for interior showering or exterior gardening applications. The shower-pipe looked exotic when he was done, knobbed with hex nuts and adapters, but the system when tested worked quite well. And the plumber, as he cleaned up, was cheerful, pleased by now that he had built something he had never built before, and that he would be able to tell his partner about the nutty job this lady had gotten him to do. He even showed her how to use Teflon tape and was expansive about its merits ove
r older kinds of sealant. He carried his heavy red toolbox out to his truck and drove away.

  Over the next few days Marian took her early-morning shower and then opened the window, hooked up the shower-hose arrangement, and turned on the taps to water her tulips. She used only the fine pulse-mist settings, treating her plants as she would want to be treated herself. The tulips responded with enthusiasm—after a week her beds were popping with color. They knew the difference between water from a shower, meant for human use, and water from a crude leaky outdoor faucet. She sat on an aluminum chair with the sun on her legs, reading The Machine in the Garden. Every so often she glanced up at her tulips. She felt happy. She had planned this to happen and it had happened: she had delayed gratification and now she was getting the payoff. Young Kevin should see what they had done together, she thought, but when she called, Kevin’s sour mother told her that he was at practice. Just as well, just as well, she thought. She began to give some consideration to her drawerful of dildae. But she didn’t need any of that; no, she’d moved beyond that.

  Just then Kevin’s little gray cat with white paws showed up on her lawn, making untoward noises and acting oddly. Quite recently it, she, had been a kitten. Now she was clearly in heat, probably for the first time—and very irresponsible it was of Kevin or Kevin’s mother not to have had her fixed! She crawled along with her forepaws very low on the ground, making low desperate mezzo-mewings, her tail jerking back, her little narrow feline hips flaunting and twitching in the air, her rear paws working with quick tiptoe steps. Marian could see her gray-furred opening; wetness gleamed from within. She went over and pressed her finger lightly against the cat’s tiny slit; gratefully, the cat returned the pressure and tiptoed ardently in place. This was a cat in the grip of a new idea. Wiping her finger on the grass, Marian found that she had gotten hot looking at this creature’s fluttery haunchings. There was a purity and seriousness to the cat’s simple wish to be fucked immediately that Marian found refreshing. The cat didn’t want love—it wanted cat-cock.